Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  Edith was getting better at running interference so Willa could have the space and time she needed to write. Edith’s job was simply to smile politely and turn the “gushers” away. If they managed to slip by her, they would be met with the Medusa mask that the Metropolitan Opera star Olive Fremstad had taught Willa to use, a look so empty and haughty as to frighten even the most forward of admirers.

  Now when they travelled, Edith’s was the only name to appear on reservations and hotel registers. Willa was simply nowhere apparent. Of course, here in Taos, in Mabel’s house, Willa had no need for the Medusa mask or disappearance. This mountain town was protection enough, so remote and filled with people so accustomed to artists and writers that nobody seemed to notice individuals. As good, Edith thought, as Grand Manan, the island in the Bay of Fundy half a world away where she and Willa had chosen to build a summer cottage.

  Ahhh, there were Willa’s dimples and she was agreeing that Nicolai should paint her. Soon. Yes. Edith, off duty, settled deeper into her chair.

  The stars were brilliant when Spud finally made his way home, a short walk cross lots from Mabel’s to the adobe he was renting on the main road through Taos. Main road, he chuckled to himself, better call it a dirt track leading out of town. Exactly what he loved about Taos, its lack of everything. No macadam, no streetlights, no fast cars, no people racing for the top. No top even. What could be better.

  At twenty-nine Spud was happy to find a quiet life in Taos after Santa Fe with Witter Bynner, sixteen years his senior and living in Berkeley when in 1922 he took Spud under his wing, as they said then. Spud had already caused a scandal at the university when he and a couple of friends published the satirical Laughing Horse, a magazine he later brought with him to Taos, and Bynner had cheered him on.

  Before Spud quite knew what was happening, they had moved together to Santa Fe where almost immediately they met D.H. Lawrence and took off with him and Frieda for Mexico. Heady stuff that, Bynner opening his world to Lawrence, boys on the beach, barefoot in the sand, exhilarating, tempestuous, insane, and finally, finally, too much for Spud. Soon after they returned, Spud moved to Taos, a long and tortuous seventy miles north by car on a narrow, rocky dirt road through the Rio Grande Gorge and then up, up to the wonder of Taos valley.

  Taos was also wonderfully quiet. Oh, plenty of uproar too, Spud chuckled to himself, but subdued, almost suppressed, until something lit a fuse and everything blew up. Like it had the summer before when Willa and Edith discovered a woman’s body near Arroyo Seco. Spud and Tony hauled the body across pueblo land and into town on a buckboard. And they, not the sheriff, checked the area around the body and the trail as they drove toward town but saw no sign of unfamiliar tracks or commotion. Tony offered their help searching for the woman’s killer, but once Willa and Edith left town, the sheriff seemed to lose interest altogether and neither Spud nor Tony found any worthwhile clues.

  The excitement soon sputtered out as uproars in Taos usually did. In the intervals one could easily be lulled into thinking Taos the most peaceful place on earth. It was for Spud, though now that he had agreed to become Mabel’s sometime assistant, he was constantly aware of underlying tensions and potential explosions. A current eruption, still smoldering, involved Mabel’s protest against the United States government’s policy of assimilation and recent attempts to sell Indian lands. Once Mabel discovered Taos and Tony, she wanted exactly the opposite to happen.

  The country, the world, so broken after World War I, Mabel declared, should put itself back together and become like Taos Pueblo — communal, harmonious, living with land and sky the way Tony did — not combative, controlling, or for heaven’s sake, distracted by Progress. Progress, Mabel sputtered, should move humans toward all that is natural and real, not away. Still, Spud chuckled again, his footsteps crunching gravel as he neared his front door, Mabel did buy Tony a Cadillac and on occasion she drove it herself.

  Most newcomers, all the ones Spud knew, writers and artists recent to the Southwest, were generally ignored as long as they minded their own business. But Mabel never minded her own business. When Mabel and Tony became lovers and then decided to marry, Spud guessed they had no real idea what they were doing. Courageous and outrageous, as scandalous as Bynner with boys on the beach, but not the same.

