A Sweetness to the Soul (45 page)

“You look young, happy as a child,” Sunmiet said. “And still so slender, as an eel. Tiny waist,” she laughed, “not like mine.” She patted her stomach, sharing her secret.

“Iyái?
Again?” I said, surprised and happy for her as she smiled. It pleased me that I felt no jealousy for my friend’s happiness.

She blushed, blinked her eyelashes. “We cannot seem to find the cause,” she said, laughing. “And so it keeps happening.”

“When?”

“In the spring. During salmon feast. He will be a big baby, like my others, Kása tells me. Aswan!” She raised her voice to bring the youngster from his digging in a basket. “No more candy for you! You’ll be sick! Maybe I will call the Whip Man, to help you remember to stay out of what is not yours!” Aswan quickly pulled his fingers from the basket as though bitten by a snake. He said something in Sahaptin which his mother answered in kind. Then to me she said, “He has seen the Whip Man at his friend Tepo’s. Bubbles called him in and the Whip Man disciplined Tepo with a willow swat to his legs. The other children too, but Tepo got the worst. It works.” She smiled as her oldest son picked up a spearpoint and scurried out the door. “We will see you at the falls?” she asked. She already knew then, of our move.

“We’ll be there always, now,” I said, and something made me ask, “Does Standing Tall resent our being there?”

Sunmiet looked away from my face. “He does not think any white man should live where the fish come up the river. He says their presence will scare the fish away. He is not alone in his thinking.” She fidgeted with the fringe on her dress. “Others disagree. There is much discussion in the council.” She looked back at me, her eyes tired. “Some argue about white man and fish. Others say the Modocs are the trouble.” She sighed. “Maybe it is because the men have little else to do now, so they talk often and long.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I felt sad for her, for Standing Tall. Yet we were not the first to have lived at the bridge. And I knew Joseph would take care there, though I wasn’t sure about the Modocs’ intentions. Surely we wouldn’t hurt the fish or her family’s livelihood.

“Now I can see you every summer,” I said. “And Aswan and Anne and this new one when it comes. You can put me to work, cleaning fish again, or watching the babies.” Sunmiet reached for her
beadwork, began work as we talked. “You’ll like how we improve the bridge. And the roads, for easier traveling.”

“Standing Tall says there are too many people passing there now. A better bridge and roads will bring more. He says new men come with books and drawings to cut up our world like a hunted deer. We will be left like dogs with only the bones.”

“And your father? What does he say?”

She looked back at me, her brown eyes showing a depth of pain I had not noticed before. “He and Standing Tall disagree. My father stands with Peter and others who say the white man is here forever, like the fish jumping up at the falls, pushing themselves over the impossible because they have a place calling them, a place to go to. And living with them, taking their ways and making them fit into ours, molding them to our ways, stretching them on our drum rings, will be better for our people than trying to stop them from being here at all.” She worked again with her beads, talked into the design. “It is my experience that non-Indians never turn deaf ears to their calling over impossible places.”

Eagle Speaker’s and Peter’s views prevailed that day. For when Joseph returned to pick me up, he was elated. “Peter will bring men,” he said, “in the spring. Some who helped at Blivenses’ like that kind of work and the steady pay. There’ll be twenty or thirty—of families who camp there every year and fish. Some new people. Peter seems to think they can do both: fish and build roads. I like his attitude. So we’ll see. Following round-up next two weeks, he’ll come by.” He put his hands out for me to step into, push up onto my horse. “We’ll ride where I want to build and he’ll see what I mean, translate to those not speaking English.” Joseph’s joy was complete.

As we rode back I heard him speaking beneath his breath, his hands moving this way and that as he does when he’s in deep thought. “What?” I asked.

“Just remembering,” he said. “Never imagined when I rode down Buck Hollow the first time and shook hands with Peter and his son, that one day we’d be working side by side. Funny, isn’t it,
how when you’re on the right road, life has a way of meeting you over and over at the switchbacks?”

