Territory (17 page)

Mildred saw the little hip-roofed house on the corner of First Street before she remembered Mrs. Virgil Earp. She resolved to stop and leave her card. And if Mrs. Earp happened to be at home to visitors, and wanted to talk about favorite tales and characters …
At least I can
talk
about writing.

She crossed the street and stepped into the shade of the porch. The front windows were open, muslin curtains shifting in the air, and Mildred could hear a whirring, a rhythmic
chuk-chuk-chuk,
and the murmur of a woman’s voice. One voice, on and on.

Mildred raised her hand to the door, and stopped. The air on the porch was hot, dry, and still, as if some fire-creature stood beside her, and she was caught in the moment between its inhale and the fireball of its exhale.

A breeze tugged her skirt, and the fancy was gone.
Perhaps that’s what ghosts feel like here. Not cold, but hot as a black rock in the sun.
She lifted her hand again and knocked. Then she thought,
Some would say it was the Devil passing.

Sounds behind the door; it opened to reveal one of the prettiest women Mildred had ever seen. Her hair was shining blond, her blue eyes were wide and direct, and her skin was tanned, but smooth and fresh-looking as Lucy Austerberg’s. She wore a wash dress of red printed calico. The humble fabric had been made to fit beautifully. “Yes?” she said.

Mildred had to rummage for a minute to find her voice. “I’m Mrs. Benjamin. Is this … the Virgil Earp residence?”

“That’s right.” The blond woman stood square in the partly open door, unsmiling.

“Is Mrs. Virgil Earp at home?”

That caused a flicker of surprise in the woman’s face. “You want to see Allie?”

“I met her at the post office the other day. I thought …”
Could
one simply say, “I’ve come to further the acquaintance,” as if Mrs. Earp had no choice in the matter?

The blond woman swung the door wide and smiled, and became prettier
still. There was a red leatherette-bound book in her left hand, and she waved Mildred in with it. “Step on in. Allie! Here’s Mrs ….” She shot an apologetic look at Mildred.

“Benjamin,” Mildred said as she stepped over the threshold. She found herself in a tiny parlor that seemed to be full of piled white canvas. The two Earp women she’d already met, Mrs. Virgil and Mrs. Wyatt, were sewing long seams in ells and ells of fabric, the former on a shiny black sewing machine.
That accounts for the sound,
Mildred realized. And the book in the blond woman’s hand—of course, she’d been reading aloud while the others sewed.

Mrs. Virgil looked up, recognized her, and stared. Mildred was surprised at the change in her. Her snub-nosed, round-cheeked face was pink; her light brown hair was pinned up loosely and made her look much younger than when it was hidden under her old-fashioned bonnet.

Mrs. Virgil began, “Why, you’re the lady from the post office—”

“Who also takes
Gallagher’s.
You remember, I suggested we might … but this seems like a poor time.” Mildred waved a hand at the canvas and the sewing machine.

“Pshaw!” said the pretty blond woman. “Nothing like visiting to make the work fly by. No, Allie,” she said to Mrs. Virgil, who to Mildred’s eye hadn’t done a thing to prompt it, “I know where your tea things are. You settle your guest.” And she hurried through a door at the end of the parlor.

Mrs. Virgil looked a little wildly from the door to Mildred. Mildred realized she was doing much the same. She met Mrs. Virgil’s gaze—

—and the little woman began to laugh. Mildred had thought her transformed before, but it was nothing to that laugh.

“Oh, mercy! You looked just like I felt!” she crowed. “Lou’s a cyclone when she sets her mind on something. Mattie, sugar, I’m fair sure there’s a chair under all this.”

That was addressed to Wyatt’s wife, the pale, dark-haired woman Mildred had seen at Austerberg’s. Until now, she’d sat quiet against the wall, as if she’d prefer to disappear into it. Now she sprang to her feet. “Under the window, most like,” she said breathlessly. Then she smiled at Mildred, the shy, hopeful smile of a sheltered child.

“Let me find it,” said Mildred. “I’m good at finding missing things.” Suddenly she felt cheerful and giddy. The Earp women were so guarded in public. Mildred hadn’t expected to find this comfortable chaos, this casual welcome.

She stepped over one pile of canvas and lifted the corner of another.

“Virge’s slippers!” Mrs. Virgil cried. “I looked high and low for those this morning! Hand ’em here, Mrs. Benjamin.”

