All Together in One Place (6 page)

The mule twisted his head to bite at a fly. “Adora doesn't know of Hathaway's plan, does she?” Mazy said

Jeremy settled back into the saddle. “Hathaway 11 have his own price to pay tonight when he tells her what he offered me…us. Once she turns seventeen, he's willing for the marriage, but until then, we'd be asked to be her family, treat her as our own.”

“She's not that much younger than you,” Elizabeth said.

“Might be a friend for you, Maze,” Jeremy said. “Doesn't seem you have many.”

“With good reason when I have to leave them behind, unexpected.” She sighed. “Well, let's talk with Tipton, then, see what she understands.”

Jeremy let out a burst of held air. “Thanks, Maze. Told Hathaway to come on out tomorrow, unless I came back to tell him different. I think this could be good, really good for us. I feel it in my bones.”

“I'm the one whose bones have feeling,” Mazy said lifting her sling. “And good's not the word I'd choose.”

The new people who'd bought the Bacon place arrived early the next day, before either Tyrell or Tipton and her family. Mazy held herself
back from the woman, a Mrs. Malarky. Her mother proved the more invitational, showing the woman the house, the furniture they'd leave, while Jeremy and the new owner rode mules toward the bluffs and the highest boundaries of the Bacon place.

Mazy watched the Malarkys’ two boys, probably three and five, who tumbled out of the wagon like puppies, exploring and chattering after the chickens. Pig had barked at them and their dog, a yellow herding type with a long tail. The dogs marked their territory then sniffed each other and decided both could stay.

“And this is Mazy s garden, what s left of it,” her mother told Mrs. Malarky. The two walked over to where Mazy squatted, pulling aimlessly at weeds. Mrs. Malarky, a short, round woman, looked as though she might have put on weight with the carrying of her children and had simply forgotten to take it back off.

“A fine tilling,” Mrs. Malarky said. “Little mussed up, maybe, but its still early for setting seedlings.”

“The brute,” Mazy said, standing, brushing dirt from her apron. “He did some renovating. I think the beans'll be fine. They didn't get troubled much. But the tomatoes, I doubt they'll make it. I brought them back inside. One or two might recover and could be set out again and staked.”

“Must be hard to leave it—all this.” It is.

They stood silent, eyes massaged by the landscape. “Do you have a seed gourd?” Mrs. Malarky asked. “No sense my keeping my seeds when you already planted yours. I've got some maple tree seed wings, too. You're taking a lilac start, surely?”

“I'd be grateful for the seeds,” Mazy said. “And now you mention it, I think I'll take a bucket of Wisconsin soil with me, too.”

“Now that's essential,” her mother said, and Mazy laughed.

The Wilson girl left no doubt about whose heart she was after, batting
eyes
at her intended. Jeremy'd said she could assist with cooking. Elizabeth smiled to herself. Men. Something about that girl said she might be interested in cooking, all right, but not over an open pit.

A slender gloved hand rested on the muscled forearm of Tyrell Jenkins as the two meandered toward the house now almost empty of all Bacon things and slowly filling up with the Malarkys'. The latter had graciously decided to walk with their children to the pond dotted with ducks when the visitors arrived.

Adora and Hathaway paced behind their daughter, Adora like a boat being dragged across shallow water. Adora didn't smile as she approached, her jaw set. Even Charles had joined them for the family discourse, wearing cream-colored breeches and that halfhearted smile.

“I wont be even a smidgen of a bother,” Tipton offered when they gathered in the large room on the Malarkys’ chairs and the ones Mazy d been forced to leave behind. “Papas told me all the rules, and I'll most certainly abide ” She smiled that clasped-front-teeth smile that looked as though she were delicately biting off a piece of meat without letting it touch her lips, her back bed-slat straight.

“Even if you dont like what you re asked to do,” Hathaway said, “you'll do it.”

“Oh, Papa, haven't I always?”

Adora wiped her nose with a white lace handkerchief. Gray, swollen eyes looked out from a puffy, grief-splotched face.

“We'll take good care of her, Adora,” Mazy said, “though no one can do that so well as a mother.”

“She'll be a help to you, Hath says, what with your arm and all.” Adora squeezed at her nose, her fingertips white. “I'll get by. Truth is, Hath says I'll be fine without my baby.”

“You still have me, Mother,” Charles said from his chosen place near the door.

“Oh yes, I know.”

Mazy patted Adoras clenched hand. “We'll be welcoming your help, Mr. Jenkins,” she said then to Tyrell.

“Worry-free wheels when a smithy travels with you.” Elizabeth grinned. “Could use that as a calling card.”

