“Yourself.”
John drank some coffee.
“I was never no Fourth of July picnic.”
Suits finished his root beer.
“Let me ask you,” he said. “Did you ever see her heal anybody?”
“Heal?” said John. I’m not about to betray her, he thought. “Like grow a leg?”
Suits shrugged.
“I saw some things that was curious,” John said. “But I never saw no dead rise, if that’s what you’re sayin’.”
“I’m not saying nothing,” said Suits. “Just asking.”
“Asking if she’s a fraud.”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t say nothin’ else either.”
John finished his coffee and slammed down the cup.
“Hell, Suits,” he said, “how am I supposed to know? You’d have to ask an Indian, I guess. Is it real? She thinks so.”
Suits nodded.
“She’s the boss,” he said.
In his jacket pocket, Suits had a letter. He had carried it all the way across the country. He didn’t know what to do with it. The notice of Tomás’s death would definitely end their chances to sign Teresita up for another year. Hellfire, the Saintess would be up and gone to kneel at the grave of her daddy. He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t a monster. Not exactly. He slid the letter across the table to John.
John read it and sighed. He shook his head.
“She finds this out now,” he said, “and we can all kiss New York good-bye.”
“I have an idea,” Suits said.
Teresita rubbed sage oil into the shoulders of Mrs. Dashiell. She massaged the great lady’s shoulders, digging her fingers into the muscle. “You have grief,” she said. Jou hob griff. She could feel it, sorrow etched into her back. Deep regrets clenched tightly in her neck. The oil felt hot under her fingers, warmed by the skin. It filled their noses. Teresita thought it made Mrs. Dashiell smell like she was about to be cooked in an oven with some potatoes and onions.
This was stupid. When was the last time she helped a mother bring a child into the world? When was the last time she healed a truly sick person? All she seemed to do was ease gout or rub sore shoulders for rich people.
In her mind, over and over: I have failed You. I have betrayed You. I am no one now.
The whole time that she was hunting down shames and disappointments in her client’s body, she was feeling her own throb like a splinter inside her. Her father. Gaby. Her sister Anita. Segundo. She thought of the good people of Clifton. Of her followers. Of the Indians in the hills and the desert. The People. She had come so far from her roots. So far from her home ground. Now, she was no longer a rebel. No saint. She was a mother, a wife. And she wondered how far she could go if she kept walking farther and farther from the dry desert path.
She smacked Mrs. Dashiell.
“Hey!” the lady yelped.
“So sorry.”
She squeezed and pulled and smoothed and pressed. She had always squeezed and pulled and smoothed and pressed.
When she was done, she said, “You will go to bed tonight and weep. You will cry for a time, but do not be concerned. It will pass within an hour, and you will sleep in peace.”
Mrs. Dashiell went to rinse off the aromatic oils, and Teresita was brought a pitcher with warm water and lavender soap to wash her hands. Rather than go to Harlem, she just wanted to go home. She wanted to lie with Laura and wait for John to come home.
Why didn’t she rub his shoulders with sage oil? How could she be kind to strangers but act cross with her loved ones? Why didn’t she find his ancient pains and rub them free?
She excused herself from Mrs. Dashiell’s party and accepted a carriage back to East Twenty-Eighth.
She would wait up for John. And when he came home, even if he was drunk, she would greet him with a long embrace. She would lead him to their bed, and she would pull the boots off his feet and pull the shirt over his head and lay him back with his head on the pillow.
And she would tell him she was carrying his second child.
“Darling!” John cried, entering the apartment like a gust of wind. He waved around a small bunch of flowers he had bought off a cart.
“Here,” she called from the bedroom.
He peeked in. She was under the covers, her bare shoulders showing. Laura was snoring away.
“Here I am,” Teresita said.
John smiled.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Me too.”
“I didn’t mean to be so tetchy.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
He showed her the flowers.
“Got these for you,” he said.
“Take off your boots,” she said.
He did it very fast.
Later, as they lay there, he said, “I’m going to take you to the sea tomorrow.”
She buried her face in his neck and smiled.
“John?” she whispered. “I’m expecting.”
“Expecting what?” he asked.
Then he realized, and he had the presence of mind to praise her and coddle her and act enthusiastic while his mind raced, trying to find the angle now—trying to calculate how he could manage the situation.
They stood at the docks in lower Manhattan. Laura goggled at the world from her pram. Stink and gulls. Great bulks of ocean liners weeping rust. Teresita watched a poor little turtle that had come down the river bobbing disconsolately between vast black hulls, looking up at them from the churning water.
“I thought we were going to stand on the beach,” she said.
“It’s the ocean, isn’t it?” he said, having a high time watching rich sons of bitches walk up the planks to the ships.
“How’d you like to join them?” he asked.
The looming ship before them let out a bellow: bah-woot! It echoed around them, shook their innards. John burst out laughing.
“Don’t you love it!” he yelled.
“It could be yours,” said a voice off her left shoulder.
