A Sweetness to the Soul (36 page)

“I’m not hungry,” Ella told him in a petulant voice.

“Did you have a nice time, child?” he asked.

“It was all right,” she said, stomping up on the porch.

“That’s good,” Papa told her softly, his voice betraying his wish to get her away from the storm he too felt brewing. “Take Baby George inside. There’s cold milk on the table for you in the kitchen, some sliced venison and cheese. Then off to bed.”

Ella started her stomp into the house, punishing us I guessed for making her leave the river, ride back, do what needed to be done. But then with a child’s ability to forgive and forget, she turned, ran back to hug me as I stood beside my horse. I squatted down to her height, felt the warmth of unfettered caring that only a child’s arms can give. I held her, buried my face in her curls, my fingers remembering the touch of lean little backs through thin calicos.

“G’night,” she whispered.

I held her a bit longer, until I felt Joseph’s hand on my shoulder. Ella reached for him as he bent down to pick her up, brushed her face with his beard.

“Sleep well,” he said. “We’ll see you again soon.”

A flash of lightning lit the night sky somewhere in the distance. “Stay,” she pleaded. “The storm.”

“They need to hurry home,” Mama answered for us. “Got lots to do there, I’m sure.”

“We’ll be fine,” I assured Ella. “The storm is far away, see, on that ridge? We’ll ride the other way, where the moon is full. It will light our way home.”

Ella seemed skeptical as Papa walked out to take her from Joseph’s arms. “You’re welcome to stay,” he said for our ears only. Joseph shook his head, helped me mount up.

Papa and Ella headed back into the soft lights of the house. Mama started to follow them in, carrying her skirt up the stairs with
her fingertips. Then she hesitated, turned back. She said: “Your presence disrupts the girl’s life. I’ve had time to think, waiting.” Her tightly clasped hands now formed a fist together in front of her as she faced us full. “She goes to St. Mary’s in the fall. Until then, I’ll thank you not to be stopping by, filling her head with thoughts of what her life might be like living with you. If you care for her—as you say you do—then leave her be. She’s had enough loss and change and needs no more from you.” My heart pounded in my ears and seemed to understand her words before my head did. I stalled for time, to change her meaning. I said: “But we didn’t do anything wrong! Only spent some time with her. Why take that away from either of us?”

“Why not?” my mother said. She shrugged her shoulders as though I’d asked her to explain why she served carrot cake instead of angel. Her lightness infuriated me, as though we spoke of meaningless things instead of someone’s love and life. Her power over the outcome made it all the more intolerable.

“The adoption papers are ready,” Joseph said. I heard both alarm and anger in his voice. “Let’s just finish what Archibald wanted, stop this dallying. We’ll pick her up in the morning.”

Mama glared at him from behind a thin smile. “I’ll not say my daughter is the cause,” she told him, not looking at me. “But I have only one child under my roof that is of my own birthing. The rest are gone. Dead.” Her eyes matched the word.

“It wasn’t my fault, Mama!” I cried.

“Whose then?” She turned on me. “Three babies. Dead within three days.” Then she hissed the words I’d imagined her saying, dreaded ever hearing: “And you live.”

“That’s not fair!” Hot tears poured down my cheeks. My breath stuck in my chest, choked out my words.

“You dare to speak to me of
fair?
There is no fair in life,” she seethed, “or I would have my family.” I could see tears forming in her eyes, too, heard the catch in her voice as her chest heaved back growing sobs.

“Your loss is great, Mrs. Herbert,” Joseph said. His voice soothed as he stepped toward her. “Don’t compound it. Jane did not cause their deaths, nor your pain.”

“What do you know of it!” Mama said then, openly, irrationally enraged, moving out of his reach. Her eyes bulged. Her chest heaved. She clasped and unclasped her hands at the sides of her skirt, her knuckles bony white. “This child, Ella,” she shouted, then calmed herself, through evenly enunciated words. “This child, Susan Ella Turner, is mine to care for.” She glared at Joseph. “She is here by God’s good grace, and neither you nor your young wife shall ever take her from me.”

