The Star Garden

by Nancy E. Turner

  We discussed, too, whether to tell Rudolfo the reason behind it, or let him come and find out at my door. It’s purely against my nature to plan a secret attack on a person, and other than Christmastime, I’m mostly bad at keeping a secret. I reckoned that if Rudolfo were angry about the situation, he might show restraint in front of his girls, all decked in their party finery, whereas if he knew in advance, he might arrive with his armed caballeros to do some harm. It was my intention to let him know that Elsa was here and why, along with the invitation to supper.

  Then Chess said, “Sarah, you know I ain’t telling you how to run things. But look who you’re dealing with. No matter what, he’s liable to come gunning for the lot of us.”

  Charlie said, “It’s not like I stole her, Grampa. I asked her to marry, but she had a choice. More than she did when he put her in the convent. I say we have Elsa come from some other room after he gets here.”

  I said, “Reckon it’s no different than Rudolfo himself would do. Using Christmas supper to railroad me into selling land to his pack of snakes.”

  So it was settled, a secret, and a date two days from now. As underhanded a plot as I’d ever been part of, far worse than just knowing Mary Pearl wrote a letter and didn’t get any answer. Charlie, with Gilbert and Chess, would go and deliver the invitation. Having just come from town with a load of flour, I had plenty of things on hand to have a first-rate fiesta, and just maybe a well-ordered and generous feast would soften Rudolfo’s heart. Deep in my soul, I doubted that prospect.

  The fellows got back and told me they just naturally invited Udell Hanna to come to the fiesta, too. Well, I don’t know what was so natural about having him around, him and his unfinished poem. Maybe I’d bother him to tell it again and he’d get to the end of it because there were other folks around. Reckon I’d have to make some of those butter pecan cookies he is so fond of. I set the men to putting up tables in the central plaza and collecting lanterns, while Elsa and I, with help from Granny, started making foods that could be done ahead, near every kind we knew.

  Granny said more than once, looking at Elsa, “Who is this?” And ever again, I explained that Charlie had married while he was in town. When my mama pressed us for more details about who Elsa was, I told her she was Rudolfo Mal-donado’s daughter. Then, minutes later, Granny would ask with a different emphasis, “Who is that?” as if she were settling in her mind the connection to the haciendado on the south road.

  January 31, 1907

  I am thankful, now that the day of this ambush party has arrived—for ambush is the only way to think of it—that Albert and Savannah, Mary Pearl, Rachel, and Rebeccah are still not home. If they were, they’d have to be invited. It is better that if any trouble comes between the Maldonados and my bunch, that it doesn’t include all the rest. However, as determined as I am to have nothing but a fine time tonight, I talked with Charlie, Gil, and Chess, and we have loaded pistols and rifles but hidden them from sight. “I know,” I said, “that Rudolfo wouldn’t dream of bringing any but his family, or causing a ruckus, but I will have more peace tonight if we are prepared for calamity.”

  The weather has favored us and it has been a mild day with a fresh but gentle breeze hinting of spring being just around the corner. The sounds of my home surround me and I love a spring morning like this, with the windmill reassuringly creaking on its axles, the chickens muttering in their yard, the bull and cows in the near distance, now and then letting out a low hum. The beauty of the day made me feel even more sinister, as we prepared the feast for this family of ours so recently expanded. Can’t say whether Rudolfo and I will ever feel like friends again. He’s likely never to forgive my rejecting his offer of marriage in that stubborn way a man can—never mind that it was only about taking my land for himself—to him it will always be an insult. Still, I know enough to enjoy every minute of a day such as this, for there are too few fresh breezes in the Territory.

  Udell came early, as if he’d finished chores before noon, and when he came a-hollering up to my front porch, I was shaking a towel off the side, making a white cloud of flour. “Fair weather, this morning,” he called. Strange, how that voice made warmth spread through me, and I drew a deep breath, feeling my worries ebbing away. Udell tipped his hat with one hand while stepping down from his horse.

  “Yes, ‘tis, Mr. Hanna. How’s work going on your house?”

  “Bottom main floor is about squared in. It’s going slow now, but Harland says it will pick up once the timbers come for the upper floor and roof.”

