Between Earth & Sky (25 page)

Paula sits outside, pulling the husks from the corn or stringing peppers as she watches the children play. They sometimes spend all morning chasing one another in circles or playing some other game. I enjoy it most when they sing. Their sounds drift through the house until I feel that I could be in heaven. In truth, they almost never fight with one another, or if they do, Paula hurries them off to her own house, claiming they will hurt the grandmother's ears with their shouting.

I look up from the letter I am writing and see their dark heads now framed by the window, and all around them the blue of the sky. Does it matter into what color skin we are born?

I remain,

Abigail

January 5, 1909

Dear Abigail,

My motives in trying to find a suitable home for your grandchild were to save you from having to take that difficult hut inevitable step yourself. You are nearly seventy; who would care for the child if you were to die? Her mother could come at any time and take her. Think of it, poor, senseless Margaret. And then what would become of the child?

I wish you had been able to come for the holidays. Surely winter must he difficult without any relations. Perhaps next year you could come and stay with John and me or Amy for the remainder of the winter. It was a lovely Christmas, with a tree Robert had cut for us, all decorated, and the house trimmed with ribbons and pine cones and lace. They came here to celebrate, all of them, Irene with her husband and four children, Robert and his family. Alex and Susan, who traveled all the way from Baltimore, where she works for the newspaper. And your Amy came with Everett and Ellen. So many grandchildren. I had filled various dishes with candies and spread them about, and there were the candies I had hung on the tree. Oh, they had a time finding them all and were filled with sweets before they left
.

Irene and Amy did all the cooking—the turkey and dressing, potatoes, green peas, breads, pudding, the pies. I had nothing but to sit in the armchair with the children playing all around me and take in the smells of the cooking. When they were done and the meal eaten, Amy came to sit by me at the partially empty table, saying she did not know what could be done about Anna, since it was clear you would refuse any help she tried to offer
.

I do not know myself and told her so. The child is dark-skinned—Amy says it is—like a Mexican or some Indian, a child of mixed origins with no father who will claim it and a mother who should by all rights have remained committed to an asylum. Who knows what this Anna will do with her life, given her heritage?

It is a difficult thing to watch the family line be extended this way. You have said that Anna's father's mother and sister care for her. Perhaps they or some other member of their family would claim her and take the responsibility of raising her. It would be more simple. Surely you must see it would benefit her also. Think how many minds you would ease if you could agree to some reasonable, some moral resolution
.

Yours, in sincerity,

Maggie

July 7, 1915

Dear Maggie,

Today is my seventy-fifth birthday. When I look backwards, I cannot imagine how I have allowed my refusal to write to you to continue for this long. One thing you must admit, your tenacity is equal or nearly equal to mine, for it has been more than five years since I have heard any news of you except for the bits Amy sends me. Have we become two sullen, foolish old women that we cannot step beyond what has happened and forgive one another? This birthday gives me pause, and I realize I cannot afford to let any more time pass without at least trying to make amends. I pledge my best effort.

You have no doubt read that we were granted statehood three years ago. Everywhere flags were unfurled in celebration, and I had the good fortune of hearing President Taft speak when he made his tour. It was a long and difficult climb. What a wondrous feeling to wake up a citizen of the state of New Mexico and know that the children born here will have the guarantee of an education.

We were in our third year of drought that fall, and there was nothing to be had, no corn, no milk from the cow. If not for José and our Spanish neighbors, Anna and I would have perished. But we have had rain the past two years, enough to fill the rivers again, and the valley is once again green.

Margaret comes to stay periodically, and each time I see how her illness has progressed. I have taken her to the doctors in the city, and various treatments were recommended, but nothing seems to help her. She has tried to poison herself with quicksilver. There was an asylum they wanted to put her in, but I would not let them. Perhaps I am to blame, trying to raise children in an unsettled place. She is as wild as the sage brush she ran through each day of her childhood, as unpredictable as the jack rabbits she chased. It is George's opinion that if a girl could run cattle, she would have been happy and not harmed herself.

George has settled on a ranch north of here, near the Colorado border. It is a large ranch, to hear him tell of it, but I have never got up there to see it. He is in charge of the entire operation and lives in a small house. I don't know that he will ever marry; he is forty-five years old now and so used to doing for himself, but there is a woman who washes his laundry. Once a year he comes for a visit, and I hardly know him for my son when he slides off his horse, picking me up and swinging me around as if I were a child.

Last month, the day before Margaret left, she spent all afternoon running through the desert until I had to ask José to go and find her, to bring her home. For another hour she screamed at the walls in her room, railing against me, then slept until late morning. That afternoon, when she disappeared without leaving a trace, I put on my riding clothes and rode up to the mesa on the gentle mare George had brought me.

It was a hot afternoon, so hot that I pictured them finding my old-woman bones weeks later, picked clean by buzzards. The sky pulsed with light, and when I looked across the sand I seemed to see small pools of water everywhere reflecting it. A dry, hot wind blew as I sat on my horse before the mesa, its shape cut against the sky, that mesa as familiar as any house to me. My eyes touched every part of it—the small piñons that grow at the base and the dark cedars that push themselves between the crevices, and the purple of the rock, everywhere rock. I leaned back in the saddle Clayton had ridden in and turned my face up to the sky. Its light poured through me, the dry heat.

Somehow, Maggie, I've let go of everyone now—my littlest children and Clayton, George, Amy, Margaret, many of the friends I made here, and you also, Maggie. It is that each day blows into the next one, all equally filled with light, and I do not expect or even hope for a letter or a visit. It no longer occurs to me to take the train east, where I could stay indefinitely with Amy and her family.

