A Sweetness to the Soul

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  His nose red, he moved quickly past their table.

  Bandit barked. Joseph’s chair tipped in the speed of his rising, his temper tested by the insult and flared by days of drain. The room froze into silence. Benito grabbed at Joseph from across the table. “No,” he said. “The man, he is not worth it.”

  Torn, Joseph stood a moment, watching the back of the lean man ease toward the door. When he saw Joseph would not pursue, he turned and adjusted his hat in triumph just before he left. Such contempt should not go unscathed, Joseph thought, though he could see Benito’s point. The man wasn’t worth it, even if Benito was.

  Voices in the saloon resumed talking, forks scraped on plates at the nearby table. J. W. wore an embarrassed face as he stood and moved his bowed legs to another card game, looking at Joseph over the head of another player.

  Joseph sat back down, leaning to retrieve his white linen napkin from the floor. Benson, the barkeep, brought another brew over and said something about the man losing an eye to a whip coming across the trail and grateful that Joseph had not pursued the bait.

  “Good,” Benito said, as Benson left them. “Good you do not pursue. Men of little minds do not deserve the energy of greatness.”

  “Greatness?” Joseph scoffed, tossing the napkin in a clump on his plate. “You, my friend, are even more tired than I if that’s what you think!”

  Pleased the tension passed so quickly, Benito said: “Yes. And tired makes me say things out loud I sometimes only think. But I will not be so tired in the morning.” He smiled. “My bones will ache from keeping up with you on our paseo. They wonder why I take them from soft beds for all of this.” He stood and rubbed his backside as if to massage away the aches. “No, crazy will be the word I think to call you then.”

  “And few would disagree,” Joseph said. “Only a few.”

  When Joseph rode into our ranch at Fifteen Mile Creek the next morning, Mama and I were at the dying tubs, tending to yarn left long in the sheds. We stood with walnut husks and dried goldenrod in gourds at our feet ready to color the yarn, aware of the glorious day. Meadowlarks warbled away their cares, little songbirds and nuthatches bopped about bravely pecking at the nuts. In the pasture, tiny yellow butterflies rallied at the slowly drying mudholes. Fifteen thin mules grazed hungrily on the new shoots pushing through patches of old, melting snow. Though the cattle had not been so fortunate, the mules had all survived.

  I almost didn’t recognize the Californian as I’d taken to thinking of him. His shoulders seemed wider, leaner. His face wore the bronze of a man who easily tanned or who by May had already spent hours in the sun. He sat taller astride a big bay gelding. A small, dark man with a mat of unruly hair rode beside him, a large hat held by a string at his throat bounced upon his back. They led no pack animals.

  The kelpie barked back as Hound roused from his lounge on the porch. I stopped my stirring and smoothed my dark skirt, tried to hike up my stockings with my shoeless feet and walked forward toward the gate.

  Mama recognized him immediately.

  “George!” She called out to Papa who was mending fence and nursing a headache near the barn. “We’ve company.” To me she said, “Hurry inside and put the bread and jam on the sideboard. We’ll take tea in the parlor.”

  I must have looked surprised because she added, “Parlor sets a propensity for good business. Now go.” She watched the men tend to their horses and added more cautiously, “I’m not sure about his man …” She eyed Joseph’s darker companion and nodded her head with approval when he took the reins from Joseph and led both horses to the hitching post. “Yes. Well.” She said then, always carrying with her remnants of her Virginian past, “It’s his man-servant. He’ll most likely wait outside.” She walked forward to greet the Californian, wiping her hands on her always immaculate apron.

  “Please forgive my appearance,” she said, touching the snood nervously at the back of her neck. “You’ve caught us unaware.” She seemed giddy, girlish, I thought, with some annoyance.

  “It’s we who ask forgiveness,” Joseph said, bending at the waist to greet her. “For arriving unannounced. And not returning last fall. It was the winter. I wasn’t sure we’d even be welcome—”

  “You certainly are …” Mama said. She eyed the darker man as he left the horses to stand beside Joseph.

  “My friend and partner, Benito Donario,” Joseph said.

