The Star Garden

by Nancy E. Turner

  “I didn’t mean it thataway.” She flustered, pulling the coverlet up to her chin. My feet felt as if they were drilled into the floor. “You best not be putting designs on him or you’ll answer to me.”

  “I only meant he seemed like a nice man. Nicer than Professor Fairhaven.”

  There was no way to tell what she meant in the dark, nothing but the sad whine of her voice. A person could make any sound come from their throat, but they’d have to go a long ways before they could hide what’s in their eyes. I wanted to shout and chase her from my room, but I’d better keep her right here so there wouldn’t be any foolishness going on. I said, “He is a nice man. His wife was dear to this family. He’s not looking for a wife right now.”

  “Professor Fairhaven began to make advances toward me so I come to bed.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “What’d he say? I’ll throw him out of the house.”

  “He didn’t say anything. It was the way he looked at me.”

  “Just get some sleep,” I said. I rolled back in and pulled up the covers, trying not to touch her. After a bit I heard her sniffing at odd times and I believed she was crying. I kept quiet. When I awoke before dawn, she was deep asleep and I slid out of the bed without waking her.

  I did the feeding with Gilbert. The eleven head of cows we ended up the season with were all in a fenced pasture close to the house where I could watch for rustlers. That meant they had to be fed and I was deep into Albert’s pockets for that. I’d kept all my horses, too—against my own common sense—because Albert put his foot down and was buying feed for them, too. Our pa had us raising horses before any of us could walk, and Albert said someday we’d need ‘em again. He just couldn’t bear the idea of me selling off the two dozen horses, though their feed bill is triple that of the cows. If all my life fell into perfect step-in-time for the next five years, I’d see things back the way they were. For now I was counting on family and neighbors to keep my place off some banker’s mortgage blotter.

  Hot breath curled from the nose of El Capitán, the prize bull, forced out in gasps between holding his breath as he tried to take a lion’s share of the hay I tossed out, and he made thick noises as he chewed. I tapped him on the side and chanced to rub his great head. There was a crusting of frost on all the cows. The only thing on them that looked warm were their wet and steaming noses. Capitán stepped sideways and I jumped quick to keep from getting my feet broken. The old fellow had gotten pretty tame, being fed and petted. Better to have a bull that only wants to kill you half the time instead of all the time. Most of ‘em see anything moving as standing between themselves and two minutes of true love. That made me think of that Professor Fairhaven. I’d sure be glad to have these strangers gone.

  I left the household to cook their own breakfast while I rode to the arroyo. I wore a pair of Gilbert’s pants under my split skirt. Udell once told me he thought he could sell sheepskin coats in Arizona. I’d laughed at him. What I wouldn’t give for a heavy fleece coat this morning.

  The sky had cleared overnight and the morning world was coated with heavy frost. Puddles on the road were frozen near solid. Baldy had been sassy when I was trying to saddle him before full daylight, and now he acted foolish, stepping in frozen puddles like a little boy will do, just to hear the ice crack. Never saw a horse do that before. At the arroyo, there were still three inches of water in the bottom, but it was sludged over with silt and branches, the last tracks of a rushing torrent. As I stood in the bottom of the gorge, torn weeds and shredded trees showed the height of the flood that had come through. The water had been higher than the tips of my fingers, with my arms stretched as far as I could reach. We’d have all been dead if we’d been in it. I headed for home and gave the horse his head. He was still feeling his oats so he got me there in under an hour, though my nose was near frozen.

  We lined up the rigs and took stock so we could load all the people and baggage from the stage, plus Harland’s family and their few possessions. Albert’s surrey could seat eight people if two were small. Gilbert hitched my dusty old buggy that hadn’t seen daylight in ten years or more, being too small for a family. Then Chess pulled up the buckboard with the two dead folks. None of us dared a look but we decided they’d be frozen pretty solid, judging by the layer of ice on the tarpaulin covering them. We rigged up a platform on the sides and piled the freight on top. Then it was time to sort the people.

