Deep Purple (19 page)

‘‘You should let the
patrones
pick up their laundry,” Atanacia admonished, as she walked alongside Catherine, helping carry the neatly folded stacks of washed clothes.

‘‘
Then I would not have as many patrons. And Quong Chang’s laundry would have more.” She paused, out of breath. The baby was due any day now, and she found even the simple task of washing clothes on the new scrub board Sam had given her an exhausting chore.

‘‘
Then you should stay in
su casa
—and in your bed,” Atanacia continued, “and let me deliver the laundry by myself.” The young Mexican woman had almost as much difficulty walking as did Catherine. At four months pregnant, she was carrying her third child . . . and she had yet to turn sixteen.

“
I enjoy the chance to get out, Atanacia—-really.”

Catherine looked at her surroundings. Tucson had greatly changed. It was two years ago the month before last
—September of ’64—when she had left Cristo Rey to come to Tucson. It was a Mexican mud village then, no more than eight hundred people. Now a distinct American flavor permeated the Old Pueblo.

The streets now had mostly Anglo names. Her own street, Calle d
e la India Trieste, was called Congress Street—for the Congress Saloon, so named because Tucson, which was now the territorial capital as well as the territory’s military headquarters, had held its first legislative session in the saloon. At Stone and Ochoa, where the Tully & Ochoa corral had been, stood a long adobe building—the territory’s new capitol building.

And Tucson now had its first hotel, the Palace. The Butterfield Overland Stage Coach Company was in operation again over on Pearl Street, which ha
d been
Calle del Correo
. Then there were the many Anglo businesses that had sprung up like mushrooms— Fleishman’s Drugstore, Levin’s Brewery, Rothchild’s Confectionary—and even a privately owned bank, the Lord & Williams Store. All Tucson needed was a newspaper and a Protestant church, and it would be a full-fledged American town.

In the seven months she had been back, she had come to realize she no longer knew the city so intimately. New streets pierced the original walls, leaving them in fragmented ruins.
And the town’s population had swelled to nearly fifteen hundred, so that many people had never heard of Catherine Howard, the murderess.

But then these adventurers that flocked to the city did not care about events of the past; nor did they care about wha
t went on outside Tucson. They did not know or care, as she did, that a war still raged in Mexico. True, Law’s Fabian tactics, along with Martinez’s terrorizing
macheteros
, had forced the French to retreat to the port of Guaymas, thus freeing the state of Sonora. But the few newspapers that Sam subscribed to reported that Bazaine’s French troops were still in Mexico City.

Was Law fighting in Mexico City now? Seven months since she had seen him! Fear clutched at her heart. Did even now his bones lie along so
me roadside, bleached by the sun, picked clean by the vultures? The very thought hurt, stabbing at her as sharply as a knife, so that she clutched at her abdomen. The tidy stack of laundry she carried spilled into the dust. “The baby,” she gasped. “I think it’s time.”

Atanacia
’s stack of clothing tumbled down to join Catherine’s. The young Mexican woman grabbed her friend about the waist. “Hurry, Catrina, we return to su casa. Pronto!"

It seemed to Catherine that it took hours to follow the narrow, winding
streets back to her
jacale
, which was no longer on the outskirts of town. Then, as she went into the first stages of labor, she realized that it had taken only a few minutes, maybe ten, for Atanacia to lead her back home. It was the labor that took hours. And hours.

Atanacia bathed her face with a wet cloth, gently urging her to relax when the pains struck like lightning. Where was Law? Catherine twisted and knotted in the throes of the hand contractions. Why wasn
’t he here when his child was about to be born? She doubled into the fetal position and clenched her fists against her dry mouth. Law, Law, Law. It was a litany her lips formed in tribute for the child that was already asserting its rights as it squirmed in the birth canal.

“
You are very narrow of the hips,” Atanacia said, concern shadowing her pretty face. Then she brightened. “But the child, it will come. I know. After two, I know there is the
dolor
. But soon it will pass,
mi amiga
. And you will forget the
dolor
. You will want more
ninos
—maybe as many as I do.”

Catherine groaned. “
That is the last thing I want right now, fifteen children.”

At last it was over. Seventeen hours after that first knifelike thrust, Catherine wearily looked up to watch Atanacia lay the baby on the old table and enfold it
in the muslin blanket. Catherine thought her daughter surely had to be the ugliest baby ever born in Tucson, but when Atanacia handed the squalling, red-faced infant to her, the maternal instinct fiercely surged through Catherine—equaling almost her daughter's sturdy tugging at her nipple seconds later.

