Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  After another forty minutes, John Dunn paused before plunging his taxi down the precipitous hairpin turns to the bottom of the Rio Grande Gorge. At the bottom they would cross the bridge he built over the Rio Grande and make the final turn north along the river toward Taos.

  “Stretch your legs, ladies?”

  John Dunn opened Willa’s door first, then came around to help Edith out.

  The ground felt good under Edith’s feet. Solid, secure. A change from the anger and darkening thoughts that had threatened to take over her mood despite the pure, sage-scented air and endless blue sky.

  The dark outline of the gorge had presented itself several minutes before. It was always a surprise. Unless you could soar like an eagle, Edith thought, the gorge would always hide itself. But when you did get close enough to the edge or high enough above, she remembered from the summer before, the view of the Rio Grande cutting its jagged path for miles and miles through the high Taos valley was stunning.

  Today the sun traced patterns in the upper reaches of the gorge, but the rest was so filled with shade and shadows that it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. Trees at the bottom looked small from this height and so did the Rio Grande, moving swiftly now through the canyon it had taken thousands of years to shape and carve. It would spread out, Edith knew, to become deceptively lazy in the Española Valley and farther south, where floods and quicksand could still prove its might.

  “That river is a far cry from what it is at Alcalde,” Willa mused.

  Lush lawns spilled across Edith’s mind, fields of corn and green chile reaching to the muddy banks of the Rio Grande where cottonwoods with their huge angular limbs spread a luxurious shade. The Española Valley, Alcalde, the Pfäffles’ San Gabriel Ranch with its extensive pattern of irrigation ditches known here by their Spanish name acequias. The ranch had been their refuge for two weeks the previous summer while they corrected proofs for The Professor’s House in the shade of the inn’s portal. So beautiful Alcalde was that they thought briefly this summer about returning there until Mabel Dodge Luhan called to say they should come back to the pink adobe.

  “A far cry, yes, it certainly is,” Edith agreed, staring again at the narrow ribbon far below, running fast, deep, and dark.

  “Breathtaking,” Willa concluded.

  II

  “WE’VE BEEN HERE for just two hours and already we’ve seen absolutely everybody,” Edith exclaimed, hanging the last of her blouses next to Willa’s in the rustic Spanish wardrobe occupying the wall next to the small alcove where they would sleep.

  “Everybody except Mabel.” Willa’s low laugh came from the little kitchen they planned to use sparingly during their weeks with Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony.

  “I expect she’s still working,” Edith remembered how Mabel would remain for hours ensconced in her enormous four-poster bed surrounded by pens and well-covered pages. Writing her memoir was the reason Mabel said she invited them to Taos in the first place. Willa, she pleaded, must read her first volume and give her advice. And Willa did, with plenty of praise. She especially praised Mabel’s directness and honesty, her refusal to back down from any subject, even her love as a young girl for her special friend, Violet. Must be close to finishing the second volume by now, Edith guessed. Mabel preferred to write in bed and could easily spend most of any day there.

  “I’m sure she’s glad to be home again. Tony, too,” Edith changed the subject. They had had to delay their visit while Tony and Mabel were in Albuquerque where Tony had been hospitalized. Mabel never said why. No matter, Willa and Edith enjoyed the new La Fonda hotel and Santa Fe, where Willa found still more books about her priests, the two whose story was becoming her next novel, the one she was calling Death Comes for the Archbishop.

  “I still love this,” Willa was chatting to her through the wall as she moved about, changing the location of dishes and pots to clear a small table for use as a desk. Edith could picture the vase precisely, tall, thin and oriental with a phoenix painted on its side and a bright red chrysanthemum, whimsical with touches of yellow and orange, leaning from its mouth. It was not a real vase at all but one D.H. Lawrence had painted on the door of the room’s only cabinet the year he and his wife Frieda occupied the pink adobe. Soon after their stay in the pink adobe they had moved to Kiowa, the ranch near San Cristobal that Mabel gave them in trade for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.

