D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
September 2009
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Although this story is fiction, we suspect that there's something of the author in the young narrator. Like his character, Phillip Parotti — a past winner in our writing contest — grew up in Silver City, and has plenty of "shadows" of his own to share. We're delighted to welcome him — and his memories — back to our pages. |
Shadows
"That's the way with shadows," Miss Hattie said. "Things come, and things go, and there isn't much that a body can do to stop them, I suppose, and when they're gone, nothing but their shadows are left to make us remember them."
By Phillip Parotti
I landed my first serious job about two weeks after General Eisenhower took up his post as President of the United States. At the time, I was 10 years old, and child labor laws were being handled with a great deal more sense than they are today. Work was thought to have intrinsic value because sports had not yet become the be-all and end-all of youthful endeavor. As a confirmed baseball player, I had been given more than my share of parental encouragement, but the idea that I might like to train myself for a career as a center fielder for a National League team — in our house, the American League, the Aristocratic League, was not even mentioned — would have sent my entire family into fits of laughter.
"Mature men work for a living," my father told me, "at serious jobs, so set your sights on becoming an engineer, a lawyer, a concert musician, or even an arc welder, but you most certainly will not be allowed to play games for a living, no matter how good you may turn out to be at them. We expect you to contribute something to this country that has been so very good to us and to do it through productive work. "
My father, the son of emigrants from a Mediterranean country, had nevertheless imbibed enough of the Puritan work ethic to make his point abundantly clear. So, along about the time that General Eisenhower stepped up to take the oath, when I asked for a slight increase in my allowance and was informed that money did not grow on trees, I knew that I had reached a crossroads in my life. On the following day, I walked the three blocks to Hall's Grocery, laid my cards on the table, and asked Mr. Hall for a job.
Mr. Hall suffered from asthma. At the beginning of the Second World War, he'd enlisted in the Navy, but as soon as he'd gone to sea, his health had taken a turn for the worse, so he'd been given a medical discharge and supported himself with the combined proceeds from his disability check and what he could make from his store. It was a small store, but Mr. Hall was a good butcher, and he made do. During the week, a college boy, working between classes, assisted in running the business. But, after checking with my father, Mr. Hall agreed to give me four hours of work every Saturday morning, and I started right off at 25 cents per hour, a wage that soon made me financially independent and the wealthiest boy in my fifth-grade class.
The work that I was asked to do was not demanding. I swept the store as soon as I arrived on Saturdays, first throwing down a sawdust compound that helped to pick up the dust and dirt. Then I filled the soda machine, opening the lid to put in bottles of grape and orange soda, root beer, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and Seven-Up, about the only soft drinks known in our town at the time. After that, I had to open boxes of canned goods, write the prices on the lids with a grease pencil, and stack whatever shelves needed replenishing, and when those tasks were done, I bagged potatoes.
Potatoes in those days were delivered in 100-pound bags. I couldn't lift 100 pounds of anything at that age, but I nevertheless pulled the potato-filled gunny sacks around the counter to the scale and then filled some paper bags with five pounds of potatoes and others with 10 pounds of potatoes and marked them accordingly. When that unpleasant job was finished, I was detailed to help customers, make change at the cash register, or run errands. The errands that I ran usually involved making small deliveries within a two- or three-block radius of the store.
"Do you own a wagon?" Mr. Hall finally asked me about two weeks after I started to work for him.
"Yes, sir," I told him.
"Do you think that you could bring it with you next Saturday? If you can, it will save you carrying several sacks of groceries by hand. "
On the following Saturday morning, I pulled my wagon over to the store, and once I'd finished my normal chores and filled the soda machine, Mr. Hall handed me a list, and I began collecting the items and storing them in some of the empty cardboard boxes that we had placed in my wagon. Then, when we were all done, Mr. Hall totaled the costs and came up with a bill of $15. 35 for the load, what might have amounted to about a week's worth of groceries for one or two people in those days.
"Now," Mr. Hall said, "you are to take these up to Miss Hattie. Do you know Miss Hattie? Do you know where she lives?"
"No, sir," I said.
"Do you know Roscoe Bender?" Mr. Hall asked. "He's about your age, isn't he?"
I knew Roscoe Bender. Roscoe Bender was in the seventh grade, and he was a bully.
"Yes, sir," I said tentatively.
"Then you also know where he lives, don't you?" Mr. Hall said.
"Yes, sir," I said. Every boy in my class knew where Roscoe Bender lived, and none of us ever went anywhere near his place.
