The Star Garden (3 page)

“What’s on your mind?” I asked. He had been hinting for two weeks now that he could move to Tucson and hang out his shingle. He thinks a fancy San Francisco architect could make a good living in Tucson. I had told him Tucson was a rough old cob of a place, but he showed me where the
Weekly Star
says that Tucson is the most important city between St. Louis and Los Angeles. I’d told him, “Tucson may well be the best city between St. Louis and China, but it still isn’t much.” Why, he’d never make it there.

“I’ve been thinking—now don’t get flustered, hear me out—about the children’s education.”

“They’re learning so quick, I can hardly keep up with them,” I said. “Regular scholars.”

“Sis, they’re pulling a switch on you. Story and Honor both had that poem a year ago in school. And Truth wrote that essay a while back, too. They all made believe they were new and pretended to learn them. And they’re not doing any arithmetic except a few sums.”

What more do they need? My children and Albert’s had all come here for school. Every one of them had come up through my book room knowing all they needed to get into college. “They’re doing Latin and planetary motion.”

“Their manners are atrocious. I’m raising a pack of rogues.”

All four of them were pretty spoiled, that was true. I never felt it was my place to do more than fuss at them, though fussing surely didn’t change their behavior much. Harland barely noticed what they did, back-talking and laughing at grown folks, fighting with each other like wildcats. I said, “They won’t be better behaved in town. You won’t even have me to help you look after them and feed them. Are you going to have time to teach them etiquette and wash their duds and cook and sew,
and
draw diagrams of parlors and keeping rooms?”

He put his arm around my shoulders. “You’ve taken great care of all of us. You feed us and keep everything clean and fine. The only thing that’s wrong here is that life is not what my children are accustomed to. There’s so little structure. So much is expected, you see, in a private school and home with a governess. Discipline and control …”

I let out my breath. Discipline and control? Did he want to raise soldiers? And was he telling me the only things he thinks I do are cooking and cleaning? I was mad enough at his words that I’d like to see him on his way. Harland’s arm lay heavy across my shoulder, and my anger was tempered with the weight of that arm. “Little brother, you know you’re welcome to stay. I own that house in Tucson. If you want it, you can live there and try your luck.”

“First time you actually sound like you’d let me go.”

“Keep telling me I don’t know how to mind children, and I’ll mail you to town myself with a stamp from my boot. General delivery. Why would you want to take your children to town? They’ll be exposed to all kinds of diseases. Rough characters. Unfair teachers.”

“They tell me you’re a mean teacher.”

“They tell me you can whistle out your eyebrows.”

He laughed. “You know, that house of yours was the first whole house I ever built.”

“Did I ever pay you for that?”

“I recollect I billed you a peach pie and a haircut. Believe you paid twice.”

I patted his arm. “When you leaving?”

“I don’t know. Thought I’d have more trouble convincing you than that.”

“There’s no rush.”

Later, I showed Miss James to my room. Then I handed her a night shift and set about tightening up the ropes under my bed to pull the sagging middle up flatter. When I’m alone there’s no harm in letting it sag. I don’t mind sharing with someone but with another woman in the bed, I’d as soon we didn’t slide toward the middle all night long.

I turned down the lamp, and as I was getting in, Miss James rolled away from me. I faced the opposite wall, too. I was thinking about Harland and each of his children. Thinking what they’d need, how they’d fare in town, how much better they’d be here in the fresh air.

Miss James’s voice startled me. “Miss Castle thought he was going to marry her. That’s all. I saw you looking cross when her name was brought up.”

It took me a minute to put that into place. “Professor Fairhaven?”

“She said he talked to her of marriage and having a family.”

“
Did
he talk of it?”

“Well, she was going to have a … no matter what she did, she was my friend.”

“I see.” No matter what she did. Going to have … what, a little visitor? The story played out in my imagination. The learned Dr. Fairhaven had seduced Miss Castle and talked her into leaving her business behind and coming with him with no promise of marriage or support. As if when he got tired of her company he could tell her to go set up a shop somewhere.

Miss James sniffled, and after a bit, said, “Do you really?”

I never could see how a woman could give over to a man, without reservation, without a ring or a parson. Still, there wasn’t any use in being harsh toward Miss James so I said, “She must have loved him.”

“She told me I had him all wrong and that he was real smart and fun to be with and clever, and she wanted to marry him, I know that.”

I saw no grief in Professor Fairhaven’s eyes. Disdain, that’s what I saw. A far cry from Harland’s deep-cut pain. “You don’t think he loved her?” I asked.

