No Eye Can See (28 page)

Suzanne hesitated, then said, “I know Pig would like that.” Sason cooed from the bed, and Suzanne shuffled to lift him up.

Mazy pulled up a chair, brushing bread crumbs from the seat. “May I hold Sason? It's been so long.” Suzanne released her son, and Mazy watched Clayton look up from his playing in the corner, then come to stand at Mazy's side. They looked…hungry, she thought, though fed. “So tell me about this Wesley. Will he join us for Christmas dinner at the hotel?” Mazy reached an arm around Clayton, who hovered in close. His hair was matted with mush.

“I doubt that. He travels quite a bit. For his investments. Oh, Mazy, I know I shouldn't feel this way, with Bryce not gone even six months yet, but it is so nice to have someone to talk to, a man someone. And he listens. He's so interested in how we made our way across the plains, who everyone is, where they are now. He really could fit in well with our little family.”

“You're thinking of marriage?”

“No, no. I meant our family, we women. The way Seth fits in.” Suzanne sniffed, waved her hands as she made her way away from the bed. “I need a clean diaper. Don't help,” she cautioned. Mazy spotted a moldy piece of bread peeking from under a corner of the stove.

“I think Seth's avoiding me,” Mazy said. “He told some pretty tall tales about this country. Mild winters. Ha. It's either rained or snowed every day since November first.”

“He'll come see you when he returns, I'm just sure.”

“Maybe. At least I'll write and invite him for dinner, remind him that he may have gambled one time too many, thinking he could convince me that Shasta is the perfect place.”

“Its my perfect place,” Suzanne said, taking her son to change his diaper. “And Wesley just adds to it.”

“Suzanne,” Mazy said, “the boys, you, it isn't…perfect. I'm worried—”

“Don't,” Suzanne said. “Don't judge, Mazy Bacon, not while looking through your own uncertain
eyes.”

Mazy winced. “Looks like a good time for me to take Pig for his walk.”

Tipton and Adora bent against the biting wind, Tipton wishing for the hundredth time that money arrived on the stinging sleet. She thought about money often. She dreamed about it—had almost every night since they'd arrived in Shasta City.

She'd hoped the brass tacks would carry them through the winter, but that dream had flitted away like a snowflake on her tongue. “Gold is worth sixteen dollars an ounce at the exchange in Sacramento. But only fourteen at these diggings,” the assayer told the women as they stood hopefully with their pound of tacks.

“What does that mean?” Adora asked.

“A reduction of value,” Lura told her. “Can't buy as much up here as we could in Sacramento or San Francisco. Gold is worth more in the city.”

“It's pretty fluid there, too,” the assayer said. “You ladies should know this country is unstable in ways. Not like back in the States where prices get set and seem to stay that way. Gold makes things shift and makes some people shifty.”

“So this isn't the paradise Seth implied,” Mazy had said.

“Just why running a business is the thing to do,” Lura said. She smoked her pipe, but when Mariah scowled at her, she snuffed it out.

“It's not all easy being a shopkeeper,” the man told them. “For instance, you got to order what's needed now, but it won't get shipped for weeks, maybe months around the horn or down from Vancouver. If your ship arrives, and doesn't sink, and if it gets unloaded first and it's carrying what everyone's been waiting for, well then you've got a gold spoon in your hand. If it gets unloaded last, or you know what's on it is no longer of interest, it may hardly be worth unloading. But still you got to pay and hand over the tax in coinage—not gold dust—or nobody unloads anything.”

“People are that fickle with what they want to buy?” Lura asked.

“Yes ma'am. Your gold dust could buy lots or nothing. It just depends. As they say, it's a golden spoon or a wooden leg in California.”

“So our little pound or so of carpet tacks brings us less than three hundred dollars,” Jason noted.

“So it seems,” Lura told him.

“We divide by eleven, then,” Jason said. “I guess its just you women?”

Tipton did the figures in her head. With flour at forty dollars a pound, that's about all they could buy with their share. A pound of flour.

“Don't count mother and me in,” Mazy'd said.

“We should share and share alike,” Sister Esther said. “You have contributed your tacks as did everyone else.”

“Yes, but we have resources some of you don't have.”

“They might not be yours, didn't you say?” the sister persisted.

“I may have to repay it with interest come next year. But for now, the money will help all of us survive. So divide the tack money by nine, ason.

With that division, Tipton and her mother had eaten for two weeks and contributed to the “surprise” for Suzanne, though it cost them dear.

“I think we could ask Mazy Mother. Repay her when we're onto our feet a bit.”

“Truth be known, your father would have wanted us to do it on our own,” Adora said. “He was proud that way.”

“Then one of us must find work! Or we sell the mules. We can't afford to feed them through the winter, Mother,” Tipton told her. “Please, couldn't we?”

“Ruth'll look after them. She owes us that much, giving two of them away to those Indians way back when. No, we'll hang on to the ones we have until the market improves. Come spring.”

They'd found an abandoned shack that overlooked another, pigs rooting about both. Tipton took some pleasure in hanging the tent against the wall to hold out some of the cold near the bed. She planned to paint the interior when she could afford to. For now, her white shawl adorned the mattress, and the women sat on two stumps close to the barrel stove that heated their tea and potato soup. It looked…homey. If only her mother would stop complaining about her bad tooth, the cold, or whatever, Tipton might even have felt proud at their meager fare.

