Before the sun came up on the morning of the third day, I made myself some coffee. I repinned the quilt. Dressed. Tried to eat a cold biscuit from yesterday, but that took too much time. I was only inches from the last corner of the quilt. All morning, the street echoed with the whack-bang sound of the hangman testing the weights. I sewed faster and faster. At eleven o’clock, I tied the last knot. Searched every inch of it for a place I’d missed. I didn’t stop to admire it, just folded it up in thirds, then set that quilt down in the chair I’d sat in—the empty chair for the extra woman, the one I had finally filled.
I dressed carefully in the new dress, donned the hat, pulled the veil over my face. I stepped out of the house at half past eleven and started for the courthouse on foot. I carried nothing but a handkerchief, which I held it tightly with both hands, as I stepped across the street.
It was the third day, noon. The time of banquets and siestas, wedding bells from San Augustine’s, happy children let out from school, rolling hoops in the street, dogs snoozing in the sun. A crowd gathered around the scaffold behind the courthouse. My heart thundered. Two ropes hung from it. And it was noon.
There wasn’t much ceremony involved. No drums rolled. No speeches were made. Willie was marched up the steps behind some other man they’d sentenced for horse thieving, too. Willie looked lost and scared, searching the faces before him. I waved. He caught sight of me, nodded. It even looked as if he tried to smile.
They put a black bandanna over the other man’s eyes and lowered the rope around his neck. Then they came to Willie with a bandanna, and he jerked away. Although his hands were tied behind him, he wrenched and fought. “Don’t put that on me,” he hollered. The sheriff grabbed him roughly and another man held him. They tied the bandanna over his eyes while Willie cried out, weeping. “I can’t see. I can’t see. Take it off me. I can’t see.”
The men behind Willie whispered to each other, then one of them pulled off the bandanna. Willie sighed and gasped for air, as if it had choked him, then settled down and stood still as a fence post while they lowered the rope around his neck. “Thank you, sir,” he said. People in the crowd murmured when they heard that. They got quieter.
The boy set his eyes on me.
I raised that veiling and pushed it to the back; I looked straight at him.
Willie’s face got all set, like stone. His body moved back and forth, as if he were keeping time to some kind of musical tune.
I stared into his eyes. Heard the noise of wind but felt no breeze.
Somewhere, a man was reading forth something strange and distant.
Tears ran down my face, but I didn’t look away.
The reading voice said something else.
I pulled hard on the handkerchief in my hands. Tore it in half. I felt every little thread pulled asunder, felt them let loose from where they belonged, joined.
The bell at St. Augustine’s began to toll. His eyes boring straight into mine, Willie’s face went white, but he didn’t look away.
I held my breath.
The trap made a whack-bang sound.
I turned my face to the wall behind me and held to the doorjamb, shuddering. There were no cheers as in some executions. There was no sound at all.
Someone touched me. I opened my eyes, and Udell was there, firmly taking my arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go now, Sarah. Charlie came and got me. I brought my wagon. Thought the boy might have liked that, to ride where his papa rode. I’ll carry him home for you. We’ll put him next to his father.”
I knew he’d have wanted that, too, but I couldn’t have said it. I couldn’t speak. Udell pulled my arm again. I found it hard to let go of the post. But Udell was there, and his arms seemed hard as iron, so I held to him and he walked me to where his wagon waited. When they set that pine coffin in the back, it sounded as if the trap was falling again, but this time softly—so gently—whack-bang. My heart ached as if it would tear apart.
It took only a few minutes to pack the few things I had brought with me. I rolled up my mama’s quilt and held it tightly in my lap. Udell drove the wagon slowly. My back ached with each turn of the wheel. It was seven hours to home, on the front seat of Udell Hanna’s big coffin-loading freight wagon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
October 26, 1906
We came around the bend, where the road cut off at Granny’s house. “Stop here,” I said. “This is where I’ll be staying awhile. I want to leave off my things.”
