A Sweetness to the Soul (6 page)

“What she write?” Benito asked as the newest emigrants to San Francisco made their way toward Lexington Street.

“This address,” Joseph told him, leaving out an important point as they located the small, active German who listened intently to Joseph’s request. He nodded, said “Ya, ya,” several times, moving his hands in a circular motion as though speeding Joseph’s story up, urging him to come to the point. But as always, Joseph was methodical and told the story from beginning to end of what and why he wanted what he wanted.

At last, Joseph finished. The German smiled, nodded his head excitedly, quoted him a price and asked that he give him a day or two.

During their final days in San Francisco, the O’Connors saw Joseph and Benito each morning, still, for pasties, with the restaurant idea never again mentioned. “You’ve been a help, Eleanor,” Joseph told her each morning just to watch her smile.

On the day before they planned to leave, Joseph complimented her again saying they’d soon be picking up their purchase from the German, moving inland. “We leave tomorrow, early,” he told her. “So today I’ll have my last pasty for a while.”

Eleanor’s eyes looked worried and she glanced with agitation at the O’Connors who both seemed busy with customers, not noticing their conversation. Her finger against her lips signaled quiet.

“Don’t worry about us,” Joseph said, thinking her worried eyes were for their travel plans. “We’ll pick up our order from the German and be gone and back before Thanksgiving.” Her eyes looked painfully at him, pleading, as though attempting to talk with him. “Would you like script?” he asked.

But before she could communicate one way or another Pinky noticed their interchange. Grabbing two handfuls of potatoes, he dropped them into her bony lap, turned to Joseph, and said, “She’ll peel extra so ye can have a big pasty this last mornin’. Before you boys move on.”

“Fine,” Joseph said, anticipating his morning meal.

Perhaps it was Benito’s sixth sense or maybe Joseph’s love of luxury that protected them that night, for they splurged on their last day and rented a bed and bath at one of the fine hotels on Market Street. So they were not present at Adam’s Livery when the fire started.

The owners said it was a miracle they got the stock out and safe and lost so little, really. “Twas a rag-tag boy I said could stay the night for cleaning stalls what saw the flames,” the livery operator told Joseph excitedly the next morning when the two men approached the still smoldering pile of boards that was once a section of Adam’s Livery. “Claimed he had a dream about big pigs snorting through the stalls upsetting the horses outside and some of yours, in. Thought he might even a seen some dark forms movin’ afore the flame started, but prob’ly just dreamin’.”

Joseph and Benito made their way to what personal supplies they’d kept in the tack room. The sickening smell of old smoke
seeped into their bedrolls and blankets tossed around and ripped apart, probably by those who helped to put out the fire. Neither thought much of the disheveled condition of what had been an orderly stacking of their items. When they calmed their sorrels in the adjacent corral and saddled them slowly, they spoke of the fire. When they paid Adam—and ignoring Adam’s protest, added extra for his loss—they spoke of it. And as they made their way to Lexington Street to pick up their order from the German, they considered those flames.

But there, with the German, their thoughts changed, moved on to anticipation as the little man rolled the heavy nutmeg-colored material out across the plank floor of his shop. Bits of cloth lay beneath the sewing machines like rocks scattered on a dark beach. Dust drifted past the shafts of light that filtered through the four dirty windows lighting the cavernous building. The women, their young children playing at their feet, stood away from their machines. And at the German’s gesture to join him, they smiled in admiration of their work spread out across the floor and formed a circle around it.

They were all seeing for the first time what Joseph had seen those days before: tents. The extraordinary raised from the ordinary. A new line of tents, available for miners ready from the newest pack string to move into the mountains.

“My brother James told me the men are so busy mining, they take no time to build,” Joseph told the impromptu audience. “Some just throw their blankets over a buck brush or manzanita and call it home. Lucky ones have muslin to sleep under in their ‘muslin towns.’ No privacy, though. The muslin may keep some sun off,” Joseph continued, “but it’s useless in the rains. And in the fighting. This German, here,” he said patting the little man’s shoulder, “may have the answer—at least to the prying eyes.”

