by Karen Osborn
This summer we plan to use the acequia to irrigate. Each landowner is given a specified time during which he can raise the gate, allowing water to flow into his ditches, and various penalties result if a landowner is caught raising the gate when it is not his time to do so. Still, if someone upstream were to use our share of the water, it would be difficult to prove his dishonesty. Señor López, from whom we purchased our land, is a large and powerful landowner who farms a nearby tract of land, and we are counting on his influence to protect our water rights. But in a drought, as Clayton has pointed out to me, there is no way to know how one’s neighbors will act.
Your Sister,
Abigail
August 5, 1874
Dear Maggie,
We have had enough alfalfa to sell some, and so I am sending the money you kindly loaned us last winter. We planted nearly an acre in alfalfa, first leveling the ground, then dividing it into squares with raised borders, finally digging the ditches to carry the water. Maintaining these ditches is timeconsuming, but well worth it. We have had four good cuttings in one season.
This past month Clayton made some money speculating on the mines south of here. He insists on taking half his earnings and investing them on a new site. I have tried to persuade him against speculation, but he will not hear me, and so I count this money gone. We spent part of what was left on the purchase of two buff-colored mules. There is enough remaining for Amy’s school tuition and her board for the winter.
The only church nearby is a Catholic chapel. It has a courtyard with all kinds of statues painted so that the place looks nearly like a circus. The Virgin Mary is a bright blue, as brilliant a shade as the sky (indeed, I have heard a woman refer to her painted robes as the sky’s mirror), and her skin is not cream colored but a darker shade, with the red of an autumn leaf or the sienna of clay. The folds of her dress and the features of her face are nearly primitive in their design, angular and harsh as if the artist did not know how to mold the lines. The feet are wide and the toes thicker than human toes. The hands also do not have the graceful curves we are accustomed to seeing on fine works of art.
By your last letter I see we are both to be delivered soon. I expect mine to come near Christmas. Amy will attend school, boarding in Santa Fe for the winter with the family of one of the other children in the school. While I have longed to send her, I know I shall miss her terribly, and even at the age of eleven, she seems young to be away at school. During the many days of Clayton’s long absences, I spoke to no one but Amy. Sometimes it seems we are of the same mind, and I thank God that after losing Josh, I have been able to keep my first born.
Your grateful and devoted sister,
Abigail
December 6, 1874
Dear Maggie,
I have sent you a package. You should receive notice of it in a week or two, as I sent it by railroad. There is nothing of too great an expense in it, just an Indian basket and a few trifles from the southwest which you may find amusing.
This year we are well prepared for the season, with grains, dried beans, and the vegetables and fruit we have dried or preserved. We have a large quantity of wood cut, and Clayton has been on a few profitable hunting expeditions. Many of the people here raise hogs, goats, and chickens, and as soon as Clayton is able, we will build a barn so that we can raise our own livestock.
George has had a cough, and I have given him plenty of red pepper tea and wrapped his throat and chest in flannel. Clayton goes to town next week to bring Amy back to us, and Mrs. Deering has offered to come and stay. My hope is that the baby will wait until Clayton’s and Amy’s return, but if not, Mrs. Deering is of a sensible mind and will be of great help.
Will Mother not write to us, even at Christmas time? You write that she is full of concern about my condition. I sent her another letter, all but begging her to reply, more than four weeks ago now, and still I have received nothing. How is it you can say that I am the prideful one?
Your Repentant Sister,
Abigail
January 3, 1875
Dearest Maggie,
I received your letter and celebrated your news of Susan’s arrival. Margaret Anne was born just before Christmas. She has hair dark as yours and blue eyes. I hope you are pleased by the name. If I cannot have my sister here in the flesh, I will have you here in spirit. She is a sweet baby but very colicky. I do not know if it is the water or maybe the drafts make her stomach cramp. But do not worry about her; she has the strongest set of lungs you have ever heard!
Amy was here for three whole weeks. She has learned reading, writing, and sewing and is quite the young lady. George Michael pestered to get her to chase jack rabbits, but she would not. She was such a help with the new baby, and every evening we spent reading together from a book of poems she had been given by her teacher. I shall miss her this long winter.
You would hardly know our house was the same shack we moved into a year ago. There is one big room made mostly of clay bricks, and we have put in a six-pane window and a wooden door. I put straw under the rag carpet Amy and I wove last summer and tacked it down. Our bed is on a platform, the curtains are put up, and Clayton got a store-bought rocker and two more chairs to go with our table. I trimmed the shelves Clayton made with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. With the stove going, we are quite snug, a far piece from last winter, when our walls gleamed with a sheet of ice and the air itself was nearly crystallized with frost.
Last week our neighbor Señora Teresa Martinez took me inside the Catholic church. It is small and built of clay bricks, lined inside with crude wooden benches that are the pews. There were a number of statues inside, similar to those in the courtyard, except that they are actually dressed, the same way you would dress up a doll, in lace and bright satin. A statue of the body of Jesus had been made and placed in a glass casket which stands along one of the walls. The figure was quite realistic, complete with gashes and blood.
