Silence the Dead

by David Crossman

  It was. There was Tiffin’s hand-carved cross. “Aye.”

  The men cleared out around it, but it was soon evident that moving it in one piece was out of the question. Wherever they put their hands, the wood fell away in soggy clumps.

  “He’ll need a proper coffin,” said Thomas.

  “Archie Leach,” said the gravedigger, expending his quota of syllables for the day.

  “Yes. Good, Coxon, thank you.” The priest turned to Thomas. “He’s the cabinet maker in town. Very good.”

  “Any relation to Riley Coxon?” Thomas asked as they walked away, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the gravedigger.

  “His son. Mortimer.”

  “Mortimer. It figures.”

  Not only did Archibald Leach build coffins (‘I really prefer to call them caskets, if you don’t mind’), but he had two or three already built in the back room. Thomas selected the most expensive, paid for it with all the cash he had left, and within the hour, Coxon and his cohort had filled it with the bones of Joshua Conlan.

  Word had spread quickly through the town that an old man had returned to Farran after a long time away, and that he was moving his father’s remains from the notorious bog to the churchyard. Speculation, conjecture, rumor, hearsay, heresy, and gossip all worked in mysterious ways their wonders to perform and, by the time the shiny new casket was lowered into the fresh new grave in the churchyard, a small congregation of the curious had assembled at a respectful distance.

  “I’ll explain it all to them Sunday,” Murphy whispered.

  “I’m going to send you money for a headstone. You’ll see to it?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, of course.”

  Thomas nodded. “Aye.” He looked at his mother’s stone, now covered with lichen. Already the engraved words were worn shallow. “An’ I’d like to have ‘ers re-struck, if you could arrange it.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be no problem.”

  “Aye. Well, say your words, padre, if you’d be so kind.”

  Murphy said the words, and he meant every one of them. Thomas was pleased at the simplicity and brevity of the eulogy. In his experience too many priests and pastors seemed to love the taste of their words on their tongue, and the feel of their breath against the back of their teeth.

  At the end, he crossed himself and said “amen,” as did the rest of those gathered thereabouts.

  “Would you like to say anything, Mr. Conllan?” said the priest.

  “Aye. That I would.” He stood up straight and turned to the crowd, their faces so familiar in the abstract, but unknown in individual particulars. “My name is Thomas Conlan,” he began. “An’ I used to live here . . . in the ruined little croft up the hill and around the corner, with me mum, Alice,” he gestured to her grave, “me little brother, Tiffin, who’s buried now in Boston, Massachusetts, an’ me little sister, Katy, who lives in Boston.

  “My Dad’s name was Joshua, an’ he died of a gunshot wound to the head.”

  A chorus of heartfelt gasps went up among the congregation.

  “They said it was suicide.”

  Another chorus of noises, this of a different tone, and with an altogether different meaning.

  “An’ so he was buried in Sinners’ Bog. But, lately, it’s been proved he was murdered.” A louder gasp, and murmur. “As to who done it, an’ why, God knows, I know, and Father Murphy here knows. The murderer’s dead and gone an’ that’s enough. It’s all done with now. My father, Joshua Conlan, is buried in hallowed ground, beside his good an’ faithful wife, me mum, where he belongs.”

  He turned to the grave amid the reverent silence that followed and lowered his voice. “There you go, Dad. I promised. Rest easy, t’both of you. Say hello to Tiff for me, an’ I’ll be along soon.”

  He put his hat on his head, picked up his suitcase and, with a handshake, thanked Father Murphy. The crowd parted as he opened the cast-iron gates of the churchyard and passed through, leaving them clustered on the hill as he began the four-mile walk to Cloghane.

  He never looked back.

