by Karen Osborn
Sometimes, despite myself, I envy what sets her apart. It is something untamed, like the wild abandon with which she rides, the brightness in her eyes matched by the hard edge of blue that runs along the horizon. More than any of us, she is a child of the desert.
The Indian children who attend the school are small, with smooth dark hair and bright black eyes. Some of the little Indian girls come to school dressed only in a slip, with a shawl or blanket. The government sends clothing for them, shoes, stockings, muslin, calico, but there is never enough of it.
The teaching that I am responsible for is not nearly as difficult as I had feared. The younger children are a delight, filled with questions and eager to try their hands at tracing letters on the slate boards. There is a young lady who, despite her dark coloring, brings Amy to my mind so surely that at times I have difficulty watching her. She can spend hours with her reader and looks up only once or twice to find the meaning of a word. I have taught her fine lace work and cross stitch, and she made the prettiest collar for a blouse of mine.
The priests continue to do what they can to destroy any good work the school could do. Many of them are corrupt We know of a man who paid a priest twelve dollars to perform his marriage to a fourteen-year-old girl. With so much corruption in this territory, I am afraid we will never get statehood. Recently, I read in the newspaper that the sheriff and police chief were assassinated by a gang over an election. This did not surprise Clayton, who has long held that most of the politicians are outlaws, but I had a vision of some order, that at least government officials were beyond the violence.
Your Sister,
Abigail
May 29, 1892
Dear Maggie,
Margaret has disappeared and left not even a note to tell us where she has gone. I have searched everywhere, each room of the house. Her bed was made, the spread pulled tight across the mattress. Her clothes still hang in the closet. There is not much she has taken besides her horse, and I was afraid at first that someone had forced her to leave.
But Clayton, certain she had run off with Ramon, rode over to his house this morning and found that he was gone also. Clayton has accused Señora Teresa of being an accomplice. “She is too nervous,” Clayton says. “ ‘Where did they go, Señora?’ I kept asking her. And she only shook her head, never denied knowing.”
If they have run off together, I cannot imagine where they will go. A minister would not marry them, a Protestant girl and a Catholic, but the priests will do anything if they are paid well.
Clayton has said he hopes she will not return. He claims she has misused every advantage we have tried to offer her and that he watched her behavior these past few years and read the future in it. But I had hoped still for a change. Perhaps I should have been firmer and insisted she go east to live for a period of time with Amy. I fear it is too late now for me to shape her life.
I have not yet written to Amy of her sister’s disappearance, as I know it will distress her. Wait to speak of it with her. Maggie, I have lost them all now, every last one. Amy to the east and all the others to the west. I know you are thinking I deserve this, stubborn as I have been to live my life out here and refuse the comfort and safety you and Mother offered. If Josh or Patsy had lived, would they be gone now also, lost to the wilderness of this place, everywhere and nowhere at once in this vast country?
Your Sister,
Abigail
February 2, 1893
Dear Maggie,
Your letters arrive and I have begun several times now to answer them, but the paper gets put away or left beside my chair, where I find it days later, still white and empty. Last summer, after Margaret left, for a time I was despondent and did not care that our cuttings of alfalfa were the largest they have ever been or that corn ripened in the fields, their kernels the color of honey. Even the trees which were thick with apples and the grape arbor strung with heavy purple clusters could not touch the sadness that hung on me when I walked through the house and looked into the empty rooms.
In September Miss Alden rode out to visit and asked if I would consider teaching more classes. After some deliberation, I agreed to teach three days a week, and since then there have been several weeks when I have spent four days at the school. This gives me little time to keep the house cleaned and prepare our meals, but Clayton has taken over with the animals and does the evening milking.
My mornings at the school consist mainly of teaching reading and penmanship to the younger students. The children are eager to learn and full of curiosity. I have had difficulties with only a few of the boys, and when they are disruptive I send them from the class. The Indian children are well behaved, quiet and gentle. The little girls, with their dark hair and eyes that are shaped like almonds, move with uncommon grace. I am certain the sketches I made of them playing in the courtyard will be excellent studies for my paintings.
In the afternoons, I teach sewing and sketching to the older girls. There are a number of “artists” in our group, and most of the girls enjoy embroidery. It is difficult for me to watch the older students who are most like Margaret, those not able to sit still or not interested in completing the tasks laid before them. I ask myself what I might say that would turn them towards a productive path, but nothing comes to mind.
I have gone twice now with Miss Alden to the Indian reservation. They live in white-walled adobes, which they decorate with long strings of bright red peppers. The Indian women adorn themselves with jewelry made of stones that only they seem to know how to find. On festival days, the Indians wear white moccasins and leg wrappings and dance in the streets, waving sticks decorated with feathers and large rattles.
Last month, Señora Teresa brought me a letter Ramon had sent, asking her to see it was safely delivered to me. In it he asks Clayton and me to bless the marriage he has made with Margaret. “He steals her away in the night and then begs our blessing?” Clayton shouted when I read it to him. “Let him beg. They’re neither one welcome here.”
