A Sweetness to the Soul (50 page)

The “ledge” crew as I soon called them, did begin their work. When they weren’t busy tending to roads and bridges, animals and fencing or a hundred other things, they began clearing and carving a space twelve feet wide and three times the length into the cinnamon rocks about twenty feet up above the road, next to the river. As they had time and energy, Peter’s crew lifted buckets of dirt and soil onto the finished flat sections, building up the natural soil there, always reminding me that my husband had one more great vision in mind and more work than hands for.

Fortunately, we did not have to feed all these crews at once. Ella, Alice, and I packed lunches in tins for the road crews who left early each morning. In the summer, most came from Sunmiet’s band and wisely supplemented their meals with dried fish and eels, roots and huckleberries, and in season, choke cherries from the ravines they dug their roads into. Large breakfasts of eggs and flapjacks became morning staples along with more house girls and cooks’ helpers to tend to the tables.

I found that the more help we hired, well, the more help we hired. And they all needed to be fed.

Feed them we did. So the roads would be built. And later, so the roads and bridges would be maintained. So people would come down them to stay at our inn, pay their toll and two bits for a meal so we could pay the wages of those we hired to help. Sometimes I wondered if we were moving forward with our life or just in a dreamcatcher’s circle.

Our life centered on those roads. They were the key to my husband’s vision. More than thirty miles in four directions on both sides of that bridge he built on the backs of men and animals. Roads, lifelines to the heart of our community and our future.

And we could not have built the roads without the Indians.

We could not have paid the Indians without the tolls.

Some have said we charged exorbitant fees to the homesteaders and sheep men and freighters and stages that made their way down our roads to the river over the years. We charged $3.75 for each yoke
of oxen or team or wagon and a dollar extra for the drivers. We never raised the tolls once we completed the bridge. Cattle crossed at 25¢ a head, sheep for a mere 10¢. These do not seem high when I look at the thousands we have paid to carve the roads out of the sides of reluctant ridges or the work necessary to maintain them and the bridge.

Joseph was very strict about the tolls and required they be put through the slot of a shiny metal bucket kept just for that. In later years, when he had built the calf barn and livery and flour mill and a dozen other structures, and his leg finally slowed him down to using a cane, he would sit at the edge of the bridge in the shade of trees we planted near the hotel. A long-barreled rifle stretched across his knees encouraged ready payment though I never knew him to ever use the gun.

My husband strung a heavy iron chain he had the blacksmith make across both sides of the bridge and no one crossed without dropping their coins into the bucket. He did occasionally negotiate, took pity on some poor family barely making it across the plains let alone across the river. More than once he sent John Suhr to bring flour and beans and coffee from the storehouse for a family barely able to pay their toll. Once he chased a man nearly to The Dalles who cheated him of 10¢, then gave it back plus more when he heard the sad story of his plains crossing. People walking did not pay at all.

He had one other exception in the toll schedule: for the Indians who summered here. Whether they worked for the top wage of 25¢ an hour or not, they never paid to cross. The Chinese he had a different standard for: on foot or not, they paid a dime. I argued with him about that, it seemed unfair. But he insisted, perhaps remembering the sound of a cleaver slicing past his ear.

On paydays, Joseph took me and the huge leather accounts book with him to meet with Peter and pay the men.

My husband still could not pronounce some of their Indian names and so in the books, he gave them names more familiar to him. “This is Patrick,” he told me on payday. I knew the slender man
looking down at his feet as K’aalas, “Raccoon.” “This one’s O’Leary,” he’d say to the smiling man with an unsavory scar down his cheek, and I would issue coins and a notation in my book beside “O’Leary” though I knew his friends called him Ach’ái, “Magpie,” that he was the son of Running Deer and the cousin of Koosh.

The Warm Springs people were tolerant of my husband’s poor pronunciation and did not begrudge him his use of his own familiar words because he treated them fairly and as equals. Some even took the names he gave them as their last and use them still.

In fact, they begrudged us little though as I see it now more clearly, we were changing their ways minute by minute, day by day. Our roads brought more and more people into their place of belonging. Along with the government acts for homesteaders and such, gave them more and more reasons to stay.

I sometimes wondered if my husband was the man in Sumxseet’s peoples’ prophesy, the one Peter shared with Joseph on their first meeting. Perhaps the engineers and builders—not the missionaries as are so often blamed—truly did carry the teaching book that made their world fall to pieces.

Perhaps that’s what Standing Tall thought too. It might explain his growing animosity toward us. Oh, he let Sunmiet and me share time together. And he accepted our help of blankets and blood purifier during the typho-malaria epidemic that swept the region killing both Indians and non. Reluctantly, at my urging, he and Sunmiet agreed not to treat the disease with the sweats as was the family custom. His consent surprised me, made me wonder about the depth of his love for his family, his ability to try the white man’s way, at least for them. Everyone in Sunmiet’s band who did not sweat during the disease lived. Most others did not.

Still, it concerned me that our involvement in their survival seemed ultimately to anger Standing Tall even more.

I considered talking with him about it, but time was an eel that sixth year Ella was with us, and just slipped away.

Spike Crickett wore a fragile temperament he called his “spirit.” He landed on our doorstep out of one of Wheeler’s Concord “Thoroughrace” stages driven by none other than “Pretty Dick” Barter, as we’d taken to calling him. Several of the passengers that day in 1879 preferred to call them both something entirely unflattering. But then, their whole trip would have taken a heap of flattery to make up for the misery.

It rained that April day and that meant the roads ran like rivers in places, were as slick as eels in a bucket of bear grease in others.

Spike arrived the last few feet on foot despite the weather, well after the others. He carried with him a cage with a gray, long-haired cat named Spirit who whined its distress despite its dry state.

