Between Earth & Sky (17 page)

“It's a wondrous place you've brought me to,” I heard Everett say to Amy one afternoon, as we looked out across the valley, and I imagined for a brief moment how changed my life would be, how wonderfully transformed, if Amy and he moved to this place. But they have made clear, both of them, that they have duties and attachments in Virginia, which they never could leave. I suppose the most we can hope for are their visits, which I assure you I value.

Their two-week visit sped by, and I must confess I fell into such despair the night before they left that I begged Amy to convince Everett to let her stay on another week. She said she herself had commitments back east, but promised that she would try to come back for another visit before her teaching job at the academy begins in the fall. How I long to have her here, but I am thankful, as is Clayton, that they are such an industrious couple. That is the way to success in all things.

Life here proceeds as it has each spring and early summer. We had a good planting, and the river is still high. Margaret seemed pleased to see her sister and went riding with them every chance she got, showing off her abilities in the saddle. Amy tried to impart some wisdom. I heard her lecturing on decorum and the skills one must cultivate to get through this life. She offered to take Margaret back with her for the year, but Margaret would not go, saying she could never live where the sky is hemmed in by trees and buildings.

If only Amy could have stayed on, I am sure she could have altered her sister's perilous course. Clayton says I sympathize too much with Margaret, but she has no sister here, no good friend in whom to confide, and I cannot bear to hear Clayton rail against her.

In some ways it is as if Amy's visits open a wound in me. For many weeks I will long for her company. I wish that I felt as much for Margaret, but I cannot. When the afternoon light hurts my eyes and cuts a sharp silhouette of the bare mesa, I think of Margaret, for this is her desert—the blinding light, the loneliness of the sky. There is a story of an apparition which is sometimes seen by lone cowboys, a beautiful young woman with long, thick, dark hair on a silver-gray horse, who does not acknowledge the cowboys' calls. It is Margaret they see riding out alone, or some spirit that is hers.

Amy does not know the fears I have for her sister, only that there are some concerns. These are words from one mother to another, words from a sister.

Keep them in your heart,

Abigail

November 17, 1891

Dear Maggie,

They have asked me to help teach at the Methodist school. Miss Alden invited Clayton and me to dinner after services last Sunday and asked if I would consider coming two mornings each week to help the children with their lessons. The school has expanded during the last two years and is in need of more instructors.

Pamela Porter, who advised me to refuse the position, does not believe the school can ever succeed at educating the Indian children. Since most of the people in the valley are Catholics, they will not send their children. The children who live on the few farms and ranches settled by easterners often run wild, and so you can imagine the task set before these educators. Most of the boys have their own horses and ride wherever they please. All of them want to get on with a cattle company and live a rough life. There are not many girls at the school, but I fear they are all like Margaret, forever riding across the desert or along the roads that run through the valley. One has to worry about them. Just last week some men got in a fight on one of those roads and a man was killed.

Maggie, what shall I do? I suppose I will go against Pamela Porter's advice and take the position. I am sure I could learn much from working beside Miss Alden, and it would allow me to watch Margaret more closely. Perhaps I can find some suitable companions for her. I have heard of two young ladies recently moved with their parents to our section of the territory.

Clayton claims I am lonely without any little ones to care for. I still wake before anyone else to watch the sun turn the desert red. After Margaret and Clayton are gone and the cow is milked and the chickens fed, if there is no snow, I might take my sketch pad and walk through the cold morning up towards the mesa, ankle deep in sand, my skirts twisting about in the wind. The sun slides across the sky, and I am above the world with it, lost to the clouds that gather along the horizon and sky, sky, sky.

Your Sister,

Abigail

February 12, 1892

Dear Maggie,

This season has been nearly lost in the flurry of my activities. I spend two days a week teaching reading, writing, spelling, and sewing at the mission school. Overall, the change of pace has done me good, and I look forward to my morning rides across the snow-powdered ground.

An added advantage to my position is that I have the opportunity to accompany Margaret to the school and sometimes observe her at her studies. I have given her extra tutoring and watched her reading improve. When I have her attention, she learns quickly and recites with confidence any passage she has memorized. I am hopeful my advice will have some effect on her.

I still do not understand how a child of mine could have become so unlike me, so foreign and unknown. Recently, I discovered her “collections”: feathers and stones of all sorts, the delicate bones of a lizard, a dried cactus husk. Clayton is certain that when she disappears for hours at a time she is with Ramon. He has questioned and bullied her, calling her all kinds of names, but she will not say where she goes or if she has been with someone. Neither will she deny his accusations. I cannot believe she has any lover; she seldom speaks to anyone, even at the school, and is so much alone.

Sometimes, despite myself, I envy what sets her apart. It is something untamed, like the wild abandon with which she rides, the brightness in her eyes matched by the hard edge of blue that runs along the horizon. More than any of us, she is a child of the desert.

The Indian children who attend the school are small, with smooth dark hair and bright black eyes. Some of the little Indian girls come to school dressed only in a slip, with a shawl or blanket. The government sends clothing for them, shoes, stockings, muslin, calico, but there is never enough of it.

The teaching that I am responsible for is not nearly as difficult as I had feared. The younger children are a delight, filled with questions and eager to try their hands at tracing letters on the slate boards. There is a young lady who, despite her dark coloring, brings Amy to my mind so surely that at times I have difficulty watching her. She can spend hours with her reader and looks up only once or twice to find the meaning of a word. I have taught her fine lace work and cross stitch, and she made the prettiest collar for a blouse of mine.

