These Is My Words (49 page)

I picked up Suzanne and we went to look at our tiny garden, and she cried because she couldn’t go to school. I told her that I have shed those same tears, and one day soon she will be luckier than her Mama and go to school with the big children.

September 2, 1894

Gilbert got into trouble the first day of school. April was mortified to own up to having him for a brother and I was forced to scold him soundly.

It appears he drew a very distorted picture of his brother on his slate. Charlie took it upon himself to discipline Gil with a sound pinch right in the middle of the fifth grade recitation. Gil squealed and whacked his brother over the head with the slate, and soon the boys were rolling together across the floor, each trying to get in a good punch.

They disrupted the whole school and both got a rod and sent to opposite corners to be stared at and mocked by the other students. Mrs. Fish has little patience with nonsense of that variety, and I know she is a fine teacher, but still, when they were out of the room, I had to smile when I pictured them both in the act. Rascals to the end.

September 4, 1894

Suzanne is coming down with another cold, her third in as many months, and is whining today and following my every step hanging onto my skirts. It is so hard to get anything done this way, and so I asked Jack to please try to get her to sleep some. He sat in the big rocker and held her, telling her stories until she did sleep, but when he moved she immediately woke and cried. So he carried her with him and came out to where I was hanging out the wash. She’s got a bad fever, he said, and handed me a wet shirt from the laundry basket.

I felt her little head, and pulled a wash cloth from the cool, wet clothes and put it on her head. Just another baby cold, I said to him.

For a while he stood there handing me things to hang out so I would not have to bend over as my back has been bothering me some lately. Then he said, There’s a call for men to go track and catch a gang that has robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad near Lordsburg. I told the Federal Marshal I’d go.

Oh, you did, I said. Well, when do you leave?

In the morning, he said, and walked away with Suzanne and took her in the house.

I hung out those clothes and hung them fast. There’s nothing I can do. Here I am not feeling well myself, and the little one sick, and Anna only comes but three days a week. I suppose I am just worn out. All I can do is pack him a couple of days’ food and hope they feed him later on.

September 5, 1894

I fixed up his two saddle bags this morning just after dawn. Jack is still carrying the one I gave him for our first Christmas, and keeps his razor and extra ammunition in the old one with a bullet hole in it which doesn’t hold much, but he won’t go without either of them. I put in a few biscuits and some hard candy, and salt bacon and jerked meat and I added a bottle of Doctor Forthcum’s Lung Elixir as Jack gets affected with a cough now and again and I warned him to take it at the first sign of a cough. I kissed him goodbye, and the children waved as they headed off to school.

I have never told him about the nightmare. It is always the same when it comes, which it did again last night. I was up with Suzy several times, and was actually glad to be forced not to sleep.

Suzanne is sicker than ever this afternoon, and I dressed her up and took her to the doctor’s office. We had to wait almost half an hour, but finally, he saw her and in just a minute pronounced that she had an acute inflammation.

Well, I said, acute inflammation of what? I know enough to know something has to be inflamed, it is not realistic to say her whole body is an inflammation.

That doctor stood there and got all tight in the jaw and looked at me indignantly, and said, I will not argue my diagnosis with a woman, period, pay at the door before you leave, one dollar.

I was ready to tell that character right then and there that he was mighty high in the britches and I had read plenty of medical books and I knew that was not a genuine diagnosis. After all, it is my child who is ill, and if she were his, he might care a fig what happened to her. But I held my peace. I paid him his dollar all in pennies.

September 6, 1894

I sent April to school with a note to Mrs. Fish to please loan me those two medical study books again. Suzanne has broken out in a dark rash, and has quit crying and now just lies in bed, weak and feverish. This afternoon when April gets home I will do some diagnosing of my own. At first all I could think of was wishing for Suzanne to quit crying, but now that she is not crying I pray that she would again. At least that was a sign of some fight in her.

Something is badly wrong with this child.

September 13, 1894

I have been waiting for days. Walking this floor. Watching. Waiting for Jack. Finally, Jack came home this morning noisily stamping trail dust off his boots on the back porch like he always does. I was ironing in the kitchen, ironing the sweat that rolled off my face right into the dress in front of me, yet I didn’t feel the heat, I was cold inside and out. He came in and tried to throw his arms around me, and I said to him Jack, come lets’ sit in the parlor.

He got a funny look on his face, but just leaned out the kitchen door to the rest of the house. Children at school? he asks. Suzanne! he starts to call. Where’s my Suzy! Papa’s home!

Jack, I said again, and pulled his hand after me toward the parlor so I could make him sit down. Jack, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I said, crying. Suzanne was buried four days ago. I sent men to ride to find you but they never could. We tried to find you Jack, we tried, I said.

The look on his face was like I never have seen before. It was like the fire that has always burned inside him had kerosene thrown on it, and it seemed to have taken over him. He broke the screen door banging it open, so that it hung off the hinge and swung all crazy, and he jumped onto his tired horse without even touching the stirrups, galloping off down the road towards the cemetery up north. A heavy trail of dust followed him, then obscured him from my line of sight. I finished ironing my newly dyed black dress. For days I have been stirring everything we own into boiling pots of black dye and tears.

Jack didn’t come back home until nearly three o’clock this afternoon, and there was a hurting and frightening look on his face and red rings around his eyes. I was sitting in the rocking chair, staring out the front window. Every now and then the breeze would lift the corner of the black crepe bow on the front door and it would flick at the window pane. I watched that black flicking. Like a little black bird pecking at this house, trying to get inside.

He knelt in front of me and put his hands on my knees. I couldn’t even look at him. What was it? he asked in a voice I didn’t recognize.

