Light changes everything, p.9
Light Changes Everything, page 9
The very last day of classes they handed out assignments and enrollment forms for the following section, but by then I’d already made up my mind to give away my paints and pencils and sketchbooks, take my horse and my camera, and head home to the Territory and never return. I said good-bye to all my friends, and since only photography class was left, at lunchtime, when they served a nice chicken dinner, I headed back to my dormitory to pack. Halfway there, I remembered I had left some prints hanging in the lab. They weren’t any good, so I didn’t care about taking them home, but I also didn’t want them to be used as an example next section of what not to do. We’d all had to endure the humbling experience of having our work held up before the room and criticized.
The professor was giving a talk. I slipped in late, and sat in the back. I took in the smells of the place, sad to leave. Capturing my vision with a lens was so much more satisfying than trying to draw it. At least with a camera, I could really preserve an image of what my eyes saw. He was talking on and on about next term. We would learn to use shadows that make highlights stand out. Exposures used to their best effect, to produce more than just a record, but a real piece of art.
Someone up front asked him if there would ever be colors in a photograph and I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t bear to have to get the colors right on a silver plate, too, unless the camera itself produced what I saw before me. Then he said, “All of you who finish next term with passing grades”—and he looked straight at me, which caused some heads to swivel—“will be invited to accompany myself and the rest of the class on a trip to one of the scenic wonders of the world. We will travel by train to the Grand Canyon. It has been arranged every other year to visit a known site and spend the last week of school at a challenging and satisfying location. Please take this paper home to your parents. This gives them all the information you’ll need. Costs, equipment, everything is there on the form. From that point in Territorial Arizona, you will depart for your homes. We’ll have time during next term to make all the arrangements. Those of you with either horses or horseless vehicles will have to make your own arrangements to get them delivered, because you will not be taking them along.”
Someone asked him if they’d need to fight Indians along the way, so I didn’t even listen to the reply. The Grand Canyon. I’d heard about it. Seen a print of a painting by Thomas Moran that I’d tried to copy. I might like to see that. To take that trip. Imagine, me, a traveling lady, single and with camera in hand. If my family didn’t want me home for Christmas, I’d make another way for myself. I might just make a career. I could be another Nelly Bly. That’s what my future looked like, and it raised my spirits just fine.
That evening the last of the students gathered in the main hall, sang carols, drank tea, and ate cakes. I got overwhelmed from the students in the photography class with silly questions about Arizona. No one had the slightest idea what could be in store on such a trip. Truthfully, I had not been in that part of the Territory, either. We’d certainly want water, I said. I told them all to bring a couple of canteens each, and heavy boots because of rattlesnakes. Maybe we’d need a couple of Arizona Rangers for safety, although when I said that you’d have thought I had guaranteed they’d be needed.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe I can ask one of my brothers or my cousin Charlie to come along. He’s a good hand with a gun.” I could only guess there might be desert to cross, and in May it would be hotter than blazes. A boy asked me why it would be so hot in the springtime. I laughed. “Spring is in February. May is just a foretaste of June. June in the Territory is halfway to perdition.” The whole crowd hollered with shocked laughter. The boy fell off his chair.
The more the students talked about the trip, the more I wanted to go as well. I told Prairie I’d see her again after Christmas, and on the spot as I spoke I changed my mind and told her I would make a try at the second term. She cried and hugged me for joy. “I’m going home by hook or crook,” I said. “I’ll be back in a month. I’ll bring canteens for both of us for the trip to the Grand Canyon.”
Her pa was there with his carriage, drove me back to the dormitory, then waited to take her home. She gave me a top hat for riding, with a silk ribbon and cockade. I gave her a set of fine leather gauntlets to keep horse grime off her sleeves. I felt pretty sure both of us would rather have had what we gave the other, but even if I never wore the fancy riding hat, I’d always treasure it.
Next morning Prairie’s father again arrived with his carriage and we tied Duende to the back. He asked me if I had a chaperone, and I assured him I did, glad he didn’t ask for more information. I had Duende in his stall and laid an extra old blanket on top of his new one. Snow packed against the windows while I waited for the train.