They have bought a tract of land in Mexico and plan on ranching. Señora Teresa has said there are bandits and all kinds of cattle thieves there. Margaret has always been determined to do with her life as she wishes. I can only hope there is a foundation of good sense laid in her childhood to which she might return.
Your Sister,
Abigail
June 2, 1893
Dear Maggie,
Clayton and I traveled to Santa Fe last month to shop and see the city, for in truth it has grown into a city, with streets which are lined with buildings and the poles that hold electrical wires. We stayed the night in a boarding house just to see the lights come on. For quite some time we wandered up and down the streets, marveling at the glow which here and there filled a dark window. There was a fiesta nearby, and we sat in the courtyard listening to the violins. Clayton held me as if I were a young bride and we danced among the gardens. I felt myself lucky to have such a husband.
The next morning the market was filled with all sorts of people, and one heard every kind of language being spoken. There was a Chinese man selling embroidered silk from his cart, and wagon loads of squash, peppers, tomatoes, corn, apples, nuts, even peaches and cherries. There were enormous jars of beans and strings of prayer beads. On all the street corners Indians stood with their blankets, pottery, and jewelry. It is fashionable to have one’s picture taken with the Indians, but one has to pay for this honor, sometimes handsomely, depending on the avariciousness of the model.
After an hour or two the market place had thoroughly confused us with its loud chaos—the shouts of those bargaining, the music of stringed instruments, singing and dancing, the screeches of a parrot, a donkey’s brays. We wandered into a stall filled with picture frames of designs made of human hair, yellow, brown, red, black. It was a sight that nearly made me sick, and I thought of the two pale-blond locks of hair I have set in a frame, tucked away with my Bible.
Clayton took my hand as we left that place, and we walked away from the
market towards another part of the town, looking for some quiet place to eat our lunch. It was there we happened upon a small gallery that sells coins, various collectors’ items, paintings, and photographs. Several canvases were on display, one by our old friend Dr. Mayfield. Clayton pointed it out, his only comment being that he felt my paintings of the desert were quite superior and that I should submit them for display despite the fact that paintings by ladies are said not to belong in such places.
I have few illusions about my paintings. I have given some of them away as gifts, and so a few of them grace my friends’ walls. But as I said to Clayton, I remain an amateur. “I’ll send them myself, then,” Clayton commented as he took down the gallery’s address. “Let them see what a homesteader’s wife can do.”
It is early summer now, and the desert is still blossoming. I ride out with Clayton along the river to see that repairs are made to the acequia. Our alfalfa fields are planted, and there are numerous apples on our trees in the orchard; the season promises already to bring a good harvest.
We are in accord, Clayton and I, in all that we do. Alone now, the two of us on an evening might walk out to the orchard or along the roadside to watch the sun drop down behind the mountains. Some evenings we spend in the garden, exchanging thoughts. “God is here in the desert and in this valley,” Clayton said last night. “I would have given up on God had I not come here after the war.” And I remembered how much without hope he was when we first came to the valley, his back bent with paralysis from the mining accident.
We looked out where the mountains meet the sky, where the sun had just begun to touch the horizon. “The firmament, Abigail,” he said. “The living light of God.”
Your Sister,
Abigail
December 30, 1893
Dear Maggie,
I must write to thank you for your kind note and the book that you sent all wrapped in the prettiest paper. I am sorry not to have written before the holidays. Some days it seems I cannot stop long enough to think even of my loved ones, and when I’ve spent the day reading to the Indian children or riding through the valley, Virginia seems farther away than ever. In a sense, I am grateful, for when this present moment is filled to its wide brim, the past nearly ceases to exist. But I must be mindful of those far away who should be in my thoughts.
George arrived two days before Christmas, having traveled by train from the ranch he is working on in Colorado. Clayton is glad to have his son’s company, and they have taken to riding out together each afternoon. They carry their guns with them on the pretext of hunting but do not bring back any game.
At night we sit by the stove and hear stories of cattle drives and roundups. One evening George persuaded Clayton to tell the story of our passage west, but Clayton is not a story teller and the journey sounded so dull by his telling of it and so short, you would think we did nothing but stare at the backs of our oxen for a few weeks.
“There was a child lost,” I said when he was finished. “Your son.” Then we both told George of the drowning, and I was surprised to hear how much Clayton could call back, each detail, how Josh’s hair was nearly dried from the sun by the time the Indian quit trying to make him breathe, how I insisted on changing his wet clothes before we moved on with the train.
George Michael leaves in a few days for Colorado. Clayton and he are gone this afternoon, having ridden up to Señor López’s to see about buying a horse. I wish that one of Amy’s visits would overlap with George’s. It has been years since they have seen one another, since before Amy’s wedding. Tomorrow is the thirty-first, and I will sweep the entire house so that we can begin the New Year clean. Maggie, do not think because you have not heard from me these many months that I wish anything but the best for you and your family. Amy writes that Robert and his wife have had their first child and Irene now has a second. Soon you will have a whole host of grandchildren!
