What Once We Loved (3 page)

She stood in a copper tub that would collect water for later baths. It was private behind her wooden screen. Still she felt exposed. She resisted the urge to just get dressed again and get to work. Instead she pulled back her tawny hair and tied it with a section of yarn. Over the top of
the boards, she gazed out at her herd of horses and the yearling foals. Her nephew and daughter now headed with a bucket of grain to feed Jumper, her “horse of high hopes.” Jessie skipped, looked happy. Good. How long it might last was anyone's guess.

She took a deep breath and looked up, her hazel eyes squinting into the sunlight dappling the oak leaves. Matthew and the boys had placed a coopered barrel on a shelf they'd build up in that tree, and a hemp rope hung from a plug that had a leather latch on it. She moved her whip and boots well out of the way, then tugged on the rope. She pinched her eyes shut and waited for the shock.

She gasped. Cold water cascaded down over her face, her bare shoulders, and splashed at her feet. Goose bumps answered the water, and she laughed out loud then, sputtering as she patted, eyes closed, for the small shelf in front of her. She was like her blind friend, Suzanne, patting for things she couldn't see.

She smelled the mint, and her fingers found the partial soap cake her daughter Jessie'd made the day she'd been seized by Zane Randolph, Jessie's…father. The faint scent reminded her of Jessies caution in things since she'd returned.

Ruth lathered her body. Jessie must have added sugar to her soap to make it suds up like it did. Ruth loosened her hair and scrubbed it as well. She wouldn't think of Jessie's pain now, nor of all she had to do yet. She wouldn't expect only the worst. A second pull on the rope and another blast of icy water. Next time she'd ask them to sun heat this spring water. She cupped her hand and pushed the soap and water down her arms, her belly, and legs. Next time, she remembered. There wouldn't be a next time. They were leaving.

That fact made the effort of this shower creation all the more frivolous; perhaps all the more precious. She patted for the huck towel that hung on a nail over the side of the boards and pressed it against her
eyes.
She wouldn't think sad things. She'd practice doing something different as Elizabeth advised. She'd enjoy a gift given and laugh out loud, alone.

“Were ‘posed to feed Marvel, too,” Jessie reminded her older cousin. “Mama said. So dont let Jumper have all the grain.” The children approached the stallion grazing in the meadow.

“I know it,” Ned told her. “There's plenty.”

Jumper lowered his head into the bucket and pushed it to the ground. “He likes me,” Jessie said, patting the place between his ears.

“Me, too,” Ned said. He scratched the sorrel's neck as the big animal crunched away at his feed. “Mrs. Schmidtke says stallions aren't usually so gentle as this one is.”

“I could ride him, I bet,” Jessie said.

“Have you ever?”

“Not by myself, but I could.” She stuck her chin out. “There are all kinds of things I can do by myself.”

“Me, too,” Ned said. “Here, we better pull the bucket from him, so we got some left to pitch over the fence for the bull.”

“I guess,” Jessie said, yanking back on the bucket. Jumper resisted, stretching his neck and pressing the side of the bucket with his nose. Jessie's apron snagged in the bucket's rope handle as the children pulled his feed away. Ned released it, and Jessie stepped backward, almost tripping over the long meadow grass, brown from the lack of rain. She caught herself and giggled. “He'll trail like a lamb,” she said. “Wanna see?” She skipped away with the bucket then while the big horse whinnied, lowered his head, and raised his feet to follow.

With the soap out of her eyes, Ruth watched Jessie and Ned make their way across the meadow, Jumper following. A Quarter-Pather breed, he had Copperbottom blood in him, from her fathers Virginia strain. Bred with the thoroughbred mares she had, Jumpers offspring would make
good army mounts—nice, easy dispositions; sturdy animals with endurance as the military liked. She couldn't have picked a better horse on which to build her future. Strong, long-legged, yet gentle enough for Jessie to ride with her. Mariah Schmidtke had even ridden him alone. Jumper had been harder to handle with the mares back from Oregon. Even Koda, Ruth's gelding, acted proud cut, as though he had to compete with the big animal now that mares were around. She'd have to let Mariah ride Jumper a few times more before they left. The girl would miss the horses more than she'd miss Ruth and her kin, Ruth guessed.

She pulled her wet hair back and squeezed it over her shoulder, watching the water dribble in the tub now nearly full at her feet. Matthew was right; she had needed a shower, and this had been a pleasant surprise. Her task was to accept it, a joy as worthy and true as the tuned freighter bells she heard jingle just then, announcing the arrival of a pack string. She dried herself. She'd let Jessie know she had water to bathe in from the copper tub. The girl liked to bathe. Was that new, her wanting to sit in the tub and just soak?

Matthew stepped out of the cabin heading toward the new arrivals.

“Need any help?” He grinned.

She wrapped the towel around her head. “Not from the likes of you,” she said.

He tipped his hat at Ruth as he walked a discreet distance past her wooden cubicle, toward the meadow. Ruth blushed and dropped her head. It was good that she had plans to leave. Matthew could become a distraction from the dream she had for Oregon. She wasn't ready for that.

