PECOS VALLEY DIAMOND
By Alice Duncan
Pecos Valley Diamond
Copyright 2005 by Alice Duncan
All rights reserved.
Illustration Photograph 2006 by Robin Andersen
All rights reserved.
Published 2005 by New Age Dimensions Publishing Co.
A Tangled Web Book
Smashwords Edition September 3, 2009
Thanks for Elizabeth Delisi for letting me borrow her grandfather’s Titanic story.
Thanks also go out to the Rebs. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.
Chapter One
School had been out for a week and it was hotter than Hades. When I looked out the window I could see little dust devils kicked up by the lazy wind and the Johnson children running to stay under the shade provided by passing clouds. Seemed like a waste of energy to me, but I wasn’t young any longer. Not that young, anyhow. At nineteen and a little, I considered myself pretty adult, actually.
“When I grow up, I want to move to the west.”
I glanced up from my book to see my brother Jack, who had uttered this declaration, and who was at present occupied in looking surly and playing mumbledy-peg with his old jack knife. Ma probably would have scolded him for doing so indoors, but the wooden floor was already so splintered and worn down that I figured it didn’t matter a whole lot. Besides, I didn’t want to provoke an argument. It was too blasted hot for that.
I did, however, feel obliged to point out the obvious to my twelve-year-old brother. “You’re already pretty far west, Jack. Go much farther and you’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean.”
“Nuts. I want to go to where the cowboys are.” A sidelong glance at the Zane Grey novel lying on the pickle barrel clued me in to why Jack was feeling sulky this particular day. Not that he needed more of a reason than being twelve, I suppose.
“We’ve got lots of cowboys right here in Rosedale.”
“Not like these guys.” Jack slapped The Man of the Forest. “These guys wear guns. They have adventures. Ain’t–”
“Aren’t.” Sometimes I can’t help myself.
Jack sighed heavily. “Aren’t any gun-totin’ cowboys in Rosedale.”
“You mean like Billy the Kid?” Billy the Kid was the closest thing to a legend we had in our neck of the woods, which was the Pecos Valley in southeastern New Mexico.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Billy the Kid was a vicious outlaw,” I said gently, not caring to fight, but again feeling obliged to clear up the mud in my brother’s brain.
“Huh. Well, our cowboys are all boring.”
“Thank God for that. From what I’ve read about the so-called Old West, even the good guys weren’t very good, and the bad guys were awful.”
“Huh.”
“Real life isn’t much like novels, Jack.” Even as I spoke the words, I wished they weren’t so. Not that I wanted more cowboys in my life, which was full enough of those already. Anyhow, I knew more about ranching and cowboys than Jack did. The most exciting thing your average cowboy did, no matter where he lived, was fight to stay awake while driving herds, keep the cows from falling into flooded arroyos, and maneuver through hideous dust storms.
What I wanted was a more glamorous brand of excitement. A jungle safari with a great white hunter, maybe, or a trip down the Nile with Sir Richard Burton. Something like that.
All right, I guess I wasn’t the ideal person to quibble about Jack’s unrealistic wishes and desires. Until he interrupted me, I’d been totally engrossed in The Sheik, by Edith M. Hull, and wishing I were the heroine. It was probably as hot in Arabia as it was in Rosedale, but we didn’t have romantic sheiks here. All we had were . . . well . . . cowboys. And Jack was right about them. They were pretty darned boring.
Perhaps I should elaborate. My name is Annabelle Blue. I’m the fifth child, third daughter, and second youngest overall, of William and Susannah Blue of Rosedale, New Mexico. My mother and father own and run Blue’s Dry Goods and Grocery Emporium, a business founded by Grandpa Blue in 1892, on the northeast corner of West Second Street and Robertson Avenue. It’s a pretty good business, for Rosedale, and, after I graduated from Rosedale High School in 1921, I worked there, too.
My two older sisters, Hannah and Zilpha, were married and living nearby. Hannah’s husband, Richard McDougall, worked at the Rosedale Farmers’ and Ranchers’ Bank. Hannah said he was going to own it one day, and I didn’t doubt it. Richard cared more for money than he did anything else, including poor Hannah. Hannah didn’t think so, probably because she was blinded by love. I guess that was a good thing.
Zilpha was married to Mayberry Zink, who owned the saddlery and shoe-repair shop down the street from Blue’s. I liked him better than Hannah’s husband, but I did take exception to his name, as regarded my sister. I mean . . . Zilpha Zink? Oh, well. I guess one can’t choose the name of one’s beloved.
Unless you were me. I’d made up dozens of names for the man I aimed to marry. Unfortunately, the man who went with the names didn’t exist, except in my imagination.
My older brother George was in the U.S. Air Service, flying airplanes for General Mitchell. During the Great War, George had been shot down over France, had thereby earned himself a Croix de Guerre, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart, and was generally considered to be a hero by the citizens of his home town. The Rosedale City Council was contemplating naming a street after him.
I was kind of surprised that Jack hadn’t voiced a desire to join the Army Air Service. Maybe he wanted to be his own man.
What I wanted was to be a princess. Failing that–and I think being royalty requires either an accident of birth or marriage, and I didn’t have a clue as to where I could find myself a prince–I’d take adventure, as long as somebody like Allan Quartermain adventured with me. It seemed unlikely, what with this being Rosedale and all, but you never knew. There might be a hero out there for me. Somewhere.
“Aw, shit.”
Shocked, I cried, “Jack!” before I could think better of it. After all, he’d said it to shock me, and reacting only encouraged the little wretch. Then as Jack, pleased with himself, the rat, disappeared into the back of the store, I saw what had provoked his outburst.
Aw, shit.
It was our aunt Minnie.
Minnie–short for Minerva–Blue was one of those people that infect almost every family to one degree or another. Some families have their dipsomaniacs, some have their slow-witted cousins, some have out-and-out criminals in their closets. We Blues had Aunt Minnie, who was about two quarts shy of a gallon. Maybe three. And that was on a good day.
