Light changes everything, p.18
Light Changes Everything, page 18
Brody galloped toward me and lifted a whirlwind of dust as he hit the ground right in front of me. “This was a big mistake, letting you come here. A big mistake! I’m—I’m just fit, that’s what. Fit to be tied. What do you think you are doing talking to that man? Don’t think for one minute he couldn’t tell you are a girl!”
Pa and Clove came up behind him and dismounted, too. I thought they’d take up for me and tell him to pipe down, but instead Pa said, “Yes, it was a mistake. Mary Pearl, I want you to go home.”
I said, “Why are you mad at me? All I did was try to get the money back.”
“If you’d kept quiet, he might not have killed that man,” Clover said.
“Are you telling me you wouldn’t have said anything?”
Pa raised his voice, and the anger on his face cut me to the bone. “We are lucky to be out of here with our skins. I want you to get on home. Leave the pack mules here. It’s a day’s ride and Clove can go with you. We’ll make another plan with the Rangers and head south again from Sarah and Udell’s place.”
I could hear him muttering the word, “Trouble,” as I swung into the saddle with one move. I was beginning to like riding in pants, for sure, but here was everyone mad at me again, as if they’d never have spoken up for our money. Now we had even less to get our boys home and we’d wasted another whole week. Ezra and Zack could be long dead by the time we found them. “Fine then,” I said. “I’m going home.” I kicked my mare too hard and made her swing her back hooves up. Without a word to anyone, I started north. Soon enough I heard horses behind me.
I shouted, “I don’t need you two sorry cayuses following me. Get on back there.”
Clover didn’t rankle easy, but he looked red in the face. “I just hoped you would sit quiet and let the men handle things.”
“I didn’t see any men handling anything,” I said. “And you, Brody Cooperand, what makes you think I need you along?”
“Everything I’ve seen you do since you got back from that eastern girls’ school, that’s what.”
“Oh, my lands. The two of you.” I galloped ahead so they couldn’t hear what else I was saying. I’d heard my aunt Sarah let out with some spicy words now and then, when she was peeved beyond containing, but this was the first time in my life that they came to me as naturally as if I had always been used to airing my lungs like a mule skinner.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Mama, I’m home. Mama?”
She wasn’t in the kitchen or in the bedroom. I found her out watering the garden wearing a wide straw sombrero. “Oh, Mary Pearl! Have you come with the boys?”
I fell into her arms. “No, Mama. Only Clover and Brody. We couldn’t find Zack and Ez. Pa and the Rangers went clear to Mexico and no one heard of them.” I hung my head. “It was a terrible time, Ma. We got captured. This general from the Mexican government shot a man standing in front of me right in the face. He shot him for stealing our money, but then he stole the money from the bandito. Everyone was mad at me, and wanted me gone. All I wanted to do was help.”
“Ah, honey. Sounds to me like they couldn’t do any good, either. Better you stay here.”
“Mama, you’re so skinny.”
“No one here to cook for. I just pick at things. I never had no one to cook for before. Granny’s going to come live here for a bit, so both of us won’t be so lonely. I’m trying not to give up hope but I don’t feel like eating.”
I collected myself for a spell, just being quiet, the way she liked to handle things; thinking and praying and quietness was what she lived by. After a while I said, “I want to take a bath.”
“Look on the kitchen window first. There’s a letter for you from a lady in Illinois.”
I left Mama in the garden and walked through the kitchen. It usually smelled like supper of some kind, but today it only smelled of desert heat and dust and tired, old, wooden furniture. The letter was from Prairie. They’d gone to Niagara Falls and Rome for a honeymoon. She was setting up house in Chicago in a good district. She went to the symphony every month and she had two maids. Bully for her, I thought. It all seemed too far away to imagine I had been for a while in a college in Illinois. I had thrown snowballs and here it was 112 by the thermometer nailed to the door out back. I had learned to compose photographs and develop prints wearing protective aprons and gloves, and I had dreamed of traveling more and wearing city clothes and riding in buggies to the symphony. The letter closed with, “Write back and tell me of your adventures. I hope you are having a lovely time and that you are as happy as I am.”