“Oh, I said that before, but how can you tell? Maybe. Love? Well, maybe. As a man does, I s’pect.”

“I’ll tell you what, Miss James,” I said, turning in the dark to look over my shoulder and face her. I saw little sparks of moonlight reflected in her eyes. “If he did, you and the whole world would know it.” I lay back down, facing my wall, and went on, “I’ve been loved both poorly and greatly by two different men. A woman who dreams of a good home with a man who holds for her only a poor love is putting a fifty-dollar saddle on a twenty-dollar horse. She’d be far better off single than riding with him.”

At that, she said no more and soon I heard her breathing hard, sleeping. Well, I had had a way of stopping all conversations this evening, that was the pure truth. Reckon there wasn’t any more to say anyway.

Completely separate from the newcomers to our house, from the family busting at its seams, and from the ranch barely earning feed for chickens, apart from all and weighted by it all, I live my life in a state of hushed desperation these days. Under my skin I feel an urgency, a need for hurrying through everything I touch, while on the surface, I work as calm as ever, moving through each day, doing one thing at a time. I used to take pride in what I accomplished, but now each chore is little more than a task to put my hands to, with no meaning of its own.

We weren’t planning yesterday to travel to town, but now with a day’s hard travel ahead of us, there followed the usual commotion of packing up clothing and setting up who’d stay to feed animals and deciding what food we’d take along. With the extra folks to carry, we’d have to borrow the big surrey from my brother Albert and his wife, Savannah, who live up the road a mile. While Gilbert went to do that, I checked off the morning’s chores with no more thought to my overnight guests than if they were a few stray cats roosting in the courtyard.

This past fall has been a season of great changes for me. My old house was torn down by a tornado, the new one built and filled with all its new occupants, then adding to it, the loss of the familiar faces of my son Charlie gone to be a Ranger, and my nephew Willie, hung for cattle rustling and murder. Charlie left to find Willie and took up with the Arizona Rangers, and he’s been gone ever since. Maybe that’s why I feel so all-fired rushed, as if so much is happening so fast, and I can barely stay equal to each day.

There is one thing that slows me down and settles my troubled soul. One person, that is. He came to this area out of the blue, last summer, bringing my brother Ernest’s remains home from the war in Cuba to rest here in my graveyard on the hill. From the beginning, Udell Hanna seemed like a decent man, and lonesome, and the two of us have sheltered our lonesomeness more and more in the comfort of our clasped hands.

Where my Jack had been all fire and storm and tumult, Udell Hanna is slow to rile as a pool of still water. Savannah keeps asking me if I plan to settle down with him, as I confessed to her that I’ve kissed him. Savannah is mighty pious, in all the best ways, and she believes all kissing should be reserved until after betrothal. I don’t know about marrying him, though. I like keeping company, is all. I really like keeping his company. I figured Udell ought to know we were driving to town. There might be some tool he’d need, a sack of baking powder or gunpowder or such. I closed the latch on the chicken coop, my apron holding four dear eggs. It’s winter and my “ladies” are slow laying. I put two under the setting hen and counted a dozen in there she’s warming, plus got a whale of a peck on my arm for checking.

I put the remaining two eggs by the tin sink to clean them off. I called out to the house, “I’m going for a ride.”

Granny looked up from snoozing by the stove in a chair and said, “Is that the parson from town?”

“Who, Mama?” I said.

“The one with the black hair. He’s sweet on you.”

“No he isn’t, Mama. He’s some professor of letters from the university and a rapscallion I’ll be glad to be shed of.”

“You said suchlike before. About that soldier fella.”

To compare Professor Fairhaven to my dear Jack Elliot was like putting a three-legged mule next to a racehorse. I felt instantly cross and was about to tell her so, but the tumult I felt under my skin has also had the effect of numbing my tongue when I’ve felt any lack of patience toward her. My mama could barely see at all, much less discern some attraction between me and that flapping, sputtering Californian. “I never got shed of Jack,” I said. “I married him.”

“I’ll be riding in the buggy with you.”

“It’s awfully cold out, Granny. You’d best stay home. We’ll only be gone a couple of days. Savannah’s going to send Mary Pearl here to stay with you and Grampa Chess.” I thought of something quick to make my point. “Harland and the little ones will need you.”

“No, I just heard you say you were going for a ride. Just you hitch up the two-seater and we’ll go down together to that Hanna’s place. He lives on that feller’s land south of the rancho. That’s what I mean. You’re not going down there without a chaperone!”

