“You did well, Aswan.”
To Standing Tall I said: “It’s over,” and remembering my father’s instruction long ago, pointed the pistol at his head. He grunted, made an effort to rise. I stepped back, ordered him to stay. I wished, almost hoped, he would lunge for me though my heart pounded against my ribs. I felt sick. Until that moment, I did not know if I could kill another human being. That night I knew I could.
Standing Tall gave me no reason. He settled back, deflated as an empty elk bladder. His hand dropped in resignation.
“Aswan!” I said, my voice in charge. “Take the bottle from your father.” The boy stood, did as he was told and I noticed that his once long, shiny hair had the boarding school cut. Standing Tall did not resist. “Go, now,” I said. “Take the little ones, to your mother.”
“Is she all right?” Anne asked, gathering blankets to drape around them.
I nodded yes. “I’ll stay,” Aswan said.
“The river’s too close. They need you. I’ll be fine.”
“You white woman, intruder,” Standing Tall snarled. He spit other insults at me, but his words were not accompanied by actions. As the children scurried out the flap, he said he did not like my treading on his place as “provider.”
“You provide misery for your family,” I said, adding nothing more. I learned early on there is no value in arguing with someone who is not present with his mind.
In moments, I heard Joseph’s big gelding approach and felt a wave of relief. Together we tied Standing Tall’s hands behind his back and walked him in front of the horses past the inn, over the toll bridge where we stopped, pounded on the blacksmith’s door.
Teddy, our farrier, roused from his cot, looked startled as he let us in. “What’s it to be?” he asked in his thick Boston accent.
Joseph tied Standing Tall, arms forward, around the center post telling Teddy what happened. “I stay awake, watch him,” Teddy said though his eyes shifted back and forth and I suspected he gave great power to Standing Tall’s height and demeanor.
“Just till we get the sheriff or the tribal elders, whichever might get here faster,” I told him. “We’ll send someone in the morning.”
In the inn, we sent the children off to bed, though Aswan resisted. We relieved Tai of his duties and considered, again, Sunmiet’s arm. Tai had cleaned it, held the wound shut so the bleeding stopped. It needed stitches. “I’ll do it,” Joseph said, and Sunmiet nodded, biting into a linen towel I gave her. She squeezed tight my hand. Her children poked their heads around the corner, eyes large with apprehension. Sunmiet spit the towel from her mouth, gentled her words, reassured them in Sahaptin and Anne herded them, waddling, back to bed.
It did not seem fair to me that she and her children should be the ones to suffer. She who believed in him, stood beside him, bore his children, and then bore the brunt of his frustrations and his pain. “It’s always you who hurt,” I said. “And it should be him.”
“He hurts,” Sunmiet said with sadness. “It is why I could not leave him for so long.” Her eyes watered, filled with tears, “But now I am afraid to stay.”
“You can only bend so much,” Joseph said, gentle. I thought of his coping saw, how too much flexibility meant widening a gap.
“A tree does not like to be uprooted,” she told him.
“It can be transplanted and be stronger than ever,” he said, “but that’s for you to decide.”
“We’ll deal with all that in the morning,” I said. “Sew you up now, so you can rest. Joseph will get the sheriff, find out who sells the whiskey.”
“I wish it was only the whiskey,” Sunmiet said.
She turned down our offer for laudanum yet did not cry out or whimper as Joseph stitched, tied the final knot. Together, we helped her from the chair. “Get some rest,” I directed. “We have all had enough for one night.” I looked out the window to stars faded by a full moon, thought of the safety of dropping to sleep next to Joseph in our bed, thought of what Sunmiet was missing.
We started down the hall intending to tuck Sunmiet in. Instead, she abruptly stopped. She inhaled her breath in pain and her eyes got wide. “What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
She answered in a tone laced both with fear and wonder. “My water breaks,” she said. “We will have a baby.”
Joseph’s invitation to a dance seemed years not just hours away.
“Is it too soon?” I asked Sunmiet.
She shook her head, her eyelashes fluttering. “No. A little early. Baby is big, so it can come.” She sighed. “I did not wish it to happen now, without the father.”
