All Together in One Place (35 page)

Mazy shook her head. “I'll eat something cold later if I feel like it. Otherwise in the morning. Sure you're all right?”

“Just give me some stew,” Elizabeth said, standing. “Lucky Fip's not in it!”

Mazy dozed inside the wagon, tossing and turning in the twisted sleep of discomfort and disillusion. She woke to a gush of wind that billowed out the canvas. She wondered if she should lower it, heard it settle down with a sigh. Sister Esther and her mother talked low outside.

“We have every reason to honor the Lord's day,” Sister Esther said.

Mazy heard a wooden spoon clink against a tin cup and knew her mother had brewed tea and stirred honey in it. She could smell the sweetness.

The Sabbath? Which day was that? Had it been that long they'd traveled? Yes, tomorrow.

“Mazy's the one you'll have to ponder with over that, I imagine,” Elizabeth said.

“And it does make one consider why your daughter is the one to establish rules,” Sister Esther said.

“Nothing written says she does. You got something you itch to say, just say it. Call a meeting same as any.”

“Well, I believe I'll do that, then,” Sister Esther said. “Now that we have come this way, had some time to gather up our thoughts. But I believe it was wise to return to the graves.”

Mazy smiled.

“And thus refreshed, we can turn again west. On Monday.”

No! Mazy's mind reeled. They couldn't go west. They were going home. That's what Mazy needed to remind them of, the importance of going home. She should get up and tell the Sister now, not wait, tell her that home was where nurture lived, where strength thrived. Home was that place that fed the soul, healed the broken pieces of a life. Home was where she'd find what she was seeking, had been seeking when she passed it by to go with Jeremy.

Mazy started to get up but felt dizzy. She lay back down, trying to regain her equilibrium. It would have to wait. She would talk of it in the morning. She listened for the sounds of Ruth rejoining the circle, of the children quieting, of Adora calling loud for Tipton to please have something to eat. She smelled the tobacco smoke of Luras pipe. They would all rest, yes. Tomorrow they would pray at the graves, and then she would convince them to go home.

Disaster struck at dawn.

The shout woke Mazy, and she sat up, breathing hard. Who had yelled? What was it she heard? Wind howled and the wagon shook, but no human sounds broke through.

She decided it must have been inside her dream. Yes, she'd heard the words within her sleep. What was it?
You dont listen to me! You dont listen to me!
She'd been home in her dream, screaming those words at Jeremy She leaned back into the pillow, recalling the detail, the fury in the words, the frustration.

The wagon shook, resisted a blast of wind.

He'd had his back to her in their bed, his face to the chinks of their cabin that had been tight and white in her dream. She'd shouted at him, crying in desperation to have him hear her, to know that she spoke, not to feign indifFerence. At least she hoped he pretended it, she prayed that his apathy hadn't been real

He had not turned over. She willed herself to see movement in his shoulders, willed them to announce that Jeremy would be turning over so they could talk, so she could look into his eyes and know he loved and listened and lived. He had not moved.

In her dream she had shrieked at him,
You dont listen to me! You dont listen to me!Then
she woke, all sweaty and scared.

Her heart stopped pounding. It had been a dream. And what had she always found about her dreams, vivid and colorful as they were? That she always spoke to herself within them, regardless of who or what character called out. Sometimes objects had voices, sometimes it was a feeling that would stay after she woke, like the residue of milk on an unwashed mug.

“I must have shouted out loud,” she said “Woke myself up.”

Mazy lay back down, pulled the quilt up to her chin. What wasn't she listening to? Who wasn't she listening to? Maybe this was about Jeremy after all. She'd been so frustrated with him, so angry when he failed to include her in his silences. She'd begged him to share her hopes; at times, she believed he had. They'd cleared trees and burned the stumps and made the place for her garden. She had loved the days they spent working side by side with the promise of something tangible waiting at the end.

She recalled a fallen tree near the garden plot; it held a swarm of bees. “You have to destroy it to get the honey out,” Jeremy told her.

“There ought to be some way to leave their home intact,” she told him.

“‘Less you're willing to tear it up, you're stuck without honey.”

“I'll wait, then,” she said and plotted the garden so the bees would flourish beside it.

No, the voice wasn't about her and Jeremy. It had cried with too much desperation, a voice squelched for so long that it had screamed to make sure it could be heard at all.

It was her own voice. She wasn't listening to herself.

