What Once We Loved

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  True joy had arrived before Christmas. It came in the form of a bawling bull attached to a very wet-smelling man and the embrace of a fond friend.

  “Just give me a bed. To lay my head,” he'd rhymed.

  “Seth Forrester?”

  “None other.” Suzanne heard him stomp his feet. “And Mazy Bacon, too.”

  “Mazy! So good to see you! However did you get away from all those cows?”

  “May I help you?” Sterling Powder said. She hadn't heard him enter the hallway at all, but he was standing at Suzanne's left.

  “These are our dear friends,” Suzanne told him, turning. “Sterling Powder, please meet Seth Forrester and Mrs. Bacon. Dear old friends.”

  “Not so old,” Seth said. “Though I like the ‘dear' part.” She heard Seth groan, “You've grown a foot, Clayton.”

  “Mr. Powder's been tutoring the boys,” she said. “And they're doing so well. Aren't you, Clayton?”

  Mazy laughed. “Clayton just looked to see if he had more than two legs.”

  “Did a bit of tutoring myself,” Seth said.

  “Did you now?” Sterling Powder answered. Suzanne heard something unpleasant in his voice.

  “Yes sir. With little Chinese girls.”

  “I'm sure,” Sterling said.

  “He did. They learned very well,” Suzanne defended. “Maybe we can see them while you're here. You know where Mei-Ling lives. We haven't found Naomi—”

  “Let me take your wet cloaks,” Esther offered.

  Suzanne heard shuffling. “Clayton's voice is very deep, but he puts a few words together now. Can you get Clayton to say something, Mr. Powder?”

  “He is not a circus dog, madam,” Sterling said.

  “Of course not. I only meant… Well, I—”

  “Perhaps I should retire now, leave you with your…friends,” Sterling said.

  “As you wish,” Suzanne said.

  “This one will soon be too heavy to carry around,” Mazy said. “You'll have to ride that old Pig, wont you, Sason?”

  “Dog gone,” Sason said.

  “He is?”

  “I meant to write to you, Mazy. I…were so sorry…its so confusing. Pig just… ran off.”

  “After Mr. Powder started here with his cats,” Esther said.

  “Shall I take the boys back to the nursery?” Sterling offered.

  “Yes…no, they've missed their friends…I'll tend to them later,” Suzanne said.

  “It is their bedtime. They do need routine.”

  “This once…” her voice faltered. “Well, yes, of course. They need their routine.”

  “Come along, boys,” she heard Sterling say along with Mazy's smacking kisses on them. His footsteps echoed in the hallway, leaving behind that scent of rosewater he usually wore.

  “I thought you were Pig, returned,” Suzanne said, reaching to put her arm around Mazy. “I've missed him so. I'm so sorry, Mazy.”

  “Me, too,” Mazy said. “I hoped to see my old friend.” She sighed. “But animals can be…unpredictable.”

  “I should have had Esther walk him. Or taken him out myself. I've thought of a hundred things I wished I'd done—”

  “You're looking mighty chipper, Missy Esther,” Seth said. “They say it's the lengthening of the days that brings on the bloom in a garden. You're blooming well.”

  “Weeds bloom too,” she said. He laughed. “But you always did know how to turn a girl's head,” Esther said. Suzanne could imagine her straightening the little cap that tied beneath her neck that everyone said she always wore. “Let me take your cloaks. Such a night it is.”

  “I've got to put the bull up,” Mazy said. “Can I tie him in the backyard until morning?”

  “Of course. Yes,” Suzanne said. “Your bull, Mazy? Your husband's brother never came and got it?”

  “One and the same. Seth helped bring him south, and if nothing else, I'm to meet at last this elusive relative and maybe get some answers about who my husband really was. I almost got Charles to deliver him, but Seth offered to bring me south. So I took him up on it. He was pretty insistent. You must like Sacramento,” she said. “Unlike Pig, I guess.”

  “I am so sorry,” Suzanne said. “I, we can't explain. I have posters out. But people…many are hungry…coyotes.

  “Maybe someone found him and gave him a good barn to sleep in,” Seth said, “As likely as the other.”

  “Pig never did like cats,” Mazy said.

  “I'll get us some hot tea,” Esther said.

  “Let me help as soon as I take care of Marvel,” Mazy told her.

