“Already working us into a routine, I see,” Mazy Bacon told Seth as she caught up with him. Mazy carried a line-dried linen that stuck out stiffly over her arm, and she held a bar of glycerin at the waist of her bloomers once red, but now faded to orange. “A woman needs routine,” she told him, pushing her auburn hair, kinky from a just-freed braid, back from her face. A wide blue scarf tied into a band caught her hair at the back of her neck.
“Does she?” Seth asked.
Mazy carried herself like a woman used to wearing the weight of disappointment. Seth liked her spirit of determination and honesty when he'd met her briefly back in Kanesville. He found her even more intriguing these three months later, now a widow. She was young, yet the word wisdom came to mind when he looked at her. From what the others told him, Mazy somehow wove the women together and brought them this far without taking away their independence. That was no easy task. He'd seen a few officers in the war succeed at it, but a whole lot more fail.
“Routine has a way of getting changed out on the trail,” Seth said. “Figured that'd be a truth you of all people would know by now.”
“Doesn't mean I don't long for consuming certainty—for something more than that the desert'll be hot and dry. And that Tipton and her mother will clash.”
Seth laughed. “Suppose so,” he said. “Even so, one routine we do need to follow is to break camp earlier, try to get on the trail while it's yet cool. It's a distance between the watering holes. There'll be a couple of days of just plain hot and sand that could bog us down. Once we edge around the desert toward Black Rock, there's a cut, at High Rock, and a spring before we start the next desert stretch. Maybe we could take a day there, just for those routine things you women seem to need. Have you talked with Zilah this morning?” Seth said then.
“I imagine she's helping Suzanne, although I haven't checked.”
Seth removed his hat and ran his hands through the thickness of hair. He needed a haircut. It would have to wait until he reached Shasta City. “Seems to be acting strangely,” he said. “Told me her name wasn't Zilah, that it was Chou-Jou or something. Acted like she didn't know who Sister Esther was.”
Mazy's green eyes grew larger. “What happened to your hand?”
“Strangest thing,” Seth said. He put his hat on, then turned his hand to look at the back of his palm. “Don't think it broke the skin. She scratched at me.”
“Zilah did? You weren't wearing gloves?” Mazy reached for his hand, clasped it firm in both hands, her thumb tracing along the welts. Good hands, she had. Strong. He looked at her face but couldn't catch her gaze, she was so focused on his wound.
A tamed antelope dragging a leash bounded out from behind Mazy and her mother's tent. Elizabeth Mueller shouted and laughed after it.
Mazy dropped his hand. “We'd better get Mother to take a look at that,” she said. “Wouldn't want it infected.” She waved toward her mother who signaled “in a minute.” Mazy turned back to Seth. “Maybe Zilah misunderstood something you said. I could ask Naomi or Mei-Ling to translate. Their English is better. Or maybe she's just tired, wants to get where we're going to be for a time, wake up with the same view more than two days in a row. I understand how all this newness wears at a soul.”
Seth shook his head, fingered the red welts. “More than that,” he said. “She looked… I've seen that look somewhere before. Can't place it exactly, but I remember it wasn't good.”
“Not…cholera.” Mazy whispered the word.
“No,” he said. “Not that.” Seth coughed. He had to remember what these women had been through, not dwell on the troubles, but not forget them either. “Got to finish hitching up.” He pulled on his silk neckerchief. “See if you can hustle along your lady friends. You surely don't need to pretty yourself more.”
“If you're going to tell tall tales about how well a woman looks when she knows the truth, your credibility's bound to be brought into question. Not good for a new leader. I'd best go check on Zilah,” she said, dropping her eyes. She turned and walked in her broad stride, away.
Seth nodded. He liked this woman. He liked her a lot. But he hoped her strength didn't grow from a rigid streak.
Suzanne slipped out of the wagon, as the dog, Pig, brushed at her knee. She felt for the leather harness, put it on the dog's back, then held the handle that stuck up stiffly. She'd dressed herself just fine. Now for the boys. “Clayton?” she called out. “Clayton? Where are you?”
