A Sweetness to the Soul

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  We did not give up on seeking a family of our own, but the pressure lessened. Joseph noticed my increased comfort. As if to honor it, in February he gifted me with my first Esther Howland handcrafted valentine, all covered with cut lace and flowers straight from Massachusetts. I’d had valentines from my school chums and little paper ones from my Joseph. But this one was elaborately designed, had been ordered up special, for me. I was delighted, a joy that continued when Joseph surprised me again later, with the rail tickets and my first visit to his New York.

  “Is it a good time to leave?” I asked him, being practical when he would have me just accept. We sat in the dusk of the long July evening. I looked at my watch. Still light at 8:00 P.M. We both rocked gently in the wicker chairs set on the porch to look onto the creek that disappeared toward the Deschutes in a tangle of willows and weeds.

  “Benito can manage it. We’ll be gone but six weeks.”

  “Maybe we should ask to take Anna’s children, or even Ella.”

  Joseph shook his head. “You’d best put that girl from your mind. She belongs to your mother now and that’s how it’s to be.” He took my small hand in his, rubbed my palm gently. “This is our trip. The one I promised you the day we wed and you refused to take. Wanted Canyon City instead, remember?”

  “I remember. It would be fun though, to see your world through a child’s eyes.” We sat serenaded by crickets. “Guess I’m a little wary of meeting your brother after all these years, wondering what he’ll think of a mere girl but twenty-one. And all your other brothers and sisters.”

  “Old enough to keep me in line,” Joseph said “so I imagine they’ll adore you as I do. Only way to find out is to go.”

  And so we did, making our way with our leather satchels, riding all nature of vehicles from stagecoach to train including a nervous sleep in one of Mr. Pullman’s new cars. Joseph promised me tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an afternoon watching the newly formed Cincinnati Red Stockings play baseball against a New York team. He kept his promises.

  A million sights and sounds made their imprint on me, an impressionable young wife in the presence of her handsome, older husband. I even spent the money Joseph gave me to indulge myself finding first a dress salon that fitted my small body with the latest striped silk fashion adding an ostrich feather hat and parasol to match. Next, I kept an appointment with a photographer who made my likeness. Later in the week, with the new photograph in hand, I headed for Tiffany’s where the gentlest of men in a fine black suit with subdued ascot smiled profusely, spoke with the softest lisp, and patted my hand gently before he found me a silver watch to fit the picture. A chain and fob and the engraving completed my afternoon’s adventure.

  “You look like the pupil who’s outsmarted her teacher,” Joseph said as he escorted me across a profusion of color and design into the dining room at the Grand Hotel.

  His eyes admired me and he held my half-gloved hand just a moment before he kissed my fingers then helped me ease the fullness of my dress over the chair. “New York agrees with you,” he said, smiling. “I almost hate to take you north, afraid the distance will tarnish some of the glow.”

  “Oh, pooh!” I said. “I’d glow wherever I’m with you. What are we having?” I asked, referring to the menu.

  “Cracked crab, dipped in drawn butter. The perfect meal to test a new whalebone corset. Though I can’t imagine why you didn’t wait until Nicholville. To have one made at the shop.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “I’d never ask your brother for such an item.” Then whispered, “How did you know?”

  He returned my whisper, leaning toward me at the table. “Your waist is even smaller than when you left this morning. And you’re having trouble breathing.”

  “The shallow breathing is because you would choose to bring up so delicate a subject in a public place,” I chided him. “And you should recognize the waist whether surrounded by whale bones or not.” I sat straight, away from his intimate posture. “You’ve held it often enough.”

  “Ah, the sassy one is back,” he said, throwing his head back in laughter. “Let’s eat!”

  Our trip was filled with the delights of a honeymooning couple, and several people commented to us about our “recent” marriage. At one cafe we took coffee, sat close together, our faces shadowed by the brim of my ostrich-plumed hat. A waiter brought us each a dish of ice cream, the vanilla bean so fragrant it must have just arrived from Mexico. “For the newly married,” he said in a loud voice. “Compliments of the gentleman at the far table.” He gestured and we both smiled appreciatively at the elderly man who sat behind a red checkered tablecloth and nodded our way. The small crowd had heard the waiter’s declaration and applauded lightly, their gloved hands the sounds of rain drops on the roof over our Oregon home.

