by Denise Dietz
* * * * *
Flames and smoke took possession of the tent colony around seven.
“Move the women and children to Frank Baynes’s ranch house, Katie,” said Pearl Jolly, silhouetted by the waning twilight.
“That’s suicidal, Pearl. The ranch is a mile away, and we have to cross open flat between the tents and the arroyo. If we go south, we’ll run into machine gun fire.”
“We can’t stay here. We’ll burn to death. I’d rather be shot then burned, wouldn’t you?”
“Look!” Kate pointed at the depot, where a southbound local freight train rumbled toward the station. Its headlights showed militiamen firing across the tracks. The train halted with a screech of brakes. “This is our chance. There have to be at least thirty freight cars and they’ll provide a barrier.” Even as she spoke, Kate headed for the pump house and well.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a soldier running a blazing torch up a tent side. She looked to her left and gasped with horror. Mrs. Bebout’s Saint Bernard loped down the path, a blazing stick of wood between his jaws. The dog’s shaggy fur was singed and he was confused. Oh, God! How many times had Kate seen the children throwing sticks for the dog to retrieve?
Yearning to chase the bewildered animal, knowing she couldn’t waste a precious second, Kate continued running toward the well.
Once in the arroyo, the surge of refugees split in two, half veering toward the Black Hills, three miles away.
“I’m going back, Pearl!” Kate shouted.
“For God’s sake, why?”
“Mary Petrucci and her children are missing. Cedilano Costa and Patricia Valdez—”
“Katie, wait! They could have escaped earlier.”
“They all hid in Alcarita Pedregon’s pit. What if they’re still there? They’ll suffocate from smoke. I have to go back.”
As Kate reentered the colony, she noted that the shooting had become desultory, the gunfire subordinate to the crackle of flames.
Approaching Alcarita’s tent, she thought she heard the sound of crying children. Dear God! Cedilano Costa was in an advanced state of pregnancy, while Patricia Valdez still breast-fed her three-month-old baby. Kate had given both tiny Petrucci girls hand-stitched cloth bunnies for Easter.
“Hey, I got me one,” said a man’s rough voice.
Kate felt arms encircle her waist and belly.
“Let’s hang him from the telephone pole,” said a second man.
Kate wrenched free and whirled around, planning to cut left and sprint for Louis’s tent.
“Look out! He could have a gun!”
She saw the soldier swing his Springfield rifle, and raised her arm to take the blow. But the man struck with such force, the stock of his rifle snapped. Kate fell, her arm broken, her scalp gashed.
Still conscious, she heard the first voice.
“Gawd, it’s a girl!”
“Let’s get out of here. We don’t wanna hang no girl.”
“Shouldn’t we see how bad she’s hurt?”
“We’re supposed to find Louie the Greek. Let’s go!”
Kate shut her eyes. I’ll get dirty lying on the ground, she thought. Mummy will be mad but Daddy’ll laugh and say, “Buy her a new dress, Johanna.”
No, wait. Her dress wouldn’t get dirty because she wore Mike’s overalls and shirt. She desperately wanted to wash away the blood that poured down her face. Despite the camp’s muddy grime, she had always managed to keep herself clean for Mike.
“I wish I were a little bar of soap,” she whispered. “I’d slide from you slowly and—”
Kate slid into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
Louis Tikas was shot in the back three times. Frank Snyder, age eleven, left the hole beneath his tent to fetch his baby sister some water. A bullet shattered his brain. The Pedregon pit was uncovered, exposing the bodies of Patricia Valdez, the pregnant Cedilano Costa, and eleven children. Mary Petrucci and Alcarita Pedregon had escaped to find help, just before Kate had been attacked outside what was now referred to as the “death pit” or “black hole.”
Briefly regaining consciousness, Kate had managed to crawl away from the burning tents. When found, her broken arm was set but she stared blankly into the distance. The rifle’s blow had caused a severe concussion and she was unable to walk or talk. In despair, Mike brought her to Edward Lytton, knowing she would receive superior medical attention.
When fed, she’d swallow—even oatmeal, a dish she had despised as a child.
