Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  His reference to the clan reminded her of the rumored Mormon background. “I understand Don Francisco is of the Mormon faith,” she said, attempting to keep her tone noncommittal.

  “You understand right—two wives and the whole bit, though my mother’s been dead for some years now.”

  His voice was coldly emotionless, and she cast a quick but scrutinizing glance at the man as he came around to her side of the wagon. The swarthy complexion—and definitely the drooping sand-colored mustache—lent the young man a feral appearance. A renegade, Margaret would have called him with a sniff.

  “That’s Sherrod’s mother, Elizabeth, at the door with Lucy,” he said with an easy drawl that had the soft resonance of the Spanish tongue.

  Catherine’s gaze went back to the two women. The younger woman with cornsilk hair bound in fashionable waves about her oval face lifted her hoopless skirts and hurried toward them. “Law,” she cried out in a kewpie-doll voice, “you really did bring her!”

  Law’s rangy leanness was deceiving, and he lifted Catherine effortlessly from the wagon and delivered her a ‘got you’ glance while Lucy rambled on. “Gracious, we were so afraid you wouldn’t accept Don Francisco’s offer, Miss Howard. Your reply didn’t come until four days ago.”

  “I mailed it back in August,” Catherine said as Law released her and picked up her carpetbag.

  “The mail service in the territory has been almost shut down,” he explained, “what with Fort Buchanan’s troops withdrawn to serve in the war’s Eastern campaigns and Cochise’s Apaches thinking they’ve won some sort of victory.”

  A stiff-backed woman in black now approached them. “Law, let the young woman get out of the sun.” Her stone-gray eyes turned on Catherine. “The men forget their manners, living out here away from civilization like we do.”

  Illogically, the diminutive older woman seemed to Catherine as formidable as the Stronghold. Her iron-gray hair was pulled severely back in a bun, and her leathery face wore the look of granite . . . surely the type of pioneer woman Walt Whitman had written about. Yet she moved with all the regal stateliness her Elizabethan name implied. A queen in her castle, Catherine thought.

  Law called out an order in Spanish, and two Mexican urchins ran out of the house to heft her heavy camelback trunk. Elizabeth led her through the house’s wooden-linteled door past the zaguán, the breeze way, into the main room on the left.

  Catherine’s first impression of the interior was one of cool shadows—three-foot-thick walls and high ceilings braced by hand-carved vigas of pine darkened by smoke and age and crossed at right angles by savinas made of ocotillo stalks A smooth, hard floor that she learned was mud mixed with ox blood and cactus juice was covered with several Axminster carpets, and the walls, plastered with laundry bluing, were sparsely decorated with Indian baskets.

  A caliche fireplace dominated the room and seemed to be courted by the simple but sturdy furniture grouped about it. The framed painting above the fireplace caught her eye. A fair-eyed, golden-complected woman of Madonna-like beauty looked down out of the canvas, her lips forming a gentle smile. Jewelry sparkled at her ears and throat and in the comb that piled high her golden tresses. “Law’s mother,” Elizabeth said, her voice dry like the crackling of autumn leaves.

  Law was already striding from the room with Catherine’s carpetbag, and children’s shouts rang out from the rooms beyond. “Uncle Law’s back!” a boyish voice squealed. And Catherine heard something about candy, then Law’s patient drawl, “Yes, I brought the licorice.”

  “You’ll probably want to wash up and rest,” Elizabeth said, “then my husband will want to talk with you.”

  “I’ll show Miss Howard to her room,” Lucy volunteered. “I’m sure it’s nothing like what you must be used to,” she said as she led Catherine through the zaguán and out into a walled, tree-shaded courtyard paved with uneven cobblestones and surrounded on three sides by tiers of open corridors. “Why, it took me years to get used to rooms that were almost windowless! In Virginia we had such big bay windows. Finally, I badgered Sherrod so, he promised me he would have glass panes, not mica mind you, but real glass, freighted in from Kansas City this coming year.”

  They passed along the stucco-covered portico that had a number of bedrooms opening off it. Lucy prattled on, hesitating only long enough for Catherine to assure her that the cage crinoline was still in fashion.