Our fall had one last big event before we settled in to our first winter at Sherar’s Bridge: round-up. Work on the bridge and the house and the general moving in all halted for that process of gathering animals from the ridges and ravines, driving them through grasses torn short to the corrals near the Y homesite now occupied by Anna and Benito. As before, buckaroos roped, flopped calves, held the bawling animals’ legs with one boot holding their necks and the other driven into the dirt. With strained arms and legs, they kept the animal still while another buckaroo wielded the hot branding iron, burned a J in the red hair on the left hip side. The area reeked of singed hair. As before, we doctored leg injuries, pulled cheatgrass from eyes, and drove curious calves sporting noses filled with porcupine quills into the wooden chutes to pull the barbs, leaving behind bloody noses and calves wondering if we’d really helped. I suspect the bull calves we converted into steers wished to ask the same question of our efforts with a sharp knife. And as before, we culled out animals who had not made the weight gain we would have liked, made plans to sell the calfless mothers with no yearlings by their side. The steers we’d cut at spring round-up stood fat and sleek, now ready for market.

The final step meant driving cows to join herds bought up by eastern buyers in their silk vests gathered at the Umatilla House or the Globe Hotel in The Dalles.

Joseph always thought making the eight-hundred-mile drive of cattle from The Dalles to the Union Pacific railroad at Kelton, Utah, would have made an interesting time. But we sold “on foot, as is” and let the buyers find their own buckaroos to drive the cattle south. “Enough trouble getting the hard-headed horn-growing bovines twenty miles to town let alone another eight hundred miles across the territory to Utah,” Joseph decided anew each year.

It was the last time Benito and Joseph worked side by side, and
I was conscious of the bittersweet event even if Joseph remained silent about it. We all behaved as though nothing had changed, Joseph and Benito laughing through the dust, speaking of the feistiness of calves, never mentioning their friendship. Anna and I readied baskets of food for the dozen buckaroos; she served and cleaned, freed me to ride and rope. My mind would not let go the thought of how I’d miss not having them close to my side.

But the Lord never closes a door but that he doesn’t open another.

By spring, I knew something else of Anna’s I truly missed: her food handling! It wasn’t that I couldn’t cook. I did, and liked to. I could stir flour, salmon, and milk into Sunmiet’s lumpy gravy known as luckameen as well as anyone. Joseph called it “spring runoff with rocks.” The two or three buckaroos we held over the winter did not complain. Joseph did. In truth, I think he wanted more time with me beside him, less of my efforts in the kitchen. He didn’t express it that kindly.

“We need ourselves a cook,” he said, sawing through the beef steak I’d gotten a little too done on the cookstove. “The crews won’t take to your way of making steaks, Janie.” He chewed. No juice dribbled from the slab. “Not that your meals don’t show care,” he added quickly, seeing the defense in my eyes. “And I suppose well-done kills off the critters.” He grinned.

“Sunmiet says its bad medicine to touch food when you’re upset or angry,” I said. “So if you want me to cook again, best you not complain too much.”

“No offense intended,” he said, lifting his hands in protest. “Travelers want a hot, fast,
tasty
meal. Personally, I like a foreign touch.” He leaned back in his chair, pretending satisfaction.

“Suggesting I’m ‘foreign’ to a kitchen?” I said, taking up the dishes. Water heated on the wood stove for cleaning them.

“Not my meaning,” he said, smiling.

“I miss Anna, too,” I said. “I actually like cooking, just not having to choose between doing it or spending time on the books or being with you.”

He sat quiet. “Thought I’d check with Chinaboy Tom at the Umatilla House.” He stood, walked to the window, looked out at the river, swirling. Sea gulls screeched at the base of the falls, dipping and swooping for early, weakened fish making their way upriver against the rapids. It was March, early in the salmon run.

“Why do they call a grown man, older than you even, a
boy?”
I said. “Seems demeaning to me.”

