3. The Pluck Me Store

 
Five nights after the firing crew brought word
of his death, John Mole stooped in at the door.
Luisa heard his boots scrape on the boards
and tried to lift her head, but she was held
by fear she couldn’t name, lay in her bunk
feeling his presence. She saw him strike a match
and touch it to the oily wick and lean
in lamplight over his sleeping daughter’s form.
 
 
Her form. Her eyes were open and his face
with black streaks underneath his bushy brows
hovered there. She knew he looked like that,
not burned as you might expect, but suffocated,
crushed and thrown through a wall. “A good death,”
Too Tall said, “but too young.” “No death is good,”
said Lefty. “Death’s an insult to a man.”
And there he was, alive above her bunk
 
 
until she bolted, shouting “Papa!” loud
enough to wake the dead—only to find
she was awake and he was dead again,
again, as if each dying made it harder.
Señora Robles moved the cardboard wall
beside her bed. To keep the sobbing girl
from waking others who now shared the house,
she held her shoulders, rocking her back to sleep.
 
 
Dreams of her mother were so different,
both day and night: her quiet suffering,
fever and rash. Luisa couldn’t believe,
despite the nightdress soaked with sweat, the moans
in Mexican, the panic in her eyes
when Conchata saw her only living child,
what stillness she became one autumn morning,
washed by women while her daughter sobbed.
 
 
Gone now as the earth itself was gone
it seemed, days at a time. The piñon jays
that fed amid the scrub—they were not real.
Jackrabbits pausing on a knoll were ghosts
as big as dogs, come for memory’s scraps,
the leavings of a life no longer lived.
She heard the neighbors talk: “What can we do?”
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
 
 
One day a woman walked up from the train
who said she had Luisa’s name in a book
and would explain the orphanage in Pueblo
for miner’s children who had lost all kin.
They sat on chairs outside in the dirt yard.
The woman talked—that too no longer real.
Nothing was real except the kindling splinter
Luisa used to scrape a toenail, peeling
 
 
oily grit from underneath, wanting
to be clean. She couldn’t raise her eyes to look
because to look at the round-faced woman
sweating in her shirtwaist meant she was real
and they were truly dead. She knew only
not to betray them out of their shared life—
the kind man tamping down his corncob pipe,
the wife he cried for till his eyes were red.
 
 
The other women gathered to defend her
with Mrs. MacIntosh, Señora Robles.
“She can’t stay here,” the stranger was explaining.
“I see she isn’t eating well, how thin
she is. I have instructions. Others need
her corner of the house. There are others—
workers, families, children. They have jobs.
I have a job. Responsibilities.”
 
 
Those wiry women swept the stranger off
as swiftly as they could.
“We’ve heard about that home. It’s far away
from everything she knows. She won’t go there
if we can help it.”
“Lady, write this on
your paper, that we keep the girl with us.
She ours like family. Like child, our own.”
Their voices rose, a flock of piñon jays,
 
 
and gone was the stranger down the stony path,
gone back to the train, gone back to Pueblo
with her book. Luisa felt familiar hands,
unreal familiar skirts surrounding her.
She watched the sunlight in the risen dust,
a dream of dust choking the dream of summer.
She felt a neighborly caress. “Sweetie,
you sit tight for now. You hear? Sit tight.”
 
 
“Arranquera,” the Señora said. “Hard times.”
 

* * *

 
Out of the rockfolds, the scrub, the deep sky,
out of the junipers that loosed the dark
when the sun crept over the mountaintops,
out of the mouths and tipples of the mines
where men still worked, inquest or no inquest,
where coke ovens glowed a stone inferno,
out of the train that wailed to Trinidad
and back to Denver with its load of news
 
 
came the sound that was not a sound, a muted
scratching for life. All day she watched the hens
of mining families cluck about the houses,
named them by the way they worried or bossed.
One was Mrs. for her Scottish talent,
catching bugs on the ground, one Señora
for the way she pushed the other hens about
despite a tattered wing—coyote plucked.
 