Teresita turned her head and beheld Mr. Suits looking like he’d grown a thin layer of mold on his face. He wore a green checkered coat that bore a smudge down one lapel.
“You,” she said.
“What a delight,” Suits intoned. “To see you again.”
She turned to John.
“You!” she said.
“Hear the man out,” he replied.
Laura looked up at Suits.
“Who you, ugly man?” she said.
He ignored the child.
“Behold the luxury liners of the White Star Line,” he said. He scratched under his chin, causing some loose flesh depending from it to wobble. “These fine ships are going to England! Imagine that!
“You too,” Suits proclaimed, “could be boarding one of these fine ships!”
She stepped away, wheeling Laura’s carriage.
Suits raised his voice.
“As the Saintess, you could go abroad and meet royalty! Miss? Don’t they call you queen?”
She walked away.
“One more year with the Consortium! What do you say? We’ll send you to Europe! Meet you a king!”
She went on down the docks and didn’t look back.
“Damnation, Van Order,” said Suits. “She don’t get easier to deal with.”
John pulled his flask.
“That she don’t,” he said.
Far from them, Teresita smiled. She didn’t want to hear any more plots. She was fully in the glow of God’s mysterious power.
Venado Azul stood there smiling at her.
He was in a black suit with a small top hat and a frock coat that hung well below his knees. He had replaced his deerskin slippers with shiny black boots.
“Saint,” he said.
“I am so happy to see you,” she said.
“I see you there and it makes me smile,” he replied.
“What are you doing here?”
He nodded to the great b
lack wall of ship before him.
“Buffalo Bill has bought us tickets on this big canoe, and we’re going to row it to England to make believe we’re killing each other for the king and queen.”
He shrugged.
“It’s a job.”
“Indian!” Laura shouted. “Indian!”
He looked down at her.
“Hello, small one,” he said. “She looks like your father.”
Teresita beamed.
“I married too. A white woman,” Blue Deer admitted.
“Oh?”
“She comes from Indiana. Fast-Horse Cathy. A sharpshooter.”
“Bless you both.”
“She’s on the boat.”
They stood there, pleasantly silent. White men, Blue Deer thought, needed to fill up every moment with chatter. Sometimes, silence was more comfortable. Come to think of it, Mexicans were babblers too.
He cleared his throat.
“I am sorry,” Blue Deer added.
“Sorry? About what?”
“About the Sky Scratcher.”
“What about him?”
“All of us mourn him,” Blue Deer said. “When he died, a great warmth left the world. Made us all feel cold.”
She could not hear. She turned. Behind her, small and shadowy, Suits and John stood drinking liquor and laughing. They looked her way and froze. They knew from looking at her that she knew.
Her hands went to her face.
She fell.
John ran. He ran toward her as fast as he could. But he knew no matter how fast he ran, he would never be able to catch her.
Sixty-One
SHE WAS SO TIRED. She was already sick in the mornings. They’d all expected her to take to her bed when she heard of Tomás’s death, but she did not. She could not. She had responsibilities. And just as Laura’s birth had not stopped her from doing her work, her father’s being gone would not stop her now. It was a question of discipline. No one would ever again see her cry. Not even God. She had decided to go home.
To Clifton.
But Mr. Smith’s men were not as willing as the Consortium to let her simply waltz off. Not with that fat roll of dollars they knew she must have with her. No, there was no way they’d let her carry off enough money to feed them and buy them drinks and boots and coats for years.
She grimly went to work in the finest clothing John had ever seen. She had become white as a New York maven—creamed and powdered. Her hair was luxuriant, treated with steaming oils and set in thick crowns. She wore gloves to her elbows and twirled a small parasol. Her heeled shoes lifted her almost as tall as he was with his boots off. Her lips were painted and glistening as berries, her eyes lined with kohl, and her eyelids blushing with copper or blue powders. Her brows became thin arched structures denoting endless surprise. Her cheeks were now rouged, slight tints of her old brown on her new white face making it look like she’d been pinched or like a cold breeze had licked her skin. Her nails were pink as little seashells, and her legs were silken, relieved of all trace of hair.
Mr. Suits had already placed items in the press reporting that the Girl Saint was going abroad to be received by royalty, but it was all a folly. As soon as she finished her last rounds of New York activities, she was through. She was going home. She could think only of her brothers and sisters, could dream now only of repairing her ties with Gabriela. She would have her next child in the west. Away from cities. She would lay flowers on her father’s grave, and not John, or the Consortium, or that Satan Mr. Suits would dissuade her.
Elias and Swab Dave caught John in Greenwich Village near a tenement building. They rushed him backward into the shadows of an alley that seemed to be hosting a convention of cats. They slammed him between the walls and punched him in the gut and left him on his knees.
Teresita knew the next child would be a girl as well. She could feel it, the way the little bean turned inside the oven of her belly, the way she settled and stretched just like Laura had. The gas and the endless peeing hadn’t started yet, and Teresita planned to be in Arizona before any of that began.
John pleaded with her.
“One more year?” he said.
“No.”
“I am not done here,” he said.
“But I am.”
