Koda nuzzled her. “It isn't Zane that pushes at me, is it? It's my own doing, being afraid and thinking that if I lean on Betha and the others I'm weak.” She thumbed her eyes. “This is weak,” she decided. “Being myself with the others, that's what takes strength.”
She'd get her family to California, settle them in and then head north for her horses. Yes, she'd choose differently, not let Zane decide her course. Then maybe what she got from her life would change too She blew her nose on a white handkerchief. “Let's go back,” she told Koda. “I'm tired of being alone.”
Mazy watched the rider approaching and knew at once that it was Ruth.
“Whither thou goest,” Mazy said when she was within earshot. Ruth looked confused, and Mazy smiled a wistful smile. “I've got sad news for you,” she said “But you've made it easier to tell with your turning back.” She spoke then of Betha's passing and that the women followed hoping she'd be found by Mazy, sure they would fare better all together as one.
They met the wagons by the evening circling, their reunion tempered by the shadow of their loss. Ruth held the children, exchanged glances with the others. “It'll be all right,” she said. “We've got each other.”
They headed south. “Some of those little stones I piled at Mama's grave I brought with me all the way from home,” Ned said.
“She'll like that,” Ruth told him.
Elizabeth had planted a columbine seed, she said, and Mazy told again the story of its meaning, “I will never give thee up.”
Ruth left a different marker at the turning place when they reached it the next day. On it she wrote: “To Zane Randolph. Your family headed to Oregon.” It was her lie, but she knew he could read and hoped he'd stay out of California.
They walked as they had the weeks before, and in the travel, they grieved Betha's passing, remembered the others, how their lives and loss had stretched each woman's heart. But the dreariness lessened, at least for Mazy. A new goal led them: to get to California, settle legal issues, contract matters, find new beginnings. A smile even crept across her face as she kicked at dust The pain in her side eased. She still ached inside when she thought of Jeremy, gone; felt a rush of blood at the memory of his betrayal. But leaves of forgiveness grew too. Forgiving him would let her forgive herself; or perhaps as her mother implied, if she was kind to herself, she'd have more to give away.
Time healed, and so could looking forward. Who would have guessed that she, Mazy Bacon, would someday not only accept the unknown but find excitement, a hope, wrapped within?
The women now knew they would settle close to each other, be together. They already resided in that place of friendship fired by difficulty, in the shelter of faith and each other. But to be physically near each other, to share the work of washing or the chatter of their days, where they could continue to nourish the broken clods of each other's spirits into ready soil, that would be a miracle. Another one of many, if truth be known, as Adora might say, as Sister Esther would surely agree was certain.
Sister Esther held the writing desk, a black splotch of ink staining the oak.
“What happened?” Mazy asked her. It was morning, a time for writing.
“I don't know for certain. Deborah?”
Deborah came on her quick, quick steps.
“Do you know anything of this?” Esther held the desk to her, shaking it like a shaming finger.
“No,” the girl told her. “I not see before.”
Her protests drew Ruth, then Lura, Pig, and Suzanne. And when Suzanne asked, Esther described the stain. “Its recent,” she said, her fingers touching the grain raised from the wet. Then remembering, she caught her breath. “Oh, I am so sorry to accuse you, any of you,” Esther said. “The day that Betha died. I reached too sharply for the lantern in Suzanne's hand. The ink bottle…1 did it myself.”
“Paper?” Deborah asked. “Paper inside?”
“Oh, my,” Esther said as she lifted the lid, her fingers shaking as she opened the hinge. Inside lay the white linen, blotched black as sin. Esther moaned as she lifted the cloth. Beneath lay Deborahs future, the parchment now nothing but a blotter for ink.
“Maybe it can be redrawn,” Mazy said She stared at the parchments edges revealing portions of letters and lines.
“By whom? How? Oh, I'm always judging someone else, and its me, my errors, my penance to pay,” Esther said.
“You were overcoming a fear,” Suzanne told her, “hoping to save a friend. Accidents happen.”
