The Star Garden (24 page)

“I’m going after them,” Charlie said.

“I’ll get my rifle,” Chess hollered, and took off before anyone could stop him.

Elsa begged, “No! Tell him, señora. Please! Charlie, you can’t.”

“She’s right,” I said. “You can’t expect to hold your own against three.”

Gilbert said he’d load up more guns and go with his brother. But Charlie looked at Elsa, then at me, then toward the hill where they’d driven so wild only a minute before. He said, “If they were highwaymen, they hadn’t got the knack of it. They didn’t chase us long enough. They’re here for something else.”

Gilbert said, “One of them had a big kit of some sort with him. Could be just prospectors.”

Charlie answered, “Think prospectors’d greet strangers with guns drawn? They’re up to something, having a look around maybe but didn’t want anyone to see what they were up to. We surprised them and they figured to scare us away.”

“I reckon,” said Gil, “they held up a bank or a train or something.”

I asked, “How far up the road?”

“About four miles,” Gil said.

“It wasn’t by the train wreck, was it?” People still keep coming out to look at the wreckage from the Santa Fe that went off its tracks and burned a couple of years ago. Some bring photographers’ gear, and some bring shovels, hunting gold they reckon is left in the disaster. They all shook their heads. “Then it’s railroaders,” I said. “Sure as I’m standing here. Rudolfo’s got a parlor full of them and we’ve chased off more than one in the last six months. They’re up to something, all right. Long as it doesn’t take place on our land, we’ll leave ‘em be.”

“But Mama,” said Gil, “what if they are old Maldonado’s men? What if they’re coming for us?”

“Well, then they’d be here by now,” I said. “Your sister-in-law is Rudolfo’s daughter and you won’t be using that tone about her father. You
ought
to respect folks you love, son, but you make a big mistake not to respect folks you don’t see eye to eye with. Elsa, you stay here with Granny and Chess, and he’ll watch out for you both. I think we’d better all ride together.”

Charlie said, “I don’t want you up there.”

“Then get Udell. You and Elsa put off your driving a couple of days. That won’t hurt, will it?”

Elsa had started for the house. Charlie whispered, “They can’t hold us captive when we might need to get to town. She’s having a baby.”

Gilbert groaned and said, “Aw, Charlie, for crying up a crick. What a thing to say.” He headed for the barn, whipping his hat against his leg and shaking his head.

I smiled and bit my lower lip. “Well, son, she’s not having it today.”

A loud gunshot and the crack of glass interrupted us, followed by a stream of violent shouts that sounded like Chess’s voice. We hurried in the direction of the noise to the side of the house, and came upon Chess covered with dust and hopping mad. He beat at his own arms and legs, knocking a cloud of dirt from his clothes just as he filled that cloud with the sorriest storm of cussing I’d heard yet. Elsa put one hand over her lips. Savannah had been right. The coarseness of my household full of men was not a fit place for a girl.

The boys tried to steady Chess by the arms. He jerked this way and that and commenced to cussing them for helping him. His rifle lay in the dirt and at the barrel end a long scuff told the tale of a round that had gone off while the thing lay on the ground. When Chess finally got settled, he rubbed his nose with his sleeve and said a no-account cat had run across his path and tripped him. Then he said I shouldn’t allow so many cats around the place, what a nuisance they were and still mice in the barn and all. He swore he meant to shoot them all.

I hollered at him he’d better not or I’d make him eat them for supper. No cat in sight, either. No space under this adobe house or other place hereabouts for a cat to run to. Our five tomcats spend their time sleeping and hunting in the barn and the bunkhouse. I’ll grant they’re pretty mean, and not the kind for petting on your lap except the calico Granny likes to hold, but none of them are given to running around the yard in broad daylight. We were on the far side from the bunkhouse.

I figured Chess just tripped on his own feet. I eyed him closely, and he shot me back a look as mean as he could. “Chess,” I said, “I was going to ask you to stay here with Granny, but I got to thinking about your army training and I think we need you with us to have a look around. Gilbert, stay with Granny and Elsa.”

“Aw, no!”

I took hold of Gil’s arm and said, “Wait here. Charlie, saddle your grandpa a horse.” Well, Charlie took off with Chess on his heels swearing that the day he needed someone to saddle him a horse, he’d swing himself a noose from the bridge below Albert’s place. I turned to Gilbert. “I expect you to do as you’re told. I want Elsa and Granny watched over by someone who has got good eyes and a sense of distance.”

“What if she has that baby while you’re gone? Some upset or other? I don’t want to be there alone with her.”