  “I do so miss following the modes,” she continued. “I’ve heard that the women in the States are wearing—Zouave jackets, isn’t it? And Balmoral mantles. As soon as you get settled, you must tell me all the society gossip. I’m so tired of listening to talk of the war and Indian raids!”

  At last Catherine stood alone in her own room. Actually Dona Dominica’s room, Lucy told her. Slowly she stripped off her gloves as she surveyed the furnishings. Austere was the word that came to mind. And scrubbed cleanliness. A substantial bed stood in one comer with a neat patchwork counterpane. Tacked from the ceiling over the bed, as if it had been a four-poster, were manta curtains. Tin retablos, religious paintings, adorned the walls. A pine washstand and bureau and hardback cane chair were the only other pieces of furniture in the spacious room.

  Yet there was a peacefulness about the room—and it was her room, as Don Francisco had promised. Too exhausted to remove her kid boots, she settled for discarding her hat and jacket before she fell across the bed. Later she would hang up the clothes she had packed away in camphor in her trunk.

  A strange loneliness kept her awake. She had deliberately cut herself off from all family and friends. She was wholly alone in the world with her way to make. A terrible sense of uncertainty lapped like cold ripples at her feet. At last her lids closed, but voices, that were not so loud as they were harsh, awoke her. She opened her eyes to find that only a faint light now streamed through the foot-square aperture that served as a window.

  Afraid she was late, she quickly poured the pitcher’s tepid water in the porcelain basin and washed her dusty face, then tucked the wisps of hair into the heavy knot at the nape of her neck. She was fastening her jacket’s buttons as she hurried outside and not really looking where she was going when the door of the room next to hers opened and slammed shut and she collided with the man who emerged from the room.

  She staggered, and firm hands reached out to steady her. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking—” they both began in unison and broke off, smiling.

  “You must be Miss Howard,” he said, releasing her.

  “And you are—”

  '“Sherrod—Sherrod Godwin,” he finished for her.

  Though not as tall as his stepbrother, he still topped Catherine’s five-foot-three-inch frame by almost a foot. Even in the dimming daylight his darkly handsome looks were evident, with deep-brown hair and sideburns and a well-trimmed mustache only a shade lighter.

  “I can’t tell you how much Lucy”— he looked awkwardly toward the door—“how excited she is that another woman her age is here. She’s getting ready for dinner, but come on with me. The children are asking all sorts of questions about you—and Father, of course, is demanding to see you.”

  As he led her inside, he recounted the reactions of the children to the idea of a woman tutor—from seven-year-old Abigail’s certainty that Catherine would wear men’s trousers to five-year- old Brigham’s disgust that the tutor had to be a woman.

  Yet Catherine only half listened to Sherrod’s voice. The voice in her head drummed much louder. She was much too intelligent, her mind warned, to let herself become attracted to the handsome man—and indeed he was handsome, dressed in nankeens and buff waistcoat. She had half expected him to dress with the same negligence as his stepbrother.

  He ushered her past the large dining room and through the enormous kitchen that had copper utensils and clay ollas strung from the ceiling’s beams. An old Papago Indian looked up from the bread he kneaded and nodded when Sherrod made the introduction, telling her Loco had been at Cristo Rey for over twenty year
s.

  Sherrod paused before his father’s office, his hand on the door handle. “I don’t suppose my father told you anything about himself?”

  She shook her head. “No. He told me very little about anything. ’’

  He sighed. “That’s like my father. He suffered a stroke last year, and it has left him weakened. As a result he's rather edgy, but don’t let his gruffness frighten you.”

  “There’s very little that frightens me any more, Mr. Godwin, and certainly not mortal man."

  He cocked his head. His warm blue eyes quietly appraised her. “I can believe that," he said at last. He smiled then and opened the door but did not enter, leaving her on her own.

  She paused with her back to the closed door, while her gaze sought out the old man clad in black. He sat in a cushioned rocker with a book spread on his lap and a cane hooked over the chair’s arm. He raised his head and fixed her with an equally studious gaze. Whatever she expected from the narrow face framed by a long bone-white beard, it was certainly not the torment that stared out of the shadowed eyes.

  “Come in and sit down,” Don Francisco rasped and indicated the scrolled hard-backed chair near the secretarial desk.