“Elizabeths always got bread at the end of the day,” Adora noted,
and from then on, they “happened” to be near the Kossuth Bakery just as Elizabeth brushed her apron of the last crumbs.

Tiptond put on a prosperous face and made up stories about her mother finding some currency. “Wasn't that lucky?” she told Mazy. “After all this time of worry over money. We'll be fine.”

But they weren't fine, if truth be known. And on December twelfth, Tipton had put aside flirting with the young miners she passed in the street, stopped giving them promises with her
eyes
she didn't intend to keep. On that day, with the flour run out, with her dreaming now of food instead of money, with no woman needed anywhere except for banking or…unmentionable things, with snow drifting through the cracks of the abandoned shack they'd moved into, hoping the owner wouldn't come back, on that day, Tipton knew she would have to do something, or she and her mother would starve.

Perhaps if they'd arrived in the spring they'd have had more choices. Perhaps if there hadn't been so many of them, all needing shelter, or if the snow hadn't come so soon, maybe they would have…what? Looking back just didn't help.

On that December morning, a light dusting of snow covered the floor near the bed when she awoke. She shivered, cuddled closer to her mother for warmth. She'd have to scrounge wood in the snowdrifts. Most of all, she had to do something differently Either admit how much they needed help or see if she could sell the mules and suffer her mother's displeasure.

“Remember the center of the wheel,” Tyrell had told her. “That's what holds everything together so you can get down the trail.” He'd been telling her about having faith, with God as the hub of that wheel. Today that faith seemed far away.

She wasn't much of a seamstress or mender. The miners all had their own needles anyway. Maybe she should consider what Lura was doing, banking in one of the gambling houses.

“You could do it for the interest of it,” Lura told her. “People are fascinating
creatures to watch. And so far the most dangerous thing is trying to suck in a good breath that ain't inflamed with exhaled whisky or cigarettes. The men pretty much leave me alone. I sass them right back if they try anything.”

“I didn't think smoke would bother you,” Tipton told her.

“I quit the pipe,” Lura said. “Mariah didn't like it. Besides, I smoke just breathing now. You know, I figure every breath that's ever been breathed is still floating around? Got nowhere else to go. Ain't that a thought?”

“That I'm breathing the air my brother exhaled, yes. That is a vile thought.”

She could ask again at Romans Bookstore, just opened, but she'd had no luck with the others. Not the market, not the land office, none had need of a young woman—which was how she thought of herself now—for honest labor. She had even asked about cleaning stalls at the livery, but there were scruffy looking boys there who did that. And she had inquired about sweeping business establishments, but she'd been told either that their customers didn't care if things were less than tidy or that they could get Indian help to do it. She'd actually considered panning for gold. But that would have to wait until spring.

And always, lurking in the background were those women who wore pretty dresses, had plenty to eat and smelled sweet when she passed by them on the street. They didn't look hungry. They didn't look hungry at all. She shivered when she realized what she was considering. She could never sink so low.

Tipton shook her head.
Think of the center of the wheel Then the spokes will hold well together.

12

Mei-Ling bathed in sandalwood perfume, sent to her by her future husband. Seth could smell the fine scent from where he stood next to Sister Esther and Naomi, the only
fan qui
—foreign devil—in attendance at the wedding. Mei-Ling had insisted, and in the end her husband had agreed to let Seth come at least for part of the ceremony. Mei-Ling wore red, a dress of silk with tiny gold buttons and the swirl of a dragon embroidered in green down the front. Her husband-to-be had it sent over for the occasion. Seth thought she shivered, but he couldn't be sure it was the occasion or the December cold.

Naomi told him what all the different colors meant, all the trappings of a Chinese wedding. Seth nodded politely, though he knew he wouldn't likely remember. He did well with figures and numbers but not details like what a headdress meant with all its height and beads and bangles. But the women would ask him when he got back, he was sure of that. And they'd probably wonder what had taken so long. Esther'd been busy with all the negotiations, giving him time for games of chance most days, and every night. Sacramento boomed.

Mei-Ling's skin looked as pale as the dried grass nodding beside the Joss House, where the marriage was held. He knew it was rice powder pressed onto her face. This was what she'd come across the country for, this marrying up, but he felt sad for her anyway. She looked white as death. Cymbals and tiny bells rang through the scent of burned incense.

“She happy,” Naomi whispered to him.

“Fooled me,” he whispered back.

“She give great gift to family, to new husband, to Mei-Ling. Now she go be wife. Very generous. Make very happy. Bees home all time now.”

One of those little poems he never planned for popped into his head:

• Mei-Lings a wife now.
  

• Her bees have found a home.
  

• She begins a new life.
  

• No bnger all ahne.
  

He shook his head.

“You say no?” Naomi asked.

“Just thinking a dumb poem,” he said.

“Ah,” Naomi said, nodding.

He watched as A-He, Mei-Lings husband, took her hand when they finished saying the words he couldn't understand. They came out around a divider, stepped through a small opening, up over a step, and out the front door, all meant to fool the bad spirits, Naomi told him, who couldn't go around corners or up and over things and only traveled in straight lines.

Sister Esther sniffled. Seth wondered if she cried for losing a daughter, or that they were marrying in a Joss House and not in a church. He thought Esther said the husbands were supposed to be “poor but worthy Christian men.” A-He didn't look to fit two of those slots.