No Eye Can See (36 page)

“I'm an easily kept woman,” Mazy said. “Fresh air, cows, and open space is enough to make me feel wealthy, setting my feet to firm. Even being around people is growing on me.”

“I think you ought to take this place, Mazy,” Ruth said.

“I thought you liked it here.” Mazy braced the fork handle on her chest, retied the scarf at the back of her neck. “Besides, I'm still looking for a place closer to Shasta. This is a good four miles out. Traveling back and forth with the milk, it gets hard on the oxen and on me, too. And don't tell her, but I miss my mother.”

“Nothing of mine fills the cupboards here, not really,” Ruth said. “I could leave.”

“But you'd take the children with you.”

“Ah yes, the children,” Ruth said.

When she woke again, Suzanne dressed, then fed Sason. Johnnie hadn't arrived yet, and the two other children slept, so she felt for the cast iron pot, swung it back on the andiron and into the hearth. Stew kept bubbling there. The pan for tea warmed at the stove. She patted for the stick Sarah left for her each night before she went to bed. “That way if I want a cup of tea in the night, I can poke the fire and get the pot hot.” She did that now and lifted the kettle with her apron, carefully dipping her finger into the cup set on the table as she poured so she wouldn't overfill it. She dropped the peppermint leaves into the mug, put her hands over it to feel the steaming heat. She could do this, on her own! Waiting for it to steep, she counted steps toward the bedroom, picked Sason back up, and was burping him on her shoulder when Pig started his barking.

“What is it, Pig?” It was his warning bark. She sniffed the air. Had she stuck the stick back in the right place? Did something burn?

“Pig?” He barked in his biting tone that grated on her ears and forced her to pay attention. “What is it!” She set Sason near the bed, hung on to the side rail, then turned square. Pig pulled on her arm now, his teeth sharp. “Ouch! That hurts.” The dog barked again, tugged at her until she moved toward the door.

She heard the clang of a fire wagon in the distance then, not in the residential district. The sound moved away from her. She could neither hear nor smell anything wrong. What did that dog want? She heard a scratching sound. No. Crackling like dried leaves.

Suddenly, she felt a rush of air.
What was it?
Then she knew. Her heart pounded in her chest.

“Sarah! Clayton! Get up! Get up! Fire! Fire!”

She tried to localize the smell, the sounds. Was it at the back of the cabin, the side? She stumbled toward the bed where the children slept, shook Sarah, pulled on the girl's quilt. Sarah started to cry. She coughed.

“Get up! Don't cry. I'm not mad at you. Can you smell the smoke? Get Clayton. Hurry!” Pig barked, pulled at her arm again. “I've got to find Sason!”

Suzanne swirled around. Grabbed for her cane, felt herself sick with the taste of smoke. Where was she in the room? She'd moved too fast, not turned square. Where was the door? Where was the smoke coming from? Where was Clayton? “Pig! Find Sason. Sarah!” She was just a child herself!

“Clayton,” Sarah wailed now. “Fire!”

“Sarah! Come here!” She felt the girl's hand. “Take me to him, lead me, quick!” Pig pushed at them. She reached for Sason, snatched him into her arms before thrusting him at Sarah. “Go! Follow Pig. Is there fire between us and the door?”

“No,” Sarah cried.

“No time for tears. Go to the door. Now!”

She was coughing now; they were all coughing. She scratched at the bed with her hands, her arms, pulled on the quilt. It resisted, the boy must have been there. She could hear coughing. The smoke was heavy, and above her she heard crackling. Her throat burned. She felt heat. “Clayton! Come to Mommy.” She made one final grab for the child, prayed it was him on the quilt.

Pig barked, standing by the bed, she thought. He should have taken the other child out! She heard her son cry. At last, she held him, felt the flames singe her hand as she rolled him in the quilt. The dog grabbed at her arm then, yanked with his teeth. She followed him, her eyes stinging, her throat tight. She felt the weight of the blanket dragging as she held her son and stumbled where Pig pulled her toward a coolness she hoped was an open door.

She heard a breaking, splintering sound, like timbers crashing in at the back of the house. “Sarah? Where are you?”

“Im here, my dear,” she heard Wesley's voice say, then. “Let me take the boy.”

Ruth wondered if her mother had agonized when she'd sent her away.

Her mother wouldn't have described it as sending Ruth off, never saw herself as a mother who abandoned her daughter. She'd have said it was to keep Ruth safe, words Ruth used about Jessie, too.

The fever took so many that year. 1832. Ruths mother pleaded with her father to send both her and Jed farther north, but Papa held firm. Jed already pored over legal books at the university, and her father saw no reason to disrupt his life. Ruth's, however, was another story.

