All Together in One Place (24 page)

The color of his dark character had been unveiled that long-ago day.

“Got yourself a private place, hey, Tip,” Charles had said, greeting her as she crawled inside a branch-and-leaf house she'd made in a dimple of Wisconsin forest floor. Tipton was six years old, and she had brought only one friend there, ever; Corinda, and no one else.

Now here lounged Charles, his lanky sixteen-year-old body smelling of tobacco and his boots muddying up her private place. Tipton shivered, remembering.
Think on good things
But pleasant thoughts flitted like butterflies; awfuls and terribles rode in on fast horses.

Charles had followed her once, discovered what she'd tried so hard
to hide. Her books and drawing pens Papa brought back from Chicago lay scattered like sticks. She couldn't see her doll. “What have you done with it?”

“Your precious gift from Mama and Papa? You can wheedle another from Pop. He'll give you anything.”

His eyes had a glassy look, and he smelled of spirits. Her stomach lurched as he sat up, a ferret, quick and sure. He grabbed her hair, pulling her in, laughing.

“I want Mama! Let me go!”

“What's the matter, Tip? Afraid to fight for what you want?”

Her heart pounded; she smelled his sweat, her own. He pushed her back, throwing her hard, her head striking the ground. She smelled a burst of pine; a flash of pain like lightning shot behind her eyes. He forced his knee onto her chest, leaned over her so that she couldn't breathe. She gasped, her arm lay crooked, pinned behind her. She tried to tell him to stop, but he laughed.

Thinking, thinking, just surviving, she signaled to him to come closer, as though to speak.

“Got something to say?” he grinned. “Can't talk?” He bent his ear to her.

His first mistake.

She bit, hard and firm, the outer flesh like fish bones mixed with salty sea. He jerked back, his second mistake.

Her teeth held tight. She felt it rip, the petaled flesh of his ear threatening to choke her; that and the warmth of his blood.

He screamed and grabbed for his ear, surprise for the first time registering in his eyes. Blood spurted between his fingers. Gasping, she scampered backwards, her palms wet on the pine needles sticky with blood, throwing herself out through the side of her makeshift fort, gasping for air, rubbing her arm, her heart pounding, still clutching at breath. She spit out the knuckled flesh in her mouth. Sobbing and running and stumbling, branches caught at her face, her dress and her hair.

“I'll get you for this,” he screamed.

She turned back, sickened by two things: his blood-streaked face; and her once friend, Corinda, now clutching the doll Tipton loved.

“Youre gripping the reins too tight,” Adora said. “Tipton?” She shook her. Tipton slowed her breathing. She was safe here.

Charles had told his father he'd caught his ear on a nail in the storeroom while standing to stock the top shelf.

“Good lesson for you to learn, then. Pound those nails in firm,” her father said.

“A lesson learned,” Charles said, tossing coins in his palm, glaring at his sister.

“Betrayal is not the only ending to one's tendering of trust,” Tyrell reminded her when she'd confided in him. “Your friend betrayed you. Charles betrayed you too, that once. But don't be seeking treachery everywhere with everyone or you'll likely find it.”

Betha must be trying to cool herself in the shade
, Ruth thought, watching her sister-in-law walk beside the wagon. Betha's face blotched red, as dazed as if she'd been struck with a post. Perhaps she had been, a woman who lived her life as dependent on Jed as any grown woman could be on a man. “A marvel of a man,” Betha repeated, “providing home and furnishings, even picking out the family linen. Jed handled all the details, Ruthie.”

In return, Betha tended him, cooked and cleaned, gave him children, and covered for his lapses into drink by taking in laundry for small coinage, a fact she concealed from him so as “not to hurt his pride,” she told Ruth, “when he comes to his senses, dear, which he always does.”

It was odd the things coupling forced a person to do. And now here Betha was, on a journey she would never have chosen for herself, the anchor of her life no longer stabilizing her in unfamiliar waters
“What'll I do now, Ruthie?” she asked later. “What would Jed want me to do?”

“Keep going. That's what he'd want.”

“Think so? It was you I think Jed went west for.”

Ruth swallowed. “Was it?”

They walked beside the wagon without talking for a time, Ruth checking back to see that her oxen plodded close behind. They lumbered past marked graves and even an abandoned wagon. Birds flitted in and out of the torn, silent canvas as through a dead man's opened mouth. A meadowlark warbled, landed on the broken wheel.

“What a story it could tell,” Betha said out loud.

“What?” Ruth asked.

Betha nodded her head to the still wagon. A torn section of canvas swung in the breeze Nothing inside marked it as unique. “Just wondering what happened there, to make them leave their things behind. Like us, you suppose?” Her eyes pooled with tears.

“Dropping excess,” Ruth said.

“Perhaps it marks a grave,” Betha said. She wiped at her eyes. “I wish we'd marked Jed's. I should have stayed there, to bring him flowers Oh, will these tears ever stop?” She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “I think I'll lie down I just can't think right.”

“It won't be very comfortable in the wagon,” Ruth said. “The road seems rougher here.”

“Doesn't it,” Betha said and sighed.