Uncle Joe Blue, my father’s oldest brother and a perfectly normal individual except for his unaccountable affection for Minnie, had married her in the late nineties, but Joe was gone. Pa said he’d died to get shut of Minnie, but I doubt that. Actually, when Joe was alive, he’d been able to curb Minnie’s most alarming eccentricities. More or less. But Joe was dead, and Minnie was heading straight at me.
About five foot nothing, Aunt Minnie used to have bright, carroty red hair. According to family legend, her hair had turned white when she was about twenty-five. Her hazel eyes were as vivid as ever, and they snapped with a manic ferocity. I don’t think she was really crazy, but she was incredibly . . . well, intense is a good word for it . . . and she could get worked up over just about anything that took her fancy.
Not that she wasn’t nice. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body, and she was forever baking things and giving them away. She was a good cook. But there was no getting around the fact that she was weird. And she was headed in a bee-line toward the store. And I couldn’t hide. Darn Jack, anyhow! If I’d seen her first, I might have found an excuse to leave the store for a few minutes and make him face her. No chance of that now.
On she came, holding her parasol aloft to protect her fair skin from the relentless sun–a more sensible solution than running around under clouds, in my opinion. She was chubby and always wore clothes that had been fashionable in her youth, which meant she looked not unlike a particularly mobile mushroom. She marched across Second Street without bothering to check for oncoming traffic, heedless of Mr. Pullen’s Model T Ford. Aunt Minnie didn’t approve of automobiles and demonstrated her contempt by ignoring them. Pa said she’d be sorry about that one of these days, but so far the kind–or the merely observant–citizens of Rosedale had managed to avoid running her down.
Minnie also ignored the blast of Mr. Pullen’s horn; Mr. Shenkel, the high school principal, who tipped his hat at her; Mrs. Wilson’s second-youngest son Jesse Lee, who jumped out of her way and spilled the armload of neatly folded Rosedale Daily Records that he’d been delivering; and Phil Gunderson, one of our many cowboys who didn’t wear a gun and who was, therefore, not romantic enough for my kid brother–or me, to be honest. Aunt Minnie was pretty single-minded when she was agitated about something. And she looked agitated.
I braced myself when she reached the door, because I anticipated what would happen next. Minnie pushed hard, the door flew open, crashed against the wall, sent a shiver not unlike that of an earthquake rippling along the shelves, and sent two boxes of Quaker Oats tumbling to the floor. Minnie ignored them, too. It was better than the last time she’d visited, when she’d managed to break two bottles of Lydia Pinkham’s Syrup. Ma had rearranged the dry goods after that, so that nothing breakable was in Aunt Minnie’s firing range when she came to visit.
Rather than rush to pick up the oatmeal and replace the boxes on the shelf, I remained behind the counter. It was much the safest place to be when Aunt Minnie was in a mood, if you couldn’t avoid her entirely. I was going to get Jack for this later.
Minnie didn’t break her stride until she arrived at the counter, behind which I stood, worried, hoping the counter was enough of a barrier between the two of us. Not that Minnie was at all violent. She was only . . . oh . . . energetic, I suppose describes her pretty well.
“It’s come back to plague us all!”
I blinked.
That was enough encouragement for Aunt Minnie. “It’s haunting, I tell you! It’s come back, and it’s going to be a judgment upon us.”
I guess I neglected to mention Aunt Minnie’s strong, not to say extreme, religious streak. She also went in for things like seances, Ouija boards, crystal balls, and Madame Blavatsky.
“Um . . .”
“The whole town will suffer before it’s over!”
Without a doubt. Especially if Minnie kept going on at this rate.
“It was a tragedy then, and it’s going to be a worse tragedy now!”
Oh, dear. I didn’t like that word, tragedy.
“Mark my words, Annabelle Blue, we’ll all be sorry before this is over.”
I was sorry already.
“I only hope nobody else will suffer.”
Me, too.
She nodded with such vigor that her hat tilted over one of her glittering green eyes. Shoving it back into place, she said, “Just you wait.”
Guess I’d have to.
“It’s going to be worse than before. I know it in my bones.”
“Um . . . what’s going to be worse, Aunt Minnie?”
Minnie, whose eyes were startlingly large even when she wasn’t on a rampage, stared at me as if I were daft. “What? What? What do you mean what?”
“Um . . .”
“It all started with that poor little child!”
“Child?” I must have sounded about as puzzled as I felt, because Minnie began puffing up like one of Ma’s Rhode Island Reds when one of her Buff Orpingtons hogged the chicken feed.
Minnie poked her finger on the counter. Lucky for me it was there, or she’d be poking my chest. “You know very well what I mean, Annabelle Blue! You were there!”
“I was?”
“What do you mean, ‘I was’? Of course, you were! You went to school with the girl. And it was the school outing that started the whole thing. You were there at the time! You can’t honestly expect me to believe that you don’t remember it!”
A dim bulb went on in the back of my brain. Electricity was fairly new to Rosedale, and this particular bulb flickered a good deal. “Um . . . do you mean Julia Gilbert?”
Minnie flung out her arm, and her furled parasol whacked Jack’s pickle barrel. Thank God Ma had rearranged the store, or Minnie’s broad gesture would have knocked over a display of Del Monte canned green beans, and I’d have had to pick them all up and re-stack them. “Well, who do you think I’m talking about?”
“Um . . .”
“And her ghost is back, and it’s active. She won’t rest, you know, because her body was never found, and the mystery has never been solved. Her spirit is restless, and she’s angry.”
My stomach flopped as it all came back to me.
It had been a nice June day when Miss Feather’s eighth-grade class took a trip to the Bottomless Lakes for our end-of-school picnic. That was my class, and my best friend Myrtle Howell and I were ready to get out of the little kid’s school and into high school. We thought we were too smart to be with the little kids any longer.