I eyed all the folks around me. I wished I’d dressed the way I had when I first arrived here, pistols and all, instead of a nice ladies’ traveling suit. When at last we boarded, I was so happy to see Mr. Washington I could have hugged him. “Mr. Washington!” I called.
“Is you traveling alone, miss?” Mr. Washington asked, his voice a bare whisper.
I nodded. “I suppose I am.”
“Just you be satisfied I’ll watch out for you. Just take your rest easy.”
“Thank you, Mr. Washington.”
“Ita be my pleasure, miss. Rest easy.”
* * *
I was sorry to leave the relative comfort of the train, drafty, smelly, wet, and dismal as it was, for the hard seat of the stagecoach in Benson. I tied Duende to the back, angry that I hadn’t dressed to ride him like I’d done before. The stage was packed two deep, and I had to hold a cantankerous child on my lap, which wrinkled my skirt because he wouldn’t be still. I got so tired of that boy I whispered in his ear that if he didn’t quit kicking my legs, I was going to throw his shoes out the window. Instead of him being quiet, he set up a raging howl, and his mother gave me a bawling out. I arrived at Marsh Station two days after my trip had begun, alone, freezing cold, and hungry.
There was no one there to meet me. I had to leave my camera and trunk at the station. If I was going to ride home in the dusk on Duende, I wasn’t going to do it in this skirt, so behind the waiting stalls I changed into my split riding skirt. I strapped my gun belt on as well. I had it in my mind to tell my whole family just what I thought of being left high and dry a week before Christmas, and that I was plumb fed up with being treated like this. Going to pack up what few things I had left there and leave them for good and all. I rehearsed the words. “Stay put. Sorry.” Then I headed for home.
I wasn’t halfway there when I heard hooves behind me. The sun had dropped early. Shadows grew long until they merged with everything around, and Duende startled a rabbit. He made a regular cloud of steam around his nose. The rider behind did not come on nor drop back, just followed. I kicked my horse into a lope. Holding one hand on the reins, I felt for the pistols, unsure whether I had loaded them. I loosened the bullwhip from the piggin’ tie on the side flap, and held it in my right hand. Then, just as I came to our familiar gate, the hoofbeat sounds behind me dropped off and faded or the rider had stopped still, watching.
I didn’t knock on the door, but pushed at it to open it. The door was barred from the inside. Only one window held a light, and it looked to be far inside, probably in the kitchen. “Mama? Papa?” I called. “Clover? Rebeccah! Ezra! Zack! It’s me. Mary Pearl.”
There was a clattering and rattling, and at last the door was opened and a hand swept me inside, closing it and barring it again, before a figure came from the kitchen carrying the kerosene lamp. It was Ma. “Mama?”
All at one time the room filled with them calling my name. Mama grabbed hold of me and crushed me to her, crying, saying, “Oh, my baby. My precious girl. Oh, my daughter. Why are you here?” But everyone crushed me so I couldn’t answer; all the boys, even Zachary, had tears in their eyes. Last I was passed to Pa, who held me, shaking like a leaf. “Didn’t you get my telegram? How did you get here? Who brought you? I warned you not to come. Oh, kitten, why didn’t you stay?”
“Is someone sick?” I finally got out. At last I was able to tell them about my journey, but as we huddled at the kitchen table, with Ma never letting go of my hand, and the boys telling me how brave I’d been, and Rebeccah wrapping me in her own shawl, I began to get used to the dim light and the looks on their faces frightened me. “Why is there no Christmas tree? Why aren’t there any candles? Someone please tell me what has happened. Is it measles again? Typhoid?”
Pa hung his head. Finally, Clover said, “War, honey. Range war.”
Ma shook my hand with one of hers, and pressed her other palm against my cheek. “Sweet Elsa is dead, along with her unborn child. Killed by her own papa, as she ran between him and your cousin Charlie. The railroaders were gunning for your granny. Shot up Sarah’s house real bad.” I gasped. “Granny’s all right. Your cousin Gilbert was shot, too. He’s not going to pull through. The doctor said his lungs have collapsed and he’s got no air. Grandpa Chess had a heart attack. And. And—” She put both hands to her face and sobbed, unable to speak.