Udell didn’t slow the horses at all. “Sarah, we’ve got to get this over and done. I’ll carry you back here if you want, afterward. We’ve got to get down the road.”
My heart stopped a beat. I thought I was going to be sick, right there in front of him. I put my hand on Udell’s right arm, and he patted it with his gloved left hand.
We crossed in front of Albert’s. It seemed deserted. Udell read my thoughts, for he said, “They’ve all gone down to your place. To see to the funeral arrangements.”
The sun was lowering. It was already that late in the year. No more ten o’clock nightfalls. “Funeral,” I said. “At least there’s hay to sleep on.”
“Yes, there’s hay, if you want it.” He tapped the horses and they picked up their steps a little. We crossed the Cienega. “Your brother and I put a few extra nails in the bridge here.”
I looked down as we passed. Tried to pin my thoughts on the bridge. It did rattle differently, but I thought that was because this wagon wasn’t my own. “Added some lumber, too?”
“Getup!” He snapped the reins. “Got to get there before the sun goes down.” The horses clipped up a bit—not a trot, but a quick step. It was only a mile to my house, and only if you dawdled side to side the way my sons used to do, carrying some bread or cheese or other from one house to the cousins’. The sky turned red overhead. A few lingering clouds like streaks of amber paint blazed across the blue-green sky. I blinked. The house had completely fallen in. Someone had cleared all the broken and torn lumber from the yard.
“What,” I said, “is that there? I thought it was the smokehouse. That’s not my smokehouse. There’s a house there. Somebody’s gone and built a house on my land! Charlie and Gilbert were supposed to be watching the place. Where’s Chess? Udell, I can’t stand another battle. Did you know they were doing it? Couldn’t you have written and told me? What am I going to do?” The closer we got, the bigger it grew. A Mexican-style hacienda, fancier than Rudolfo’s, had sprouted from the land where my house had stood for twenty-five years. A veranda hanging with baskets of flowers spread across the front of the house. My old rosebush was tied up to one of the porch posts, and it looked as if it had been there forever. “Somebody’s taken my land!” I said.
Udell patted my arm. “Right now, Sarah, we’re going to bury Willie. We’ll see the house afterward.” He drove past the house and on up the rise to the graveyard. He helped me down from the wagon seat. My new black dress was dusty, but still fine. Albert and Savannah’s family was there, waiting. Chess and my sons, too. I hugged everyone. Savannah held my hand. Rudolfo’s family came. Dressed in black, somber, they stood at a respectful distance. Leta Cujillo, the new Doña Maldonado, nodded at me as I recognized her. I stared over their shoulders at that square box of a house.
Everything felt disjointed. Worse than other funerals where I couldn’t concentrate, this one passed in a blur. I could barely take stock of what was happening around me. We put Willie next to his papa. Savannah held my hand. She had come through her trials without me by her side. She’d had her husband and children to comfort her and was never as alone as I felt. Aubrey was there, standing between Mary Pearl and Albert. Zachary held my other hand. Udell stood behind me. Chess said some words. I thought about Granny, and what she’d said to Willie—how he wanted to go on living so hard, he couldn’t stand that his papa wasn’t also. I wished so much that she could be here to say those words again. I wished to goodness I could tell her how right she was. I couldn’t bear the thought of Wil
lie being dead. Yet I wanted to go on living. Wanted to go on being at this place, loving these people. Oh Lord, I want my mother. Heaven help me if she is too old to live over the sad mission she is on with her two grandsons and my brother’s family.
As the sod clumps fell on Willie’s coffin, I thought of my children and grandchildren. Felt my mama’s presence as clearly as if she’d been standing there. I straightened my back. I had to keep going. The battle of this existence wasn’t done.
I looked toward Jack’s grave marker. How foolish to look forward to lying there next to Jack. Not since he’d died had I felt so greatly the need to live. I loved him, but for the first time, it didn’t hurt to think of him. Putting Willie in the ground suddenly made everything and everyone around me more precious, more urgent, more real. The moon rose before we finished, though the sky was still glowing in the west. The star that was Jack’s twinkled at me, and instead of the twinge of longing to join him, I felt a glad satisfaction that I’d known and loved a fine man. Nothing more. Udell had said to think only of the here and now. To do that, I had to let go of everything I thought had been holding me up.
