No Eye Can See (15 page)

“It hurts.”

“I know. But you've got to push a little, into the pain, or you'll never be able to use your leg again. Here, I'll help you lift. Elizabeth says it's healing well. You've got to get strong enough to try the crutches.”

“They won't hold me. You want to see me fall.” The child stuck her lower lip out—that act and the child's constant complaints flashed heat into Ruth's face.

“Jason and Ned worked hard to fix them for you,” she said. “And Sarah padded the arms. You're being unreasonable.”

“Ugly sagebrush. They smell. So does this,” she said and tossed the bag of buckwheat husks toward the ground.

Ruth spun around, grabbed for the bag and walked away, shaking inside. She'd chosen this caring for the children, chosen this living with others. But she was no good at it. Fury came faster than fondness.

“Don't go, Auntie. I'll be good. Promise,” the child wailed then. “Please, Auntie.”

Was it her imagination, or did the girl drag out the word
auntie,
as though she said it as a tease?

“I've horses to tend,” Ruth shouted to her over her shoulder. “When you feel like being pleasant, I'll come back.” She fast-walked away. She needed to…leave, to go away, that was what she needed. To find a place where she couldn't injure others and where she could not be touched. Behind her, she heard Elizabeth talking to the child—Ruth's child— making her laugh. Ruth brushed at the hot tears that threatened.

“It's all right, Koda,” Ruth said as she approached the horse, her hands moving along the animal's familiar jaw line, patting at his withers, then running her hand down his leg to check his foot. First one, then the others. She checked for nicks and scrapes, then did the same with Jumper, finishing with handfuls of grain for each of them from the packs she'd hung in the low branch of a pine. Here at least she was competent, could make things happen. The smell of damp ground and steaming manure, the mixture of horse scent and smooth hides
always soothed her. She pulled the brush from the pack and began at the base of Koda's mane, pushing out toward his tail. She could stay with people, she decided, as long as she could spend a little time with horses.

“But I do have to manage the children,” she told the horse. Koda nickered low. “Yes, if you could talk you'd tell me, what? What a fool I was to take them on?” The gelding nudged her.

“I could look after them, when we get into town.”

“Oh, Mariah. You surprised me.”

“Didn't mean to scare you. I'm good with children, really I am.”

“Doesn't your mother need you for that business she talked about?”

“I know there was that time with Clayton, when I didn't watch like I could have, but…” The girl had picked up a brush and worked on Jumper, her
eyes
barely able to see over the big stallion's back. The center part in her hair was straight. Ruth looked at it as the girl worked.

“Everyone gets distracted,” Ruth said. “I wouldn't hold that against you.

“Good.” The girl stopped, came around, and stood with her hands on her hips, elbows out. Ruth smiled. It was how she stood herself, more often than not. “If you want to do a good thing, you have to concentrate. And I can do that. Keep my head now, I can. Ma says she's going to have herself a business and make bushels of money and make Matt proud of her when we meet up again. That's not me, though. I want to make Matt proud, too, but by being around horses. And children,” she added in some haste. Jumper, the horse Mariah preferred, nudged her. “Keep your head up, that's what I'm finding I need to do. All the time. Look for chances. That's how we found the stock that time, not letting ourselves worry over whether we would or not or what we'd do if we didn't. We just looked for tracks and counted on making something happen. Remember?”

Ruth nodded. Mariah scratched at the horse's ears. The girl reminded her of herself those years before, all hopeful and bright with
ideas. How could she have such an influence on this one and yet be so inept with her own child?

“I'm not sure what kind of an employer I'll be,” Ruth said. “I do want things to happen my way. If you work for me, you'll have to remember that.”

Mariah's face lit up. “But you're willing?”

“And there's the question of whether your mother will let you.”

“If you asked, there'd be a better chance she would. I'm discovering that my ma and me don't always see eye to eye.”

“I'll ask, then,” Ruth said.

Maybe this could work. Things might be looking up.

7

Sacramento City

David Taylor, jehu for the Hall and Crandall Stage Line, lounged against a post in the shade of the bakery's roof, separating himself from the crowd milling about. His homespun shirt stuck to him in the October afternoon heat, and he scratched against the trickle of sweat that threatened his back. Dust from stomping horses thickened the air. David tried to look relaxed, his booted ankles crossed over each other, his hat pushed back on his head. But he felt lost, away from his coach—the big Concord—incomplete as any jehu was without his whip and leather reins laced between his knuckles.

With his left hand—his near hand, as the jehus called it—he scratched at the day-old growth of beard on his chin. His mother would have clucked at him, “Always putting adventure before hygiene.” He was only eleven when she'd said that first, as he'd tromped, full of spring mud, into their house. He asked her what the word meant—
hygiene.

“Hygeia was the mythical daughter of Aesculapius,” she told him, wiping dirt from his face. “In Greek stories. She was the goddess of health, and her father was the god of medicine.”

“Who was her mother?” David asked.

“I haven't a clue,” she told him, touching her nose to his. “Just a story. I only know that hygiene is the offspring of good medicine, which
means you, young man, need more than a face wash if you re to stay healthy.” And she'd sent him toward the copper tub, lifting a riding quirt from his muddy pants as he passed.

