All Together in One Place Read online

  “Oh, did he?”

  “Never wanted this to be torture for you, Maze.” He reached, lifted her hand and cupped his over it as he held the reins, felt the pull of the leather against her palm, the coolness of her fingers. “Wanted it to be our journey together. Just didn't know how to…to bring it up, without you getting all agitated. And then you've been so off your feed, as your mothercl say.”

  “Would I?” Elizabeth said.

  “That confirmed I made the right choice in waiting, just doing it all on my own.”

  Mazy started to pull away. He held her hand firm.

  “All I want is some say in my own life,” Mazy said.

  “Its what I want too. It is, Maze. To decide things together. When we can ” He was never sure how much to tell her or when.

  “I still don't understand why we have to go at all, why you need such a change.”

  “Life is just that All it is, and adjusting to it”

  The mule twisted his head to bite at a fly. “Adora doesn't know of Hathaway's plan, does she?” Mazy said

  Jeremy settled back into the saddle. “Hathaway 11 have his own price to pay tonight when he tells her what he offered me…us. Once she turns seventeen, he's willing for the marriage, but until then, we'd be asked to be her family, treat her as our own.”

  “She's not that much younger than you,” Elizabeth said.

  “Might be a friend for you, Maze,” Jeremy said. “Doesn't seem you have many.”

  “With good reason when I have to leave them behind, unexpected.” She sighed. “Well, let's talk with Tipton, then, see what she understands.”

  Jeremy let out a burst of held air. “Thanks, Maze. Told Hathaway to come on out tomorrow, unless I came back to tell him different. I think this could be good, really good for us. I feel it in my bones.”

  “I'm the one whose bones have feeling,” Mazy said lifting her sling. “And good's not the word I'd choose.”

  The new people who'd bought the Bacon place arrived early the next day, before either Tyrell or Tipton and her family. Mazy held herself back from the woman, a Mrs. Malarky. Her mother proved the more invitational, showing the woman the house, the furniture they'd leave, while Jeremy and the new owner rode mules toward the bluffs and the highest boundaries of the Bacon place.

  Mazy watched the Malarkys’ two boys, probably three and five, who tumbled out of the wagon like puppies, exploring and chattering after the chickens. Pig had barked at them and their dog, a yellow herding type with a long tail. The dogs marked their territory then sniffed each other and decided both could stay.

  “And this is Mazy s garden, what s left of it,” her mother told Mrs. Malarky. The two walked over to where Mazy squatted, pulling aimlessly at weeds. Mrs. Malarky, a short, round woman, looked as though she might have put on weight with the carrying of her children and had simply forgotten to take it back off.

  “A fine tilling,” Mrs. Malarky said. “Little mussed up, maybe, but its still early for setting seedlings.”

  “The brute,” Mazy said, standing, brushing dirt from her apron. “He did some renovating. I think the beans'll be fine. They didn't get troubled much. But the tomatoes, I doubt they'll make it. I brought them back inside. One or two might recover and could be set out again and staked.”

  “Must be hard to leave it—all this.” It is.

  They stood silent, eyes massaged by the landscape. “Do you have a seed gourd?” Mrs. Malarky asked. “No sense my keeping my seeds when you already planted yours. I've got some maple tree seed wings, too. You're taking a lilac start, surely?”

  “I'd be grateful for the seeds,” Mazy said. “And now you mention it, I think I'll take a bucket of Wisconsin soil with me, too.”

  “Now that's essential,” her mother said, and Mazy laughed.

  The Wilson girl left no doubt about whose heart she was after, batting eyes at her intended. Jeremy'd said she could assist with cooking. Elizabeth smiled to herself. Men. Something about that girl said she might be interested in cooking, all right, but not over an open pit.

  A slender gloved hand rested on the muscled forearm of Tyrell Jenkins as the two meandered toward the house now almost empty of all Bacon things and slowly filling up with the Malarkys'. The latter had graciously decided to walk with their children to the pond dotted with ducks when the visitors arrived.

  Adora and Hathaway paced behind their daughter, Adora like a boat being dragged across shallow water. Adora didn't smile as she approached, her jaw set. Even Charles had joined them for the family discourse, wearing cream-colored breeches and that halfhearted smile.

