These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

by Nancy E. Turner

  Felicity asked me what had I fixed for breakfast, and would I mind bringing it to her?

  In that instant all my aggravation at her came back just like the tick of a clock had brought it on. Just as I was about to open my mouth to say something I’m sure I would regret, I heard a terrible wail from the back of the house. Downstairs, I found Gilbert and Clover and Joshua all bearing Charlie like he was a sacrificial ram into the kitchen. Charlie was fussing at them to leave him be, though was surely in some kind of distress. Charlie’s arm was hanging down, and he was doing his level best not to cry, but he was about to let go. Jack and Albert and Rudolfo rushed up also, and with everyone trying to get a look at Charlie at once, it made me dizzy and I leaned on his chair for my own support.

  We have put aside all the cooking to take him to see the doctor. Mama and Celia, and of course Felicity, stayed behind to mind the turkeys, and the whole rank and file of our family waited in front of the doctor’s house for Charlie to come out with a splint. Charlie’s arm is broken, in the very same place as his Uncle Albert’s. It seems the boys all went to catch the ball at once as it was coming down out of the sun overhead, and the four oldest ones crashed together without even seeing each other.

  There has been no rest today, and after Thanksgiving supper, which was purely wonderful and noisy and which we ate again as if we were sitting at a trough instead of the fancy dining table, Jack insisted almost gruffly that I had to lie down. But I didn’t want to miss anything and Charlie said his arm hurt him terribly, so I convinced them all that I would rest and put my feet up in the parlor, and Charlie could sit by me. Before long, though, I was asleep and when I awoke the dishes were all clean and the house was quiet with all the family outside visiting. Charlie was asleep next to me with his poor splinted arm resting on my lap. That is how I happened to have some time to write this journal today amidst the commotion.

  It is a rare thing to see that boy not moving. Even in his sleep his body seems to be quivering, trying to grow as fast as it can. He eats about five meals a day, and he is just a child. He has got a big scratch across his nose and cheek from Lord knows what. And freckles, and rambling, wavy hair like his Papa’s. His hands look too big for his arms, and his nails are all broken and ragged on calloused fingers with a wart or two on nearly every knuckle.

  I was sitting there trying to think how I could get up without bothering his arm, when Gilbert tiptoed into the room. Mama, are you awake? he says.

  Yes. Come here, son, I whispered.

  Look what I made you, Mama, he said. Uncle Ernest showed me how to whittle and gave me this here knife. He showed me a pocket folding knife and at the same time produced a long, thin, sharp twig he had peeled and put a point on.

  Well, look there, I said. That is a fine thing, son, and I know what I will do with it. Next time I make a cake and need to run something around the edge to get it out of the pan, I will have a good tool for it and the knives won’t go dull or scrape ashes from the pan. Just smooth wood; it will be a fine tool.

  Gilbert was glowing with pride.

  You know, I told him, if you could find a good sized stick that had a kind of hook in it, and smooth it pretty good and round off the ends, I could use that to pull a cake pan out of the oven. His eyes lit up and he folded up the knife, handed me his gift, and went out the back door to hunt for a stick.

  Charlie looked over at me, and said, It’s just an old stick, Mama.

  It’s a gift from my boy, I told him. A kitchen tool. Then I saw him looking kind of glum. See, I told him, You run faster and throw better than anyone in the school. You have a real hand for riding and roping, which you took to faster than any child I ever saw. And your brother is littler and not as quick to do those things. But he likes fine work with his hands. What’s Gilbert going to ever do that he can claim as his own? He can’t be you. He’s got to find himself a talent, and maybe this is just the start of some fine whittling.

  Whittling ain’t nothing but a waste of time, he said.

  Isn’t.

  Isn’t. It’s just a stick.

  Well, you’ll know it isn’t just a stick when your own boy hands you a thing he made with his hands. Then we went outside on the porch with the others until the sun set.

