A Sweetness to the Soul (54 page)

The sheriff decided to wait until the morning stage returned from Canyon City, and arranged for Crickett—or Lonnie Williams as his family knew him—to stay in his room, cuffed to the bed. Crickett turned despondent. The sheriff tried to convince him that going back would not be bad. Crickett sat stony-faced and forlorn upon his bed. Dirt still smudged the front of his tight-fitting vest.

Alice was inconsolable. She spent the better part of the afternoon sitting beneath the rimrock stroking Spirit, crying, her eyes puffed and red.

“It’s not the end,” Joseph told her when he arrived back from the roads. He folded his long legs beneath himself and leaned back on his elbows beside her on the grass. He did not look at her, honored her, wanted her to know he was there. “Though I expect it doesn’t seem so now,” he said. “Maybe it’s the best place for him.”

She looked at him, accusing. “This was the best place for him. Until that man came.”

“He’s only doing his job, Alice. It’ll take you nowhere but to misery to blame another for things the way they are. Not Crickett’s fault either. He had to do what he had to do. We all do, I suspect.” He reached for her then and I saw through the window that she allowed him to hold her while she cried. It was progress.

Crickett wasn’t hungry when I took a tray to him. Even Alice with her handkerchief stuffed up her dress sleeve in case she began to cry again, could not urge him. “Just take a bite,” Alice said. Crickett stared straight ahead.

I succumbed to the strangeness of the day and let Spirit spend the night out of her cage with Alice.

In the morning, the stage arrived, three passengers disembarked, donned their moccasins and slipped their feet beneath the table. A
pretty woman not much taller than me said she was a photographer from Minnesota, looking to set up a studio in The Dalles or maybe Portland. We talked of Ella’s wedding later in the summer and she handed me her card. “Jessie Shep” it read. “I can be reached at this post.” She wrote a Portland number on the card. “At least until August.” Something about her intrigued me. Perhaps it was talking with someone without having to look up, or enjoying the presence of another independent woman here beside the river.

The male passengers always behaved better when a woman rode with them, so when I met the sheriff and Crickett in the hall, I made a fateful suggestion. “If Crickett wants to eat breakfast, perhaps he could do so without the cuffs? There’s a woman passenger.” The sheriff shrugged his shoulders, asked a subdued Crickett if he’d like to eat at the table, and Crickett nodded yes.

And Crickett did eat. A bit woodenly but enough to make Alice feel better about him and the long ride ahead. The driver gave the five-minute call, and the men stood to put their boots on. Standing on the porch, they talked of weather, the horses, smoked their rolled cigarettes. Peach blossoms from the upper orchard drifted to the earth in the gentle breeze like snow falling softly. The photographer walked toward the falls and asked if there was sufficient time before they left to take a photo.

“Sure ’nuf,” Young Handly, the driver, said. “Got to load the sheriff’s passenger yet. Guess we’ll tie his horse,” he added absently to himself.

The driver lifted the stagecoach boot and handed Jessie her tripod and her camera. She set it up, bent beneath the black cloth and focused, loaded the glass plates and took her shot of the falls. Seeing the men standing on the porch, the inn and the unusual rock wall as a backdrop, the blossoms drifting through the air, she asked if they wouldn’t like to pose. A few coughs, lame protests and the men lined up. “You too,” she called to Crickett and the sheriff stepping out of the inn. “The men of the meal,” she jested. “The tallest—line up in back,” which is what Crickett and the sheriff did as she reloaded.

“Got it,” she said in a lilting voice after she took her picture. The men moved forward, offered to carry the heavy camera, her tripod. Jessie meandered, seemed to relish the fragrant morning, the roar of the river. Even the sheriff slowed to talk with one of the passengers.

Then into that placid lull before the storm, Crickett made his decision. Our laxness brought opportunity mixed with anticipated loss, and Crickett brushed forward in an instant, past the sheriff, past the photographer, past the stage. He headed for the river.