“Look at yourself!” he cried. “You’ve become a fine lady! You wear little straw hats and white stockings.”
“I never meant to be a fine lady, John.”
“Aw, now, sweetheart. You yourself said you’re no saint.”
“I am not a saint. You said that I am.”
He hung his head.
“You tell the world that you heal the sick.”
“God heals them, not I. I am God’s instrument.”
He smiled.
“Really,” he said.
“Yes, really.” She stared at him. “After all you’ve seen, do you doubt me?”
“What have I seen?” he said.
She just looked at him.
“I have nothing to say,” she said. “I am without words.”
Teresita had agreed to wear a new Gibson-style dress for a small gathering on Park Boulevard. John called it the beauty competition. Though it was true that the best-dressed lady of the event would win a small ribbon, it was all for charity and general amusement. Nothing major. But it was her last commitment. After that, her contract ended and her connection to New York was broken and she would go home.
She got her things together.
“I will be back late,” she said.
“Win that ribbon.”
“I will.”
She kissed Laura on the head.
She paused at the door and said, “I am sorry you never saw a miracle.”
She walked down the stairs.
John said to Laura, “I guess I have to pack our bags now.”
Laura said, “Drink me!”
He poured her some apple juice, then got out his flask and slugged down a few.
Teresita returned home at ten o’clock. She had been a sensation in her dress and her magnificent hairstyle. Black lacquer chopsticks held the bun in place, with small pearls in cunning woven settings that looked like drops of dew in her hair. She did not feel lovely. She did not feel happy. She smiled because she had become an expert in smiling. She thought of her father, of how her father would both disapprove of this dress and desire to see it on Gaby. She smelled like lilacs. She could no longer smell roses at all.
She carried her gilt and purple ribbon in her hand. Queen of New York. How funny after everything. She didn’t even say farewell to her friends. She had trouble remembering all their names. Their faces were already fading from her mind as if covered by snowflakes.
Men stood in the shadows down near Lexington when she left the cab and opened the front door. The vestibule was dark, cold. She climbed the stairs, feeling the unbearable heaviness of the new child dragging her spine back down. Her body simply didn’t want to climb another stair. Her high heels hurt her feet. The bindings and corsets and stockings made her hot and itchy and sweaty, and she wanted it all off.
John was not home. Poor Mr. Somers from downstairs snoozed in John’s big chair, and Laura was balancing her new teddy bear on her head. The bears were all the rage, and Teresita had ordered this one all the way from Germany.
“Hello, Mama,” said Laura.
“Why are you still awake?” Teresita said.
“How does she do that?” Laura shouted.
Teresita shook Bill Somers awake and thanked him with a kiss on the cheek and sent him back down to bed.
She locked the door and carried Laura into the bedroom and laid her in her crib.
“You’re too big for that,” she said. “Time for a big-girl bed.”
Laura held up her bear and made it dance in the air.
Teresita pried the shoes off her feet. She had a blister on her right foot—the stocking had worn through in the shoe, and little tatters had rubbed on her smallest toe. She pulled up her skirt an
d detached the stockings from their hooks and peeled them off like dead skin. She rubbed her legs and sighed. Her feet in her hands felt cooked and tender.
“Stinky feet!” Laura commented.
“I am the Saint of Cabora,” a baritone Teresita intoned. “My feet smell like flowers.”
They giggled.
“Mama stinks,” Laura said.
Teresita pulled the chopsticks from her head, careful to catch the pearl webs before they fell to the floor. She shook her hair loose, and it fell heavy on her shoulders. She gripped it in both hands and fanned it out and scratched her scalp.
The dress fell like heavy crepe to the floor and she stepped out of it and let it lie. It formed a small battlement—looked like a one-woman prison. She undid her underthings and set herself free and dropped a loose nightdress over her head and slipped her feet into sheepskin moccasins and twirled her hair into a braid.
Teresita was ready for home. It was over. She was finished. She could feel it in her body. Home. As she folded her clothes and stuffed her trunks, as she sang to Laura and lit the candles and the gas lamps, she thought of home. Of the flowers she would plant on her father’s grave. New York had been like her first beer—she’d thought it would taste sweeter.
“Arizona, Mamá?” Laura asked over and over, as if tasting a new candy. “Arizona?”
“Yes, sweet pea, yes.”
“Papá too?”
“All of us in sunny Arizona.” She was distracted with her packing.
“Sunny!” Laura shouted, clapping her hands.
The crash of the splintering wood startled them and made Laura scream. Elias and Swab Dave surged through the door as Teresita rushed to the crib and grabbed her wailing daughter. The men stood there panting from the rush and the door-busting.
“You had to be trouble,” Elias said. He was rolling up his sleeves. Swab Dave laughed a little. He took off his hat—blond hair fell past his shoulders.
“Get ready, girlie,” he said.
“Get out,” Teresita replied.
“Give us the money,” Swab Dave demanded. “Maybe we’ll leave.”
“What money?”
“You’re so cute,” Elias said. “What money, she says.”
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