You have to understand that there aren’t a whole lot of nice picnic places around Rosedale, because it’s mostly desert. However, the Bottomless Lakes, especially in the early summertime when the thunderstorms came and made the cactus and the weeds bloom, were pretty. Up to that time, it had been a tradition of sorts for eighth-grade classes to hold their parties there, celebrating the end of the school year.
There weren’t all that many children in Miss Feather’s class, maybe fifteen in all, and we were a pretty rowdy group. We weren’t, after all, sophisticates. Most of us were the children of farmers or ranchers or small business people in the dinky town of Rosedale, New Mexico, which at that time had a total population of around ten thousand.
Rosedale is approximately two hundred miles away from a city of any size, and even those other cities (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, Amarillo) weren’t exactly garden spots or Meccas of intellectual activity. There was a small clique of society matrons who put on airs and pretended to be urbane and classy, but I suspect a lady from New York City or San Francisco might have a different opinion about that.
Rosedale started out in life as a hub for cattle ranchers. They’d run their cattle to Rosedale and send them to Kansas City from the railroad yards here in town. We were still pretty much a hub in 1923, and we depended mainly on cattle ranching and sheep farming for our livelihood. I don’t suppose cows and sheep have ever appealed a whole lot to people with refined sensibilities, but we kids didn’t care. We enjoyed our life in the middle of nowhere. You have to remember that the moving pictures were fairly new, too, and most of use hadn’t had the opportunity to become dissatisfied with our rural and rather limited existence.
The Bottomless Lakes were even more nowhere than the town of Rosedale itself. About twelve miles to the east of the city boundary, there are eleven lakes in all, and they aren’t really bottomless. The name came about because in the late 1800s, cowboys from the Chisum ranch tried to find the bottoms of them by tying ropes together and sinking them. It wasn’t until a good while later that scientists figured out the lakes were fed by underground streams whose currents pushed the ropes sideways. Still and all, they’re pretty darned deep.
It was after lunch and we were having a good time, romping around and skipping stones and playing hide and seek. I remember that I was “it” when it happened. Actually, “happened” is a rather specific word for an imprecise event. What transpired was that I was “it,” all the rest of the kids were hiding somewhere or other, Miss Feather and a couple of mothers who were acting chaperones were resting in the shade, and Julia Gilbert never showed up.
One by one the other kids either tagged home or I found them and tagged them, until Julia was the only one left. We called and called, nobody concerned at first. Then we went looking. It was unusual for Julia, who was a quiet and obedient child, to misbehave. After we’d called and searched for maybe an hour, Miss Feather became really concerned. She organized search parties consisting of a parent and a few children each, and we went to every lake in the district, calling and looking. No Julia.
It was a subdued group that went home in the wagon that had carried us to the lakes, leaving Mrs. Howell there . . . just in case. Sheriff Greene and Willard Vickers, who was the police chief, mustered all the men in town to head out to the lakes and search as soon as we reported what had happened, but Julia was never found. It was presumed that she’d drowned, but her body was never recovered. That in itself was odd, since bodies eventually rose to the surface. I mean, Julia wasn’t the first person to drown out there, and she wasn’t the last. But, as far as I know, she was the only one whose body was never recovered.
After that calamity, eighth-grade classes celebrated their end-of-school picnics up at the Spring River, in spite of the mud holes, bogs, and mosquitoes. No class ever went back to the Bottomless Lakes.
Remembering that day always gave me the willies.
“But . . . well . . . Aunt Minnie, why is Julia haunting your house? If you have a ghost? I mean, I’m sure you do, but . . .” You had to humor Aunt Minnie sometimes. “Well, I mean, you don’t live anywhere near the Bottomless Lakes.”
There went her parasol again, and again it cracked against Jack’s pickle barrel. “The ways of the Other Side are infinite,” she declared sententiously. “Who are we to quibble with the spirits?”
Good question, and one to which I had no answer. I did, however, ask rather timidly, “What does Uncle Joe have to say about all this? Doesn’t he mind Julia’s ghost butting into his territory?”
I know, I know. Uncle Joe was dead. According to Minnie, he was still in communication with her. Poor Uncle Joe. Communicating with Aunt Minnie was difficult even if you were a living and fully functioning entity.
“That’s the problem,” she muttered, allowing her parasol to droop.
“What’s the problem?”
“Her! She’s interfering with my communion with your uncle!”
A few people in town at that time had short-wave radio receiving sets. Some of those people, including Minnie’s late husband Joe, had been interested in wireless communication since far before the radio craze of the 1920s. In actual fact, a friend of Joe’s, who lived in Massachusetts at the time, had intercepted a distress signal from the Titanic after it hit the iceberg in April of 1912. When he ran indoors and told his folks the great ship was sinking, they didn’t believe him. True story. Ma thinks that might be one of the reasons Aunt Minnie believes Joe still communicates with her, although I can’t see a connection myself.
But I digress. The thing about radios is that sometimes something will interfere with their signals, and they’ll fizz and bubble. Radio people call this phenomenon “static.” I had a mental image of Minnie sitting down before her crystal ball and seeing fuzz.
“Um . . .” I wasn’t sure how to ask the question. Or even what question to ask.
“That’s why you have to do it.”
I think I blinked again. I know I said, “Do what?” even though I figured it would only set Minnie off again.
I was right. Up went the parasol. Crash went the pickle barrel. Good thing it was sturdy. “What? Why do you keep asking silly questions, girl? You have to stay at the house with me.”
Oh, no. I didn’t groan aloud and was proud of myself. But . . . staying at Minnie’s house? Nuts. “But what can I do?” I protested feebly.
“Do? Do? You can talk to the girl, of course! You’re her age! You can understand her!”
“But . . . Aunt Minnie, she’s been dead for six years.”
The look she gave me shouldn’t be bestowed upon any but the feeblest-witted. I resented it, although I knew my resentment to be as foolish as it was useless. Nobody ever understood Minnie; my current befuddlement wasn’t my fault.
