What Once We Loved (18 page)

“I'm sorry. I have no right to tell you what to do or not,” Suzanne said. “I guess I'm just feeling…restless, wanting some excitement, something to anticipate. Mr. Powder has the boys in hand. You have me in hand, and I have…hands with nothing to do.” She lifted her palms.

“Idle hands are the devil's workshop,” Esther said. “So you best strum that harp.”

She was more like an older sister than a stepmother, David Taylor imagined, not that he'd known either before he met his father's widow, Mazy Bacon. In one year, he'd gained an Ayrshire cow, a Wintu wife and her child, a stepmother, and even a grandmother. And he had a deeper knowledge of the life his father'd lived after he left the gold fields of California. Still, David wondered why his father never wrote, never let him know he was alive back there in Wisconsin.

“Maybe he hoped to see you, to tell his story to your eyes,” Oltipa told him when he thought out loud about it all.

“Tell it to my
eyes”
David nodded agreement. He stacked the armful of split wood in the wood box of their cabin, preparing for another frosty night. “A story like that would tell better face on, wouldn't it? Hard for a man to pen that he had two families. A double mind of sorts.”

“Your father believes his brother would be with you soon. If he writes to you, then his brother knows of his strange dealings far away in Oui-scon-sin.” David liked the way she said the name of that state, as though it had a French twist to it. “Your father chooses his own time to tell him. Waits to say words to his
eyes.
But he joins the Up-in-Being first.”

David nodded. What she said made sense, and he guessed it did little good to swirl the murky past into the present. Like dirt in a bucket
of water, if left alone, it would settle soon enough, and then he could see clear again.

David scanned the room. This cabin was finally getting to be the home he'd always imagined, and he wasn't sure he wanted to leave it all to take up farming with Mazy Bacon. Her “plan,” as she called it, arrived too soon.

There'd be some complications with Mazy Bacon, he knew. He didn't want to talk about them with Oltipa, but Mazy Bacon saw him as a cowhand, he was pretty sure ofthat. Hadn't she given him an Ayrshire, him a stranger to her even if they were somewhat kin? Milking cows wasn't something he ever imagined he'd be doing. He tried to see himself burying his face in a cow's udder on a frosty morning. He shook his head. He'd thought to keep one cow, maybe, for milk and butter and such, for his own. One, a woman could milk. He wasn't interested in a dozen that needed milking morning and night. That was what Mazy Bacon had in mind to manage. She had a big plan, all right.

He walked back outside, lifted his ax and chopped thin slivers from the edge of the log, for the kindling stack.

He hadn't liked discussing it with Mazy Bacon either. She had kind eyes, a warm smile, and was generous to a fault, but there was something about the way she got things happening that made him wonder how well she might actually listen to a fellow who saw things different than she did. He didn't know if moving to Shasta was something Oltipa wanted either. She'd stayed alone in this cabin during the past winter and did well, until that Zane Randolph came around. And now they all knew: That crazy man wasn't all that far away. Still dangerous, even with a cut-off leg.

It might be safer at Mazy Bacon's. He'd have to find out how Oltipa felt. Maybe she'd feel buffaloed by this well-intentioned woman too. He'd have to ask, talk to them both, he guessed. He swallowed. He didn't like talking about what he felt. He had trouble finding the words. He preferred speaking with hostlers and horses to women any day.

Things just got complicated with kin around. He'd forgotten that in the years since his father left and he had had no one to be accountable to, no one to please or disappoint. But he was learning again right fast.

David watched Oltipa fixing her acorn soup. He'd acquired a taste for that golden meal. He wondered if his father had ever eaten it. His father had been a dairyman in Fort Vancouver and now, he learned, Wisconsin, too, before he died. It might just be that dairying was inside David s blood. At least that was how Mazy Bacon put it to him when they met to say good-bye to Ruth Martin. Oltipa had a special place in her heart for Ruths girl, Jessie. Otherwise, they would never have joined in.

“I spent my life driving the big Concords,” he told Mazy. “Meeting people from here and there wearing tall hats and speaking with accents. I like that. Im not so sure about cows. They seem to be pretty much everyday creatures without much changing.”

“Meet up with some unsavory folks driving a stage, too,” she said.

His face felt hot as she talked, reminding him that he'd never really confronted Zane Randolph the way he'd hoped, that he'd failed to protect this woman he'd grown to love and married.

“I take people places,” he told Mazy. “It's honorable work.”

“I'm not saying it isn't. But so is dairying, and it has the advantage of predictability,” she'd insisted.

He had predictability traveling the same route daily. But it also kept his mind alert, his body engaged in handling ribbons of reins and thousands of pounds of horse flesh. In rain or snow or hot sun and dust, he watched the world spin by from the height of a tall stagecoach. It gave him perspective that he didn't believe he'd find seeing the world through the underbelly of a cow.

“I'll be needing thinking time for that,” he told her, and to her credit, she'd accepted it, at least for a time.

He'd felt…maneuvered by her. The way he would sometimes get a horse to harness, feeding it a handful of grain and talking nice while all
the time knowing that his little treat would be short-lived and soon the horse would be hauling instead of standing and eating.

Or maybe she was just being direct, asking for what she needed. He didn't know much about the ways of women. Women looked at things differently, now there was the truth. He'd barely begun to understand how Oltipa thought things through and now was adding the rise and swoop and dip of another woman's thoughts, winging through the air like a hungry hawk. He wasn't sure he was up to it, he just wasn't.

