Johnny forgot his promise not to touch her. She seemed to have forgotten it, too. She was kissing him the way she had in Tubac. She sort of sagged against him, and he laid her down on the hay and kept kissing her until his own head was spinning like the merry-go-round he’d seen in Phoenix one time when a traveling circus had come to town.
Tía felt as though she might black out. Johnny was kissing her face, her throat, and her mouth again. Finally he just held her close for a long time.
She sighed with contentment. “I reckon that ought to be worth a bracelet,” she murmured, so pleased with herself that she could have popped a freshly sewed button.
“They don’t make bracelets that are worth that much.” He reached into his pocket, took out the bracelet, and put it on her wrist.
“You weren’t supposed to give it to me. I lost the bet.”
“Well, I’m not going to wear it. I guess I can give it to you if I want.”
Tía smiled and snuggled close against him. “I’m glad you’re not still mad at me.”
The sun had set behind the Dragoons. Through the lone window at the east end of the barn, a solitary star shone in the sky. He pointed up at it. “See that light there? You know what that is?”
“It’s a star.”
“Nope. It’s Venus, a planet.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw it in one of Steve’s books.”
“Just like our planet?” Tía wanted to let him know that she had gone to school and paid attention.
“But colder. It’s farther away from the sun.”
“How do you know it’s not a star?” She hadn’t listened all the time. Now she wished she had.
“It doesn’t twinkle. See how steady the light is?”
Tía peered intently at the tiny light hanging above the mountains. “Could you be wrong?”
“Never been before. Venus has been moving around up there since before I was born.”
“You must think I’m pretty dumb.”
Johnny shook his head. “I was testing you.”
“For dumbness?”
“To see if you’d ever had a steady fella.”
“How would that tell?”
Johnny laughed. “Because that’s one of the first things a fella tells a girl he wants to impress.”
Tía sat up and wiped the straw off her. “We better get back. I don’t want to get into trouble with Steve my first day here.”
“I hope I’m not going to have to answer any more questions about Steve,” Johnny said, his voice changing. Tía started to tease him, but his face was such a thundercloud suddenly that she didn’t. He stood up and pulled her up beside him. He walked her to the back door and stopped. “Don’t lose that bracelet. It’s probably worth a lot of money.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t give it to me.”
“We already chewed that over.” Respectfully, he touched the brim of his hat. “Good night.”
Tía turned and walked inside. The house was dark except for lights in the parlor. She wanted to slip past and get to her room without being seen, but Steve stepped out and saw her.
“Do you have a moment?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Could you come into the parlor?”
Tía followed him back to the parlor. Andrea sat on one of the leather Morris chairs. A book lay open in her lap. Judy stood up and excused herself. “I just wanted to talk to the two of you for a minute.”
He looked uncomfortable. Tía glanced at Andrea. “Yes, sir?”
Steve cleared his throat. “I’m not good at saying things to women, but I wanted to mention that there are a lot of men living in this compound. I don’t expect you to have any trouble of any type, but in case you haven’t lived in quite these circumstances before…you may have noticed that we have a cantina.”
Andrea caught Steve’s attention. “You sell alcohol?”
“On Saturday nights I allow the men to buy as much beer and whiskey as they want as long as there are no fights. We’re isolated here, and many weeks go by when they can’t get into Fort Bowie or Tombstone. In years past, there was no Tombstone.”
Steve looked at Tía. “Sunday is the men’s day off. They work till noon on Saturday unless we’re having Indian trouble, then sometimes they don’t go outside the walls. During spring branding and fall roundups, the men camp out. The women have Sundays off except for breakfast. The men fend for themselves, usually eat canned goods and the like.”
Andrea glanced at Tía, then looked up at Steve. “Are the men likely to bother—”
“I don’t expect any man in my employ to force himself on either of you, but under the influence of drink, men are capable of making mistakes. Especially if a woman is attractive and friendly. I know you’re both ladies, and I’m sure you know how to handle yourselves among men, but I just wanted you to know how we operate here.”
“What do they do for fun?” Andrea asked.
“On Saturdays, the vaqueros play music, and anyone who wants to is free to dance and drink. Things get a little loose. If you go out, just try to stay with the crowd. That way you can’t get in too much trouble. I know all the men, but occasionally a drifter will come through and work awhile. Some men are pretty hard cases.”
Steve looked as if he had embarrassed himself. He stopped speaking abruptly, and then excused himself. Tía and Andrea walked in silence to their separate rooms.
When the house seemed quiet, Tía slipped out of her room and into Andrea’s. In her long flannel nightgown, Andrea was just climbing into the big feather bed. Andrea held the covers for her sister to scoot under with her. “Where were you tonight?”
“Johnny asked me to take a walk with him. Are you all right? I was scared to death for you today,” Tía whispered, shivering at the feel of the cold cotton sheets. So close to the mountains, the valley was refreshingly cool after sundown.
“Stay away from Johnny Brago,” Andrea warned.
“How come?”
“Because he’s nothing but trouble.”
“He is not.”
“Of course he is. You want to turn out just like Mama?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mean that. Johnny Brago is just like Papa. He’ll never amount to anything. He’ll make your life a misery.”
