We were over a week on the road. Mother loaned us the money to purchase another horse because the wagon was overloaded, and, well, you know The Beatitudes. Perhaps he should inherit the earth as he has proven himself not adept at moving across it.
We were not long getting to Texas from Lone Wolf, but once you get to Texas everything is long. The Texans do not think so, though. They think nothing of traveling for days, to Amarillo or El Paso, for a new bridle or a spool of red thread.
The Texas panhandle is no different than our corner of southwestern Oklahoma, though Mr. C. H. Griffith told Gus McQueen that the border between them is not only physical. Like all native Oklahomans, he looks down on Texas, as Kansans look down upon Oklahomans, does Mr. C. H. Griffith, who took my piano to settle a debt I had no part in and more than likely sold it for far less than it is worth. Whatever he got for it is less than its value to me, Sandy, for I miss it so much I requested Gus McQueen to cut a board the exact length of the keyboard upon which I have painted all the keys in black and white. While we traveled from Lone Wolf to our new home in Texas, sharing those bumpy lanes with herds of cattle, shady characters, Women of the Church in bonnets, tinkers, drummers, Mexicans, soldiers, and the ostentatious automobiles, which thankfully one can hear coming from far away, allowing one to make ample room as they think they own the roads, these motorists, having forgotten in a day how people traveled (by horse, Sandy, and I shall never not travel by horse) for centuries, I played the songs I have committed to memory, chiefly and repeatedly “Für Elise,” which carries well in the high flat plains of the panhandle.
On the other hand, speaking of horses and automobiles, holding on to the past is not in some cases healthy, for what is done is not to be undone by poring over its doing.
Love,
Elise
August 1, 1918
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy,
I neglected to mention that on the way here, we came across the most beautiful spring! Gus got in and floated on his back. Men are not natural floaters, but Gus is the exception. While we were enjoying ourselves in the spring, a man came by and ordered Gus out of there (I was sitting on the bank, my piano across my knees, regaling Gus with hymns as it seemed he was being baptized). The man had come down to fill his water jugs. He claimed that the spring was the source of his drinking water and not a swimming hole for Oklahomans to befoul (he had asked first thing where we were coming from). As he filled his jugs, Gus engaged the man in conversation, which would not have been my inclination. The man said many unkind things about Mexicans, leading us to believe he was a native Texan. That is one way you can tell. Gus said to this man, after listening to his unflattering remarks about Mexicans, “Mexico was outright stolen, if you think about it,” and the man said he did not have to think about it, how it came to be was how it came to be. Apparently this is another way to tell a Texan. They don’t need to think about how it came to be.
Love,
Elise
September 2, 1918
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy—
Fort Davis is a half-day’s drive to Shafter, where Mother and Father live. We chose this town based on a newspaper given us by a traveling salesman Gus McQueen met in Lone Wolf, and we are happy with our choice. Our cabin is in a grove of cottonwoods along Limpia Creek, two miles from town. Right upside our property (which we rent but would like to someday purchase) are bluffs that change color all the day long. In the morning they are muddy brown; in the full noon sun they are dirty blond. Then the afternoon clouds roll in and they turn boot black. In last light they are bright purple. That is just to describe them on one randomly chosen Tuesday.
Sometimes, when the sun is about to drop behind the bluffs, I see a wolf. Silhouetted in the last light, he looks out over the canyon. He has come from the prairie to watch over us all, our lone wolf.
Love,
Elise
December 4, 1918
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy,
It is not as if I have no curiosity about Wyoming. Curiosity abounds. I wonder if the town is filled with cowboys, bandits, speculators, lawyers, painted ladies, and incendiaries. I wonder about the sky above and the earth beneath your feet. Is the sky as huge as it is in Lone Wolf and is the earth teeming with life? Does the wind blow? (It does here.) Do people use their words to communicate or is it a land of grunt and shrug? I have it in my mind that people point quite a bit. I have an image of a young and strikingly beautiful transplant from the Oklahoma prairie detraining at Sheridan Station and asking directions of a tilted, whiskery man, who points in a direction unhelpfully general.
I wonder what you hear in the night. Coyote wind or just coyotes? I have many questions, Sandy, about life there in Wyoming. I wonder—for instance and finally, for a sadness has taken over me, and making marks on a page takes all the effort of chopping the tree that produced the pencil I wield—what in the world is a Coffeen? Do they mean to say Coffee Avenue? Or is it how you spell coffin in Wyoming?
Love,
Elise
P.S.: Have you any prairie dogs there?
P.P.S.: How does one (say, for instance, the unstated audience) stay warm on her way to school in cold that can subtract digits?
Dear Sandy,
Our cabin in the cottonwoods is just about perfect. This being a penny postcard, I have not the space to draw you a picture, but next time, I promise. We don’t yet have curtains, but I am going to make some soon only so I can see them aflutter in the wind of your arrival.