  Mabel, rich and Anglo, was a socialite and rabble-rouser with three previous husbands and one flamboyant lover. Tony, married and a man of tradition, was a spiritual leader in his pueblo. Mabel had often created scandals, living lavishly in Italy with her second husband, establishing a salon for labor leaders and intellectuals in her Fifth Avenue apartment, and in 1913 helping to organize demonstrations at Madison Square Garden and Paterson, New Jersey for the silk workers’ strike. If that weren’t enough, she was also behind the 1913 Armory Show in New York City that introduced modern art to the country and shocked all of America. And now she expected Taos to transform the world. Well, maybe it would. Spud wished her well.

  But before Taos could change the world it had to catch up with it, Spud thought, at least a little and in certain ways. Last summer’s murder, for instance, couldn’t just continue to be ignored. Not now with rumors of two more bodies, headless and dropped unburied in almost the same place. The dinner conversation that evening had been pleasant until Spud mentioned the rumors. Edith in particular expressed shock and outrage. And she was right. Everyone agreed mañana justice in Taos had to end. Spud didn’t know how, but he was determined to make that happen, to make Taos safe for everyone.

  “Lovely. The evening. The day. All of it. Just lovely.” Willa took Edith’s arm to steady their way across the little bridge over the acequia madre that ran just above the wild plum trees lining their walk to the pink adobe. The fragrance of piñon burning in kiva fireplaces in the area invaded their senses and from a distance came the various pitched voices of dogs conversing in the cool night air. Oddly, their voices intensified the silence.

  Edith felt compelled to pause, to breathe deeply, to let the sensation of well being and quiet exhilaration reach all the way to her toes. The unpleasantness at dinner about the uninvestigated deaths of three women finally gave way. Willa called out the constellations, Cassiopeia and the two dippers distinct among the thousands of stars above.

  “Taos has to be the most beautiful place on earth,” Willa pressed Edith’s arm closer to her ribs. Edith smiled and nodded in silent agreement.

  They had lingered after dinner, Mabel inviting them with Tony into what she called her Rainbow Room, her comfortable library a few steps up from the living room. Rainbow because the room’s ceiling, made up of slender stripped-pine poles called latillas that crisscrossed above thick pine vigas in a herringbone pattern, were variously stained red, blue, and white, the colors of earth and sky, just as they were in the dining room. Like the rest of the house, the Rainbow Room was full of color and art representing a rich mix of cultures and religions from around the world.

  Willa and Edith seemed always to be finding new things — sketches and paintings on whitewashed walls of birds, turtles, and other images sacred to the pueblos; an amazing variety of oriental and Navajo rugs, brilliant in their designs; gothic doorways with images sacred to local Catholics, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, carved or painted on the doors; huge portraits and landscapes by the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance interspersed with pieces by Cubists and other contemporary artists and with rustic santos, small wooden carvings and crosses that had adorned homes around Taos for generations depicting the images of saints; the wall of windows in Mabel’s bathroom that Brett and D.H. Lawrence covered with geometric designs to provide Mabel with unwanted modesty; and the large collection of lovely pueblo and Italian vases, pots, and figures, including the large ceramic roosters Mabel distributed along the roofline of the western portal that explained why she named the house Los Gallos. A hodgepodge of everything lovely, Willa called it, just like Mabel herself.

  “Yes, yes, a hodgepodge,” Mabel laughed with deli
ght, her voice then slipping into its lower registers, “just like Taos itself. Everything come together as one! That’s as close as anyone has ever come to describing me. Jelliffe, Brill, Jung, none of them caught onto me as well as you. And you have done it in just one word. Hodgepodge.”

  Mabel poured each of them an after-dinner coffee and offered them a Lucky Strike from the carton they brought with them from Santa Fe as a gift for Mabel. Tony settled into his large corner chair, as he often did, and began to provide background music for their conversation, drumming and singing traditional pueblo songs. The unfamiliar words and quiet rhythmic sound drew little direct attention but radiated calm and peace. Jamie, the resident tabby, sauntered in to stare at the four of them, each in turn, and finally nestled in Edith’s lap for his evening nap. The women lit their cigarettes, sipped their coffee, and sat for a moment before Mabel continued their conversation with a sly smile, “Hodgepodge, yes, but not always so lovely.”

  “Human then,” Willa offered.

