Maxcy and Louella, married now, thank goodness, before Haw’s accusation could taint their courtship, found me half conscious on the floor. Together they laid me on the bed, and Louella, dear girl that she was, wiped my face and hands with a wet cloth.
I struggled to sit up, the heat of ultimate betrayal giving me strength, but Louella pushed me down against the pillows.
“Hush,” she said. “You’ve had a shock. Lie still a while.”
“Shock!” I wanted to shout, but my throat and chest ached from the purging. “I’m betrayed,” I managed to say. “By him who’s worse than Judas. I wish I could die.”
“I won’t let you.” Maxcy took my hand in his big, warm ones, and for a second I thought of his namesake, Nat, who was always kind, always there to comfort. “Everybody who knows you will know the truth,” he went on. “You have real friends who love and respect you for what you are. All Pappy has is the men he’s bought.”
“Why wasn’t I told? He owed me that at least.” I clutched at Maxcy like one who was, indeed, dying.
“The whole mess is supposed to be a secret, and Billy swears he brought you a copy of the decree.”
“Billy!” I wished I could spit. “I told you I wouldn’t let him in the house. If he says different, he’s another liar.”
“Billy plays all sides against the middle,” Maxcy said. “He’s been on her side from the start. And now he and Pappy are butting heads.”
“Well, at least there’s that to be thankful for.” I pushed myself up. “You know…you must know, both of you that I never…”—I swallowed, unable to say the hated word—“I’ve been a faithful wife. Whatever he’s said, it’s not true. It isn’t!”
Louella patted my other hand. “Of course, we know. But…but there’s worse. A rumor, but you’d better hear about it.”
I closed my eyes, steeled myself, although I doubted there could be anything worse than being proclaimed an adulteress.
Maxcy cleared his throat. “I heard Pappy and Billy yelling at each other. Couldn’t help it. They just about raised the roof. Pappy was accusing Billy of cheating him out of money, of messing up the Durango business, and then Billy said that Pappy had better back off or he’d tell about the marriage in Saint Louis. He didn’t say anything else. Probably couldn’t. It sounded like Pappy punched him. But Pappy was in Saint Louis a couple weeks ago, and she wasn’t around, either, not that I looked for her. If they were married, they’re keeping that a secret, too. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but it’s best you know the facts. Frankly, the whole thing makes me sick. Makes me sorry he’s my father.” He looked across me at Louella. “If I show any signs of turning out like him, I want you to shoot me.”
Louella turned white. “I won’t!”
Miserable as I was, I recognized the love between the two and intervened. “What your father’s done has hurt all of us, but don’t let it touch what you have. I love you both very much.”
Louella’s eyes filled with tears. She bent and kissed me, gently, on both cheeks. It was sweet, I thought, to have a daughter after so many years, a woman who in every way was a compliment to Maxcy.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad to have a mother like you. I’m proud!”
So, good things follow on the heels of horror. “I think I’ll sleep. Or try to,” I told them as exhaustion swept away my last strength.
Oddly enough, I did. I’d fought for a belief, for what seemed, now, like a dream, and fought well, but the decision had been made. There was no more for me to do except live it down, hold my head high. How wrong I was!
Although, as time proved, there had, indeed, been an illegal and secret divorce decree, the furor in my family was trifling when compared to what was happening in the rest of the country. In July, 1882 President Garfield had been shot, and for the rest of the summer all eyes were on Washington, on the man who lay dying—slowly, to be sure—but there was no doubt that Chester Arthur would, at some point, become President of the United States.
For a time, the gossip, the scandal surrounding Haw, who I still thought of as my husband, and the woman, Baby Doe, took second place to what was happening in Washington, and I took advantage of that to make a trip back to Maine. I hadn’t been well that year. How could I have been? I was broken, exhausted, sick of it all, needing the sight and sound of river and sea, the cool shade of the forest, the land that had nurtured me. I was still there in mid-September when word reached us of Garfield’s death, and immediately I headed back to Colorado, knowing that the political climate, always unstable, was about to change once again, and with it my life.
My feelings were confirmed when President Arthur appointed Colorado Senator Teller head of the Department of the Interior, leaving a Senate seat vacant. Who would fill the spot? Why, Haw Tabor, or so he thought, but Governor Pitkin, who, after the scandal was no friend of Haw’s, appointed another man to the position till the end of the year. In January the Colorado Legislature would then meet and appoint someone else—or two persons. One to fill out the seat for Teller’s remaining thirty days, and another to serve for the usual six years.
