Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  Kathleen Tipton watched as Belle reached up slowly to drag a carpetbag down from a high shelf.

  “I’ll get that for you,” Kathleen said, touching the younger woman’s shoulder sympathetically.

  Belle smiled gratefully though she was embarrassed. She knew they were aware of how she lived. But people didn’t interfere with how a man ruled his family unless they could prove he’d done murder for no good reason. At first she’d cursed her mother—under her breath and in her dreams—for selling Belle for a few drops of water. Then the Apaches attacked the house Belle had been born in and Irma Gettings had been shot through both eyes.

  “Honey, why don’t you sit a spell?” Kathleen suggested. “You been tryin’ to do for guests like this was a social.”

  Then the bright-faced woman who was at least twice Belle’s age leaned closer to her ear. “I got a drop or two of laudanum that’ll fix you right up.”

  Belle licked her lips nervously. She’d had laudanum a few times. The doctor had given it to her on both occasions when she’d miscarried, again when Elias broke her arm for burning a pan of biscuits, and then when he nearly split her skull. A cracked skull was how his first wife had died. He’d claimed she fell.

  The opiate was a marvelous substance when one was short on Eden. Belle would imagine herself racing across the desert as a bird with yellow wings. The tall saguaro cactus spun like dancers, lifting up graceful arms and turning as choruses of grasshoppers produced a strangely mesmerizing song. The sun would be on the horizon like a burnished ruby. The senitas would be opening their petals in the canyons where night had already fallen, and on the tops of hills the bright gold flowers of barrel cacti would be drawing up the last of the light. The air would be a lazy cool and fragrant. And there were no wisps of sour smoke from stovepipes, no mean hovels or fences or railroad tracks scarring the land.

  “Belle? That all right with you?” Kathleen asked, jarring her from a reverie.

  “I would appreciate it,” Belle replied softly.

  “Apaches!”

  The scream came from behind the house. It was almost unnecessary since the sound of war whoops and rifles caught the attention of the assembly immediately. What few people were out tending to their wagons ran inside. Men closed shutters built with gunslits as they shouldered their weapons. They didn’t wait to start firing on their attackers.

  Belle ran to shut the door after the last of her visitors hurried in. Then she saw Elias, speeding toward the soddy. There was an Indian close on his heels. He already had blood running down the side of his face and his eyes were boring into her to keep that door open a second or two longer.

  But if she did, the Apache could get inside; they could all get in if it wasn’t bolted fast. She heard a flaming torch hit the roof and was glad Kathleen’s son Toby had soaked it down with water earlier. She couldn’t keep the door open, could she?

  Every memory of a bruise and broken bone throbbed with an answer. Close it! Now’s your chance to be rid of the monster!

  The expression in Elias’s eyes turned to pleading. He’d seen what crossed her face in shadow. He was steps from the door and the Apache was clutching toward lanks of his bloody yellow hair.

  Belle closed the door in her husband’s face. She grunted as she heaved the bolt down, the cracked rib in her right side protesting with splinters of agony rubbed into her muscle. She was going to badly need Kathleen’s laudanum.

  “God!” Sterling McCulloch shouted from his position at a window near the front. He started to turn and stare at Belle in shock. He swerved back and began firing at the Apache that had grabbed Elias by the hair. The Indian yanked his head back to scrape off an acreage of scalp. It was too late for Elias Sedeen.

  She felt a ragged flush of shame and glanced at the baby.

  Tears sprang into Belle’s eyes. She took Ben Pike’s gun to reload it for him as he switched to fire from his pistol.

  “Had to do it,” she heard someone mumble under the loud reports of their assembled arsenal. “What choice did she have?”

  It was Kathleen saying this to her own husband, Albert. The sunburned rancher regarded Belle with grim surprise, then planted a kiss on his wife’s cheek. He peered through the gun slit and aimed as another Apache prepared to jump onto the roof to tear through the sod.

  If it had been just the Sedeen’s, they would never have made it. But half the county was there and the Apaches withdrew in less than five minutes.