A strong mite, she thought, with Law
’s thick blond curls and her own heart-shaped face. But the eyes—they were a muddy blue, so it was still too soon to tell their final color.

“
What will you name the
bebe
?” Atanacia asked as she knelt beside the mother and daughter to gaze at God's newest creation.

Catherine had considered naming the child for her friend, Atanacia. But at the last second she replied with a mystical smile, “
I think I shall call her after my father, Jesse. For in a way he was responsible for my coming to the territory. Jessica Atanacia Davalos.”

“Miguel, again—the verb forms for the word ‘drive,’ ’’ Catherine said.

The shoeless boy began, “
Drive . . . drove . . .” and then gave up in hopeless laughter as Jessie crawled across the earth-packed floor to pinch curiously at his dusty toes. The five other students joined in the laughter. Atanacia hurried in from outside, where she had been cooking the noonday meal, and scooped up the child. “No, no,
traviesa
,” she scolded the child fondly.

“
It’s all right.” Catherine sighed, taking Jessie. The child was indeed a mischievous little thing. Yet love for the seven-month-old filled her heart to overflowing, it seemed. The feel of the strong heartbeat in that small ribcage, the tiny dimples in the plump elbows and knees, caused Catherine to feel as if she had performed an incredible feat in giving birth to such a perfect creation. Secretly she had to laugh at her mother’s pride.

Atanacia
’s own daughter, the three-month-old Rosalie Catrina, lay docilely in Jessie’s crib each day while Atanacia helped about the
jacale
as Catherine taught school. The baby was never any problem, never demanding and daring as Jessie had been at three months—and still was.

Without Atanacia to help, Catherine could never have begun tutoring again. It was Sam and Lionel who had persuaded some of Tucson
’s citizens to send their children back to her school. In turn, Catherine had insisted on paying Atanacia, minimal though the salary was, for her morning help. And Atanacia was delighted with her own money . . . her
independencia
, as she called it. Sam teasingly claimed that Catherine’s talk of the women suffragists, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was giving his wife outlandish ideas.

“
Class is dismissed,” Catherine told the students. She waited for them to leave before she opened her blouse and gave her breast to the small, eagerly sucking mouth.

“
Where is Loco?” she asked Atanacia, who picked up her own daughter and began to nurse.

Atanacia shook her head sadly. “
He wanders. I saw him earlier this morning down by the river, but now—I do not know.”

Catherine worried for the old man. Since February he had behaved like a shaman on peyote. She feared Lo
co, like his name, was indeed losing his mind with his advancing years. There were times when she feared she was losing her own mind, especially those first weeks after Jessie was born. She had so wanted Law to be with her.

As the months passed and no word
came from him, she became like Loco, moving restlessly from her bedroom to the front room and back and sometimes outside to wander the dusty street until a bout of chills drove her to her bed for rest.  A depression, a miasma, had seeped into her very bones.

She did receive word from Margaret, who had married, surprisingly, a penniless schoolmaster
—a short letter telling of their mother's quietly dying in her sleep.

In late March a shabby-looking American stopped outside her house to pass along the news. L
aw, serving under the supreme commander of the Juarista forces, General Escobedo, was besieging the city of Queretaro, where Maximilian was making a last-ditch stand to retain his empire.

“
Is there any other message?” she had frantically demanded of the threadbare man.

“
Nope—he just said to wait for him, ma'am."

With a both lightened and saddened heart, she had fed the man and sent him on his way. Surely then within months Law would come home.

Atanacia went home to feed Sam, who closed the store during the summer’s long siesta hour, and Catherine picked up the brown wrapping paper the students wrote on that was scattered about the floor.

Afterward she began to feed Jessie the mashed beans and applesauce . . . which was so expensive now that apples were a dol
lar a pound. She knew she should be eating something herself. Her weight had dropped drastically since Jessie’s birth. She told herself it was the nursing that was pulling her down. Atanacia wanted her to stop. “But who can afford milk these days?” Catherine asked her friend.

A knock on the door interrupted the stale tortilla she was forcing herself to eat, and she called out, “
Enter,” thinking it was Loco. When the door opened and Sherrod stepped inside, hat in hand, the tortilla dropped from her fingers.

“
Hello, Catherine,” he said quietly.

