The Great Plains (19 page)

‘Your father made me his ward,' Serena began, ‘I have rights.'

‘We have rights,' George corrected. ‘We are Wades.'

‘You have no rights,' Edmund said bluntly to the man.

‘You know it to be true.'

‘I know no such thing.' Edmund looked the Indian up and down. ‘This is the first time I have met you.'

‘We have rights,' Serena repeated as the baby began to mew.

‘What rights are those? You ran away, caused nothing but sadness for my father and your grandmother and now all these years later you come back asking for money? That's why you are here?'

‘Let me speak to Annie, she will help me.'

‘My parents are long dead, Serena. You may well have been my father's ward but you did everything possible to destroy the love and care he tried to show you. There is nothing for you here now.' As he said the words Edmund thought of Philomena. Perhaps if George had not come with Serena he might have let her into his house, been prepared to care for her and her children, if only for Philomena's sake. But George had come and brought back all the anger and sadness of the past. The Serena of old had been replaced by an ageing woman of loose morals. He couldn't do it. He couldn't risk his household being turned upside down by her presence, he couldn't risk Tobias being exposed to the angst Serena was bound to create. ‘I will give you some money, then you must go.'

George clenched his fists. ‘We don't want handouts. We want our share.'

‘There is no share to be had,' he announced. ‘It is seventeen years since Serena last paid us the compliment of a visit. Anyway, from what I hear, you people are quite happy to accept handouts.'

George moved quickly. He lifted a fist and swung at Edmund who, in turn, neatly dodged his attacker and landed a punch squarely on George's nose. Bone on bone crunched. Blood flowed from the Indian's nose. He stared at Edmund with unabridged hatred.

‘Stop it!' Serena shouted. The baby began to bawl.

From inside the house came footsteps. The front door opened and Wes squared up opposite George while Tobias stood shoulder to shoulder with his father.

‘Here, take this.' Edmund took a fistful of notes from his wallet and handed the money to Serena. ‘You have made your choice, Serena. You left here of your own accord –'

‘That's not true. Aloysius sent me away to be with Philomena.'

‘Because you could not settle here, because you
would
not settle here,' Edmund concluded. ‘You have no rights where this family is concerned – you didn't want us. After everything my father did for you, you didn't want to be a part of this family.'

‘What of my children? What of little Abelena?' Serena wailed, clutching the money.

It was then that Edmund recalled where he'd heard the baby's name. Philomena had mentioned it. His beloved had said that Tobias would care for the child Abelena all his life, but it would be an unrequited love.

‘I think it's best if you leave.' Wes crossed his arms.

‘Tobias, Tobias, you remember me, don't you?' Serena tugged at his arm.

‘Come, Serena.' George steered her away from the men and led her down the steps.

‘I spit on you,' Serena scowled, spitting onto the ground. ‘I spit on you all. You think you're all so high and mighty, don't you? You think one generation can save my grandmother and then ignore the rest of us, like we are so much rubbish that blows away down the street? Well, let me tell you a thing or two, my kind are always going to be walking the earth. Do you hear? Always. I have your blood in my veins, Edmund, and my children have it too. Don't ever forget that.'

George called to the boy in the Apache tongue. Jerome came running from around the side of the house. On seeing his uncle he ran to the older man and George swung the lad up into his arms. ‘The white man still has much to learn,' George called out to the others standing on the porch. ‘There is such a word as family.' Placing a sheltering arm around Serena's shoulders, they left the house surrounds and began walking down the street.

‘It's for the best,' Wes said softly to Tobias's querying gaze. ‘It has to end somewhere.'

‘Are you all right, Father?'

Edmund put a hand on his son's shoulder. He'd made a choice between Philomena and his son, between the living and the dead. He would always regret breaking his promise to Philomena and there was a certain element of guilt where Serena was concerned, but Tobias had to be protected. ‘Yes, lad. I'm fine.'