“Well spoken,” Mazy told her, touching her hand. Then, “Tipton draws. Maybe you and Deborah can remember some of the design and tell Tipton.”
“I saw it, too,” Ruth said “When Sarah made it her kite.”
“You could describe it to Tipton, you and Deborah? I would be so grateful.”
“Better,” Ruth said. “I'm a lithographer. We can draw it together.”
Several days after the parting of the ways place, they crossed a deep, white, windy valley with no water. They walked well into the night, the bugs and mosquitoes constant companions, their throats parched. The moon rose high above them, casting shadows of sparse sage on sand; no grass, nothing to stop for; water promised only when they made it through this.
Mazy moved past Sister Esther and heard her praying beneath her breath. Mazy patted her shoulder, dragged her own feet through the dust beside Suzanne and Pig, Sason still in Tiptons shawl sling. No one whipped the oxen. They did all that they could on their own.
“Do you need to ride, Suzanne?” Mazy asked her.
“I'm thinking of calling myself Suzie,” she said, adjusting her dark glasses. “Suzie's not so formal. Something new. And no, I'm fine walking.
Tipton reached for Sason, to relieve Suzanne.
“You've stayed with us, Tip. We've needed you. I'm grateful,” Mazy said.
OI’ Snoz, Sister Esther's favorite ox who had survived the crash and journey this far, did not stay with them; he expired from thirst in the night.
“Leave him,” Esther said, wiping her nose, sniffing in the moonlight. “Nothing can be done for him.” They clustered around the fallen ox, offering comfort to the straight-backed woman. “I'm too tired to butcher it, too weary without water to care.”
“And we've no time,” Mazy said. “Need to keep pushing or we'll lose another ox, or worse.”
Esther grieved for the beast long after they left him.
At last, while it was still dark, as the moon set without the rise of the sun, they reached a campsite, recognizable by its single water hole that looked dark and still, but wet. They unhitched the remaining oxen, which sucked at the water, their noses deep in. Lura lay on her stomach and splashed her face. “Stinks and it's warm,” she said, “but it's wet.”
“Close your eyes and pinch your nose,” Adora told Tipton. “Won't even taste it.”
Tip ton sighed and dipped a cup in “The critters…” she said.
“Oh, nothing can live in that,” Elizabeth told her, “even without boiling.”
The women hobbled the mules and horses, offered them and the milk cows buckets of the putrid stuff, which they took grudgingly. Suzanne gave her share of hoarded water in the lidded bucket on Lura's wagon to Clayton, made sure the other children had enough, then gave the rest to Pig.
Tipton watched Adora swallow before she let the warm water trickle down her own throat. She grimaced. “What a body wont do to survive,” she said, then tried not to think of what she'd just put inside her.
Each woman fell into a deep and hungered sleep.
They awoke to the sounds of an ox bellowing in the distance.
“Must be another group gaining on us,” Elizabeth said, blurry eyed.
But when she stood up, she saw no other wagons, no other emigrants close behind. Instead she hurried to Sister Esther s tent. “You ain't going to believe this, Sister, but we've got us a resurrection.”
Sister Esther peered into the moonlit night, her eyes pinched from the long day in the sun. “Can i
t be?” she said. “Snoz?”
“He must have found some old alkaline hole, and here he is,” Mazy said.
The animal bellowed and shook his big head, but he did not stop to greet his surprised and grateful owner. He lumbered past her to the water hole just beyond.
“Praise God?” Deborah said, softly making her way beside Esther.
“Oh my, yes, do that,” Sister Esther answered.
They found a good watering spot farther on in the morning though with little grass. Nothing grew here, it seemed. The cracks in the white baked earth were wide enough in places to catch the children's ankles, scratch them deep as they pulled their bare feet back out.
“Hope we didn't make a mistake coming this way,” Ruth told Mazy.
“What's done is done,” Mazy said. “I don't have any fuel to give to the wondering of what I might have done different, at least not at this moment, while we're in it. Have to evaluate when we get where we're going. Decide what I've learned then.”