  She took a seat on the chair’s edge, arranging her voluminous skirts as best she could. After a moment the old man said, “Your face possesses the same character your letter indicated.”

  “I hope that is a compliment, Don Francisco.”

  “It’s a sigh of relief, Miss Howard.”

  She raised a questioning brow, but he did not elaborate further. He closed the heavy book. “The Mormon’s Doctrine and Covenant,” he said, catching her interested glance at the tome. For the first time he smiled, a bitter smile. “In my more robust days I often strayed from Joseph Smith’s revelations, and I suppose a brush with death has brought me back into the fold again.”

  Was he speaking of his stroke, or the death that had claimed his second wife? “A brush with death cannot help but affect one’s outlook on life,” she said, fully appreciating the man’s situation. “Tell me how else I can be of help.”

  The door opened, and Elizabeth came in, closing it behind her. “I was just beginning to tell Miss Howard of her duties here, Elizabeth.”

  He struggled to lay the book on the desk, and the woman took it and placed it there for him. Locking her hands before her, she turned to Catherine. “What my husband probably has not told you is that we brought you out here to be more than just a tutor.”

  “Oh?”

  “First there’s Abigail and Brigham. Sherrod’s wife has had a smattering of education, if you consider those silly finishing schools that teach music and needlepoint an education. But the woman doesn’t have a lick of common sense. I wouldn’t trust her to teach Brigham what he will need to know to run Cristo Rey.”

  “Of course, when he's older,” Don Francisco said tiredly, “he'll be sent off to St. Michael's boarding school in St. Louis, as were Sherrod and Law.”

  Catherine relaxed a little. So far the objectives did not seem beyond her capabilities. “Then there’s Sherrod," Elizabeth continued crisply. “He’s carrying a heavy burden running Cristo Rey since my husband’s stroke. Sherrod needs to devote his total attention to the place—and Lucy doesn’t understand.”

  “Elizabeth, you’re being unnecessarily harsh on Lucy,” Don Francisco rebuked. “She’s lonely and misses civilization.”

  Elizabeth’s lips folded thin. “She doesn’t have the stamina— the strength—to live out here. A crying, whining woman is a millstone my son doesn’t need. Lucy has to have another woman to talk to—about the finer things of life. I want you to be her companion, Miss Howard.”

  “I see. That takes care of everyone but Law-—Lorenzo—then, doesn’t it?”

  “Law,” Elizabeth said grimly, “can take care of himself.”

  CHAPTER 5

  One rarely heard days, weeks, or months mentioned at Cristo Rey. There were clocks in the Stronghold, but no one bothered to wind them. If a day was referred to, it was the day Loco burned the bread or Sherrod went to Tucson.

  After caring for her sickly mother for so long and then listening to the agonizing groans and cries of suffering men, of smelling the putrefying stench of rotting limbs and festering wounds for a year, that first month at Cristo Rey seemed a preview of heaven to Catherine.

  January in Baltimore would have brought subzero blizzards howling through the streets, but at Cristo Rey the sun-splashed cool days and even cooler crystalline nights slipped gently into another week, another month.

  She fell easily into the routine of the Stronghold, waking at six-thirty each morning when Loco rang the bell, warning that breakfast would be served in thirty minutes. The tutoring of Brigham, who was a five-year-old fountain of curiosity, and Abigail, whose preadolescent plumpness concealed the promise of her mother's beauty, took most of Catherine’s day. From eight until noon she taught the children in the courtyard, then recessed for lunch and returned to teach from one to three.

  Afterward she would sit with Lucy and, mending or helping with the carding of the wool, listen to the young woman’s chatter until time for dinner.

  Despite having borne two children, Lucy was at twenty-seven still a very beautiful woman, and Catherine could understand how Sherrod could have fallen in love with her. “My parents were very much against my marrying a Mormon,” she told Catherine one afternoon. “But they soon recognized Sherrod’s honorable intentions and”—Lucy smiled—“his charming manner.”

  “Does it ever bother you," Catherine ventured, “that Sherrod could take a second—or third—wife?”

  The clicking of Lucy’s needles halted. A small nervous smile flitted across her porcelain face. “You know how it is when a woman gets married. At first you’re too much in love to care. And now . . . now another wife would be nice to help share some of the—duties of a wife to a husband.”

