Ella, on the other hand, was something more than handsome. She was beautiful. Her wine red dress set off the pink of her cheeks, the depth of her dimples, the pale blond of her hair that peered from beneath her matching bonnet. Her dress molded itself tightly over a fully developed sixteen-year-old form. Perhaps a little too tightly, as though her body had just recently surprised her with its changes. Tiny hands removed dark gloves, one finger at a time. She rested them quietly in her lap, her breathing even, unlabored. When I looked directly at her, she smiled ever so slightly, showing one broken tooth and revealing a touch of sadness in an otherwise flawless face. She dropped her eyes to her lap.
“I thought it time we should visit,” my mother said, fluffing herself on the chair like a hen, nesting. “And having not received an invitation or being sure of the day you receive, I hope you’ll not think less of us for having just dropped in.”
What was she thinking? How could I think less of her than I already did? She’d told us to stay away, to have nothing to do with her or Ella! How could she have expected an invitation? And now, just when I was beginning to enjoy my life, she arrives, carrying with her both old memories and the promise of new pain.
“You’re welcome any time,” my gracious husband said, ignoring the look I shot him. He waited then, like me, wondering about their reasons. The Seth Thomas calendar clock ticked quietly. We heard the shouts of men at the river, moving toward success. Bandit yipped his aging bark in the distance. I noticed the large fern behind my mother had dead fronds that needed removing. More silence.
“Yes. Well,” my mother said, clearing her throat though not the raspiness of her voice. “I will get to the heart of it. I’m to be married next week. To Mr. John Cates. A fine man, Mr. Cates.” She said the latter defensively, I thought, though no one chose to argue. Neither Joseph nor I knew the man, nor did I think I wanted to.
“Our congratulations,” Joseph said. Again we waited. I twirled her astonishing news around in my mind.
“Mr. Cates would take a honeymoon trip back east though I prefer the southern coast of France.” She played nervously with the ribbons of her bonnet. “It’s said to be a lovely place.” Imaginary lint disappeared from her pelisse.
Only the Seth Thomas ticking filled the quiet.
“Let me get some tea,” I offered, starting to stand, looking for a reason to escape. Ella glanced up at me as I rose.
“It is not a place for young ladies,” my mother continued as though I hadn’t mentioned tea. With her gloves, she motioned me to sit and I obeyed. “The sun at the South of France can be so beastly to the faces of young women.” She blinked her eyelashes, waved an imaginary fan before her face. “Isn’t that so, Ella, dear?”
The girl had not yet spoken. Her hands were calm in her lap. I noticed her nails were chewed to the quick. “It’s what I’ve heard,” Ella said in a voice as soft as a baby’s breath.
“And since she has not seen you,” my mother proposed, “for so long a time, I thought perhaps you might wish to spend some time with Ella. Perhaps you have need of some help here, what with the inn doing well. Maybe at the post office?”
Neither Joseph nor I said anything, dumbfounded. Ella’s working for us had never entered our minds. “And, of course,” my mother continued, “there would be no objections should you wish to complete adoption proceedings. It has been her father’s wish for some time. Her older sister has a place with the Gilliams, in the Mitchell country. Her brothers remain with their father in Vale. Only Ella is without. That is, if you’ve still such a mind to. A child needs a family, after all.”
Adoption? Now? It was an incredible suggestion. I took in the wonder of it and felt it explode into fury inside my chest.
“When you no longer have need of her,” I said, “you send her to us. Is that it? Or is it that your Mr. Cates does not like the burden of a family? What about Baby George? Do you want us to adopt him, too?”
“Well.” Mother fidgeted on her chair. “I thought you would be pleased.” She picked up her gloves, strained them through her hands, put them back in her lap, strained them again. “George is going with us, of course. But Ella, well, I thought it better if she remained. And she agreed.”
Joseph asked, curious. “And Mr. Cates? He is willing to have Ella left behind? To be adopted by us?”
“Don’t even think of it!” I shouted at him. “I will not rescue my mother! She never saved me!” I glared at her. “And she could have!” I felt the tears of rage and hurt burn behind my eyes. Joseph reached to calm me, touch my hand. I shook him off, swallowed back my fury.
My mother looked nervously at Ella, back at me, twisted her gloves again.
“I see it,” I said, calmer. “It’s you who doesn’t want her with you. Afraid Mr. Cates might find a young woman more appealing than her older mother. I won’t protect you from that!” I felt spent, tired, and my voice reflected it. “Learn to live with the uncertainty of wondering if someone loves you. I did.”
“I meant to love you,” she said stiffly. “It was forgiveness I found I couldn’t give.”
“Forgiveness? You should be asking for mine!” My heart pounded in my ears. My mouth was dry and yet I swallowed over and over.
“ ’Tis neither of yours to give,” Joseph said, stepping over my despair. “But to receive if ye both be willing.”
“Well. I’m not there yet, so let’s salvage what we can,” my mother told him.
“And what’s your pleasure, Ella?” Joseph asked. He was always the gentle one, sensed the thread of my need before I could see how to sew it. He knew I lacked time to see the gift my mother had just offered us, and he didn’t want me to throw happiness away just to be right.