Ruth begged to be allowed to stay. She told them she wouldn't get sick, pulled on her father's arm, her fingers gripping into the thin-striped lines of his sleeve.

“It's for your own good, “her mother said. Her hands shook. She pushed up her tiny glasses on her nose. ‘You'll be safe, out of the city, away from this plague. “

“You don't want me, “Ruth shouted at her, the force of the words causing her mother to blink and lower her chin as though struck. “There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not sick. You just don't want me. “

Ruth swallowed, the memory choking.

Then finger by finger, her father pulkd Ruth's hands from the grip of his arm. “You have wounded your mother deeply. You will apologize. “

It was the first time Ruth really saw the hardness in his eyes. She planned to apologize, of course. She hadnt meant to say it, though she believed it to the depths of her soul. It was a moment of defiance. She stuck her lower lip out and crossed her arms instead.

With a handkerchief, Ruth's mother wiped perspiration from her own wide forehead, stood, and turned her back. Ruth watched her narrow shoulders kave through the carved oak parlor doors without even a backward glance.

It was the last time Ruth ever saw her mother. She succumbed to cholera that night.

“Where'd you go?” Mazy said, touching Ruth's arm.

Ruth shook her head. “Sorry. I have a habit of drifting away.” She turned then, picked an egg out of the pile of grain sacks stacked in the corner. She handed it to Mazy, who tied it in her apron. “My mother was an artist. Did I ever tell you that? Quite good. A perfectionist. She used to say, ‘My eyes just aren't what they used to be. My hands either,’ after she drew a lovely piece that people raved about. I tried my own hand at the replica of a horse one time, wanting to please her. She patted my head and said, ‘You'll master it in time, dear. In time.’ I was always a disappointment to her.”

“That sounds like something encouraging a mother might say. Not disappointing.”

“Does it?”

Ruth bent back to her work.

“Maybe, as a grownup, you're looking at your life with the same critical eye you think belonged to your mother. Maybe that's the cause of the dance of demand between the children and you.”

Ruth didn't respond. She watched Mazy throw another forkful onto
the manure pile, making the pen that held her cows and calves all tidy. Mazy's shoes had burlap bags tied around them.

“Why dont you just buy yourself a pair of boots?” Ruth said irritably. “Sometimes, you hold back when going ahead would be wiser.”

Mazy stared at her. “Manure'll cure scratchy feet,” she said, “and peeling hands. A little seeping through my shoes is nothing to worry over.”

Ruth shook her head. Mazy bent her back to the muck, pushed the wooden fork tines with her foot, then pulled back on the handle, bent her knees to lift the load. The layer of hard crust made her grunt with effort. It gave with a second push of her fork.

“Since I'm already standing in muck, so to speak,” Mazy said. “And seem to be annoying you anyway, I may as well share this thought, too. Those boys ought to be out here. We could show them that working together can be a good time. That we like their company.”

“Its soothing without them about. And I can do it better anyway.”

Mazy carried the mix of old straw and manure to a pile they would come back to later, to fertilize the garden plot next to the cabin they'd planted. “It may not be my place to say this, but your nephews need to learn to be useful, that others are counting on them to do their parts. Jessie is at least churning butter now. If you dont give the children important tasks and let them know they're important, they'll grow up expecting others to meet their needs. Maybe even lazy. Worse, they'll learn to think they have no value, not even to themselves. It's hard to hold a family together when people think their not being there wont even be noticed.”

“Jason wanted to be paid,” Ruth said sharper than she intended. “They never have owned up to losing the harmonica and taking my hat. And there are other things, almost eerie. Things moved. My whip twisted differently than the way I hung it. And they deny it, that's what rankles. It's like they're teasing me, Mazy. I even found a photograph… My face had been scratched out.” Ruth shivered. “Maybe if I'd had one child at a time with room to get to know them, maybe I'd feel more
secure about this mothering thing. Maybe if I had made a better choice in who fathered my children, or left him at the first sign of his…ways. Maybe my son would still be alive, maybe I wouldn't be living with his father's shadow over every part of my life.”

“There's no wage in finding blame,” Mazy offered. “Not of others and especially not of yourself. What's done is done. It really is.”

Ruth nodded then wiped at her eyes. “All I can do now is figure out how to react.” She looked past Mazy toward the road then. “Wonder why Seth's got his horse all lathered up.”

It was like taking milk from a baby, Zane decided, holding Suzanne as she shivered. He draped the smoldering quilt around them, her and the boy. Sarah carried the youngest one on her hip. Both children cried, their faces red with tears and snot, coughing up the smoke.