All Together in One Place (29 page)

Sister Esther spoke the words, about dust to dust and ashes to ashes.

They heard the clatter of a wagon, and the group turned to see Dr Masters rolling out, his shoats squealing after. That left the women and a few sons to lay their men to rest.

“He's leaving?” Adora wailed, leaning against Charles, who stiffened at his mother's touch. “Now?”

“Didn't do anything for us,” Ruth said “Good to see him go.”

Following the prayers, Mazy pounded the simple cross between the rocks she'd carried to cover the grave. She thought of what she'd come through, where she'd been, and what the future held. Then she made up her mind.

Lura Schmidtke hadn't spoken since they'd prayed over Antone's grave. For more than twenty years, she had not moved until her husband told her, had not fixed a breakfast without him saying first that he preferred buckwheat pancakes that morning rather than a mess of eggs. She was what, forty-five years old, forty-six? Yet she felt older than her grandmother who had died the day she turned seventy-nine.

For twenty years, Lura had seen the world before her always filtered through the shadow Antone cast. Yet here she sat She knew she should move. The rest of the women had.

“Mama?” Mariah said. The child's voice still sounded weak. “Its time to go now.”

Lura sighed. She let herself be lifted by the shoulders, her short cape sliding upward along thin arms. Her legs ached from the sitting. Mariah picked up the high-back chair and scooped it to her elbow while, with her other arm, she helped her mother balance as their toes scuffed up loose dirt.

“Where's Matt?” Lura asked, looking around. Her voice sounded flat like a piano key out of tune.

“He's back checking cattle. Likely Joe Pepin needs a little help. He'll be back to drive Pa's wagon. I can do the other. Joe'U have to take the stock alone. Don't see how he'll handle that many,” Mariah said.

“Is that what Matt thinks best?”

“Just what needs doing.”

“You're a good girl,” Lura said and patted her daughter's hand. “But I'm so tired now. Just so tired.”

“Pa said walking's good for the back.”

“Yes. He knew everything important,” Lura said.

“Sometimes I worry that I gave it to Pa,” Mariah said, no longer sounding like a competent young woman looking after her mother but as the thirteen-year-old she really was. “I drank from the river, on my belly, just like Pa. I heard someone say that's where the sickness came from. I had it.”

“I think I'd do best if we just rested a day or so right here. We need to know what Matt thinks we should do.” Then she remembered something. “It was likely those Asians,” Lura said, her voice lowered, “not you. Likely them what caused it.”

From her position beside the oxen, Mazy watched her mother feed the antelope, a last task, she said, before they started out. The little black nose jabbed for milk, pushed against the rubber bottle her mother had
fashioned from the rain gear sleeve. Fip, they'd named it, for its small size. Even Pig joined the act, barking his
gruff gruff sonna
, his tail wagging the whole time. A simple, everyday thing that seemed out of place.

Everything felt uprooted: the antelope, a child laughing, Suzanne standing beside her with lips pursed as tight as machine-stitched seams even while her son giggled. What good were psalms that said God guided everywhere if Mazy couldn't feel him? What good did it do to write praises in her book when beside it she wrote of graves passed and lives changed forever? She had followed Gods plan, and he had promised to take her to pleasant places. She looked around. There was nothing pleasant here.

She was a needle on a compass, just bobbing forward and back, seeking direction. She scanned the low hills, the grasses, the Platte wide and shallow as it headed east toward where they'd come from, through what was familiar. That was it, then, to find direction. Her mother was certainly clear about the importance of such a thing. Jeremy had changed his whole life and then lost it because of his passion for a single thing. Well, she could be determined too. Some would call it obstinate, stubborn, headstrong. Whatever the term, it had served her well once or twice in her life, and Mazy decided it could cut through the haze of her confusion now.

She strode to the back of the wagon, her dress flapping between her legs with the speed and length of her stride. First, she would get their attention. Then she would advocate for a bearing, her bearing. She reached for a heavy kettle tied on the wagons back and, with an iron spoon, began clanging her way through her losses.

11
sustenance

Mazy s clanging on the kettle startled Suzanne, intersecting her sorrow with vibration and sound. Most of the teams, already hitched, shifted with the unexpected noise, their heavy oxen hooves moving from side to side, tails flicking at flies. Wheels groaned forward and Suzanne heard only women's voices talking to animals as they stood by their sides, urging them to stillness The pain of the sounds both pierced and angered.

“Stop that!” Suzanne called from beside her wagon. “You'll cause a stampede.” Both hands cupped over her ears.

“Whoa, whoa,” Naomi said, speaking with words that sounded like chirps. “What are names, Missy Suzie?”

“It's Suzanne. Suzanne, not Suzie.” The clanging stopped.

“You name the oxen as yourself?”

“No. I am Suzanne. No Suzie or Missy Sue.’ Can you remember that?” She sighed. “Bryce named the oxen Breeze and Blow—the lead team. It doesn't matter.”

“That Missy Mazy. Okay I call her Mazy?”

“What's wrong?” Betha asked.

“I'm sorry,” Mazy said. “But I want us to gather. For just a moment.”

“A prayer for our journey would be welcomed.” Sister Esther nodded sagely.

“Can't a meeting wait until evening?” Ruth said. “Better we get
rolling. Need to take advantage of this weather and good grass while we can. Chimney Rock.” She nodded to a site across the river. “There marks the beginning of rougher terrain.”

Mazy lowered her voice. “Unless we meet now, I won't be at an evening gathering.”

