Her eyes sought out Tyrell's bedroll in its familiar place beside their wagon. It wasn't there.
“Got us more company,” Mrs. Mueller said behind her through a yawn. “Looks like a town exploded and dribbled people everywhere. Thought you'd sleep late.”
“So much to see,” Tipton said. She forced her voice into lightness, Tyrell's missing bedroll an ache behind her eyes.
“Guess kids don't need no sleep to wind them up. Heard a good-size group came in from Wisconsin in the night.” Mrs. Mueller stretched. “Hear ‘em?”
“No, nothing.”
“We've got delays crossing the river, too,” Mrs. Mueller told her, cracking her knuckles. “A thousand wagons ahead of us.”
“Truly? A thousand!”
“Should have been here last week, Jeremy's saying.”
“His precious Ayrshires'll be ‘diluted of grass,’ I suppose,” Tipton said, pouring tepid water into a bowl. “Worries more about them than us.”
Mrs. Mueller didn't answer.
Tipton splashed water onto her face. In silence, she plaited her tawny hair into a long braid, then twisted it on top of her head. She stared at the dark blue eyes gazing back at her from the section of broken mirror. Her mother said they were the color of Lake Michigan in a cold October. She pinched her cheeks and smoothed her blond brows with a wet finger. Her mind returned to Tyrell's missing bedroll. Where could he have gone? Her fingers shook as she tied on her skirt hoop.
“What's your hurry, girl?” Mrs. Mueller said, her head cocked to one side.
Tipton said nothing, trying not to look fretted “With additional womenfolk around now, we'll finally have a few more skirts to circle with in our necessary times,” Elizabeth continued.
Tiptons cheeks burned hot with embarrassment. Why must she speak of such a private thing as if it were nothing more than washing dishes?
“Don't tell me that talk of ladies’ latrines puts a blush on that pretty face,” Mrs. Mueller told her “You best learn to loosen up—hey, I made a joke,” she said, “or your old bowels'll be packed like a cannon.”
Tipton buried her head in a bachelor-button blue lingerie dress. When she reached Mrs. Mueller's age, she'd never talk about her bowels with others, not ever. She pulled the line-dried folds over her head, settled the waist, then sat to pull on her stockings and slippers, keeping her head low. When she sat up, she tied on a satin ribbon hat, wiped glycerin on her hands to soften them from the dry air, and pretended the pink on her cheeks came from the dot of rouge she rubbed there, not from the subject at hand
“I'm a bit grieved by Jeremy's talk of going it alone,” Mrs Mueller said. “You ask my noggin,” she continued, undoing her own long braid laced with gray and snubbing her fingers through it to untangle the plaits, “shouldn't be on one of these overland trips without at least five women. Six'd be better. We've had trees for our necessary circle so far, but come the prairies, you'll be pleased as pigs in heaven to have the backs of women's skirts to hide you while you squat.”
“A lady doesn't, squat,” Tipton said. “She relieves herself, which I intend to do right now.” She felt her neck blotch hot. “I mean, relieve myself. Of this conversation.”
Tipton stepped backwards down the steps, one hand managing her hoop skirt and the other grasping the side of the canvas for balance. She heard Mrs. Mueller's hearty laugh as she left.
It was one thing to lack privacy with personal hygiene and quite another to have it openly discussed. Tipton inhaled a deep breath just as Tyrell had said to whenever she felt rattled or flushed She looked up. Wispy clouds streaked across a blue canvas. Tipton stood a moment, savoring the light over the misted river, distant dust rising with sun streaks like gold thread woven through it. Deciding to risk continued conversation with her bedmate, she stepped back up, leaned inside to get her parasol, and plucked the pink silk from beneath the straw tick. Mrs. Mueller never even saw her. She stood with her back to the opening, one hand rubbing her hip.
Outside, Tipton scanned the wagons and the men standing in clusters, listening to the hum of conversations broken by an occasional burst of guffaws, the clank of iron against cauldron, the chatter of children at play. She smelled crackling cookies frying, felt the wetness of mud seep into her slippers. She decided to stand right where she was and scan until she found him. Now her breath came in short gasps.
