What Once We Loved (4 page)

“Well,” Mazy said, sitting back on her knees. “Maybe you'd like to be transplanted in…Oregon, with Ruth and the children?” Now there was a worthy plan, a way for Ruth to take something with her, a reminder that strength came from clods, sometimes from being broken and planted in new soil.

Smiling, she held both clumps in her hand and was about to place one new root in the hole she'd dug, then find a container for the other to take out to Ruth, when she felt a small hand warm against her back.

“You again,” Mazy said. It was one of the orphaned Indian children who'd become regular partakers of her mothers breads that they'd been leaving out. “I don't think she has any here, right now,” Mazy told the child. She was never certain how much English they really understood. Most of them slipped in at nighttime, took the food, and disappeared. So it surprised Mazy to actually recognize this round face with a scar beneath her right eye and an upturned nose. And her face was puffed up as though full of air. Was she ill? The mumps? Mazy'd never seen that look on any of the children before. An epidemic would be the worst thing possible! However would they get medicine and a physician willing to treat them? Where could they house them? Her mind raced with the possibilities of all a major illness could mean before she recognized a flicker of mischief crossing the child's brown eyes.

The girl clapped her cheeks with her palms, spraying water right into Mazy's face.

“Hey!” Mazy screeched, standing.

The child crouched back.

“It's all right,” Mazy said, when she saw the fear in the child's eyes. “Cooling me down, are you? It's hot enough, that's sure.” Mazy smiled broadly, wiping her face of the water with her dirty hands. The child laughed then and pointed, and Mazy guessed she was streaked with earth. Mazy chuckled too and then turned. She moved toward the little pool where a spring dribbled down the side of the rockface that marked one border of her herb garden. She willed the child to stay, could feel the dark eyes on her back. Mazy lifted the heavy braid at the back of her neck, then cupped her hands. She caught the cold liquid in them, then quick as a fawn's tail twisting, she turned and threw the water at the girl. Mazy smiled as she watched the spray cascade toward the child's wide
eyes.

“Ayee,” the girl said, lurching out of her crouch, but she didn't run. Instead her eyes held Mazy's for just a moment before she grinned, revealing an open space where two front teeth should have been.

Must be six years old, maybe seven.
Mazy thought. Jessie s age. The girl giggled and slipped past Mazy toward the spring, began splashing water at Mazy. Mazy showered her back until both she and the girl stood dripping wet.

“I'm hungry,” Mazy said then. “Want a cookie that looks just like a dog?”

The girls face became still, then she nodded just once.

Mazy reached out her hand. “Lets go inside and get one,” she said.

The child pulled back, hesitated, then dropped her brown palm into Mazys. She stood still.

“Well, come along,” Mazy said. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of another in the shadows. A woman in tattered clothes. The adults rarely came close. Her heart pounded. The child's mother? An auntie? Mazy reached her free hand out. “You come too,” she said.

The girl pulled on Mazys hand then, and the woman followed quiet as the morning dew.

Good enough
, Mazy thought. That was how friendships began. One step at a time, often led by a child.

Ruth's
eyes
scanned for the children, the source of the screams. She heard neighing horses and a bellowing bull, then shrieks and groans. Dust filled the air near the barn. Ruth swore later she heard the ripping of flesh, but of course, she couldn't have, not from where she stood, not with the towel about her head. She could see Matthew run, his boots kicking up red dirt near the corral. His face looked strained, and her eyes searched for Jessie and Ned, Jason and Sarah.

“What is it, Auntie?” Sarah asked, stepping out from the house.

“I don't know,” Ruth said, moving forward, searching.

She saw the two youngest out in the meadow now, close together. She wondered why Matthew pushed at them, moved them toward the
freighters while one of the Mexican handlers turned a string of mules away from the corrals. The animals bucked and brayed in upset over what? Ruth didn't know.

Her eyes worked across the meadow. She could see Koda and the mares running into each other. Odd. Then the dusty fog near Marvels pen cleared. Ruth watched as Matthew grabbed a goading stick to push at the big bull. He was loose? The bull was loose? The animals nose lifted to the dusty air. She heard him bellow as though in triumph. Clods of dirt pelted the ground like rain as the brute pawed and twisted raising a red-earth cloud.

Had Matthew stumbled? She couldn't see! When it cleared, the bull lowered his head, his horns angled to attack. Her heart pounded. She heard a crack, wood against flesh, and Marvels bellow. That high-pitched scream again. Matthews goading stick lunged, and the animal moved back, the ground throbbing with his agitated weight. The brute was so large, and yet he twisted with the ease of a dog snapping at meat thrown in midair. Matthew shouted. The brute circled, disappeared inside the dirty cloud.

When it cleared, the bull was in the pen next to his own, and Matthew rushed forward to slide the oak latch. The animal pawed, head lowered. He bellowed but didn't lunge the gate.

Good, Ruth thought. He was back in. Everyone was all right. But what was that screaming, that— She stepped forward, barefooted, onto the warm earth and moved as though sleepwalking toward the corral, aware that her body knew something her mind would not admit.

“Ruth, stay back!” Matthew shouted to her now, his palms extended, his hat held as though to shield her eyes.

“Why? What s wrong?”

And then her eyes slid down to the lurching form just inside the log corrals, the struggling sorrel form of Jumper.

The horse lay groaning, snorting, a muffled scream now, weakened. His head lifted, then dropped. His hooves carved graves into the dust.
She let her eyes move like sunset sinking, threatening blackness. She smelled the acrid scent of blood, of seeping life, heard the bellowing of the cow brute, long horns held high as he circled the paddock, heightened too by the smells, the sounds of groans and dying.

