Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  At last it was over. Seventeen hours after that first knifelike thrust, Catherine wearily looked up to watch Atanacia lay the baby on the old table and enfold it in the muslin blanket. Catherine thought her daughter surely had to be the ugliest baby ever born in Tucson, but when Atanacia handed the squalling, red-faced infant to her, the maternal instinct fiercely surged through Catherine—equaling almost her daughter's sturdy tugging at her nipple seconds later.

  A strong mite, she thought, with Law’s thick blond curls and her own heart-shaped face. But the eyes—they were a muddy blue, so it was still too soon to tell their final color.

  “What will you name the bebe?” Atanacia asked as she knelt beside the mother and daughter to gaze at God's newest creation.

  Catherine had considered naming the child for her friend, Atanacia. But at the last second she replied with a mystical smile, “I think I shall call her after my father, Jesse. For in a way he was responsible for my coming to the territory. Jessica Atanacia Davalos.”

  “Miguel, again—the verb forms for the word ‘drive,’ ’’ Catherine said.

  The shoeless boy began, “Drive . . . drove . . .” and then gave up in hopeless laughter as Jessie crawled across the earth-packed floor to pinch curiously at his dusty toes. The five other students joined in the laughter. Atanacia hurried in from outside, where she had been cooking the noonday meal, and scooped up the child. “No, no, traviesa,” she scolded the child fondly.

  “It’s all right.” Catherine sighed, taking Jessie. The child was indeed a mischievous little thing. Yet love for the seven-month-old filled her heart to overflowing, it seemed. The feel of the strong heartbeat in that small ribcage, the tiny dimples in the plump elbows and knees, caused Catherine to feel as if she had performed an incredible feat in giving birth to such a perfect creation. Secretly she had to laugh at her mother’s pride.

  Atanacia’s own daughter, the three-month-old Rosalie Catrina, lay docilely in Jessie’s crib each day while Atanacia helped about the jacale as Catherine taught school. The baby was never any problem, never demanding and daring as Jessie had been at three months—and still was.

  Without Atanacia to help, Catherine could never have begun tutoring again. It was Sam and Lionel who had persuaded some of Tucson’s citizens to send their children back to her school. In turn, Catherine had insisted on paying Atanacia, minimal though the salary was, for her morning help. And Atanacia was delighted with her own money . . . her independencia, as she called it. Sam teasingly claimed that Catherine’s talk of the women suffragists, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was giving his wife outlandish ideas.

  “Class is dismissed,” Catherine told the students. She waited for them to leave before she opened her blouse and gave her breast to the small, eagerly sucking mouth.

  “Where is Loco?” she asked Atanacia, who picked up her own daughter and began to nurse.

  Atanacia shook her head sadly. “He wanders. I saw him earlier this morning down by the river, but now—I do not know.”

  Catherine worried for the old man. Since February he had behaved like a shaman on peyote. She feared Loco, like his name, was indeed losing his mind with his advancing years. There were times when she feared she was losing her own mind, especially those first weeks after Jessie was born. She had so wanted Law to be with her.

  As the months passed and no word came from him, she became like Loco, moving restlessly from her bedroom to the front room and back and sometimes outside to wander the dusty street until a bout of chills drove her to her bed for rest. A depression, a miasma, had seeped into her very bones.

  She did receive word from Margaret, who had married, surprisingly, a penniless schoolmaster—a short letter telling of their mother's quietly dying in her sleep.

  In late March a shabby-looking American stopped outside her house to pass along the news. Law, serving under the supreme commander of the Juarista forces, General Escobedo, was besieging the city of Queretaro, where Maximilian was making a last-ditch stand to retain his empire.

  “Is there any other message?” she had frantically demanded of the threadbare man.

  “Nope—he just said to wait for him, ma'am."

  With a both lightened and saddened heart, she had fed the man and sent him on his way. Surely then within months Law would come home.

  Atanacia went home to feed Sam, who closed the store during the summer’s long siesta hour, and Catherine picked up the brown wrapping paper the students wrote on that was scattered about the floor.

