This grandeur carried with it a sense of animation and comfort from ageless struggles, Edith thought, not over nature but with it. In Taos, ancient irrigation ditches bore the steady music and movement of mountain streams through tree-lined streets and green pastures. Here on the mesa, blue grama, sagebrush, and chamisa held tight just to keep the earth in place. Grasses seemed permanently bent by the wind. The sun warmed and clouds hung suspended or scudded in white puffs across the blue. Eagles, hawks, ravens rode the air, and comical magpies replaced sedate meadowlarks on low-hanging branches and twigs, echoing the jazzy black-and-white body paint and antics of the clowns in pueblo dances. Wind, wildness, warmth, and utter joy, that’s New Mexico, Edith felt like laughing out loud.
“Glorious morning!”
Willa’s shout matched Edith’s own feeling about the day, and soon Willa was alongside, helping Jasper pick his way among the sage next to the trail. Just then Jesse’s ears pricked forward and Edith noticed how the trail narrowed and clumps of piñon and sage began to thicken ahead. Tall ponderosa pines loomed in the distance. They must have come farther than she realized. They had to be close now, close to the spot where they found the woman’s body the previous summer.
Spud began his day with a walk to the pueblo, his thinning hair safe from wind and sun under a wide-brimmed straw hat. In the far distance, he caught a glimpse of two people on horseback. They were just specks moving at a purposeful pace toward Arroyo Seco. He guessed they were Willa Cather and Edith Lewis.
It was unusual to see Willa on horseback this early in the day. The previous summer she had spent all her mornings writing. But Spud was not surprised. He was pretty sure he knew where they were going. At dinner last night, Edith asked Tony what had happened about the woman whose body they discovered last July. Tony said he had heard nothing, which Mabel explained meant that nothing had happened.
That wasn’t exactly true and Spud said so. Edith gasped when he explained that this June he heard two new bodies had been found a little farther along on a nearby trail, both female and this time, headless. He watched as Willa placed her fork carefully on the edge of her plate before turning toward him to demand details. Exactly where were they located, how were they dressed, were they, like the first woman, of Mexican or Spanish descent, how were they found, what was the condition of their bodies, did anyone know what had happened to their heads?
Willa’s questions tumbled forth in fully formed sentences, her voice low and steady, eyes intense. Spud found himself flustered. This Willa Cather was all business, direct and straightforward, so unlike the graceful woman with smiling blue eyes, charming dimples, and melodic voice he had come to know. Edith, always quieter and somewhat hesitant, also pressed for details. But Spud had little to offer. He hadn’t thought to ask.
Spud was no stranger to forthright women. He rather expected women to be intelligent and inquisitive. It had been seven years since American women won the right to vote. They were flappers. They could wear pants. They could move their arms and legs freely and dance and drink in speakeasies. They had been going to college since well before the turn of the century. They had careers. Well, some had careers. And he was of the new generation, the generation some called Lost. He was not lost. He had found Taos. But Taos had suddenly produced the headless bodies of two women, women Willa and Edith adamantly demanded he describe in detail. What on earth, they wanted to know, was going on?
With that, Spud volunteered to go with Tony in the morning to find out what they could from the sheriff. Tony had first to go to the pueblo with John Collier, Mabel’s latest wunderkind. Certain the Pueblo Indians would interest Collier as much as they did her, Mabel had invited this eager young social reformer from New York City for a visit. Once Collier caught hold, as Mabel knew he would, she and Tony helped him organize a contingent of artists and writers from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to persuade the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Congress to change their policies.
Hard to believe their most powerful foe was northern New Mexico’s own congressman, Steven P. Cutlass. But there it was. Cutlass, a wealthy businessman and sometime rancher, wanted no changes in the way things were. He was known to be ruthless and his opposition to John Collier was formidable. Collier had recently increased the pressure on Cutlass by lobbying Congress with the American Indian Defense Association to convey exclusive rights to the Taos Pueblo Indians of the 48,000 acres of the Blue Lake mountain area on Wheeler Peak that was sacred to the pueblo. Cutlass was furious.
