Jane Kirkpatrick - All Together in One Place (Kinship and Courage Series #1)

1850
near Cassville, Wisconsin

Cold water quaked from her torso to her toes. In an instant, Madison Mazy Bacon understood: greedy reeds and grasses lurked beneath the rivers surface. Fear surged through her. She struggled against strands yearning to tangle her ankles and knot the flounced hem of her swimming dress. Cold numbed her arms; thickening stalks sucked her under. As she fought, she scolded herself for not suspecting the danger signs. For being naive, swimming in the mighty river alone.

No, no, no, no! Determined, Mazy swallowed her panic, spit out murky water. She closed her eyes tight in concentration, then jerked her legs into a ball beneath her dress. She twisted until supine, surrendered to heaven. Then with a controlling backstroke, a thrust of her sinewy legs, and a prayer, she pushed toward warmer, safer water.

Sheltered later in their log home cradled by grassy bluffs, Mazy warmed herself before the fireplace, her thin chemise clinging hot against her back. Wet chestnut strands of hair veiled over her head as she bent and toweled it with an old quilt piece.

There's a dangerous place of currents in the Mississippi, she told her husband of two months. It looks safe, calm almost, then all of a sudden, and you're in it.

Its a necessary discovery, Jeremy Bacon told her, not looking up from his book about cows and cow brutes. Things are often not as they seem at the surface.

True, Mazy said. She tossed the thick tousle of hair over her back. Knotting the still-damp waves into a single braid, she vowed to remember his words of warning.

She didn't.

April 1852

Mazy Bacon embraced her life inside a pause that lacked premonition.

Warm sun spilled on her neck as she bent over seedlings she'd nurtured in walnut shells and pumpkin halves through a blustery winter. Humming a German song her mother'd taught her, she celebrated the plants survival and the scent of sweet earth at her feet. Pig, her dog, lay beside her, his black head resting on paws, his brown eyes watching plump robins peck at worms in the newly tilled garden soil She relished her life. Everything smelled of promise.

Around her legs, the wind whipped the red bloomers her mother had given her for Christmas the year before.

Red? Mother, she had said, pulling them from the string-tied wrapping. Hardly anyone wears them at all, let alone ones as red as radishes.

You was needing some seasoning in your days, her mother said. A little spice now and then, that's good. You're young. You can wear em.

Today, for the first time, Mazy'd donned those loose folds that billowed out at her hips, stayed tight at her sturdy ankles. She didn't wear the jacket, choosing a cream chemise instead. Her muscular arms, laid bare to the sun, already showed signs of spring freckles. And her hair, the color of earth and as unruly as wind, fluffed free of its usual braid.

Her wooden spade cut the soil. Mazy thought of the fat rattlers that moved lazily in summer sun, pleased they'd still be sleeping in the limestone rocks and caves and not surprising her. She disliked surprises. She knelt, planted, and pressed dirt around her precious love apples. Tomatoes, some called them now. They'd be fat and plump earlier than ever before.

Finished, Mazy stood, brushed dirt from her ample knees. Ample. Ever since she was twelve years old and stood head to head with her father's five-foot-nine-inch frame, she'd thought of herself as ample. By the time she turned seventeen and married Jeremy Bacon, a man twice her age and exactly her height, the image of herself as large was as set as a wagon wheel in Wisconsin's spring mud.

Jeremy, her husband of two years, said she was like fine pine formed from sturdy stock. Mazy loved him for that and for his melting smile and for treating her as fine china. He'd been gone two weeks, but he'd be back anytime, today for certain. It was their second anniversary.