“It's me, Mazy,” the woman said, “approaching on your left.” Suzanne smelled fragrant soap.
“Have you seen Clayton or Zilah?”
“Neither one. But Seth has. Zilah, at least. She's acting strange, he says.”
“Left without telling me this morning. That's certainly not like her,” Suzanne said. “And she's never taken Clayton without saying. The baby'll be awake soon.” She reached for the bodice of her wrapper, the mere mention of the baby's waking causing her breasts to ache at their fullness.
“Have Pig take you to the morning fire. Lura has one going beside her tent. Maybe Mariah has Clayton—oh, there he is!”
“Where?”
“That's odd.”
“What?”
“Zilah has him. They're out in the sand. Maybe he has to do his necessary thing. Are you training him, Suzanne? He's sitting down it looks like.”
“I didn't tell her to do that. It's not safe, is it? Aren't there snakes and stickers?”
Suzanne heard Mazy's intake of breath. “What is she doing?” She clutched at Mazy's arm. “Tell me! Mazy?”
“Mother! Seth! Come quick!”
Suzanne heard her son wail. “What? What's happening?”
“Oh, Lord, please,” Mazy whispered. “Zilah's—wait here!” Mazy peeled Suzanne's gripped fingers from her arm before Suzanne heard Mazy turn and run.
Boy making too much noise, too much. Follow all time. Put him by flower in garden, phnt him. Water him. Make him wait, grow up, leave Chou-Jou be.
“No cry! You bad boy. Scare Chou-Jou. No hit Chou-Jou when walk by wagon. No hide! You stay in garden now. You stay. Sit dow. Sit dow!” The desert sand tripped her, made her feet heavy. She yanked at the boy, forced him hard again to his bottom, his wail piercing her ears. “No cry!” she screamed. “No cry!” She struck at the boy but he moved, quick like a fox. No, like a snake. He slithered between her legs, crawling, crying. She spun around. She couldn't see him; her eyes were filled with tears, her mouth, too, so many tears. She choked, coughed. She rubbed her hands across her lips, looked at the back of her palm. All white and foamy now. She felt Clayton move. She grabbed the boy's feet, held him, pinched his ankles. She could not breathe, not swallow. She looked up.
Sun, all yellow, mean good luck.
She squinted toward a noise at the wagons. Hot. Snakes run toward her! One wears hat, walks upright, calls her Zilah.
Not Zikh! Who Zikh?
She could not breathe. Her heart pounded. Strike back! Stop snake on ground, snake up tall Stop, stop. Her world turned black, then white.
3
Near the Decision Point, along the Oregon Trail
The horse stomped impatiently. The man yanked at the reins, and the horse, resisting, danced sideways. The animal spun around, twisting the lead rope of the pack mule. Zane jerked the lead over his head, spurring, and yanking on the leather reins. “Headstrong, are you?” he said. “No challenge for me.”
In time, the big gelding tired, shook his head, and snorted. He stood, tail twitching. Behind them, the mule brayed.
“Much better,” the man said. “Thought you'd know by now.”
The sorrel lifted his head up and down, jangling the bit and cheek pieces. The animal pawed at the hard dirt but didn't dance.
The man stared then at the sign. It was handwritten in her pen. It seemed odd to see the loop of her letters here at the point of decision where people either chose the Oregon Territory or headed south to the States, to California.
It was his own name w
ritten on a piece of broken bed slat, written with a pen she'd held, a sight he had not seen for five years. Zane Randolph, your family has gone to Oregon, it read.
Not likely, though she was honest to a fault. It was one reason her testimony against him had been believed, he imagined. But she wouldn't have told him the truth about Oregon Territory. No, he'd find her in California. He didn't know where or when, but he knew he would. He swallowed in anticipation and smiled. She knew he was following her, had foolishly hoped to turn him north. That was good. He heard the sucking of his breath and cursed. He had to change the habit. He was free now, free of the brick walls, the damp smells, the cries in the night. He was free.
