What Once We Loved (5 page)

“Did he, Esty?” Suzanne said. “Did he use the sign?”

“He put his little hands into a ball with his fingertips pointing together, Suzanne,” Esty said. “Oh, and look, Sason just did it too!”

“My baby?”

“I'll make inquiries among my colleagues to see if there are others who could assist us in further…diagnosis, Mrs. CuUver. Meanwhile, a sign for ‘help' might be of use. Or one for ‘eat.' I'll draw a picture for Miss Williams here—”

“We have a Wintu friend,” Suzanne said. “I'm sure she can show us. We don't need anything more from here.”

“Oh, well, of course,” he said as Suzanne stood, “though I assure you—”

“Come, Clayton. Take Esty's hand now. And you have Sason, too?” Esty tapped her hand and placed it over Suzanne's cane as they rose to leave.

Suzanne stepped out into the Sacramento air, breathing a sigh of relief as she heard the door latch behind them. Her dog, Pig, stood up, and she reached for his stiff leather harness and followed him down the steps.

In the carriage, Suzanne listened to the clop-clop of the horses and let it soothe her. The stage trip south had been a backbreaking journey, and Suzanne had arrived tired and the children cranky and the dog barking, barking at this fabulous city still recovering from floods and fires of the year before. But she'd been determined to seek help here for her son. To accept help.

Suzanne sighed as she listened to carriage sounds, tried to identify the scents of trees, cooking fires, even the hog pens they passed. Esther had been a dear to find the doctor with whom they'd spent the morning discussing Clayton. The specialist was said to work well with children who were slow. How would she explain to Sister Esther that the man was a finger-talking quack!

“Mommy!” Clayton said. He struck his mother in the arm, forcing Suzanne to the present.

“Clayton. Stop that!” He could startle her so, coming at her that way. And he was strong for someone so small. “Mommy. Mommy,” he chanted, punching her with his tiny fists. She grabbed at his hands and held them in her own. He started to wail, bounced against her and kicked.

“Clayton! Cease!” Suzanne said.

Esty must have found something to distract him for he quieted, even the bells on his shoes stopped tinkling for a moment. He still let Suzanne hold his hands. “Do you really think the signs the doctor suggested make sense?” Suzanne asked Esty as they jostled about in the buggy.

“What can it hurt? Oltipa can show us a few.”

“I'm afraid…well, that people will think he isn't…all there,” Suzanne said, finally naming the fear riding the doctor's suggestion. “I remember a man back in Michigan who couldn't speak or hear, and people were wretched to him. But his eyes had such light in them I always thought he could understand. Do Clayton's eyes have that light?” Suzanne asked.

“They do,” her friend told her, patting her hand.

Suzanne sighed. “Sister Esther will have to know too. And anyone he's with. Oh, if we could just find out why he's this way and fix it. I just want to get things tended.” Suzanne kissed the knuckles of her sons hands. “And everyone will know now that I haven't.”

“They already know,” Esty told her.

“That I'm a failure? Why did they tell me to stop worrying then?”

“They know that he has something wrong, not that there's anything wrong with you. They just don't know what they can do to help. At least the signs are something. And it will show us if Clayton can locate sighted people to ask for help. It takes intelligence to do that.”

“Sighted people. Yes,” Suzanne said. “Sighted people. Not his mother.”

She turned her face away. She couldn't see through them, but her
eyes
could betray her with unexpected tears. She knew this had to be, this having to rely on others at so many levels of being a mother, a widow, a woman. It pained her. The boy beside her must have sensed something as he jerked his hands free, stood up, and touched her face. “Mommy,” he told her, the only word she'd heard him say in months.

“Yes. Mommy.” She pulled the boy to her, then kissed the top of his head. She patted his little arm. And then he did the strangest thing. First, he hit her shoulder as he had before, then he lifted her hands from the cane across her lap. He placed them like two cups, pushing the fingertips together.

“He's showing you the sign,” Esty said. “For
more!”

“Is he?”

“What had you done? Do it again,” Esty said.

Suzanne thought. Stopping him from hitting her? The kiss? The hug? She reached out for him. “Let me hold you,” she said, and he melted into her, then turned so his back nestled against her breast. She kissed the top of his head. “Let me hold my boy,” she said. He made the sign
for
more
then, her arms still wrapped around him, and she felt him nod and grunt, then she kissed his head again. The dog panted and yipped. “He's making that sign, Suzanne. And he's smiling. But no bigger than you.”

Crescent City, on the California Coast

The salt spray forced Tipton Wilson Kossuth to pull the shawl tighter around her slender shoulders. Sunset usually promised a wind and a chill, but she didn't want to go inside just yet. The ball of red sinking on the horizon still felt warm against her face, and she found she could think more clearly at the shore.

Nehemiah, her husband, was a good man. Everyone said so. So she didn't know why this recent request annoyed her so. He rarely asked a thing of her that wasn't reasonable. Maybe that was it. He was always so…reasonable, telling her things “for her own good” as though his sixteen more years of living gave him some superior right to tell her what to expect, how to behave. Her mother was always telling her what to do. Her brother, Charles, gave his advice freely, when she couldn't avoid his presence. Now she had a husband who thought it his duty to educate her mind and soul…and body. She shoved that thought aside. She would be seventeen in less than a month. She guessed she knew a few things about living, about how a young wife was supposed to behave.

She bent to pick up a clear stone. An agate. She'd have one of her own to show him. He'd like that, though she supposed he knew about this beach full of them. He was always talking about the pretty rocks he picked up on his journey inland to Oregon when he brought supplies for the mining communities growing there. “An entire agate desert lies in the shadow of two strange land formations people in Jacksonville call Table Rocks.”

