Twenty-five miles to the south, in the growing town of Hillsboro, Mary Elizabeth Inlow woke with a cry on her lips.
Covered in cold sweat, badly shaken, Mary knew the dream had come again.
A child cried out to her. No matter how she struggled against unseen bonds, she couldn’t reach the child, she could not stop the cries.
Mary willed the nausea to subside, willed her limbs to stop shaking as she pressed her hands to her lips. She was strong now, strong enough to beat back the feeling of helplessness and the heartache brought by the dream.
A year of widowhood added to ten years of marriage had taught her the depth of her strength.
But the dream brought back all the doubts that had plagued her year of supposed mourning.
She lay alone in the double-size bed, wondering, as she often had this past year, what she would do.
How would she cope with the days stretching into years before her? Who would she be?
This was the most consuming question she asked of herself, for she was not the same woman who had married Harry Inlow eleven years ago.
Sixteen. A woman grown. One with five years of keeping house for her father behind her. What had she believed she knew at sixteen?
She had thought she knew how to judge a man. Into her father’s blacksmith’s shop they had come, the cowhands, the gamblers, the miners and the gunmen. And Harry, handsome Harry, with his rich claim and laughing eyes, had swept her into his arms at a dance and told her she would marry him and no other. He had courted her, flirting and buying her foolish presents, and he had gained her father’s approval. Foolish little girl. She had married him and learned she knew nothing of men at all.
Mary briefly closed her eyes. She did not want to remember. After the dream was the worst time, for she felt a stranger to herself. But she would cope. She only had to remind herself that she was strong.
She stared up at the ceiling, and listened to the chirping of birds in the giant cottonwoods that shaded the house. The silence within its walls confirmed that her cry had not disturbed the sleep of her cousin Sarah, or their newly widowed friend Catherine.
Unable to lie still, Mary slipped from the tangled bedding. She smoothed down the wrinkles of the cotton nightgown as she padded barefoot across the wooden floor.
A look out the second-floor window revealed an overcast sky. Not a breath of air stirred the lace curtains. It was on a morning such as this that she most missed her mountainside home, where the wind blew wild and free.
It was the only thing she missed.
Hillsboro lay in a pocket between low hills. From the first cabin, built four years before by the two miners who found gold in the Black Range, the tent camp had grown into a town. This despite its isolated location and the Indian raids. Its name had been chosen from those written on slips of paper and shuffled in a hat.
It was a good place to live.
A good place for Mary to begin anew.
Percha Creek bordered the town, and north were the San Mateo Mountains and the Black Range. There, in hidden pockets were mining camps, outlaw hideouts and places known only to the renegade Chiricahua Apache who had escaped the San Carlos Reservation. A little to the northwest were the Gila wilderness, and the Mogollon Mountains, with its mining camps along Cooper and Mineral creeks. The high mountains made travel between camps difficult, and some said it was a nest of outlaws and claim jumpers.
In the quiet peace of morning, Mary sometimes wondered if men ever thought they might be wrong. They had come into this area and taken away the lands where the Apache lived and hunted. They told those who had roamed free that they could do so no longer.
This was not, to her way of thinking, the path to peace. She could not condone the raiding and killing by white men and by the Apaches. But she could sympathize with people who had been dispossessed of all they held dear.
Sage-covered hummocks blended with thickets of walnut, pine and cedar. Mary loved the quiet walks to gather the abundance of nuts, for the peace of the forest paths were a balm to her wounded spirit.
A hard land, but one filled with beauty. Toward the south lay the railroad and clusters of mining camps, some of them growing into towns.
Far to the east, the Rio Grande curved like a massive scythe to cut the territory in half. Her father claimed the old mountain men had called it the River of Ghosts. He had taken her to a gorge where volcanic flows covered with ancient layers of gray, black, salmon pink, brown and orange lichen reached nearly eight hundred feet down. An early lava flow had crystallized into black basalt, but it was surrounded by sagebrush-carpeted benchlands broken by fields and pastures.
Beautiful and wild lands, which led beyond the river to the Jornada del Muerto—a day’s journey of death. Men who had lived to cross the desert land claimed it was aptly named.
Closer to the outskirt of town was the hill where the church foundation of stone and adobe had been laid last week. They had collected fifteen hundred dollars from a hat passed around the saloons for donations. The lot next to the church was staked out for a school.
Children…
The reminder brought back the dream. Its frequency these past weeks unsettled her. Mary rubbed her arms against the someone’s-walking-on-your-grave chill.
Turning aside, Mary resisted the temptation to return to bed, aware the choice was hers. She had to remember that. Sometimes it frightened her to once again have the freedom to choose what she would do with every waking moment.
But it was a heady draft, too.
She concentrated on that to help dispel the faint unease lingering from the dream.
After all, she reminded herself, it was not her child that she dreamed about. It couldn’t be.
Straightening the bed, she gently smoothed the wrinkles from the newly finished quilt. She had taken little more than her clothes and her horse when she was ordered to leave her home after Harry died.