  Catherine could not conceal the surprise on her face, and Lucy laughed. Her needles began darting back and forth in rapid flashes. “Oh, I know what you must be thinking, Catherine. Honestly, I felt the same way when I first came to the Stronghold and watched how Dona Dominica and Elizabeth attended to Don Francisco.”

  An impish voice in Catherine dared her to ask what it was like, but instead she said, “I understand Dona Dominica was at the Stronghold to begin with—that she was a widow.”

  “Yes. Law’s father had been killed in an Indian attack several months before she met Don Francisco. Sherrod told me that his father came out here in '48 with a Mormon battalion that was on its way to fight the Mexicans in California. After the Mormons took possession of Tucson from the Mexican forces, Don Francisco decided to stay. He sent to Santa Fe for Sherrod and Elizabeth, and, as Sherrod tells me, by the time he and his mother reached Tucson his father had taken Dona Dominica as his second wife.”

  Once more Lucy paused in her knitting to smile wistfully. “You know, Catherine, Mormon wives call each other ‘sister.’ I’d love to be able to call you my sister, truly. It’s so wonderful to have you here I hate to think of your leaving one day.” Stunned at Lucy's frankness, she could say nothing. Only at that moment did she allow herself to fantasize being married to Sherrod. He would have made the kind of husband she had always dreamed of—warm, intelligent, responsible. “It pleases me that you care enough to want me as—your sister. But Lucy, I’ve waited this long to marry, so you may be sure that if I ever do, I’ll be the only wife or I simply won’t marry.”

  “But what of duty, Miss Howard?” Elizabeth’s voice asked from behind the two women.

  Turning to look at Elizabeth, dressed as always in black, Catherine dryly wondered if the woman was in mourning for her lost youth. Lucy had told her that Elizabeth was forty-four. But the woman looked years older.

  “From so many hours tending farm crops," Lucy had told her. "And then when the Mormon persecution began in Illinois, Elizabeth made that long walk with Don Francisco and Sherrod and the other Mormons bound for Sant
a Fe. And you know, Catherine, so much exposure to the sun is not good for a lady’s skin.”

  "You certainly seem to be a most practical woman, Miss Howard,” Elizabeth was saying. "You’re not silly enough to think romance is a lasting thing. If your husband took himself another wife, I’m sure you would see that it was your duty to make the best of it so that everything ran smoothly.”

  The corners of Catherine’s lips curled uncontrollably. “I’d see that it was my duty to keep my husband so happy he would not think of taking another wife in the first place.”

  Elizabeth's smile was thin. “You speak as an unmarried and inexperienced woman, Miss Howard . . . foolishly, unwisely. My daughter-in-law will tell you that a wife knows that it is not always possible to—please a husband.”

  Lucy blanched and was inordinately quiet after Elizabeth left the room. The woman’s words recalled a conversation Catherine had overheard the first week she was at Cristo Rey. An argument it was really, and only a few words—but revealing words. “What?” Don Francisco had thundered. “You gave Miss Howard Dominica’s room? I ordered you to leave that room untouched!”

  “Isn’t it time you stopped keeping that room as a shrine?!” Elizabeth had hissed.

  Catherine had hurried on past Don Francisco’s office. Don Francisco was still in love with his second wife!

  The day after Elizabeth's stinging rebuke to Lucy and herself, Catherine went to Don Francisco's office in hopes of finding an extra dictionary for Abigail Once again she could hear the old man arguing. His diatribe was cut short when he bade her enter after her hesitant knock on the office door.

  Law was slouched in the armchair across from Don Francisco's desk while the old man limped about the room, still raging. “It’s all right,” Don Francisco told her. He waved his cane in Law’s direction. “I was just telling this rakehell if he'd spend less time in bordellos and saloons, he might make something of his life!”

  A suppression of a smile hovered over Law’s mouth, as if he were indulging his stepfather’s outrage. It was the first time Catherine had seen Law in more than two weeks. Out of the three months she had lived at Cristo Rey, she could count on her hand the number of times her path crossed his, which was fine with her. There was something about the mocking way the young man looked at her—as though . . . as though he found something about her amusing!