Your Sister,
Abigail
April 7, 1894
Dear Maggie,
I am writing you this letter upon Amy’s insistence. I am past putting the losses of my life onto paper. As you know, Amy arrived with Everett last week for her father’s funeral. George came three days ago and will stay the summer to help with the farming. It seems I have gotten my wish that they see one another again. He was fifty-four years old. The doctor has said it was his heart, which the injury to his back all those years ago had weakened.
He was buried on our land, beneath the pale-green cottonwoods. The leaves filter the sunlight so that it flickers across the ground in delicate patterns. It is a restful place. In some ways it seems I knew that our time together was limited, that he would leave me to get old alone. But still, when I saw him that morning—for he died in his sleep, with little sign except for a complaint about indigestion the night before—I could not stop myself from falling down beside him, from sobbing. It was Teresa who found me like that, a few hours later when she came to show me where a patch of wild onions grew.
I do not know what life holds for me—an older woman alone on her dwindling homestead, for I shall have to sell some of the acreage. George has promised to stay on to help me get things in order, but he will return to cattle ranching, which is what he loves. Amy will return east. I have written but received no answer from Margaret.
You have not yet written, but I know how the letter will read when I open it. And perhaps I should sell the land and return east with Amy. She argues this case in an admirable way several times a day. But, as you have commented over the years, I am stubborn beyond belief and seem to have gotten myself planted here in all this sand and dry heat, my roots running as deep as the cottonwoods. I cannot imagine looking out from my window and not seeing the mesa in the distance.
And I must ask myself what Clayton would want. He came to love this land the past twenty years. Last month, on a day when the weather was mild, we climbed the mesa. The piñons that cling to the crevices in the cliffs were a deep green against the purple and red rock. Clumps of sage brush and prickly pear covered the hillside. “In another month the cactus will be blooming,” Clayton commented, and told me he intended to ride back up there with me so I could paint them in their full color. I’ll need to climb that mesa, Maggie, for both of us.
Your Sister,
Abigail
Chapter 7
October 2, 1894
Dear Maggie,
You ask the same questions that Amy asks many times over: “How do you get along?” These have been difficult months, but you need not be uneasy about me. I have managed to keep the house and the better part of the ranch by selling off more of the outlying land. Of the fifty acres I have kept, twelve are close to the river, where the soil is rich and can be planted each summer in alfalfa. Another few acres are planted in apple trees, the very same ones that Amy and George set in with their father years ago. The remainder of the land is just the way we found it, dry sand and clay scattered with cacti and the sweetness of sage brush and a few juniper trees. I have replanted the grape arbor, and this summer the grapes hung in thick bunches from the trellis. There is an abundance here of everything, and so I have given away what I do not use to good friends and neighbors and the school.
Three days a week I travel the ten miles to the Methodist school, where I read to the younger children or correct the essays by older pupils. In the afternoons I teach the girls the fine art of embroidery, and when I bring my sketching paper and charcoal, those who have finished their work join me for a drawing lesson. They say that there are public schools now in some of the larger towns, but we are still dependent on our little mission school for any kind of education.
Miss jenny Alden is a source of pleasure for me. If I were younger and unmarried, I would strive to be more like her. She rides into the Indian villages and up into the mountains alone, equally at home and unafraid in any world she enters. She has learned to speak Spanish and the Indian language fluently, so she has no need of an interpreter. Some afternoons we two go together, and
I marvel at her.
You must see, I am seldom alone, and when I am I enjoy the solitude of my garden, the company of the animals I care for, or a ride to the mesa. Here at the world’s bright edge, now without Clayton, I carve out my life as on a precipice but sheltered from the wind, nourished by the sand and stone.
Your Sister,
Abigail
December 23, 1894
Dear Maggie,
Today we began the Christmas celebration at the school. We give the children candy, sing hymns, and decorate a tree with tiny gifts wrapped in tissue, hung from each branch. The children delight in the candies, ribbons, buttons, and other trinkets. I am fortunate to be kept busy with the activities at the school, for they give me little time to think on Clayton and the celebration we would be planning were he here.
The Indian tribes spend the holiday feasting and dancing. Long ago they were forced by the Spaniards to participate in Catholic rituals, but now they do so willingly, incorporating many of their own dances and superstitions into the celebrations. Some of the Indian children will stay through the holidays. They are really very sweet, shy and retiring. Their dark eyes are large and round. I do think they can learn just as a white child can.
Jenny Alden is an excellent teacher. Each day I am impressed again by her enthusiasm and energy. She is not much older than Amy and came here alone to be a missionary in this unsettled place. Her faith and dedication are inspirational. She believes that all people on this earth have the right and the need to be saved by Christ, and she intends to spread the doctrine as far as possible. She sees the Indians as a people needing instruction. Indeed, as she has pointed out, when approached with patience they learn to read as any other child does.
