She looked at her daughter, said softly, “You can either see what Jeremys done as opportunity, or spend your days pinching your nose like he's a polecat. You 11 get tired pinching, Mazy, but the choice is yours.”
Choice, what choice did she have? Take a job as a day lady or gather clamshells for the button factory, board herself out? Through the window, she watched her mother remove the rags from her tomatoes, placed to hold back the threat of night freeze. Elizabeth sang over the garden remains, sang over change. Mazy lay back down on the bed. What would people think if she sent her husband and mother off while she stood waving good-bye in her bloomers? Was she strong enough to stay? What then? Her eye caught the seed gourd she'd decorated with berry juice designs that now hung by hemp twine over the oak mirror. All that work of planting.
She wanted penance, that's what she wanted. Some payment for his not sharing what he'd been thinking about all those months, for excluding her from the most important decision of their marriage. All those evenings she'd watched his strong jaw profiled in the candlelight and thought he understood her while she talked about what she'd plant, how certain flowers would keep the gophers away, how she'd dry the tomatoes and imagined them deepening winter stews. But all those tender moments had been betrayals, wide breaches of faith.
The times he'd lifted his eyes, adjusted his round, wire-framed glasses, and smiled at her through moistened lips as she spoke of the eagle s flights or the area where wild daisies grew, he'd been thinking not about what she said or what she hoped for, but about some far and distant place. She might have been talking of bloomers or bunions for all the difference it made. He hadn't trusted her to understand, to want to share his dream. He'd treated her like old ironstone that could be used and broken, or simply left behind.
She'd take that mirror, she decided, and the bench and the table and the plank rocker, heavy as a horse. She'd take them all, surround herself with familiar and defiance.
Jeremy looked over the furniture items Mazy marked to bring along. The round, oak table, the saltbox, her wooden mixing bowls, the doughboy with its residue of flour permanendy kneaded into the oak.
“The mirror stays. So does the chest of drawers, the bonnet dresser, the table and chairs—I'll make new ones. Don't want to kill the mules with replaceable things, especially oak. Way too heavy. Only take essentials,” he said.
They stood like two dogs arguing over place. “We best get this essential thing straightened out,” Mazy said. “If I'm going, I'm taking things that matter to me even if they don't to you.” The firmness in her own voice surprised her. “Don't you agree, Mother? Grandma's chairs come?”
“Oh, you two children best work that out.” Elizabeth turned back to the linen she sorted. “We'll all settle in together just fine.”
“Caged birds rarely settle, especially without a perch,” Mazy said. Her side throbbed, and she sat down on her grandmother's chair. “I'm taking the bonnet dresser and the bedroom set if we have to latch it to the side for the chickens to cackle at ” She crossed her good arm over her chest. “The china service goes, and we take the dining room table. Take it apart if we need to and double the floor with the boards I won't arrive without familiar things around me”
“You're so beautiful when you're giving orders,” Jeremy said. He reached to pull her to him, his hands tangled in the chestnut fall at the back of her neck.
“Nobody listens,” she said, felt her face flush.
He kissed her then stepped back beyond her reach. “You can't take the hickory rocker. Nor the chairs, table, or dresser. But the bed, all right.” He grinned. “The essentials.”
“We'll be risking our lives just to get there. West,” Mazy said in disgust. She and her mother walked the rows of what was left of her garden. Cows mooed from the corral. The pain in Mazy s arm made her lightheaded.
“You're exaggerating again, Madison. Something I was sure you'd outgrow.”
“Horace Greeley says, with the Indian trouble and all, it's criminal for a man to take women and children across the plains.”
“The Fox and Sauk Indians are quiet, I hear,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, everyone knows what to do and what not to. Most don't even hire guides, the trail's so well marked. It's a good year for families to go. It's a good year for adventure. It'll be no more trouble than getting from Milwaukee to here.”
“And wasn't that full of surprises.”
Elizabeth looked into the hurt of her daughter's green eyes. “We may as well have this out now as later.”