“Good heavens, Gilbert, you know a cow takes near a year to drop a calf. Elsa isn’t going to have a baby for months. You just guard from outside if it makes you nervous. They’ll fix you some lunch and sew. You set on the porch and keep watch.”

Charlie, Chess, and I toted firearms and rode in file like we were an army detachment. Then Chess told Charlie to flank off the north side of the road, and pretty soon, Charlie and his horse disappeared into the scrub like a coyote. We came upon those fellows—two men on some seedy horses, pulling a couple of others loaded too heavy with packs. The pack animals were balky and tired. These were tinhorns or they’d have used mules to come this far with that load. We pulled reins and waited while they sized us up. I had them figured right away by the slope of their hats. Easterners for one thing. Worried, for another. Waiting for somebody, was my call. Up to no good for certain.

Chess had a pistol on a belt under his coat. But he kept his hands very still and said, “You boys lost?”

I watched them turn stiff and wary. “No,” the taller man said. “We’re all right.”

I said, “You two see some folks in a buggy with an extra rider come this way?”

“Yeah,” the same fellow said. “While back.”

“They head to town?” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Well, did they pass you or not?” Chess asked. Can’t say.

The second man volunteered, “They changed their m-minds. Turn-turned around. Like you all should do.”

“That so?” said Chess.

“Go on home, c-clodhopper,” the second man said.

“I think we’ll go ahead and pass you boys. You go your way and we’ll go ours.”

“Old m-man, I said t-t-t-turn around,” the man said again.

We heard hooves. The first man said, “Here comes Luce. Listen, folks. We don’t want trouble with you. Just go on. Go to town some other day.”

The rider came closer. Charlie rode straight at them with his reins and a pistol in one hand, a lasso in the other. He whipped that loop around the taller man and yanked him from his saddle faster than I could breathe, and pointed the pistol at the other, telling him, “Off your horse. Now!”

After some fussing and hollering, Charlie got those fellows to say who they were waiting for and what they wanted here. The railroad. They had come with stakes and flags, all ready to set up for some new tracks.

“Well,” I said, “you’re going to have to tell them you failed, on account of you’re on our land.”

“No we ain’t,” the second man said. “We got a c-c-court order. Deeded and signed. One fourth of this quarter-section belongs to Señor Rudolfo Maldonado
and
the Santa Fe Railway Company.”

Charlie said, “Hand me your court order, and your maps and deeds.”

“Aw, get shucked. We don’t gotta show you nothin’.”

“Yeah,” said the first man. “Who are you to be shoving us around?”

“Arizona Ranger,” Charlie said, lifting his pocket flap to produce his badge. I didn’t know he still had it. “These are my folks, and you’re on our land. I could string up the pair of you right now for firing at me and my wife for no cause earlier on this very road. So you’d better find some manners, right quick. Hand over the papers.”

The first fellow swept off his hat and said, “M’ name’s Bill Deacon, Mr. Ranger. Now, we’d never a-shot
you,
directly, we had our orders to chase off anyone snooping around. They’re surveying up there and we was told to keep folks off the road that might come down. Now, see, but here’s our problem. We don’t have no papers, and we’re a-waiting on Mr. Ashton Luce to bring ‘em. Ranger, sir.”

One thing I know is that once they get that track laid, it is going to be blessed hard to unlay it. Another thing I know is that Charlie said he’d quit the Rangers, yet he still carried the badge. Deacon elbowed the other man, motioned with his hat in hand, too. The shorter fellow pulled his cap in a move like a boy will do who’s obeying because he has no choice.

He said, “Name’s Tick. They calls me Tick. Short for B-b-bob T-t…” And then he began to say another name that began with a t but he was caught with such a fit of stuttering he seemed in the grip of apoplexy.

“Never mind, Tick,” Charlie ordered. “Suppose we just wait here for Mr. Ashton Luce and let him explain them laying railroad tracks across Prine land you say belongs to Maldonado.”

Well, he did explain. Then he allowed us to the station, even clear to town, and promised us passage across our own land to home. Charlie and Gilbert went to town and brought Aubrey Hanna back, but not before they had a chance to do some checking on the town side of things.

