Harvest of Fury (47 page)

To Chris, there was strangeness in finding accounts in the
Bisbee Daily Review
of aerial battles over Europe fought at 6,000 to 19,000 feet, while across the border in Agua Prieta, Villistas were being shot against the wall.

Congress had passed a Selective Service bill May 18, and when a government agent had entered the Navajo reservation to register men for the draft, he'd been run off. In Phoenix thirty-seven Russian conscientious objectors had gone to prison. In a raid over London German planes killed ninety-seven people and wounded more than four hundred. On June 20, 1917, England finally gave women the vote. The next day in Washington, a mob tore down suffragette flags.

Ladies were wearing Paul Revere tricorns with insignia of the Signal Corps and martially styled coats.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
played at the Orpheum, following Fox's best production,
A Tale of Two Cities
. Doug Fairbanks thrilled fans in
The Americans
, and Theda Bara, for ten and fifteen cents, could be seen at the Central in
Her Greatest Love
. Fatima cigarettes were an elegant smoke and gas-fired water heaters and ranges brought clean convenience to the home.

War fever was mounting. The agitators at Jerome were called traitors and saboteurs because copper was a basic need in munitions. Trouble raged in the mines at Butte, Montana, climaxing in a walkout June 21. There was unrest at the Globe mines, but the
Review
complacently reported that all was peace in Bisbee.

When Chris mentioned Jerome or Butte or Globe to Johnny, he just smiled, turned back to his guitar, or took her in his arms. She'd heard of no real difficulties, though there were rumors that the existing union resented the infiltration of IWWs. Miners moved around so much, especially young, unmarried ones, that new men were constantly being hired, and under pressure for increased war production, screening for radicals wasn't as thorough as it had been during the slump years.

Sometimes, after Johnny had left for his night shift and she lay restless in the bed they'd shared physically though he wouldn't share his thoughts, Chris felt a great need to talk with Sant, or simply be with him.

Why was that when she felt she couldn't marry him? He had first asked her when he finished medical school three years ago. She had refused him with almost as much shock as if a brother had made the proposal, a younger brother she'd taken care of when he was little and shy.

Not that the four-year-old orphan Patrick had brought home looked much like the tall young man with Apache-black hair and eyes the color of a blue thundercloud just before it rains. Talitha had said to him once, “Watching you is just like seeing James, my brother, the way he'd have been if the times hadn't torn him between being white and Apache.”

Sant had laughed. “My Apache blood couldn't have come from a man who'd have given me more credit with them. They still remember Fierro—and the white woman who died with him.”

This heritage had smoothed Sant's way as a doctor on the San Carlos agency. He had inherited his father's healing hands and instinctive method of diagnosis. He also got the Indian medicine men to help with treatment.

“Apaches are just like whites in that many of their ills are caused by a sad or angry or frightened heart,” he had told Chris on his first visit home. “To know that people are praying and singing for you to get well, appealing to the great powers, has to give hope, help the body to heal itself.”

“Teresita brought back my sight just by speaking.”

“She had great power. Much of it was hypnotism, I'm sure, but she must have also been a conductor of tremendous energy. I have some of that in my fingers, but nothing like hers.” His eyes changed and he'd reached for her hands. “Chris, you can't hide at Socorro all your life! You have to get out in the world and live in it, decide to trust a man.”

She had tried to pull free. He held her implacably, his face as grim as Fierro's must have been when he prepared for battle.

“I teach school here!” she retorted defensively.

“And visit the sick and help Talitha and Sewa look after the aging and newborns!” He gave her a little shake. “Face it, Chris! You're living just as you did before you married Riordan, sleeping in the room you had as a child, safe with a family and people who love you.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“You aren't living your own life, loving your love.” This shake was rougher. “Christina Revier, you seem perfectly ready to stay here till the day you die, never try again for anything of your own, never risk anything!”

