Territory (7 page)

“Wasn’t that young Tom McLaury?” Lucy asked.

“That’s what he said. Is he a longtime resident?”

“Oh, not quite on Mr. Schieffelin’s heels, but long enough. He and his brother Frank had a place on the Babocomari until lately. Then they settled a ranch out south and east.”

“Then I sat on the goat of a respected landowner!”

Lucy looked thoughtful. “Now that depends on who you ask. There was trouble a few months ago, about stolen government mules—”

“They stole government mules?” Mildred asked. A man could be kind and funny and still have his flaws. But stealing stock …

“Well, Deputy Breakenridge thought the thieves might have hidden the mules out at the McLaury ranch. So he got some men together to go see. It made for bad blood that hasn’t settled yet.” Lucy pulled up a stool and got comfortable. “The McLaury boys didn’t think much of being accused of keeping stolen goods. But it seems some kind of burr got under Wyatt Earp’s saddle, too. Frederick’s dyspepsia was troubling him, and he couldn’t go with Deputy Breakenridge, but he heard afterward there were words between the Earps and the McLaurys that a man doesn’t forget easily. Of course, if there’s a quarrel, you generally find Wyatt Earp in it somewhere.”

Now that Mildred thought about it, she recalled setting a rather restrained story about William Breakenridge in pursuance of his duty, et cetera. And
Harry had said, “Odds are the
Epitaph
’ll make a mountain of it, with the Earps right on top. Clum likes to put ’em on the front page.”

“How did Mr. Breakenridge think the mules got there, if the McLaurys didn’t steal them?”

Lucy shook her head and leaned farther over the counter. “When the deputy and the Earps went out to the McLaury ranch, there were some of those cow-boys there, too—that man Brocius and his friends.” Lucy nodded firmly, as if that settled where all the missing cattle, horses, and mules in Cochise County had gone.

“Mr. McLaury seemed like a nice enough young man,” Mildred said, trying to sound matronly and innocuous. “Even offered to replace my glove.”

“Funny how sometimes the rough-looking ones will turn out to be perfect gentlemen.” Lucy nodded at her own wisdom. “While the fellows who wear nice coats and smell like lilac pomade can be mean and quarrelsome clear through.”

From the other side of a shelf, crockery clattered. Lucy looked up and turned pink. A little woman in a dark cotton dress with a faded mantelet over her shoulders rounded the shelf and swept up to the counter. Her chin seemed too soft and round to be so thrust out, and her little flat nose looked out of place carried so high.

“I don’t want this thread after all,” she said, and smacked a spool of light blue cotton on the countertop.

Another woman came around the shelf and stood back from the counter, kneading her embroidered purse nervously between her hands. She was taller, with dark curling hair escaping her hat to brush her pale oval face.

“You won’t find better anywhere in town, Mrs. Earp,” Lucy warned.

“I’ll pass on it just the same,” said the little woman.

“Allie,” the dark-haired woman said breathlessly, “you get it. It’s just the color.”

The short woman glanced at her companion, and her face softened. “Changed my mind. Let’s go, Mattie.”

Mildred watched the little woman sail out the door, with the dark-haired woman hurrying after, eyes down. The little one’s firmness made her seem older than she probably was, just as the other’s nervousness made her younger. They were probably of an age, and that barely twenty.

When the women were past the windows and gone, Mildred turned to Lucy. “That was Wyatt Earp’s wife?”

“The short one? Oh, no. She’s Virgil Earp’s wife. Wyatt’s is the dark, pretty one. Much good it’ll do her.” Lucy shook her head. “Mrs. Virgil was quick to
get peppered up, wasn’t she? I hope she didn’t think I was talking about their menfolk when I said what I did about nice coats and lilac pomade.”

Mildred studied her face. Lucy seemed convinced that Wyatt Earp was not precisely who she’d been talking about.

“Have you heard from Mr. Austerberg?” Mildred asked.

“Yes, he sent a note in. His mare went lame around midday, and he had to stop at Marsh Station. I hope they can give him his dinner. Frederick’s always out of sorts without a good dinner. What about you? Mr. Woods hear more about the robbery?”