  I supposed it would be best to insist Miss James ride with me to keep her from making cow eyes at Harland, but she preferred to ride with Chess, sitting over the dead ones, on top of the boxes and baggage filling the buckboard’s false floor. Professor Osterhaas took off his hat and asked if he could have the pleasure of riding with me.

  Fairhaven did not look happy about riding with Harland’s children all the way to town, which gave me a guilty pleasure thinking how the children would surely entertain him. Gilbert was to stay home and mind the place, but he walked us out of the yard holding the side of the buckboard, until we turned the corner toward Albert’s place. Harland wanted to stop a minute and say farewell. Albert will follow us tomorrow and help drive all these rigs home. It was nearly ten before we got on the road.

  One thing about a long trip with a stranger, if they’re inclined to talk and be genteel, it can be interesting and pass the time right along. Professor Osterhaas knew a great many things, but he was also every bit as interested in what I knew, and asked why I read so many books and all. He declared he had been up most of the night reading, and didn’t even seem surprised that I taught my children and all my nieces and nephews until they went to town for university studies.

  “But you’ve never been, yourself?” he asked.

  My double team was made up of one fairly sober horse on the left and an ornery one on the right that always thought she should pull left. If I put her on the left, we did nothing but turn in circles as if she were hard of seeing in one eye. I shook the reins. It helped to make her pay attention that I was the one holding the harnesses. “Nary a whit.”

  “May I ask where you took your prior education?”

  “Took it, sir?”

  “Normal school, or grammar, that sort of thing?”

  He had a colorful way of stringing words, this professor of letters. Why, under threat I would not admit to a stranger that I’d never passed through the door of a schoolhouse, except the day I took my twelfth-grade examination by mail order. I was plenty tired of these folks, and I surely didn’t want this one clucking his tongue over my ignorance for the next eighty miles.

  Then I remembered my papa making me sound out letters and words from our old family Bible, and then Savannah giving me a piece of newspaper to practice on. “Private,” I said. “I was schooled privately.”

  “Excellent. What a fine governess you’ve had, then. What was that good lady’s name?”

  “Most of the time I’d like to not be asked so many questions, Professor Osterhaas.”

  “Beg pardon, ma’am.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “I think it’s better. Still black and blue.”

  “Starting to knit up, then.”

  After a spell of silence he said, “I must say, it has been a relief to be free for a few minutes from Professor Fairhaven.”

  “How so?” I said.

  “The man’s an intemperate rounder. A popinjay.”

  “Well, I had him called, then. I’d have thought someone who’s a professor—”

  “It has been to my continual … ah. If we had remained in California I’d have recommended him for censure. When I found out the unfortunate Miss Castle was not his bride, you see, I was put in a dreadful fix. As we had been hired together, I was forced to extend professional courtesy as a colleague.”

  My team tussled with their rig. I said, “Tell me about going to college. All my boys tell me about is the pranks they pull and how awful it is, but I saw from their books what they get to read.”

  Reckon I hit on Professor Osterhaa
s’s best subject. He expounded for a good hour on everything a person could study and do and see and all in the name of education. Hearing it made a tingling run from my hair to my shoulders. At the same time disappointment made itself hard in my throat. While he talked, I could imagine the school buildings before me, picture folks from all over the territory waiting for a professor to come tell them about Chaucer or the Alps or Gregorian music. There were student meetings after class, discussions of philosophies from distant lands, clubs and societies for this subject or that, convocations to attend, displays of bird species and lectures on chemistry and real microscopes to look through, and what he called “savoring the search for truth” with poetry and tableaux and violinists from New York.

  “All that,” I said, “takes place here in Tucson? In the Territory?”

  “It took place in Philadelphia. I’m sure the university here is quite the same.”

  “My daughter and her husband lived in Philadelphia for a while. She never mentioned a university.”

  “Well, it probably wouldn’t interest a married woman. She’d have many other concerns.”

