Haymarket (3 page)

This time Albert flared. “Don’t know what you’re implyin’, but I don’t like it. Those men were
dyin’
to find work, work where they wouldn’t be cheated out of their wages after the job was done. I paid them
on the line
, week after week. The first pay they’d ever had, I’m proud to say.”

“All right, then.” Lucy laughed. “You got to remember we’re jes gettin’ acquainted. And I’m a highly suspicious woman.”

“I’ve noticed. About the most suspicious woman I ever met.” Some anger still burned in his eyes.

“And with good reason,” Lucy said sharply. “But that’s a different story. You were tellin’ me about that harvest.”

Albert decided not to press her further. “We brought it in together, standin’ and sweatin’ all day in the sun. And you’re right—I’m no farmin’ man. One harvest was enough to teach me that. But it brought me enough money to start the
Spectator
. Money long gone—or I wouldn’t be out here makin’ like a tax collector. No one’ll hire me as a reporter, or printer …”

“Why? You got the skills.”

Albert laughed. “Sure do. But I got me a reputation, too. I didn’t close down the
Spectator
. People just stopped buyin’ it. Called me a low-down scalawag, gone over to ‘the enemy.’ Seems I printed too many stories about the plight of colored folks. Wrote ’em myself, hell, I did
everything
myself, a one-man operation. It was the story about the eight-year-old black girl they raped to death near Montague—”

Lucy made some strange guttural noise in the back of her throat and got up from her chair so abruptly it nearly toppled over.

“That was the story,” Albert continued, his voice an octave lower, “that got me on Cullen Banker’s Most Wanted list. He updates it weekly y’know, nails it to the door of the Eagle Saloon in Waco.”

Lucy was pacing back and forth.

“You know about Cullen Baker?” Albert asked gently.

“Acourse I know, who don’t,” Lucy snapped. “The Swamp Fox of the Sulphur, he likes to be called. Kills colored folks for sport. Some whites, too.” Suddenly she burst out in a torrent. “It’s
worse
than slavery times, that’s what it is!
Worse!
And I mean for grown colored women, too … don’t dare say no … White men think it’s their right, they don’t ask, they choose, like pickin’ a cow at auction: ‘I’ll take this here heifer, brand her, throw her in my wagon …’ I’ve heard all the stories I wanna hear, got me stories enuf to back up the bile to my throat! You hearin’ me? Don’t want no more stories!” She was screaming by then, and Albert rushed over to take her in his arms. The sobbing racked her body, and spittle seeped from the corner of her mouth. Albert had to rock her in his arms for a long time before she was able to dry her tears.

Everybody on the place realized that Albert was seriously courting. And everyone seemed to approve, judging at least from the way the two Mexican
women would beam at him the instant he came into sight. Some of the cowpunchers liked to tease him about “bein’ so ugly he had to go courtin’ in the next county.” “Well, fellas,” Albert would say genially, “I’m doin’ the best I can with what the good Lord gave me.”

Only Lucy’s uncle was standoffish, barely civil for the first few months. Until the night, that is, when Albert made casual reference to the new tax rolls “due out any day,” and tacked on the calculated comment that an upright citizen like Señor Gonzalez, what with being fully paid up and all that, had nothing to feel concerned about. The very next night Gonzalez took Albert aside and, with a patently insincere smile, said he’d been noticing his interest in Lucy and thought they did seem a likely pair. “You’re beginnin’ to feel like a member of the family.” Gonzalez didn’t bother to spell out the rest. Tax rolls never came up again and Señor Gonzalez became downright cordial.

At night, Lucy gave Albert two choices: sleep outdoors or in the bunkhouse. He chose the outdoors, knowing that nobody snored like an exhausted cowpuncher. But the time came in late fall when it was too cold for sleeping outside—or for Albert to maintain the pretext that he any longer had enough revenue work to provide a steady wage. He knew he had to find a new job, or at least a new territory, and that meant returning for a time to Waco. To Lucy, he made light of the distance between Waco and the Gonzalez ranch and promised he’d make the trip every two weeks. She believed him, secure in his affections and feeling certain he was an honorable man. Gonzalez told him he’d be welcome to stay over for a few days each visit and could have a small room of his own in the main house.