  Afterward she began to feed Jessie the mashed beans and applesauce . . . which was so expensive now that apples were a dollar a pound. She knew she should be eating something herself. Her weight had dropped drastically since Jessie’s birth. She told herself it was the nursing that was pulling her down. Atanacia wanted her to stop. “But who can afford milk these days?” Catherine asked her friend.

  A knock on the door interrupted the stale tortilla she was forcing herself to eat, and she called out, “Enter,” thinking it was Loco. When the door opened and Sherrod stepped inside, hat in hand, the tortilla dropped from her fingers.

  “Hello, Catherine,” he said quietly.

  Suddenly she was glad that the room was darkened. Her feminine vanity came to the foreground for the first time in months, and she glimpsed a mental image of how awful she must look—with clothes that bagged on her and gaunt hollows beneath her cheekbones. “Come in, Sherrod—and sit down,” she said, rising to set Jessica on the ground.

  “Is it all right—or should I wait for you outside?"

  She laughed. “My social life has changed considerably. I’m an old married woman now.”

  “So I heard—only recently, Catherine.” He took a seat on one of the students’ benches. “I had heard that you were ill.”

  She swallowed her pride. “I know I must look emaciated, as shriveled as an old woman.”

  “Yet when you smile, as you are doing now . . . dear God, but I love you.”

  She looked down, uncomfortably with both his admission and his adoring gaze.

  He blurted in a tone that sounded as distressed as she was feeling, “I thought your daughter might like this, Catherine.” He held out the gift he had brought for the child. “Law’s child, if what Sam told me is the truth.”

  She took the brown-paper-wrapped package. “Why, thank you, Sherrod – and, yes, Jessie is your niece.” She tore away the paper to find a yellow stuffed duck. “How perfect! Maybe now she will stop crawling after the chickens outside.”

  “She should be brought up in a better place!”

  Catherine looked up at him, and his gaze dropped to the straw hat in his hands. “I’m sorry, Catherine. But Law’s daughter— Jessie, is it? She’s as much an heir to Cristo Rey as Brigham or Abigail. She belongs there where there’s plenty of . . .” His words trailed off.

  “Luxuries?” she asked. “Perhaps, but that will be her father’s and my decision when the time comes.” She changed the subject. “How is everyone at Cristo Rey?”

  The hat twirled in Sherrod's hands, and, watching him, she thought again how aristocratic, how handsome, were his looks. No wonder she had been temporarily blinded to Law’s extraordinary male mystique.

  “Abigail is at Miss Phelps’s School for Young Ladies in Chicago, and Brigham’s at Markham Academy in Richmond. Father’s as irascible as ever. And Mother . . .” His shoulders shrugged. “I never know what she’s thinking.”

  I do, Catherine thought. “And Lucy?”

  Sherrod’s gaze met hers, and she saw the misery there. “Lucy’s dying, Catherine. Cirrhosis of the liver. And her mind’s going. We just returned from St. Louis to see the doctors there. I would have been to see you sooner, but we didn’t make it back to Tucson until last week.”

  “Oh, Sherrod, I’m so sorry to hear that. I really liked Lucy.”

  “And she you. She was disconsolate when you left. We all were.”

  Not everyone. “It worked out for the best.” She smiled, and
realized he was again looking at her through the eyes of a man in love. “If I had not left, I would never have had the opportunity to persuade your stepbrother to marry me.”

  They talked awhile longer, until Jessie began to play with the gaiters at Sherrod's ankles. With a laugh, he picked the baby up and bounced her on his knee. “She’s adorable,” he said, before he took his leave. “All of Congress Street will spoil her.”

  After he left, Catherine gave thought to his invitation to live at Cristo Rey. She knew, though, that Elizabeth would make it miserable for her and Jessie there. Still, as the months passed, as June gave way to July, then one season passed into another with the almost insignificant changes of temperature peculiar to Tucson, she thought more and more often about accepting the invitation.

  Tucson was becoming every day more of a gunman's town, a roughneck place peopled by all sorts of remnants of the Civil War veterans—outlaws, gamblers, and swindlers—seeking the town's wide-open gambling establishments.

