All Together in One Place (27 page)

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 remembered 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.

She heard the sounds of birds coming alive just before dawn. She made out the soft stomping of oxen, the heavier beast that didn't like the yoke. Men from a distant camp shouted. Dogs barked. The black dog who had taken to her barked back. He must have stood close below the wagon. Why the dog had chosen her to spend his nights with she did not know. She had kicked at it, though she probably missed, and she scolded it, but for some reason it kept coming back.

Bryce had been like that. After the accident, she pushed him away, disgusted with her stupidity. He wouldn't leave. She would have gone if he had been the one who was blind. She never would have allowed herself to be boarded in by a cripple held hostage by darkness.

“I think of you as having limits, that's true,” Bryce told her once, “but not a cripple. You have so much to offer, Suzanne, to me, our son, to the future.”

“Are you up?” It was the woman Elizabeth, the good-natured one who smelled of lavender and leather, an oddly comforting combination.

“Why should I be?” Suzanne said. “Nothing to rise for.”

“That boy of yours'll be howling ‘fore long. May as well get yourself around. We've burials to attend to, then we're heading on to Laramie. You up to that?”

“Just leave me. Take Clayton and let the buzzards feed.”

“You think I'm that cruel? You'd probably give ‘em indigestion.” Suzanne snorted. “No, we'll get your wagon hitched. Take a few of us to do it ‘til we get the hang of it. We'll move slow ‘til we get our rhythm. Let's get you dressed and fed first.”

“I'm quite capable of dressing myself,” she said.

“Thought you might be. We'll head out to the circle for our privates when you're ready, ‘less you want to use the slop jar. I'll stand right here and pat Mazy's lazy dog ‘til you're about. Or let me come get the boy and help you down.”

“Just., leave.”

“I'll be back with bacon.” The woman almost chirped as she left.

Suzanne laid the covers back, patted the bed for her wrapper, fingered the buttons on the front that expanded to give her more room as the baby grew. This one was larger than Clayton. She pulled the wrapper over her head, combed her hair with her fingers and braided the strands into a tight knot at the base of her neck. Bryce had said her hair looked like spun gold.

“Spun straw is more like it,” she said out loud, yanking at the strands coarse in her hands. She pulled until tears stung at her nose “Mommy? My mommy?” Clayton jabbered, pulled at her hair.

“Oh!” she said. But like the color that appeared when she pressed against her eyes, the pain demanded she think of it instead of what was missing.

“You hurt?” Naomi asked Sister Esther.

The sturdier of the three surviving Asian women opened wide her almond-shaped eyes. She had called herself Passion Flower, but Esther had renamed each of the girls. “Missy Esther, you burn finger on spider pan?”

“I'm fine, Naomi,” Esther said. She smiled at the round face with skin the color of millet. The girl looked healthy now, but so had Cynthia and then she'd died.

“I get grease?” Deborah asked.

“Not necessary,” Sister Esther said. The girl shrank. “I did not mean to upset you.” Esther sighed. “Water will do if you care to bring me a dipper. I shall drink it and also soothe the burn ” She ran her long fingers
to tuck gray hair beneath the black mesh cap she wore, patted the bun at her neck beneath it, folded her hands in front of her apron as though about to make a speech, but took a deep breath instead. Such a tightness she felt, even to breathe.

“I help, Missy,” Deborah said, taking labored steps to the water barrel. She was always the eager one, the beekeeper who knew how to tend, but her damaged feet interfered with her willingness. Esther watched the girl check the six white squares that lined the side of the wagon, their little platforms folding down to permit bee flights every other week. Deborah made sure the ventilation door with tiny holes opened to give them air. Daily, she lifted the feeder lid at the top, renewed the water supply, made sure the larva and brood stayed protected.

Esther was glad Deborah checked the bees often They were said to be a gentle strain, but Sister Esther did not want them to break free, pour out into the wild land they moved through when they gathered up their juices from the plants and not come back. “Bees come back for queen,” Deborah had told her once, but Esther wasn't sure if such rules applied in this territory beyond the States.