The Star Garden (14 page)

So the evening meal was a long and windy one, with so many things to tell Charlie, so much I wanted to know from him and Elsa but couldn’t ask. I’d always thought if a girl went into that convent, she was as good as gone and likely to be sent to South America. She was a pretty girl, too. Pretty enough to turn a young man’s head.

Mary Pearl kept trying to tell Elsa about things
she
was interested in, like fashions and school and that time she stomped on a snake last summer. But to all her questions and prodding for conversation, Elsa only nodded. It was as if she had been utterly locked away from any kind of girlish frills for those two years, as if Mary Pearl’s words were foreign to her.

In between everything, we got the story of their secret romance, and how just before Thanksgiving Elsa had left the convent after what she called a grievous ten days of prayer and penance, convinced she was not called to a life’s vocation. Together they told how Charlie’d stopped in the market to find a gift for me. Pausing by Elsa’s table, thinking she was only a girl selling embroidered handkerchiefs, he discovered her anew. Gilbert kept quiet, now and then looking up with a dark flush to his face.

After we washed up, made more coffee, and pulled out blankets to bed down the children, it got quiet as the little ones turned in. April went to bed, too, being worn out and looking swollen with her next babe. Only then did we tell Charlie and Elsa about last night’s Christmas Eve at the rancho south of here, the railroad man coming to the house, the
políticos
and
cientifícos
gathered around Rudolfo’s table. Elsa’s eyes grew wide and dark with fear.

I reckoned my Charlie had caught himself a timid little cottontail rabbit, used to being bullied by her papa. Snagged her right out of the jaws of an old lion that Charlie was going to have to battle as long as he lived. Then something changed in Elsa’s face. She sat rigid, gripping her coffee cup as if she warmed her hands on it, and looked quickly to Charlie before she said, “All the time I’ve been gone I prayed to be united to Christ, but my heart is not a Sister’s. For three years my friend Esperanza secretly brought letters from Charlie when he was going to the school there. She carried my messages to him, too. Then when he left, I was crushed. I didn’t know why he was gone and couldn’t get word to him. I thought he’d left me. I tried to forget Charlie, though I’d loved him since we were children. I left the convent and I’d been living in Tucson for a month and a half at a widow’s home, sewing and washing, doing odd tasks. When Charlie came to town and we met by a miracle, so perfectly ordered that I knew it was no accident, I … I’d already accepted his proposal before he made it. That’s how certain I am that I love Charlie.

“I have had plenty of time to think and begin to understand my father. His strength is also his weakness. Much as he has built his wealth on hard work, he is very much afraid to lose anything. If he will not bless our marriage he will lose me. If we have to leave to keep you safe, we will, but I think he will be too afraid of what he will lose to make a decree to us and lose me forever. This is what I think.”

“I’m ready, too,” Charlie said. “If we can stay here a bit, I’ll work for you, Mama, harder than I ever did, for our room and board. If not, I’ve got a job waiting for me up toward the Mogollon as a deputy sheriff out of Springerville. Word is they’re breaking up the Ranger outfit come summer, and anyhow rang-ing’s no life for a man with a wife.”

“No, don’t go. Of course you can stay.” Lands, if they went that far away, I’d never see them. There could be babies born, just like when April was in Philadelphia, that I’d not see for years. I turned to Albert, Chess, and my mama, lastly to Savannah. Her e
yes
were misty and she nodded slowly. I felt as if my jaw had frozen.

In the midst of my thickheadedness, I remembered my gift. The last shirt I’d ever make for my oldest son. I rushed to my bedroom. Opening the chest, I took up Charlie’s shirt. I had no gift for Elsa. What with thread and cloth so dear I’d barely managed something for those at hand; I hadn’t done extra. In that chest was the remainder of the pinafore material, waiting to be cut up for quilt scraps. I trimmed it up square and folded it carefully. I found a piece of lace in there, about two yards long, raveled out at one end, but I trimmed it smooth and folded it onto the cloth. Folks were talking in the other room. I laid a long spool of white thread on the stack, though I had not a single button to spare except some big round ones that go on men’s pants fronts, nothing a lady would wear. Hunting for more, I lifted the quilt at the bottom of the chest. There was the spirit level I’d bought. I refused to let myself look on it or think on the man I intended it for. I was headed for the door when I spied the assortment of odd things jumbled on top of the highboy chest, and from it I took up my best new thimble, adding it to my gift to Elsa. Couldn’t it have been anyone other than Elsa?