At dinner the previous night Mabel tried to explain all of this to the Fechins, insisting that any Anglo expecting to live in northern New Mexico needed to understand its history, its mix of races and cultures, and become actively involved in helping the pueblos once again defend their lands and customs. As Tony said, “My people cannot do this. Anglos must speak so Anglos hear.” Nicolai was excited to learn. Willa and Edith were already well-informed. They had been in the midst of the activists in Santa Fe and Taos for two summers now, and though neither was inclined to political action, they understood the issues.
Willa rarely talked about her writing, but she often talked with Mabel and Tony about the mix of Pueblo, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo cultures in northern New Mexico and the two French missionary priests, Jean Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, whose lives in northern New Mexico in the 1850s formed the core of her new manuscript. No less than Mabel, Spud was pleased with her choice of subjects, two gentle men who, because they stood apart from the culture they meant to convert, came to see clearly how to change both the culture and themselves to become one with it. Spud, an outsider himself, speculated about how like those men he was and now how like his new friends, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis.
Given current attitudes toward Pueblo Indians and Indian land, Spud thought Collier’s project a long shot, but John could be very persuasive and Tony liked working with him. They might just pull it off. And this morning, Spud guessed, Tony and John would also be asking around at the pueblo to see who might know something about those headless bodies. Once he joined them, Tony could drive the three of them to the sheriff’s office.
At the edge of the pines, Edith pulled up to have a closer look around. Jesse took the opportunity to stretch her head down just enough to get a nibble of blue grama grass. On the other side of the trail a rabbit froze, pretending to be a stone slightly larger and darker than the ones near the trail. A stream burbled just out of sight.
“I thought I knew exactly where that woman’s body was, but now it all looks the same.”
“Not here,” Willa nodded after a moment. “She wasn’t this close to water. And I think the trail was on a ridge of some kind.”
“Yes, but which way?” Edith’s words came out slow. She glanced back then rose in her stirrups to look farther ahead where the trail seemed to dip and turn into the trees. She needed to think back through the ride they had taken the year before. She couldn’t remember the trail going through pines like these before they saw the woman’s crudely fashioned grave, really just a hollowed trough that monsoon rains had revealed a few feet below the trail. But perhaps they had ridden through pines, perhaps after a bit the trail would circle back out of the trees.
Willa pushed Jasper past them, and Edith nudged Jesse into a jog to catch up. Once in the lead, Jasper’s stride covered more ground than Jesse’s, and Edith found it necessary to maintain leg pressure to keep Jesse from lagging behind. It was cooler and quieter in the woods with the horses padding along on the needle-strewn path. No rocks here. But Edith didn’t have time to think about that. Once in the trees the trail dipped again sharply and soon they were crossing the creek they had heard. It was narrow and deep, more like an irrigation ditch. Jasper plunged right in and out again on the other side, Willa holding onto the saddle horn for support.
Edith felt Jesse’s muscles tighten and her body prepare to jump. At the last second, Edith grabbed mane and barked a sharp “No.” Jesse immediately changed her mind and slid deep into the swift water, then
leaped up the opposite bank where she paused to shake herself dry, Edith still holding tight to her mane. Jasper was waiting for them a few feet away with Willa, hat pushed far back on her head, laughing. Then she pulled the bandana off her neck and held it out. Grateful, Edith used it to wipe her face dry.
“This can’t be right, can it? I don’t remember any of this.”
“I don’t remember you taking a dunking, that’s true.”
Edith leaned down to wipe off her boots, which were tall and tightly laced. They were both wearing outfits they bought more than ten years before from Abercrombie and Fitch, advertised as suitable for hiking and riding. They had used them all over the Southwest. Suitable, Edith grumbled to herself, but not waterproof.
“Do you want to cross the creek and go back?” Willa was still chuckling.
“No,” Edith groaned, “but I have no idea where we’ll end up if we go on.”