Crickett’s spirit was a good one, though, and while he could not seem to stop himself, when he plunged headlong into the turquoise swirl of the raging Deschutes River, he leaped alone.

U
NFOLDING

I
t did not seem possible that in one short week new life should join us and another leave. While we tried to comfort Alice, explain how much Crickett’s mind must have suffered to end it as he did, tried to make sense of the craziness of choosing death over the torments of his life, none of it made sense to her. She had lost him just after he was found.

“It’s that way, sometimes,” I said, holding her while she cried. We sat at the river’s edge, Alice’s place of belonging.

“Never again!” she said adamantly, pulling back from me. “I will not care so much, never again. Why did that man have to come for him? We should have run from the dance!” A further thought caused more anguish as she said: “If it was not for me, he would never have remained at this river!”

She sat apart from me, resolute. Fearful that she might waste years as I had, I shot an arrow prayer for wisdom and good counsel before I spoke next.

“I know it seems you’ll never heal,” I said. “And you may not want to. I didn’t, a long time ago, when I lost three someones I loved. I thought that I would never want to feel again, it hurt so much. Worse, I thought my loving caused it.” She was listening though staring
straight ahead at the rocks across the river, rocks she loved to fish from, rocks she escaped to. “I waited a long time. I blamed others who blamed me and then myself. I said only one thing could ever fill my empty space. If I had stayed that way,” I told her, talking quietly, “I never could have loved you, or Ella when she came.” Alice’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I would have missed so many moments, from Sunmiet’s children, you, Joseph, all the ones I love who softened me up over the years.” I thought of my brother, too, wondered if I’d stayed away from him these years not just to avoid my mother but to protect him, afraid my loving him meant I would lose him too. “A hard heart has no room for the good things God gives,” I said. She tossed a small rock into the rushing water, watched it sink from sight. “I know your heart feels like a stone now, but please don’t let it stay that way. Love did not cause your loss,” I said softly. “It gave you your greatest joy.”

Alice sat poised like a frightened deer. Almost anything could set her off, make her disappear in fact or form. Then into that taut moment jumped Spirit, springing onto Alice’s lap with her fur and purr. Alice startled and patted the cat’s arched back, running her hands out to the tip of its tail. The cat put its nose to her chin, pushed, and I saw a small smile through Alice’s swollen eyes and knew it would be Spirit who would bring Alice from her deep despair. Spirit, answered prayer, and our unyielding love, which in time gave us back our happy Alice. Spirit, who joined us at Sherar’s Bridge that summer and never spent another night inside her cage. Spirit, who some months later, led the real Dr. Crickett and great change to Alice’s life.

The letter informing us of James’ death back in New York had taken weeks to reach us despite advances in the postal system. Sometime in March he’d died. Eliza penned the letter, said that she and Carrie and Henry would be fine, that she thought James had left them well cared for.

My husband did not grieve, at least not in the way I expected. Or perhaps I didn’t notice as I might have. Ella’s wedding preparations
took my time and energy. That and keeping an eye on Alice. For a brief time we’d been planning two marriages. “We’ll have to clean twice as much, mother,” Alice had said once, her dark eyes glowing. I had delighted in her newfound consideration of me as mother, was grateful Crickett’s death did not take that away.

We prepared for the marriage of our now legally adopted daughter, papers all signed and courthouse sealed. I had thought some great feeling would arise from me the day we signed the papers making Susan Ella Turner become Susan Ella Sherar, but it did not. I suppose I had already accepted her as my own—perhaps even all those years before—so the papers were but the punctuation in a long sentence of our lives.

Every mother imagines her daughter’s wedding day. Must be something put into the water of the womb. And while I was deprived of that water, the image did not escape me. So we traveled, Ella and Joseph and I, to Portland to find the loveliest dress that ever fashioned itself over a form.

