All Together in One Place (13 page)

Mazy skimmed pans of milk, placed the cream into the churn. Then began the rhythm of the task, exchanging hands when her recovering one ached up to her elbow and her side began to throb.

Seth Forrester was an easy man to be around, she thought, the way that Jeremy had been those years before when her father had brought him home to recover from an injury suffered on the docks. They'd talked for hours as she cared for him, changed dressings, brought in food and fed him until his knife-gashed arm and broken ribs were healed enough to let him leave. Then Jeremy's absence had left a gnawing ache.

He had come back as though an answer to a prayer, and her father had permitted them to court though she was just sixteen. They'd walked arm in arm, Jeremy telling her of his travels, of his earlier immigration from New England back in ‘48. “Became a part of the greatest migration to the territory,” he told her. “Every nationality and language one can imagine came to Wisconsin in ‘48. Helped make her a state.” Mazy heard pride in his voice. “Want to save my money and then head east to St. John's College in Maryland, where George Washington's nephews went. Become a solicitor perhaps. Take up an essential occupation.”

“Like my father's,” she said.

He had scoffed at that, she just remembered. No, maybe he coughed. “Surgeons are well respected, Madison, but doctors can get their license in a month Doesn't take much time to learn to bleed a
person. Only remedy they seem to all have.” He'd lifted her chin, stared into her eyes. “Your fathers an exception. Good man. Could have been a surgeon, if he'd wanted, if he had the gall for slicing quick and sure.”

The conversation had bothered her, but she didn't know why.

Jeremy had declared himself to her soon after, and she'd put the edge of uncertainty aside Then before the marriage could take place, her father had been stricken by paralysis and everything changed. The doctor, her father, decomposed before her, went from round and robust to exposed bones as fragile as the future.

He could still talk with effort but mostly spelled words out on a makeshift alphabet board Jeremy had devised. As he grew weaker, he signed his wish to see his lawyer and that Mazy and Jeremy should marry.

The wedding ceremony itself on April 5, 1850, was a quiet one followed by a small gathering of friends with food and music but no high-stepping in their parlor Her father lived to give his blessing. On the day they buried him, three weeks later, Jeremy learned of his own uncle's passing and that a farm in Grant County now belonged to him.

Mazy had thought they'd sell the land and head east.

“We'll live there,” he said instead. He'd given her no reason except to say that improving the farm would be a good investment and that a change from working at the docks right then had become
essential
They'd said good-bye to her mother, traveled several days west through dipping, rolling lands, and arrived in a green profusion of June. A stream pushed through it low, toward the Mississippi. Clamshells littered the shore. Mazy had christened the place by swimming in the river.

Now here she was, forced into another move driven by her husband.

“I suppose I shouldn't be surprised,” she told Pig, who lifted her loose hand with his head as she considered and churned She patted the silky fur and laced the dog's ear between her fingers. “It does seem to be the way he decides things—on his own, without counsel.” She was left only to react. She remembered the simple interchange with Seth
Forrester and felt a longing for a man who would respect her and share in her desires.

“It doesn't have to be this way,” she told the dog. Something needed to change—and soon. She called for Tipton to finish up the churning if she would, rinsed her hands in the water basin, then went in search of her husband.

“Come on ahead, man!” the ferrymaster shouted. Ruth Martin flicked the whip, and the heavy oxen team moved forward with a jolt. The wheels groaned, and the ferry lowered itself in the water with the weight Once surrounded on three sides by the river as dark as Boston baked beans, Ruth had a temporary loss of direction, a feeling so strange she closed her eyes and shook her head then stared, attached to a point of land showing between the big oxen's ears.

A mist began dropping from a sky as gray as her broodmare.
Oh, fine Just what we need Rain on top of dirty water.
Well, she'd always liked a challenge. She took a deep breath and gripped the whip.

She'd wrapped her hair up high, stuffed it under the hat that had been her husband's, then pulled the felt down tighter toward her ears, the touch bringing back the memory and with it piercing pain. She shook her head, but she couldn't shake the feeling.

“Are you frightened?” Betha asked her from the seat above her.

Ruth shook her head and must have scowled because Betha said, “That's right—I'm not supposed to ask you questions.”

“No one seems to care,” Ruth said in a soft, low voice She wore a pair of men's blue pants and boots and her brother's shirt with a ban-danna at her neck she could pull up around her face to look more like a drover warding off dust. She stood hunched over to look wider and stockier She didn't like being deceptive, though flouting convention by wearing a dress at the crossing hadn't seemed wise, either.

Jed's wagon rolled onto the ferry behind them. Ruth felt the water lift the ferry, which now began to turn downstream

Her nieces squealed in the back. “Sit down!” Betha said, then to Ruth, “I think they're having fun, though I don't see ho-o-o-w!” Her words rang out as the ferry lifted on a push of wave, hesitated, then plunged, taking on splashing water over the oxen's wide feet.

Water lapped hard against the side of the flat-bottomed boat, sending another muddy splash over the side. Ruth swallowed She didn't easily get seasick, but the rush of water and the twisting in the current threatened.

“Almost to the first island, kids. Hang on! Can you see your dad back there?”

“He's there, Mama,” Jessie shouted. “Got's white eyes!”

