Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Whatever my feelings toward my father, I couldn’t turn her down. My mother-in-law volunteered to look after our son. Pardon this aside, but I clearly recall her reaction to the newspaper stories Ida had mailed about the shooting, my father’s arrest and indictment. My mother-in-law read them with a bemused expression, as if she were reading about the doings of some quirky tribe on the far side of the world. She assured me there was nothing to worry about—it looked like a clear-cut case of self-defense. Then she said, “Your father sounds like a colorful character, and a … how shall I put it? A bit of an anachronism?”

  Those Arizona papers had had a field day with the color and the anachronisms. Headlines like “Gunfight at the Sonoita Corral!” and “Duel in the Sun!” Comparisons to Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. That kind of thing.

  The Sunset Limited pulled into Tucson at ten in the morning on May 7, 1951, the day before the trial. My aunt and uncle drove me to the San Ignacio. My parents were in Nogales, consulting with Ben’s lawyer. They continued to live in their old house after the sale of the IB-Bar but had been staying with Jeff and Lilly for the past couple of weeks because it was closer to Nogales than the mountain place.

  Frank and Sally, my sister-in-law, had arrived earlier with my nephew. Late in the afternoon my parents returned, and we all gathered in the living room of the main house. Ben, wearing Levi’s, white shirt, bandanna, and green and black cowboy boots, lived up to the portrait painted of him in the newspapers as—I’m quoting almost directly—“the rangy, sunburned rancher, looking every inch the border lawman and frontiersman he’d once been.”

  My mother looked as if she’d aged ten years since I last saw her. And yet it was she who seemed in command, Ben who was subdued. After the preliminary greetings were over, she said, “Your father has something to say to you,” then, with a sidelong look, cued him.

  He expressed his thanks to me for coming so far in my condition, and then apologized for shutting my husband and me out of his life.

  “I was damn mad at him and you,” he said, “but you’re right, I’ve been unreasonable. I ain’t just saying that, Grace. I’m as sorry as a man can be. About a lot of things.”

  The first thing that comes to mind about the day the trial began is the Santa Cruz County courthouse. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a square stone building painted desert tan and crowned by a bright tin dome topped by blindfolded Lady Justice with her sword and scales. It occupies a hilltop above Morley Avenue. From the street, three flights of steep stairs, flanked by cypress and orange trees, ascend to the front entrance. The builders’ intention must have been to create the impression of a temple and to instill in all who made that climb, the innocent no less than guilty, appropriate feelings of reverence for the Anglo-Saxon system of justice.

  All I felt, as I went up with Jeff and Lilly and an entourage of relations, were butterflies.

  The courtroom was as crowded as a redneck bar on Saturday night or a Baptist church on Sunday morning. Overhead fans paddled against the May heat, to little effect. The county attorney sat beside an assistant at the prosecution’s table, my father at the defense table with his lawyer. He looked rueful. He wasn’t at all certain he was going to get off, and neither were we.

  Our family sat on one side of the aisle, Quinn’s on the other, like families at a wedding. I glanced over at Quinn’s much-younger wife, Rosario, dressed in mourning. My memory of her hasn’t dimmed. She had one of those classic Mexican faces—severe, dignified, tragic—and looked older than her years, what with her black dress, her black hair pulled into a bun, the matronly figure bestowed by bearing three children in five years. Three girls, I found out, the last one born only weeks earlier.

  The clerk called the court to order, the jury—nine men, three women—filed in, the judge swooped to his lofty chair, and the ritual began.

  The trial lasted four days, and when the prosecution rested, it was obvious that it did not have a strong case. Ida had not been allowed in the courtroom, as she was to appear as a witness for the defense. Midway through the third day she was called to the stand. I was rather proud of how composed she looked in her best suit, her only suit, in fact, a gray wool too warm for the season. Direct examination, cross-examination. I watched Rosario watching her, the woman of the man who had killed hers. Rosario’s upright posture and impassive expression barely changed. Now and then she inclined her head to one side to listen to a man beside her whisper abridged translations of Ida’s testimony.

