The Chili Queen (22 page)

“Do you think he will figure out who you are?” John asked, when they stopped to water and rest the horses.

Emma shrugged. “Addie has heard of me. She brought up my name once. On the train, she sought to frighten me about blacklegs and told me some were women. She mentioned several whose names I believe she made up, as they sounded like prostitutes. Then she said Ma Sarpy was in the jail in Breckenridge.”

John’s ice blue eyes were mirthful. “Then I believe we must avoid Breckenridge at all costs. They did not mention Georgetown?”

Emma shook her head. “We should be safe at home. I am anxious to be there.”

John thought that over as they mounted the horses again. “Nonetheless, we should be prudent and consider turning west at Pueblo and going through Leadville. If Ned does follow us as far as Pueblo, he’ll figure we’re headed for Denver. Who would believe we’d leave the main road to go through the mountains? Does he connect you with Denver?”

Emma didn’t know. She couldn’t recall mentioning Denver to him—nor Leadville and certainly not Georgetown. She did not like the idea of taking the mountain route because it meant extra days in the saddle. But she knew John was right, although she shuddered at the idea, for the tiredness already had seeped into her bones.

John turned and studied her. “Can you make it?”

Ned had asked her the same thing, and she gave the same reply. “You will not find me wanting.”

When they came across a coulee with a trickle of water for the horses, John called a halt for the night, although Emma was willing to ride on. She felt exposed on the prairie, under a bright moon the color of butter, and refused to let John build a fire. Since the night was bright, Emma was afraid that Ned, following behind, would see the smoke. So they ate a cold supper, then rolled up in the blankets John had brought, to sleep away the day’s fatigue.

Sometime after midnight, Emma was shaken awake. At first, she thought that Ned had found them, and she cursed herself for not insisting they keep a watch. But it was John who had awakened her, saying she had muttered loudly in her sleep, then had cried out.

“Nightmares?” he asked, holding her so tightly that she could not move.

“Yes,” Emma whispered, as the dream flooded back over her. The dreams that once made her afraid to fall asleep at night had become less frequent over the years, but they still came, usually just after she and John had finished a job. The excitement, the little wave of terror, the letdown when it was over brought them on.

“I’ll sit with you,” John said, but Emma told him no. She wanted him to keep his arms around her and make her feel safe, but he was exhausted after the headache and the events of the day. One of them should get some sleep, and she knew she would not be that one. Besides, she never slept much. John reached for his saddlebags and took out a bottle of whiskey and handed it to Emma. “Maybe this will help, but be careful. You don’t want to get full when we have a long ride tomorrow.”

There was a time when liquor had been the only thing that helped. Emma uncorked the bottle and took a sip, but she found the whiskey excessively bitter, and she gave the bottle back to John.

“They deserved it, Addie and Ned. All the others, too,” John said, lying on his back and looking up at the stars.

“The others, perhaps, but not Ned and Addie. We were wrong about them. They aren’t so bad—not like Charley said. Addie, I think even you might have liked her.” Suddenly Emma leaned forward and said, “John, we killed the Minder brothers, Ned and I did. I stabbed Earlie, and Ned shot Black Jesse. They were as evil as everybody said they were, horrid men devoid of morality. Earlie was just like Yank Markham. We buried them where nobody will ever find them, buried them facedown. I wish they had buried Yank that way, facing toward hell.”

Emma hadn’t been sure that she would tell John about the Minders, but now that she had started, she told him everything, how she and Ned were ready to rob the bank at Jasper and how the Minders had gotten there first. She told him of riding into the canyon in the rain to get away from the sheriff and camping and waking up to find the Minders standing over them. Earlie had forced her to go with him, she said, and when he turned away, she stabbed him over and over again, just the way she would have stabbed Yank Markham. In fact, she wasn’t sure but what she thought it was Yank she was killing. Emma didn’t cry as she talked; her voice was steady. It was almost as if she were telling about something that had happened to another woman. Not until she was finished did Emma realize John had wrapped his blanket around her shoulders and was caressing her back and arms. “I was glad we did it, John, glad we killed them. Ned told me a story about two boys the Minders murdered. They were vile men, and they deserved to die. They’ll never hurt anyone again. I’m glad they’re gone.”