  Brazos (Conllan) Ridge, New Mexico

  April 9th, 1881

  Sadie hadn’t been eager to traipse all the way up the mountain to Brazos Ridge. But, for Tommy’s sake, she’d grin and bear it. She’d hardly been able to get him to talk about anything else since he and Amadeo had begun logging up there, nearly two weeks ago.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it, Sade! Ye’r eyes ain’t big enough to take it in! Nor y’er brainbox big enough to ‘old it! I tell ya, ya can see clear to Pagosa Springs – hell, all the way to Durango in one direction, and clear to Abiquiu in the other. An’ Brazos Falls, even this time’ve year, they thunder like the ocean! There’s deer, elk – big as bison, I swear – bear, rabbits, trees so thick with wild turkeys you can’t see the leaves! You’ve never seen nothin’ like it, me girl!”

  “You soun’ like a bleedin’ broadside.” Most of Thomas’s words were just noise to Sadie. She had long since been overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the land they had entered ever since she’d first glimpsed it in their descent from the station at Cumbres Pass. She’d worked there for six weeks as camp cook – boiled beef, bread, and coffee, morning, noon, and night – until it was time to move on for the last push into Chama. During that time, same as at the Sublette and Osier stations, she’d kept her nose to the griddle. But that last day, as they left the cabin for the last time and she raised her eyes, the instinct of her senses were in conflict, part wanting to hunker down and shelter itself from the sheer magnitude of a prospect her intellect could not contain, the other part eager to clutch and grasp and gorge itself on the sensory feast. It was a beauty beyond human expression. Certainly beyond hers, at any rate, and she felt it somehow sacrilegious to attempt to reduce it to words.

  Thomas’ last two words, however, resonated deeply. His girl. Would he ever come to his senses?

  They had been walking – climbing – for over an hour. Actually, Thomas had been trotting and Sadie more or less dragged most of the way, when the forest fell suddenly away to the west and they came out on a cliff top, below which the world, in all its late-spring finery, presented itself for their inspection.

  Thomas was laughing, and next thing she knew, he’d taken her hand and together, they were spinning in circles along this narrow ledge of earth and stone that fringed the edge of the world and dropped away precipitously to the forest thousands of feet below, and a million miles from County Kerry, Ireland.

  Suddenly, Thomas stopped. A look of shock on his face. “Sadie!”

  “What! What is it, Thomas! What’s wrong?”

  He suddenly broke into a smile, and resting a hand on her shoulder, reached down and pulled off his boot.

  “You don’t mean to say . . . !”

  He stuck his hand into the boot, and tilting the sole toward her face, poked his little finger through the newly-minted hole.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Kingston, New Mexico

  April 5h, 1886

  The road from Chama south to Kingston, though less than four hundred miles, was the longest journey Sadie Conllan had ever taken. Longer than Limehouse, England to Queenstown, Ireland; longer than Queenstown to Boston, Boston to Junction City, Junction City to Colorado Springs, or Colorado Springs to Chama, New Mexico. She was walking to the end of a dream.

  Why Kingston? she wondered as she walked. She’d been there once before on T.D.’s business, driving a wagon of supplies to an emporium that T.D. and some partners had set up in the little boomtown. The town itself was nothing special. But there were miners flush with gold and silver, time on their hands, and the need for the kind of recreation she could provide.

  Not that there wasn’t competition. But with what she considered her natural gifts - and the advantages that might be had in return for a certain necklace of gold coins she’d had the good fortune to come into possession of during her early adventures in the area – which she’d had the good sense to ‘put-by’ agains
t whatever opportunities or challenges life might present – she might set herself up in business.

  “Life’s always one or the other, ain’t it, Tommy?” she’d said on the night she took her leave of him, forever, though only she was aware of that fact at the time. “Opportunities and challenges.”

  The next morning she rose early from her bed above T.D.’s store and, slowly and painfully wrote a letter of farewell on the back of a label that had fallen off a marmalade jar.

  ‘Well, Tommy, old son, now as your good an setled with Solly an shes got the worry of you Ill be movin on. Its bin a helava time, aint it? we lef sum good folk along the way - all them poor sods on the Crimea and tiff an katy and roland an them folk on the wagon train. but we come to the end of them boots of yours in the end dint we my boy.

  ‘I know your gonna want to come after me cause thats what you do. But im askin you rite now don’t. you know me, tommy an ill be all rite where im gonna make meself a life and be just whatever I want to be.