  D.H. Lawrence Painting in the Pink Adobe

  “Yes, I do, too,” Edith responded. “Maybe if Tony’s feeling up to it we could arrange for another trip to their ranch this summer.” She remembered the view of the mountains from the porch of Lawrence’s small rustic ranch house near the tiny town of San Cristobal, eighteen miles to the north and five hundred feet above the seven-thousand foot elevation of Taos.

  So many birds, that’s what Edith remembered most about their visit. The sky above the ranch had been absolutely filled with motion and commotion. They had watched a pair of bald eagles diving, darting, floating, and even cartwheeling high through the blue. And in the trees below a pair of Steller’s jays chasing a much larger Cooper’s hawk, flitting through sun and shadow, the jays in unison uttering their full-throated complaint. But a much louder sound had come from a totally unexpected source — hummingbirds, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, careening together through a canyon below the ranch. Lawrence had taken his visitors on a short hike to the canyon where he knew they might hear the birds’ thunderous hum long before they could see their tiny bodies hurtling through air.

  Edith was amazed. They all were, and their visit with the Lawrences and the deaf young woman who moved with them from England had been delightful. Brett, Dorothy Brett, Edith remembered the young woman’s name, a painter. Slight and blond, she used an ear trumpet and read lips. She seemed devoted to Lawrence, almost more than his wife Frieda, who clearly enjoyed a good argument.

  But then, so did Lawrence, Edith chuckled. An odd threesome, not exactly Jack Spratt, but a skinny, talkative, red-bearded Englishman with a hearty wife whose gusts of conversation came in a German accent, and a slim assistant who simply did whatever she was told. Mabel brought them to New Mexico where they hoped Lawrence would find relief from the tuberculosis that ravaged his lungs, and where Mabel hoped Lawrence would write so brilliantly about Taos, the world would finally grasp its magic.

  But Mabel had quarreled with Lawrence, and the Lawrences had gone off to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson, friends of Mabel’s and in the case of Witter Bynner, or Hal as he liked to be called, an old acquaintance of Willa’s and Edith’s. Spud they knew from the previous summer, a truly nice young man, an aspiring writer with thinning hair and large glasses, but they knew Hal from twenty years before when the three of them had been at McClure’s Magazine together. Edith remembered Hal as rude and flamboyant, a young man whose inherited wealth and early success made him impossibly self-absorbed. And, she recalled, he had no interest in working with women.

  Bynner was just about to leave as poetry editor when first Willa and then Edith joined the staff at McClure’s. In all the years since, they had heard nothing from him though they knew he had moved to California and was now living in Santa Fe. He had been out of town when they were in Santa Fe the previous summer, but they had gone to one of his famous parties just the week before while they were staying in Alcalde. They found Bynner twenty years older but otherwise unchanged.

  When Bynner heard they were planning another stay with the Luhans, he began chattering away about his time in Mexico with Lawrence. Nothing of much consequence, Edith thought, but a great deal of noise about the beauty of young Mexican boys. He went on at such length, Edith neglected to tell him that they had already met the Lawrences and furthermore knew a great deal about them through Achsah and Earl Brewster, people Hal knew nothing about. Achsah had been Edith’s college roommate and was still her best friend, and Earl was about to publish a life of Buddha. Lawrence had stayed with the Brewsters in India and they knew him wel
l. Lawrence, after all, had lived many places in the world before he found Taos or travelled with Bynner.

  It wasn’t until the spring after the Lawrences left for Mexico with Bynner and Spud Johnson that they came back to Taos with Dorothy Brett and began to fix up the Kiowa ranch. Lawrence had hoped then to found a utopian colony, a new world in the New World, but Brett turned out to be his only colonist. The three of them, Brett, Lawrence, and Frieda, managed to make the ranch more or less habitable and lived there until British residency requirements forced Lawrence to return to England.

  The Lawrences were now in Italy, temporarily, Edith hoped. But a trip to Lawrence’s ranch with Tony was still a possibility. In the midst of the mountains, the ranch seemed greener and the mountains closer in than what they could see from the porch of their pink adobe. And where the ranch house stood in the shadow of an enormous ponderosa pine, their own porch overlooked rows of wild plum trees trained to arch over a wooden walkway that crossed through the alfalfa pasture between their pink adobe and Mabel’s main house.