“Let’s go home, Sarah,” Chess said.
“I have no home. I expect to bed down at Granny’s place.”
“There’s a house yonder,” Chess said. “Waiting for you.”
I looked from face to face, my family gathered around. I said, “Whose house?”
“Come see it now, Mama,” Gilbert said. “We built this house for you. All your friends and family.”
“What do you mean, ‘my friends and family’?”
Charlie said, “The house there, Mama. You drove right past it.”
“In three weeks, you built a house? Chess, what did you use for money? Who did this work?”
Charlie said, “Why, Mama, that isn’t polite. Come on inside. We’ll show you around. With the drought, everybody’s out of work, got nothing to do. Flores and Conciliada came. Shorty and his whole clan. People from Willcox to Prescott and Douglas to Yuma pitched in.”
I was ushered in and shown through a fine wide adobe house, with doors painted pale blue all around, a courtyard in the center. Lanterns flickered around the courtyard. Savannah and Albert’s children presided over tables of food, keeping flies away. Willie’s funeral supper was a banquet meant to welcome me to this strange house. High on the center walls were clerestory windows, which would pull up the heat of the summer and keep a breeze constantly blowing through the house. The ceiling was higher than at Rudolfo’s hacienda, the rooms wide as a church, and then some. It reminded me of his place, yet it was different ; the furnishings were spare, but mostly my own.
My armoire and my bedstead were set up in one room. Charlie and Gilbert’s things were in others. Space had been made for Granny—a large room right next to mine. Harland’s painting hung over a huge fireplace that was built right into the house, not added on and patched around later. All the rooms opened onto the courtyard, hacienda-style, with shade and screens stretched across one end of it for sleeping in the summer. I recognized the water pump, which had survived the destruction of my kitchen. It was now outside in the courtyard, ready for a cool drink or to water plants there, while a second one was in the room opposite my bedroom, a complete kitchen with a fine new stove.
I watched the people gathered around the tables, eating, talking, even laughing. Willie’s passing had not meant so much to them except as a reason to have come tonight. They were here to celebrate this house, it seemed. At that moment, I felt exhausted and disgusted with them all. I told Chess I wanted to turn in, and then the party died down and everyone left for their homes, bearing lanterns in the darkness, the way some of them had come to watch my well being dug.
Udell made some coffee and we drank it, rocking slowly, watching the fire burn low. I kept seeing Willie’s eyes staring back at mine. Hearing that echoing bang. I said, “I’m sorry for all the tears, Udell.”
Udell said, “Take your time, Sarah.”
“If he had told me …” I said. “If only he’d told me before we went to town.”
Udell said, “Then you would have had a terrible decision to make. What would you have done? Broken the law? I doubt it. He spared you that choice. Made it himself.”
“He did,” I mumbled. “I could have forgiven him.”
“Willie was a young man with a lot of chances to do right. Instead of living out here in the clean air, he spent his childhood in saloons and running the streets with criminals. I believe the only thing he ever did right in his life was what he did that day.”
I turned on him, my jaws tight, and said, “Is that like the only good Indian is a dead one? Are you one of those men?”
Udell said, “I’m saying he went not like a coward, but like a young man standing up straight and true. Him not putting that on you, making that decision for himself—that was an act of honor. Maybe the first one in his life.”
I sighed. Said, “Reckon so. Suppose I’m purely edgy.”
“I collected his things from the sheriff. In his rolled-up book was a letter for you. I didn’t open it. I believed it needed to wait until you had a moment of quiet.”
Folded into the half a Bible was a slip of paper torn from blotter in the sheriff’s office. My hands shook as I opened it at the crease. I stared at it blindly, unable to read the words. Udell took it from my hand and read aloud, though he stuttered over the poor handwriting, and his voice broke halfway through.
