“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.”
TRANSITIONS
The 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.”
Bubbles snorted. “Your own house. Yes, so no one will hear your cries when he treats you like a slow horse.”
“Is that true, Sunmiet?” I asked, alarmed. “He beats you?”
Sunmiet looked away, her eyelashes fluttering in embarrassment or shame, I couldn’t be sure. “Only when he drinks the whiskey. He is always sad it happened when the night is over.” She looked up, defending. “It is so hard for him. The arguments over the fishing. The Wascos at the big river are of one family. They have fished there since time began, and now, they are told to stay away, come here, where other families care for fishing sites and he does not belong. It is too hard on him.”
“Does your father know?” I asked, missing again my own father.
Bubbles answered. “Everyone knows.”
She plopped onto a corn husk mattress spread across from Sunmiet and changed the subject as though we had been discussing choke cherries. “When did Kása give the hummingbird design to you?” she asked Sunmiet, too sweetly.
“Long ago,” Sunmiet said.
“She promised it to me before that,” Bubbles said, pouting. “Mother says you tricked her out of it. You are always there, being her hands. You never let the rest of us come around.”
Sunmiet set her jaw, as irritated as I’d seen her. Her eyelashes fluttered. “No tricks. She gave it to me. You might have had it. But you can never be found when Kása needs huckleberries picked or salmon dried or roots dug. She gave it to whom she wished. And so will I.”
“Can I persuade you to give it to me?” Bubbles asked, looking with envy on Sunmiet’s fine beadwork.
“I will think on it,” Sunmiet said. “As Huckleberry Eyes thinks on the sweat.”
Bubbles raised her eyebrows, surprised I’d been asked. “I need to give it more time,” I said, uncertain. I wanted to confer with Joseph about it, and about Standing Tall’s behavior.
Sunmiet nodded, understanding that I needed to hang onto my wounds, for whatever reason, would let them go only when I was ready and in my own way. We shared in that, I think. She offered her healing with the sweat, and her willingness to wait.
Joseph stuck his head through the opening, Bandit pushed past him onto my lap. “Ready?” Joseph asked. I nodded, touched Sunmiet’s fingers lightly, told a lounging Bubbles goodbye, and with Bandit bouncing at my feet, we left the reservation, heading back home.
Joseph’s mood always lightened after time with Peter, chiding him about his eagle-feather, teasing, trying to trade him out of it even after all these years. They always spoke of cattle and sheep and change. Joseph found a fellow visionary in Peter and sharing his company proved ample reason to ride with me to the reservation even if he had little to say to my friend’s husband.
“Standing Tall …” I began as we rode, broaching the difficult subject with Joseph. I tried again, “Sunmiet says Standing Tall hurts her. Well, Bubbles said he did and Sunmiet didn’t deny it. Everyone supposedly knows. Why don’t they stop it?”
We rode side by side, mounted, watching the weaving grasses like waves of water through the ears of our horses.
“It’s their business,” Joseph said, uncomfortable with the subject. “They have their ways.”
“I don’t think we can dismiss it as their way. I mean, it’s a human way, the way we treat each other. It makes a difference, it seems to me, regardless of your race or family or tradition.”
“Don’t get involved in this, Janie,” he said. “It is something you don’t understand. We wouldn’t want someone telling us how to be with each other, would we?”
I thought for a moment. “If you were hurting me, I think I’d be very pleased to have someone stand beside me, help me fight back for what is right.”
“There’s the difference,” he said. “You’d fight back. Sunmiet won’t. It’s their way I’m telling you. Stay out of it.”
It made no sense to me: not Standing Tall’s behavior, not Sunmiet’s, and not my husband’s ability to dismiss the pain of someone else so easily. He always reached out to others. This time, he held back as though to honor Sunmiet’s people. I struggled with the quality of such honor.
“Sunmiet thinks the sweats might help me,” I said. “Even Kása said perhaps the Indian doctor could assist me. It’s a great honor, I think, that she would ask me.”
“Honor. Yes, it’s that, I suppose,” my husband said. His hands tightened on the reins. I could tell there was a hesitation for him.
“You’re reluctant? About the sweat?”
“Let’s see first about the Chinese doctor, Dr. Hey. We’ve not considered him.”
“What’s the difference?”
He was thoughtful. “One’s religion,” he said. “The other’s herbs. We could go to Canyon City in a week or two. Looks like an open winter.”
“It isn’t my religion,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing something that was sinful. Just seeing if the sweats could get me restful. Cleanse me.”
“You’re clean enough,” he said, irritated. I could tell the subject bothered him, something about the sweat. Or perhaps just the subject of my fertility itself distressed him. Or maybe his distress arose from the constant wondering of what part he might play in our inability to advance our family. “Suit yourself,” he said, dismissing it. Then he added more kindly, “As I’m sure you will.”
Since my marriage, the only children I’d spent time with belonged to someone else.
Lodenma had another. “Easy as a hog skinning,” she said, “long as you can stand the stench. Not to worry,” she added, her wide hands patting mine kindly. “You’ll have one soon enough.” I felt her embarrassment at her fertility in the presence of my lack.
She was less hopeful, mentioned it less often as I turned twenty, still childless, with neither an Ella or my own. Sunmiet shared her children with me, helped fill my days. A natural mother, Sunmiet’s children each arrived larger than the one before. But she had no throwing fits. After Anne, she’d been healed enough within a day to move about. Of course, having her mother and auntie and Standing Tall’s family close by made nurturing as available as mother’s milk. I envied the family Sunmiet’s children were born into.
Even Bubbles delivered a healthy boy the summer of ’68. Still stocky though sporting a waist now, she had mended some of her ways which had persuaded a handsome Koosh to claim her. Their union seemed fitting since she’d once claimed him from the river.
For Joseph and me, there was no baby-planning, no vanilla-smelling toddler splashing in the copper boiler, no little voices crying in the night. I played
catch with Benito and Anna’s children since they lived so close; took them on rides to spots where deer slept, even introduced them to my pistol, with their parents’ permission.
Joseph never spoke of our disappointment though he must have felt it. I’d see him watching Peter and his son riding together, their heads bent in planning, their voices raised in laughter and I knew he must have missed it terribly, that rawhide tightness that comes from well-matched strands.
We caught glimpses of Ella sometimes when the St. Mary’s girls went on outings near The Dalles and we happened to be near. From a distance, we watched Ella go from being a little girl to quite a proper young lady. Joseph and I did not discuss her, keeping what we felt for her inside, to not hurt the other.
I had not spoken with my mother since the day she shut Ella from us.
For Joseph and me, those were years of coping a marriage and a friendship rather than a family. And though we each took time when we could to be with Sunmiet’s children or made ourselves favorite auntie and uncle for Benito and Anna’s two, Joseph and I mostly spent our time together, learning each other’s ways, not the ways of children.
I discovered how Joseph liked his venison fried (thin-sliced, lightly floured, and seared once on each side) and that he loved to give—gifts of silver, gifts of time, gifts made from wood. He discovered I liked the feel of things: rough wool woven into warmth, alder cut and carved into a child’s toy, and the grit of earth beneath my fingers and the vegetables and blooms that grew. On our rides together, Joseph often took the time to mark a flowering plant, promising to return later to transplant it in the fall. And this he did, expanding the variety of flowers that pushed up through the worked soil each spring creating splashes of color around the weathered wood of our home.
It turned out Joseph’s temper was for things that didn’t always work the way he wanted; he rarely used it against people. He demanded much but treated others with more tenderness than he did himself. He assigned work well, built on the strengths of his buckaroos.