The smells of the soup were so rich his stomach growled before he could even say thanks to Oltipa who set a bowl of it down in front of him. She lifted her boy and held him on her lap. Then she snuggled the child to her breast, and he began suckling. David reached for Oltipas hand and bowed his head, saying a table grace he'd learned as a child, adding a prayer for guidance at the end.

Oltipa stroked the boy's thick black hair as she stared at David slurping soup from the side of the wooden spoon. With the fork, he poked for a hunk of cheese Oltipa had laid out too. “You talk like you talk to friend,” she told him.

“To you, you mean?” David reached for Elizabeth's baked bread, tore it off and dipped it into his soup where the cheese melted slowly.

“When talk to Up-in-Being,” she corrected, the fingers of her small hand pointing gracefully to the sky.

“Speaking to God like a friend. I guess I do. My mama always said to give him thanks but to be sure to talk things over with him too. He wants to be that involved in our lives,” he told Oltipa. “Even about little things.”

David savored the soup, then looked up at his family. Oltipas dark hair, wrapped with twists of calico cloth, hung over the boy's hands. Ben touched one lightly in his fingers. She hummed a song to the child. They both looked like children, so young. He wondered how old she really was, how many summers she'd seen before becoming a young widow, a mother, and now his wife. She looked up at David then with
such devotion in her eyes, such a look of peace upon her round face that his stomach tightened. She brushed at the boys cheek, and he noticed still the scars on her wrists from where the ropes had burned into them, from the time when Zane Randolph had held her. His eyes filled up then, an overflow from his heart.

He set his bread down and leaned back in the chair, relishing this moment at his banquet table, mixing family and faith.

Ben finished nursing and sat up, pushing against his mother to be let down. She set him on the floor, and he pulled into a crawl. He rocked on his baby knees, squealing.

“You heading my way, partner?” David asked. Ben laughed, rocked again, his arms like a young colts legs just learning to stand. His little elbows locked stiff while his knees flattened under him. He pushed up again, looked down at his palms flat to the floor then scooted with his bottom. He took a sprawling squat forward, landing on his nose.

Oltipa swooped, leaning toward him.

The boy didn't cry at first, instead offered up a look of surprise.

David held his hand up, and Oltipa stopped. “Let him be,” David said, smiling encouragement at him. He held his arms out. “He's working his way through this. Just needs some confidence from us.” Ben kept his eyes glued to David s, he pushed back up, moved one hand out and then the other, just far enough to inch forward, stay balanced, and still make progress. Ben looked up at his mother and grinned. He grew bolder then, pulled himself up on David s pant leg, took a step, wobbly, still clinging to Davids leg. “See,” David said. “What'd I tell you? A fellows got to take a few falls in new territory before he makes any real progress.”

Oltipa smiled. Maybe that was a good reminder for himself, too. Mazy Bacons plan did offer him a way for more of this. He could have time closer to Oltipa and his son, watch over them, keep them safe from those who saw Shastas and Wintus and the other tribes as property to be used up, sold, or discarded. The land at Poverty Flat did offer safekeeping,
at least more there than at this isolated cabin. He doubted Mazy would let someone come bullying in to claim Oltipa as a vagrant even if David was away. And if they lived there with Mazy Bacon, Oltipa would have woman company. She might like that. It could all work out well…except for him, feeling stuck with cows every day.

He watched the boy plop down on his bottom, then stand up and move, hanging on to the table until he reached his mother s skirt.

“That boy keeps on trying,” he said. “Pretty soon he'll be doing what he wants no matter where he starts from.” Davids face broke into a grin.

Ruth smelled smoke as they rode. Matthew said it came from Indians burning underbrush to clear out meadows for hunting deer. They rode side by side, Matthew occasionally moving off the trail to keep the mares gathered; Ruth often trotting ahead to check on the boys, talk with Mariah, then back to see how Lura was faring driving the wagon.

“You never told me,” Ruth said, “how it was you came to be in Southern Oregon when you were headed for The Dalles.”

“You didn't want to hear any more scary stories,” he said. She laughed. “And I never heard how it was you came to end up in Shasta instead of heading north.”

“So we both have a story or two.”

Matthew rode quietly, the jangle of the bridles and bits broken by the sound of leather creaking as their bodies shifted on their saddles. “Couldn't have done it without Joe,” he said finally. “He just kept us looking one day ahead and not worrying over what we couldn't fix. Guess, like you, we thought the way we went would be a shortcut but it wasn't. I wrote to tell you and Ma, of course. But I wrote to The Dalles ‘cause that's where I thought you and Ma and Mariah would be. And then we found out you were that close to us that whole long winter.” He shook his head.

“Just as well you weren't in Shasta. It snowed and snowed,” Ruth said.

Matthew nodded. “They said it was an unusual year. I was feeling pretty glum to have carried snowshoes all the way from Laramie to never use ‘em until January came. The people we bunked with, the MacDonalds and their five kids that took us in, well, we couldn't see out their window on account of the snow. That's when the animals started bawling. Mares looked thin as hatpins. I knew some would abort come spring. And they did. But that little buckskin filly,” he pointed into the herd, “she's a feisty one. And she pushed herself through some snow I wouldn't have thought she could have and got snarled up with a fir tree. Branches poked out and threatened to rip her tender hide. But when I got closer, I saw the strangest thing. She wasn't fighting the branches, she was eating them!”