Right down the street rose up Charles's Mercantile financed in part by his mother's mules. Mazy heard them arguing with packers over supplies one morning when she delivered the milk tins to Washingtons Market. She could hear Adora screeching from the covered walk.
“You brought me more Dutch ovens? I ordered three-legged spiders. What about the Lovers Eyes? By the time you get here with them, the fad'll be over. People will paint their own eye for a locket. And what about that piano?” she said to the packers back as he unloosed diamond hitches to unload his tired mules. “We ordered that first thing, didn't you, Charles?”
“I left that to you, Mother. My gout.
She halted and looked at him, eyes soft. “Your gout. Only old people are supposed to get that,” she said. “My poor baby. I'll check the orders. See if its there. It isn't something I'd be likely to forget, though, a piano coming in. You bring those bolts of cloth?” She was back at the packer. “And maple candies? I'm tired of Hong Kong getting all the market for sweets. You take better care of those Chinese than you do your American customers. Oh, hello, Mazy. I didn't see you there.”
“I've got to get my foot up, Mother.” Charles walked on his heel, limping in a way Mazy thought exaggerated.
“You should ride out to Mazy's and wait until one of her cows makes a pie. Stick your foot in it while it's still hot. That works,” she said. “For gout. Elizabeth told me. Doesn't it, Mazy?” she said as she fast-walked after her son inside the store. “Charles?”
Mazy shook her head. The last thing she wanted was Charles Wilson putting his feet in a cow pie while she was anywhere around.
She had enough chaos in her life. Much as she planned, nothing seemed to happen easily. She milked her cows—but Mavis would stick her tail in the bucket, ruining a day's work. One morning, Jennifer got into clover next to the creek and bloated. It had taken her and Jason and Jessie as well to get the cow up, put a stick to hold her mouth open, then yank her neck tight toward her back, trying to release the gas. They'd walked her then, for more than an hour while Mazy frantically read in Jeremy's old cow books to see if there was anything more they could do. If all ehefaih, seek the highest point of the bloat on the left side. With a butcher's knife, puncture the cows stomach at the top to release the gas. The cow may not survive this procedure. One of Lura's sharpened knives had done the deed, and Jennifer survived. But now Mazy had to clean the wound daily to prevent infection. Always something to break up her plans.
One day she'd churned the butter for placing into new wooden molds. But the cart for hauling the milk broke, spilling white gold into the thirsty dirt. She planned, all right. But she must not be doing something essential or she wouldn't be having so many problems.
“If I do things right, if I plan them out and work hard, then they should work. And if they don't, it must be my fault,” Mazy told Ruth one day as her friend arrived home from her new job as a lithographer.
Ruth was thoughtful, then said, “If you tell yourself you've made a mistake or done something stupid every time something happens, you'll soon be afraid to do anything, won't you? I would be.”
Ruth pulled seven-inch hatpins from her wide-brimmed hat and placed it on a hook. “I can hardly wait to get out of this corset,” she said.
Mazy still found it strange to see Ruth wearing a skirt and going off to work.
“Maybe God's telling me to make a new plan,” Mazy said. “I just haven't been listening.”
“Do you have need of Sarah?” Ruth asked Elizabeth. “She's a good little worker.”
Elizabeth motioned Sarah away from the tent front she called the Popover Bakery where she'd been kneading bread and Strudels since the fire. “We grownups just need some time to talk here. Why don't you see what Ernest is up to? His saddle shop is almost rebuilt. My bakery is next for boards.”
“I see what you're doing, Ruth,” Elizabeth said when the child was out of earshot “It's hard enough to see Ned off with Suzanne and Lura on their ‘entertainment circuit.’ You've got Jason and Jessie working with Mazy. Just seems like you, young woman, are walking on a crooked road. ‘Course Luras traveling there, too, and she's old enough to know better. No helping her see different, though. But you—”
“Please,” Ruth said. “Mazy's already said I'm asking for more trouble than a barrel full of snakes. But this is best. The lithograph work isn't so bad. I can put up with Sam Dosh's tirades, too. For the children's sake. Besides, everyone says Ned has a voice like an angel. He promises to bring his weight in gold dust come winter, if their touring is successful. He'll see some of California, too.”