  “I'll do it, Mazy,” Seth said. “You go get dried off.”

  Mazy thanked him, and Suzanne could hear her friend and Esther move down the hall.

  And then Seth turned to her, to Suzanne. “I'm reaching for your lovely hand, Mrs. Cullver.”

  “Suzanne,” she said. She smelled wet wool as he lifted her fingers and kissed the back of it, held it for just a moment longer than he should have, long enough for Suzanne to feel her heartbeat quicken.

  “Hands still as soft as rose petals,” he said.

  “That's because Esther takes such good care of me.”

  “An enviable task,” he said.

  The bull bellowed again, but Suzanne was sure Seth stared at her, could feel it almost, the warmth of his breath brushing her face. “You were the prettiest of the lot even then,” Seth said. “Way back on that trail. Here is my truth—you're a beauty, forsooth.”

  “That is the most dreadfully beautiful poem I have ever heard,” Suzanne said.

  “I'm out of practice,” he said. “No inspiration. But I have a feeling that's about to change.”

  Ruth thought Jessies condition would be temporary, just one of those childhood things. She stayed hopeful while life moved on around her. At times, it reminded Ruth of waiting for Jessies return when Zane abducted the child, except here her daughter lay before her, dark shadows beneath her eyes. Still distant, almost gone.

  The arrival of the braves had set it off, even though they'd settled themselves near the barn just as they'd said they would. They'd been peaceable. Jason and Ruth and Matthew and Mariah had taken turns watching the small fire flicker through the night in the center of the Takelmas' cluster. Then, in the morning, against Matthew's wishes, Lura marched out with a basket of baking powder biscuits.

  “Men got to eat,” she said. “Harder to kill someone who's fed you or treated you human.”

  Jessie watched, her eyes a glaze of terror. “Its all right,” Ruth said. “See, Lura's coming back.” She urged the girl to look out the window, then wished she hadn't. Jessie s breath came fast as a hard-run horse.

  Ruth steered her from the curtain to the bed where Jessie shivered as though cold. Her face felt hot, and Ruth wondered if maybe the child had developed a fever.

  By the time the braves mounted up and rode out, howling wildly as they passed the house, Ruth exhaled along with the others, as though they hadn't taken a breath all night. Ruth went outside and counted her horses. They were all there. Martha, the milk cow, too. Even the oxen. And in Lura's breadbasket, they'd left dried salmon and a handful of dark round roots that Ned said tasted sweet.

  “Try one, Jess,” Ned told her, but the girl just grabbed Ruth's arms and held tight.

  “Maybe she's gotten the ague,” Lura said later when Ruth swept the dirt floor of supper crumbs.

  “That's a summer ailment,” Ruth said.

  “Haven't really had a hard, hard freeze. It could be the air still holds it.”

  Jessie lay pale as an onion skin. “I can't move my legs, Mama,” she said.

  “What?” Ruth dropped the broom, touched Jessies damp forehead. “You're so weak,” she continued. “You need to eat, and we need to get this fever down.”

  “I'll go for the doctor,” Matthew said. “After we give our visitors a little time to head out.”

  Matthew rode out, bringing McCully, the doctor, back. “Looks like the ague,” h
e said. “Just late.” He offered no real explanation of the ailment and prescribed some concoctions that Lura complained would be no more effective than mud on a washcloth. Ruth insisted they be administered.

  And Jessie did seem to perk up after the second week; then the days waned into more with little change. The goat and her kid arrived, a gift delivered. Jessie appeared to tolerate the goat's milk. At least she drank the mugs, a sip at a time, while Ruth held her head.

  While the child slept, Ruth pushed herself to work the yearlings, her mind kept tightly focused on the animals at the end of the rope, the needs of the horse protecting her from worrying over Jessie, from wondering why bad things just kept happening.

  “She's worse when you leave,” Lura told her once when Ruth came back into the house.

  “So are you saying I shouldn't? That I should just let the horses run wild?”

  “Hey, hey,” Matthew said. “No one's saying—”

  “Mama! Mama! I hurt,” Jessie wailed.

  “Where? Tell me where?”

  “Don't go. Don't go outside. I need a drink.” Her arms arched at Ruth's neck. She frenzied herself, became another person, almost. She had the eyes of a horse caught unexpectedly on ice.

