A Sweetness to the Soul (44 page)

“Don’t think this is the best idea,” Joseph said. “They’d eventually come with us. Riding in this wagon …”

“Let’s give it a try,” I said picking up the reins.

“You’ve got to move fast enough to keep them in there—but not too fast,” he warned me.

We started out well enough.

With great care, I began down the twisting, winding descent of narrow road, feeling the wheels drop over rocks that seemed to appear overnight in the trail. My legs were tense, beginning to ache. My feet jammed the front board, my hand gripped then released the
brake, setting, releasing, my arms aching in the effort to help the horses hold back the wagon with its load. A doe and her fawn startled, distracting. The pair lunged up the steep side hill, the fawn a muted shadow behind its mother.

This road was some of my husband’s best work up to that point. Difficult to believe that the governor of this state would someday call him the “Greatest Roadbuilder of the West.” That fine governor should have been riding with me in that pig wagon!

I wondered how Dick was handling his much heavier load when I heard him coming up behind me. He shouted, though I didn’t know what and my team became agitated, maybe because they thought he got too close with his. At any rate, mine picked up speed.

I tried to slow them, saw their ears flick back and forth in agitation. Half standing, I pushed my weight against the front board, whoaing them. They pulled and jerked the harness, the tongue of the wagon bobbing up and down like a chattering child. My leg cramped, my forearm strained from holding back and I shouted, “Back off, Dick!” but by then it was too late.

Our action broke a rock loose, startling the horses more as it fell, bouncing and careening like a cannonball off the boulders below.

“Whoa, now, whoa!” I said, trying to keep alarm from my voice. “Easy, now.” The horses had another plan and then theirs was thwarted, too, as the wagon picked up greater speed and jerked over rocks and ruts like it was a rock itself, bouncing off the narrow canyon, the wheels riding up on the side. I could feel my heart throbbing against my ribs, my breathing shallow, and I’m praying now, out loud, “Please, God, please, God, please,” hoping he will know exactly what I need. I hear another squeal and think I see a spotted form fly out of the back and tumble down the ravine.

The wagon wheels crunch, horses lunge, as though escaping the very thing they drag behind them. The rear of the wagon careens around the switchback, shifting the weight of the pigs from side to side, sending the wagon up on two wheels then dropping, hard, as we twist to make the next turn. I hear Dick shouting and realize by
the closeness of his voice that he’s moving faster than he should be, too. I can’t take time to look, my wagon is rushing, pushing, way too fast, and I’m bouncing on my seat, standing, sitting, pulling on the reins, wondering why I cannot get the wagon stopped despite my desperate slamming of the brake.

It has taken on a life of its own, my wagon, with the shoats protesting, bouncing in the back, and I am sure we will not make the next tight twist in this excuse for a road when we round the bend and the ground levels out, blessedly, to run more gently beside the rushing Deschutes River where the horses at last, slow.

I breathe prayers of thanks while catching my breath, and finally pull the horses up and stop. Dick hauls up beside me.

“Whooee!” he shouted, his dimples deep, his boyish face washed in grin as he towers over me. “What a ride, hey, Mrs. Sherar? You can drive for me anytime. Whooee!” He lifted his hat and wiped his forehead then made a sweeping, gallant bow. He was full of compliments while I was feeling fury. He jumped off, helped me down, and balanced me a moment on my shaky legs before he checked my wagon and what was left of the squealing pigs.

“You were way too close,” I snapped at him. “Scared the horses and me half to death. Could have gotten us all killed.”

He looked surprised. “Just trying to warn you. The leather split, dropped off back on the trail,” he pointed behind him. “You didn’t have no brakes to speak of. Pulled back soon as I saw you were having a hard time with ’em. But hey, Mrs. Sherar, you done good! Lucky no bells rang. We had the road all to ourselves. Really put the steam on. Just the way I like it.”

Later, when passengers stepped off the stage at our hotel, I always had a special sympathy for those who rode with Dick. Many reported walking down that grade rather than ride with the Wheeler Stage Company’s handsome young driver. I knew how he liked to take his big Concord down the steep twisty road at breakneck speed. He grew bigger with the thrill of that steep grade while I shrank smaller than my five feet.