  “I wont be even a smidgen of a bother,” Tipton offered when they gathered in the large room on the Malarkys’ chairs and the ones Mazy d been forced to leave behind. “Papas told me all the rules, and I'll most certainly abide ” She smiled that clasped-front-teeth smile that looked as though she were delicately biting off a piece of meat without letting it touch her lips, her back bed-slat straight.

  “Even if you dont like what you re asked to do,” Hathaway said, “you'll do it.”

  “Oh, Papa, haven't I always?”

  Adora wiped her nose with a white lace handkerchief. Gray, swollen eyes looked out from a puffy, grief-splotched face.

  “We'll take good care of her, Adora,” Mazy said, “though no one can do that so well as a mother.”

  “She'll be a help to you, Hath says, what with your arm and all.” Adora squeezed at her nose, her fingertips white. “I'll get by. Truth is, Hath says I'll be fine without my baby.”

  “You still have me, Mother,” Charles said from his chosen place near the door.

  “Oh yes, I know.”

  Mazy patted Adoras clenched hand. “We'll be welcoming your help, Mr. Jenkins,” she said then to Tyrell.

  “Worry-free wheels when a smithy travels with you.” Elizabeth grinned. “Could use that as a calling card.”

  Tyrell blushed “If I had such a thing.” He fingered his hat brim. Elizabeth guessed him to be in his midtwenties, but he might have been older, gauging by those experience lines flowing out from his kind eyes. He was a well-proportioned young man, with a wash of wisdom about him, something offering compassion and care She watched him perch his hat on his knee and rest his wide hand over Tipton's while the girl twirled the reddish hairs at his wrist.

  “You'll write,” Adora told her daughter. She looked at Mazy. “You'll make her. They say they leave mail at the forts and riders coming east will bring them. It would be so helpful, to know what's happening…I just could not bear it if something…and I did not know.”

  “You heading through Iowa, then,” Hathaway asked. “South overland? Not taking the river to St Louis?”

  “Just flat country straight east across the ferry,” Jeremy told him.

  “And you'd know that, how?” Mazy asked.

  “Readings I've done Those forty-niners heading back from the fort talk I know what I'm doing, Maze,” Jeremy said.

  “Mama worries overmuch,” Tip ton said. “Tell her, Papa, there's nothing to worry over.”

  “Maybe not, but caution still needs to be heeded. In all things,” her father said and raised one eyebrow to his daughter.

  “So your baby'U wed in Oregon,” Elizabeth said. Adora let out a little mewing sound Hathaway put his arm around his wife and patted her shoulder. It seemed to Elizabeth that the woman stiffened when he did.

  “On the day I achieve seventeen. We'll have a daguerreotype made and send you the likeness, Mama. Oh, it is such an adventure. Isn't it, Tyrellie?” She twirled at his wrist hairs again, and the square, sturdy man picked at a scrape on the leather of his boot as he blushed.

  Mazy and Jeremy lay on the narrow cornhusk mattress squeezed into the back of the wagon. Tonight was a trial, to see if they had what they needed before starting out in the morning. Mazy gazed at the headboard of her grandmothers old bed, but it didn't hold the bed slats. They had become part of the wagons floor. The space beneath the canvas wagon cover c
onfined her like a corset, stuffed as it was with shelving and barrels and trunks. And yet she felt emptied by the inevitable.

  Outside, crickets clacked and Mazy wondered if there would be crickets where they were going. Or clamshells for her buttons? Ducks of a dozen names? Morel mushrooms—would they grow there? Or a hundred other things of nature that nourished her and filled her soul. The Lord knows my bt He makes my boundaries fall on pleasant places She would keep repeating the phrase along with “help me, help me, help me.” It was all she could do.

  She listened to Tyrell snore from his bedroll on the ground outside. Tipton and Mazys mother shared a straw tick in Elizabeths wagon. Mazy crept out of the wagon and dropped with a gentle thud to the dew-moistened ground. In the pink of the morning light, she made her way to the garden for one last look of longing.

  Mazy watched the outline of deer etched in the distance. Morning fog lifted over the timber in the direction of the river. She wiped her face with her shawl and felt the shiver of the morning cool her swollen arm. She breathed hard, fatigued by the effort at getting out of bed. She yearned to run, to hide inside a limestone cave until this uprooting passed. But Jeremy was her husband She'd vowed before God to stay with him ‘til death. No place was worth the melting away of a marriage.