"Right," said Mr. Hall. "Well, you pull your wagon straight up the Benders' drive-way until you come to the back gates; there are two of them, and Miss Hattie lives behind the green gate. She has a little one-bedroom brick house back there that sits on the rear of the Benders' lot. She's related to the Bender family somehow, but how, I don't know. Rather than living with them, she lives out there by herself, and that's where you are to take these groceries."
I wanted to ask Mr. Hall what I was supposed to do if Roscoe Bender tried to make trouble for me, but I didn't. Instead, I pulled Miss Hattie's groceries up the street in my wagon, stopped just short of the Benders' driveway, and then, when it looked to me like the coast was clear, made a beeline for the green gate at the back of the drive. And I'd just about made it when Roscoe Bender suddenly emerged from behind the gate to his house and blocked my path.
"Say, what-do-you-think-you're-doing-up here?" he said, surprised to see me, his voice filling with sudden menace.
"Delivery for Miss Hattie," I croaked, hoping that I was cloaking myself with enough of Mr. Hall's authority to clear my passage.
The mention of Miss Hattie's name seemed tantamount to the mention of "Open Simsim" in the tale of "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves." Once Miss Hattie's name had dropped from my lips, Roscoe changed color slightly and backed off without even punching me in the shoulder as I hurried by. I'd made a narrow escape, I knew, but one that I made note of in hopes that I might develop variations of the "Miss Hattie" ploy for use at school.
Pushing open the gate, I pulled my wagon inside. The sidewalk inside that gate was both old and cracked, and it didn't extend four full feet before it came to an abrupt stop against Miss Hattie's front step. Once I had the wagon inside the gate, I knocked on the door, and after I'd waited about five minutes, the door opened. I found myself looking up at a very tall, very thin, very wrinkled old woman wearing a sun bonnet like the sun bonnets women wore in the Randolph Scott and Wild Bill Elliot Westerns we used to see for 10 cents every Saturday afternoon at the El Sol Theater.
"What," Miss Hattie said, "you've never seen a woman wearing a sun bonnet before? Goodness me, boy, you'd better close that mouth of yours, or the flies are liable to light in there and set up housekeeping. "
"Groceries for Miss Hattie," I said, trying to cover my surprised discomfort with an announcement that sounded halfway official.
"I expect so," Miss Hattie said. "I'll hold the door open for you, and you can put all of that chuck on the table. "
I didn't know for sure what Miss Hattie might mean by the word "chuck," but I guessed that she used the word to indicate her groceries, and I think that turned out to be right.
"Mind my shadow box," she said, as I carried in the first sack. "Don't trip over it."
I didn't have any idea what she meant by the term "shadow box" either, but I did my best to avoid the black enamel footlocker that she had sitting right in the middle of her floor. As I carried each sack of groceries into her tiny kitchen, I noticed that she didn't make any attempt to move the box even though it was smack in my path.
"Now," she said, as I set the last sack on her table, "I owe you some money, and I want you to count my change out to me, out loud. I don't see as well as I used to, but I can hear just fine, and I can feel the difference between a quarter and a nickel."
I took the $20 bill that she handed me and put it in my left pocket; then I took the change Mr. Hall had given me from my right pocket and counted it into her blue-veined hand.
"That makes us square," she said, folding her change into the pocket of her apron. "Now, what's your name, boy?"
"Anthony," I said, "Anthony Turratti."
"Is that Eye-talian?" Miss Hattie asked.
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
For several seconds, Miss Hattie remained silent, her eyes looking to me like they weren't quite in focus. "I knew some Eye-talians," she said finally, "but that was in the shadow time. They worked the Southern Cross, or maybe it was the General Lee; I can't quite remember, but they were hard workers, and they took a lot of silver out of those mines. You related to any of them?"
"I don't think so," I said, shaking my head. "My father didn't come here until 1937, and he's with the college. My grandfather is a miner, but he mines coal, in Illinois."
"Hmm," said Miss Hattie.
"If you please, ma'am," I said, "what's 'the shadow time'?"
"The shadow time is when I first came out here myself," Miss Hattie said, "and that shadow box, there on the floor, came along with me. I just had it out, for the first time in years. It's full of my shadows. Want to see some?"
I wanted to see Miss Hattie's shadows, sure enough. The only shadows I'd ever seen where the ones that followed me when I was walking at an angle with the sunlight. I'd never seen shadows in a box, so I was curious, but I also had Mr. Hall's $20 bill in my pocket and a job that I was supposed to be getting back to, and I think Miss Hattie saw the hesitation in my face.
