Safe Passage

by Carla Kelly

  “That’s a good idea,” he said, not because he wanted to placate her but because she was right.

  She hesitated a moment before the closed door, as if she expected to see a rebel standing just outside it when she turned the doorknob. She looked back at him. “Will I always be afraid?”

  “What you will always be is cautious,” he said. “That’s even better.”

  The glance she gave him then was full of gratitude. She seemed to stand a little taller when she opened the door. He heard her rummaging around in their former bedroom, and then a “woo hoo!” which made him happy to know that not even war was going to take all the fun out of his wife.

  She came back to Grandma’s room, needle and thread on one hand and a necklace in the other.

  “The ravaging hordes missed your necklace?” he joked, looking at the gold chain and locket he had given her on their first anniversary, when life was good.

  “I hid it in the box where I keep my monthly supplies,” she said, her face reddening. “I suppose not even guerillas like to plough through stuff like that. Wish I had put more of my jewelry in there. Everything else is gone.”

  “Addie, you’re resourceful.”

  She undid the clasp of the necklace and walked to him, turning around so he could work the stiff clasp, his job with this particular piece of jewelry. He did so with pleasure, enjoying the fragrance of her, even if she wasn’t any cleaner than he was.

  She stood for a long moment looking down at Grandma Sada, who definitely needed to be buried. Ammon saw the tears on Addie’s cheeks and started to gather up the sheet for her. He stopped, remembering.

  “Does she have temple clothes?”

  Addie nodded and knelt by the bottom drawer of the bureau. She took out the packet containing the temple clothes and handed it to him without a word.

  “We can’t put her in them because she’s a bit far gone for that, but we’ll do our best.” He looked at her. “Are you square with that?”

  She nodded, the muscle in her jaw working as she tried so hard not to cry. He shook out the temple clothing and spread it across Grandma Sada, grateful that he knew Heavenly Father straightened out everything in the eternities. He had believed that all his life, but he understood it on a deeper level now as he prepared a fine old woman for the best grave they could manage in such desperate times.

  Ammon returned his attention to the task before him, gathering the sheet and pleating it back and forth until Grandma Sada was hidden from view. As he worked, Addie threaded the needle. She sat on the bed when he finished and with a delicate stitch, sewed the pleats together. Ammon watched her, ready to take over if she faltered. Instead, her face grew more calm with every stitch, until Addie had regained the serenity that had attracted him to her in the first place.

  Without a word, Addie followed his lead and gathered the bottom sheet in her hands. When he nodded, she lifted her end and they carried Grandma, a light bundle, down the stairs, and out the back door. They lowered her gently to the porch.

  “Do we have a shovel?”

  “The Thayns do. I’ll get it.”

  “Can you get a few more bottles of fruit too?”

  While she was gone, Ammon looked around the backyard, wishing with all his heart that they could do more for such a fine lady. The ground was softest under the clothesline. The cord hung limp from all the rain, and he remembered the times he had helped Addie hang clothes. Once the sheets were up, she was easy enough to entice inside the sheltering dampness for a kiss. Probably not today, though; maybe never again. The thought troubled his heart. Maybe he wasn’t as immune to her as he had tried to make himself believe.

  Addie returned with a shovel and two jars of blackberries. She flipped the clasps and handed him one, which he drained, tipping out the blackberries until the jar was empty. He handed it back to her.

  “Dry it out well, and get a piece of paper,” he said. “Write who is buried here, and include birth date, death date, and place of birth. Maybe next of kin. Whatever you think is important.”

  She did as he said, returning to the house for paper and pencil. He began to dig, wincing against the pain, but grateful for the night’s rain that had softened the ground. When he had to stop, Addie took over without a word. She dug until she ripped out the other sleeve of her blouse. She had pushed up her sleeves until he could see the bruises on her arms, which were turning an unsavory green now. Ammon closed his eyes and thanked God for the doctor who had saved her virtue and probably her life too. The least he could do was see that the physician’s wife got the money her husband stole from him.

  It took them two hours to dig Grandma Sada a grave that was deep enough to discourage wild animals. Ammon had no idea what guerillas might do to such a mound in the back yard. His arm pained him so much that he started to shake. Addie frowned and bit her lip to see him so weak, but he couldn’t help himself. She held out her hand to help him out of the hole, but he shook his head, fearing that if she pulled him out, he would never be able to get back in to finish the task.

  “Can you pull Grandma Sada from the porch?”

  She nodded finally and did as he asked, gasping when she had to bump Grandma Sada down one step. He knew better than to assure her that Grandma had no idea what was happening. He remembered the old lady as a woman with a real sense of humor, who relished a good practical joke. He hoped she was chuckling now, watching them from the spirit world.

  Addie tugged her grandmother to the edge of the grave. Ammon reached up and gentled Grandma into his arms while Addie watched him, her eyes anxious. He knew it was the perfect opportunity to deal himself a sympathy card and groan a little, but he resisted. Addie was under enough strain.

