What Once We Loved (17 page)

Couldn't be touched by what?
she wondered.
The silence?
She made herself sit down on a maple chair she'd purchased from a newcomer arrived on Noble's Trail. She put nothing into her hands. She took in deep breaths, the way she did as a schoolgirl before having to stand and recite in front of the class. It was not laziness to be staring out at the world from a comfortable place, she reminded herself. After all, she wasn't going to sit forever in that chair. She was just stopping for a moment, to savor the quiet. There must be a reason she was here alone. Now. There were things she was meant to learn by experiencing what she could smell and see, what sounds she heard or didn't, how her body fit into her clothes, what space she filled up with her being. Hadn't she read in the dictionary that experience meant “to be present”?

Her mother's comment about kinship came to mind, about tending it for friendships. Perhaps that was why she'd developed closer ties on the wagon train than at any other time in her life. The women saw each other every day. They survived difficult times together. They adjusted what they ate, when they slept, how they tempered their tongues, and they laughed together. Yes, those friendships had taken a toll. She'd found qualities inside some of the women that she would never have given a second thought if she hadn't been forced to see them the next day. Qualities she guessed that she needed to pay attention to in her own life. She'd have shared a meal with Tipton or sewn something for Suzanne, but she never really would have known them. Nor let them get to know her. She swallowed, fidgeted again with the thought.

She'd let few people really know her. She'd come closest with Ruth. A thrust of pain pierced her heart. With Ruth gone, Mazy had no one to be herself with. Her mother, yes, but time with Ruth had been different. Heaviness weighed against her chest. She didn't want to cry, not
here, all alone. It did no good! She breathed a prayer of safety for her friend, of healing with no permanent scarring for their friendship.

But this wasn't about Ruth, not really. It was about…kinships and the meaning that hovered inside them.

She started to get up but didn't, her legs weak and achy, her heart heavy yet empty. She took a deep breath suddenly tired beyond belief. Maybe she was just lazy. Maybe she wasn't formed of “fine pine,” as her husband had once said, wasn't sturdy stock after all but merely timber that looked tall and straight on the outside but was eaten by worms from within. Jeremy. The last time she had been by herself for a night with no other human around had been the two weeks before Jeremy brought the bull back from Milwaukee. That was the last night she'd spent in her own home. Alone. Until now.

Afternoon light poured in through the imperfect window glass, and a spider made its way to the upper corner. A crow called out in the distance, a cow bellowed again with insistence. She felt pasted to the chair, her body big and bulky, taking up the space. She sat alone, totally alone, more frightened than she'd ever been in her life.

“The Lord knows my lot,” she said out loud. She spoke the phrase as a reminder of his promise and as comfort to herself. “He makes my fences fall on pleasant places. Pleasant places. Fenced-in places, but not necessarily confining ones.” She had to remember that.

An old proverb Esther had quoted came to mind. “Silence is the fence around wisdom.” To learn the lessons and find the wisdom in her days, she must learn to savor silence. It was a way to tend relationships. She breathed deeply inside her fence, entered the gate called prayer.

“So tell us another Oregon story,” Jason urged Matthew. Firelight flickered against the boy's face. After only a few days on the trail, they'd fallen into a routine with Matthew telling tales at night.

“Well, let's see. Leave the red leaves alone on the trail. I learned that
one the hard way. Those madrone trees, the ones with bark about the color of…a red sunset.”

“Or Mazy's hair,” Mariah said.

“Or Mrs. Bacon's hair. Right. Hers is a bit darker though. Well, those red bark sheddings, they mix in with…poison oak leaves.” He leaned way into the fire when he said “poison oak” as though he was some kind of monster from the Brothers Grimm stories.

“Do you have to eat the leaf for it to hurt you?” Sarah asked.

“Just touching them can make a body sicker than you'd know. And itchy! But the real reason to pay attention to those leaves and never touch them…is that that's where rattlesnakes hide and they'll leap out at you!” The children all leaned back as one with stiff necks and wide
eyes
when Matthew shot up from his seat at the word “leap.”

“Snakes don't jump that far,” Jessie said.

“Some do,” Ned told her.

“And then there's the Table Rocks,” Matthew said with a shaky tone to his voice, rubbing his hands into an imaginary ball.

“I thought you said they were beautiful,” Ruth said. “That wild-flowers grew there and all.”

“Taller than Independence Rock back on the trail and flatter, that's true. The Rogue River runs right below ‘em. Two flat rocks. Side by side.”

“What's scary about them?” Ned asked.

“Beings from the sky, from faraway stars, sing songs that sound like babies crying, and they come swooping down to settle there in the night. And they look out across the land, eyeing…little children to snatch up for supper.” He lifted his arms like wings. “Late at night,” he whispered. “And when they can't find them, they lay eggs all over the ground at the base of the rocks. Those eggs will hatch in the heat and—”

“Which is why some children grow up to have heads as hard as rocks,” Ruth said, looking directly at Matthew. She stood at the wagon back, wiping the tin plates. “And that baby-crying sound is a mountain lion for sure, nothing from the night sky. And those pretty stones I'd
guess are agates, not eggs. Come on. Time to bed down.” A chorus of groans followed, but the children moved forward and were soon settled in bedrolls near the fire. Mariah and her mother took a lantern into the pines for their necessary time, and Ruth chose the opportunity to talk.