She wondered why Tyrell hadn't thought to find her this morning. Maybe he wanted time away from her. Perhaps with others around now, he'd find more amiable companions, older and wiser.
She felt the familiar sensation press against her chest, the sense that air would not come through, and then the tingling numbness beginning in her fingers. Where was he? Why couldn't she see him? Maybe he and Mr. Bacon had had words. A buzz formed at the top of her head. If Tyrell left the train, she would run away with him. He wouldn't take her willingly, she knew that; he'd given his word to her parents. But she'd never be left with the Bacons. She'd escape to follow him on her own. She swallowed, her throat dry. She couldn't even make her saliva go down when she wanted.
“Did you sleep all right?”
Miz Bacons words startled her from behind. She was light as a bird on her feet despite being as tall as most men. Tipton's eyes flickered, tightness stretched across her temples. No, it couldn't happen, not now, not here with all these people, not with Tyrell nowhere around to ease it away.
“Have some cornbread and sweet cream. Fixed it fresh this morning.” Miz Bacon put her good arm around the girl and eased her toward the Bacons’ fire. There was no resisting the firmness. Miz Bacons apron smelled of cabbage and something sour Tipton couldn't place. Still, the woman's arm felt comforting as a quilt. “Set a spell and keep me company,” Miz Bacon said, and it sounded like a sigh.
Lonely, that's what she is. Loneliness could happen married to a man like Mr. Bacon; that and her being already so old with no children. Why, Miz Bacon must be almost nineteen.
Tipton let herself be helped to the milking stool set beside the embers.
“Haven't had enough of me yet?” Tipton said. Her voice sounded wispy even to herself. Her fingers felt so numb. She lowered her head below her knees. Sometimes that helped. She pretended to be gazing at the fire, blotting dampness at her slipper.
“We've a long way ahead of us to be tired of each other,” Miz Bacon said. Her voice was always so gentle when she wasn't talking at her husband. “I've written a good report to your mama.” The woman rubbed at the wrapped arm she now moved without a sling.
Tipton took a breath and held it. Sometimes if she did that, the tingling in her arm went away.
“Have you seen Tyrellie, Miz Bacon?” She exhaled it as a blast of air.
“I'll bet his mother named him that specifically so no one could add an ie at the end. Mothers'll do that, you know,” Miz Bacon said. “Not want someone calling their six-foot-tall boy ‘Mikie’ someday, so they name him ‘Jeremy to begin with or something solid like Isaac or Tyrell. Then some sweet thing comes along and rearranges it. Tyrellie.” She rolled her eyes.
“It's no one's business excepting ours, his and mine.” Tipton s voice took on strength, and the tingling in her hand lessened. She sat up straighten
Miz Bacon bit off a hunk of the cornbread and chewed. She winced as she tried to catch the crumbs in the palm of her bad hand.
“Have you seen him then, Miz Bacon?” Tipton let her eyes scan the area “After all this time, dont you think ‘Mazy is in order?”
“Not like him to wander from the wagons before we've had our good mornings.”
“There'll be more folks around now, Tipton.” Miz Bacons voice got all soft. “People needing work done on their wagons, their horses trimmed. That's Tyrell's job. Its what a blacksmith does, why his work is so valued. Not looking after you.” She said it with kindness, but still the words stung. “Your mama and papa delegated that task to us, at least for a while.”
“Do tell, ma'am,” Tipton said, lifting her chin. A songbird
warbled into the silence. The scent of fried bacon drifted from a fire across the circle.
Pig, lying on his side in the wagon shade, let out a sharp, quick bark, woke himself, and trotted over to the women. Miz Bacon fed him bread from her palm. The dog slobbered. “You fat little pig,” she said as she brushed at the dog's head in tenderness. Tipton looked away.
“What's with you? Are you worried? You strike me as so sure of yourself. You never turned an eye back toward home when we left. I envied that, the way you said good-bye without even shedding a tear. It doesn't fit then, it seems to me, your needing Tyrell so much.”
“None of your business neither,” Tipton said. She gathered up her parasol and poked it on the ground before her.
“Now see, that's just what I mean. Put me in my place but then so…lost almost, as though you can't be your own post—you've got to lean on him. That can tire a man.”
