The Staircase (2 page)

The whole trip up to the time Mama died took fifty days. And we still had more to go. We could have taken the train to
southeast Colorado, the farthest point the railroad went. But Bishop Lamy wrote that he wanted his grandniece to "witness the travel on the Santa Fe Trail," as he had so often done, before the railroads took over.

Elinora knew, all the while, that she was Miss Importance on this trip. Every whim of hers was satisfied. If she wanted to stop and pick wildflowers, we did so. Mama and I shared the same basin of water to wash as we crossed fifty miles of dry plain, but Elinora would have her own. At Fort Union Mama was already sick, but Elinora must be taken through the fort to see it.

Only one time did she not get her way. She had wanted to travel the Mountain Branch route to see Bent's New Fort and all the trappers, Indians, and military men there. Daddy said no. The Cimarron Cutoff was a hundred miles shorter. But I think the real reason was because Daddy just didn't want to see Uncle William.

I WAS FEEDING BEN
and seeing to him for the night when I noticed Elinora talking with Daddy a bit away from the fire. She wanted something again. Probably to stop tomorrow at some stream and do a watercolor for her uncle. She had her drawing paper and watercolors with her. She fancied herself an artist. I know Daddy wanted to get on with the trip. It was already the beginning of October.

Oh, it would be so good getting shut of Elinora.

I stayed awhile with Ben. I had a bit of sugar for him. I put my face close to his, and he knew I was grieving. Horses know.
Animals know,
Mama always said.

"We're going on to Colorado," I told him. "We're going to find gold, and someday we'll come back here and find Mama and take her home for a proper burial."

By the time I got into the wagon, Elinora was already snuggled—in my traveling bed, the one Mama had made by sewing two comforters together. One side was lined with a warm Indian blanket and the other was covered with canvas so water would roll right off it.

"It's going to be cold tonight," Elinora said. "You wouldn't want me to come down with the fever, would you? Your daddy promised my uncle I'd be delivered safely."

"Keep the old thing," I said. "I'll use Mama's." My mother had made one for herself, too.

"See that fire outside? Your daddy's burning it because your mama died of the fever." She pulled up part of the wagon canvas so I could see the fire. It was sending sparks into the surrounding dark.

I settled down on the other side of the wagon, in some quilts, with a pillow. Oh, how I wished I had a kitten! I heard the murmur of voices outside as the others settled into the wagons. My daddy would take the first watch, then sleep under our wagon. A dog would do, I decided. Maybe on the way to Colorado Daddy would let me get a dog.

I ached for Mama, for the way she'd always kiss me good night. The pain was like what Daddy had told me his pain had been when he'd first lost his arm—and sometimes still was. An aching of the part of you that was not there anymore. How could that be, I'd wondered when he first told me. Now I knew.

"Do you want to talk about your mama?" Elinora's voice came across the dark.

"No, I want to be left alone."

"You can't go on to Colorado with your daddy, you know."

"And why not?"

"It isn't right, a girl our age going to Colorado. There's
nothing there but miners and Indians and saloons and bawdy houses. No real homes or real people."

"My daddy is real people."

"He's too addled to take care of you."

"He's not addled. Anyways, I don't need taking care of."

"You go there, you'll be doing laundry in a tub of cold water. Eating in a saloon. There's no churches, no proper families."

I snuggled into my quilts. "What do you care?"

"No need to be Miss Sassy-Boots. I'm only trying to help."

"I don't need your help, thank you. Now I need to sleep so I can get up early and help put stones on Mama's grave so when we leave the wolves don't get into it."

Elinora made a shuddering sound. "How you can talk so," she said. "You've lost all sense of propriety. My mama's been dead since I was ten, and you don't see me being boorish, do you?"

"I hope, shortly, not to see you at all, Elinora."

"I'm suffering this from you only because you just lost your mama. I'm offering it up."

"You do that."

"You're blasphemous, too. The Sisters will be shocked when they meet you."

"They won't meet me if I can help it."

"You do get over it, you know. Your mother dying. She's in heaven with God. You should be happy for her."

"I'd be happier if she was here, Elinora. God doesn't need her, and I do."

