What Once We Loved (44 page)

“Having to do with her first love,” he said quietly.

“Even before that, I suspect. Charles didn't seem all too pleased to have Adora talk about your taking over the store.” Mazy shivered.

“Tiptons so confused. Blames herself, I think. She's scared about this baby, she must be. Why else would she run away?”

“Paper is full of men seeking runaway wives,” Mazy said. “Haven't you noticed? Most are ads from mean husbands or poor ones wanting their share of their wife's assets.”

“Mean…” he said.

She stopped. “If you laid one hand on her—”

“I didn't. But I…we were distant. And I never talked of it. Never spoke of what she meant to me. She couldn't know. Something made her snap, and she left. She signed the letter she left with ‘love.' Anything could happen to her.”

“I doubt we'll be reading about her in the
National Police Gazette”
Mazy said.

“Those lurid crimes? You don't think—”

“No, no. I meant I think she's more resourceful than we know. Maybe than she knows. That could be what she's trying to discover— her way.”

“If I just knew where she was, I'd leave her be if that was what she wanted. I just hope to tell her that I'm sorry. For not owning up to…some things.”

“She should let you know she's all right.”

“Don't condemn her, Mrs. Bacon. Please. You don't know all the details, all the things I did that sent her away.” He lifted his hat, ran his hands through his reddish hair. His eyebrows lay like red caterpillars over troubled eyes. “How will I ever find her?”

“Allen Pinkerton finds people,” Mazy offered.

“I was sure she'd be with kin.”

They reached Elizabeths bakery, looped Nehemiahs horse at the hitching posts, and stepped inside. Elizabeth greeted Nehemiah like a long-lost son. She embraced him, sat him down, gave him food and drink, and pulled a chair right beside him, giving him her undivided attention. It was another quality Mazy found she admired in her mother, always ready to embrace what was before her.

“So you're looking for Tipton,” Elizabeth said after he'd filled her in, gave more details than he'd shared with Mazy. “Well, let me think.”

“I just thought she'd go to family. To people she knew. Isn't that what people do, even when their family isn't always the most inviting?”

“Tipton marches to her own tune,” Elizabeth said. “And if it wasn't for her carrying a wee one, I'd say let her be until she finds what tune she's hearing. But she might get addled with the changes a baby brings, her being high-strung and all.”

“You're willing to meddle, Mother?” Mazy asked.

“To a point. Not always wise to stand by and just watch.” Elizabeth drummed her fingers on the table. “I say we write to both Suzanne, south, and to Ruth, north. Both could be places she'd make her way to. If not now, as her time gets closer, I could see her seeking out a friendly face. She might even show up back at home. Which is where you best be, Nehemiah. There and doing what you intended doing. Wasn't you going to run for Congress? Ain't that what we heard?”

Nehemiahs face reddened. “County commissioner. That, too, might have pushed her off, my having to be gone a lot to campaign and more if I won.”

“Why, I'd think she'd love the pomp and circumstance of all that folderol,” Elizabeth said. “You give her a chance to go with you?”

He shook his head. Elizabeth patted his hand. “Never mind. We'll find her if she wants to be found. After all, didn't that Zane Randolph find his wife in the middle of the fastest growing state in the union?”

“But we were all together in one place then, Mother. Easy to find eleven widows traveling together, one wearing pants, and one blind, led by a black dog.”

“Tipton'll stand out. You mark my word. Well put our fishhooks out and see what we can catch.”

Nehemiah said he'd finish up at Adoras store, then bring the string out to Mazy's, spend the night there at what Elizabeth said was fast becoming some kind of “stage stop” even without a stagecoach changing teams. “People just like coming to that place and camping out a night or two before heading on to the next phase of their journey. That bend in the river sure lured us to it.”

Mazy drove the team with the empty milk wagon back down the Shasta road, puffing up reddish dust as she drove. Tipton on her own. Maybe the girl wasn't addled but just wanting to try living without a dozen people hovering, to see if she could make it. Sad she had to hurt Nehemiah to do it, but she had at least left him a note. Unlike what Jeremy had done to her. No note, no explanation, no nothing to help her understand why he'd lived a lie with her.
Mind mumbling.
She sighed. She'd loved him, and he had kept a secret he knew would hurt her. That was an act of love.

It wasn't so terrible to have loved him. She loved what she thought he was, and he tried to live up to that, in his way. Maybe he would have told her in time, and then she'd have had to contend with putting the lie away while he still lived. Testing her ability to forgive.

There had been many good things he'd done for her. He'd bought a farm for her—well, perhaps
not for hen
but for them. He'd insisted she stop her jam-making to walk through the woods, collecting morel mushrooms beneath blue columbines. He'd held her hands while they looked across the bluffs above the Mississippi, watching eagles weave through birches while grass waved in the wind. The sumac in the fall in Wisconsin turned red as her bloomers. Jeremy always made it a point too, on a dark night, to lift her needlework from her hands, and lead her out to the back stoop to stare up at the stars together.

“The Milky Way,” he said. “North Star. Orion's Belt. See there?” She had actually found the stars that marked the constellation when he'd stood behind her, moved her head and held it with his hands so her eyes
were guided perfectly to what he wanted her to see. She let herself be led, and he'd wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. Somehow that closeness had disappeared into the everyday routine of cooking and working and taking for granted. Oh, if she had it to do again, she would do it differently, she would.

She'd love a man who loved the stars…and her. He
had
loved her. That he loved another first did not mean he had loved her less. Who could explain or ever understand what made people do what they did? He had loved her, and she had loved him back. That was the truth of what was.

She turned down the lane to her farm. Between Ink's ears, she saw skiffs of snow marking the muddy track. A flock of geese had chosen to winter at the Flat, and they lifted now in the distance. People gathered near the barn, a few of the children squatted low as though clustered in trouble.
What now?
she thought.