Both Albert and Gonzalez proved as good as their word, though Albert’s probity was put to the harsher test. No stagecoach line ran directly north from Waco—not that Albert would have had the patience to abide the constant breakdowns from rutted roads or flooded riverbanks, or the tedious stops to deliver mail and to change teams. His only option was to ride the sixty miles to the Gonzalez ranch on Bessie. His very first trip coincided with a late, blistering heat wave, and that meant the descent of a horde of black flies not yet killed off by frost and as relentless in their assault as the sweat that poured down Albert’s back. In the plains area, the water was so muddy that the locals liked to say they “had to chew it before they could swallow it,” and both he and Bessie were parched and
suffering until they could find a clear spring. Thereafter, as the weather cooled, the trips became easier, and Albert arrived faithfully at the ranch every two weeks. In between, he found occasional pickup work in one of Waco’s friendlier printing shops, giving him just enough money to survive. In early spring he got his job back as a tax collector, and his life with Lucy again took on a smooth daily rhythm.

They ventured beyond the ranch only rarely, usually in response to a neighbor’s call for assistance. When a new settler and his wife in nearby Grandview sent out a call for help in raising their house, they knew that every healthy man within a five-mile radius would feel obliged to show up. Lucy and the other women kept the food and drink coming, while Albert joined the men in cutting the felled trees into logs, using pry-poles as levers in rolling the larger pieces onto an ox-cart, and then, at the building site, lifting them into place so they could be notched. Albert had neither the skills nor the acquired stamina of the others, yet insisted on working as long as they did. “Is this what’s known as ‘fun’ around here?” he gasped to Lucy. “It’s all we got!” Lucy answered with a laugh. “But cheer up—you’re goin’ to love the all-night dancin’ that follows.” A bleary-eyed Albert sank to his knees in mock despair, hands raised to heaven in silent entreaty. “I’m only teasin’, silly.” Lucy said, kissing the top of his head.

In the tradition of the area, when a family wanted to celebrate some milestone, they’d send out riders to notify the surrounding community that they were throwing a dance. (Once, Lucy told Albert, she’d been at a party where the fiddler had been a negro, a man no one in the area had ever seen before; she’d tried to talk to him between sets, but he quickly moved away.) She and Albert did attend one neighbor’s celebration of a daughter’s marriage. The fiddler that evening played variations all night long on the same three numbers—the Quadrille, the Virginia Reel, and something called Shooting the Buffalo, which, strangely, proved the most sedate and formal of the three. Albert quickly mastered the dances—Lucy already knew them—and even invented his own special shout when turning his partner during the Reel. Lucy said it sounded somewhere between a hog grunt and a yodel.

Despite the occasional pleasures of the country, Albert no longer felt at home among ranchers and farmers—which he himself thought curious,
since he’d lived on the frontier as a boy and had loved the outdoors. He supposed Waco had citified him more than he’d been aware; he’d come to prefer people to unpopulated space, however beautiful, and would rather debate the changing face of Reconstruction than the comparative merits of branding calves at birth versus later. He’d come to think that should he have to leave Waco for good, his preference would be to move to a still larger town, one that might offer the chance to work again as a reporter or typesetter, and to plunge into the daily maelstrom of events.

And might offer, too, the chance to take Lucy with him. He wanted to marry her, to live with her, to set up a place of their own. He’d made that clear many months ago. Initially Señor Gonzalez had been opposed to what he called “too quick a hitchin’ ” (an opposition, Albert felt sure, based on disgruntlement over losing an efficient housekeeper). But then Gonzalez’s fortune took a decided turn for the better: the plague of rust and grasshoppers that had decimated wheat fields across north Texas for five years abruptly ended, with a resulting harvest so bountiful no one could remember its like. An elated, much more prosperous Gonzalez gave his blessing, and promptly hired a third Mexican woman.

But Lucy herself held back, much to Albert’s bewilderment, since she’d already told him that she fully reciprocated his feelings. On the evening when he formally asked her to be his wife, her eyes shone with pleasure and she told him in a hushed voice that she’d been certain from the beginning that they were meant to spend their lives together. Albert held her close and kissed her, his heart pounding. But as she clung to him, her face became shadowed in sadness. Lucy knew they could never legally marry, not here in Texas, anyway. Mixed marriage was a crime (though white men forcing themselves on female slaves before the War hadn’t been); interracial couples could be imprisoned, deported to Liberia—or burned alive. Lucy had long ago made the decision never to reveal that her ancestry
was
, in truth, part African; she refused to let the world use the information to circumscribe her options or subject her to the scorn and indignities meted out as a matter of course to “inferior people.”