"Oh, sweet Mother of God."

I knew she was crossing herself. She'd come from a convent school in St. Louis. She was all the time saying her beads and showing me pictures of saints with fire around their
heads and their eyes cast to heaven. I knew them just from her telling: Saint Theresa. Saint Agnes. And some man saint all pierced with arrows, like he'd been attacked by Comanches.

Worse yet, her last name was St. Clair. Her mama was the Bishop's niece, had gone to school in Santa Fe herself and taken it all so seriously she'd gone and married somebody with a saint's name.

"Of course, your mama's likely in a Methodist part of heaven, and that isn't as good as the Catholic part. But I'm sure she's very happy."

"If you don't hush up, Elinora, I'm going to take those beads of yours and wrap them around your neck!" I meant it. She didn't hush, though. It'd take more than that to make her.

"Did you know that years ago my uncle met Kit Carson?"

I did not answer.

"Did you know there are two witches who live in Santa Fe who dispense love potions?"

I turned over on my quilts, hating her.

"I already know how to make a love potion. You mix herbs, powders, cornmeal, and worms. They can be fried or mashed, it doesn't matter. Then you put some urine of the person you want to love you in it."

"How do you get that?" I demanded.

"What?"

"The urine of the person you want to love you. How do you get it?"

"Well, if you're going to split hairs, Lizzy Enders, when I go to visit the witches in Santa Fe, you can't come with me."

"I won't be there, so you can
live
with them as far as I'm concerned."

"Don't be so sure that it won't happen."

"What?"

"Never mind. Did you know that my-uncle-the-Bishop once fought off an attack by Comanches? It was just after the war. On his way home to Santa Fe after a trip to Rome, he picked up some Jesuit priests and some nuns in Ohio. Their wagon train was attacked by Comanches along the Arkansas River. Some men traveling with him were killed, but he was right out front fighting, shooting his six-guns, for six hours. And they finally beat the Comanches back."

Well,
I thought,
then maybe he'll be a match for you.

I heard her turning over in my traveling bed. I never thought I could hate anybody so much in my whole life as I hated Elinora St. Clair that night. My whole body shook with sobs of hatred for her. At least that was what I told myself my body was shaking from. But I buried my face in the pillow so she wouldn't hear me.

NEXT MORNING I WOKE
to the sound of hammering. Damn, I'd overslept. No, I mustn't let Elinora hear me say
damn.
I'd learned that word in Independence, from Uncle William. Mustn't let Daddy hear me say it, either. It would give him one more thing to dislike Uncle William for, and he disliked him enough already.

No matter, Elinora was still sleeping. I got up, dressed quietly, and crept out of the wagon.

It was cold. October-morning cold. Grave cold. The sun was only a red promise in the east. To the north the Sangre de Cristo Mountains looked like jagged edges of black tar paper torn off a shack. The kettle was on the fire. Mrs. Wade was bending over a frying pan. I smelled bacon. I was about starved.

Daddy was hammering a rude cross into the ground over Mama's grave. The sound carried, made bigger than it was, like everything else out here. All around us in the vastness were shapes. By the light of day they would likely be stunted cedar trees on a flat mesa. But now they could be witches or
crouching Indians. Whatever the mind made them. I shivered. The whole place brooded.

A pile of stones was nestled at my father's feet. I went over to help set them about Mama's grave. A nagging thought clouded my head. No, it was the filmy leftover bits of a dream. What had I dreamed? It came to me in pieces. Something about cutting off the ears of mules. Then I remembered. William Becknell had cut off the ears of his mules to drink their blood when crossing the fifty-mile dry plain. Elinora had told me that story. I shuddered, kneeling on the cold ground, setting the stones on top of Mama.

"Daddy?"

"How are you this morning, Lizzy?"

"I'm right fine, Daddy. How long to Santa Fe?"

"Three or four days now."

"Daddy, I had a dream last night. It sticks in my mind like glue."

"What is it, Lizzy?"

"About cutting off the mules' ears like Becknell did."

"Who told you that story?"

"Elinora."

"That girl does have a sense of drama."

"Daddy, you aren't going to leave me in Santa Fe and go off to Colorado alone, are you?"

