Had he been Maria, Adam guessed, he could never have survived such violence as well. Blade had beaten her into submission. Submission would have thrown Adam into a state of depression. But submission, Adam realized, could do that only to someone who thought they were in control, in the right, equal, the same as others. Somehow Maria had survived despite all that Blade had forced her into and shown no sign of defeat or self-pity. Adam found that admirable. He wished he could tell her that, but all he could do at the moment was offer her a cup of hot tea.
Edith heard a light pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof. A female shower on the way, she thought, pleased with the way Pueblo Indians chose to identify gentleness as female. An essential, archetypal gentleness that nourishes and creates growth. Jung was certainly onto something there, Edith decided, and turned back to considering the differences between Jung and Freud.
Freud’s preoccupation with sex and malaise had interested Edith and Willa enough for Willa to decide to portray the depths of depression and mental breakdown in her main character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, in The Professor’s House, the novel she and Edith had been proofreading in Alcalde the previous summer. But to depict the professor’s condition, Jungian concepts had proven more useful. Like earlier doctors who labeled such depressions neurasthenia, Freud considered the individual and his unconscious solely responsible for his own condition. Jung, on the other hand, saw an individual’s situation as reflective of a universal archetypal experience. For Jung a cure required something different and more than individual analysis. Cures involved an epiphany leading to a recognition and acceptance of one’s place in the universe.
When she thought about it now, Edith realized that she and Willa had both witnessed breakdowns similar to the professor’s. Isabelle McClung’s father and Sam McClure, the publisher of McClure’s Magazine, for whom Willa and Edith had both worked, had each been diagnosed with neurasthenia. Judge McClung’s case was so severe that in 1908 he had had to resign his position with the court.
That happened two years after Willa left the McClung household and moved to New York, but Willa visited the McClungs often and actually spent part of the summer of 1908 abroad with Isabelle, just before moving into a new apartment in Greenwich Village with Edith. Because of the judge, Willa knew intimately the effects of neurasthenia, and she cast the professor’s breakdown as a kind of internal lament for a world split in two, when romance and the certainty the professor felt before the Great War gave way in its aftermath to a profound sense of loss, a loss of love and belief.
Edith was pretty sure not only Willa but many others empathized with the professor’s lament. After all Mabel was in Taos because she felt the world, having been violently severed from its past, made a wrong turn after the Great War. Once she found Taos and Tony in 1917, she wanted nothing to do with the masquerade of modern commercialism. This post-war world, Mabel declared, was not a fair and proper exchange for tradition and the certainty about universal truths that it replaced. In that sense, Mabel, Edith, and certainly Willa, empathetically understood the professor’s breakdown.
To dramatize the professor’s breakdown, Willa chose to interrupt her novel’s conventional plot with a completely different story and character, a young man named Tom Outland. Then she made Outland’s pre-war discovery of prehistoric ruins in the Southwest and his response to it as a lost civilization echo the professor’s post-war realization that while loss is devastating, life goes on — if differently.
Edith thought it a brilliant strategy. Over several weeks Willa worked hard to adapt and integrate a short story she had written several years earlier about Outland’s discovery of Mesa Verde. Outland would provide a counterbalance for the professor and Outland’s death in the Great War a reason for the professor’s malaise. In the depths of depression, Willa’s professor is solipsistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered. He rises out of himself finally when he symbolically dies and rises again after gaining perspective and a stoic affirmation of his faith in life.
Of course, Willa being Willa, the professor’s resolution was destined to be complicated and ironic, not romantic or heroic. Her professor’s epiphany might involve such lofty Biblical archetypes as Eve and Mary, but Willa brought his experience down to earth by using a mummy to represent Eve and a dressmaker’s dummy to represent Mary. Irony, Edith smiled at Willa, still slumbering on the daybed next to her chair. Irony and Willa’s wonderfully sly sense of humor.