  “Is he out at your place? He should come to supper, too.”

  “No. I meant last time he wrote.”

  “Don’t you have timbers for the bottom floor? I thought you drove home with a couple of wagonsful.”

  “I’m only using the wood framework to hold until the cement sets. The bottom floor is built of solid rock. I thought maybe this afternoon, there’d be time to ride back and see it. If you’d care to. I know you’ve probably got something on the stove, though.”

  I gave the rag another flip in the air, snapping it loudly. “I’ve got bread rising. Rest is pretty much ready. I reckon between Elsa and the boys and my mama, they can manage if I’m gone for an hour. Will your horse take two?”

  He pondered the animal. It was a heavy draft horse. “He’s got the wind for it, but I don’t know about the temperament. I’d better get you—”

  “Baldy. I’ll get him from the corral.” Only I didn’t need to fetch the horse; he’d come on his own given the right bait. Whistling that melody I’d heard Gilbert and Charity James singing, I fetched an apron full of apples, then hollered to Gilbert to let the gate down. When he did, I whistled a shrill for Baldy. That good rascal came along pretty smart, expecting an apple or two for his good manners. I fed him two, gave two to Udell’s horse, then I slung myself up on Baldy’s warm, bare back, and off we went.

  Udell said, “He’ll mind with a cotton halter?”

  “Oh, Baldy’ll mind even without a rider. He’s about my favorite, now that Rose is retired.”

  We talked about horses on the way, about how I got some of them to do so well, and I don’t allow Mexican spurs on the place. I’d seen caballeros leave a horse bloody and scared to death in an hour, and have to have a new one ten times a day, as they rode them so hard. Myself, I’ll work on only one horse or two, most of the day, but I don’t ask him to kill himself for me, and I reckon they know it. Udell allowed it was good to have a horse know who was boss, but it was sure better to keep them in good spirits.

  It was a nice time that early afternoon, with the wind soft at our backs, and me smelling so much of fresh-baked bread like a fancy perfume, and him all cleaned up and shaved with witch hazel and soap. I notice how a man smells. It’d never be right to say it to anyone, and I don’t know if all women do, but I notice. I reckon that is part of the many mysteries women must keep secret, part out of decency and part because it would seem plum foolishness to tell a man I liked the smell of him. I found myself hoping he’d take the liberty he’d come so close to taking in April’s parlor, too.

  We passed the field where his herd of sheep had been killed in the fire, tied in their tracks by one of Rudolfo’s men, so the poor animals couldn’t even run. The ground was damp and haired with green shoots. One end of the plot of land was dug up and a row of three barrows stood waiting to be filled. Farther on, where the hills rose and fell away and rose again, we passed the trees where we’d hid from the bandits that day not long past. And then, rounding a curve in a road that Udell had been slowly etching into the ground toward his new place, I saw the hill where we’d followed the jackrabbit that day, leaving Mary Pearl and Aubrey behind in the buggy.

  An ugly, rugged structure grew from the top of the hill, thick and squat, with narrow windows and wide doors, built completely of rock. It was about the sorriest thing I’d ever seen. Not fit for a chicken coop, it seemed to me. My heart sank. Then I thought maybe this was a barn. It would be natural to build
a barn first. So I looked around with better hopes that this was not the “bower” meant to tempt me into marriage. The walls were about six feet high, braced here and there with frames and struts of wood. Strange openings were on one side of the big square thing, and a pile of cut bricks showed where he’d been creating an old-fashioned fire box and hearth. We rode around the whole of it. Udell talked about difficulties he had overcome in the building here and there, bracing and timbers and callused hands, and about how he’d hired some fellows but they had gone home at noon and wouldn’t be back until the first week of February. He made it clear that this stack of broken rock and concrete was the house itself.

  Beside the half-built walls, a windmill turned merrily in the light breeze. It was a new Aeromotor, and a painted one at that. Pretty as a quilt, all red and white, it looked like an incredible flower in the sky. Whoever had put in his well while I was quarantined in town had done it slick and fine.

