“Please! You mustn’t!”
“Oh, I coon’t ‘elp meself, could I? Here,” Clipper said, sidling close and following along as the maid retreated toward the back of the house. “I s’pect a girl as pretty as you is steppin’ out with someone reg’lar. Am I right? ‘Cause if I am, I ain’t one to intrude on another man’s territory.” He took her by the shoulder and stopped her in her tracks, then placed a finger under her chin and lifted her head. “But if the menfolk of Boston is too bleedin’ blind to see a treasure unner their noses, well, I mean . . . Clipper’s the name, miss. Wot’s you’rn?
“I don’t know if I should,” said the girl, who had never been romanced before, apart from her dreams. At that moment her heart wanted nothing more than to part with her name, her virtue, her undying love and devotion in return for the opportunity to mold him into the man she always wanted, and with him hand-in-hand, sally forth upon the grand adventure of life. She was, he estimated, about thirteen, and he knew the thoughts of girls between thirteen and twenty-one or twenty- two tended toward such foolishness. It was a lute upon which he intended to play sparing no fingers.
“Now that’s wise, that is. I can tell yer not one’ve these loose-lipped tarts as some I’ve known. No. Now, that’s encouragin’ for someone serious as me. ‘Cause you know why?”
“Why?” she said, sauntering toward the gate at a leisurely pace.
“‘Cause I been watchin’ you, I have.”
A thrill tripled up her spine. “You have?”
“I have. Free days now I been over there . . . ” he pointed at his hiding place, “a-watchin’ of you ev’ry chance I get.”
“Why?” said the girl, slowing almost to a standstill.
“Why? Ain’t that obvlious? I mean, ‘ave I seen anyone prettier in this ‘hole bloomin’ town? Ask me twice, an’ I’ll tell ye the same. No! Now,” he continued, “I grant the young lady what just departed in the motor car, well, she’s what you call beautiful in a statuey kind’ve way.”
“That’s Miss Katy.”
“She can be Miss Understood, f’r all I care,” said Clipper, caught up in the rhythm of his own patter. “Aside’ve you, she pales. That’s wot she does, is pales.”
The child was completely under his spell, and he knew it. “You know wot?” he said. “You know wot, Lisa?” he emphasized, as if a great revelation had come to him.
“My name’s Patience . . . ”
“Of course it is. Patience,” he said, rolling the word around on his tongue. “A virtuous girl with a virtuous name. Suits you down to the ground. Mind if I call you ‘Pay?’ Now, Pay, you know wot? You’re the one as should be toodlin’ off in motor cars, not that Katy wot’s-‘er-name.”
“Saltonstall.”
“Saltonstall. That’s wot I said. Now, if you’d been born inter money like ‘er . . . ”
“Oh, but she wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t wot?”
“Born into money. She’s a foundling?”
“A foundling?”
“Yes.”
“They found ‘er, on the doorstep, like?”
“As good as! And they adopted her.”
“Why?”
“‘Why’ what?”
“Why did they adop’ ‘er?”
This gave Patience pause. “I . . . I don’t know as I should say. It happened a long time ago . . . before I was born, I think.”
“If you don’t want to say, then don’t you say, darlin’. Wot bizniss is it of mine, you say, an’ you’re right. If ol’ man Saltonstall got some maid in a family way an’ . . . ”
“Oh, no! It was nothing like that. Mr. Saltonstall is devoted to his wife! Don’t say such a thing!”
“Didn’t mean to offend, to be sure, Pay.”
“It’s just that . . . now this is what cook says, ‘cause I wasn’t here, like I said, but cook says the Saltonstalls had just lost a daughter about that time; very young she was. Drowned. Then what happens? Miss Eleanor is out driving to market one day, and she finds Miss Katy without anyone to her name. As if she’d been put there by the angels! Now, what do you make of that?”
“Just off the street,” Clipper said dreamily. “Just like that. Angels, must be.”
“That’s what I thought. I think it’s romantic.”