  “Once again, exactly right.”

  Mabel had not always been so agreeable, Willa and Edith knew from the many stories they heard about her over the years. Rabble-rouser, suffragette, unionist, commie! Charges against Mabel had been loud and various and to some degree true. She had held salons in her Fifth Avenue apartment where labor leaders and anarchists fomented rebellion and plotted the Paterson strike. She had supported the crusades of people like Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Big Bill Haywood, and Emma Goldman. She had been in a well-known sexual relationship with John Reed. Several of Mabel’s New York friends had at some point been arrested for their political activity or fled the United States. The rumors about Mabel herself had been no less startling. Insane, said some, a meddler who loves to disrupt relationships and embarrass even the most invulnerable, said others. Mabel sparked so much gossip over the years that Willa and Edith had been wary of accepting her invitations to Taos and once they did, tried to distance themselves by using formal terms of address, referring to themselves as Miss Cather and Miss Lewis and to Mabel as Mrs. Luhan.

  But their reserve dissolved once they read Mabel’s memoirs, spent days exploring the country around Taos with Tony and occasionally Mabel, and learning from them about the history and culture of New Mexico, both past and present. Kindred spirits, Willa decided, except for Mabel’s desire to be the center of attention. Willa had wanted that kind of attention as a young woman but now she wanted that only for her work, not herself. Mabel had no need to earn a living. Willa and Edith did. They preferred to stay out of the limelight and let Edith’s editorial work at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and Willa’s short stories and novels speak for them.

  Adam hung the ax on its pegs above the door and latched the door before carrying the new bundle of kindling to the box next to the stove. It was late. The sun had been down for quite a while and he was tired. Time to build up the fire so they could heat their beans and tortillas.

  They would eat in silence, Adam at the table, Maria on her stool near the open shelves storing their few dishes. He expected nothing different. It had been a week since he arrived at Kiowa and found the ranch house broken into and still occupied by a huge young man with shaggy blond hair, an unshaven beard, and a dark scar that ran from the left side of his forehead to his right ear. Adam flinched when he said his name was Blade.

  That’s about all the man did say. Adam hurried to explain that the owner had sent him to live at the ranch as a kind of caretaker. His rush of words felt lame even to Adam, and Blade resisted leaving until Adam offered him a couple of dollars to clear out quietly. But once Blade gathered up what he had strewn about the few rooms and called to someone outside, Adam learned that his problem was larger than Blade.

  Maria, blouse torn at the neck, skirt caked with mud and dried grass, sandals loose on both feet as though they belonged to someone else, emerged from the tiny cabin behind the house. Adam could not see her face because her long brown hair fell across it and she did not look up but pressed against the cabin’s exterior and splayed her hands across its logs as if expecting to be hit. Adam moved toward her, but Blade spun him around and said just two words. “She’s mine.”

  Stunned, Adam stood a very long time in what felt like a stupor until he came up with two words of his own. “Sell her?”

  Blade dropped his grip. “Ten dollars.” Exactly the amount Adam had in his pocket.

  When Blade left, Adam fitted the doors with inside bars to serve as locks and gathered what scrap wood he could find to barricade the windows. Then he, with Maria, cleaned the two cabins. Maria said nothing. Adam could understand only a few words of Spanish and he was not sure Maria knew English. He was sure that she remained too frightened to speak. Adam would have to check this situation out with Spud when he finally went down the mountain for supplies. Spud would know what to do. Spud had, after all, sent Adam to the ranch so he would have a place to stay and paint his mountain landscapes until Lawrence returned.

  III

  EDITH LIFTED HER reins and nudged her mare into a trot. It felt good to be on Jesse again, a sweet-tempered bay with a smooth gait and quiet curiosity. Nothing rash or ill-mannered like the chestnut she had drawn for the ride into Canyon de Chelly. Sunny they called him, but there was nothing sunny about him. He was a cranky gelding with short pasterns and a choppy gait who tried to jerk the reins from her hands and trot quickly up and especially down the rocky trail. Edith’s hands and arms ached from holding him back, and the muscles in her inner thighs complained for days.

