Mazy turned back to look at the oxen and her cows. They were lying down, chewing their cud in the fading light. She brushed the air against the insects buzzing and hovering. For Ruth, it was a miracle those stock were back, an absolute miracle. What on earth did it mean?
“Get back! Get back!” Tiptons words cut through the evening air, but still the flames licked up against Suzanne's skirt, finding fuel in the petticoat, smoldering putrid smoke against the damp wool of the woman's skirt.
Tipton pushed against her, toppling Suzanne from the flames, throwing dirt on the butternut-colored dress. She used her own hands to pound against the flames.
“What are you doing?” Suzanne screamed at her. “Let me be!”
“You're burning up! Dont fight me at it!”
It had happened so quickly that others barely turned to the shouting before the flames were out, the smoldering smell of wet wool now filling their heads.
“I've wanted to do this,” Mazy said, walking to help Suzanne up, touching her arms, “but I got distracted.”
“Burn me up?” Suzanne asked, though Mazy thought her usual acid tongue had been slightly diluted
“No, try out an idea.” She and Tipton brushed Suzanne off. Then Elizabeth checked over Tiptons hands to examine her burns while Deborah brought over a bowl of honey she spread on Tiptons fingers. “Using Ruth's skills,” Mazy said, turning back to Suzanne. “At converting a harness into something that'll fit Pig. With a handle you can hang onto I think he'd keep you from getting too close to things, lead you around danger. If you'd let him. Maybe even warn you of Clayton's whereabouts.”
“He'd get distracted,” Suzanne said. “Like you. By the children or Fip or whatever.”
“Might be worth a try, though, don't you think? Give you more of that ¨independence you're always saying you want.”
“Where's Clayton?” Suzanne snapped.
“Growing up,” Mazy said, adding with kindness, “now, how about you:
They had agreed to continue their gathering in the morning and had retired with full stomachs and hopeful hearts, sure medicine for untroubled sleep. Silver Bells and her man spent the evening outside the circle where the others slept too now, mostly on the ground that had begun to dry quickly with a strong west wind.
The Pawnee braced some cottonwood branches at an angle into the earth, covered them with a buffalo hide, and shortly had a lean-to, windless and warm. Elizabeth thought it a pretty fancy abode and altered the makeshift lean-to she'd prepared for herself and Mazy to a similar configuration. She returned Bethas wagon to her and her children.
She wished Mazy had agreed to spend one more night on the mattress at Bethas, but Mazy had insisted she share Elizabeths space. Both of their wagons were mangled beyond repair, making them the only family—as Mazy put it—to be homeless.
Gusts of wind struck the wagon canvases, cracked them like wet sheets. Elizabeth lay where she could see the stars poking through the windswept clouds, feet first inside the blanket-covered lean-to. Same sky that arched over her back in Milwaukee, that she and her Hans had looked up to as they stood on the porch steps. He taught her the constellations’ names, reminded her how thousands before them had studied the heavens and they had not changed, had not failed to disclose the north star where it belonged, night after night, the lip of the dipper marking its path.
“Few things are steady as stars,” he told her.
She loved the hint of Germany that sifted through his English. He always said her speech brought Kentucky back country to his old ears. His old ears. Why, he was younger than she was now when he'd said that, and she felt young as Fip. Life had too much to offer to be speaking of age. This whole journey just proved it, offering up daily doses of delight, even in the midst of misery.
Elizabeth sighed and rolled over, her bulk not enough to keep the cold from seeping into her hips. Sometimes it was as though Hans still lived. Not the way he looked, so much. That had oddly faded. But he came to her in a voice, a choice of words, a moment in time, in the little mannerisms she noticed in Mazy, like her tendency to hold her chin in her hand while she thought deeply on some subject or the way she rubbed the back of her neck to buy time.
Mazy had his slender form, too, though the girl seemed to think she was big as a house.
“Have to find a way to let her see herself as others do,” Elizabeth said out loud.
“Hmm?” Mazy said, tossing, then resumed her sleep.