  ‘I love you an im more graitful then i can say fr all you dun. your a one off, tommy an that god your always on about i guess he just looked down on me an thot, that poor little cow needs sumbuddy to look after her an he give me you. an you can tell him this for me when you see him, tommy, case i don’t never get the chance, you can tell him you done a good job. tell him i says so.

  your sadie.

  She’d been walking eighteen days, and in that time, apart from a few buzzards and some stray cattle, hadn’t seen a living soul. Even the Apaches she feared never materialized though, real or imagined, she often felt their eyes on the back of her neck.

  All along the way, she half expected to hear hoofbeats behind her at any moment . . . to see Thomas riding to her rescue. It would have seemed natural, and somehow the fact that he didn’t tore a gaping hole in depths of herself she’d never visited.

  Of course, that wasn’t fair, was it? She’d told him, flat out, not to follow. He was just abiding by her wishes.

  Still.

  Now, the distant sounds of the town swelled up from the valley below and lifted her head. She stood for a long time, studying her new horizon.

  “Beats the Crimea all to hell,” she said at last and, throwing back her shoulders and raising her chin, she waded into her future.

  Not far from town she came upon a ramshackle graveyard with just four graves, though any town with twenty-two saloons and a few thousand thirsty miners would soon see to its expansion. The marker nearest her, a wooden cross just four feet off the road that seemed to be fighting a losing battle with gravity in its attempt to remain upright, bore a telling epitaph: ‘Sarah Jane Creech, whore.’

  “Sarah Jane!” Sadie cried, echoing the name she herself had been born with.

  Stuck by the coincidence, of both name and profession, she just stood for a long time, pondering the miserable little heap of dirt, obviously shoveled on with such perfunctory disregard that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hand or foot poking from the sun-dried earth. No rocks bordered the grave. No flowers. No footprints to indicate the vigil of someone, anyone, who cared; just ‘Sarah Jane Creech, whore.’

  “That what’s gonna be on your marker, Sadie old girl,” she said to herself. “Sadie Conllan, whore.”

  As she stared, strange ideas began to form in her mind. She made no attempt to rein them in, though she was unable to silence the suspicion they might lead to madness. At the end, no nightmare presented itself, but a metamorphosis had taken place, born from the need to separate herself from her past and slip into a new skin.

  By the time she strode into town, she had assumed the name and identity by which she would hoodwink history - Sarah Jane Creech, though, for reasons no one could fathom, she often referred to herself as Sadie.

  Sarah “Sadie” Orchard, 1886

  Epilogue

  A few facts; many of them true

  The winter of 1885-’86 was one of the worst on record; the snow was so deep that no wagons ran from Chama or T.A. to Pagosa Springs for nearly two months. During that time, however, Sadie took the job of her dreams, as parlor maid (girl-of-all work, actually) to a high-born lady named Demetria Cole, from Colorado Springs, who had had the great good fortune of being stranded in Chama when the snows hit. And hit. And hit again.

  Sadie was in her element. Foreign as it might seem to her inclination, she loved domestic work almost as much as she loved driving a team of horses. She had come to revel in those precious times when Mrs. Cole would be down in the dining room of the hotel and she could try on her fine clothes. Ladies’ clothes. Magnificent, floor-length skirts, some of silk, some of linen, others of soft chamois leather for riding – which Mrs. Cole did magnificently, side-saddle – all with just the slightest hint of a bustle. Delicate blouses, hand-sewn vests, delicious under-things. All Sadie’s exact size. Often, she daydreamed how wonderful it would be if Mrs. Cole just happened to drop dead, and in her will, leave all her clothes to her faithful maid.

  That’s not exactly how it happened that Sadie came into possession of the wardrobe of her dreams. Had Mrs. Cole been more circumspect, it might never have happened at all. Then again, Sadie being Sadie, it might have made no difference. The simple fact is that the mistress had the unfortunate habit of talking down to hotel staff. To a point, Sadie had been exempted from similar treatment until one afternoon, when Mrs. Cole was in her bath and Sadie, quite by mistake, brought her the foot cream instead of the hand cream. The words Mrs. Cole selected to express her disapprobation were ill-considered, when directed at a girl of Sadie’s temperament, and she would never know how fortunate she was that a certain whip had been left at the store in Los Ojos.