“Of course, she’s been dead for six years. That’s the whole point,” Minnie said, as if she were explaining a simple equation to an extremely dull student.
“But why can’t you communicate with her by yourself? You’re better at that stuff than I am.” Truer words were never spoken.
“Oh, for heaven’s– Listen to me, Annabelle Blue.”
I listened. Couldn’t do anything else, darn it.
“You were in her class. You were with her when she vanished.”
Vanished. Now there was a good word for it.
“You were her age–”
”But I’m not any longer,” I pointed out, thinking it was a valid detail.
“Fiddlesticks! You were her age when she vanished.”
No doubt about it.
“Therefore, you’re obviously the one to do it.”
“Stay with you, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“But . . . .” Arguing with Minnie once she had her heart set on something was almost invariably useless, but I figured it was worth a try. I hated staying at her house. It was a big, lonely ranch house, although all ranching operations had died with Uncle Joe. Now, where there used to be cattle and horses and men to run and ride them, there was a whole lot of nothing. And it was way far away from the town, out on the Pine Lodge Road, which is the road leading to Capitan and Ruidoso, which were up in the mountains. The place was eerie and full of strange noises even when it wasn’t being haunted.
The only other person on the place was Miss Libby Powell, the lady who’d been with Minnie for more years than anyone could remember. I think Minnie had hired her to be a maid in the Dark Ages, but Libby was now her companion and friend. Libby was built like a house and did the work of two men, thereby negating any need Minnie might otherwise have had for a hired hand. Also, and not the least of the reasons I was loath to visit Minnie, Libby was both deaf as a post and exceptionally sharp-tongued.
She was also big. I think she must have been six feet tall, and must have weighed well over two hundred pounds. I don’t think much of that weight was fat, either. She was just all-around big. I’m not sure, but I think she might have had Indian blood in her background somewhere, because she had an olive complexion, and used-to-be-jet-black hair that was naturally wavy. Her hair was more gray than black anymore, and she wore it pulled back in a severe bun. Just about everything as regarded Miss Libby was severe. I didn’t consider her a comfortable person to be around, although Minnie loved her like a sister.
It’s odd to me how friendships develop. If you met Minnie and Libby separately and didn’t know they were friends, you wouldn’t think of connecting them in your mind. But they were kind of like ham and eggs. Toast and butter. Samson and Delilah. You couldn’t have one without the other, if you know what I mean.
I suppose in mitigation of Minnie and Libby, there was Jeepers, the dog. Jeepers was of uncertain origin and a peach of a canine. His coat was medium-short, black and white, and he had a tail that was basically black but had white feathers that waved when he wagged. I loved Jeepers a lot, but he, too, was elderly and deaf, and I couldn’t count on him for company because he slept all the time.
Add to that Minnie’s only close neighbor, Olin Burgess, and you have a setting that would have appealed to Robert Lewis Stevenson in his Jekyll-Hyde mode. Poor Mr. Burgess. It wasn’t his fault. But he was a very unpleasant-looking individual. Rumor had it that he’d been torn up in the Civil War, lost an eye, and received the hideous scars that marred his face and made him limp. He scared people, and kids taunted him. I felt sorry for him . . . but he scared me, too, darn it. I didn’t like being around him. But I was positive Aunt Minnie would only pooh-pooh any objection based on Mr. Burgess. I didn’t dare tell her about my objection to Miss Libby.
The fact that Minnie’s house was also a good twenty miles eastward from where Julia Gilbert disappeared, however, seemed to me a cogent point and a fairly good place to start my argument. “Aunt Minnie, there’s no earthly reason for Julia to be haunting your house. If she’s dead–”
”She’s dead.”
“Probably. But even if she is–I mean, even though she is, there’s no earthly reason she should be haunting your house.”
“We aren’t speaking of the earthly plane, Annabelle. Will you get that through your head?”
Oh, brother. I forged onward through the bog. “But think about it, Aunt Minnie. She can’t be haunting your house. You don’t live anywhere near where she died.”
“How do you know?”
I’d opened my mouth to keep arguing, but this statement made the words I was going to speak shrivel up. I swallowed the dried bits of them. “Well, because she died at the Bottomless Lakes, didn’t she?”
“We don’t know that.”
“But . . . that’s where we were when she . . . vanished.”
“It must be obvious to you, then, that she didn’t die there! She died near my house!”
Huh? “Um . . .”
“Just because the whole world believes something to be so doesn’t make it so, Annabelle Blue. You, of all people, ought to know that?”
“Why me of all people?”
“Because you’re young! You’re open! You don’t scoff as much as the rest.”
Boy, I decided then and there not to be so darned polite to my crazy aunt. I mean, there are limits. “But . . .”
“And furthermore–” She broke off suddenly and, to my utter horror, tears started dripping down her cheeks.
I reached for her hand–a first, believe me–but she looked so wretched, I felt sorry for her. “Aunt Minnie, what is it?”
“I miss Joe. And he won’t come as long as she’s there.”
Oh, brother.
My mother entered the store from behind me–we lived in the back–and I thought rescue was at hand. With profound relief, I turned to her. “Ma! Aunt Minnie’s here.”
“So I see.”
My mother is a saint. She might occasionally say sarcastic things about people when they weren’t around, but she was invariably kind to them in person. She held out her hand and gave Minnie a sweet smile. “So good to see you, Minnie.”
She must have noticed the traces of tears on my aunt’s face. “But what’s this? Is something the matter, Minnie?” Ma rushed around to the other side of the counter and took Minnie in her arms (Ma is also braver than I). “Tell me, dear!”
So Minnie told her. Even as she spoke, I saw Ma’s face crunch up into her I can’t believe my daughter said that to you expression. I was intimately familiar with that expression. And I knew my days of peace were numbered.