“Your father would have loved this place,” Elizabeth whispered. Mazy didn't answer. “Well, good, you re resting.” She inhaled the night air, spoke a prayer for her child, that in her grief for the baby she'd lost Mazy would find healing. Who knew what tomorrow would bring, what new way they'd discover to wash away the little chunks of dying daily that came along with living?
“I'm awake,” Mazy said.
“Are you?” She turned to face her daughter, stroked the curls in Mazy's hair.
“There's nothing left of him now, is there, Mama? Nothing. Just physical things, his eyeglasses, his clothes, a book or two his fingers have touched. But no.…baby. Nothing that was a part of his living is left in me or anywhere on this earth. Nothing.”
“Memories, Mazy. That's all we ever get to hang on to when we lose someone we love. Just the give and take of memories, living inside our hearts.”
“It isn't fair,” Mazy said. “We'd just begun. Our baby…”
“I know it. It's just what is. Got the memories. That's what'll warm us on the journey back.”
“So you think we should keep going back home too?”
“I meant in our journey back to where we began, where God sent us out from.” She said it softly, hating to disappoint the longing she heard in her daughters voice. “He makes us new and different people here, stretches us, some beyond what we can even recollect. But he's always with us, Mazy, always gives us just what we need no matter where our feet might land. It's how he fills us up.”
“So there's nothing there then, at home. That's what you're saying. Back in Wisconsin. Just the memories of what was.”
“Memories you carry with you. You don't need to go back for them. I'd say you got to long for something different, to recognize the new trail God's put you on—then you'll be truly headed home.”
In the morning, Adora awoke to see that the Pawnee family had departed. Just as well. She didn't want to seem ungrateful, but there was still that question in her mind of where the disease had come from, the disease that had taken her Hathaway and the rest. The Pawnee woman had funny marks on her hands and face, scabs almost. And she'd given the roots to Elizabeth. After that, the sickness had begun.
It was never wise to mingle with other races. Those little women with Sister Esther presented enough of a strain. She made sure she didn't sit too close to them either. It was probably good also that she couldn't smell much anymore.
Adora stood, stretched, and arched her back against the morning. She looked at the corset and cast it aside; slipped on her dress and apron, splashed water onto her face. Tipton seemed to have slept better, even with her burnt hands. She'd seen no evidence that her daughter had imbibed laudanum or whiskey lately. Couldn't find any, even to relieve the pain of Suzanne's legs, which had turned red as beets after the flame. She didn't hold with that honey, but Tipton said her hands didn't sting.
Adora noticed the Pawnee had left behind their buffalo hide laid gently over the lean-to Elizabeth had crafted. Hairy old thing. She stuck her head out of the wagon back and scanned the stock. The Bacons’ riding mules were there. She looked for her eight. She could only count six.
“You had no right to let them have my mules,” Adora said. Her shrill voice left no late sleepers, though Elizabeth was surprised to see that she and Mazy were the last to rise.
“There's no way you could keep your two wagons going. You were depending on Zilah to drive one as it was,” Ruth said. The younger woman poked at the fire, requiring Adora to talk to her back. “And we wouldn't have gotten any of the animals
back without their help.”
“I'd have found those mules,” Adora said. “They'd have come home.”
Ruth scoffed. “Not without the herd. At least I know few mules likely to come back to a spot they'd only barely been to except to join up with a bell horse. Which we don't have.”
“Mules are smarter than some people, if truth be known. You overstepped your boundaries, Ruth Martin,” Adora said.
“I'll pay you for them if it comes to that. But you won't even need them, probably.”
“Money doesn't settle things,” Adora said. She slammed her tin cup against her plate, spilling her coffee down her apron. “There, now see what you've done?” She spoke louder. “They weren't yours to give away. You should have handed over one of your fine horses if you wanted to be generous. Why didn't you do that?”
“Because my horses aren't worth much out here. They wouldn't survive without grain the way Pawnee ponies do. But mules will.”
