Savannah and Albert’s girl Esther had fallen in love over some letters and poems from a boy who delivered them every night by way of a ladder and a rosebush. When I look back on it now, it was not much different than my April running away with Morris. But Esther and Polinar ran into trouble, not into town. Morris had done fine by my April, and she by him. There was no reasoning out why one had gone so well and one so bad. I said, “Polinar was only twenty years old, honey, and he got murdered, too. It wasn’t his fault, either. They fell into a terrible fix.”
Savannah nodded. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
“Well, coffee’s made. We could cut some bread. It’ll be daylight soon.”
“I brought pie, too. We could eat that.” She fished into that basket and pretty soon we cut up the pecan pie that had been packed under the loaf of bread. I poured coffee and milk into cups. “This is no temperance pie. It’s got two drams of vanilla in it.”
“Why, Savannah!” I sniffed at the pie. “It’ll be intoxicating!”
“I do love the taste.”
I laughed. So did she. Then she burst into tears and flung herself on my neck, and we both had a good, long, crying hug. Afterward, we went back to eating our pie, all crunchy and runny at the same time. Savannah said, “Sarah, I’ve missed you so. Then when we heard the shooting I got so terribly afraid! Afraid I’d lose you without ever telling you how sorry I was. Granny was right about that other, too. Last year when I thought I was going to have a baby, it wasn’t anything but the change. Comes on you slow like that. Now things are back to normal, and then sometimes not.”
“But you’re not crazy.”
“I hope not. Touchy some. I was always afraid I’d end up like—”
“My mama? I am, too. I don’t blame her a bit, but I don’t want to be that way.”
“No. Neither of us.”
“We won’t, will we?” I said.
“No. We won’t. It’s only our summer.”
Chapter Sixteen
November 2, 1907
Savannah and I were sisters again—deeper than blood-born—though I remained puzzled by her actions, her love lost and now found as if it’d been mislaid like a glove. Although I understood her fears, a little corner of my heart bears a scar, as if she had hurt me in a place no one else on earth could touch. I told myself what came between us boiled down to that she had her upbringing and I had mine. Chess and I exchange cross words five times a day and never question our ties. My bunch can make a noise like a shivaree any time of the day or night, but it never included the shunning of the others. Until this year, it always seemed like she and I were two parts of a set. While the set is whole and the pieces still work together, it’s been broken and glued. Still, I can bear anything if Savannah is there.
Udell loaded up his old Springfield and brought a couple of bands of ready-loads to my house. He looks like a man set for war, as if he has put off being a farmer, and with a change of his hat and a sad but cold look in his eye, become a soldier. He stayed, bunked in the front room, on guard.
In the morning, when he got ready to return to his place to take care of the feeding, I followed Udell to the yard where he saddled his horse. He was tied near the ocotillo fence and cropping at tufts of grass. I lifted a hoe leaning next to the fence and fiddled at some weeds with it. He spoke without turning toward me. “Sarah, marry me now. Let’s don’t wait. I won’t mind if you take off and spend a while in town finishing your school term. We could ride down to Benson this afternoon yet.”
“Why, Mr. Hanna,” I said, mocking him. No cheery teasing rested in his face.
“I can’t watch out for you here. Take a look at the pommel on my saddle.”
A deep U-shaped cut ran throug;h the leather clear down to the wood.
He went on, “I shot back and hit one of them, but he just kept on going.”
“How will marrying change that?”
“I’m thinking about your old people. Your mama and your father-in-law. Your boys ought to come here, too. This thing is about to blow up in our faces like dynamite. We can only hope to hold out until some wandering soul sees the fix we’re in and brings help.”
For the first time, I let myself think beyond my own nose and saw how everything I did, whether I married Udell or not, went to school or not, fussed with Rudolfo or kept my peace, all of it concerned my children and my old folks, none of it was about my happiness. I’d been giddy, mooning over Udell like a schoolgirl, all right. Going to school instead of tending to my business. Thinking young girl things and feeling young girl shivers every time I saw him. Now this put a new wrinkle on everything. Would I marry him for the sake of the others? Yet the only certainty in my life was that nothing stood forever. I had to put off denying him.
