What Once We Loved

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  A few shirts still dried. Sheets soaked in a heated tub, and she wondered if all the moisture was what made her head throb so much. She moaned. She had to finish the work. She tried to sit up and cried out, shouted almost, with the ache at her head.

  “Hey! Quiet! Trying to sleep here.” Her neighbor pounded against the canvas-covered boards, knocking her feathered hat from the peg. It fell on the bed, Esty's hatpin still attached. Hadn't her mother told her that a hat on the bed was bad luck? She should hang it back up. She rolled to do so, cried out again.

  “Quiet!”

  “Sorry.” Tipton pounded back. Tears pressed against her eyes. She wouldn't be able to do this alone, not without help. Certainly not without the powder.

  She'd been back to the Chinese doctor, and he'd agreed to help her with the baby when her time came, but she was not to use the opium. So she didn't. But her stomach had ached, and she'd been almost as sick as she'd been on the ship. She had taken just a pinch one day, hoping to slow the cramps. And he had looked at her suspiciously, gazed into her eyes as if he knew. She hadn't used it again, but it called to her, sitting there promising to ease her distress. She needed the doctors help, she reminded herself. She didn't want to offend him.

  Once, after leaving him, she nearly ran into a Chinese woman coming in to see him too. It might have been the woman who had been there that day her feet took her screaming away. She couldn't be sure through her blur. She thought the woman had lifted her hand as though to speak to Tipton, then lowered her eyes quickly.

  She could see bruising on the girl's cheek and an odd disfigurement in her walk as she passed. Her baby made a cry like a kitten, pitiful. Had someone struck her? Tipton shivered. There was little worse than being attacked by someone a person thought would be safe. Didrit she know that well?

  Tipton closed her eyes. She couldn't tell if the headaches she had now caused her eyes to blur or if the marred vision brought on the ache. It didn't matter. The powder would relieve it. She had to get up, finish the ironing so she could indulge. Not indulge, but take a treatment, that was what the opium was. She pushed herself up, waddled to the heating stove, and picked up the hot iron.

  She still had a few coins, and when she finished this job, if she could finish it, Flaubert would pay her. She could buy more powder from the Chinese apothecary…or get something to eat. Flaubert would be by this evening to pick up his trousers and shirts. It was strange how she'd found herself a part of a family of misfits here. She'd even exchanged pleasantries with the fallen women who lived next door. Once she'd turned her nose up at “that kind of woman,” and then the woman had brought a steaming stew to share, telling her food tasted better when “it were divvied up.” She told Tipton of a closer place to get her water for washing too. And even the Chinese had proven themselves friendly as they shufHed by with laundry bags hung from shoulder yokes.

  But Tipton liked the actors best. Most of them slept during the day and performed at night. They'd hired her to clean the costumes for the theater. This was a good place for her baby to be born.

  Laundering was a good profession. Hadn't Nehemiah even read to her of a wardrobe manager whom King Josiah's priests sought advice from? What was her name? Oh yes, Huldah. A simple woman who led a nation back to God.

  But she didn't need Nehemiah teaching her and treating her like a child. She didn't need Elizabeth to answer questions or her mother to remind her of whatever failings she had, how her brother was so much more perfect than she.

  His memory made her shiver despite the steaming heat in the room. She needed nothing from Charles. She had a family right here. She was a woman complete unto herself. She set the iron down, wiped her brow with the back of her arm.

  She'd been dependent on everyone once and afraid of everything, too: of Tyrell heading west without her, then of them not being able to marry, then of her parents and brother arriving. She'd worried about Tyrell—that he might get hurt or that she'd lose him to some western woman. She fretted about Charles, that his hatred for her grew and swept her mother's love from her. She even worried about being intimate with Nehemiah.

  She'd been afraid of so much, and all that emotion had changed nothing. She'd gone with Tyrell, fluttered her way onto the wagon train, then lost Tyrell anyway. Nothing of her worrying had brought her gain. All alone she'd survived what she'd worried about most—the loss of a love.

