If she needed quiet, she'd spend an evening with her daughter, reading, or taking a bath, while Mazy worked on the quilt pieces she'd gathered up so far.
“This mining town may be a crazy place to call home, but I love it,” she told Mazy as her daughter poured hot water into the copper tub, over her shoulders. The smell of rose hips floating in the water came to Elizabeth's nose. “A dozen different languages, people rushing about. Makes me remember when your father lived and he brought folks home. Just like your Jeremy. But I didn't do so good a job letting that husband of yours in,” Elizabeth said.
“Jeremy said things weren't always as they seemed.”
“True enough from him, having a wife and child somewhere else. Hand me that towel, will you?” Mazy did, then sat down on one of the two grandmother chairs they'd managed to bring with them. Her skirts fluffed out around her like a mushroom.
“These are good.” Mazy held up a popover her mother had saved back for her. “Thank you.”
“Be even better with your home grown grain, come fall. Still, a mother likes to think she can see a wolf showing up at the door, looking like a lamb. And I didn't.”
“You let me make my own choices. That's what a good mother does, even if sometimes the results aren't what she wants.”
Elizabeth grunted. “Always were a forgiving child.”
Nehemiah Kossuth was an accommodating man. The rooms he provided for Tipton and her mother were larger than Suzanne's whole house. A smaller room off to the side held a copper tub, their lingerie, and the irons that pressed them. The main room was both a bedroom and a sitting room, furnished fully. When she'd first seen it, Tipton took short, quick breaths until her arm tingled. It was like a fairy tale, this room, this hotel, this encountering of Nehemiah. Even after three months here, Tipton wasn't at all sure how she felt about accepting it. Or what attachments came with the receiving.
Her mother had no doubts. “He thinks you're a princess, come right out of a book. Oh, we are so fortunate to have found him, so lucky to have fallen into that window.” Her mother threw herself onto the bed, her arms spread across the gold-and-rose-colored brocade cover. Adora stuffed a lace-covered pillow with ruffles beneath her head.
“He is a nice man, mother, but I don't know—”
“Of course you don't. You're young and inexperienced. You just trust your mother. Let him soothe his conscience.” She sat up, rubbed her arm as she talked.
“Your elbow is fine.”
“Well, I know that. But truth be known, it does ache more than it did before I fell. It does!”
“It needs exercise, like ironing.”
“We dont have to do that now.”
“I only agreed to stay here because its better for you.”
“Nothing bad has happened since he let us have this room. He isn't making any demands, is he?”
Tipton shook her head.
Adora went on, “I didn't think so. It's just a gift. Hospitality. You could quit that laundering—if you just would.”
“People count on me. And Tyrellie always said that was the best thing to have in a day, knowing it mattered whether you did what you said you would or not. Just staying here, in this fine room all day, it's like I'm being—”
“Tyrell was a fine man,” Adora said. She stood, untied her bonnet, hung it on the high, turned walnut post at the foot of the bed. “But he is gone. He is never coming back.”
Tiptons eyes watered. “I don't like this, Mother. I don't like this mixture of feelings, of liking Nehemiah's dinners and visits and now providing a room. I feel obligated. I don't like working so hard my knuckles bleed, but I'm not fond of charity, either. You wouldn't let us accept help from Elizabeth and Mazy.”
“This is different. You're helping that poor man with his grieving.”
“If only Charles hadn't taken our money and left us. It's all so unfair.”
Adora motioned Tipton over to sit beside her on the huge bed. “You can help each other, you and Nehemiah. Let him keep looking after you. You might find yourself enjoying his company. Keep scrubbing if you must. Set aside the money for a room and offer it, though I doubt he'll take it.”
“We could still sell the mules. Use the money for the room.”
“Those mules are the last of our legacy, our money in the bank. Don't want to use that up foolishly. Besides, Nehemiah looks to me like he's got enough to give away. Isn't that what Elizabeth said hospitality was?—having gratitude enough it spilled over and you could give it away. Nehemiah Kossuth is grateful to have met you. And you're letting him be kind, so you're being generous too.”
“I thought Elizabeth said hospitality grew out of being grateful for your home,” Tipton said. “Your place of belonging. This doesn't feel like my place. I don't feel like I'm giving anything to Nehemiah.”
“Because you won't spend a nickel to put something here that's yours.” Adora patted her daughter's shoulders then stood and swirled around the room. “You got to spend a little to feel at home.”
A boundary existed, Mazy thought, between Hong Kong and the rest of town, and there were unwritten rules about when it could be crossed. At the Chinese New Year, the Asians gave every woman a good-luck gift, a “Sacred Lily of China,” sometimes an embroidered scarf or two. The men got cigars, and everyone laughed and clapped at the parade with blasts and pops of firecrackers and gaudy paper dragons winding their way through town to the sounds of cymbals and drums. Even children ate the nuts and ginger and candy and the doughnuts without holes that were fried in special oils that made them the color of pale carrots. Then the next day, those same spectators and recipients of lilies talked of how troublesome the Chinese were and that Governor Keating was right about having them shipped back to China and making them pay a special tax on any gold they mined.
