by Karen Osborn
The Reverend Brown and his sister have suggested that I allow them to find a more “suitable” home for Anna, “a good Spanish family.” They also offered to raise the child at the mission. I must remind myself that they are trying to be helpful, but she is my grandchild, and I am most capable of making decisions concerning her well-being.
Pamela Porter and Annabelle Sloaner, along with, I’m quite sure, all of the ladies of this valley, believe I have no business raising the child. What they would have me do with her is not clear, but as soon as I enter a room at school or at church where they stand conversing, they are outspoken about their feelings on racial intermingling and the ill that will come of it. Perhaps they fear she will marry one of their own grandchildren when she is grown. Just yesterday, Pamela Porter expressed that it all might seem more acceptable if I were more outwardly concerned, by which she meant more visibly repulsed by the child. I suppose then I could play the martyr.
I still plan to teach this fall at the mission school one morning each week. I attend church each Sunday I am able to make the trip, and I hold my head high.
I remain your sister,
Abigail
December 7, 1904
Dear Maggie,
As you may have heard, George and Margaret were both here for a visit in early November. George had written that he would come just as soon as the cattle drive was over and spend two or more weeks making repairs on the house. Margaret’s visit was a surprise to both of us. She arrived late one morning, having arranged a ride with a stranger from the train station. I do not know where she got the money for the ticket, as she came with nothing.
For some time George has been critical of my handling of his younger sister, claiming I should not allow her to come and go, visiting the child when she desires. But she was quite enamored of little Anna, carrying her about the house, singing to her in Spanish, taking over the largest portion of her care, so how could I do as George wished and forbid her access to the child as long as she refused to take responsibility for raising her? He claimed I must take part of the blame for her vagabond life, for I have made it too easy for her to wander about.
One evening, thinking he was partly in the right, I helped him to confront her with her behavior. An argument ensued, in which George told her she was no longer a child and needed to settle down and take responsibility for what was hers.
I will never forget how she turned towards him, her eyes narrow and with a low hissing sound, as if she could kill him, her own brother. “You’re the worst kind for that,” she told him. “Riding wherever you please, without a care for anything but your own pleasure. I’ve met some like you and had relations with them. I know the sort you are.”
“What are you saying?” he said, shoving her hard up against the wall, whispering so that I almost could not hear him. “That you’ve worked at one of those saloons?”
I did not hear what she answered, but the next thing, he stepped back and spat on her, then walked out of the house, and we stood there, the two of us listening as he rode away.
Maggie, I said nothing to her. As children, she and George spent entire days together, running across the fields and riding into the mountains. I could think of nothing, as if my whole mind was filled with the darkness that was starting to settle over the earth, for it was late in the day when all this happened.
By the time George returned that night, Margaret had gone. When I saw she was in her room, gathering her things, I found José and asked him to take her to the train station. Before she left I gave her all the money I could spare and a good dress I had bought for her. I have not told Amy of Margaret’s abrupt departure, but Maggie, I do not know what else I can do for her. She is gone now, as if she has been carried off by the wind. I have no idea where she will be blown.
George stayed on a few more days, repairing the roof and sealing the windows and doors. We said little to each other. I was bewildered, and in truth, I reproached myself for allowing her to be turned out of my house in that way. However, if she had stayed on, she would have disappeared eventually, and in the end I would still be left with no clue as to where she might have gone. When George rode back north, he left an envelope on the table, with money in it. “For care of the child,” it said. I believe he felt remorse also over how it had ended.
Maggie, I cannot believe she is my youngest daughter. Sometimes it seems as if she too is dead, and all I can do for her is raise Anna as best I am able.
Your Sister,
Abigail
April 4, 1905
Dear Maggie,
I know I should sit down more often to compose a letter to send east. Amy writes that you are all filled with concerns. We have acquired two more dogs, a brown one and a black one. They arrived during the winter, half frozen and starved, but are by now filled out and quite at home in the kitchen, where they spend most of the day by the stove.
I have heard that in the cities some people have indoor plumbing and telephones put in their houses. Amy writes she now has an indoor bathroom with its conveniences. Have you had occasion to use a telephone? If so, you must tell me what it was like, as I cannot imagine. I am sure it will be some time before there are men stringing wires across the desert.
The children are well and growing. Paula is forever chasing them about the yard, and I delight in watching them tumble over one another as they run wild and silly as chickens let out of a pen. Anna scrambles with all of them, ripping her pinafores, muddying her skirts, so that I let Paula dress her in play clothes like those her own children wear. It is natural that they play together, for as you seem to forget, indeed as I am sure you would like to forget, she is very much like Paula’s children. Her coloring is quite dark.