Tyrell blushed “If I had such a thing.” He fingered his hat brim. Elizabeth guessed him to be in his midtwenties, but he might have been older, gauging by those experience lines flowing out from his kind eyes. He was a well-proportioned young man, with a wash of wisdom about him, something offering compassion and care She watched him perch his hat on his knee and rest his wide hand over Tipton's while the girl twirled the reddish hairs at his wrist.

“You'll write,” Adora told her daughter. She looked at Mazy. “You'll make her. They say they leave mail at the forts and riders coming east will bring them. It would be so helpful, to know what's happening…I just could not bear it if something…and I did not know.”

“You heading through Iowa, then,” Hathaway asked. “South overland? Not taking the river to St Louis?”

“Just flat country straight east across the ferry,” Jeremy told him.

“And you'd know that, how?” Mazy asked.

“Readings I've done Those forty-niners heading back from the fort talk I know what I'm doing, Maze,” Jeremy said.

“Mama worries overmuch,” Tip ton said. “Tell her, Papa, there's nothing to worry over.”

“Maybe not, but caution still needs to be heeded. In all things,” her father said and raised one eyebrow to his daughter.

“So your baby'U wed in Oregon,” Elizabeth said. Adora let out a little mewing sound Hathaway put his arm around his wife and patted her shoulder. It seemed to Elizabeth that the woman stiffened when he did.

“On the day I achieve seventeen. We'll have a daguerreotype made and send you the likeness, Mama. Oh, it is such an adventure. Isn't it, Tyrellie?” She twirled at his wrist hairs again, and the square, sturdy man picked at a scrape on the leather of his boot as he blushed.

Mazy and Jeremy lay on the narrow cornhusk mattress squeezed into the back of the wagon. Tonight was a trial, to see if they had what they needed before starting out in the morning. Mazy gazed at the headboard of her grandmothers old bed, but it didn't hold the bed slats. They had become part of the wagons floor. The space beneath the canvas wagon cover confined her like a corset, stuffed as it was with shelving and barrels and trunks. And yet she felt emptied by the inevitable.

Outside, crickets clacked and Mazy wondered if there would be crickets where they were going. Or clamshells for her buttons? Ducks of a dozen names? Morel mushrooms—would they grow there? Or a hundred other things of nature that nourished her and filled her soul.
The Lord knows my bt He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places
She would keep repeating the phrase along with “help me, help me, help me.” It was all she could do.

She listened to Tyrell snore from his bedroll on the ground outside. Tipton and Mazys mother shared a straw tick in Elizabeths wagon. Mazy crept out of the wagon and dropped with a gentle thud to the dew-moistened ground. In the pink of the morning light, she made her way to the garden for one last look of longing.

Mazy watched the outline of deer etched in the distance. Morning fog lifted over the timber in the direction of the river. She wiped her face with her shawl and felt the shiver of the morning cool her swollen arm. She breathed hard, fatigued by the effort at getting out of bed. She yearned to run, to hide inside a limestone cave until this uprooting passed. But Jeremy was her husband She'd vowed before God to stay with him ‘til death. No place was worth the melting away of a marriage.

Jeremy sneezed behind her.

“Can't surprise you, with this dratted nose,” he said. She felt him fumble for a handkerchief, blow his nose again. “Appreciate your change of heart, Maze.” He rocked her side to side then, gentle, the way a
mother rocked her baby. “Expect someday you might forgive the way I did it?” Jeremy said. “I did better, with the Wilson girl, didn't I?”

“You did. Though I think before this journeys over we may both be wondering what lapse of thinking attacked us when we agreed to take her on.”

“Shell be fine. This is what she wanted. Doubt shell challenge it.”

“Men can be thick as a tree trunk,” Mazy said.

“Oh, can we?” He turned her to him then, his hands on her. The wash of his words whispered at her ear, rounding the edges of her anger. “You're a good woman, Maze,” he said, “doing what's right. It's a man's lot to make a way for his family. That's all I'm doing.” He leaned to kiss her.

Mazy pulled away, aware of his startled
eyes.
“I'm keeping my vows, Jeremy,” she said, “to stay with you through thick and thin. That's why I'm going. But I've plans to come back. Wisconsin is what I knew first, and I can't imagine finding anything to replace it.”

“The West'll seduce you, the vistas and valleys. Just as I'd like to now,” he said, pulling her to him, “before the cows need milking.”

She pushed at his hands. “Mother'll hear.”

She turned and stomped back to the wagon

“I don't much like good-byes,” Mazy said.

“Sometimes, if we're smart, we can turn them into hellos,” Elizabeth said. “They live just on the other side.” Elizabeth wedged her way between Tipton and Tyrell, settling onto the seat. She smiled and lines creased out like spokes of a wagon wheel as she waved her daughter toward the lead wagon as they readied to head out.