  Tipton put the iron down, tested the smaller one for heat. She pressed her hands against the low of her back, waited to see if the pain would strike again. A small pinch, little pain.

  She'd survived a westward journey even though she didn't feel like living. She'd stood at a grave site now trodden over by a thousand oxen's feet. She'd dragged laundry through deep California snow to take care of her mother in a hard Shasta winter, then stepped forward in white, high-button shoes to marry Nehemiah. No one forced her. Not a soul. A picture of Nehemiah reading her note came to her mind, but she pushed it away.

  Tyrell might not be happy with her, even though she had done this in his memory, for this baby, that it would be born to a strong woman who didn't need a teacher telling her how to do things.

  She felt the baby kick. “Maybe panning for gold would be better, Baby,” Tipton said. She stuck the stirring stick into a mass of sheets that swirled together like glue. She lifted the load out, shook one or two back to lighten it, then laid the shirts on the makeshift drying rack of layered sticks she'd built near the stove. She returned to the iron.

  Sluicing the streams for gold. And what would she do with a baby then? “Put you on my back instead of in my belly and keep moving,” she said to her child. That was what life required, that she keep moving.

  She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with her apron, lifted the heavy irons from the fire to steam seams onto the pants when she heard the knock on the door.

  “Come on in, Flaubert,” she said. “I'm nearly finished.”

  “Yes, you are,” she heard the voice say. She turned toward the door. Her heart pounded with recognition.

  “How did you find me?”

  “You're so easy,” Charles Wilson said. “You leave tracks wherever those tiny slippers of yours take you, dear sister.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, gazed around. He sneered. “Mother would be distressed to see her darling Tipton so near the Celestials.” He picked up the ceramic opium pipe, smashed it on the edge of the table. The scattered shards startled her, and she blinked as they fell to the floor. “All I did was ask for a pretty lady, a tiny little blond wisp of a woman, carrying a child in her belly and a laundry basket on her shoulder, and I got directed here. This is certainly beneath you, my darling Tipton,” he said. “Thin boards instead of the luxury of a hotel?” He clucked his tongue, took off his hat. With his fingers, he brushed his tightly curled hair behind his jagged ear. “Mother tells me you lived in the finest room at Kossuths hotel. Before it burned, of course. Funny how that fire started so close to your rooms. Trouble does seem to follow my darling sister.”

  “How did you know that? And about my baby?”

  “That the fire started near Kossuths? Apparently it didn't spread quickly enough to the ‘private rooms' of my darling sister and her mother.”

  “You set it,” she whispered.

  “Always the dramatic one,” he said. “But, yes, now that you mention it. That's exactly what I did. And what did it get me? My mother, dragging out a trunk that would dress my darling sister in wedding white so she and her dear husband could take what should have been mine.”

  “But she loves you most. That's why she stayed behind. To be with you. She sold the mules for you.” Her heart raced with the outrage of it, the startle of discovery, how lethal he truly was.

  She wanted Flaubert to come. She wanted the neighbor who'd pounded on her wall to get angry and storm in. She wanted help. Oh, please, God, please send help!

  “Ah, I see you understand,” he said. “You always were a quick one. Vicious, too.” He touched the jagge
d ear and started toward her.

  Her thoughts raced. She backed up. She wanted to run. Her hand touched the heavy iron, her fingers gripping the warm but no longer hot handle.

  He lunged for her, grabbed her wrist, splashing water onto the floor. “I'm no fool, Tipton,” he said. He twisted her arm and she gasped, releasing the iron. He pulled her around the steaming washtub, knocked over the drying racks. He shoved her against the bed now, her head hitting the wall. Like a bull, he charged against her, pinning her to the bed. “Dear Mother can't say enough about her new grandbaby. Can't say enough about how wonderful it will be to see the next generation born Californian, how Mister Kossuth will come back someday to run my store. My store. But he will not run for office. Not after I let the world know his young wife lived in a brothel, an opium pipe in her bed, exposing her baby to disease and disgust and was most likely killed by a jealous lover.”

  “You're the disgusting one,” she said. He struck her. She cowered on the bed, her eyes blurry, her head throbbing.

