No Eye Can See (34 page)

“Maybe I'm not ready to say my life is better because we left, not with him dying. And not telling me his whole truth.”

“Seems a waste to keep yourself from sitting on God's footstool. You said the ground around here tasted like home. Are you punishing Jeremy, or yourself?” The girl sipped and sat, lost inside herself. “Maybe
you should hurry and talk to that lawyer fellow. Maybe that should be your goal come spring. Clear the air for good so you can begin again.”

“Maybe.”

That girl was more maybe than not. She could put off deciding longer than anyone she knew. Why, Elizabeth had found this room and a purpose in less than a week. Mazy was still looking for the perfect place. Oh, she was a busy woman, her daughter. She'd been working on the town fathers and the church elders to consider ways to help those orphans. She hadn't yet brought up her plan to get the women of “negotiable affections” to feed and tend the wee ones. “I don't think they're ready to know my entire plan,” Mazy'd laughed.

So in nearly six months of their being in the Whoa Navigation city Mazy had navigated greatly around the area, but all she seemed to say was “whoa!” To Seth, too.

Seth was a good man. But Mazy had to find that out for herself— and a home first, Elizabeth guessed. ‘Course, avoiding that journey south with Sister Esther and her girls
had
decided two things for Mazy: no alone time with Seth and no unsettling news about Mazy's former husband's life. Maybe her daughter did know that she made decisions by choosing not to.

Elizabeth dressed herself by candlelight that March morning. She splashed cold water on her face, dabbed it dry with a linen, tied her shoes on, and thought to herself that it would be nice if someone cobbled a shoe that fit each foot separate, wasn't interchangeable. She'd soaked the callus on her right foot and scraped it with a knife, but it always came back. Soon as she could get a lemon, she planned to soak some of her fish-bone buttons in it. The lemon would melt the buttons to a salve she'd heard would work to rid the callus of its hold. She'd given the last lemons for Sarah's little Angel Pie they gave to Ruth for Christmas.

Breakfast came after she heated up the bakery ovens, well before daylight. Then she kneaded and rolled dough, patted it, watched it rise. She moved the big pans of pretzels and biscuits so they had just the right
heat, just the right amount to brown. She could hardly wait until they had milk again. And fresh butter. How that would change the flavor of her Strudels.

She did love the joy that flour could give, first in the making, then the eating, watching others smile and be filled. Mr. Kossuth paid dearly for the flour, too, what with so few fields planted last year. Mining distracted even farmers.

Once a day, Elizabeth walked to the post office even though she never expected to read a single letter addressed to her. She liked to hear the names called out, of people waiting for news from somewhere else. That was another nice thing: Her whole family was right here. It was enriching just to howdy people, lend a listening ear. Pack trains arrived two, three, even four times a day now with the snows melting in the mountains and runoff pouring down the streets, turning them to mud. Stages rumbled in, got stuck, got pushed free, and rolled on south again. There was talk of a new stage road north into Oregon Territory. This town was growing. And the roar and rumble of tenpin games and gambling houses going day and night never bothered her. She found the noises soothing as a waterfall, lulling her to sleep.

If she needed quiet, she'd spend an evening with her daughter, reading, or taking a bath, while Mazy worked on the quilt pieces she'd gathered up so far.

“This mining town may be a crazy place to call home, but I love it,” she told Mazy as her daughter poured hot water into the copper tub, over her shoulders. The smell of rose hips floating in the water came to Elizabeth's nose. “A dozen different languages, people rushing about. Makes me remember when your father lived and he brought folks home. Just like your Jeremy. But I didn't do so good a job letting that husband of yours in,” Elizabeth said.

“Jeremy said things weren't always as they seemed.”

“True enough from him, having a wife and child somewhere else. Hand me that towel, will you?” Mazy did, then sat down on one of the
two grandmother chairs they'd managed to bring with them. Her skirts fluffed out around her like a mushroom.

“These are good.” Mazy held up a popover her mother had saved back for her. “Thank you.”

“Be even better with your home grown grain, come fall. Still, a mother likes to think she can see a wolf showing up at the door, looking like a lamb. And I didn't.”

“You let me make my own choices. That's what a good mother does, even if sometimes the results aren't what she wants.”

Elizabeth grunted. “Always were a forgiving child.”

Nehemiah Kossuth was an accommodating man. The rooms he provided for Tipton and her mother were larger than Suzanne's whole house. A smaller room off to the side held a copper tub, their lingerie, and the irons that pressed them. The main room was both a bedroom and a sitting room, furnished fully. When she'd first seen it, Tipton took short, quick breaths until her arm tingled. It was like a fairy tale, this room, this hotel, this encountering of Nehemiah. Even after three months here, Tipton wasn't at all sure how she felt about accepting it. Or what attachments came with the receiving.

Her mother had no doubts. “He thinks you're a princess, come right out of a book. Oh, we are so fortunate to have found him, so lucky to have fallen into that window.” Her mother threw herself onto the bed, her arms spread across the gold-and-rose-colored brocade cover. Adora stuffed a lace-covered pillow with ruffles beneath her head.

“He is a nice man, mother, but I don't know—”

“Of course you don't. You're young and inexperienced. You just trust your mother. Let him soothe his conscience.” She sat up, rubbed her arm as she talked.

“Your elbow is fine.”

“Well, I know that. But truth be known, it does ache more than it did before I fell. It does!”

“It needs exercise, like ironing.”

“We dont have to do that now.”

“I only agreed to stay here because its better for you.”