Ella’s answer came to me, not him, and I suspect she’d had enough of being in between.
“Mrs. Herbert has been good to me,” she said. I scoffed. Ella glanced quickly at me. She took a deep breath and spoke as though rehearsed. “I’m a good worker. I can clean, cook, ride, milk, read, write, tend the books or the saloon. My temperament is even. I listen and get along with all nature of humanity. I am not demanding. I learn quickly or can be off without a fuss.” She sighed.
“I repeat the question,” Joseph said. “What’s your pleasure?”
Ella looked at him now, a kind of light filling her face as she prepared to risk her wants. “It would please me to come here, to be with you. I know my mother would have wished it.” Looking back at me she said, “If you’ll both have me.”
Joseph had Ella’s Saratoga trunk unloaded from the wagon they’d arrived in. My mother left in it without a backward glance or wave.
Ella attended her wedding. I have not spoken to my mother these twenty-one years hence.
Perhaps because I’d been prepared for nothing, I found Ella doubly delightful: she was an unpredictable surprise and the offspring of Francis. So Joseph and I both knew we’d been guided by an angel.
She was light and frothy, full of fun yet on her way to leaving I was sure, as soon as some young man could turn her head. St. Mary’s had given her a good education and a better sense of herself than most young women her age.
She volunteered to teach the English classes when she realized Alice M could neither read nor write. Soon, several of Sunmiet’s cousins sent their children and George sent his children too. We were wary of the latter’s formal education since there was talk of making it illegal to teach Indians how to read and write. Later, that turned true, but Ella had already made a difference by that time.
Alice M attached herself to Ella like a pea to honey, the less experienced girl copying the spirited, sweeter one in subtle ways. A tinge of jealousy fluttered in my chest when Alice asked Ella for advice instead of me, but they were sisters, after all. Alice changed the way she combed her hair, took to wearing the redwine ribbon Ella gave her on the latter’s second day here. Alice opened up more, too, in the presence of a sister. She shared with us the way to make sagebrush-twine nets to capture rabbits wreaking havoc on
the garden. With the inside of sagebrush, she wove soft leggings she gave to Joseph, to put around his ankles when he walked beside the roads through tall grasses, to protect his pants. She showed us how to capture crickets, grasshoppers, and ants and roast them to crisp. Surprisingly, they proved tasty little bites we served at meals and never once divulged their source, the three of us grinning whenever those tasty “nuts” were mentioned.
Alice never told how she had learned these things—not even to Peter whom she seemed to trust beyond all others, walked often to his and Sumxseet’s house, moved now to the same side of the river as our inn. With Ella near, Alice smiled more, and once or twice even looked me in the eye, if only for a moment.
Ella had not done justice to her own list of personal assets identified that fateful day in May. Not only did she do all the things she listed, she did them well. Her ability to cook came at a perfect time, what with Sung-li having made his way rather dramatically to The Dalles and us still needing to feed a bridge crew. Ella pitched in immediately and the men seemed only to notice the addition of a sweet-smelling young woman, not the change in menu. In the weeks before we acquired Tai, our long-term Chinese cook, Ella was a God-sent gift in more ways than one.
Both “A” supports were set for the bridge that day in May, stretching forty feet across the gorge where the river ran more than one hundred feet deep. On following days, cross beams fell into place between the two frames and over the old bridge where possible. Then the planking began, the pounding breaking the morning silence and continuing until the wind came up the canyon as dusk fell.
Within a matter of weeks, the bridge was complete with a solid base and fir side-rails.
James, whose friends had dropped him over the side, told Joseph there were caves back under the rocks and writings on the walls beneath the bridge, carvings of a man, animals, figures. “Indian books,” he said through Peter, his interpreter, and asked to carve them on the bridge sides, a request Joseph granted warily as he watched James hang out over the water.
We did not have any grand ceremony the afternoon Joseph motioned two heavily weighted freighters across the bridge without a sway or bounce. Several men stood around and nodded their heads appreciatively. The drivers shouted their approval on the other side. “Tell your friends,” Joseph yelled to them. “Roads’ll look better each time you come!” The drivers waved their hats, slapped the leather on their horses’ rumps and headed up the road toward Bakeoven, newly born colts tripping along beside the mares. The freight drivers chatted amiably with the few crew members who understood English as they passed them on their way up the grade.
At dusk on the day I considered the bridge finished, Joseph and I stood at its center, looking over into the swirling turbulence below. The wet muscle of turquoise and white froth twisted beneath us, cutting through the lava rocks. Sea gulls called and swooped at the white water. Men on scaffoldings leaned out over the falls beyond us, arching their long poles with nets into the powerful surf. “We’ve done it, Janie,” Joseph said. “Won’t ever have to worry or creak or close your eyes to cross again.”
“You’ve done well,” I said, knowing this bridge marked a milestone on my husband’s path.
“All of us have,” he said. “Been blessed with the best of hands. Yours, and Peter’s, James’s, Alice’s, now Ella’s too. Even Benito and Anna and all those who’ve been with us down this trail.” The rush of water, screech of sea gulls and the memories of people and time pushed our voices into silence.
“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 t
he 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.
A Sweetness to the Soul Page 36