Rebeccah finished Ma’s tale. “Aunt Sarah went to check on Uncle Harland in town, and found our tiny cousin Blessing sick, but there was nothing they could do. She took pneumonia and was buried two days ago. She died in Aunt Sarah’s arms. Uncle Harland hasn’t been right in the head ever since.”
“We wanted,” Pa started, with a tremble in his voice, “we hoped you’d stay there with your friends and have a happy Christmas. I sent a telegram telling you to stay. You must not have gotten it. The weather’s been drear. Maldonado had declared—” Then his voice caught in his throat. I stared hard at my pa. I couldn’t see his face at all. He’d shrunk into the shadows.
“I’ll stay here and fight with you,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound as firm as the words did. I squared up my shoulders. My voice might falter, but my backbone did not.
There were a few moments of silence. At last Ezra, fourteen years old now, and gotten all long and gangly, said, “Old Mr. Maldonado said he was gunning for you, Mary Pearl. He laid it was your letters that sent Elsa out of the convent and married to Charlie, and got her killed even though it was him put a bullet through her back.” He sobbed and wiped at his eyes indignantly. “Poor old cousin Charlie. Right in front of him. He picked her up but she was already dead.”
Elsa. All we’d ever done was braid each other’s hair and tell each other secrets, laughing about boys as we grew up. Now she and Esther, the closest girls I’d known all my life, were gone, for the sake of what? They’d died because they’d loved someone? I was only a witness to their hearts, me, the girl slightly younger, caught in the middle, the holder of their secrets, and the only one left alive, other than Rebeccah who stood behind Ma. The only way I knew it was she was because I saw the glimmer of tears streaking her face. “How is it my fault?” I asked, knowing there was no answer. All of this, less than four weeks since Rachel’s wedding to Aubrey? I began to weep, as well, and we huddled together for a while. I tried to put all this in place. “What about Rachel?” I dared.
“She’s in town,” Rebeccah said. “She’s fine.”
Zachary climbed into my lap and strung his arms around my neck, saying, “But you are home, Mary Mary quite contrary Maypole. Safe and sound. You are here with us, and you are safe.” Even Ezra wrapped his bony arms around me. I thought I heard him say, “I love you,” but I couldn’t be sure, mumbled as it was into my shoulder.
For a while, everyone in the room shrank into their own thoughts as if even a prayer was too much to venture. Pa said, “Mary Pearl, that’s twice you’ve come home alone. I don’t want you doing it again. It’s too dangerous. I know you feel like you’re grown up, but don’t do this again. Promise me.”
“All right, Pa. I promise,” I said. Tears fell unstopped then, I was so overcome by all the sorrow and misery I faced. My poor family. And there I’d been, dressed in a nice gown, closest to the heater in the classroom, fussing about whether Roman sculpture was copied from the Greeks or the other way around while people I loved were dying.
At last Ma stirred and asked, “Are you hungry, Mary Pearl?”
* * *
In the broad light of day, we traveled to Aunt Sarah’s place and I heard more about what had happened. Sarah prayed over Gilbert, lying on the kitchen table, blood splattered about him on the floor. A young doctor named Pardee had come to tend to him, and Rebeccah was trying to do a good turn helping out. I couldn’t stand to see it, but I hugged Aunt Sarah, and then Ma and I did some washing, trying to soak the bloody sheets from all the horrors. I cried without a moment’s peace, and after a while I had to go into the book room and curl up on a stuffed chair and pour out my sorrow on the arm of the chair. Rebeccah brought me a quilt, and then Ma came in with coffee. She set it by me on the floor and then just wrapped me in her arms and we both rocked and wept. I’d never before known I could feel so grieved, and when I said that, Ma said, “Just give vent to it, honey. If you try to hold back the tears they will get stuck in your heart and make you touched all your life, like my sister was.” By the time I quit sobbing, my coffee was cold, but I drank it anyway, and Ma went back to Aunt Sarah’s side in the kitchen with Gilbert. I couldn’t bring myself to go back in there, and to me, the whole house smelled sickeningly of blood. I was a long, long way from Wheaton College. Couldn’t imagine ever going back.