They stopped only briefly at noon. On their way again, Joe Pepin came back to say that a stream ahead dribbling into the Platte looked fresh and clear and that there were a few stands of good grass. He mentioned that a horse had died and lay rotting beside the trail with yellow jackets all over it.

Other wagons were moving on past them, people staring ahead. A rider approached from the west. He folded his hands across the saddle pommel on his mule, talked with Antone, looked back at the new widows, shook his head, and continued east.

The setting sun hurt their eyes with its brilliance. Elizabeth sat grateful at dusk after they'd circled the wagons, rubbing her bare feet, pulling stickers from the pads.

“Me and the dog,” she said as Pig sat nibbling at his own paw.

Mazy urged Jeremy to join them as they ambled back toward Ruth and Betha, handing each a chunk of her Dutch oven bread.

Betha declined the food.

“You've got to keep your strength up,” Mazy said. “For the children if no one else.”

“For the children, then,” Betha sighed, and nibbled at the brown crust with her tiny, even front teeth.

“You have so many good memories,” Mazy said.

“I do.” Betha's eyes watered.

“I don't even know Sister Esther's brother's name. And I hear her other brother's not feeling well now either.” Mazy put her biscuit down, aware that she wasn't hungry herself. She rubbed at her temple.

“Harold,” Betha said. “I believe his name was Harold. He and Jed shared a love of a certain tobacco.” She leaned to whisper, “So does her brother Ferrel, but none are supposed to talk of it.”

“I'm surprised that Sister Esther had a brother who smoked,” Jeremy said.

“He imbibed a bit, too,” Betha said, turning to see where the children sat. “I believe it's why he and Jed formed a friendship.”

“We shoulda waited for Papa,” Jessie said approaching the dog. “He won't like it we left him back there in the road.”

“He ain't getting up, dummy,” Ned told her. He threw a rock and it pinged against a pot.

“Is too!”

“No, he ain't. He's dead.”

Jessie started to cry. “Ned, please,” Ruth said. “She's young. She doesn't understand.”

“You always take her side,” Ned said. “Don't she, Mama? Ain't that what you told Papa?”

“I'm thirsty,” Jason said. “I'm getting me a drink from the Platte, Mama, like Papa used to.”

“Without my boiling it? Shame on you.” To Mazy, Betha said, “I know it doesn't really matter if we drink the bugs, but the thought of live things squiggling in my throat…” She shivered.

Mazy nodded. “I hate that tepid water. Tastes funny.”

“Not the temperature that matters,” Jeremy told her. “Sinkholes we dig beside the Platte are as good as any to drink from.”

“I'm with Betha,” Elizabeth said. “If we can avoid the swimming tails sliding through the teeth by boiling ‘em, all the better.”

“Already drank from the stream,” Jeremy told her. “Laid on my belly quite a while back. So did lots of others. Stream's clear as air. Don't think it's anything to worry over.”

“Are you feeling well?” she asked. “Your pants look baggy.”

“All this walking is firming me up,” he told her.

“There must have been some disease brought with us,” Sister Esther said.

It was night. The moon had risen, just a swipe of silver in an ink sky. She'd come out to Mazy's campfire, carrying her desk, setting it down, just as Mazy wrote the word
keeper
and the accompanying thoughts in her book.
One who tends to things, like a beekeeper. God minds and ministers as a keeper. He has made the bee able to find a home in the most distant, ravaged phces. He cares for the smallest of the universe and thus I thank thee, for finding me worthy of your keeping. Forgive me when I fail to keep the least within your world.

“I'm sorry,” Mazy said closing the book latch. “What did you say?”

“Someone carried it, delivered it here. The sickness.” The Sister paced, a behavior that looked foreign to her usual rigid, wagon-tongue demeanor. Her words took flight too, so the sizzle of her
S s
cracked the air like heat lightning. Mazy watched her striding back and forth between the wagon and the fire, thought to interrupt, but lacked sure-ness.

“That child Jessie, she got ill first. Perhaps it is them, those people from St. Louis,” Sister Esther said as she rubbed the cross at her neck.

“The child recovered.”

“But her father died.” Esther paced but kept her fingers clenched together before her apron. “We did not have illness until we began encountering those from the south Platte who crossed over. Perhaps they bring it.”

“You're grieved, Sister, over your brother's loss.”

“A victim of the baseness of those of poor and filthy rank.”

“We've no way of knowing,” Mazy said. She stood, touched the older woman s arm. “And there's no good in it, to blame and find fault.” She reached into a basket attached to the side board, pulled up a platter covered with a stained double bag. “Come sit beside me,” Mazy said, patting the ground. “Eat a bite of chicken. Focus on your brother who still lives, your charges who need you.”

Sister Esther stared at her. “He sits silent as sage,” she said, “my brother does.”

“He misses him. Your Celestials may well too.”

“The Celestials.” Sister Esther spoke the name with numbness, and Mazy realized that her eyes showed no tears, weren't puffed the way Betha's or Suzanne's were. She was probably still shocked, still stunned more than angry. “Blame must be placed,” Esther said. “Disease is God's way of correction.”