“What'd she say?” Lura asked Mariah.

“You're not thinking of leaving us?”

“I am thinking, Ruth.” Mazy turned to her. “I'm thinking of what's essential. I have determined something. Some of you might want to determine it too.”

“This really ain't a good time, child,” Elizabeth said. “Not for you or any of us. Not good to be making some rash kind of decision. We just need to keep going.”

“Things have changed, Mother. What kind of reasonable people would we be if we didn't take into account a change in circumstance, look at new information before moving on. If the cows stampeded, we'd stop to collect them after they scattered, we wouldn't just pretend it hadn't happened and try to keep on going.”

“There's been no stampede,” Suzanne said. “I know that much.”

“In a way there has,” Mazy said. “We've all been trampled. But we could be in worse shape.”

“Now what could you be imagining, Mrs. Bacon?” It was Charles Wilson asking.

He'd ridden up on the far side while they'd been yoking. He sat there now, a used ember hanging on, challenging wind, threatening to burst into flame. He wore Tyrell's spurs. Mazy looked to the women instead.

“What's happening, Mama?” Tipton asked. She stuck her head outside of the wagon, her eyes dreamy as though she still slept.

“Mazy wants to discuss something. I don't know. I think we should get moving.”

Tipton sighed. “It's fine with me.”

Mazy thought the girl looked more hollow, wizened than when they'd headed west. Adora, too, had aged since the day she'd appeared in Kanesville full of the delight of catching up with her daughter. They were all changed.

“My head's in a swirl,” Adora said. Her fingers rubbed little circles against her temples

“I'm sure Tipton can settle you, Mother,” Charles said. He spit.

“I say we move on,” Ruth Martin offered. “Seems to me—”

“I agree. You was just trying to buy time, right, child?”

“We have a long distance to make and have not yet encountered the mountains,” Esther said. “But the Lord will see us through.”

“What do you think, Matt?” Lura Schmidtke turned to ask her son who had just ridden up.

“I have a proposal,” Mazy said. She set the kettle down and stepped up into the box of her wagon to give herself additional height. She wanted to see everyone, evaluate their faces and their posture in addition to their words.

She drew deep for the will to make something happen, to be determined. There was a power in that word
determined
, even a conviction. It overcame the heavy sighs of resignation that formed a carapace of sadness over these people and this place.

“We are now an unlikely group of overlanders,” Mazy began. “Some of us did not want to leave our homes at all. None of us chose this time when disease or accident—chance—permitted some of us to live and some to die. Who knows who'll be ill this evening—or dead by morning? I can't see a way to change that. But there are some things we can control.”

“What's your point?” Suzanne said. She'd lowered Clayton to the ground but kept the rope tied to his middle and to hers. He tugged against her, and she jerked forward slightly as she talked. “Naomi, can you see him? Is he too close to the ox?”

“He fine, Missy Sue—Suzanne I watch him good.”

“This many wagons without a teamster,” Mazy said, “if we have a breakage or if we lose an ox, or you there, Adora, if you should lose a mule, will be disastrous. The single men, Matt and Joe Pepin and Charles, you'll be needed with the stock.” She glanced at Charles when he shot a blast of air through his nose.

“We'll be at Fort Laramie soon,” Sister Esther said.

“And what will that gain us?” Mazy asked.

“The Lord will provide for us there, in ways we have not yet imagined.”

“I'm not prepared to stake my future on that,” Mazy said. “Not anymore. Who're we going to find to help us drive our wagons or stock? The people there, trappers, traders, soldiers? None of them are likely to want to sign on with women.”

“We could join up with some of the groups across the Platte,” Betha said. Her voice was tentative with its little-girl breathy sound “Couldn't we, Ruthie? I see across there. Lots of dust so must be lots of wagons.”

Adora said, “I just want to rest.”

“No matter if we tried to join up with folks even on this side or at Laramie. They'll take one look at us and know that our eleven wagons joining in will put their own at risk.”

“What I'd like is to go back to Jed's grave. I should have marked it like you did Jeremy's, Mazy. And Antone and Hathaway. Theirs are marked,” Betha said.

“Am I allowed to talk?” It was Mariah. Mazy nodded. “Could we just split up? Trail along with one or two groups that might take us in?”

“That presents the same problem, as I see it. Who will want to be saddled with us?” Mazy said. “Wagons without teamsters.”

“You're acting like we're…lepers or something,” Ruth said, her words sharp.

“Join up,” Suzanne said. “We're all cripples, with no guide, no leader”

“I am no kind of cripple,” Ruth said. “We're capable, all of us, just been given a hot pan to hold with the deaths. It'll cool. We just need to head west. Quit jawing about it.”

“People get blinded in all kinds of ways,” Suzanne told her.

“Death confuses,” Ruth responded. “We should go forward, stay our course. I've driven this far alone. If I can, the rest of you women can.”

“But this is the easiest part,” Lura said. “I know I shouldn't be speaking; I didn't ask permission. But I remember Antone said that. He said, ‘Mama, once we pass Laramie, the hills get higher and the moun-tains're bad. We got to stick together, yah, that's the answer. Need all hands then and a good captain

“So that's a yes?” Ruth snapped.

“Well, yes, I think its a yes to stay together,” Lura said. “Or maybe a no, to going on.”

“I do believe Lura has made good points about the rigors of continuing,” Esther said. “But what are you actually suggesting, Mazy?”

Mazy took a deep breath. “I'm determined to go home.”