  We got off our horses and I listened while he pointed here and there some more, talking about what he had in mind for raising a crop and more cows. I kept turning back to those rock walls. The man believed he was building something beautiful for me and that heap of rocks had less charm than an army camp. I didn’t know rightly what to say. Maybe this was the foundation foot he was building, and got it too high, but then the firebox would be in a basement. I felt as if a shadow from some unseen cloud passed across my heart. This wasn’t a place I could ever love. Nor live in. Maybe I was fooling myself into wanting this man. Maybe I have been blinded by lonesomeness into telling him I’d come here.

  As if he could hear me thinking, Udell said, “Well, what do you think?”

  I said, “It’s looking fine. But I thought you said you had the house started.”

  “This here’s the house.” It had all those holes in it, not like any kind of house, and though I only know a wood house and adobe, I started to wonder what on earth he was building. I even wondered if he’d lost his mind on it, and if Harland had designed this, what had gone with my little brother’s reason, too. He said, “Sure gonna be a beauty. Come on up here and see. It’s an easy step-hold, the way we left it. The rocks there will hold the next layer better when they’re all in stairs, and I can start fresh with the wet cement over the dry because the weight of them holds it down. Walls are a good two foot thick. It’ll be safe as a bank vault, and cool as a spring morning in the summer, warm in the winter. This—watch your step there—is going to be the kitchen. And that wall run with a lead pan up on top? Windmill takes a pipe no bigger than your little finger, and sends a fine drizzle of water down it any time you want. That kitchen will stay airy all summer long. Feel the breeze that comes up this side of the hill? That’s what convinced Harland and me it’d work. Those slots there will pull in the air all you want, and you can close them off in the winter with iron furnace plates.”

  Standing on the walls, I held his hand just to keep balanced. The strength of his grip, the warmth there, pushed the clouds back. I held my face toward the sunlight. To the north hills, I could see smoke from the two ovens going at my house. There was a clear sight of the road we’d come down, too, especially where we cross under the twelve-foot-wide ocotillo that marks the corners where Udell’s and my land make the junction with Rudolfo’s. To the west, I could see the fields, the rows of barrows that now obviously looked as if he were hauling that dirt one bucketful at a time to some other place. Eastward, we got a clear sight to the Rincon Mountains; below that, a place where the clear-cut canal supplied water straight from the San Pedro to Udell’s land. A road I’d never known, older and grown over, cut across the landscape here and there. And to the southwest, so small it seemed no more than a matchbox on a ledge, but clearer than a picture postcard, was Rudolfo’s hacienda.

  Udell had stopped talking. He stood on top of the wall close to my side and took my arm. We watched the scurry of a couple of men riding up to the hacienda, dust rising only high as the horses’ knees. A large fancy wagon with a team of four perfectly matched buckskin horses stood out in the yard.

  “Maldonados are fixing to head to our place for the supper,” I said. It would take him forty minutes or more to drive that slowly to my house. We had time, and we were only a ten-minute ride away, on horseback. I turned to Udell. I looked down at the rocks under my feet, all carefully laid in two rows with a sandwiched layer of scrabble and cement in the middle. Then it dawned on me from something I’d read long ago.

  He was building, not a gentle, kindly nest, but a formidable castle. A fortress, like the ones from before the Norman Conquest. I looked downward, able to make a better judgment of what I was seeing than before. Like a miniature of the castle at Edinburgh in Scotland, this house rose from a three-sided hill. From what seemed to be its ramparts, he could see anyone coming from below in the distance long before they’d see him. I turned back to stare in the direction of the hacienda. The tight feeling in my chest relaxed. I said, “You come along, too, if you will. There’s food for the Sixth Army waiting for supper. We could use another man on our side of the table.”

  “I’ll come just for that reason, then. What do you think of the house so far?”

  I didn’t want to say. It looked more like a dungeon than a castle to me. “It’s going to take you some time to get this finished. Maybe a year.” That way, I’d have time to think plenty, figure this way and that, whether I wanted to live here.

  “Could be. Don’t think I’m going to be in it by summer. Wearing my fingers clear off is slowing me down. Mixing that stuff, I thought I’d hit something with red dirt in it, and then I found it was my hands bleeding into it. The only luck of it is the cement seems to stop infection.” He held his hands out for my inspection. “My workers will be back next week, and Harland’s coming out again. I think I’ll have a roof on by July. Between toting rocks and planting a field in April, I’ll read all those books about cattle raising in between hauling topsoil from the sheep field.”