Chapter Two
“I don’t know why I have to go,” I grumbled, knowing as I did so that it would only irritate my mother. Anyhow, to argue was pointless. It was the morning after my encounter with Aunt Minnie, my mother was adamant, and my bag was already packed. “Why don’t you make Jack go?”
“Your brother has to help with the store. Anyhow, your aunt asked for you.”
Lucky me.
In other parts of the civilized world, a girl might have taken a taxicab to visit her aunt. Rosedale, although moderately civilized, didn’t have taxicabs in 1923. We didn’t have street cars, omnibuses, or trolley cars, either. We didn’t even have very many automobiles. There were so few, in fact, that Jack and his pals used to wait out on Second Street until they saw a car coming, then bet each other that they could crawl across the street before getting run over. That game lasted until Pa caught wind of it.
At any rate, in the absence other means of transport, Phil Gunderson was waiting for me in the kitchen. He was going to take me out to Minnie’s house in the wagon he’d driven to Rosedale, pulled by a team of big brown horses.
Phil was a nice guy and he usually worked for his father, who had a ranch a few miles from Aunt Minnie’s place. Sometimes he helped out his older brother at the hardware store he owned in town. The Gundersons had an elderly but serviceable Ford truck, but when it came to hauling supplies they depended on the wagon. That day, I felt like a supply. And I didn’t like it.
Phil was also sweet on me, which was kind of a problem, since he was one of the boring people I really liked but didn’t want to hang around with for the rest of my life. God knew how I aimed to get shut of Rosedale and the folks who lived there, but I wanted at least one adventure before I got married and faded into the woodwork.
“Stop complaining, Annabelle Blue. It’s little enough to ask of you. Your poor aunt Minnie needs you.”
“For what? I’m not in the ghost-removal business.”
“Don’t you be sarcastic about your aunt, Annabelle. It’s a very unbecoming trait in a young woman.” She shoved a sunbonnet at me.
“I’m not wearing that, Ma.” I hated sunbonnets then, and I hate them now.
“Don’t be foolish. The sunbonnet will protect your skin from the sun. It’s hot out there, and you’re sure to get a burn if you don’t wear it.”
“I’ll wear my new straw hat.”
Ma humphed. She did that a lot. “Vanity is a sin, Annabelle Blue.”
“I don’t care.” I was feeling mighty defiant that day, primarily because I was doing something I really, really didn’t want to do. I was entitled, darn it. “Whenever I wear that thing, I look like Kate Bush in The Battle at Elderbush Gulch.”
“Nonsense.”
“It’s the truth.” And it wasn’t a flattering image.
So I got my new straw hat, purchased from our very own dry goods store earlier that month and decorated by my very own fingers with yellow felt flowers, and stabbed a pin in it. Since I hadn’t yet dared get my hair bobbed–you had to work up to these things gradually when you lived in Rosedale, New Mexico–I still had lots of long brown hair. That day my hair was knotted into a bun, so the one pin held the hat on nicely.
Observing myself in the mirror, I decided I looked quite presentable, considering my features. They weren’t bad, my features. I had normal ears, blue eyes, and a regular nose, but I sure wasn’t any Mary Pickford. My hair wasn’t anything special, being an ordinary brown, although I always rinsed it with vinegar and it shone like anything in the sun. If Ma hadn’t been there, I’d have smiled into the mirror to see if I could appear coquettish if I tried. I mean, even though I wasn’t sweet on Phil Gunderson, I didn’t necessarily want to lose him to somebody else until I found my prince. Or at least Allan Quartermain.
“I don’t know what’s going to become of you, Annabelle Blue,” Ma said.
The way she said it made me feel guilty, but I didn’t let on. Instead, I muttered, “Ghosts, of all things,” grabbed my bag, and headed downstairs to the kitchen. As soon as I walked through the door, Phil stood up, holding his hat in his big, work-worn hands, and staring at me like a hungry puppy. I deduced I looked respectable.
Naturally, I couldn’t get away from the house without fifteen or twenty admonitions from my mother. Phil and I exchanged a grin and I heaved a sigh of relief when he clucked to the horses and the wagon pulled away. The only good thing about all this was that Jack had to work in the store for the duration of my stay at Minnie’s house because I wouldn’t be available. Served him right, the little stinker.
“And don’t you be sarcastic about your aunt’s beliefs, young lady!” followed us down Second Street, along with a huge cloud of dust. None of the roads were paved in those days. Heck, they still ran cattle through town twice a year, right there on Second, which is Rosedale’s main east-west street.
“What’s your aunt up to now, Annabelle?” Phil’s smile was almost as warm as the weather, and it made me feel good.
“She claims her house is haunted.”
“Mmm. She’s probably got bats in the attic.”
“Probably.” Fortunately, I didn’t mind bats.
“You got a sunbonnet? That hat’s not going to protect your neck from the sun.”
Darn it! “I’ll be all right.”
“Hmm.” He handed me a bandanna he plucked from his pocket.
I eyed it with misgiving. “Is it clean?”
“‘Course it is.” He chuckled.
So, in spite of the fact that it didn’t go with my outfit and only made me feel stupid, I wound the bandanna around my throat, making sure I covered the back of my neck. And that was that. Not a big conversationalist, Phil.
He was a good-looking guy: tall, lanky, with dark curly hair and chocolate-brown eyes framed by lush dark lashes. I always wished I could have eyelashes like that, but I had to augment mine by judicious use of mascara. It had to be judicious, because if my mother found out I was using makeup, she’d shoot me. Back then, it seemed that half the world was embracing flappers and all they represented and the other half was decrying them. My mother and father were among the latter group.
As for me, I wouldn’t have minded being a flapper, but it required too much work. Face it, it was one thing to follow all the fads and fashions if you lived, say, in Los Angeles, California, amongst all the motion picture actors and beautiful people, or, more importantly, had a lot of money. It was a whole ‘nother thing if you lived in Rosedale, New Mexico, and were about as well off as your neighbors, which meant not very.
