A Sweetness to the Soul (49 page)

“I can almost see the stagecoaches rumbling down those roads, hear the sheep bleating,” I told him after a time. Then thinking of all the work past, I added: “You have visions larger than your hands.”

“That’s why God gave me yours,” he said, taking mine in his. “Gave me a tireless partner. He knew we had much to do. Still do.” I felt some irritation with his reminder of what was left undone. I liked savoring completion, liked not always being on the way to somewhere else. Wisely, I did not take the moment to protest. Instead, we savored the rush of water, the pink sunset settling like goose down over the river, reflecting off the red rock walls. For me, the bridge was an ending, a finished piece. For my husband, it was just another beginning, the sign of what could be accomplished with a vision and “mit faith,” and mit friends, doing.

In the months and years ahead, Joseph’s crews worked the approaches to the bridge until they leveled them with pounded rocks and loads of dirt, making entry from land onto the sturdy frame bridge unnoticeable to passengers but for the change in sound.
When the bridge crew finished their work across the Deschutes River, Joseph moved them to Buck Hollow Creek.

“Whatever for?” I asked him. “There’s not even a road there, just a trail the Indians use.”

“Will be. Someday,” he said. And so that bridge, too, rose up to cross the narrow creek, made wide enough and high enough, we hoped, to manage the spring runoff before it poured into the Deschutes. That smaller bridge finished, the men returned to the grade crews, digging and dragging the narrow cutouts being widened up the ridges toward Bakeoven and Canyon City on one side, Fifteen Mile Creek and The Dalles on the other, all linking our remote little family with the world beyond.

Top soil, dug out from the ridges was often loaded into wagons and brought down, across the bridge, to the house. There, other men spread and shoveled, making room for a larger garden we tended vigorously to feed the increased traffic coming down our road.

It was where we buried Bandit.

He’d been missing and Joseph asked if I would ride with him, call, to see if we could find him. I felt a little guilt at having banished Bandit mostly to the outside the year we moved to the river. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for him. His feet brought in so much dirt, leaving behind him little seeds and piles of fine black sand testifying to his having lain in the river backwater pools then plopped in the dirt.

“Cleaning has become an obsession with you,” Joseph accused. “It’s fine to not be cluttered, but a place has to be lived in.” He was putting on one of the pair of a dozen or more buckskin slippers of varying sizes I kept by the door.

“I can’t very well ask all the guests to don Sunmiet’s moccasins while they’re here and then expose them to a dog’s dirt,” I said.

“You could make a pair up for him,” he said, irritated, trying to find the size tens I kept for him, “since you’ve such a hankering for variety of size.”

The little dog was broader now, not quite as quick as he had been, but his ears were alert and he recognized his name.

“I don’t think such tidiness is necessary,” my husband finally told me. But he agreed the house was my domain and consented, grudgingly, to my preparing a bed for Bandit in the mud room off the porch.

Joseph hadn’t taken Bandit with him much in recent years. The dog moved slowly and couldn’t make the leap onto the saddle anymore. He rode fine in the buggy, his tongue dripping onto the leather seat as he surveyed the land he’d so easily adopted.

But when he did not appear at his bed as usual one evening, Joseph and I rode along the river then up into the ravines behind the house, up along the road that had once been a pack trail, up toward the “Y” where we’d once lived. The choke cherries would be ready to pick soon. In the distance stood the roof of our old homestead surrounded by bigger trees, a blacksmith shop, more green besides the lilacs.

“Do you regret it?” he asked me. “Leaving?”

“Not a lilac leaf,” I said.

We rode back down and this time walked beside the river, closer to the edge, calling, yelling to the Indians fishing, asking if they had seen the kelpie. No one had. As we were about to quit for the evening, Joseph saw a form he thought earlier had been a rock, lying beside a backwater pool. As swiftly as his bad leg would take him, he descended on the form and found his kelpie.

There were no marks on him. No sign of distress. No injuries. The little dog had simply succumbed to old age, lying there as though sleeping. His face wet with the tears of loss, Joseph picked up the dog and slowly walked toward the garden. So much they’d been through together! So much they had shared. “I’ll remind myself he was only a dog,” he told me, his lips trembling, “later.”

And seeming without notice, despite the changes, gains and losses, my life filled up. Activity swirled around our inn, crews and stagecoaches
darting in and out. Chatter of guests exchanging news from the East could be heard three times a day and more often when people stayed over and filled the saloon with laughter. Young men lounged about, pursuing Ella, noticing Alice. And I had seasons to look forward to, Sunmiet’s return and the pleasure of old friends sharing memories at the river’s edge.

The roads brought fascinating people to our table, a fact which intrigued me. I marveled that we lived so remotely and yet never felt the sense of isolation so many settlers did. We never knew what surprise the roads and bridge now held for us with stages running daily, people traveling, moving east and west.

Sometimes, those who came were not so welcome. Once, while Joseph and I visited Portland, our inn was robbed. An acrid smell seeped through the dining room the morning after when a dazed Ella and Alice and the Fairchilds, our caretakers, awoke. My watch—Joseph’s first gift to me—and hard cash were missing along with valuables from Joseph’s desk. Seeing that my children and our caretakers were safe, I could become outraged at the violation of it, frightened for those I cared for! Imagine, someone coming into our home, walking where we spent our days, laying cloths of chloroform on the faces of those I loved, then pawing through our things! No one had ever touched Joseph’s desk but him. Why, the robber knocked people out with the very thing I used to ease the pain when we pulled someone’s tooth! And risked what I most loved besides my Joseph: my Ella and wise Alice.

“Notice anyone unusual?” the sheriff asked the Fairchilds. Neither they nor Ella could recall anything out of the ordinary. The keen eyes of Alice did.