Feeling her change in mood, Albert held her at arm’s length, the better to gauge it. Lucy did her best to feign a smile, but she’d never been good at concealing emotion. Albert sensed, suddenly and with certainty, that he knew exactly what was bothering her. The time had finally come to talk openly about “the rumors.”

He broached the subject farcically, puffing out his chest like a stage buffoon as he announced how lucky Lucy should feel at gaining entrance to a family as accomplished and patriotic as his.

“High-toned folks, no doubt,” Lucy sniffed. “Meaning boring and self-satisfied.”

“None of them as sprightly as me, that’s for sure!”

“Well, my ancestry’s just as illustrious as yours,” Lucy said tartly—fully realizing what topic they were about to embark on. She gratefully picked up on Albert’s farcical tone.
“More
illustrious, come to think of it. Several great civilizations course through my veins. All you got is that thin Yankee stuff.”

“What?” Albert mocked. “I’ll have you know, young Texas miss, that my great-great-granduncle was the first judge for the Northwest Territory—till he drowned when his canoe capsized. One member of my family lost an arm at Bunker Hill, another a hand at Valley Forge.”

“Not too good at holding on to their body parts, are they? Must’ve been runnin’ backwards rather than forward.”

“Unlike your Montezuma, they managed to keep their heads at least.”

Lucy let out a delighted screech and smacked Albert hard. “Don’t you go defaming my people—you hear me, Yankee boy!”

“You dare talk that way to a wild young colt like me?”

“Oh? Ain’t noticed no colt ’round here.”

Albert grabbed her aggressively around the waist and with a loud puckering sound kissed her on the lips. She stepped away and rolled her tongue around her mouth, as if savoring a candy. “I’d call that a cheerful kiss,” she said mischievously. “Fond and friendly. Didn’t taste no eager, plucky ‘young colt’ in it.”

“That’s ’cause your mouth’s set so stern, nuthin’ much can get through.”

Lucy made a playful swipe at him. “I’m a serious woman,” she declared. “Don’t want no wild teenager for a husband, so it’s a good thing you’re a lousy kisser. I’m looking for a man with good cow sense.”

“The cow’s about the stupidest animal exists.”

“But does what it’s told. No sass.”

“Oh—so you’re lookin’ for somebody you can boss around. Sorry ma’am, no descendant of Revolutionary War heroes is about to take orders from anyone, not even from an Aztec queen.”

“I ain’t all Aztec.” She gave him a hard stare and decided it was time to get it over with “I love you, Albert,” Lucy said solemnly. “Even more, I admire you,” she went on, her voice low and resonant. “Your principles, your dangerous work on the
Spectator
on behalf of my—of people who are downtrodden. I want to share that work with you. I want to spend my life with you. I’m a proud woman, Albert. I’m not ashamed of any part of who I am. But you should know that I’m of many parts, not just Spanish and Indian. Do you understand me? To try and marry would mean the other parts might come to light—with hell to pay.”

“I understand, I’ve understood for some time,” Albert said, his voice subdued.

“You and I know who I am. We also know that if I want to live with you and stay alive, only you and I must know.”

Albert moved to embrace her. “I accept that completely, Lucy, completely.” She abruptly pushed him away.

“Better than
I
can, then! I’ll do what I have to do, what I been doin’, but I curse this land that makes me deny part of myself in order to survive. I
curse
it, you hear?!”

Albert grabbed her and held her close, comforting himself as much as her. “I know, my love,” he whispered quietly. She cried bitterly as he stroked her hair. “I know. But we do have each other. That means something, doesn’t it?”

Lucy wiped away the tears and disengaged from Albert’s arms. “It means everything—especially if they don’t murder us.” She let out a playful laugh, as Albert marveled to himself at her quicksilver changes in mood. Lucy grabbed his hand and led him toward the house. “Now recite me some verse, my wild colt, like those poems you sing to Bessie. Prove to Lucy that she’s in the hands of a safe and singing man.”