“He’s drunk,” I said, angry once again for her. She didn’t deny it or defend him and I set aside my outrage to tend to her.
In one of my trunks, I found a pale nightdress, cooler than Sunmiet’s buckskin, not covered with the blood of her wounds. Joseph saw himself in the way and said he’d be in the bedroom if we needed him. He did not sleep. Instead, he said he listened for the creak of the floor where Sunmiet and I walked.
In the ladies’ dining room, back and forth, we women walked. Close to the cool spring water available to the kitchen, we walked. Around the dining room table and its benches and chairs, we walked, stopping at each of her contractions, panting, holding. I felt helpless against her grimacing pain, could do nothing but be with her.
Tai stuck his half-shaved head around the corner, wide young-man eyes wondering at the noise. “Go back to bed. This is no place for a boy,” I said. He didn’t need to be told twice. His braid flipped around his neck as he left.
Sunmiet hung on to me when she stopped, squeezed my hand and squatted, panted, eased her way into the wave graduating to pain, then up and over it, down the other side until the next one, dipping and bending into it like the eagle into wind.
She sipped water in between. I thought of what might make her comfortable: wet a flannel and held it to the back of her neck, dabbed her face of perspiration. I checked the bandage we’d put on her arm. Found a hard candy for her to suck on. She wished a bed on the floor and so with quilts and linen sheets we made a resting place beside the horsehair couch.
“If Kása were here, she would sing to me,” she teased, a sparkle in her eye.
“My voice would scare the baby back to Christmas,” I said, combing her damp hair from her temples with my fingertips. “Would you like me to send Aswan or Joseph for Kása?”
She shook her head no. “I do not wish to explain my night to her before it is over.”
It surprised me that Sunmiet would be calm enough between contractions to just talk. It was not how I imagined my mother bringing children into the world.
Sometimes Sunmiet seemed to doze. Watching her, I thought she could have been my taller, fuller sister, wearing my nightdress, her dark braids pulled over her shoulder. I had never seen her in anything but buckskins; seeing her in my clothes made me warm inside.
Once we heard little whispers and scuffling and turned to see five pairs of eyes at the door. Sunmiet shooed the children back to bed after words of reassurance. “I am well. Your nana or yáiya comes soon. Go now. Rest. Huckleberry Eyes and I have work to do. You can see the baby in the morning.”
Sometimes Sunmiet just sat, ankles crossed, rocking gently. She spoke softly about the baby, pointed when the baby’s feet pushed into the wall of her stomach as it turned. She put my hand there to feel the flutter of feet. “It is floating,” she said of her baby, preparing its entrance into this outside world. It developed hiccups and we laughed.
Once or twice, following a particularly difficult pain, she reached beneath her gown, withdrew her bloodied hands and said, “Not yet.” With great effort, like the wind rising from the depths of a deep ravine reaching for the timbered top, she stood, and we walked and talked once more.
She told me of the argument. Aswan’s arrival back from school, his hair having been cut, started it. There had been no choice about his going. All the children were required. Along with being forced to make his
way with farming, being pushed back from the Big River, having to use Sunmiet’s family’s fishing sites here at Sherar’s, Standing Tall had been pushed too far, his strong and caring spirit spent. The mean and hopeless part that lives in all of us finally taking over in him. A knife and whiskey both close at hand, he’d struck at Aswan and Anne, then at Sunmiet when she’d intervened. Blade met flesh and pulled to bone.
“Worst,” Sunmiet said, “was leaving the children. Aswan said to go, come here, he would keep his father calmer if I left. Could make better time without the babies, but I am glad you brought them here.”
Another contraction. This time I could see the pain wash over her face, last a long time. It struck me that even with my mother’s last two, Loyal and George, I had been more like the little eyes in the doorway, not there in a privileged place beside my mother.
And it was a privilege, to be present when new life came. In all my years, I had never asked to be part of someone’s birth. Others may have thought it too painful to request me to midwife for them, having had no infants of my own. A reasonable thought. One I’d had myself! No more, not after this!