  “Well. I’m pleased I’m sure,” Mama said, flustered by Benito’s offer to shake her hand. As her fingers adjusted her snood again, Benito awkwardly returned his work-stained fingers to the rim of his large hat now held in front of him. “My husband will join us shortly,” she said looking at Joseph. “Shall we go inside?”

  She didn’t wait for their answer. Instead, she lifted her crinolined skirts discreetly above her work shoes and walked toward the porch steps. “Jane,” she said as she walked by me. “Let’s serve our guests.” She walked quickly inside.

  My feet seemed sucked into mud; my hands stuck to each other like pitch to fingers behind my back. My smile worked and I gave it to Joseph as he removed his hat and stopped in front of me. His friend stood beside him, saying nothing. Joseph threaded his wide fingers through his thick brown hair, looking me over with the kind surprise a distant uncle shows for a niece not seen in years.

  “You’re a tad taller,” he said, “and a whole lot prettier.”

  His words embarrassed me, and so I did what I do best when someone does something out of my control: “Do mule skinners always travel without mules?” I said, with only a little lightness to my barb.

  “Glad to see the winter didn’t freeze your sass,” he said. He smiled wide, revealing a softness that filled his full face, his kind eyes. “I figured what this mule skinner needs spent the winter here.”

  “I did,” I said. Then, my face ablush: “I mean they did. Spend the winter here. The mules. Did.” His friend had a funny look on his face.

  “Jane!” I heard Mama call out and for once I was grateful for her interruption.

  “You’d best go on,” I said. “Papa’ll be along any minute.” Then I led Joseph, Benito, and the kelpie inside, waiting for Mama to shoo the latter two out, but she didn’t.

  Later, I would try to reconstruct what happened, to see if a path through the tangle could have been hacked out some other way. Wisdom, of course, carries with her both the future and the past while we humans have mere memory.

  My father entered next, stomping mud from his boots. Mama touched his arm as she began to introduce Joseph who had just turned to face him, eyes adjusting to my father’s form standing in the backlight of the door. The kelpie growled. Mama stepped back in surprise when Papa stiffened, recognizing Joseph first.

  Papa held his hand to his side as Joseph offered his, not even looking at him, Papa’s eyes beyond. “We’ve a foreign guest,” he said as he spied Benito standing next to the fabric chair, hat in hand. He had risen with Papa’s entrance.

  Mama was soothing. “He is Mr. Sherar’s partner,” she said. Then moving quickly said, “Mr. Sherar has come for his mules. Remember, I told you. He left the deposit?” To Joseph she said, “We are so fortunate. My husband put up extra stocks of hay and our mules, while thin, will fatten nicely with this snow-stained grass.” She took my Papa’s arm more forcefully. “Let’s sit, George,” she said firmly.

  At the sound of my father’s name, Joseph dropped the offer of his hand. I noticed caution now in his eyes. And then some kind of recognition.

  Papa recognized him at that moment, too, though neither Mama nor I knew how until much later.

  “The man who drinks with dogs,” Papa sneered.

  I thought he was looking at the kelpie standing at Joseph’s feet, lips pulled back, teeth showing, no tail wagging.

  Mama gasped at Papa’s poor manners. “George!” she said. “Yes. Well. I never—”

  “Shall we have tea, then?” I said, interrupting with my tray of things, trying to move past this awkward moment, fee
ling more like my mother than I ever had till then.

  “Yes. Tea, then. Here it is,” my mother said, her wide dress swirling about her legs as she turned to the sideboard, quickly, to help me.

  Joseph’s words were deep, even, spoken with an Irish tinge to our backs. “I’ll not be drinking tea, then,” he said. “Not with a man who cannot bide his tongue.”

  I turned to look at him and saw his neck was red and his eyes a stony blue directed at Papa.

  “In a man’s home, he can say what he wants,” Papa said, and I was inclined to agree. “Have who he wants to tea,” Papa told him, spitting at the “tea.” “And even sober, I don’t want the greaser.”

  Benito shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and said softly. “I will wait outside—”

  “Sit!” Joseph said. “I’ll not walk away a second time.”

  “Now, George,” Mama said, her voice higher pitched. “We have a business arrangement to complete. Surely we can do that without rancor.”

  “I wait outside,” Benito said as he moved to pass Papa.