“I'm working on that too,” Ruth said.
Within days, they looked down into a wide valley marked by the slender ribbon of what Mazy said had to be the twisting Humboldt River.
“There'll be some rough places yet,” Mazy said. “They say the water gets worse instead of better and the river gets thinner But beyond is a meadow and then, California and the high Sierras. Good water there, not to mention the cool of the mountains.”
“I like the way you think on pleasant things, child,” her mother said. “Keeps us moving.”
Mazy's lips were blistered and cracked and the bloomers she wore shredded, but she didn't care. She wasn't frightened anymore, at least not of indecision. She'd chosen on her own, and she'd been faithful, not apologized or btamed the others or herself when things got rough or wrong. They were here, on the verge of achieving what they'd set out to do, find a new home, a new place to be.
She looked at each of the women. They all wore caked blisters, dirt ground into their skin. Lura's apron hung like a limp brown rag against her faded dress, and Mazy sent a prayer of remembrance for Betha and her tidy ways.
“We look so wretched,” Tipton said. “Just look at us.”
“What was that little poem you said, about it being a gift to be simple and to come down to where we ought to be? Sarah, what was that?”
“And when we find ourselves in the place that's right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.”
Mazy started to laugh at the faces of caked dirt, the sun-streaked clothes, blistered feet, and yet how beautiful each woman was, from the inside, where things were essential “We're in the valley, all right. And each of you looks as full of love and delight as any I ever knew back in the States. Though to some, we might just look like buzzard bait.”
Elizabeth looked up at the hot sky. “See any?” she asked. The other women looked up. “No? Well, we've got something more to offer then. Lets keep going, simple and free as we be.”
They looked wretched, but it was a temporary state. It was all temporary. All the misery and worry, all the hardship and strain. Just temporary. All the good things too, Mazy supposed, the moments of joy and lightness, of love and delight. Those didn't last either, but time was better spent musing on them.
The best we have is the present, what happens right now, with all these women given to each other to help us survive, keep going It was almost worshipful, watching their thin calicos move across the desert. Like the Israelites, wandering and dusty as they sought the Promised Land. Only when they came to trust, only when they stopped demanding on their own, did they discover the water of the Jordan. But even there Moses had made them stop to remember the past, what they'd learned, so they could take the stories and truths with them and not wander uncertain again.
What had she learned so far? To make the best of the moment with people she'd come to care for, was willing to change for; and to thank God for the choice, and trust him for the rest.
Mazy smiled.
“What is it, darling?” Elizabeth asked her.
“I'm just counting my joys. Finding such good people out here in the middle of nowhere. Friends. Ten times more than I had back in Cassville. And thinking of what Jeremy told me once when I got tangled up in the reeds in that cold spot in the Mississippi. He was right. Things aren't always as they seem. Sometimes they're even better.”
They began meeting more people: traders on horseback, Californians asking about relatives from Missouri or Wisconsin, from New York or the Ohio Valley. Their animals sometimes carried supplies, dried beef and fresh spring-fed water. Several said they were hired by relief groups, out from Sacramento and other places, to bring the emigrants in, to welcome them with “open arms,” those who had spit in the elephants eye.
“They must want something,” Lura said, chewing on her empty pipe.
“Its only for the destitute,” one man said as he tipped his hat at Tipton.
“Which you aren't,” Tipton said, eyeing him dressed all clean and covered.
“You dont fit that description either, ma'am,” the man said, his ears turning red.
“Why, that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, I'm sure,” Tipton told him and curtsied. She batted her eyes at the man, her face a mass of scabs from insect bites, her skirt shredded, dirty and limp, her bodice stained with sweat. Her bare feet had the look of sausages, all swollen and red. But she was upright and walking and sassy, and she could still make a man blush.
“Where you coming from?” one of the men asked.
“Oh, from all kinds of places. Along the North Platte,” Mariah told him “How about you?”