All winter we were chilled by a freezing wind. In February, when it rained, the ground turned to smooth, shining ice, and I could not walk to the barn but had to ask José to do all the milking for me. On the coldest evening, an old man came to the door with a brass bell tied to the handle of his cane and black rosary beads. I gave him a cup of warm milk and a plate of meat Teresa had cooked. He told me I would have a long life, not a difficult prediction, as already I am old, and then stumbled out into the cold. Teresa says he is a holy man and that once he touched a blind woman and instantly she could see. The next morning the cold broke, ice dripping upon the ground. Soon the valley and deserts will blossom, and so again the world will be transformed.
You ask about the school. Miss Brown and the others voted not to have me teach there anymore, which is just as well. I am occupied here with Anna and overseeing the alfalfa crop, the orchard, and the animals. I do miss the children and the few friends I had made there. Last Sunday when Reverend Brown shook my hand as I was leaving the church, I saw Pamela Porter step aside and begin talking with Mrs. Crompton so that she could avoid me. Her behavior is astonishing to me. We have been friends for years, but she cannot forget the color and circumstances of the grandchild I am raising in my home.
Jenny Alden is the only one connected with the school and church who has the courage to stand up against the popular prejudice. She was outspoken in her disagreement with Miss Brown’s decision, and she continues to speak with me on Sundays and frequently rides out to pay me a visit. “We must answer only to God and our own conscience,” she has told me. She advises me to bring Anna to the mission school, but I may decide to school her myself, as I do not think I can bear for her to suffer the gossip that will surely surround her.
Your Sister,
Abigail
October 16, 1905
Dear Maggie,
I have meant for some time now to respond to the letter you sent last summer. You must not concern yourself so much about Anna on my account. I will not be persuaded to “give her up now that it is clear Margaret can never care for her.” I do not care that I have become “isolated” from my friends because of her. The experience has taught me to see them for what they really are. I have a great affection for Anna and cannot imagine my life without her livin
g here in this house, sleeping in the room where her mother once stayed. I have lost them all; those that are not dead are scattered across the country. I will not be denied the raising of my granddaughter.
I do not care anymore what anyone thinks of me, if my old friends scorn me because the grandchild I have chosen to raise is dark-skinned and born out of an improper union. And I do not care about propriety. It seems I am too old, too much of my life gone. When I traveled to Santa Fe during the harvest to oversee the selling of the alfalfa and corn, I looked up Thomas Mayfield. He was not there when I rang the bell at his home, but I left a message, and later he came to the hotel where I was to stay the night and asked if I would share dinner with him.
I told him I had ceased caring what anyone else thought of me and that I have few desires left but I wanted his friendship. Then we talked of the desert and riding and of the book on the southwest he has nearly finished compiling. I told him about my painting and about Margaret and Anna and the alfalfa cutting and the orchards. He talked of his wife and the hospital and his son who was killed.
We drank our coffee, and it was nearly eleven. The restaurant was closing as we stepped out into the street. “After I found Clayton and left for the east coast, I was certain I would travel around the world or discover some new medicine or cure or be the first white man to walk through some ancient ruins,” he said as we stood under the yellow-colored light from the street lamp. “There was a whole continent, but I came back here and married and set up a practice, trying to get back what we had planned.” He looked down at the pavement, up into the light, everywhere but at me. “You went on in the face of everything.”
I took his arm and said I wanted to walk. The city’s square was lit with restaurants and saloons that were still open. In just a few hours the farmers would start setting up their wagons for the market the next morning. “I want to stay with you tonight,” I said when we had walked nearly half an hour, circling the center of the city and back up along the street where he lives. “I don’t care how old I am or about guilt.” And I followed him into his house, where there was a bed of solid, heavy oak with the silhouette of a cactus carved into the head board.
I left Santa Fe the next afternoon, having sold all of the alfalfa and corn. He has sent a letter asking if he could come this month for several days. We will ride under the cottonwoods, which have turned the most brilliant shade of yellow, and climb up into the mountains. He has said he will bring his sketch pads and notebooks, and perhaps he will let me paint his portrait. We’ll wander out into the desert, and I’ll be grateful that I am old and live alone under the hard blue sky.
Your Sister,
Abigail
January 20, 1906
Dear Maggie,
The guarded comments in your last letter about love that “comes too late” being better left alone are transparent. You are right when you say, half humorously, it seems, that I have become more determined and less likely to conform to what is “thought to be right” as I have grown older. “An unusual circumstance,” you say. “For most of us mature into a sense of morality.”
Thomas was here for several days in the fall, and I have promised to travel to Santa Fe this winter. As soon as I can arrange for Anna’s care, I shall. My morality is not based on popular opinion. You write that selfishness belongs to the young, but mine is a selfishness born of age. I am impervious to any criticism.
George visited in November and he repaired the roof, so we stay warm and dry inside the house. He brought with him a graphophone from his latest trip to Denver. I could not have believed the invention of such a machine had I not seen it myself. He played me an opera. It was delicious. He also brought me clothes such as they are wearing in the city, a new hat, a skirt of dotted swiss.
