The Last Woman Standing (18 page)

CHAPTER 20

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1881

Rosh Hashanah came and went in mid-September. While the more observant traveled to Tucson where there was a rabbi, I ignored the communal rituals and turned, as I often did when I wanted to feel a sense of family, to baking. Because I couldn’t use the San Jose’s kitchen, I went to see the Flys, passing a sooty group of ragged, ill-humored miners on the street. I made Papa’s raisin-studded challah recipe in Mollie’s oven. Her Camillus had just returned from Apache territory with a mustache full of dust and a bad case of sunburn. He was treating it with whiskey taken internally.

Mollie and I dipped the fresh-baked bread in honey to commemorate the Jewish New Year. We embraced our newfound friendship and collaboration as among the year’s sweetest surprises. Lacking horseradish, we shared a cigar and drank brandy shots to rinse away the smoke’s bitterness.

Not all the bitterness I’d tasted would be rinsed away. Johnny’s betrayal still hounded me as the liquor burnt my throat.

Johnny’s mistreatment had diminished me. I feared that I was a laughingstock in Tombstone. And yet, rationally, I knew that when I broke with Johnny, I’d dodged a bullet. President James A. Garfield, in the more civilized district of the country, had not. The object of assassin Charles Guiteau, the president had taken two shots—in the arm and back—on July 2 at the Capitol’s train station. While the president had survived the Battles of Chickamauga and Shiloh, rising to be a major general in the Union army, his peacetime wounds festered and proved fatal. Garfield lingered through the summer but died on September 19.

In reaction, our town not only mourned the Republican’s untimely passing while in office, but revisited Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, only sixteen years before. That critical event was burnt into the memory of most of my neighbors. No one had forgotten where they were when they got the news, and the deep emotions it aroused. Lincoln’s death was my first memory: Papa returning early from the bakery, unexpectedly opening the door, and the unearthly sound of keening outside entering with him. Mama disappeared upstairs, returning dressed in black. We joined the flood in the streets to mourn together as a city and a nation. Men and women wept openly and, although my mother did not, I cried, too, only half knowing why. I felt a genuine sense of loss, that something obscene had transpired, and America had been divided into a before and after marked by Lincoln’s assassination.

Then as now, citizens wore black to mark the event. Riders draped crepe—a stiff, crimpled silk—from their saddles. The dressmaker Addie Bourland sold out her darkest silks by noon. While national events often seemed muffled (a distant sound and fury) compared to the chaotic news of Cochise County reported in the
Epitaph
and the
Nugget
, Garfield’s shooting disturbed the boomtown locals. What were free elections if one crazy individual could veto the rule of democracy? And while local lawlessness thrived—drunken gamblers shooting one another over a card game, stage robbers shooting Wells Fargo agents—assassination remained taboo, the province of cowards and savages. If the president could be cut down in a busy train station, no one with a public profile was safe in the heavily armed, deeply polarized aftermath of our least civil war. Women wailed out of sadness and fear: Who would protect them if their husbands and fathers died? How many widows lifted their skirts nightly at the town’s bordellos, or bent over endlessly at the dark cribs on the edge of town where miners lined up after their work shifts?

As the town continued to grieve, Yom Kippur arrived on October 3. I fasted, having refused food and water since sundown the night before. I felt penitent for the grief that I’d caused my family, although I had yet to mend the broken bonds with my mother. I was at a loss for how I would accomplish that from afar. I knew that a thousand miles away, she was in synagogue, wearing white, attending the rabbi’s drone, the cantor’s sweet voice, in perfect harmony with her God, if not with me. Hennie would be at her side, sharing the shame that I wasn’t seated with them, dead to my mother with the entire congregation as witness. And yet I was not going to
schul
to make my peace with God, to atone for the rupture between us that I’d caused of my own free and errant will.