She was told, by Ned, that Mike had died from a stray bullet, but her expression never changed. Sometimes she’d raise her arms, hands clawed, fingers splayed. In her own mind she was trying to catch an imaginary baseball. But she always missed and the ball would roll into a flaming pit and she’d hear a man atop a black horse shout, “Never mind, girlie, tomorrow we’ll get the roasted baseball!”
* * * * *
Seated on the edge of her chair, Kate stared through the music room window.
She watched the sky turn blue then black—sometimes dotted with candle-stars—then blue again. From time to time it rained. The rain will put out the baseball, she thought.
Had her brain projected images on a motion picture screen, it would have shown a house with trees in the front and backyard, children singing “Ring-a-Rosy,” and a shaggy Saint Bernard running through the grass, a piece of scorched wood between its flaming jaws.
“She might improve if her husband paid her a visit,” the doctor suggested. “There’s always hope, Mr. Lytton.”
“It’s hopeless, Loutra,” Ned told Mike over the telephone. “Thank God I have the means to make Katie comfortable. She can’t even feed herself. We have a nurse with her at all times. No, you can’t see her. The doctor says the sight of anyone or anything connected with Ludlow might cause irreparable damage. I’ll let you know if she improves. You have my oath on it.”
Ned knew his medical pretext wouldn’t keep Loutra at bay for long, so he contacted Randolph Tassler. Tassler said an assassin was out of the question, but he’d arrange for Mike to be taken into custody, charged with marijuana possession. Marijuana had been outlawed in order to combat insolent demands by Mexican workers who looked at white women; workers who also had the audacity to insist their children be educated while they harvested sugar beets.
In a voice dripping with sarcasm, Randolph Tassler said that Mike would appreciate an opportunity to join a convict chain gang—where he’d benefit from fresh air and physical labor.
Mike Loutra now spent his nights at the Colorado State Penitentiary. During the day he built roads.
Kate remained incommunicable, so Ned turned to Richard Reed, admitting a renewed interest in the Ku Klux Klan. After all, who had been responsible for Kate’s illness? Immigrant Catholics and Jews. Katie was so young. Greeks and dagos had poisoned her mind against her family. Ned vowed to avenge the loss of his daughter.
But first he wanted to drink himself senseless.
Twenty-Three
Cripple Creek: 1914
Aspen trees, shiny with flower catkins, signified the end of winter.
Fools Gold Smith focused on a catkin. “I can’t remember the lady’s name,” she said, shifting her gaze toward Jack Gottlieb. “It sounds like Appaloosa.”
“What lady?”
“The Greek lady who changed people into statues.”
“Her name was Medusa. Hold still, Flo.”
“I know how her victims felt.”
“Medusa was decapitated by Perseus. I know how he felt.” Jack waved his arms, and paint from two brushes spattered the spongy ground.
“The Master Artist might not agree with your color scheme,” Flo teased.
“Stop moving!”
“Please let me stretch. I’ve been in this same position for hours and hours.”
“Don’t exaggerate. You sound like one of your Vitagraph heroines.”
“Do you know why movies are called movies, Jack?”
“I s
uppose because they move.”
“Exactly. I wish I were a Vitagraph heroine. At least I wouldn’t be stuck in one place like a statue.”
“Ungrateful girl. I must be the only artist in the world who lets his model read a movie magazine while she poses.”
“Here’s an article by somebody named Henry Arthur Phillips. Three names, Jack. He must be very important. Mr. Phillips says, ‘Plot material is the telltale dust of deeds that lies heavy behind the curtain of Commonplace Event.’ ”
“I give up. Squirm, run, hop, jump. Anyway, the light’s wrong.”
“The light’s perfect. You’re just hungry.”
“No, you’re hungry. You’re always hungry and you’re always moving. First you had to wash your hands because they were sticky from the sap of stems.”
“You were the one who suggested I make a circlet for my head.”
“I said primroses, not weeds.”
“The weeds looked lonely.”
“Lonely? They grow like weeds. After that, you had to spoil Dumas and Whistler’s Brother with the last of our sugar cubes.”
“The horses looked lonely.”