The small group hovered around the cloth as yellow as sandstone except for a patch of natural white. He lifted the tent by the patch of white fabric roof and smiled at the German. “You’ve made a change,” he said. “I like it.”

“Danke, danke,”
the German said, his accent thick. “I tot the roof chud be vite, like is, not dye. And I make pocket, for ridgepole.” He glowed over his alterations.

Joseph felt the oiliness of the white patch. “This is good,” he said.

“Ya, ya,” the German said, his mutton chops moving up and down as he talked. “Paraffin oil. On hemp cloth. Vill kiss da rain goodbye, ya.” He kissed his fingers to his lips and threw them out to the admiring women, who giggled.

“It’s excellent, Levi. Thank you.” Joseph said as the women returned to their machines and he and Benito rolled and tied the blocks of nutmeg canvas. “Perhaps we’ll make Strauss tents famous in the mountains.”

“Ya,” Levi said. “You do that. I make jeans famous myself!” He smiled and waved a quick goodbye before urging his helpers back to work inside his small garment factory where reams of future jeans awaited him.

They rode, then, to the wharf area for one last pasty and to show Eleanor their tents. But they found this last mission thwarted. For the O’Connor lean-to was occupied by others. “What happened?” Joseph asked the new vendor, “to the O’Connors? And the woman?”

The vendor merely shrugged his shoulders. “Some come, some go. Those in this stand only been here for a week or two at most. Prob’ly got too cold fer ’em and they moved on.”

Joseph said he suspected otherwise. To Benito he remarked: “Remember you asked what Eleanor wrote besides Levi’s address? Well, it was ‘Good food, bad plan,’ ” Joseph told him. “A word to the wise I never even thanked her for.” He shook his head. “Maybe fire started by piggish man in boy’s dream?” Benito wondered out loud.

The thought unnerved Joseph. Was it coincidence that they’d slept away from the livery that one night? Coincidence that the O’Connors disappeared the morning after? He remembered his mother saying that if you believed in God’s plan for your life, there
were no coincidences, everything was part of the plan. But he wasn’t at all sure that what he and Benito were entering into in the gold fields with tents and mules was so noble as to be called a part of God’s Plan.

Joseph sold his tents and turned his cash into a significant investment of a pack string composed of forty mules. As they expanded, adding more mules to the string they ran, Benito sent for his brother and some cousins who brought their wives and children and formed a small city of their own with the mules serving as the traveling meeting hall around which all decisions were discussed and made. It made quite an entourage. I never saw it, at least not the string he skinned in California.

But he tells wonderful stories of those years. And once, when we rode to Canyon City the year after we were married, I had the feel of what it must have been like to move always on a mule’s back, travel single-file down mountain ridges, listen to the rocks crunch, break loose then bounce down canyon sides as steep as cows’ faces, so steep they surely were not meant for men—nor woman—to even see, let alone traverse. On that trip, the sights and sounds and sense of solitude filled me up and then pushed tears of awesome joy onto my cheeks. I think it must have been like that for Joseph in those early days in the mountains outside San Francisco.

The ranch he began in the Hupa Valley in northern California he hoped would be his life’s place. In the shadow of Mt. Shasta with the manzanita and laurel to green the brown hills, he brought Benito and his cousins, their families and mules, and several hundred head of cattle who fed on the deep ravines of California’s northern country.

Here, Joseph was doing daily what he thought he’d set his heart on doing: making money with integrity and adventure though I do not think he saw his future. That would come later, when he was led north, to Oregon’s Valley of the Tyghs. And to me.

T
EACHING

W
hile Joseph made his way in the world of mules and mines in northern California, I gave up baby teeth, added scant few inches to my slender frame, and spent my time looking after Rachel and Pauline and my baby brother, Loyal.