“Sent out to let you know about Beckworth's largess and to avoid the Lassen Cutoff,” he said. “Just stay on this route, head into Sacramento,” he told them. “South around Ragtown, along the Carson River. You'll be in good shape.”
He'd tipped his hat again and ridden on, but his presence was the subject of the evening circle around their necessary time.
“Wouldn't it be nice if we just could make a choice and then go with that and never waver? Never have to change course?” Ruth said.
“Like on a ship?” Mariah said.
“Even ships make adjustments, go around storms if they can and have to steer through what they can't control,” Sister Esther said. She was in the center of the circle. Outside, Mazy watched the boys looking after Clayton while Sarah and Jessie sat like little statues, being allowed to hold Sason for the first time on their own. The children were cleaner than they'd been for a while, a stream having provided a needed place for bathing and for a good scrubbing of their threadbare clothes. They cried less as each woman made time to hold them and wipe their tears. The women had pitchered water over each others heads, the feel of cool water on their dirty scalps like a balm to a wound.
“We are on a course,” Mazy said. She inhaled deeply the clear, cooler evening air. “A good direction. It's a little exciting to see what's around the next bend, don't you think? We'll just have to weigh what these men have to say to us before we veer off in one direction or another. What matters is that we've made the commitment. We have to trust Providence for the rest.”
In the morning, they met three riders touting various routes, offering to buy up Adoras mules. They eyed a thin Ink as well.
“If you're willing to give me that kind of cash out here,” Adora said, “think what I can get in California.”
“Your mules've got to make it. They're looking pretty slim.”
“They're tough as tacks,” she said.
“Speaking of them,” the man said, scratching at his hairy chin, “we'd buy them up too if you had ‘em, which I see you do there, on your lettering wagon.”
The offer came more than once.
“What would they do with those?” Suzanne asked when Mazy told her what they wanted. “My carpet tacks? And Lura's? Everybody's?”
“He's wearing white,” Tipton said. “I can see that. And he's about the same size as that Laiamie man.” The wo
men stared, wary of the distant rider with a high top hat.
“Time I faced him,” Ruth said. “Mazy, keep Jessie and the others in the wagon, will you? I don't want them seeing him or him seeing them.”
“Seeing who, Auntie?” Jessie said.
“He must have taken the Salt Lake trail to be coming at us from the west like that, doubled back.”
Suzanne asked, not certain of what she heard, “He's riding in from the west, heading east?”
“Well, ponder that,” Elizabeth said, squinting her eyes into the distance. “We all know who that is”
“Charles?” Adora said
“Not ¨Charles,” Tipton said.
“No,” Elizabeth told them, beginning to wave her arm in a wide and welcoming arc “It's that gambling man turned teacher, Seth Forrester.”
“Why, Seth,” Mazy said as the rider pulled up his horse before them. “You white-collared man. What happened to your quality beaver-skin hat?”
Seth grinned at her “The quality comes from what's under the hat, not what material's in it.” He removed the white hat, said, “It is my pleasure to encounter you again. Where's that giant dog of yours?” His eyes cast across her, searched them all They stopped at Pig standing beside Suzanne, and then his eyes moved back. Mazy could tell that he counted no men.
“What happened?” he said, his voice low, his eyes holding hers.
“Sit a spell with us at our nooning and we'll tell you,” Elizabeth said.
And so he nooned with them, and they told him of the sorrow and the losses, the burials and the moving east and then west again like a dance There was a tenderness in the telling, for he was someone who could hold their loved ones in his mind. It made the giving richer, the remembering deeper. And as they spoke, the men and women they'd lost filled their lives again, Jeremy and Antone, Jed, Hathaway and Tyrell, Bryce, Harold and Ferrel. Betha. Cynthia, too. All entered their conversations.
“We'll bring our memories with us, to new places,” Elizabeth said.
“You've been through much,” Seth said. “Worthy of admiration.” He fingered his hat as he sat on the milking stool Mazy offered him, set in the shade of a wagon. “I'm sorry to learn of your losses.”