I knew this was the closest I would come to bringing life into the world. And for the first time, I truly understood what my mother must have felt when she lost the gifts of her womb, understood why she looked for someone to blame. I understood and could finally forgive.
Again Sunmiet squatted, reached beneath her skirt, shook her head. “It is good you stand with me,” she said, sweat beading on her forehead. In the lamplight our bodies made bulky shadows on the wainscoting. The Seth Thomas clock struck three. “Not good to have baby reach this world in the company of only its mother. Needs to know at once it has a family.”
“Here I am thinking I’m the one getting the gift,” I said, “just to be present when you have this baby. Didn’t think I was giving a thing.”
Sunmiet’s smile turned into a grimace of pain and she gritted her teeth, grabbed at my hand, leaned against the table, and cried out. Squatting, she reached again beneath herself, the flounce of the gown draped across her arm. A slurpy sound, then a wad of mucous struck the floor. More liquid. A pungent scent. She squatted lower, her knuckles white in my hand, panting, panting, reaching for the table edge to grip now with the other.
“Do you want to lie down?” I asked, knowing it was close, feeling helpless, wanting to do something, anything, to make it easier.
She shook her head. “Here,” she said, and released a long, low moan that rose and fell into a pant. “Be ready,” she directed. “To catch it.”
Catch it! Good heavens! My heart pounded. I felt my own sweat beneath my arms. This was such a moment! “I’m ready,” I said, breathless, and was about to ask her if she was when someone pounded loudly on the front door.
Sunmiet’s eyes grew large. “Don’t worry,” Joseph said rushing past in his undershirt and jeans. He barely glanced in our direction. I heard the blacksmith’s voice, heard Joseph shout, heard him stomp his feet into his boots, angrily yell he’d be back and slam the door.
I had to concentrate, not wonder, reassure her with my eyes. Sunmiet moaned again, reached, started panting. My heart beat faster, my fingers ached against her strong grip. Her breath came in short gasps between her gritted teeth. She panted, the pain rising, rising and reaching into pain and then a push and strain before she wailed, “Take it!” I shook loose my hand. She took one deep breath, laid back. “Next push will be the baby!”
And so it was.
With tears I didn’t know were hiding there behind my eyes, I reached to catch Sunmiet’s child. Into my hands slipped a fine, wet, dark-haired girl with plump and perfect skin of bronze beneath a sheath of water. Somehow my trembling fingers hung on to the warm and fussing form.
“What is it?” Sunmiet asked, her voice weak but excited. “Is it all right?”
“A girl,” I said, laughing and crying at the same time. “And she’s perfect.” I raised and lowered her lightly. “Weight like a silver salmon. Itsa-right,” I crooned to baby and mother, “Itsa-right, now.” A prayer of thanks rose from my heart, another asked for blessings on this child’s life.
Sunmiet sighed, eased back onto the floor-bed. I dabbed gently over the baby’s eyes with a piece of soft cotton, laughing, smiling at her and squeezed the mucous from her nose and ran my finger gently inside her mouth. I heard her take in breath. She did not really cry, just sucked at life as I handed her to Sunmiet. “So warm,” Sunmiet said, stroking her, eyeing her in wonder as though she’d never seen an infant before.
“Cut the cord,” she said. I looked surprised, but of course, someone had to do it. “It is the father’s right he gave up, as he is not here, so it is your privilege.” I remembered that my father had been absent at Baby Pauline’s arrival. Lodenma must have cut the cord.
My fingers shook. I found my sewing scissors and some flax thread. I tied two places on the cord and clamped them tightly, then cut between them. Blood spurted. It was done. “I will save the cord, and the twist at her belly when it drops off,” Sunmiet told me. “And put it with her things. Tie it in a buckskin bag and hang it on her cradleboard when Kása brings the one she made. She will always have something of her time when she and I lived as one, and something of you, for being here at her beginning.”
“I’ll get a blanket.” I remembered that my father had laid out swaddling for the first birth in my memory. His thoughts must have been there with his newborn even if his body wasn’t. “Then we’ll get you washed up too.”
