Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  Edith thought Mabel’s words a little formal for what her heroes had managed to accomplish, but she ducked her head and felt her cheeks redden only a little. Willa murmured thank you. Spud made a little wave with his right hand. Adam flushed a deep red. John Dunn grinned until his teeth were actually visible beneath his mustache. And Tony remained his usual stoic self.

  Mabel also introduced Maria, who was helping Amelia and several women from the pueblo do the serving. Maria was a special hero, Mabel explained, the most important of all for helping Agent Dan understand what had actually happened at the Lawrence ranch. Maria would now be living at Los Gallos and deserved their special thanks. Maria understood nothing Mabel was saying, but she colored deeply and appeared to study her toes when everyone applauded.

  Finally, Agent Dan rose to bring everybody up to date on what had transpired during the day. He chose to start with the bad news first: they found no one at The Watering Hole in Red River, and no one could tell them where the women had gone. But not everything in Red River was bad news.

  Once Agent Dan had assured Madame May that he had no interest in arresting her, she remembered seeing a touring car pull away from the back of The Watering Hole. She couldn’t say how many people were inside, but she had noticed the touring car before. Several times. Always at the back of the saloon, never in front. She never inquired because she didn’t want to know about anyone else’s business. Didn’t want anyone to know hers, either, though she did enjoy talking to that novelist person who visited with Agent Dan. Agent Dan paused to grin at Willa before adding that of course Madame May didn’t know then that he was Agent Dan.

  When they broke into The Watering Hole, Agent Dan said, they found it in total disarray. Tables were overturned, beds upended, and clothes strewn about. The only area not affected was the back of the bar, where glasses and liquor bottles were still neatly lined up on the highly polished shelf that ran the full length of the mirror. It was as silent as if only ghosts had occupied the place, but lingering odors of spent tobacco and spilled liquor made it obvious that these ghosts had just recently departed.

  And these ghosts, Agent Dan continued, had been extremely careless. On the floor of what had been a small office, he found letters strewn about and a worn ledger. The letters revealed that The Watering Hole was but a tiny outpost in an elaborate, well-established and widespread white-slavery operation. Women from all over Mexico had been kidnapped, drugged, brought across the border, and transported to places as far away as Washington, DC and Los Angeles. Only a handful ended up in New Mexico. Many more passed through the state on their way north or west. The Lawrence ranch and The Watering Hole were just two of several distribution centers or “holding pens” north of the Mexican border.

  The operation itself was huge and, according to the ledger, which recorded transactions in New Mexico, extremely lucrative. So lucrative, Agent Dan said, that some very wealthy and powerful men were involved, some of whom were well-known to the residents of Taos, though he would share no names until the men had been arrested and prosecuted. Agent Dan sat down, and everyone began talking at once. When the talk landed on those slimy bastards who made money off of women’s lives and deaths, the adults kept the word bastards to a whisper. But all agreed, this was the most sensational thing to happen in northern New Mexico in a very long time. Well, Mabel said, one of the most sensational.

  After the guests left, Mabel invited Spud and Adam, along with Willa and Edith, to join her and Tony in the Rainbow Room for an after-dinner indulgence of cognac and conversation. There with the door closed, Mabel confided that despite Spud’s insistence on Manby’s guilt, Agent Dan had told her in utmost secrecy that no, Manby’s name was not among those in the letters or ledger. Spud half rose to protest, but Mabel put her hand up to silence him.

  “Wait until you hear the rest,” Mabel’s voice rose. “The name of the greatest villain in New Mexico history is there!”

  “Who’s that?” Spud dropped back in his chair.

  “Drumroll, please, Tony.” Mabel waved her hand toward Tony, who had been quietly drumming and singing in the background. He responded with a flourish of quick, loud and deep drumbeats. Mabel rose from her chair and raised her glass of cognac in jubilation.

  “The current New Mexico Representative to Congress, the foe of all that is good and decent in northern New Mexico, Steven P. Cutlass!”

  “Oh, my God,” Spud couldn’t help himself. “Your nemesis!”

  “And Tony’s, yes. And everyone’s at the pueblo and the artistic community here and in Santa Fe.” Mabel sounded out of breath.