“Hope Barter marries one of those Huots girls soon,” snarled one of the regular passengers on the run between The Dalles and Canyon City as he stepped into the dry inn. “Or else stops trying to get down the ridge on time. He waits and waits until the last minute, mooning around her, and then tears down that grade no matter what the weather. Don’t dare argue with him. Like a king, he is.” As were all stage drivers. The passenger looked weary and worn and he ordered an ale to cheer himself while he took off his boots.

Crickett’s arrival did nothing to bolster the other passengers’ temperaments. With Spirit howling in the cage, Crickett brushed off the rain as though it hadn’t happened and swished his boots in a puddle to clear the mud. Inside, he set the cage on the floor in the saloon and donned the moccasins without complaint, letting his cat do that.

Crickett introduced himself as “Dr. Crickett” which we decided accounted for some of his oddities. His suit pulled against his large frame as though he’d forgotten to buy larger clothes when he grew up; his rust-colored hair had been cut with home shears as a man too busy to barber in town. The cut left an uneven length. He was smooth shaven and loud talking. Still, his nails were pink and clean despite
the muddy trip and he knew much about hospitals and medicines and people in distress even if he did only look to be in his mid-twenties. He didn’t complain about the rain, simply asked for his trunk so he could change. And when Dick lifted his luggage from beneath the boot in the back of the stage, the valise bore his initial and name preceded by “Dr.” pressed into the leather, so we guessed he was.

“Just an eccentric,” Ella whispered to me in the kitchen after the noon meal. “Didn’t make any friends on the stage, I hear. Guess they were glad the cat got off with him when he found the road too rough to ride on.”

“Appetite vely big,” Tai, our Chinese cook, noted. “Vely big.” He scraped the plates and dipped them in soapy water followed by the required steaming.

“He’s bigger than most,” I said.

“He has kind eyes,” Alice M volunteered, and both Ella and I raised our eyebrows at each other over her head. “And the cat’s mouth was dry. Calmed down with water. He’s gentle with it,” she added, speaking of Crickett. Alice rarely volunteered information about the travelers, and I hadn’t noticed that she had noticed him. It appeared to be a sign that she was growing up, maturing into what must be sixteen years.

“I do wonder if they’ll stay a bit,” Ella mused, “what with the roads so bad. At least until the rain stops.”

I had mixed feelings about them staying. It meant more people would be arriving behind them and we could have twice the number for the supper meal. Waiting would make Joseph’s job much easier in the long run, however. Despite his efforts to preserve the roads, rain proved his biggest enemy. It washed out the dirt around the rocks and roots, relentlessly pounded at the packed earth until it wore a tiny hole. Then it washed and washed until the hole became a pit deep enough to sink a wheel, stop a stage. And if that weren’t enough to cause repair, any wagon risking the slick, wet road also risked becoming mired in muck or slipping and sliding, losing its cargo or itself over the steep-pitched sides. Either way, the rain and
wagons left the road with deep ruts when it dried out. The crews spent long hours following any storm dragging juniper logs to repair the roads and smooth the ruts.

“Maintenance” Joseph called it. “Never-ending” was my term.

“Looks like Dick’s going to risk it,” Joseph told me after the meal. We sat at the family table, in the kitchen.

“Was there ever any wonder,” I said, checking the larder to determine supplies.

“Says he made up for lost time on the ridge coming down. Had new shoe leather for brakes. Wants to see if he can still get to Bakeoven on time.” Joseph pulled his big frame up from the chair, pulled thoughtfully on his long beard. He considered the Cold Shore Cut Plug Tobacco tin, thought better of it. “Best I get the teams ready. Think we’ll be pulling him before the afternoon’s over. You’ll have quite a time making the dance tonight, Ella,” he teased as he slipped his boots back on. “Bet your Clayton will be clogged in.”

She smiled at him, bantering as she cleared the tables. “He prefers ‘Monroe,’ ” she corrected, “and he knows his way around mud. I suspect he’ll get here. Last chance for us to see each other for a while, till round-up’s over.”

“If he arrives in this muck and weather, you’ll probably see him during round-up too,” Joseph laughed. “Ah, true love. Carries a bridge over the impossible, right, Mother Sherar?” He winked at me.

“That it does,” I said, liking being referred to as “Mother.”

April often arrived with the rain. And this year was no exception. The stages rolled, the men rode and repaired. We cooked and served and tended the garden and handled the post office. Together, we plucked chickens, prepared for spring round-up, sheared sheep, planted the garden, and added a peach cutting to the cliff orchard, just as we did every April. The rain made it all take longer, worked us a little harder. The Community Hall at Nansene, where the dances were planned, not far from Fifteen Mile Crossing, promised a respite the young people all made extra effort for, including riding through mud.

Ella especially would. She planned to marry Clayton Monroe Grimes in July and saw this dance as the cool drink of water she needed at least monthly to survive. I had never seen her so happy, her eyes so full of sparkle. Since she’d met Monroe, as he preferred to be called, at the fall round-up, she’d been giddy and taken to daydreaming. We had no need to wonder of what. At twenty-two, she deserved some day-dreaming time.

We’d hired on extra stockmen that year to handle branding and the several hundred head our herd had grown to. Monroe also did well with sheep and he’d stayed on at the bunkhouse for several weeks, working, and giving the spark of their relationship time to kindle to the flame it became. He’d left in February, marriage proposal secured, to work in the Grass Valley country.

In March, following a month of separation and despite my better judgment, Ella and I rode across the Buck Hollow bridge toward Grass Valley to find him. Wind whipped us along the same route Joseph had taken his first time to the falls, nearly twenty years before. We rode up the ravine and along the ridge past what’s now the Buckley place, to intersect with the Dalles Military Road. It wasn’t much of a road, compared to Joseph’s.