“Standing Tall did not wish it,” Sunmiet said, facing her mother again, searching her eyes.
“No. He took issue.”
Magpie interrupted, believing they wished to know her thoughts. “He thinks you pay him back, for his foolish visit in the snow that cost you big time at the school,” she said, remembering.
“Sunmiet does not have venom,” Morning Dove told her sister. “And Standing Tall is a good son. We made a wise decision those years ago choosing him for you.” Morning Dove stood back, surveying as she spoke. “He is a good hunter. Good fisherman. He listens to his mother and his kása.” I wondered if Sunmiet had told them of her fears about him or if she would let them only see his good side. “He will provide for you and his family,” Morning Dove finished, straightening something on Sunmiet’s dress. “So he had to wait.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It is not the first time.”
“Nor the last,” Auntie Lilie said and giggled.
The long fringe on Sunmiet’s buckskin dress flowed like water as she moved her arms to straighten her beaded belt, ignoring her auntie. Her mother stepped closer, held both her daughter’s hands out before her, admiring the gentle drape of the hide over her daughter’s slender frame, the tiny stitches and network of beads, the elk’s teeth and shells that decorated the bodice. Many calluses had been grown for this moment.
“You are a good berry picker,” Morning Dove told her daughter. “And a good root digger. Only a good root digger receives a kápn from both her mother and her kása, is that not right?” Sunmiet lowered her eyes in embarrassment at her mother’s high praise. “Perhaps someday you will be one of the seven to dig first roots. You will be a good mother,” she said, lifting her daughter’s chin. “You will bring joy to your husband’s bed and his family’s fire and pride to our hearts for what you will do for your family. You will bring us roots in our old age and we will not go hungry.” She reached her hand behind her daughter’s head and touched her gently. “You are beautiful on your day. Your husband will forget he was asked to wait, he will be so pleased to see you. It will be as it should be,” she said, with finality.
“If only we can find that bundle,” Auntie Magpie sang out, spoiling the moment, beginning to rustle about once again.
The music seemed louder now and Kása, entering, had to speak more loudly over it. “What holds it up, then?” Kása said, puffing. She trundled into the dressing area bearing a huge basket before her like a last-minute pregnancy. With a grunt, she delivered the basket to the dirt floor revealing her skinny body dressed in a freshly tanned hide, covered with beads. Deep lines like rivers flowed down either side of the island of her mouth. She looked upset. But I had begun to understand that Kása always looked upset.
“We’re looking for the bundle with Sunmiet’s veil,” Bubbles said lazily, coming in behind her, as though there was no hurry. “Do you have it?”
Kása looked briefly at the chubby girl she claimed as granddaughter, scowled. “Who would trust you with something so precious?” she said, looking into her woven basket filled to overflowing with stacks of homemade gifts of bags, smaller baskets, food utensils, and supplies. She shook her head. Three younger girls poured through the opening carrying baskets as well, filling the already cluttered space with women and woven things. Kása scanned the bounty of their baskets. They too were filled only with the gifts for the wedding dinner.
“You should have taken care of it yourself,” Kása told her daughter.
The drumming music increased its pace.
“It is not here, then,” Morning Dove said, her voice holding a mixture of regret and alarm. Then deciding said, “We must find another way. Let me think on it.”
Kása, Morning Dove’s auntie, clucked at her the way Morning Dove sometimes did her own daughter. “What way is there? The drums beat faster. There’s no time now. She will have to marry without it.” She shook her head. “It will be a stain.”
Morning Dove ignored her. “It should look like purifying water cascading over her head, covering the part in her hair, her eyes and face, down to her throat, until she is joined.…” She was thoughtful, stepping over Kása’s negative view that nothing could be done. She scanned the baskets, seeking a solution. Something of what Morning Dove said triggered my memory and my eyes roamed the room looking for a particular basket I’d noticed during the search.
The drumming grew more forceful, the wedding singers’ voices more piercing in the August air.