  Then, too, there was the financial situation to consider. Even with the laundry business and teaching, her income never seemed enough. She had long since sold Sonora to get her, Loco, and Jessie through the long, slow summer when business dropped off everywhere.

  “You’re too proud,” Sam accused her one afternoon when she refused to accept a side of beef he offered. “Perhaps,” she said, smiling. “But pride is all I have left.”

  In November, shortly before Jessie's first birthday. Loco disappeared one morning and was not seen again. “Sometimes the old ones, the Indian ancients,” Atanacia said, “they go off to be alone when they know they are going to die. And he was very old, was he not?”

  Yes, Catherine thought. Loco was very old—as old as she felt, and must surely look without Law’s love to renew her.

  And that was the reality that she had put off facing for so long. The war in Mexico had ended with Maximilian’s execution in Queretaro, on the Hill of the Bells, five months earlier.

  So why had Law not returned?

  CHAPTER 25

  "You're spoiling her," Catherine said. “Gifts for her birthday, Christmas, even the Feast of San Agustin. Jessie’s come to expect them from you, Sherrod.”

  Sherrod lifted the two-year-old from his knee, where he had been bouncing her in the imitation of a horse ride. “She needs a pony, Catherine,” he said, his gaze lingering on the cherub-like child. “With Law’s yellow locks and your gray-green eyes, though they appear greener than yours, I admit the child is extraordinarily beautiful. However, it is your dimpled smile that charmed the beholder. But most importantly, she’ll never ride as well as you if you don’t put her on a horse.”

  Catherine arched a brow. “And I suppose her next gift will be a horse?” she asked, smiling.

  “If you had a place to keep the horse, it would be.” He paused, then added, “You do have a place to keep the horse, Catherine. Lucy has been dead six months now. And Jessie needs a father.” His words accelerated, as if he knew she would stop him. “With Abigail and Brigham away at school and Father getting feeble, the Stronghold is lonely. He took her hand and would not let her disengage it as she usually did. “Say you’ll marry me, darling.”

  “I’m already married, Sherrod,” she said, turning her head away.

  He jerked her wrist, pulling her around to face him. “Dammit, Catherine, don’t you think Law would be back now if he were alive? Nothing would keep him from you! I know, because I love you, also.”

  The intensity in Sherrod’s voice and his piercing gaze made her at last face the truth she had been avoiding. Her mind reviewed the years—how many, five?—since she had come to Arizona to find a husband. Now she was getting a second chance . . . not just any man, but a handsome, loving husband who also adored Jessie; not just a home but the fabled Stronghold.

  Her decision to come west to the Arizona Territory had been a wise one. She had truly been blessed in those five years.

  Her free hand came up to caress Sherrod's jaw. “Thank you, Sherrod, for what you're offering me. But Law asked me to wait. And if I have to, I’ll wait forever.”

  Sherrod took Catherine out often, as often as he could come into Tucson. Elizabeth did not approve, of course. She pointed out that with Don Francisco bedridden following a heart attack, he was needed more than ever at the Stronghold. His mother was right, but, like his stepbrother, he supposed, he could not rid himself of his love for Catherine.

  She continued to teach, even as her health dwindled, and she would not hear of him taking her to the doctors in St. Louis. "They will not tell me anything, Sherrod, that any of the other doctors have not already told me,” she would say in that no-nonsense voice of hers. But he knew the malaria was damaging her heart and lungs.

  He had to content himself with taking her and Jessie to the new open-air restaurant in the Carrillo Gardens for the novel dish ice cream, or to the Tivoli Theater when special acts came to the territory.

  But most often Catherine asked him to drive her out alone into the desert, for her hacking cough embarrassed her when she was in public places. “I think there is nothing lovelier than the desert,” she told him. “Especially in the spring. Who could think that such a barren waste could produce such delicate blooms of beauty? And the sage—what a wondrous shade of deep purple!”

  He would help her out of the buckboard, and they would sit quietly against a tree, usually a Joshua, if she could find one, and watch the sunset in all its glorious colors, more brilliant there on the desert than in any other place on earth.