“You went to the cabin for something to eat three times, but who’s counting? I doubt you’ve been posing five minutes.”
“Now who’s exaggerating?” After carefully placing her magazine in the crook of a tree, Flo donned Jack’s bathrobe. “I’ve a hamper full of cheese, fruit and pasties, so I’ll pull down one of those blankets strung up between the trees and we’ll have ourselves a picnic.”
“Picnics are for the young.”
“Picnics are for everybody. And you’re not old, even if your beard does show a few silver threads. Thirty-eight isn’t old, Jack.”
“It’s twice your age, honey.”
“I’ve got buttermilk cooling in the stream.” Spreading a blanket over paint-spattered flowers, she sat, stuffed a wedge of cheese into her mouth, and reached for a meat pie.
Jack sank down onto the blanket. “You’re going to get fat again.”
“I don’t think so. When I was ten years old I weighed the same as I do today, and I was awfully heavy.”
“You were ten inches shorter.”
“Eight. The cabin wall says I’ve grown eight inches. I wish Sally Marylander could see me now.”
“Who’s Sally Marylander?”
“A beautiful lady from my past. I wonder if she ever buried her horse. That would make a fine subject for one of your paintings. A ghostly white stallion galloping across the sky.”
He reached for an apple. “You’d gain weight if you ate parlor house food instead of our plain fare.”
“When Mary Pickford approached Biograph Studios and D.W. Griffith, he said, ‘You’re too little and too fat, but I think I’ll give you a chance.’ Maybe I should cut and curl my hair like Mary’s.”
“Over my dead body. If I chopped six inches off your body, ironed the cleft in your chin with a clothes press, and painted your hair yellow-ocher, you’d pass for Pickford.”
“Funny you should say that about painting my hair yellow. I once told someone I’d have yellow hair when I grew up.”
“Give it a chance. You’re not grown up yet.”
“His name was Cat McDonald and he saved me from . . .” Her blue eyes clouded over. “I never thanked him, but I couldn’t speak. I think I loved him. Oh, that’s silly. I was a child.” She spread the bathrobe’s cocoa-colored silk more evenly and tightened the bow at her waist.
Jack propped himself against a tree, beneath a canopy of leaves. “Move closer to me. I’ll have to change the pigment on my canvas if the sun keeps shining down on your face. You’ll look like a Negro.”
“What’s wrong with that? Did you ever see the Negro preacher who gave weekly harangues? He drew large crowds. When I was a little girl I stood on the corner one afternoon with some five hundred others. We all sang ‘There Is Sunshine in Your Soul.’ ”
“Maybe I’ll reproduce that scene for one of my paintings.”
“Good idea,” she murmured, changing positions so that her head was pillowed in his lap. “You sell your Cripple Creek scenes as fast as you finish them.” She yawned. “I wonder what became of Cat McDonald. Sometimes I see his father shopping on Bennett. John McDonald’s old now, and he looks so sad. I remember when he’d visit Little Heaven before . . . before . . .” She yawned again and closed her eyes.
Jack saw the mounds of her breasts rise and fall. When had she grown breasts? Only yesterday her boyish form had posed against their cabin wall or her mare’s dappled flanks. He could probably trace her growth by stacking his canvasses in a row and watching her figure develop. Her face, too, although that wasn’t so obvious. She’d lost the startled deer expression, thank God, yet her eyes still held a hint of vulnerable sorrow.
In many ways Flo reminded him of his deceased wife. Leah’s hair had been waist-length and raven-black, like Flo’s, but Leah’s eyes had shined sapphire blue rather than Flo’s dark cobalt. Leah’s mouth had possessed a full lower lip, the same as Flo’s, but it hadn’t led a person’s gaze downwards, toward a cleft chin.
Jack recalled the morning when Flo had sobbed out her pain at the death of Minta and her green snake, Spinach. She had whimpered about a small man who’d hurt her with his hands and knees, and she’d wept until she had no tears left.
When the storm inside and outside his cabin had subsided, before Jack could escort Flo back to Little Heaven, she had pleaded to stay with him, promising to cook and clean and sleep on a pallet inside the second room, which held his completed paintings.