Mildred scooped them up and presented them with a flourish that made Mrs. Wyatt giggle. “I told you I was good at finding things. And here’s the chair.” Mildred wiggled the spindle-backed chair out from under the pleats of canvas and sat in it. “Now, lend me a needle and put me to work.”

“Oh, no!” Mrs. Wyatt shook her head so hard her dark curls bounced. “You’re company.”

“We don’t get much visiting,” Mrs. Virgil said, “but we ain’t forgot how to treat a guest.”

“If I were in your place, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. Please do let me help.” Industry might smooth over any awkward places in the conversation. “What is all this going to be?”

“Miners’ tents,” Mrs. Virgil said. Her voice was firm and flat, more like the one she’d used to Lucy Austerberg. Her little round chin went up, as it had then.

What did I say?
Mildred wondered. “Do you sell them yourselves, or do the stores in town take them? It must be awfully comfortable to work in your own parlor. I have to tramp four blocks to work every morning, rain or shine.”

Mrs. Virgil’s expression softened. “Well, we have to clear it away at day’s end if we’re wanting a parlor to sit in after supper. It’d be awful nice to have a sewing room.”

“Or a little shop in town,” Mrs. Wyatt murmured. She handed Mildred a sturdy needle and a reel of heavy thread. Mildred scrambled in her purse and found her thimble and folding scissors with a surge of relief. They seemed like a badge of membership in this very womanly club.

“Then you’re a working woman, Mrs. Benjamin?” Mrs. Virgil asked.

“I set type for the
Nugget.”

“I don’t know as I’ve heard of a woman working on a newspaper.”

“I spend so much time correcting reporters’ spelling and complaining about their handwriting, it’s almost like teaching school.” It wasn’t, really; Mildred would have hated teaching school.

Lou, the blond woman, came in with a stout brown teapot, four cups, and a plate of sliced molasses cake on a tin tray.

Mrs. Virgil made a little outraged noise. “Lou, those ain’t the good cups!”

“The good cups are too small. What a blessing you came, Mrs. Benjamin,” Lou said. “Allie works us like field hands, and I was fair parched for my tea break.”

Mrs. Virgil laughed. Mrs. Wyatt smiled and shook her head. “Lou, you’re an awful fibber.” She took the first poured cup from Lou and gave it to Mildred.

Mildred wanted to carry on with the blond woman’s joke. But there was
something in this room, this family group, that she didn’t yet understand. Besides, not everyone could tell when Mildred was joking. For no good reason, that made her think of Jesse Fox who, it seemed, could. The recollection made her uneasy. “Thank you, Mrs. Earp,” she said.

“If you call us all ‘Mrs. Earp,’ ” Mrs. Virgil declared as she came out from behind the sewing machine, “we’ll be in the stickers in no time. Call me Allie. That’s Mattie.” She nodded at shy Mrs. Wyatt. “And Louisa, there, is another Mrs. Earp, of course.”

“Mrs. Morgan Earp,” Lou said, pouring another cup of tea. She brushed a blond curl off her forehead with the back of her wrist. “But Allie’s right—call me Lou.”

“And I’m Mildred,” Mildred replied, with a deep sense of relief. She passed the cup to Allie.

The tea was strong, and the cake was dense and full of raisins. Not a token meal, but proper refreshment for working women. Mildred felt nearly as comfortable as she would in her own kitchen.

That reminded her of what she’d been doing at her kitchen table. “Mrs.— Allie, what did you make of the serial story in last week’s
Gallagher’s?”

Allie frowned a little over a mouthful of cake. “Tell the truth, I thought it was pretty silly. Why didn’t Jonathan just
tell
his brother he’d got married?”

“Oh, good, it wasn’t just me!”

Lou poured more tea in Mildred’s cup and said, “But the rest of the story wouldn’t’ve happened if he’d just told him.”

“Well, then he needed a good reason not to,” Allie said, as if she’d like to give the characters a piece of her mind.

Mildred considered the problem. “What if he’d married a beautiful quadroon, and didn’t dare say so for fear of being cast out of the family?” It sounded terribly melodramatic, but as she said it, she began to imagine the story. The dusky-skinned bride, her Paris gowns and lovely manners the outward signs of her inner quality, would come looking for her long-delayed husband. She would arrive on the doorstep and announce herself, never expecting that her husband would turn coward and deny he’d married her. “Connected we may be,” he’d declare in front of his father and brother, “but not by the laws of God and Man!”

“Oh, that’d be a fine story!” Mattie breathed, her eyes sparkling, and Mildred realized she’d done her musing aloud. “Oh, Allie, don’t you think that’d be good?”