  November 28, 1892

  Albert and Savannah and the children went home yesterday with Mama. The Maldonados and Mason left the day before. For four days now I have tried every way I know to be kind to Mrs. Ernest Prine but I am purely out of patience. This morning I found Felicity counting the silverware, and she asked me since Ernest told her he gave me some of it did I plan to give it back now that they were married.

  That woman has not lifted so much as a finger to contribute to the work around here. I have flatly refused to do her washing and ironing as she asked, and that caused an hour long fit of wailing and crying. She wants to take a bath every blessed day even though she has done nothing to break a sweat all day, and she spends hours at a time in the bathroom so that all of us have more than once had to make use of the outhouse behind the shed because of her and it is too blessed cold to think that is no small sacrifice. She lies around and Ernest totes things to her, then she complains about them and he brings something else.

  Not only that, but I have discovered because one day she was careless and forgot to do up the way she usually does, that those black, black eyebrows are painted on. That woman is a hussy if ever there was one. The one time I got her to lend a hand in the kitchen, she dished up supper and made sure the biggest piece of steak was on the bottom and started the plate around so it came to her last. Same with the biscuits. The biggest, lightest ones seem to make it to her plate every meal. Any time she thinks she is alone with Jack, she finds a way to bump against him or touch him. He has taken to following me from room to room, even if he is reading a book, just so he doesn’t take the chance of being left alone where she can use him as a scratching post. All the while my brother Ernest just moons over her and eyes her like a calf looking at a teat.

  Ernest, I said, we have a passel of company. There have been upwards of twenty-three people in this house and more than half of them under the age of twelve. I have cooked and cleaned for this army for days. There is washing to do, and children to tend, and floors to sweep and furniture to dust. There are lamps to clean and stoves to watch. If she needs company, she will have to come downstairs. She is not sick, and she ought to be lending a hand, not whining about her nerves.

  This morning we are leaving in just a bit for the ranch. It will be a slow ride as Jack is taking me in the buggy so it is not too bumpy. My back is hurting so badly I cannot ride the wagon and certainly not on a horse. Well, we don’t have an extra team for Ernest to ride Felicity in the wagon, and Jack went to get loan of some stock from the fort so Ernest and Gilbert could ride, but Charlie shouldn’t because of his arm, so he will hold Suzy in the back for me and be smashed up next to fat Felicity the whole way. Poor boy.

  That woman grinds my grits, and that’s a fact.

  November 29, 1892

  This visit to the ranch may just be the very best thing I ever did. Felicity just could not say enough about our house in town, and when she found out how many hundreds of acres I have bought, and that Jack lets me run the whole thing, and how many cattle there are, she was just full of questions like how much do cattle sell for, and how fast do they have calves, and how much money did I think the whole place was worth. I asked her right out did she have in mind to buy the place out, but she said, Oh, no, it was just interesting to her.

  There are always lots of chores to do and she was certainly interested in anything that had to do with making money, particularly how much money Jack and I had, not necessarily what she could lend a hand at. She asked more questions than I had answers for, and finally I got to saying, I don’t even know how much land there really is, and I leave it to the hired men to count the cattle. She kept saying she would like to own a spread herself, and she and Ernest could work it, or she could buy into my plac
e on credit, and work here and pay off the loan from us, while taking part in the profits also, as we have certainly managed to live fine in that big house in Tucson, although of course, she just couldn’t do without a couple of maids and a cook. I just didn’t know what to say, but luckily Jack said right out that credit was something we didn’t deal in, and had no plans to.

  Last night as I had just got the children to bed, Felicity let out a scream that would have split a rock. It was only an old tarantula crawled into her room from the open window, and she was cursing the fact that there was no screen on it like in town. I picked up the little hairy fellow in a newspaper and set him carefully down outside and she screamed at me to Smash it, smash it!

  And I said, I will certainly not, as those nice tarantulas keep the scorpions down, and eat several of them at night. That’s probably what he was doing in your room, looking for supper. Then my true meanness came out for all my family to see, because I added, Besides, if you’ve got tarantulas, you know you don’t have rattlers, because they’d eat ’em.