“Nothing bad has happened since he let us have this room. He isn't making any demands, is he?”

Tipton shook her head.

Adora went on, “I didn't think so. It's just a gift. Hospitality. You could quit that laundering—if you just would.”

“People count on me. And Tyrellie always said that was the best thing to have in a day, knowing it mattered whether you did what you said you would or not. Just staying here, in this fine room all day, it's like I'm being—”

“Tyrell was a fine man,” Adora said. She stood, untied her bonnet, hung it on the high, turned walnut post at the foot of the bed. “But he is gone. He is never coming back.”

Tiptons eyes watered. “I don't like this, Mother. I don't like this mixture of feelings, of liking Nehemiah's dinners and visits and now providing a room. I feel obligated. I don't like working so hard my knuckles bleed, but I'm not fond of charity, either. You wouldn't let us accept help from Elizabeth and Mazy.”

“This is different. You're helping that poor man with his grieving.”

“If only Charles hadn't taken our money and left us. It's all so unfair.”

Adora motioned Tipton over to sit beside her on the huge bed. “You can help each other, you and Nehemiah. Let him keep looking after you. You might find yourself enjoying his company. Keep scrubbing if you must. Set aside the money for a room and offer it, though I doubt he'll take it.”

“We could still sell the mules. Use the money for the room.”

“Those mules are the last of our legacy, our money in the bank. Don't want to use that up foolishly. Besides, Nehemiah looks to me like
he's got enough to give away. Isn't that what Elizabeth said hospitality was?—having gratitude enough it spilled over and you could give it away. Nehemiah Kossuth is grateful to have met you. And you're letting him be kind, so you're being generous too.”

“I thought Elizabeth said hospitality grew out of being grateful for your home,” Tipton said. “Your place of belonging. This doesn't feel like my place. I don't feel like I'm giving anything to Nehemiah.”

“Because you won't spend a nickel to put something here that's yours.” Adora patted her daughter's shoulders then stood and swirled around the room. “You got to spend a little to feel at home.”

A boundary existed, Mazy thought, between Hong Kong and the rest of town, and there were unwritten rules about when it could be crossed. At the Chinese New Year, the Asians gave every woman a good-luck gift, a “Sacred Lily of China,” sometimes an embroidered scarf or two. The men got cigars, and everyone laughed and clapped at the parade with blasts and pops of firecrackers and gaudy paper dragons winding their way through town to the sounds of cymbals and drums. Even children ate the nuts and ginger and candy and the doughnuts without holes that were fried in special oils that made them the color of pale carrots. Then the next day, those same spectators and recipients of lilies talked of how troublesome the Chinese were and that Governor Keating was right about having them shipped back to China and making them pay a special tax on any gold they mined.

A woman's life had strange borders here, too. She was presumed a lady but had to work as hard as men. She thought of Tipton's red knuckles. Most of the miners treated the widows like fragile flowers, tipping their hats at them, stepping aside when they met them. Then they turned around and…well, used some women like property, as though they weren't someone's daughters. They seemed to accept Ruth with her
pants and her hat. And they acted hopeful they'd have cow's milk soon, assuming Mazy'd be successful at building her herd.

The rules weren't laid out nice and clear, here. That's what seemed confusing. They were each responsible for their own boundaries and overcoming their own barriers, by themselves. While Adora thought it grand, Tipton hadn't blossomed as Adora thought she would under Nehemiah's attention. Suzanne's friend, Esty, seemed a pleasant sort, but Adora was sure she did more than bank. She had told Suzanne, “You might be risking a tarnish on your stellar reputation by associating with the likes of her.”

Lura, however, said Esty and her friends kept to themselves in the casinos. Some of them, like Lura, had just found ways to support themselves as independent women. “Then there're others who do what they will.”

“How sad they've chosen to let themselves be used that way,” Mazy said.

“People got to do what they got to, to survive,” Lura defended. “Don't be thinking you're better than them, Mazy, just ‘cause you got a man's money in another way.”

Her words irritated Mazy, made her think about being a “kept woman.” Was that what she was in part? Allowing Jeremy's money— money that might not even be his—to define her life now? What was that definition of a virgin Ruth had told them? “A woman not dependent on anyone and complete unto herself.” Perhaps it wasn't possible for a woman not to lean on someone.

She wore a scarf around her neck and pulled it tight beneath her chin. The wind was cold, though the sun beat warm against her face. She kneeled and dug with her spade, working up the soil for the herb section. She wasn't exactly doing good things with what Jeremyd left her; but she would. Didn't that make her different than those others? She was still mourning, that was all. She'd keep walking through that landscape, and then she'd recognize the perfect place to call home.

Mazy pushed against her knees to stand. Come spring, she'd have
the milk to sell. Come spring, she'd plant the seedlings in this patch of ground back by the water hole, fence it from the pigs that wandered here and there. What she and her mother didn't use, she planned to harvest along with other people's summer overflow. They'd serve up big stews at the church. One good meal a day for the orphans. She'd gotten the elders to agree to that at least. She wasn't sure how she'd get the children fed next winter.

She could recognize six or seven of the children now who came out at dawn to put their brown hands inside the white linen of the breadbaskets. People said that a growing town like Shasta served its children well, even planned a school. Yet here were dozens, maybe hundreds of children made orphans by those same “good people” killing off their parents—encouraged to do so by the editorials and letters from the legislature. Grabbed and thrown into slavery in the gold streams, in peoples houses, working off their indenture as though California carried with it a bit of old England or the South.