  The climax came on the fourth day, when Father spent two hours in the witness chair, testifying in his own defense. On cross-examination, he was unflappable, parrying the prosecutor’s questions in his western drawl.

  The judge called a recess before the attorneys made their closing arguments.

  The prosecutor’s was that Ben had not fired in self-defense, that the gun battle was actually a duel. Because he didn’t leave after Quinn made his threat, he had, in effect, accepted a challenge. The county attorney contended that in a duel it makes no difference who fires first. I seem to recall him appealing to the jurors to act as social reformers—by returning a guilty verdict, they would demonstrate that Arizona was not going to tolerate a return to the days of rough frontier justice.

  The defense attorney’s argument was more succinct. He depicted Ben as the kind of man everyone would like to be, a man who’d exposed himself to fire and shot his assailant to protect his own life and the lives of his wife and innocent bystanders.

  I rather doubted that the prosecutor’s summation would sway the jury, but I confess that his comments stirred up some disloyal thoughts in me. As much as I wanted to support my father wholeheartedly, I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole ghastly mess could have been avoided. Did he have to punch Quinn? Couldn’t he have told my mother and the Burton woman, There’s some trouble, let’s go have some coffee till it blows over? My poor mother, after all she’d been through, had to witness that. But I knew my father’s way. Never let an insult go unanswered; never back down; scour any stain to your honor with blood; if threatened, destroy the threat, even if the destruction breeds another threat in its turn. Quinn was no different—he too was a servant of pride and honor. Two old men who had outlived their time but didn’t know it, two old men shooting at each other in a dusty shipping pen in the middle of the twentieth century, and over what? A dirty remark. Over nothing. Not that I believed my father was guilty of murder in any degree. To my mind, he was guilty of an unbending fealty to his own archaic code.

  The jury deliberated less than an hour. We were summoned back into the courtroom. The jury foreman handed the verdict to the clerk of the court, who announced it: not guilty. My father showed no emotion.

  We filed outside, into the copper light of late afternoon. Ida could not resist going up to Rosario. What she thought she could say to comfort the young woman I couldn’t imagine. After she spoke her piece, Rosario looked up at her—she was barely over five feet tall—and answered in a venomous whisper. As she turned and walked off, my mother blanched. My Spanish had grown rusty, and it took me a moment to parse out Rosario’s reply. I’ll never forget it: “My hope, señora, is that you will suffer as I am, and if not you, your children, and if not them, their children.”

  A curse, as only a Mexican can deliver one when she really means it. We were shaken but collected ourselves and joined Father as he accepted the congratulations of friends and well-wishers. I felt a little embarrassed by my disloyal thoughts and kissed his cheek. He embraced me. As he held me, I was a little girl again, on the night the lightning struck the windmill. I felt that everything was going to be all right.

  I should have known better. That summer Ida wrote that Father had received death threats, the acquittal having angered many Mexicans on both sides of the line. Some of their enmity had fallen on her. A week after the trial she’d gone shopping at a wholesale market on International Street, across from the border fence. As she parked, Mexican kids on a hill overlooking the fence bombarded h
er car with rocks. She’d begun to suffer spells of vertigo and sharp flashing headaches.

  In September, when I was three months into a difficult pregnancy, the phone rang. It was my aunt Lilly, who said she had some very bad news. I knew what it was before she told me. That morning she, Ida, and my sister-in-law, who was visiting, had been stirring a chili for the ranch hands when my mother gave a short cry, clutched the back of her head, and said, “Oh, such a headache,” and fell to the floor. She must have died immediately, for when my aunt and Sally went to her, they could feel the warmth passing out of her body. The doctor said it had been a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The funeral would be held day after tomorrow. Ida was only fifty-two.

  There was no question of making another transcontinental journey in my condition. I supposed it was just as well. I could not have borne the sight of her lying in a coffin, nor of the coffin going down into a grave. I know some people thought that the strains of living with my father contributed to her early death. I’ll admit it crossed my mind. It seemed to me that Father had been selfish, following the dictates of his nature and living as he chose, whatever the consequences to my mother or anyone else. Maybe Ben was too comfortable in his own skin; it made him literally hidebound, incapable of changing his ways.

