Crossers (47 page)

Text of a letter submitted to the AHS by Grace Erskine Castle
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125 Scott’s Cove Rd
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Darien, Conn
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January 9, 1967
      

Arizona Historical Society
929 E. 2nd St
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Tucson, Arizona

Gentlemen:

I’m writing in response to your most recent request for my impressions of, my reactions to, my father’s trial on second-degree murder charges
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To tell you the truth, I feel peculiar writing to you, mostly because I’m telling you things about my father that I haven’t even told my children. It’s those mixed feelings I mentioned in my last letter. I’ve never been able to sort them out. And to be candid, I’ve been afraid that my son would end up hero-worshiping Ben, that he might see him as some kind of straight-shootin’, hard-ridin’ Old West swashbuckler and want to imitate him. That was the image a lot of young men had of him, like my nephew, Blaine Erskine
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My father did many brave and honorable things in his life. But he also did some things that make me cringe—to this day. His shooting of Mr. Quinn was one of those things. I hope I can explain why
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My mother had written and asked my brother and me to be at her side during the trial. It wasn’t a problem for Frank—he was a mining engineer in Bisbee—but I was here in Connecticut, had a four-year-old boy to look after, and had just found out I was pregnant again. And it was a three-day train trip to Tucson. It goes without saying that I wasn’t eager to see my father tried on a murder charge. And this, too: relations between us were very sour at that time
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I bring this up because it gives a glimpse into Ben’s dark side. During the war my husband, Tony, and I eloped. He was a flight surgeon at the Army Air Corps base outside Tucson. We ran off when he got orders that he was being shipped overseas. Ben could not forgive me, he could not forgive Tony for failing to ask him for my hand. After our son was born in 1947, my mother took the train east to see her new grandson, and she came alone
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Whatever my feelings toward my father, I couldn’t turn her down. My mother-in-law volunteered to look after our son. Pardon this aside, but I clearly recall her reaction to the newspaper stories Ida had mailed about the shooting, my father’s arrest and indictment. My mother-in-law read them with a bemused expression, as if she were reading about the doings of some quirky tribe on the far side of the world. She assured me there was nothing to worry about—it looked like a clear-cut case of self-defense. Then she said, “Your father sounds like a colorful character, and a … how shall I put it? A bit of an anachronism?”

Those Arizona papers had had a field day with the color and the anachronisms. Headlines like “Gunfight at the Sonoita Corral!” and “Duel in the Sun!” Comparisons to Wyatt Earp and the OK Corral. That kind of thing
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The Sunset Limited pulled into Tucson at ten in the morning on May 7, 1951, the day before the trial. My aunt and uncle drove me to the San Ignacio. My parents were in Nogales, consulting with Ben’s lawyer. They continued to live in their old house after the sale of the IB-Bar but had been staying with Jeff and Lilly for the past couple of weeks because it was closer to Nogales than the mountain place
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Frank and Sally, my sister-in-law, had arrived earlier with my nephew. Late in the afternoon my parents returned, and we all gathered in the living room of the main house. Ben, wearing Levi’s, white shirt, bandanna, and green and black cowboy boots, lived up to the portrait painted of him in the newspapers as—I’m quoting almost directly—“the rangy, sunburned rancher, looking every inch the border lawman and frontiersman he’d once been.”

My mother looked as if she’d aged ten years since I last saw her. And yet it was she who seemed in command, Ben who was subdued. After the preliminary greetings were over, she said, “Your father has something to say to you,” then, with a sidelong look, cued him
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He expressed his thanks to me for coming so far in my condition, and then apologized for shutting my husband and me out of his life
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“I was damn mad at him and you,” he said, “but you’re right, I’ve been unreasonable. I ain’t just saying that, Grace. I’m as sorry as a man can be. About a lot of things.”

