What Once We Loved (8 page)

She warmed to her subject, milked faster and harder now, ignoring a small voice inside that said to slow down. To not let her hopes outrun her reason.

The cow stepped sideways, her tail flicking at Mazy's face. “Now, now, Jennifer. It's all right. Sorry. Didn't mean to pull so hard.”

She was mind mumbling. Ruth would never want to go into a partnership with her now. Mazy sighed. It couldn't be fixed; they couldn't go back to what was. Ruth would leave, and Mazy'd have to take the cow brute south. Mazy might not have a pure dairy herd if she bred her cows with a Durham bull, say, or some of the Mexican stock, but she'd still have good milkers and she'd get rid of this…bad memory. For now, Mazy didn't want to miss a chance that she and Ruth could bridge this rushing river the bull had tipped them into.

Mazy pressed her fingers at the small of her back, rubbing. Bending over to milk was hard on a tall body like hers, having to squat on a stool. Probably on a short frame, too. It was worthy work though.

Milking required a commitment to routine, that was certain. And
anyone who said every milking was the same—just like any journey— had never done it more than once. Something was always challenging a dairywoman: A cow with porcupine quills stuck in her nose at milking time or a calf refusing to suck required thinking. And yet Mazy always ended satisfied, as though she'd completed a chapter of a good book.

She carried the milk to the river trough she'd built for cooling. She poured the white gold into flat tins to wait until the cream rose for churning, then emptied another bucket into tins that looked like chimneys settled in the water. She had to move the cooled tins from a previous milking and place them at the end of the trough where she'd pull them out in the morning for delivery in town. She'd ask Mariah to skim, then churn the risen cream. She'd be glad when that goat and the treadmill she'd ordered arrived. The goat could do the hard work then of churning cream into butter. These were tasks with beginnings, middles, and ends that filled her like good bread. She'd begun feeling empty and alone this evening. Yet in the rhythm of pulling and squeezing and listening to cats meow and cows chewing their cuds, she'd found a respite from the ache of splintered friendships.

Mazy watched as a mallard paddled off in a pool of rushes near the trough, the sun glistening on his emerald neck. Browned grasses eased in the breeze and Mazy inhaled. A pleasant place. That was what she had always wanted. She and Ruth had that in common. Maybe that shared dream would be enough to mend them back together.

The younger children sat along the wall like lily pads around the outside edge of a swirling pond. Eyes moved back and forth between herself and Matthew, Ruth noticed, as she cut the noodles, stopped, then held a knife to punctuate her point, waiting for Matthew to counter, his own knife sending whittling chunks of alder onto the wood floor.

“You wanted my honest opinion,” Matthew said. Ruth nodded.
“I think its nuts. Crazy. Break ‘em for working cattle? You got to be kidding.”

“And to sell to the military. Look at the freighter market alone,” Ruth said.

“You don't see any mules drawing stages though, do you?”

“But good solid, big mares, bred to a big jack would bring about a sturdy animal. It would. And it would still have the same agility because they're built differently I just never paid that much attention before, but it's true. And with people getting back to field work, growing crops and making hay, big mules could be a premium to the Spanish ranches right here in California.”

“So are you saying you'd stay here, in California?”

“Now Matthew's getting interested,” Jason teased.

Ruth frowned. She lifted the strips of egg noodles and hung them over the towel holder behind the washbowl, checking their thickness. She busied herself, made a new hole in the mound of flour on the dough boy, broke an egg inside, added oil and beat them, pinched in more flour until it felt right, and she pressed the new mass flat.

“Got enough noodles there for an army,” Matthew said.

“People are coming out. Mazy, too, I suppose. I wish your mother'd sharpen my knives,” she growled then as the dough bunched up along the blade.

“Maybe she doesn't want any weaponry within your reach,” he said.

“I know how to make noodles, and I like the idea of going north with big jacks. Maybe because that's where Jed and Betha and me hoped to go all along. Maybe because I don't really like all the memories of this place.”

“New diggings don't change a person or their memories,” he said. “It's how they see what they got already that does that.”

“Sometimes a change of scenery can take the work out of what you have to look at though. And I don't want to see…what happened to Jessie or Jumper in every rock I stumble over.”

A part of Ruth wondered why she even had this discussion with Matthew Schmidtke. He wasn't her brother, no kin at all. He had given her his honest answer, which she'd asked for though. And he did know some things about stock. He'd been clear and truthful, who could ask for more? So why was she so irritable?

“You said you thought I could go north with the children alone. Why is my wanting to take a couple of jacks along so much different?”

“Because they don't herd well. One would be bad enough, but two?”

“Jumper's foals will be good size, or should be. I'll breed them and their mothers to good jack stock.”

“Too small,” Matthew said. Ruth raised the blade in protest. “Well, they are. Fine looking brood mares, don't get me wrong, but they don't bulk up the way you'd want for what you're talking about.”

She thought to argue, but she had to agree. She just wasn't ready to say that yet. “If I can find myself a good jack, he'll make up for their smaller size. It would work. Who knows, maybe they aren't so unruly with other jacks around the way stallions and geldings can be.”

