All Together in One Place Read online

  “Father would still be here. But no, you had to have your way, had to go with Tyrell. Now see what that's gotten you? You've killed him, too.

  Tipton covered Tyrell's body with her own then, tried to pull him to her chest, rocking, moaning now, a haunting, distant wail. She stroked her beloved and sobbed.

  “He was always looking after Tipton,” Charles said. “Who's going to do that now?”

  Tipton turned to her brother, watched the tensed shoulders, the bright red of his mottled skin, the throbbing of that vein in his short, tanned neck.

  “Mother insisted Father find you, so she wouldn't be without her Tipton.” He spit the word that was her name, a family name.

  What would Tyrell do, what would Tyrell say to stop her thudding heart? Tipton didn't know and couldn't pull it forth.

  “Tipton this, and Tipton that.”

  “Charles. Stop,” Mazy said.

  He continued his steely tirade, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth Tipton could see his lips move, his eyes dark, hooded. The words ran together like thick cotton pressed into her ears. “No,” she whispered, looking up into Mazy's eyes. “No.” Mazy bent over her and loosened Tipton's distorted fingers from her intended's lifeless body.

  “Tyrell neither!” Charles shouted, breaking through. “Went west to please you, make a life for you, Papa and Tyrell did. Always taking care of Tipton, that's what killed Papa.”

  “Charles,” Mazy said, her arms wrapped around a wispy Tipton. “Enough”

  Charles wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. Tipton wanted him finished of saying out loud the painful words she said now to herself “You'll pay for this someday. You will,” he said.

  “I already am,” she whispered.

  Mazy turned the girl toward the Wilson wagon. Tipton moved as though through mud, her feet heavy. She held her breath as Tyrell once told her to do. Still, her fingers contorted into a crone s hand, the thumb and index finger spread out, the others cupped and rigid. Her breath came short, and she felt the numbness creeping down her shoulder.

  “I got his spurs,” Charles said. “I'll take ‘em in trade for bringing him back.”

  “Charles,” Mazy said. “Please. It's all she's got left of him.”

  “Not much of him left,” Charles said. “Like I said, stupid, in more ways than one.”

  Tipton moved in a nightmare. She saw Elizabeth striding toward her, arms outstretched. She searched for her mother, her father, then remembered. The silver rowels spun as Charles yanked on his horse's bit and trotted away. Tipton felt weightless, as if the wind could lift her. She prayed it would, lift her and take her away.

  Help me, help me, help me.

  Mazy held her up.

  “What's happening?” Jeremy asked her. “Why aren't we moving?”

  Mazy wiped his forehead with a cool rag, ran it around his neck and over his chest. He shook, his teeth chattering even as his body oozed perspiration.

  “We've decided to stop. Hathaway Wilson's died. Antone Schmidtke, too, and Mariah, their daughters peaked.” She busied herself with rinsing the rag, twisted the water out, letting her hands cool before turning back to her husband. “Tyrell's gone,” she said. “Passed on.”

  “He was sick? I didn't…I've missed days?”

  Mazy shook her head. “Not from this, whatever it is. An accident.” Even as she told him, it made no sense—Tyrell was such a careful man, so methodical.

  “Guidebook…”

  “I know. More die of accidents than illness. Tipton's beside herself. Adoras of no help what with Hathaway gone too. Oh, Jeremy, you ve just got to get better.” She heard the desperation in her voice, vowed to change it. She took a deep breath to slow her words. “So we re staying, just for a day or two. I dont know what will happen now. I suppose someone will step forward to take Antone s place.”

  “Maybe…I'll improve ” He grimaced.

  “I'd not oppose it this time, that's sure.”

  “Timing's, essential,” Jeremy said. He shook and sucked air in through his teeth

  She spooned soup into his mouth. His skin looked blue in the frangible light filtered through the canvas amber. She felt a tightness in her throat as she helped him lay his head down on the rolled blanket, settled it beneath his neck. He looked older than she remembered, and his skin puckered the color of her father's—just before he died.