Love,
Elise
December 21, 1918
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
January 14, 1919
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy,
I write with some real “news.” Gus McQueen has gained employment at the local newspaper.
One Joe Dudley out of Odessa is the publisher. Joe Dudley, who is an atrocious speller, handles layout and circulation and operates both the linotype machine and printing press. Gus is the editor and sole reporter, as well as the photographer, though he knows nothing of photography. He writes all the articles save the columns written by correspondents from the smaller hamlets in the region—Kent, Balmorhea, Toyahvale, Valentine, Marathon, Marfa. The nearest paper is in Alpine, which covers some of the same territory, including many areas populated by Mexicans. Mr. Arturo Gonzalez translates some articles into Spanish at Gus’s insistence, Joe Dudley out of Odessa being of the opinion that they can start their own paper. However, the Mexicans are loyal customers and the subscriptions have increased since Mr. Gonzalez started writing his column, though some Texans dropped the paper in protest, to be expected.
The correspondents send in weekly accountings of the doings, comings, and goings of their neighbors—who is down with la grippe, who had their horse stolen, who is taking the train Saturday to El Paso. Oh, but why am I explaining this to either of you, who grew up reading these very columns in the Kiowa County News? As you know, these columns are the heart of a small-town newspaper, and Gus McQueen is ever mindful of it. He knows his readers want just a little of what the crooks are up to in Austin and Washington, and some of the European situation, though the more important feature is wheat and cattle prices.
I have asked Gus twice if he might allow me my own column, which I would like to call News from Limpia Creek,
but he told me I ought to wait until more people live on the creek, which is his way of saying no.
Gus McQueen does not appear to miss teaching at all. I do not think I am alone (I believe the unstated audience might be in agreement with me on this) when I say that although he had his shining moments in the classroom, he had not the patience for it. As I have pointed out to him since we have been in Texas, he sometimes went on about things of questionable significance (the Natchez Trace, his “theory” that a noun is more than simply a person, place, or thing, which he never thoroughly explained), and sometimes he flat out made stuff up and passed it off as fact.
Love,
Elise
P.S.: Gus has hired some Mexican men to help him dig a well and he is trying to get them to teach him Spanish. Even though I have a million chores to take care of, I bring the men water every half hour because I too want to learn Spanish. I was told by one of the well diggers that my Spanish is muy bueno, which I attribute to my being more musically inclined than Gus. Spanish is a musical language, as you well know, Sandy, from your time cliff diving in Acapulco.
P.P.S.: Gus McQueen sees me writing letters. Sometimes he says, “Who are you writing to, Elise?” and I say, “Sandy, of course,” but he knows who I am really writing to because I give him the letters to post. The first time I gave him a letter addressed to you, Sandy, on Coffeen [sic] Avenue in Sheridan, Wyoming, what he did, and all he did, was nod.
Dear Sandy,
The baby is due the first full moon of June. The baby is due the first full moon of June. Writing it down makes it true. The first full moon of June. The baby is due. First moon June.
Love,
Elise
January 17, 1919
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
February 6, 1919
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy—
I just realized, writing the above, how many you have to care for you there in Sheridan, Wyoming.
That is as it should be, Sandy. Everywhere you go, you leave that place all the wiser. You spread yourself thick. When people see you, gasps are sucked from their lungs. At night the ocean weeps for lack of your hoofprints sucking the wet sand from its shoreline. With each wave it sends millions of shells to entice you to return. The shells tinkle like frozen letters of words falling from the unpinned blankets of yore. And this is your finest moment, Sandy. You bore us gallantly and selflessly through winds icy and coyote. You kept intact, always and overhead, the blanket of sky. Not everyone—certainly not I—can say they always know the way.
Love,
Elise
July 7, 1919
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy and also dear Unstated Audience,
About a month ago, Mother came up from Shafter where Father has a stake in a silver mine. I did not have to ask if they had struck it rich for she was a bag of ungiggly bones and wearing the same pale plaid dress she’d worn when I was playing in the old sod house with the Bulgarians. She might have worn it in Nebraska, or in Axtell, Kansas, where I was born. Perhaps it was packed in the steamer trunk when she went off to Knox College in Illinois. The day she arrived, she went with me to the garden to pick some butter beans. I looked up to see her lift her arm to wipe sweat from her forehead and saw sunlight streaming through the fabric.