“I'll bet he has! If he lives through this, I'll kill him,” Betha said, “but don't you tell him.” Ruth heard the girls giggle.

Beau, the right ox, bigger and less sure, bawled and raised the nose chain with a toss of his thick neck. The motion caused the wagon to roll back against the chock, and Jessie fell with a thump Ruth heard Jed from behind them shout, “Whoa, now!” followed by the ferryman's orders

“Keep ‘em clear of each other! Keep ‘em clear! Get ‘em under control!”

“As though we had control,” Ruth told Betha before she remembered to hold her own tongue.

They hit the island a few feet beyond where they'd expected. Another ferry waited on the far side to take them across the second fork if the wagons didn't sink too deep into the rain-soaked island soil. Ruth felt the jolt of the bow square against the land, signaling their arrival The low gate dropped open. Six or seven men, some on horseback, shouted orders.

“Come ahead, then. Come on!”

Ruth cracked her whip above the oxen's heads, and the heavy animals lumbered forward, the yellowed wooden yokes about their necks revealing the calluses caused by the endless scraping of the oak.

“You kids doing all right?” Betha asked

“Just chirk, Mommy,” seven-year-old Sarah said, her eyes as big as cow pies.

Ruth tipped her hat with her leather-gloved hand as they passed by the ferryman who was too occupied with unloading to notice the smooth face of the bullwhacker.

She talked to the nigh oxen as they rolled across the strip of ground that marked the critical halfway point of the crossing. The ferry would head back, end up downstream from the crossing, and be towed by cable back up for another load. It was a long and tedious process.

When this was over, she'd rejoice Then she'd have to stand and wait while wranglers drove her horses across She would have preferred to be with them, but she had no other way to get her wagon here except to drive it. The horses were all branded and would be separated at the end so others could move them; but she was her own teamster when it came to the wagon.

Ruth just didn't want to bog down now, didn't want to make a mistake here or at the second boarding.

When the back wheel sank in almost to the hub, Ruth groaned. She shouted to the team, slapped their backs with her hands, snapped the air above their ears, all the while thinking maybe she should have taken the wheels off and paid the men to pull it with the ropes at the downriver crossing. Maybe she should have asked that Roman-looking man with the flawed ear who danced with her for help. Maybe she should have been where the oxen could swim instead of face this ferry contraption. She shook her head clear of the thoughts. Why did she always doubt herself halfway through a thing? It was her curse—one among many

“Are we stuck, Auntie?”

Ruth caught her breath and followed the trail to the second ferry. “We can do it,” Ruth said.

The children bounced happily in the back As Ruth stared out at the even wider rush of water and what looked to her to be a much less
sturdy craft they'd have to board, she wondered at the exuberance of children. What lay ahead felt more of faith than of assurance.

Tipton churned the milk, standing beside the Bacons’ wagon, grateful for the task. She'd awoken with the heaviest of feelings in her stomach, and only when she heard her mother's singsong voice chatting with Elizabeth outside the wagon did she remember what had happened and how her life had abruptly changed.

Over the morning breaking of their fast, her father told of how they'd make this something grand, this going west. “I expect we can always head back next year if need be.”

“Back to nothing,” Charles said. He picked at his chin, pulling at the few hairs that threatened to require shaving.

“Now, Charles, you'll be tended to,” her mother said. “Tipton, dear, tell me how you've spent your days? You're looking slender as a goose's neck. You've not been ill, have you?”

Charles glared, but not at his mother.

“Will I be—?”

“Going to California with us? I should say so,” Adora answered.

“Remaining in the Bacons’ wagon, is what I meant to say. Miz Bacon needs me.”

“Why, after the crossing, when we make a few adjustments, your father and Charles plan to sleep beneath the tent, and you and I will share a bed of cornhusks.”

“We can't sleep in the wagon?”

“Charles brought his photographic equipment with him, dear. It—”

“I had to get something out of this,” Charles said. She expected to have words with Charles the first time they were alone. Fire had always flashed between them; and with him here against his will, he'd be slinging cutting words, and maybe more, straight in her direction.

“It just takes up a heap of room,” Adora smoothed. “Mules are strong, of course, so we have an extra tent. What matters is that we're together now.” She nuzzled her nose in her daughters hair.

Later, before leaving to help with the crossings, Tyrell tried to settle her as they walked to the Bacons’ wagon. “No need to be worrying,” he said. “Your family came just to look after you, not to keep us from marrying.”

“But I liked being with the Bacons.”

“Don't always get what we like. Sometimes we got to like what we get.

“Didn't you like our times together, without someone hovering close?”

“Any time with you is pleasing,” Tyrell told her. “We'll still have time together.”

“Mother'll watch us like children.” She turned to see Charles staring at them. “Charles could've had the store to work in for his life. Now he has nothing but uncertainty.”

“Everything except eternity's uncertain. Charles could strike out on his own. He could have stayed there in town. I know lots of young men who've lived without their parents by the time they turned seventeen. Charles is already what, twenty-two, -three?”

“Twenty-five,” she said. “An only child until he was ten.”

“Your papa needed him. Being needed is a good thing, he'll come to find.”

She kicked at a rock in the path with her slippered foot. She stopped and spoke to Tyrell's face. “What if my parents've changed their minds about allowing us to marry? Maybe they really intend to turn around. They didn't actually say they weren't going to turn back.”