“Give me a hand here, will you?” John Collier squatted awkwardly next to the right rear tire and fitted the jack into place. He pulled his handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his forehead, which glistened with sweat.
“Just as soon as I block this wheel,” Spud grunted. When he finished wedging a rock against the right tire, he rose and stretched as tall as he could. His back hurt. With Tony driving as fast as he could, Spud had been bounced several times almost out of the car.
“Good job,” Tony cheered from the driver’s seat.
Collier paused and glanced up. “You do have the brake set, don’t you?”
Tony nodded, looking serene and regal with a shawl-like white blanket draped loosely over his shoulders. He set the brake.
Collier bent back to the jack handle and pumped several times before pausing to catch his breath and wipe his forehead again. “This heat is going to kill us if the sand doesn’t choke us first.”
“Could, but I doubt it.” Spud made his way around the car to spell Collier. “Still adjusting to the sun and altitude, I see. You’ll get used to it soon enough.”
Distant thunder rumbled. Spud glanced toward the mountains before dropping to his knees for his turn at the jack.
“Rain would be nice. Cool us off.” Collier stood and brushed sand off his knees.
“Not here yet. At San Cristobal,” Tony pointed.
Near San Cristobal, the Lawrence ranch, and Adam. Spud glanced again at the mountains. The clouds there belched blackness with streaks of light. The whole sky boomed after each streak. Spud could imagine the downpour, wind shifting, churning trees, all directions at once. Adam can handle it, Spud decided. He’s young but resourceful. Spud felt a smile form. Good painter, too. His smile grew. Once all this business about headless corpses and uncooperative sheriffs was over, he would look forward to a visit to the Lawrence ranch. Even before it was all over, he corrected himself. Edith Lewis said something to Mabel at dinner about visiting the ranch. He would make sure he could tag along. It was after all his friend who was looking after the place.
“That does it,” Collier handed Spud a fresh tire. “You can put a tire on, can’t you, my man?” Collier shook out his handkerchief and refolded it before stuffing it back in his pocket. He turned to Tony and glanced at the sky. “So odd how it rains here, a little here, a little there. Should be able to get to the sheriff’s office before we get wet, don’t you think?”
V
THE SOOTHING SOUND of light rain continued to fill the room where Willa slept and Edith nodded in thought. She found herself smiling. Willa’s professor and now her priests. One never really knows where the impetus for a story begins, but Edith guessed Willa chose to tell the story of her priests because they endured a loss similar to the professor’s, leaving their European old world in exchange for the New World. But their loss is different, the journey between old and new more definitive and deliberate, and the resolution, the final letting go, more joyous than stoic.
Everything Willa and Edith found at the historical library in Santa Fe and elsewhere — Machebeuf’s autobiography, correspondence by Lamy with his sister in France, and many, many historical accounts — gave them all the details Willa needed. But how to tell the story, that was the issue. Edith was well aware that Willa wanted never to repeat herself. Willa loved to strike out into new territory, to experiment, and to create meaning through unexpected turns in structure or character.
In an especially silly moment, Willa declared that her familiar spirit was a wild turkey, a wily old bird t
hat forsakes her feeding ground at the first sign of human footprints. Edith had laughed heartily when Willa gobbled loudly, flapped her elbows, pranced out of the room, and peeked back as if she wanted to be sure she wasn’t followed. Trampled ground was not for her. Others could use conventional plots and characters. She would not. From then on if her disappearances were cloaked in decorum, they would still be disappearances. Critics and gushers would simply have to learn not to assume or anticipate what she might do. She would stay wild and free.
Edith chuckled again at the thought. Willa made a huge leap from the norm in the way she structured the story of her professor. She would jump even farther with the story of her priests, but the leap would be subtle and she would draw little attention to technique or herself. Willa may shun trampled ground, but she would never ignore tradition or the past. In fact she would choose to do exactly the opposite. She would tell the story of her priests the way the Catholic church depicted the lives of saints and martyrs through many centuries — appealing to senses and emotion, not knowledge or fact. Church missionaries consistently recast pagan myths and rituals as their own and appealed to parishioners through incense and art — music, paintings, carvings, rood screens, statuary, architecture. Worshipers who could never be expected to understand Latin would grasp meaning through their emotional response.
