Between Earth & Sky

by Karen Osborn

  Mrs. Boswell’s poor baby died the day after Christmas. She had grown so weak I did not think she would live to see Christmas, but her mother seemed determined to make her live long enough to shower her with gifts. Mr. Boswell says they will leave for California as soon as the weather is reliable enough for travel.

  I have met the new missionary, who will help to start the school. She traveled here alone from the east, riding first in a railway car and then in an old wagon driven by a Mexican and pulled by two burros. She rode this way a full day and most of a night and could not understand a word spoken to her by the driver.

  When she at long last arrived at the mission, it was well into the night, and she swears the driver, who must have gotten lost coming over the mountains, had been drinking whiskey from a canteen he kept beside him on the seat. She pushed him aside after they slid off the road for the fourth time and drove herself. It does not sound as if there was much to drive, the burros barely keeping pace with an old Indian woman who walked beside the wagon for several miles and would not accept a ride.

  I imagine that when Miss Alden reached the mission and saw how they are supplied—for they have no readers, slates, not even a desk—she wanted to turn back, but she claims she will teach the alphabet by drawing in the dirt with a stick if she must. Already, no matter what the weather, she rides through the valley and even up into the mountains alone on her small, dark horse.

  Your Sister,

  Abigail

  July 1, 1880

  Dear Maggie,

  Congratulations on Irene’s graduation. Does she plan to start work on her teaching certificate next year? I have heard from Aunt Celia all of her accomplishments. And soon Robert will be graduated also. No doubt, John will be glad to have his son working beside him in the store.

  This is a busy season, and the canvas I had started to paint last spring sits in the corner of my living room, unfinished. I have marked out the shape of the horizon with the mesa rising up into it and found the right shade of blue for the sky. But these past few months I cannot find the time to paint until it is well into the evening, and by then, of course, it is too dark to look out the window for my inspiration. Clayton says I should put it aside and start another of a still life, perhaps a vase of poppies or roses; we have a trellis of dark-red roses growing near the house.

  It is late in the afternoon and raining. Clayton has taken George with him to ride out and check the ditches. Margaret and the baby are sleeping. Recently Señor López, the man we purchased our land from, offered Clayton a mule and a young horse if Clayton will tell him which mines to put his money in. I begged Clayton not to accept. Señor López is a powerful man, and there is no telling what he could do to us if the mines fail. But yesterday evening Clayton rode out to the Lópezes’ farm and returned with the mule and the horse. The horse is a mare, silver-gray, marked with white streaks across her back. In the near dark it looked as if Clayton were riding an apparition.

  During the last drought Señor López smiled and sent us vegetables from his garden, all the while denying that he kept the gate open and used our share of water. One morning after we had left our gate up through the night, I opened the door and found the hoof of a goat lying in the dirt. Our neighbor Señora Teresa shuddered when she saw it. “It is Señor López’s doing,” she told me. “There are many who would curse you for him. Let him have the water.”

  The sky goes on forever and is almost always brilliant and smooth as a piece of satin. Sometimes, in the afternoon, it is a blinding, bare light that makes one empty inside. The people here are the same as the sky, brilliant and warm, distant, terrible. I cannot trust them. As it is, laws do not protect one here. The Boswells left last spring for a more civilized place. Pamela Porter claims we need a sheriff from the east to impose order. “Perhaps,” she said last week, “we need an entire militia.” Last month the governor resigned, saying there was no way to govern. Anything can happen.

  I am watching the light-brown mule from the window I sit at. It is the color of the hills, and there is a patch of evergreen trees not far from the house, the prettiest blue-green against the muddy earth. Perhaps it is them I should paint.

  I remain your loving sister,

  Abigail

  October 12, 1880

  Dear Maggie,

  Autumn is full of so much color, red, orange, deep purple, yellow, against the bright blue of the sky. I want to paint all of it, and every chance I get I lay out a branch of yellow cottonwood leaves or red peppers and try to match their color. George takes such care of Margaret, and they both love to spend the afternoon out-of-doors. Patsy naps while they play, so that I often take an hour away from the chores of the harvest to do as I please. And an hour seems like such a lot.