That night alone in the study, Edmund opened a leather folio within which were copies of a variety of legal documents: property deeds, bond certificates and his last will and testament. Another certificate of which he had both the original and the only copy made had been written on the instructions of his late father, Aloysius. The cream parchment paper noted Serena Wade, great-granddaughter of Joseph Wade, as the legal ward of Aloysius. Monies had been placed aside for her and Serena had also received Philomena's inheritance, an inheritance that remained untouched since her grandmother's passing and which had grown into a substantial sum. Rising, he took both the original and the copy of his father's wishes to the fireplace. As he struck a match and watched the papers burn, he relived again Serena spitting into the dirt, saw the look of entitlement in George's face. Edmund curled and uncurled his fist. His knuckles were sore. The document blackened and shrunk to nothing.

Four years later
May, 1924 – north-west of King fisher, Oklahoma

Serena stood in the doorway of the sod house, her face shaded by a man's felt hat. Five-year-old Abelena tugged at her skirt while a baby fed at her breast. The baby whimpered and whined and sucked and hiccupped. She was a crotchety child, who cried continually and sicked up most of what she drained from her mother. At times Serena was sorely tempted to give the girl away, for this was her first proper home since leaving their allotted lands near Fort Sill over a year ago and although her man José cared for her, Serena knew the hard times were making him irritated. He'd taken to looking north-west and talking about Dakota. He said he reckoned the living would be better there, easier, kinder. Serena doubted Dakota would be better and she didn't want to leave Oklahoma. She couldn't rightly explain why except that it was a feeling that had taken root. All her life she'd found it difficult to fit in, difficult to stay in one place no matter where she was, or which people she lived with at the time – Indian or white – but one thing Serena did know was that she couldn't leave Oklahoma. She spoke to George about it and her uncle understood.

When their people had been offered the choice of either moving to the Mescalero Reservation in south-eastern New Mexico or taking up allotments in the lands around Fort Sill after they were finally released, George had accepted the latter. This was the land he knew. The old country of his people, Arizona, was just a vivid memory. But their block of land had not been fertile and George was not a farmer. He would spend his days on horseback with the wind in his hair, hunting for whatever game he could find. It was not the life Serena wanted, but she tried unsuccessfully to adapt for she had nothing to replace it with, then she'd met José and he'd offered her a place in his home. Not as a wife, but he was prepared to take Jerome, who was now nine, and young Abelena. George followed, unasked.

‘Where is he?' Her uncle walked around the side of the house, a string of pigeons hanging from his shoulder. His horse, a pinto, followed quietly.

Serena swung her hips from side to side, trying to calm the baby as Abelena sat in the dirt at her feet, chewing on a piece of leather. ‘He went to check the corn again.' A clod of dirt, clumpy with prairie grass, slipped through the gap between the canvas ceiling and the door to fall on her bare breast. Serena plucked the baby from her nipple and blew the dirt from the child's face before laying her on a narrow cot.

‘I have looked. Most have not germinated.' George hung the pigeons from a peg on the outside wall of the house. ‘There will be no seed for next year and no money to buy any.'

Serena finished doing up her blouse and wrapped a thick homespun shawl around her coat. ‘You should go back to Fort Sill.'

‘And you should come with me.' He called to Jerome in the Apache tongue and the boy appeared from around the side of the house. The nine-year-old was tall, lean and swarthy skinned. He listened to his uncle's commands and walked away.

Serena stepped outside and shut the door against the bawling child. ‘No, I cannot.'

‘Then I cannot go. I promised my mother.'

‘My grandmother is a long time dead,' Serena finally answered, ‘and still you do as she says.'

‘As is Geronimo these past sixteen years, but even he worried for you.'

Serena poked at the still warm pigeons. George had appointed himself her saviour ever since Aloysius had sent her to the Fort Sill reservation to live with Philomena all those years ago. ‘You are as bad as the Wades, trying to tell people what to do and how to do it.'

George lifted Abelena into the air. The little girl began to giggle. ‘I tell you nothing. I simply say, Serena, that if you stay, then I stay as well.'