“Papa didn’t make Mama’s life a misery.”
“Of course he did. Mama was a lady. Because of him, and marrying him, she had to live like white trash.”
“Mama did not!”
“Of course she did. You think respectable white women live like we did? Do you think they work in saloons? Or befriend fancy ladies and saddle tramps?”
“Mama likes all kinds of people, if they aren’t phony.”
“Mama would have preferred to like people who were looked up to by folks around them. She had no choice.”
Somehow it unsettled Tía to have Andrea talking about Mama as if she’d never been happy. She decided to change the subject in hopes of getting Andrea in a better mood.
“I was scared for you today. I rode up to tell Judy that I was Teresa, but I got there too late. You’d already shot off the gun.”
“I’m glad you didn’t say anything. I was fine. The Indian attack was more pitiful than anything else. I was a bit shocked when I came inside the house. Now I remember when we were here.”
“You do? When? I don’t remember anything.”
“That’s because you weren’t born yet.”
“Oh, well, that makes sense.” They were silent for a while.
“This is the kind of place we’d have grown up in if Mama hadn’t married a wild man like Papa.”
Tía didn’t know what to say to that. Mama had married Papa, and they had grown up in Tubac, which had seemed good enough at the time. She didn’t know why Andrea was always saying “what if.” It didn’t make sense to her to worry about how things would have been if someone thirty years ago had done something other than what they’d done. Uncle Tyler worried about t
hat all the time, and all it had gotten him was a sour look on his face and a dyspeptic stomach.
“Andrea, isn’t Steve handsome?” she said.
“Yes, very.” Andrea tried to decide if she wanted to tell Tía about the episode in the hotel room. But she worried that Tía would let on somehow and Steve would know she had told her.
“He seems nice, doesn’t he?” Tía asked. “I love him.”
Andrea ignored her last remark. Tía loved everybody, whether they deserved it or not. She was in love with the idea of having a brother. She had talked of nothing else the whole trip from Albany. Andrea was sick of the subject. “He may be nice to you. He resents me.”
“But he spent dinner sneaking looks at you,” Tía said.
“He barely knew I was alive,” Andrea protested.
“That was when you were watching him. The rest of the time he was staring at you.”
“He thinks I’m his sister. He’s probably looking for some family resemblance.” The subject made Andrea uncomfortable. “Johnny Brago watches you like a chicken hawk with his first pullet. If you’re smart, you’ll avoid him entirely.”
“I don’t see why.”
“You haven’t listened to a thing I said. Judy appears to be quite affected by him, and I think he’s a cheat. And I can’t stand a cheat!” Just thinking about Johnny Brago and Tía made Andrea angry. Tía would end up just like Mama: tied to a man who would be nothing but trouble!
“I thought you loved Papa,” Tía whispered.
“I do love Papa, but that does not mean that I have to be blind where he is concerned. He made Mama’s life a misery. At times she hated him, and so did I.”
Tía didn’t know what to think about that. She hadn’t known Mama hated Papa. She hadn’t know Andrea did, either.
“Well, I didn’t—”
“You didn’t care to know. You loved him so much you couldn’t see anything else.”
Tía frowned at the ceiling. She wasn’t sure she liked growing up. She was learning all sorts of things she didn’t want to know about people.
“Tía, are you asleep?”
Tía pulled the covers around her and snuggled closer to Andrea as if that could somehow rearrange the unsettling memory that had already lodged in her mind. Andrea was talking. Had she been talking long?
“Did you know Steve is a mining engineer? Judy bragged that he was the one who convinced their father to buy into the mine. He knew or guessed that the rock formation there meant the vein they found was going to go deeper and get bigger, not peter out the way so many of them do.”
“Steve says he’s here at the ranch to keep you and Judy from killing one another.”
“Or maybe he wants to watch the fun.”
“You’re too suspicious, Andrea.”
“She plainly resents me.”
“She’s nice. I think we’re going to be friends.”
“Sure. Until she finds out who you really are.”
“Maybe we should tell them right away.”
Andrea thought about that for a moment, then discarded the idea. She wanted to get to know more about Steve before she told him she wasn’t his sister. “Couldn’t we wait a week or so, until they get to know us? It won’t hurt anything.”
Tía sighed. She didn’t like pretending to be someone else. Every time someone spoke to her, she had to try and remember who they thought she was. It was wearing on her nerves. And she didn’t feel honest playacting at being someone else. She was sorry she’d thought of the idea, but it pleased her that Andrea was so happy with her role. Andrea liked to play at being the lady of the spread. She brought dignity and grace to the role. It was no surprise to Tía that no one doubted her.
Tía didn’t see what good waiting a week would do, but she couldn’t see any graceful way of telling the others they had been tricked. To her way of thinking, she should have confessed after the Indian attack. To let it go on longer seemed to be looking for trouble, but if it was important to Andrea, then she would go along with it. They would either forgive them or not, and when they told probably wouldn’t make a big difference. She just hoped she wouldn’t have to listen to Andrea talk about how different her life would have been if only they’d told at a time different from when they actually did tell.
