Between Earth & Sky (16 page)

I guess you have heard about stampedes. There was a big one last August when we were driving the cattle. I nearly got thrown by my horse. Right before that stampede started, everything got quiet like we was out in the desert heat in the middle of the afternoon. The cattle, the horses, you couldn't hear nothing, even no insects or the wind. I believe the world was pausing to think about what chaos was coming. All at once hundreds of them cows started running. They didn't pay no attention to direction. They were all just thundering across the ground any way that they could, and we had to try to turn them all together to keep them from trampling each other to death. I had all I could do to stay on my horse. There was a boy with us, his first drive, and he fell off and got crushed to death under those pounding hooves
.

I promise you I will come down there to visit before summer. Maybe in April or May for a week or two. I can take the train. I have enough saved up for the ticket
.

Your Son,

George

January 19, 1888

Dear Maggie,

I was glad to hear of Alex's progress at the university. He is a bright young man and will do well in law or business, in whatever he endeavors. Our holiday was gay, filled with excitement and busy with preparations. George arrived December twenty-third with two other young men, all of them cowhands at the ranch George is working on. You can be assured there was plenty of merriment, food, and good company. George's young friends were as sweet-natured as George himself, and both had excellent manners. I cannot picture the three of them driving cattle, with all the whooping and shouting and hard riding that seems a necessary part of that work. I venture that I would not recognize them if I saw them out on the open range.

Margaret was thrilled to have actual “cowboys” staying at the house and sharing our table. She asked every sort of question and spent hours sitting before the fire, listening to stories of cattle drives and ranging, with a deep glow in her eyes. “I'd go back with you, if they'd take a girl,” she told them one evening, and, of course, they all laughed.

“Really, I would,” she insisted.

Maggie, I believe she would. I am almost afraid she will cut off her hair and try to pass as one of them. Amy thinks her sister will change and become a lady during the next year or two. She relates several stories of young girls at her school who turned from boyish ways as they matured. In Margaret's case, such a change would have to be an utter transformation, and while I pray for it, I am not at all certain it will come about.

Your Sister,

Abigail

June 6, 1888

Dear Maggie,

I have seen Sally Burton. She stopped here for nearly two weeks on her way east. She was traveling by railroad, and Clayton and I rode to the station to meet her. She confided in me that she has had great troubles because of her husband's drinking. There are all kinds of saloons in California where they settled. Her daughter is married to a minister, and they have moved up to Oregon to live. Sally will stay in Virginia for a month or more, as her boys are big enough now to take care of the place. It was good to visit with her, but I hardly did recognize her after all these years. She has gotten heavier, and all her hair is gray.

She had word of Bea Manning, who moved to northern California after her husband died ten years ago. She has her own store, where she sells fashionable dresses, and has joined the suffrage ladies. I do think she is right and that we should get the vote.

You must visit with Sally while she is in Stillwater. I wonder what she will think of the transformations that have taken place.

Your Sister,

Abigail

September 20, 1888

Dear Maggie,

I was pleased to get your letter relating the visit you had with Sally Burton. But I must disagree with you over the causes you found for her hardships. I doubt her husband's behavior would have altered had they stayed east of the Mississippi, and surely that is the origin of her troubles, not, as you put it, “a life spent in the wilderness of California.” Let me assure you, the California Sally has settled in is far from being a wilderness. There are large towns with streets and stores, schools and churches, and yes, saloons. But men who would do evil will find temptation wherever they may go.

Let me also assure you that my appearance is not “that of an old woman, completely worn by wind and sun and hardship.” My hair is still nearly all yellow, and while I do not look like a young girl, my complexion has not been “furrowed by the elements.” I will have my picture made immediately and sent, so that you can see for yourself that the west has not so altered me.

There was a spelling bee at the school yesterday, and it was well attended. Amelia Brown, the minister's daughter, won the prize, which was a bound edition of Tennyson's poems. There will be a neighborhood gathering this weekend, which promises to be lively. I have convinced Margaret to go and wear the new dress I have made her. You see, we are quite civilized here in the west.

Your Sister,

Abigail

April 17, 1889

Dear Maggie,

I was most distressed to hear from Amy that she was delivered early and the child was lost. She says the doctor reports it is a weakness in her constitution, but she was always a strong girl and as a child could work beside me the whole of the day, planting or caring for the little ones. I never knew her to tire.

I telegrammed that I would come east at once to assist her recovery, but today I received a note that she has nearly regained her strength and will return to the school to teach until the end of the year. She writes that I should not leave, especially now just when the planting will begin, and that she and Everett still plan to visit us in June, just two months away. Once again, I entrust her to your care. Perhaps I can convince her to stay with us the entire summer. I believe she needs the desert air.

Your Sister,

Abigail

January 2, 1890

Dear Maggie,

We spent Christmas Eve at the Sloaners' house, which is nearly twelve miles from here. They are homesteading like us and attend the Methodist church. There were ten adults and several children, and we ate wild turkey, pheasant, squash, pumpkin, breads of all kinds, and corn pudding. I brought a dish I had made of the last of our potatoes, and the Porters brought oysters, a rare treat. The house was decorated with lace and pine branches, and there were small figures cut out of paper pressed to all the windows. A tree hung with candles filled the hallway.

