What Once We Loved (31 page)

“Maybe she's gotten the ague,” Lura said later when Ruth swept the dirt floor of supper crumbs.

“That's a summer ailment,” Ruth said.

“Haven't really had a hard, hard freeze. It could be the air still holds it.”

Jessie lay pale as an onion skin. “I can't move my legs, Mama,” she said.

“What?” Ruth dropped the broom, touched Jessies damp forehead. “You're so weak,” she continued. “You need to eat, and we need to get this fever down.”

“I'll go for the doctor,” Matthew said. “After we give our visitors a little time to head out.”

Matthew rode out, bringing McCully, the doctor, back. “Looks like the ague,” he said. “Just late.” He offered no real explanation of the ailment and prescribed some concoctions that Lura complained would be no more effective than mud on a washcloth. Ruth insisted they be administered.

And Jessie did seem to perk up after the second week; then the days waned into more with little change. The goat and her kid arrived, a gift delivered. Jessie appeared to tolerate the goat's milk. At least she drank the mugs, a sip at a time, while Ruth held her head.

While the child slept, Ruth pushed herself to work the yearlings, her mind kept tightly focused on the animals at the end of the rope, the needs of the horse protecting her from worrying over Jessie, from wondering why bad things just kept happening.

“She's worse when you leave,” Lura told her once when Ruth came back into the house.

“So are you saying I shouldn't? That I should just let the horses run wild?”

“Hey, hey,” Matthew said. “No one's saying—”

“Mama! Mama! I hurt,” Jessie wailed.

“Where? Tell me where?”

“Don't go. Don't go outside. I need a drink.” Her arms arched at Ruth's neck. She frenzied herself, became another person, almost. She had the eyes of a horse caught unexpectedly on ice.

Ruth decided to stay close. She worked on the rope she was weaving from Jumper's mane and tail hairs, getting Mariah to bring in other

Strands after she brushed the snags and snarls from Koda's tail and some of the mares. Ruth heard the jacks yelled at by different voices—the boys when one jack got out, Matthew when he tried to rope that left front leg to get Carmine caught.

Few people trekked along the trail from Yreka toward Jacksonville now, snow falling in the Siskiyou Mountains keeping Californians on their side of the range. At least Ruth needn't worry over Zane for the next few months. How could he cross the mountains?

Ewald pawed the bottom rail of the corral and skinned up his leg enough that Lura had a new patient to hover over. Matthew killed a deer, and they quartered it on the plank table he'd built and hung it in the smokehouse finished just before Thanksgiving. The scent of alder swirled the air that hovered as an overcast sky threatened rain and sometimes delivered. Once the crack of thunder startled Jessie into a scream. And even Matthew's telling her that the lightning was angels playing billiards with fireballs of sagebrush across the open range did not calm her. Once a fire shot up on the ridge beyond the meadow. A squall drenched it, but not before Jessie saw it, beginning another of her long, sleepless nights.

The horses fared well. They easily pawed through skiffs of light snow that fell. Some made their way up the slopes where the wind blew the snow away for them. The little creek froze over, but the boys kept a hole open for watering stock, bringing the cows and horses down to the flat most evenings to drink.

“I heard a group of braves, seven or so, attacked a farm not far from Jacksonville,” Matthew whispered to Ruth one day when he came back from buying more medicine for Jessie. “Totally surprised ‘em. A survivor said one lay on his back and shot his bow using his feet. Said he grinned the whole time he did it.”

“Are people forming up?” she asked.

He nodded. “They're seeking a posse.”

“You aren't—”

“I wont,” he said. “Well post ourselves as guards. Ned, Sarah, Ma, Mariah, too.”

Ruths shoulders sagged with relief.

“We were fortunate,” Ruth said.

“We had someone watching over us,” he answered.

Matthew shared reports of skirmishes but always out of Jessies hearing. Still the child continued to wane. Just before Christmas, Lura surprised everyone by having a cookstove delivered. Fingers of fog flittered at the valleys neck as the freighter helped Matthew unload it.