  I saw Rudolfo’s rig head up the road. I wanted to postpone this supper as long as I was able. “You need a can of teat salve. Show me again, how you are going to cool off this kitchen,” I said. The homely stack of drab rocks and mortar began to look less ugly. Then I asked him what was the measure of the place, and how many rooms he expected, and where would he have the stairs and all. We walked around the place on top of the wall as far as it would go, and back again to where the wall stepped down to the ground.

  He said, “Well, I figure—if we, that is—that Chess will need a room, and your ma, and then I don’t know about Gilbert or Charlie and Elsa. They’re welcome but Charlie’s likely to want his own place.”

  “I reckon if I came here to live it would just be with Chess and Granny. I …” Suddenly a pain as deep and threatening as an arrow went through my ribs and made me clutch at my sides. I felt all the losses I’ve ever known crowd into my soul at that moment.

  “Are you ailing?” he said.

  It was hard enough to lose the living. But to never again look out the kitchen window and smile toward Jack and the others? “My graveyard is on the hill where I can see it. Back there. You can’t see it from here. I’ve always been able to see it from the house.”

  “I’ll build it taller so you can.”

  The pain went into my throat and I held both hands at my collar. I could barely breathe. “You don’t understand. I have—babies buried there. And …”

  “And Jack?” Udell’s eyes pierced mine.

  “Yes. No, it’s not that,” I said feebly. Udell pulled on my arm and I let go of my throat, put my hands on his shoulders and let him surround me with his arms. But it was Jack. Jack waited there, always at hand in case I needed him. I held tightly to Udell’s shoulders, nestling my face against his neck. When I looked up at last, he smiled at me and kissed my forehead. Then he kissed my hair, right over my ear.

  “It’s all right if it is that,” he said. And then he kissed my mouth, sweetly and gently erasing all other thoughts of longing and lone
liness. His eyes held mine and with a shared pain he whispered, “I know. I know. Let’s get along, now.”

  I pressed Baldy too close with my knees and he bolted out of his tracks, trying hard to do what he thought I wanted. I had to circle him around to ride alongside Udell’s workhorse. I had to get my mind back on the horse, and not on the fellow next to me, or Baldy would likely take off for Texas, the way I felt. I wondered if I had taken up loneliness for a habit, and was too addled by it to recognize the end of it.

  We weren’t home a half hour before that fancy trap pulled by the four yellow horses came up to the edge of the yard, and I knew our siege was on. There was no more time for musing on either the past or the future.

  Rudolfo grandly presented his four other daughters and an eight-year-old son, who I rarely have seen, and they all formed a line and curtsied or bowed. The boy wasn’t like any I’d had around, and it occurred to me that Rudolfo rarely mentioned him and I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. It wasn’t too long that I came to realize the child was blind. Nearly mute, too, though he did whisper softly to his sisters, but he was led around by first one then the other, and helpless if no one touched him. Luz stared haughtily at the furnishings, and taking a seat in one chair she finally deemed suitable, stiffly said that their madrastra preciosa greatly regretted her health required her to stay at home. I knew Rudolfo’s new wife was great with child, and wondered if that was Luz’s regret, too. The two were the same age. I also knew the sneer on Luz’s lips was hidden from her father by her position in the room, the voice perfectly sweet and light.

  I said to Rudolfo, “Well, aren’t you going to ask that fellow, that driver, to have supper, too?”

  Rudolfo smiled that too oily smile of his and didn’t even turn toward the carriage. A man, very small in stature and with a mild, unmoving face, stood holding the reins of the lead horse. He had on the clothes of a deep-country peasant from Mexico, loose white cotton pants and shirt and a plain brown se-rape over his shoulders. His hat slid forward, then, as if he were asleep on his feet. “Caldo? He is only el chófer, and eats with the men when he is done working for the day. Now, dear friends, let us be merry and celebrate the return of our trust in one another, and how happy I am that you have opened your cocina for the joining of our familias at this time.”