  “Oh, God,” Spud sputtered, “I can’t wait to tell Hal.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Mabel glared. “Hal Bynner would have it all over Santa Fe in seconds. This needs to be kept secret until after the Bureau arrests Cutlass.”

  “Yes, of course,” Spud conceded. “But how exciting for you and Tony. Cutlass has been the major force blocking the pueblo from getting Blue Lake back. John Collier will be ecstatic.”

  “John Collier and a lot of women who might now be able to find their way back to their previous lives in Mexico,” Edith broke in.

  “Absolutely,” Spud agreed.

  “Let me propose a toast to all of us,” Willa lifted her cognac. “We did it. We put an end to Cutlass and his cronies. An end to the fear their reckless greed, misogyny, and murderous carelessness about women and Mexicans generated here and, from what Agent Dan suggested, all over this country.”

  “You did,” Mabel took a sip of her cognac. “You and Edith. If you hadn’t pushed this investigation along and found the hunting camp, we might never have succeeded.”

  “We did,” Edith smiled. “But young Adam here, without knowing what he was doing, had an even more important and heroic role.”

  “A drink to Adam’s health,” Spud offered.

  “Hear, hear,” Willa cheered, and Tony struck his drum with several loud beats.

  “Last words,” Tony raised his voice. “No more fear. Justice, goodness, peace return.”

  Afterword

  Willa Cather and Edith Lewis in Context

  WHEN I FIRST visited Taos in the mid-1960s, I knew nothing about New Mexico, had never heard of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and paused only briefly at the Kiowa Ranch because D.H. Lawrence was buried there. For a graduate student in English literature, reverence to D.H. Lawrence was a given. I had read one novel by Willa Cather, The Lost Lady, and no professor in any class had mentioned her. Not one. Today I live in New Mexico, Mabel Dodge Luhan is widely recognized as a writer of memoirs and the wealthy art patron who single-handedly brought writers and artists to Taos, and D.H. Lawrence is still a writer of stature. So is Willa Cather whose Death Comes for the Archbishop is set in New Mexico.

  What I began with On the Rocks, my first Willa Cather and Edith Lewis mystery, I continue in Death Comes: a fictional account of Willa Cather and her partner Edith Lewis, set among people they actually knew and situated in a time and place they actually lived. Cather and Lewis visited Taos, New Mexico at least four times: in 1913, 1915, 1925, and 1926, the year Death Comes takes place. They stayed in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s pink adobe casita for the first time in 1925, and Edith Lewis wrote a line-a-day in her Blue Jay notebook describing their two-week stay. Cather asked to return in 1926, though it is not clear they actually did. Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote Cather that Tony was in the hospital in Albuquerque, so they would not be there to receive them. Most likely Cather and Lewis remained at La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe. It is partly for that reason that I chose to set Death Comes in 1926. I would be free of the line-a-day schedule in Edith’s 1925 account and could set my own fictional agenda.

  Characters directly involved in the mystery, including the federal agent Samuel Dan and Adam and Maria, are fictional. Other major characters are drawn from real people, all of whom were actually in Taos in 1926: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Tony Luhan, Andrew Dasburg, Ida Rauh, Nicholai Fechin, Long John Dunn, Arthur Manby, Doc Martin, Walter Willard “Spu
d” Johnson, and John Collier. In Edge of Taos Desert (1937) and Winter in Taos (1935), Luhan gives a detailed account of her life in Taos and refers to many of the people featured in Death Comes.

  Mabel Dodge Luhan first arrived in Taos in 1917, rented living quarters from Arthur Manby, divorced Maurice Sterne, hired Tony Luhan from the Taos Pueblo to build her new home, and in 1923 married Tony, her fourth and final husband. Long John Dunn, Doc Martin, and Arthur Manby were already well known in Taos when Luhan arrived. Ernst Bluemenshein and five other artists had founded the Society of Taos Artists in 1915, but Luhan wasted no time transforming Taos into a nationally recognized art colony. Writers and artists from all over the world accepted Mabel’s invitation to Taos, including Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Leopold Stokowski, Martha Graham, Thornton Wilder, and Willa Cather.

