All Together in One Place (8 page)

“It's no one's business excepting ours, his and mine.” Tipton s voice took on strength, and the tingling in her hand lessened. She sat up straighten

Miz Bacon bit off a hunk of the cornbread and chewed. She winced as she tried to catch the crumbs in the palm of her bad hand.

“Have you seen him then, Miz Bacon?” Tipton let her eyes scan the area
“After all this time, dont you think ‘Mazy is in order?”

“Not like him to wander from the wagons before we've had our good mornings.”

“There'll be more folks around now, Tipton.” Miz Bacons voice got all soft. “People needing work done on their wagons, their horses trimmed. That's Tyrell's job. Its what a blacksmith does, why his work is so valued. Not looking after you.” She said it with kindness, but still the words stung. “Your mama and papa delegated that task to us, at least for a while.”

“Do tell, ma'am,” Tipton said, lifting her chin. A songbird warbled into the silence. The scent of fried bacon drifted from a fire across the circle.

Pig, lying on his side in the wagon shade, let out a sharp, quick bark, woke himself, and trotted over to the women. Miz Bacon fed him bread from her palm. The dog slobbered. “You fat little pig,” she said as she brushed at the dog's head in tenderness. Tipton looked away.

“What's with you? Are you worried? You strike me as so sure of yourself. You never turned an eye back toward home when we left. I envied that, the way you said good-bye without even shedding a tear. It doesn't fit then, it seems to me, your needing Tyrell so much.”

“None of your business neither,” Tipton said. She gathered up her parasol and poked it on the ground before her.

“Now see, that's just what I mean. Put me in my place but then so…lost almost, as though you can't be your own post—you've got to lean on him. That can tire a man.”

“Our love is a post. We're roped together around it. We don't intend to let it untangle loose after we say our vows, not Tyrellie and me, not the way some married folks do.” Tipton stood then. “We're the same. We understand that being together isn't leaning at all. It's filling up. It's…tying up loose ends, now that we have each other.” She eyed the woman chewing, still staring. “Maybe that's what you envy, ma'am.”

“Just don't get so roped together you get hung up,” Miz Bacon told her.

Tipton straightened the blue pleats of her skirt and opened the parasol. “I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl,” she said and swirled out across the circle toward the new wagons.

Tyrell hadn't soured on her. They did belong together. These six weeks had proved it. He'd been kind and good and gentle. It was how he proved his love, not coming back for Tipton after two years apart the way her mother wanted. The mere thought of two or three years without Tyrell took her breath away.

She let herself take in the sights and sounds around her. The smells of horses and men, of cooking and smoke all swirled about by her parasol She walked past roped places; one held Marvel and another the Ayrshire cows, Jennifer and Mavis. People milled like water swirling in a bucket, more men, women, and children in one place than she'd seen in months back in Cassville, even dark-skinned people, and slender, bowing girls with ivory hairsticks and wearing what looked like trim silk dresses. She spied the boys who'd peeked in the wagon. They pushed hoop rings before them with sticks. She overheard one say, “You think she's blind?”

“Why else would she carry that stick?”

“To hit people with, she's so grumpy.” The boys laughed.

A girl with short pigtails stuck straight out like thumbs ran between them, forcing wind through a sock attached to a stick.

Tipton spied a dozen dogs, some tied and barking, others lying about or marking their homes. She'd gotten used to the Bacons’ dog. He was big and carried a deep bark, but he gentled when he knew a person. Other dogs proved more worrisome, and she made a wide berth around two snarling over a deer's leg bone beneath a wagon.

So much was worrisome. She tried not to think of it as she walked. But there was the river, the Missouri. Wide and gorged with rain, it was worth worrying over. People said lightning fires could race across the prairie and leave nothing but charred remains of wagons and people.
She could worry over that and over the Sioux, too, who could steal and kill stragglers, and the Pawnees who just harassed. She'd heard tales of messages left by travelers scraped onto human skulls warning of the dangers of sickness ahead. Everything was worrisome if she was honest, everything. Her mouth got dry with the thinking.

“You got to settle your thoughts,” Tyrell told her nearly every day. “You can tell them, ‘go straight away and they will. It's the only thing we all control—our thoughts, our own actions. No one else's.” But he helped control hers, when he was there to remind her to take deep breaths She could bury the fears because Tyrell stood beside her

He said he'd never leave her, sounding almost like the words in Scripture Mrs. Mueller read out loud before they went to bed. Because of that fine promise, she felt more confident now as she walked. Tyrell gave her that, and she took some small satisfaction in knowing that Miz Bacon, Mazy, a wiser, older woman, envied it.

Tipton meandered in her own world of thoughts and didn't notice the couple until she bumped into them.

The man apologized for not watching, then introduced himself as Bryce Cullver and his wife, Suzanne, who wore a bonnet so floppy it shadowed her face. She held in her hand a goading stick instead of a parasol. “She carries a pink parasol as pretty as the lady herself,” the man said, apparently describing Tipton to the woman clinging to his arm. “She has blue eyes, dark as dusk. Quite a photograph she'd make,” Bryce Cullver said, patting his wife's hand.

Tipton watched the woman tug awkwardly at him as though to move away. She swung the goad and Tipton jumped back.

“Suzanne,” the man said He shook his head, tipped his hat, his eyes saying “sorry” before they moved on.

Tipton watched them, then became distracted by a tall, well-dressed man who bent in attentive conversation to a bloomer-clad woman. He had the look of a white-collared man, a gambler, one Tipton knew best to shy away from.

