Woman of Light (70)
In her confusion and grief, she stood from the ground and dragged her husband’s body toward the porch by the roots of his arms. Glancing behind her to make sure the path was clear of large rocks, Simodecea spotted the crying faces of Sara and Maria Josefina in the window, serving as a type of center, a reminder that she existed in this plane. Simodecea turned her neck and continued to pull. Beyond Pidre’s boots were the tops of those white tents like the peaks of shuddering, false mountains.
They’ll kill us, she thought, and pulled with the strength of several men, carting the body of her beloved into their home.
The first thing she had them do was clear the table. Simodecea placed a white sheet across the pine with the help of her girls, who trembled as they all flopped their father’s body onto the surface. Sara said she could not breathe because she was crying with such force, and Maria Josefina was holding her big sister, as if to keep her from falling over. Simodecea pulled their marital blanket from the bedroom and draped it over her husband’s body. Pidre’s blood had leaked a glinting trail from the yard, up the porch steps, and into the house, now pooling on their floor.
Had Simodecea stopped to take stock of the gory, blood-soaked woman she had become, she would have seen that she was a bright, glowing red. But instead, she was frantically planning, calculating distances and train fares, their ability to escape the company guards, the Animas sheriff, the hateful lying world in which their lives had been dropped. She turned to her girls, and told them to put on their good shoes. In Saguarita you have a distant cousin, Angelica Vigil. Say this name, remember how it sounds. She searched the house for her pistols and a map, marked Saguarita with black ink, and stuffed these things into a kidney-colored satchel, which she draped over Maria Josefina’s right shoulder. “Can you carry it?” she asked, and Maria Josefina nodded through her agony.
They set out on foot. It was midday, skies ablaze. Simodecea had changed out of her soiled dress and was now hidden in a pair of Pidre’s trousers and an unseasonably warm deerskin jacket. The girls had howled at leaving their father’s body on the table, and Simodecea did not scold them or ask them to quiet. She felt release each time they wailed, the duty of motherhood keeping her from revealing her own pain. They walked for several miles through desert and heat until the beginnings of town seemed like an endless dream. Horses and carriages, law offices, and saloons. Simodecea kept her face downcast as she traversed the townscape with her daughters. They had made it, reached the train station’s ticket window, but in that long line of people like ants, Simodecea heard the click of a loaded pistol at her back. Before she turned to face her destiny, she leaned forward and gave each of her girls a squeeze of the hand, and from the depths of her soul, Simodecea shouted, “Run.”
KILLER MEXICAN WOMAN CAUGHT, MIXED-BREED CHILDREN FLEE
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DENVER, COLO., AUGUST 30, 1905. A rumor is circulating among railcar passengers arriving from the southern portion of the state that an armed unknown Mexican woman has been captured after shooting in cold blood two company guards and prominent mining superintendent Henry Sullivan of the Everson Luminous Corporation. There is no indication of motive. Townsfolk are demanding swift retribution against the murderous Mexican. It is said her mixed-breed children may have escaped on foot.
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THIRTY
The Split Sisters
The Lost Territory, 1912
Sara and Maria Josefina met several times a week to share a hand-rolled cigarette along the westerly facing adobe wall of Santa Isabel Catholic Church on the corner of Mariposa and First in downtown Saguarita. Despite the irritation of their employers, once the sisters had completed their seemingly endless chores of feeding chickens, corralling meandering cattle, and beating millipedes and scorpions and thick gobs of mosquitoes from the manta techo, the gauzy and filthy veil that hung below the vigas, the girls rushed from their separate households to be with each other as the afternoon bells of that old Spanish mission tolled.
Most of their conversations revolved around observations each sister had made of her employer. Maria Josefina was housed by a land-grant family named Trujillo who had laid claim to the land for nearly 150 years, some distant grandfather, a direct descent of Juan de O?ate. Sara resided in the home of an Anglo family run by a decrepit patriarch named Carson Mears who had made his fortune in the gristmill and sawmill industries of the Lost Territory.
They were young women now, fifteen and fourteen. Sometimes Maria Josefina would inhale the redolent tobacco with a serious face and try to tell Sara of her bad dreams. The images she saw of her father’s throat open like a gorge, her mother shackled and dragged away as the girls ran for their lives on that terrible day so many years ago. Whenever Maria Josefina spoke this way, Sara would turn and gaze into that wide and blue sky, the white peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. “Remember what I said,” Sara would tell her little sister. “You have to stop thinking about it.” But Sara did not follow her own advice, and since they had been in Saguarita, her own visions and dreams had intensified, coloring her entire existence an overpowering blood-soaked red. In the end, Sara would try almost anything to shut it off.