Finding it, I reached into a bundle of buckskin laces, inhaling the smoky fragrance and pulled out a mass of fine sinew threads and thin, feathery light, white buckskin lengths. “Can we use these?” I said, holding them cascading over my fingers. “Tie knots along each length, to look like beads of water, string some wild grapes—”
“And antler beads. And dentilium. Yes! I saw them somewhere,” Morning Dove said, excited now. “Quickly. Bubbles, Auntie,” she said, directing, “you and Huckleberry Eyes take these and tie the knots. Leave space for beads and berries we will tie with sinew. You,” she spoke to the younger girls, “go bring two handfuls of plump grapes. But almost dried so they will not stain,” she called out to them as they scurried out the door. “Quickly! Quickly.”
“It will not work,” Kása said, dropping her bird-like bones onto a pile of blankets off to the side. She adjusted her colorful kerchief, wiggled her bottom into the blankets before resting her scowl on me.
Morning Dove pulled the beaded necklace she wore off over her head. “We will use this too,” she added tenderly fingering the intricate design of the white bird beaded onto a brilliant blue circle of sparkling cut beads. “With a branch of red willow around this.” She set the perfect circle on her daughter’s head. “From which we’ll hang the laces and the beads.” Her lips pursed in approval. “I will ask your father to get the willow, now,” she told Sunmiet. “We will make your own veil, from the things of this place and your life, made with your family and your friends.” She looked at me before she slipped out the doorway, “It will be a new tradition, from both Indian and non.”
Sunmiet’s veil was exquisite, even if it was conceived in part by a non-Indian. Having never seen what one should look like, I truly enjoyed the finished product put together by the women those last minutes before the ceremony. Our fingers worked in eel speed and just as smoothly until Morning Dove placed the beaded work on her daughter’s head and led her out to her husband-to-be.
The two were married, then, at He-He, “laughing,” there beside the Warm Springs River that bubbles out of the mountain called Jefferson. Standing Tall looked as a grown man with his breastplate covering his dark chest and his beaded arm bands accenting his strength. He wore new buckskin leggings and soft moccasins. I noticed he raised his eyebrows in question as he looked at Sunmiet’s veil. We heard some chattering behind fingertips from the wedding guests.
Then Standing Tall smiled at his bride, held her hands gently as she smiled back. They stood that way, as though none of us were even in their presence while the elders sang the prayers and spoke the words over them that would join them forever. It seemed to me Sunmiet had come to some peace about him for she had never looked happier.
Just as the words ended, Sunmiet’s parents and Standing Tall’s parents came forward carrying a Hudson Bay blanket. Standing behind the couple, they wrapped the blanket around their shoulders, swaddling them together as though babies ready for their cradleboards. There was much laughing and giggling and more words were spoken in their language, and only later did I learn that their families had truly joined them together with the blanket embrace.
The wedding exchange had already taken place, a few weeks before. One beaded bag made by Sunmiet’s family equal to three Hudson Bay blankets brought by the family of Standing Tall. Sunmiet’s family offered many gifts made by their own hands. Tanned hides, baskets, beaded bags, dried fruit and salmon to better furnish the cooking place of Standing Tall’s mother. His family offered store-bought goods, from Muller’s st
ore or the agency, as was the custom. Blankets and calico and tools and things purchased with the trade-goods of Standing Tall’s family and dried venison, to show that he could provide.
After the exchange, dozens of guests had sat as they did now, on willow mats, to eat salmon, venison, piaxi, lukws, wild celery, and finally huckleberries, in that order, the way Sunmiet’s people believe the Creator gave them the food. We began and ended with chuush, “water,” always with the life-giving water.
Morning Dove had cooked for days with her family to prepare the meals, grateful to be higher in the mountains where the nights were cool when wearing buckskins brought unwanted perspiration. Sunmiet’s younger cousins, both boys and girls, served the food and everyone ate until they were full.
Many people, more than those I’d spent time with at the river, sat around the circle on the mats, eating. “Sahaptin-speaking Warm Springs people and more Wascos, tribes put together by the treaty whether they wished it or not,” Koosh told me handing me a bowl of steaming piaxi that reminded me of potatoes. “They thought we would kill each other off. We have fooled them and we get along, in our way.”