“Our love is a post. We're roped together around it. We don't intend to let it untangle loose after we say our vows, not Tyrellie and me, not the way some married folks do.” Tipton stood then. “We're the same. We understand that being together isn't leaning at all. It's filling up. It's…tying up loose ends, now that we have each other.” She eyed the woman chewing, still staring. “Maybe that's what you envy, ma'am.”
“Just don't get so roped together you get hung up,” Miz Bacon told her.
Tipton straightened the blue pleats of her skirt and opened the parasol. “I was not born in the woods to be scared by an owl,” she said and swirled out across the circle toward the new wagons.
Tyrell hadn't soured on her. They did belong together. These six weeks had proved it. He'd been kind and good and gentle. It was how he proved his love, not coming back for Tipton after two years apart the way her mother wanted. The mere thought of two or three years without Tyrell took her breath away.
She let herself take in the sights and sounds around her. The smells of horses and men, of cooking and smoke all swirled about by her parasol She walked past roped places; one held Marvel and another the Ayrshire cows, Jennifer and Mavis. People milled like water swirling in a bucket, more men, women, and children in one place than she'd seen in months back in Cassville, even dark-skinned people, and slender, bowing girls with ivory hairsticks and wearing what looked like trim silk dresses. She spied the boys who'd peeked in the wagon. They pushed hoop rings before them with sticks. She overheard one say, “You think she's blind?”
“Why else would she carry that stick?”
“To hit people with, she's so grumpy.” The boys laughed.
A girl with short pigtails stuck straight out like thumbs ran between them, forcing wind through a sock attached to a stick.
Tipton spied a dozen dogs, some tied and barking, others lying about or marking their homes. She'd gotten used to the Bacons’ dog. He was big and carried a deep bark, but he gentled when he knew a person. Other dogs proved more worrisome, and she made a wide berth around two snarling over a deer's leg bone beneath a wagon.
So much was worrisome. She tried not to think of it as she walked. But there was the river, the Missouri. Wide and gorged with rain, it was worth worrying over. People said lightning fires could race across the prairie and leave nothing but charred remains of wagons and people. She could worry over that and over the Sioux, too, who could steal and kill stragglers, and the Pawnees who just harassed. She'd heard tales of messages left by travelers scraped onto human skulls warning of the dangers of sickness ahead. Everything was worrisome if she was honest, everything. Her mouth got dry with the thinking.
“You got to settle your thoughts,” Tyrell told her nearly every day. “You can tell them, ‘go straight away and they will. It's the only thing we all control—our thoughts, our own actions. No one else's.” But he helped control hers, when he was there to remind her to take deep breaths She could bury the fears because Tyrell stood beside her
He said he'd never leave her, sounding almost like the words in Scripture Mrs. Mueller read out loud before they went to bed. Because of that fine promise, she felt more confident now as she walked. Tyrell gave her that, and she took some small satisfaction in knowing that Miz Bacon, Mazy, a wiser, older woman, envied it.
Tipton meandered in her own world of thoughts and didn't notice the couple until she bumped into them.
The man apologized for not watching, then introduced himself as Bryce Cullver and his wife, Suzanne, who wore a bonnet so floppy it shadowed her face. She held in her hand a goading stick instead of a parasol. “She carries a pink parasol as pretty as the lady herself,” the man said, apparently describing Tipton to the woman clinging to his arm. “She has blue eyes, dark as dusk. Quite a photograph she'd make,” Bryce Cullver said, patting his wife's hand.
Tipton watched the woman tug awkwardly at him as though to move away. She swung the goad and Tipton jumped back.
“Suzanne,” the man said He shook his head, tipped his hat, his eyes saying “sorry” before they moved on.
Tipton watched them, then became distracted by a tall, well-dressed man who bent in attentive conversation to a bloomer-clad woman. He had the look of a white-collared man, a gambler, one Tipton knew best to shy away from.
At last, she spied Tyrell. Not in the circle of wagons but near the stock ropes, those reddish curls clustered around his head looking almost like spun sunrise. She smiled and took a deep, filling breath.