  Maggie, do not tell anyone, not yet, but I am expecting another child. It should be born sometime early in the spring, perhaps March. I had thought Patsy my last, but I am so looking forward to another. Patsy is our little joy. When I watch her play with a simple rag doll—and she can do this for hours, singing to it or talking with it—I am reminded how easy it is to be happy.

  She is Clayton’s pet, and he would carry her everywhere if he could. Sometimes he takes her with him when he rides out to the river. She sits in front of him on the saddle, her blond curls gleaming in the sun, a little princess.

  The mines Clayton advised Señor López to invest in have not been successful. It was what I warned against, but Clayton claims Señor López understood the risks. We have lost money in them also. So far there has been no hint of retaliation. Teresa and Doña Romero see ill omens everywhere this fall—in the ashes of their fireplaces, in the way the animals behave, in the sky. I try to ignore them. The autumn is so pretty, and we are blessed.

  Your Sister,

  Abigail

  February 2, 1881

  Dear Maggie,

  We have been struck by influenza. It has taken many in this valley the last few weeks: Señora Teresa’s daughter, Señor López’s first grandchild. And it has taken my youngest, my last baby. I began to write to you as soon as she was gone, but then I nearly lost Margaret and was, myself, so sick that I delivered early and lost the child I carried.

  I am sending a picture we had made of Patricia, our Patsy, in the small wooden coffin. The sickness hollowed out her face, but you can see she had hair the color of sunlight, so much like Josh—oh, both my fair-headed babies. There was no doctor to tend to her. Doña Romero brought poleo—an herb to fight fever—and a specially made oil. She stayed the night, counting her beads. Nothing comforts me.

  Oh, Maggie, last night I walked out onto the earth and looked into the sky. I felt her close to me, touching the hem of my wrapper. When I closed my eyes I felt Josh there too, twisting his fingers in my hair, the way he did as I carried him a long way from home. The stars slid across night’s bowl, a wild sprinkling of light. The night of Patsy’s death, I thought Clayton would go mad, but soon he had to nurse me and Margaret; he could not afford the time to grieve. At his insistence, we buried Patsy and the infant in a small patch of ground that looks down on the river, where she loved to ride sitting in front of Clayton on his horse.

  Life is blown away quick—not more than three weeks ago I watched Patsy playing on the rug with her toys and thought how perfect each gleaming hair on her head, how sweet each busy finger. In mourning, I am your sister.

  Abigail

  May 20, 1881

  Dear Maggie,

  I have not been able to “get free” of all this sadness, as you suggest I do in your letter. I do not want to plant a garden or cook a meal or even paint. I do not care if the alfalfa is planted on time. Pamela Porter has asked me to speak with the new minister, and I suppose I shall. But I do not care even to hear a friend’s advice.

  The desert is strung with flowers: blossoming cacti, the red and orange Indian paintbrush, and the prairie torch, whose flowers line its stalk like small white bells. Yesterday Clayton and I rode up into the mountains through the brightly color
ed blossoming. The prickly pear were covered with their large, fleshy flowers, and for the first time I hated them for how sensuous, how prolific, how incredibly beautiful they were. It is the same with Margaret. I cannot bear to watch her play or feel her small, plump hand on my arm. I cannot help it that I turn away.

  We have started work on our house, a ranch house with a pitched roof and a long, deep porch. Last night while Clayton and I worked in the fields, the sun streaked across the sky until the mountains beneath it turned the many shades of purple. It saddened me.