Disheartened and angry, I dropped the letter on the table and went out to the screened-in bathtub room behind the house and started pumping water. I had to pick a skinny tarantula out of the bathtub. Poor thing was nearly starved from being trapped in the tub with no scorpions to eat. I set him down by the door where he could easily crawl away, since I’d already stripped off my dusty old clothes. I stepped into the water, cool from the earth, and covered myself with Aunt Sarah’s homemade soap. Then I cried and cried as if I would spend my last breath doing it.
I had ruined everything. I gave away our place by shooting that snake. I cost a man’s life by asking for our money. Maybe he’d have died anyway. Maybe we wouldn’t need the money the officer kept. Maybe it was too late to save my brothers. My own life was a mess, too, and all I’d wanted to do was find our boys before I ran away from home to have a baby in Albuquerque and never see my family again. Everything was a disaster, and I was the biggest landslide in the middle of it. Prairie’s letter only confirmed how different our lives were. How tidy and sorted out it had seemed in Wheaton, and how rambling and dusty and dangerous it was here. I wished I’d married Nation Hollingsworth and stayed in Chicago.
Yet all this would still be happening. They wouldn’t have told me or come to get me. I just wouldn’t have been here to help. Or likely, I wouldn’t have been here to make a mess of everything, shooting at snakes and having to see a murder less than six feet from my face. That was different than being shot at and shooting back, like Aunt Sarah had warned. That was just murder and it made me want to vomit. I wept so violently I nearly drowned from bobbing my face in the bathwater.
I heard Clover call out. Since the bathing room had only got walls halfway up and screen on the top half, it was our rule to holler forth if someone wanted in, so they didn’t alarm anyone who might be in there. “You drowning in there?”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I croaked, and sucked down my tears.
That evening, Clover and Brody ate supper with Granny, Ma, and me. Ma declared she was happy to have someone to cook for, but I can’t imagine why any woman would welcome standing over a hot stove in the summertime. I listened as the men talked about everything on the farm that had gone bad while we’d been off on a wild-goose chase. Then they talked about where Maldonado had gone and where our brothers were.
Then Brody looked straight at me and said, “You look like you’ve been crying for days.”
My lips started to tremble again. I felt very aware that my skirt waist was hiked up in front a bit, and that I’d gotten round. I only said, “I’ve never seen a man shot through the head only six feet away from me. Even if he was bad. I’ve never seen that before.”
He turned away, shaking his head.
Mama sighed. “No, of course not. I thought times had changed, but not so much. Up to now, honey, you’ve been spared many things I grew up seeing.”
I stared at her a moment, my mouth hanging open. I’d heard all about their struggles. I knew Pa’s face sagged on one side from being shot across the skin above his ear, but I never had imagined what it looked like before then, or what it might have been to witness such a thing. I’d never imagined a gun pointed at my head, or thought that I could die any second before I’d even begun to live my own life. I said, “I’m not cut out to be strong as you, Mama.”
Granny looked up from her plate. I thought she’d fallen asleep. “Ever’ woman has her troubles. Is it Comanches?”
I heard a buggy pull up outside and voices. Mama said, “That’ll be Rebeccah and Dr. Pardee.” While she left the table to go to the door, I stared at my plate, and when I looked up Brody was staring at me like I’d grown two heads.
“Something on your mind?” I asked. “You look like you’ve got something stuck in your craw.”
“I would just like to know why you’re so all-fired set on acting like a man.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m not.”
“Prancing around wearing men’s pants. Riding out like a wet-eared boy trying to do a man’s job. What’s got into you since you went to that college?”
“Nothing—well, nothing. What’s it to you? You think you have something to say about my life?” I drank some water.
“I can tell you one thing—” and then he stopped because Rebeccah and her fiancé, Dr. Pardee, and some old woman came into the room with Ma.
