El Paso: A Novel (73 page)
By then, Tom Mix had become the biggest cowboy star in Hollywood, and to everyone’s surprise—and Katherine’s breathless delight—he accepted an invitation to come to Newport for Beatie’s big western party featuring Slim’s band. When he arrived that afternoon, Mix immediately visited Timmy and Katherine, and what was said between them has remained a secret from that day to this.
Duly impressed by Cornwall, Mix informed the Colonel and Arthur that he left Pancho Villa right after the kids were rescued, figuring that one day it was “going to come down to Villa and me, and I reckoned it would probably be Villa,” so he sneaked off. He said he’d rather have done it another way, but the way it was done would just have to be good enough.
Tom brought a lady friend with him, however, which almost broke Katherine’s heart. She’d never quite lost the crush she’d developed, and for a while it became more ardent when he began appearing in movies. She told her mother later that she noticed when he arrived he was wearing the little four-colored ascot-neckerchief she’d sewn for him. He didn’t mention it, she supposed, because the lady friend was present most of the time.
However, at the western party that night Tom asked Katherine to dance—she had just turned seventeen—when Slim played his theme song, “I Love You More Than Yesterday.” She was radiantly beautiful in a white crinoline dress and he looked fine himself in a dark blue western-style suit with a cowboy-trimmed shirt and white silk tie. They made such a handsome couple waltzing around the floor that the other dancers not only cleared a path for them, but pretty soon couples left the dance floor entirely and stood on the sidelines to watch the famous movie star and the beautiful granddaughter of the host and hostess glide faultlessly along the dance floor, smiling and looking into each other’s eyes.
They wound up in front of Slim’s bandstand as he sang the concluding melodic lyrics:
This is how I love you
,
Forever and a year
.
I love you more than yesterday
,
And less than tomorrow, dear
.
Mix and Katherine exchanged bows and salutations with Death Valley Slim, who was all smiles and had grown a little mustache, and was resplendent in his fancy cowboy suit that glimmered with red sequins. Everyone at the party was applauding except for Mix’s lady friend, who remained at her table keeping a wary eye on things. As Mix escorted Katherine off the floor, he whispered to her, “Well, missy, I reckon I’ve finally saw the ocean.”
“Yes,” she said, “and much more, I’m sure.”
“If you ever come out to California I’ll show you something special,” he told her.
“What’s that, Tom?” Katherine asked.
“You remember that big cat that got after you?”
“The jaguar,” she gasped, putting a hand to her throat, stopping just short of the family table where the lady friend sat.
“Now he’s a rug in my office,” Mix told her. “I had him skinned, tanned, and stuffed, head an’ all.”
“Oh, my,” Katherine said. “A rug?”
“I wouldn’t have let him hurt you, missy,” Mix told her. “I became very fond of you two.”
“I know that,” Katherine said. “And thank you for it.” She leaned up and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “’Bye Tom,” Katherine said, and fluttered off toward some friends from her school. There was still something there, barely definable, but suddenly it wasn’t a crush anymore. Katherine was certain of it. It was a kind of gratitude mixed with—oh, she’d figure it out another time.
BEATIE PASSED AWAY IN 1938 AND THE COLONEL DIED
the following year, but from the day she and the Colonel got back from El Paso till the day she died, she was a different woman. Maybe it was because the Colonel was a different man, too. They traveled to Europe and the South of France, and even went on African safaris. The last years were good to both of them.
Bomba had stayed on for a while as the Colonel’s chauffeur until he proposed marriage to Lurie, the Gourd Woman. Colonel Shaughnessy set him up in a chauffeuring business in Hartford, where he acquired a fleet of big cars to haul the state’s crooked politicians around, and made a handsome living while Lurie ran the office side of the business.
Xenia had Mick’s baby and she and Arthur adored him from the outset. Officially, he became Arthur Shaughnessy, Jr., but they called him Cowboy. Like his grandfather, he finished Harvard, but just in time for World War II. In 1943, he was killed in the South Pacific as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.
After the railroad fiasco, Arthur did not return to Boston. Instead, with money from the sale of the NE&P, he and Xenia went down to El Paso and started an orphanage. Arthur asked around and found the same little piece of property northwest of the city that Cowboy Bob had once owned with the runaway wife. Bob’s description of it had been so charming that Arthur had pictured it in his mind as a golden place. He bought that and much more, in the shadows of the Franklin Mountains.
There they built the orphanage of adobe buildings and put in trees amid the big cacti, and flowers, a lake, a school, a chapel, a hospital, fields for farming, riding trails, and livestock operations. There were baseball and football fields, a fully enclosed basketball court, as well as clay tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course. It was a first-class orphanage. They named it the Bob Braswell Children’s Academy, and opened it to any orphan, regardless of race, creed, or gender. For a while they took in a lot of Mexican kids whose parents had died in the revolution.
