Doubters and Dreamers

Feather River Sonnets

8 Feather River Sonnets 1 They lease a cabin where the river bends. The canyon’s wider here but steep just north where summer clouds have billowed in. He tends a big garden on the flood plain, and Fourth of July we visit them, Mom’s sister Lil and her husband Ivan, a three-pack smoker, curmudgeon, a sour trickster with a stubby thumb from his lumberjack days. Lil sews, cooks, presses flowers, crochets afghans, knits socks, cans fruit, and cleans. She carps about the stifling summer heat and says she lives too far away. “But if I harp, he’ll take me to Smorgy’s,” she winks and nods. He soon comes in with carrots from their yard. 2 Sometimes a rattler slips into the grass and creeps along with raised head and flicking tongue. “Ivan, grab the dog and make it fast!” Lil shouts. Our heavy uncle runs, ticking 9 off the yards in seconds to scoop the pup, a Chihuahua named Itty-Bit, who snaps and growls because my uncle will not let up teasing him. (But he adores that dog, wraps him in the crook of his arm, carries him everywhere.) Ivan seizes a hoe to behead the snake, and if we tarry outside a moment, he will curse and throw a rock to herd us away. Ruffian of sorts, his words are gruff, his old face grim. 3 At the cabin relative peace prevails. We hardly fight. No one yells, storms, or cries or feels called upon to stretch the truth, lie, or dissemble. Grades? Who cares? No one fails, at least not much. We can dress like boys, no one disapproves. This willful ignorance is nice. We hike, fish, swim, run. Kick the Can’s our favorite game. We watch the river flow, pick gold poppies on the road, listen to the wind that blows each afternoon. Our mom seems merry away from home and Dad, from worries about money, about him, who 10 does what dads do without family near— funny things, perverse, all a little queer. 4 Our mom and aunt were born just down the road when muleback was the customary mode of transport. Goods came by train, and a stagecoach ran from Innskip through red dust and sage and dry manzanita. Things smelled of sweat, leather, wool, coal, and smoke. People would get letters written in ink by pens with brass nibs. “Dearest Mother, just a line to ask how you are doing, how are Cindy, Jacques, Leander? Has Dad struck gold, did the flock of ducks survive? Did your old cow give up the ghost?” Fifty years later we feel ruptured from this past—almost. Our mom and aunt, in tandem, laugh, “Bring back those times? You can’t.” 5 “Of course, the river’s dammed up now,” says Mom, “and Jim Lee’s pergola is gone. He tapped the soda springs for tourists and mapped a place for picnic lunches near our home. 11 Folks came by train and walked along the trail— there was no highway then. Jim kept a stone beneath his arm. The boys said, ‘If he throws that rock at your feet, you will die, frail and consumptive.’ We knew he had power, practiced Indian cures. Strange things went on. The spirit world was present. Now they’re gone. Remember the ceremony, the flowers we picked when Mama died?” she asks Aunt Lil. “Singing to that wild river?” Neither smile. 6 “The kids would never tell me what went on in Indian school. I know that it burned down is all. They came home scarred, hair full of lice. Dad cut it short, and they used turpentine to kill the bugs. It stung their scalps. They cried, the girls did. ‘If you get that in your eyes, you’ll go blind,’ they said.” Mom waits a spell, then resumes. “They built another grade school in Belden. The kids went there. They learned to read, write, do math. They never felt spurned by their classmates, and they liked their teacher. I was young, but I’d have walked ten acres 12 to go to school, as little as I was,” she cries, fiery determination in her eyes. 7 We hike up Yellow Creek to Grandpa’s claim, an old abandoned mine, cabin with worn planks, dynamite beneath the iron frame of...