What Once We Loved (15 page)

“Easy does it, Carmine. Easy now,” she cooed, swirling the whip at the ground. He stopped once or twice and stomped with both front feet toward her, but she stayed steady, didn't back away. “Like fishing for trout,” she whispered to herself. And the next time he ran back and forth in front of her, she acted: She cracked the whip, winding it around his left front foot just about where that white hair ran its ring. He stopped as though struck with a club. Carmine never moved a muscle. It was as though the rawhide around his foot was a cage of steel, a bear caught in a trap.

Ruth walked toward him, keeping the whip taut around his foreleg. The animal breathed hard from his running, hung his head low, but made no action to bite at her or lunge or pull away. “I wondered if your feet didn't do your thinking for you,” she said. Ruth smiled. Elizabeth always said that the scars of a person's past gave clues to what would hold them hostage. “Bring the hobbles, Jason, and a little grain,” she said. “We've got this one figured.”

“It's only for a short time, David,” Mazy said. “I want to take the bull south, to meet your uncle and give him his due. Unless you'd rather,” she said.

David Taylor shook his head. “I've applied for the mail run,” he said. “Between French Gulch and Weaverville, here and south. I'll be home most nights that way. Keep Oltipa and Ben safe.”

“If you could, if you would, handle the cows for me—”

“I've never milked a cow,” he said. He sounded annoyed. It reminded Mazy of David's father.

“It's easy enough. Reliability is what matters. Having someone I can
count on being there to do the work two times a day and make the deliveries, too.”

“What about Charles Wilson?” David said.

Mazy scoffed. “He's reliably unavailable for any real work,” she said.

David rubbed his chin with his hands. Mazy didn't want to push him, but she wasn't sure who else she could ask. Seth had agreed to go south with her, and they needed to head out before it got cold if they were to make it back before the snowy season. “I need some time to think about it,” he finished.

“I understand,” Mazy said. She stayed to take a bowl of Oltipa's acorn soup, asked her how she made it. It smelled heavenly and tasted the same. She'd come up with something else, maybe hire a packer to drive the bull south.

“I'll let you know in a few days,” David said. “And I'll think about it, I will.”

Back above her mother's bakery, Mazy broke a tendril of thyme and rubbed the stem on her forehead. Her mother said it was good for headaches and fainting and sleeplessness, too. That, she could use. Something to help her sleep. She just missed Ruth, she guessed. Ruth and the children and what was familiar.

No time to sleep now, she thought. She hadn't seen her mother all day, a fact that surprised her since her baking was usually finished by late morning. They often took lunch together. She drove back out to Poverty Flat to begin the evening milking.

She had more cows now, with the Durhams. But she decided she'd wean only a few of the calves so she would have less to milk until later. She might sell some stock for beef this winter. She would be able to get a good price, she was sure. The miners had scared wild game so far into the hills even venison was becoming a delicacy.

She finished with milking, grained the bull in his pen, and stood watching the sunset. She'd have to move her things from town soon, take over the cabin. She didn't have the heart to try to build another
place even though the man she leased from had said she was welcome to do it. The Sacramento River looked gold in the twilight, shimmering, promising ore but delivering something quite different: steamers bringing passengers; ferries bearing wagons of people from miles away, all stepping into new places. She wasn't alone, and she was better off than most. She knew Poverty Flat. Ruth would have to learn a whole new place. Tipton had already, discovering Crescent City s coastal ways. And she still had her mother as a friend; neither Ruth nor Tipton had that. She should remember to be grateful. It was so easy to think complaining thoughts when all around her was abundance. She took a deep breath. She had to trust that she had stepped out onto a cloud of faith believing she would not fall through. So far, despite the loss of an unborn child and a husband who both betrayed her and left her widowed, she'd found faith enough to take the next step. Why should she think she deserved more?

She placed the wooden bucket back in the barn and noticed a pale light coming from the cabin. Who could that be? Maybe David had decided they would come after all? She picked up her skirts to move more quickly toward the cabin, more curious than concerned.

Crescent City

“Chita, what ever did you put in those beans?” Tipton said. “My stomach is a tumble.”

“Just what is always in them,” the Mexican girl said. “As Senor Kossuth say to fix them. A little vinegar, to take the wind away.”

“Please. Dont even say that word.” Tipton held her side, and then put a hand over her mouth before retching into the pan Chita held for her just beneath her chin.

“I've never been so sick in my life,” Tipton said, wiping her mouth. Her knees buckled when she stood, and Chita steadied her. “I must look a fright,” Tipton said.

She wobbled toward the mirror and peered at herself.

“You are lovely, sefiora,” Chita told her.

Tipton pulled at the skin beneath her eyes, revealing dark pockets like heel prints in the beach sand. Her usually creamy complexion looked pasty as a wet sand dollar.

“Maybe it is
h nina?”
Chita told her.

“Nina? What baby?” Tipton said. She lifted her chin to stare at the round face beside her in the mirror. The girl had
eyes
so brown they looked sable, hair so black and shiny it was the night sea. Beautiful, that was what she was. Maybe that was why Nehemiah kept her around.