It appears Rudolfo has gone and sent lawyers and detectives and looked under every rock and toadstool in St. Louis, and found my dead brother Ernest’s floozy wife—no doubt in some brothel. Felicity “Lulu” Prine has taken money for Ernest’s birthright, the inheritance of one-fourth of Granny’s homestead. Ernest died in the war in Cuba and his son got himself hung for cattle thieving and murder here in Tucson. As the remaining children, when we inherited it, Albert, Harland, and I would have split that parcel in thirds. Then—this was some kind of seven-legged horse—the railroad claimed it has bought from Felicity the right to build right through Mama’s land north of my place, clear to the bounds of where Rudolfo’s land meets mine. It looked legal on the papers, to us. Chess stuck them up to his nose then held them as far as his arms would reach, and said the same. I don’t know if it’s possible to sell a birthright, but you’d have to own it first. A judge in town had declared that Felicity abandoned Ernest and their marriage dissolved before Willie got hanged.

Railroaders surveyed every inch of Granny’s place.

Thing was,
nobody
could inherit a square inch of that land. Granny wasn’t dead.

Once they finished the survey, the rail crew cleared out. All stayed quiet, else I’d not even venture on this crazy notion of schooling. Last night, too hot and still to sleep, I laid awake and stewed it over. I decided not to go. Whatever possessed Udell Hanna to give me that? To say it? Whatever possessed me to react the way I did? Lands, deep inside, I must be every inch a strumpet. Then this morning, every other minute I ask myself what on earth I should do, stay or go. In between those questions, my heart sings like a red bird, as if my thoughts were cutting slices of pie out of the air and gulping it in with my eyes so wide I could see until tomorrow. Now the rain clouds gather in the distance and the air smells of lightning, so I know this heat will go and tonight will be blessed and cool. It gave me the courage to decide to go. Dread and hope crowd my heart at the same time.

It has been hot enough today to kill my chickens. Leastwise, that was all I could figure would put half of them down at once. We were due for a gully washer, from the stillness of the air and the weight of it. The dogs were poorly and we were all mean as snakes, waiting for rain. I needed Savannah to talk with. I looked toward her house as storm clouds gathered in the south and rumbled this direction.

As I heard the first close-up crash of thunder, I kept thinking there must be a way to talk to her. A cool wind swept aside my hair, and I breathed in as if I’d been holding my breath all day. I’ll write her a letter.

I raced to the book room and took a paper and found a good pen. Then I opened the ink and tipped the jar to fill the little dam so’s I could dip easy. I wrote: “Oh, Savannah. I yearn for your friendship. How long will you hate me?” Rain began to pelt at the windows, so I had to pull them down, leaving just two inches open so the fresh smell and breeze could come in. The letter flew from the table and I set it back. The words were so childish. I turned the page over and began again. “Dearest Friend,” I wrote. Wasn’t she my dearest friend? The rain became a sizzle like bacon in a pan. I should just go to the house of my dearest friend, but crossing the Cienega in this weather could be treacherous. I wrote, “please forgive me and let us put this fussing aside. If you will let things be and …” I tried two sentences and quit. My letter sounded like either a whining kid or a scolding hen. The smell of rain on the greasewood perfumed the house, filling my head with a pleasantness that made it impossible to write any letters at all. I went to bed, leaving the letter unfinished where it lay.

This morning the air was still again, but cool and lovely. I got out early and went down to Udell’s place. The rain had softened the garden ground. There he and I planted the rest of his garden, squash, beans, and muskmelon. It may be too late for any good to come of them, but slim chance is better than none. I couldn’t talk to him about school. I couldn’t question his notion of giving the present or my accepting it to him. I didn’t talk to him about Savannah, either.

By noon, we finished and went to my place; he sat on my porch with the door open, brushing mud off his boots. I soaked my hands in soap and water, trying to get dirt out of my calluses. I spoke to the walls in the kitchen, to Granny, Chess, and the calico cat curled in his lap. “I have decided I cannot go off to school. Not with this railroad business hanging over our heads.” Through the open door, I saw Udell’s back straighten when I said that, but he didn’t speak.

Chess said, “Sarah, we can handle things here. Likely if you’re in town, you can do some nosing around. If you go, it’d be all right. Charlie’s going to be here, n’ Gil.”

“Where’re you going?” Granny said.

“Town, Mama.”

“Get me some gingham. Red, if they got it. Or any color’ll do.”

Udell stood in the doorway, put his boots down at the jamb outside. “Have you changed your mind about wanting school, or do you think your staying here would make Maldonado play any straighter than he’s already done?”

I tried to read his face. “There’d be all that driving, every weekend. It’s too far.”

He turned at a sound in the yard, a cat making way past the sleeping dogs with a hiss and a spit. “It isn’t so far you couldn’t get home if you had to,” he said.