Mildred told her what the
Nugget
had printed, but nothing of Harry’s speculations.

“Just as the
Epitaph
had it,” Lucy said, and colored again. “Not to slight the
Nugget.”

Mildred smiled and waved it away. “No other news worth mentioning, I’m afraid,” she said. Then she recalled the stranger, Mr. Fox.

“Mrs. B? Whatever you’re pondering doesn’t seem to please you.”

I’ll never make a cardplayer,
Mildred thought. “I’m just trying to recall what else I need. Besides gloves.”

“I’ve a nice gray kid right over here.” Lucy flounced down the counter and ducked out of sight. “You’re what, size five?”

“Six.” Mildred let a breath pass, to make her next words seem idle. “Have you heard of a Jesse Fox, Mrs. Austerberg?”

Lucy straightened and laid a paper parcel on the counter. “I don’t believe so. Is he from these parts?”

“He’s a newcomer. He came in to buy a newspaper. I can’t remember ever seeing so much trail dust on one human being.” Mildred unfolded the tissue and lifted out one of the thin kid gloves. She caught the tanned leather scent and longed to hold the gloves to her nose.

“Is that so? Did he seem like one of the cow-boys?”

“He was dressed like a drover. But he sounded like a town man. He claimed he wasn’t staying in Tombstone.”

“Heaven’s sake, where else would he stay?” Lucy said with a lifted eyebrow. “Contention’s barely civilized, and Charleston’s just a glorified camp. And until the railroad comes in, you can’t say we’re on the way to anywhere.”

Mildred smoothed the gloves over her fingers and the backs of her hands. “I thought it was odd, too.” Lucy would pluck the threads of her gossip-web; if there was anything to know about Fox, Lucy would be able to tell her next time she asked. “These are lovely, Mrs. Austerberg. I’ll wear them home.”

Mildred was startled by how low the sun was when she left the store. She
bolted down Fremont and whisked into the post office with only minutes to spare. As she paused to get her breath, the door shut on the hem of her skirt. She tugged it free with a hiss of exasperation, and turned to find the clerk and his customer staring.

The customer was the smaller Mrs. Earp, Virgil’s wife, who’d refused to buy the thread. Mildred felt a blush heat her face, even though she hadn’t been the one to make disparaging comments.

Then she saw the periodical Mrs. Earp was trying to tuck quickly into her string bag, and recognized the title banner.
Gallagher’s Illustrated Weekly.
Her eyes flew to Mrs. Earp’s, and the little woman blushed, too.

Is she embarrassed because she reads it, or because her husband does?

Mildred smiled and nodded, and tried to make both as genuine as she could. Mrs. Earp looked startled. Then a cautious smile flicked across her face.

“Do you take
Gallagher’s,
too?” Mildred said. She had no idea why, but suddenly she wanted to make this woman’s acquaintance. “I thought ‘A Fatal Woman’ in last week’s was splendid.”

Mrs. Earp smiled wider, but still cautiously. “I did like it. But Marlena shouldn’t have died at the end. Poor thing was innocent as a baby.”

“But that made Lisabette so much more evil. And I love a good villain.” Mildred shook her head and thrust out her hand. “I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Mrs. David Benjamin.”

“Mrs. Virgil Earp,” said the little woman, with that martial lift of her chin.

“Pleased to meet you. Perhaps, once we’ve both read the new issue, we might compare favorites.”

Mrs. Earp narrowed her eyes and tilted her head a little, as if trying to see some part of Mildred that wasn’t visible. Then she nodded, sharply, but with a grin that warmed her face. “Might be. Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Benjamin.” She pulled the strings of her bag tight and hurried out the door.

Mildred watched her disappear down the street and thought,
I suppose if my husband and his brothers were at the center of so many storms, I’d be cautious, too.
She turned to the counter and the clerk. “Good afternoon. Mail for Mrs. David Benjamin?”