He was using a rock as a hammer. He slammed it violently atop the cross. "Don't know what good this soil is for anything out here."

"Did you hear me, Daddy?"

"Yes, I heard you, Lizzy."

"Well, you ain't going to leave me, are you?"

"Don't say
ain't.
Or I'll have to leave you with those nuns.
You've had better schooling. Your mama would turn over in her grave right now if she heard you."

I finished with the last of the stones and stood up. "Then you aren't going to leave me?"

He threw the rock down, shook the top of the cross to test its firmness, dusted his one hand off on his pants, and turned in the direction of the fire. "Now, why would I do such, Lizzy?"

But it wasn't a real question. And it wasn't an answer, either. His voice had taken on that indifferent tone he used when he was lying. I stood there near Mama's grave, watching the others gather for breakfast. The Wades' twin boys were up, jumping around and demanding food. Mrs. French's baby whimpered, and she went off a piece to open her dress and nurse it.

I should help,
I told myself. I went to the fire and picked up two tin plates and heaped them with bread and bacon and beans for the Wade boys. I took only some coffee and bread for myself. Somehow I couldn't eat now. Something sat where my stomach should be. And I recognized it for what it was.

Fear. And knowing. The same fear and knowing I'd had when Mama took sick. The kind that finds a home in your bones.

The milk was all gone, so I put extra sugar in my coffee, but I tasted nothing. Mama had wanted to bring a cow along, but Daddy had said no. Once or twice we'd been able to stop at farms and buy some milk.

Elinora came out of the wagon, blinked, rubbed her eyes, and took the coffee and plate of food handed to her by Mrs. Wade. "No milk," Elinora complained. "I hate coffee without milk."

"Likely we'll get some goat's milk the next spread we run into," Daddy told her. She was sitting next to him on a blanket. He set down his coffee to put his arm around her shoulder, and she smiled at him. I now felt fear and knowing and nausea, too.

We ate in silence, watching the day lighten. Then everybody but Elinora had chores.

I washed dishes. The Wade boys, though only seven, had fetched the water from a nearby creek and then had gone to get more to carry on the wagon. The Frenches put out the fire and spread water on it. And then from the corner of my eye I saw them spreading underbrush on top of the stones on Mama's grave. The Wades packed the mules. Daddy hitched up the oxen. I watched him. Never could I do anything but stop and wonder the way he did things with just one arm. Then he checked the wagons, making sure the water buckets, the feed box, everything was secure. Then came the "gee" and "haw" and "wo ho" to the animals, and we were off.

If I recollect anything about that day besides the tearing disbelief inside me that I would never see Mama again—that we were really leaving her there under the stones—it was that Daddy scarce spoke to me or looked at me. And every time I happened to engage his eyes, he'd look away.

THE NEXT DAY I
carved my name on a rock. We stopped to "noon," as I was told the trail travelers called it. And the rock was there on a mound. Daddy was writing a letter, likely to Uncle William. I took a knife and walked off to the rock and carved my name.
LIZZY. OCTOBER,
1878.

"Somebody will think you're buried under it," Elinora said.

So I said, "Let them."

We ran over two rattlesnakes with our wagons that afternoon, and later on in the day I saw some antelope. You could scarce make them out from the desert brush. "I wonder," I told Elinora, "if after you live out here awhile you start to blend into the background like they do."

She scoffed and said we were all made in God's image. "And He doesn't look like an antelope."

"How do you know?" I asked her. She had no reply.

That night, when we were at supper, an Indian walked into our camp. Elinora screamed, but I didn't. It seemed as if I just looked up and he was there, a dark figure against the red and purple streaks of sunset. At that time of night you can look up and expect to see anything, so I was not surprised.

He said he was an Arapaho. He spoke both Spanish and English and looked longingly at our stew pot and bread. My father offered him some food, and he sat right down and ate it, taking care first to take off his quiver of arrows. He wore a striped blanket and beads. He had long sleek hair tied in a piece of red felt. He said he was not looking for trouble, just food. So we let him eat. I felt curiously at peace with him sitting there outlined by the sunset, though Elinora took her food and went into the wagon.