“She is right, though,” Elizabeth said. She sat on a wagon tongue, watching Clayton play hide-and-seek with Jessie and Sarah around the wounded wagons. “It wasn't your decision to make without conferring. You robbed Adora of the opportunity to be generous instead of quarrelsome.”
“I fail to see what s quarrelsome about defending my rights,” Adora said.
“You might have agreed if you'd been allowed to have a say. Wouldn't you, Adora?”
“Almost nothing worse than having someone take away your choice,” Mazy added.
“Both of our wagons are intact,” Adora whined, “and we had all our mules back.”
Ruth said, “I just know other Pawnee have come begging, and some Sioux have harassed wagons Remember hearing about that? We witnessed a major battle…” She paused. “They'd could've just taken what they wanted, maybe all of the mules. Those two did nothing but help, and they deserved something for it.”
“Give them beads then, or baubles or something, but not my mules!”
“Do you want Ruthie to go get them back?” Betha asked, patting Adoras hand. “I'm sure she could.”
Ruth frowned at her sister-in-law.
“What do the rest of you think?” Mazy asked.
“So we vote?” Ruth asked. She spit the words out She stomped toward the cooking fire, pulled off her neckerchief and picked up the coffeepot with it, poured herself a cup.
“It's no one else's decision but mine,” Adora said. “They were my mules.”
“You might be right, Adora,” Mazy said. She tied her thick hair back with a piece of rawhide. “But it's been done now. We have to decide what to do from here, maybe learn from this about talking with each other before we just act.”
“So we don't let you push us into things?” Ruth asked, addressing Mazy “Maybe we wouldn't be in this fix now if we hadn't turned around.”
“Didn't see anyone doing what they didn't want,” Elizabeth defended.
“I just wanted a marker for Jed's grave. That's why I came back,” Betha said
“They were my mules,” Adora whimpered.
“But they were a part of this gathering,” Mazy said. “And things are different now. Our decisions may look like they're drawn individually, but they're colored by each other.”
Esther and Betha walked on either side of Suzanne to the place in the road where their men were buried. A hundred or more wagons had rolled across the site since the graves had been dug.
“I hate leaving him here,” Betha said. “But it does ease me some that your brothers lie here too. And Bryce.”
“And Cynthia,” Esther reminded her.
“I'd just like to leave something here, maybe a rock we could scratch their names on or—”
“I can smell the cottonwood trees,” Suzanne said. “And is that columbine?”
“Yes,” Esther said. “We will memorize the hills and the river and the sounds of wind in the trees and the scents in the air. And when we reach the West, we will set a marker in a place to remind us of them. It will be better.”
“Mazy says that columbine means ‘I will not give thee up,’ ” Betha said “It's good for Jed to know that, that he won't be given up.” Betha sighed. The wind whipped at her flounced hat. She pushed it down with one hand; the other still held Suzanne's elbow. “So you plan to head west?”
Esther nodded. “It was to comfort you and Mazy, too, that I turned around. The girl seemed so…needful of securing her purpose. But our future is west, not east. It will be different without my brothers, without Cynthia. But it will still be what I believe I'm called to do. If I just lis-ten.
“And you, Suzanne?” Betha was never sure if the woman would stay silent, bark back, or bite, but it was rude to talk around her, as though she wasn't there.
“I don't have the luxury of a calling.”
“Oh, but you do,” Esther insisted. “We all have such a plan. We must just be open to seeing what it is.”
“Seeing. Well then, there's the problem.”
Something made Betha risk. She lifted Suzanne's hand and leaned into the taller woman, not meaning to touch her, but when she did she felt Suzanne's stance first stiffen and then soften. “I'll help you see it,” she said. “We all will. That's what friends are for.” Betha felt her own tears come again and watched two others ache down Suzanne's cheeks, too. Esther put her arm around Suzanne's shoulder, and the three stood together overlooking what some might say was only an empty stretch of trail but which Betha would always remember as the place of cotton-wood and columbine, a place where Jed—and Bryce and the others— would not be given up.