“I don’t feel it’s right. There is too much trouble going on.”

“No one’s heard a peep out of Maldonado. You go if you
want
to.”

I looked at all their faces. None of them were begging me to stay. Finally, Granny repeated, “If you
want
to. Hear that? A girl don’t never get much chance to go her own way, do her own mind. Might be nice for a spell.”

“All right, then.”

I spent the rest of the week sewing, mending, trying to set things up right so I could be gone four months to town. My heart raced in bursts of excitement, and then I like to cried for lonesomeness, and I wasn’t even gone yet. Once in a while, I wondered if I wasn’t gone addled too far to figure, and that I was lost in a mix of my past wishes, my mama’s “otherland,” Savannah’s anger, Mary Pearl’s new dreams.

Saturday evening, I took a ride bareback, trying to get Hatch to settle, and wandered toward Albert and Savannah’s place. After I passed the bend in the road, I could see smoke from their chimney. The wind shifted. The breeze waved the warm salty smell of their supper this direction. I spotted Ezra and Zack a-playing in the yard. I missed those fellows. The scene seemed like a picture painting that moved, and with the lowering sunlight, changed colors. The boys became little figures Mary Pearl had drawn on a paper taken from April’s desk.

I asked, “Does she ever think of me?” Hatch looked back in confusion. After studying the ground a bit, I clucked to Hatch and we rode for another half hour, then headed home. There weren’t any tracks in the road leading from her place to mine.

Tomorrow I will move to a room in Harland’s house, the one Charlie used to sleep in, to be ready for school. I spent a long afternoon with Udell, walking and talking, giving each other directions as if we were both leaving on some adventuresome journey. Finally, he said, “I’m going to miss you, powerfully. I’m sorry I suggested this. It seems like a long time for you to be gone. Do you need me to go with you? Or come fetch you home once a week?”

“Oh, no. You’ll have some peace and quiet, I reckon.”

“I’d rather hear you hollering at me.”

“I didn’t holler at—”

“Now, Mrs. Elliot. I remember some pretty cross words aimed at my skull, once.”

“You didn’t deserve them. Have I said ‘thank you’ for this you’re doing?”

He blinked a couple of times and grimaced. “In a manner of speaking.” After a deep breath, he went on. “I’ll mind your herd. What else can I do for you? Buggy got wheels? All of ‘em round?”

“The boys will look after the cows and Elsa will see to Granny. Mind Chess.”

“I’ll ask his help sanding all those doors. It’ll serve us both.”

“Udell, have you been to a university? What’s it like?”

“Grammar school was my stock and trade.”

Couldn’t we relive that moment you told me, again? “
I promise I’ll study.”

“Will you promise to … come back?”

“Why, of course.”

“Aubrey told me Mary Pearl isn’t coming back. To him, at least. That she’d changed her mind. Said she sent a letter.”

“She told me she wanted to be older before she married him. Not that she didn’t love him still.”

“He took it pretty final.” He looked at me, searching my face, it seemed. “That letter didn’t leave much doubt.”

“I didn’t read the final one. She showed me her first one and I told her to try again. She’s young, though. Mighty young. You know I’m coming back.”

“To me?”

“Yes, Udell. To you.”

Then for a while we didn’t need words to say what we needed to say.

Granny and I have moved into two rooms in Harland’s house. We spend our days taking his and April’s children to the park or plays and sometimes the public swimming pool. Most children played in their old clothes, but there were grown women in the water, too, wearing short-legged skirts and gathered bicycle-pants with half their legs showing. It looked cool and wonderful, but I would never dream of that out in public!

Gilbert will be taking Granny home soon and that will be fine with this household. She has been putting up a mighty fuss, wanting her quilt, worried about influenza, wanting everything from the ranch that I could not bring to town. Blessing acts as if Granny frightens her, and I figure if my mama would do less caterwaulin’ and more polite conversation, she’d fare better with the girl.

Today Blessing has brought me a book she wrote herself: eleven pages of a story about a top that fell in love with a dolly, and it asked the little girl who owned them both to marry them. The girl set up a little wedding for the toys. Blessing said she needed a cake. After she asked and then demanded, Rachel refused to make it for her. Blessing said, “Miss Rachel declares it is a unnatural event to have a wedding between a top and a doll. What does that mean?”

I put my finger to my lips and looked about the room secretively. I whispered, “Miss Rachel doesn’t believe toys could fall in love.”

“Oh!” Blessing gasped.

I nodded.

“Doesn’t she know?”

“I suspect her toys never fell in love.”