  Of the settlers, only Belle’s husband had been killed. There were at least six Indians dead.

  Had to do it. Had to close the door…what else could Kathleen have meant by it?

  Later Belle stood at night by Elias’s grave. She had taken the laudanum and Elias was a dead man in her trance.

  She stared at her fingers. She could feel the two twisted ones, broken when Elias ground her hand under his boot once; she’d forgotten his excuse. They hadn’t been set right and had healed crooked. They looked like the fingers of a seventy-year-old woman, crippled with arthritis. Odd next to the others which were smooth and finely boned. Most of her was eighteen but these two fingers were omens of what was to be, should she live to be ancient.

  “There are two fountains in which spirits weep when mortals err,” she heard spoken behind her, “Discord and Slavery named, and with their bitter dew two Destinies filled each their irrevocable urns. The third, fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion’s lymph, and hate and terror, and the poisoned rain…”

  Shelley. It had been years since she’d heard any kind of poetry. The only book Elias had allowed was a Bible and somehow this was farcical.

  Belle felt arms enclose her as she began to turn. In a smattering of starlight she could make out the full mask. She reached up with both hands to caress it. The darkly-dressed man took these and kissed each palm. He touched the two convoluted fingers and sighed.

  “This is the land of pain,” he told her and she couldn’t deny it. The rattlesnake head in his pocket hissed faintly.

  She closed her eyes and he embraced her. He smelled of juniper trees and white water rapids. She felt for a moment as if she was flying across the desert in the body of a yellow bird. She smiled and let the dark man take the place of the dead man.

  This is it, she thought. He’s come as he said he would. To take me away.

  But when she no longer felt him pressed next to her, her bright blue eyes blinked open. He was gone. He’d crushed her against him for a minute and then left. She hadn’t heard his horse even though, naturally, there must have been one. Because it was moonless she couldn’t see him anywhere. The only thing different from when she’d been standing at her husband’s grave alone was that the cross—which had been made with two wooden branches—was broken, the pieces stuck into the turned earth as if to force a dangerous spirit to stay down.

  ««—»»

  Belle opened her eyes.

  How long had it been now? Did this coach never stop? She kept waiting for the bugle call to signal attendants at the station up ahead to harness fresh horses. Did coaches still do that?

  Did we stop as I slept? Why didn’t the driver wake me?

  She didn’t even remember where she was going. She surely must have boarded in Tucson. It was the closest town the stage line ran through. San Francisco must be her destination.

  The coach rattled across knotted sagebrush until she thought it would shake to pieces. And the top of it kept creaking, making her flinch and feel a mite strangled.

  “I don’t want to go to San Francisco,” Belle said aloud.

  “Why not?”

  Belle jumped, startled to see her mother sitting opposite her. She was wearing a stiff taffeta bonnet with bone white ribbons and owl feathers. She frowned and added, “I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco. That’s where civilized people are. It’s better than this awful place. Everything dry and dead. Horrible!”

  “I don’t think so,” Belle answered. She didn’t even ques
tion how this woman could be there. “I love the desert. I always have.”

  “It’s an evil place,” Irma Gettings said spitefully.

  “Yes, but it’s also good and charmed.”

  “Only an murderous Apache would think so. It’s hell and they’re demons.”

  “I understand why they love it. It’s a painted paradise, it’s free. And they only killed because they wanted to live there and we wouldn’t let them.”

  “I would expect a drug addict to say something that addled,” her mother said with contempt.

  Belle trembled as a chill crept around her shoulders. The old woman’s eyes had vanished, revealing two scorpion’s peering out of dry sockets. Then the whole apparition disappeared.

  She caught sight of the Apache, much closer this time, riding his Appaloosa alongside the stage. His mouth was working. He was trying to shout at her.

  It wasn’t a war whoop. It wasn’t a threat. What was he trying to tell her? He cupped his hand around his lips as he yelled. But she couldn’t make it out. It was lost in the wind. She was no longer afraid of attack but watched him—a beautiful, wild image.

  She shook her head and shrugged at him.