Mazy heard her heart thud in her ears. Sometimes her scoffing could take her where she didn't really want to go, jabbing with words but not getting too close. A serious conversation with her mother was a place she tried to avoid.
“The day Jeremy got to Milwaukee he said he was heading west,” her mother said, leading her to a pine stump, helping her to sit. “I laughed, didn't seem like him, a man who's always rubbing oils on his hands to keep ‘em soft as a baby's bottom. But he was serious. I turned selfish when I pondered. I might not see my grandbabies—if you ever have any So I found a way to tag along.” She lifted Mazy's good hand and settled it in her wide palm.
Mazy felt the calluses on her mothers fingers, the firmness of her hold, and listened, watched as her mother fluffed at the lace collar on her gray dress.
“So I said I was going if you was. Jeremy laughed, told me it'd be easier to catch a weasel asleep than selling my home that fast.” Elizabeth leaned into Mazy. The scent of lavender leaned with her. “Well, I said that part about the weasel. But when I mentioned needing to sell my things, a buyer showed.”
“‘Wish Maze could act that fast,’ Jeremy says to me when I told him I'd sold the house, which had a few surprises of its own by the time it was settled.” She didn't elaborate. “But I tells him, you got your papa's ways—studied-like and loyal. He said the loyal part was something he'd be needing since he hadn't told you yet.” Elizabeth's blue eyes watered. “I was sad for that, his not sharing it with you. But then I pondered, well, I can't change it. But I never woulda held something like that back.”
Mazy sighed. “I couldn't have stood it if you had.”
“Oh, darlin, don't you know? If a body can't stand somethin it'll pass right out.” She laughed then, her wide, fleshy face blotched red, her blue eyes brimmed. “I looked for the good in it when I found out ” Elizabeth licked her lips. “Except for holidays and that short month visit here last year, we ain't spent time together as two married women, like we are now.”
Mazy nodded, touched her mother's chubby cheek with her finger, surprised at the smoothness. “I'm just…afraid,” Mazy said.
“I know it.” She patted Mazy's hand. “My mama always said fear's just a reminder to dress good as you can while you're wearing new circumstances”
“But then,” Mazy said, “Grandma hadn't heard of bloomers.”
The Bacons’ neighbors, such as there were, planned a gathering for them at the little log church in Cassville, to celebrate the changes the Bacons were making.
“It would be a salve to my soul to have a preacher there today,” Mazy said, as they rode the mules into town, “but it's too early in the year to see him.”
“I'll be needing salve somewhere else before this day is done,” Elizabeth said, rubbing her hip. “Always worse after I ride.”
“Just hang on to that pie,” Jeremy said.
“More worried about your stomach than my backside, I see,” Elizabeth said. Jeremy laughed while Elizabeth checked the cloth that hung from her sidesaddle as it flopped against the neck of the black mule named Ink. Mazy hoped she would get fed at this gathering, find something to fill the emptiness of their leaving, calm the uncertainty.
Jeremy Bacon stood in the center of a cluster of men shaded by the maples that arched over the log building. Lilac bushes threatened to bud. Tobacco smoke circled the face of Hathaway Wilson, who drew on his pipe, then used it to make some point, all eyes turned in his direction. His right hand he s
tuck in his paisley vest as though holding his heart. Jeremy stood taller than Hathaway and several others, even without the hat he'd left hooked over the saddle's horn.
Mazy couldn't hear their words, but bursts of laughter rose from the group and then quieter sounds, nods of heads, pats on suspender-crossed backs. Several men bore the sun marks of a hat wearer, forehead paler than cheeks. There seemed to be looks of admiration directed at her husband, perhaps even looks of longing. It didn't seem possible that so many men could want to uproot, take their families into danger and beyond, or that so many others would admire them for it. It stretched her understanding of how different men and women were.
