Listen to the Mockingbird (18 page)

“Miss Matty, this place be affectin’ your brain. Why would a thief mess up a…” Her voice slowed. “…a wall.” She rolled her eyes and looked at me hard. “I don’t want to know.”

She knew about that chest and that it was full of double eagles and slugs. I had used most of the heavy, eight-sided fifty-dollar slugs to purchase the ranch.

Zia yawned and was shoving her fist into her mouth, melting my heart, when sounds of boots scuffling and men grunting came from the front of the jail. Something heavy met the floor with a thump and a clatter. She turned to stare at something I couldn’t see. “What in tarnation is that?”

Zeke’s voice growled irritably, “She wants a goddam stove.”

A grin filled half Winona’s face with gleaming white teeth. “Well, if that don’t beat all.” She bussed my cheek through the bars, winked at me and disappeared.

Zeke emerged from the hall mopping his head and neck with a blue rag that might once have been a bandana.

“Winona says someone broke into the house. Made a mess of things.”

He nodded. “So I heard.”

“Well, I don’t see you getting on your horse and getting out there to see what’s going on. Or did the Texans pass a law saying it’s okay for thieves to ransack your neighbor’s house as long as they leave yours alone?”

Zeke shook his head. “You think that’s all I got to do? I heard nothing was stolen, nobody out there saw anything and nobody could tell if anything was taken.”

“So you aren’t even going to look into it?” Suddenly, I thought of the map I had found on the dead boy in the barn. Could whoever had searched the house have been after that?

Zeke was scratching the top of his head. “Tell you what. I’ll send a deputy around to the saloons to see if anyone heard anything about it. That’s about the best I can do.” He opened the lock on my cell. “Now stand back so me and Murphy can get by. This fool thing ain’t big, but it’s sure enough heavy as a dead ox.”

Scraggly, yellow-haired Murphy was big, but more than one or two of his wits were among the missing. He helped Zeke with fetch-and-carry work. They wrestled the small iron stove into a corner of the cell, grunting and groaning and complaining every inch of the way.

“Don’t put it there,” I said.

Zeke mopped his head, his chest heaving with the exertion. “Why not?”

I pointed to the wall beneath the tiny window. “It has to go there, and I’ll need a pipe to send the smoke out.”

Zeke groaned, but they moved the stove. Then he sent Murphy back to wherever he’d come from.

“Thanks—” I began, but he cut me off.

“Don’t thank me. I’m sick and tired of your natterin’ about my cooking. Fact is, I ain’t fond of my cooking myself.”

“You were doing the cooking?”

“You think we got a chef from Atlanta, maybe?”

“You mean you were eating the same food?”

“Of course, I been eatin’ the same food.” A sad look passed over his face, and I remembered that his wife had run off.

“What was her name?” I asked gently. “Your wife?”

“Dora,” he grunted and examined the toes of his boots. When he looked up, his blue eyes were shiny. “She was a good cook, was Dora,” he said in a tight voice.

“I’m sorry—” I began.

“Didn’t harm me none,” he muttered and stalked out, banging the cell door behind him. “I’ll find you a dang stovepipe.”

I didn’t call out to tell him he’d forgotten to lock my cell; I just wrapped the arm of the big padlock around the two center bars and snapped it locked myself. I wasn’t about to try to break out. Leastways, not right then.

I was wondering whether Dora was just a silly twit who would have run off with anyone who gave her a lace hanky or whether, like Andrew, Sheriff Zeke Fountain had an ugly side that drove her to seek any available refuge.

Chapter Twenty

When Andrew raised the notion that I should plead his case with General Wilkinson, I had my first inkling for escape. At first I thrust that idea away; my visit to the lawyer a few weeks before had been such a failure, I feared to hope for anything. But as Andrew became set upon sending me to the general on my own, I began to form a plan.

Winona, of course, had caught me trying to cover the bruises on my face. One morning, when Andrew had left the house, I went to the kitchen and told her everything.

“I knows somethin’ be powerful wrong,” she said. “I did not know it be that bad.”

“You don’t have to go with me,” I told her. “I don’t think he would do any harm to you.”