The turmoil was like a match struck to dry kindling. The scandal erupted again, worse this time. In the papers Haw was being portrayed as a bigamist, an illiterate, a blundering boor. He was accused of having not one, not two, but four wives, his actions at the time of the miner’s strike were recalled—to his detriment—but nothing seemed to faze him. Nothing except me and my silence.
As far as I was concerned, the papers weren’t wrong, for I had doubts about the legality of the Durango divorce, but I hated hearing Haw’s name damned without regard for the actual good he’d done for the state—the roads he’d built, the schools he’d supported, his early fight for law and order in the camps—all of which had contributed to the making of Colorado as it was now. I hated it that my part in those early times was also in question, for I knew the worth of what we’d achieved—together. What ever else, we had been pioneers. We’d survived with hard work and decency, we’d taken care of the poor, fed the homeless, done what we could to right the wrongs of a new frontier.
When I thought back to those days, when I remembered the young Haw Tabor full of plans and adventure, the man who’d given me strength and a life I’d never have had, who’d fathered a child who we both loved, I could almost forgive him again, and that’s the truth. He’d given me everything. In the light of that, who was I to deny him his chance at further greatness?
Since I had no answers, I kept my questions to myself, and, as Machebeuf had suggested, I worked in the garden all those brilliant fall days. If there was nothing I could do about events that shaped the larger world, I could, at least, shape the smaller one that was my own.
I was on my knees planting bulbs when Haw found me. His shadow lay long and dark across the newly turned earth, and I looked up surprised, half afraid.
“Who’s the farmer now?” he said.
I climbed to my feet, stumbling on my skirt, and he put out a hand to steady me—a hand, I noticed, that was dirtier than mine. But all I said was: “What’s happened?”
“I need your help.”
“I’m sure you do. Bigamy’s a difficult charge to fight.”
He looked away, the small boy again, caught, guilty, but still demanding. “Don’t you start,” he said.
I laughed. “Why not? I’m the one whose good name’s ruined. I’m the one you called an adulteress. And now you expect me to help. Who’s going to listen to me?”
“Everybody,” he said. “Even that god-damned Pitkin. I don’t know how you did it, but this whole town loves you. You! And after all I’ve done. What I’ve spent.”
Perhaps what he said was true, but he was changing the subject and that I wasn’t going to permit. “Let’s go inside,” I said. “We can talk better there.”
He planted his feet. “I’ll say what I have to say out here with none of your old biddies around to butt in. I want a divorce. And I want it before the Legislature meets in January. I’m begging you. I want my chance at the Senate. I’ve waited for it long enough.”
“You already have a divorce,” I reminded him. “Isn’t one enough?”
Two paces away, two back, his face twisted in frustration. “God damn it, Gusta! Quit tying everything I say in knots! For once, for once, give me what I want instead of acting high and mighty like I’m nothing. Do you know who in hell I am?”
I couldn’t resist. “You’re my husband. Whether you like it or not.”
He kicked at my basket of bulbs, overturning it, and I watched the brown husks tumble out and lie exposed and helpless, the papery skins shriveling as I looked. Whether it was that or the sound of his breathing, harsh and irregular, that decided me, I’ve never been sure, but suddenly my whole body ached with a tenderness that almost tore me apart. We were like those bulbs, unable to bloom without someone to nurture them.
“Do you love her?” I whispered, and saw his face change in an instant.
“Yes.”
One word. “Did you love me? Ever?”
He hesitated. Then: “Yes.”
“When did you stop?”
Baffled, he shook his head. “I…don’t know. I don’t. But what’s that got to do with it?”
“Everything,” I said. “Because I love you. Because ‘love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.’”
As always, literature stymied him. “What the hell are you talking about now?”
“Shakespeare. The man you said never did anything for Denver.” Oh, why couldn’t I stop taunting him? Why was my love always fractured? Why was I born flawed?
I stepped closer to him, stood in the darkness of his shadow. “Never mind. Because in spite of what you’ve done, I love you. I’ll give you your chance, though it tear me apart.” Brave words that nearly killed me.
He clenched his fists as if to control some emotion I couldn’t read. “You mean it?”
The enormity of what was happening in that quiet place, with the sky blue overhead and the Front Range holding it up on massive shoulders, made me dizzy. I closed my eyes. “I’ll go to Amos Steck in the morning.”
He didn’t answer. When I looked for him, he was gone. No thanks, no gentle parting, no reminiscences of a shared past, just gone as if he’d never been there at all.
I picked up the bulbs, finished my planting, and went into the house.