  Ruth decided to stay close. She worked on the rope she was weaving from Jumper's mane and tail hairs, getting Mariah to bring in other

  Strands after she brushed the snags and snarls from Koda's tail and some of the mares. Ruth heard the jacks yelled at by different voices—the boys when one jack got out, Matthew when he tried to rope that left front leg to get Carmine caught.

  Few people trekked along the trail from Yreka toward Jacksonville now, snow falling in the Siskiyou Mountains keeping Californians on their side of the range. At least Ruth needn't worry over Zane for the next few months. How could he cross the mountains?

  Ewald pawed the bottom rail of the corral and skinned up his leg enough that Lura had a new patient to hover over. Matthew killed a deer, and they quartered it on the plank table he'd built and hung it in the smokehouse finished just before Thanksgiving. The scent of alder swirled the air that hovered as an overcast sky threatened rain and sometimes delivered. Once the crack of thunder startled Jessie into a scream. And even Matthew's telling her that the lightning was angels playing billiards with fireballs of sagebrush across the open range did not calm her. Once a fire shot up on the ridge beyond the meadow. A squall drenched it, but not before Jessie saw it, beginning another of her long, sleepless nights.

  The horses fared well. They easily pawed through skiffs of light snow that fell. Some made their way up the slopes where the wind blew the snow away for them. The little creek froze over, but the boys kept a hole open for watering stock, bringing the cows and horses down to the flat most evenings to drink.

  “I heard a group of braves, seven or so, attacked a farm not far from Jacksonville,” Matthew whispered to Ruth one day when he came back from buying more medicine for Jessie. “Totally surprised ‘em. A survivor said one lay on his back and shot his bow using his feet. Said he grinned the whole time he did it.”

  “Are people forming up?” she asked.

  He nodded. “They're seeking a posse.”

  “You aren't—”

  “I wont,” he said. “Well post ourselves as guards. Ned, Sarah, Ma, Mariah, too.”

  Ruths shoulders sagged with relief.

  “We were fortunate,” Ruth said.

  “We had someone watching over us,” he answered.

  Matthew shared reports of skirmishes but always out of Jessies hearing. Still the child continued to wane. Just before Christmas, Lura surprised everyone by having a cookstove delivered. Fingers of fog flittered at the valleys neck as the freighter helped Matthew unload it.

  “May be the last trip over the mountains bringing supplies,” Lura said. “And I figured to have it in our own house.” She looked pointedly at Matthew. “But seeing as how we're here, I decided no need to deprive myself of what would make life easier while I'm waiting for something different. We'll have raisin pie for supper,” she added. “That'll perk you up, won't it, Miss Jessie?”

  The girl had only smiled. Ruth dabbed the wetness from the corners of the child's eyes and considered: She wasn't getting better. Surely Jessie wasn't so strong-willed she could “make” herself this sick. No child would deprive herself of being able to run and play and laugh and dance in some willful state, would she? It must have been caused by something in this southern Oregon air, something that weakened her, something unusual in this unusual place.

  Jessies dark eyes followed Ruth as she moved about the room, a small smile hovering just above a pooched-out lower lip when Ruth administered the strong-smelling medicines. The little packages Mazy had sent along with them contained dried herbs. Jessie's was full of spearmint that she took easily as a tea.

  “Isn't that something?” Lura noted. “The very thing for pneumonia, and that's what that girl gets sent to her. That Mazy. She's got some way of knowing things.”

  Ruth hadn't thought of Jessie's condition as pneumonia-like. Her daughters' breathing was shallow but generally steady and not raspy. Ruth wondered if Mazy might have noticed something about Jessie that Ruth had missed. They'd spent a lot of time together, making soap, she remembered. Had the child had something like this before? She wondered if Mariah or Lura ever wrote to Elizabeth or Mazy. She should write, ask her what she might know about Jessie, ask her to hold them in her prayers. Still, it didn't seem right to ask for prayers only when things were dismal and then to never show up when things were grand.

  Christmas came quietly. Ruth had given Matthew a final list of items he might find in Jacksonville including special hair ribbons for Jessie, Sarah, and Mariah, a Jacob's Ladder for Ned, and two kinds of spinning tops for Jason. They all went out to cut a tree, all but Ruth and Jessie. They trimmed it with paper rings and popped corn. And Matthew insisted they had to hang a pickle.