“Sure to God you ain’t that dumb, Miss Matty. He only thinks he own you. He knows he own me. He knows I can’t go to nobody. He knows if I run away he could get them to set the hounds on me.”

I squeezed my eyes shut against a headache that threatened to split the top of my head. “As soon as we get to Santa Fe, I’ll set you free.”

“That would be mighty nice. But the first thing we got to do is get there.”

It didn’t take long to pack. There was little I wanted beyond my mother’s silver and a few clothes. There was no question of Andrew ever relinquishing any of my own funds to me, and I could take nothing he might notice, nothing that might alert him to my plan, until I’d had time to get far enough away. I only hoped I could sell the silver for enough money to get back to St. Louis.

By the time Andrew returned in mid-afternoon, I was ready. We had hitched Fanny and a black horse to the wagon, and I had sent Winona back to the cabin she shared with four women who washed clothes for the army.

Andrew’s head hung lower and lower as he ate the supper Winona had prepared, and I waited for whatever final horror I was sure he had in store.

Instead, he looked at me, and a tear drizzled down his cheek. “Please, Matty, don’t desert me.”

Something fluttered inside me, and I found myself reaching out to pat his arm and reassure him. But by the time I touched him, his eyes had closed and his head fell to the table. I sat stunned, staring at him, thinking him dead, feeling a peculiar mix of joy and fear and sorrow.

Then Andrew began to snore, and I realized he had doubtless spent the afternoon drinking and had merely passed out. I was carefully and quietly getting up from the table when Winona appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“We ready?”

“Sssh,” I motioned then whispered, “He’s asleep. It’s best we don’t wake him.”

“He ain’t gonna wake up. Not soon, anyways. I done give him enough yarrow leaves in his soup to keep him quiet a good long time.”

I stared at her. “You poisoned him?”

“I sure did want to, yes, indeed. But I got to thinkin’ you don’t know what he has tol’ folks about you. He might of told ’em you are the crazy one. He might of told ’em you’re dangerous. So I just give him enough to put him good and sound asleep.”

She leaned over Andrew then straightened. “Seeing as he probably had him a snoot-full of whiskey to boot, he likely gonna sleep right there till tomorrow night. He gonna feel sickish, but he wake up all right. More’s the pity.”

I expelled my breath all in a rush. “Thank you,” I whispered, not sure whether I was thanking her for putting him to sleep or for not killing him. “Let’s get on with it then.”

999

I know exactly when I conceived the most outlandish scheme a sane woman could imagine

Winona and I found the trail along the river and followed it north most of the night. The moon was plenty bright, the horses fresh; and with every mile we covered I felt a little lighter.

We stopped a few hours before dawn, threw our bedrolls on the ground and collapsed onto them. I wasn’t much worried about Indians or coyotes. Perhaps any threat the desert might harbor seemed tame compared to living with Andrew. And I had brought the revolver he’d used to torment me, as well as a full flask of powder and his entire stock of caps and balls. I hadn’t done any shooting in a very long time, but I knew how. My father had taught me when I was little more than a child, placing targets in the meadow behind the castle in Durnstein.

It wasn’t until much later that it amused me to grasp the pistol Andrew had held so often to my own head and to use it the way I eventually did.

I curled up and fell into the first sound sleep I’d had in many months, and woke to the smell of coffee and sizzling bacon. Winona had built a fire just big enough for a kettle and a frypan. The aromas mixed with a spicy odor of some desert shrub and nothing had ever smelled so sweet. It was the smell of freedom.

“’Bout time,” Winona said. “I thought maybe you was plannin’ to sleep all day.”

I drank my coffee, ate a day-old biscuit and gazed at a sky the color of royal robes.

A dreadful thought disturbed my relief at having escaped: even if I could sell the silver, even if I managed to return to St. Louis, Andrew would eventually look for me there. He would never let me go.

“Would it be askin’ too much to know where we is goin’?” Winona asked.

“I guess we’re headed for Santa Fe.” But the last thing in the world I wanted to do was meet Andrew there as he had planned.

“Well, if we wait here long enough, that stage is gonna come along and your husband is gonna be on it. Seems like we best get off this here trail and find us another.”

In that moment, I knew precisely what I was going to do. “No.”

“What you mean, no?”

