All Together in One Place (16 page)

It reminded her of Indian country, this land beside the Platte. Ruth had seen plenty of Indians back in Kentucky. They'd been fierce at one time, warring, her father said, forcing her and her sisters to practice drills using a Kentucky long rifle. The drills were followed by a sneak and crawl on their bellies to the potato cellar dug out of the damp earth on their isolated farm. Ruth thought the snakes they had encountered in Kentucky much more dangerous than the Indians she saw once or twice through the door cracks. The Pawnee simply lifted a basket of apples or pulled at tobacco leaves hanging from the drying shed rafter or found a bolt of cloth they draped around them as they left.

None of the items taken seemed worth a life, though her father said what belonged to them was worth killing for.

Justice was a word her father used often. She wondered how his justice would fare in this place, with wagons owned by some and driven by others; with travel made without permission across uncharted lands; decisions made not by any standard law nor by the wisest, but by those who could convince the others of their certainty through the power of their words or might. Her father had been good at that, using words to convince. He had not convinced her, and that had been her loss.

Ruth slapped her hand on the shoulder of an ox. It was good to be on the trail, to be actually heading toward something instead of just
running away. New sights and sounds and smells, that's what she needed to replace the past. She didn't mind a sky the color of pewter either, the way some did, or light misty rains that kept the dust down. Those kinds of days felt like quilts around her, comforting and close.

Zane had liked those heavy days too. It was just one of their many commonalities. She supposed that was what deluded her in the end, the belief that only those meant for each other could share so many finely tuned details like the rub of wool against skin or relishing the taste of caviar without it having to be acquired.

She shook her head. The neck string holding her hat pulled against her throat. He'd been a good man—hadn't he? She would not think further than that.

Ruth walked beside the last wagon. On either side and to the front rolled wagons hoping to avoid the puff and spurt of prairie dust by branching out at an angle from the other teams. She pulled the neckerchief up over her nose, straining the dusty air. Ruth would not rotate toward the front as the others would throughout the journey, a decision that had been voted on by men—and only men.

“A woman without a teamster ought not to place others in jeopardy,” one man said.

“You have a breakdown and it will slow the rest of us, not having any man to help you right away like,” Antone told her.

Even Jed had shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “What can I do?”

Well, what could he do or should he do? Nothing, she decided. She would keep to her own fire at night from here on in. She would cook for herself and not depend on Betha to feed her. She would handle the stock and harness and, yes, make repairs as well. She would be alone in her spirit. She needed no one. She'd already learned that by giving away all that she'd loved. She could even defend herself if necessary, though she doubted the attacks would come from Indians. That she had learned too.

Relief fluttered at Tipton's edges. That Martin woman had been told to bring up drag. Every day she'd bite the dust of others. The men assured the woman that they would not let any harm come to her, but they didn't want Ruth in the middle where her broken wheels or split tongue or lame animal would hold them up while they tried to find someone to make repairs.

“Got to hit Laramie by June 15. Can't afford delays.” That's what they always said. “Can't afford delays” as though speed were a commodity, something you could purchase at her father's Cass-ville store.

Ruth Martin in the back, isolated. That would keep that full smile of hers polished with dirt stuck between her teeth. It put one potential problem in its place, leaving Tipton free to work on the larger one: convincing her father of their need to head to Oregon since Tyrell was going there, or convincing Tyrell to head south—without the Bacons.

The men had determined Ruth
could
run her stock in with theirs. “That's only right,” her brother defended. “She got this far with them. I'll call ‘em mine if need be, ‘til we get to Oregon. Horses are hers, though. If we have losses, stampedes and such, she can't gather up her own. Got to help each other when it comes to that. We'd do it for anyone.”

Ruth hated accepting anything from them. But Jed was right. She wouldn't be able to herd them alone and bring the wagon too, and she needed the wagon for the grain. The horses couldn't make it without the grain. Mules, yes; fine horses, no.

Still, while she ate the dust of all the other emigrants, she wasn't far from the horses. Horses gave back what they got. Horses, like children, were just.

“At least you don't have to pretend anymore,” Betha told her. “Don't have to keep my mouth shut or fib about you having a teamster waiting in Laramie.”

“Right,” Ruth said.

The wagon right in front of her today held the Marriage Association wives-to-be The Associations wagons would choke on others’ dust too. At the same meeting, Sister Esther had raised a ruckus about the Sabbath policy and their not stopping.

“Any who challenge tradition 11 pay a price,” Jed told her.

“Tradition! You call a group of total strangers making things up as they go tradition? It isn't as though we were a town. Not even a group. Where do they get their authority?”

“It's the way it is,” Jed said, “and the sooner folks accept what is, well, the sooner we can solve problems.”

Ruth cracked her whip over the head of the oxen—two-colored beasts, four strong—and forced herself to think of positive things.