She had loved and she had risked, but the blood had been Cruz's. Would she never feel clean of that? Tears stung her eyes. Averting her face when she couldn't wrench away from those determined hands, she said in a tight whisper, “Sant, can't you leave me in peace?”

She felt and heard his breath catch. “Chris, I've always loved you. Why won't you marry me?”

“I've told you before! You're like a brother to me.”

He set his hand behind her head, brought her close with his other arm, and kissed her long and sweetly and savagely. In spite of her scarred memories of Fayte, her deliberate blocking of any sensual hungers that tried to stir in her, Sant's hard yet tender mouth sent her stilled blood racing, swirled spreading fire through her. He touched her breast. She moaned, twisted away from him.

“Sant! That wasn't fair!”

His eyes seemed almost black. “Could a brother do that?”

Retreating, she raised her fingers to her lips and gazed at him reproachfully, till a new thought struck, a way to make him stop tormenting her—and, not so incidentally, to assuage the roused desire that coursed tumultuously through her whole body.

“Would you like to come to my room?” she asked.

His face colored violently, then drained. Rising, he clenched his hands behind him. “No, I won't come to your little girl's room! I won't take you while your blood's up so you can despise and forget me.”

He had read her even better than she knew herself. Sobered, ashamed of what she would have done to their long, special bond, she put out her hand to him. “Sant—”

“I want to live with you,” he said, each word heavy. “I want to live with you my whole life, see your face the last thing in this world, lie next to you up on the hill after we are dead. I won't have you, Christina, till you feel that way, too.”

He'd gone back to the reservation. What he'd said festered; she could no longer sink herself in teaching in the little ranch schoolhouse or in sharing the life of the family, dear as they all were. At the end of the week she had begun to look for a job. She found one in Bisbee.

That had been two years ago. Sant's response to that had been, “Well, at least you're breaking out of your nice, warm cocoon. But it'll be a wonder if you don't marry some mining tycoon or engineer. Trophies have such a nice, safe life. They just ornament a house.”

She laughed at him. “Sant, I think whatever I do, you'll say I'm not facing life till I decide to marry you!”

After a moment's surprise, he chuckled, too, but the way his eyes touched her throat and mouth stilled her laughter. “You're right. I am what you have to face up to, Chris. Soon or late.”

It was hard for him to force that issue, though, tied down by his work at the reservation. She'd seen him at Christmas when they both went home to Socorro, and he'd come by at Easter, staying at the Copper Queen Hotel, though he was with her every waking moment.

“All right,” he said on their last evening. “You've proved you can live away from home. Now, when are you going to prove that you can live with love?”

Holding Nicodemus, stroking his soft coat, she said, “I don't have to jump hurdles, Sant. I'm doing useful work, I enjoy the children, and—”

“You're shutting out your life as a woman.”

She yawned wickedly. “Suppose I told you I have a half dozen strong, stalwart miners?”

“I'd know you lied.”

“Heckle me enough and I may try it!” She sprang to her feet, scowling. “Sant, can't you get it through your head that I feel incestuous with you? I care far too much about you, even when you're being a stubborn mule, to use you for a convenience.”

“I'm not that convenient.” He got to his feet, strong, clean, beautiful in a masculine way. He
did
appeal to her, and he sensed it. “Give me a night, even an hour, and we'd have no more of this incest and little-brother nonsense.”

She watched him, gripped by the desire that radiated from him with real physical impact. “You can have me, Sant.”

He took a long stride then checked himself. “Not like that. Not till you mean it for more than a way to get rid of me and cool any fever you've worked up!”

She hadn't seen him since. As she waited in the twilight for Johnny, she wondered what Sant would think about them. Strangely, she felt guilt, as if she'd been deceiving someone with a claim on her.

That was crazy. She'd been honest with Sant. In fact, if he stood by his tiresomely repeated convictions, he ought to applaud her for taking a lover, one who was certainly not safe.

Toward the end of June, Johnny said he wouldn't be able to see her for a while. The evening of the twenty-sixth he played his guitar in the park, attracting a crowd to listen to six leaders exhort the miners to strike till the company agreed to seven demands.