White lace, layer on layer, flowed from Ella’s shoulders out over that bustle right down to her toes. She wore a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich plume pouring ivory over the side. I couldn’t resist purchasing the stuffed silk dove made in Chinatown, though Joseph shook his head like I’d lost mine. We pinned it into Ella’s hat, peeking out from under the plume for the occasion. I thought Dr. Hey would have been pleased with my choice of symbolism. After all, I had taken his advice and mixed with the sage wisdom of Sunmiet and Pastor Condon, had found my place in life, found forgiveness and another kind of nesting place, found my family.

Here stood Ella on her wedding day as proud proof.

The dress fit perfectly and was not too hot for July. On her feet, she wore slippers of pure satin. A gold chain draped around her neck, hung down over the tiny tucks in the bodice. Joseph gave it to her along with a locket. Her father from Vale sent her a lovely gold bracelet and I wondered if after all these years of mining, he had finally struck it rich—though he had already given us his greatest treasure. Ella’s ash blond hair was swirled on top of her head with a
mass of curls and to finish off her modern look, she rubbed real rouge we’d bought in Portland on her dimpled cheeks.

She was as lovely as the white icing on her cake.

I didn’t want to think of Ella’s leaving. My face must have been speaking up a storm while Alice and I were dressing Ella.

“There’ll be grandchildren,” Ella said. Then aware beyond her years of how I might take that promise—one I promised my own mother but had not achieved—she added, “And if not, we’ll have more time together, Monroe and I. Build a life as you and Father Sherar have, loving other people’s children.”

Is that how she saw us? Loving other people’s children? I guessed that was so. Even Joseph had taken Monroe under his wing, referred to him as one of his boys and I suspected they shared a visionary mind. So Joseph, too, had found a son loaned him from another.

“I don’t think a child can get too much, do you? Love, I mean,” Ella continued, looking at herself in the mirror. “There are always children enough to go around if you take a little time to find them. You always did.”

I marveled that on the biggest day of her life, Ella could find the positive in someone else’s life. “And I’ll see you, though not like every day, like now.” She looked at me in the oak mirror, then at herself, checking her white dress, gloves. “You can come see us, too,” she reminded me, sticking the pearl hat pin through the pile of curls, adjusting the brim, the bird peeking out, resting her hands at her side.

She turned from the mirror. “You can ride that same trail we did. Past your ‘green river.’ Or maybe Father Sherar will work a new grade and you can bring the buggy up it.” I nodded, swallowing back tears, not wanting to talk, fearful I might ruin her day. “Change isn’t the end,” she reminded me, softly, her dress swooshing on the floor as she kneeled beside me. “It’s an unfolding, the beginning of something different.”

With that bit of wisdom, my bright-eyed, twenty-two-year-old daughter held me, dabbed my eyes with her hankie, adjusted my amethyst watch on my bodice, mothering the mother.

“It’s time,” she sang, a child again, and she stepped out into the parlor of her future in-laws’ home, reached for the arm of her soon-to-be husband, and stood before the justice of the peace to become Mrs. Monroe Grimes.

“It’s not the end,” I remembered her saying as she took her vows. Beside Joseph, watching the ceremony, I blinked away tears. “It’s the beginning of something different,” I repeated softly, to which Joseph responded in a whisper: “No doubt.”

James’s death brought on a new drive for my husband, as though he had not yet challenged himself enough and perhaps that was how he grieved. He began constructing, putting his still firm brawn and muscle into barns. Huge barns, big enough to harbor four stage relief teams at a time; enough to feed fifty calves in winter; enough to nurture twice as many lambs. Along the White River Joseph built a three-story structure—a flour mill—to grind the wheat the rich land gave up to the ever-increasing homesteaders dotting the rolling hills above us. The construction had taken months and my husband had been energized each day he rode the three miles to supervise, consider problems, solve them, and ride back home.

On our river, on the inn side of the bridge, he built storage sheds and from them more than once he ordered flour and salt dispensed to hungry settlers too poor to even pay the toll. But his pride and joy was the calf barn, a huge cavernous structure whose foundation was the river rock. To make walls perfectly straight, he sighted across his gold pan filled with water level to the brim. Then he and the crews stood the fir walls, carefully leaving less than six inches from the barn to the precipitous river’s edge.