“That's a reason to deprive yourself of him? For the money?”
“One look at California prices should answer that. But no, it isn't for the money I let him go. Suzanne can nurture his music. I can't. And you can teach Sarah to bake. I can't. And Jason and Jessie, well, Mazy's got a way with tough little kids. I don't.”
“You sell yourself short, I'll ponder. Seem to me—”
Ruth held her hand up to stop Elizabeth's next thought.
“The Popover'll be inside a building before long,” Elizabeth conceded, allowing herself to consider Ruth's request. “Out of this cooking tent. Not a brick building, mind you, but we ain't on the main street, either. The Strudels and pretzels'll lure them in. Sarah could run errands.” She turned her hands over, followed the palm lines with one finger. “These're better, but sometimes they still tingle and ache. I guess I could use another pair of hands even though it worries me, Ruth, that Sarah'll be serving me instead of you. I have to say, Ruthie, seeing you in a skirt with them feathers in your head and seven-inch hatpins stead of your whip makes me wonder what your running is really taking you to, or if you're standing still.”
Essential. Mazy's husband Jeremy had used that word often as he gazed over the top of his round glasses, frequently sending a withering look his wife's way. Scorn might have better described it. Or disgust. Oh, Jeremy would smile that lazy smile of his, even run his hands through her tousle of auburn hair and call her “his pine of sturdy stock.” Now with a year since his death, it was his looks of disgust that kept more gentle memories distant.
“Stand back,” Mazy told Jessie as she poured water over the ashes in the pit behind the house. They were making soap. That was an essential she thought Jessie should know about. They'd made the molds first, greasing the wooden rectangles with butter. Then Mazy'd found a broom handle. Soap handles seemed to get shorter through the years, the lye formed from the ashes and peppermint tea-scented water eating away at the wood. In the blue-sky afternoon, Mazy stirred, keeping her head twisted away, coughing, then taking in a good breath. She told Jessie what she was doing.
“Put your hand over the top, like this,” she said. “Don't touch it. It'll burn. Now hold your breath so you're not breathing in this stuff. All right. Feel the heat of it? When it's just right, we'll dip in the crock and slowly pour it over the tallow. Until it's like honey, creamy-like. Stir now,” she told Jessie, “for a half hour or more, or do you want to do something else?”
“Got nothing to do,” the girl said.
“Gather up the eggs, then,” Mazy told her, “or make yourself a special mold, something that'll be just yours.” Jessie's face lit up, and she headed toward the house.
The stirring gave Mazy time to think. Today, Jeremy just seemed on her mind.
Sometimes she wondered if her marriage could have survived had Jeremy lived, respect so essential in a marriage and its absence such a ravage on theirs. A frightening thought. Maybe that was why Seth's suggestions of closeness found their way to a category she labeled “later” in her mind.
Honor, that was another essential. She had promised to love, honor, and obey him, and she had. It was he who'd worn deception. Seth showed up in that thought too. Could she honor a man who liked whisky and widows? Could she trust him to be what he was and accept his good qualities without letting his other ones keep her pushing him away? What was essential in a marriage an
yway?
She had wondered over that. After nearly a year here, she still didn't know what it was that kept her deceased husband more on her mind than the friendship and love offered by another. At twenty years of age, Mazy knew how to be a daughter. She'd been what she thought was a good wife. She had no brothers or sisters, so being a sibling wasn't asked of her. Maybe her relationship with Ruth fit that, a sister in spirit, at least. But this morning, when Mazy pressed at the dark circles under her eyes—eyes Jeremy had once called “fern green”—she'd called herself a widow. A young unmarried woman. She still didn't know how to be that.
