A Sweetness to the Soul (42 page)

In all, the visits were depressing, offering no new information,
reminding me only of my inadequacies. Joseph couldn’t have been more encouraging. Still, the pall over our visit remained even when we left the city and by boat, took the canal and then by coach arrived at now his brother’s store in Nicholville, New York. Perhaps the pall was merely a premonition of what would follow.

James greeted us politely. He was not as I had pictured him. I had made him bigger in my mind, more the size of Joseph though he was shorter, slender, and held himself like the stiff collar he wore at his throat.

“Eliza expects you for supper,” he said formally. “And you are welcome to remain with us while you visit. Caroline would be happy to have time with her western uncle and aunt. And you should meet Henry, too, our youngest.”

James’s stiff demeanor did not change during our visit. He and Joseph shared only words of business talk, the markets, stock raising in the West. He filled Joseph in on other nieces and nephews, some we would see in a week. James looked pale, I thought, not well. I know my husband looked for some sort of connecting with his oldest brother but it was not to be, at least not that trip.

James behaved so formally that I expected Eliza to be as reserved and was pleasantly surprised when she wasn’t. She greeted us with open arms scented with lilacs, her wide hoops circling out behind her as she hugged first Joseph and then me. “Welcome! Welcome!” she said. “And do not let James intimidate you,” she told me smiling, slipping her arm through mine, though I suspect she spoke to Joseph too. “He is a somber man but a good husband and father.” She moved us gracefully into the parlor, commenting as she did on my lovely watch and Joseph’s eye for beauty. “Carrie!” she called. “Put away that mirror and comb and come meet your Aunt Jane all the way from Oregon. Henry! The cat belongs on the floor. Please wash your hands!” She turned back to us. “Children can be so trying, just when you want to show them off. Ach! No matter. You’ll know soon enough when you have children of your own.”

I became wistful during our stay. Perhaps it was seeing another
happy family however different Eliza and James were from the Blivens or the Mays or even Sunmiet and Standing Tall. Perhaps it was the steamy August air, the gathering of relatives, Joseph’s nieces and nephews, my new sisters-in-law and their children, seeing them laughing, chiding their charges into adulthood. Perhaps it was being in a space that belongs to someone else. Whatever the reason, we shortened our visit and soon headed home.

On the return, lying on the Pullman bed, rocking less than gently through the night, I lay awake, thinking. First, about the gift of my marriage and the joy we’d shared in being “newlyweds” these past few weeks. I wished to keep that feeling, that closeness that made others notice us while we noticed only each other. Joseph turned over in his sleep and I heard him start to snore, then stop. A good man. God had given me a good man despite my less than worthy state.

While the train chugged vigorously across the plains, I thought too, about my child. No one knew her but me. Not yet conceived, she had become a being in my mind, soft, with brown eyes and skin as smooth as corn tassel and hair as yellow. I did not name her. That would have been too much to risk. Bringing her to real was wrapped inside my one last hope: Joseph’s Chinese doctor. Perhaps there was the answer to my prayer to have a family of my own. It posed no threat, I thought, by trying.

T
O
T
RUST IN THE
P
LAN

T
he winter of ’69 and ’70 left little time for travel. A hard season plagued the region, a time of struggle with the wind and snow and cold unlike any we’d known since ten years before. This winter, at least, I did not wonder where Joseph was and he did not spend his spare time reading books with Philamon in the Klamath country. Philamon had returned to working with his father when we sold the ranch. Joseph and I weathered that winter together though spending so much time with snow piled against the windows often made for short tempers and stale air.

Benito and Anna and their children plowed their way through deep drifts on snowshoes to spend days with us playing checkers with antler slices on the soot-blackened checkerboard stump or dealing cards with no money risked. We sang old songs and the men told stories of their days along the Isthmus and in San Francisco. Anna told of meeting Benito in Northern California and their whirlwind courtship and marriage. I entertained the children with a story or two I remembered from Sunmiet’s family, about how Bear lost his tail, how Dog got his name, the tricks of Coyote. “These can only be told when snow is on the ground,” I reminded them. “That is the way of the Sahaptin and Wasco and Paiute people.”