Emma paused, then she began to shake. “But Earlie…looking into his eyes when he started for me, it brought it all back about Yank and the others, details I’d forgotten. It was raining when we rode into the canyon. There was thunder. It always makes me shudder—because of Cora Nellie. She was afraid of it. There was thunder the night before Yank came, and we took Cora Nellie into bed with us to calm her.”

“I know,” John said, and his steady voice calmed her. He rocked back and forth with Emma in his arms. He stayed with her like that, holding her and murmuring that she was safe, until Emma told him she was all right and that he should go sleep. She would check on the horses and sit under the stars a little longer, until she was sleepy.

“I don’t suppose you will ever be free of that terrible rough time,” John said.

Emma didn’t answer, and they both knew she never would. After a while, John went to sleep, but not Emma. Wrapped in a blanket, she sat in the dark and let the dread of that time wash over her, as if it had all happened that very day. In reality, the day had been eight years before.

Emma was nineteen when she married Tom Sarpy. She met him the morning he arrived in Galena, Illinois, seeking his fortune. He had fought in the Union army under Ulysses S. Grant and decided that the town that claimed the general ought to be as good a place as any for a man to get a start. Emma was hanging up sheets in the back of the boardinghouse where she cooked and cleaned and did the washing. She appraised Tom from the corner of her eye as he climbed the hillside and stopped at the boardinghouse.

“Sir,” she mumbled, for her mouth was full of clothespins that stuck out like buck teeth.

Tom cocked his head a little and grinned at her. “You got a room, do you?” he asked. Afterward, he told her he wasn’t looking for a place to stay at all, since he had little money, and he husbanded it. But inquiring about a room was the only way he could think of to strike up a conversation with Emma. He found her mightily attractive.

Emma took the clothespins from her mouth and nodded, a little afraid her voice would betray her if she talked, for she was already wondering if it were possible to fall in love at first sight. She took Tom inside the boardinghouse and showed him accommodations on the second floor, directly below her own attic room. Emma had lived in the boardinghouse since she was sixteen, when her father died from grief. Her mother had passed on two years before that, and Emma’s father never recovered. Her parents had been cultured people, her mother from a family in New Jersey, where she had attended a finishing school, just as Emma told Addie. Emma was raised in the sunshine of childhood to take pleasure in poetry, to stitch a pretty seam, to speak with refinement. Her father was a prosperous farmer, but things had gone awry after Emma’s mother’s death, and in place of the substantial estate her parents had expected to leave their only child, Emma inherited debts. So instead of attending a college, as her parents had planned, Emma quit secondary school to work in the boardinghouse. She had had proposals of marriage—back then, she had been quite pretty, tall, with black hair and strong features—but no one caught her fancy until Tom Sarpy came whistling up the steep road to the boardinghouse.

“You’ll have to stay a month. That’s the rule,” Emma said, when she was sure her voice was steady. There was no rule to that effect, but Emma had such a feeling just then about Tom Sarpy that she could not bear for him to leave before they got to know each other.

Later, Tom admitted, “I would have stayed a year if you’d asked me to.” But as it turned out, a month was long enough, and when it was up, they were wed—a marriage of true love. It developed in a homey way, for Tom had little money to spend on courting. He helped Emma in the kitchen, talking as he shelled peas and stoned raisins. He chopped wood while she rubbed sheets and shirts on a scrubboard. When Emma’s day was done, the two of them walked past the prosperous cottages and gaudy mansions of Galena and out along the river or sat on the porch, Emma’s piecework in her lap.