After a bit, Blessing said, “Maybe they did and she didn’t pay no attention.”

We nodded as conspirators do, and then Blessing read me the story again. Blessing was six. She drew all the pictures and wrote the story, put a cover on it and stitched the pages, just like a real book. There wasn’t any rust growing on this child’s thinking gear. This book gave proof Rachel wasn’t shirking her teaching. If Rachel lacked Blessing’s appreciation for the spiritual natures of the toys in one’s own cabinet, it was a small failing. Myself, I wish I could wrap Blessing up in cotton candy and gobble her down, as she is far too clever to be easy to manage. That will be her nature all her life, I can see.

Twice a week I visited April and her family. Often Granny and me, but sometimes Story, Truth, Honor, and Blessing went to visit April’s children, too. In the evenings I wrote letters to the fellows at home and to Mary Pearl. I feel as if I have been gone forever, but it has only been two weeks. Every bone in me rings with alarm, telling me it is time to go home, but I’m staying here. My uneasiness grows daily and I am quarantined to town for having caught education.

Udell came to town for supplies. Gilbert rode along with him, so we are having a wonderful reunion, eating watermelon and grapes and hard biscuits in the shade of April’s back porch where we all pray for a breath of wind. April has recovered from her lying in and she flitted around, making sweet noises like a mockingbird to everyone there, as if she’d arranged a happy play party. She made her children do recitations for us, and served our fruit lunches on white china plates I’d never seen before. As she put the girls down for naps, Gilbert said with a grin on his face, “Mama,” he said, “you won’t mind meeting my girl for supper, would you? At Uncle Harland’s house? I asked him.”

Lands, the boy sounded fearful. I swapped a gaze with Udell, and said, “It is his house, I suppose.”

“I’m thinking of asking her to marry me, like Charlie did. What do you think?”

I think he’d be too young, too inexperienced with money and the workings of the ranch. Where would he plan to live? In the big house with me and both his grandparents and his brother and wife, a mere boy bringing another wife there? The place was beginning to look like an anthill. “Well, son, I haven’t met her yet.”

I suspect having Udell in Harland’s house seemed as natural as having me, to my little brother, so it went along that with Gilbert bringing a guest to supper, we would send Aubrey an invitation, too. It went along with that, that Rachel put on a fresh dress and combed her hair for a second time that day. In the late afternoon we waited Gilbert’s return in the parlor, talking of the heat and yesterday’s little thunderstorm, and the plague of mosquitoes it left behind.

At the table, Blessing made a big process of showing me her mosquito bites and counting every one, except two, which, she whispered, were on her backside. Then aloud she said, “The skeeters in the outhouse are terrible fierce, Aunt Sarah.”

I wanted to laugh, but Rachel frowned at her.

At six o’clock, Gilbert drove up in the buggy and helped a girl, taking her arm on his own, to lead her up the steps. I took a deep breath. After all, my oldest boy had chosen to marry Elsa Maldonado without any more thought to the whole scheme of things than a whim. Why would I be surprised that here came Gilbert leading that woman from the stage wreck, Miss Charity James?

She squeezed his arm several times, and when he introduced us as if we’d never met, she tried to smile. I don’t know whether I managed to look pleasant or not. We sat down to supper with roast mutton, a plate of vegetables and another of risen rolls, and chocolate cake. Charity didn’t seem as ragged as she had when I first met her, but I reckon surviving a stage wreck would be trying on a woman’s features.

“Mrs. Elliot?” Charity said. “This was a fine supper.”

“Well, I didn’t make it,” I said. “Harland has a hired cook.”

“Oh. I cook some. Not as fancy as this. Plain fixings.”

“Plain is all right, isn’t it, Mama?” said Gilbert.

“Plain is fine,” I said. “Better, mostly.”

“Gil says you make the best pies in the state. I never could get a hand on pie crust except to get it all tough and it comes out like hardtack.”

I said, “Well, maybe you need a little lighter touch, that’s all. It’s not hard.”

Charity giggled. “Mine is. Maybe if I was to try to make hardtack I’d come up with something else for crust.”

We all started to laugh, and then Gilbert interrupted, just sober as a judge. “Well, Miss Charity, make biscuit dough and put that on top. Cobbler’s as fine as pie any day.”

After supper, Charity and Rachel and I got to talking while Gilbert, Udell, and Harland went to the front room. According to her story, Miss James made her living in a ladies’ boardinghouse, sewing fancies for rich women in town. I asked her which one, as there are
ladies
houses and then there are the
other
ones.