I was looking hard at Clover, sitting there, not minding at all if this hired hand talked to me like a child needing a paddling. Clove at last caught eyes with me and his brows flew up, he stifled a grin, and stood, welcoming the ladies to the table. Brody muttered something about washing up outside. I frowned and stuck my chin at him, but he wouldn’t look my way again.
Mama said, “Mary Pearl? Say hello to Miss Flanagan, Dr. Pardee’s aunt, who came along as a chaperone for them,” and she was giving me a look as if she’d already said it once before.
I said hello, and dished them up some supper. Staying busy with my hands was a good way to swallow my sadness. Wasn’t there something in Granny’s memories about that, too? Maybe that was why all the women in this family worked so hard.
In just a little while, the sun’s angle was no longer striking the front porch and we took coffee out on the chairs set all around. I told Mama I’d wash dishes, and soon as I said that Brody stood up and started for the kitchen, too, but Rebeccah said she’d help, and he turned right around and went outside. Soon as we were done, we joined the rest of them, but just as I sat down Clover disappeared into the house. I could hear him going up the stairs the way he and my brothers always did, two or three at a time. He came right back down with Brody’s guitar and handed it to him. Not a word of why it was in our house, but there you are. Always felt lately like my brother was up to something.
Brody picked some tunes. Rebeccah and the doctor, whose name was Robert, made moony eyes at each other, and Ma and Miss Flanagan talked about cabbage. Cabbage soup, cabbage fritters, boiled with onions and potatoes. My best opinion of cabbage is that chickens like to eat it and the more they eat of it, the less I have to.
“Well,” I said, “I’m tired. I’m going in to bed.”
Brody kept on playing, but he looked toward me for a moment, and just for a split second, he didn’t look mad but kindly, with gentleness in his eyes, which was the first time he’d looked like that in a hundred years, I’d bet. Then, what did I care? Just another pair of big stinky feet around the house, that’s all he was. Him and Clove caught eyes together and then he turned back to me with a little smile and a flush on his face.
Clover announced, “Me ’n Brode are gonna sleep out here on the porch. Doc, you can join us. It’s cooler than the girls will have upstairs.”
“My room is just fine,” I said. “Third floor pulls all the air up the stairs and it’s plenty nice. Rebeccah can sleep in Esther’s old bed in my room. We’ll make up a bed for you in the twins’ room for privacy, Miss Flanagan.” I didn’t say the rest of what I was thinking, which was that now we’d have to wake up and share the outhouse with just as many people as usual, and one of them was that Brody Cooperand and why in blasted cow pies didn’t he just ride on home to Aunt Sarah’s bunkhouse where he belonged? What was he doing sleeping on our porch? Then, I thought, perhaps, just perhaps, the banditos followed us. Or the Federales. Of the two, the last was the most frightening.
Once I remembered that, I guessed I didn’t mind the men being there overmuch. At any rate, by the next morning I didn’t remember my head hitting the pillow. It was full light when I woke the next day. Rebeccah’s bed was already made and the house was silent. I knew chores started early, and I felt ashamed of sleeping so long, but even with the guilt, a lingering drowsiness kept me moving slowly. I didn’t even dress, but put on a wrapper and went downstairs to find some breakfast. I found the coffee gone cold on a sideboard, next to some sliced bread already curled up and dried. I doused some milk in my cup and dipped bread in the coffee and milk mixture, and it struck me how it was sparse fare, but so much more to my taste than what we’d had on the trail. I reread Prairie’s letter while I ate.
I found my family sitting on the porch. That alone was so unusual it gave me concern, but everyone smiled and greeted me. Pa had come home during the night, but Dr. Pardee and Miss Flanagan had left at first light, they said. Brody had gone back to Aunt Sarah’s since she’d be home now. His guitar still leaned against a wall behind a pot of aloe.
Ma had a Bible open on her lap, but her arms were crossed, as if she’d already said what she’d meant to say. Clover spoke up first, saying, “I never could have guessed we’d come to this. We have to get the boys back.”