  As it was, when she called for hot water some quarter hour later and received no reply, she finally had to climb out of the tub, wrap a towel around herself, and go in search of her maid – who was nowhere to be found. Nor were Mrs. Cole’s clothes. They had been packed up and removed down to the last garter. Jewelry, likewise. Money, likewise. One article, in fact, was a combination of both, being twelve five-dollar gold pieces fixed to a silver chain to form a necklace.

  All that remained that Mrs. Cole could call her own was a porcelain jar of Perlmutter’s Restorative & Aromatic Foot Ointment for Ladies of Distinction and the towel that, until she dropped it in disbelief, protected her modesty.

  Technically, the towel belonged to the hotel.

  The historical Sadie turns up in Kingston, in the Black Range of New Mexico, in 1886, and immediately, with her distinctive style of dress, her horsemanship, her accent, and her language – to say nothing of her prodigious whip – created quite a stir. She seemed to have known local businessman James Orchard at some time in the past. Whatever their personal history, they were married soon after she moved to Hillsboro. Her true story . . . what there is of it . . . may be found in Wily Women of the West, by Grace Ernestine Ray (The Naylor Company, San Antonio, TX) and an entry in Wild Women of the Old West (Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado) titled Sadie Orchard - A Hard-Working Woman by Glenda Riley.

  The stagecoach she drove for eighteen years after moving to Hillsboro is on display in the Governor’s Mansion Museum in Santa Fe.

  A fact unknown to those historians who have attempted to tell Sadie’s story is that, with her new identity, Sadie had begun taking delivery of mail addressed to Sarah Jane Creech. These letters, most of which were from her mother, informed her that the poor woman whose identity she assumed was not the solitary figure she’d imagined, but one of ten children born to Nancy and Bennett Creech, a horse-trader out of Kinsley, Kansas. Being lonely, and thinking it the kind of Christian charity of which Thomas would approve, Sadie kept up the correspon-dence under Sarah’s name, allowing the girl’s parents to believe their daughter alive and well, rather than a dead whore.

  Certainly there could be no harm in that.

  All the stories she related in her letters with, she judged, ever-improving penmanship, were the things that were happening in her own li
fe, with certain omissions of a commercial nature. So they were true. What could Thomas possibly object to? He had a high regard for the truth.

  One day, some years later, after she’d moved to Hillsboro, married James and open the first of her three hotels, she received a shock when Boots, her boy-of-all-work, announced the appearance of two women.

  “There’s an’ old’n and a young’n,” he said. “An the old one claims she’s y’er sister.”

  And so, during a visit that lasted over a month, she made the acquaintance, after a fashion, of her extended family. At the end of that time, she felt as if she knew them, and her imagination was so vivid that she half-believed herself to have lived Sarah’s life.

  Her subterfuge was not as difficult to perpetuate as she had, at first, feared, for Mae, the sister who appeared at her door, was ten years Sarah’s younger and had been only six when Sarah had left home - the family living, by then, in Iowa - so had no actual memory of her. What nuggets Sadie had mined from irregular correspondence had enabled her to salt her conversation with just enough common knowledge to lend verisimilitude to her accounts.

  The younger woman was Sarah’s niece, a widow named Martha Norland. She had never known Sarah and so - even had she been more curious and less scatter-brained - would probably have never been the wiser.

  In time, her new relatives took their leave and, though she kept up the correspondence for the rest of her life, she never saw any of Sarah’s family again.

  Her most prized possession, it was said, was displayed in a simple frame on the wall behind the desk at the elegant hotel she and James built in Hillsboro. It was a much-folded, yellowed document with faded bold type that read:

  ‘WANTED: TRAIN ROBBERS.

  Believed to be heading west from Exchange Place, New Jersey. Information leading to their arrest and conviction will be promptly rewarded. Notify the station master or telegraph operator at the nearest PPG depot. Believed to be armed and dangerous. Approach with caution.