All Together in One Place (2 page)

Later, she would be filled with ifs, the stuffing of regret, but at that moment, Mazy Bacon rested inside contentment.

An unfamiliar sound made her stand and turn toward the wooded trail. Anticipation preceded puzzlement. Was it a woman's voice? A shout or grunt? She couldn't see anyone and no one used her name; a neighbor would have called her name. Her skin prickled at her neck. She felt large and exposed in her bloomers.

“Jeremy?”

A breeze washed through the pines, gave no answer.

Suddenly, something slashed through timber, loud and unruly. She caught a flash of rust and white, braiding through the shadow of birches, poplars, and pines. Her eyes followed the sound as it shifted in the wooded thickness. She willed herself to see what she heard. She couldn't.

“Jeremy? Is that you?” She shaded the sun from her
eyes
with her hand, aware that her heart pounded. Sweat dribbled at her breast, her hands felt damp, her body responding to danger before her mind could make sense.

A sound behind her didn't match with the clatter coming from the
timber. She twisted in the dirt. Spiders of fear inched up her spine as the truth of its source stung clear.

Jeremy Bacon cursed the branches swiping at his face. How had the animal gotten away from him? So close to home but the cow brute wasn't familiar with this corral, so he wouldn't head home on his own. He would frenzy himself in the trees, move out and be lost forever, Jeremy's investment, gone, unless he could catch up the cows and hope the brute would come to them. With all the ruckus, the milk cows had bolted too. The hemp lines trailed behind them, threatening to catch in the trees and the brambles.

If only Mazy had agreed to come along! She could have helped. Instead what he had was misery, multiplied by frantic stock. He had to get them to the corral. His eye caught something through the trees near the meadow and he stopped. What was Mazy doing in those blasted bloomers? He shouted but she turned from him. He strained to see what took her attention. When he caught sight of it, his heart thudded to his knees.

The cow brute shook his wide mahogany head weighted with horns that arched upward like parallel arrows. His nostrils and mouth sprayed foam and saliva in the air. Tilled earth spewed over his back as he pawed at the ground she'd just planted. His eyes bore into Mazy's.

Mazy's hands and feet were stumps of thickness, too heavy to move. Cold, like the dangerous place of the river, coursed through her. Her head screamed to run.

Instead, she backed away, as careful as a heron's lift and laying of limbs. She stared at the ground now, her beloved soil, the seedlings both
frail and exposed. The brute snorted and then lunged. Mazy sank to the earth as though dead.

Had she read that somewhere? Had Jeremy once told her? Remembered advice from some wounded patient her father had treated? She couldn't remember. Her face fell into the seedlings, her cheek gritty with dirt, just as the brute rushed ahead.

Horns gouged the ground beside her, launched pebbles of earth to her back, pelting her like snowballs on the calves of her legs, her bonnet, her head. Spray from his nose dribbled, foamed on her arm. She could see it there, the clear bubble, wondered if it was the last thing she would see. Her eyelids folded closed on their own.

She heard and smelled and felt everything as though cut with her mothers sharp scissors. Agitated weight shook the ground beside her head. The brutes breathing labored raspy, yet he bellowed, and Mazy knew that if she opened her eyes she would see the wide, wet nose inches from her head. More dirt, then his sweated scent, and she heard the thin chemise rip at her side from the scrape of his hoof as he twisted and jerked.

Help me, help me, help me Keep me still, dorit agitate him more
Her mind journeyed then, searched for pleasant places, the things she loved: her Lord, her husband, her mother, the land. She drifted above the timber to the far corners of the boundaries of the Bacon place, to the land that bordered on bluffs cut by a year-round stream that rushed through the meadow in the hot Wisconsin summer and froze over, hard as a horseshoe, in winter. Stands of pine surrounded the meadow, spearing the sky so high nothing grew beneath them on the forest floor: shelter for deer, high perches for eagles. The cleared meadow gave up stacks of hay for wintering the Bacons’ stock. At the edge of the one hundred sixty acres rose the log house Jeremy's uncle had built and when he died had left—along with the farm—to his nephew.

Mazy loved this place. She relished the routine of her days, the high vistas and views. She hoped to spend her life here, to live and till and
plant and let herself be nurtured by home and the love of her husband. Wind wove through eagles wings soaring above her.

Her mind jerked back with the grunt of the brute.

He'd gore her next, gouge her with his arched horns, throw her over his back and then stomp her, and she'd be dead at the feet of a longed-for dream. Her passing would wound her husband, grieve her mother, the two in her life she loved most. Jeremy would bear the blame; she was sorry for that when this was her doing. She shouldn't have worn the bloomers, she should have gone with him, she should have, she should.

The brute twisted then. She could tell by the spray from his nostrils and the rumble of earth beneath her head. He pawed and bawled. She smelled dirt and manure. Then fury propelled him just as the piercing pain of his horns jabbed her side, the force of it lifting her, pushing, then rolling her over. She lay on her back, the blue ribbon of her bonnet caught at her throat. Her arms were like dolls’ arms, stiff and exposed. A place at her side burned like the stab of a poker.