  “Raising babies. She’s got three already.”

  “And that young man, Harland, he’s a brother, not your husband?”

  Well, he’d whittled things out of me without my knowing. “Professor, I’ve put two husbands in the ground by that big tree at our place. Here’s the arroyo. You hold on to the sides. This gets to shaking, but it’s not going over.”

  It took our train the better part of an hour to go down one side and back up the other. Professor Osterhaas turned whiter than a sheet a couple of times, but I drove that team hard against the sides, and the footing was wet and soggy but did not give way. At the bottom, we unloaded the buckboard, and while I drove, the men pushed it uphill. To the last, each of us wore half our weight in mud by the time we got back on the road.

  The professor must have been some orator for he started in again, and kept me in a spell with his words about learning. If anyone ever wanted to hear a fine speech, they’d do worse than to pay a nickel for his time. A long time later, when we could see the outlines of Tucson in the distance, Professor Osterhaas said, “I suppose you’re quite caught up in household affairs. Pity. With your educational background, you’d make a fine student.”

  I gritted my teeth against a quick, sharp pain in my chin. “Sir, my educational background was only this side of Abe Lincoln’s spade. The honest truth is that I found some books cast off by the side of the road. That there was the lock, stock, and barrel of my school in between washing diapers, baking bread, and fighting Indians. I’d no more fit in that classroom full of young thirsty minds—as you put it—than I could wear feathers and fly to Constantinople.” I snapped the reins. The buggy jerked forward as the horses picked up their feet a bit. A fine student! Long ago, I’d dreamed of it, but I’d been a girl. Now it was pure tomfoolery and nonsense.

  My eyes watered up and I couldn’t see. Tears slid out of place and tracked down my cheeks. I turned my head away and wiped them, hoping he wouldn’t notice. I had a ranch to run. Work to do if I was going to drag my place out of the ground again. It might never be what it had been when Chess first came with his gift of a cattle herd. The children were small. Jack was here. The work was keeping track of breed stock and branding and hiring and such. Now there was just hoping and scraping and trying to get the garden up and keep the chickens safe from coyotes, both four-legged and two-. What would make a man I barely know think he could talk to me of my secret dreams as if they were no more hidden than a pinto pony in broad daylight?

  “Still, any woman who’s read Theories of Planetary Motion without benefit of instruction, why, deserves a chance—”

  I quit crying. “I reckon you’re trying to be polite, Professor. I’ve always longed to go to school and there’s no one that’s thought about it more than me. It just ain’t going to happen, so I wish you’d let go of that rope and just let the dust settle on it!”

  “Pardon me, madam.” He was quiet the rest of the way to town. It took me a long while to set my face to rights, feeling so torn inside.

  Chess called a halt to our travels and Miss James climbed into the surrey with the children. Then Chess turned off the road toward the undertaker’s. Harland followed me north of town to finally take leave of our company of travelers.

  When we got to the university steps to let them out, that buzzard professor says to me, “It was a simple spade he used. I seem to remember he dug a good, long furrow with it, too. President Lincoln, that is,” and took his bags with not a single word of thanks for all I’d done for him.

  Chapter Three

  December 13, 1906

  By the time we pulled up to my house in town, the sun had dropped behind the mountains past Sentinel Peak, and long shadows followed our weary horses. Jack and I had built that house when April was little and the boys were babies. Two more children had been born there. The baby boy never took a breath, but little Suzanne grew to be two years old. She’d skinned her nose once, toppling off the porch when she was learning to walk. Scarlet fever took her from us before she was three. There were a lot of memories in that place. I watched Harland’s “band of rogues” bundling up the steps, impatiently waiting for me to open the door. I suppose I hadn’t even thought of the place as sad, but there was nothing like the clatter of children to wake a wooden house up. Truth, Honor, and Story bolted through the empty place, whooping and scrambling up the stairs, and for a long while we could hear them stampeding across wooden floors high overhead.