Maybe that was what Suzanne was trying to discover by heading into the camps as an entertainer, trying to find her way as a woman not dependent on someone else. She hadn't even asked for Mazy's opinion, just worked it out with Lura, and suddenly they were gone. It would have been easier on the rest of them if Suzanne had allowed assistance. Even while staying during Tiptons wedding, she'd insisted on dressing her children herself, putting the dog's harness on, even if it meant the rest of them twiddled their thumbs until she was ready. She'd even told them that when she got back from their “entertainment tour” she'd be getting her own place again, without moving in with any of them. “I don't want to hold you hostage,” she told them. “So don't be planning for me.” She'd turned her head to where Mazy stood—it was almost as though Suzanne could see who would be planning the most.
“That's foolish, Suzanne,” Mazy had told her. “The fire could have been disastrous.”
“But it wasn't.”
Even Seth condoned Suzanne's plan. At least he located props for their show, costumes and such, before they left. Apparently he had “friends” from Sacramento who performed in saloons too. Mazy wondered if Seth's shadow-life was as unknown to her as Jeremy's had been.
After they waved good-bye to the Schmidtke wagon filled with entertainers, Mazy told her mother she was thinking of building a house large enough for Suzanne and the boys, too, when they got back. “I know she doesn't see she'll need one of us, but I think I can convince her.”
Her mother had shook her head. “Haven't you learned yet that Suzanne's got her own way of seeing things? And you, you're putting off seeing what you need to, just focusing on other people's problems. Might just ask yourself who you're really helping and what it is you avoid like it was a fragrant skunk.”
Her mother's willingness to let things be, to just accept things as they came without attempt to alter made Mazy wonder sometimes if she hadn't been an orphan child picked up after being abandoned at her mother's door.
“Think of why you're always giving advice,” Elizabeth told her, patting her daughter's shoulder. “People got to solve their own troubles, Madison. You can't always be ‘Mazy fix-it’ even though it's natural to you.”
She had felt her face flush. This, from her mother who would offer hospitality to a stranger from her own deathbed.
“You do too much for someone, Mazy, and they start to eat the idea that they can't do it for themselves. They wonder if you're maybe wanting something back from them. Or worse, they accept it, come to count on your giving. Then they just wait and open their mouths like baby birds expecting others to do for them. Then folks resent it if you don't. What we intend ain't always what arrives.”
“Oh, Mother,” she'd protested, but a flicker of recognition came wrapped within Elizabeth's words. Mazy didn't want to end up as the period of a sentence that always read: You coulant do it without me. She'd resent that herself, she guessed, which was probably why she spent so much time making her plans, making sure no one ever had to help her.
On the trail, when she'd miscarried, then she'd accepted help. But the trail wasn't life. The journey west was a pause, a hesitation, nothing more. All of what she'd learned along the way—like looking forward just a bit to the pleasant places God had in store for her—was more difficult to apply in everyday life, harder to hang on to in any new moment. She wondered if that was why she spent so much time in the past or in other people's lives and couldn't seem to settle on what she should do about her own.
Jessie interrupted her reverie. “Is the soap ready?” The girl puffed as she rolled a heavy stone, stopped it at Mazy's feet. The center had been smoothed out into an almost perfect oval several inches deep.
“Where'd you find that?”
“With some baskets and stuff. Buried off over that way,” she pointed to an area in the tree line. “I dug ‘em up. Auntie Ruth says they're old Indian things. This'll make a round soap, won't it?”
Mazy nodded, kept stirring. Ruth was right. The girl did have a funny emphasis on the word auntie. “Help pour the lye and tallow mixture into the mold,” Mazy said “Keep your head to the side so the fumes don't sicken you. Looks about right,” she said then. “We'll stir in a little sugar. Makes the soap lather.”
Together they lifted the pottery crock and poured the creamy substance into the wooden molds making sure there was enough left for Jessie's stone one. “After it sets for a bit—no, don't touch it. It'll still burn you. After it sets, we'll use a knife and cut lines for breaking it later. That'll be the size we get. Then we let it dry in the shade. In a month or so, we'll wrap them and have a daily treasure that makes us clean and smells nice, too. Good work, Jessie,” she said.
The girl beamed, and Mazy squeezed her thin shoulder. “Your mold has the most interesting shape. You have your auntie's eye for art.”