  Well, I have never actually seen a conniption before, until now. Ernest looked at me real mad for saying that and started to explain to her that I was just being touchy, but before long he was backed into a corner and quiet. That woman went beside herself, all dressed in the biggest, most ruffled and fluffy night dress I ever saw, with her hair up in rags, her eyebrows down to normal size, and ranting around the room like a wet hen.

  Ernest fell to saying, Now, Sweetie, Now Honey, now, now, until I wanted to box his head. He was standing up in the corner of the room repeating it when I just walked out and shut the door.

  December 1, 1892

  Savannah’s house was no escape for me. Felicity insisted on walking with me and taking the air on the way from my house. Gilbert asked me why she needs so much air, and is it because she is so pillowy? I just laughed and clapped my hand on his mouth and told him not to say things like that out loud, even if he thinks it.

  December 3, 1892

  We are headed back to town. Ernest and Felicity are both mad and silent and pickley looking.

  She said yesterday she had figured out that if she just had a screen on her window and a bucket under each post of her bed so nothing could crawl up the legs, she was real happy staying there. In fact, between the house in town and the ranch, she said, she could just feel like staying forever, it was so homey. And so nice for a winter, as she had never seen a winter without several feet of snow in Pennsylvania. Well, by then, I knew for a fact that my brother Ernest had been shooting off his mouth to her about this ranch, claiming that he owned a share of it and the pecan farm too, and that our family was going to be the wealthiest family in Arizona Territory before long. He flat out told me that he had bragged to her before they got married, too. Not a word of that is true; this ranch was Jimmy’s and now it is mine and Jack’s. Yesterday, just before Felicity’s sudden change of mood, she had pestered him to make Albert buy out for cash Ernest’s share of the farm, and he was going to try. And he wanted me to consider her good offer of buying a share of this ranch on credit so she could help out and they would own some of it, also.

  And she decided, she told me, to learn to cook, so she could be helpful at the ranch and feed the ranch hands. Even when I told her they cook for themselves, she insisted that she would feed them for me. When she thought about them, she said, her eyes just watered right up. She wanted to be sure we knew that she knew Ernest had a share of the pecan farm that Albert runs, and he intended to own part of my ranch, especially if she stayed and worked there and cooked for the hands. Cooking was something, she declared loud and long, that she could do for those poor, poor men out there living in the barn with no one to care for them.

  Well, I said, They don’t live in a barn, it is a bunkhouse, and they always have a man to cook for them, and they clean their own mess or they aren’t allowed to stay, but she wouldn’t listen. I told her it would aggravate her hand condition, but she said it is purely better from living on the ranch. I told her every way I knew how that it would never do, and then I thought of something that would fix her wagon for sure.

  I did it while Ernest and Jack were gone over to Albert’s where they were getting wood to re-roof part of Mama’s house. I figured that’s when Ernest was also going to try to put his hand in Albert’s pocket, too.

  I went to the bunkhouse and told my two top hands, Bud Higgins and Sterling Foster, to run up a few of the range bulls that we had missed during roundup, which they had been keeping in a section west by the Raalle land. I said, We are going to have some out-of-season branding. They didn’t really want to do it and I don’t blame them, but I gave them each two dollars extra for the day’s work, and I told Felicity to get ready for some ranch work, as she was about to learn the one thing I needed her to do so she could live here.

  Well, Bud and Sterl held the first bull still, tied him with ropes, then told Felicity how to cut the soft part on him to make him a steer, and save enough of the skin to sew shut. They handed her a sharp knife and the needle with the special catgut thread. She cried out and blubbered, and wouldn’t do it. They put the branding iron in her hands and told her to punch him in the rump and she cried some more and only waved it over the fur. The bull wailed at her and she screamed. Then they got out the de-horning saw and started the cauterizing iron heating in the fire and said, Try your hand at this here, Ma’am, and commenced to explain exactly what she was to do with those things, shoving the blade in the head and searing off the horn and all, and she fainted there in the corral onto a little fresh pile of steaming manure.

