All Together in One Place (18 page)

Elizabeth noticed an obsidian knife lying in the grass. She picked it up and began cutting beside him, removing hide from neck and hams. He glanced at the knife in her hand once, then turned to his work. White globs of fat like Milwaukee winter snow stuck to the hide they peeled back. Several times they'd laid down their knives and shoulder to
shoulder, with four hands, pulled, ripping it free of the muscle, the flesh still warm at their knuckles.

Elizabeth chatted about the calf, how big it was compared to a deer. In a pause, the man grunted.

“Can you hear us all rolling across the prairie like that?” Elizabeth went on. “Bet you can. Probably smell us, too.” She sniffed herself, scowled. “Same old dress I started out with.”

After a time, they worked in silence. Sweat dripped from her forehead. When the buffalo's brown, curly-hair hide with flecks of red lay in a heap beside the naked animal, a woman came out of the buckskin shelter

“You been in there that whole time?” Elizabeth asked, standing. The womans face looked pinched and drawn, and when she offered Elizabeth a gourd of water, Elizabeth noted tiny scabs on the back of her hand and others on her neck A baby cried from inside the shelter.

“Do you know what time my mother left or where she was going?” Mazy asked a weary-looking Tipton, putting away her pencils.

“We don't talk much. We
ponder
even less since my parents came. Whose diapers are you carrying?” Tipton curled up her nose.

“I'm helping Mrs. Cullver Their poor child's bottom must be red as a radish. Thought mother'd have some ideas for chipping off what's dried.”

“I haven't seen Tyrellie much, either,” Tipton continued. “Have you given any thought to hiring a teamster at Laramie?”

“Doesn't Tyrell plan to go on with us?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Oh, you know what I mean.”

“I know you're scared he will and you're not sure how to keep that from happening, right?”

Tipton nodded, and tears pooled in her eyes.

Elizabeth wiped her mouth of the sweet water and, at the woman's invitation, bent into the shadows of the shelter. A fluff of black peelings lay in a heap on the floor. The woman offered small, round roots with fingers stained dark.

“Good,” Elizabeth said, chewing the white root and liking the pungent taste.

The woman motioned, and Elizabeth lifted the ends of her apron and spilled the roots into it, gathering the cloth like a pocket. She gazed around at the clean and simple larder of their shelter, the smell of burning sage heady from a clay pot nestled by what looked like bedding. She smelled meat cooking outside, and the man soon brought in a piece of backstrap. She was given a chunk, meat so tender when she tasted it, Elizabeth found she didn't need to chew.

“So you cook, too?” Elizabeth said to the man who just stared down at her, the way she often did when she offered up some new dish at a Christmas Eve supper, waiting for the nod of aye or nay “Don't find too many men of my kind willing to work at the cooking fire,” she said. She lifted the piece of meat up in her greasy fingers and smiled at him. “Just dandy.” He nodded once, handed the woman a piece, and left.

Elizabeth studied her, a small-framed person with a heart-shaped face, wearing hides laced together with strings of gut and graced around the neck with what looked like yellowed elk's teeth. In the corner she saw a baby kick his feet. His mother lifted him from a bed of green moss and held him to her breast. The child appeared to be about ten months old. The woman didn't look to have an ounce to spare him. The man returned and brought a chunk of fat he'd sliced from the calf hide. The baby kicked his feet again, in excitement, smiled, and reached for it, laughing as he held the piece, then quieted into sucking sounds, content with the snow-white fat.

“That was good eating,” Elizabeth said, wiping her hands on the
dirt floor, then at her hips. She wasn't sure what the proper etiquette was when eating with a Pawnee, but appreciation must be universal.

What happened next surprised her. The woman set the child down, reached around her neck, and removed the string of teeth. She handed them to Elizabeth, motioning for Elizabeth to put them on.

Elizabeth started to protest, but something told her no, that the receiving of a thing became a gift in itself. The woman knelt behind her to put it on She smelled of wood smoke and something sweet.

“It's just a jewel,” Elizabeth said, patting the ivory teeth. “Wish I could give you something.” She stood up then and rubbed her hip. As she did, she felt the pocket tied beneath her skirt. “Ah,” she said. She undid the apron and set the roots down, then unhooked the skirt pulled between her legs. She reached up under the yards of material to untie the cloth pocket.

“Godeys Lady s Magazine
wont approve the combination,” she said, “you wearing skins and all. But I like to muddle up my fashion.” From the pocket, Elizabeth handed the woman a pair of silver earrings. “My son-in-law would say these took up wasted space anyway,” Elizabeth told her. “Go ahead, put them on.”

Elizabeth held the earrings in her fingertips and heard the tinkling of the silver bells as she gestured for the woman to take them.