  Joseph said he felt like a young boy instead of a man approaching thirty-six. His eyes watered when I handed him the Tiffany box and with one thumb he opened it to see my likeness. He read the engraving, the opposite of the words he’d placed on mine. “Your wedding gift,” I said. “After all these years.”

  “You’re the gift,” he told me. “I’ve never wanted for more.”

  I savored his words and didn’t immediately notice that he looked hesitant.

  “What is it?” I asked, fearing something.

  “I had planned to wait,” he said. “To give this to you in Nicholville. But I think now’s the time.” From his pocket, he lifted a thin box wider than the palm of his large hand. It too, was embossed with “Tiffany’s.”

  “What have you done?” I asked, pleased. He motioned me to open it and when I looked inside, my heart nearly stopped. There, wider than my thumb nail and half my height in length was a solid gold chain. A large purple amethyst intertwined it and moved up and down it like a bola. The chain held something else: a watch of heavy, shining gold that opened for two portraits.

  “It can be pinned,” he said, excited about the engineering of it. “And then the watch hangs from it.” A smaller chain connected the watch to a dress pin over my pocket while my breast would be laced with links of gold.

  “It’s stunning,” I said, breathless. “I … I don’t know what to say. It’s so lavish, so unique, so delicate, strong, all at once.”

  “As are you,” he said.

  I turned the watch over, sure there would be an inscription. “All my love, always, JHS to JAS.”

  “I could find no stronger sentiments,” he said, “than love and truth.”

  And so we spent our holiday lost in love and laughter. At least most of it.

  We did venture into the wood-paneled offices of specialists in female disorders. Most prodded through my new silk clothes and asked questions. “You’re young,” they all said. “No reason for you not to conceive. Give it time. Take warm baths.” Others said the same about my youth, but told me to soak in cool water three times a day, take naps, and most definitely indulge less in physical labor. I did not ask them their opinions of regular riding in the rugged ravines of Tygh Ridge.

  In all, the visits were depressing, offering no new information, reminding me only of my inadequacies. Joseph couldn’t have been more encouraging. Still, the pall over our visit remained even when we left the city and by boat, took the canal and then by coach arrived at now his brother’s store in Nicholville, New York. Perhaps the pall was merely a premonition of what would follow.

  James greeted us politely. He was not as I had pictured him. I had made him bigger in my mind, more the size of Joseph though he was shorter, slender, and held himself like the stiff collar he wore at his throat.

  “Eliza expects you for supper,” he said formally. “And you are welcome to remain with us while you visit. Caroline would be happy to have time with her western uncle and aunt. And you should meet Henry, too, our youngest.”

  James’s stiff demeanor did not change during our visit. He and Joseph shared only words of business talk, the markets, stock raising in the West. He filled Joseph in on
other nieces and nephews, some we would see in a week. James looked pale, I thought, not well. I know my husband looked for some sort of connecting with his oldest brother but it was not to be, at least not that trip.

  James behaved so formally that I expected Eliza to be as reserved and was pleasantly surprised when she wasn’t. She greeted us with open arms scented with lilacs, her wide hoops circling out behind her as she hugged first Joseph and then me. “Welcome! Welcome!” she said. “And do not let James intimidate you,” she told me smiling, slipping her arm through mine, though I suspect she spoke to Joseph too. “He is a somber man but a good husband and father.” She moved us gracefully into the parlor, commenting as she did on my lovely watch and Joseph’s eye for beauty. “Carrie!” she called. “Put away that mirror and comb and come meet your Aunt Jane all the way from Oregon. Henry! The cat belongs on the floor. Please wash your hands!” She turned back to us. “Children can be so trying, just when you want to show them off. Ach! No matter. You’ll know soon enough when you have children of your own.”

  I became wistful during our stay. Perhaps it was seeing another happy family however different Eliza and James were from the Blivens or the Mays or even Sunmiet and Standing Tall. Perhaps it was the steamy August air, the gathering of relatives, Joseph’s nieces and nephews, my new sisters-in-law and their children, seeing them laughing, chiding their charges into adulthood. Perhaps it was being in a space that belongs to someone else. Whatever the reason, we shortened our visit and soon headed home.