  She began to talk then, repeating and rapid, of the routine and everyday. She spoke of Sister Esther and the honeybees and the antelope's antics scattering pots and pans when it followed Elizabeth about, leaving her mother panting as she pounced on the animal's tether rope. She talked of the tomato, how her mother confessed that she'd sprinkled flour dust on it now and again when she made a pie, just to keep Mazy puzzling. Something to think about besides the blisters.

  “One cow, Mavis,” Mazy said, “I think she's been bred. She'll calve a month or two after our baby's born. Isn't that lovely? I think it's lovely. Do you want more soup? Oh, Jeremy, what can I do?” Her speech rushed as though utterance and disallowance could prevent from happening what she knew was now truth.

  “When should I re-breed her, Jeremy? How many days after she calves?”

  He answered with a thick tongue, and she knew when he did that he knew the inevitable too. “Breed her,” he said, “so she conceives, seventy-five to one hundred days…after she calves. It will give”—he stopped to take a deeper breath—”the greatest milk. The eighty-fifth day it will be twelve months…between calves. Keep records, Mazy. Cant remember Double the herd…still sell…milk.”

  “The eighty-fifth day. I'll remember,” she said and felt the tears press against her nose and eyes.

  The Lord knows my lot, the Lord knows my ht.

  She wondered at what she chose to tell him, there was so little time. She couldn't say the words, didn't want to say out loud that this might be their last discussion over anything at all.

  “Go on,” Jeremy told her. He had thrown up the little soup she'd gotten down him, and now perspiration soaked him and the linens. “Donation Land Claim. You. Your mother ¨stay. Just three years. There's money. To prove up.”

  “Don't talk ofthat now.”

  “Money. In the wagon. False floor. A thousand dollars.”

  “Where did it come from? Jeremy?”

  “Go on, Mazy. Don't turn back.”

  “But is it from the sale of the farm? Where?”

  He shook his head, struggled to talk. “Just keep going, promise me

  She didn't want their last exchange to be of something so mundane as money, of calving and cows; she didn't want to make any promises she couldn't keep.

  She squeezed the water from the rag, dipped it into fresh, and laid it back across his wide forehead. He looked stripped without his glasses, vulnerable and small. If she pretended not to hear him, then none of this would happen. She had to give God time to perform his miracle of healing. She prayed. She believed. All she wanted was her husband well and his arms around her heart.

  Shadows flickered against the canvas that bounded them like a cave of thinnest bone Candle wax smelled strong, his breathing raspy.

  Suddenly, she had to know, had to find an answer to a question she had harbored in her heart.

  “Would you have gone without me, Jeremy? If I hadn't agreed to leave the bluffs, the river, would you have gone on without me?”

  “I am going on…without you, Maze,” he said.

  “But would you? If I had stood firm. I need to know, to know if I could have prevented this if I had just refused, been stubborn, and insisted that we stay home.”

  “I'm going home.” He lifted his hand to her head, as gentle as a butterfly landing.

  “Please, Jeremy, tell me.”

  “I would have left,” he said then. “It was in my blood, to come. No regrets for leaving home; but for being willing, .to leave you for it, for not loving you…enough to stay For that I ask…forgiveness. Think God's given it.”

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sp; He lifted her hand to his lips then, gazed at her. She thought she nodded to him. His eyes looked as though to sink inside hers. “You're…a big girl, Mazy,” he rattled from his chest. “You can do this.” He took one, then two last halting breaths before his labored breathing ended

  It could be sliced with an icicle, Ruth thought, as the emptiness of death settled on them, heavy as any snowfall back in the States. This time of grieving brought all that back, that winter past when she couldn't lift her legs without them aching, pushing against the wet and heavy drifts to feed the horses. The next day she'd done it all again, not because she wanted to or thought her body could, but because to succumb meant a loss too great to imagine; animals down or dead, her own desire defeated

  This time shadowed that. Her brother, gone. Her gentle, caring brother, dead, and now others, people new to her but somehow connected like the spokes of a wheel all bound to a hub. What Ruth could offer was a push to action. That was what countered grief.