Each bright square of calico and gingham, every soft velvet piece, was decorated with every fancy embroidery stitch she knew. Her cousin Sarah had offered to help in the evenings, when chores were done and they sat in the warmth of the kitchen, and later Catherine, but Mary had sewn every stitch herself. The quilt was entirely hers.
The thought came not so much from possessiveness or from pride as the desperate need to reassure herself of her worth. By such small things she was going to rebuild her life.
Mentally she jerked back from the direction of her thoughts.
“Stop it.” But it was too late for the whispered warning.
The old Mary, the one who had survived as Harry’s wife, tried to fill her mind with dreadful memories. All the ones she kept hidden.
The new Mary—for she thought of herself as that—the one who was supported by Sarah’s strength and Catherine’s determination, refused to give way.
She stripped off the cotton nightgown, crushing the soft cloth between her hands. Head bent, shoulders bowed, she fought the insidious pull of memories so painful they made her tremble.
You can’t give in. He’ll win. Even from the grave, he’ll win.
She was strong, and brave, and had fought this fight with demons from the past too many times to count in the past year.
Logic said she could not wipe out ten years of her life in one.
But she yearned with all the recovering spirit within her to do just that.
Mary poured tepid water from the pitcher into the washbowl. She sponged her sweat-dampened body. Her thoughts focused on the last trimming needed to complete a topsy-turvy doll for Nita Mullin’s granddaughter. The child’s birthday was two days away and Nita was going to visit her in Lake Valley. They were lucky to have a stage line operating from Hillsboro south of the town.
Nita had proved a good friend to Mary. She owned the dress goods shop and gave her the scraps of material and bits of trimming she was unable to use.
Like the quilt, the making of the dolls had helped Mary return to a time when she felt secure in who she was.
She thought of her grandmother’s patience as she had taught her to make the cloth-bodied dolls, whose flaring skirts could be flipped over to reveal another doll’s body and head.
Little girls loved the dolls, few though they were, and Mary soaked up their pleasure the way the desert soaked up rain.
Thanks again to Nita, P. J. Crabtree had bought a few dolls to sell in his dry goods emporium. Miners with money to spend might buy them for the children they left behind. She hoped they did sell. The only money she earned was from orders to add delicate embroidery to the dressmaker’s frocks. Most women hereabouts made their own clothing, so the orders were few and far between. Every penny earned, even the little given by a grateful miner for her limited medical skill, was contributed to the household.
When her father died and she learned that his blacksmith shop, the house and the land had been sold, with the money going to Harry, there had been no stilling her anger.
By the time Harry died and she discovered that his will left all his worldly possessions to his cousin, Mary could not summon anger, only relief that that chapter of her life was over.
She refused to dwell on how narrow her choices would have been if Sarah, already widowed, had not insisted that she come here to live.
It was a reminder that she was lingering overlong this morning. From the bureau drawer Mary removed a pressed pair of cotton drawers, a camisole and two petticoats. She dressed quickly, foregoing the half corset, as thoughts of comfort won over proper lady’s dress.
The rocking chair squeaked when she sat down to pull on neatly darned stockings.
Strange, she mused, how life’s paths twisted and turned.
Despite the difference in their ages, she, Sarah and Catherine had been childhood friends. They had shared all the important first happenings that marked their growing-up years.
The progression had run from doll’s tea parties to shared giggles over a special look given by a boy after church services. She had lost her parents first, then offered comfort to the others when they were orphaned. She had thought they were lovely, innocent times, as they confided dreams, first kisses, courtships and marriage.
Married first, Mary went to Harry’s home in the eastern territory. Mary had missed the women’s special closeness. Attending weddings with Harry had ensured there was no time alone with her cousin or her friend.
They had seen little of each other during the years of their marriages.
Now, they had come together again, to share their first year of widowhood.
Guilt sometimes nagged her. Mary had skimmed over the details of her marriage.
She was twenty-seven years old, and shame still played a part in her silence.
Retrieving the only pair of shoes she owned, Mary took the buttonhook off the small floral china tray on the bureau to close the buttons on her shoes. She slipped on a faded violet-and-cream gingham day dress and fluffed out the ruffle around the yoke. She had deliberately made the fit loose, for she was uncomfortable calling attention to her body.
She tugged free her waist-length braid. One of these days she would find the courage to cut it again. The first time had been an act of defiance. Harry, with his possessive love of its red shades and thigh-long length, had forbidden her to ever cut it.
“But Harry’s dead,” she reminded her reflection in the mirror.
Afraid of finding telltale ghosts in her eyes, Mary looked away as she brushed out the tangles.
Minutes later she placed the last hair pin in a neat cornet of braids. Tying on a fresh apron, she smiled as she left her room.
The old wood floor in the hall gleamed from the waxing she had given it last week. The aroma of coffee drifted up the stairs and told her that Sarah was awake.
Mary hummed on her way to the kitchen. She had a new day to look forward to, ordered and peaceful, as the past days had been.
If the secret sorrow of her heart never left, she still had so much to be thankful for.
She would continue to break the chains of the past. Somehow, some way, she would finally be free.
And when she was, perhaps the terrible haunting dream would not come again.