We finished the drive in the shadow of the rimrocks, noticing the tangled remains of a raven’s nest and the resident’s white droppings dribbled down the red rocks. I heard the falls, could see the turquoise twist of water surging through the lava cuts roaring beneath the splintered bridge. Then we stopped, presenting fourposter and pigs to the base of the canyon and our new home.

We had survived the day. Even the tossed-out pig found his way to his mates having taken a short cut. Once we actually lived at the river, I worried we’d lose pigs, that they’d wander too close and fall in. Only Joseph’s assurance of their intelligence—“they can probably swim”—and the thousand other demands coughed up by our decision to move kept me from dwelling long on the shoats’ fate.

The stove, too, proved troublesome to move. And we had to take with us a winter’s supply of pinewood and fir so we’d have other than brush to burn through our first winter at the river, there being no trees where we had chosen to live, just rock.

But the most difficult and unexpected part of the move was Benito and Anna’s response to it.

“Is not personal,” Benito said, stirring the spoon in his coffee a little too vigorously the day Joseph carried his enthusiasm to Benito and Anna, announcing his purchase of the falls. “We stay here.”

“Ye don’t wish to be part of it?” Joseph asked.

“We do our part. Here,” Benito insisted. “Buy this claim if you let us, run cattle, this place. Or other.” His finger tapped into the tabletop with each phrase, tentatively emphasizing his point.

“I need you,” my husband said, still surprised. Corlamae climbed onto Joseph’s tall knees, sat in her “uncle” Joseph’s lap. Aware of the tension, she sucked on her fingers and leaned her head into Joseph’s shirt. “It won’t be the same if you don’t come,” he said.

Joseph had not considered that Benito and Anna and their children might have different plans. I suppose he figured he had discussed his wish so often with Benito that he expected his friend
would share in it as he had with all the rest. Or perhaps he never asked.

“This is what we came north for,” Joseph persisted. “You’re the one who urged me to come all those years ago. Now you want out?” Anger in his voice hid the pain.

Benito nodded his head in disagreement. “Not out. Different.” He smiled and I realized for the first time that it was not a smile of pleasure I often saw, but a habit, a way of expressing his discomfort, of buying time. I could tell he did not relish this discussion, disagreeing with his life-long friend over something so important as the future. He diverted his eyes from Joseph’s face, studied the crack in his cup. “This is our home now,” he continued. He reached around the waist of Anna who had moved to stand beside him. Her arms crossed over her chest, she willed her strength onto her husband in this. “We stay here, yes? Or we take other claim,” he said.

“You’d move somewhere. Just not with us.” Joseph said. He chewed on his lower lip, patted Corlamae’s arm as she tensed on his lap.

“Is not personal,” Benito said, “against you or Missus. But is for us. Personal.” He sighed, struggling with the words. “We … to have own place. Not always ride drag behind big friend. Do not want to start again, far from things. Want to do things … different … even make mistakes.”

“Haven’t I treated you fairly? Haven’t I—”

“You have a right to your own dreams,” I said. “I doubt being fair has anything to do with it.”

“What if I don’t want to sell?” Joseph said.

I squeezed my husband’s shoulder gently as I stood behind him. “Each has a different path. Isn’t that what you’ve always said, Joseph? It isn’t about you and Benito. It’s about Benito and Anna, what they want for their family.”

His gaze went to his hands hugging the small child. He was quiet.

I looked across the table at Anna. We each stood behind our
husbands, our eyes sharing a message.
The friendship matters
, her eyes said.
But more, my husband’s pride, of who he is and yet will be away from the shadow of Mr. Sherar
.

“You’ll visit?” I said, lighter than I felt, aware at once of how much I would miss them, their ready laughter, good sense, the smell of Anna’s cooking, the chatter of Spanish mixed with English. “Bring the children?” My words caught in my throat. Oh, how I would miss the children!

“Yes,
si
,” Benito said. “And will help with roundup. Share, still. Just set own pace,” he said, his eyes pleading with me, with Joseph, to understand.

Anna left her husband’s side and came to mine, her eyes searching, each knowing what we would miss, each supporting the loves of our lives. “I save seeds,” she said softly, “so you can plant at the river. We will share some of the same view. Come. I show you,” she said, and we walked arm in arm outside.

