No Eye Can See (58 page)

He'd thought Mazy was. But he was wrong. He could see that now. Mazy was gathering resources to stay put, build her a house, milking cows two times a day, put up hay, then commit to being there through the seasons, day in, day out, the same. That wasn't him and he knew it. Maybe she'd become like a sister to him, someone he could spar with, love true and true without the entanglements of anything more. That was what he'd hope for. To be thought of as kin.

They took a day to visit Mei-Ling, who bowed and smiled and looked as if she carried a watermelon under her tunic top. “Why, you're expecting,” Mazy said, and A-He grinned back the answer.

“You come be married in Sacramento?” Mei-Ling said to Seth. “You and Missy Mazy?”

Seth thought Mazy blushed. “No, were just friends, Mei-Ling, like you and I are.” He thought Mazy tilted her head in question at him.

“You come be friend for baby too?”

“We'll always be that,” Mazy said.

“Naomi have baby too. She tell me.”

“Well,” Sister Esther said. “How lovely. Perhaps they have put their differences to rest, then.” Esther had ridden out with them, and they all walked through the peach orchard A-He had started two years back until they reached Mei-Ling's bees buzzing around their boxes on the far end.

“We should go by Naomi's, too,” Esther asked.

Mei-Ling shook her head. “She say husband not like visitors. I come see her some. She say things be better when baby comes. She bring baby, show Missy Esther.”

“At least life'll be easier for her with a child,” Esther said.

“Kids never seemed to me to make life easier,” Seth said as they rode back to the boardinghouse. “Problems just seem to get bigger.”

“Still, they bring a change,” Esther said. “And it is much harder to stay self-centered after a child arrives. They often do help their parents get raised up. Those of us without little tykes to teach us skip some lessons,” she said, the word
lessons
zinging in that way she had. “And we only know we've missed them by the ache in our hearts.”

In the morning, Mazy told Seth she was ready to go home. Like an older brother, he sparred before relenting. “Might be we should wait to travel home with a freighter, packing north,” Seth said. “Might be safer.”

“Did you pick that information up at the local amusement house?” Mazy asked.

Seth wondered if Sister Esther tracked this double team of conversation. He cast a quick glance at the older woman, couldn't decide, then turned his ear back to Mazy. “The driver reported it. Not many are leaving except by stage. Or in packs. Just want you to be safe. Me too, for that matter.”

“I can take a stage if that would suit you more, or the steamer. Leave Ink here with your of Snoz, if that's all right with you, Esther.”

“That's fine,” the woman said. “But when will you get your mule?”

“Seth can pack her back. You'd do that, wouldn't you? To help me out?”

“I'll take you now,” he said. “Wouldn't want you behind on your schedule.”

Mazy nodded. “I'll get packed up then.”

Seth's smile was wistful. He knew as he gave it to her they would always be friends, nothing more. And yet he didn't feel adrift as he'd thought he might. He had planned to tell her of his turn of fortune at what Mazy called the gambling “hell” last night. He could settle down now. But it wouldn't have made a difference with her. She wanted passion, and she didn't feel it with him. Maybe that he wasn't devastated by her rejection said he hadn't been all that ready for more with her, just as she'd said. He might not be ready for the wealth he had rolled into his pack, either. It should have made him elated. Instead, he felt weary.

They headed back, Mazy riding Ink, only not sidesaddle. She'd found a good saddle at a livery, so new the stirrups were still stiff.

“The tongues will wag,” Esther told her as she mounted up.

“Let them,” Mazy said. “The world looks much better staring through the ears of a mule straight rather than off to the side. Besides, no self-respecting California woman will waste her time worrying over wags. Come on, Ink,” she said. “Let's go home.”

“What did you work out about your cows?” Seth asked as the clouds lifted over the Sacramento River.

“The cows are mine. The bull is theirs.”

“That'll cut into your herd-growing a bit,” he said. “Not that being without one for a year hasn't.”

“True. But I've got a plan,” she said.

“I'm sure you do,” he said. Mazy was a good woman, but he knew she would never be his. He had plenty else to keep his interest, he decided. And what Esther said, about the emptiness of missing some little tyke's lessons, maybe that was speaking to him.