  But by the fall, before Jessie’s sixth birthday, Catherine had become so weak that he had to lift her from her bed into the wagon and carry her again to sit beneath a tree. She always took a handkerchief with her now. By the time the sun had set there would be the faint dark splotches on the material to match those last bright-red shafts of sunlight.

  He pretended not to notice, for he knew she wanted no mention made of her dying.

  Then one evening, when he had driven her out into the desert and settled her against the solid trunk of a Joshua, she mentioned her death herself for the first time. “I worry for Jessie. I know Sam and Atanacia would take good care of her, Sherrod . . . but they already have so many children—six, and another on the way. And then there is Cristo Rey . . . I want Jessica to know her heritage.”

  She paused to cough spasmodically into her handkerchief, then continued, her voice more hoarse. “I never told you, Sherrod . . . but your mother forced me to leave the Stronghold. She knew you were in love with me.”

  He cradled Catherine in his arms so she would not see his surprise at the revelation. He would deal with his mother later.

  Catherine grabbed at his hand now. “You must promise me that you won’t let your mother force Jessie to leave . . . as she did me.”

  He caught her thin, bloodless hand to his cheek. “I promise,” he rasped.

  As if satisfied, Catherine’s hand relaxed, and she closed her eyes. He was afraid she had died, so shallow was her breathing. But she opened her eyes again and said in what was hardly more than a whisper, “You know, Sherrod, Jessie asked me if death hurt.”

  He knew Catherine had something she wanted to say, and he asked, “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her that it was probably a quick little pain. Like a cactus spine in the finger.” Her voice drifted lower, lighter, so that he had to bend his head nearer to hear her words. “I couldn't tell Jessie that sometimes one even looks forward to death’s sweet pain . . . to the release of the emotional pain . . . the pain that has tormented me a hundred times more than . . . the malaria.”

  But it wasn’t malaria’s effects that were killing her, he thought. It was a broken heart. Beyond death, he knew, that’s where she would find the release she was looking for. That's where she would find her beloved.

  But where would he find his beloved? Too soon Death would steal her from him. He enfolded her more closely against him, as if to withhold her from Death’s talons. Dear
God, but he loved her! Tears streamed silently down his cheeks as she began to speak again, slowly, painfully. And he was glad they both were looking ahead and not at each other.

  “You know . . . when I first came here . . . the landscape looked as unreal to me as plants on the moon . . . now it’s a part of me. Did you ever see the night-blooming flower, Sherrod?”

  He was too choked to speak, and she continued, unaware of his agony. “No, I don’t suppose you ever did,” she murmured. “I’ve only seen one once myself.”

  His arm tightened about her waist. Her hair was damp where his head rested above hers. “The sky . . .” Her breath, her words, were no more than the mere flutter of a butterfly’s wings. “It’s really quite beautiful, isn’t it . . . streaked with purple that way?”

  Through shimmering eyes he watched the sunset change through its rainbow of colors before he allowed himself to look at her. How beautiful she was, her soft lips parted, her long lashes lying like fans on her cheeks. There was an iridescent quality in her emaciation.

  With an anguished cry he realized he was alone on the desert, and he buried his face against her breasts and wept.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  PART I I

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  CHAPTER 26

  1880

  "Ahh, please, woncha?" Bob Merckle pleaded. “Just once around the rink with me, huh, Jessie?”

  Impatiently Jessie knotted the ties of her left roller skate, showing more of the booted ankle than was permissible, to the breathless delight of the teenage boy on the splintery bench beside her. He had slicked back his hair from the middle with pomade in honor of this monthly occasion, when Jessie Davalos came into town with her uncle. Three more boys, just waiting for the thirteen-year-old tawny-haired beauty to come onto the floor, skated aimlessly about the newly constructed rink with the rest of the crowd.

  Jessie sighed and rose to her feet. “Maybe later. Bob. I just want to practice skating on my own for a while, all right?” She rolled out onto the floor without even waiting for his reply and with a petulant grimace managed to forestall the other boys who hastened to catch up with her.