“Mama, I was just going down for a bit to share the eggs with him. You stay here and be warm. We can’t leave for a couple of hours. It’s going to take Gilbert a while to fetch the freight and grips from the stagecoach. May as well be neighborly.”

“You want folks to talk?”

I felt a sudden heat swelling from my breastbone to my chin. “It’s not like I’m still a girl,” I said.

“Well, it ain’t like you’re a old cob, neither.”

“Mama.” Nevertheless, I hitched the buggy myself, and wrapped Granny in three blankets plus the lap cover. As we drove along, I could hear her humming. The cold burned my face. I didn’t want her to fall asleep and freeze to death, so I talked a blue streak about the weather and the look of the sky, what we’d do in town and if she meant for me to bring something back special for her. After a while, I asked her again, and still she didn’t say anything. Finally, I said, “Mama? Can’t you hear me under there?”

She said, “Sarah? I’m thinking. Hush.” After a while, Granny said, “This here Rudolfo Maldonado’s land?”

“It’s the quickest way to Mr. Hanna’s place.”

“Well, go around! I won’t ever set foot on Maldonado land again. Not after what he pulled last summer. I don’t care if he builds you ten houses, he ain’t going to ever pay you back for running off the cows and pi’soning the well.”

I sighed. I’d as soon whip my old friend Rudolfo Maldonado as see him, but chances were good he wasn’t even here. More likely to run into him in Tucson than at the hacienda. And strictly speaking, Willie had taken the cows, not Rudolfo. But Rudolfo was the one who’d paid a cowboy to poison my south water tank; thankfully the wells by the house were safe enough. It was him feeling guilty that made him foot half the bill to put up the adobe place we live in now. “Well, stay in the buggy, Mama, and you won’t be setting foot on his ground.”

“You’re awful quick to forgive and forget.”

I said, “I’m not forgetting. I’m just not grudging the land, only the man that owns it.” It was four miles from my house to the Hannas’. About two miles of it was across Rudolfo’s land.

“Tried to starve us out of business.” Granny leaned to the side and spat. “That’s what I think of you and all your kin!”

I laughed under my kerchief and chucked the reins. A hard place in my chest suggested I was neither forgetting nor forgiving the size of that wound. We were silent the rest of the way.

Long ago, after my first husband Jimmy died, left me with this place, and I was running ragged trying to keep it going alone, I’d even considered marrying Rudolfo’s twin brother, Ruben. Ruben Maldonado had died at the hands of an Apache warrior before I gave him my answer. That would have made three for me—three dead husbands instead of two. After that rascal Jimmy died, well, along came Jack Elliot and I never looked back. I shook the reins again, hurrying the horses across the scarred ground of my memories.

Here, on this higher, grassy slope, I shed all thought of the strangers troubling my house. My heart gave a stir when I laid eyes on Udell, chopping rows in the earth with a pickaxe behind a wire fence. I knew him by the coat and hat, but also by the regular method to his movement. When he turned to see who was coming, the warmth that had ringed my throat rushed upward to my hair, and I knew I was all a-blush. I was thankful for the kerchief around my nose and cheeks and the Stetson hat pulled low.

He tipped his hat as I pulled to a stop. “ ’Morning, ladies,” he said.

“ ‘Morning,” I said. Granny only nodded. I continued, “I won’t interrupt your work. Just wanted to know if you needed anything from town. I forgot the

Udell reached up for Granny while he said, “Come in and I’ll stoke the fire. Was just going to make a pot of coffee.”

She didn’t move, so I said, “Mama, don’t you want to go in?” “Well, I’m about froze to death,” Granny said. “Naturally.” Instead of the line shack Udell uses for a summer house, we went into the tent he had built around his stove. When his house burnt down last season, he and his son, Aubrey, had taken the stove outside and left it clear of the first lean-to he made, afraid the stove’s heat would burn the lean-to, also. By himself, the stove was too heavy to move, so he’d pulled up an army tent and pitched it around the stove. It was a pretty good setup for winter, warm as a summer’s day inside.

Waiting for the water to boil, Udell told us about a garden he was digging and we talked about planting for a winter crop. I watched him drop the coffee into the boiling water, and caught his glance for a moment. He turned away quickly, studying the coffee grounds. For a long spell, no one spoke. At last, when the smell started to welcome us, he got some cups from their nails on the wooden tent frame and handed them out. “Kind of soon for you to be going back to town, isn’t it?” he said. “Sugar?”

“I’d take sugar,” Granny said. “Thank you.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Stagecoach turned over. The passengers are at my place and I’d rather drive them to town than feed them. Driver’s dead, and a woman.”

