What Once We Loved (20 page)

“Knew you'd be needing a tad of help then,” O'Malley told him, stepping out from beyond the shay “Later on, you can be doing it on your own, but for now, best you be accepting.”

Zane seethed at his need. The image of that blind Suzanne and her pathetic hunger for assistance flashed before his eyes. His leg throbbed. Tiny flickers of light made him blink. He let go of the crutch without meaning to, felt himself sink.

“Let me be getting that for you.” The man began lifting him.

“Not back inside! Take me out to the shay.”

Zane lunged forward, pushed against the Irishman in an effort to do it alone. Took one step and his good leg collapsed. He hit the ground, the pain searing up toward his head. He gasped, cursing Ruth, just before he passed out.

David hadn't slept well again. He wasn't sure if it was Ben's knees pressed into his back or David s own worrying over whether he'd roll over onto the child. David sat up. He guessed it was anticipating meeting Zane Randolph by the time this day had ended that really disturbed his sleep. He decided to get up though the sun wouldn't be up for a time yet. He listened to the breathing, heard the more rapid hushed breath of Ben mixed with the steady sounds of sleep coming from his wife.
His wife.
He loved the sounds of those words.

Their marriage had changed things, mostly in good ways, but this sleeping with a baby had hit him broadside.

“I just figured we'd have our own…bed,” David told Oltipa that first night. Elizabeth had offered to keep Ben to give them time alone, and David had thanked her and accepted. Then he noticed Oltipas face darken, that shadow cross her eyes like a hawk's wings over a rabbit.

“Somethings wrong,” he said.

“Baby will miss his place of belonging,” she told him. “Will wonder what he has done to be left behind.”

David's face turned a little hot as he realized he had put his own needs before the child's. Of course Ben was still reeling from his mother's being gone. David should have considered that fact before he accepted. So he'd thanked Elizabeth for her kindness, then politely declined her offer.

Oltipa had smiled gratefully and lowered her eyelids in that shy look of hers. It hadn't really been a problem that first night at all. The boy fell asleep sitting up in his basket-board, and David and Oltipa had found pleasure in newness of sharing their bodies in marriage. Their union had been everything David had hoped for, his inexperience a catalyst for discovery and not a cause for embarrassment. He must have told her one hundred times how much he cared for her, how grateful he was she'd consented to be his wife.

He didn't know when Oltipa had brought Ben to bed with them later that first night, but when he awoke and rolled over to place his
arms protectively around his wife, he'd felt the child's head and chubby neck nestled at Oltipa's breast though both still slept. The scene had warmed him, made him send his “arrow prayer,” as his mother had called those instant conversations sent heavenward in gratitude. He hadn't thought he could be this happy.

But just now, the boy's knees had poked straight into David's back. He was sure he had little red marks turning to bruises beneath his shoulder blades. He yawned. His head felt fuzzy.

It was probably not the boy at all but his own difficulty in talking with Oltipa about the sleeping arrangements that bothered him most. He hadn't come right out and said he wanted Ben to have his own little mat. Every time he cleared his throat and said something he thought would fall easily on her ears, like “I didn't know that boy could roll so much in his sleep,” she'd do some sweet thing like bend to kiss his nose or run the tips of her fingers across his lip. Or she'd offer him a taste of plumped-up huckleberries or whatever else it was she was fixing.

David wondered if his own mother had been like that, cutting his father's words off with her acts of distraction? The thought hadn't occurred to him before—just how it was that a man and woman worked out these…details. He guessed usually they had time to grow together before they added that third person. This was different, all right.

Only once had she sounded as though she knew he wanted to talk of something he found hard to say. But when he'd barely gotten the words out, she'd stopped him with, “It is the way my people sleep with their children. To keep them safe.”

So it wouldn't be an easily changed arrangement. He wouldn't be able to just offer a solution like “I'll frame up another bed for the boy.” First they'd have to agree there was a need for change. And then find a way to reassure her that the boy was safe sleeping just a few feet from them. From the sound of it, negotiating that meant bringing his ancestors and hers back to life, a few more people than he cared to have discussing his bed habits. And it might mean bringing up what had happened
to her when she'd been left unprotected by Ben's father and then later, by him. He feared she could never forgive him for allowing the likes of Zane Randolph to torture his family. He'd failed her, them. Oltipa had rescued herself and Ruth's girl. All David had done was pray and keep looking. Who would want to trust a man who'd let that happen?

David got up, stepped outside to relieve himself, then returned to pull on his shirt and pants. He yanked at his boots, never feeling fully dressed until they were on. He didn't guess Ben would share their bed until he moved on to his own marriage bed, so there must have been a time when even Oltipa's people pushed the little ones out like a mother bird freeing her babies. David could only hope that day wasn't years away.

And while he was thinking about kin, he realized he ought to reach out to his sister, Grace. Now that he was a married man, his uncle might let her live with him. He'd gotten a letter from her. She was with their aunt and uncle in Sacramento. He could have seen them when he took Suzanne Cullver south, if he had taken the time. But he had been anxious to get back to Oltipa and Ben, to get married and keep them safe.

Grace would have to wait. He poked at the fire, hung the black pot filled with water on the andiron. Waited for it to heat while he found the tin of barley coffee.