There was a grassy spot with some cottonwood trees next to the horse corral where Arthur had commissioned a larger-than-life-sized bronze monument modeled on a Frederic Remington sculpture. It was of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco, waving his hat in his hand, and at the base was an inscription from what the priest had said at Bob’s funeral: “Greater Love Hath No Man Than This, That He Lay Down His Life For A Friend.”
The children liked the monument because it was a place to gather around, but also because it represented action and toughness, and bravery and loyalty—what people like to think of as the old cowboy creed; the children went there during their lunch recesses. The birds liked the monument, too, and after a few years, with rains, baking heat, cold blue northers, and the birds, it took on a special patina that, if you caught it just right in the El Paso sunsets, made it glow “like an old iron skillet that’s been left too long on a fire,” the Colonel once said.
Timmy—Tim now—finished at Groton, and went on to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude. Taught to fly by his father, he stayed in El Paso, where he started a flying school that the army used during World War II to train pilots. He survived the war himself, flying P-38 fighters in the Pacific, and became involved in the orphanage. But he spent much of his time in adventurous traveling, too—hiking in the Alps and Urals, diving in the South Pacific, mountain climbing in South America, sailing in Australia. At one point, for a lark, he even led a gold prospecting expedition in Mexico’s high sierras.
Katherine’s fate, however, was tragic. She had just graduated from Miss Porter’s School at Farmington when Arthur and Xenia moved to El Paso, and she went with them for the summer. Tall, beautiful, smart, and poised, she was teaching equestrian jumping to some of the older orphans when her horse nicked the high bar; a fluke. It stumbled, couldn’t recover, and she went over the top. She only lived for a few minutes after that, but Arthur and Xenia managed to rush to her. Her last words were, “Papa, I’m cold . . .”
They buried Katherine in the corner of the field near Cowboy Bob’s monument. More than twenty years afterward, Tom Mix stopped by while traveling for promotion of his Wild West show. He was a little old by then, and somewhat bent, but people, including Arthur and Xenia, remembered that at one point he went down on a knee before the stone and hung his head for a long while.
As he walked away, children from the orphanage, scores of them, swarmed around wanting autographs. They presented pads of lined paper from school, backs of church bulletins, paper napkins, brown lunch bags, and scraps of paper of all description. Mix put on his signature smile and signed his name, as he’d done thousands of times before.
Arthur, gray-haired now and a bit portlier, had been watching from the shade of a long open corridor between buildings, and after a while walked out to where Mix was finishing up his signing, not far from Katherine’s grave.
“You understand,” Mix said, “that I never wanted to keep those children. I said so at the time, but was overruled.”
“That’s what Katherine told us,” Arthur said. “You know, she developed a serious crush on you,” he added.
“I kind of thought so,” Mix replied. “At that time, though, I never had anybody have a crush on me. Didn’t really know what one was.”
“I’ve always wondered,” Arthur said, “why you got mixed up with Pancho Villa in the first place.” The great red-orange sun was setting low between a gap in the mountains and cast cathedral-like rays of light on the school and its yards, as if they were filtered in stained glass.
“Well,” Mix said, “I’ve thought a lot about that myself. What comes up to me is that there’s a difference between dreams and lies, and while I was with those people, I think I might’ve got it confused.”
Arthur nodded. “El Paso,” he said.
“What?”
“A lot of people come to El Paso hoping for a break, and then jump the wrong way.”
“That was me, I guess,” Mix said. “I went there to get in the movies and wound up in Mexico.”
“You’ve had quite a career, haven’t you?” Arthur remarked.
“It was a privilege, sir, to have known your son and daughter,” Mix said earnestly.
“I wonder,” Arthur said, “if you see your way to coming back here sometime. You’re such a big star to the children.”
“Mr. Shaughnessy,” said Tom Mix, “I will bring the whole show with me. And I’ll do it every year. It’ll be a pleasure, sir. Why, you have a whole family here.”
AFTERWORD
C
asualty figures during the Mexican Revolution are sketchy, but millions are estimated to have perished. Students of the period will notice that I have occasionally tampered with the evidence. Some of the terrain has been altered and some historical events described happened at slightly different times than those fancied in the plot and have occasionally been condensed to suit the story line. I hope it will be forgiven, since this is a novel, not a history, and not even a “historical novel” in any conventional sense.
Of the actual, historical characters depicted in this tale:
Tom Mix went on, of course, to become the most famous cowboy movie star of his era. He later owned a traveling western circus and died peacefully in his sleep in 1940.
Ten Days That Shook the World
, then contracted typhus and died in Moscow in 1920. He is buried in Red Square, near the tombs of other famous Communists.