How could he say no? How could he relegate Flo to the scene of Minta’s murder and Samuel Peiffer’s brutal attack?
Now, five years had passed. Flo was the daughter Jack would never have. Long ago, he’d understood that Leah was the only woman he’d ever love. Sometimes when his need was great, he’d visit a parlor house, but he’d throw himself under a speeding train before he’d touch Flo. She, who had never known her father, treated him with daughterly affection and a teasing camaraderie.
Jack couldn’t imagine how he had existed before Flo. Her thirst for knowledge rivaled her love for riding. She had a mind like a blotter and was able to absorb long passages from Shakespeare and poets like Robert Frost. She amused Jack with silly monologues picked up from the melodrama players at Cripple Creek’s Imperial Hotel. He began to use her as a model.
If she had one fault, it was her devotion to movie magazines. She was obsessed with the unhappy childhoods of Mary Pickford and Helen Holmes. While Flo posed, she read articles out loud: “How I Became a Photoplayer” or “Funny Stories That Are True by the Players Themselves.”
She had never seen a movie.
* * * * *
The sun shone with midday brilliance when Flo blinked open her eyes. Jack dozed. Carefully lifting her head from his lap, she stretched like a cat. Then she headed for the cabin, her bare feet ignoring pebbles and twigs, her voice singing out a greeting to her pets—a raccoon called Stripes, a skunk named Stinky, and the green garter snake she’d named Jim.
Inside, she sifted through her stack of movie magazines. Some were three years old and she had memorized many of the articles. Selecting a few recent issues, she paused to gaze about the cabin. Jack could afford what he called “pretty pieces,” but Flo was happy with their familiar furniture and scratchy gramophone. One addition had been Minta’s dragon-decorated screen, which now separated Jack’s bed from the rest of the front room.
Jack had rebuilt the roofed stalls out back then added a new structure nearby to hold his paints and canvasses. That left the cabin’s second room free for Flo’s use, and she filled it with a bed, bureau, and shelves to hold her books. The only items she had taken from Little Heaven were the screen, the ballerina jewelry box, Blueberry’s nugget ring, and a framed rotogravure of Minta.
Last year Jack had traveled to New York City and attended something called an Armory Show. When he returned home, his excitement was
palpable. “That was the first exhibition in the United States of European and American post-impressionistic art,” he told Flo.
“What’s post-impressionistic?”
“Colored prisms. Circles and cubes, honey, but they showed a subject. There was this painting by a French fellow, Marcel Duchamps, called Nude Descending a Staircase.”
“I can see circles for the breasts, perhaps the belly, but cubes?” Flo had glanced down at her own body as if contemplating where cubes might fit.
“Despite the public’s outrage, three hundred exhibits were sold.”
“Couldn’t you have bought one?”
“No. I’ll have to stick to the poor man’s way of collecting. Lithographs and book illustrations.”
And collect he did. The cabin walls were covered with Jack’s pictures and her pictures. An illustration from Harper’s Weekly, called A Winter’s Night on Broadway hung next to a studio portrait of Mary Pickford. George Bellows had copied his painting, Stag at Sharkey’s, creating an inexpensive lithograph, and Jack’s copy hung between magazine photographs of Charles Chaplin and William S. Hart. Illustrated title pages from Flo’s books shared the wall space with Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame Aux Camellias, Lillian Gish, fresh from D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and Kathlyn Williams, a serial heroine.
“Hungry again?”
Startled, Flo whirled about. “No, Jack. I ran inside to fetch us more magazines.”
“Us?”
“Me, then. Aren’t you going to paint this afternoon?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong? You haven’t been the same since you got back from New York.”
“I guess I want to paint those newfangled pictures like that fellow Duchamps.”
“We don’t have a staircase.” When Jack didn’t acknowledge her attempt at humor, she said, “Go ahead. Paint your circles and squares.”
“I would if it were a few years ago, but for the first time I’m making money. Sandy says I’d get triple for the paintings I’ve done of you.”
“Sell the ones of me.”
“I can’t. Won’t. They look too much like you.”