All Together in One Place (51 page)

Respectfully I remain
,
Benjamin Fumas, Esquire
,
Caroline Fry Marriage Association, Inc.

At her earliest convenience? What was convenient? To not be told why or which ones? To be given no names as though the women all ran together? Esther shook her head, fanned herself with the thin pages. She hadn't told the Association that one of the women had died That was an error. So was not reading this letter until now. She should have written to get clarification before they reached California Delaying did not increase one's control.

She would have to pray to make sense of this, find a way to protect her charges, and still meet her obligations.

No one asked her about the letter's contents. She kept it in her pocket when they'd crossed Dry Sandy Creek, the wheels finally tightening up against the iron rims after several days of dry heat. The soaking kept the wheels on her wagon from shrinking further. Afterwards, she and Naomi packed the space between the shrinking wheels and the rims with strips of Elizabeth's soaked buffalo hide to keep the wheel tight against the iron. She did not want the wheels to break, the wagon to drop, or anything to happen that might upset Deborah's bees.

The insects had taken extra tending through the driest areas. One day they had gone thirty-six miles, Mazy said, because there were no water holes between. The bees had become agitated, and when Deborah lifted the lid to add more water, she heard their angry tone rise an octave.

“It is the warning!” Deborah shouted. “They will sting. Back away, Missy Esther. Away!”

As she tried to lower the lid, Deborah struck some of the bees. They stung her close to her eyes, then another at her wrist, the soft spot at her ear, the warning already sent to the others, frantic now, being caught up as she tried to secure the lid. Deborah slammed it now and struck at the loose bees flying and darting, knowing those who stung her would die an agonizing death unless she could kill them. Esther sat splayed against the side of the wagon, her heart pounding, while Deborah rescued the bees and her future.

Perhaps losing the bees would be a penance for her delaying, for not being truthful with the Association about Cynthia's death. But perhaps it didn't matter, if what was in the letter was a truth and not a lie.

Tipton couldn't get the blacksmith from her mind. The tools he used, pounding hot iron, making something useful out of nothing, discarding bits and pieces that didn't fit. Was she just a bit and piece? Did she belong on the scrap pile of things no longer needed? Or was Elizabeth right? And the aching and numbing of her hand resulted from resistance. Maybe she was being pounded into something she could not yet imagine. She tightened the strings of her drawers, wrapping the excess into the waistband. She put little in her mouth—that was her agreement with herself, to eat only the food on one side of her plate. She didn't want anyone to notice how her belly pooched out. Yet her drawers fairly hung at her hips. How could she be so fat and yet her clothes get bigger?

They took the Sublette Cutoff rather than head south to Fort Bridger The discussion had been amiable among the women, the decision easily
come to. Sister Esther had only half heard it. Once they reached South Pass, the air had become cooler and the bees more restful They'd stopped early to let them fly. But she felt there was no point now.

She watched the Celestials. Each had revealed unique skills along this journey, though they still had much to learn.

Naomi had fine, strong arms. Her silky dress no longer stretched across her body, now turning from soft to lean. She kept herbs in her pottery pots, seasonings that scented the quilts and the clothes. She said fond things too, offering cheerfulness especially to Tipton or Suzanne when clouds marked their days. Her herbs healed cuts and scrapes, and she'd actually rescued one of the Barnards’ oxen by giving it salt pork and vinegar after it drank the alkali water. Who would have thought ofthat?

Zilah did not look down so much either, or cast her eyes as though in shame as she had before they began. She tended Clayton, and since she'd taken on this task, the child lacked even a scratch on his face except for the scar near his eye from the mule incident. She played with him, making little circles out of colored papers, folding them until she could blow into them and they would puff up. She was not a pretty girl, with pockmarks and lacking the delicate features of Deborah, but she smiled easily around children, and they transformed her into something of joy.

And Deborah, so delicate with those tiny, damaged feet. She proved tireless, if a bit irresponsible. She did remember details not only of what the bees needed but of people as well, keeping the wagon orderly and anticipating what Sister Esther wished, often before she said the words.

But none of the women had resources, except for Deborah's bees and the paper patent she'd nearly lost. Sister Esther felt tears come to her
eyes.
What would become of them once they discovered they were on their own, without husbands to provide for them?

“I'll go first,” Lura said. They stood in the necessary circle. “Here are my truths and lies.” She cleared her throat. “I can play the harp. That's one
And I have always wanted to run a sutlers store.” She grinned. “Mariah, if you know, dont say.”

“Oh, the harp. I think you can play that,” Adora said. “I heard that sound the night we made Kanesville, so pretty. Didn't know it was you playing”

“You carry a tune well,” Suzanne agreed.

“Not so good with valuables, though,” Adora said.

“Mother!” Tip ton scolded.