“I don't see why we have to leave one of our good wagons behind,” Adora complained. “First you give away my mules, and then you say I get only one wagon.”
“Because we're all leavin something behind,” Ruth said. “We didn't get all of the stock back.”
“I got all of mine.”
“If we were part ofthat Rough and Ready Company or the Spring Rangers group, we'd have been forced already to pair up in fours and fives. They would have fined us if we hadn't,” Betha told her.
“That wasn't Antone s way. He didn't want so many rules,” Lura said She'd found her clay pipe and had taken to chewing on it without tobacco
“We don't need many rules, either,” Ruth said. “But some.” She looked at Mazy. “Like hobbling the mules and horses when we camp. Might have saved ourselves this stampede if we'd done that. We'll make better time with fewer wagons.”
“Some have either stock or wagons, is that right?” Suzanne asked.
Mazy felt her heart start to pound. She'd known the group had been circling around a western tent. And she knew within that moment she was too tired, too beaten and defeated to talk them into going east. If only she had the courage to go that way herself.
“In addition to beginning all our gatherings with prayer,” Sister Esther announced, “we must stop on the Sabbath and rest ten minutes of every hour we travel, to preserve the animals.”
“I don't mind prayer and preservation,” Elizabeth said.
“While heading west,” Ruth said.
Elizabeth looked out of the corner of her eye at her daughter, expecting protest.
“Setting aside an entire day each week when we're already so far behind seems a little risky,” Ruth said. “Let's rest when the terrain permits.”
“Oxen work hard with rest. We too,” Naomi said. “Mei-Ling— Deborah's bees fly out without fear of being lost.”
“It will be a part of our witness to God's wonderful provision,” Sister Esther said, clasping her hands in a ball before her, “if we can say we arrived safely and still we rested each Sabbath.”
“Do we vote?” Lura asked. “What did we decide about that?”
“I'd still like an explanation about why we can't take our two perfectly good wagons with us,” Adora said. She chewed her lower lip, and her voice had risen an octave.
“Because the wagons we brought are not as sturdy, Mother.” Tipton sighed when she said it, as though the w
ords were as weighty as the wheel she and Mariah had been struggling to pull off of one of the Bacons’ wagons. Grease smudges streaked both girls’ faces. They'd hang the good wheel underneath the box of someone's wagon as a spare.
“They survived the thrashing taken by the rest of the wagons,” Adora argued. “Seem pretty sturdy to me.”
“Only because they were on the near side, opposite where the animals bolted,” Tipton said, “Otherwise—”
“Fine. Fine,” Ruth said. “Let's just decide what we're taking and who's going with us.”
“So we're not voting,” Lura said, almost to herself.
Something in the bickering, the quarreling in circles, each person clinging to her own ways, to what she knew best, pressed against Mazy s temples, ached at the back of her neck. She searched for something to say that would get at what they were struggling with, tried to identify the feelings that were bouncing off the arguments like water on a hot three-legged spider frying pan. It wasn't the words they were saying; it was what wasn't being spoken of that drove the dissension; she wished she could grasp the meaning. Perhaps make sense of it for herself.
“I know you'd like to take everything you brought along, Adora,” Mazy said. “We all would. The thought of leaving a chest of drawers or the dishes that were my grandmother's is—”
“Or Hathaway's picture,” Adora wailed. “How can I leave any of the little I have left of him? You tell me that.” The last words had come out shattered, splintered. “You tell me how I'm to live without my son, gone off to who knows where. With a child that's aching and so far away I never will get her back. I can't…” She dropped her hands to her sides, the palms up in defeat. “I just can't. The wagons and mules were the last thing Hathaway bought.”
She turned aside, reached for her apron, and held it with both hands to her face. She stood alone, her shoulders shaking, speaking grief, catapulting them back to their own.
Betha stepped beside her, put an arm out to reel her in. The woman allowed it, sank into Bethas arms and, with the movement, gave permission to release the hard, racking sobs of powerlessness, of mourning what was no more, pushing the world away while reaching for connection, begging not to grieve alone.