Mother stayed with us until the baby was born. That was three weeks ago. I was outside practicing Spanish with Rodrigo and his wife, Juana, who live just across the creek from us, when my water broke. The two of them helped me into the house, where Mother was resting in the bed. Mother started crying. Juana ordered Rodrigo to stay on the porch. Mother cried because she had not brought along some special soap to wash the baby’s head. When she heard this, Juana went outside and spoke to Rodrigo. The window was open and I understood her. “La madre no ayuda.” The mother is no help. “Ve a buscar a María.” Go and get María. While he was gone, Juana moved about the room like a draft. Shadows grew long in Texas. Contraction is an ugly word, and yet even in its ugliness, it does not do justice to the pain it is meant to describe. Gus came home. For an hour he wandered in and out until Juana ordered him to stay on the porch with Rodrigo. María García, who lives in town and has brought seventy-three babies into the world and not a single white one, spoke so softly and rapidly to Juana that I could not understand her. Mother cried in the corner and sometimes she put a cloth on my forehead and other times she sang songs. Mostly lullabies. In the long night there came a train. I heard the whistle and had my boy. And so my boy came on the train.
Love,
Elise
August 15, 1919
Sandy
c/o Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Sandy and dear Lorena,
On that day so long ago, in our Lone Wolf parlor, when Gus, then called Mr. McQueen, appeared, dressed as a scarecrow, the day he claimed his father was dead, he also changed the subject. I said, “Only the three of us know the truth,” referring to the day the wind took my finger and toes, and he changed the subject.
Last night after I put Leslie to bed, I asked Gus why he changed the subject.
“Do you remember everything?” he said.
You used to say, Lorena, that I remembered things that did not happen. But I remember every last ride I took with you, Sandy. I remember those nights you would come stand outside the window after I lost five of my toes, a finger, a sliver of nose (actually I forget about this, because I am not much on mirrors, or noses), and I remember buckling on the special shoes I had to wear then, before I learned to walk by placing the weight on my midsole in the manner of stealthy Indian warriors. I remember sneaking past my parents’ open bedroom door and climbing bareback atop you for moonlight rides across the prairie, the grasshoppers hopping, the rabbits scampering, the snakes slithering out of our way, look out, prairie, here we come, all the way some nights to the Red River and maybe beyond. Maybe we crossed, some of those nights, into Texas and didn’t even need to think about it.
“Yes,” I said to Gus McQueen. “I do remember everything.”
“Do you remember the day of the blizzard?”
“Yes,” I lied. Because, sometimes, Sandy? I have moments of I suppose you could call them panic, when I worry that the only reason Gus is with me is because I am maimed and he feels sorry for me. I do not remember that day in the way I remember my rides with you and the coyote-wind mornings you ferried Lorena and me to school. I remember the in-between, the nothing. If you remember pure nothing, you remember everything. No one realizes this. Elise turned blue, the snow was red. In the wind I heard the whistle of Big Idea, but it went past me to the ears of someone far away, maybe Rodrigo out rounding up cattle in the pasture beneath the bluffs. Maybe Rodrigo had himself a big idea. Hell is fire and heaven is the North Pole. So far as I know, this is not in the Bible. I saw the fence post move and then the snow bleeding. I lost both of my shoes, I have no idea how, where, when.
“I haven’t really hired myself out to stand in a field and scare away crows.” That is what Gus said when I told him, “Only the three of us know the truth.”
“You had just accused me of looking like a scarecrow.”
“That was well before I said anything about the three of us and the truth.”
Gus turned over heavily in bed.
“I suppose you do remember everything,” he said.
I turned over heavily in bed. I put my chin on his rib cage. I let him know I was not going to change the subject. I had Gus in my sights and I kept him there.
“Why
did you change the subject?”
“Because,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
But I know why. The three of us were one too many. It’s not right or wrong. It may involve numbers, but it is not arithmetic.
Love,
Elise
December 5, 1919
Lorena Stewart
c/o Mrs. Edna O’Connelly
326 Coffeen Ave.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Dear Lorena,
Today we woke to snow. It is December and it has been cold out, at least for Texas. People here are unaccustomed to the cold. Last week it snowed two inches and they sent the children home from school, the sheriff retired to the saloon, the Catholic priest announced he would not take confession. When I say they are unaccustomed to cold, I am comparing them to us (and Sandy, of course) who used to venture out in weather that here would shut down the saloons, which are rumored to have stayed open twenty-four hours a day since the first beer was drawn.
The locals are scared of snow, which is only words falling like pieces of wedding cake from the mouth of the sky.
Today the snow fell all morning and was thick on the ground. After lunch I bundled up Leslie, who was half-asleep and in that contemplative state infants often lapse into, wherein they appear to study intently the winking sunlight as it flashes across the patterns of the blankets we bought from the Kiowa. I took Leslie with me out to the barn and put him down in a pile of carefully placed hay. He sat there watching me, looking very serious, as I saddled The Beatitudes. I strapped Leslie to my chest papoose-style and wrapped the Kiowa blanket about us. I had brought pins. I attempted to pin the blanket on the mother and child. Leslie watched, fascinated. He made his little noises that are actually words. I can understand him.
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