You will probably think this the babbling of an old, mindless woman. No doubt you and John are the contented elderly couple, surrounded by your children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces. Anna is becoming a young woman. My granddaughter, at least, I have not lost. And although I seldom leave the ranch, Thomas Mayfield continues to visit me, and Jenny Alden rode out just last week. Teresa is here, and Paula and José. I would change not anything I have done in my life.

Your Sister,

Abigail

December 14, 1915

Dear Maggie,

I did not write last summer to receive your pity. Please know that I am content with the life I have made for myself. Señora Teresa, with her bags of leaves and the piles of ripe pumpkins and squash she somehow harvested even when no rain fell, is still a great comfort to me, and I am able to attend church, where I see Jenny Alden. Once or twice a month, José drives Anna and me in the wagon. He leaves us by the front door and goes with Paula and their children to the nearby Catholic church. We are the gossip of the morning, but I sit with Anna in the back and do not pay it any mind. During the winter months José drives Anna to school. I twist her hair into pincurls each night and tie it up with ribbons before she leaves. She looks quite the young lady.

Pamela Porter passed away three years ago, but before she died she came to see me. It was during the last year of the drought, and we were two dried husks whispering and finally laughing together over the past. “What does any of it matter?” she said at last, and so we were reconciled.

I have learned to forget my other “Christian” friends who have deserted me. Surely a just God would see nothing “unseemly” or sacrilegious in my life. It is social custom which they are defending, and an unfair one at that. American men constantly make pregnant the “dark beauties,” some of whom work in their homes. These men worship the Lord each Sunday, and the ladies of the church turn their heads the other way and do not notice the Mexican or Indian babe with light hair or a pale complexion.

Thomas Mayfield is dead now also. He came out to stay with me late last summer, during the harvest. We spent the days riding up into the mountains and watching José and his sons bring in the corn and beans and bright chile peppers. The dark-green alfalfa was already bundled, so much of it there was, and the trees were heavy with apples, for it had been a good summer, with plenty of rain.

One day we went out into the orchard and picked apples. The ladders are long, and there we were high up in the trees, touching the red fruit, the leaves, and all of that light, light, light, the sky. Bees hummed with the sweetness. “I've found one, Abigail,” Thomas called out. “It's perfect. Completely red.” And I heard him bite into it, heard him sigh with how deeply he enjoyed it.

Later we brought out chairs and watched the sun set behind the mountains, among the trees, a thick, honey-colored light. And then it was November and he was dead, of a stroke, his daughter told me in the telegram she sent. She came back from the east to prepare for his funeral and asked me to attend.

There was a crowd of people there to mourn him, many of those, I suppose, who had been his patients or read his books on the southwest. I did not know anyone, except for the daughter, whom I had met once. Afterwards she asked that I come the next day to his house, where she was staying while she cleaned it out. The next morning when I arrived she gave me the drawings and paintings I had given to her father over the years and a watercolor which he had made recently, a bright-blue sky filled with leaves and red apples.

“He spoke of you often,” she said before I left. “He missed my mother terribly.”

I have little reason to travel now to Santa Fe, but last week I rode there in an automobile with Jenny Alden. “Come with me,” she had said. “It will do you good.” And so we laughed, two old women, for even Jenny is old now, in an auto bumping at that accelerated speed over the dirt roads.

The city is so changed, with electric lights that make the streets glow as soon as the sun goes down, and the theaters, which all advertise moving picture shows. I convinced Jenny that we should go inside one to see what the fuss is about, and so we bought tickets. The story line was rather foolish, but I cannot comprehend how the pictures are made to move across the screen. It is a marvelous invention.

At any rate, I have strayed too long from my purpose in writing, which is to wish you the best of holidays. I would send a greeting card, but as I seldom leave the ranch, I do not have any. This will have to suffice. It is a dark and chilling day, but I am seated in an armchair beside the stove, both dogs curled at my feet. I would make a cozy picture.

Your Sister,

Abigail

June 17, 1916

Dear Maggie,

We have had a beautiful spring, the valley and desert sown with color. The alfalfa fields have turned a deep purpled green and are ready for another cutting. Yesterday morning I walked into the orchard and saw the small apples hanging like ornamental balls in the early sun. I nearly reached up to pick one, they looked so golden in that light.

I read in the newspapers of the fighting in Europe. There is talk of sending our troops. If we enter the war, will they send for your grandsons? I believe George, at forty-six, is too old. He has numerous injuries from cattle ranging, so that I cannot imagine they would take him.

I did enjoy seeing Amy and Everett last month. It was so good of Ellen to take time off her studies at the university to accompany them. It had been three years since I had seen her, and I was impressed at what an attractive, articulate young woman she has become. Amy is fifty-three years now, I cannot believe it, and Everett is nearly sixty. He was suffering with a sore back while they were here, so Ellen and I and Anna went out riding without them.

“Watch out for your grandmother,” Amy called to Anna and her daughter as we got on the horses. She does not seem to comprehend that I ride out alone still as often as I like when they are not here. I stayed back and let those two young women take the lead out across the desert and along the base of the mountains. I heard their laughter and pieces of their conversation. It was good to see them together this way.

Bea Manning was here in April for a few weeks, after all the years it has been. She was traveling by railroad to Colorado, to stay with her son. Oh, it did me good to see her. We two went riding along the river and up into the mountains. She does not seem nearly as old as I am, for her skin is soft and her hair is still nearly all dark. This she attributes to her lack of association with men the past forty years. “They age us, Abigail,” she told me.