“You know,” I said, “we’ve been letting this all turn around on Rudolfo’s say, but why don’t you and I ride down to the Cujillos’ place and see where they stand?”
“His daughter is Maldonado’s wife. No matter what, Cujillo stands with her.”
“And Charlie’s wife is Maldonado’s daughter. If Rudolfo felt that way about his own daughter Elsa, we wouldn’t be having this talk.”
“You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you?”
“About riding to Cujillos’?”
“About marrying me. Something’s different. I don’t know what. You don’t look at me the same. The house isn’t finished, you know. It’ll be better when I’m done.”
“It’s not the house, Udell. And I look at you the way I always did.” Even as I said it, I couldn’t face him.
“But you won’t marry me now, just to be safe? Or if you aren’t pleased to marry yet, would you … live there … to be safe, I mean? You’ll have your own rooms anyway. No one … well, no one needs to know. I’d respect your privacy.”
I put down the hoe and studied the ocotillo limbs that made up my fence. Green openings formed on some of them, hints of the leaves to come on a plant that refused to die even when made into an ordinary old fence. I took a hard breath. “I don’t know if I can marry you, Udell.”
He rested his gloved hand against the thorny fence and looked to the distance. “How’m I going to watch over you and your folks with you living in another house?” Udell took my hands in his. My garden gloves in his leather work gloves seemed a portrait, there in the sun, the hands of two people who worked hard but counted on each other. I wanted to count on him, down to the marrow of my bones. But I felt all loose ends. He said, “But you said you’d marry me. You mean later?”
“Come on to the house. Let’s talk this over with the family. I—I can’t think straight.”
He stopped. “Because you don’t want to come? Is it because I took advantage—”
“No! I can’t think straight because I want to run to your arms, and stay there the rest of my days. But it’s got to be for the right reason. There’s more to think about. That house isn’t mine. Besides. Besides. You said yourself anything I do affects a passel of folks, and they’ve got a right to a say.”
“So you haven’t lost affection for me?”
“Udell, I feel so weighed down, so haunted by this mess with Rudolfo. I won’t stand up and promise to love and keep you and then turn away. I’ve got to be sure before I give you my word and oath.”
A warmth flooded up from his collar, turning his face dark under the tanned skin, and his lips tightened. He said, “I never had any faith in life being easy or simple. I knew trouble was coming and I built us a house I could defend. The door is on. Top floor almost finished. The shutters have gun slots. I’ll fix screening in the holes to keep out flies. Plenty of furniture in the two sheds, too.”
“I can’t because there is the thought of us spreading out too thin. That would leave only Charlie and Elsa and Gilbert at this house. They are so young.”
We stood talking by the door so long, Savannah and Albert, my sons, and Elsa all came to the front porch. I knew I had to draw up some gumption and tell Udell I was not
going to marry him. I tried words out in my imagination this way and that, pretending to see his reaction. I said, “Udell? You have been nothing but good to us all, from the day we first met.”
Udell’s expression looked hopeful and then somber. “‘Twas always my intention, Sarah.”
“I’ve been thinking, honestly. Sincerely, I must tell you something. With all you’ve done with the house and all—maybe it is better for us not to come there.” I wanted to rush and hug him. To protect him from the hurt I planned to deal him.
“Oh. No, I’m sure Maldonado intends to run me out, too. He needs your land. Me, he wants gone on principle.”
“I am talking about marriage. Reckon the formal way is to release us from our, our promise of betrothal.” I could as much as feel every soul gathered there hold their breaths. My head spun. Sweat broke on my forehead. “There is no simple way to say it. I can’t marry you. I can see it now. I was rushing headlong.”
“Sarah, if I led you to this, if it’s too fast—is it because of Aubrey and Miss Rachel?”
“Rachel?” I looked quickly to Savannah. A handkerchief to her eyes, she shook her head.