Oh, I pulled weeds from the potato patch we’d planted not far from our Oregon cabin. That was our livelihood those first years, raising and selling potatoes. And I sometimes rode with Papa as he drove freight wagons loaded with the bounty fifteen miles north, to Dalles City and the Columbia River. He made the trip pretty regularly exchanging the loads for necessities that got us through each winter. Together, we cleared more of Papa’s acres, bought additional cows, more mules. Mama was with child, often, when she wasn’t helping folks coming on the Barlow Cutoff heading for the Willamette Valley, or those coming back, all wet and drenched, looking for a life with less rain.

But it was the looking-after of my brother and sisters that consumed me, filled me up. I never counted it as weight, the older-sister load I carried. No, I counted it as wealth, even when I had to scorch the wheat grain to a dirty brown powder for their wet bottoms or thought to paddle their behinds for being sassy or disobedient or
disappearing without warning. Even when I had to pour kerosene over their heads to kill the pesky head lice that they hatched, I counted it as fortunate. For each occasion caulked us tighter than a log chink regardless of their responses to my presence or my scolding.

Sometimes in the night I’d hear Rachel and Pauline awake, chattering like magpies in words I couldn’t quite decipher through my sleep, discussing something of great import, enough to wake them up. Beneath a crescent moon casting pale light in the cabin loft, those girls would start to tussle Loyal. Their voices rising, I’d pull myself from sleep enough to counsel quiet, adding with more gentleness, “Itsa-right, itsa-right. Now, find another way to settle, sisters,” and so they would, faces buried in the duck-down quilts now shaking with their gentle laughter until they slept again and I returned to my own sweet dreams of babes. So by the time 1859 rolled around, I had my own life sense: to be surrounded by children through a family of my own.

It was the mix of work and care for them that satisfied my days. Especially in the potato patch where left alone, without our parents, we discovered much of who we were.

The potato patch was my classroom until the Walker School was formed. Surrounded by the leafy greens, I sang songs composed with Hound as the subject, or my sisters. Sometimes I talked with rattlesnakes, teaching Rachel and Pauline. “If you speak nice to them, they’ll leave you be,” I told them. “Just sing, ‘I’m too big to eat,’ like that, and you won’t have to worry about stepping on them even if you see their tracks in tater leaves or tall grass.”

I remember in particular the summer I turned eleven. Papa had offered to teach me how to use the Kentucky. It was a huge, long rifle that he’d brought with him from Virginia. Many of the settlers preferred more modern weapons, but Papa liked a rifle he could fix himself if something went wrong with it. He also liked finding flints from the hillsides rather than worrying about spending precious potato money on manufactured percussion caps that the newer rifles required. He was frugal that way.

He’d offered to teach me, said with the Yakimas unsettling up north and our living so close to the reservation, I should learn to help patch at least, in case there was some kind of argument. The Warm Springs Indians, Sahaptin-speaking people, had yet to even disagree about the weather with their neighbors, but one never knows the future. I wanted to shoot more to know I could bring in game if needed or chase off cougars that frequented the timber and terrified the stock. Either reason, Mama had to grant permission for such “unlady-like” lessons.

On the big day, she was mixing up gingerbread cookies, the scent of molasses seeping through the logs to the open air. It was early August and the weeds were coming on thicker than a bee swarm on the lilacs, and Mama said I had to work the potatoes before I could shoot.

Then she did the worst: made me choose which of the girls I’d take with me. Rachel could weed good when she wanted but she was a scamp. She usually found something else to do. Once she started digging in some soft dirt near a hole in a hillside, shoveling sand between her legs like Hound would if he’d been with us. It struck me funny until I spied a striped animal with rolling fat moving quickly toward us like he was the landlord and we were about to be visited with an eviction! He stopped and rose up on his toes and I saw that he was huge, weighing more than either Rachel or me. “Rachel,” I whispered as loudly as I could. “Back up slowly and stand behind me.”