What Once We Loved (35 page)

“I just hope the boys outlast him, keeping Ewalds corral and the mares' poles up until he does.”

Carmine finally disappeared in the timber. This time he didn't come back.

“When he's hungry he'll show,” Jason said as the boys came stomping in, warming their hands at the stove.

“There's lots of grass yet,” Ned reminded him.

“Yeah, but he's got to travel some to find it not under the ice. Our stack's easier pickings.”

“Besides, he likes his girlfriends,” Ned said.

Sarah giggled.

“Well, he does,” Jason said. “He treats those mares like they was his own little playmates.”

“Were,” Ruth corrected.

“Huh?” Jason said.

“Like they were his playmates. Your grammar. If you're not going to go to school, you'll have to accept my instruction here,” Ruth told him. “McGuffey Reader awaits.”

“Yes, Auntie,” he submitted. “Anyway, he sure is attached.”

“I'd always heard mules were herd bound,” Ruth said. “More so than horses. Guess they get it from the jack side of the family.”

“Funny, isn't it?” Lura said. “We always think of the females being the ones attached to kin. Truth be told, I think men are more family oriented. I remember your father being the one who always wanted to go maple syrup gathering. All his brothers and their families headed upstate, and they did more jabbering than gathering. Your pa always liked that time. And his home just so. Said it was a place of refuge.”

“I remember, Ma,” Matthew said. “Missing him, are you?”

“Oh, every January I expect he'll come to mind. Along with every other month of the year.”

“We should do something like that,” Mariah said. “Have some special event each year we look forward to.”

“There's the women's quilt. We'll get that eventually, won't we, Auntie?” Sarah asked.

Ruth nodded.

“Maybe we could go back to Shasta. Have a reunion,” Ned said. “We could see Suzanne again. I miss her. We used to sing real good together to those mining camps. Remember, Mariah?”

“I'll bet you do miss her,” Ruth said.

“Or start our own tradition. Right here,” Matthew said.

“Chasing jacks?” Lura said. She finished slicing the meat and put it into the pot to boil. Ruth was growing accustomed to stew. Still, she wasn't going to complain. Anyone who did that soon got assigned to kitchen duty.

“The Table Rocks,” Mariah said. “We could hike to them come spring. You said you could see all kinds of different plants and things in the pools up there, right, Matthew?”

“Wasn't that where the treaty was signed last year? At the base of it?” Ruth said.

“For all the good that did,” Lura said.

“Never been there myself,” Matthew told her, nodding agreement. “But I heard you can see the whole valley from that point.”

“Might be we'll be needing that view to find your red mule,” Lura said.

“A red one or a dead one,” Matthew said.

“I've need for a live, red jack,” Ruth said, “who will spend this night separated and cold for going out beyond his limits.”

They listened to the pelting ice, stoked up the stove, and Matthew directed the boys to bring in more wood to keep it dry inside.

Ruth thought about the limits of things. She was certainly beyond her limit here. She'd gone to the place her father had said each “man” must go: to the limits of her longing.

“You've got to go out so far you can't come back,” he told her brother, Jed, as Ruth eavesdropped. She was just a child, but she never forgot. “That's how you find out who you really are. Can't just put your hand into a thing, Jed. You've got to put your whole body into it.”

Sometimes Ruth wondered if that challenge didn't also drive her brother's love for whiskey, sinking him into the amber liquid when being out beyond his recall got to be too much. She knew her brother's taking on her case against Zane Randolph had taxed him heavily. And
their flight west on her behalf had used up his life and Betha's, too, dropping their children as orphans in Ruth's care.

Still, her brother had put the whiskey bottles down when they headed west. Perhaps he'd left the States not just^r her but because he wanted to stretch his own limits of longing, follow the passion of his
own
heart, too. Maybe that was in her blood, that needing to seek, to push, to find how much she could really achieve.

How odd that she wasn't doing it alone.

“I hope he's all right,” Jessie said, breaking Ruth's thought.

“Who? Carmine?”

“No, Matthew. He sounded so…mad,” she said.

“He did, didn't he? Being mad isn't bad, Jessie. It's what we do with it that counts.”

“He throws gloves and stomps.”

“I think he was just frustrated. All the waiting and watching. We'll find Carmine in the morning. It'll be all right.” She hoped she wasn't telling her child or herself a lie.

14

They settled into their beds listening to the sleet strike the wooden shakes, a sound that soothed through the night. Ruth rose early. It had become her habit to bring in wood and stoke the morning fire. Sometimes she worked on the rope she was twisting out of Jumper s tail hairs. It was almost finished. She didn't sleep well lying next to Jessie, so it was natural for her to take on some morning task. She worried she might roll onto her daughter and halt her shallow breathing. Sometimes the child complained of pain in her legs, and Ruth gave her a dose of Perry Davis s Pain Killer that the locals said treated ague. That was the general diagnosis from those who heard the symptoms. “Usually happens in the summer and leaves come cold weather,” Dr. McCully told her.

But the weather had turned cold, and Jessie didn t seem much better. And the symptoms floated, Ruth thought, drifting from one part of her body to another. Lately, Jessie hadn't been strong enough to even walk without help.

Ruth was coming to accept something she hadn't earlier seen, like stars arriving at dusk. Jessie just might not get much better than she was. If that became true, Ruth would have to find a way to manage the stock, handle the spring foals and the breeding that had to begin soon after, while still tending the child. She needed to break ground to plant grain, buy cattle, and smoke the beef. Live. Provide. She just didn't know how she'd do it.