Señora Teresa told a strange story about the man who sculpted it. As he worked on the statue, his feet bled from mysterious holes, which could not be healed. It became his wish to live long enough to finish his sculpture for the church, and when he did he prepared to die. At that moment the holes closed over, and a red rose bush grew instantly on the ground where the last of his blood had fallen.
Our Spanish neighbors wave to us, shouting greetings as we ride by in the wagon, but I have not been able to converse much with them. I do not understand their beliefs in miracles and curses, devils and witches. It seems they celebrate frequently, and we have heard that any wedding, baptism, or saint’s day is an excuse for a fiesta or a dance.
Several Protestants besides ourselves have settled in the valley. Mrs. Porter lives with her husband and two boys not far from here, and the Deerings are establishing their ranch less than a day’s ride north. Mrs. Porter came to call on me last week, and we discussed setting up a sewing circle, even if it is just the two of us in attendance.
Indians still come to the house, mostly to beg for food, and it is likely if we have any visitors on a cold winter day it will be them. They go through the scraps I put out for the rabbits; they are really quite sad. Last fall Clayton and I visited a small group of them that live near here, and I must say that the majority of them are very industrious; I think these beggars are but a small portion of the entire Indian people. They have plentiful gardens and weave rugs and blankets from the wool of the sheep they raise.
You must write and give the news about everyone. I have a letter recently from Aunt Celia but still none from Mother. It seems as if Mother has lost all affection for me. Aunt Celia writes that my decision not to return to Virginia two years ago was a great disappointment to Mother and that she refuses to open my letters herself but seems to listen if Aunt Celia reads them to her. Do I no longer exist for her? Can she be so cruel? Aunt Celia advises me to bring the children east for a visit. If I were able to manage the trip, could amends be made? Would she allow me to return to the southwest without resenting m
y leaving of Virginia all over again? I am afraid her animosity would be doubled.
I am your loving sister,
Abigail
May 2, 1875
Dear Maggie,
I must thank you for your comforting words about Mother. I suppose it is her love for me which makes it so difficult for her to accept my leaving. I will continue to write to her, as you advise, even if she does give the appearance of turning away my letters.
We have had a wet spring, thunderstorms driven out of the mountains across the valley, the entire sky a churning pot with the explosion of clouds and brilliant, sharp lines of lightning. Then, as soon as the rain stopped, the sky was swept clean. The river and ditches became so full with water, gushing and running with a swift current, that several times a week Clayton had to ride out to repair a bank or remove branches and whole trees which had been knocked loose by the force of the water.
Last month a Spanish boy drowned trying to drag a tree from the river. After Clayton helped to retrieve his body from the tangled branches, he attended the boy’s wake, a strange affair, with the boy laid out in the main room and much drinking, eating, and crying going on all around him. There was a guitar and singing. Clayton swears some of the sounds were unearthly, strange moans, the screech of some animal, and there was a gust of wind that came and pulled at the boy’s hair; all this while the doors and windows remained closed.
“It was as if there were ghosts,” he told me. All night there was an owl just outside our window, and I do not think either one of us slept through its queer, dark sounds.
Doña Romero, an old woman who was born in this valley and learned to speak some English years ago from a missionary, claims that the excess of water so early in the season forebodes a dry summer. “Too much, too early,” she says, shaking her head, staring out across the valley, which is thick with the growth of early summer. I cannot imagine that she is right, for if the river is more full now than usual, certainly it will be higher later in the summer than is normal. With the help of two men Clayton was able to hire, we planted nearly four acres in alfalfa this month and are hopeful of a great harvest.
Your Sister,
Abigail
July 20, 1875
Dear Maggie,
You ask what has become of my drawing and the art work I hoped to take up once we settled in the west. I will tell you. Each morning I wake just before dawn and go outside into the dark desert. The sky is crazy still with stars. They seem to spin and fall in all sorts of ways until the sky is like a large wagon wheel rotating so fast the spokes cannot be distinguished, dirt and clay and stones set flying. Some mornings I stay outside in my wrapper so long among the stars and planets, splashing water on myself, that I see the first streaks of red light to the east as I walk back towards the house. I love best the earliest hours of the day.
When I return to the house I often need to help Clayton get up from the bed if he is stiff upon waking. By now little Margaret is awake, and I sit as long as I can to feed her before hurrying to the stove to fry up hominy cakes or stir porridge. The children dress, and after eating we go into the fields and begin to work the corn or beans or alfalfa. Clayton rides out to check the ditches, and often there are repairs to make. Last month a portion of the bank collapsed and the land flooded. The ditch had to be dried out before it could be dug again.
We have a cow now, which Amy milks before coming to the field. George Michael is already quite adept at feeding the chickens and collecting eggs. I bring the baby to the field and set her on a blanket while Amy and I work.
We stop work for lunch and rest until the sun moves across the sky and the heat lessens. Often in the afternoon, the wind increases, and the heat and sand are driven across the valley in waves. If we do go outside, we must wrap our faces with a cloth. I read to the children and feed the baby; I put on a pot of beans or grain for supper.