  “We will both go outside,” Joseph said. His temper still ran his thinking as he pushed past my father, followed by Benito out onto the porch.

  “Please! George!” Mama pleaded. She twisted her fingers on Papa’s striped shirt sleeve. “For heaven’s sake! Control yourself!” Mama seemed frantic. “Complete the deal and then express your politics!”

  Papa pulled away from her and out to the porch. I stood in the doorway, my stomach a knot of hornets.

  Joseph and Benito digested the events near their horses, their faces close to each other with strong feeling but not in anger it didn’t seem to me. They were working something out between them.

  Papa seethed at the gate. Having won his argument, he seemed uncertain about how to proceed. Mama pushed by him to stand before Joseph. I heard her express apologies and they exchanged some words and then Mama led him back toward Papa and the gate.

  I’d never seen her quite so muddled. “None the worse for wear, shall we say, Mr. Sherar?” Mama smoothed and straightened her snood. “Mr. Sherar would like to complete his exchange,” Mama said, “and be on his way.”

  “Mister Sheer,” Papa said, glad to have some steps to his uncertainty. He put a “sneer” into Joseph’s name and added, “has no reason to stay. There is no deal to ‘exchange’ as you put it, Elizabeth.”

  “But he left the deposit—”

  “Which shall not be returned as he did not keep his end of the bargain.” He looked at Mama now, daring her to challenge him. “He was to have brought the principal in three to four weeks. He did not.”

  Mama gasped. I heard it from the porch. “Excuse us,” she said to Joseph. “For the moment.” She tugged on Papa’s sleeve again. He brushed her off.

  “There’s no need for privacy, Elizabeth. The deal’s done. When we didn’t hear, I sold them. J. W. bought the animals in March. Will be heading out momentarily, I expect.”

  Mama looked genuinely pained. I didn’t know then of the debts adults incur or how relying on one thing to happen serves as hope and drops one deeply to despair when the thing is changed without recourse. She was so stunned she didn’t see Joseph walk closer to my father. “I had your word—”

  “My wife’s word. You did not keep yours, sir. I’m not obligated to keep hers.”

  They stood close, like two bulls who eye each other for one moment in honor before striking.

  What possessed me to speak into that tense vibration still remains a mystery to this day. Perhaps I felt my mother’s humiliation, my father’s need for control. For whatever reason, I did and so entered into the fray adults call life.

  “Puddin’ is mine,” I said, my voice cracking. And looking straight at Joseph added, “So at least one Herbert mule is still for sale.”

  JOINING

  I had never seen Sunmiet so still, standing in the shadows like a blue heron, steadfast in the water. It was summer and the tribe had gathered at He-He in the mountains for the celebration. In the distance, beyond the lodge at the cool mountain campsite, I could hear children laughing, men talking, drummers warming up.

  Sunmiet reigned serene despite the chaos that drifted around her like the heady fragrance of honeysuckle.

  “Hurry, Bubbles!” Sunmiet’s mother said. “We are almost ready, just waiting for your lazy body to find that bundle!” Morning Dove, Sunmiet’s mother, appeared the most unsettled I had ever seen her. “The one painted green and white with fresh buckskin laces,” she continued, chastising her niece in the midst of the excitement.

  “Did I not tell you to guard it as though it was the summer’s roasted camas?” Sunmiet’s Auntie Magpie spoke to her daughter, Bubbles, without gentleness.

  “You would not be careless if it was fit to eat!” Auntie Lilie said.

  “My mother brings her beaded bags,” Bubbles said with some authority in her voice. “And the cornhusk ones you made last huckleberry time. The blankets are here. All the shaptákai are here. Everything is here.…” Her voice always seemed to whine at the end, as though tired of having to defend herself each time she spoke.

  “Not everything,” Magpie snapped. “It is the bundle I sent you to bring that worries me. It holds the beads of Sunmiet’s kása from the Spokane people of her father. Oh, what did you do with it?”

  Morning Dove rustled around again in the blankets and bundles lining the floor of the anteroom of the longhouse, stirring up the pungent scents of alder-smoked buckskin mixed with wind-dried salmon. Her daughter stood quietly off to the side, seemingly patient. The drummers began a slow, heartbeat cadence and with the first high-pitched song of the wedding singers, Morning Dove’s frenzy increased. “Look! Look!” She said to Bubbles and me and her sister, Magpie. “Find it!”

