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
——
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.
——
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.
When they had first arrived by cattle car in Saguarita, the girls had walked to Santa Isabel Church, where they slept on the wooden floors between the pews and the kneelers. They did not trust anyone, and were fearful of hospitality. On that first night, Sara imagined a great fire overtaking their bodies in the church, the flames scorching the fat-fleshed bottoms of their feet as if they were held to the blaze by demon spirits. She woke screaming, alerting the nearby mayordomo to their existence. He was a kind man named Benjamín Jirón, and he looked upon the small girls as if he’d discovered rare and starved twin rabbits resting in his church. He was beside himself with sorrow as he lifted first Maria Josefina and then Sara, one over each of his shoulders, carting them to the home he shared with his wife, Eulogia, beside the little church. They fed them calabacitas and fresh tortillas and heated acequia water for washing. Sara pleaded to know the whereabouts of Angelica Vigil, that long-lost cousin their mother had so desperately remembered. They eventually discovered that Angelica Vigil had fallen ill several years earlier and gone to live farther south in the valley, but by all accounts, she was certainly deceased by now and had no family left to speak of. Benjamín and Eulogia would have kept the girls, raised them as their own, but they had so little to spare. In the end, the archdiocese offered to find the girls employment within the homes of the few wealthy families of Saguarita, who were always looking for poised domestics. Benjamín sobbed into his large fists as he told the little girls the news—they were to be separated, split sisters between households.
On their last night together in the mayordomo’s home, Maria Josefina looked over at her sister from the hay-filled bed on the dirt floor. She clutched a corn-husk doll given to her by Eulogia. “Hermana,” she said. “I don’t want to be without you. I’m afraid.”
Sara slowly swiveled her dark eyes toward Maria Josefina. “I know,” she said, trying to sound strong.
“We can run away again. We don’t have to be apart.”
Sara looked into the room’s darkness. A crucifix on the wall appeared to tilt. “We can’t,” she said. “We are too little to run again.”
Several hours later, Sara woke to the sounds of Maria Josefina sobbing in her sleep. Like a dog kicking through her dreams, her arms crawled in the air.
“What is it?” Sara asked breathlessly.
Maria Josefina told her that she had seen their mother standing against a brick wall. There was the crack of gunpowder and her mother quickly turned, facing the firing squad as the bullet entered her skull, tore through her head, driving in from her right temple, erupting like shattered glass behind her eyes. The outside world seeped in, her mind flooding with light.
“Push it away,” Sara had said. “When the bad dreams and pictures come up, push them down, as far away as you can.”
Maria Josefina was shaking with fear, but she tried as her big sister suggested, placing the dream of her mother in a deep and hidden box within a room of her mind, a place she’d swear never to go.
And in this way the girls began to forget their mother and father.
* * *
—
Sara was the first to hear of the dances. Several of the domestics from other families had been attending them on Friday nights.
“They’re coal miners,” she told her sister, as they stood outside the church that afternoon, passing between them the last of their cigarette. “Alicia from Antonito says some of these guys have a lot of money to throw around, and some of them she claimed will get rich.”
Maria Josefina, who by now went by what her employer called her, Maria Josie, stammered as she blew the last of the cigarette smoke from her poised mouth. “And what’s it to us?”
“That’s how we can leave Saguarita,” Sara said imploringly. “Get out of these wretched houses, these horrible chores for no pay and nothing but moldy beds and stale tortillas.”