She padded in her bare feet to the door, stepping over Matthews bedroll, hearing the boys toss and turn up in the loft. She stood for a moment watching Matthew breathe. He'd turn nineteen later this year. He seemed years older. She shook her head of the thoughts.

She opened the door and gasped. The world was awash with silver. An icy, drifting crystal mist. Ruth had never seen anything like it. It was etched out like the finest lithograph ever created.

Tree branches thick with sterling dotted the perimeter of the ranch. The corral poles lay frosted white. The pines wore sugared icing. Every blade of grass bent with a sea of hoary frost. Even the rock outcroppings had a glaze like sugared water over their edges. Small yellow flowers stood stiffly frozen, the color made more vibrant by the etching. And over everything hovered a pewter fog. No sound sifted through it.

Ruths eyes rested then on a small canvas tent near the haystack. It, too, was covered with ice.

She looked beyond for Carmine, didn't see him. She'd check the tent to see who was there as soon as she stoked the fire. She reached out as though to touch the silver air, it filled her senses so. Then in one giant swoop her feet went out from under her, and she landed with a smack, her head cracking against the stoop. She moaned. Even the wood decking was frozen slick as a dog-licked plate.

Almost instantly Matthew was standing behind her to help her up, wearing his unmentionables. “Kind of squirrelly out here,” he said, reaching beneath her arms.

“Whoa!” he said as he fell too.

Ruth grunted as his hip hit hers, but it was so slick she slid out from under him, her arms tangling with his, her head still throbbing. She felt a flush of irritation, and then she blushed as she looked at him sprawled and her with her nightdress whipped around her calves.

“Wait here,” Matthew said.

“As if I could go anywhere,” Ruth said.

On hands and knees, Matthew made his way toward the door, tugging at Ruth who now couldn't keep from laughing.

“Thanks,” she said when her bare feet were firm on the warm floor inside. “I couldn't have done that without you.”

“We've sounded the alarm for breakfast, that's sure,” he said.

Standing up safe, she nodded toward the tent. “Who do you suppose that is?”

“Wasn't there last night. Neither was that mount.”

“Let him come to us,” she said.

“Might take ‘til noon, even if he started now,” Matthew said.

It was probably just a traveler having to stop somewhere due to the storm. “Maybe the children will have their tradition now,” Ruth said. “We'll pop some corn, play a game or two of jacks… not dead jacks,” she said.

“Spend the day being a kid again. That sounds good.”

“I wasn't going that far.”

“Why not? You don't play enough, Ruth. Always so serious. Maybe Ned can teach you how to win at his string game. People grow different on you when you're playing with ‘em,” he said. Those piercing blue
eyes
seemed to stare right through her.

“I'm not walking there until the sun comes up and thaws some of this stuff out,” she said, tucking the quilt up around a sleeping Jessie's neck.

“You think it'll thaw today, do you?”

“It will, won't it?”

Matthew looked out the window at the opaque sky, the mist drizzling ice. “Should,” he said. “But I never was one to predict women or the weather.”

Chita found Nehemiah at midday. He still sat where he'd read the letter, his hand gripped around the paper. “Oh, Senor Kossuth,” she said. “I worry when I do not see fire from your chimney. You and Mrs. Kossuth are not well?” She gazed around the room. “Senora. She is not here?”

He handed her the letter. She pushed it back. “I do not read the English,” she told him. “But I see her hand in it. You are like struck lightning,” she said. “The news is good, yes?”

“That's right, I remember,” he said. “Mrs. Kossuth thinks you should learn English, you know. I was the one who suggested she learn Spanish. Did she ever speak to you in Spanish? She's a very good student, you know. Very good.”

“I fix you up something hot to drink. Build the fire. It is very cold out. You will feel better as soon as Chita fixes you something to eat. You can tell me of the news then. All of Crescent City should hear your news.”

He frowned at her but let himself be led from the room and sat at the table while Chita worked, building the fire, patting flour and water into a round tortilla. He knew he wasn't thinking clearly. She was saying things, being cheerful, talking of Crescent City interests. What interest was it of anyone's that his wife had left him because he was a dolt, a man who bankrupted his life? An army couldn't have done a better job of destroying him.

A thick blanket draped his thoughts, wrapped him in a fog. The scent of Tipton lingered, from the lavender of her toilet water to the sachets she filled and scattered about the room. Everything his eye touched pierced him with her memory. Across the back of the couch draped his old flag with fifteen stripes. It had been changed to one with thirteen stripes with so many new states being added, but he could never rid himself of the old one. He knew as a veteran he was supposed to destroy the fifteen-stripe flag. And he'd been grateful when Tipton said it would make a lovely throw, something useful. The clock ticked. The clock she'd set on the lace-covered side table. Her hands had held that clock, had wound it tightly. It wasn't running now, he noticed. Time had stopped with her leaving.

“What did you say?” Chita asked, turning.

“Nothing. I didn't say anything,” he said. He must have groaned out loud with the anguish of his loss.

“Senora Kossuth has gone to visit friends?”

He shook his head. He didn't want to say. It was none of anyone else's business what happened inside his household. No one need know what travesties occurred here, how he'd failed his wife.

“She will be back soon?”