Scarlet fever, I told him. Then we held each other. I felt the dirt and sweat from his clothes smudging into my stiff ironed black dress. I watched my black sleeve turn brown and smeared. I felt brown and smeared, through and through. The other children came home from school and walked somberly into the house, and as they came in, each of them patted Jack on the shoulder and said Sorry, Papa. When they had gone on to their separate places and left us alone, the most awful, hurting, frightening sound I’ve ever heard came out of Jack and he sobbed into my shoulder like a child.

September 18, 1894

Jack walked in this morning while the children were getting ready for school and stood in the middle of the usual uproar of lost pencils and missing buttons like a statue.

When they were gone, he said to me he has done some thinking and reckoning, and he was terribly sorry to have been gone when Suzy died. There was no way to know, he said again, echoing words I heard a hundred times since he got home. But, he said, he has decided to quit the Army for good, and has found a job as the town Fire Chief, which they were in bad need of, anyway. That last was added hopefully, as if it made sense to him to fill some kind of need in other people’s lives.

Maybe the fight is over inside him, I do not know. Maybe he will be happy to be home every day, and have hot meals and eat at a table and lie in a bed. He is blaming himself for Suzanne’s dying, and there is nothing I can say to him, he just looks kind of haunted and dead and pained all at once.

November 1, 1894

No wonder Mama went away in her head when Clover passed on. And then Papa. I am going to visit my Mama tomorrow and tell her I am sorry for everything I ever did that caused her sorrow or worry, and for ever wishing, during those days, that she would come back. She probably wanted to stay there. It’s a wonder she came back at all. If I knew how to make myself go away in my head, I declare I would.

Christmas day, December 25, 1894

This house is just too quiet. I told the boys to bring their friends over, and they did but the weather is nice and they are all playing in the yard. It is still too quiet inside. I wish Mama had come to visit, but she takes Christmas with Albert, and I didn’t feel like going out to the ranch for just a day. April says she hates the ranch anyway, and she is off to show off her gifts to her friends.

Jack said last night he wants us to think about having another child. The truth is, I don’t know if I want another child or not, but I said to him, this time, let’s just let nature take its course, and see what happens. We loved each other for the first time in months.

So he seems a little cheered. He has not been the same man since Suzanne died. He smiles and plays with the boys, and is cheerful around the house, but in everything there is a mood of sadness, a shadow over his face. He claims he likes being the fire marshal, although there are stretches of time where there is little to do. But he stays busy and tends the fire horses.

He has no interest in the ranch really, and I still run it all with Mason by mail, even though Jack has the time now. I suppose he never was cut out to be a rancher, but asked his Papa for all those cattle just for me. It is good to have him home every night and know that he will be here. He spends a lot of time with the children that I have never been able to, what with the cooking and cleaning, and making soap and ranch business. Most of the time, they hurry after school to get homework and chores done then he takes them riding or they play baseball, or practice roping, or some other thing.

Mama told me it takes time, a long time to get over the loss of a child. But I don’t want to get over it, I want to turn back the calendar to when it never happened and all the future is sunny. I used to complain to myself that life was so boring, that there was too much laundry to do, too many noses to wipe. Now there are not enough noses to wipe. I wonder if Jack feels as hollow as I do. We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it’s as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can’t tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together.

I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different.

March 1, 1895

Today Jack asked me if I would like to travel this spring, maybe take the train to visit the Lawrences in Texas with Savannah and a few of her children. He said maybe a change would lift my spirits. I told him thank you, but I am not inclined to go. I will keep it in mind, but there isn’t much I want to see in Texas. I find that I don’t care about much of anything any more. I have a brand new book on the shelf I haven’t even unwrapped. The only time I feel better is when we go to the ranch. Maybe it is because Suzanne was there only rarely, and her memory seems steeped into this house.

April and the boys have gone on with their lives. I know from my own losses that losing a brother or sister is not nearly so terrible as losing a child, and they don’t have the same thoughts of Suzy that Jack and I do.

Gilbert asked me if he died would I be that sad, too.

I hugged him close and told him yes, it would be the worst thing for me.

He asked me, Mama, would you miss me the most?

Well, Gilbert, I said, there is only one boy like you in the whole world, so I wouldn’t just miss any old boy. Only you can be you. It would be like someone shot a hole through my heart. I wasn’t sure that made any sense but he seemed pleased.

He just said, Well, then Mama, I’ll wait until I’m real old.

May 27, 1895

April is giving a recitation of an essay she wrote on The Value Of Statehood For Arizona Territory. I am so proud. She is to be the third one, right after the high school valedictorian and the salutatorian, and she is only eleven years old. I have to finish hemming her new dress this afternoon.

The University has already expanded and added a school of Mines to add to their Medical and Law departments. April says she will hate to study any of those, especially mining, but I told her there is no learning that is wasted, and all of it can be applied sometime, someplace. Besides, I said, what if, one day when you are a grown lady and are looking at a piece of property, you just happen to pick up a little chunk of quartz with a ripple of black and yellow in it? Wouldn’t you like to own that land?

She said to me, What for?

So I told her, Exactly my point. If you study Mining and Engineering, you will learn what I mean, and I’m not telling you the answer, you have to look it up. Go in there to the shelves and find Striechenburg’s Geological Resource and see what you can learn. Believe me, if I found that piece of quartz I would pay top dollar for that land.

She got all high in the britches and not only wouldn’t do what I told her but fussed around and cried some and then stormed off mad to her friend’s house. That girl tries me to the bone, sometimes. I think her father will have to have another talk with her about respectfulness.