I gave my son and his new wife their gifts for Christmas and they were kind and said their thanks. Though I replied, I could barely speak above a whisper. Elsa grabbed my shoulders and hugged me and I think I smiled but, Lord, I wanted to cry. I wished them a house full of healthy children and all, but I couldn’t leave off thinking my boy Charlie had married the only girl in the Territory who could bring to this house the tender femininity possessed by a leaky keg of blasting powder.

I got my saddle blanket on a green-broke pony and rode north across the Cienega toward the sandy cliff. The cold that seeped through the seams in my old coat cut into my ribs and chest. I came upon the place where the stage had turned over and I kept going. My mount, a small bay named Hatch, was shy of the shadows, and danced as she walked. I’d left the family to make their own breakfast and had gone to the barn after only a cup of coffee. Chess offered to come along wherever I was going as I shouldn’t be out alone but I told him to stay put. Maybe he thought I was going to see Rudolfo. Have some words with him. Truth is, I didn’t know where I was going, I just needed a ride.

By now, Udell should be in Colorado, and maybe caught up with the end of the rainbow he’s chasing. I gave Hatch her head and went up the stage road to where the bend went toward Granny’s place. Two miles up, I found a wooden stake beaten into the ground with a strip of a red handkerchief tied to it. The horse snorted at the fluttering cloth, and pulled on her reins. I pulled up that stake and tossed it into some brush. I made her settle, and then we cut far around by a washy place where the sand had become frozen and hard. It broke in U shapes with each step of Hatch’s hooves.

Far upwind, the slow-rising call of a wolf spooked Hatch and she hauled up into the air about three times before setting off on a dead run. I jerked the reins, held on for my life, and got her to plant her front feet, but nearly went over. The wolf gave one more howl as I jumped off and pulled that horse’s nose to my chest, talking low and steady. Hatch’s eyes were white all around and her ears laid back. Without me on her, she could barely keep her feet on the ground.

I should have ridden Baldy. Leastways I’d be free to think of my own worries instead of his. I should have used a saddle instead of just a blanket, so this lunkhead cayuse would mind. We set off walking, me pulling Hatch’s chin lead, across the frozen patch of sand to the cobbled gravel beyond it, knowing I’d left footprints behind me. I watched the ground closely, finding a path where the greasewood was far enough apart Hatch wouldn’t have to rub her sides on it. Ornery horse. I wanted to be somewhere else and I didn’t much care where it was.

I pictured my papa when I was a girl, the day he came to the house and told us to bring in the herd because he’d got word there was better grazing in San Angelo, Texas. He’s buried there, now. Savannah’s papa and sisters had stayed there, too, farming, all except Ulyssa, who died at the lung asylum here in the Territory a couple of years ago. How had Papa come to choose moving instead of staying? If he’d known it would cost him his life, would he have gone pulling up stakes and leaving the only home I could remember? I had visions of the curly-stemmed grass that used to get into my stockings when I was a girl, in the place I grew up, Cottonwood Springs, and the way the wind blew constant for days rather than coming in gusts and storms the way it does here. Had he ever felt part and parcel of the land he wanted to leave that day? Was it easy to ride away?

Then I got right down to my sore spot, and pressed it. If I were a man, I might just leave. Strange what a man can do that a woman would break apart doing. Maybe there’s more to being a woman—other lives were intertwined with mine like the bougainvillea that had long ago become part of Albert and Savannah’s front porch. I was caught between Rudolfo and the railroad, with a load of dynamite just moved in, as near to flat-out broke as I’ve ever been, lonesome for a man I barely knew, and responsible for too many people to just run away. Unless I packed the lot of them along, too.

There weren’t any Apaches or Comanches left in the Chiricahuas. It’s winter. There’d be water past El Paso. I had no reason to move to Texas other than that my pa had wanted to go there. I knew nothing about the place, didn’t even remember it, except for Chess’s ranch, that’s probably overgrown with mesquite and cedar. We could head to Austin and pick up Chess’s old place, buy it back from his daughter, who’s a widow now and not running anything on it but some chickens. Or I’ll sell out and take up life in town. Raise chickens and sell some eggs, myself. Then again, I wasn’t ready to ride a rocking chair the rest of my days. Right now, though, I could leave this ranch with nothing to show for the life I’d led but some footprints that will blow away when that sand thaws. I was too young to just sit and wait to die.

