by Donis Casey
Matt croaked out a chuckle and gave his brother a wink.
Second Chances
Web was sitting at a table in the hotel dining room, absently fingering the delicate china cup full of tea, when he caught sight of her coming down the staircase. He stood and waved to catch her eye, and she paused before walking toward him across the lobby. Web held her chair for her before he sat back down. They regarded one another for a long moment.
Elizabeth was beautiful, Web acknowledged to himself for the hundredth time. Such lively dark eyes. What was that expression he was seeing in those eyes as she looked at him? Was it anger? Desperation? No, it was disappointment. His heart sank. He considered his words carefully before he breached the silence. They were standing on a razor’s edge now, and he knew it.
“Elizabeth, I’m sorry.” He paused, leaving room for a response, but none was forthcoming. “I’m sorry I covered up for Geoff. I’m sorry that I’ve been so wrapped in my own affairs, building the practice and all, that I never noticed how unhappy you’ve become. I never wanted that, believe me.”
“I know that.” There was no emotion behind the words, Web noted. He could have done with a little emotion.
The waiter approached and Elizabeth ordered her own cup of tea, giving Web a few moments to consider his strategy. Odd. He had been rehearsing arguments over the past several days, ever since he had boarded the train in Tempe to come to Los Angeles, trying to think any combination of words that might persuade her to come home with him. He opened with his high card. “Chase misses you.”
A thin smile appeared. “I doubt that.”
Her response took him aback, though upon consideration it shouldn’t have. Web didn’t really know if Chase missed his mother or not. He approached from another angle. “Don’t you miss your boy, Elizabeth? He needs his mama.”
Elizabeth took a sip of her tea, then carefully set the cup down. “I love Chase. Of course I do. But I never have been as good a mother to him as he deserves. I don’t have the knack. I fear his childish antics don’t fill me with glee like they would a natural mother. I crave the stimulation of adult matters. Besides, no child thrives with unhappy parents. Do the boy a favor, Web. Let Mr. and Miz Carrizal raise him. They’ll make a fine man of him.”
“Catholics?” Web blurted, before he could catch himself.
Elizabeth’s lips narrowed and he knew he had made a mistake. He recovered the best he could. “No, you’re right. There are no finer people than the Carrizals. But it don’t matter what the reason, a child should know his own parents love him.”
She sighed. “Web, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of trying to fit myself into a life that don’t suit me, of pretending to be somebody I’m not. I’ve told you a hundred times and you’ve never heard me. I’m done. Cindy and me have got ourselves jobs with Mr. Bosworth’s company at Paramount Pictures. I’m a production assistant on his next flick and Cindy has an acting part. Once I’m settled proper we can discuss Chase’s future.”
Web suddenly felt cold. “What about our future?”
Elizabeth seemed amused. “What future is that, Web?”
“Surely you don’t aim to go through life as a divorced woman? You are too high-class a lady for that.”
“Cindy is divorcing Geoff, and nobody here in California has batted an eye over it. I don’t expect to ever want to marry again, but you may want a proper wife someday. I’d think you’d be glad to get shet of me. If you knew me better, some of the things I’ve thought or done…I know you would.”
“Oh, Elizabeth. Geoff did Cindy very ill, and she’s well rid of him. But I don’t want any other wife but you. I’ve never looked at another woman, I swear it.”
“I know you never did.”
Web leaned forward and took her hand across the table, earnest. “We had our happy times, didn’t we, Elizabeth? You remember when we first set out for the Arizona Territory? We were going to be pioneers. We were going to bring law and civilization to the untamed West, and were pretty surprised to see that the West was already fairly tamed. But we built that house. We built that law practice together. Why, you were my first law clerk, and I swear I never have had a better one since.”
The memory made Elizabeth smile. “That was my happiest time,” she admitted. “I loved researching your cases with you. Then you partnered up with Geoff and the practice grew like Topsy. I was even pondering studying for the bar myself, till I got in the family way. And that was that.”
“But you’d always said you wanted a passel of youngsters, like your sister.”