Ma must have telephoned Aunt Minnie to tell her I was on my way, because she and Libby were standing on the covered porch and Minnie was waving her handkerchief at us when the wagon drove up the long road leading to her house and pulled up to the porch. Jeepers barked once and subsided, sitting himself down on the porch beside Miss Libby. I guess he decided I wasn’t worth the effort of an all-out barking barrage, being related and all.
I braced myself for Minnie’s onslaught. Then I thought of something that might save my own personal sanity while I stayed with Minnie and Libby–besides all the books I’d brought along, which I’d borrowed from Rosedale’s Carnegie Library, a block north of our store.
Taking Phil by the arm before he could hop down and help me alight, I whispered, “Phil, you have to promise that you’ll visit me. Once a day, at least. Okay?”
His eyes brightened, and I felt guilty again, this time for giving him false hopes. Darn it, none of this was my fault!
“Sure thing, Annabelle. Happy to.”
Then Minnie was upon us, and there was no more time. She’d hurtled down the porch steps and thrown herself upon Phil. Jeepers still watched from the porch along with Miss Libby. Of the three, he was the only one I especially liked. Oh, well.
“Philip! Are you staying with us, too? Thank God, thank God!”
“Er . . .”
Since I wasn’t any shrinking violet and had always been more of a tomboy than my mother thought was proper, I didn’t have to wait for Phil to help me down from the wagon. I hopped down myself, using the wheel as a step. “Phil can’t stay, Minnie. He was kind enough to bring me out here, is all.”
“Oh.” She released Phil, who staggered back a step or two. Minnie could be pretty powerful when she was in one of what Pa called her “phases.” “That’s too bad.” She rubbed her chin, looking troubled. Her gaze sharpened as she glanced at me. “Why aren’t you wearing a sunbonnet, Annabelle? You’ll burn yourself to a crisp in that frivolous hat.”
I swear, I couldn’t win no matter what. Grumpy, I handed Phil his bandanna, ignored Minnie’s question, and muttered, “Thanks.”
Giving me a grin, Phil took his bandanna. Then he turned back to Aunt Minnie and asked politely, “What’s the matter, ma’am?” I was glad he’d opted not to tell Minnie he’d asked me the same question she’d asked about the use of sunbonnets versus pretty straw hats.
“Come indoors and have a glass of tea, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Phil cast a doubtful glance at the horses, which were drooping slightly. It was darned hot. “Well, ma’am, I’d like to, but I’d best be getting the critters home. My pa’s waiting for me, you see.”
Although Minnie didn’t generally pay attention to any human miseries but her own, she had a soft spot for dumb animals, and a glance at the horses confirmed Phil’s assessment of the situation. “Well . . . all right. But you come back this evening for supper, young man. Annabelle and Libby and I are going to need help dealing with this situation.”
Oh boy, I could hardly wait. “Yeah, Phil. Please come for supper.” I suppose there might have been a trace of a whine in my voice as I made the request, but I was suffering, darn it, and anticipating further miseries to come.
Again, Phil said, “Happy to,” tipped his hat, bobbed his head, waved to Libby, who still stood on the porch, her arms crossed over her bosom, looking stern, and jumped aboard the wagon again. Jeepers woofed once more. Stupid dog.
Minnie took my arm in a grip like an iron manacle (or maybe I was only feeling the least little bit put upon), and led me into the house. It was cool and dark in there, since the ladies had drawn the curtains against the mid-day sun. Jeepers picked himself up from the porch with a grunt and limped after us, stiff-legged and with his tail drooping. Guess he had the rheumatics, like most old folks.
Minnie’s house had been built by Uncle Joe around 1900, I guess. It was big and open, with a large fireplace in the parlor and smaller fireplaces in most of the other rooms, since there were no electrical lines running that far out of town, although Phil said it was only a matter of time. Minnie’d had a telephone installed when the telephone company made them available to rural customers, but there was no indoor plumbing or anything else of a modern nature. A screened-in porch off the kitchen was used as an extra room when it was needed.
I didn’t mind that so much. In those days, the whole of Rosedale was pretty rugged, and lots of people didn’t have plumbing, gas lines, or electricity. You’d have thought we were still living in the Old West my younger brother was so fond of, except for the occasional automobile and the telephone poles. And, of course, the Pecos Theater, which showed moving pictures that usually reached us several months after the rest of the country had seen them.
Minnie’s furniture was old but well-made, and she and Libby kept the place squeaky clean, no small feat in those days when dust storms were common and there were very few trees to get in the way of whatever the wind wanted to do. Antimacassars protected the backs of chairs and sofas from anyone’s hair oil, and the rugs Minnie had braided when she and Joe were first married still covered the floors (made from pine logs Joe had cut himself from up around Capitan way). Both the floor and the rugs would probably last forever.
“I have to tell you the latest, Annabelle. The ghost was active last night. I’m so frightened it will drive my darling Joe away for good and all.”
“I’m sure there’s no chance of that.” I meant it, too. I mean, ghosts? What next?
“I’m not so sure. There’s something evil about that ghost, and I’m afraid.”
Libby, who probably hadn’t heard anything from the time Phil and I had arrived until that last comment of Minnie’s, nodded her head. “Evil.”
Wonderful. I just love encountering evil spirits. Bats, I reminded myself. It’s only bats. There are no such things as ghosts. I missed Phil already. “If you think it’s Julia Gilbert’s ghost, why do you say it’s evil? Julia wasn’t evil.”
“Of course not. She was only a little girl.”
If Minnie thought that explained the matter, she was dead wrong. So to speak. Seeking enlightenment, although from a pretty leaky source, I said, “Well, then, how come her ghost is evil if she was only a little girl? And a nice one, if I remember correctly.”
“We’re dealing with forces from the Other Side,” Minnie said ominously. “Things happen on the Other Side.”
Ah. Well, then . . .
“Can’t Uncle Joe do anything about it? Drive her ghost away or something?”