I’m not sure Joseph understood until much later. Sorting out the change in their relationship and how it would affect our move to the falls took energy. It was as though he had to ruminate on other old connections, with his brother, his father, have them work to the surface whenever some current encounter attached to the past. Slowly, though, my Joseph washed his feelings in the soothing water of time and we moved to Sherar’s Bridge without his life-long friends.

It was called Sherar’s Bridge almost immediately. I never understood that. Todd and May and Hemingway and O’Brien—not to mention the Tyghs and Teninos and Warm Springs people—all had their marks on that piece of the river. Somehow “Sherar’s” stuck.

O’Brien had begun work on a wooden flume to bring spring water from a grassy ravine above the rock ledge to a storage tank near the cabin. It was our water supply. Finishing that task took Joseph’s first energies, begun even before we began the move. Then he started on the house.

The place came with a single-story frame structure, made up of a large kitchen with a room to eat in and gather, a small parlor, and on the other side, three bedrooms, two for weary travelers. Almost at once, Joseph determined to add on, to enlarge the small parlor into a saloon. He wanted to expand the kitchen area, create a long, rectangular dining room with eight small bedrooms sticking out from the saloon. Each little room would house a narrow bed, a washstand for a chamber set, a Chatham-square mirror, and two clothes pegs pounded into one wall. I wondered how weary travelers could sleep with their tiny bedrooms attached like nipples to the belly of the bar, but they did.

Thirteen rooms in all. Finished, it would be larger than the home we left behind, very different, as we prepared for the increase in passengers Joseph was sure would follow with his improvements in the road.

I always appreciated that he tended to the house first even though it must have galled him some. He knew the roads so badly needed work. Perhaps he concentrated on the house because it was October, and he knew it was futile to begin the real road work before spring. I prefer to think his efforts reflected his remembering: my wish for a house with room enough for a large family to slip their feet beneath the table; room enough to strike up the fiddle and hear the shuffle of smooth soles across the polished floor; room enough to house all my memories and hopes.

At the same time, the bridge itself did require his attention. He wished to secure it, make it sturdier, and widen it to accommodate the larger loads and traffic he imagined would come down the ridge and cross. I often wonder if he ever imagined that just ten years later Jess and Stephen Yancy would bring five loads of thirty thousand pounds each to that bridge, having eased their way down the grade, the owners trusting in his construction enough to creak their heavy, ponderous fifteen-ton load of a light plant to the water’s edge. They hoped what they carried in their wagons would illuminate the entire town of Prineville, south of Cross Hollows—if they could only reach
the other side. I marvel that my visionary husband could have engineered something that inspired such confidence, especially that first fall.

And there were other pressures on us as we moved to our new home. Developing a crew was one. We needed men to handle the livery animals, harness and tend to traveling teams. If we were successful in building roads, we’d have stagecoaches making that treacherous grade. They’d require feed to refresh their mounts to make it up the other side. There’d be passengers to serve, tolls to collect, food to prepare for travelers and our own crew, assuming we had one.

“So who will we hire for the road work?” I asked my planning husband. “There’ll be enough work to keep what buckaroos we have busy without releasing them each day for the road.”

“Been thinking on that for a while, now,” Joseph said. “Going to make a ride to the reservation. Want to come along?”

He knew he didn’t have to ask twice.

Sunmiet greeted me with a warm embrace and invited us inside. Seeing us, Standing Tall bristled, grunted a greeting as he pushed his way past us to the outside without further comment. He left unmended dipnets on the floor. “He is busy with the horses today,” Sunmiet said awkwardly, “and forgets his manners. Please, sit.” She made room for us on the furs and blankets and it dawned on me as we sat that there were no chairs in the room. Nothing, actually, of the white man’s world. Rock pestles, spear shafts, snowboards, all handmade. Even Sunmiet wore the buckskins of her own tanning. “You like dried salmon?” she offered.

Joseph declined, saying he had really come to see Peter and would do that now. I accepted her offer though I wasn’t hungry. I knew that giving meant much to her. “You stay,” Joseph urged me. “Visit, while I look for Peter.”