“Well, then, let’s find out.”
Tony let out the clutch and the Cadillac jerked forward, its wheels headed down the dirt road that lead away from the pueblo toward Taos.
“Where did you see the riders, Spud?”
“They looked like they were going to Arroyo Seco. They were pretty far away.” Spud pointed vaguely toward the northwest.
“Bad place to go.”
“Why? What’s wrong with Arroyo Seco?” John Collier obviously didn’t know what to make of this hubbub about dead women and Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. “Do you think they’re in danger?”
“I can’t imagine they would be,” Spud leaned forward to be sure Tony and John could hear him. “They’re just riding pueblo ponies on pueblo land. Of course,” he added, “they don’t look like Pueblo Indians.”
“Don’t look Indian,” Tony nodded, “and they are beyond pueblo land.”
“How do you know?” John became almost plaintive.
“They are headed where the bodies were found,” Tony glanced back toward Spud. “I think we’ll go there, too.”
“But if they’re really in danger, shouldn’t we stop by to tell Sheriff Santistivan first? Perhaps he should come with us.”
“We three are strong.” Tony’s expression remained serene. “We don’t need the sheriff.”
“He has no jurisdiction here anyway,” Spud raised his voice again to be sure it carried over the Cadillac’s sputter.
“Not here, maybe. But in Arroyo Seco.”
They passed the pueblo’s San Geronimo Mission Church where three women, dark blankets draped loosely over their shoulders like shawls, dipped their heads and averted their eyes as pueblo women did. Another, wrapped in a white blanket, walked farther back along the stream that flowed through the pueblo, carrying buckets of water toward her home.
The stream, Spud knew, was a life source for the pueblo. They used its water for everything — drinking, washing, cleaning, bathing — and they had no electricity. Primitive is what the tourists who came to the pueblo called their way of life. Others said traditional. Either way, Spud mused, Tony with his Cadillac motorcar and electric lights, running water, and even a bathroom in his home, no longer fit. And his wife, the magnificent Mabel, certainly did not.
Until now Mabel’s outrageous deeds had always been within the context of her own culture. But Spud knew her union with Tony was a challenge to both cultures. Tony might laugh, as he had during dinner the night before, over Mabel’s story about dropping into Tony’s kiva at the pueblo early in their relationship because she decided he had stayed away from her too long.
Taos Pueblo, 1920s
But funny as her story was — she had, after all, literally “dropped in” since kivas are underground sacred ceremonial circles where men, only men, are instructed in tribal history and prepare themselves for ceremonial rituals and dances — it was also sad. After that, Tony, who had been an important drummer, singer, and spiritual leader, lost his place in the kiva and his status in the pueblo. As a member of the tribe, he still had tribal rights and a home in the pueblo where his former wife, Candelaria, lived, but Tony with Mabel was now an outsider. They both were.
Deep into the ponderosas, Willa held up her hand and signaled Edith to join her. The trail provided just enough room for Jesse to sidle alongside. In the clearing, ahead a crudely fashioned tent of canvas and ropes sagged between trees. The grass around it was thoroughly trampled and a narrow path trailed off toward a small stream, probably the same stream they had crossed earlier. Off to one side a large fire pit held chunks of burnt wood and ashes but showed no sign of flame or smoke. Several well-worn stumps circled the pit, and an ax nestled against blackened pots and utensils stacked on a large, flat rock on the other side of the pit.
“What do you think?” Willa whispered.
“I think it’s time to turn around,” Edith whispered back.
Neither of them moved. Jasper and Jesse seemed content for the moment to peer from a distance.
“Awfully quiet here,” Willa ventured again. “Doesn’t look like anyone is around.”
“Can’t be sure.”
Jesse raised a hoof, ready to paw the ground or move on. Jasper reached over to nip her neck.
“Just take a peek?”
“I’m not at all interested in visiting with strangers,” Edith offered in return. “Besides, we should be going back. They’ll be wondering where we are.”