"Dean Hall won't mind if you're another 20 minutes getting back to him," she said, pointing me to a chair, "so sit yourself for a minute, and I'll show you some shadows. Now, about how old are you right now?"
"I'm 10 and a half," I answered. "I'll be 11 in May."
"Well," Miss Hattie said with a smile, "that's just about how old I was when I first came up here with my folks. There were 29 of us in our party, 24 men, mostly miners trying to get in on the silver strike, and five women, and we came up here in wagons from Mesilla. I had just turned 10, myself. I was born in Ohio, in 1869, and we got up here after camping at Cook's Springs for the night in the fall of 1879, in September, I think it was, because the nights were just starting to turn cold."
And with that, she reached down and opened the lid on her tin trunk.
"You see this?" she said, lifting up a faded blue uniform coat. "This is one of my shadows. This is my father's Civil War uniform. He was a sergeant in the 49th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Fought at Stone's River and got wounded there. Almost lost his arm. Surgeon wanted to amputate, but my father wouldn't let him, and eventually the arm healed. If you look close, you can see the hole where the mini-ball passed through, and that rust-colored stain is some of my Pa's blood."
I looked, and I could see both the hole the bullet had made and the stain. I'd never seen a Civil War uniform up close before, and what I remember about that one, aside from the bullet hole, was the fact that the buttons had tarnished and the chevrons had turned brown.
"Did your father fight through the whole war?" I asked.
"No," Miss Hattie said. "That wound disabled him, so after he got out of the hospital, the army gave him his discharge and sent him home, and that's when he married my mother, and for a while, they farmed somewhere around Cincinnati, and that's where I was born, on the farm. You see this shadow? This is my rattle. My ma made this out of a tobacco can and some birdshot that she put inside it. "
I'd seen a baby's rattle or two, and Miss Hattie's didn't look a bit like them. In fact, it looked downright primitive.
"What made your folks move out here?" I asked, because I was having trouble making the jump from Ohio to New Mexico, particularly back when New Mexico was still a territory and downright dangerous.
"Along about the time I was eight years old," Miss Hattie said, "my mother got the consumption, and the doctor told my pa that she was going to die if he didn't get her to a dry climate with good air. As far as I know, my pa didn't think twice about it. He just sold the farm, and we started west. At first, we settled down in Franklin, what they're calling El Paso now, and pa worked as a clerk in a store down there, but then we moved on up to Mesilla where he ran a hotel."
"Did your mother recover?" I wanted to know.
"She did," Miss Hattie said, "but she had to rest a lot and took a nap every afternoon for the remainder of her life, and we kids had to be mighty quiet when she was doing it, or my pa tanned our hides. "
"But then you moved on up here?" I asked.
"That's right," said Miss Hattie. "That old hotel in Mesilla was a stop-and-go proposition; sometimes it was full, and sometimes it wasn't, and when it wasn't, we didn't eat regular. So when the big silver strike was made out there on Chloride Flats, my father reached a decision and looked around for some partners to go into business with him. And that's when we moved up here and started the hardware store down there on Yankie Street. Pa named that store after me; it was called Hattie's Hardware. See this shadow here? This is an old copy of the Silver City Independent, and right there at the bottom of the page is one of our ads. Can you read what it says? 'New picks, $1.00. New shovels, $1.25. .32 Cal. Colt Revolvers, $2.10. Buy your goods at Hattie's Hardware.'"
"And did you live here, when you first came to Silver City?" I wanted to know.
"No," Miss Hattie said, moving a few things around in her trunk until she found a faded photograph and handed it to me. "I didn't build this house that I'm living in now until after my folks died, and that was in the Twenties, just after the Great War. When we first came up here to Silver City, we lived in the house that you can still make out in this photograph. This is one of my favorite shadows because this is the house that my father built for us, and it was good and strong. The house you see here had adobe walls that were two feet thick, and those walls came in mighty handy when the Apaches raided us, and back in those days, that happened too often for comfort, if you see what I mean. Things are quiet around here now and have been for a long time, but they weren't always that way, and when I was still a girl, they could be downright deadly."
I don't think that it had ever dawned on me before that my friends and I were growing up in a time when we were still close to what we called "The Old West," so that we were actually living around people who had experienced it directly. When the revelation struck me, I think my mouth fell open more than a little. And then I wanted to know right quick if Miss Hattie had ever seen one of those Apache raids.
"Were you ever in one of their raids?" I asked. "An Apache raid?"