  The pink adobe was pink, of course, only because of the paint that trimmed its windows and the porch that shaded its doors on the east, the traditional direction for doors at the pueblo, meant to face the sacred mountain and greet the morning sun. Aside from the Victorian gingerbread that decorated its porch and the Florentine door handles Mabel brought with her from Italy, it was a small and unpretentious house with thick adobe walls inside and out. Each room had multiple windows and doors, more windows and doors than Edith had ever seen in one dwelling. And the doors, even the front doors facing east, were like windows, their raised sills and low lintels required simultaneous climbing and stooping to pass from one room to another or move from inside to out. Tradition, Tony told them. From the pueblo. Keep everyone safe. No enemy can be strong when stooped.

  Pueblo workers built the house under Tony’s supervision, just as they had Mabel’s main house, where the steps leading to the bedrooms upstairs required the same sort of simultaneous climbing and stooping. But the pink, Edith guessed, might have been Lawrence’s addition. Adobe houses were always the color of the mud that formed them, and in Taos most of the doors were blue. Tradition, Tony told them again. Just like doors at the pueblo, blue to ward off evil spirits. Mabel’s big house, one of the only multiple-story houses in Taos except for the five-story pueblo, was trimmed in bright turquoise.

  “They’re coming back. You heard?” Emilio shuffled papers on his desk in the outer office, then tipped his chair so it rocked on its front legs. He didn’t look up. It was almost quitting time.

  “Tony said. I heard.” Unsmiling, William Santistivan, Sheriff of Taos County, dropped into his leather chair and slid open the bottom drawer of his desk. He paused to nestle one well-oiled boot against the other on top of the file folders stacked inside. The two women strode again through the door in his mind. He first saw them a year ago, when he was not quite seven months into his job, the older one fuming, the other a bit younger, a little less bold and hesitant in her speech but no less insistent. Anglos, from the east. They demanded that he arrest a murderer. Immediately.

  The sheriff chuckled to himself. The two had burst into his office out of breath, as though they and not their horses had run a long distance to reach him. They had discovered a woman’s body in a partially dug grave on a little-used trail not far from Arroyo Seco. The trail ran through pueblo land where he had no jurisdiction, but the body had been dumped just beyond. He had no idea where the actual murder might have occurred, but the location of the body put it just within his jurisdiction. So close to the line, the pueblo could give him trouble.

  A woman had been murdered, he agreed with those women about that. A violent death. But he had no idea who she was or who the killer might be. Not then. Not now. The woman was not the only dead female found out there. And she wasn’t the last. Two more bodies had appeared on a nearby trail in just the last month. And with these, the sheriff was more than twice as much at a loss about identifying the corpses. They were missing their heads.

  Any number of possible suspects could have killed those women. There simply were too many complications and too many possibilities. The sheriff had asked Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, to explain to these women how that might be. They were staying with Tony and his wife, who always seemed to have a crowd of Anglo artists and writers at the house. Even Tony couldn’t make them understand. And then they left. Their departure had been a relief.

  But the sheriff had made no progress on the case since then, only empty speculation. Could the murderer actually have come from the pueblo? The sheriff didn’t think so. All of these women looked like they came from Mexican families, not Indian or even old-Spanish families. They would have had no business on pueblo land. So the sheriff had speculated further, maybe the killer was one of the young whoremongers or gamblers who hung around Madame May’s in Red River. A rough customer from the mining area around Elizabethtown. Lots of loose women and violent deaths up there, but also lots of out-of-the-way places to dump a body. Why haul the bodies all that way through the mountains, presuming they were all three killed by the same person? So if the murderer wasn’t a Pueblo Indian, a customer of Madame May’s, a gambler, or a miner, maybe he was that sorry excuse of a man, Arthur Manby. The sheriff hoped it was Manby.

