Read Online What Once We Loved by Jane Kirkpatrick - Free Book Online

sister a tender touch. “We're talking about Ruth here.”
    “What's Ruth up to?” Mariah asked.
    Ruth filled her in while Lura sucked on her empty clay pipe. Matthew shook his head, frowned, and Ruth wondered how he could have been so encouraging of her going it alone yet act as though her ideas were more squirmy than worms.
    Mariah, familiar in Ruth's kitchen, popped the raised noodles into a boiling pot of water, then sent Jessie and Sarah out to collect tomatoes from the garden and the last of the lettuce, too.
    “Is that it then?” Lura asked when the girls had left. Ruth nodded. Lura tapped her pipe on her palm while she sat, kicking her foot draped across her knee. Her white-and-blue striped skirt bobbed up and down as though she were dancing. She was always in motion. “Let me think how that would work,” Lura said. “Exactly.”
    “She's talking new uses for stock, now, Ma,” Matthew said a bit condescendingly. Ruth caught her breath. “It's a little complicated.”
    “I know all about stock,” Lura snapped. Both Matthew and Ruth turned to look at her. “People been talking about such things at the store and before that while I banked at the casinos. Lots of talk about seeing in new ways. What you're suggesting is mixing up livestock.'“ She laid the pipe in her lap. “And you can count me in.”
    “Count you in on what, Ma?”
    “Look,” Lura told her son, standing then, quick as a hungry fox. “Best thing for us to do is to sell those Durham cows of ours to Mazy Bacon.”
    “Sell them?”
    “She's got herself a herd then, dairy or beef, and she can dump that Marvel cow brute with an easy heart. Shell get herself some good help. Maybe David Taylor, her stepson of sorts. We can take some shares in her dairy instead of cash, if need be. Then we bag that money, and we buy ourselves some stocky mares, some from that Primrose blood out of Virginia, bred back or not. Maybe a couple of heavy Quarter-Pathers, too. Then the next few days, we roam these hacienda hills for the biggest, the strongest, and the prettiest jacks anybody ever saw—maybe two or three days. We buy them up. We breed them to any open mares we have. Next year they meet up with Ruths mares, or by then you may be ready to sell them, too, Ruthie, and get yourself some of our stocky brood. It wont matter whether you like the breeding part or the training. We'll have plenty to do in this…dynasty you're proposing. We'll need to break them, and we'll need people to sell them to the army, the farmers, and cattlemen. Maybe some good buggy mules'll sell too. They'll all need tending, that many animals.”
    “Ma,” Matthew said. “I think maybe—”
    “ ‘Course we got to find land enough to house us all and the mules, too. It'll be worth investing all we got. This could become the biggest moneymaker from a common thing since…brass tacks. You're a whiz, Ruthie, a true whiz. I had no idea you carried around such innovating thoughts in that pretty head of yours.”
    “Me neither,” Ruth said. She felt spun around like a bottle at a party. She sneezed from the flour that dusted her face. “I only wish I'd thought of it myself,” Ruth said as she sank onto the stool.

    “This came in for Miss Martin,” the editor at the Shasta Courier told Elizabeth. “You're heading out that way?”
    “Indeed. Tonights the big shindig. We hope to have a few fiddlers and plenty of food. You could join us.”
    Sam Dosh adjusted his printers cap and shook his head. “Got to get the paper out. I'm going to miss her. She was a fine lithographer.”
    “She's a fine artist,” Elizabeth said.

    “Its not polite to read another's mail…” Sam said. “But hard not to when the writing's on the outside.”
    “Well, thank you, Sam,” she said as she pulled the letter from his hands. “Ill see that Ruth gets it.”
    It was all happening too fast with too many things to sort through. Ruth listened and watched and wondered how her life had suddenly