On the other side of me sat George “Washington” Peters, explaining, pronouncing. A quiet boy, he and Sunmiet had ridden three days before to fetch me. George had said almost nothing during the long ride from Fifteen Mile Crossing to the reservation letting Sunmiet talk about family history inspired by a view of Mutton Mountains or the river. But during the ceremony and after, at the dinner and the pow wow, it was George who seemed to know before I even asked what I might be wondering about. Like the change in music, the meaning of the songs, how the dancers competed with the drummers, anticipating the final beat that to my untrained ears seemed abrupt, unplanned. He talked about “old ways.”
“Some do not believe non-Indians should even witness our ceremonies,” he told me leaning back on his elbows, chewing a long strand of grass. “ ‘They will steal them as they have stolen our land’, they say.” He was thoughtful as we lounged on the striped wool blanket. His face was a sharp profile against the dusk, like it had been cut with Mama’s sharpest scissors. “You will dance?” he asked as people formed two circles. “An honor dance, to shake the hands of the family of Sunmiet and Standing Tall who are joined this day.”
He pulled me forward into the circle and led me, toe-heel, toe-heel. I hugged Sunmiet when I reached her in the inner circle, lingered in her embrace. She would go away now, to the lodge of Standing Tall’s family and I did not know how much more of her I’d see.
“Who can blame them?” George continued after the dance as though we had not interrupted our conversation. I fidgeted, wondering who might wish me gone from the circle. Standing Tall perhaps? He did not like how non-Indians were changing his world. “Sunmiet wished your presence,” George said as though reading my thoughts. “So you will always be welcome. It is why her father asked the agent to speak with your father, to have you join her on this day of her beginning.”
It must have been quite a conversation. Mama told me later, when I came in from the potato field, that Sunmiet’s father and the Indian agent had been there, spoken with Papa. As she and I pulled weeds from the herb garden, she said: “The agent was headed to The Dalles, to the Fort I’d say, and stopped by as a favor to Eagle Speaker.” She brushed the hair from her eyes and left a smudge of garden dirt on her forehead. “So. You’ll attend Sunmiet’s wedding.” Her voice held a strange quality.
Anyway, you could have knocked me over with a whiff of basil so stunned I was to hear they would agree to such a thing since I had wounded Papa greatly with my sassy talk that day with Mr. Sherar. Mama said something about “teaching the heathens” and must have justified my going by assuming they would learn from me. Instead, I learned from them.
Now, in the midst of all the joy and learning as part of Sunmiet’s wedding, I decided I must have been forgiven for what had transpired those months before, when I first defied my father.
Joseph did not buy Puddin’ that day, of course, or any other. Papa would never have permitted that. Joseph would never have negotiated such a transaction “with a child.” But my offer, coming when it did, did the damage by itself, forcing my father to see me as something more than just his child.
“They all belong to me!” Papa bellowed that day. “I’ll not have a child of mine seize the moment to make herself above her elders!”
“He’s mine,” I said, and did not whine. “You gave him to me. I choose to sell him. Now.” A huge silence seemed to fill the air around our home, settling onto us like a scratchy, suffocating blanket.
Papa started toward me, enraged by the turn of events that day and by my defiance. I hunched my shoulders in anticipation of a blow almost deserved by my betrayal. I stood my ground, glaring at him. Baby George looked up, his eyes big in question. He turned, as I did, and Mama and Papa too, when Joseph spoke.
“I’ll not buy from the child,” he said, speaking with his deep voice like a man who could bite rocks for breakfast. “You’ve no need to spend your anger on her.” He called the kelpie and the little dog left Baby George’s side, scurried to Joseph, and sat straight-backed in the dust before him. Joseph squatted as though idly patting the dog while keeping a wary eye on Papa.
Papa had halted mid-stride. I think he would have challenged Joseph, believing he would take my bait, but Joseph’s lowering himself and patting the dog took the edge off a moment stretched out with tension. Papa’s outrage exhaled to mere irritation.