She sighed. It was just what life was, she guessed, this deciding and sorting and responding and learning to love. She took a deep breath, asked herself what she wanted to experience with whatever challenge lay ahead: To be used up or invigorated? She guessed the choice was hers.

She pulled up around the far side of the barn, giving herself time to wresde with the upcoming commotion.

Oltipa joined her, reaching up for the yoke at the mule's head. “You have visitor,” she said.

Mazy took a wrap around the brake. “Another traveler?”

Oltipa grinned. Behind her, coming at Mazy as though out of a broken dream, trotted a dog. He was emaciated, dirty, covered with stickers and burrs, but she still recognized him as a gift her husband had given her for their first anniversary: a black dog she loved named Pig.

18

In March, lilies sprouted along the walkways of Shasta City. Each year the Chinese gave the imported bulbs as gifts, and when they bloomed, Mazy found herself reminded of the generosity of others. She stood at the window of the bakery, the window box full of the stalks her mother had planted, the buds promising blooms. Pig pushed against her knees. “The lilies make me remember our first year here,” Mazy told her mother.

Elizabeth said, “Bring him on in.” She motioned toward Pig. “He can eat lots. He dont have to worry over ruining his figure. Now his memory,” she tapped her temple with her finger, “that's right up there with the best.”

“‘The warder of the brain.’ That's what Shakespeare called memory,” Mazy said.

“Did he now. Ponder that. Memory may be the warder of the heart, too,” her mother said. “Keeping good things from reaching us.”

“I hadn't thought of that.” Mazy stepped inside, looked back over her shoulder down the street, leaving the door open to the spring breeze.

“Charles Wilson sniffing around you this morning?” her mother teased.

“I think I've slipped into town early enough he isn't up yet. That's my new plan. It's working well. Deliver while Charles is still getting his beauty sleep and always have a pitchfork to hand him when he
comes out. He is a strange one, Mother. And it bothers me how Adora puts up with him that way. Cant she see he uses her?”

“It might be good for Adora to push that rooster from the coop,” Elizabeth nodded, “though I doubt she will.”

Mazy shivered.

“You chilled?”

“Just by the likes of him.”

“We need to remember, Daughter: Adoras getting something from tending him, or she wouldn't be doing it, I'll ponder. We all got needs. It's how much of ourselves we're willing to give up to get ‘em met that matters. How far astray we'll go.”

“I don't think I know what you mean,” Mazy said. She sat down, Pig at her feet.

“Adora likes being needed.”

“Tipton needed her mother, and Adora refused to go with her.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “Adora saw her daughter was taken care of. Or maybe she didn't want to find out that she wasn't going to be the center of her daughters life from then on. Takes a bit of getting used to, letting a child go.”

“And Charles? What's he giving up to be taken care of?”

“Oh, he's worse off than most,” Elizabeth said. “He gave up growing up.”

“That won't cost him much as long as Adoras there to pluck worms for that rooster and keep his feathers fluffed.”

“It'll cost him big, just the same. He may not realize it, but he's an empty man. He's keeping himself from sitting at the family table because he has to pass things around, learn to give and take. He'd rather be by himself, eating alone all the time with only his own company.”

“Where do you come up with those ideas, Mother?”

“Eatings my passion, Child, don't you know that?” She patted her daughters hand. “Pretty easy to spot someone undernourished when you've been feasting like I have all my life at the table of…risking and giving.”

Mazy laid down the letter she carried, took Pigs big head in her hands and massaged his jowls, ran her thumbs on the bone between his eyes. He closed them as though asleep. “I didn't know how much I missed you,” she said. “Isn't memory a gift? He had to remember how to get here, to swim rivers, avoid coyotes—”

“Oh, they wouldn't bother him none,” Elizabeth said.

“He could have become someone's lunch,” Mazy defended. “You just wanted to get home, didn't you, Pig? Eat at our table.” He opened his eyes at his name, yawned wide, then slurped up at her face. She laughed. How she loved that dog! Someone to talk with, to walk with, to lie across her feet while she wrote at night. Someone to listen. “And Pigs big enough I don't trip over him like I do Davids dog, Chance.”

“You got people aplenty out there, I'll ponder.”

Mazy nodded. The numbers of people she gathered around her tired her. She told herself that she wanted to respect David and Oltipa's privacy, suggesting a separate home not unlike the ones she'd built for the Indian workers. Oltipa had given her that squinted-eye look that Mazy had come to recognize as unspoken disagreement. Oltipa appeared to like the bustle of bodies around. Together, she and her Wintu friends wove grass for traditional mats and summer skirts and ground acorns into meal. They chattered in words Mazy didn't understand, laughing. Even when David took his day of rest, there were always others underfoot, not that David complained. So why should Mazy?

It was, after all, what she'd said she'd wanted. Being helpful to people. Using what she'd been given to make a safe place for others, speaking out because she could.

But she wanted distance, too. She was a boomerang tossed out to be with people, then swinging back to be alone. Maybe that was just the metaphor of her life.

“What did Suzanne have to say?” Elizabeth asked.

“About what?” Mazy asked, looking away from Pig.

“Where'd your mind go?” Elizabeth asked. She nodded toward the table. “That letter from her you said you got.”

“Esther must have written it. Looks like she was tired when she did. Kind of a scraggly hand, almost like Seths. Suzanne said she'd miss Pig terribly, but that a dog that made his way that far to find me deserved to be where he felt at home.

Her mother mumbled agreement, then brought chamomile tea for the two of them. “What else?”

“I didn't get it all read yet. Just drove on over here, hoping to avoid Charles.” Mazy read to herself. “Well, Naomi is with her. She and her baby. A sickly thing, it sounds like. When she's better, they'll come north.”