Later, the boys showed me Grandpa Chess’s grave. Said he’d been digging it for Gilbert so it only seemed natural they laid him in it, and dug another for his grandson who was not yet ready to pass over. Ezra told me that the doctor had been worried Grandpa might have taken morphine to make himself die—something none of the adults had mentioned at all—but all the pills were accounted for, and so the doc concluded it must have been his heart.
Zack said, “Do you think my heart will give out, too?”
“No,” I said. “Does it hurt you?”
“Mine does,” said Ezra.
“Mine, too,” I added. Grandpa Chess Elliot was my cousin’s grandpa by birth, but mine by choice. I felt misery take hold of me, deep inside.
The day was cold and drizzly. We stood there in silence for a few more moments. Then I heard careless footsteps behind us, and turned to see Brody standing there with an ax. He said, “I’m splitting firewood. Wondered if you boys’d help stack it by the stove for the ladies.”
“Yes, sir,” they both replied.
“Miss Mary Pearl, your mama wants you to come back to the house, too, if you will. Says she’s worried you’ll take another chill like last year.”
“Sure,” I said. “I feel fine, though, except this—” and then I couldn’t get the words out.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“What’s wrong with your hands?” I asked. “Your gloves are torn apart and there’s blood.”
“Dry mesquite. It’s the very devil to split. Sorry if that ain’t polite talk.”
“I see that. Pa and Clover always did it at home, and I never knew it could cut you up so bad. You better come on in and get some salve on it.”
On the way back to the house he held back a tree branch for me and I saw he had on heavy chaps, too, so he could stand in the dead and frozen chaparral and make a path for me. Even as we walked I hoped he wouldn’t ask me to clean the blood off his hands. I just didn’t think I could take any more blood. But he stopped at the door and went to the bunkhouse. In a while he left there and went back to the woodpile, wearing heavy gloves.
For the next week I moved through all the people, stunned. I suppose since they’d been here, they had taken it in as it came, like having to be dosed with bitter medicine day after day. For me it was a rock slide of bad news, and I forgot for two days about my things back at the stagecoach station. Finally Charlie and Clover took me up there in a buckboard, bristling with rifles and shotguns, and we brought back my things. The boys were purely edgy, and jumped at every jackrabbit. I asked them where Elsa was buried and they told me that in the fury that followed, with guns blazing every direction, El Maldonado’s men had taken her body and she was buried on his place. I was warned by both my parents at the top of their lungs not to try to go there, and I knew they were right. Instead I said good-bye to my friend at my sister Esther’s grave, and imagined that someday I might paint a picture of the two girls, the same ages when they left this earth, walking hand in hand in heaven.
* * *
When next we saw Uncle Harland and his little boys, it was Christmas Day, and they came with a couple of wooden tops for my brothers, and Zachary gave Honor and Story his Yo-Yo, the toy he called a “wheeler.” He said, “I’m sorry, but there’s just one. We ain’t been able to get to town. You fellows can share it, can’t you?” It was tragically sweet.
Uncle Harland had had a memorial portrait taken of Blessing, laid out in a new dress in her bed as if she were asleep. “It’s called memento mori,” I said. Someone had curled her hair and put flowers in her hands. She had been only six years old. I studied it a good while. Seemed to me I would have used brighter flash powder. But, perhaps it was one of the things we were to learn next term—brightening and darkening that happens in the developing room. She looked sad and wasted. I felt something sweep over me, as if I could have done better, not just for my grief and this dear loss, but that I might have soothed his grief just that tiny bit more with a better photograph. If I could learn enough, study hard enough, I could give people something to remember their dear children that would not look so grim. Oh, but what if I couldn’t go back and learn that? If they needed me here, I had to stay. Our lives were a thousand years and nearly two thousand miles from Illinois. Perhaps we were ruffians. We were the people they were two or three generations descended from, the ones who’d fought and clawed their living out of that land of cornfields and trees. I wanted to go back but I needed to stay here. I would wait until I could talk to Pa and Ma in the peace of some coming day. I handed the card back to him and said, “Thank you for letting me see this.”