  Tomorrow, they'd get through the burials. So many. Sister Esther's second brother dead too Ferrel, his name was. The Sister's face carried the look of a frustrated cat about to pounce on something. Antone, Tyrell, Hathaway, and Jeremy.

  Then Ruth would press to convene a meeting, provide relief with the presentation of a plan. Move forward. They'd slip through the grip of grief as long as they headed on. She was as sure ofthat as she was that the Platte harbored quicksand.

  She'd talk with Matt and that Pepin man about taking the cattle ahead, to make faster time to Fort Laramie. Some of her horses could go too, send packs full of grain from her wagon. She'd bring Jed and Betha's and meet up with them later. Maybe the Bacon bull could go with them, be less of a trouble for them. They'd have to combine wagons.

  Ruth made her way past Suzanne's wagon, surprised to see the Bacons’ dog lying there, what with Jeremy passed on. She checked on Betha, brushed the hair from her nephew's puffed eyes, let the children cling to her. She looked for Sarah, who asked for so little, and held her, too. Jessie had begged to come with her for the night, and she'd agreed. She liked the action of tucking the coverlet around the child as she crawled into the bed. She'd pulled the flannel up to the girl's chin. Jessie flipped it back. “Too hot,” she said, then closed her eyes to sleep.

  In her bedroll, Ruth listened to the crickets and swatted at the buzzing of mosquitoes, wanting to drown out the sounds of sadness she heard from wagons beyond. Jessie slept beside her. She'd concentrate on the child's safe, even breathing. A tiny island of joy in this sea of frozen grief.

  Mazy had seen people die before, her father's patients. But those were distant people, men most often, people she knew had families, parents, sometimes wives and children to mourn them. But she hadn't intertwined her life with theirs. She'd never felt love's other side—great loss, betrayal, even dark anger—when they died. She had not hung grief on her shoulders and worn it like a cloak.

  They'd been gone but two months on this trail, and yet her world had changed beyond any power she had to change it back.

  “Good to see you're up, child,” Elizabeth told her.

  Mazy stared at her, sorting the words. She barely remembered the night.

  “Lura's boy, Matt, and their teamster, Joe Pepin, are helping folks get their wagons hitched. Charles might help too, though I have my doubts about that one. We'll have the service for Antone and Hathaway and Jeremy, that Ferrel fellow. Then be on our way.”

  “Go somewhere?”

  “You'll have to handle a wagon, Mazy. Madison? You think you can?”

  “But there's no reason to keep going,” Mazy said. She heard her voice as though weighted, carrying rocks from a long way off.

  “No reason not to. Almost halfway.” Elizabeth's voice softened. “Not even June 15. Making good time.”

  Mazy s mind moved over to the cold places death left behind. “How could he do this? Let this happen?”

  “Wasn't Jeremy's fault he took sick.”

  “I promised and prayed, Mother. How could he?”

  “Madison, we're gonna bury these good men, and then we're heading on to Laramie. No sense blaming. Don't remember anywhere it says if we keep our promises God'll be forced into something he might not have in mind.”

  She looked up at her mother, stared at the soft waves of gray-streaked brown that made her mothers eyes look exceedingly blue. “God loves obedience. I obeyed. I came as Jeremy asked me. He told me, Mother, that he would have come without me. It would have torn our marriage apart if I had stayed at home ” Her eyes watered, and she brushed at the tears. “But maybe he wouldn't have come, maybe I could have saved him then, from this., horrible death. Or if I'd stayed, he could have moved faster, gone on ahead, missed this disease.”

  Elizabeth picked up the ivory-handled hairbrush and began undoing the twist of her daughter's heavy chestnut hair. “You're torturing yourself, Madison. No need for it ” She laid the combs aside and drew the bristles through natural waves that expanded with the brushing. “He didn't promise us a smooth ride, darling,” Elizabeth said. “Just that he'd be there with us through it, that he'd never leave us nor desert us. So I spect he's here still, making plans He knows our lot.”

  “I had good boundaries and I left them For this, this godforsaken land without a tree for miles except beside a stream.”