She bore no further argument, simply turned and went inside, pulling the latch string behind her when she closed the door.

I looked at Joseph, expecting he could see the hole my mother’s words had exploded in my heart. And so he must have, for he came to me, touched my shoulder, and then held me in my grief.

We rode on home, lightning over the ridge sending flashes that lit Joseph’s set jaw, pierced my tear-swollen eyes. Thunder cracked within a few seconds, rattling the horses who skittishly moved sideways, picking the trail home in the darkness. They needed more concentration from their riders for control.

Then, as though our grief was insufficient, we both smelled the smoke.

“Lightning strike somewhere,” Joseph said, looking into the night sky. The strike could have been miles away, could have happened hours before. Smoke could drift great distances in the ridges and ravines, settling over a homestead miles from its source. Or there could be a wall of flames just over the ridge. “We’ll have to stand night watch,” he said.

“No matter,” I answered. “I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.”

The next hours were lit by flashes of lightning ripping across the ridges like a sharp blade flashing against the sun. The thunder rolled and cracked, startling the horses who ran in circles in the field until we caught them up and tied them close to the house. It worried the
cattle, even bothered the mules who looked up into the flashing night sky.

I moved as in a nightmare, my mind thick, body tired from crying. It seemed fitting that a range fire should light the empty darkness.

We were as prepared as we could be. Anna and Benito and the hands all had buckets of water dipped from the well and the creeks. In the dark, we slopped the water around the house, splashed up on the walls. The smaller animals we let run loose assuming their instincts would best protect them. The kelpie kept close to us as we ran here and there with more buckets, more water. Finally, the thunder moved on, and we waited to see what the lightning had left us.

The low, fast-moving flames reached us in the early-morning light, their red and gold crackling of the dry bunch grass preceded by a wall of dark smoke.

“All the buckets to the barns!” Joseph croaked in a smoke-husky voice, and he and Benito and the buckaroos moved from splashing water around the houses to the largest barn. We had already decided that the houses were best protected by their position in the Y of the two creeks. If the flames did not jump the water, they’d be safe; if they did, nothing would protect them.

The barns, however, sat on the far side of the split creeks where their wide doors opened onto the corrals and green grass in the spring. But this was August. Hot, dry August. If the flames moved to the upper end, they could easily move toward the barns. Anna and I and several other hands wore calluses into our hands digging a fire line around the upper end of the barns. Joseph and Benito and other men formed a bucket line from the creek, hoisting bucket after bucket of water to splash on the barn walls and up onto the roofs. When it seemed we had dug what we could, we joined the bucket line, pulling buckets of water from the horse troughs, slopping them up on the walls and on the dirt fire line we’d dug beside the men. Dark smoke billowed around us. We watched the grasses burn fast
and pick up speed in their own wind, moving down the ridge toward the creeks.

I supposed the intensity the fire demanded was good, in a way. It kept my mind from considering the emptiness and loss.

Joseph attempted to yell something, his voice lost in the thick smoke. My eyes burned and my nose filled with the scent of singed sagebrush. I looked around for Bandit and then saw what Joseph yelled for: Bandit, swirled in smoke, lying beside the creek closest to the barns. “Bandit!” I yelled, “Oh, please God, not Bandit, too,” I prayed and knew that if I lost the dog, I would not wish to wake up in the morning.

“Bandit!” I called again, searching through the smoke, and God answered my prayer. The little dog lifted his ears, coughed, then splashed through the wetness of the creek to my side.

We were all taken care of that night, despite the fire searing and roaring on down the ravine to the Deschutes, burning up the nettles and the choke cherry trees and exposing the rocks and ridges of the pack trail as it moved back and forth across the now naked stream. At the upper end, the fire burned above the barns and disappeared over the ridge to be consumed by the White River. Our dug lines around the barns held the flames at bay.