  A year after Ida’s death, my brother was killed in an accident in the Phelps Dodge copper mine in Bisbee. They were blasting in the Lavender Pit, and he was crushed when tons of rock and debris fell on him. I traveled again to Arizona for his funeral. My father and I were devastated. In twelve months he’d lost his wife and son, I had lost a mother and a beloved brother. We buried Frank in Black Oak Cemetery. I consider myself a rational woman, so I say with some reluctance that I recalled Rosario’s curse at the services and half believed it was responsible for their deaths.

  For the next five years Ben lived alone at the mountain place, hiding out among those canyons and wooded draws like one of the solitary, unbranded bulls he’d pursued when he was young. Who knows what phantoms haunted him there on nights when the owls hooted and the coyotes sent up their dismal cries. Some in the family were worried he was going a little mad in his solitude. Uncle Jeff wrote that he and Ben were having a drink one night when they heard a car pull up. My father grabbed a flare gun (where had he got that? I wonder) and his pistol and ran outside, hiding behind his workshop. Then he fired the flare. It lit up the whole front yard, terrifying the people in the car. Turned out to be just a couple of tourists who had got lost and stopped to ask directions back to the highway.

  To me, it sounded like the same old Ben, ever watchful for an attack by his enemies. It was lucky for him, Jeff, and especially the tourists that he didn’t shoot first and ask questions later.

  He did not isolate himself completely. My sister-in-law moved to the ranch with my nephew after Frank was killed. Sally wrote that Ben became a surrogate father to Blaine, teaching him riding, roping, shooting, tracking.

  On a June morning in 1956 Blaine was sitting on a corral fence with two ranch hands watching Ben offer a lesson in horse breaking. The animal was a young stallion with an ugly temperament. Ben had settled him by forcing him to drag a railroad tie around the corral until he’d tired of it and stopped trying to escape. Now it was time for the next step—hazing, by waving a burlap sack in the horse’s face to teach it not to rear and strike.

  Ben entered the corral with the sack. When the horse went up on its back legs, pawing the air with its front hooves, he lunged forward, waving the sack. He was sixty-six years old, his reactions were slow, his body not as nimble as it once had been. The stallion struck him in the chest, knocking him down, and then rained blows on his head. The ranch hands grabbed lariats and roped the animal. Once it was subdued, they ran to Ben’s aid and saw that there was nothing they could do. His skull had been crushed.

  And so the man who had survived so many perils, who had evaded death at the hands of so many enemies, was killed as his father had been, by a rank horse.

  And so did I, with my husband and two children, return to Arizona for yet another funeral, the last.

  It was held in the community church in Patagonia, which could not hold all who’d come. The mourners flowed into the street, and I overheard the Mexicans among them whispering that it wasn’t a horse that had killed Don Benjamín; it was a diablo, possessed by the wrathful soul of Rafael Quinn. Once more I thought of Rosario’s curse and hoped she now was satisfied.

  There is a strange postscript to this story. I learned a lesson: there are hazards to probing too deeply into one’s family secrets; you may discover some best left undiscovered. After my father’s funeral Sally and I sorted through the things in his house, while my husband cleaned out his workshop, a windowless tin shed where he’d taken up his former hobby, turning out horseshoes, bits, and belt buckles. Tony came in carrying a box and said something like, “Any idea what we should do with these?” He reached into the box and took out two human skulls. One had been embellished: antlers from a spikehorn buck protruded from holes drilled into the crown; the tusks of a javelina boar had been attached to the upper jaw, creating a fanglike effect. The companion skull had not been adorned, though it bore signs of botched attempts. There was a small hole in one temple and a larger one in the other, a jagged puncture slightly bigger than a fifty-cent piece. Its front teeth were missing. “Those might be here,” said Tony, and dipped again into the box to pull out a kind of bracelet consisting of two thin, braided wires run through a set of gold teeth. All three of us were baffled and disturbed. Tony wondered aloud if my father had been robbing cemeteries. Sally replied, “This is the border. There’s a lot of dead people around here ain’t in cemeteries.”