He uncorked his canteen and drank from the warm water. He replaced the stopper, matching the black mark he'd made on it with the tiny dent in the lip. A perfect alignment. He liked things to be precise.
He'd waited at Fort Laramie, not sure at first if he was ahead of her. Before he left the States, he'd asked their neighbors—the ones who would talk to him—where Ruth might be. They'd shook their heads, unknowing. Or covering for her. Then he'd ridden to the home of his brother-in-law, Jed, that fat lawyer who'd helped carry the charge against him. He didn't live there anymore.
“Headed west,” a toothless woman told him when he inquired. “Left with his wife and four children and his maiden sister.” The sister would be her. Ruth. No maiden but Zane's wife.
Zane had headed west, taken a steamship up the Missouri to St. Joe, every day expecting to catch up with them. He'd decided they must have taken a northern route. Everyone stopped at Laramie, though. North Platte travelers and those like him, on the south. Once at the fort, he'd read the register to see if Jed Barnard and his brood and his “maiden sister” had signed in. When he failed to find their names, he relaxed. He'd gotten ahead of them. He could now just wait.
For a week, he spoke with his Southern charm to women and men looking tired and beaten, watched their eyes light up at the interest of a well-dressed stranger. He slipped in quick but pointed questions about who their traveling companions were as he nodded at their wearisome stories.
But like a knife tossed for sport, his blade never drew blood, came out streaked only with dirt. He listened with false interest to tales of “trail justice,” people murdered by jealous husbands, or of women, all modesty lost, fawning after men not their husbands. Zane clucked his tongue as the storytellers expected him to. “Just no sense of honor anymore, anywhere, is there, ma'am?” he said. “What's the world coming to?”
Then as they walked away, he found himself wanting to bathe, to wash off the grime from being with people, put cologne on strong enough to block out the smells of the righteous.
Still, his time at Laramie fed him. One delicious morsel was a momentary conversation with a beautiful woman, blind and with child. Intriguing. She wore a shawl of independence heading west without a husband, yet carried vulnerability on her shoulders. If he'd had time, he might have pursued her, tamed her in his way. But the woman came first, his wife. And the next day he'd found he was on her trail.
Going back once more over the registry at the fort, he looked not for her name or Jed's this time, but he read every entry. A wrangler named Matt Schmidtke wrote a sentence about having someone's cows in tow, telling Betha and all howdy and announcing to “Ruth Martin” that her horses were fine. He saw the date—two weeks before he'd gotten there. Somehow this Schmidtke had gone ahead, and Ruth could not have been much behind. Zane had made a choice then: to assume he'd somehow missed her, she'd somehow passed him by. He'd had no choice but to follow.
Today, he knew for sure. The sign with his own name on it.
No, she wouldn't go to Oregon, not and tell him so. She'd do the opposite. And he would find her. And when he did, he would play her like a harp, tease her into believing she was safe, then slowly orchestrate her cunning heart, drive her to increased frenzy until, like him, she'd have no place to run.
He inhaled, his mouth open wide, his breathing raspy again. He must practice stillness, hold the rage he felt and bury it deep, fuel the only future he could imagine.
He reined the horse south.
He pictured Ruth, then, as he had a thousand times before. Sometimes, he dressed her slender frame in white, all ruffled and laced. He'd expose her shoulders and place a pearl choker at her throat to bring out the hazel of her eyes, the wet sand color of her hair. Sometimes, he imagined her with a long black skirt, her knees pulled up to balance on the sidesaddle, her hand holding a short quirt instead of that blasted whip she'd taken to cracking.
She was always smiling in his images, Ruth was. And when he was finished dressing her to perfection, he always laid her softly against purple satin. Sometimes, he placed a lithograph in her strong hands folded now across her body. He could see the still smoothness of her face, the fine bones, the shine of her hair.
His breathing calmed, the making of a new habit. He wiped his wet hands against his thighs.
Then came the best part in these images, when his thoughts dwelled upon her eyes. Sometimes those hazel globes registered surprise. Often, pleading, sadness, emptiness, fear. One thing always stayed the same— she was held in a confining box, a box he'd laid her in himself, one that he controlled.