  They said Get up, Get up! We don’t need a cook. We need someone to do this here. It takes a quick hand to get those horns out before he hooks you, and you got to plunge that red cauterizing iron in the hole. She fainted again.

  We fairly tormented her until she got up and stumbled to the house, crying sort of addled, saying, Fetch my bags, Ernest, Fetch my clothes!

  I just watched her run, and sighed real deep, and turned my back on her. I watched the men brand the half dozen strays, and they simply blunted the horns and didn’t do anything else but leave them to be bulls and turned them into the long corral. Pretty soon here came Ernest saying he has to leave quick and get Felicity back home, clear to his post. He was plenty mad at me and made it real clear I had strained every last nerve Felicity owned.

  I am sorry, I said, really sorry that you feel that way. But she wanted to live on this ranch, and I’m not supporting slackers here. Everyone on this ranch works or they don’t eat. And I said, Isn’t that right? to the hands.

  Sterling and Bud both said, Yes, Ma’am.

  Well, we can’t send them to town in our buggy and have no way to return ourselves, and I don’t want to put out Savannah and Albert, so we are all leaving at once for Tucson so Felicity and Ernest can take the next train out of here. It took me fifteen minutes to be packed and ready, except for five more minutes it took me to go back to the corral and give Bud and Sterling each another dollar. Hallelujah!

  December 8, 1892

  Two days ago Adelita and George had a tiny baby girl. The baby looks healthy although it is entirely covered with blond hair. She is a bit early, which is the reason for it and it will go away, the doctor said. Everything seemed peaceful with them when we left, and Adelita didn’t have a very long labor, only seven or eight hours. The baby’s name is Hannah.

  Tonight it started to rain, and in a little while, the rain turned to ice and then to snow. The children are excited, it is their first time to see snow. I’m sure there won’t be much, but it is beautiful and makes me feel good to be inside with a kettle of beans and ham going on the stove and everyone inside safe and warm.

  Lord, look down here and let me know what to do. It is past midnight. After we went to bed, the snow had stopped and became rain again, chattering on the metal flashings on the roof as the snow-turned-ice broke and slid off. I thought I heard something, an hour ago, and Jack said, no, it is just the rain.
But again I heard soft tapping, too regular, and it had a human feel to it, so I went downstairs to see if someone was at the door. The sound came from the kitchen, and when I opened the door, a man pushed his way into the house. I held the lamp high.

  Mrs. Elliot, said George Lockwood. I can’t go back there. She’s done something, Oh, God, she’s done something! He was literally sobbing, wrapped tight in his coat and poncho, all white knuckled and wet and freezing. His breath made a cloud around his head.

  George! was all I could say.

  Then Jack was behind me with another lamp. Come in here, man, he said.

  No, George said. I’m going. I can’t stay. Oh, God, he said again. God forgive her!

  Lockwood, said Jack, settle yourself. Have a chair. Tell us what’s wrong. Then Jack reached his hand out to pat George on the shoulder. As he did it, George backed up against the wall quick, and there in his hand was a Colt revolver and I heard the hammer nock back on the spring.

  No, I’m not staying. No! He said, God forgive me but I’ll kill you if you try to stop me, and then he opened the door and ran away into the dark. Then we heard hooves beating past, slopping in the wet.

  So I am sitting here alone in the bedroom and Jack has ridden through the rain and cold to the fort to see what has happened, and then back here to tell me, and now he is gone to get the Marshal. He said it looked like Adelita had murdered her baby, and George found her with bloody hands, and shot her dead with a solitary bullet hole through her head.

  Maybe he came here because he thought we would understand. Maybe he thought we could stop him. Or forgive him. But it was too late. He is gone. So he will be wanted for murder and desertion, also, and if he is found he will surely hang. Run, George Lockwood. Run.