  On the return, lying on the Pullman bed, rocking less than gently through the night, I lay awake, thinking. First, about the gift of my marriage and the joy we’d shared in being “newlyweds” these past few weeks. I wished to keep that feeling, that closeness that made others notice us while we noticed only each other. Joseph turned over in his sleep and I heard him start to snore, then stop. A good man. God had given me a good man despite my less than worthy state.

  While the train chugged vigorously across the plains, I thought too, about my child. No one knew her but me. Not yet conceived, she had become a being in my mind, soft, with brown eyes and skin as smooth as corn tassel and hair as yellow. I did not name her. That would have been too much to risk. Bringing her to real was wrapped inside my one last hope: Joseph’s Chinese doctor. Perhaps there was the answer to my prayer to have a family of my own. It posed no threat, I thought, by trying.

  TO TRUST IN THE PLAN

  The winter of ’69 and ’70 left little time for travel. A hard season plagued the region, a time of struggle with the wind and snow and cold unlike any we’d known since ten years before. This winter, at least, I did not wonder where Joseph was and he did not spend his spare time reading books with Philamon in the Klamath country. Philamon had returned to working with his father when we sold the ranch. Joseph and I weathered that winter together though spending so much time with snow piled against the windows often made for short tempers and stale air.

  Benito and Anna and their children plowed their way through deep drifts on snowshoes to spend days with us playing checkers with antler slices on the soot-blackened checkerboard stump or dealing cards with no money risked. We sang old songs and the men told stories of their days along the Isthmus and in San Francisco. Anna told of meeting Benito in Northern California and their whirlwind courtship and marriage. I entertained the children with a story or two I remembered from Sunmiet’s family, about how Bear lost his tail, how Dog got his name, the tricks of Coyote. “These can only be told when snow is on the ground,” I reminded them. “That is the way of the Sahaptin and Wasco and Paiute people.”

  “So much snow means lots of stories, Auntie,” four-year-old Corlamae said, her nose pressed against the frosty window. A look at the depth of the drifts made a body wonder if we’d be telling stories still at Easter.

  Unlike some, though, we had enough to eat. After a harrowing trip by sleigh across crusted snow, we shared lean beef with Sunmiet’s family and some others, horrified that the Indian agent could gather so little for the tribe, saddened that like stockmen everywhere, the Indian herders too were forced to watch their cattle die.

  When the weather broke once in January with a false promise of a thaw, we learned that all went well with the Blivenses’ five. Joseph and Benito sledded supplies to Mama and Ella though even that did not thaw her freeze.

  What hay we had we took to the high country where the cattle raked for grass, pushed their big heads to clear a way to the frozen shoots of grass oppressed by winter. Many cows gave birth to calves that could barely stand to suck before they succumbed to the cold. At night, their mothers bawled. In the morning, we would see them, tails switching, standing guard over the bodies of their dead babies, watching warily any who approached.

  Then, as before, in one day, the sun came out, warmed up to sweater weather and the creeks began to rise.

  It is a phenomenon not easily appreciated, the spring thaw. The hard ground so quickly turns to mud and muck that streams flow through every uneven ridge making even flat surfaces slick and splashed with dirty water. Piles of dirty snow sink before your eyes pouring out liquid like an orange half squeezed over a glass juicer. The earth smells of wet leaves, pungent decaying grass as the high water cleans ravines of rotting carcasses left over from the toll of winter. Meadowlarks sing of drier days and yet gratefully, of the spring and summer yet to come. Greater Canadas high above us in their V-formations move on North, announcing what we already know: spring is here.

  Such volatile gyrations of nature also forewarn disaster.

  From the window in the kitchen, I watched the two creeks on either side of us swirl by with debris and flotsam, foaming at the edges in their surge. Where they met at the base of the Y near the rise the house sat on, they formed a dirty plait rushing on down to the Deschutes. The pack trail grew closer to the creek as the water rose and I wondered how Joseph’s rock and root supporting system would hold up.