“Where did all the Rangers go?” I asked.
Pa said, “They said they were sorry, but there was no trail to follow. If we get another notice or other information we should send them a wire. That’s all they could offer.” He walked to the far end of the porch, then came back and put his hands on my shoulders. “I know you want to help, Mary Mine, but I fear for your mother home alone. Heard you popped a snake with a hip shot. I need you here.”
“I want to find my brothers, Papa,” I said with tears again filling my eyes. “If it’s the last thing I do.”
“This is how you help us do that.”
Mama at last turned to me and said, “Please, Mary Pearl?”
“Yes, ma’am, Mama.” I wanted to say, “But you’ll have Rebeccah here for company,” although I knew in that same instant that company didn’t mean safety, and that Rebeccah had never in her life pulled the trigger on a gun, and so maybe Pa wasn’t just being protective of his women. Maybe he really needed me here.
* * *
Pa and Clover set out for Aunt Sarah’s house. They were planning to collect Udell and Charlie, and head south to the Cochise County sheriff and see if they could raise either some information or a posse. They took all the money with them.
Mama watched them ride away, and said, “Mr. Hanna will be good help.”
“No telling,” I said. “If he’s like his son, probably not.”
“You’re sure sour on Aubrey, aren’t you?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Well, Rachel wrote that they are going to come visit again next week. By then the boys will be home. We’re going to want to set up all the summer beds on the porch while they’re here. I have new potato sacks that I want you to thread on the rods for cooling. Beccah will help you.”
I stared at her a moment, wondering if she’d lost her mind, but I said, “Yes, ma’am.” I should write to Prairie of my lovely adventures. Seeing a man shot between the eyes and hanging hemp bags on wires to pour water over, just to try to get a night’s sleep. Sometimes we even wet down our sheets, just so we can escape the roasting temperatures. I wished I was back in Illinois. Wished I was at the Grand Canyon. Or Kentucky.
While we worked on hanging the curtains and making beds, I asked, “Ma, is Brody going down with them?”
“I don’t know, honey. Why do you ask?”
“Well, Aunt Sarah would be all alone then. She should stay here, too, until all the men get back.”
Granny walked out onto the porch and took a rocking chair. “Come over here, girl,” she said. We all took notice but I moved toward her first. She reached for my hand. “I want to add something to my memories. You got ’em hid, like I told you?”
I bit my lip. “Yes’m. I didn’t tell anyone else.”
“I’ve let the cat outta the bag,” she said, pursing her lips with a frown.
I nodded. “I’m sure we can trust Mama and Beccah to mind what you ask.” They smiled and nodded as well.
I sat for an hour and wrote her words while she went on about how to cook a wild rabbit so you don’t catch rabbit fever. Granny fell to sleep in the middle of her last sentence. I just set the pencil down on the papers near her, and put a rock on the stack so it wouldn’t blow away.
Rebeccah leaned in close and whispered to me, “Why doesn’t she want anyone to read her memoirs?”
I thought a minute, struggling with telling an outright lie and finding a way to smooth out the truth. Then I said, “There’s nothing in there except a person getting on through a hard life. You know she was young during the big war. I reckon she doesn’t want to answer any questions. She had some things to say, that’s all. You know how Granny will say things that don’t fit what’s going on, or seems like she’s addled? Well, after listening to her tell me all these tales about her life and things her granny and great-granny told her, and putting them all together in light of what’s happened at the minute she decides to say something, what I believe is that her words are coming from some distant time, and seem out of place the way we hear it, but all her life is one huge supper table, and it’s her going around taking a bit of that dish and a bit of this one. Some of it is sweet relishes and some is bitter and harsh. It goes together, but not in our listening order. It comes out in her tasting order. She ain’t addled at all. Her table’s just full.” My words surprised my own heart. I hadn’t ever put into a statement what had become my inner knowledge. I felt proud.