  “A pickle. I'd forgotten. Your pa's pa used to do that, didn't he?” Lura said.

  Matthew nodded. “First child to find the pickle on Christmas morning gets a special present.”

  The children rose early, squealing and giggling, the scent of their clean hair, Castile-soaped nightshirts, and Lura's cooking mingled in the air. No one could find the green pickle, it blended in so perfectly with the fir's tight branches. Finally, Jessie said, “There it is!” She pointed from the cot she lay on.

  “Good for you, honey,” Ruth told her.

  “You get the pickle gift. And the pickle, too, if you want it,” Matthew said.

  “Neither one,” she said, causing the room to grow silent.

  “I'll take it,” Ned said. He crunched into it and wrinkled his nose. “Umm. Good,” he said, the bite releasing the scent of vinegar.

  “And we can split up the present,” Matthew said, pulling a fresh orange from a stocking he'd hung by the stove. “Seeing as how Jessie is so generous giving things away.” Jessie gave a weak smile.

  The sounds of the other children happily slurping couldn't remove Ruth's growing dread.

  Over sage grouse that Lura cooked—that Jason had shot for their dinner—Matthew said he'd heard in town that a woman named Emma Royal wanted to start a school and she had collected money from the miners for it. “You should send the boys,” Matthew told Ruth.

  “Should send our Mariah and your Sarah, too, if the weather holds,” Lura said.

  “Would you like to go, Jessie? If you were well enough, you could.”

  “I'd like to go, Mama,” Jessie said.

  “Good!”

  A cheer went up from Jason and Mariah, too.

  “That's the best Christmas present ever,” Ruth said. She cast a hopeful glance toward Matthew just as Jessie added, “But I can't go to school. Who would take care of you?”

  The child's words set like an anvil on Ruth's chest.

  “Sinclair Taylor.” The tall man standing eye to eye to Mazy introduced himself, as Mazy stood once again in the posh offic
es of Josh Mc-Cracken, solicitor. Just a few months earlier Mazy had discovered she had a stepson at this solicitor's desk. Now the view of family would be expanded. “Please. Be seated.”

  Mazy didn't like being directed by Sinclair Taylor any more than she'd liked bringing the bull to him. She'd accommodated just about as much as she could. She'd met him at a freighter station as he'd asked, so the bull could be loaded onto the wagon. Seth and the freight driver and she had done most of the work, Mr. Taylor barely prodding with his fine cane. Mr. Taylor apparently either paid or cajoled others to do work he didn't like.

  Finished, the bull standing with his horns like twin arrows toward the sky, Mr. Taylor tipped his hat and said, “I see you have transport.” He nodded at her horse. “I believe we meet next at Mr. McCracken's then,” and he'd stepped inside his carriage not even offering her passage. No matter. Seth would have trailed her horse back to Suzanne's, but this way she wasn't beholden to Sinclair Taylor for a thing.

  She'd put up with it for one reason only: She wanted all the knowledge she could acquire about the Jeremy Bacon she'd been married to. And this man was the only road to it.

  Mr. McCracken had made himself scarce, leaving his office to them. “May I present my niece, Grace,” Sinclair Taylor said then, nodding to a child maybe fourteen who curtsied and then sat, keeping her head shadowed in the stiff-brimmed bonnet she wore. Mazy folded her own hands, chapped from milking cows in the cold air, and glanced at the girl. Grace resembled her brother, hair the color of Wisconsin soil, eyes winter sky blue. Her caped arms disappeared inside a fur muff. She looked well tended and content.

  “It is my understanding that one of your conditions for bringing the bull south was to meet me, to ask some questions. Grace consented to come along. Curiosity, I suspect.”

  Mazy nodded. He was a broader man than Jeremy had been, easing toward portly. And graying, so he must have been the elder of the two. He had that same air of certainty about him, a kind of cool disinterest that Mazy decided just might be a family trait. Then he surprised her.

  “I am sorry about the…disruptions my brother placed in your life,” he said. “I…we were unaware of his reason to remain in Wisconsin until your arrival here in response to my letter. I understand you intercepted it on the trail west.” Mazy nodded. “We knew only that he had remained in Wisconsin and that at last, after much correspondence, he was to head west, to California, to keep his agreements.”