Ruth felt like a chunk of winter hail, hard and cold and sharp with no hope of melting. She bumped into things in the house, picked up Jessies clothing and brought it to her face to inhale the scent of her. She tried not to ignore the others, now that all of them were back. She told Ned he looked healthy, and he did, not as chubby as he'd been. He'd stretched up. Stood almost to her shoulder. She remembered to thank Jason for helping Matthew, for graining the horses, for bringing in venison, for working beside him like a man. Especially after the other drovers down from Oregon had scattered into the gold fields, except for Joe Pepin, always loyal to the Schmidtke family. It was nice to have Sarah around again too. Even Suzanne and her little ones gave them all a distraction while she waited for Mazy to return. Lura didn't bother as she had either; the woman calmed some with the presence of her capable son.

It was Jessie's absence she mourned. She'd never gotten to tell Jessie the story, the whole story. She'd told her nothing at all. And now, it might be too late.

Ruth hung Jessie's jumper on the wall hook, fingered the bar of soap Jessie had made. Her eyes watered. She needed to finish the drawing of the girl. Zane's she'd completed, had printed, and given to the postman. Jessie's face she found harder to draw. She had not sketched it enough, had not really seen the child. Her child. She hadn't gotten to
know her. She felt weepy again. At times, she couldn't seem to stop sobbing. She was an ice crystal waiting to shatter against a child's grinding stone.

She looked around. She controlled nothing in the end: not her life, not her feelings, not her future. At least Zane Randolph no longer controlled her thoughts. They were only of Jessie and her prayer that the girl still lived.

Oltipa's dress dried into twists of wrinkles that looked as though she'd just wrung the water out. She brushed at her skirt, the flounce at the bottom half torn off. My Jessie's thin nightdress exposed cut knees. The gown was smudged with dirt and ripped from a bad fall she'd taken. But they were heading back. Going home. Oltipa allowed her heart to sing with the flush of reunion.

She finished ripping off the bottom of her flounce, then undid My Jessie's hair, running her fingers through it to get some of the snarls and twigs out. She did the same with her own, then twisted it with the blue calico on top of her head. “Just like David Taylor show me,” she told My Jessie.

“He your man?” My Jessie asked.

“My man,” she said. She tied the remainder of the flounce into a scarf she held with a knot at the back of her neck. She would not look Wintu as she walked back, but like one of David Taylor's people. The child with her would protect her too. Hard to believe that a small child could lend a woman her dignity, but Oltipa welcomed it on this journey. Walking beside this white child she would not be whisked away as a slave. In her grass dress here on this trail she would have stood out. So it was good, though she did not know it then, to be dressed in David's gift when the Randolph man took her. And she was there for My Jessie, showing her berries and roots they washed down with spring water, provided
to keep them alive. Who could know what was ahead? Who could see far down the trail?

When they heard a rider, Oltipa pulled My Jessie off to the side, peered to see if one was David Taylor, waited until the man passed, then kept on, steady, sure, heading home.

No dog barked as they approached the cabin a day later. No wind moved the dried leaves. The tin wash pan hanging on the log end had not been moved. An ax still creased the splitting log.

And then she heard it.

At first, Oltipa thought it was a bird, and then she thought the stream rippled, singing over rocks. But it rose higher, lifted like a hawk, and then she saw them and she knew a sound so deep, so filled with joy. A greater treasure than just arriving home—the laughter of her son riding high on David Taylors shoulders.

She was a woman split by a sharp whip, cut down the middle. Two children she had failed to protect. Two children, gone because of what she'd done or failed to do. Ruth heard voices outside, children chattering. Pig barked. She cupped her hands in the basin, flushed the cool water onto her swollen eyes. Would she ever feel whole again? Would the tear in her heart ever heal? Now she could hear laughter. Would she ever take a full breath again? Squeals and shouts, then, “Auntie, Auntie, come quick!”

Ruth sighed and stepped to the doorway. She watched Matthew moving from the barn, his long strides taking him swiftly toward a wagon bringing visitors. As though dreaming, she gazed as Matthew pulled a child from the wagon, hair twisted in blue calico on top of her head. She wore a thin nightdress, like Jessie s. And then she knew.
Jessie! My Jessie!
Her heart felt whole enough she could run.