“You shouldn't scare them so,” Ruth said as she hung the towel on the backboard. She'd agreed to help with cleanup while Lura assumed all the cooking. It had worked well. The children assisted too, along with tending the stock. The rope ramuda allowed them to post minimal guard on the horses, and hobbling both jacks had proved wise too.

Matthew whittled a piece of burled wood he'd picked up along the trail. “They love it,” he said. “Just stretches their minds.”

“I'm not sure Jessie does. Her eyes were big as boulders when you talked about things coming out of the sky to get them and take them away.”

“She knows it's a story,” he said. “She's a smart kid.”

“Maybe. But she's different since she got back from…well, you know. She cut her finger on a rock this morning, and you would have thought she'd broken her leg again.” Ruth sat beside him on the log and looked at the bark. “This isn't poison oak, is it?”

He laughed, shook his head. “Seems to me your Jessie was always a tiger,” Matthew said.

“You remember her from the wagon train?”

“A little. I was keeping an eye on Mariah and comparing her some with the other girls, even though she was lots older. Jessie always walked like her chin knew just where she was headed and she was just along for the ride.”

Ruth wondered if for some strange reason he remembered her, too. She'd only thought of him as that young wrangler with the white streak of hair against coal black. Now he seemed much older, wise beyond his years. And those blue
eyes
of his had a way of seeing into her soul. She stopped herself. She couldn't afford to see him as anything beyond a wrangler helping her move a herd north. She had to stay a loner, just be there for the children. That was the path she walked on just now.

“Jessie is different,” Ruth insisted. “Its not like she's wanting attention, but that she's really frightened about something. Lura clanged the Dutch oven against the wagon wheel before supper, and Jessie got that same big-eyed look and started breathing real fast. I asked her what was wrong, and she didn't even seem to hear me. And I touched her, and I could actually feel her heart pounding through her pinafore. She was scared. Over nothing. Kept it up until I got her a drink of water, and then she didn't seem to know what I was talking about.”

He sat without speaking. “I'll try to be more careful,” he said. “Maybe it's just all the changes she's had. Knowing you're her mama for certain, being stolen and coming back and now, on the trail. Maybe it brings back old thinking, like when her auntie died. You said they were pretty close.”

“Betha was her only mother,” Ruth agreed. “I hadn't thought of that. Thanks,” she added after a time of quiet.

“For what?”

“For taking me seriously, about Jessie and telling tall tales. I…it's hard for me to ask things,” she said.

“I consider myself honored then, and I'll try to be worthy of it. Guess I best check on our jacks.” He stood.

“Don't let anything come swooping down out there and whisk you away,” she said.

He cocked his head to the side. “I'm honored again,” he said. “That you might grieve my going.”

“I feel badly whenever I know you're doing my laundry,” Suzanne said. Esther scrubbed at a board, and Suzanne could hear the rub of the cloth and occasionally the throb of knuckles against the rough tin. “And I can't do a thing to help.”

“You just keep playing your harp there. That's your job. Gives me pleasure while I work. The steam doesn't hurt the wood in your harp? I just now thought ofthat.”

“I dont think so. But Esty said there are dozens of Chinese willing and needing to do laundry in Chinatown. Its how they earn their wages to send back to China. Why don't we employ one of them?”

“I can do the work as well,” Esther said stiffly. “And that's not the only kind of work those poor people are asked to do for a mere pittance.”

“What? What else?” Suzanne asked.

“Just…things. Cooking and such,” she said.

“Do I not pay you enough for our personal care? I could offer more—”

“Nonsense. I'm doing fine. You need your money to pay for the children's teaching. And for this house. I'm grateful we worked out what we did,” Esther said.

“Maybe I'm just feeling useless,” Suzanne said. “I can't even clean the lamp chimneys without someone having to redo them. I know you do that, Esther. No need to protest. I'm as useless as a wax dropping on a gentleman's napped hat.”

“You're your children's mother, first. That's your task, and you're tending it well. Just play,” she directed.

Suzanne strummed her troubadour harp. She stopped. “I could give children music lessons.”

“Not many children around here free for lessons, Suzanne. This is a hard place, this mining country. Not kind to men nor to women and certainly not to children. Most of them are working, helping at boarding-houses, with gardens, ironing, all kinds of things to make ends meet. You're lucky in some ways, not to have to see it. Not so hard here as Shasta City, but still not much time for frivolity.”

“I did all right entertaining in the mines,” she said. “People need music and plays when they're feeling destitute and empty. It lets them forget.”

“You got yourself some gold, certainly, but you paid a price.”

“I know,” Suzanne said, chastened.

“Besides, I'm not sure forgetting is what'U help people who are looking for a way through a life they don't feel is worth living,” Esther told her. “Doing what you did—getting clear and getting courage—that's what helped you, and that's what'll help them.”

Suzanne sighed. “All the more reason why you should stop cleaning that theater. Get you away from all that.”

Esther didn't speak, just kept up her scrubbing. Perhaps Suzanne had gone too far. Esther had cleaned at the Sacramento Theater for the past year, late at night, and she had not once complained, as far as Suzanne could remember, not in her letters, not in her speech since Suzanne and the boys had arrived. Esther was paying off the contracts from the failed marriage arrangements of the Celestials she'd brought west. But she suspected Esther got something more out of that theater attachment than simply paying her bills. What, she wasn't sure.