Crossing her arms to ward off the morning chill, Serena walked out to the edge of the cornfield. She couldn't go back to their lands near Fort Sill for many reasons. The cemetery held the bodies of the babies she'd birthed and lost due to illness, along with many others. Every time she had run away over the last twelve years, George had tracked her down and brought her back. And every time they returned the first thing she saw was the Post Chapel on the hill. The building taunted her. The white women at the fort turned their backs or ignored her, the old Apache women hissed when she passed by, while the younger ones thought she was a whore. Serena knew she was better than all of them put together, that if she wanted she could be a great lady, living in a big house like Annie and Aloysius. But she didn't want that life. She didn't know what she wanted. She just knew that wherever she lived, she never really belonged.

The field began a couple of hundred feet from the house and followed the curve of the land down into a gully and then up a slight rise. A fool could see it was bad land for farming. How blindly she had followed José with his talk of a good season coming and his turn to succeed.

‘It's grazing country. A man can grow a little crop in a good year, but in a bad,' George flicked his fingers, ‘when there is no rain, the land blows away. They plough it up, but they do not understand that it is the thick root of the prairie grass that holds the soil together.'

‘Last year, travelling on the train there were crops and flour mills, green hills and thick trees, I hoped …' Serena didn't finish the sentence. It was only after their arrival that they learnt the truth of their new home. The original homesteaders had gone broke on it and José had purchased it cheap, using money saved from a decade in the silver mines. Since José's arrival seven years ago his wife had walked off, taking their four children, and the seasons had not been kind.

‘All men hope for the best. I do not hold that against José, but I cannot see the point of staying if he will not marry you and if there is no money.'

‘Marriage isn't everything.' Serena bit her lip, a smidgeon of blood welled on the surface of her skin. ‘I am not going back to them for money,' she said quietly. ‘I would sooner slit my throat than knock on their door again. You know what happened last time. Edmund punched you. They hate me; they have always hated me.'

‘If there was money José would probably marry you, buy a better farm or perhaps cattle. He is a
greaser
, a Mexican, but he is a good man. He has never struck you.'

This was not the first time George had mentioned Serena's possible access to the Wade money. ‘No, he hasn't.'

‘Well, then you should think on it, Serena.' George lifted Abelena and sat her on his shoulders. ‘Think of your children. What will you do if he decides to leave here and go to Dakota?'

‘I have survived. So will they.'

‘Then we will have to go back to the acres we have been given at Fort Sill.'

Serena stamped her foot. ‘Stop telling me what to do. I did not ask you to come with me. I think sometimes that you are only here because maybe one day there will be Wade money for the taking.'

George looked at her coldly. ‘You are a stupid woman. You must find a place for yourself in the new world, one where you will be cared for. Look.' He pointed beyond the dun-coloured dirt. There were no trees looking westward, simply an expanse of gently rolling country that eventually edged out to the flat lands of The Great Plains. ‘The old country, the land of our forefathers, is nearly gone, Serena, but out there you can feel the breath of Mother Earth. When I rest on her at night, her heart beats against mine. She talks to me of the old days, of the buffalo, of the time before time began and then she shakes her great head at the things men do in the name of progress. You must think on these things and not do anything stupid.'

Behind them sat the house. It was a small construction with a third of it dug into the hill behind. Only seven feet in height, it had four glass windows fitted into the thick sods forming the walls and a mixture of dirt, iron and scavenged timber for a roof. ‘There is not so much progress here, brother.'

George grunted under Abelena's weight. ‘No, not so much. The girl grows heavy.'

Abelena was the result of Serena's brief affair with a Mexican trader who came to the reservation. He was not the first Serena had lain with in exchange for money, although the need that welled up inside of her when she saw a man she was attracted to was her primary consideration when she lay with them. Money was an after-thought. It was the same with Thomas all those years ago. There had been a wanting inside of her back then too. They'd hidden in a barn on the edge of town the night before his hanging and huddled together for warmth. That was the first time for her and it made her feel loved. Even now she remembered the slip of black skin on her white, skirts hitched up and pants tugged down, her bare legs welted by straw.

‘The baby is no better?' George asked.

‘No, she has always been weak, she takes after José.'

‘I have seen her. The spirits will come soon for the little one.'

‘I know,' Serena replied sadly. ‘She will be dead in a week.'