Joseph brushed a spiderweb from the window, held a cold glass of spring water in his other hand. “Never considered it,” he said. “Doesn’t say much for me, does it.”

I shrugged my shoulders, dipped the plates into the steaming water. “Wasn’t being critical. Just wondering.”

“Suppose some folks still see Tom as a boy, from when he first came there working in the kitchen and taking care of the chandeliers, cleaning and all. Thinking on it, though, no boy would have stuck it out so long. Or been so quiet doing his work. Not complaining, just sending his money back to China for his family.” He took a drink, swallowed. “Something to think about. Anyway, we could ask Chinaboy—Tom—if he knows any of his countrymen who would cook for us, passengers, and crew.”

“He’ll most likely send us to Canyon City or John Day town,” I said. “Gold mines petering out there might free up some cooks. But we haven’t time for a trip now, pushing on roads like we should be. And didn’t you say you wanted to build a bridge across Buck Creek too this year?”

My clanking of dishes filled the silence. “That might not be such a bad plan, if we do it soon enough. Before Peter gets here with his men. Put two chickens in one pot.”

“What?” I asked, still steaming the plates, not following where his mind had gone.

“If we head out to John Day town now, we could seek ourselves a good, authentic Chinese cook to add to the Sherar’s Bridge family.”

“That’s one chicken in the pot. What’s the other?”

His voice gentled, letting me know he spoke of something of import, something that truly mattered, and something he had not forgotten. He turned from the window to face me. “We could collect some advice from Dr. Hey while we’re there. About expanding a family of our own.”

U
NPREDICTABLE

S
ung-li’s almond-shaped eyes slid like a slow snake down Joseph’s body, halting at my husband’s feet.

“No need for that,” French Louie said, clearing his throat. He added something that sounded like Cantonese, repeated it in English as though talking to a child. “Don’t challenge this man.”

Any who needed translating in the gold fields of Canyon City called on Louie at one time or another. Today, Louie came to the cooking hut of the Lodi mines to help his old friend, Joseph Sherar, find a cook with a reputation.

He found us a temperamental cook, though any other kind was rare.

Sung-li moved his eyes slowly from the blue morocco on Joseph’s boots, gauging his wool pants, appraising the value of the turquoise stones at the end of his belt, the soft weave of his vest. He ignored Louie’s command and boldly looked into Joseph’s eyes instead.

“I speak Engli,” he said in a voice as loud and brash as the dinner gong that called the men to eat. The blue silk of Sung-li’s pajama-like shirt pulled tightly across his back as he braced his legs and crossed his arms in front of himself. He hid his small hands in the folds of the wide sleeves. His mouth was a straight line beneath
a small nose and he wore his coal black hair straight away from his face, pulled tight and hanging in a queue down his back.

“Good,” Joseph answered. “It’ll save time. The question is, can you cook?”

“I cook good for many here,” Sung-li said as he turned his back on the older men and walked like a satisfied king behind the throne of his butcher block. “No mind to leave,” he added, picking up the cleaver, turning it over in his immaculate fingers. He handled the blade like a new weapon. He never took his eyes from Joseph’s. Defying his look of confidence, his feet stepped back and forth in one spot, as though stepping on hot coals. He seemed to realize his strange habit and stopped, abruptly.

Joseph pulled on his beard. The man was bold, but I suspect Joseph liked that, liked someone with confidence. Yet something about him struck a tender note too, I think. Perhaps the smallness of the slippered feet that shuffled nervously again on the floor. Joseph ran his tongue back and forth like a metronome over his upper lip. His tongue stopped abruptly with his mind made up. “You will work with my wife? Take directions from her?”

Sung-li paid attention to me for the first time. With that same boldness, he looked me over, checked out my wide-brimmed hat, tiny earrings, paused briefly at my eyes, my throat, easing his eyes imperceptibly down to the parasol I held in my hands. Looking back at Joseph, he nodded his head slowly in concurrence. His demeanor nudged a caution in my mind, but I set it aside.