“I have never known a woman to be so direct spoken,” Tom told her one evening, as they stopped to rest from their walk, in front of a brick mansion with white trim that dripped from the eaves like icicles. He did not care for a simpering woman, he said. “You are good-natured in accepting the hardship that’s befalled you.” He plunged ahead without thinking. “I need a wife who isn’t afraid of hard work, and you would suit me finely.” He blushed furiously at that, for it wasn’t the proposal he had intended.

Nor was it the proposal Emma wanted. She looked away, studied the mansard roof of the great house where the dying rays of the sun lit up the pattern of diamonds made by the multicolored shingles. She was disappointed, although she would have accepted any offer of marriage from Tom, for he had stirred her heart to a froth. He was cheerful and lighthearted, and he made friends with everyone. Emma admired those qualities since she herself was dour at times, and she was wary of people. But she longed for more than Tom’s telling her she was a worker and that they were suitably matched. She wanted words of love and undying devotion, silly though they might be. Emma was practical, oh, yes, but in her heart, there was romance. She had dreamed of being swept off her feet by a boy who would hand her a bouquet of roses as he knelt on one knee, begging for her hand.

Tom seemed to sense that. Suddenly, he grabbed her hands in his and looked earnestly into her eyes. “You are the truest girl I’ve ever met, and I love you more than life itself. Why, if you don’t agree to marry me, I shall leave this minute for the western gold fields, and you will have to clean out my room and throw my things onto the rubbish heap.” Then despite the dusty street and two women watching from the pergola in the yard, Tom dropped to his knees, a mournful look on his face.

It was a bit of foolishness that Emma cherished for the rest of her life. And right then, she leaned over and kissed Tom on the mouth and told him, “Why, I will follow you anywhere, and I would prefer to do it as your wife—” she whispered devilishly, “although it is not absolutely necessary.” Then she blushed furiously, and Tom knew it was absolutely necessary.

The two of them tried to buy land in the splendid-looking farming country of rolling hills around Galena, but what was available was too costly, and neither of them had money—Emma barely had enough to pay for the gold watch she gave Tom as a wedding present. Besides, they were adventurous, and so not long after they were married, they decided to check out for themselves the new agricultural El Dorado in the West. They piled their few belongings into a wagon and left Galena for a Colorado homestead, settling near the rough little town of Mingo.

The farm was as cheerless a prospect as anyone could imagine, hardly the first-rate land to cultivate they had hoped for, but they got by, and neither Tom nor Emma ever regretted moving to Colorado. The two of them were indeed well suited. Emma worked beside Tom in the fields, planting and harvesting, and he built her as nice a house as he could make from strips of sod he dug from the plains. He even installed a glass window. They made friends with other homesteaders, and they attended the little church the settlers had started. Emma had a fine voice and a flair for drama, and she acted in the theatricals and tableaux vivants that passed for culture in Mingo.

Two years after Tom and Emma married, Cora Nellie was born. She was early and small, and her parents knew before she was very old that Cora Nellie would always have the sweet, simple mind of a child.

When that became clear, Emma fretted. “I have failed you,” Emma told Tom.

Tom shushed her. “Cora Nellie is God’s perfect child, for she will never know the evils of the world,” he said. And Emma believed him.

The two of them hoped for other children, someone to take care of Cora Nellie after they were gone, but that had not happened. And so they considered the little girl their lucky piece.

As if to make up for her simple mind, Cora Nellie grew into an exceptionally pleasing child in looks, with coal black hair, white skin, and eyes the color of Emma’s—the color of the prairie sky. “She looks like my doll baby,” Lorena Spenser, a neighbor girl, told Emma, and indeed, the little girl was as pretty and as delicate as a china doll.

Cora Nellie was seven when Yank Markham rode into the Sarpy barnyard with three other men. Mingo was a lawless place, attracting desperadoes and malcontents, and Yank wasn’t the first man of unsavory character to stop at the Sarpy farm to ask for a meal or a fresh horse. But Tom welcomed everyone most heartily, ready to share whatever was on hand, and the little family was never molested.