She shook her head at her own youthful folly. “I did. But I found out that I’m not cut from the same bolt as Alafair.”
“Please, Elizabeth, please consider coming back to us. I’ve broke off with Geoff. His wife leaving him over his bad behavior has caused a scandal and he’s leaving town, as well. We’ll start a new law firm, you and me. You can be the law clerk again. I’ll help you study for the bar, if that’s what you want. Why, you know enough law that you could likely pass the bar right now. In fact, there’s that new law college down in Tucson. If you want the law degree, it wouldn’t take you but a couple of years.”
Elizabeth gave him a sad smile, as though she pitied his hopeless perseverance. But there was a speculative light in her eye that encouraged him.
“May I stay a while, Elizabeth?” he ventured. “I know you’re committed to Mr. Bosworth’s picture for the duration, but I’d enjoy to see a bit of California and watch some movie-making. Perhaps we can keep company, go to dinner every once in a while. I won’t press you any further, I promise.”
She flashed a smile. “You’re determined to lose all your clients, aren’t you, Web?”
“Bother my clients. I don’t care about clients. I’ll get new ones. I care about you, Elizabeth.”
His impassioned pronouncement surprised her so much that her mouth fell open. Web couldn’t help but laugh at her stunned expression. “Don’t look at me like I grew two heads all of a sudden. If you don’t know how much I care for you then I’ve failed you even more miserably than I thought.”
Elizabeth chewed her lip for a moment. “What about Chase? We can’t just dump him on poor Miz Carrizal if you stay here in California for months. Or if I was to travel down to Tucson to study for a year or two…”
It was all Web could do to tamp down the fire of hope flaring in his breast. “I thought of that before I come, honey. Chase is in a real good situation.”
Home
Alafair could not keep from weeping when the train pulled into the station at Boynton. They had wired their itinerary from Amarillo, so the children knew that they would be coming on the train from Oklahoma City at three in the afternoon. As soon as the train left Sapulpa and entered familiar terrain, Shaw, Alafair, and Blanche made the rest of the trip with their noses pressed up again the windows, excitedly pointing out recognized landmarks. The train came into Boynton from the north, rounding a long curve, which made it possible for them to see the station several minutes before they reached it. It looked as though every relative they had was crowded onto the platform.
They were sitting toward the back of the car and had already gathered their belongings from the overhead rack when the train came to a stop, so they were the first to disembark. They found themselves immediately engulfed in a sea of whooping, crying, shrieking relations. The tide was so inexorable that it effectively dammed up the exit and trapped all the other occupants of the car behind them. Finally the station master had to fight his way through the crowd and bellow loud enough to be heard over the din that they had to disperse.
Three-year-old Grace had ripped herself out of Martha’s grip and climbed her mother like a tree, where she now hung suspended in Alafair’s arms, pressed so closely cheek-to-cheek that Alafair found it hard to speak. Not that she would have had it any other way.
Once they had made their way off the platform where the group could spread out and breathe a little, their third daughter, tall, blond Ali
ce, heavily pregnant but aglow like the full moon, took her turn at hugging her mother, Grace and all. As Alice drew back, a movement below her sight line caught her eye and she looked down. A cute, funny-faced boy with buck teeth and knobby limbs, long-legged and skinny, was dashing about between his elders’ legs and brushing by their skirts, apparently having a high time.
“Well, Mama,” Alice said in that dry fashion of hers, “another youngster. Just what you need.”
Alafair followed Alice’s gaze and her lips curled when she realized who her daughter was looking at. “That’s your cousin Chase. He’ll be staying with us for a spell. It’s a long story.”
Alice looked up, an impish twinkle in her pale blue eyes. “I know. Martha got a telegram from Uncle Web this morning. Seems Aunt Elizabeth is going to be a lawyer.”