  But Jesse was happy to take notice of their surroundings and pick her way carefully along the trail. With her, Edith could relax and enjoy the mare’s intelligence and the lively feel of her body even through several layers of leather. Willa’s horse, a dark brown gelding named Jasper, was equally willing and sweet-tempered. Tony had his choice of horses from the pueblo and he chose well.

  Riding was something Edith and Willa had grown up doing as a matter of course. Nothing like the feel of a horse, a good horse, Willa agreed with Edith about that. Like everyone else at dinner the night before, Mabel and especially the Fechins loved hearing Willa’s stories about her childhood on horseback, visiting neighbors on the plains around Red Cloud, Nebraska. Immigrants all of them, from places as far-flung as Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Germany, and Russia, living however they could in dugouts, sod houses, and for the wealthier ones, single-story buildings with weathered clapboard siding. It was like taking a world tour of homes, languages, stories, and, for the young Willa, kitchens. Fragrant goulashes, warmed-over rabbit stews, and fresh-baked kolaches right out of the oven. Willa’s memories were literally mouth-watering morsels.

  Younger by nine years, Edith had spent her childhood a hundred and fifty miles east of Red Cloud in the bustling frontier capital of Lincoln, Nebraska. She grew to love many of the same newcomers and traditions Willa enjoyed, but her in-town life provided little of Willa’s opportunity for day-long rides across the open plains. Except for a brief respite on her father’s ranch near Kearney, Edith and her brother and sisters kept a pony and a cart in Lincoln and learned to ride properly and well. And her days in Lincoln were filled with social gatherings where she also learned to balance a teacup and practice manners.

  When she became one of the recording secretaries of her local sorority, she was called upon to create flowery, if tongue-in-cheek, descriptions of such exciting events as the Naming of the Bulls, sponsored by a wealthy rancher whose daughter had also pledged Delta Gamma. After a pleasant luncheon, where everyone indulged in their favorite version of sophisticated chatter, the girls trooped outside to seats decorated with floral wreaths and arranged in a semi-circle around the side of a corral where young bulls were presented one after another to be formally dubbed by the girls and registered as Sir Lancelot, Ulysses, or Zeus.

  Edith never ceased to be amused and a little embarrassed by her own youthful posturings, but Willa’s spirited freedom and theatrical posings — as Pocahontas, a scientist, a s
cholar, a doctor, or actually on stage as a Greek goddess or the villain in a melodrama, mustache, top-hat and all — Willa’s young self was downright exuberant and uproarious. Yet Willa, being Willa, never lost perspective. As easily as Edith, she would laugh at her young self and at the years they each spent actively smoothing their rough western edges.

  For that, Edith had gone to Smith College in Massachusetts. Willa, after gaining notoriety during her first year at the University of Nebraska by wearing her hair sheared into a flattop and calling herself William, finally accepted the advice of her elders and shifted to ladylike hairdos and dresses for the rest of her college career. But it took five years of living with the McClungs in Pittsburgh’s fashionable and wealthy Squirrel Hill area for Willa to be really “finished.” Her friend Isabelle McClung achieved that miracle. Or at least she moved Willa as far as possible into acceptability and for the first time Willa became comfortable in society. In trade, Willa taught Isabelle French and travelled with her in Europe.

  Willa did manage to lure Isabelle into joining her for a few weeks of roughing it in Nebraska and Wyoming, but Isabelle preferred chamber music and Europe. Edith, on the other hand, enjoyed listening to music and loved going with Willa to the opera and concerts, but for her and for Willa, nothing could be better than a long hike or a day’s ride across the mesa. What folly, Willa finally declared. Instead of working so hard to become ladies, we should have been teaching ladies how to become western women. How to live without fear in open spaces and accept the freedom to be anything we dare. At the time, Edith simply closed the book she was reading and silently agreed. Living well in society was fine, but growing up in the west had served them well. It was something they shared.

  Their ride this morning held nothing from their youthful rides except the sense of space and open sky. In the vast emptiness around them now, mountains and mesas rose to define the horizon. Here the sky was paler and the earth lighter and more variegated in hue than the Nebraska plains. It held none of the fresh-plowed fields or waving grasses that sometimes reached higher than their stirrups. Instead of feeling small and sometimes alone in the magnificence of Nebraska, here one might feel small but not alone.