  Arthur Manby had been parading around Taos for years in his jodhpurs and tall English boots cheating people out of land and money, but no one had quite gotten anything on him they could prove. And he hung around women in the Mexican neighborhoods, especially Teracita Ferguson, who owned the tourist camp on the edge of town.

  But mostly Manby was crazy. One of the local stories was that during the Great War, when that wealthy woman who married Tony Luhan first showed up in Taos and rented part of Manby’s house, she could hear Manby on the roof at night listening through a chimney to conversations at her dinner table. Then he told federal officers she was a spy arranging for Taos to be invaded from Mexico. Well, Tony’s rich wife took care of that nonsense all right, but as far as the sheriff was concerned, all Anglos were strange, British or American.

  From the outer office Emilio interrupted, “What are we going to do?”

  “About these Anglos? Nothing,” the sheriff sighed. “Nothing we can do.”

  Dinner that evening proved festive. The large dining room was specially decorated. The serving tables overflowed with flowers, and the wonderfully handcrafted furniture and bright red-and-black floor tiles gleamed with fresh polish. To celebrate Tony’s return and welcome old friends, Mabel declared, and toasted Willa and Edith with a chardonnay made from grapes grown in vineyards near the Rio Grande.

  The sun, resplendent in reds and golds, dipped below the horizon just as they finished dinner, its long rays reaching through French doors to cast its last bit of light across the celebrants. Dressed in burgundy satin softened by a shawl the color of cream, Mabel exuded warmth and welcome at the head of her long table. Her dark hair, cut straight at the base of her ears with bangs across her forehead, accentuated the shine in her eyes. Tony, at the foot of the table, echoed her mood and appearance, his long silken black braids woven through with ribbons of burgundy and cream.

  Facing west, Edith and Willa with Spud Johnson between them turned a pale rose in the fading light of the sunset, while those opposite, Alexandra and Nicolai Fechin and their twelve-year-old daughter Eya, showed no change in hue. Recent immigrants from Russia, the Fechins were planning to build a house in Taos. The idea thrilled Mabel, who so loved to build houses she was getting ready to add a new one to her compound. Now with the Fechins, she could be involved in two at once. His would be different from all the others, Nicolai declared, more like Russia. During their three short years in New York City, Nicolai had managed to build a national reputation as a portrait painter. Now tuberculosis forced his move to the Southwest.

  “The light, look,” Nicolai exclaimed, pointing at the three sitting across from him, “Beautiful, the light!”

&nbs
p; “It is beautiful. Painters love the light in Taos,” Edith agreed. She had spent much of her time during the previous summer sketching and drawing with several of the local painters, especially Mabel’s friend Andrew Dasburg. Fascinated with the way the light in Taos fell on adobe walls, the many variations of colors it created, she used pastels to capture them as Dasburg had. She hoped this summer to try again, and with Nicolai here, to work with him and his brilliant use of color as well.

  “Writers, too, love the light in Taos, yes?”

  “I certainly do, yes,” Willa nodded.

  “Beautiful, the light,” Nicolai said again, this time looking only at Willa. “I paint you like that. Serious, somber, striking in that light.” Nicolai took Willa by surprise. She blushed. “You, too, Mabel,” he turned to the head of the table. “I love to paint you, too, yes?”

  Mabel did not blush. She simply said, “Yes. Yes, of course. And once you live here, you must paint whatever you like. Tony, too, don’t you think?”

  “All the Pueblo Indians. Yes, yes!” In his unexpected exuberance Nicolai made a toast first to Tony and his fellow Pueblo Indians and then to Mabel, his hostess, and finally to the famous novelist sitting across from him. Willa blushed again and tried to demur, but Nicolai would have none of that. “Yes, yes,” he insisted, “I paint you, all of you.”

  Amused, Edith leaned forward to glance past Spud’s lanky frame and catch Willa’s eye. She hoped Willa was pleased and not about to slip away from Nicolai’s praise. So often now Willa felt a need to hide from the fame that had attached itself to her once she won the Pulitzer Prize. She was happy, she said, that so many people read her books, but that’s all she wanted, for them to read her books and leave her alone.