She heard the crack the moment the brute lunged, the solid bone of her arm breaking while her elbow sank into earth. A wail formed at her throat but she held it, swallowed it, still as a new-planted seed; amazed but committed to living. The sound of wind she recognized as blood rushed through her ears, her heart pounded. Her mind willed the sounds into stillness.

Pig barked then. A clatter from the timber broke her drifting. She heard splintering in the trees and what sounded like a woman's voice and then gunshots, a lead thud close to her in the dirt. A bawl, the brute snorted, and Pig barked, standing between her and the seed cow. Earth struck her like pelts of soft rain. She heard another shot, recognized it as Jeremy's cap-and-ball revolver, heard the animal bellow but farther from her now, closer to the corral. She knew in that instant what Jeremy was doing and that she, Mazy Bacon, would live not from her husband's crack shots but from her stillness, her wit, lying dead like an uprooted plant.

She heard her husband shouting directions to the dog, then to her. “Mazy! Don't move, no sounds We'll have him in, just hang on.”

Pig barked in the distance. Mazy risked opening her eyes. White, fleecy clouds drifted above her. She pressed her left hand over her stomach and stuffed part of the bloomer against oozing blood. Her arm throbbed and burned, and when she tried to move it, she felt a thousand bee stings all at once. She panted. The bull roared in the distance.

Now all was a blur, not precise. Someone ran toward her. Relief and pain touched her stomach; a prayer of thanks pressed into her mind.

“I am so sorry, so terribly sorry,” Jeremy said, scooping her shoulders to lift and pull her to him. She cried out as he rocked her, then his hand held her head while she retched “O, Mazy! The brute, .it got away from us. The cows got tangled up with the ropes and we—”

“Cows?”

“Mazy, Mazy.” He wiped her forehead with his soft fingers as she buried her face into his shirt smelling of perspiration, fear, and relief. The dog bounded over and tried licking her. “No, Pig,” he said. His fingers made a feathery probe in her side. “You'll be sore. Badly scraped. And the arm…” He cradled the bone of her arm, the movement forcing a gasp. “Lets get you inside,” he said. “You're starting to shake.”

He squatted as though to lift her, and the pain of the action and the thought of his trying to carry her and the relief she felt at being alive, at seeing him, and the dogs licking at her toes, forced a strangled sound from her throat. Parched joy she felt, mixed as it was with the rhythm of living and pain.

“I'm too big,” she said. “Dont try to carry me. Just help me stand.” She heard the thump of footsteps thudding across the ground. The brute bellowed. She tensed. “He's corralled,” her husband said. “Its all right.”

“Who's there?” Pointed shoes stopped in the dirt beside the dog. “Mother?”

“I waddle like a duck when I'm hurrying,” Elizabeth Mueller said, breathless.

“Here, I got this side of her, Jeremy. Let me hold the arm steady. Is
it broken? We was so worried, baby,” she said, kissing her daughters forehead. To Jeremy she said, “Got the cows in too?”

“Cows?” Not just a bull? It didn't make sense what her mother was saying.

Mazy's teeth chattered. She wobbled between Jeremy and Elizabeth as cobwebs smothered her mind.

They set her arm, the rub of bone against bone making her sick in her stomach. They splinted it, held it firm to her chest with a sling formed from a strip of her petticoat; Mazy's swollen fingers fisted over a pair of Jeremy's gray knit socks, something soft to steady and grip. They gave her dark laudanum. It turned her mind to sleep.

“Can you wrap my arm in a poultice of fresh mullein leaves? It'll cut the swelling,” Mazy said through a thick tongue when she woke.

“Tomorrow,” her mother told her, the back of her palm soothing her daughter's hand. “We'll make a turmeric-and-water paste to stop bruises. Just like your papa used to.”

Jeremy adjusted the sling. “We've a good supply of milk now,” he said. He patted her arm. “That'll help the bones heal.”

“I don't like milk,” Mazy said.

“Essential for bones. Take it like medicine.”

“Some chamomile tea'll help you sleep,” her mother added. The older woman tugged at the tiny sticks and dirt still clinging to Mazy's hair. “Got your own little woods right here among your curls. That nose of yours'll have a bruise too, looks like. Don't look broken, though. So lucky, child.”

“‘Lucky’ isn't the word I'd have chosen,” Mazy said. Every part of her body felt riddled with rawness, and just as she wondered if she'd find sleep again without throbbing, she dozed.

“Fright,” Mazy heard her mother say later when she awoke to a candlelit room. Shadowy light flickered against a framed sampler hung
on the log wall. “Afterwards, that's when you worry. Folks get through their pickles and then die of surviving. That's what her papa always said.” Elizabeth Muellers bulk obscured Jeremy until she moved and Mazy saw her husband seated at the table.

At forty-eight, Elizabeth Mueller was barely ten years older than Jeremy Bacon and sometimes Mazy wondered if he didn't have more in common with his mother-in-law than with his wife. She watched them now from her refuge on the bed, the low fire flickering against their faces. Jeremy read some sort of drawing laid out before him. Elizabeth Mueller leaned over, spoke in a low voice, then returned to the hickory rocker that creaked as she lowered herself into it. Mazy felt clammy and wondered if she had raised a fever.