“May be the last trip over the mountains bringing supplies,” Lura said. “And I figured to have it in our own house.” She looked pointedly at Matthew. “But seeing as how we're here, I decided no need to deprive myself of what would make life easier while I'm waiting for something different. We'll have raisin pie for supper,” she added. “That'll perk you up, won't it, Miss Jessie?”

The girl had only smiled. Ruth dabbed the wetness from the corners of the child's eyes and considered: She wasn't getting better. Surely Jessie wasn't so strong-willed she could “make” herself this sick. No child would deprive herself of being able to run and play and laugh and dance in some willful state, would she? It must have been caused by something in this southern Oregon air, something that weakened her, something unusual in this unusual place.

Jessies dark eyes followed Ruth as she moved about the room, a small smile hovering just above a pooched-out lower lip when Ruth administered the strong-smelling medicines. The little packages Mazy had sent along with them contained dried herbs. Jessie's was full of spearmint that she took easily as a tea.

“Isn't that something?” Lura noted. “The very thing for pneumonia, and that's what that girl gets sent to her. That Mazy. She's got some way of knowing things.”

Ruth hadn't thought of Jessie's condition as pneumonia-like. Her daughters' breathing was shallow but generally steady and not raspy.
Ruth wondered if Mazy might have noticed something about Jessie that Ruth had missed. They'd spent a lot of time together, making soap, she remembered. Had the child had something like this before? She wondered if Mariah or Lura ever wrote to Elizabeth or Mazy. She should write, ask her what she might know about Jessie, ask her to hold them in her prayers. Still, it didn't seem right to ask for prayers only when things were dismal and then to never show up when things were grand.

Christmas came quietly. Ruth had given Matthew a final list of items he might find in Jacksonville including special hair ribbons for Jessie, Sarah, and Mariah, a Jacob's Ladder for Ned, and two kinds of spinning tops for Jason. They all went out to cut a tree, all but Ruth and Jessie. They trimmed it with paper rings and popped corn. And Matthew insisted they had to hang a pickle.

“A pickle. I'd forgotten. Your pa's pa used to do that, didn't he?” Lura said.

Matthew nodded. “First child to find the pickle on Christmas morning gets a special present.”

The children rose early, squealing and giggling, the scent of their clean hair, Castile-soaped nightshirts, and Lura's cooking mingled in the air. No one could find the green pickle, it blended in so perfectly with the fir's tight branches. Finally, Jessie said, “There it is!” She pointed from the cot she lay on.

“Good for you, honey,” Ruth told her.

“You get the pickle gift. And the pickle, too, if you want it,” Matthew said.

“Neither one,” she said, causing the room to grow silent.

“I'll take it,” Ned said. He crunched into it and wrinkled his nose. “Umm. Good,” he said, the bite releasing the scent of vinegar.

“And we can split up the present,” Matthew said, pulling a fresh orange from a stocking he'd hung by the stove. “Seeing as how Jessie is so generous giving things away.” Jessie gave a weak smile.

The sounds of the other children happily slurping couldn't remove Ruth's growing dread.

Over sage grouse that Lura cooked—that Jason had shot for their dinner—Matthew said he'd heard in town that a woman named Emma Royal wanted to start a school and she had collected money from the miners for it. “You should send the boys,” Matthew told Ruth.

“Should send our Mariah and your Sarah, too, if the weather holds,” Lura said.

“Would you like to go, Jessie? If you were well enough, you could.”

“I'd like to go, Mama,” Jessie said.

“Good!”

A cheer went up from Jason and Mariah, too.

“That's the best Christmas present ever,” Ruth said. She cast a hopeful glance toward Matthew just as Jessie added, “But I can't go to school. Who would take care of you?”

The child's words set like an anvil on Ruth's chest.

“Sinclair Taylor.” The tall man standing eye to eye to Mazy introduced himself, as Mazy stood once again in the posh offices of Josh Mc-Cracken, solicitor. Just a few months earlier Mazy had discovered she had a stepson at this solicitor's desk. Now the view of family would be expanded. “Please. Be seated.”