The first thing that comes to mind about the day the trial began is the Santa Cruz County courthouse. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a square stone building painted desert tan and crowned by a bright tin dome topped by blindfolded Lady Justice with her sword and scales. It occupies a hilltop above Morley Avenue. From the street, three flights of steep stairs, flanked by cypress and orange trees, ascend to the front entrance. The builders’ intention must have been to create the impression of a temple and to instill in all who made that climb, the innocent no less than guilty, appropriate feelings of reverence for the Anglo-Saxon system of justice
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All I felt, as I went up with Jeff and Lilly and an entourage of relations, were butterflies
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The courtroom was as crowded as a redneck bar on Saturday night or a Baptist church on Sunday morning. Overhead fans paddled against the May heat, to little effect. The county attorney sat beside an assistant at the prosecution’s table, my father at the defense table with his lawyer. He looked rueful. He wasn’t at all certain he was going to get off, and neither were we
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Our family sat on one side of the aisle, Quinn’s on the other, like families at a wedding. I glanced over at Quinn’s much-younger wife, Rosario, dressed in mourning. My memory of her hasn’t dimmed. She had one of those classic Mexican faces—severe, dignified, tragic—and looked older than her years, what with her black dress, her black hair pulled into a bun, the
matronly figure bestowed by bearing three children in five years. Three girls, I found out, the last one born only weeks earlier
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The clerk called the court to order, the jury—nine men, three women—filed in, the judge swooped to his lofty chair, and the ritual began
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The trial lasted four days, and when the prosecution rested, it was obvious that it did not have a strong case. Ida had not been allowed in the courtroom, as she was to appear as a witness for the defense. Midway through the third day she was called to the stand. I was rather proud of how composed she looked in her best suit, her only suit, in fact, a gray wool too warm for the season. Direct examination, cross-examination. I watched Rosario watching her, the woman of the man who had killed hers. Rosario’s upright posture and impassive expression barely changed. Now and then she inclined her head to one side to listen to a man beside her whisper abridged translations of Ida’s testimony
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The climax came on the fourth day, when Father spent two hours in the witness chair, testifying in his own defense. On cross-examination, he was unflappable, parrying the prosecutor’s questions in his western drawl
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The judge called a recess before the attorneys made their closing arguments
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The prosecutor’s was that Ben had not fired in self-defense, that the gun battle was actually a duel. Because he didn’t leave after Quinn made his threat, he had, in effect, accepted a challenge. The county attorney contended that in a duel it makes no difference who fires first. I seem to recall him appealing to the jurors to act as social reformers—by returning a guilty verdict, they would demonstrate that Arizona was not going to tolerate a return to the days of rough frontier justice
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The defense attorney’s argument was more succinct. He depicted Ben as the kind of man everyone would like to be, a man who’d exposed himself to fire and shot his assailant to protect his own life and the lives of his wife and innocent bystanders
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I rather doubted that the prosecutor’s summation would sway the jury, but I confess that his comments stirred up some disloyal thoughts in me. As much as I wanted to support my father wholeheartedly, I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole ghastly mess could have been avoided. Did he have to punch Quinn? Couldn’t he have told my mother and the Burton woman, There’s some trouble, let’s go have some coffee till it blows over? My poor mother, after all she’d been through, had to witness that. But I knew my father’s way. Never let an insult go unanswered; never back down; scour any stain to your honor with blood; if threatened, destroy the threat, even if the destruction breeds another threat in its turn. Quinn was no different—he too was a servant of pride and honor. Two old men who had outlived their time but didn’t know it, two old men shooting at each other in a dusty shipping pen in the middle of the twentieth century, and over what? A dirty remark. Over nothing. Not that I believed my father was guilty of murder in any degree. To my mind, he was guilty of an unbending fealty to his own archaic code
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The jury deliberated less than an hour. We were summoned back into the courtroom. The jury foreman handed the verdict to the clerk of the court, who announced it: not guilty. My father showed no emotion
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We filed outside, into the copper light of late afternoon. Ida could not resist going up to Rosario. What she thought she could say to comfort the young woman I couldn’t imagine. After she spoke her piece, Rosario looked up at her—she was barely over five feet tall—and answered in a venomous whisper. As she turned and walked off, my mother blanched. My Spanish had grown rusty, and it took me a moment to parse out Rosario’s reply. I’ll never forget it: “My hope, señora, is that you will suffer as I am, and if not you, your children, and if not them, their children.”

A curse, as only a Mexican can deliver one when she really means it. We were shaken but collected ourselves and joined Father as he accepted the congratulations of friends and well-wishers. I felt a little embarrassed by my disloyal thoughts and
kissed his cheek. He embraced me. As he held me, I was a little girl again, on the night the lightning struck the windmill. I felt that everything was going to be all right
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I should have known better. That summer Ida wrote that Father had received death threats, the acquittal having angered many Mexicans on both sides of the line. Some of their enmity had fallen on her. A week after the trial she’d gone shopping at a wholesale market on International Street, across from the border fence. As she parked, Mexican kids on a hill overlooking the fence bombarded her car with rocks. She’d begun to suffer spells of vertigo and sharp flashing headaches
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In September, when I was three months into a difficult pregnancy, the phone rang. It was my aunt Lilly, who said she had some very bad news. I knew what it was before she told me. That morning she, Ida, and my sister-in-law, who was visiting, had been stirring a chili for the ranch hands when my mother gave a short cry, clutched the back of her head, and said, “Oh, such a headache,” and fell to the floor. She must have died immediately, for when my aunt and Sally went to her, they could feel the warmth passing out of her body. The doctor said it had been a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The funeral would be held day after tomorrow. Ida was only fifty-two
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There was no question of making another transcontinental journey in my condition. I supposed it was just as well. I could not have borne the sight of her lying in a coffin, nor of the coffin going down into a grave. I know some people thought that the strains of living with my father contributed to her early death. I’ll admit it crossed my mind. It seemed to me that Father had been selfish, following the dictates of his nature and living as he chose, whatever the consequences to my mother or anyone else. Maybe Ben was too comfortable in his own skin; it made him literally hidebound, incapable of changing his ways
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A year after Ida’s death, my brother was killed in an accident in the Phelps Dodge copper mine in Bisbee. They were blasting in the Lavender Pit, and he was crushed when tons of rock and debris fell on him. I traveled again to Arizona for his funeral. My
father and I were devastated. In twelve months he’d lost his wife and son, I had lost a mother and a beloved brother. We buried Frank in Black Oak Cemetery. I consider myself a rational woman, so I say with some reluctance that I recalled Rosario’s curse at the services and half believed it was responsible for their deaths
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For the next five years Ben lived alone at the mountain place, hiding out among those canyons and wooded draws like one of the solitary, unbranded bulls he’d pursued when he was young. Who knows what phantoms haunted him there on nights when the owls hooted and the coyotes sent up their dismal cries. Some in the family were worried he was going a little mad in his solitude. Uncle Jeff wrote that he and Ben were having a drink one night when they heard a car pull up. My father grabbed a flare gun (where had he got that? I wonder) and his pistol and ran outside, hiding behind his workshop. Then he fired the flare. It lit up the whole front yard, terrifying the people in the car. Turned out to be just a couple of tourists who had got lost and stopped to ask directions back to the highway
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