I thought it was a pretty good question, but I guess Minnie disagreed, because she glared at me. “It’s evil,” she said again, “and your uncle Joe is not equipped to war with the devil.”
Oh. I nodded, as if I understood and agreed with her. In truth, I thought she was fast descending into out-and-out lunacy. Anyhow, I wasn’t equipped to war with the darned devil, either, but she didn’t seem to care about me. Phooey.
Minnie perked up. “But come into the kitchen, Annabelle, and have some lunch. Libby’s made an excellent stew.”
The only good thing about staying at Aunt Minnie’s house, besides Jeepers, was the food. Both Minnie and Libby were wonderful cooks, and Libby’s stew was as excellent as advertised. So were the pecan biscuits with home-made butter and some of Aunt Minnie’s apricot jam. And then there was the buttermilk pie for dessert. I guess that if I had to face the supposedly evil spirit of a poor little thirteen-year-old girl who had met an untimely end twenty miles to the east of us, it was nice that I’d get to do it well-fed.
One funny point–at least I think it’s kind of funny–is that Miss Libby never sat at the table and took meals with Minnie. Anyhow, she didn’t when Minnie had guests, even guests like me, who were more in the nature of captives. Claiming she “knew her place,” she stood back, arms folded over her enormous bosom, and frowned at the diners. I was so accustomed to this performance that Libby’s grim expression didn’t put me off my food even a little bit. Guess a body can get used to most anything.
I liked Minnie’s kitchen better than any other room in her house, because it was cozy. It was large, with a wooden table in the center where the two of them prepared food and ate informal meals. The ladies cooked on a big wood-burning stove, since, as mentioned earlier, there was no electricity, and gas lines didn’t run out that far out yet. They had a deal with Olin Burgess, the ugly little man who lived about a half-mile away, to cut and deliver wood to them once a month.
Either Minnie or Libby had made curtains for the kitchen windows out of a pretty white cotton material that was decorated with apples and that Minnie had bought at Blue’s. I thought that if I ever had a kitchen of my own, I wouldn’t mind having curtains like that. There was a water pump at the sink, so you didn’t have to go outdoors to pump water to cook or wash up with, and a door led to the cellar where Minnie and Libby kept root vegetables and preserves and so forth.
I think I already mentioned the screened-in sleeping porch off the kitchen, where you could sit and work on days when you needed a breeze. The back door led to the garden, where Minnie and Libby grew cucumbers and onions and squash and tomatoes and cabbages and melons and anything else that took their fancy, including okra, which wasn’t my favorite vegetable, although I liked it well enough when it was coated with cornmeal and fried. Both ladies were good gardeners, too.
As we ate, Minnie regaled me with tales of the ghost. Evidently, it made noises at night (bats, I reminded myself); disturbed the chickens (coyotes. Minnie ought to get herself a younger dog. One with ears that still worked); and occasionally hollered things in a language she couldn’t understand.
That last item got me. I couldn’t think of anything that might explain my aunt hearing night noises speaking in tongues. Insanity, maybe, but I wasn’t ready to relegate her to the loony bin in Las Vegas quite yet. I don’t think anyone in our family had ever gone completely nuts, although I’m not really sure. Back then, people weren’t as eager to brag about their mental problems as they are now.
Besides, she was blaming all this disturbance on a little girl who used to be a friend of mine. Didn’t seem fair. “Wait a minute, Minnie. Are you telling me you think poor little Julia Gilbert has got herself a band of foreign-talking devils to plague you?”
Minnie frowned at me. “You can’t begin to imagine what transpires on the Other Side, young lady.”
“I guess not.” How could she? I didn’t ask. “But . . . well, I don’t think Julia could ever be evil, Minnie. She was too nice. And she was kind of shy. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
“So you say. I know what I know.”
As far as I could tell, she didn’t know a darned thing. Nevertheless, I heeded my mother’s words and didn’t say so. “Um . . . could it be Mexican shepherds?” I suggested without much fervor. Anyhow, I was too full of good food to get truly worked up about Minnie’s nuttiness.
“No, it could not.” Minnie gave me another good glare. “Don’t be silly, girl. Why would Mexican shepherds be shepherding at night in my yard?”
Another good question. “Um . . .” A man named Dr. Cable MacTeague was in charge of an archeological expedition from the University of New Mexico. I suddenly thought of him and offered another suggestion. “Maybe it’s one of Dr. MacTeague’s men. Some of them are foreign. I think.”
“Why,” Minnie asked me in that school-teacherish voice I was coming to hate, “would archeologists being digging at night in my back yard?”
I shrugged and smiled at her. “Guess you got me there.” I didn’t understand why Julia would be haunting her at night, either. Again, I kept my opinion to myself.
“Here are them extra biscuits.”
Minnie and I glanced up just as Miss Libby plopped a bundle wrapped in a checked cloth onto the table between us. Minnie said, “Oh, yes, I forgot.” She turned toward me, and I sensed a duty coming on. Because I wanted to stay on these ladies’ good sides, I only smiled.
“Take these biscuits to Mr. Burgess, Annabelle. I promised him some. And he’s got some Swiss chard for our supper. I’ve got to finish up some pillow slips I’ve been sewing.”
Ack! As if ghosts weren’t enough for a young woman not even twenty years old to deal with, I now had to speak to a man who scared the living daylights out of me! I wanted to bury my head in my hands. “Sure, Aunt Minnie. Happy to.” Boy, was that a lie!
Miss Libby must have heard some of my unwillingness in the tone of my voice or something, because she stabbed me in the shoulder with a sharp forefinger. “And don’t you go sniggering at him, girl.”
I stared up at her, offended. “Snigger at him? I never snigger.”
“Humph. That poor man’s endured enough nastiness in his lifetime already. Don’t you go forgettin’ that he lost his looks when he was younger than you are now, and he was on the good side of that war, too.”
The “good” side was, naturally, the Federal side. And I agreed with her since I can’t even conceive of slavery being anything but bad, but that didn’t make the errand any more palatable to me. Especially right then, since I was feeling not unlike a slave myself.