  I learned later that day from one of the ranch hands that Ben sometimes placed the skulls in his window to ward off unwanted visitors. But where had he found them? Then I remembered that terrible night in 1931 (described in my earlier letter) when the gunman with the gold teeth had tried to barge into our house.

  The next day I went to Patagonia to talk to Martín Mendoza. He was retired from cowboying, and he and Lourdes were living in a small trailer on Smelter Lane. When I brought up the incident, he said, “Los espectros y los huesos”—The ghosts and the bones. The way he said it gave me goose bumps. I asked what he was talking about. He then launched into a weird tale. In the early 1930s, after he’d quit the ranch and gone to work as a wrangler for the Civilian Conservation Corps, he overheard a work crew speaking excitedly about two skeletons they had come upon in a dry wash while they were clearing trails. From their description of the place, Martín realized they’d found the remains of the two gunmen he and Ben had buried after the fight. Flash floods must have unearthed the skeletons. The skulls on both were missing. The tale spread to other camps and ranches. One night a vaquero rode into the CCC camp on a sweat-lathered horse, reporting that he had fled from a pair of ghosts he’d seen wandering the hills. These phantoms were headless. When Martín heard that, he knew the cowboy had seen the spirits of the gunmen.

  I didn’t believe that ghosts were walking around, but I was very troubled by his revelation that the skeletons were missing their skulls. I asked Martín if he knew how they had come to be sin cabezas—without heads. He didn’t know.

  ¿Quién sabe? Maybe the ghosts the vaquero sees are looking for their heads. I don’t know.”

  I then asked if he remembered that one of the men had gold teeth, and he said he did. He’d seen them in the light of a flashlight when they were loading the bodies onto the truck. Then I asked—hesitantly, I might add—if he or my father had cut off the heads and taken the teeth. I recall that he was shocked, that he drew back, grimacing. “No, señora! I would be afraid to do such a thing! No, we do nothing but bury them.”

  I had one final question: “And you said it was in 1933 when the workmen found the skeletons?”

  Martín wasn’t sure. About then, he said.

  So the skulls had been in Father’s possession for more than twenty years, secreted away somewh
ere. He had gone out to that arroyo at some point between the gunfight and the time the remains were discovered and decapitated them. Why? A manhunter’s trophies? Had he become so anesthetized that he saw nothing barbaric in this desecration? I assumed he had not taken his artifacts out of their hiding place until after my mother’s death. I assumed further that that was when he did his creative work, extracted the teeth, affixed the horns, the tusks. The holes in the temples of the one had not been the result of bad workmanship; they’d been made by his bullet long, long before.

  Ghosts and bones. Well, that’s all Ben Erskine is now, his bones in the ground, his ghost stalking the corridors of my memory. I can only add that there were too many corners in my father’s “hard and isolate” soul that I cannot penetrate and frankly don’t wish to.

  Sincerely yours,

  Grace Castle

  34

  WAS SOMETHING OUTSIDE? Samantha’s barking woke Castle at a postmidnight hour. He shook off his grogginess, got his spotlight and revolver from out of the bed-table drawer, and went outside. A full moon, so bright that the trees cast daylight shadows, almost made the spotlight unnecessary. As he swept it back and forth, a pair of eyes glittered in the beam like electrified emeralds; then he made out the squat, shaggy form of a javelina. He stepped off the porch and waved an arm. The animal fled.

  “Only a pig,” he said to Sam, returning inside. She padded after him into the bedroom, where he put the spotlight and the pistol away. Unable to get back to sleep, he read Seneca till his eyes grew heavy, then turned off the lamp.

  The alarm buzzed at six. He and Blaine were going to truck a few culls to the Wilcox livestock auction today. These cows were, in Blaine’s description, “nondoers,” heifers that had failed to calve. Two weeks had passed since the shooting, the media hoopla was over, and Castle’s life had reclaimed normality, or a decent facsimile of it. There were emotional aftershocks; the things he’d witnessed that day reeled in his mind, a kind of videotape that played and replayed. Blaine, to all appearances, was unaffected. It wasn’t that Castle had grown tenderhearted about a drug smuggler. He simply thought that shooting someone at point-blank range, actually seeing him die, would change a man forever.