  Joseph wondered about O’Brien’s bridge though he wisely did not suggest we ride there. “I bet it goes,” he said. “And Nix’s too.” His voice held a certain anticipation to it.

  “You’re not hoping it’s so, are you?” I asked, wiping the Tea Leaf ironstone plates, standing them, tiny copper designs all facing upright, in the cupboard.

  Joseph ignored me. “The Military Road will be awash as well. I’m going out. See how the trail fares. Coming?”

  “Give me a minute to put my old boots on. This mud,” I said shaking my head, “makes a mockery of housecleaning.”

  “Need spring standards,” Joseph said. “A little lower than the rest of the year.”

  “Need to have everyone wear slippers,” I said, “including the man of the house.”

  “Coming?” he asked, sweetly, holding out his hand.

  We squished into soft, saturated ground, our feet leaving little levies around our prints before ponds formed each place we stepped. Puddles appeared in Bandit’s footsteps behind us. Joseph held my hand and we leaped across rivulets of water to stand closer to the creeks. Both still rose, leaving the knoll with the house and smokehouse and bunkhouse still well above danger. But lower, nearer where the two creeks met, where Benito and Anna and their children resided, the water seemed more ominous.

  We walked toward their home, and I noticed that the cattle we’d herded into the corrals for calving and easier feeding stood now in a foot of water. They bawled to their babies who seemed oblivious to any danger.

  Benito and Anna and their children stepped carefully up the rise to stand beside us. “We do what we can to prepare,” Benito told us. “Can help with cattle. Then we wait.” The watchword for spring flooding: wait.

  “Wait at our house if you like,” I said. “We’ll move them.”

  “I help,” Benito said, though Joseph protested.

  “Do we have time to saddle up?” I asked.

  Joseph assessed the creeks, nodded, and we saddled Sage and Buttercup. “Bandit and I’ll cross, move what we can. Stay her
e, unless we need you.”

  His instruction annoyed me and I showed it, but his argument held water. “I don’t want to rattle them any more than they are. One horse and a dog may be enough. I’ll signal if I need you.”

  He started across the creek, water swirling around the white legs of his horse. “Don’t come,” he yelled back at me. “Swifter than it looks.”

  I could feel anxiety burning in my stomach, watching the dirty liquid push against my husband. I’d been in swift, spring run-off water, seen how quickly it could rise. He’d picked a place to cross that looked safe enough. The memory of a flooded creek came. I pushed it from my mind.

  Bandit leaped in after Joseph and swam, passing him up, the water carrying him downstream a bit, swirling him around before he pulled out and shook himself on the other side. Joseph reached the sloppy ground near the corrals and turned to wave.

  The kelpie nipped at the cattle, biting at their heads to push them back or snapping at their heels to move them forward toward the now open gate. Cows can always find a hole through a fence yet rarely see an open gate.

  Bandit worked. More than once he came away with his mouth full of hair, some blood, spitting and shaking his head as he moved on to the next cow-calf pair. Being kicked didn’t seem to stop him as he’d roll into a ball like a caterpillar and land with a thump, shake himself off and return, his tongue hanging, panting, almost in a smile, his eyes sparkling with the intensity of effort.

  They moved most of the pairs together, man and dog, and were nearly finished. Joseph had gotten off his horse to lift a halter left hanging near the gate. He didn’t notice that one last cow and calf returned, disoriented by the water, not wanting to leave what seemed familiar. As if in a bad dream, I watched as the cow circled back, somehow putting Joseph closer to the fence and her calf. The mother turned on Joseph. Bawling, she moved her one thousand pounds with more agility than would be imagined.

  “Joseph!” I screamed. “Watch her!”

  Joseph turned in time to see the cow charging toward him. He stepped back. His leg weakened, he could not quickly climb the fir pole fence. He turned and flailed his hands before her eyes. She startled, stopped, bawled again, backed up, then lunged once more, this time closer. Again, Joseph threw her off, struck the side of her head with his palm and threw himself to the side, still grasping for the corral, the water slowing him more than the protective mother who stopped only for a second. I watched her big red and white Hereford head lower, the gleam of her horns. She attacked again.