“Time I parted with them,” Elizabeth said. “Bought ‘em to please myself after my husband died. Thought they'd comfort, but they didn't. Only time and kind adventures do, I'd say. This afternoon here counts.”

Silver Bells, as Elizabeth now thought of the woman, accepted the gift. The two women patted their exchanges. Elizabeth picked up her roots, and they stepped outside. The man still bent over the animal, cutting strips of meat and then poking the flesh onto sticks to dry by the fire.

Beneath an endless blue sky, Silver Bells walked with her a distance while Elizabeth's mule plodded behind them. The woman's rasping breath cut a slice against the prairie stillness The baby'd been wrapped
in a board the woman carried on her back. “Child's almost big enough to carry you,” Elizabeth said. “How long you been sick?” Silver Bells merely smiled, then made a quick dart to touch a slender plant. She pointed to Elizabeth's apron full of roots “I'll look for those,” Elizabeth said. “Thank you for adding to my stew.”

“The scenery,” Adora Wilson told Mazy as they walked beside each other the next morning, “takes a body's breath away, if truth be known. Just look at that pointy rock.”

“It does look like a chimney,” Mazy said. She shaded her eyes. The rock outcropping rose across the Platte, but those on the north Council Bluffs road could still see it “Clouds look like fat egg noodles plumped in a string, don't they?”

“The river looks so soothing, truthfully.”

“It does mesmerize, the way it meanders and yet keeps heading in one direction. Flowing back toward home.”

“Hathaway says when we reach the Divide, the rivers all flow toward the Pacific Imagine that! How does that work, water changing course, just like that?”

“Cross over a mountain and everything changes, I guess,” Mazy said. “Have you thought any more about heading into Oregon?”

“Tipton won't let us not think of it. Hathaway seems sure we'd be better off south. He has a cousin came out in ‘49 on that horrible Pioneer Line. Survived to tell the tale. You'd have thought folks wouldn't talk about it, heading out as they did with that mountain man guide dying of cholera before they even left Independence! It'd be a sign for a body to stay home, I tell you, having so much trouble on a trail.”

“Where's he live?”

“Sacramento area, his cousin is.” She opened and closed the wrist purse she carried, a black beaded piece smaller than Mazy's palm. A
habit, Mazy decided, the clasp clicking like knitting needles. “They correspond,” Adora continued. “We sent a letter on so he knows were coming. Hathaway s reluctant to say it outright to Tipton any sooner than he must. Besides, Charles has expressed little interest in Oregon. Even less in doing something Tipton might want.” She sighed. “Don't know how some folks do it, raise children who like each other instead of being at odds”

“Might be an argument for having single children,” Mazy said.

“Oh, birthing itself is as good an argument for that as there is, but we pay little attention. You wont either.”

Somehow the word of Mazy s condition, her “feeling poorly,” had spread. Perhaps Tipton had seen her ill that morning, or her mother had let word leak out. More like flood out, coming from her mother. Suzanne wouldn't have told a soul.

Mazy wiped the back of her neck with her handkerchief. “I feel so clammy,” she said.

“Doesn't look like rain,” Adora said, gazing up at the sky. Crows cawed and dipped above. A meadowlark warbled and landed on a single strand of leaning grass left behind by the ravenous stock of wagons gone before them.

“It never does, and then we find ourselves drenched. The mosquitoes are worse than I've ever seen too. Wish mother'd come up with a remedy for them.”

“Your mother.” Adora clucked her tongue. “I can't believe she entered that Indian's hovel. Disease and all? She's lucky she got out alive.”

“She was invited,” Mazy said.

“Still, I've heard their homes—if you can call them that—are so squalid”

“Mother described quite a pleasant—”

“Sister Esther's right,” Adora continued. She swatted at horse flies then turned her head. Mazy could feel her staring. “Disease is a tool of
correction among those with low morals. Your mother exposed all of us—

“The roots made a nice addition to your stew.”

“She put some ofthat woman's food in the stew?” Adora gasped.

“Just roots,” Mazy said.

“Well. I think in the future we ought not to allow people to tramp off so far from the wagons,” Adora said. “Indians could have killed her and us, too. She tells her stories so proud, but she invites danger, she does.”

“Little scares mother,” Mazy said. “She says she s too old to fight and too fat to run, so she just has to rely on her good nature to survive.”

“I'd say your mother is having too much fun for a woman her age.”

“I wonder how that's measured?” Mazy said and walked a little faster.

“I suggest you let me take the patent paper, Mei-Ling. I mean Deborah,” Sister Esther said. They stood outside the wagon where the smaller woman tended her boxes of bees in the dusky light.