  One of Luhan’s first guests was the Cubist painter Andrew Dasburg, whom she had known in Greenwich Village and who later returned with his partner, Ida Rauh, recognized in New York as a lawyer, activist, actress, and sculptor. D.H. and Frieda Lawrence arrived in 1922, and the British painter Dorothy Brett joined them in 1924. As Luhan recorded in Lorenzo in Taos (1932), her friendship with Lawrence was turbulent. Mabel’s offer of the Kiowa Ranch twenty miles from Taos allowed Lawrence enough breathing room to stay in New Mexico and plan to return. In the spring of 1923, Lawrence and Frieda travelled to Mexico with the poets Witter (Hal) Bynner and Spud Johnson. From there Lawrence went to England and then to Italy where he and Frieda stayed with Cather and Lewis’ good friends, Earl and Achsah Brewster.

  Spud Johnson, Witter Bynner’s secretary and partner during their 1923 trip to Mexico with the Lawrences, worked for Luhan occasionally until she hired him as her fulltime secretary in 1927. Johnson brought with him his iconoclastic literary magazine, The Laughing Horse, which featured his own poetry and essays, but friends like D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan frequently contributed to its pages.

  Emigrating from Russia in 1923, Nicolai Fechin first settled in New York City, where his reputation as a portrait painter was well established. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Fechin first visited Luhan in Taos with his wife and daughter in 1926. In 1927, they returned and joined the growing community of Taos artists. In addition to artists and writers, Luhan also invited people like John Collier and his young family, expecting to engage Collier in the campaign she and Tony Luhan were waging to save Taos Pueblo lands and their sacred Blue Lake high up on Taos Mountain. That campaign became Collier’s life work. In 1933 he became US Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

  Over the years, Luhan’s generous and numerous invitations changed the lives of countless artists and writers and helped to shape the future of Taos. For Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, Luhan’s 1925 invitation was a warm welcome to visit old friends in comfortable circumstances. Cather and Lewis were at first wary of staying at Los Gallos. Luhan was said to be jealous and quarrelsome, a troublemaker mischievously gleeful about breaking up established relationships. Focused on doing research for Cather’s novel, Cather and Lewis wanted no drama or disagreeable interruptions. They were relieved to find Luhan a charming hostess who wanted editorial help with her memoir. Far from jealous or cantankerous, Luhan encouraged Tony to be their tour guide and made an effort to see that they fully grasped the details of Archbishop Lamy’s life and the culture of Northern New Mexico. She also encouraged them to move to Taos, at least during the summers when Lewis could take time away from her job at J. Walter Thompson. But they chose instead to build a cottage on the Canadian island of Grand Manan, a location at once as remote as Taos and more familiar. Cather and Lewis had already spent several summers there as part a women’s summer colony at Whale Cove, the setting of my first Cather-Lewis novel, On the Rocks.

  Why Grand Manan and not Taos? Or Santa Fe, where they spent still longer periods doing research for Death Comes for the Archbishop? All three locations are far removed from New York City, and when Cather was writing, that’s exactly what she wanted—quiet and distance from the distractions of the city. Taos was less hectic than Santa Fe and the home of the Society of Artists, most of whose members Lewis knew from New York. But Cather and Lewis chose Grand Manan because people there proved even less intrusive for a writer at work. For Cather and Lewis, the drawback with Santa Fe and Taos was exactly what enticed other writers and artists to live there: they were lively arts communities. But with so many artists and writers living there and so many of them old friends, Cather and Lewis chose instead to spend their summers on a quiet island in the Bay of Fundy.

  Old friends in Santa Fe and Taos included Witter Bynner, whom they knew from their early days at McClure’s Magazine; another old friend from that period, Elizabeth (Elsie) Shepley Sergeant, was building her own adobe home just north of Santa Fe in Tesuque and publishing accounts of its progress in Harper’s Magazine. (Cather’s friendship with Sergeant had already cooled. In 1953 Sergeant published Willa Cather: A Memoir that rivaled Edith Lewis’ 1953 Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record.)