“So much snow means lots of stories, Auntie,” four-year-old Corlamae said, her nose pressed against the frosty window. A look at the depth of the drifts made a body wonder if we’d be telling stories still at Easter.

Unlike some, though, we had enough to eat. After a harrowing trip by sleigh across crusted snow, we shared lean beef with Sunmiet’s family and some others, horrified that the Indian agent could gather so little for the tribe, saddened that like stockmen everywhere, the Indian herders too were forced to watch their cattle die.

When the weather broke once in January with a false promise of a thaw, we learned that all went well with the Blivenses’ five. Joseph and Benito sledded supplies to Mama and Ella though even that did not thaw her freeze.

What hay we had we took to the high country where the cattle raked for grass, pushed their big heads to clear a way to the frozen shoots of grass oppressed by winter. Many cows gave birth to calves that could barely stand to suck before they succumbed to the cold. At night, their mothers bawled. In the morning, we would see them, tails switching, standing guard over the bodies of their dead babies, watching warily any who approached.

Then, as before, in one day, the sun came out, warmed up to sweater weather and the creeks began to rise.

It is a phenomenon not easily appreciated, the spring thaw. The hard ground so quickly turns to mud and muck that streams flow through every uneven ridge making even flat surfaces slick and splashed with dirty water. Piles of dirty snow sink before your eyes pouring out liquid like an orange half squeezed over a glass juicer. The earth smells of wet leaves, pungent decaying grass as the high water cleans ravines of rotting carcasses left over from the toll of winter. Meadowlarks sing of drier days and yet gratefully, of the spring and summer yet to come. Greater Canadas high above us in their V-formations move on North, announcing what we already know: spring is here.

Such volatile gyrations of nature also forewarn disaster.

From the window in the kitchen, I watched the two creeks on either side of us swirl by with debris and flotsam, foaming at the edges in their surge. Where they met at the base of the Y near the rise the house sat on, they formed a dirty plait rushing on down to the Deschutes. The pack trail grew closer to the creek as the water rose and I wondered how Joseph’s rock and root supporting system would hold up.

Joseph wondered about O’Brien’s bridge though he wisely did not suggest we ride there. “I bet it goes,” he said. “And Nix’s too.” His voice held a certain anticipation to it.

“You’re not hoping it’s so, are you?” I asked, wiping the Tea Leaf ironstone plates, standing them, tiny copper designs all facing upright, in the cupboard.

Joseph ignored me. “The Military Road will be awash as well. I’m going out. See how the trail fares. Coming?”

“Give me a minute to put my old boots on. This mud,” I said shaking my head, “makes a mockery of housecleaning.”

“Need spring standards,” Joseph said. “A little lower than the rest of the year.”

“Need to have everyone wear slippers,” I said, “including the man of the house.”

“Coming?” he asked, sweetly, holding out his hand.

We squished into soft, saturated ground, our feet leaving little levies around our prints before ponds formed each place we stepped. Puddles appeared in Bandit’s footsteps behind us. Joseph held my hand and we leaped across rivulets of water to stand closer to the creeks. Both still rose, leaving the knoll with the house and smokehouse and bunkhouse still well above danger. But lower, nearer where the two creeks met, where Benito and Anna and their children resided, the water seemed more ominous.

We walked toward their home, and I noticed that the cattle we’d herded into the corrals for calving and easier feeding stood now in a foot of water. They bawled to their babies who seemed oblivious to any danger.

Benito and Anna and their children stepped carefully up the rise to stand beside us. “We do what we can to prepare,” Benito told us. “Can help with cattle. Then we wait.” The watchword for spring flooding: wait.

“Wait at our house if you like,” I said. “We’ll move them.”

“I help,” Benito said, though Joseph protested.

“Do we have time to saddle up?” I asked.

