Harvest of Fury (49 page)

Chris's head felt light and strange without the hair she'd cropped with shears Jed had purchased. She wore a straw hat pulled low and believed that to a casual eye she'd pass for a rather girlish boy.

Johnny knew her at once, though. As she trudged up the slope to the mine, he left the pickets and hurried forward. “Chris! What on earth—”

“Women aren't supposed to be out today.” With difficulty she kept from catching his hands or reaching up to touch that curly red-brown hair. “Johnny, they're going to ship you all out tomorrow. Why don't you go now?”

His gray eyes were incredulous. “I helped start this. Got to stay with the men. You know that.”

She was ashamed. “Then I'm staying with you,” she said.

“You can't!”

“Why do you think I cut off my hair?”

“Oh, pretty lady!” He gazed at her, between distress and mockery, before he completely sobered. “Chris, there may be killing. This isn't for you. Why, you're not even sure the strike's justified! Go along home.” He put his hand on her shoulder and grinned coaxingly. “Maybe by the time your hair grows, I'll be back.”

She shook her head. “I'm staying with you.”

“Why?”

“Because I can't bear to wait behind a door while that posse does whatever it's going to do.”

His mouth quirked. “You could if you didn't know me.”

“But I do know you.”

He sighed, but his thin body seemed to grow more substantial, become more firmly put together. “All right. Let's find a picket sign just your size.”

Most of the pickets went home at dusk, but a few stayed on, including Johnny and Chris. When shifts changed at midnight, there was jeering back and forth between the strikers and men who'd gone on working. “Call me scab all you want,” shouted one burly miner. “Scabbed is what you're gonna be when Wheeler gets through with you! Goddamn sabotaging Wobblies!”

Soon it was still again. Only a few lights burned in town. Chris huddled close to Johnny; at that altitude nights were cool even in July. He didn't talk to her, but off and on he played softly, sometimes sang a little. Not IWW songs, but “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Bonnie Annie Laurie,” “The Gypsy Laddie,” and the one he'd sung when they'd first met, when he'd asked for food.

“
Who's goin' to be your man tonight
…”

She shivered and stayed close to him. Now and then she drowsed; but when she jerked awake, Johnny was always sitting up, either playing or gazing into the night.

The gray fingers of dawn appeared on the horizon, changed to peach, and rose as the darkness shrank away. Johnny got up, went over to the other pickets, and began to sing “Joe Hill.”

“‘
Joe Hill ain't dead,' he says to me
,

‘Joe Hill ain't never died
.

Where workingmen are out on strike

Joe Hill is at their side
.

Joe Hill is at their side.'
”

The pickets began to sing with him, softly, then with fervor. “Look!” called someone. “They're coming! Wheeler's men!”

“What'll we do?” whispered a young miner next to Chris.

“Let them arrest us,” Johnny said. “Don't give them an excuse to use those guns.”

“Come on, you Wobs!” shouted the leader. “We're gonna give you a free ride out of Arizona!”

Gesturing with rifles and pistols, the deputies hustled the pickets along the railroad track toward Warren, a mile away, and herded them into the fenced, board-sided baseball diamond where other prisoners were being cooped. Chris managed to slip in among the confused crowd without being spotted by the deputies. A few miners stared at her in momentary surprise, but they were too worried about their own fates to trouble about a rich man's daughter.

The whole scene was nightmarishly unbelievable. The posse had seven machine guns in addition to their smaller weapons. Several times, Chris saw Fayte bringing in strikers and turned so he wouldn't see her face.

There was the sound of a distant shot, then several more. In a few minutes word buzzed through guards and prisoners that a deputy named McRae had been shot by a miner named Chew, who'd been instantly killed. As well as searching for strikers, the posse was hunting for the arms and ammunition they thought the IWW had cached, but nothing was found.

“My wife's going to have a baby!” one boyish miner protested. “Who's going to take care of her if they send me away?”

“My old mother depends on me,” muttered another.

An older man seemed to be dazed and kept shaking his graying head. “It ain't fair! This is America! They can't do this!”