  Just a few miles northeast of Sergeant’s adobe, the serenity of the Española Valley and the village of Alcalde drew Cather and Lewis to the San Gabriel Ranch. Run by the wealthy New England renegade from high society, Carol Stanley Pfäffle, the Ranch was but one of several ranches around Alcalde owned and run by wealthy female movers and shakers like the anthropologist Mary Cabot Wheelwright (who, along with Hosteen Klah, established the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in 1937). These “New Women” worked closely with women in Santa Fe, including wealthy party-givers Martha and Amelia Elizabeth White and the novelist Mary Austin, to support and sustain Indian arts and culture. The anthropologist and feminist Elsie Clews Parson and Alice Corbin Henderson, co-editor of Poetry whose daughter married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans, also helped apply political pressure to preserve Indian lands and lives.

  Alcalde, Santa Fe, Taos, these and the other places Cather and Lewis stayed in New Mexico — including Lamy, Albuquerque, Laguna Pueblo, and Gallup — were important for developing Cather’s knowledge of the land and people she portrayed in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Mabel Dodge Luhan always hoped she could entice someone to extoll the virtues of New Mexico and Taos Pueblo’s way of life. Luhan expected D.H. Lawrence to do that. He never did. Instead, Willa Cather’s classic Death Comes for the Archbishop so illuminates Northern New Mexico and its culture that even today tourists read it as a much-loved travel guide.

  Cather and Lewis chose never to engage directly in political causes, but Cather’s fiction reveals her own love of New Mexico and her attention to the political issues of her day. Learning about the details of their stay with Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan in Taos adds to our understanding of Cather’s fiction, places Cather and Lewis in their historical context, and provides a compelling backdrop for Death Comes.

  A Final Note about the FBI*

  On July 26, 1908, Charles J. Bonaparte, the United States Attorney General appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, created the federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI) after a political showdown with Congress, which had banned the loan of Secret Service agents to the Department of Justice. One of the bureau’s first official tasks was visiting and making surveys of houses of prostitution across the country in preparation for enforcing the “White Slave Traffic Act,” the Mann Act, passed on June 25, 1910. In 1932, the bureau was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation. The following year, the BOI was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and renamed the Division of Investigation (DOI) before finally becoming an independent service within the Department of Justice in 1935, when it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI.

  Although the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office didn’t officially open until 1949, the federal agency’s presence in the area went back many years earlier. Since the Bureau’s beginnings in 1908, its agents investigated federal crimes in Albuquerque and the rest of New Mexico. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the El Paso, Texas office handled the territory now covered
by the Albuquerque Division. Bureau agents in New Mexico pursued car thieves and interstate traffickers in women.

  * Wikipedia.org and FBI.gov

  Acknowledgements

  MY VIEWS OF Willa Cather and Edith Lewis come from reading their unpublished letters; the 2015 Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout; and Edith Lewis’ 1953 memoir, Willa Cather Living. My greatest debt is to them and to the many archives across this continent that hold Cather’s and Lewis’ correspondence — from the Huntington Library in California to the Houghton Library at Harvard, from the University of New Brunswick-Fredricton to the Grand Manan Museum in New Brunswick, Canada.

  My knowledge of Taos, the artists and writers associated with Los Gallos, Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan, Spud Johnson, and D.H. Lawrence’s Kiowa Ranch come primarily from reading their memoirs and fiction, my research on location and at the New Mexico History Museum, and from interviews with Claudia (Taudy) Smith Miller (Mabel Dodge Luhan’s great-granddaughter), Kevin Cannon (current owner of the pink adobe), and Sharon Oard Warner and others familiar with the Mabel Dodge Luhan estate and D.H. Lawrence’s Kiowa Ranch.

  Thanks to the American Council of Learned Societies, Rutgers University, and Princeton University for giving me opportunities to pursue my research. I am also grateful for the advice, encouragement, and generosity of the Arbor Farm Press Editorial Board: Lynn Miller, Hilda Raz, Ruth Rudner, and the late Lisa Lenard-Cook; The Willa Cather Foundation and its Executive Director Ashley Olson; The Willa Cather Archive and archivist Joshua Caster; and Cather scholars John J. Murphy, Janis Stout, Andrew Jewell, and Melissa Homestead. Special thanks to those who helped with the production of this book—Ann Weinstock, Sara DeHaan, Mary Bisbee-Beek, and Charlie Capek.