“Oh, come on, a peek won’t take long and it’s probably just an abandoned hunting camp.” Willa raised her reins and Jasper walked into the clearing.
Edith took a deep breath and let Jesse follow.
Nothing happened. No one was in the tent and aside from a few strips of venison drying into jerky on a rack behind, there were no signs that anyone would be around soon. But there were several coiled ropes and a few items of clothing strewn just inside the tent. And darkened blood, a lot of blood, stained a large stump and the ground around it at the edge of the woods on the other side of the clearing.
“Perhaps you were right,” Willa finally whispered.
Jasper snorted and backed away from the stump. Willa kicked him in the ribs. Edith had no better luck with Jesse. She absolutely refused to move forward. Finally Willa allowed Jasper to turn back the way they had come. Jesse followed at a walk, but Edith noticed both horses had lengthened their strides and quickened their pace. Edith could feel the tension in Jesse’s body. Was Jesse actually apprehensive, Edith wondered, or was Jesse’s tension simply a reflection of her own? Either way, Edith was relieved to be following Willa and Jasper out of the clearing and she guessed Jesse was, too.
“Let’s hope that whoever was there is not coming back on this trail.”
“What an uncomfortable thought.”
Edith reached down to pat Jesse’s neck. She needed her to relax before reaching the creek where, Edith hoped, they could negotiate a smoother crossing.
Soon after they passed the pueblo mission church, Tony turned off on what looked to Spud like a simple path across the desert. Short cut. Wagon wheels, not car tires, made those tracks and their ruts didn’t quite fit the width of the Cadillac’s wheels. Fortunately, the monsoon rains hadn’t yet made them deep or Spud guessed he’d be jostled right out of the back seat.
“There’s no need to rush, is there, Tony?” John Collier gripped the edge of his seat.
Tony downshifted and the car gave an extra lurch, “Guess not. Don’t know.”
From his perch in the back, Spud scanned the open land before them. No sign of the women or anything else, just the usual blue-green wispy grass and occasional sage and cactus that the monsoons watered this time of year. Like everyone he knew, Spud had learned to love the monsoons that filled July afternoons in New Mexico. Most were gentle female rains, as the Pueblo Indians called them, refreshing showers that disappeared quickly after cleansing the sky and encouraging new growth in tender plants. But the monsoons could bring high winds, terrifying lightning strikes, huge balls of hail, and great rumbles of thunder. Those were the male rains, brief, heavy downp
ours that sometimes caused flash floods or wild fires that deepened arroyos and flattened forests.
Gentle peace or booming drama, it didn’t matter, Spud loved the monsoons. Part of their charm was that they were visible from long distances, often several at the same time. Individual rainstorms dancing across the mesas and valleys, each distinct, their distant drops slanting through sunlight, rainbows glistening. There were two now behind them, hovering miles away near the Rio Grande Gorge with Pedernal standing sentinel in the far distance beyond. Closer in, a hawk shot across the sky, two small birds in close pursuit. Must have stolen an egg or maybe a fledgling from their nest. Slim pickings when he could have grabbed a rabbit with a good deal less fuss, Spud chuckled aloud at the hawk’s antics.
“Check it out, two o’clock ahead.”
John’s staccato words brought Spud’s musing to an end. Two wisps of dust floating high in the air trailed two dots that moved with measured speed in their direction. They were still a long way away but wouldn’t be for long.
“Must be them. That’s about where I saw them earlier,” Spud answered the unspoken question.
Tony eased up on the accelerator. No need to rush now.
“Arriving today by car. Samuel Dan, Special Agent, federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Emilio’s penciled note sat on top of the small stack of papers placed precisely in the center of Sheriff Santistivan’s blotter. The phone call had come from Dan’s secretary first thing that morning, long before the sheriff finished his fried eggs and coffee at Sadie’s. Within minutes of the sheriff’s arrival, a tall fellow with brown glossy hair strode through the door to the sheriff’s inner office and introduced himself as Samuel Dan.
Death Comes Page 4