  “Driver, could you stop the coach a minute?” she cried, trying to lean safely from a window.

  The stage didn’t slow.

  “Please, driver?” She wanted to know what the Indian seemed frantic to tell her. Sometimes visions said intriguing things.

  She huffed at the driver’s obstinacy. Or maybe he was drunk as these yahoos often were. She sat back and then saw what was in the seat opposite her.

  A bloody hank of blond scalp dribbled across the leather.

  Hallucinations. That was all these things were. She averted her eyes from the scalp which too closely resembled Elias’s. She picked up her little purse and opened it. Sure enough, there was a bottle of laudanum inside. And sure enough, it was empty.

  Out the opposite window was a Dog Town, a settlement of prairie dogs. Something poked its head up from one of the hundreds of mounds. But it wasn’t a rodent. There was an angle to it—a grotesque curvature to fanged jaws—that made Belle cringe. It flopped up a pair of invertebrate limbs that couldn’t have belonged to anything other than a monstrosity from the bottom of an ocean. The entire colony of dirt mounds rippled.

  She pressed her fingers against her sore eyes to close them, thinking that this was the way people shut the eyes of the dead.

  ««—»»

  Belle stared at her hands, having stood up from her last attempt to at least pretend she was helping with the crop. But she had no interest at clawing at the baked earth. It wasn’t as if she was much help anyway to her son. Or to Kathleen Tipton’s boy, Toby, who came over as often as he could to aid Marcus.

  The Tiptons had been the Sedeen’s closest neighbors forever. They had kept Belle going after Elias’s death. She’d actually worked then, scratching at the useless soil. As soon as her child was old enough, he was out planting, too.

  When had she given up? Well, it wasn’t so much that she’d given up as she didn’t seem to have any energy. All she wanted to do was sit and look out at the horizon, hoping her stranger would come for her as he’d promised to. The water was pretty in the irrigation ditches Marcus and Toby carved. It sang as it ran through. It shone under the sun in streaks. She would listen to it for strains of Shelley’s poetry it might be bringing to her in messages from her lover.

  It had been eighteen years since she’d last seen him. She looked at her fingers. All ten of them now looked like the those two twisted ones. Grubbing in the solid dirt would do this. She was old before her time, ancient at thirty-six. But this was only the way the desert claimed her. Her graying hair blew around her face in wisps and made her smile. Gray was just another color found in this dusty utopia. Her blue eyes had faded and were even more like the sky when the heat bleached it.

  “Ma?” Marcus said to her, seeing she had strayed in her mind again. She was staring off to god knew what. He could smell the laudanum on her in opium strained through alcohol.

  “Mmmmm?” This was usually her only response to him. She was smiling listlessly, a child’s rag doll in calico.

  “Marcus,” Toby whispered. “You given any thought to my suggestion?”

  The eighteen-year-old shrugged, running a hand through red-blond curls. “You mean about sending her to a sanitarium?”

  The only reason he didn’t strike Toby at the idea his mother was crazy was because the man was like a brother to him. Toby was about twelve when Elias was killed by Cochise’s Apaches. He’d been around often anyway because the Tiptons tried to take care of the widow Sedeen and her youngster. Neighbors were supposed to look out for neighbors. Toby had taken the kid under his wing. Would he make any sort of suggestion that wasn’t carefully thought out?

  “Don’t let this happen to her,” Toby said, wiping his face with a stained bandanna. “I watched my ma die on that stuff. She went into a coma and we couldn’t wake her. Then one day she stopped breathing. Happens a lot to poppy drinkers.”

  Belle tightened her lips but didn’t stop looking at the silhouette of the Superstition Mountains. They were gold at this time of day and there was supposed to be gold in them. They were a ways off, to the northwest of the farm. She’d been up there in a stage once, on a trip to Phoenix. The Superstition Mountains had seemed to her to be a giant Arabian fort with crusade battlements carved from rock, domes and turrets gleaming at sunset and sunrise. She’d been greatly pleased when someone had informed her it was no mirage.