The horse stumbled, caught itself, bringing Zane back to the present. Not long and he'd approach the Humboldt. He'd follow that lazy river, pass the time with camps and ask discreetly after Ruth, maybe even the blind woman. How many blind, pregnant women could there be on this trail? There'd been a huge dog with her. Easily noted.
A man could lose himself in country like this, choose something different than he'd been. And he would do that, choose something different. But only so it took him closer to his goal, his all-consuming goal of terrifying Ruth until she broke.
Just as she had thought she'd broken him.
4
Mazy swallowed. She was looking at an animal, cornered.
Zilah lunged from a hunch, a foamy alkali thickened on her lips. She twisted Claytons leg with one hand, struck at Mazy with the other. Mazy felt Seth come up behind her, step protectively in front.
“You're all right, Zilah.”
“Chou-Jou! You crazy!” Zilah shouted. The effort frenzied her more, her eyes wild without recognition.
Pig barked closer. Clayton screamed. Suzanne kept shouting, “What's wrong? What is it? Clayton? Zilah?”
“Chou-Jou! You no listen!” The girl struck out. Her mouth foamed, eyes like slits, her tongue hanging as though too large for her mouth.
The others moved into a circle around them, Seth closest to Zilah, his hands at his side, crouching as he spoke quietly. “Its all right now. All right.” But the crazed woman jerked forward, then back, threatening Clayton as she yanked at his little leg. The wails of the child pierced the dry air and broke up the fast beating of Mazy's heart.
“Clayton?” Suzanne called out.
Seth's hands motioned them to stay back. Zilah turned then, her mouth open as though to chomp at the boys flesh, when her body began shivering, the convulsions knocking her to the desert floor. Her unseeing eyes rolled back into her head.
“Claytons all right, Suzanne,” Mazy shouted, holding the blind woman's arm as it strained against her.
“Get a rope,” Seth said.
Mazy turned to run, but there was no need. The Asian girls tiny feet made impressions in the sand where her body writhed and then stopped. Even Clayton silenced, his face a pinch of tears as he stared at his keeper.
The stillness held them hostage until Suzanne pressed forward, her arms sweeping the air before her.
“She's…dead,” Mazy said.
Sister Esthers fingers pressed white against her own lips as though to keep from crying out, as though she could not believe that one more woman in her care was gone. Shattered and gone.
Mazy turned from Esther and reached for the child wailing now, arms outstretched for his mother. Another loss, another tending interrupted. Mazy felt as
hot as a fired iron and just as heavy. Somehow she'd thought Seth's leading them would keep them safe, but nothing could do that, not in this thankless wilderness her husband had brought her into. She felt a surge of anger flush her face. She wished for the hundredth time she could have shoved those feelings into Jeremy's hands. But he had died before experiencing the full range of her fury She was forced to hold on to it alone.
Suzanne pressed Claytons face to her bodice. “It's all right,” she said. “Its all right. Mama didn't know Zilah was sick. I'm so sorry. I never should have asked her to watch you.” She rubbed her hand over the down of his hair, kissed his temples until he calmed. “It's all right,” she said. “It surely is,” though she knew in that instant it wasn't.
“Is what she got…contagious?” Lura Schmidtke asked. “I been letting Mariah spend a lot of time around that woman and your boy there, Suzanne.”
“Got to wait and see,” Elizabeth said. “Best we get her buried. All right with you, Sister Esther?”
Suzanne heard Sister Esther tell the other Celestials how to lift Zilah, and with Seth's help they carried her back toward the camp. They wrapped the still body in one of Suzanne's quilts, one she'd had the privilege of making when she could see, when her husband provided a housekeeper so she had the luxury to sit and sew. Such a long time ago that was. A much safer time.
Suzanne heard a scraping as a hole was being dug in the roadbed. Mazy said they laid Zilah in it, covered it with dirt and tiny purple rocks, then ran the wagons across the grave so no one taking this trail— and no scrounging animals—would scruff up Zilah's remains.
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