“Well, she lost those pearl combs and all, Tipton.”

“You've lost your purse, Mother.”

“Well, I'd say that one about the stores your lie, Lura, if truth be known.”

“The store's the truer,” Ruth said. “Your wagon is well organized. Boxes in little places A sutler would have that skill, shelving and stacking and keeping products from shifting.”

A few others made their guess, and Lura took in the kindnesses expressed within the guesses, knitted them into a shawl of new information to comfort herself.

“I can't play a thing,” she told them at last. “Not a single note on a traveling harp or whatever. No, it's the store I'd love.”

“I never knew that, Ma.”

“Your father thought it a foolish dream, and I never mentioned it after we were married, he being a farmer, a practical soul. Handled the books. Didn't need me, and then I got addled and all. But I might again, now Mention it to myself.”

“Well you should,” Elizabeth said. “Now ain't this fun? Who's next?”

“I'll go,” Sister Esther said.

“You gonna tell us what's in the letter now?” Jason asked. He and his brother stood outside the circle until the women finished, listening intently.

“No. I am not,” she said. She had thought long and hard about this
task, thought it silly at first, but liked the effort it took to clarify, keep her mind from always judging “First. I am frightened of bees, of being stung as I have been since I was a small child. That's the first statement. And second, I studied the same classes as my brother Harold, who was a divinity student in the East.” She looked straight ahead, did not want to catch the eye of anyone.

“Why, that's easy,” Adora said. “You're not afraid of bees. You've ridden with them all this way without a peep. That's silly. They're supposed to be hard to guess, like Lura's was.”

“Is she cheating, Mama?” Sarah asked.

“Shush. Pay attention,” Betha said.

“If it is the bees, if that's the truth, then you are a remarkable woman,” Suzanne said. “To live each day with a fear as that, surrounded by the thing that terrorizes you. How could you do that and still be a useful person?”

“Perhaps as you do, Suzanne,” Sister Esther said. “By faith and grace.”

“By faith,” Mazy said. “But then that would make the second statement seem the truer. I could imagine Harold training for the ministry. He was a very kind man.”

“Yes, he was,” Esther said. “They both were good men, my brothers.” She sighed heavily, the mark of hanging on to something that drained the soul.

“Are women allowed to read divinity?” Tipton asked.

“She didn't say she read it, just studied the same stuff her brother did,” Mariah corrected. “That could be.”

“I'd rather she told us about the letter,” Ned said.

“In due time,” Esther said. She smiled. The banter was a comfort she had not known she needed.

“We give,” Elizabeth said. The others agreed.

“I wish it was that I had read theology along with my brother, but neither brother did, and yes, Tipton, as a woman, I could not. Not that
I didn t try to get one or the other to do it. How I badgered. My father was a minister, and he, too, pressed his sons before he died. In the end, they consented only to come with me, to help me carry out my mission.” She looked away. “And so you see what happened.”

Deborah broke the silence with her tiny voice. “So is lie you…read same like brother?” The girls left eye was almost swollen shut from her bee stings. “And truth you fear bees?”

“The truth is that.”

Deborah put her fingers to her lips, blinked quickly.

“And still you stay with the bees and help,” Mazy said. “You ride beside your fears.”

“Ride beside them, yes. As do we all who chose to make our way along this trail.”

19
filling up

Mazy sat beneath the shade of a hardwood tree. The green canopy offered rest; a book lay open on her lap. She had written a word, some quality of faith. Then she heard the agitation of wings.

They'd flown like hawks diving for rabbits, tearing toward the soft spots of her face. Her heart pounded, eyes enlarged by the sight of the black swarm in the sky.

Sit very still, sit very still, dont let them knowyoure here.

They'd swarmed onto the trunk and over her eyes, her mouth, her nose. She couldn't move. She couldn't breathe! She felt her throat constrict, shut off the air that committed her to life. She'd die if she didn't move, didn't change, whether they stung her to death or not! She melded into the solid but unmoving trunk, and the bees blackened over her, made her one with the tree. She fought, knowing to move was to die of their stinging; but to stay, just a lump on the trunk, that was a death over time.

“Wake up, darling. You're dreaming bad,” her mother said, moving the muslin cover from her daughter s face, shaking her.

Mazy fought through the ooze of nightmare, blinked to see herself on a dusty trail far from home.

“What was that all about?”

“Bees.”

“Stinging you, were they?” Elizabeth stroked Mazy's cheek, moved wet strands of hair back behind her ears.

“They didn't sting,” Mazy said. “I felt more…choked, more suffocated and sad than anything.”

“Just a bad dream,” her mother said. “They pass, in time.” The dream stayed with her through the day. She struggled to understand the meaning of the sadness, the lack of stinging. And she wondered what the word was that she had written in the book but could not read through the suffocating bees.