A woman's life had strange borders here, too. She was presumed a lady but had to work as hard as men. She thought of Tipton's red knuckles. Most of the miners treated the widows like fragile flowers, tipping their hats at them, stepping aside when they met them. Then they turned around and…well, used some women like property, as though they weren't someone's daughters. They seemed to accept Ruth with her pants and her hat. And they acted hopeful they'd have cow's milk soon, assuming Mazy'd be successful at building her herd.
The rules weren't laid out nice and clear, here. That's what seemed confusing. They were each responsible for their own boundaries and overcoming their own barriers, by themselves. While Adora thought it grand, Tipton hadn't blossomed as Adora thought she would under Nehemiah's attention. Suzanne's friend, Esty, seemed a pleasant sort, but Adora was sure she did more than bank. She had told Suzanne, “You might be risking a tarnish on your stellar reputation by associating with the likes of her.”
Lura, however, said Esty and her friends kept to themselves in the casinos. Some of them, like Lura, had just found ways to support themselves as independent women. “Then there're others who do what they will.”
“How sad they've chosen to let themselves be used that way,” Mazy said.
“People got to do what they got to, to survive,” Lura defended. “Don't be thinking you're better than them, Mazy, just ‘cause you got a man's money in another way.”
Her words irritated Mazy, made her think about being a “kept woman.” Was that what she was in part? Allowing Jeremy's money— money that might not even be his—to define her life now? What was that definition of a virgin Ruth had told them? “A woman not dependent on anyone and complete unto herself.” Perhaps it wasn't possible for a woman not to lean on someone.
She wore a scarf around her neck and pulled it tight beneath her chin. The wind was cold, though the sun beat warm against her face. She kneeled and dug with her spade, working up the soil for the herb section. She wasn't exactly doing good things with what Jeremyd left her; but she would. Didn't that make her different than those others? She was still mourning, that was all. She'd keep walking through that landscape, and then she'd recognize the perfect pla
ce to call home.
Mazy pushed against her knees to stand. Come spring, she'd have the milk to sell. Come spring, she'd plant the seedlings in this patch of ground back by the water hole, fence it from the pigs that wandered here and there. What she and her mother didn't use, she planned to harvest along with other people's summer overflow. They'd serve up big stews at the church. One good meal a day for the orphans. She'd gotten the elders to agree to that at least. She wasn't sure how she'd get the children fed next winter.
She could recognize six or seven of the children now who came out at dawn to put their brown hands inside the white linen of the breadbaskets. People said that a growing town like Shasta served its children well, even planned a school. Yet here were dozens, maybe hundreds of children made orphans by those same “good people” killing off their parents—encouraged to do so by the editorials and letters from the legislature. Grabbed and thrown into slavery in the gold streams, in peoples houses, working off their indenture as though California carried with it a bit of old England or the South.
She'd written about that in her ad, but the Courier editor Sam Dosh had toned it down. She guessed she'd crossed some boundary of “proper-ness.” Well, so be it. A woman was allowed that kind of fence crossing, here in California.
Suzanne could be pushed into needing him. Zane could create a crisis, a little chaos that would make her come to him and ask for his assistance. Something about Clayton, perhaps. He might come up missing, and Suzanne would ask for Zane's help. Or perhaps the baby could be injured, not badly, but enough for her to see how damaging it might have been if he hadn't been there to intervene. He'd insist she move into a home large enough for him and her children so he could keep her safe, manage her day, provide daily what she needed.
And Ruth would come to visit.
Yes, he must create a crisis, be there to pull her from it. He'd think of something. It was like a new trap line being readied.
Mazy and Ruth bent to their tasks, cleaning the stalls in the barn. The milk cows, curious, found them in the old building, the June light coming through the roof slats to catch the confetti of dust. Both of Mazy's cows had had calves. One heifer and a sturdy bull calf, both with reddish spots and deep, brown eyes. On spindly legs they'd stood, their mothers licking them to life.
Mazy'd stayed on at Ruth's after the March arrivals, waiting three days before beginning to milk the cows, all of them then celebrating with a drink of “white gold.” That was what Seth called it when Mazy lifted the tin of milk cooling in a nearby stream. Foam fuzzed at their lips. They talked of fresh, sweet-tasting butter. But something in Seth's eyes said he'd prefer another subject.
“Now that you have your herd going,” he'd said to her, “I'll never get you to myself.”
“You have plenty to occupy your time,” Mazy said. “Always have, as far as I can see. Didn't even hear from you since December ‘til now.”
“Giving you room in this house of cards you're building. Poor use of words,” he said and grinned. “What would it take?” he asked her, taking the tin from her hand, wiping the foam from her lip with his finger. He let his hand linger, wiping at her lower lip when she knew it held no drops of milk.
His touch had startled her, warmed her more than she cared to admit. “To what?”
“Allow me to officially come courting.”
She bent to place the larger milk container back in the stream, put the cover on the tin she was taking back to Ruth's house. “We're so different, Seth. You like…excitement. I like…calm. You like fixing things. I like to keep them from being broken.”