By the time I returned with a swaddling blanket, the infant had coughed and fussed until she settled skin to skin, against her mother. In a peaceful presence, Sunmiet held her daughter to her breast, aided her to nurse and nuzzle, caressed her tiny fingernails.
I put some water on to boil, kept busy, wore a constant smile as I thought about this birthing business. It surprised me, but I did not feel deprived for never having experienced it myself. Instead, I felt blessed to have received the gift of Sunmiet’s willingness to share this precious moment of her life. My prayer was one of gratefulness, fullness, not of longing, and I recognized it as something that had eased into my life as I was ready, able to let go of distant dreams and pains and accept just what was.
Sunmiet talked softly as the infant nursed. She winced again. “Must push,” she said and for an instant I thought she might have another! She acted as if she had a small contraction, pushed. “Save it,” she said of the red moon tissue I held in my hands. “We will bury it tomorrow. In the choke cherry ravine where first we talked of Standing Tall.”
Joseph stomped back in, breaking into the pleasant mood. He slammed his rifle down, then calmed when he saw the infant. “Well,” he said in wonder. “From the dregs of a miserable night comes something soft and warm. Congratulations, Sunmiet.”
“And her father?” Sunmiet asked, eyes wary.
Joseph sighed. “Rattled Teddy with his surly talk. Should have put John to watching him, too. That’s why Teddy came to get me. Time we got back,” he nodded toward the baby, “her father was gone. I’ll wait by the bridge for him. Has to cross to get a horse. We’ll get him, don’t you worry.”
“Unless he goes the other way,” Sunmiet said, resigned. “Farther away from the Big River and the reservation.” She sighed. “It is already the direction he is going.”
Joseph set himself up beside the bridge for the rest of the night, but no one crossed. To my knowledge, Standing Tall has yet to cross it though it’s been fourteen years since.
In the morning, Joseph stretched and walked back in to share the day with the infant and Sunmiet’s other five who now hovered over the baby, begging to hold it, marveling at its perfect, tiny features. The infant yawned.
“Quite a night,” Joseph said.
It was an understatement made even more so when Alice and Dr. Crickett arrived back with Ella and Monroe.
“Bet we can top your evenings,” I said to Ella and Alice, leading them to view the baby in
Sunmiet’s arms, resting now in one of the bedrooms. Monroe and Crickett lounged in the saloon. I could hear Spirit howling.
“She’s a wonder,” Alice said, “What’s her name?”
“Inanuks,” Sunmiet said. “It is a Wasco word to honor her father’s people. It means ‘otter.’ She came slippery into this world.”
“Such big eyes,” Alice said.
“I will think of her,” Sunmiet said, smiling at me, “as a young Huckleberry Eyes.”
“She is beautiful,” Ella said. “But we’ve a startle of our own. Show her, Alice.”
I looked at Alice M, her face ablush, her eyes sparkling with anticipation as she pulled a piece of paper from her wrist purse.
“What is it?” I asked, opened the envelope to read it, then turned to her, astonished. “It’s a marriage license!” I said.
“I know!” Alice said, twittering. “Dr. Crickett—Spike—promised he’d take good care of me. And now, he says, we’ll be wed within the week.”
“I think not!” I exploded. “You barely know him!” I was angry with myself for not seeing this coming. “He has no right to come in here and fill your head. Ella! How could you have gone along with this—this ridiculous thing!”
“She’s of age, Mother Sherar. And we have no right, really. I mean, I’m not her sister, nor you her … her mother, really.” I knew she hesitated with the word, wanting to walk both sides, comfort each of us yet face the situation.
“Yes. Well,” I said, only later realizing why that sounded so familiar. “I’ll be having words with Mr. Sherar and then with Dr. Crickett. You, my dear Alice, will stay right here.” I lifted my long skirts to move the faster into the men’s saloon, annoyed to discover both Ella and Alice right on my heels.
The cat howled in the cage and I dealt with it as the distraction I needed. “Please, retire the cat now or give it water or do something to stop its howling.”
“It’s quite happy, don’t you know,” Crickett said brightly. “That’s why she sings.”
“I’d prefer a miserable cat then, if I’d get silence,” I said, spiteful.