Some days she felt as though she lived in a desert too, nothing more than a shiny object her husband polished toward perfection. At least Tipton had made her mother happy. Tipton sniffed. Her mother would say she'd made a good marriage with a man both kind and aspiring. Hadn't he recovered his assets after being wiped out by a fire? Hadn't he already arranged financing for warehouses that stocked his pack string? And he spoke more openly now about running for political office. Everyone Tipton met said he should. They needed a good representative from this northern end of Klamath County. And everyone treated the Kossuths as though they'd always belonged at this far reach of the world shadowed by transport and timber.

So what was wrong with her? She quickened her pace, her linsey-woolsey skirt whipping around her high-top boots. Tipton glanced toward the shore. No Indians. Nehemiah warned her that the Takelmas and Klamaths and other bands weren't as friendly as those who had helped them on their journey across from Wisconsin to California. Little sandpipers quickstepped against the foam that left a line as thin as lace against the sand. It was hard to keep everything straight in a new place. She didn't like the strong winds or the sudden weather changes either, changes that could take a dark, distant skyline to the heavy fog.

Sometimes the fog stayed out there, something she could see but didn't feel at all. Other times, it moved in to cover the land the way laudanum crept over her when she took it to soothe a hurt. She knew it would arrive to make the world hazy and slow, just not when or for how long.

She'd told Nehemiah about the ocean storms, especially the fog and how it chilled her, made her want to sink inside the cabin and stay a month.

“I'd have thought someone with such dramatic inclinations would enjoy the vagaries of the ocean,” Nehemiah told her, “being so similar in temperament.” Her husband was gentle in his saying of it, held her to him with one big arm as their boots sank in the sand. But his words still
wounded. She wasn't “dramatic” as he implied and certainly not as changeable or as impulsive as his word “vagaries” suggested. She'd had to look that up in the dictionary he'd purchased. She'd been surprised he used a word meaning “odd” or “whimsical” to describe her personality. Sometimes she wondered if Nehemiah did that sort of thing on purpose, to make her feel young and inexperienced, as though she was his student and he always the teacher.

As Tipton saw it, Nehemiah was the one who demonstrated vagary ways like the weather, not her. His marriage proposal had come the same day as the fire that wiped out Shasta City, and they'd left to begin a new life the day after their wedding. The memory of her mother's betrayal that day, strong. She pushed it from her mind.

She stumbled, caught herself on the tree roots washed up onshore all stripped and bare and stacked like a witch's knotty canes against the sandbanks. Tomorrow, in a wash of storms, the beach could be swept clean as Chita's kitchen.
Chitds kitchen.
The Mexican house girl who worked for them owned that room. Tipton felt displaced even in her own house—it was as though her mother had come with her.

Her mother. The wind picked up swirling leaves and twigs. Tipton walked with her back to the wind then, letting it push her from the beach toward their cabin. Grass refused to grow beside their home, the salt and rain pelting it, leaching it of life. Maybe it was the constant shade of the tall firs that pierced the sky over their home that made her feel…closed in, somehow.

She did love the tangled foliage, the huckleberries and elderberries that tasted sweet and the flowers that bloomed soft pinks even in the fall as it was now. It was all so lush and humbling, this ocean place. She felt so small here. So very small.

That was what she'd wanted her husband of three months to understand.

She changed direction again, walking the other way now, facing the sea. The fog bank moved closer, tightened her chest. A steamer cut the
horizon. Tipton wondered if it was the
Cameo
and if it would dock in Crescent City or head on north to Portland and Vancouver. She could use a new issue of
Goody's
to peruse. That brightened her spirit. And maybe there would be a letter from Mazy. She'd heard nothing from her mother, and she probably wouldn't. Her mother had Charles now. Nehemiah would get his newspaper from the ship too and disappear inside it. He kept on top of the political news in New York and Washington, sometimes reading to her of subjects like the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed earlier that summer. He got agitated by some law being repealed, something in Missouri that had happened thirty years before. And
abolitionists.
What on earth was that? It sounded like a sneeze or the stomach ague, what she was sure she'd suffered from herself this past week.

“Nothing more than eating seafood when you're not accustomed,” Nehemiah told her, patting her arm in that gentle way he had.

“Chita's hot sauces more likely,” she'd countered.

“Now, Tipton,” he'd said. “We are the foreigners here. Remember that. We need to learn the newer ways, not them.”

She didn't like that part of California at all, the foreign influences. California had dozens of them. Why, Nehemiah had informed her that five nations' flags had flown over California. “Do you know which countries they were?” he'd asked as if she were a dolt.

She guessed Spain and Mexico right off. Then thought of the United States. But she never did guess the other two. He'd been almost smug, twisting at his red beard when he said, “Russia and the Bear Republic. Yes, we were once our own little country, not unlike Texas.”

She just never got used to hearing the languages spoken on the muddy streets, and unlike Mazy, Tipton didn't find them the least bit interesting to listen to. She just marched right on by if she encountered a Celestial or one of the native people with their solemn faces. Or were the Indians the natives, she wondered? That made the Mexicans, what, foreigners just as she was? It was all too confusing.

Which made Nehemiah's request all the more difficult to understand. Why did these California people use so many foreign words still? They'd been a state for nearly three years. Yet half the things Chita said ended in an
o. Pronto. Pequito. Gordo.
She'd heard
that gordo meant fat
, a word she'd also overheard and hoped had not been meant for her. Tipton had been diligent about what she ate. She was very careful to stop at the first sign of pressure against the whalebone busk, taking small bites of any new thing offered. She could never be sure what those people put into foods anyway.

So why did her husband want her to learn their language? That was the frustration. She didn't need to actually learn the language outright to be able to converse with their Spanish neighbors. They were all learning English. That was as it should be.