Mazy didn't like being directed by Sinclair Taylor any more than she'd liked bringing the bull to him. She'd accommodated just about as much as she could. She'd met him at a freighter station as he'd asked, so the bull could be loaded onto the wagon. Seth and the freight driver and she had done most of the work, Mr. Taylor barely prodding with his fine cane. Mr. Taylor apparently either paid or cajoled others to do work he didn't like.

Finished, the bull standing with his horns like twin arrows toward the sky, Mr. Taylor tipped his hat and said, “I see you have transport.” He nodded at her horse. “I believe we meet next at Mr. McCracken's then,” and he'd stepped inside his carriage not even offering her passage.
No matter. Seth would have trailed her horse back to Suzanne's, but this way she wasn't beholden to Sinclair Taylor for a thing.

She'd put up with it for one reason only: She wanted all the knowledge she could acquire about the Jeremy Bacon she'd been married to. And this man was the only road to it.

Mr. McCracken had made himself scarce, leaving his office to them. “May I present my niece, Grace,” Sinclair Taylor said then, nodding to a child maybe fourteen who curtsied and then sat, keeping her head shadowed in the stiff-brimmed bonnet she wore. Mazy folded her own hands, chapped from milking cows in the cold air, and glanced at the girl. Grace resembled her brother, hair the color of Wisconsin soil, eyes winter sky blue. Her caped arms disappeared inside a fur muff. She looked well tended and content.

“It is my understanding that one of your conditions for bringing the bull south was to meet me, to ask some questions. Grace consented to come along. Curiosity, I suspect.”

Mazy nodded. He was a broader man than Jeremy had been, easing toward portly. And graying, so he must have been the elder of the two. He had that same air of certainty about him, a kind of cool disinterest that Mazy decided just might be a family trait. Then he surprised her.

“I am sorry about the…disruptions my brother placed in your life,” he said. “I…we were unaware of his reason to remain in Wisconsin until your arrival here in response to my letter. I understand you intercepted it on the trail west.” Mazy nodded. “We knew only that he had remained in Wisconsin and that at last, after much correspondence, he was to head west, to California, to keep his agreements.”

“He never told you he was married?”

“We knew he was married to—”

“My mother,” Grace said.

“Yes,” Mazy said. “Your brother talked of her to me. She must have been a fine woman.”

“Indeed,” Sinclair Taylor said.

“She has no need of compliments from you,” Grace said.

“Grace,” Mr. Taylor scolded.

Mazy raised her hand as though to say it was all right. She thought of what it must be like for Grace, a mere child, uncovering betrayals within her own father s life. Not that anyone could ever know what their parents thought or did, even if they had the interest or courage to ask while their parents were alive. Grace had lost her mother and her father. She was an orphan as certain as Sula was. And here Mazy was, someone threatening to disrupt memories perfectly intact.

For the first time, Mazy asked herself just what she was doing here. Just what did she think she needed to know?

“You immigrated?” Mazy asked.

“Before Jeremy. He is, was, my younger brother. There were only the two of us. We both married in England, and Jeremy had this idea to go to the provinces. Canada. And make our way to Fort Vancouver. He was always the one with ideas,” Sinclair smiled for the first time. “He could always talk me into doing them first, so I arrived in Vancouver before them. We became enamored of the idea of having our own dairying, here in California. The purebred bull you delivered will complete that phase of what he wished for, what we wished for. And I am grateful.”

“You wont have a purebred herd,” Grace reminded him, “without the cows.”

“No,” he said. “But a good sire and sturdy cows will nevertheless add to the herd we already have. And your fathers widow needs some just compensation. Adjustments are always called for, Grace. Its not a sign of weakness.”

The girl blushed. “Yes, Uncle,” she said.

“And the rest you know, I presume. He was a good son to our father. A good brother though more prone to impulse than me. He treated his wife and children well from all I know, and he left fully intending to come back, fully planning to keep his commitments. I trust
that. There was an injury, an illness, I believe, that may have affected his timing.”