I turned Hatch to the south and stopped on the ridge again. Above the house, smoke curled in earnest from three stovepipes. A rooster crowed, almost in time with the windmill’s creaking. West of the main yard, below the black, leafless branches of the jacaranda tree, the graves of people I’ve loved lay under a haze of frost. My dead babies, two husbands, an assortment of cavalrymen including my brother, and my crosscut nephew, Willie. Smoke raised a line from the stovepipe, straight up over the house to where it met some kind of breeze and there it spread in a fan. From the very first timber Jimmy Reed cut, that place had belonged to me. These double adobe walls were sturdy and solid, and bound to be pleasant in the summer, but though I’ve lived here near three months, the place didn’t feel like my home.

I put Hatch in the barn. Chess was tinkering with something and set it down to pull the saddle blanket down. We walked toward the house. I asked him, “Was it hard to leave your place and come here? Did you just reckon this was your new home?”

He stopped in his tracks, his head nodding with a rhythm he can’t control. He said, “What’re you driving at?”

“I’m feeling like pushing on. Maybe head back to Texas, where my pa always wanted us to live. Reckon we never gave that a chance, just up and left because Albert and I were only young’uns and didn’t know what to do with ourselves but run back.”

After a few steps, he said, “Always thought our boy Charlie had more sense than to do what he done.”

“What man’s got sense when he loves a woman? Or woman, either.”

“We’ll see how it fares, soon as the old boy finds out. So you reckon not to stand up to Maldonado again, that it’s better to up stakes? Let him win it all?”

I took a few more steps, slowing to keep pace with him. “Suppose I don’t want to fight this battle.”

“Reckon not.”

“Maybe you’d like to go home.” I stopped. “Chess?”

He turned. “You asked me to stay the day we laid Jack in the ground. It ain’t about the roof and windows.”

I’d have hugged him, except he’d have ducked away. I said, “Maybe Rudolfo will be all right. Maybe he’ll even be happy. Nothing like a grandchild to melt a heart.”

“ ‘Til they grow up and go off Romeo-ing with some Juliet.”

“I should never have let the boys read Shakespeare. Wonder which one of us is the Capulets? I could swear.”

“Well, go ahead. You don’t get profane often enough, Sarah Elliot. It’d do you better than leaving. And what about that Hanna fella? Don’t you owe him no fare-thee-well?”

“He isn’t Jack.”

“Naw. But you ain’t the kind to fiddle with a person. You got grandchildren, too. Look at that houseful. So, no sense turn-tailing. I reckon old Charlie’da got the notion some otherwise. I’m hungry. Let’s quit jawing and start eating.”

We stepped through the door into warm air perfumed with cooking. I’ve stuck on this land through fire and flood, gale winds and Apache raids, and though Rudolfo’s hand in the building of the house itself still rankled me, I wouldn’t be chased off this land. Especially not by my own fears.

Long before dawn I went out to get eggs, and when I got back to the kitchen, I found Blessing sitting in the chair that Granny usually occupies when there is a good fire going. The child was shivering, but she said nothing when I came in, so I gave her a minute to open up while I set down my egg basket and put up my hat and coat. When I turned around, she had gotten out of the chair and had a chunk of firewood in her arms. “Aunt Sarah?” she said. “Ain’t I big enough to make this stove up for you?”

“Well, I swan, you are at that. But before you put in that old log, you’d better add some kindling.” I bent and poked in the depths of the stove with an iron, moving banked embers to the front while she picked up some twigs. “There, lay it on top of the coals. Don’t get too close. It’ll scorch you.”

She poked a few slips of split shaves and twigs in while I pushed over the coals. Blessing said, “Poppy says we have to go home, but I like it here. There’s a mommy
and
a daddy here. He says we’re too much trouble for you. I could help you light the stove ever’ morning. You might need that. I’m real helperful.”

I tried not to grin. It hadn’t been long since she’d hated my very breath. I sat in the chair and held out my arms to the girl. She climbed in my lap and laid her head against my shoulder. I said, “You aren’t ever going to get over missing your mama. I know it.”

“Miss Cousin Rachel is mean. And she’s not my mother.”

“Rachel is trying her best. She’s new at being a nursemaid and maybe you have to give her a chance.”

Blessing straightened. “Nursemaid? Poppy says she’s the giver-nest. She givers us castor oil, and givers lectures, and scolds Story about scratching his behind in Sunday School, telling him he mighta caught worms and that if he don’t tuck in his shirttail for the fifteenth time today, she’s gonna sew lace doilies on it so all the boys can see. I don’t see what’s wrong with scratching what itches in Sunday School. It ain’t his fault.”