“This west thing is a craze, that's what it is,” Adora Wilson said. The formidable-looking woman, broad shoulders, narrow waist, now stood beside Mazy. She wore a pink bonnet with a stiff pasteboard brim that shaded a face that was just beginning to wrinkle. “You'd think they were boys discovering a new fishing hole and not sure if they want to share the news or keep the treasure to themselves. My own husband among them.” She fussed at her bonnet, removed it. “I don't know how you'll manage, Mazy. I simply could not do it.” The last words came out like hammer pounds.
“Hathaway's not thinking of going, surely.”
“Oh, the subject was raised, but I put my foot down. And Charles balked.” Adora nodded to her son, a striking man who leaned against the tree scraping at his fingernails with a knife. He wore a white, collar-less shirt, button pants. One ear had a healed-over notch, visible even in the shadow of his gray hat. Mazy never liked to have him wait on her in the Wilsons’ mercantile: Charles always came around the smooth counter to stand beside her, liked to brush his fingers over hers when she handed him the book of cloth. “But the west fever's affected us…” Adora continued. “Tipton's fallen in love with that Tyrell Jenkins.”
Mazy's eyes wandered to the man notable for his large forearms, his short but sturdy-looking legs, and his stellar reputation. He was said to be a skilled smithy, and she'd heard that in his back room, he fed orphaned kittens from a glove.
“I imagine a farrier'd be welcomed well on a westward train,” Mazy's mother said, joining the twosome, waving away flies from the table as she talked. Elizabeth had met Adora last year, had only a brief conversation, but Mazy's mother knew no strangers, could carry on as familiar as a lifelong friend “You could do worse for your daughter.”
“ButTipton's only fifteen,” Adora said, lifting her chin. “And a mite headstrong.”
“Ponder where she got that,” Elizabeth said.
Adora frowned. “She'd make any man's head turn like an owl's, but not out of wisdom, I'm afraid. She's been whittling on her father about marriage and heading west. With Tyrell. So far, he's stood firm, which he best do. We waited seven years to marry.” She straightened her broad shoulders, fidgeted with the tucks that spread across her wide bosom. “‘Til he had the store going strong. No reason she can't wait until Tyrell's good and settled. He can jolly well come back to pick her up. Hathaway told him that trail runs east just the same as west.” She fanned her face with her hands, lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “‘Course I think she'd do much better, with Tyrell out of the picture.” She leaned in. “Poor people have poor ways, you know. Did you put spices in that pie, Elizabeth? It is Elizabeth, isn't it? I never can taste a thing, but sometimes I think I can smell spices.”
Elizabeth nodded her head to the questions. “No harm in wishing good things for our kin, I'd guess,” Elizabeth said. “Best things we mamas do.”
Then Mazy's mother left to organize the food on the table and turned back to talk with Kay Krall and Janie Switzler, women watching toddlers waddling on the grass. Mazy heard the younger women laugh, noticed her mother join in.
Her mother fit like a hand-cobbled shoe, as though she'd always been a part of Cassville. Mazy guessed it was Elizabeth's backwoods upbringing, with a dozen cousins living close by, that let her turn everyone into family. It was a trait Mazy longed for in herself
“Is Tyrell leaving soon?” Mazy asked Adora.
“Not soon enough.” She opened and closed the clasp on her wrist purse without ever looking inside. “Truth is, I've a worry she might just run off. I know I'll watch her like a cornered bear the day he leaves and for two weeks after. He could have joined up before this—I wish he had. Tiptons keeping him here, in a daze, with all her flirting. Look at her,” Adora said, but Mazy heard pride rolled into the words of scold Tipton Wilson laughed. The girls high cheekbones flushed rose, a color Mazy guessed she'd pinched into them just before she swirled open her parasol for shade. Petite and blond and draped in blue—including the stones in her ears—she was the Wilsons’ only daughter. The girl didn't just stand between her father and Tyrell, she composed the center of the circle. She stared up at her intended, flashing even, white teeth clasped together as though she posed for a portrait and had been told not to move a muscle. Tipton blinked long eyelashes, touched a gloved finger to her cheek. She spoke and the men laughed. Tyrell Jenkins's face splotched pink in the bare places free of his rhubarb red beard.