There was probably very little, Clipper thought, that Patience wouldn’t find romantic. “If I put ‘er at nineteen? Twenty? I don’t guess I’d be far off, would I?”
“Not too. She just had her birthday not two weeks since. It was lovely! We all had cake.”
“Cake,” Clipper echoed, though his thoughts were elsewhere. “An’ they adopted ‘er, did they?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
“An’ now she’s just one’ve the family?”
“Very nice, she is. A real lady.”
That’s what Clipper loved about America: a foundling off the street could grow up to be a lady. “Couldn’t never ‘appen in England,” he said.
“What?”
Clipper hadn’t realized he was thinking aloud. “Oh, nuffin’. Makes you wonder what sorta family she come from though, don’t it? I mean . . . was she lost, like? Or was she left?”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Patience, her free hand flying to her mouth. “I’d never thought of such a thing. Surely that couldn’t be, ever! No! That’s a wicked thing to suggest. I’m sure you’re wrong.”
“I s’pose I am,” said Clipper. “Woon’t be the firs’ time.” He turned her toward the back gate and resumed walking. “So, with ‘er so ‘appy an’ all, I don’t ‘spect she ever tried to fin’ ‘er fambly, or ‘ooever it was left ‘er or lost ‘er or whatever.”
“Shows what you know,” said Patience, indignant on behalf of her mistress. “She sent a detective out west to find ‘em.”
“Out west? Why out west?”
Patience shrugged. “That’s where they went, I guess.”
“When was this, then?”
“A year or more,” said Patience, unsure. “Not more than two or three, I think.”
“A detective?” Clipper said, lifting the latch and passing the hapless girl through to the back yard.
“That’s right.”
“An’ wot’d ‘e find?”
“ ‘e never come back,” said the girl, her eyes wide with any number of gruesome possibilities.
Later that afternoon, Clipper trudged his way through thick undergrowth on Copp’s Hill burial ground. It took him the better part of half-an-hour, but eventually he found the grave of Tiffin Conlan. The headstone had tipped over. He straightened it as best he could, tore the worst of the weeds away, and put a clutch of wildflowers on the grave. “I don’t know ‘oo you was, Tiffin, my boy. But jus’ so’s you’d know, there’s folks out there that ain’t forgot ya.”
For no particular reason, he stood there a long time, wresting meaning from the words carved in the stone.
Conllan Ranch
Canyon Ridge, New Mexico
March 10th, 1957
Regan had finished sifting through the pile of papers without result. “No more letters.”
“But there must be,” said Maryellen.
“Look for yourself.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“Guess not.”
No one spoke for quite a while. Becky went out on the porch and lit a cigarette. Maryellen followed, leaving the boys talking over a game of Sorry!.
Maryellen sat on the porch rail, inhaling the night. Off to the west the dome of heaven was spangled with stars. “It took a special kind of person to settle out here, didn’t it?” she said at last.
“Funny you should say that. I was thinking pretty much the same thing. Old Gramps. Sometimes we forget the older generations had a whole life before we even knew them.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“I won’t know ‘til I hear it, will I?”
�
�Where is Mr . . . where is your husband.”
“His name was Josh.”
“Was?”
“He was killed . . . in France, during the war.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . ”
Becky took a long drag on her cigarette and squashed it out in an old ashtray. “That’s okay. I can understand your wanting to know, especially given the way you feel about Tiff.”
Maryellen dropped her head. “It’s that obvious?”
“Well, let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t play poker, if I was you.”
They let that thread dangle for a while. “Josh was an amazing man. He didn’t have to enlist – he was thirty-seven – but he felt like he’d missed being able to do his part in the first war when he was too young. He joined up as soon as he come of age, though, in the 20’s. We got married after he got out.”
Turning around, she propped her bottom against the railing, crossed her arms protectively across her chest, as if to shield her from pain, and stared holes in the past.