Andrea turned over and put her arm around Tía. “Judy has to be the most nervous girl I’ve ever known. After you and Johnny went outside, she talked without a breath the whole time. I think she was hoping either we wouldn’t notice or she wouldn’t.”
“Oh, no,” Tía moaned. “Judy is in love with Johnny. Now she probably thinks I’m trying to take him away from her.”
Outside, crickets whirred, and a dog barked. Tía wondered if Johnny listened to them make their screechy little sounds, or had he already gone to sleep? Beside her, Andrea plumped her pillow and repositioned herself. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” Tía whispered. “I found a place out back where someone planted jasmine and wisteria and a lot of different flowers. Maybe Judy did that.”
Andrea punched her pillow with her fist. “I might like it better if I didn’t have to worry about Judy.”
“I like it a lot,” Tía murmured, snuggling close to her sister. “Are you sorry we changed places? I mean because of Steve?”
Andrea closed her eyes. All day she’d been thinking about Steve Burkhart and how she had let him kiss her. She had always thought herself different from Mama’s friends, who talked about men constantly. In Tubac she had worked at being different, because if she got a chance to get away from Tubac, she wanted to make the most of it. She didn’t want to be tied down by a man who thought he had some claim on her or by a houseful of babies. No one ever got rich having babies, Mama had said, and Andrea had believed her. Now she was twenty-five years old and a virgin. She had thought until her eye-opening experience with Steve it was because she didn’t have the same feelings about men other women felt. Now it appeared that none of the men she had been exposed to had appealed to her.
The grandfather clock over the mantel in the parlor chimed nine times. Nine o’clock. Tía stirred. That was late for her. She kissed Andrea’s cheek and slipped out of bed.
Tía stopped at Judy’s door on the way to her own bed. She wanted to go in, but she didn’t know what she would say to Judy. No sound came from Judy’s room. Perhaps she was asleep.
Undecided, Tía slipped back to her own room. She had to be up at five the next morning. She took off her dressing robe, turned out the lamp, and walked to the window. Through the wrought-iron bars Steve had fashioned and installed over the windows to protect against sneaking Indians, silhouettes of the outbuildings were visible. Slowly, Tía’s eyes adjusted. The building to the left was the Mexican women’s quarters, the one opposite hers was Johnny’s cabin.
A vision of Johnny lying in the haystack made her smile.
The building to her right was the main bunkhouse. Lights burned brightly there. Occasionally a man laughed or shouted some unintelligible remark. For the vaqueros who liked to be separate, another, smaller building had been built south of the bunkhouse.
Tía wondered why Johnny had to have a place of his own. She studied his cabin in the semidarkness. A female shape materialized out of the shadows and paused for a second in front of the door, then slipped inside.
Judy! Going into Johnny’s cabin. She’d be right out. Johnny would send her to bed. With a mixture of dread and anticipation, Tía watched for a few minutes and then turned away from the window. It was bad enough to change places and lie to people; she shouldn’t be spying on them as well. She walked to the bed and lay down. Maybe she was coming down with something. Her head ached, and her stomach felt queasy.
Tía closed her eyes, but sleep did not come.
Judy entered Johnny’s cabin without knocking. Inside, she scanned the small room. “Well, what happened? Did she manage to get away from you?”
The lamp on his table was turned low. Surprised by Judy’s walking in so unexpectedly, Johnny sat up an
d ran his fingers through his hair. He had hoped to put this off or avoid it all together.
“She’s supposed to be my friend,” she said, her brown eyes flashing. “If that little maggot is chasing you, I’ll tear her apart.”
“Rein in your temper. She’s not chasing me.”
“You’re chasing her?”
Johnny stood up and opened the door she had just closed. He didn’t want to fight with Judy about Tía. But he had learned women did things according to their own timetable, no matter what a man wanted sometimes.
“I’m not jealous, you know,” Judy said vehemently, standing in front of him, her chin up, her slender young body poised in that stubborn posture he knew only too well. “I’m mad! I will not be made light of in front of my servants. I won’t have my man chasing the hired help right in front of my eyes. It’s humiliating! Besides, you don’t need her. You’ve got me. We’ll be married soon.” She stepped close to him, put her arms around his waist, and burrowed her face against his chest. “Oh, Johnny, it feels so good to be in your arms.”
Leaning away from him suddenly, she smiled. “I really love it when you look so fierce. You have the most beautiful eyes when you’re trying to figure out what to do. I can imagine you doing any number of things to me when you look at me like that…”
“Judy, dammit.” Things were moving too fast for him. Judy had a way of assuming a whole bunch of things, and if he didn’t have enough time to sort them all out, she’d be working on another bunch of assumptions based on the last bunch he hadn’t had time to call her on. Johnny picked the one that riled him the most for his challenge. “We ain’t lovers.”
“Of course we are.”
“No. Maybe we could have been at one time, but not now,” he said emphatically. “You’re like a sister to me.”
Judy’s laughter drowned him out. “Sister!” she cried. “That was not brotherly devotion the other night, Johnny Brago. That was lust, just like the preacher yells about on Sunday morning, real hell-fire-and-damnation lust. I could tell.”
After Eden Page 18