Sometimes a neighbor calls on us, or we see burros on the roads, packed with great bundles larger than themselves. There are these few distractions. So you see, by evening when the children are all in bed, I am too tired to get out paper and charcoal, and there is not much light from the oil lamp that hangs over our table.
Doña Romero’s prophecy about the dryness of the summer has been borne out, as we have had no rain for three weeks now. I have heard that she is a curandera, someone who can cure sickness, and that she can predict the seasons of drought. She has said that until the moon turns its horns down and lets the water out, we will not have rain. Some evenings when Clayton raises the gate, the ditch is almost dry. He mentioned that this was so while several of them, including Señor López, were repairing the main ditch, and he says there was too little reply made and that he noticed a few mysterious smiles. In the past two weeks we have lost nearly an acre of alfalfa, after all that work of planting and digging the ditches. “Only our second summer, Abigail,” Clayton told me, “and I see already how a man could kill for water.”
I know you will wonder again, perhaps out loud, why I chose this life, for it is full of difficulty, but in truth I feel it has chosen me. When I walk out into the dry fields and take the crumbling soil in my hands, I feel as if this were the earth I was made of, that I was born to work it. You will say that desires plant themselves inside us, so firmly, so convincingly that we live our lives out of them, believing they are destiny. And perhaps life is a canvas on which our dreams and desires are painted. When the sun sets behind the mountains here, they glitter as if bits of gold had dropped from the sky. So do not be too sorry for me.
Your desert-crazy sister,
Abigail
Chapter 4
February 2, 1876
My Dearest Maggie,
I was filled with grief on reading your letter. To have lost both twins within a few days of each other, and just weeks after they were born—how empty your arms must feel. They left this world as they came into it so little time ago—together. But I know the thought of them with one another is a small comfort, so I will not write to you of it. I am sure that you have been counseled that the Good Shepherd has taken your gentle lambs into His flock. Instead I would tell you that grief is like a mourning cloak that can be removed and hung on a high hook but is always with you. Do not turn too quickly to the living. Let sorrow wring your heart until it is emptied. It can be filled again.
If at all possible I will come east next month, as you suggest, and bring the children. I do so want to hold you in my arms.
I am your devoted sister,
Abigail
March 29, 1876
Dear Maggie,
Perhaps we can come at Christmas time. You see, it is difficult to leave a farm—we now have two milk cows and chickens—without considerable planning. I long to be with you now, but I am not certain that Clayton could manage the animals and the planting alone if I were gone. We will plant the four acres in alfalfa and hope to put in a considerable vegetable garden as well.
I am sending a money order with this letter, written to the amount of John’s money which Clayton lost to the mines. He has had better luck speculating this past year, and I now sell enough eggs and milk to manage our small household. You must tell Mother not to worry about the living we are able to scrape out anymore, for Aunt Celia has written that Mother does worry, even if she will not write to me of it.
Amy will return in May for the summer. The teachers have written that her progress is exceptional and that she should go on to finish school and attend an academy or a college. She could train in the east for a vocation such as teaching. I cannot tell you what a demand there is out here for teachers.
George Michael plays with a boy who lives nearby. They speak Spanish together, and I cannot understand all that they say. I would like to find him more suitable playmates. Pamela Porter and I meet occasionally to sew or share tea and conversation, but her boys are old enough now to work the ranch with their father. Any schooling they have had she’s managed to give them herself with books she brought from Tennessee.
/> I wish that I could promise to come east by this fall, but after the harvest is finished, the weather will turn quickly and we must prepare wood for the stove. While I do not mean to worry you, for in truth we want for nothing, our life here is a struggle fit to the changes each season brings, and I fear what might happen if we were not prepared.
Now that we have the comforts of a true home, with plenty of bedding, shelves of cookware, and ample provisions, perhaps John will allow you and the children to make the trip westward. I assure you, there are no more wild, scalping Indians. To the contrary, you would find their villages most interesting. If you can come we will make an outing to one, and you can tell everyone back in Virginia you have met the “savages.”
Clayton says that if you come by railroad, we could meet you at the station with the wagon. The trip would not be arduous. We have plans to expand our home, and there would be plenty of space to accommodate you and the children. Until we see one another,
I keep you in my prayers,
Abigail
August 19, 1876
Dear Maggie,
I am writing to you by lantern, as this is the only time I can steal for such things as letters. Our alfalfa cuttings have been more successful than last summer, due in part to an abundance of rain in late June, which has meant water for the ditches all summer. Our neighbor, the old woman Doña Romero, had said it would be so. She watches for signs: the smoke from a newly made fire which settles quickly to the ground, the whirl of ashes in her fireplace, the coyotes’ cries.
Last month Clayton and I took her with us to the market place, where we saw her trade for copper bells and the feathers of a song bird. “For use in her incantations,” Clayton whispered, smiling. He finds her predictions amusing. But she was right about the water. I cannot tell you what a change it has made not to concern ourselves over each drop spent on dishes or wasted during a washing. There is no animosity between neighbors, only good wishes for a bountiful harvest.