Udell said, “Well, I told the boy he was casting Miss Mary Pearl aside too soon, not giving her a chance to come home and see her again and all. I’ve done all I can with the boy—man. Well, you know he’s grown. They’ve got a will of their own. He’s said he’s wanted to marry Miss Rachel since he got to know her better. Says they’re more suited, more equally yoked. Closer, you know, agewise and education and—”
“Udell, we can’t move Granny and everyone to your place because I can’t marry you because I think we’re going about this all wrong. I think I was just wishing you were Jack, and that you were thinking I’d turn into Frances.”
“Into Frances?”
That parlor on the hill was full of Frances, her mother’s tables and lamps, under every lamp antimacassars that Frances had embroidered with flowers and frippery. “It’s that piano, Udell. That house full of lace doilies.”
He shook his head and pulled a hand through his hair. Then he reset his hat, picked up his ammunition and rifle.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Udell peered at me, glanced around at my family, turned back to face me. “Were you just toying with me, Sarah?”
“No. I was just caught up. I’m sorry.”
He put his hat on and left without another word. I went inside, sat and stared into the fireplace all day, while around me, people talked and ate and slept. I told myself telling him straight-out was more honest. Oh, Lord, my heart was as black as the firebox, cold as iron, too. Now I’d have to face all this without him. The loss felt worse than losing Savannah. All the dark, hard places of my heart shook with angry tears that refused to fall. I cursed myself for hurting a truly kind man. A decent man. A man who deserved better than to be too easily, too comfortably had. I shivered and missed him, ached for the easy, simple way of him. Still, it was better this way. It must be! Had to be, because there was no future here with him, there was only that bleak house on that hill, that bower of the dead wife’s, in a future with him. I wanted the man but not what he’d created, wanted the friend but not the husband. In the midst of my agony, passion for him swept over me in currents so strongly I wanted to seize the nearest horse and gallop to him.
After that night, we didn’t see Udell again for three days. Every other minute of each long day, I told myself I was glad to be shed of him. The minutes in between, I longed for him, pined for him the way I’ve pined for Jack. I wasted half my day looking over my shoulder to the horizon, hoping to catch sight of him coming on one of his big workhorses.
Finally, I packed up a basket lunch and changed into a clean dress and took myself a walk in his direction. I held a conversation with my shadow, tromping over rocky ground, thinking aloud about that man living on that hill in that stony castle. “Do I love him,” I said to the quail trying to beat my path clear before me, “or do I just want to love someone—anyone—so much I can’t see straight? How in the name of heaven can anyone know if it’s love until you’ve climbed a few hills together? And isn’t Charlie right? Marriage is the hardest, cussedest thing a person can do.”
When the house came into view, I slowed down and took a good, long look. Nothing much seemed to have changed except the dark boulders now seemed less menacing. I climbed up the steeper steps right on the front, straight up to the door, and banged on it with my knuckles. There was no answer. I hollered, “Mr. Hanna!”
I rapped on the wooden door with a stone he kept on the porch as a doorstop. “Udell?” He might have been out in the barn. It was down the hill in the back, every bit as huge and ominous as the house. I rounded the curved path to it. Then stopped in my tracks. No sound came from the barn. No cows. No bleating of the four calves. I hurried to the door and found it standing open, swinging on a breeze.
“Udell?” I ran from stall to stall. No animals. None of the cow mess was fresh, either. “Udell!”
A cactus wren squawked at me from a beam overhead. I left the basket outside the door and went around the hill, going in the top level of the barn. Eight cows and five horses stood there, eating. But no Udell. The pepper plants in the garden drooped like willows from want of water.
I hurried to the house, flinging wide the back door. I couldn’t remember where anything was. I rushed into storage rooms and the privy, calling up the stairs, and at last found him prone at an angle on a bed on the top floor. He lay fully dressed across the counterpane, drenched in sweat. The room felt still and stifling, the smell of sickness came from his breath.
His lips moved but no sound came out. Fever made him start at the touch of my hand, which must have felt like a cold rag on his burning brow. “Udell,” I said, “let me get you into this bed.”