The priests continue to do what they can to destroy any good work the school could do. Many of them are corrupt We know of a man who paid a priest twelve dollars to perform his marriage to a fourteen-year-old girl. With so much corruption in this territory, I am afraid we will never get statehood. Recently, I read in the newspaper that the sheriff and police chief were assassinated by a gang over an election. This did not surprise Clayton, who has long held that most of the politicians are outlaws, but I had a vision of some order, that at least government officials were beyond the violence.

Your Sister,

Abigail

May 29, 1892

Dear Maggie,

Margaret has disappeared and left not even a note to tell us where she has gone. I have searched everywhere, each room of the house. Her bed was made, the spread pulled tight across the mattress. Her clothes still hang in the closet. There is not much she has taken besides her horse, and I was afraid at first that someone had forced her to leave.

But Clayton, certain she had run off with Ramon, rode over to his house this morning and found that he was gone also. Clayton has accused Señora Teresa of being an accomplice. “She is too nervous,” Clayton says. “ ‘Where did they go, Señora?' I kept asking her. And she only shook her head, never denied knowing.”

If they have run off together, I cannot imagine where they will go. A minister would not marry them, a Protestant girl and a Catholic, but the priests will do anything if they are paid well.

Clayton has said he hopes she will not return. He claims she has misused every advantage we have tried to offer her and that he watched her behavior these past few years and read the future in it. But I had hoped still for a change. Perhaps I should have been firmer and insisted she go east to live for a period of time with Amy. I fear it is too late now for me to shape her life.

I have not yet written to Amy of her sister's disappearance, as I know it will distress her. Wait to speak of it with her. Maggie, I have lost them all now, every last one. Amy to the east and all the others to the west. I know you are thinking I deserve this, stubborn as I have been to live my life out here and refuse the comfort and safety you and Mother offered. If Josh or Patsy had lived, would they be gone now also, lost to the wilderness of this place, everywhere and nowhere at once in this vast country?

Your Sister,

Abigail

February 2, 1893

Dear Maggie,

Your letters arrive and I have begun several times now to answer them, but the paper gets put away or left beside my chair, where I find it days later, still white and empty. Last summer, after Margaret left, for a time I was despondent and did not care that our cuttings of alfalfa were the largest they have ever been or that corn ripened in the fields, their kernels the color of honey. Even the trees which were thick with apples and the grape arbor strung with heavy purple clusters could not touch the sadness that hung on me when I walked through the house and looked into the empty rooms.

In September Miss Alden rode out to visit and asked if I would consider teaching more classes. After some deliberation, I agreed to teach three days a week, and since then there have been several weeks when I have spent four days at the school. This gives me little time to keep the house cleaned and prepare our meals, but Clayton has taken over with the animals and does the evening milking.

My mornings at the school consist mainly of teaching reading and penmanship to the younger students. The children are eager to learn and full of curiosity. I have had difficulties with only a few of the boys, and when they are disruptive I send them from the class. The Indian children are well behaved, quiet and gentle. The little girls, with their dark hair and eyes that are shaped like almonds, move with uncommon grace. I am certain the sketches I made of them playing in the courtyard will be excellent studies for my paintings.

In the afternoons, I teach sewing and sketching to the older girls. There are a number of “artists” in our group, and most of the girls enjoy embroidery. It is difficult for me to watch the older students who are most like Margaret, those not able to sit still or not interested in completing the tasks laid before them. I ask myself what I might say that would turn them towards a productive path, but nothing comes to mind.

I have gone twice now with Miss Alden to the Indian reservation. They live in white-walled adobes, which they decorate with long strings of bright red peppers. The Indian women adorn themselves with jewelry made of stones that only they seem to know how to find. On festival days, the Indians wear white moccasins and leg wrappings and dance in the streets, waving sticks decorated with feathers and large rattles.

Last month, Señora Teresa brought me a letter Ramon had sent, asking her to see it was safely delivered to me. In it he asks Clayton and me to bless the marriage he has made with Margaret. “He steals her away in the night and then begs our blessing?” Clayton shouted when I read it to him. “Let him beg. They're neither one welcome here.”

They have bought a tract of land in Mexico and plan on ranching. Señora Teresa has said there are bandits and all kinds of cattle thieves there. Margaret has always been determined to do with her life as she wishes. I can only hope there is a foundation of good sense laid in her childhood to which she might return.

Your Sister,

Abigail

June 2, 1893

Dear Maggie,

Clayton and I traveled to Santa Fe last month to shop and see the city, for in truth it has grown into a city, with streets which are lined with buildings and the poles that hold electrical wires. We stayed the night in a boarding house just to see the lights come on. For quite some time we wandered up and down the streets, marveling at the glow which here and there filled a dark window. There was a fiesta nearby, and we sat in the courtyard listening to the violins. Clayton held me as if I were a young bride and we danced among the gardens. I felt myself lucky to have such a husband.

The next morning the market was filled with all sorts of people, and one heard every kind of language being spoken. There was a Chinese man selling embroidered silk from his cart, and wagon loads of squash, peppers, tomatoes, corn, apples, nuts, even peaches and cherries. There were enormous jars of beans and strings of prayer beads. On all the street corners Indians stood with their blankets, pottery, and jewelry. It is fashionable to have one's picture taken with the Indians, but one has to pay for this honor, sometimes handsomely, depending on the avariciousness of the model.