A Ford parked at the corner, and the driver got out and stood for a long time watching the prisoners. Sant! Chris almost shouted his name, then remembered where she was and swallowed her outcry. He could get her out of the bullpen, but she could do that herself just by revealing her identity. Sant couldn't stop this deportation, though. No use getting him mixed up in it.

Her father must have phoned him, and Sant had driven down to look after her. He'd worry when he couldn't find her, but eventually she'd be on a boxcar with Johnny, the train would take them somewhere, and she could let her family know she was safe.

Still, when Sant got back in his car and drove toward town, she felt abandoned and had to fight back tears.

Armed deputies formed two rows through which strikers were made to pass as they were loaded into waiting cattle cars and boxcars. They were asked if they'd go back to work. Those who agreed were released. The others were herded into cars that smelled of dung.

Johnny played his guitar and sang till the waiting men and those on the boxcars joined in fervently.

“
You will eat, bye and bye
,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay
,

You'll get pie in the sky when you die
.”

Fayte came through the prisoners to Johnny. Chris faded behind some men. “We don't want you on this train,” Fayte said. “Come on, songbird. Sheriff Wheeler's told me to give you a ride out of town.”

“I want to go with my friends.”

“So you can keep them stirred up?” Fayte prodded Johnny with a pistol. “Get moving, Wob.”

Slowly, Johnny moved through the prisoners. Chris followed, though she kept out of Fayte's view. Sant's Ford was back. He was scanning the crowd in the diamond. Someone must have told him she'd been seeing one of the strikers. As they cleared the fringe of strikers, Johnny turned around.

“Let me stay with the others.”

“No. You're the head of the snake, maybe its heart. Without you, it won't rattle long!”

“They'll think I made some deal with you.” Johnny's voice rose. Chris had never seen him afraid, but he felt fear now. “They'll think I sold out.”

Fayte chuckled. “That's exactly what we'll tell 'em, songbird. Maybe next time they won't listen to you damn Wobblies.” He nudged Johnny with the gun. “Get going.”

Johnny walked a few steps. Then he turned suddenly, dropping his guitar as he sprang for Fayte. Fayte's gun and another guard's roared at the same time.

Slammed backward, Johnny put his hands over his side. Blood poured between his fingers, pumped from the wound in his throat, as he fell.

Chris ran toward him, hat dropping off as she fell on her knees to lift him. His eyes opened.

“Pretty lady.”

He coughed. Blood poured from his mouth as he died in her arms.

Tomochic Cananea. Blood. Darkness. The blue of the sky went black as she felt Fayte's hands gripping her. But as he called her name, there was Sheriff Wheeler's angry voice demanding what Fayte was trying to do, and there were Sant's hands and Sant's voice.

It was late September. Chris, Nicodemus in her lap, had been sitting on the porch with Talitha when the baby stirred, tugging at her vitals. Johnny's baby, the stranger's seed, rooted in her as any drifting seed will try to find a warm rich place to nestle and rest and produce its kind.

“The babe?” asked Talitha. Her eyes were bright blue at seventy-seven and, for all they had looked on, were still unwavering.

Chris nodded.

“When are you going to marry Sant?”

“I can't, Grande.”

“Why? Because another man got you with child? That child's going to need a father. Sant would be a good one.”

“It wouldn't be fair.”

“Fair, fiddlesticks!” Talitha leaned forward. “That boy loves you, always has, always will. And you love him. Or haven't you realized that?”

“I know I love him.” Whatever she'd had for Johnny had been transformed into tenderness for his baby, the will to make sure part of him lived on and loved and laughed, grew up strong and well. “But I—I've been married once. And now there's this baby. Sant should have someone young and fresh and new—”

Talitha seized her coffee cup and hurled it at the wall. “Christina Revier, you plumb turn my stomach with that sort of talk! Sant loves you! Of course you don't deserve his patience, but I didn't deserve your blessed grandfather's either! I still think he was a sight happier with me than he'd have been without!”

