No Eye Can See (53 page)

Ruth paced the room. “He had to have been here before. Do you think he might have hidden Neds harmonica and my hat…?”

Her
eyes
grew large.

“What're you thinking?” Matthew asked.

“The photograph…he scratched out my face. For him to just…to take her… right out from under me! If only I hadnt taken that job. If only I'd gone ahead and tried to find you, Matthew, find my horses, left this place. Gone to Oregon.”

“He still might have found you,” Matthew said. “Looks like he's been on your trail for a time.”

“I'm going to scratch his face,” Ruth said, “on a lithograph. Sam Dosh will let me print some, I know he will. And I'll put them up at the mercantiles in the region. Maybe of Jessie, too.”

“We could ride out and show it around. Give it to the postman too,” Matthew said.

“That could work. At least it would be something.” She heard Jason shout outside. She stood, went to the door open to the August dusk. “What? Who is it?”

“Looks like Elizabeth,” Matthew said. “She's got Sarah with her, and they're pushing their mounts. And they got a basket full of something.”

Within moments, Elizabeth was pulling up, huffing hard.

“It just didn't come to me right away, it just didn't,” Elizabeth said after she told them she'd explain in a minute about the baby named Ben. Sarah took the basket, barely able to carry it inside. “But then Sarah, bless this little cherub, she remembered the name. Zane Randolph. That's it, ain't it?” Sarah nodded.

“What about Zane?” Ruth said. Her shoulders stiffened. Her hands clenched at her side. “Have you seen him and Jessie?”

“Jessie? No, well, see, he come into my bakery a week or so ago. Said he was a friend of Suzanne's—”

“Suzanne's?” Ruth gasped. She'd brought danger to Suzanne, too?

“Said he knew her back in Missouri or Michigan or wherever she was from. And that she'd wrote to him to come visit. But after he left—”

“You didn't tell him how to find her?” Ruth felt her chest tighten, and her hands grew sweaty. She wiped them on her skirt but couldn't seem to get them dry.

“Don't know myself. But I told him you was working at the
Courier.
I didn't know. I thought you might know where she'd be singing. Well, then after he leaves, Sarah says he lied, that his name was Wesley Marks.”

Ruth blinked, sat, trying to weave it together.

“Shoulda told you before, but I forgot. Didn't tell Mazy either. That ain't the real trial. Today a stage driver comes in with this baby. Says someone has taken his Wintu wife, claimed her as a vagrant, he thinks, and he's off chasing them. Then he shows me the note left by the one took her. Says he has
possessions
with him, like he had more than one. And Zane Randolph signed it.”

Ruth felt lightheaded. She stared at Elizabeth, gazed around the room, the tentacles of Zane's mastery overwhelming.

Oltipa rode behind Jessie, the weight of her head and her great tiredness forcing her dark hair split by her braids onto the girl's head. She jerked away, then allowed her
eyes
to close, the drone of the Randolph man coming back to her like a mosquito refusing to light. More words than she understood, sounds taken by the wind as he talked back over his shoulder. She recognized
beauties
and
learn
and
soft.
David Taylor used those words too, but with a different meaning.

She looked down at her legs. They were covered in the tiny blue flowers clustered on pink stripes of the dress David Taylor gave her. Beautiful,” he had called her when she put it on and later when
Wita-ela
—Ben—first pushed up onto his knees and rocked back and forth as though to crawl to her, had reached at the “flounce.” David Taylor had clapped and shouted as she saw other white men do. His eyes sparkled and he said, “Look what our boy is learning.” His eyes showed tears. “Getting soft,” he'd said.

She did not like those words used by this Randolph man, about what his “beauties needed to learn” about their being “soft” from doing nothing through the summer.

The skirt of the dress bunched up on her legs, pushed between her and the child. My Jessie, her name was. Young. Scared but with eyes hard as marbles. Oltipa wished she had her grass skirt on so when she killed this Randolph man, she could move quickly, wouldn't be stopped by calico catching at her ankles. And if he killed her in her effort and she died, she would already be dressed for her ending.

“I wish his mouth would be quiet,” My Jessie whispered. Oltipa nodded, her chin bumping the girls head.

“I wish him dead,” Oltipa said. “For what he does to my boy.”

“You think your baby's dead?” My Jessie whispered. Oltipa nodded, fought back the pounding in her chest. “He missed the dog he shot at. Least, I didn't see him when we got hauled out to your horse. Maybe he messed up with the baby and he's all right too.”

The image of Ben smiling, crawling, arrived on wings of hope. She scolded herself then, for not paying attention to what she knew as real. The shaking and bruising of her baby while he screamed, that was real. The dropping of him, that was real. The silence when the light went out in the cabin, that too. He would have cried if he had lived, his
eyes
stayed searching for her through his tears. She would have heard his wails as they rode away. And they'd been gone now, two, three days. How could a small child live without someone to tend him, someone to
hold him for safety and love? No, she would be honest with herself. Her family was gone, all gone. The thought made her as dried and wizened as the manzanita berries she saw clustered on the bushes.

“I'm hungry,” My Jessie said.

“You girls having a chat, are you? Regular little sisters back there. Not tired out yet? Not as soft as I thought.” He clucked his tongue. “Unfortunate,” and he rode faster, jerking the rope that bound them. At night, he gave them hunks of food they ate like animals, gobbling. He was smart to bind them. Oltipa would have found a way to hurt him if he hadn't.

She wished he had chosen the trail along the McCloud River where the Pit Indians raided for horses and food. Few white men traveled there now. They might have been freed by the Pit River people. On this Trinity trail north, none would interfere with a white man bound to a woman and child.