“I got the stock fed,” he said.
“I know. Stretch your arm out.” I pulled his shirt and pants off him, tossing them into a corner. There wasn’t a bureau or chair. “When did this come over you? I should have checked sooner. I thought you’d had enough of my company for a while.”
“Malaria. Since … Cuba.”
“Malaria?”
He nodded. “Thirsty.”
I searched the top floor. No canteens or water pitchers, not a thing to bring a drink in. Down in the kitchen, I found dirty pans and a couple of spoons, slimy with old water. In a chest, then, I discovered several cups that matched, and though there wasn’t a pitcher, there was a flower vase, so I ran the pump in the washroom and filled it. Then I hunted through the chests he’d pointed out before for some kind of flannel I could use. I took the big pillow off the bed in the room he’d set aside for Granny under one arm, a china cup and the vase in both hands, and went back up the stairs.
By the time I got done fixing him up and wrapping his forehead in cool, wet flannel, he fell fast asleep.
I fetched my lunch basket from the yard. I watered the animals and the garden. I checked on Udell every half hour and damped the flannel to cool it again. I washed the pans and straightened the kitchen up, setting the cups in rows instead of all piled together waiting to fall over. I swept the kitchen, then the whole downstairs. Then I hefted a chair over my head and got it up the stairs. I set it beside his bed, and stayed in it a while, thinking. It was high time I headed home, but I couldn’t move him. I reckon if someone at home starts to wonder where I am, they’ll come a-looking.
Late in the afternoon, I wandered through that house. The room where he lay must be the one he meant for himself. I remember that old bed from the shack he’d built after his old house burnt down last fall in the range fire. I had sat on it once to put on some boots. The other rooms stood wide and roomy. The windows needed opening, though, so I pulled up the sashes and a good breeze came in. In the center of the house, next to the chimney that branched off to each room, a second flue was built, and it had a double damper that moved from a box in the kitchen on the bottom floor.
Opening that flue drew fre
sh air in every window at once and out the top as if it were smoke, so the place went from stuffy to pleasant in no time. I thought of my brother Harland, figuring to put that air vent in a house, and figured just like my old place in town that he had designed, this one must have a dumbwaiter somewhere. I found it in another room off the kitchen pantry. There, a genuine washing machine had been set up, looking like a churn turned sideways, with a big dasher by which you could sweep the clothes back and forth.
It wasn’t until suppertime Charlie came riding toward Udell’s house. I met him outside and told him how I’d found Udell sick with malaria. I don’t know if Charlie wanted to be sure of my words or Udell’s fever, but once he saw the man, he said he reckoned if he was that sick, someone ought to stay with him.
“The only other bed in the place is downstairs right off the front parlor. It’s for your granny,” I said.
‘I’ll come check on you in the morning. Elsa will bring food.”
“Ask her to fetch me some clean clothes, too. I didn’t expect to work so hard in this dress and have to sleep in it, too.”
When I went to Udell’s room again, he had curled up on his side, shaking and moaning. “Cold,” he managed to get out. I covered him with the lone blanket on the bed, closed his window, and went to hunt more coverings. I found three beaten-up quilts and a light feather counterpane in a chest. I carried them all up the stairs and tucked him in. Then I went down to the room reserved for my mama and sat myself on the bed, hoping to fall asleep. I lay in the darkness, listening to the night sounds. Gnat-catchers trilled in the sky overhead. A bat squealed. From the barn, the contented murmur of horses sounded like friends talking low. A thump overhead jarred me wide awake.
I had to find a lamp. Find a match. Then find the stairs and get back to Udell’s room. “I’m coming,” I called out. “Don’t walk around in the dark, you’ll trip down the stairs!”
“Sarah?” Udell’s hoarse voice cried. “I can’t find you.”
I held the lamp high as I came through the room. The room was large and the flame seemed swallowed up in darkness. I almost tripped over him. Udell sat on the floor, holding the back of one hand to his face. He pulled it away and blood trickled from his lip.