The skin at her ankles chafed, and she threw the covers back and reached for the glycerin to spread on them, to stop the itching that plagued her. Her face had broken out too with tiny bumps. Her mother said it was the pregnancy, that everything inside changed to make room for this new and ever-changing being. “Its what life's about, girl, all the change. Starts with the first seed planted. We live and breathe it our whole life through.”

Mazy rubbed her ankles. The glycerin intensified the cold of the wagon box It had been so hot yesterday as they traveled, but now the air harbored hidden snow.

She heard a horse neigh, a mule answer, and a blast of wind hit again, this time shaking the wagon. Something about the fierceness of it frightened her. She grabbed the side board, balancing herself against the blast of wind. Pig barked close outside. A pan tossed by the wind rattled and clanked against the wheel. She was about to get up and call Pig in, check the flaps to see if they were secured, when the first shower of hail pounded the canvas, ripping the top, shredding it in seconds. Ice pitted against her like rocks thrown by an army of bullies.

Mazy put one arm over her head, her elbow tight against her ear, the other arm over her stomach. She tried to remember in the darkness if she had anything hard she could put over her, a board from a table, a bureau drawer she could lift out and get under. Then she decided the wagon would be the safest spot. She should get under it.

She grabbed for a shawl and scrambled in the dark. Lightning lit the rubble around her. She started to cry out to her mother. The wind blasted and shook the wagon, which pitched as though at sea, lifted up on two wheels, paused for what seemed a lifetime, and then…the wagon dropped back. With a gust of wind so brutal it took her breath with it, the wagon rolled and pitched on over.

Esther heard the howling of the wind and then hard chunks of ice pitted against her skin. At first she thought the bees had somehow gotten free and were stinging, but they only did such things if the hive was threatened or if they'd been hurt. Had they been either? She looked for the lantern. Sleet struck the side of her head. For an instant, she floated. Something sticky as the propolis of the bees oozed beside her eyes.

“Missy Esther? Missy Esther?”

Esther moaned as the soft hands of Deborah pushed against her, the rough rub of the tiny callus of her fingers pressed against her arms.

“Go under wagon. Storm very bad!”

The girl tugged at Esther, who moved like thick batter on a sloped bowl while she let herself be lowered down the ladder. Cold rain and hail pounded their backs even as they knelt in the mud, hunched and shivering beneath the wagon box. The sound of the wind roared in her ears, roared like a storm she remembered as a child, huddled in a potato cellar with her brothers and parents.

“Move, Missy,” Deborah said, pressing her knees against Esther. “Make room for friends.”

Esther thought she heard the Bacons’ cows mooing, maybe oI’ Snoz with his high-pitched bellowing. She could hear the black dog barking. She didn't feel well. Her head throbbed like a drum. Deborah's paper! Where was it? She heard loud cracks of thunder. Voices shouted, and though the hours promised dawn, the night was as black and slimy as seaweed coughed up from the depths of sea.

“Ay-ee!” Naomi said, pushing Deborah closer to Esther. “Rain sting! Sky burn fire.” White marbles of ice covered the ground around them.

In a flash of lightning, they watched one of the Schmidtkes’ wagons tip and topple.

“Sister's God leave?” Deborah asked Esther.

“He already gone,” Naomi answered.

Ruth heard the sounds of Koda in distress before she realized her bedroll and clothing were soaked. The hail battered apart the end of her wagons canvas, exposing the dresser that had been her mothers and the trunk that held the baby clothes that had been worn by her twins. Inside was something else, something that had once belonged to Zane. She had wondered why she'd bothered to bring it, but tonight it might prove useful.

She climbed to the wagon then flung open the trunk. She grabbed up the pair of men's pants with double rows of buttons and the heavy leather boots. Her fingers were cold, and the wet buttons resisted being pushed through the woolen, machine-made holes. She settled for two buttons on each side, stuffed a shirt beneath the wide waistband, pulled on his boots, and pushed the felt hat on her head. She'd packed a rubber slicker of Zane's too, packed way back in Ohio on a hot summer's night when everything that mattered had been stripped from her. The rubber might be hard and brittle now, but against this wind and rain, it could keep her from becoming chilled until she found Betha and the children.

Ruth jumped down, startled by the urgency of the wind. She splashed mud, her boots sunk almost to the tops. Had it rained that much? Hard enough that water rushed beneath the wagons as though they camped inside a stream? She steadied herself and reached for the lantern, but the wind and rain frustrated the lighting. Ruth so concentrated on finding light that she failed to hear the shifting sounds of oxen groaning from uncomfortable to fretted, working into rushed.