He needed a bath now, that was sure, and a shave, too. And he needed to braid the silk of his whip as he always did at the end of a run. He never neglected something on which his life could later depend.

But the scene spread out here entranced him. This mass of people pressed together beneath a sky washed almost white by the heat of a late afternoon drew him in. People, looking all curious and pushing and pretending they were bidding for horses or land instead of what they were. He ought to head for the home station where he could rest and wash his lanky, nineteen-year-old frame, complete his daily routine. He felt for the smooth hickory handle of his whip, then remembered it was with the coach, back at the stage stop. He'd go there shortly, he would. But for now, he studied the crowd, eyes just forward, as though catching another's eye would convict them for participating in such a vile event. Who would have the courage to look and nod while they did what they did? People hid beneath the shadows of their hats while sweat beaded on foreheads.

“One hundred eagles!” someone shouted, and David realized it had begun. His heart beat a little faster as he turned to the voice, so close to him. A number of others risked a glance at the big man dressed all in white, his eyes glistening as they scanned the crowd, his lips a thin line that masqueraded as a smile. The man sat astride a sorrel of eighteen hands who fought against the tight reins, moved its hindquarters about, and jerked its head up and down, the noise of the bit breaking into David's thoughts.

“I repeat. One hundred gold eagles.”

“Taken,” the auctioneer said.

Even from the distance, David could see the auctioneers Adam's apple bobbing with excitement that the first bid should be so high.

David hadn't noticed that the bidder, large and sitting above them,
had even been in the crowd, yet in seconds he consumed everyone's focus. His first bid was high, just to bring attention, maybe. Or perhaps he was the impatient kind, didn't like to waste time. Another bid came from somewhere else in the crowd. Necks craned to see who countered, but David kept his eyes on the rider. He thought he saw the white-clad mans one eyebrow flicker with the act of a challenging bid, noticed he breathed in through his mouth now.

“One hundred fifty,” the auctioneer shouted back, pointing toward someone on the other side. Back to the large man. “Do I hear one seventy-five for this fine specimen?”

The big man ran his fingers at the edge of his hat. The auctioneer snapped at it. “One seventy-five. Do I hear two hundred?”

The man turned then, scanned the crowd, and when he did, he stared into Davids eyes. David swallowed at what he saw there, sharp and hard and hot. He blinked and read
empty
before the mans gaze moved on.

Something about his intensity as he turned back toward the auction block, his tight control of the horse, his body rigid as a lamppost, the moisture at the side of his mouth, all brought fire to Davids stomach.

Imagining things, that's what he was doing. From habit, David reached for the whip, felt the emptiness at his side. He continued to watch the bidders, the milling of men, the smells of human sweat fed by greed excused by the mob. And in the midst sat this big man as though above it all, yet driving it. He'd seen lots of men, big men like that, with a kind of presence, but they usually didn't attract his attention. Maybe because some folks said David was big and broad too. Maybe it was just this place on the Sacramento River and the yeast of desire raising the mass of men to do things they otherwise wouldn't do.

Not a good place to be, David decided. He rubbed at his jaw line with the back of his hand. Just being at this sale said something about him he didn't think he liked. His jaw ached from the clench, felt raw with his finger's rubbing.

The smell of fresh bread floated in from behind him and it nudged at him, reminded him again of his mother. This was his first free day in two weeks, and he was wasting it. A man was responsible for what he exposed himself to. That was sure. Why tempt fate further at this outdoor auction of flesh? David straightened his hat, uncrossed his legs, and pitched his back away from the post. If he spent more time, even just watching, not participating, not ever saying he approved, he could still be affected by the tentacles of stench. “Pernicious,” his mother would have said, like a disease that rotted a person slowly over time even when they didn't know it was there. He'd had to ask what that word meant too.

He brushed the dirt from his pants, began to turn his back just as the Wintu woman on whom they were bidding raised her eyes over the crowd. They were brown
eyes,
deep and dark as good earth, and now, they locked on Davids.

Zane Randolph, dressed in white linen, wearing a tapestry vest of cream silk, stared at the low-sided wagon set up as an open-air stage to display the merchandise near the river levee. He scanned the women who stood there, their eyes downcast, dark shoulders bent against the river's backdrop of dusky blue. A gust of Sacramento wind lifted tendrils of dark hair. Dust swirled. Men grabbed at their hats.

The women, girls, the merchandise all looked far away, as if wanting to pretend they were not here. He could see that, but it would not protect them. It wouldn't prevent the fate that these slobbering men had in mind for them as soon as they paid the price. The one or two he would successfully bid on were fortunate, indeed. They just didn't know it yet. He offered…opportunity for them. The other bidders, the lowlife miners and merchants and mountain men were nothing but greed-infested beasts massaged by the women's flesh enough to make their mouths water. They failed to see the larger picture.

He had seen the picture, perfect and clear, last night. After things quieted down, Zane approached the man known as Greasy, bought him a drink and chatted amiably with him, slowly bringing him around to a discussion of mining. Then horses. Then women.

“You say you encountered a blind woman, with a group of women traveling west? How long ago was that?”

The man's eyes were glassy with drink, and he needed sleep. “Just two, three days back,” Greasy yawned. “Such a beauty she was, wearing blue and holding a baby in her arms.”