“As soon as the call went out for officers . . . well, he didn’t say anything at the time. Didn’t know how I’d take it. But I knew what he was thinking, and I knew that he’d never be able to live with himself if he didn’t go.” Tears were flowing freely now, stealing silently down her cheeks. “So I told him to go.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. “I told him to go!”
Instinctively, Maryellen embraced the older woman and let the tears flow.
“Hey! What’s goin’ on out here?” said Tiffin, then he stopped. “Ma? You all right?”
Becky jerked upright immediately, wiping her eyes on the collar of her dress. “I’m okay, Tiff. Just . . . ”
Tiffin cast an appealing glance at Maryellen. “We were talking about your father.”
“Oh,” he put an arm around his mother’s shoulder. “You okay?”
Becky nodded, but it was plain to see she was on the verge of losing it again. “Let me take her in the house,” said Maryellen.
“Sure,” said Tiffin, standing aside. “Sure. Go ahead.” As the women pressed by him, he brushed his mother’s head. “Let me know if you need anything, Ma.”
The women passed Regan in the doorway. In response to the question in his eyes, Maryellen shook her head. He held the door until they were inside, then closed it quietly. “What’s up?” he whispered.
“They were talkin’ ‘bout my dad.”
Regan filled his pipe. “He died in the war, right?”
“Mm.”
“She ever talk about it?”
Tiffin looked up, as if only just aware of Regan’s presence. “No. Never. I mean, she’d talk about him . . . about them, but never about the War or . . . what happened to him. It was like he just disappeared.”
“What was he like?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Los Ojos, New Mexico
November 16th, 1931
“You’re gettin’ yourself all riled up about nothin’, Josh.” The speaker was Domy Andrews. A spare, wiry man in his middle 40s, he had made himself a legend of contrariness; make the mistake of asserting anything in his presence, whether the color of the sky, the finality of death, or the depth of your love for your woman, and he’d refute it. And if he managed to argue you around to his way of thinking, he’d immediately take the opposing position. That’s the way Domy was. Still, for some unfathomable reason, men listened to him and, generally, credited what he had to say – even if it was the exact opposite of what he’d said the day before. He sat at on his own special stool at the counter of Burns’ Store, swaddled in denim, flannel, and home-rolled tobacco smoke, and made pronouncements on whatever remark drifted his way.
Josh Conllan had been arguing with other sheepherders on the Committee that it was soon going to be too late to get their stock down to Abiquiu. The snow was bound to come.
“Winters’re gettin’ milder every year,” said Andrews, looking more than ever like some misplaced Eastern mystic. “That’s the way it is. Weather cycles, they call it. Pretty soon, there won’t be any need to move the flocks from one end’ve the valley to the other. Maybe there ain’t now. The asters are still in bloom, fer cryin’ out loud. Look at last winter . . . ”
“What if last winter,” Josh interrupted, “was a freak? And the winters before it, too. Let’s say we’ve been in one of these cycles you’re talking about. What if it’s ended? I think we should’ve had them sheep down in Abiquiu two or three weeks ago . . . if not more.
“Up on the ridge Solly reads signs this year’s gonna be . . . ”
“Indian mumbo-jumbo. Ain’t gonna happen,” Domy proclaimed. “I’d say we’ve still got another month ‘fore the snows set in. Maybe not even then.”
“I think hiss right,” said Estefan Espinosa.
Like most of the partido shepherds in the valley – those who ran sheep for the big landowners – Estefan had had a good year. He ran three bands for T.D. Burns. Early the previous spring, each band had eight hundred to a thousand head. After lambing, there were more than two thousand in each band. Seventy-five percent of these lambs were his to do with as he wished. Most of them he’d load aboard the train in Chama and ship to markets back east. From the proceeds, he’d pay T.D. thirty-cents a head for grazing rights to his land and settle his credit at the store. Whatever remained after these expenses was his profit, and thanks to the fact that the mild winter meant very little loss from the original band, which would be deducted from the lambing total, that might average out to as much as $40 a month for his labors. Well above the normal.