  “Quiet over there! Cant a man get sleep?”

  Tipton opened her mouth to scream, but Charles was too fast. He clamped his hand over her face. The smell of his cologne sickened her. She tried to bite, but his hands gouged her teeth against her lips. She tasted her own blood.

  “Never fear, sir!” Charles shouted back. “My lady and I will strangle our enthusiasm for each other, in honor of your good sleep. Wont we, my dear,” he whispered to her.

  She tried to push him back. She tried to move him off her child. She tried to take in more air. His fingers mashed her nose. She groaned with the pain, and then it came back, the day she tore at his ear with her teeth to free herself from him. She clawed now at his hand, and with the other he wrenched her arm and shoved it back behind her, arching her chest and her baby toward him. Her hands felt tingly, as though they would soon go numb. Maybe she should just sink and drift away. Then the baby kicked.

  My baby! I have to protect my baby!

  “We must be quiet, quiet,” he said to her. Spittle formed at the side of his mouth, his eyes glistened like a mad dogs. “So I will answer more questions in your curious eyes. That is curiosity, isn't it? Which we know killed the cat. So let me tell you about your dear Tyrellie. A godly man, he was going to marry a pretty lady. They were going to have a pretty child. The grandmother so wanted a child. The grandfather wanted a child too. And Tyrell, the good man, was going to oblige them when the pretty lady turned seventeen.” He smiled. “Here's where the plot thickens, my dear. Listen carefully. It has a surprise ending. Tyrell was a weak man. A stupid man. And so he died.” He chuckled, his eyes glazed. “It took almost nothing to kill him, Tipton. Nothing. All the hopes of the grandmother and grandfather dashed, the pretty lady almost dead of her dramatic grief. And later, we learn, almost dead of drink and laudanum. But she just couldn't do it, poor baby. Even with opium, she couldn't do it. Her poor pipe got broken. But the pretty lady still tried. She was just so slow in destroying herself. Now here comes the ending. She dramatically prolonged her grieving by getting married, by almost having that pretty baby. And then her big brother came to save her from her troubles. But alas, he was too late.”

  He pushed her arm back up behind her, pressed himself against her. She could feel the hotness of his breath, the smell of passion mixed with rage stronger than the scent of her fear.

  Behind her, her fingers felt for the feather of her hat.

  “Yours will be the more engaging death. Oh no, I wont quickly snuff out your life, dear Tipton. A kitten should be played with, teased. I'll simply snuff out your will to live. The world will know about Tipton Kossuth. And Nehemiah Kossuth will be laughed from his campaign. All your hopes shattered. Like puffs to the air.”

  When Charles said puff he released his hand from her arm just long enough to raise his fingers as though a dandelion fluff had been spun into the wind.

  It was enough. Tipton bunched the felt hat until she gripped the hatpin. Her fingers clutched for the brass of the dragonfly rising at the end of the tempered steel shank.

  In that moment Tipton knew: She could thrust the shank into his neck and take her brother's life. She could end the years of hoping that the future with him in it would be better. But in that moment she knew too: Charles had let a memory, a false memory, drive him down a lonely, rocky road. She was strong enough to live with what was; not be held hostage to what once she'd loved.

  With a strength she'd never known she possessed, she wrenched her arm free, thrusting the shanks pointed end across the finely chiseled face of her only brother.

  He bellowed like a mad bull, released her.

  “Nehemiah wont care what you say about me. He loves me.”

  Charles clutched at his face, blood pouring over his fingers. “You hurt me,” he said. The wound ripped from his ear lobe to his chin.

  She squeezed out from beneath him.

  He whimpered, “You hurt me. There's blood.”

  “If you do one thing to injure Nehemiahs reputation, to even suggest that I am less than his loving wife, I will tell them you confessed to starting the Shasta fire. And that you killed Tyrell. I'll have you sent where every day you'll work your lazy, lethal fingers to a bone.”

  “You hurt my face. There'll be a scar,” he said.

  Someone knocked on the door, and she yelled, “Come in! Come in!”