Alafair’s Recipes, Southwestern Style
Any woman who provides three hearty meals a day to a large family and anyone else who shows up is always on the lookout for new recipes. Alafair’s trip to Tempe, Arizona, provided her with the perfect opportunity to expand her cooking repertoire. From the spring of 1916 on, the Tuckers family’s regular menu included several items of native Arizona cuisine which had been passed through an Arkansas-Oklahoma Scotch-Irish/Cherokee prism to create a unique culinary rainbow. Beans and fatback could now be refried and served on tortillas (which the children called “flapjacks”). Buñuelos were simply an adjustment to Alafair’s already-beloved doughnut recipe. Slow cooked dove and bean stew evolved over the years into any-available-game-bird and bean stew. Some of the foods Alafair enjoyed in Arizona were not readily available to her in Oklahoma, such as nopales. So she adapted the recipe to use with okra, which has a similar flavor and consistency. Every family that ever lived has its own personal take on daily diet, and the Tuckers were particularly blessed in their talented mistress of the kitchen. Her creations live on to this day on the dinner tables of her descendants.
Buñuelos
2 cups flour
¼ cup sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp melted butter
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Oil for deep frying (Alafair would have used lard)
1 cup sugar mixed with 2 tsp cinnamon
Beat the eggs and ¼ cup of sugar until thick and lemon-colored. Add the 1 tsp of melted butter. In a separate bowl, combine 1 ½ cups of flour, 2 tsp baking powder, and salt. Slowly add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and beat well. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic. Keep flouring the board and your hands as needed to keep the dough from sticking. Shape the dough into about a dozen-and-a-half balls and flatten each ball with the palm of your hand until it is four or five inches in diameter and about 1/2 inch thick. Fry in hot oil until golden. They will rise while cooking. Drain on a towel. While still warm, roll each buñuelo in cinnamon sugar until well coated.
Tortillas (Flapjacks)
3 cups white flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp salt
4-6 tbsp shortening or lard
about 1 ¼ cups warm water
Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl. Cut in the lard with a fork or mix in with your hands until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add warm water a little at a time until you have a soft dough, pliable but not sticky. Knead the dough for a few minutes until smooth. Let it rest in the bowl for ten or fifteen minutes. While the dough is resting, heat a large cast iron skillet over medium to medium-high heat.
Pull the dough apart into 10 or 12 balls and on a floured surface roll each ball into a flat, round disc about an eighth of an inch thick.*
Lay the tortilla in the hot, dry, skillet and cook until it is covered with brown speckles. This takes just a few seconds if the skillet is hot enough. Turn the tortilla over and brown the other side. Pile the finished tortillas one on top of the other on a plate and keep warm with a towel. Eat plain, fresh, and hot. Or smear with refried beans or fill with meat or cheese or what you will. Nothing like it.
* Alafair could roll her ‘flapjacks’ into a perfectly circular shape with three or four swipes of an entirely unremarkable kitchen rolling pin. No one knows how she managed to do this, since after four passes with the rolling pin ordinary mortals will end up with a tortilla that looks like an amoeba. She could also do this with pie crust. She was a rolling pin savant.
Refried Beans
Refried beans are not really refried. They are simply squashed. There are many fabulous ways to cook and season refritos from scratch, but Alafair simply took the leftovers from the big pot of beans and fatback which she always cooked on wash day, reheated them in a skillet, then mashed them with a potato masher or the back of a big wooden spoon. You can press the beans through a sieve if you want to get rid of the skins, but if you cook your beans without salt in the water in the first place, the skins will be tender.
Dove with Beans
8 cups cooked or 3 lb uncooked pinto beans
4 cups home-canned stewed tomatoes with juice
1 large onion, chopped
diced hot peppers to taste
1 lb dove meat, chopped into bite-sized pieces
salt to taste
If the beans are precooked, put all ingredients into a large stew pot and simmer together on low heat for at least an hour. If the beans are uncooked, the all ingredients except the dove may be simmered in a very slow oven in a clay pot eight hours or overnight. Add the dove meat during the last 45 minutes of cooking.