Matthew laughed. “Have you ever been around a jack? They're the most stubborn beasts known.”

“And you'd know this because.

“Shoot. Ask anyone from the South. They use them to farm down that way. You can hardly train ‘em to stay inside a corral is what I always heard. That's why they run wild on the deserts.”

“I didn't know you were an expert,” she said as she brushed flour from her face. She pulled off the towel she'd tucked into the waistline of her pants, rolled it into a bunch. Sarah scrambled from the bed where she sat and took it from her, slipping out the back to shake it in the wind.

“You'll have your work cut out for you, with or without a jack, and besides, these mares are already bred back to Jumper. So you can't start a…dynasty until next year anyway. Why not wait to find a jack in Oregon? Herding one north will just add to your misery.”

“Who's starting a dynasty?” Lura said, entering with her daughter,
Mariah, close behind. No knocking, no howdy, just walking right in. “You? Matthew Schmidtke? Well, its about time.”

“Ma, we're not talking about me,” he said as he rose and gave her a peck on her forehead. Ruth remembered that Elizabeth always said a woman could tell what kind of husband a man might be by watching him with his mother.
Why had she thought ofthat?

Matthew squeezed his sister close, held her for just a moment, and Ruth noticed that she let him, the bond between brother and sister a tender touch. “We're talking about Ruth here.”

“What's Ruth up to?” Mariah asked.

Ruth filled her in while Lura sucked on her empty clay pipe. Matthew shook his head, frowned, and Ruth wondered how he could have been so encouraging of her going it alone yet act as though her ideas were more squirmy than worms.

Mariah, familiar in Ruth's kitchen, popped the raised noodles into a boiling pot of water, then sent Jessie and Sarah out to collect tomatoes from the garden and the last of the lettuce, too.

“Is that it then?” Lura asked when the girls had left. Ruth nodded. Lura tapped her pipe on her palm while she sat, kicking her foot draped across her knee. Her white-and-blue striped skirt bobbed up and down as though she were dancing. She was always in motion. “Let me think how that would work,” Lura said. “Exactly.”

“She's talking new uses for stock, now, Ma,” Matthew said a bit condescendingly. Ruth caught her breath. “It's a little complicated.”

“I know all about stock,” Lura snapped. Both Matthew and Ruth turned to look at her. “People been talking about such things at the store and before that while I banked at the casinos. Lots of talk about seeing in new ways. What you're suggesting is mixing up livestock.'“ She laid the pipe in her lap. “And you can count me in.”

“Count you in on what, Ma?”

“Look,” Lura told her son, standing then, quick as a hungry fox. “Best thing for us to do is to sell those Durham cows of ours to Mazy Bacon.”

“Sell them?”

“She's got herself a herd then, dairy or beef, and she can dump that Marvel cow brute with an easy heart. Shell get herself some good help. Maybe David Taylor, her stepson of sorts. We can take some shares in her dairy instead of cash, if need be. Then we bag that money, and we buy ourselves some stocky mares, some from that Primrose blood out of Virginia, bred back or not. Maybe a couple of heavy Quarter-Pathers, too. Then the next few days, we roam these hacienda hills for the biggest, the strongest, and the prettiest jacks anybody ever saw—maybe two or three days. We buy them up. We breed them to any open mares we have. Next year they meet up with Ruths mares, or by then you may be ready to sell them, too, Ruthie, and get yourself some of our stocky brood. It wont matter whether you like the breeding part or the training. We'll have plenty to do in this…dynasty you're proposing. We'll need to break them, and we'll need people to sell them to the army, the farmers, and cattlemen. Maybe some good buggy mules'll sell too. They'll all need tending, that many animals.”

“Ma,” Matthew said. “I think maybe—”

“ ‘Course we got to find land enough to house us all and the mules, too. It'll be worth investing all we got. This could become the biggest moneymaker from a common thing since…brass tacks. You're a whiz, Ruthie, a true whiz. I had no idea you carried around such innovating thoughts in that pretty head of yours.”

“Me neither,” Ruth said. She felt spun around like a bottle at a party. She sneezed from the flour that dusted her face. “I only wish I'd thought of it myself,” Ruth said as she sank onto the stool.

“This came in for Miss Martin,” the editor at the Shasta
Courier
told Elizabeth. “You're heading out that way?”

“Indeed. Tonights the big shindig. We hope to have a few fiddlers and plenty of food. You could join us.”

Sam Dosh adjusted his printers cap and shook his head. “Got to get the paper out. I'm going to miss her. She was a fine lithographer.”

“She's a fine artist,” Elizabeth said.

“Its not polite to read another's mail…” Sam said. “But hard not to when the writing's on the outside.”

“Well, thank you, Sam,” she said as she pulled the letter from his hands. “Ill see that Ruth gets it.”

It was all happening too fast with too many things to sort through. Ruth listened and watched and wondered how her life had suddenly become someone else's. She looked around, wanted to concentrate on what was simple and sure.