“dear aunt Sarah—
You been the best mother to me a boy could have and weren’t no one to blame but me stoled them cattle and all your money. I done them other things too but I ain’t writing them so’s maybe you’ll forget over time and remember this here. Tell the boys for me I hold no grudges and what we done to each other was all my fault. And say to them little fellers they should mind their ma and pa and you and grow up right and true—them things you told me about right and wrong and being a man is what makes me able to go to my Maker hoping I can make up for some of it I done. Thank you for sitting by me. Them were some hard days and long nights. Many a time I made up some story or other for the judge or thought to kill the deputy and get away. After I seen what misery I brung you and then the roof coming off, and still you stuck by me, why I just couldn’t do less than I done. I reckon if saint Peter lets me in the gate it will be because of you, aunt Sarah, and he’ll know you tried to put a halter on me much as I tried not to wear one, but for a while I rode for your brand and maybe that will be enough. Maybe he’ll see I get another chance. Never would have guessed him to be a rancher myself, but the book give me says the Lord has cattle on a thousand hills. I reckon if I get in, the best part of heaven will be riding watch at sunup, don’t you?
Kind regards. Ever your son, Willie—Ernest, Junior—Prine.”
My son? My son—maybe I hadn’t failed Willie. My brother Ernest had failed him, not knowing he was alive, and Felicity had failed him, raising him like she did. It was almost as if he’d found what he was hungry for, what was haunting him, and after that, his life was done.
A breeze came in the large deep-set windows of this fine adobe house I’d done nothing to deserve, or to earn, or to construct. All at once, I felt as if something came on that breeze that made things seem clearer. Here I’d been raising my boys the best I could, trying to balance good humor with straight talk and hard work, and they’d followed right along and then slipped down other paths without me noticing. But their paths weren’t bad or wrong; they were just different from the ones I’d had my eyes on. Charlie will make a fine lawman, if that’s what he wants to do. I raised him up to be a man who believes in right and decency, and he made a choice to stand up for it. And Gilbert, he’s as clever as the day is long, and knows horses like my papa did, an instinct. He wants to breed horses and there’s no wrong in that, even if he doesn’t have any degrees written after his name on an envelope. My April, I’d always thought she ran away from me. Thought she was angry, or hated me. But no, she was an
gry with Jack, same as I was, for dying. Mad at the world for her papa leaving her, and she couldn’t face life without him, maybe because I was bound and determined to do exactly that. Reckon my being a mother is finished, like putting down a good long book. All this time, they’d been making choices of their own because I taught them to be clearheaded and go after what they wanted. I thought I was leading them, but the truth was, I was just following them, holding up a lantern.
Udell said nothing more. Our talk was replaced with the soft trilling of nighthawks and, somewhere off, an owl. I looked at him after a spell, and he’d fallen asleep, his head bent forward. I’d found a friend in this man. So I thought about that some, too. Finally, I had to turn in, so I touched his hand and said good night. The men all went out into the central courtyard. I went to the strange bedroom, made for me, where my bed waited on a raised platform near a window, where it would be cooled by the night breeze.
I slept fitfully, though Jack did not return. The sound of a gallows trap woke me at dawn. I saw Willie’s eyes. I listened for the sound again, trying to decide where I was, and in a little while I remembered. I put my head back on my pillow and slept. When I awoke, I smelled food cooking. Dressed in my wrapper, I closed the courtyard to see who was cooking in that kitchen.
Mary Pearl had spent the night in Granny’s room. She was bent in front of the stove as I came in. “This stove surely draws nice,” she said.
I sat at the table. It was hewn from large boards sturdy enough to butcher a cow on. Half of the chairs were new. A large pie safe stood next to my old, smaller one. Mary Pearl told me Gilbert and Charlie were out checking the stock. Chess was working in the garden. Udell had gone home. They’d left me orders to sit and rest.
“Well, that’s a fine thing,” I said to Mary Pearl. “I’m supposed to take orders ?”