  Jeremy sneezed behind her.

  “Can't surprise you, with this dratted nose,” he said. She felt him fumble for a handkerchief, blow his nose again. “Appreciate your change of heart, Maze.” He rocked her side to side then, gentle, the way a mother rocked her baby. “Expect someday you might forgive the way I did it?” Jeremy said. “I did better, with the Wilson girl, didn't I?”

  “You did. Though I think before this journeys over we may both be wondering what lapse of thinking attacked us when we agreed to take her on.”

  “Shell be fine. This is what she wanted. Doubt shell challenge it.”

  “Men can be thick as a tree trunk,” Mazy said.

  “Oh, can we?” He turned her to him then, his hands on her. The wash of his words whispered at her ear, rounding the edges of her anger. “You're a good woman, Maze,” he said, “doing what's right. It's a man's lot to make a way for his family. That's all I'm doing.” He leaned to kiss her.

  Mazy pulled away, aware of his startled eyes. “I'm keeping my vows, Jeremy,” she said, “to stay with you through thick and thin. That's why I'm going. But I've plans to come back. Wisconsin is what I knew first, and I can't imagine finding anything to replace it.”

  “The West'll seduce you, the vistas and valleys. Just as I'd like to now,” he said, pulling her to him, “before the cows need milking.”

  She pushed at his hands. “Mother'll hear.”

  She turned and stomped back to the wagon

  “I don't much like good-byes,” Mazy said.

  “Sometimes, if we're smart, we can turn them into hellos,” Elizabeth said. “They live just on the other side.” Elizabeth wedged her way between Tipton and Tyrell, settling onto the seat. She smiled and lines creased out like spokes of a wagon wheel as she waved her daughter toward the lead wagon as they readied to head out.

  Mazy looked back only once. She saw Mrs. Malarky, round as a pumpkin, waving from her doorway, two boys like short stakes on either side. In the distance, Mr. Malarky already strained behind a mule tilling soil. She felt a rush of blood come to her face, a feeling of envy so pro- found it made her ache. She memorized this last look of their place, inhaled it, vowing to remember every detail, every nuance, every smell and touch and taste of where she'd first known contentment and independence braided together as peace.

  “What s that? You bringing weeds along?” Jeremy said glancing at the bucket of dirt pushed up against the dashboard that kept mud from the mules’ hooves from flying at their feet.

  “Wisconsin soil and a tomato plant,” she said, prepared to counter a challenge. “I intend to plant them in our new home. Who knows, maybe I'll even come back here to do it.”

  Jeremy said nothing, slapped the reins on the mules’ backs.

  Ahead, Pig chased after rabbits, checking back in from time to time, and Mazy could see his black tail pointing to the sky as he flushed quail. Tiny white flowers pushed through the dark forest floor reaching up for light. The land bloomed lush and green and the air felt balmy, just a light breeze lifting the leaves of sumac and oak. Before long, the morels would expose themselves beside blue columbine in the shade of the elms. It was such an early spring. Mazy bit her lip. Her garden would have been so bountiful.

  3

  the gathering

  What was that racket? It sounded like chickens playing marbles with the dogs. Tipton pulled the linen over her head. Hadn't she earned a good nights sleep? Hadn't she done all the Bacons had asked and then some? Milking those cows ‘til her hands ached, and from behind, too. Whoever heard of such a thing? And she'd endured for days the chafing of damp clothes after the hailstorm and Mr. Bacon refusing to stop long enough for things to dry out. Had she complained? Not once, not that she didn't have cause.

  She'd thrown things out of her trunk to lighten the load while Miz Bacon hung on to that bucket of Cassville dirt! It didn't seem fair. Mr. Bacon was a stern and driven man, even if he did help his wife hang the cauldron over the fire without her having to ask. Still, Miz Bacon said Tipton s was the “attitude that needed buttressing.”

  What attitude? She'd rarely said a word these past six weeks. She was sure she didn't roll her eyes as often as Miz Bacon did at her very own mother, especially when the older woman mentioned her aching “backside” fifteen times a day, which she did. Tipton counted.