A tiny-framed woman with almond eyes stared at her from the back of the wagon ahead of her. The girl kneeled, never changing the expression on her somber face though she shifted left to right with the road, her knees barely moving. She didn't seem at all a happy bride-to-be. More wisdom than age.

“Does that doll talk
to
people?” Jessie asked. The child walked beside Ruth.

“That's a girl, a woman actually,” Ruth told her.

“Looks like a doll. One of Lisbeth's.”

“Who's Lisbeth, one of your new friends?”

“She's big but she has a little girl named Mazy, and she still likes dolls Like that one in the wagon. She says the doll in that wagon talks to bees, but she ain't ever talked to people.”

The girl did look like a porcelain doll, perfect olive skin, high cheekbones, and dark eyes. Her hair was cut short against the nape of her neck, and beside her lay a pointy straw hat.

“Bees?” Ruth said.

“So would she talk?” Jessie asked.

“I don't know. You'll have to pay attention, and when we stop, if she looks willing, you might ask her.”

If the beekeeper didn't talk much, it would add to her mystique, Ruth thought. Her silence already endeared her. Womens talk usually irritated Ruth. She'd heard Betha and that Wilson woman twitter and chatter over “Asians” and “savages.” A silly waste, jabbering about subjects they knew nothing of. They spoke of rattlesnakes and rumors of cholera and musket accidents, but it was the talk of Indians that most incensed Ruth.

“Have you ever seen an Indian?” Ruth asked Adora once when the woman stopped talking long enough to take a breath

“Indeed I have.”

Several others hadn't, and the woman whispered tales that fed fears they'd be taken all the way to Cow Town. Ruth walked away, disgusted. Even Jessie acted scared when they saw a roll of dust off in the distance.

“Indians?” Jessie asked, eyes big as biscuits.

“No. The wind. Something you see every day just in a different way.”

“Only new things re scary, huh, Auntie?”

Ruth considered the question as she watched the child smooth her little apron along her butternut-colored skirt, adjusting it at her hips. She'd seen Betha do that, often. Something in the gesture sent a sweet ache into Ruth's soul

“Sometimes even what we're used to can be frightening, I guess, if it changes and isn't what it once was.”

“Huh?” Jessie asked.

Ruth ran a gloved hand down the girl's bouncing sausage curls as they walked. “Fear just tells us that something is different. To deal with it, we just have to apply what we know, do our best in that new place.”

“If that dust was a Indian, Papa might have to shoot him, huh?”

“Not you too, Jessie,” Ruth moaned.

“What if they come and shooted at us and took Mommy away and—”

“It's a dust devil, just the wind making the dirt rise up like that. Don't get your imagination all worked up over nothing.”

“What's magination?”

“Something you have in your mind, something you play like. A dream, sort of.”

Jessie walked in silence. “But I'm awake, Auntie. I'm not sleeping.”

“Strange thinking doesn't require sleeping, Jessie.”

“Lisbeth says to dream all the time, so I know what to reach for when I'm big.”

“That's more like hoping, having something to look forward to, to hang on to when you're…mixed up, when you're uncertain. So you have something to remind you of where you're going.”

“Yup,” Jessie said as though she understood completely.

Ruth cracked the whip over the ox's head to divert a shift to the left

“Mommy says they'll steal food from us, the Indians will. Take your horses, too, she said.”

“If you were hungry and someone had a picnic in your yard, wouldn't you want to join them?”

“We're in their yard?” Her brown eyes stared at Ruth in wonder, her face holding the awe of new insight. 1 d say so.

“Wait ‘til I tell Jason He don't know they're coming to a picnic. Tell Lisbeth, too. I'm gonna tell ‘em right away.”

“Jason's pretty far ahead. Several wagons. You won't get lost?”

“I'm really fast.” She started to bolt ahead.

“Wait a minute,” Ruth said. The girl's skirt and apron billowed up around her like an upside-down tulip as she jumped up and down in her excitement to go. Her toes left small impressions in the soft dust.

Ruth looked behind her to see how closely the cattle and horses followed. She'd heard of accidents, wagons rolling over children, and didn't think she could live if something that dreadful happened to Jessie. Not Jessie. One lost child was enough.

“I believe the Bacons would release you from the contract if they could find another teamster at Laramie to take your place,” Tipton suggested. She blinked her eyelashes. She gazed at Tyrell walking in the wagons shadow.

“Not the point, Tip,” Tyrell said. “I signed on to help the Bacons. They still need me.”

“Maybe we should talk with my father about me heading on with them, then. I'll tell them that I'll follow the Bacons’ wagon anyway if they don't agree. I threatened to do that before, and it got them to let me come here.”

“Got them here too, Tip.”

Her parasol shaded her eyes as she looked up at him. “Which means they know I'd make good on my threat.”

“I wouldn't let you. Be too dangerous. The Bacons would send you back, and I'd honor that, you know I would. No, better we accept our disappointment and face what is. Set our sights on staying in touch so when you turn seventeen I'll know where to come in California to find you for my bride.”