Jessie looked at her, cocked her head to the side, and opened her mouth as though to speak. She didn't. Instead she bent to push the stone into the shade of the back of the house.
Making something practical out of discard, that was how Mazy saw making soap. Maybe it said something essential about the remaking of her life.
They gathered for a meal at the newly built St. Charles Hotel, as they'd agreed after the fire to do weekly. On Sunday, the widows worshiped together at Reverend Hills Methodist Church, continuing “stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship,” as the verse in Acts said to do, “and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” On this Wednesday, the fellowship had broadened from the wagon train women to some new additions.
“The St. Charles still has the best food in town,” Adora said.
“My baked goods and candies are much improved with Mrs. Muellers charms,” Gus said. He owned the rebuilt St. Charles, along with the Popover Bakery Elizabeth ran. He sat next to Mazy's mother, his short, fat fingers covering the dots of brown that speckled the backs of Elizabeths hands. “I am sorry Mr. Kossuth did not rebuild. Competition is good for the soul.”
“If that were true, this country'd be made of saints instead of all these sinners,” Mazy said. “Present company excluded—or almost,” she said.
“One cant live on bread alone,” Adora said.
“No, you need sweet things, too,” Elizabeth said. “That's why I'm so proud of Mazy's cows. Cream makes such a difference in cooking.”
“I don't suppose I could talk you into selling your milk through my store,” Charles said.
Mazy still found the sound of his voice jarring, thinking of the hurt he'd given to his sister and his mother. They'd just been healing of it too, looking forward to a new adventure when his finely etched face with those tight Roman curls showed up, chopped ear and all.
“Its mostly spoken for,” Mazy said. “Until I expand my herd…” She raised her hands as if to say it was out of hers. “Maybe you can drive one or two cows down from Fort Vancouver,” Mazy said then, aware of the chill in her voice. “You being such a well-traveled man.”
“Now, Mazy, my Charles is just taking care of his mama,” Adora defended. “With the money I got for the mules, we didn't have to borrow any to stock our shelves. Unlike some folks building a herd on borrowed funds. We're contributing to the community, Charles and me.”
“And what he could have had in Wisconsin, if I remember right,” Mazy said.
“Well, we had to follow dear Tipton now, didn't we?” Charles told her, si
tting up quickly enough that Mazy blinked and moved her head back. Charles sucked on the stick he used to stir his gin-sling, eased back into his chair.
Mazy couldn't understand how Adora had simply let him slither back into her life, shatter the fragile relationship she'd restored with her daughter, and then act as though this was what was always meant to be. She'd hated seeing the tears pool in Tipton's eyes as she hugged her mother good-bye. Nehemiah had borrowed Mazy and Elizabeth's oxen to haul the wagon, leaving the mules behind. Mazy hadn't even had time alone to talk with Tipton and couldn't imagine the betrayal she felt.
But Mazy ached too, seeing Adora treat her boy as though he were the prodigal son returning. He was hardly that. He hadn't a repentant bone in his body. And his return, riding high on a good horse, his shoes polished and his hair cut by a barber's scissors, told them all he'd done well, despite what he said, while his mother and sister had suffered terribly from their losses on the trail. He would do anything, Mazy suspected, to achieve his ends.
But who around here wouldn't? she decided as she and her mother walked back to Elizabeths new little two-story bakery after their St. Charles meal. Everyone in Shasta seemed engulfed in the drama of becoming rich overnight, regardless of the cost. Seth wasn't unique in that either, she guessed. And who was she to say she wasn't just like them, in her way? Thinking about how much money she could get for milk, how she'd expand her herd once the cow brute arrived, what alternative she had if it didn't. Oh, she provided food for the orphans, had placed a few in worthy homes. She tried to offer a way out for the women like Esty too. She'd even invited two or three to tea, but they'd declined.
And she'd had no help from the press with her concerns, even after she took out ads, even after Ruth began work there. Instead they'd printed an article rousing people to more killing of any remaining Win-tus and Shastas. Mazy cut the article out of the Courier and showed it to her mother.