In the afternoon heat, hungry and testy and starved for company, I exited my airless room at the San Jose. Lightheaded and lonely, I sought out Dave the tobacconist, who might share my Yom Kippur sorrows. Even on that holiest of days, he kept his shop open. He offered me a lemon drop. I rejected it, referring to my fast. As he saw my knees give way, he found me a short wooden stool. Dipping his handkerchief in water, he wiped my brow and said, “
Gut yuntiff,
” or “Happy holiday,” in Yiddish, and “a pair does not a minion make.”

I put my head in my hands and waited for the ceiling to return to the roof and the floor to make itself solid below my feet. Dave held the cool handkerchief to my neck. Behind me, the door to Johnny’s office opened. The damp handkerchief moved on my nape and was no longer still, but stroking gently. I put my trembling hand to the back of my neck, and it was grasped by a familiar hand. My stomach lurched, and I could not distinguish the inspiration: hunger, queasiness, or lust.

With an effort I raised my heavy head. It had begun to throb. (Unlike Mama, I’d never had a talent for fasting. This was not the first time someone had to catch me with a chair.) I hardly lifted my eyes when they were caught in Johnny’s intense and welcoming gaze. They seemed to say that he knew I’d return—that I couldn’t stay away. He knelt at my side, sitting on his heels, his hand moving down my back. I felt the wet stripe form.

Johnny flashed his shiny teeth, perhaps mistaking my pale face for penitence, my liquid eyes for lovesickness. That was just about when the nausea that had been subsiding rose again. I heaved but had nothing but mucus in my empty stomach, and such bile that went along with it, but the mess was enough to soil the knees of his trousers.

“Jesus, Josie, what kind of greeting is that?” he asked, standing up so that he towered above me.

“None at all,” I said.

“Isn’t it time you stop fooling around and come back home?”

“I can’t come home, because you’re still living there. I think you owe me rent,” I said, miserable and angry at putting myself in Johnny’s path. Only then did I question my own motives, visiting Dave’s shop knowing that Johnny’s office lay just beyond. My actions were suspect. He still stirred me, after all that had happened. My heart rose to my throat when I saw him after time spent apart, and scrambled my words. Just seeing those familiar laugh lines at the corner of his eyes made me melt, even if that attraction paled to what I felt for Wyatt. I knew who Johnny Behan was as a man. Standing beside his only son, I’d seen him clearly with Mrs. Dunbar on the bed we’d bought together, and here I was again. I would not blame God on Yom Kippur for making me face my mischief. I’d walked over in the heat of the day, a damsel one fainting spell away from broken promises. If I hadn’t already been nauseous, this realization would have made me sick to my stomach.

“Dave,” I said to the tobacconist, “I’ll take that lemon drop now.”

“Take two,” he said.

I rode beside Wyatt for the first time bound for a night of camping in the Dragoon Mountains. I had rarely felt such peace before that moment, and it was a feeling that I would return to again and again with Wyatt. It was October 7, and he’d promised me a full moon and clear skies, beans and beef jerky. It was not the Grand Hotel, and I rejoiced in that. We would not travel far—Apaches had hopped the San Carlos Reservation, and they were at large—but we were safe within a few hours’ ride of Tombstone.

Wyatt set an easy gait. My horse followed suit. My anticipation of our night alone under the stars, lying rough, focused and clarified my senses: we scared a doe from her hiding place, sent jackrabbits scurrying for cover, and watched hawks swirl in liberated arcs above us riding the air drafts. The sky was a melting watercolor of lavenders and violets and a streak of peony pink that I would have called my favorite color except that it could not be captured; it changed from moment to moment, defining itself against the darker sky, and then disappearing as we neared camp.

I shed my impulse to control the situation, to question our destination, to wonder about my looks and if they would suit. I trusted in Wyatt and the quiet that wrapped us together rather than separating us. I trusted my hold on my mare and her easy trot, my heels digging into the stirrups. My fears dissipated. I drew my strength from her rather than trying to dominate the animal. If I absorbed her ease, then she would be easy with me. As it was with the horse, so the man.