“There's joy in taking a little risk,” he reminded her. “Look at Suzanne. She's lit up like a new candle, being on her own. Who would have thought in her blindness she'd be the one to see that?”
“Last time I was there, I saw a house riddled with danger,” Mazy said. “She needs routine more than anyone, and she's got three kids running around, four with the Chinese boy, so nothing is ever back in the same place. I'm not sure what Ruth was thinking of, sending Sarah off to Suzanne. She isn't sorting the dirty clothes from the clean any better than Suzanne did. Johnnie must be doing all the washing and cooking, but it still isn't safe.”
“Tipton does some of the laundry. Suzanne told me.”
“Well, then you've been there, seen it. Food scattered all over the floor like a fete for roaches. I worry about her, I do. Her independence just may cost her more than she wants to pay.”
Seth smiled. “Led you right into a change of subjects, didn't I? I'm not very good at this.” He stepped in front of her. “Mazy. Let me be a part of what opens up your life. Give us a serious chance. There's something special between us, I know that.” He pulled her to him.
“Oh, Seth, I—”
She still held the milk tin between them, but she let herself sink into the strength of him, felt herself melting like warm butter, her heart like the thumping of a fast churn.
“Maybe,” she whispered into the leather of his vest. His finger touched her lip as she stepped back. “What'll it look like, your courting me? Different than what you've been doing?”
“We'll talk of us. Of what we hope for with each other, not just about the cows.” With his thumbs, he pushed wispy strands beneath her kerchief.
“So that means I can talk about my hope you'll find a more…respectable occupation?”
Seth smiled “Not exactly the hope I was hoping for.”
He bent as though to kiss her, but she raised her hand to halt him before he crossed a boundary she wasn't sure she wanted crossed.
14
Zane smelled smoke through the windows open to the June night. He heard the rip and crackle of the flames he couldn't place at first. Then someone in the big room he shared shouted, “Fire! Next door!” Despite the confusion, Zane still grabbed for his telescoping glass.
He slid it into his saddlebags pouched with gold dust as the first sound of the fire alarm clanged the town awake. He took the rickety back steps two at a time, pushing off smaller men from the St. Charles making their way bootless to the water wagons. The whole street blazed. Zane headed for the livery where hay stored in the back already burned. Horses reared, screamed, eyes wild with fright. He grabbed a rope, and in the guise of helping pull horses out of the building, yanked at the nearest bay, led him out, then tied the gelding to an oak. Raced back in for a saddle.
He could hear shouts and cries, a fire wagon clanging. The whole town flamed. The St. Charles Hotel, Washington's Mercantile, the bookstores, the silver shop, Kossuth's. From roof to roof the fire moved like squirrels, carrying the flame to the residential area. It was light as day, black smoke rising high into a dark sky. He yanked the bridle onto his horse, threw the saddle, tightened the cinch. He swung up, then kicked the animal. Chaos, that was what he called this. A fortune could be made in chaos, if a man kept his head. He pulled up the horse. Yes, if a man kept his head! This was it, what he'd been waiting for!
Suzanne woke with a start at the sounds. Pig, scratching? One of the children up early? “Sarah? Is that you?”
The girl moaned, still inside sleep. It wasn't the boys. She heard their sleeping noises. The branches of the huge pines outside, brushing against the shake roof, that was what it was. She calmed herself. She'd ask Johnnie to chop off the limbs. Surely he was large enough to do that. She might ask Wesley. No, he'd think she was relenting, giving in to his constant conversation about her need for him. Bryce had done many things for her, but he'd never made her feel as though she couldn't do them herself. Something about what he did for her felt temporary, as though in time she'd learn the new routines and eventually take over again. But Wesley's tending cloyed, like the heavy scent of flowers at a funeral.
She'd ask the boy. Or maybe Seth. His assistance didn't come with hidden obligations either. He was a friend. Perhaps she'd get Seth to sweep the needles from the roof, at least. Squirrels, was that what the sound was? The little things racing from branch to roof and back. Did Shasta have
squirrels? No one had ever said. Raccoons. Maybe that. She should get up and serenade them with her troubadours harp, sing a tune. That would drive them away.
She heard a sound like someone crunching nut meats. Squirreh. It must be. She smiled, felt herself snatch at a moment more of sleep.
Mazy and Seth had sparred weekly, for a time. They'd argued about where Mazy might live and about the wisdom of Seth's new plan to invest in a lumber mill or build a warehouse near the river. “Still speculative,” Mazy said.
“You think only dairying is stable,” Seth answered. He thought she put too much time and energy into her “feeding and reforming” activities, and she thought he didn't care enough for human causes. Now he talked of going out to meet the first wagon trains in a month or two, taking Jason with him. “Maybe we both need time to think,” he told her. His visits had been fewer since then.
In the June warmth, the cows pushed at Mazy with their noses, tipping their big horns so Mazy could scratch at their heads. She patted Mavis, the sun warming the heifers fat side. The smell of cows and earth punched the air while red-winged blackbirds dipped then disappeared into grasses close to the river. The last of the orange poppies faded on the side hills.