“It’d be better by a long chalk,” Allie agreed. “But then I’d say that if Jonathan married her, he ought to show some spine and stand by her.”

At that, Mildred saw a look flash between Allie and Lou. It was gone before she could identify it. “Well, if he doesn’t, it’s a tragedy. And if he does own up at the last moment … Say she’s gone to fling herself in the river, poor girl, but he realizes that he’s just thrown away the dearest thing in the world to him. He tells his family that he loves his bride and they can, too, or they can go to …”

“Hartford,” Allie said promptly, grinning.

“Exactly! And he runs after her and finds her on the cliff above the river. He flings his arm around her waist just as she’s about to go in—”

“—And he pulls her to his bosom and calls her his dear,” Mattie finished with deep satisfaction. “And says they’ll never again be parted, in this world or in Heaven.”

“Oh, good touch! I like that bit,” Mildred said.

Allie laughed. “Well, that’s a silly story, too, but miles better than what they printed in
Gallagher’s.”

“Allie, there ain’t a romantic bone in your body!” Lou scolded. “I liked it.”

“Just ’cause it’s silly don’t mean I don’t like it. Mrs. Benjamin—Mildred— it’s a shame they don’t have the likes of you writing for ‘em.”

Mildred half wanted to tell them she
had
written, and been accepted, and was doing it again. It would feel so good to have someone make a fuss—a good sort of fuss—over her. But she had an instinct to hold back. It was one thing to say that someone like Mildred should write for
Gallagher’s
; it was another to say that Mildred should
be
that someone.

Perhaps when “Stampede at Midnight” appeared in print, she’d tell them that she was M. E. Benjamin. Instead she said, “Where did I put that blessed needle?”

They spent a pleasant half hour sewing; or rather, Allie, Mattie, and Lou sewed. Allie assigned Mildred the job of reading aloud once she saw the quality of Mildred’s stitching. The book was
Vanity Fair,
and Mildred made her hostesses laugh by doing voices for the characters.

At last Mildred felt the effect of the tea. “I’m afraid I need a bit of a pause.”

Allie looked up inquiringly, then understood. “Oh, sure! Go straight through the kitchen. It’s at the end of the yard.”

The kitchen was small, but fiercely clean, with a well-blacked stove and a scoured wood table. Four loaves of bread were cooling by the sink board. Outside the back door Mildred passed a fenced patch of kitchen herbs, already inclined to go to seed from the hot days, and a tiny chicken yard and coop. The outhouse was half-hidden and shaded by a thick growth of trumpet
vine. Just beyond it was a corral with a shelter. Mildred could hear the lazy flicking of horses’ tails from inside it.

Had Virgil Earp built the hip-roofed house, or had he bought it? She and David had been lucky to find their cabin when they’d come to Tombstone. Boomtown real estate didn’t sit vacant long. And if there hadn’t been anything ready-built, she reflected with a smile, she might have had to settle for a canvas tent like the ones the Earp women were sewing. David hadn’t been what anyone would call handy.

As she returned to the kitchen through the back door, she heard voices from the parlor. One of them was Allie’s, but the other was new to her: low, hoarse, attractive but sexless. The speaker could be a contralto woman or a tenor man. Mildred paused at the door to the parlor, reluctant to step into unknown social waters.

Allie was saying, “… peelin’ her eyes for boys at her age. My Lord, Hattie’s seventeen! But where’s she gonna meet ‘em? It ain’t like Jim and Bessie get asked to parties, so who’s gonna invite Bessie’s little girl?”

The stranger laughed, brittle and unamused. “Let her meet men the way her mama did.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Such a nice little sewing circle you’ve got here.” Mildred thought the stranger—a woman, she decided—was changing the subject. “The Earp ladies, all good honest wives helping to support their households.”

“And what’s wrong with that?” Lou asked, scorn in her voice.

“Not a thing. A little sewing, a little egg money … And your sister-in-law Bessie on her back on the line, keeping Jim Earp in nice boots.”

There was a moment of silence so deep and shocked it felt like the moment after a gunshot. Jim Earp—that was the oldest Earp brother, who kept the Eagle Brewery on Allen Street. He and his wife had a nearly grown daughter ….

“Bessie wasn’t ever a whore!” That was Allie. Mildred could imagine the flush in her face, the fierce set of her jaw.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t she get poisoned by the Earps like the rest of us?”

Quiet Mattie spoke up, to Mildred’s surprise. “You take that back, Kate Holliday. The Earps have done nothin’ but kindness to you and your man.”