“We are going to wait for that stage.” By the time I finished, a wave of giddiness was washing over me; and I barely got a few feet from the camp before I threw up.

“You is plumb crazy, Miss Matty.” Winona drew herself up to her full height, crossed her arms over her chest and fixed me with a stare.

“What else am I to do? Throw myself on the mercy of General Wilkinson? And have him hand me over to Andrew with some whispered advice that he should keep a better eye on his dotty wife?”

“You is gonna get yourself killed, is what you’re gonna do.”

“Except for that silver, I am penniless,” I flung back. “I can’t go back to St. Louis because that’s the first place Andrew will look for me.” I didn’t add that if Andrew found me nothing would stop him from taking the child I was carrying.

“If you don’ get yourself shot on the spot, they catch you for sure; and then they hang you. They hang me, too, for good measure.”

“If we’re careful, we can do it. Yes, we can. Then we can go to Albuquerque and draw up your freedom papers.” I wished my own freedom would be as easy.

Winona’s head moved like a pendulum. “You is daft as a doorknob.”

She was sitting on a rock next to our second night’s camp; and I was making my case, pacing back and forth in the dust in front of her like a lawyer in front of a judge. “Winona, you don’t understand. I have about twenty dollars and my grandmother’s silver. That might get us a couple weeks lodging. Then what? Besides, I’m nigh to certain a good share of the money in that chest is mine and he stole the rest.”

“That may be, but you don’ want to lose your life gettin’ it, neither.”

I was standing there in the sun, waving my arms about, trying to persuade her to help me rob my husband, when I fainted.

Winona was holding a cup to my lips when I came to. “Lordy, Lordy,” she grunted. “You coulda told me you be ’spectin’ a child. I should of seen it myself, but I never set foot in that house of yours without countin’ the minutes. The air was so thick and ugly and I paid no mind to anything but gettin’ out of there.”

“I’m okay now,” I said, wiping my hand across my face.

“Course you is, honey. You is in perfect trim to go out there and rob you a stagecoach.”

999

In the end, of course, she agreed. I explained why Andrew must at all cost be kept from learning about the child.

We had almost a week to prepare. In Socorro, we purchased a pair of ready-made breeches and more powder, caps and balls. I was nervy, prepared to give the clerk a story about the son for whom I was buying these things; but he barely glanced at me except to take my carefully counted coins.

We examined dozens of places along the trail, looking for the best site from which to launch our foray into crime. Mornings and evenings, I would take a dead coal from our fire, draw a target on some rock and practice shooting. I wanted Winona to give it a try, too, but she told me my brain was made of green cheese.

“It makes me shudder just to touch a gun,” she said. “I can fair feel the death in it.”

I insisted on showing her the mechanics of loading and firing, but after that she would twist bits of cotton, poke them into her ears and crouch behind a rock while I tried to gouge holes in the target. One can’t gain a whole lot of skill in a week’s time, but I did improve.

999

The rock was huge and orange-brown and looked like a camel kneeling for a drink. Wind had scoured the corners round and there looked to be a small hollowed-out place facing the trail. I walked around it, examining every possible angle of view.

What looked like a single rock was actually three. The space between the larger two was just wide enough for a horse to squeeze through. “This is it,” I told Winona as we pitched our camp in its shadow.

We reckoned we had about four days left. We used three to rehearse. I drilled with Fanny, repeating the sequence over and over again, stopping only for another round of target practice. We had to hunt for a long time along the riverbank to find a fallen tree big enough to do the job I had in mind and small enough for us to drag.

On the last night, we feasted on a supper of beans and onions. Then I sprawled on the ground in front of the fire and watched the sky blacken while Winona chopped at my hair. “Just make it short enough to push up under the hat. With any luck, they’ll be looking for a man afterwards.”

“Has it entered that head of yours that you is also gonna be lookin’ like a man when they’re lookin’ for a man?” Winona cut another handful of my hair with the big knife we had brought along for rope and bread and salt beef.

I fingered a severed lock that had cascaded over my shoulder and dropped into my lap. It would be a long time before a thick, luxurious braid would run down my back again. “They won’t be expecting their man to be wearing a skirt.” I turned to look at her. “You’re sure you know what to do?” She nodded and went back to cutting.