  Six weeks they'd been on the road together, jostled and bounced across Iowa's rutted roads until Tipton's neck ached more than Mrs Mueller's behind, not that she'd be so rude as to say it. Iowa was nothing but mud sketched through the shadow of tall, towering, blocking-out-the-sun trees. Tipton felt constantly cool. Snow had sometimes spit at their faces. Snow! Only the presence of Tyrell beside her gave her warmth, that and the memory of stolen moments when he'd kissed her as Mrs. Mueller pawed for something in the wagon, or the evening she'd crept to his bedroll and he'd held her briefly before he whispered her back. Stealing the experiences made them the sweeter.

  With effort, they'd reached and forded the Desmoines River in what Tyrell told her was record time. Still, they'd rarely had a day without some happening to make Mr. Bacon complain that they weren't moving fast enough or far enough or paying enough attention to “essentials.”

  “We're required to be in Kanesville by May fifteenth,” Mr. Bacon said, tapping his finger to his temple in that way he had. The delays hadn't been anyone's fault, not that Mr Bacon would say so. No, someone always had to be at fault with him. A broken king bolt? Mules gone lame? He blamed that on “too many worthless things being carried.”

  They got oxen, unruly ones, from a settler, and she'd heard Mrs. Mueller say they had to lay out cash, too. Tyrell told her they should have had oxen to begin with. But Mr. Bacon set his own pace and didn't much listen to the wisdom of others.

  But Tyrell was so easygoing, such a gentleman, he always let Mr. Bacon have the last word Tipton hoped that wasn't a sign of weakness in her future husband. She wished he'd spoken up when the women asked for time to hang clothes on a bush to dry or look for berries to supplement biscuits and flour gravy.

  “We keep moving,” Tyrell told her later, his mouth surrounded by that red beard. “Not much worthy of bickering over. You got to get clear about what matters and then have the courage to do it.” He picked up her hand and rubbed the tips of her fingers as he talked. She loved to watch him talk.

  What mattered to Tipton's way of thinking was time with Tyrell, when her feet weren't so sore from the walking, when her hands weren't so red and dry from the water and wind.

  She had dreamed of making this journey together. Except for the first day out, there had been little to dream about, just long hours of riding, then walking, and sometimes just waiting while Tyrell pounded on ir
on to repair the wheels. They moved fallen trees from trails, crossed rushing streams. Her days were filled with the clang of Mr. Bacons orders and Miz Bacon refusing while he brushed off dust and focused on “essentials.” Tipton heard that word in her sleep.

  Then last evening, they'd rattled into the valley cupping Kanesville or what some called Council Bluffs. Rounded mounds on either side marked this gateway to the Missouri, and campfires twinkled across the area. Tipton was sorry she was too tired and sore to explore. Mrs. Mueller set her sights on meeting people, invited her too. “Mazy says you can sleep past dawn tomorrow. Shell look after the cows in the morning,” Mrs. Mueller told her

  Instead, Tipton did what Tyrell planned to do: crawled into bed early

  Now it was morning and the cackling and barking and what sounded like the chattering of children tore her from a dreamless sleep.

  Her supple fingers with tapered nails clutched her chemise at her throat as she crawled over Mrs. Mueller. The older woman didn t budge. Tipton wrinkled her nose at the snores, the smells of old sleep. She cringed at the closeness, the assumption of intimacy.

  The whispering outside grew louder. Tipton folded back the wagon flap and startled as a child's dark blue eyes peered straight into hers. They both screamed at once. Tipton jumped, and the small boy clambered off the low step, tripping over another boy, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Then they fled, kicking up dirt as they left. One was thin as a hairbrush handle, the other as round as crossed buns.

  Children! Tipton prepared to scold, but what she saw outside stopped her cold.

  Tents and wagons and people moved everywhere. New people, cooking next to painted wagons. Women in white aprons bent over low fires, pushing their skirts back from the flames. Dogs lounged about, some sniffing close to cackling, caged chickens. Cows and oxen bellowed in the distance. The boy who'd peeked into their wagon, his hair slick and parted in the middle, turned to pick up his cap and then slipped beneath a tethered horse that hadn't been there when Tipton had told Tyrell good night.