  We’d barely gotten in the door when Blessing dropped to the dusty floor and started kicking her feet against the boards. She yelled and hollered until Harland was beside himself trying to get her to hush. Finally, I said, “Harland, follow me,” and led him out the door. We left her crying on the floor and went around the yard. “You’d better either cut a switch and use it, or ignore that, much as you’re able,” I said. “Soon as she sees you’re not paying attention, she’ll quit.”

  He looked a little nervous, but paid attention while I showed him how to start the pump to get water to the top floor, where the ash hopper went through the wall, and where the valve was to get the gas going into the pipes for lights in the parlor. The whole time, Blessing followed us, sniffling, at times crying, but we ignored her until she came and put her arms around Harland’s right leg.

  “Poppy? Carry me.”

  He took her in his arms, where she sagged against his neck, quiet at last. Harland said, “And how can you tell if all the lights are down? Isn’t there a main switch? I’d put one in.”

  “Maybe you should. I always worried about the gas and mostly used kerosene. We never ran gas lines to the upper floors because I was afraid the children would leave one open and unlit.” I felt as if I were abandoning my little brother to take care of himself. Then I remembered he was only a couple of years younger than I and he’d been doing just that for twenty years. I took Harland’s arm.

  I’d left a couple of cots in the place, where Albert’s and my offspring usually slept while they took classes at the university, and a rugged old table and a few beat-up chairs furnished the kitchen. Otherwise, the house had more spiders than furniture. Well, Harland said he couldn’t possibly do up the place without a woman’s help, so he asked me to stay another day and help him buy some things. I told him if he wanted real style, he’d do better to ask April to come along, as she has lived in Philadelphia and her house is the grandest thing I’ve ever known.

  That evening, I fixed us a simple supper and we all pitched in to clean and sweep the kitchen and make up spare fixings for tonight, with the promise of better things tomorrow. The children were none too happy with just a blanket to curl on, to be sure. But I circled them up and made up a story for them, about four children on a great adventure who could ride their bedrolls like a cloud in the sky, and wherever they wished to go, they could go. The kitchen was the only warm place in the house, so Harland and I let them
eat their suppers sitting on their blankets around the cookstove. They made up a game and shouted out fantastic things we’d eat from their magic bedrolls, like popcorn-ball-picnics held deep under the ocean and animal crackers over the moon, flying fish in India and noodles in New York. Truth said he’d prefer camping in the kitchen to having a regular bed, anytime.

  Harland gave me a stiff argument about the rent, insisting he’d pay $52 a month. I got him to settle on $38. It was fair enough, since he’d helped me build the house years ago. Then he paid me in cash, six months in advance. I’d never taken money from my family, except for when Granny paid for my well and windmill this fall. I took that money—$228 in folding money made a wad too big to put in my pocket—and as I held it in my hand, it poured an awful and strange torrent of feelings through my soul. I was glad to have it, sorry to take it, happy to know we’d eat through Christmas, and mortified to need it, all at the same time. He said he’d fix up a room so I’d always have a bed in town.

  First thing we did next morning was to pay a call at April and Morris’s house. I let my brother talk to my daughter—and she went on and on about furniture and wallpapers and fancy new linoleum floors—while I went upstairs to find her children. Vallary was nine now, Patricia was six, and Lorelei was three. How I love to see those three grandchildren of mine run to my arms! As they smothered me in kisses, I thought of Professor Osterhaas’s foolish suggestion. Schoolgirl grandma—what a hoot! When we came down, April sent their maid for some tea and cookies. She looked pale. When I gave her a hug, she said, “Oh, Mama, please don’t. Oh, my—” and then hurried out of the room. Well, I followed her a ways and she only made it to the conservatory door before she let up her lunch into the potted fern there.

  I went past her and found a clean towel in a stack of folded ones. I ran water over it and brought it to her to wipe her face. “Honey,” I said, “you’d better get out of that corset and lie down.”