Joseph stood to take the reins Benito offered him. “We’ll make other arrangements,” he said to Papa. Then of me he said, “Your daughter has a kind heart. I thank her for her wish to sweeten a deal gone sour.” He held the reins and swung his lanky body up onto the saddle with grace and agility rarely seen in so big a man. “Perhaps,” he added, patting his thigh for the kelpie to leap to, “when she is older, we will meet again. Under gentler terms. And I shall return the favor.”
He touched his hat to Papa, Mama, with barely a glance. Then he looked at me, took his hat off, held it to his chest for just a heartbeat, smiled and nodded once in my direction and then rode out.
I heard what he said, watched what he did, and believed, young and inexperienced as I was, that he had spoken to my soul.
Mama and Papa had their own words after Joseph and Benito left. A kind of seething expectation descended on our home, like the rattle on a wet snake. I learned in bits and pieces that the mules had been committed in a card game or somehow mortgaged; Papa had never found a way to tell my Mama. He hoped Joseph would simply not return and thus avoid the confrontation.
J. W., old enough to be my Papa, arrived one fine morning that same week to “smile at a grasshopper” he teased, and take the mules off. Mama, furious, kept a cool distance from my father for some days thereafter. She had counted on the sale more than the integrity of her commitment to Joseph; and with Papa’s choices, had lost both on one spring morning. I learned something about the strain of business deals bogged down in the muck of poor decisions and the accompanying boil that could split a union if allowed to fester.
Joseph was fairly well occupied after he left us, changing his life.
“The Army, um. It has need for cattle,” French Louie told Joseph and Benito when they arrived back in The Dalles. They stood together in front of the livery, desperately watching another pack string make its way to the Deschutes.
“They’ve a wait,” Joseph said of the string. “At least we have the high water going for us. We’re all stuck for a while yet.” He cursed himself for not bringing more mules from California, wondered how quickly he could get the word to those left south, perhaps to Philamon, to buy up more and head north. This whole adventure was curdling like sour milk before his eyes as he tried to recall the strong feeling that had initially led him to commit to all these changes.
“You do not listen, my friend,” French Louie persisted. “The Army. Needs cattle. Will buy. My sources, they say the Indian agent, he
makes the trip for fresh beef in few weeks. The tribes, um, do not eat well this winter. Many cattle die. Deer, elk, too, are thin. High water hurts the spring run of the Chinook. So they look for beef soon.” He picked at his fingernails with the knife as he talked, popping little pieces of nail onto the boards in front of the livery office.
“It will bring some cash?” Benito asked.
“Oh, yes,” Louie said. “Or maybe some Army script. For trade.” He pushed the knife back into his leg sheath.
“Only trade I’d be looking for is beef for mules,” Joseph said listening to the hammering of a building going up down the street. “Do they have mules, Louie? That would make your sources worth their weight in dust.”
The Frenchman grinned. “I see some fine animals in the paddocks, my friend. You want I should explore?”
“I want,” Joseph said.
And thus was the pack string of Joseph Sherar put together that spring of 1862. It began a year of lucrative activity for Joseph. His crew of men already knew and trusted each other which gave his venture a head start even with skinny, unknown animals and the other packers leaving first. Half the success of any venture is finding people to share it with you, willing to ride the roads of peaks and valleys that come with great ideas. Joseph had that in Benito and his family and he was adding men like French Louie as he moved.
The Army mules rounded out the string of forty mules, two lead men, and one cook, Benito’s Anna, who rode a gray bell mare. They set off to Canyon City in early May. At the mouth of the Deschutes, they loaded their supplies of pickaxes, beans, flour, shoes and shirts, and even wheelbarrows onto rafts manned sometimes by the Celillo band of Indians who fished on the Columbia. They swam the mules across. Joseph kept an eye out for the bell mare, not just for Anna’s protection. The tinkling bell on that gray horse would lure the herd-bound mules. And keep the cook happy.