Willa would do the same. Plot, action, even accuracy didn’t matter. Just as the church had done, Willa would fill the most static of religious forms, a saint’s legend, with color, motion, rituals, scenes, images, symbols, and archetypes from all cultures and times. And just as the church had its converts, Willa would lead her priests and her readers to a similar kind of felt knowledge — a fusion of old with new, earth with sky, and life with death.
Readers might not understand Willa’s experiment. In fact, Edith was pretty certain many wouldn’t. Any more than critics understood modern paintings after the Armory Show. They simply accused Cubists like Andrew Dasburg of not knowing how to draw. Some might not even recognize Willa’s novel as an experiment. Or as a novel.
Others might think she had lost her literary way or converted to Catholicism or was delving in mysticism. Certainly some, especially men, failed to grasp what Willa was doing linking her hero with Parsifal in One of Ours. Or rather, they failed to comprehend how Willa’s Parsifal could be heroic. He remained much too sweet and inexperienced. Of course, those who did understand awarded One of Ours the Pulitzer Prize. Those who didn’t attacked Willa for daring to portray a soldier in battle, a subject they declared no woman ever could or should know anything about.
Their attacks did not deter Willa, and Edith had cheered her on. After all, Willa had always countered romantic notions and played with literary references and nods to classical gods and goddesses. Just hints along the way, nothing too consistent or strikingly parallel. As she said to Edith at the time, she was not interested in rewriting Sophocles or Shakespeare or even church doctrine in modern dress. Her work should stand on its own. But of course she wanted it to last as long as Sophocles and continue to make meaning in new times. They both did.
Edith found herself suddenly wakened. The Prescott had slipped from her lap and made a loud clap on the floor, its pages closed. Raindrops still spattered on the roof. Monsoon, of course, female. How odd, she thought, the way male and female monsoons exist together, different rain falling at the same time, often in close proximity. Male, female, different but rain all the same.
Edith yawned. She hadn’t realized she had nodded off. Willa’s eyes were open, too. She looked startled but said nothing and her eyelids fell shut again. Edith glanced at her watch. Such woolgathering, she chuckled. The only real issue they had to deal with now was what to wear for the next meal. How lovely to do nothing productive and have no deadlines at all. Vacation. Edith let the word float in her mind until it flooded her consciousness. Then her eyelids fell shut again, too.
Spud felt a few raindrops when Tony opened the door to the sheriff’s office and stepped back to let Spud and John Collier enter first. Tony had said little since they caught up with Willa and Edith. But then Tony usually said little. One could never tell what Tony was thinking or even whether he was thinking. Spud couldn’t at any rate.
Tony was impressive, always neatly dressed and pleasant to be around. When loose, his shiny black hair fell to his waist, but he usually wore it in braids brightly decorated with colorful ribbons that draped down the front of his shirt. He had a special smell, a sweet smell Spud guessed might have something to do with the herbs and grasses in his medicine pouch. It was an odor Spud identified only with Tony. Mabel placed tiny bowls of cinnamon throughout the house to fill it with scent and chase away mice. But Tony’s scent was entirely his own, and he always wore a little smile on his lips. His eyes reflected the same gentle kindness. But Tony rarely spoke or looked at anyone directly, not at Spud anyway. Inscrutable is a real word, Spud decided. Not a negative word, Tony was always pleasant, but a meaningful one.
“Sheriff’s not available.” Emilio glanced at the three of them when the door closed behind Tony.
“We’ll wait,” John lowered his body into one of the wooden chairs near the door. Spud did the same. Tony stood, his body lax and still. He seemed to Spud the model of patience.
Emilio shuffled papers from one side of his desk to the other. The process looked random.
John stirred in his chair and cleared his throat.