Nopales
Nopales or nopalitos are made from the pads of the nopal, or prickly pear, cactus. Nopal fruit, stems and pads are all edible and have been used as food and as medicine in the Americas since long before the Europeans came. There are literally hundreds of ways to cook nopales. Since nopal is a cactus, it does have spines, of course, which have to be removed before preparing. Only the tender young pads are used in cooking. The spines are cut out or peeled off with a knife, or scrubbed off with a stiff brush. The pads may then be boiled, stewed, fried, or grilled. Boiled nopales tastes rather like green beans. Like okra, nopal has a sticky, mucilaginous juice that some people find off-putting. Rinsing will get rid of most of this as will cooking them with tomatoes. Cut the pads into strips, dip them in batter and roll them in cornmeal and fry them up for a real treat.
Here is the recipe for the dish that Elizabeth served Alafair. Alafair liked it a lot, but getting her hands on nopal pads was not that easy for her in 1916, so she usually used okra in place of nopales. The taste is somewhat different, but the consistency is quite similar.
1 lb chopped nopalitos
½ large onion, chopped
1 large jalapeno pepper, stem and seeds removed, chopped
1 large tomato, chopped.
1 tbsp oil or lard for frying
In a large cast-iron skillet, saute onion and pepper in hot oil for one minute. Add the chopped nopales and cook for ten more minutes, stirring occasionally. Add tomato and cook until heated through. Salt to taste and serve hot. Serves 4.
Historical Notes
Tempe, Arizona
Charles Trumbull Hayden, owner of a mercantile and freighting business in Tucson, homesteaded the town first known as Hayden’s Ferry in 1870. In 1872, several Hispanic families from southern Arizona founded a town called San Pablo just to the east of Hayden’s Ferry, but by the time of our story in 1916, both settlements had grown together and formed one community. The town was named Tempe in 1879 by “Lord” Darrell Duppa, the Englishman (and something of a scoundrel) who helped establish Phoenix. He said that the sight of the butte, the wide river, and the green fields reminded him of the Vale of Tempe in ancient Greece. After the towns combined, the former San Pablo was simply called the barrio.
In 1885, the Arizona legislature selected Tempe as the site for the Territorial Normal School to train teachers. By 1916, the school was called Tempe Normal School of Arizona and had an enrollment of around 300. In 1958, after several
name changes, the Tempe Normal School became Arizona State University. As of 2011, ASU’s enrollment at all campuses is around 72,000.
Guadalupe
The village of Guadalupe, located southwest of Tempe, was named after the patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe. It was founded by Yaqui Indians around the turn of the twentieth century when they fled their traditional homeland along the Yaqui river in Sonora, Mexico, to avoid enslavement by the Mexican government under President Porfirio Diaz. In 1916 Guadalupe was a purely Yaqui town, but over the years, it became become a stopping point for Mexican immigrant workers. The population make-up of the present day town of Guadalupe is about 50 percent Hispanic and 50 percent Yaqui.
Raid on Columbus, N.M.
During the early years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) Pancho Villa was portrayed in the U.S. media as a populist hero and was supplied arms and aid by the U.S. Government. After years of public support for Villa, Washington decided that Villa’s rival Venustiano Carranza was in a better position to bring the revolution to an end, so President Wilson bowed to the inevitable, recognized the Carranza government as legitimate, and stopped all aid to Villa’s army.
Villa was outraged and swore revenge for what he considered Wilson’s betrayal, and began launching raids along the U.S. border and murdering and kidnapping U.S. citizens living in Mexico. Because of Villa’s depredations, there was a great deal of pressure on Washington to intervene in Mexican affairs. But for many months Wilson stood firm and refused to send troops into a sovereign country. However, Villa’s activities so close to U.S. territory frightened the American government enough that President Wilson ordered General John J. Pershing to deploy troops across the border region from Texas to Arizona.
Early on the morning of March 9, 1916, Villa and about five hundred pistoleros crossed into the U.S. near Columbus, New Mexico, and attacked Camp Furlong, the outpost of the Thirteenth U.S. Cavalry. The cavalry was caught completely by surprise, but after several hours of fighting managed to repel the invaders. As the Villistas retreated back toward Mexico, they looted and burned the civilian town of Columbus. Fourteen U.S. soldiers and ten American civilians were killed and Villa lost around eighty men.