  He settled Grandma Sada in her resting place, thinking of Felipe Camacho and his grave under the pepper trees. Addie handed him the glass jar with Grandma’s name, death date, and place of birth—Daviess County, Missouri, 1837, plus her nearest of kin. Ammon looked through the glass. Addie had written, “I am the resurrection and the life,” from the book of John.

  “I wanted something so elegant for Grandma Sada, but here we are,” Addie said as she sat beside the grave. “Is it enough?”

  “It wasn’t until you added that verse from John,” he told her, reaching up to touch her leg.

  Her eyes filled with tears. “When she was nine years old, she stood holding one corner of a tarp over her mother who was giving birth in the mud beside that trail from Nauvoo. After her mother died, Grandma carried her little brother all the way to Winter Quarters.” She bowed her head, and he increased the pressure on her leg. “Why did she have to leave this world in the middle of a revolution?”

  “You were with her, and we all know how she felt about you, Addie.”

  She stood up, all business again, even though tears ran down her face now. She held out her hand for him. “Come on out. It’ll take us a while to bury her, and you still have to dedicate her grave.”

  She helped him out, then went to her knees, head bowed, while he dedicated Grandma Sada’s makeshift grave, the home for her body until the resurrection, when the dead would rise again. “Make this a hallowed place, Lord,” he prayed. “Addie and I have done the best we could for a fine lady.” He stopped, unable to say any more. Addie leaned against him until he could whisper a close to his prayer and hope that he had said the right things. Amazing how many new experiences had come his way since he rode into Mexico.

  She brought him the shovel, but he knew he didn’t want her to watch while he shoveled the first few layers of dirt over her darling grandmother. Addie looked so uncertain standing there, so young, reminding him of another girl at another grave he had dug only days ago.

  “How about you go inside and try to find some better clothes,” he suggested as he leaned on the shovel, trying to look so casual, when he could barely stand upright.

  “Everything’s ruined.”

  “Not the clothes in the attic,” he reminded her. “See if you can find a full skirt. Something
that’ll work on horseback. I have an idea.”

  She nodded and went inside, maybe thinking he really did have an idea. After a few moments gathering his strength, Ammon shoveled the good dark earth of Colonia García over a kindly woman who knew what trouble was and who had pioneered her whole life. She had always treated him well, even when Addie wasn’t speaking to him.

  He was taking a break when Addie sat beside him on the porch step, clothing in her arms. “You’ll laugh, but I found a wonderful skirt that I remember wearing a long time ago for a Cinco de Mayo celebration.” She shook out the gathered folds.

  “I won’t laugh at all. That’s perfect, Addie,” he told her. “Do you have a shawl?”

  She held it up, triumphant. “Now all I need is a bandolera to look like a soldadera!”

  “I have an extra one where I stashed Blanco.”

  “You’re serious,” she said, her eyes wide now.

  “Never more so. Addie, we have to blend in, if we’re going to even get close to that doctor’s wife in … in …”

  “San Pedro.” She looked at the skirt. “There was a shirtwaist in the attic that might work too.”

  “Change clothes and I’ll finish here.”

  He wasn’t done when she came down again, wearing the full skirt and white blouse he had seen on many a señorita. She had found a red sash for her waist, and sandals.

  “You’ll do,” he said, admiring her, which he found as easy to do as it had ever been. She was a lovely woman, maybe not the beauty that her sister Evangeline was, but something better. He had decided early in their marriage that Addie was the sort of woman who would grow more lovely as she aged. He figured Evangeline was about to peak any day now. Not Addie.

  Without a word, she took the shovel from him and continued where he had stopped. “You go upstairs now and see what you can find,” she said.

  “I can fin—”

  “Go.”

  He went, taking his time, mainly because digging the grave had exhausted him, reminding him that he had probably lost more blood than he had thought at first. Food would help, something more substantial than blackberries and apricots. He thought about the canned salmon that everyone in the El Paso lumberyard was tired of and then about Serena Camacho. “I hope you’re still alive, Serena la soldadera,” he said as he went into the attic.

  He found two white shirts that must have belonged to Grandpa, dead a long time and buried in a much grander plot in Colonia Juárez. If he was still alive when this whole adventure ended, Ammon knew he would get a coffin for Grandma Sada and take her down there to lie beside her husband.

  He pulled on one of the shirts, and in a moment of whimsy—maybe he wanted Addie to laugh again— draped the two fox fur stoles around his neck. Their black glass eyes still gave him the willies same as they had when he was three.

  He walked down the hall, brushing aside broken glass with his boots, shaking his head over so much destruction for no good purpose. He stood for a long moment in the doorway of the room he had shared with Addie before their own house was built. There had been mornings after he had come home from a week or two of freighting to just lie there with his wife, talking, laughing, and then putting the quiet time to better personal use. Grandma Sada had never even rolled her eyes at them when they finally came downstairs. She was a woman in a million, much like her granddaughter, whom he had let slip through his fingers like a fool.

  Ammon went downstairs and into the dining room. Maybe it was like a tongue seeking out an abscessed tooth to stand there in that doorway and remember Addie’s ferocious anger that he was only beginning to understand.

  He looked at the sideboard pulled onto the dining table, glasses and dishes broken and scattered, the table caved in. The corner cabinet hadn’t been pulled over, even though the bowed glass front that hadn’t even cracked coming across the plains was now a ruin.