  Abigail

  March 3, 1882

  Dear Maggie,

  Amy is a young lady now. How quickly it happens! Irene, Amy, Robert—can it be they are grown? She finished her schooling this past winter and is determined to complete her teaching certificate. To do this, she wants to return east. It is my hope that she might stay with you and attend the teachers’ college with Irene. When she gets her certification, she will return to New Mexico to teach. After all the years of separation, Maggie. If possible, I will bring Amy east myself so that we can see one another again.

  Our house has five large rooms, and even in the winter they are thick with light. I have planted climbing roses and grapes along one end of the wide porch. This year George has attended the nearby mission school begun by Miss Alden and the reverend and his sister. The school is now furnished with an organ, maps, a blackboard, readers, slates, and even pens and ink. Several white children from the surrounding homesteads attend, but the majority of the students are the Indian children whom the missionaries have come to convert. The older Indian girls bring babies with them, as it is their job to care for their younger siblings. If George had his way, he would not attend school at all, for already he seems sure that he wants to spend his life working on a ranch. It is not a life I would have chosen for him. The ranchers are a rough bunch. Their lives grow out of the desert sand and rock and clay. You can hardly imagine anything like them back in Virginia.

  Clayton and I and the children spend much of our time simply keeping the farm in operation, caring for the animals, planting and harvesting. When Clayton is gone speculating, I am here alone with the children. Last month while he was away, we had a snowstorm, and so it was three weeks before he was able to come home. Señora Teresa sent her son to see if we had fuel and food, but other than this we saw no one.

  George, who was home from the mission school, and Margaret were a great help feeding the animals, but they long to spend all their time outside in the fields or riding through the red hills and grew quite bored with sitting around the stove. During the storm, they quarreled so often I nearly sent them out into the drifting snow.

  The pleasure of another lady’s company is a rare treasure. Pamela Porter and I have become the best of friends, but we seldom see one another because of the distance between our lands. When we are able to visit, we eagerly trade issues of Godey’s and discuss the fashions and all that has transpired in our lives. The new Methodist minister preaches a sermon every other Sunday, and we enjoy the service and seeing the other families. A picnic is sometimes held, and after days, sometimes weeks, of speaking mostly Spanish with our neighbors, we enjoy both the food and the conversation.

  Maggie, I do not understand the course my life has followed. Often it seems a curse comes with a blessing. I have fallen in love again, and with my own husband. After we buried Patsy, for months I could not bear to see him, but then at the end of last year’s summer I sat in the garden, which Clayton had filled with flowers and cacti and beautifully shaped rocks before even the house was finished. There were purple verbena and roses. As I sat in the quiet fire of that blossoming, my life one thin thread, quick and full of gleaming, there was a movement behind me, slight as a breeze sifting through my hair. Then Clayton’s hand was on my shoulder.

  “I feel as if we’re all here,” I said to him. “In this garden. Patsy and Josh and the baby I would have had, all of us, a family. I feel as if we’re whole here, even you.”

  Clayton nodded. “It’s a wondrous place, Abigail,” he told me. “A heaven on earth. I’m sorry for what we lost, but not sorry we came.”

  Something has changed, and a new tenderness exists between us. There is, it seems, so much for us to share: rides up to the mesa, where the river falls through the trees like a length of turquoise sky and the colors of the land (orange, red, yellow, green, brown) overlay one another in endless patterns below. The sky is so close it fills our lives with light, harsh yet brilliant. It is as if we are spun together, Clayton and I, in a web of glittering sky. At night the stars and planets turn, an explosive wheel above us, until sometimes, walking with Clayton through the garden or out into the yard, I am dizzy with light.

  When Fernando, who does occasional chores for us, came yesterday with a stack of wood, he told a story about the formation of the heavens, in which the stars were kernels of corn that had spilled from a basket one of the gods carried on his head. “And now still they feed us,” he said.

  Clayton nodded when Fernando finished. “They feed us.”

  Last fall Clayton helped me order a selection of art supplies—paints, charcoal, paper, and more canvases. In the evening when the weather allows, I sit in the garden drawing or painting. I have completed a few landscapes with the mesa in the background. Clayton claims one of these as his favorite.