Today, he would meet Zane Randolph face to face. He would just have to do that on his less-than-rested best.

Legally the man had done nothing wrong—that was the sick of it. Claim an Indian and take her, leave a baby to die, flee with your own child you haven't seen for five years—none of that would even be challenged in a court of law. David felt his face grow hot with the outrage of it. The situation begged for justice, yes. So today, he would hand out more than Ruth's packet of her divorce intention: He'd hand down justice of his own.

They were not even a day's ride out from Jacksonville when Carmine took off again.

“You should have hobbled him,” Matthew shouted as they watched the animal quick-race south of the trail through an opening in the pines.

“I can get him,” Ruth yelled back. She pressed the reins against Kodas neck and headed after him, ducking as they rode beneath the huge pines. A hobbled animal looked so pathetic, hopping as though it had two legs instead of four. Besides, she could catch him now, with her whip or a rope. She just had to get him into the open where she could swing out and snag that left front leg.

A shout behind her, a crash of branches to her side, caused her to turn. Carmine had doubled back. She saw the rascal pitch and turn again, this time circling the mares then biting at their hindquarters. To the bellowing of Ewald who was tied to Lura's wagon, Carmine pushed the mares back through the stand of pines.

Matthew would not be happy. Neither was Ruth. She turned Koda back into the trees, riding a parallel course, keeping one eye on the mares and the other on the low hanging branches. So she didn't notice until they reached the other side just what lay ahead.

“Matthew,” she shouted. “Jessie! Boys! Come on through!” She waited until she heard them behind her, then kneed Koda, and they stepped out into open sunlight.

A timbered ridge broke into a low wrist of land that flared out like webbed fingers of trees and shrubs separated by the meadow below. Nestled in one section of wood was a cabin. Mounds of grass hay were stacked lopsided not far from the house. No smoke rose up. A half-finished split-rail fence lined a portion of the perimeter. It was as peaceful as a painting.

The mares had already started down the side ridge and spread like a swarm of bees over the meadow. A still-warm afternoon sun spilled over the sorrel and black and bay backs. Like a twist of moss-dyed yarn, a stream still licked at green despite the late season. Ruth could see tiny dots of black on the water. Geese or ducks. Further from the banks, and working up the side hills, grass waved brown beneath oaks and scattered pines, and a herd of deer ripped at the blades as though alone in the world. It reminded her of a Saint Louis city park.

Ruth became aware of Matthew beside her.

“Pretty, ain't it,” Lura said then, not asking a question. The woman puffed, pushing her way through to stand between Ruth and Matthews horses.

“Indians have cleared it with their fire,” Matthew said.

“It reminds me of your prayer, Sarah,” Ruth said. “About the valley of love and delight.”

The girl wrinkled her eyes in her small, heart-shaped face. “Marians the one who told that, Auntie,” she said.

“What prayers that?” Jessie asked. The girl wiped at her eyes, and Ruth wondered if she might be getting a cold or if it was smoke in the air that irritated.

“‘When we come down to where we ought to be,’ that's the line I remember,” Ruth said. “This place feels like where I ought to be.”

Water, grass, timber. Off the trail but close to it. It had a southern exposure for a garden and home, yet it was snug, tucked up beneath the trees. She scanned the horizon.

“Looks like old Rumpelstiltskin spun his gold here,” Jessie said.

Ruth smiled. The children's story had been one of her favorites, too, of a little man spinning straw into gold and the queen who outwitted him to avoid giving up her firstborn. “It does have that look,” she said.

“So we're home?” Jessie asked.

The question jarred her.
Home?

“Someone else probably owns this already,” Matthew told her. “And it's nowhere near those Table Rocks I told you about.” He turned in his saddle. “I'm not sure exactly where we are. We might still be in California.”

“Is it as good as the place you wintered in?” Mariah asked her brother as she made her way to stand beside him. She patted his horse's neck.

“We were holed up north of Jacksonville.” He looked toward the mountain range to the east, getting his bearings. “The MacDonalds lived north, the folks that took in me and Joe. If they're still here.”

“So we are in Oregon then,” Ruth said.

“There was talk this summer of making part of this territory and some of northern California into a separate section to apply for statehood. Might have happened by now.”

Why was he talking about things like that now? Ruth wondered. It was almost as if he didn't want their traveling to end.

“Well I like it, wherever it is. Sometimes a place just talks to you. This one is saying my name,” Ruth said. The land rolled easily toward the stream, an apron of gold edged in green. Ruth could almost see the girls running down the gradual slope with their pinafores blowing in the wind. The boys would be whooping and hollering as they rode. She thought of young colts wobbling their first steps across the grass. Just then a red-tailed hawk swooped over to cheer them on, confirming it. Even Carmine fit right in, his reddish hide looking copper as he kicked and squealed. Water. Grass. Shade. Family. Privacy. Peace. It fed her, this land did. This could be the place where the pebbles of her life tossed across a continent could now settle, find their angle of repose. “The
landmarks should make it easy to describe, to find out who owns it,” Ruth said.

“We're too far away from civilization to be settling in here,” Lura said. “ ‘Cept for tonight, maybe. Got to be closer to town. I want to get me some chickens and a goat or two. Can't sell goat's milk if we're living too far from thirsty miners.”

“Thirsty miners'll travel,” Matthew told her.