  Ammon found a scrap of a rug in the parlor and returned to the dining room to spread it over the glass fragments. He knelt on the rug and gingerly felt under the china cabinet. He smiled as his fingers closed around his wedding ring that Addie had thrown at him two years ago. Stubborn woman! She had just left it there, too proud to retrieve it. They needed it now. No telling what they could barter for with that ring.

  A look into the kitchen turned up a battered canteen with no stopper and a moldy loaf of bread that even the mice had ignored; he ignored it too. From a forgotten wooden box, he coaxed a handful of brown sugar, hardened into shards, which he put in his pocket. He wrapped some loose salt in one of Grandpa Storr’s handkerchiefs, also retrieved from the attic. And that was it. Anything else that might have been eaten had been carted away or rendered inedible by someone’s call of nature.

  “I would say we are not beloved among the various rebel factions,” he announced to Addie when he sat down beside her again on the porch.

  Addie looked at him and laughed to see the fox furs around his neck—precisely the reaction he wanted. He started to remove them, but she put her hand on his arm.

  “They’re the latest fashion! Leave them on.”

  He did, happy to humor her, especially when she looked back at her work. She had finished burying Grandma Sada. He could feel her sadness in the way she seemed to deflate and then lean against him as though her strength was gone.

  “No, they do not love us,” she said, looking at the bruises on her arms. “Father wouldn’t let us learn Spanish or mingle.”

  Ammon never thought he would feel inclined to defend his father-in-law, but he reminded her that early Church leaders had advised just such a course. “I know they wanted us to remain neutral.” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. “My father thought otherwise, so we learned Spanish.”

  They were both silent until Ammon handed her the wedding ring. Her face grew rosy, but she took it from him. She started to slide it on her finger, but he stopped her.

  “Put it on that chain around your neck.”

  She gave him a hurt look. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it, her lips in a firm line.

  “It’s not what you think, Addie,” he told her, choosing his words carefully, because sitting there beside his wife, he wanted more than anything to see his ring on her finger again. “It’s safer for you on the chain. When I was freighting near Hacienda Muñoz in Sonora, I saw a rebel chop off a woman’s finger to get to her rings.”

  She gasped and turned slightly so he could undo the clasp. Her hand shook as she handed back the ring to slide on the chain.

  They sat together in silence until Addie cleared her throat. “What do we do now? You said you have an idea.”

  “Just a small one,” he said, wondering why on earth he had ever told her he had an idea. “We’re going to get Blanco and ride into the mountains. We’ll sleep today and ride at night. It’s safer that way. We’re going to hope we look like peasants or a soldero and his soldadera. We’ll take that money to the doctor’s wife in San Pedro, then turn around and head for the border.”

  “What are we going to eat?”

  “We’ll take as much fruit and juice as we can manage, and this country is full of prickly pears. It would be better not to fire the guns.”

  She nodded and stood up. She hesitated a moment, then held out her hand to help him up. He almost shook his head to tell her he didn’t need any help but changed his mind. He took her hand and she boosted him to his feet.

  “Let’s get Blanco,” she said. “García is starting to make me nervous.”

  He pried up the Thayns’ floorboards this time, while she reached inside for four more quarts of blackberries. He ate and drank two quarts of peaches, then insisted that she do the same. Addie shook her head after the first quart.

  Before he tamped down the boards again, Addie wrote a note of apology and stuck it inside one of the empty peach bottles. “I hope they aren’t too angry,” she said after she put the jar back under the porch.

  He had married such a tender soul. Ammon didn’t have the heart to tell
her that it was highly unlikely the Thayns would ever return to García. He looked up and down the quiet street, memorizing it for the last time because he doubted he would return, either.

  They took the back alleys to the north side of García, where their house was set back from the road in a grove of pepper trees. On the way, he told her how he had burned the front of their house so anyone riding by wouldn’t bother to stop.

  Still, he saw the tears on her cheeks when they came to their home. “I used to go back here now and then, after you … you left,” she said, her voice soft. “I’d sit on the porch and rock.”

  “Did you ever go inside?”

  She shook her head. “You weren’t there.” She stopped and set down the two quarts of blackberries in her arms. It took her a long moment to raise her eyes to his, but she did it. “I owe you such an apology, but it’s probably not possible to un-hear hard words. I know I can’t un-say them.”

  Maybe we can both try, he thought. Before he could put his thoughts into words, Addie had picked up the bottles and started walking. He hurried to walk beside her, wanting to take her hand, but he was holding the other two quarts of fruit.

  She stopped at the front of the house, shaking her head. When she set down the bottles again, he set his down and took her hand. Without a word, he kissed her fingers, then held her hand to his chest.

  “I used to love it when you sat on the porch, just humming and knitting,” he said. “You almost always fell asleep.”

  She nodded and gave him such a shy glance that it was almost like the look she used to give him at Juárez Stake Academy, when he decided he was in love. And here they were, standing in front of their ruined house, the one that hadn’t fared any better than their marriage.

  “Did you break the windows?” she asked, dismayed.