The morning revealed a black, exposed world. Around us, the land smoldered with drifting smoke. Nothing brown or green; just black beyond our fire lines, as far as our eyes could see. It fit how I felt. Joseph took my hand and we turned back from the barns, smoke still clinging to us like a nightmare that lingers into morning.

“Looks bad, but not much real damage done,” Joseph said. I marveled at my husband’s optimism. “We’ve still got this island of green.” He gazed at the tiny space of sparse grass growing between the houses and the barns. “And a whole lot more since the buildings were spared.” He pulled a dipper of water from the well, handed it to me, surveyed the bleak, pastureless horizon. “My mother used to say ‘a fire is as good as a move’ for cleaning out the old, forcing you
to appreciate what you have and look to whatever is new.” He took a long drink of the cold water I handed him, wiped soot from his forehead with the back of his hand. “So that’s where we are, Janie. We’re cleaned out of the old; got to get on with the new.”

T
RANSITIONS

T
he sweat might heal you,” Sunmiet told me. “Relieve you of the hurt that sits on your heart.” She rested her needle, thread, and red bead on top of the buckskin lying on her lap. Her fingertips idly rubbed the colored beads she’d traded dried salmon for, examining the hummingbird design as she paused. Aswan, “little boy,” and Anne chased each other in the center of their Simnasho home. She had named her second Anne, a non-Indian name. Standing Tall initially protested, agreed only when Sunmiet’s kása promised to have a naming early, before Anne was full grown. The children flopped in laughter onto the bedrolls, tickling each other, rolling then racing again. “Oh, hayah! Go outside now,” Sunmiet said, scooting them out the door. We watched their chubby legs disappear through the opening, heard them laugh as the newest puppies attacked them on the outside.

“You have beautiful children,” I told Sunmiet. She smiled and nodded, better about receiving compliments.

We sat, our backs against the wood frame, leaning into the leather hides hung on the walls. The leather kept the cool October air from moving too quickly through the cracks in the wood. The soothing scent of smoked leather filled the small space packed with
baskets and furs and herbs hanging from the ceiling like black moss dripping from the firs.

“Many of my people take the sweat, to feel stronger, to move the bad spirits out of their pores,” she told me. “To be cleansed, refreshed, and free,” she added. “I will ask Standing Tall to heat the rocks if you wish it.” She returned to the beadwork, completing a design that had been her grandmother’s and handed down to her. “If I ask him, he will do it, even for a non-Indian.”

Did I wish it? I wasn’t sure anything would heal what ailed me. “Our spirits grieve,” the pastor had told me, “and in time, as the Lord heals, we are given newness. It’s that way with loss. It is all right to feel sadness, even anger. In time, both will go away and leave only a small emptiness in a corner of your being. You’ll receive greater fullness, then, as you will have stretched your heart, made room for the Lord’s blessings.”

His words had comforted me at Papa’s funeral, helped ease the pain of Papa’s loss.

But now, as I approached my twentieth birthday never having given my father a grandchild, with no change in Mama’s distance or Ella’s closeness, I wondered if too much loss might simply shut me down.

“Shall I ask him, then?” Sunmiet said, breaking into my thoughts. “You will sweat with me and the children? It will heal your body even if you do not let it heal your insides,” she told me. She straightened herself with a sharp intake of breath as Bubbles came through the door, unannounced.

“I need to think on it,” I told Sunmiet.

Bubbles noted Sunmiet’s brief flash of pain. I thought it because of her intrusion. Bubbles took it differently. “You need the sweat to heal the blood spots on
your
body,” she said to Sunmiet, having listened at the door, knowing some secret. “You married the wrong brother,” Bubbles crowed. “You should have waited for Koosh.”

“I did not wish Koosh,” Sunmiet said, irritated. “My husband is
a good provider. He gives me a house of my own, even if the door does not keep everyone out.”