  I looked, even though I wasn’t sure of the bundle’s appearance. At least I felt useful, something I hadn’t felt since arriving three days earlier. I’d never been to an Indian wedding before and knew myself both privileged and nervous at the same time, wanting not to make mistakes and yet to take in every beaded detail of the day.

  “I can be persuaded,” Bubbles said, tapping her forefinger beside her cheek, “to remember.…” She closed her eyes, earning time to think and I noted idly as I watched her that Bubble’s eyes were the shape of her hide scraper, arched at the top, round at the bottoms.

  “Oh, hayah!” Morning Dove said. “You will just fall asleep.” Irritated, she advised, “If you brought everything I told you, then go look outside. See if it has been set in with the baskets of food out there by mistake.”

  She watched Bubbles ease her way through the narrow opening into the sunlight, the hide door catching briefly on Bubble’s beaded roses that kept the ends of her braids in place. Dust glittered in the ray of sunshine that pierced the lodge when Bubbles left.

  “Who could have known this day would come so quickly!” Morning Dove said to me—or no one in particular—anticipation and loss joined in her voice. She clutched at the necklace she wore, rubbing the tiny seed beads beneath her fingers as she thought. Then with her hands she directed my searching again, motioned me to look here then there, beneath the stacks of buckskins, fur hides, trade beads, dried fruit and meats, talking as we turned up and inside out, looking for the small shaptákai that held the precious veil.

  Morning Dove buried her head in a basket, searching. “When Sunmiet was born,” she told us, remembering, “we accepted the gift of Standing Tall’s parents and their request to join our daughter to their son. We used the time until the full moon to consider, invite them back to share a meal and give our answer.” She shook her head in amazement. “The day of our promise disappeared like the moon behind the clouds. We knew it was certain to be there, but hidden from our vision just the same. Until now.”

  “I am glad you waited,” Sunmiet said, speaking for the first time since the search for the bundle began. She stood in the shadow of the lodge, dressed in white buckskins from head to toe, the deer’s tail sti
ll attached to the hide at the hem as was the wedding custom. She was as beautiful as any bride I had ever seen. ’Course, I’d not seen many by that age and never an Indian bride. Sunmiet had told me that each detail of her regalia had been carefully thought out and planned over the years, just for this day. From the tiny red and blue seed beads sewn into her moccasins to the matching design on her leggings to her beaded belt and bag worn at the back of her waist. Even her wrist bracelets and the ermine woven into her braids that eased over her breasts, just whispering to the dirt floor, each detail spoke of care and respect, family and tradition. The entire bodice of her dress had been beaded by her mother with beads she’d traded bags and buckskins for over the years.

  Sunmiet cooled herself with her eagle feather fan. Her cheeks were as flushed and soft as a baby’s bottom as she said quietly, eyelashes fluttering, “I’m glad you permitted me one more summer, even though my flow began last fall.” Her voice was tremulous, shaky with gratitude and a bit of fear.

  “We could be laughing, remembering all this commotion for a whole year already instead of searching, searching, readying ourselves for this wedding yet to come,” her Auntie Magpie said.

  But Morning Dove heard the fear in her daughter’s voice, stopped her frantic search and came to her. As she spoke, she touched Sunmiet’s cheek flushed with emotion. “We thought you were too young,” Morning Dove said, her fingers tracing her daughter’s fine cheekbone to her chin. “And you are our only daughter.” She brushed some wispy tendrils of hair that stuck, damp, to Sunmiet’s temples, weaving them with her fingertips back into Sunmiet’s braids. “And your father reins in his views with the skill of the good horseman he is. So it was not so difficult to persuade the family of your husband-to-be to wait one more year.”

  She turned her daughter around, checked the necklace of porcupine quills she wore at her throat, adjusted the braids parted at her daughter’s neck. Her fingers, callused from the years of joining beads to buckskin gently touched Sunmiet’s skin. “Your father did not wish the boarding school pain on you. But you will understand the non-Indian ways better, for the good of your children’s children.”