All Together in One Place (58 page)

Adora would never have made it alone, Mazy thought. She needed help more than most, always hanging tighter to what was. Still, on this big mountain crossing, she'd seen most of these women shift to accommodate each other, put memory and useless baggage aside in order to make room for the new. Even Sister Esther seemed to soften her certainty.
Perhaps that wasn't fair. They needed the Sisters assurance of Gods presence when it wasn't obvious he was there.

By the campfire light, Adora and Tipton moved what things they thought essential into Betha and Naomis wagon while Lura joined Mazy and her mother, Suzanne and Zilah, too.

“I thought you might like these,” Tipton ventured, handing a small package to Lura.

“What?” The woman loosened the string. Her face became a question as she held up two silver combs. “These aren't mine,” she said.

Tipton shrugged. “They don't stay in my hair much. And I thought you could…in return for your cooking, you know…” Her eyes dropped. “I know they're not what you lost. Couldn't find what you lost, nor what Mama lost, either.”

“My, oh my,” Lura said and wrapped Tipton in her arms, still clutching the girl's hair combs And Tipton let her.

“I kind of like lying close to Mavis,” Mariah said. “She chews her cud and those sounds and the coyotes howling just drop me to sleep. Ruth likes my company back there with her too. I'll see you in the morning, Ma.”

“At least you have plenty of room to sprawl out,” Adora told her. She had that indignant tone in her voice, and Mazy wasn't looking forward to the evening's sleeping arrangements.

How odd, Mazy thought as she walked to milk the cows, that Adora should be in the company of her and Suzanne and thus with Zilah, the woman she once charged with theft.

“Distance breeds distrust,” Ruth told her when Mazy expressed the thought out loud as the two finished the milking by lantern light.

“But isn't it amazing how it worked out, with the very people needing—whatever it is they need—forced together. Just funny how that
happened. Like it was meant to be. Love and loss and betrayal, all a part of life, but we're given gifts to get us through.”

“Through to what, I wonder.”

“Maybe understanding,” Mazy offered.

“I'd like a safer place,” Ruth said.

“Kinship. Kindness. Security. Strength. Guess they go together,” Mazy said, the words coming to her like the scents of favorite flowers.

“Adora,” Lura said, “If one of those Californians comes by, you can sell what mules you have now and make good money.” It was the evening after the mountaintop experience, and Tipton's combs sat on Lura's head like jewels in a rat's nest, packed inside the snarls of her unwashed hair.

“Mules are all I've got,” Adora protested. “Grieving everything but what I can stuff in a corner of someone's else's wagon. That's what it's come to.”

“And me,” Tipton said. “You still have me. If you're interested.”

Adora looked startled. “Why wouldn't I be interested?” she said.

Tipton shrugged her shoulders.

Adora poked at the fire for a time. The women swatted at mosquitoes. Deborah brought out some muslin to drape over Suzanne and Sason, and the women made the sounds of getting ready for rest. Mazy had almost forgotten what Tipton had said by the time Adora spoke again.

“I have a truth and a lie,” Adora said.

“Oh, good,” Betha said. She threw the dirty sock for Pig, who chased it and trotted back to the fire with it. “I like this game.” The others assumed the position to listen.

“I came all this way from Wisconsin, went through all this trouble to get here because I was interested in my Tipton. That's one.” She
threw pebbles toward the fire, their plink causing a flicker in the flames. Pigs ears alerted. “Now two. I followed my daughter here because I didn't want to go unnoticed.” No one spoke. “Now you're to guess, isn't that right?”

“And one of those is a lie?” Elizabeth asked.

Adora thought. “No. I have to change one. Wait. I
didnt
come here to follow Tipton, that should have been the first one. Oh, I can't do this right.”

“Then the lie is that one,” Mazy said. “You came here because of your daughter and because you didn't want to go unnoticed.”

“Yes,” Adora whispered. “If truth be known. I would have been, back there in Cassville. You were always the honey that brought the bees by, Tipton, gave me things to talk about.” She reached across the log they sat on and patted her daughter's hand. “Truth be known, I came here for me as much as anyone. But I'm glad to have found someone more important to be with than myself. If that makes sense to you.” Tipton held her mother's hand. “And I'm worried over you, how thin you are. Scared, I am, to lose you.”

“I'm next,” Tipton said. She swallowed, but her voice held firm. “I have laudanum hidden, I'm afraid to eat more, and I make my arm go numb.”

“Huh?” Jason said, looking at his hand. “That's three.”

“I've seen those fingers of yours,” Lura said. “I don't think you could cause that. But there's no laudanum around. I'm sure of that. And I've seen beans terrorize you.”

“It's the hand,” Ruth said. “You can make it go all contorted like that.” Tipton nodded, her face turning pink. “Amazing what our minds make us do, isn't it, Tip?”

“Any more guesses?” Suzanne asked, not being able to see Tipton's nod.

“Elizabeth told me that someday I'd know why my hand numbs,” Tipton told them. “Why my arm ached and hurt. She made me mad
when she said that. But its true. When I breathe real fast it happens. I could make it happen right now”

“No, don't,” came a chorus of protests.

“I breathe that way so I don't have to think about how scared I am of something else Of being alone, I guess. Of Tyrell going away, of eating too much, of everything being in a swirl.”

“I believe if you hold your breath, it'll stop that,” Elizabeth said. “The tingling part in your hand and your nose.”