  Flaubert's eyes scanned the room, the blood, her panting, the hatpin still a weapon in her hand. “Are you all right? Is this some play you are rehearsing without telling me?”

  “My brother,” she introduced, her breathing rapid as a hunted deer. “He's just done a scene where he confessed to arson and murder. But his plot to kill me has been permanently upstaged.”

  19

  The sound of her own laughter enriched her. Ruth skimmed leaves from the water barrel and filled the bucket they used for drinking. She supposed it was the giddiness of their success that did it. All of them, working together, making it happen up there on spring ridge, as she called it, saving those mares and her future. Even Burke Manes had been provided just when they needed him. Who could have imagined that a man who lived not far away, who was never lost but “powerfully turned around a time or two” and who carried with him the mantle of a preacher unlike any Ruth had ever known, should show up on their night of misery? Suzanne was right: No eye could see the good God had in store for them.

  Ruth smiled as she poured the water into the drinking bucket inside. She came out and nearly bumped her head on the supper triangle, the iron Lura clanged to bring them in from the field. So now she was attributing good things in her life to God. Wouldn't Mazy find that a surprise?

  Mazy. Ruth ought to write, to tell Mazy of all this, but she didn t know how, couldn't even begin to put into words the emotional ride she'd been on.

  Even the loss of another mare the first week after the thaw hadn't “pushed her to the outside,” that place where she'd dismount and stand, just watching, as the Giant Stride turned around life's pole without her. Matthew had noticed the mare with her head low, walking as though her legs were stuck in thick mud up on the spring ridge. He'd led her back to the barn, but they'd been able to do nothing for her, and the mare had died a heaving, wretched death.

  “Why did it have to be Puff?” Mariah wailed when she heard.

  Matthew held his little sister and just let her cry. She yelled about how unfair it was, how everything she loved got taken. He didn't try to argue. He didn't try to make it all right. Because he couldn't, Ruth decided. It was something about him she'd come to respect: that he didn't always try to fix what he couldn't, that he somehow had the presence of mind to know when to just listen and when to act. For someone so young, that was a marvel.

  For someone so young. It was a phrase she wished didn't pop into her head quite so much. Still, when he leaned across her to reach for the shears to trim the boys' hair and his arm would brush her shoulder or when he asked her to give him the linseed oil to put on the bridl
e and his hand would linger over hers, she didn't think of his age. She thought about the racing of her heart, the strange sensations on her skin, the dry-ness of her mouth. And then that smile would come, breaking through a silver storm to warm her.

  She hadn't ever felt this way with Zane. That courtship had been flattering more than unfolding. She'd felt swept away, not allowed to wade in at her own pace. But this…relationship made her feel like a flower being opened inside a protective hand. No wind to buffet, no pounding rain to strip the petals, no harsh sun to dry her up. She wasn't sure she could trust it or herself.

  “Just let it be,” Matthew told her once when she tried to explain her reservations about his age. “I'm what, five years younger.”

  “Six,” she said.

  They stood watching the horses graze. “What did you want in a partner?” he said.

  “I wasn't looking for a partner,” she told him.

  “Well, if you had been. What would you want?”

  She'd stepped away from him, to avoid the influence of those eyes. He had a full beard now, trimmed daily. “Someone who just took me as I am, I guess. Who didn't try to change me into what they thought I should be.”

  “And have I tried to change you?”

  “No. It's just…too soon. You need to live your life. How can you know that I'm the one? Maybe…you're looking for someone to look after you and—”

  He'd laughed, a big hearty, belly laugh. “Like my ma, you're thinking? Like I'm a kid needing his mama?”

  She'd looked sheepish.

  “Ain't nothing in the world about my ma I see inside you, Ruth Martin. Except maybe a good heart, even if it does come out sometimes twisted as a rope. And maybe a passel of power to get things to happen. I see that, too, in both of you. But I'm not looking for a keeper. Fact is, I wasn't looking at all. But I found. And I know a gem when I see it. No man with any sense will walk on by a treasure just because it came along the trail when he wasn't expecting.”

  “You think of me as a treasure?”