The Randolph man looked back, again smiling, a silk scarf blowing out in the hot breeze from his throat. Then he turned and faced forward. They rode down a steep ravine, the horses’ front legs sliding, back legs bending so that the animals nearly sat on the hillside as they slid down the slope. Oltipa lifted her legs in protection, the steepness pushing them forward toward the saddle horn, the rope wrapped around them loosened slightly in the shift. She noticed the man held his right foot out higher, then quickly back. His foot must hurt.

Oltipa's thighs ached. She had rarely ridden, always a walker, gathering acorns and roots. David Taylor had given her the horse they rode on, but she did not know the animal's ways. They rode beside a stream. A trickle of water splashed up as they crossed it, then back again. Her eyes followed him, studied the horse's ways. Her thoughts plotted.

“How should we do it?” My Jessie whispered.

“I do it,” Oltipa said. “Silver spoon I carry will be sharp inside his eye. You run then.”

The man turned, his hand holding the lead rope high, the rough
hemp pinching their arms. “Pretty steep,” he said as they climbed away from the little stream and headed up to a ridge where they could see mountaintops and timber, silver streams of water pressing out from rocks. They rode, one horse following the other, as though they were simply friends out riding. At the top, the ridge widened. Oltipa dropped her head again, rested her chin lightly on My Jessies head. She must think how to get free.

“Look awake,” the man said. “You, too, My Jessie.” He yanked on the rope.

“Not your Jessie,” the child whispered.

Oltipa looked up, scowling. Then her heart quickened. She recognized a rock! She'd seen it in the summer as she'd grown up. At the base of its gnarled gray and sunset yellow grew manzanita berries, ripened in the heat. Glossy dark green leaves could not hide their luscious fruit. She had picked them in season when they were dry and powdery inside. Here she'd mashed them on a rock, made them into a fine powder, a soup. And later, added seed-filled chaff to water and soothed her throat with the drink. Those dried old berries gave much!

Her digging stick had sunk into this dirt once, twice, many times. Beyond were lilies and wild onions found at another time of year—
oltipa
—spring. It was a distance from the river of her birth, but she knew this place. In late summer, her husband had climbed black oaks in the distance and had shaken the acorns like tiny pebbles covering the ground. Over there, she'd twined a basket, later served salmon in it in the fall. Her father had built a hut for them not far from here. She'd heard rain tap-tap into a steady rhythm on the cedar bark, and they'd moved toward their own river before the snows fell. A
pam-hal-hk!
A cave! Where she once looked out to see the rock formation. Her eyes scanned the shrubbery and trees.

She knew her people were gone, raided and taken, just as she had been. Yet something about recognizing where she was, seeing the familiar, lifted her spirits like a hawk's wings, just above the mourning of her loss.

She smiled at this gift given in a groaning time: that this
eltee-wintoo
—white man—who meant to take her far away and sell her to another was heading north, through a place Oltipa knew as home!

Suzanne and Lura's wagon rattled up the lane to Ruth's place. Suzanne beamed with her newfound sense of direction. She could hardly wait to tell Mazy, Seth, all the rest. As the wagon stopped she heard Mariah whoop.

“Well, I'll be,” Lura said. “It's my Mattie.”

Suzanne imagined hugs and hellos, heard expressions of joy. Made out Elizabeths voice, children, and a baby. In a lull, Suzanne accepted Matt's hello, then asked “Isn't Mazy here?”

“She and Seth headed out a week or so ago,” Ruth told her. There was something different in Ruths voice. A quietness. Defeat? “I expect they'll be back next week. Matthew's milking for her.”

“And me too,” Jason reminded Ruth.

“Yes. And doing a fine job,” Elizabeth said. “From what Ruth tells me.” She turned to Suzanne. “We do have some things to talk about, Suzanne.”

Ruth sighed. “And it isn't happy news.”

“What?”

Elizabeth was the one who spoke of Jessie's disappearance, of Zane Randolph's involvement. Finally she said, “Your Wesley Marks is one and the same as Ruth's husband. Zane Randolph, and the snake grabbed Jessie and is gone.”

Suzanne felt struck by a split rail.

“You saying that Suzanne's suitor was already taken?” Lura asked.

“That isn't what the worry is,” Ruth said.

“I…don't know what to say. He took Jessie? His own kin?”

“Our sister's gone?” Ned said, his voice quivering.

“Its my fault,” Ruth said. “He followed me. I should have stayed in Ohio and faced him.” Her voice broke.

“Come on, Ruth,” Matthew said. “Lets let Elizabeth fill in details. Tell it without us. We'll get the milk cows up. The fresh air'll do you some good.”

Suzanne heard Matt and Ruth walk away.

“Oh, that young man you sent my way went after them. He don't know that JeSsie's likely with them. Least we're making that guess. And the baby you hear? That's his boy. Said you sent him to me. Ruth's a wreck. You can see that.”

“She can't see anything, remember?” Lura interjected.

“I can see the man trusted my advice about Elizabeth,” Suzanne said. “Baby's pretty quiet.”

“Good as gold ‘til you try to set him down or take him out of his basket. Then he wails like a stuck pig. Something happened to him awful when Zane took his mama.”

Suzanne swallowed. “Wesley…I mean Zane…wanted things to happen in a certain way. He came in once when I wasn't there. I felt him there, though. And I asked him not to do it again. I should have trusted myself more, that it didn't feel right.”

“He came looking for you first. Maybe when he couldn't find you, he—”