“What you want?” Emilio directed the question to Tony. Tony nodded toward John.
“We came to find out about the women who were discovered near Arroyo Seco. The ones,” John paused to clear his throat again, “with the missing heads.”
“Nothing to know.”
“Come, now, from what Spud here says the sheriff has had a month to investigate. Isn’t that true?”
“Sí.” Emilio opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a newly sharpened pencil. It was yellow and had a much-used eraser on the end. Spud could just make out the words Eberhart Faber on its side, the same brand he used. Emilio placed it next to the stack of papers to the right of his blotter. He glanced again at John and repeated, “Nothing to know.”
“Well, is the sheriff in?”
“Sí.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
The clock on the wall behind Emilio’s head said 2:45. Its minute hand clicked. Spud began to anticipate its clicks. He let his index finger match the clock’s movement, tapping on the arm of his chair. John crossed his right leg over his left. Spud did the same. Emilio picked up his pencil and put it down. Spud decided to try a little two-finger syncopation.
At 3:05 the sheriff’s office door opened and an unusually tall man came out. He was wearing a suit. The sheriff was still talking behind him, so the man was half turned away from Emilio and the three men arranged against the wall in the outer office.
“That’s really as far as we have gotten,” the sheriff was saying. “You seem to know more than we do.”
“I was hoping for more,” the man cleared his throat. “A lot more.”
“Excuse me,” John rose, addressing the stranger and the sheriff at the same time.
“Oh,” the sheriff said.
“Yes?” the tall man said at the same time. His eyes took in the three of them. “What is it?”
“We came to find out what you have learned about the three women who were found near Arroyo Seco, one last year and two last month.”
“Three?” The tall man glanced at the sheriff. “Arroyo Seco?”
“Arroyo Seco, yes,” the sheriff offered with a nod. He glared at John. “Why?”
“Well,” John paused to gather his thoughts. “The women who found the first body last summer have returned and want to know what is happening. They were shocked to learn that two more bodies have been found and no one has been arrested for any of the murders.” John’s voice gained strength. He turned to the sheriff, “Just what have you found out about all this?”
“Details of such
investigations are always confidential,” the sheriff announced, his lips pursed.
Pink Adobe Porch
Spud found himself having to exercise control over his own lips. He wanted to guffaw but caught himself because there was really nothing funny about this conversation.
“Excuse me,” the tall man interjected. “I am Samuel Dan of the federal Bureau of Investigation, Albuquerque office. I’m here to investigate those murders.” He turned to John, “And you are?”
“Sorry to interrupt, Miss Lewis,” Long John Dunn paused to scrape his boots back and forth across the doormat, two steps below the actual sill. The rain had stopped, but his boots still carried a bit of wet sand from the path. “I know it’s growing late, but I thought I should stop by.” His smile was polite and the stub of his cigar, almost hidden by his mustache, firmly clamped between his teeth.
“No interruption at all, Mr. Dunn. Miss Cather and I just spent the afternoon reading and dozing. Delicious, napping in the rain.”
John Dunn’s yes was a little uncertain and Edith realized he probably never took naps. For the first time Edith found herself looking directly into John Dunn’s steel-blue eyes. Kindly eyes, Edith judged, but with depths reflecting more sorts of experience than she could quite believe possible for one man. Unladylike, her mother’s voice echoed from the past and immediately she dropped her gaze. John Dunn didn’t seem to notice.
A rustler, Mabel had assured them the previous summer on a drive toward Llano to look at property she wanted them to buy. A gambler and a desperado. Years ago when he was a young Texan, Mabel said, John Dunn shot a man to death and then ran until he got lucky with cards and finally made his way to New Mexico. He’s been sort of honest since, Mabel shrugged. Once he reached Taos he started a livery stable, bought a stagecoach, and began hauling people and mail from the train at Tres Piedras. Wasn’t long before he bought the first car in Taos and upgraded his service.
Death Comes Page 6