“Ruth, please…” Matthew said as she neared him. He grasped her arms, urging her to stay back. “The bull… it s gored him in the… artery…”

“I've got to,” Ruth said, her voice far away and aching like a dream lost to the morning. She shook free of Matthews hand.

“He could be…could hurt you. Not meaning too. I'll put him down, Ruth. No need—”

But she was already beside the stud, sobbing now, a deep and awful bawling broken by gasps of choked air like a child exhaling in anguish with her loss. Then she met his eyes, her Jumper's eyes. Her grieving must have frightened the stallion as he lay in the pool of blood, red and black beneath his belly, the horn-rip of his belly, gaping like fresh meat, laid bare. A shiver of horror swelled through her in a raging wave. Eyes wild and staring, the horse tried to rise when he saw her, as if he longed for her to take the pain, to set him free.

She bent to his big head, barely touched his jaw and his ears twitched back, the pain so great. Her
eyes
throbbed with the knowing. She pulled the towel from her head, tried to push it against the blood flow.

“Let me,” Matthew said. Ruth couldn't answer. Matthew held the towel to the horse s sheath but was unable to stop the bleeding. The big horse tried once more to rise, to lift his head with a gasping snort.

Ruth wept into Jumper's neck, a selfish moment taken before she'd free him: have to free him.

But even in his dying, the big horse gave. Jumper strained his neck, tried to lift his head as she crooned to him, “No, no, stay still, stay still,” until he seemed to sigh, his legs no longer scraping, the screams of pain lessened. His breaths came shorter. His nostrils moved in and out; his
heaving slowed. His eyes wide with fright, he sighed once more, then died.

Ruth stayed with him that way, wrapped around his neck until she felt only brittle cold. She stayed until the moon came up, until the stars filled the night sky like distant, dying fires. She stayed until she felt the blanket Matthew draped around her shoulders while he sat beside her in silence, while she said good-bye to a dream and what once she'd loved.

Sacramento City

“But what good will it do to teach him finger signs?” Suzanne Cullver asked. “I can't see them, or haven't you noticed, Doctor?” She spoke his title with the disrespect he deserved. She should have gone to a dentist or one of those hydropaths instead of this quack. She knew her face burned red with frustration. “I won't know what my son wants if he did use those…those things you said. And I'll have to have someone teach them to me as well, just to be able to tell him things. Which makes no sense. He can understand, he just can't say anything back. No, there has to be another way.”

Her voice sounded strident, irritated. Well, she was. She'd done what she thought she was supposed to do, surrendered to uncertainty more than at any other time in her life, trusting that freedom thrived inside. No more putting her children at risk just because she wanted to do things by herself. No more singing or making music in the mining towns, no more taking risks without focus. Suzanne shook her head.
Focus.
It was still a strange word to pop into the head of a blind woman even if she had once been a photographer who knew the meaning of the word quite well. But it didn't just mean clarity; it meant hearth, that which warmed a person to the center of their being. Suzanne's focus was her children, pure and simple. That was what warmed her.

What this doctor suggested was pure foolery.

“Maybe I could teach you,” her friend Esty Williams told her, taking Suzanne's hand from the place her fingers fluttered at her neck. Esty covered Suzanne's fingers with her own. “Is there a book of some kind?” Esty must have turned to face the doctor, her voice seemed directed away from Suzanne.

“The Indians use some gesticulation, of course,” the doctor said, clearing his throat. “These have not been written down, but remembered. For the military. I can make a list of several if you'd like, with drawings. Nothing elaborate. The child is only three. But it could reduce his…frustration when he wishes to tell someone something but can't make himself understood. You can make up little signs, of course. Be…inventive.” The doctor had leaned close enough to Suzanne that she could smell the herb santolina on his wool jacket. He must have used it to keep the moths down. Or perhaps he'd expelled so many worms from young patients with it that the scent was forever on his skin.

“But he never will talk if we give him a way to avoid it,” Suzanne said. “No. I think it will divert us from finding out why he refuses to speak.” She pulled her hand from Esty's, clasped her own together in a prayerlike position. Took a deep breath. “Is his mouth all right? Are his teeth formed so he can talk?”

“Everything appears to be physically as it should be,” the doctor said, his words clipped like a man patting a pestering dog.

“But you're not a dentist, after all.”

“The signs could perhaps help teach him to talk, in a way we just don't understand. I've seen it happen.”

He'd probably taken up medicine when his interest in farming or horse racing ran out. The thought made her ask a question. “Do you think that accident with the horse last year could have caused this, when the animal kicked him in the side of the head? Or losing his father to cholera—could that have frightened him into silence?”

“It is futile to seek the cause, to lay blame,” the doctor pronounced.

“You haven't anything to lose by trying this, Suzanne,” Esty said softly.

“Of course you don't, my dear,” the doctor said. “Nothing at all. See here. Clayton,” he called the boy. “Clayton, look at me now. Would you like more water? Yes? Good boy for nodding yes. And here is how to tell me more.

Suzanne waited in the silence, her heart pounding with the reminder of what she could not do for herself. Then she heard her son giggle. “Oh, look at that,” the doctor laughed now. “He's pointed to the dish of sweets and made the sign, Mrs. CuUver. He learns quickly.” He paused. “He's a handsome child. Favors you with his towhead.” He cleared his throat.