He took my mama’s cup and carefully poured in the coffee, set it down, and passed her a Mason jar full of chunks of brown sugar. “It wasn’t Pancho Dailey, was it?”

Granny fished into the jar with two fingers, pulled out a lump, and said, “Bennychelli.”

“We’re leaving before noon,” I said, “I want to get there before dark. Gil and his grampa are going to decide which among ‘em is going and who’s staying. I meant to bring you an egg. I plum forgot.”

“You asked Chess about the weather?” Udell said. His hands touched mine as he filled my cup. His brows lifted slightly, and the twinkle in his eye was as sharp as the sun in June. “I don’t know about his rheumatism, but by my shoulders, I’d be ready for rain.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s been so crotchety lately,” I said.

Udell sat on his haunches, blowing over the top of his own cup for a minute. “You can probably beat it to town. Long as you’re going, I could use nails. Five pounds. And three iron strap hinges, six- or ten-inchers, whatever they’ve got. I’ll give you cash so you don’t have to lay out for it.” From under the bedroll in the corner, he pulled a tin that had once held salted fish.

“I’ll bring your change,” I said.

He put a five-dollar note in my hand. “Whatever’s left, use on beans. Even if it’s only a pound or two. My sack got mold.”

Granny went after the sugar in the bottom of her empty cup with one finger. Pretty soon she looked up at me and said, “What?”

“Good coffee?” I said.

“Ain’t had sugar in a spell,” she said. “If you’re going to kiss anyone, feller, you best go on get it done. We’ve got tracks to make.” She licked her finger again.

I said, “Mama!”

“It ain’t like you’re a little girl, I heard,” she said. Udell looked at me. I don’t know if my face was as red as his, but it felt as if it were. Granny said, “That’s what we come for, ain’t it?”

I shook my head. “I came to see if he needed any goods from town,” I said.

Udell smiled broadly. “Well, now, Granny, usually someone charges a fee for delivering goods. But a kiss? It seems a fair bargain for fetching my hardware. I’d gladly pay it. Do we have a deal, Sarah?”

I handed him my empty cup. “I’ll not be bargained for nor fiddled with by my own mother. If you want a kiss from me, Mr. Hanna, it had better not be traded for nails and hinges but for something of equal value to the kiss itself.” I smiled, then said, “Sun’s a-wasting,” and stood and straightened my hat.

He squinted at me, then said, “I assure you, Mrs. Elliot, my intentions are pretty honorable. However, the kiss I intended was not for you.” He bent and bussed my mama’s cheek loudly.

“Oh, fiddlesticks!” she said, swatting at him with her bony hands. “Rascal!”

I laughed as I put his five-dollar note in my glove, and while I was putting on the glove, Granny lifted the tent flap and headed for the buggy. Udell bent quickly and brushed my lips with his. I took one step toward the tent flap with him on my heels, and when I turned my head, he was there. It was just a moment’s kiss, a debt paid in kind, the trade goods for the kiss before it. I hadn’t had sugar in a long time, either.

He called, “Godspeed,” as we drove away. Granny and I pulled up our kerchiefs to keep the cold from freezing our noses.

A ways down the road, she pulled the calico off her face. “What’s wrong with him?” Granny demanded.

“He fixed
your
wagon, didn’t he?”

She pushed the kerchief over her nose and got quiet again, but I smiled the whole way home.

We got those folks loaded into Albert and Savannah’s surrey, and Gilbert and Chess packed up the flatbed, putting everything above the bodies on a false bottom that sets on a rack. Chess had won, or lost I suppose, the right to drive the wagon, and he drove behind me while I handled the surrey. I could have let one of the professors handle Albert’s team, but I knew the horses better than I knew the men, so I drove. I tied Baldy on behind, to have a saddle horse when we got to town. Savannah and her daughters Rebeccah and Mary Pearl had packed us apple butter sandwiches made on thick chunks of bread. I took the basket and bid them farewell, and we started down the road toward Tucson.

We got about an hour down the road, and from there, we were higher above the rest of the road toward town. The town of Benson is off in the distance one direction, and Tucson is the other way, though you can’t see it from here. Another hour along we’d come to a place we call the “arroyo grande,” a wide and deep gorge that leads up toward Pantano Ranch. It stays dry most of the time, but when it runs it’s a tumult. The smell of rain had been in the air since we left. I pulled the horses to a stop, and Chess brought the wagon up alongside. The sky north of us loomed gray and heavy, as if clouds sat right down on the land. The mountains that should have been due north were swallowed in the dark mantle. A chill wind broke through the flaps of my coat and burned my neck.