  “We just can't always see what lays ahead, Madison, and we sure can't let the past alone be creatin our present. Got to see it for what it is and let us find the pleasant places wherever we are, wherever we're planted. It don't seem like it now, but you'll come through this, you will.” She retwisted the hair into a soft roll that rose up from the back of Mazy's neck to crown her head. “Come now, let's get your face washed and put on a fresh wrapper. Unless you want your bloomers”

  Elizabeth lifted loose wisps of hair with the backs of her fingers and caught them into the roll. Mazy felt the tears press against her nose and pool inside her eyes She leaned her head into her mother's skirts and wept.

  Suzanne opened her eyes, expecting to see light. She was disappointed, once again. How many more years would she be sightless before she opened her eyes and did not experience that split second of hope, the belief that she would not only feel the warmth of light but see it before the darkness came upon her like a mud slide. Perhaps forever. At least now she noticed the warmth. And she saw the colors.

  It had taken her awhile to discover swirls of stain in reds and yellows and whites and blues. She could remember as a child—a seeing child in Michigan—that if she closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against them, she would see tints and hues of soft light beneath her lids, not unlike the northern lights. Something about the pressure against her eyes brought out the color, that's what Franklin had told her. He was a wise older brother, and she loved that she could see something he could not, but that he still believed in what she said.

  “Like the aurora borealis, Coot,” he teased.

  “Boars aren't roaring,” she'd said, taking her fingers from her eyes She turned toward the pens where their father kept the large hogs they raised. She could see plainly then, the big shoats snorting. “I can't hear them roaring, anyway.”

  Franklin laughed and tousled her hair.

  “Aurora borealis,” he said, enunciating. “It's the name of the bouncing lights you've seen against the horizon. Remember? I think that's what pressing against your eyes is like.”

  She did remember the northern lights at home. Home, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan; home, where she'd first learned to love. She'd seen them in a night sky as black as her world was now but for the strings of color that shot through it, flickering, glowing green and yellow off the far horizon.

  “How did they get there?” she asked Franklin.

  “It's where they were put,” he said, providing as good an answer as any she'd ever heard. “Just like us.”

  Years later, after the accident, when they'd removed the bandages from her eyes, and she opened them with all the hope she dared, she rem
embered Franklins words. She'd been dropped like a shooting star crashing to a dark earth. Not even the soft hues; nothing but blackness. That's where she'd been put.

  She didn't have to like it.

  Weeks later she became aware of the colors, soft swirls of egg and strawberry jam creamed into a cocoa-floured cake. Small consolation, she thought, dribbles of yellow and red when once she had known an artist's palette of paint.

  Once she had seen the blond head of her child bobbing in a bassinet, smiling and kicking his feet as he cooed; once she had looked through a cameras lens, seen the image of a wedded couple upside down but known that it would appear perfecdy on the glass plates. She had once sewn intricate garments fit for senators’ wives on a sewing machine Bryce purchased when they married, an extravagance her cousins had marveled about.

  Little good the thing did now. She hated that Bryce insisted they buy a new one just before this journey.

  “What, you think I can thread a needle?” She'd asked him.

  “Your fingers…1 could do that part if you would let me.”

  “And then what? Turn the wheel and stitch my hand into the cloth? That's what I'd do and be even more crippled than I am. I can no longer sew, Bryce. No longer do anything that matters, don't you see? Leave it here, that machine. Leave me here! Take Clayton and go.”

  But he'd taken it anyway, and he'd brought her, too, to a place “where no one will expect you to do what you did before,” he said. “Where you can…we can start new.”

  “I'll know what I could do before,” she'd shouted at him, tears burning against the scarred eyes that looked out on nothing. “I'll be with myself. I'm not allowed to leave that behind.”

  What did it matter now? Bryce was dead and here she sat with Clayton, alone, another child on the way, a child whose light she'd never see. The scent of bacon being fried reached her, was strong enough to push through the mildew smell of the canvas and the pungent scent of Claytons scraped but as yet unwashed diaper covering his bottom.

  She needed to change him. She turned her face in the pillow, her hand patting for her child Instead, the scent of Bryce greeted her from the down, along with a dozen memories. The world of the past was stored within scents and sounds and proved more powerful than any book of old photographs.