Suddenly she was glad that the room was darkened. Her feminine vanity came to the foreground for the first time in months, and she glimpsed a mental image of how awful she must look
—with clothes that bagged on her and gaunt hollows beneath her cheekbones. “Come in, Sherrod—and sit down,” she said, rising to set Jessica on the ground.

“
Is it all right—or should I wait for you outside?"

She laughed. “
My social life has changed considerably. I’m an old married woman now.”

“
So I heard—only recently, Catherine.” He took a seat on one of the students’ benches.  “I had heard that you were ill.”

She swallowed her pride.
  “I know I must look emaciated, as shriveled as an old woman.”

“
Yet when you smile, as you are doing now . . . dear God, but I love you.”

She looked down, uncomfortably with both his admission and his adoring gaze.

He blurted in a tone that sounded as distressed as she was feeling, “I thought your daughter might like this, Catherine.”  He held out the gift he had brought for the child. “Law’s child, if what Sam told me is the truth.”

She took the brown-paper-wrapped package. “
Why, thank you, Sherrod – and, yes, Jessie is your niece.” She tore away the paper to find a yellow stuffed duck. “How perfect! Maybe now she will stop crawling after the chickens outside.”

“
She should be brought up in a better place!”

Catherine looked up at him, and his gaze dropped to the straw hat in his hands. “
I’m sorry, Catherine. But Law’s daughter— Jessie, is it? She’s as much an heir to Cristo Rey as Brigham or Abigail. She belongs there where there’s plenty of . . .” His words trailed off.

“
Luxuries?” she asked. “Perhaps, but that will be her father’s and my decision when the time comes.” She changed the subject. “How is everyone at Cristo Rey?”

The hat twirled in Sherrod's hands, and, watching him, she thought again how aristocratic, how handsome, were his looks. No wonder she had been temporarily blinded to Law
’s extraordinary male mystique.

“
Abigail is at Miss Phelps’s School for Young Ladies in Chicago, and Brigham’s at Markham Academy in Richmond. Father’s as irascible as ever. And Mother . . .” His shoulders shrugged. “I never know what she’s thinking.”

I do, Catherine thought. “
And Lucy?”

Sherrod
’s gaze met hers, and she saw the misery there. “Lucy’s dying, Catherine. Cirrhosis of the liver. And her mind’s going. We just returned from St. Louis to see the doctors there. I would have been to see you sooner, but we didn’t make it back to Tucson until last week.”

“
Oh, Sherrod, I’m so sorry to hear that. I really liked Lucy.”

“
And she you. She was disconsolate when you left. We all were.”

Not everyone
. “It worked out for the best.” She smiled, and realized he was again looking at her through the eyes of a man in love. “If I had not left, I would never have had the opportunity to persuade your stepbrother to marry me.”

They talked awhile longer, until Jessie began to play with the gaiters at Sherrod's ankles. With a laugh, he picked the baby up and bounced her on
his knee. “She’s adorable,” he said, before he took his leave. “All of Congress Street will spoil her.”

After he left, Catherine gave thought to his invitation to live at Cristo Rey. She knew, though, that Elizabeth would make it miserable for her and Jes
sie there. Still, as the months passed, as June gave way to July, then one season passed into another with the almost insignificant changes of temperature peculiar to Tucson, she thought more and more often about accepting the invitation.

Tucson was becomi
ng every day more of a gunman's town, a roughneck place peopled by all sorts of remnants of the Civil War veterans—outlaws, gamblers, and swindlers—seeking the town's wide-open gambling establishments.

Then, too, there was the financial situation to consid
er. Even with the laundry business and teaching, her income never seemed enough. She had long since sold Sonora to get her, Loco, and Jessie through the long, slow summer when business dropped off everywhere.

“
You’re too proud,” Sam accused her one afternoon when she refused to accept a side of beef he offered. “Perhaps,” she said, smiling. “But pride is all I have left.”

In November, shortly before Jessie's first birthday. Loco disappeared one morning and was not seen again. “
Sometimes the old ones, the Indian ancients,” Atanacia said, “they go off to be alone when they know they are going to die. And he was very old, was he not?”

Yes, Catherine thought. Loco was very old
—as old as she felt, and must surely look without Law’s love to renew her.

And that was
the reality that she had put off facing for so long. The war in Mexico had ended with Maximilian’s execution in Queretaro, on the Hill of the Bells, five months earlier.

So why had Law not returned?