At last, she spied Tyrell. Not in the circle of wagons but near the
stock ropes, those reddish curls clustered around his head looking almost like spun sunrise. She smiled and took a deep, filling breath.

He bent beneath a gelding whose foreleg braced against the leather apron laid out on Tyrells thigh. The whole weight of the animal leaned against the man though three legs held the big sorrel up. No wonder his back ached, with the constant bending and the leaning of horses against his frame. Tipton heard the familiar rasp of the file pressed into service to shape the horses hoof. Clumps of nippered hoof littered the ground before him, giving up their pungent smell.

A woman—a pretty woman—held the horse by its halter.

Tipton felt her chest tighten.

The woman's face lit up when she talked. Tiny white lines made their way from her hazel eyes then disappeared like wisps into fawn-colored hair caught in a snood at her neck. She wore a faded calico dress, and what looked like men's boots poked out from beneath the hem. Judging from the color of her face, she seldom wore a bonnet and did not now. Leather gloved fingers pushed at a loose curl, folded it behind her ear. She nodded at something Tyrell said. He laughed.

Tipton clutched her parasol so tightly her fingers hurt.

Ruth Martin felt more than saw the parasol and girl approach. The closer she floated in her wide skirts, the straighter her back became. Ruth had seen the flash she guessed was fury cross the girl's face, replaced with a smile of white teeth.

“You must be Tipton,” Ruth said in a gravelly voice. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me. This dust makes my throat thick.”

“I don't believe we've met.”

“I'm Ruth, Ruth Martin.” She put her free hand out the way a man might. The girl stared, then touched it lighdy with her fingers. “I'd know those ‘startling blue eyes’ and someone ‘dressed like a china doll’ anywhere. Your intended here has said few words, but most have been of you.”

The girl's face relaxed a little, but Ruth recognized the anxiety in it, the fright folded into the fine-boned face.

“Thought you might do a painting for her,” Tyrell offered, his voice spoken into his work.

“Of you, ma am?”

“Me? Oh no,” Ruth said. “I might like for you to draw my Koda here.” Ruth nodded toward the horse. “He's a favorite of mine and getting on in years. Does a few tricks I've taught him. He counts and takes handkerchiefs from my sleeves sometimes when I'd rather he didn't.” She patted the horse's nose, and he pulled his lips back as if he were laughing. “I'd like to have a keepsake of him. Do you do charcoals?”

Tyrell grunted with the horse's shift in weight.

“I'm sorry,” Ruth said to Tyrell. “I'm not paying attention. Koda does have a nasty habit of leaning.” She pulled the halter gently, spoke to the horses nose, scratched it with her fingers, and the horse shifted its weight. “I shouldn't have let him go so long without a trim.”

“Well spoken,” Tyrell said, “though you have a gift for it, I'm seeing.”

“Can't count on any but myself most times.”

“Won't be needing to go so far for service this trip,” he said. With the back of his arm, he wiped the sweat from his forehead, looked up at her, and smiled. He had an open, inviting face, Ruth thought. Kind.

“There'll be fair competition for your skills, Mr. Jenkins, on whichever train you join.”

“You might loan your own trimming skills out,” he said. “You did good.”

“Oh, I doubt—”

“You and your husband are going west, then?” Tipton asked, interrupting. The girl fluttered her eyelashes and spun the umbrella. Koda's ears twitched at the movement, but Ruth had trained him well and the horse didn't jerk away.

“I'm driving my own wagon,” Ruth said.

Tyrell lifted the horse's foreleg off his thigh and stood to stretch. “No husband or brother or teamster?” He laid the rasp in a wooden
bucket and moved it and himself in one motion back toward the horses hindquarters. “Could be risky”

“I have a brother,” Ruth said She heard the irritation in her own voice and made an effort to lighten her next words. “Though Jed and Betha and their crew're more likely to be needing taking care of than me.

“You dont share his wagon?” Tipton asked.

“Have my own. Bullwhack it fine Jed does his. His wife, Betha, she has her hands full with their four little ones. They're around here somewhere.” She looked around. “Pigtails, that's Sarah. Ones chubby, Ned; the other, Jason's like a strip of bacon. Youngest is Jessie. My brother's a solicitor, or was, back in St. Louis. I'll help them with the children some, but he'll let me be ‘responsible for my own lot,’ as he said before we left. That suits me fine.”

“What if something happens, who would handle your wagon?” Tipton asked.

“I believe what happens will, and having a man beside me won't stop any misery that might come.” She knew that from experience “Won't spur solutions into daylight, either.”

“I didn't think women could go without a man's help assigned,” Tipton said. “You wouldn't want to let your wagons get behind, not with children along. Mister Bacon would fairly sizzle at such an idea.”

“Why is it people think only bad things can happen to women alone? If something happened to Jed, Betha would have to cover for him. I don't see the point of such thinking.”

Tyrell picked up his nippers.

“Fine,” Ruth said. She'd thought this out before, knew the subject would come up more than once, and she had to sound as confident and secure as she was but without challenging the men. They didn't like that, she'd found.

Ruth said, “I can take on a teamster at Fort Laramie if need be Between here and there, the trail's easy enough Don't see it'll be a problern.
If I absolutely have to name someone wearing pants who'll walk beside me while I bullwhip, 111 find a kid. Someone fifteen or so, not otherwise committed It's no small irritation though, for a kid to be considered more reliable than a woman who's already come alone all the way from Missouri.”