 
And the old cock who croaked his song at sunrise
was a Welshman for the way he tried to sing.
Her playthings. Better for not being people
and being so much smaller when they died.
Girls came by, showed her their stitched dolls. Boys looked
over their shoulders, whispered among themselves.
She heard them talking. Breezes. Hens. Women.
Whenever she passed the yards, their washtubs,
 
 
their bodies at work. “She knows,” said Mrs. “She knows
the rag, the blood. She’s not too young for it.
We’ve men who’d stoop to the wrong thing here.
She isn’t safe.” And more she wouldn’t hear,
though it came at her in whispers from all sides
in the feeding and breeding and dying life of the camp.
She watched as a woman scooped up a hen
by the legs, stepped on its squawking head, and jerked.
 

* * *

 
“Casamiento de pobres, fábrica
de limosneros.” A marriage of the poor
is a factory of beggars.
Señora Robles said it like the scripture,
watching her own young ruffians at play.
She turned back to the stoop where Luisa sat
beside two apple crates of her possessions.
La pobrecita—always waiting for men.
 
 
Luisa watched the others watching her
as she had done at her father’s funeral,
the short march of neighbors to the dry hill
of wooden markers, words of kindness spoken
for the girl a good man left behind.
He’s gone. He’s gone. Don’t look. Don’t ever look.
Señora Robles cooked food like her mother’s
with jalapeños and black beans, while Too Tall
 
 
on occasion brought a rabbit home for stew.
She hated evenings when he went to work
as her father had, taking the path up
while Robles and his diggers limped back down.
She noticed Mrs. MacIntosh would keep
her thin hands busy as she could to calm
her mind—even that sinewy Glaswegian
who had borne two living children was afraid.
 
 
Her boys were Tom and Nicky, eight and six,
and neither of them much help to their mother.
They wore the holes she spent her spare time darning.
Luisa watched them, kept them from snakes
and blasting caps. She carried water, wood
and hunks of scavenged coal. She tried to help
the neighbors who helped her as best she could,
read from her father’s Bible, scrubbed their pots.
 
 
Too Tall had said her future was arranged
and everyone was safe—what did he mean?
Why did the older women watch her so
and chase the boys away with angry words
in Mexican or Scots, brandishing sticks
to wave them off? She waited on the stoop,
her skirted knees held close as if to guard
her body from the eyes. What wasn’t said.
 
 
Word reached the pluck me store in Cedar Hill,
where Mrs. Reed, who had four daughters, lay
pregnant, confined to bed by a company doctor.
She’d lost a son last year and couldn’t bear,
they said, to lose another.
She had a four-room clapboard house, a well
for water, space beside the kitchen stove
where a thing as slight as young Luisa Mole
 
 
could throw a pillow and her blankets down
to sleep. In time perhaps they’d build a bunk.
The girl could cook, clean house and mind the children
in exchange for shelter in a Christian home.
It was arranged. While others crammed her house
Luisa waited with her boxed-up goods
beside her as the buckboard wagon drew
nearer on the road.
 
 
She saw the man who drove, his straw hat shading
half his face. She saw Too Tall MacIntosh
on foot beside the wagon, talking to
the man, the straw hat nodding, coat and tie
though it was hot—her future coming close.
The enemy, or so she used to think,
a man of scrip and heavy prices, cursed
by mining folk. A stranger. Mr. Reed.
 
 
“Luisa.” Too Tall stooped to touch her hair.
“Lass, this man’s your new employer. Chin up.
Let’s look at you.” She saw the man’s good shoes
when he stepped down, the trousers, buttoned vest.
“George Reed,” said Mr. Reed. “Don’t be afraid.”
He swung his hat off, a man of thirty years
with blue eyes and a blond mustache, his hair
parted almost down the middle. “That’s it,
 
 
good girl.” His mustache bristled when he smiled.
“She’s not much older’n mine. You say she can read?”
“She’s had it hard,” said Too Tall.
“There’s plenty
around here’s had it hard,” said Mr. Reed.
“But we could use the help if she can work.
You can work, can’t you, young lady? Luisa,
right? Luisa, you can work, can’t you?”
Luisa nodded. “That a girl. Good girl.”
 
 
They loaded up her apple crates of clothing,
Bible, the wooden santo her mother brought
from a village far away, the carver’s name
made shiny by the rub of hands: abuelo.
“No tiene uno ni madre,” said
a voice behind her. “Good lass. Good lassie.”
“Work hard and don’t forget us,” said Mrs.
“Good-bye,” said the house, the hens, the risen dust.