Chris blinked. Her grandparents had just seemed to belong with each other, but when she thought, she remembered old stories and knew it hadn't always been so. Talitha had loved Shea for many years, and had married Judah Frost. She'd been as old as Chris was now when she found her peace with Marc.

Taken aback, Chris put down her cat and picked up the broken cup. “I'm going for a walk,” she said, “before you heave something at me.”

“Well, try to think a little while you're at it,” Talitha scolded. “Sant's coming this weekend. It's high time you stopped wearing him out with running back and forth.”

“I don't know, Grande. It's so soon—”

“It's always soon!” Talitha's voice softened at the shock that must have shown on Chris's face. “Life's that way, my dear. Johnny's dead, but he left a child. It's out of struggle and death that new life, new hope, come.”

Chris looked at her uncertainly, stirred yet troubled. Talitha's hand closed over hers. “Sometimes when I sit on the porch and watch the mountains, do you know who comes to sit with me?”

“Who?”

“Socorro. Your great-grandmother.”

“Oh, Grande, really!”

“I don't see her.” Talitha's eyes twinkled. “But I feel her. And we
think
together. We don't have to say anything.”

“And what do you think?” inquired Chris skeptically.

“That it's amazing how the ones we love live on—how a denied love may at last find fulfillment generations later. I have seen a lot of death, Chris, and a lot of life, and more and more I know they flow into each other as each harvest leads to a new crop.”

An awesome thought. One Chris needed to ponder. Rising, she said, “Can I bring you anything?”

“I can get whatever I need.” Talitha's chin rose testily. “Except a granddaughter with plain common sense!” Catching Chris's hand, she gave it a squeeze. “Don't be a redhead burro like your great-grandfather!”

Smiling down at her grandmother, Chris had a moment of marveling at all this woman had weathered and seen. An Apache captive till ransomed by Shea, she had lost her beloved brother to his Indian blood when he became the dreaded Fierro. She had loved Shea and lost him; married the scalp hunter Frost to save the ranch; seen the United States move in and subdue the Indians. In the span of Talitha's life, she'd seen Arizona change from a no-man's-land to full statehood.

Mighty events. Yet Talitha, small and indomitable, seemed greater than all of them. “You know,” said Chris, bending to kiss her grandmother's cheek, “you really are
grande! Muy, muy grande!
”

Followed by Talitha's snort, Chris went around the house past the corrals and new barns. To the west grazed the Herefords which were now the only kind of cattle raised on the ranch; to the east ranged the blooded horses Patrick had been breeding, though the descendants of the first horses brought here far outnumbered the newcomers and were preferred for work by the vaqueros, themselves the children of Sanchezes, Vasquezes, and their relations.

Climbing the hill where crosses showed against the sky, Chris thought of Johnny and what had happened to the other prisoners. Shuttled about the Arizona and New Mexico desert, the strikers had finally been marooned near Columbus, New Mexico. The army had been ordered to feed them and house them temporarily in a stockade for Mexican refugees. A tent city sprang up, and the men, though told they could go wherever they liked, decided to stay where they were till the government could assure their safety.

Newcomers to Bisbee were investigated before they were given a card, and without one they wouldn't be hired. Investigators from the State Federation of Labor were turned back, and though President Wilson had ordered an investigation into the deportation, there was almost no chance that Wheeler and his deputies would be punished, especially since Wheeler had joined the armed forces.

Of the 1200 deported men, 312 had draft registration cards and 142 subscribed to the Liberty Loan. They had offered to form a regiment and go fight in Europe, as they waited in the tent city.

Gradually, the camp melted. Workers found jobs in New Mexico or Texas or drifted back to Arizona, staying clear of Bisbee. Some sent for their families and started life in another camp.

Johnny?

He was buried there, on the other side of Lonnie, another young stranger, who long ago had died to protect Talitha. Here rested Belen, Santiago, Marc, and Socorro. There were crosses for Shea, Caterina, and James, who lay in other soil.

Surrounded by her dead, those who had given her their blood, flesh, and spirit, Chris knelt among the graves and then stood tall, reaching her arms toward the sun, pledging herself to life.