Dressed, she stepped out from behind the walls of the shower. She looked for a tree stump to sit on to pull on her socks and boots. This little bathhouse operation could use a good milking stool, she thought.

She heard the shout, almost a scream, and stood up. Jessie? Was that Jessie? Her hazel
eyes
scanned the meadow. And then as though walking in oozing mud, she turned, aware not of goose bumps refreshing her skin, but of needles of dread.

Mazy made her way to the garden. With a twig she pushed out dirt stuffed beneath her fingernails. That feeling of packed earth at her nails was always a bother. She should have borrowed a pair of Ruths gloves for this. The lambs ears did not like to have their roots separated, she decided. They resisted. But unless she broke them up now they wouldn't flourish, and then she and her mother would have no soft leaves next spring to use for bandages. Lambs ears leaves were better than muslin, soaked up more, and she was sure there was some healing quality in those leaves. But come fall, the roots had to be divided and replanted and this plant, at least, didn't like it.

In her diary that morning, Mazy d written
gardener
as she thought of a quality of God s character. It was one of the things she let herself take time for, this morning musing. Any dream she'd had would get written down there. Maybe even her mother's observation about what it meant. She found it helped to write when she wandered in her “wilderness places” as she called them, times of struggle and indecision.

She did so like the peacefulness of gardening. Gardeners changed the earth, but the soil changed them as well. Perhaps more. Take her little herb garden. After the Shasta fire scorched her plant starts last year, she'd thought she'd lost everything. But they'd come back, the lamb's ear, the lemon balm. The balm she planned to send to Mei-Ling, as she'd heard it attracted swarms if a hive was rubbed with it. It supposedly eased gout, too, and drove away depression. “Strong courage” her mother described that kind of wilderness time. She needed that right now, strong courage. She disliked change, that much of what her mother said was true. And Ruth's leaving meant change.

The clods resisted her fingers. She'd let them go too long. Some gardener she was: lazy and self-indulgent and—

No, she wouldn't say those hurtful things to herself anymore. She wouldn't talk to other people that way, so why mumble to her own
mind like that?
Mind mumbling.
She'd make a note to tell herself that was what it was, mind mumbling, whenever it happened. What mattered was that she was out here, doing what must be done. She looked at her hands, then retied the kerchief beneath her chestnut hair right at the back of her neck, feeling the perspiration of the heavy braid and the afternoon sun.

At least Matthew and Lura and Mariah would still be here along with Mazy and her mother and Adora and her son, Charles—Dear Despicable Charles, as Mazy thought of him. Still, that was all that remained of their wagon group here in this place. Why did everything have to change? Why did Charles Wilson decide to stay and take advantage of his mother? He always leered at Mazy when she walked by their mercantile. Had she done something to invite his interest? Maybe the lemon balm would work for his gout, and he'd stop showing up at Poverty Flat asking for fresh manure for his foot treatment and then spending the day watching others work. Or maybe she was destined to attract men she didn't favor.
Mind mumbling
, that was what she was doing again. Useless.

She just didn't want Ruth to go, that was why she was mind mumbling. Her mother was right. Ruth'd become like a sister to Mazy. She brushed at her eyes. She took a deep breath, kept pushing at the roots of the medicinal plant.

She'd made a friend, a lifelong one forged from the difficult days along the trail and since. Friends were new for Mazy. Even Kay Krall from her dream had been someone Mazy admired more from a distance. That woman had two children, helped midwife the arrival of others. Kay always had time to listen to people, and now that Mazy remembered, she'd been a fine gardener, too. She and her husband actually held hands across their horses when they rode together, though they must have been married for several years. Mazy hadn't revealed much of herself to this woman, now that she thought of it. She wished now that she had.

Mazy had taken a risk with Ruth. They'd been through much together. But her friend was leaving. Mazy didn't know if she could make another friend like Ruth nor maintain their friendship once they were separated by a mountain range and miles. Oh, she did want Ruth to have a good life, to follow this dream she had to build up a herd and sell horses to the military, to be a good mother and auntie, a woman, standing alone. A friend supported another's dream, didn't she?

But still, Mazy felt, oh…envy maybe, that Ruth had the excitement of something new in her life. She had a daughter and kin to grow old with. Mazy would miss Ned and Jason and Sarah and Jessie, too, when they were gone. They said funny things and saw the world through spring-fed eyes. Mazy sighed. Ruth was a woman she didn't have to winnow her words with. Who would understand her as well as Ruth did? Ruth, too, had made a poor decision in choosing a mate.

Mazy pushed against the root-bound plant, spoke out loud to it. Her mother told her to talk to plants and tell them what she'd be doing to them so they'd cooperate. Not likely, Mazy thought, but she did it anyway. Maybe she'd become some old crazy lady that the children whispered about, someone who had no friends and talked to plants and scratched at herself without remembering where she was.

“Let go now,” Mazy said out loud. “I'm just going to replant you. It'll feel new, but the place I picked is nice soil. Let go,” she told the roots, forcing her thumb between the clods. She gave extra pressure this time and, with a crunch, the ball broke free.