“Large man with pig ears asked about biscuits,” she said. “And his eyes got big when Ella says, ‘Mr. Sherar likes Mrs. Sherar’s better.’ Sherar name made him look familiar in his eyes, and far away. Maybe he came back for biscuits.”

With a little effort, Joseph pried a better description. Coupled
with that picture and the big footprints outside the window, Joseph felt sure the robber arrived from his distant past—Pinky O’Connor, once of San Francisco, last of Canyon City.

His belief was confirmed when the “Pinkish” man was discovered by French Louie at the livery before the week had passed. Seems O’Connor hid his stash in the hills until he thought it safe then came on in to trade his mount. Louie alerted the sheriff. Inside his saddlebags they found most of the valuables, all of the cash. But nothing returned with greater pleasure than my watch, Joseph’s special gift to remind me that time stood still when I was with him and did not start again until I went away.

Children, too, came down that road, many brought happily by me.

Sometimes, Sunmiet’s people arrived at the river without their children, because the boarding school held them hostage, in session, though the salmon season had begun. It gave me a mission.

Like an untreatable cough, controversy still rattled over the boarding school. Children of the Warm Springs people and the Wascos and eventually the Paiutes were all forced to attend, forced to give up their language and their ways. It became clear to anyone with light in their eyes that the tall brick school set on a wind-swept plain not far from the Warm Springs River was not a place for children.

For many it was only spring they lived for. That time of year, the children waited every weekend in their scratchy brown uniforms, satchels packed at their sides, hoping their families would arrive to take them to the rivers of their pleasure and to familiar open fields. They waited, hoping their families were close enough to fetch them and that they’d not be left in the cavernous building for one moment longer than necessary under the supervision of the matrons.

I could not change the laws that made the children have to go there, but I found my way to touch that place and build my own bridge over disappointment and time. When Sunmiet’s people arrived that first spring with only half their families, I began what would become my custom.

At the parents’ pleasure, I harnessed a team and set out for the reservation on my own. On those trips, I was thrice blessed.

First, because I found pleasure in my own company without someone always about requiring decision or care. The road I traveled from the river to the reservation was familiar and my mind wandered as I bounced over the rocky roads in the buckboard. Nights, I spent with the Indian agent and his long-suffering wife awaiting my second blessing which came on Friday morning.

It began as I pulled up to the boarding school. There I’d see the looks of cautious joy in the eyes of the children lined up in their little brown uniforms, waiting, to see if anyone they knew would come for them that weekend. Seeing me, they showed no outward emotion. They’d step up into the buckboard, older children helping younger, and stiffly sit, side by side, like wind-dried salmon in the shallow wagon box and we’d start out. I heard only the sound of the hames and the harness and wheels crunching across the rocks until we reached the top of the hill.

With the school out of earshot but still distantly in sight, I’d pull the team up. The children would metamorphose before my very eyes, turning from the brown, closed caterpillars the school had made them into the butterflies of light and spirit they truly were. Rid of their uniforms, they’d don their buckskins, shake their shoes off, pull wing dresses made of calico from their satchels and on over their heads. To their squeals and laughter, I’d pull from the basket at my side, slabs of cooked or dried venison and thick slices of bread formed into sandwiches washed down with spring water. And they’d talk: of what they planned to do when they reached the river; asked questions about their aunties and their
kásas
, the horses, dogs, and even sheep. We carried on conversations as comfortably as if we were all eating at my table. As we resumed our journey I celebrated inside as from their mouths would come the gentle swoosh and click of Sahaptin and then Wasco and some Paiute, words not allowed all year at school, yet only words their
kásas
could understand. Such a joy to hear them, like squirrels chattering in a language of familiar
that I could not understand but knew kept them connected to the things that truly mattered: family.

And then the third blessing, when I delivered my cargo to the river. Like a bouquet of wildflowers, I watched them, tears brimming in my eyes, as the children spilled from the buckboard and scattered themselves along the river’s edge to the waiting arms of family, happy, home again. Once or twice a child skipping toward the water’s edge or near their family’s lodge, would turn and wave at me, blow a kiss. And sometimes, one would run back, with words of thanks disguised as breathless
“kása”
or “auntie.” And while their little arms grabbed around my crinolines and squeezed my knees, it was my heart they held in their hands.

Just to watch them was my blessing and my wage.

Filled, I’d lead the team and wagon to the barn where Joseph waited, smiling in his knowing way, to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “You’re quite the little mother,” he said once.

“Yes, well, I am at that,” I told him. With the scent of sweet hay surrounding us, my husband would hold me, and I recognized the fullness of my cup, so filled to overflowing, overflowing with children, overflowing with love.

S
PIRITS

T
ake ladders to reach it,” Joseph said, “but we wouldn’t have to worry over deer or other critters any more.”

His voice sounded teasing, but he drew in his sketch book. “Water’ll come from the spring up there.” He pointed. “Pipe it down. We won’t need to always use a ladder to get there, either. When we build the hotel, the third story will be even with the ledge and we’ll have a little bridge out to it, from one of the bedrooms.”

“The hotel will have a third story?” I asked, incredulous.

“Among other things.”

“You can’t possibly build something so accurately that you could put a bridge out to a ledge, assuming you could make a ledge in such a place.”

Joseph envisioned a garden chipped out of the side of the steep rocks that ran behind the inn. A natural ledge appeared to be there. I thought he brought the subject up to make us laugh at the possibility.

“Why not? We’ll hack out the area we want,” he said. “Plant the trees now and have a harvest by the time we build the hotel. I’m thinking we should talk with Blivens about sweet grape starts. Make an arbor there along with some peach trees and apples.” The man was lost to his dreams.