  I want to paint the priests in their wide hats and vestments on their way to mass, the farmers in their cornfields, the little Indian children at the mission school, the ranchers on horseback, their faces thick with red dust. And I want to paint the sky. Perhaps I will send you these paintings so that you can know my life for yourself.

  I am your sister,

  Abigail

  Chapter 5

  May 4, 1882

  Dear Maggie,

  Amy will take the train east, arriving at the station in Richmond on the fifteenth day of August. I am sending you the schedule of her departure and arrival, and while we have been told that the trains are punctual, I cannot guarantee it. Let me know of your plans for meeting her, so that I can give her accurate instructions. She is most excited about the trip and filled with anticipation over the pleasure of meeting, after so many years, her “eastern family.”

  Maggie, the fare for the trip was more than I had anticipated, and as much as I long to accompany her, my trip east will have to wait. With the combined costs of our new house and Amy’s schooling (despite the generous scholarship, there are a number of costs), we have little to spare. I am only grateful there is enough to send Amy and that she will receive the best possible of educations. If not for the war, both you and I would perhaps have been educated there. What a different world it would have been.

  I have purchased cotton broadcloth, linen, and several yards of wool with which to outfit her. We spent several evenings last week bent over my issues of Godey’s, trying to determine the latest styles. Amy chose a suit with drapery in the back, and I will make her a white blouse and a dark wool skirt. I am enclosing a sketch of the suit so that you can tell me whether or not it is the fashion there. Amy does want to dress in style, and I fear we are behind.

  Your Sister,

  Abigail

  July 10, 1882

  Dear Maggie,

  Amy has instructions to meet you at the railroad station on August fifteenth at four-thirty in the afternoon. She will be wearing a blue dress and carrying a valise inscribed with her initials. I have told her to notify us of her arrival at once by telegram. Clayton and I will be quite anxious for her.

  We have had no rain for six weeks now; the ditches are low. Clayton is sure we will get no more cuttings of alfalfa, as the fields are brown and nearly barren. There was a new family from Alabama that bought land a few miles south of here and built a house this past spring. They stopped by yesterday afternoon and announced they are moving farther west to California. “With no rain, it is like living on a desert,” they told me. “How do you survive?” They had come here as we did, unaware of the peculi
ar laws that govern water rights and taking for granted that the most precious of resources would always be available.

  How do I survive, Maggie? It seems we will never know for certain how much of our water our neighbors use during a drought, but the mere suspicion is enough to cause bad will. And now another family come from the east that will not stay. Except for each other, George and Margaret have only the Spanish-speaking children as playmates. They catch horned toads and snakes and dig in the clay. I hear them singing Spanish songs, and I cannot understand the words. In the evenings they repeat the tales they have heard of animals and treasures, of a boy who was turned into a wolf, of phantom horse riders.

  Virginia feels as far away as another continent. But perhaps, through Amy, we two can be reunited. I shall sigh with relief as soon as I get word that she is in your hands.

  Your Sister,

  Abigail

  August 18, 1882

  Dear Maggie,

  The telegram has arrived, and oh that I were there with you also! I do long for the happy reunion we would make. I cannot convey the depth of my concern after leaving Amy in the railroad car. We pray that she is content while staying with you and that her progress is worthy of the scholarship she has received. Take care of her for me.

  Your Sister,

  Abigail

  December 12, 1882

  Dear Maggie,

  Amy writes that she will spend a pleasant holiday in your home. I thank you for welcoming her. She writes also of her frequent visits with Mother, who, she tells us, is gracious in every way and has bought her another dress, a silk blouse, and a woolen skirt, and made presents to her of hair ribbons and laces. I had not thought that a young woman attending school would need such ornaments, but Amy writes that fashion is more extravagant in the east. I know you will understand my meaning when I tell you that I am grateful for Mother’s attentions but do not want my daughter moved in any way against me.