“She'll be a handful for any husband,” Adora sighed.
“Desserts are fixing to spoil,” Mazy's mother interrupted. “And my stomach's agrowling.”
The women signaled their men, who headed for the tables. Tipton and Tyrell walked as though weighted, their heads bent in conversation.
Mazy noticed Tipton's brother loitering behind, his gartered shirt sleeve pressed at his shoulder against the tree. That odd notch out of his ear silhouetted against the light. He tossed something shiny in his palm, coins it looked like, clinking upward without his watching His eyes stared at Tipton instead, a glare until he noticed Mazy watching. A half smile formed at one corner of his pursed lips. He made no move to join the others.
Hathaway asked the blessing over the brown betty pudding, cobbler, cookies, and pies. Elizabeth had baked Mazy's favorite raisin pie; the plump fruit had been carried in spring water in a crock jar all the way from Milwaukee. Light conversation filtered over the eaters, in between bites and batting at horseflies, gentle chastisements of children. Toddlers scampered beneath the lilac bushes, the ribbons on the girls’ dresses limp and the boys’ knees covered with grass stains. A half-dozen dogs lay beneath wagons. Pig panted in the shade of a buckboard while food and well-wishing were washed down with sun tea. Mazy thought of the pleasantness of this place, these people, and swallowed back tears.
Finally filled, they said good-bye, hugs and hands patting on backs. The women expressed good wishes with a sense of relief, Mazy thought, relief that it was she leaving and not any of them. She looked around her. These were good people, but she'd become close to none these two years past. Perhaps that was a blessing.
“I've made a decision,” Jeremy said.
The three of them rode home through the timber, the mules clop-clopping like a grandfather clock on the packed road. The squeak of the leather and the swish of the mules’ tails gave Jeremy a moment to think about what he needed to change to make this come out differently than the last announcement given to his wife. He wiped at his nose with the handkerchief Mazy had embroidered with the letter /, stuffed it back under the rim of his hat, and cleared his throat.
“Am I to be surprised?” Mazy asked.
“I'm speaking about it beforehand. Tyrell Jenkins wants to go west,” Jeremy announced
“Another man with a wild idea.”
“Hathaway's fearful his daughter'll run off after him when he leaves,” Jeremy said “She's threatened that—”
“And probably will if Adoras words prove true.”
“Quite.” He plunged ahead. “With your arm so bad and you so sore and still healing, we could use someone to drive your mother's wagon. And a blacksmiths skills would be of value.”
Pig yawned in the road far in front of them, stopped and sat to scratch.
“We'd just need to take the girl along, too,” Mazy said.
“Quite,” Jeremy s
aid. For someone so young and untested, Mazy could surprise him with her quick conclusions. She could see what other people yearned for, when she wanted to. He couldn't believe she hadn't sensed his need to leave, to try new vistas.
“You're proposing that we mother hen that one?” Elizabeth asked. “Wouldn't be a spree.”
“She could be a help to you, Maze, especially with your arm as it is,” Jeremy said. “Hath's willing to pay for her passage, which would help us secure Tyrells wage for driving. But it would mean having another around, not exactly your porridge.”
“Maybe we should wait until I'm healed before we leave. We could do it ourselves then. Alone.”
“No,” Jeremy said. “This is the perfect time. Good grazing, before big herds come through. We'll be well over the mountains before any threat of early winter. No, April's the best time to leave so we're there by October. Tyrells strong arms and skills are a gift, if we decide to take it.”
“The true gift is that you're actually asking me,” Mazy said “Before you've committed. Or have you?”
“I haven't”
A robin chirped in an oak as they rode past a mound of grass shaped like a bird. “Old Indian burial spot, Mother,” Mazy said, pointing. “There're several back in the trees.”
“I told Hathaway I'd have to talk it over with you,” Jeremy persisted.
“That must have taken some tongue biting on your part,” Mazy said.
“Hath said he knew it was like herding cats getting a woman to go down the trail you want.”
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