“Sure enough,” he said, and turned to the cubbyholes of sorted mail, now mostly empty. “You’re the lady typesetter at the
Nugget,
aren’t you?” he added over his shoulder.

“Yes, I am.”

“I wouldn’t work for Harry Woods. Man never shuts up.”

“He’s much better at the paper. He works it all off in print.” Harry’s ability
to talk intelligently and at length was one of the things she liked about him. But perhaps he was an acquired taste.

“Speaking of print.” The clerk laid her mail, including her copy of
Gallagher’s,
on the counter. “Keeping an eye on the competition?” He had a sly smile under his moustache, as if he thought Mildred might whisk the paper out of sight as Mrs. Earp had done.

She beamed at him. “Oh, we can’t compete with
Gallagher’s.
The
Nugget
doesn’t get to make up nearly so many of its stories.”

The clerk laughed and smacked the counter with his palm. “And you ought to know! Well, maybe they’re writing to thank you for the kind words.” He pointed to the cream-colored envelope on top of the little pile. The
Gallagher’s
ornate logotype and the return address were printed in the upper corner.

Mildred’s stomach jumped. “I suppose so,” she managed. Was that a sensible reply? “Thank you.” She scooped up her mail and smiled—she hoped it was a smile—and got out the door without running into the doorpost.

She’d reached the corner before she summoned the courage to look at the envelope again. It sat blandly on top of a few card-sized envelopes from friends in town, a bookseller’s catalog. She felt as if she were cradling a cream-colored rectangular snake. More than anything, she wanted to open it … and she wanted never to open it. She felt cold and hot by turns, and her mouth was like a dry wash.

A lady didn’t read her mail on the street corner. At least she could delay until she got home.

The sun was a corona of fire on the peaks of the Whetstone Mountains when she reached her front door. For an instant she felt a different, more familiar lurch in the pit of her stomach.

It’s not Friday, and it wouldn’t matter if it were.
Friday’s sunset was no different from any other now. Mother wasn’t there to say, “How could you be so late? Did you
want
to miss Sabbath?” Father didn’t sit in the parlor behind his newspaper, ready to say to Mother, in front of Mildred, that it was a woman’s job to teach God’s law to her children.

David hadn’t believed in God. There was no Sabbath with him to remember.

She hung her hat on the hook by the door and hurried through the dim parlor to the kitchen. She laid the little heap of mail on the kitchen table and stared down at it.
No, first things first.
Now, of all times, she would keep to her routines. There was religion and there was superstition, and in her case, the latter held up better under hard use.

She lit a scrap of kindling in the stove embers and carried it, sheltered by her cupped hand, to the lamp on the parlor table. She could have used a match, but she liked the symbolism of the single hearth fire, the sun of the house.

“Thank you for today, and the promise of tomorrow,” she whispered, and lit the wick. When she set the chimney down over the flame, the light spread in the room like clear water. She took a deep breath, and another, and felt peace settle around her like a cloak.

The first time her brother Eli had missed the lighting of the Sabbath candles was when he was seventeen and Mildred was fourteen. He’d come home long after dark, his curly hair flattened with rain, his cheeks red with excitement, wine, and cold.

It may have been their mother’s place to discipline daughters, but their father considered an adult son his responsibility. She’d heard the voices in the study, Father’s deep and harsh and Eli’s rising unconsciously with his feelings. She heard them even with the study doors shut, even at the top of the house.

Afterward she’d asked him, in dismay and wonder, how could he have stayed out on Friday night? Eli frowned and flushed. Of course—Father had probably started with the same question. Then his face softened, and he laughed.

“Doesn’t every day belong to God, Millie Mouse? I don’t think He cares which one we choose for lighting candles and wearing our best clothes.”

“Did you say that to Father?” she’d asked, certain he wouldn’t have.

“I did.” Eli’s smile took a wry turn. “He said I’d never shown any rabbinical leanings before this.”

She’d laughed and let it go. But she couldn’t let go of the notion that every day was, potentially, holy. After that, with the first flame she lit in the evening, she would breathe a little of the
kiddush
as the wick caught. She kept it secret even from Eli.