José approached from across the field. He was of medium height with a barrel chest, black hair and a thick moustache. His skin was darkly tanned, smooth and unscarred. Beneath his suit coat, waistcoat and shirt was thick black hair that Serena liked to lick after their love-making. There was always the tang of sweat and their sex and smells of the land that encircled their home. If he left, there were things she would miss.

‘Ah, my two Apaches talking together.'

George compressed his lips. The words had an edge to them. This was José's little joke. His father fought Apache raiders off for years when they came to his village in Mexico, and now he had one to cook and clean his house and another who worked for free. George knew that for José this was a good arrangement, especially as his new woman was very fine to look at.

‘I must take this one for a ride.' George walked away, jiggling Abelena up and down in his arms.

‘Has the baby stopped crying?'

Serena listened. ‘Yes, for now. How is the corn?'

‘Bad.' José pulled a plug of chewing tobacco from a pouch at his waist and began to grind it on one side of his mouth. His cheek muscles bulged, distorting his round face. ‘Planted in late April after a hard cold winter and barely a hint of rain, I should have known I was wasting my time.' He spat out tobacco juice. ‘We needed this crop badly.' He kicked at the edge of the field, a spray of dirt fanned out from his boot. ‘What didn't die from lack of rain was washed out down in the gully when we got that freak storm a couple of weeks ago.' José scratched the back of his neck, grimy with dirt.

Serena looked at the twenty acres of useless corn buried before them. More than five hundred hours of labour had gone into preparing and then sowing the grain and that didn't include the time the men had spent trying to repair the ancient horse-drawn machinery lined up against the side of the house. The surrey planter barely stayed together this year.

‘I'd hoped for a thousand bushels,' José admitted with a wry smile.

Serena forced a smile. She was sick of stupid men like José who promised the world and then had nothing to show for their efforts.

‘I've talked about Dakota and I think that's where I'm headed. It's a good place for raising cattle. We'll leave at the end of the week.'

She watched as he walked away from her, as if a woman had no say in the matter. ‘And how are you going to buy cattle when you've lost everything here?'

He turned slowly and spat a line of tobacco juice on the ground. ‘Mining,' he replied curtly. ‘I'm going back to the mines. I'll find us a house somewhere nearby and we'll just have to make do until we have enough to buy a place of our own.' He surveyed his holding. ‘I'll put this on the market. We'll get some coin for it.'

The wind blew across the land, whipping Serena's hair about her face and causing eddies of dirt to blow in a mist across the cornfield. ‘I'm not going with you, José.'

‘Of course you are.'

‘Why, so I can go and live in another dirt house, with no money and no food?'

José walked towards her. ‘And what did you have before me? Nothing. You should be grateful I took you in, and those brats of yours.'

Serena placed her hands on her hips. ‘George and I have allotted land near Fort Sill – you know this.'

‘Well, maybe the two of you should go back there now.'

Serena contemplated the threat. ‘I'll be taking the children.'

‘Take the bastards, but you're not taking the baby, she's mine.'

Serena spat on the ground. ‘She's a bastard too.'

José took Serena by the shoulders and shook her gently at first and then harder until her head shuddered violently. Releasing his grip he tucked a strand of her hair behind an ear. ‘I said I would care for you, Serena, you need caring for. Why do you make things so difficult for yourself, for us?' He waited for an answer. ‘I would like you to come to Dakota with me. We could make a good life there.'

‘It is not my land.'

José spat out the wad of tobacco and wiped dark juice from his chin. ‘I think you are scared. I think you have spent too much time at the Fort Sill reservation, too much time relying on the handouts of the government, on the advice of the Apache peoples. For the life of me I can't understand why you never went back to your true family. When I saw you at Fort Sill I thought I must have been dreaming; a fine woman like you living with a bunch of Injuns.'

Serena tugged at the shawl about her shoulders, stuck a finger through a widening hole in the yarn. ‘I told you they did not want me.'

‘You see then, we are both without family. This is not my land either, Serena, but we take what we can in this life and make the best of it. You must learn this. I'm going to see Atkinson on the eastern boundary, see if he wants to buy the land or maybe lease it. Then if things don't work in Dakota, we can come back.'