What Once We Loved by Jane Kirkpatrick Page A

dying was a sign that Ruth was supposed to stay! Ruth could make her way here, with help from her friends, instead of pushing herself north to a place she'd only heard of, where she said she could get a land grant of nearly a quarter-section just by showing up. Oh, she knew Ruth liked to do things on her own—what woman didn't? But Mazy could help her buy this place. They could own it together! They could buy Poverty Flat instead of Ruth's leasing it as she had for a year.
    She warmed to her subject, milked faster and harder now, ignoring a small voice inside that said to slow down. To not let her hopes outrun her reason.
    The cow stepped sideways, her tail flicking at Mazy's face. “Now, now, Jennifer. It's all right. Sorry. Didn't mean to pull so hard.”
    She was mind mumbling. Ruth would never want to go into a partnership with her now. Mazy sighed. It couldn't be fixed; they couldn't go back to what was. Ruth would leave, and Mazy'd have to take the cow brute south. Mazy might not have a pure dairy herd if she bred her cows with a Durham bull, say, or some of the Mexican stock, but she'd still have good milkers and she'd get rid of this…bad memory. For now, Mazy didn't want to miss a chance that she and Ruth could bridge this rushing river the bull had tipped them into.
    Mazy pressed her fingers at the small of her back, rubbing. Bending over to milk was hard on a tall body like hers, having to squat on a stool. Probably on a short frame, too. It was worthy work though.
    Milking required a commitment to routine, that was certain. Andanyone who said every milking was the same—just like any journey— had never done it more than once. Something was always challenging a dairywoman: A cow with porcupine quills stuck in her nose at milking time or a calf refusing to suck required thinking. And yet Mazy always ended satisfied, as though she'd completed a chapter of a good book.
    She carried the milk to the river trough she'd built for cooling. She poured the white gold into flat tins to wait until the cream rose for churning, then emptied another bucket into tins that looked like chimneys settled in the water. She had to move the cooled tins from a previous milking and place them at the end of the trough where she'd pull them out in the morning for delivery in town. She'd ask Mariah to skim, then churn the risen cream. She'd be glad when that goat and the treadmill she'd ordered arrived. The goat could do the hard work then of churning cream into butter. These were tasks with beginnings, middles, and ends that filled her like good bread. She'd begun feeling empty and alone this evening. Yet in the rhythm of pulling and squeezing and listening to cats meow and cows chewing their cuds, she'd found a respite from the ache of splintered friendships.
    Mazy watched as a mallard paddled off in a pool of rushes near the trough, the sun glistening on his emerald neck. Browned grasses eased in the breeze and Mazy inhaled. A pleasant place. That was what she had always wanted. She and Ruth had that in common. Maybe that shared dream would be enough to mend them back together.

    The younger children sat along the wall like lily pads around the outside edge of a swirling pond. Eyes moved back and forth between herself and Matthew, Ruth noticed, as she cut the noodles, stopped, then held a knife to punctuate her point, waiting for Matthew to counter, his own knife sending whittling chunks of alder onto the wood floor.
    “You wanted my honest opinion,” Matthew said. Ruth nodded.“I think its nuts. Crazy. Break ‘em for working cattle? You got to be kidding.”
    “And to sell to the military. Look at the freighter market alone,” Ruth said.
    “You don't see any mules drawing stages though, do you?”
    “But good solid, big mares, bred to a big jack would bring about a sturdy animal. It would. And it would still have the same agility because they're built differently I just never paid that much attention before, but it's true.