Already we are having a difficult winter, with several inches of snow covering the ground. In the afternoons I bundle Anna, and we walk through the snow to Teresa’s house, which smells of cinnamon, anise, and cloves. Plates of molletes, sopaipillas (the sweet fried cakes), chocolate, and puddings are lined up across her table. There are pots of ground meat for sausage and piles of the corn husks she wraps for tamales. Anna in an apron is her little helper, rolling out dough, filling the sausage skins. Bunches of herbs and bags of leaves hang from the ceiling. In the corner, a pile of ripe pumpkins. If she is a bruja, it is a good magic she practices. I would hate to live without it.
Your Sister,
Abigail
May 5, 1906
Dear Maggie,
I read in the newspaper the reports of the destruction of San Francisco by an earthquake and descriptions of the burning city. It is impossible to conceive of the lives lost, and I wonder how many of the names of the dead I would recognize, as a number of families from our wagon train all those years ago settled in that area. The Holmeses and the Snellings, the Millers. You would know the names also, Maggie, their descendants strewn from east to west, difficult to trace such a scattering. And Margaret—I cannot keep myself from wondering day after day where she has gone, if she could be buried beneath some building, inside some open crater in the ground.
Last week I accompanied Teresa and Paula and the children to a church some two hours ride from here. It was a small chapel at the foot of the mountains, made recently famous as hundreds have come to see the miracles that are claimed to have happened.
A statue of the Virgin Mary stands in the church yard, and there are some who report they have seen actual tears fall from her clay eyes. Every kind of healing has been laid claim to at this place, all attributed to the weeping statue. While we were there we saw numerous pairs of crutches left by those who no longer needed them, and we heard reports of blindness that had been cured and arthritis and heart trouble.
Paula and Teresa knelt on the ground and would have stayed that way through the afternoon and into the night had I not been there to remind them of the children, who would need to sleep in their beds. I envied them their devotion. “Pray for your daughter,” Teresa admonished me, and I tried.
The statue was the size of an ordinary woman, her dress and veil painted bright blue, her hands, face, and feet the color of clay. Her fingers touched in the motion of prayer. No tears fell from her round, blue eyes, but sorrow was so deeply carved into her face that I looked on her and felt I would weep. All that I have left behind seemed embodied there.
Numerous gifts of flowers and food, even coins and a stringed instrument, were placed around the statue. Paula had brought a finely woven basket filled with fruit. Teresa had brought a bowl painted with butterflies. I wished suddenly that I too had carried something, and so I left the small silk change purse from my pocket.
It was late when we left for our valley, and we rode the last hour home through the dark. I was afraid the horse would stumble on some rock or the wagon turn over an unseen embankment. The children slept, and all three of us were silent, staring across the land, which after dark stretched away from the road like fields of black water. Then Teresa began to weep, sobbing so forcefully I was afraid she would wake the children. But her sounds were hollow against the night, which poured out everywhere as if the sky had split and the dark, star-speckled ink ran out. It would have brought me comfort, a measure of relief, to have joined her.
When we reached home, the children were still asleep, all except for Anna, who wanted to know how a statue could help someone to walk again or see. I wanted to tell her about God, I should have explained Catholicism, a faith that does not follow reason, but instead I told her about art, that a statue, like a painting or drawing, can never be more than a mere representation.
“Even if it cries tears?” she asked.
“We did not see any tears,” I reminded her. “And if we had, if indeed others have truly seen the statue weep, it means only that the work of art is so well done, it comes so close to being the actual person, that we look on it and believe we see the tears. That is the power of art, to change our vision, to make us see what is not there.”
Anna kissed me on the cheek; she went to bed. In the evenings I watch her running through the orchard, so light on her feet she could be dancing, and I think for a moment how like her mother she seems, moving everywhere at once. But as soon as I think this, she runs across the field and lies on the ground at my feet, more pensive than her mother was, more practical. She says she is sure it is time she was in bed. “Like a little adult,” I tell myself. “Already, like a little mother.”
Your Sister,
Abigail
October 25, 1906
Dear Maggie,
We have started riding, Anna and I, up into the mountains. Last week we rode beneath the long, flat mesa, and the sky suddenly tore. Clouds twisted against the flat blue in every sort of shape, gray mushrooms, thick bulbous creatures. The wind rushed between branches of the piñons and fir trees, blowing sand into our faces. Dark clouds knotted, and long, feathery plumes swept the sky.
We dismounted and found a small cave. From that hollow place cut into the side of the mesa, we watched lightning strike so close we could smell the burnt, sulfuric odor and see the sparks that grazed the piñon trees. Maggie, I wanted to weep with fear, but Anna reached out, she held my hand, and we stood watching until the storm had passed.
Later as we walked back I told her how brave she had been. “We need the rain,” she said simply, and it was true, we were in the midst of drought.
Do not worry that we are too surrounded here by the Catholics and “their miracles.” Anna will make her own way. Unlike her mother, she is a sensible child. Her feet are firmly planted.
I am your sister,