Tipton pinched some color back into her own pale cheeks. “What baby?” she repeated. “Did you let someone bring a child into our kitchen? You know how dangerous that can be.”

“No, no.” Chita pointed and smiled, those dark eyebrows opening up her whole face when she did. “The baby inside sefiora.”

“What?” Tipton turned to stare, too quickly, and the room started to spin. The kerosene lamp smell made her sick, and she pushed her hand over her mouth again, her eyes searching for the retching pan. Chita found it. Tipton filled it. Then with a clay cup Chita handed her, she rinsed her mouth of the foul taste.

The stale beer did little to improve her disposition or her breath, but their water supply was dismal. Everyone had taken to drinking wine and beer brought in by ship. At least until the rains filled the streams and reservoirs.

“Your peppers, that's what it was,” Tipton insisted. “Women… indisposed…get morning sickness, not evening sickness, Chita, not that I should even be discussing something so intimate with you. No, this is from your cooking. Don t you pawn that off on some nonexistent condition.”

“You lay down now,” Chita said. “I will get a cool cloth for you, yes? Mr. Kossuth, he comes home. We will clean your face and put fresh linens on you. He will be so happy to know he is a father, pronto.”

“Oh, just stop that. I guess a woman knows if she's…or not. Well she does. There is no way I
can
be, Chita. I know that much.”

Chita grinned at her. “How do you think this happens?”

“I know,” she said though she wasn't totally certain. “That's why I'm sure it could not be happening to me. Not that it is any of your business.” Tipton took the cool cloth Chita offered her and settled it on the back of her neck. “I have never once, not ever, sat on my husband's lap. That's how I know.” She closed her eyes. “Which is exactly what my mother warned me against doing to avoid an…unplanned event ofthat nature.”

Chita laughed out loud.

“What?” Tipton pulled the cloth from her neck.

“Is all right, all right,” Chita said, her palms defending. “You have other story maybe to tell why you have no flow for two months.”

“Chita!” Tipton stood now, started to pace.

“I wash clothes. I know this. Two months. You tell Sefior Kossuth you have bad beans. Give you time, but Chita knows.” She touched her finger to her temple. “How you will explain why your
estomago
grows, that will be different.” Chita laughed again as she left to empty the bowl.

Insolent girl
Tipton thought as she gathered her skirts up around herself and curled onto the divan. Had it been two months? Her face
was
a little fuller and her corset actually hurt a bit, pushing up against her breasts. But even on the trip across, her flow had changed, stopped for a time. Elizabeth said it was because of how she ate. So, there. That was the explanation again. Beans, nothing more.

Tipton lay listening to the wind sighing in the huge redwoods standing as a sentry around the cabin, allowing her mind to drift.
A baby.
How that would change her life! And not for the good. She turned over, not wanting to think of such a thing. Too intimate. Back home, she had had to hang her father and brothers unmentionables and her own underdrawers up at night, and her mother would rip them from the line before first light. “No one should see such things,” Adora would say. Maybe that was why her mother resisted Tiptohs doing laundry for the miners last winter in Shasta, even if it did allow them to survive. Tipton sat up. Maybe that was why her mother was so anxious to marry her off. Not for Tipton's happiness but to avoid the embarrassment of her daughter tending strange men's unmentionables.

She moaned and lay back down. She couldn't be with child. She just couldn't be. A baby meant hours of paying attention, something she wasn't up to, not right now. She rubbed her arm in that achy place that meant she wanted to escape. That was what Elizabeth told her.

A baby.
There'd been those times, in the quiet of the night, when
she'd felt loved and tended as Nehemiah lay beside her, his hand stroking her hair, his kisses soft and lulling. She'd fallen asleep, hadn't she? No. Gone away, more likely. She'd had frantic dreams after, she remembered now, full of wildness and unfamiliar scents. She sat up straight in her chair.
Perhaps it had happened then?
‘There had been that one night…

How could she be sure? She couldn't ask Chita. She couldn't discuss it with her husband. She'd never even undressed in his presence, had always insisted the lamps be put out before she stepped out of her underdrawers and donned the white muslin she slept in, covered from head to foot.

A baby?
No, it had to be something she'd eaten. She was hungry now, her stomach fluttering with the foreign thoughts. Roasted apples, that was what she wanted, or something fresh to bite into. She rose, made her way to the back porch, and reached into the barrel. She lifted a smallish Maidenblush apple that Nehemiah said came by ship all the way from New Jersey. Well, originally from that far but now there were trees bearing the waxy yellow-skin fruit in Oregon. She found the corer and stripped the apple of its seeds, then took a bite. Her stomach felt better already. The queasiness came from how she'd been eating.

She wished she could ask her mother. She snorted to herself. What would Adora care? She could ask Elizabeth. She'd write to the older woman, find a way to get the information without telling her what she needed it for. Just curious, she'd tell her. She'd describe the beans and the effects. That woman knew everything about food.

She took another bite of the round fruit. It would make a good cider, she thought. Something better to put into her stomach instead of that stale beer. She picked up two more apples and began slicing them.
A baby?
She couldn't be expecting Nehemiah's child. She still wasn't sure how she felt about him.