Joseph assessed the creeks, nodded, and we saddled Sage and Buttercup. “Bandit and I’ll cross, move what we can. Stay here, unless we need you.”

His instruction annoyed me and I showed it, but his argument held water. “I don’t want to rattle them any more than they are. One horse and a dog may be enough. I’ll signal if I need you.”

He started across the creek, water swirling around the white legs of his horse. “Don’t come,” he yelled back at me. “Swifter than it looks.”

I could feel anxiety burning in my stomach, watching the dirty liquid push against my husband. I’d been in swift, spring run-off water, seen how quickly it could rise. He’d picked a place to cross that looked safe enough. The memory of a flooded creek came. I pushed it from my mind.

Bandit leaped in after Joseph and swam, passing him up, the water carrying him downstream a bit, swirling him around before he pulled out and shook himself on the other side. Joseph reached the sloppy ground near the corrals and turned to wave.

The kelpie nipped at the cattle, biting at their heads to push them back or snapping at their heels to move them forward toward the now open gate. Cows can always find a hole through a fence yet rarely see an open gate.

Bandit worked. More than once he came away with his mouth full of hair, some blood, spitting and shaking his head as he moved on to the next cow-calf pair. Being kicked didn’t seem to stop him as he’d roll into a ball like a caterpillar and land with a thump, shake
himself off and return, his tongue hanging, panting, almost in a smile, his eyes sparkling with the intensity of effort.

They moved most of the pairs together, man and dog, and were nearly finished. Joseph had gotten off his horse to lift a halter left hanging near the gate. He didn’t notice that one last cow and calf returned, disoriented by the water, not wanting to leave what seemed familiar. As if in a bad dream, I watched as the cow circled back, somehow putting Joseph closer to the fence and her calf. The mother turned on Joseph. Bawling, she moved her one thousand pounds with more agility than would be imagined.

“Joseph!” I screamed. “Watch her!”

Joseph turned in time to see the cow charging toward him. He stepped back. His leg weakened, he could not quickly climb the fir pole fence. He turned and flailed his hands before her eyes. She startled, stopped, bawled again, backed up, then lunged once more, this time closer. Again, Joseph threw her off, struck the side of her head with his palm and threw himself to the side, still grasping for the corral, the water slowing him more than the protective mother who stopped only for a second. I watched her big red and white Hereford head lower, the gleam of her horns. She attacked again.

I stood so helpless! I could do nothing from where I stood but pray and that I did, hands pressed to my mouth.

Then from the corner of my vision I saw a familiar reddish streak strike out for the big cow’s heel, pushing the cow toward Joseph!

Bandit barked and bit, drawing blood at the cow’s heel.

I held my breath, heard my heart thud, expecting the cow to throw her half-ton of weight directly at my husband, smashing him against the rails as she escaped the kelpie’s bite.

Instead, the cow swirled to attack the dog.

Water sprayed in all directions. The cow’s lumbering body took a sideways turn as she lowered her head, bellowing, at Bandit. She butted the dog, and sent him flying higher than her head. Joseph
slipped beyond the mother, up and over the fence rail and out of striking distance, deciding wisely to let her move her young one when and where she wished.

Bandit hit the ground with a splashing thud. He lay still. The Hereford bellowed and with her calf beside her she stood by the still form; nudged it. Bandit did not move. The old cow bellowed again, butted at her calf and sloshed away from the corral, away from the rising creek.

Joseph circled around, bent to Bandit, and I knew he would be shedding tears for that small dog.

“I’ll come across,” I shouted, tears already brimming.

Then as Joseph kneeled beside him, the strangest thing happened: Bandit sneezed. Dazed, he stood. His legs wobbled, but he lived! “He’s all right!” Joseph yelled at me, his voice cracking. “Fall must have been broken by the water!” With Joseph’s help, the dog leaped into his open arms. “Good boy!” Joseph told him, over and over, letting the dog lick his face. “Good boy! He’s earned his keep!” he yelled to me, waving. Remounting, he rode upstream. “Cross where it’s narrower,” he signaled.