  He lives there, she thought to herself now, the little fly of Marcus buzzing around her ears. This is the castle my stranger keeps.

  She frowned, thinking what Toby and her boy were discussing. Didn’t they know she was right there and could hear them? How could they be so callous to speak of putting her away when she stood right next to them?

  Shouldn’t she turn and say something?

  “I’m not going to leave my lovely desert!”

  But she found speaking to be too much effort. It was easier to let the sound of their voices fade. It was better to watch the rumble of the land as it shifted from cinnabar red to Tyrolean purple. The saguaros were dancing for her again.

  She didn’t really understand how the time had changed. Days and nights might have drifted by. She was on a wagon and her son Marcus was taking her into Tucson. The shotgun sat by the rough wooden seat in case of trouble. But Geronimo, one of Cochise’s followers, had been captured last year, in 1886, and so it was unlikely they would be attacked by the Apaches.

  Why were they in Tucson?

  A flash of that morning came into her head. She’d swallowed the contents of a bottle of the reddish brown liquid she craved and kept hidden from her son. But he’d walked in on her. She looked guilty and a bit defiant. She’d been tempted to cower, because there were memories of Elias’s fists and boots crashing down. But Marcus was never cruel to her. He was as devoted as the seasons.

  He put his arm around her shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. We’re going to see Doc Kearny, Ma. He’s gonna set up a trip for you.”

  And the ride in on the buckboard had been fuzzy. The sights of her painted desert were euphoric and very entertaining. But now she was so sleepy she could barely keep her head up.

  A young tough sidled up after Marcus stopped the wagon in front of the Doc’s. It was Sal Gentry, a kid who picked on anyone he thought might be goaded into a fight.

  “Hey, Sedeen! I hear you’re finally sendin’ your loco mother t’ the madhouse!”

  Normally Marcus would have ignored the fool and stuck to his business. He’d been under a strain lately. Was Belle that difficult to take care of? She knew she was. Laudanum addicts often wouldn’t eat and so suffered from malnutrition. They had to be force fed to keep them from starving. And they wouldn’t crawl from the baking sun to keep from burning to a crisp. And they wouldn’t come in out of the rain like even any regular idiot so they might catch pneumonia. Sit a
nd stare. Dream and sleep.

  But Marcus was edgy.

  “Don’t mind my lookin’, do ya?” Sal grinned and spat as he sauntered closer. “Freaks is fun. ’Specially thems what gets away with killin’ their husbands.”

  Marcus leaped from the wagon and the two of them commenced to throwing punches. Belle felt herself waking up a little, turning her head as she heard someone shout, “Break it up!”

  She saw Marcus bloody Sal’s face with a hard right to the punk’s nose. There was a sickening splat, similar to the noise made when a boot came down on a small barrel cactus. Sal cursed as he pulled a knife.

  In a haze she reached for the shotgun. The two boys stumbled close to the wagon and the horse reared. She brought up the weapon as Sal lunged at her son, the blade gleaming in the afternoon light. And Belle didn’t know if the horse reared again before or after she fired—if it jumped because the sound of the report frightened it or if it had bucked and this was why her aim was jarred. She saw the flash as if it were a bolt of lightning inches in front of her face, and she heard the roar as if the accompanying thunder had come into being inside her ears.

  She was thrown from the wagon, striking her head against a wheel. The horse took off, dragging the buckboard behind it. If there was pain, Belle didn’t feel it. There was too much opiate in her system for discomfort to register in the frozen nerves.

  But Marcus was lying still when she sat up. Sal was crumpled on the ground, having been pulled apart from her son by the people who rushed out to help. Doc Kearney was kneeling next to the punk and shaking his head. Sheriff Bonham was bending next to her.

  “Mrs. Sedeen? Belle? Are you all right?” the sheriff was saying through a lavender mist so thick it choked her.

  But Belle still managed to scream at the sight of the shotgun wound that had not only gone through Sal but Marcus as well. They had been in a clinch as Marcus grabbed Sal’s knife and they struggled for domination of it.