“Tyrell said to let out long breaths And I want to, now. To stay…here, to find some other way, so my hand doesn't do that. As for the eating—”

“We'll do it,” Adora said, holding her daughter's thin hand. “A little bit at a time. We'll sit together and just be Without our full span of mules, no wagon of our own, we still got something to hang on to we didn't know we had.”

“I believe this is cause for celebration,” Elizabeth said. She walked to the back of Betha's wagon and reached inside. She carried the troubadour's harp to Suzanne. “Play us a joyful song,” she said, “if you feel up to it.”

Suzanne's hands knew the instrument. She strummed an Irish melody, quick and light.

Mazy looked at the strings, all separate but playing together, held in tension by the curve of the wood, the lines of a pleasant place.

“I put this on the discarded pile,” Suzanne said quietly when she finished. “A harp is not essential.”

“I brought ‘er back,” Elizabeth said, “because joy is.”

21
where we love

They awoke with renewed vigor, Mazy in the pattern of her past. She found her journal and began writing. She read a Psalm, then thought of a quality of Gods character “Anticipation,” she wrote. Expectation, foreknowledge As though something has been planned ahead, prepared.

What they'd needed on this journey west had been prepared for.

They needed to laugh, and Elizabeth had provided the occasions, even if sometimes Mazy felt older than her mother She looked forward to how joy would appear. She anticipated something pleasant.

She wrote it down, surprised at what words and quiet brought to question.

Betha swept the ground around the campfire. She nodded at Mazy. “Good to see you writing in the morning again.”

Had everyone noticed?

Mazy finished, then headed toward the cows. Ruths independence, her handling the stock so skillfully with never a complaint—they needed that commitment, to see it every day, this woman doing what she knew best while she struggled inside.

Mazy bent her head to Jennifers udder. It felt different. One last milking, then no more til she delivered a calf More changes. Mazy thought of her traveling companions, how they had changed, as her hands stripped milk into the bucket
Lura had offered to alter the silk dress that Zilah wore, after Mazy expressed concern that the loose cloth would catch on one of the oxen's horns when she leaned over them to adjust the yoke. Suzanne described a way to take the tucks in that gave the girl a look of curves when everyone knew she leaned slender as a bean. Their joint efforts cheered her, and the other Celestials came forward asking for ways to salvage their hems shredded by walking through stickers and sage.

Even Tipton—having given up her parasol to the discard, her combs to Lura, and absent the laudanum—displayed new spirit, biting back at the now gentle jibes her mother gave her about her still needing “Tipton-watching,” only now because she'd stumbled over Fip and nearly squashed the pronghorn.

And they needed her, Mazy decided as she swung the bucket at her side. Yes, they did. They needed her own good mind, her ability to bring independent spirits together into one place. She could make decisions. She smiled at that. She did that “deciding thing” well for other people. She just had trouble making compassionate choices for herself.

But she'd changed, too, unveiled herself—as had they all—like petals of flowers unfolding to light Maybe in her life with Jeremy that unveiling had not existed. He had never unfolded himself to her. The letter just confirmed it, telling her of things she neither knew nor imagined. Had she wanted him to be elusive? She realized that she, too, had been elusive—in her way. Had it been too painful to know herself and so she'd let him define her boundaries, kept herself so privately engaged at pleasing him—and other people, too—that she had failed to recognize who either of them was?

The guidebook said they would encounter another difficult mountain within the next two days, but instead by midmorning, they were given
the choice of paying a toll for using a road “just completed the end of July,” said a young man who introduced himself as Buck.

“McAuleys cleared it round so you dont have to go over. Get some service berries along the way/’ he said and grinned. They paid the toll happily, shortening the journey through the efforts of others.

Rain fell on them that night while the mules munched on good grass. “We're supposed to have no water now for seventeen miles,” Mazy said. But they were blessed with fast-flowing rivulets throughout the next day and arrived at Soda Springs where they camped near what Jessie called “fuzzy water.”

A Mormon up from Salt Lake stopped at their campsite, loaded with two baskets of fruits and vegetables, and everyone splurged and sank their teeth into onions and even corn.

“Corn,” Mazy said. “Mine would be ready back in Wisconsin.” They boiled it and spread the last of the butter over the plump kernels, marveling at this feast.

“My mama told me once that all the little silk of corn is connected to each little kernel,” Elizabeth said. “God made ‘em so the silk catches the light and brings it inside the husk. And where they're missing kernels—that's where a silk got pulled out to the wind and that little thing didn't grow up, didn't get to play its part.”

Lura pulled her cob back to stare at it. “Could that be true? God attending to detail like that?”

“Think of his planning for us, if he's put so much thought into each kernel of corn,” Esther said, licking her fingers.

“He anticipated,” Mazy said. “Gave each of us a place.”

“Hunger makes a good sauce,” Betha said, butter oozing over her palm. She looked around, then wiped her hand in the grass. “My mother used to say that.”

“Mine always said this little poem,” Lura remembered. A kernel dropped off her chin.
“Ich bin klein Mein Herz ist ganz rein. Wiemand wohnet darin Jesus allein.”

“What's that?” Jessie asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Well, if I remember, it means, ‘I am little. My heart is all pure.’ She patted her heart with her buttered fingers. “ ‘Nobody lives there, except Jesus alone.’”

“Nobody's home except Jesus?” Jessie asked.