“Isn’t. You say ‘isn’t his fault.”

“Well, at school some girls say ‘ain’t’ all the time. I heard Granny saying ‘ain’t’ and Grampa Chess says it.” She sighed and moved her legs around, holding her stocking feet toward the stove. “Why don’t you come to our house and be our giver-nest? You tell better stories, and you don’t scold so much. I wish I was your little girl, now that Mommy’s gone to heaven in Chicago.”

“I wish you were my little girl, too,” I said. For the blink of an eye, my tiny Suzanne was in my lap, prattling away in baby talk over a string of wooden beads. Suzanne died of scarlet fever even before Jack was killed. Blessing’s mother died of cancer and left this child sitting here in my lap on this bitter cold December morning. I kissed the part in Blessing’s hair and the past vanished. As Blessing rhythmically waved her left foot toward the stove I rocked the chair for a while, without either of us saying another word.

The year is drawing to a close and I for one am glad to see this one put in the barn. It has been one of the toughest years I’ve faced, with famine, flood, and fire. Reckon the only thing missing was pestilence, but then I thought, I have Rudolfo Maldonado, so we’ve endured plagues enough. Harland and his little ones left this morning, as he had to get back to his practice, and they had to return to school shortly.

Elsa, April, and I have washed clothes all morning and hung them outside to dry. Every few minutes we take a look at some gathering clouds, but still no sign of rain. They also helped me put on some bread to rise and three of the loaves have cinnamon and raisins rolled into them. What a fine treat we’ll have this evening. Keeping the table full for this big family has been near as hard as riding a roundup for a week.

About noon, April went out to check the clothes on the line and hollered, “Sprinkling!” so Elsa and I ran to help pull them all in, dried or not. We got shirts and pants and drawers laid around the book room, and lit a fire in the stove in there, then we worked up some lines in the kitchen and every bedroom, too. Patricia and Lorelei thought that was great fun and ran, whooping, beneath the hanging clothes, surprising each other and dashing through the house.

Once we got this little army fed and put down for naps, the rain started up with more purpose. All we females settled in the kitchen for some tea and cookies, and to watch that bread rise. April put her feet up on a second chair and pulled off her shoes, rubbing her swollen ankles. Granny snoozed in a rocking chair. The calico cat rose and arched his back with a flick of his tail and hopped from Granny’s lap to April’s.

“Elsa,” I said, “you have to sit and rest with us now. You’ve been working all morning.”

She looked from April to me. “We’re all working,” she said.

April laughed. She said, “Mama doesn’t want anybody to best her, is all. Get down, cat. Why don’t you name that old thing, Mother? Hand me another of those cookies. We’ll get them cleaned up before the boys get in here.”

“I’ll save mine for Carlito,” Elsa whispered.

“No you won’t!” April crowed. “If you don’t eat it, I will. With this baby, I’m so hungry all the time! Besides, there’s not enough for all of ‘em and Charlie gets all the food he wants. Come on. Hand it over.” She laughed, but she meant business.

I watched Elsa’s face closely. She frowned. Then she sat up straight and pushed out that strong chin, and put half that cookie in her mouth at once. I laughed and said, “Now you girls, do I have to give you a talking-to or will you behave?”

April and Elsa laughed, too. Elsa greedily chomped on the rest of the cookie while April said, “Mama, are there any left in the crock? Just crumbs? I’ll take them. I’ll make some more. Elsa, we’d better be good now. Mama’s talking-tos can pin your ears back for a week.”

“No more’n you deserve, young lady,” I said.

She giggled. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”

Elsa said, “We can make more cookies. Granny said she likes them, too. Come here,
gatito.”
She held her hand down toward the cat with a tiny piece of cookie on one finger. She’d made a friend, I could see, and the calico curled up on her lap, then, to stay. “Charlie and I want to start our family soon.”

“Well, I’m not sorry about that,” I said. “I think grandchildren are the best part of being a mother. Twice the fun and half the worry.”

Elsa peered under lowered lids from me to April. “How, how
do
you know if … ? How can you tell if … if there is a baby? Can you tell before it comes?”

“Well,” April began, “I always get a brown spot on my left hand, right here, and my ankles puff up. Then I have a sour stomach nearly every day for a month. That’s a sure sign.”