He bent beneath a gelding whose foreleg braced against the leather apron laid out on Tyrells thigh. The whole weight of the animal leaned against the man though three legs held the big sorrel up. No wonder his back ached, with the constant bending and the leaning of horses against his frame. Tipton heard the familiar rasp of the file pressed into service to shape the horses hoof. Clumps of nippered hoof littered the ground before him, giving up their pungent smell.
A woman—a pretty woman—held the horse by its halter.
Tipton felt her chest tighten.
The woman's face lit up when she talked. Tiny white lines made their way from her hazel eyes then disappeared like wisps into fawn-colored hair caught in a snood at her neck. She wore a faded calico dress, and what looked like men's boots poked out from beneath the hem. Judging from the color of her face, she seldom wore a bonnet and did not now. Leather gloved fingers pushed at a loose curl, folded it behind her ear. She nodded at something Tyrell said. He laughed.
Tipton clutched her parasol so tightly her fingers hurt.
Ruth Martin felt more than saw the parasol and girl approach. The closer she floated in her wide skirts, the straighter her back became. Ruth had seen the flash she guessed was fury cross the girl's face, replaced with a smile of white teeth.
“You must be Tipton,” Ruth said in a gravelly voice. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me. This dust makes my throat thick.”
“I don't believe we've met.”
“I'm Ruth, Ruth Martin.” She put her free hand out the way a man might. The girl stared, then touched it lighdy with her fingers. “I'd know those ‘startling blue eyes’ and someone ‘dressed like a china doll’ anywhere. Your intended here has said few words, but most have been of you.”
The girl's face relaxed a little, but Ruth recognized the anxiety in it, the fright folded into the fine-boned face.
“Thought you might do a painting for her,” Tyrell offered, his voice spoken into his work.
“Of you, ma am?”
“Me? Oh no,” Ruth said. “I might like for you to draw my Koda here.” Ruth nodded toward the horse. “He's a favorite of mine and getting on in years. Does a few tricks I've taught him. He counts and takes handkerchiefs from my sleeves sometimes when I'd rather he didn't.” She patted the horse's nose, and he pulled his lips back as if he were laughing. “I'd like to have a keepsake of him. Do you do charcoals?”
Tyrell grunted with the horse's shift in weight.
“I'm sorry,” Ruth said to Tyrell. “I'm not paying attention. Koda does have a nasty habit of leaning.” She pulled the halter gently, sp
oke to the horses nose, scratched it with her fingers, and the horse shifted its weight. “I shouldn't have let him go so long without a trim.”
“Well spoken,” Tyrell said, “though you have a gift for it, I'm seeing.”
“Can't count on any but myself most times.”
“Won't be needing to go so far for service this trip,” he said. With the back of his arm, he wiped the sweat from his forehead, looked up at her, and smiled. He had an open, inviting face, Ruth thought. Kind.
“There'll be fair competition for your skills, Mr. Jenkins, on whichever train you join.”
“You might loan your own trimming skills out,” he said. “You did good.”
“Oh, I doubt—”
“You and your husband are going west, then?” Tipton asked, interrupting. The girl fluttered her eyelashes and spun the umbrella. Koda's ears twitched at the movement, but Ruth had trained him well and the horse didn't jerk away.
“I'm driving my own wagon,” Ruth said.
Tyrell lifted the horse's foreleg off his thigh and stood to stretch. “No husband or brother or teamster?” He laid the rasp in a wooden bucket and moved it and himself in one motion back toward the horses hindquarters. “Could be risky”
“I have a brother,” Ruth said She heard the irritation in her own voice and made an effort to lighten her next words. “Though Jed and Betha and their crew're more likely to be needing taking care of than me.
“You dont share his wagon?” Tipton asked.
“Have my own. Bullwhack it fine Jed does his. His wife, Betha, she has her hands full with their four little ones. They're around here somewhere.” She looked around. “Pigtails, that's Sarah. Ones chubby, Ned; the other, Jason's like a strip of bacon. Youngest is Jessie. My brother's a solicitor, or was, back in St. Louis. I'll help them with the children some, but he'll let me be ‘responsible for my own lot,’ as he said before we left. That suits me fine.”
“What if something happens, who would handle your wagon?” Tipton asked.