I was, however, my mother’s daughter, and Ma had taught me never to be unkind to anyone. That went double for the old or infirm, and Mr. Burgess was both. Therefore, I’m not. Unkind, I mean. I was never one of those kids who tormented poor Mr. Burgess. In fact, a couple of times, I tried to make my friends stop when they did it. That didn’t mean I wanted anything to do with him.
“Don’t worry, Miss Libby. I’m never rude to people. My ma would skin me if I were.”
“And a good thing, too,” said Miss Libby with another snort. “I swan, young people today don’t know a thing.”
Possibly, although I doubted it. I’m sure I could quote more passages from Shakespeare than Libby had ever even read, but I sensed that what she meant didn’t have anything to do with book-learning. With a sigh, I stood up and took the bundle. “Let me go to the bathroom, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Going to the bathroom” was a pretty standard euphemism back then. While Minnie’s house did have a bathroom, it wasn’t what most people today think of as a bathroom. It was a room with a tub, a pump, a wash basin, and a mirror, where you could wash up. If you were feeling particularly energetic, you could even heat your water and use buckets to pour the heated water into the tub, although usually people made do with cold water from the pump. If you had to go to the toilet, you did it in the outhouse in back of the house, behind the kitchen.
So that’s what I did. And then I girded my loins, so to speak, took the sunbonnet Minnie handed me and put it on without a murmur, and took off up the road to Olin Burgess’s shack. In order to make myself feel better, I sang. If Jeepers had been five or six years younger, I’d have taken him along for company, but he was too old and rheumatic to make the journey any longer, more’s the pity. Maybe I’d just have to find a puppy somewhere and give it to Minnie. Wish I’d done it before that day.
But I endured. When I got to Mr. Burgess’s shack, around which he’d built a fence out of wood he’d undoubtedly cut himself up in the mountains, I paused at the gate, sucked in a breath of creosote-scented air that was probably hovering in the area of a hundred degrees, and pushed the gate open. I told myself that being ugly wasn’t anything Mr. Burgess could do anything about, and that my aunt and Miss Libby had lived near him for twenty or thirty years, and he hadn’t killed either one of them yet.
That in itself was a point in his favor. Most of the other people I know probably would have succumbed to the temptation to do away with one or both of them by this time.
Chapter Three
I didn’t have to knock on Mr. Burgess’s door. His two dogs–I couldn’t see them because they were in the shack, but I sure heard them–started barking as soon as I pushed on the gate, and he anticipated my approach. He was standing in the open doorway by the time I got to his shack. I’d already braced myself, but there’s no way for a body to really prepare herself to meet Olin Burgess.
We’ve all met ugly people. But Mr. Burgess was more than ugly. He was deformed. And I guess the source of his disfigurement must have entailed gun powder and fire, because his skin was stained blue in patches. He’d lost an eye, and the socket was all wrinkled and nasty and blue-black. He listed to one side, I suppose because the injuries to his other side had been so severe. What little you could see of his flesh looked almost as if it had melted and was now a mass of scar tissue. In short, he was difficult to look at, and, even though I’m sure it’s a sin of one sort or another, I didn’t want to look at him.
That being the case, and since I had to do it anyway, I forced a smile and held out my packet of pecan biscuits. “Brought these for you, Mr. Burgess. Miss Libby just made them, and I can vouch for them. They’re very good.” There. That was polite, wasn’t it?
“Miss Libby’s food’s always good,” he said in a flattish voice that scraped slightly when he talked, as if it, too, had been damaged in whatever conflagration had ruined his body. He took the bandanna, nodded, shoved a paper sack full of Swiss chard at me, and retreated into his shack.
Okay. I guess that took care of that. A little disconcerted, although more pleased than not that he hadn’t engaged me in conversation, I turned and went back through the gate.
I ambled along, thinking that it would be nice to have walked that half-mile in the blazing sun and have more to talk about at the end of the trip than what had just transpired. Maybe I’d still see a herd of wild burros or antelopes. Or maybe I’d see Phil and some of the other fellows from the Flying G Ranch herding dogies. Or maybe an eagle would swoop down out of the sky, scoop up a vole, and carry it back to its aerie in the mountains. Or maybe a tall, dark, handsome stranger, would come riding down from the hills and fall madly in love with me. Heck, a girl can always daydream, can’t she?
Since I no longer had the encountering of Mr. Burgess to worry me, I took note of the well-tended rose bushes he’d planted along his fence. That was nice. I like flowers, and appreciate people who take the time to cultivate them in inhospitable surroundings–and the high plains of southeastern New Mexico are inhospitable, believe me.
Then something green caught my eye and I detoured to my right. You tend to pay attention to green stuff when you live in the middle of a desert, as noted previously regarding the rose bushes.
Lo and behold, behind Mr. Burgess’s house, he’d cultivated himself a vegetable garden. Mind you, vegetable gardens in and of themselves weren’t unusual, since most people had them. It was cheaper to grow your own than buy them at Joyce’s Produce Company on Main Street, unless you wanted unusual fruits like bananas or oranges. At our house behind the store, we grew apples and apricots in addition to the vegetables.
And here, by gum, I saw that Mr. Burgess was doing the same thing. He hardly ever came to town, being uneasy about the taunting-kids situation, I reckon, and here was one of the ways he avoided doing so.
He hadn’t only planted a vegetable patch, either. He’d made himself a pretty little garden spot behind his house, with wood chips and crushed pecan shells lining the rows between the beans and onions and tomatoes and so forth, and flowers surrounding the whole thing, smack up against and doing a good job of hiding, the fence he’d made out of chicken wire. You had to have a fence out there, to protect your vegetables from jackrabbits and antelopes. I saw where irises had bloomed earlier in the year, and now there were poppies and hollyhocks lording it over the vegetables, as if the vegetables were their servants or something.