The sheep he didn’t send to market, the best of the flock, he would add to his own little herd. Maybe one day he would be landlord with shepherds working for him. “The snow iss not so bad as it use to be. It cost money to feed the sheep if we move them. Why not let them stay here a few more weeks, where feed is free!”
Miguel Valdez and Lindo Velarde, the two other shepherds in attendance, heartily seconded Estefan’s assessment, especially the part about not spending money unnecessarily.
Josh Conllan shook his head. “What if it snows tonight?”
“If eet doss, so? We head south!” said Valdez.
“I mean, what if it snows a lot, ‘til it’s too deep to move them?”
“Won’t happen, I tell ya,” said Domy, shaking his head sagely. “Give it two weeks, then head on down. You’ll be right as rain.”
While there was no set law governing the process, it was customary for all the shepherds in that part of the valley to move their sheep at the same time. The division of labor amongst the shepherds meant they didn’t have to hire extra hands, and there was less likelihood that quarrels would arise over grazing. A spot on the wool of each sheep was dyed in a particular way, or with a distinctive color, so they could be easily separated at trail’s end.
It was up to a committee of five to determine, by simple majority, when to move the sheep. It was that committee that was meeting now in T.D. Burns’ Store.
Willis Cox had been listening to the debate from the vicinity of the jerky basket. “I’m with Josh,” he said, chewing ruminatively. “Ain’t worth the risk to the flocks just to save a few dollars.”
“Noted,” said Domy, “one comment from the peanut gallery. This here’s a closed meetin’, Will. When you’re voted onto the Committee, you can talk all you want. ‘Til then, pipe down.”
“I guess I can talk all I want,” said Willis, his mastication becoming more aggressive as he slapped the counter resoundingly with a half-eaten piece of dried beef. “This committee represents all of us!”
“That’s right,” Domy agreed, “an’ it’s our job to decide when to move the sheep. So, let’s have motions from the floor.”
“I move we wait two weeks,” said Estefan, holding up his hand.
Lindo held up his hand. “Second.”
“Let’s vote. All in favor of holdin’ off two weeks. That’d be . . . ” Domy consulted a Bromo Brand Bicarbonate of Soda calend
ar on the wall “ . . . Monday, the 30th. Say ‘aye.’
Four ‘ayes.’
“‘Nays’, just for the record.”
“Nay,” said Josh.
Willis put up his hand.
“Put your hand down, Will,” said Domy, “it don’t signify.”
Willis kept his hand up a little longer and didn’t put it down ‘til it got tired.
“Motion passed,” said Domy. “Any other business?”
Josh was tempted to announce that he’d be moving his sheep first thing in the morning, with or without the approval of the Committee. But they’d all know it was an empty threat. He didn’t have enough manpower to move his four bands, and he couldn’t afford to hire help. Every extra penny he’d had over the last two years had gone into adding onto the cabin on Canyon Ridge. That and the little he set aside whenever he could for Thomas’s seventieth birthday surprise, just two years away now.
Of course, he could ask his Dad to help, but he’d pretty much retired to the reservation with Mom, and his brother and brother-in-law, but they were busy building lives of their own, and not as shepherds. God bless ‘em.
He threw up his hands and re-situated his hat. “Have it your way,” he said, turning to leave. “I just hope you’re right about the snow.”
“If worse comes to worse, there’s always the train,” said Lindo stoically.
“Si,” said Miguel. “He’s right. We can take them to Abiquiu on the train.”
“A minute ago you’re talkin’ about savin’ a few dollars, and now you say we’ll just put ‘em on the train!” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Don’t you worry, Josh,” said Domy. “I’m right. You wait an’ see.”
He didn’t have to wait long. That night, a storm front swept in over the San Juan Mountains like nothing anyone in the valley had ever seen before, driving before it a wall of snow that was more like an avalanche than a blizzard. By morning, more than two feet blanketed the ground. When the snow finally stopped, the valley sighed under a deadly white mantle of majesty four feet deep.
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