What Once We Loved Read online

  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 thi
nk 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.

  “I'm sorry. I have no right to tell you what to do or not,” Suzanne said. “I guess I'm just feeling…restless, wanting some excitement, something to anticipate. Mr. Powder has the boys in hand. You have me in hand, and I have…hands with nothing to do.” She lifted her palms.

  “Idle hands are the devil's workshop,” Esther said. “So you best strum that harp.”

  7

  She was more like an older sister than a stepmother, David Taylor imagined, not that he'd known either before he met his father's widow, Mazy Bacon. In one year, he'd gained an Ayrshire cow, a Wintu wife and her child, a stepmother, and even a grandmother. And he had a deeper knowledge of the life his father'd lived after he left the gold fields of California. Still, David wondered why his father never wrote, never let him know he was alive back there in Wisconsin.

  “Maybe he hoped to see you, to tell his story to your eyes,” Oltipa told him when he thought out loud about it all.

  “Tell it to my eyes” David nodded agreement. He stacked the armful of split wood in the wood box of their cabin, preparing for another frosty night. “A story like that would tell better face on, wouldn't it? Hard for a man to pen that he had two families. A double mind of sorts.”

  “Your father believes his brother would be with you soon. If he writes to you, then his brother knows of his strange dealings far away in Oui-scon-sin.” David liked the way she said the name of that state, as though it had a French twist to it. “Your father chooses his own time to tell him. Waits to say words to his eyes. But he joins the Up-in-Being first.”

  David nodded. What she said made sense, and he guessed it did little good to swirl the murky past into the present. Like dirt in a bucket of water, if left alone, it would settle soon enough, and then he could see clear again.

  David scanned the room. This cabin was finally getting to be the home he'd always imagined, and he wasn't sure he wanted to leave it all to take up farming with Mazy Bacon. Her “plan,” as she called it, arrived too soon.

  There'd be some complications with Mazy Bacon, he knew. He didn't want to talk about them with Oltipa, but Mazy Bacon saw him as a cowhand, he was pretty sure ofthat. Hadn't she given him an Ayrshire, him a stranger to her even if they were somewhat kin? Milking cows wasn't something he ever imagined he'd be doing. He tried to see himself burying his face in a cow's udder on a frosty morning. He shook his head. He'd thought to keep one cow, maybe, for milk and butter and such, for his own. One, a woman could milk. He wasn't interested in a dozen that needed milking morning and night. That was what Mazy Bacon had in mind to manage. She had a big plan, all right.

  He walked back outside, lifted his ax and chopped thin slivers from the edge of the log, for the kindling stack.

  He hadn't liked discussing it with Mazy Bacon either. She had kind eyes, a warm smile, and was generous to a fault, but there was something about the way she got things happening that made him wonder how well she might actually listen to a fellow who saw things different than she did. He didn't know if moving to Shasta was something Oltipa wanted either. She'd stayed alone in this cabin during the past winter and did well, until that Zane Randolph came around. And now they all knew: That crazy man wasn't all that far away. Still dangerous, even with a cut-off leg.

  It might be safer at Mazy Bacon's. He'd have to find out how Oltipa felt. Maybe she'd feel buffaloed by this well-intentioned woman too. He'd have to ask, talk to them both, he guessed. He swallowed. He didn't like talking about what he felt. He had trouble finding the words. He preferred speaking with hostlers and horses to women any day.

  Things just got complicated with kin around. He'd forgotten that in the years since his father left and he had had no one to be accountable to, no one to please or disappoint. But he was learning again right fast.

  David watched Oltipa fixing her acorn soup. He'd acquired a taste for that golden meal. He wondered if his father had ever eaten it. His father had been a dairyman in Fort Vancouver and now, he learned, Wisconsin, too, before he died. It might just be that dairying was inside David s blood. At least that was how Mazy Bacon put it to him when they met to say good-bye to Ruth Martin. Oltipa had a special place in her heart for Ruths girl, Jessie. Otherwise, they would never have joined in.

  “I spent my life driving the big Concords,” he told Mazy. “Meeting people from here and there wearing tall hats and speaking with accents. I like that. Im not so sure about cows. They seem to be pretty much everyday creatures without much changing.”

  “Meet up with some unsavory folks driving a stage, too,” she said.

  His face felt hot as she talked, reminding him that he'd never really confronted Zane Randolph the way he'd hoped, that he'd failed to protect this woman he'd grown to love and married.

  “I take people places,” he told Mazy. “It's honorable work.”

  “I'm not saying it isn't. But so is dairying, and it has the advantage of predictability,” she'd insisted.

  He had predictability traveling the same route daily. But it also kept his mind alert, his body engaged in handling ribbons of reins and thousands of pounds of horse flesh. In rain or snow or hot sun and dust, he watched the world spin by from the height of a tall stagecoach. It gave him perspective that he didn't believe he'd find seeing the world through the underbelly of a cow.

  “I'll be needing thinking t
ime for that,” he told her, and to her credit, she'd accepted it, at least for a time.

  He'd felt…maneuvered by her. The way he would sometimes get a horse to harness, feeding it a handful of grain and talking nice while all the time knowing that his little treat would be short-lived and soon the horse would be hauling instead of standing and eating.

  Or maybe she was just being direct, asking for what she needed. He didn't know much about the ways of women. Women looked at things differently, now there was the truth. He'd barely begun to understand how Oltipa thought things through and now was adding the rise and swoop and dip of another woman's thoughts, winging through the air like a hungry hawk. He wasn't sure he was up to it, he just wasn't.

  The smells of the soup were so rich his stomach growled before he could even say thanks to Oltipa who set a bowl of it down in front of him. She lifted her boy and held him on her lap. Then she snuggled the child to her breast, and he began suckling. David reached for Oltipas hand and bowed his head, saying a table grace he'd learned as a child, adding a prayer for guidance at the end.

  Oltipa stroked the boy's thick black hair as she stared at David slurping soup from the side of the wooden spoon. With the fork, he poked for a hunk of cheese Oltipa had laid out too. “You talk like you talk to friend,” she told him.

  “To you, you mean?” David reached for Elizabeth's baked bread, tore it off and dipped it into his soup where the cheese melted slowly.