On June 28 the Citizens' Protective League, made up of about a thousand businessmen and residents, condemned the IWW as a treasonous group conspiring against the government. Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler was down from Tombstone to keep order. He was the last commander of the Arizona Rangers, which had been disbanded by the legislature in 1909.

In spite of pickets, about half the miners were still at work. As the town seethed, Wheeler swore in two hundred deputies. Officials claimed that most of the pickets were foreigners. Except for snatching a few hours' sleep, Johnny was constantly on the picket line now, playing his guitar, singing Joe Hill's songs.

The union demands sounded fair enough to Chris, though not serious enough for a strike till more negotiation had been tried. She knew of Johnny's dream world without classes, wages, or bosses, a society where everyone worked and received enough for a good life. The idea appealed to her sense of justice, but she strongly doubted that it would work.

All the same, though of two minds about the strike, Chris decided to bring Johnny milk and sandwiches. Her action would mark her as a radical and shock the mineowners who were friends of her father, but she felt she must stand in the daylight beside the man who had given her such joy at night. Johnny smiled and thanked her, then wolfed down the food.

Next morning only Sulev joined her for a nature walk. “My da's on strike,” he said proudly, “but the others aren't. The kids would like to come, Miss Christina, but their folks are scared to let them keep you company.”

She and the Lithuanian boy had a stroll beyond Chihuahua Hill, watched a pair of red-tailed hawks soar and plummet, found a wolf spider's hole, scared a rattlesnake away from a curved-bull thrasher's nest. After parting with Sulev, Chris walked slowly homeward.

Several members of the school board were waiting on her porch. They came to the point at once. Was she keeping company with an IWW, an outsider come to stir up the workers and make trouble?

“I'm Johnny Chance's friend.” She glanced from one board member to another, sad at their closed faces but not blaming them.

“We don't want a person like you teaching our children,” said an angry woman who was wearing one of the Paul Revere tricorns.

An elderly storekeeper, who'd tried more than once to squeeze Chris's arm, coughed gently. “As the father of daughters, Miss Revier, let me remind you what grief your conduct would bring to your father, the senator. Would you want him to lose his place among the honored lawmakers of this state because of your folly?”

“My father can't be blamed for what I do,” Chris said curtly. The thought of how quickly he'd have dispersed these puny souls helped her control her hurt and humiliation. “Very well. You've discharged me. Please stop trespassing and go about your business.”

“You're renting from my brother,” hissed the big blond woman. “He asked me to tell you to move.”

“My rent's paid till the end of July.”

“He'll give you a refund.”

“I prefer to stay here.”

“Brazen!”

“If you don't leave,” said Chris, opening the door, “I believe I'll have to call the sheriff.”

After much mumbling and spiteful, curious stares, the group went down Opera Drive, full of righteousness but deflated at her acceptance of their edict.

Finally, it was no sacrifice. Chris lived on a tithe of her income, a good portion of which went to send promising young people to college and help support a children's home her mother had started in Phoenix. The pain was in caring about the children, trying to find a way to interest each one in learning, and now realizing that she wouldn't see them in the fall, wouldn't know how they were doing.

Too, it hurt to be spoken to like that.

Nicodemus rubbed against her leg as she stared sightlessly out the window. Picking him up, she pressed her face against him and let herself cry.

The mayor banned street gatherings. On July 3 the mines in Globe were shut down by strikers, and on the next day five carloads of cavalry reached that embattled town to keep order. In Bisbee's July 4 parade the Workmen's Loyalty League, miners who weren't striking, joined the procession in Tombstone Cañon and marched with it through Brewery Gulch.

There were burro races, pushmobile races, and ball games, but Chris went out only to take Johnny his lunch. She hadn't told him that she had lost her job or that the children, except for Sulev, no longer walked with her. He wouldn't want to know it. He was totally absorbed in the strike, encouraging the pickets with stories of other hard-won union victories, cheering them with his music.