Small gifts—handkerchiefs, sachets—were exchanged by all of the ladies. I made Margaret a dress of gray wool, trimmed in bright green, similar to one I saw in the
National Cloak and Suit Company,
with a tight waist, buttoning up the side, which Amy writes is quite the popular sort to wear. Margaret had wanted a new saddle, but if she was too terribly disappointed, she did not show it.

For me this Christmas there were paints Clayton had ordered and a new sketch book. I had sewn Clayton a shirt of white linen, and he laughed when he saw it, as he has little occasion here to wear it.

Maggie, your life sounds so filled with excitement. To have Robert's wedding one month and the following month the birth of your first grandchild. I wish Irene and the baby the best of health.

Your Sister,

Abigail

May 21, 1890

Dear Maggie,

There is a heaviness that will not leave me since I read of Aunt Celia's death. After Mother died, Aunt Celia wrote to me often, filling her letters with town gossip and news of Amy. Just last month she sent me a recipe for a butter cake that is most delicious and advised me to send Margaret away to school. She became, these last years, the mother I lost when I decided to stay in the west. And now she too is gone, lost to me even if I did return east.

This summer the heat has come early. Already, it rises off the desert in waves, by noon turning the land into a sea of red sand. The prickly pears blossom like mad, as if the abundance of light has forced their bright orange and pink outbursts. Our garden is thick with blue verbena. Clayton has bought a parrot from a Mexican, our latest “pet,” which he keeps in a cage made of willow twigs hung in the garden. He claims he will train it to speak English, but so far it only cocks its head to one side and spits out bits of Spanish.

Margaret is fifteen, and I had hoped that by now she would at least show some signs of becoming a young lady, but I am afraid she does not. This spring she has disappeared sometimes for much of the day, taking a horse and riding up into the mountains. Once she was gone for an entire day, and I feared she had run away as George did, but she returned in the evening tired and hungry, her skin burnt from riding out in the open.

She said she got lost up in the canyon, but Clayton fears there is a boy she is meeting. He rails at what he calls her deceptions and threatens to hire a Mexican for the purpose of watching her. Their fights are awful to endure, the yelling and screaming, with Clayton calling her a whore and Margaret accusing him of every sort of cruelty. I should not go against my husband, but I believe, I know in my heart, she is only bewitched by the desert and cannot stop herself from riding all day up into it.

Your Sister,

Abigail

January 24, 1891

Dear Maggie,

This morning I write to you sitting beside our new cook stove, a Majestic range Clayton bought in December. I have baked seven loaves of bread, which has warmed the damp, drafty house. George was here for Christmas. Last summer he helped bring a herd of longhorn cows up from Mexico and said some of their horns were nearly five feet long and could easily rip a horse open!

“It's time you were settled,” I told him.

“Come back home to live,” Clayton said, and told him there was land here he could have.

But George is set on working ranches. I guess he would not know what to do with himself here after the excitement of working with the herds. I can only hope he will meet some girl and she will make him settle down. But that is unlikely while he is living among cowhands and the herds.

The night before he left, he came to us and said that Margaret had begged him to take her with him up north to the open range. Maggie, you write that Susan is also strong-headed, but Margaret is sometimes beyond all sense. I had thought she would outgrow the notion that she could live like a boy, but she still has a child's desire to do all that her older brother does.

Soon she will be grown and has received little schooling. A few years ago I wanted to send her away to school, as we did Amy, but she said she would never live in a town, where the houses are close together and where there are always people in the streets. Yet here in the valley she is too solitary, no young women to laugh with, no proper young men to socialize with.

Last spring and summer she often met Señora Teresa Martinez's son, Ramon, when she rode out to repair the acequia. It is a chore she has helped with for years, and quite often they have done it together, as most repairs require more than two hands. She does not understand why, now that she is a young lady, she can no longer accompany a young man, especially one of Spanish descent, unchaperoned. Some mornings they were gone together for hours. Clayton said he would not allow it and often rode out after them. He never saw that they did anything together other than repair the acequia; indeed, they were usually dragging out branches or reinforcing a bank when he came upon them. She has no thought about pretenses or reputation, and she is alone so much of the time, more so than Amy or George ever were. All of her companions are Spanish. She speaks the language without a fault.

My failure has been her education. She cannot sew even a simple hem, and her arithmetic is so poor that I don't believe she could figure the prices listed in a catalog or in a store. When I tried to get her to read to me from the Bible one evening, there were not many words she knew.

“How will you manage your own house?” I asked, but there is no shaming her. She thinks she can live like George does, out in the open on a horse. And she does ride well; there are not many men who ride better than she does. My hope is she will marry some rancher and be content to let him do her riding for her. It is difficult to be a mother of such strong-willed children.

Your Sister,

Abigail

June 15, 1891

Dear Maggie,

Amy and Everett's visit last month was a treat for us. They came in May, she said, because that is when the desert is most beautiful, and we spent many afternoons, and several mornings and evenings, riding through the wildflowers, Spanish broom, which are covered with yellow flowers, the red and orange Indian paintbrush, white-blossoming snakeweed, chamiso, and the cacti, which blaze with large ornamental flowers this time of year.

Everett seemed to enjoy these trips and suggested rides nearly every day up into the mountains or along the mesa. From there, surrounded by red and yellow clay, the small, gnarled piñon trees and prickly pear, you look out across the fields of the valley, which are pale green with the early plantings of alfalfa and corn. Perhaps it is the contrast between the valley and the mountainous desert that makes this place feel enchanted.