The quiet company of the ride out was something I learned to love—the sharing of the view, Wyatt’s intimate knowledge of the wilderness and his reading of its signposts that meant nothing to me. But that day in October was different. It was twilight, and the full moon had begun to rise over the Durango Mountains. The air was fresh in the way it is in early autumn, welcome after a hot summer and slaking a thirst for coolness that had built up over months. I felt my love and anticipation building deep inside of me and ignored my impulse to verbalize it, to deflate it, leaving it coiled and ready.

When we arrived in the foothills, we didn’t climb far, finding a ready-made curve against a rock wall. A fire-licked circle of stones already marked the protected spot facing north, away from Tombstone, toward the entirety of the Americas. Wyatt dismounted while his horse was still in motion, taking the leather reins over its head and tying them to a bush.

Meanwhile, I dug my ankles into the mare. She stopped in time for Wyatt to turn to me, taking the reins and throwing them over the horse’s head. She stood at attention as he reached up, his large hands encircling my waist. He hoisted me off the horse, but when we looked eye to eye, he stopped. With his arms wrapped tightly around me and my feet still weightless above the packed earth, he leaned in for a kiss, his chapped lips rough but their touch gentle. His contact communicated what we were beginning that night even before our horses were watered and fed. That part of me that was coiled inside met his kiss as an equal in love and passion, but I held back the full weight of my desire. This was only the beginning, the raising of the curtain, the taste of what was to come. When he set me down on the rough, packed earth, I floated upward, wanting more but trying to wrap myself around the patience he was teaching me.

Wyatt unstrapped a camp chair from his saddlebag, unfolded it a few feet from the fire ring, and motioned to me to sit down, holding my hand to steady me. He retrieved a pile of kindling hidden beneath the bush and set it alight at my feet. Before he continued the business of making camp, he poured me a thimbleful of brandy that he carried but did not indulge in himself. He left the flask at my side. While I appreciated the light changing and the rising sound of crickets and toads, soprano and bass, he laid out the buffalo-skin rug, the bedrolls and blankets, together in the elbow of the rock. I knew we would end up there, and I walked a tightrope of desire and restraint, knowing that on any spectrum I was closer to the former than the latter.

When Wyatt finished his preparations, he walked the perimeter. Then he cooked beans, which we consumed with the clatter of tin spoons on similar bowls. We ate, and it was simply eating, sustenance. With him at my feet, we watched the moonrise, holding hands until I got familiar with every callous and scar. The sky darkened around us, and the light’s alteration first brought the bushes closer and then made them disappear into the shadows. All that existed was the tight circle around us with the campfire at its center, and then above us the large pale moon at its fullest in the cloudless sky. It was one of those all-seeing moons that looked down upon us, blessing our unity, and saw, too, all who were not hidden under roofs, or buried underground, Apaches and cowboys alike, sparrows and snakes. It did not see Mama, but it saw me.

I could feel myself unfold in the cool, bright light, letting go of all the lies of my existence, the promises to false men, the restraints of daughterhood, and the expectations of becoming a wife. In my thoughts, I called out to a God who saw everything from on high but refused narrow judgments, a world parsed in Ten Commandments and subdivided in countless customary restrictions between men and women, both the foolish Adams and Eves and the wise.

Sitting beside Wyatt, I felt my legs fall loosely from my hips and my sex rise up, releasing as if ready to accept all of the outdoors—the moon and stars, the flesh and bone. I began to grope my hair for the pins to release the curls from their bondage, and Wyatt kneeled beside me and finished the job until my hair was as wild as a mane and fell darkly down my back to where it now arched.

Wyatt took my right hand in his and eased me up off the stool. He was so big and powerful this close that what I’d begun now frightened me: those broad shoulders, the muscular arms, the narrow hips above forceful legs. And yet I let that go, too—my natural fear, my worries, my second guessing, for I felt my pelvis press against his thigh, and his fullness against my bosom. His knowing hands turned me around and herded me, as ablaze as the moon above, toward the buffalo rug and the layers of bedding he’d spread there. He holstered his Colt .45 revolvers and set the pair by the head where folded Indian blankets served as pillows.