"Well," Miss Hattie said, showing me a broad smile, "if I don't mistake the recollection, I was in about six of them. Now, you know Julia Wilson, don't you? Julia that's married to Percy who used to be the mayor of Silver City? They live over there in that big white house on the corner of West and 12th Streets."
I knew Mrs. Wilson and said so. My friend Tommy and I used to stop and talk to her when we were walking home from the Training School and while she was out watering her lilacs.
"Well, you ask Miss Julia about those raids," Miss Hattie said. "Miss Julia and I went to school together, and we were in some of the same raids, and her folks did the same thing with her that mine did with me. The minute a raid started — and they usually started after dark — they stuck her under the bed, pushed blankets in behind her, and didn't let her come out until the Apaches had gone and the streets were safe. That's what my folks did with me, too; they stuck me under the bed, pushed this shadow box up behind me, and left me there until the raid ended."
"And you never sneaked out to look?" I asked.
"You bet I didn't!" Miss Hattie laughed. "I was too scared. I stayed right where the folks left me, kept quiet, and didn't move. "
"Did the Apaches ever attack your house?" I wanted to know.
"Mostly, they raided through town, shooting off a gun or two and trying to steal stock," Miss Hattie said. "One or two of them must have come close one night because they killed our goat when they charged across our back field, and Pa unloaded both barrels of the shotgun when he saw them trying to get our mule, Ruben, that we had locked up in the stable. My father fired off a couple of more shots with his pistol while Mother was reloading the shotgun, but that was the only time that Pa ever had to shoot during a raid, and the others, I think, drove through town more down in the direction of Chihuahua Hill, where the livery stables were located. "
"Was it Cochise that made those raids?" I asked.
"I don't think it was," said Miss Hattie. "Folks here thought Geronimo might be leading those raids, or maybe Victorio, but I don't think anyone ever really knew. When one of those raids started, there was plenty of shooting, I can tell you, but in so far as I ever heard, nobody that we knew ever hit anything. If one of those Apaches had been killed or captured, the town authorities might have been able to identify the band responsible for the raid, but that just never happened, and those raids, when they did occur, seemed to take place mighty fast, a few Apaches swooping down through town as fast as they could go, stampeding whatever stock they could find and then getting out fast before the citizens could get up a posse to follow them."
"Was anyone ever hit?" I asked.
"I think they shot a miner once," Miss Hattie said, "somewhere north of the Catholic church. He must have been on his way back out to the diggings on Chloride Flats and gotten caught. That night they raided our place, they left a couple of bullet holes in our stable door because they were trying to shoot off Pa's lock so that they could get in and get Ruben out, but when Pa let loose with the scatter gun, that dissuaded them, and they lit out."
"Didn't the cavalry fight them?" I asked, thinking about the movies I had seen.
"I think the cavalry tried to fight them," Miss Hattie said, "because once or twice we saw the troops come through here from Fort Bayard as they went out on a scout, but that was usually several hours after a raid had ended, and those Indians were always long gone by the time the cavalry got over here. And once, when I was downtown, helping at the store, I saw the troopers return from a scout; they were covered with dust when they finally rode in here that afternoon. Judging from what I could see, they looked mighty tuckered, and I don't think they'd found a thing."
"When did all of that stop, Miss Hattie?" I asked. "When they caught Geronimo?"
At first, Miss Hattie didn't say a word. Instead, she just sat in her chair for a moment and looked to me like she had set her eyes away off in the distance, like somewhere on top of Boston Hill.
"This here is the darkest shadow I've got in this box," Miss Hattie finally said, leaning over and lifting up a yellowed handkerchief, its linen texture still folded tightly into a pocket ensemble with three extended points. "You know where Fleming is located — was located?" she asked, correcting herself as she posed the question.
"No, ma'am," I said. I'd never heard of it.
"Well, I'm not surprised," she said, "it existed for a while, about 10 miles from here, out between Silver City and Cliff. What's left of it. . . nothing more than a few foundation stones, I suspect . . . is still out there on the Franks ranch somewhere, but the road no longer goes through it. In its heyday, there was a mine out there, a saloon, a couple of stores and some houses. And you say that you've never heard of it?"
"No, ma'am, I've never heard of it before," I said.
"Well, that's the way with shadows," Miss Hattie said. "Things come and things go, and there isn't much that a body can do to stop them, I suppose, and when they're gone, nothing but their shadows are left to make us remember them."
I didn't say anything to that. I didn't think I was expected to. Instead, I waited while Miss Hattie once more looked out the window, off into the distance, and seemed to lean her eyes on the summit of Boston Hill.
"Well," she said finally, bringing her attention back to me, "that handkerchief you're holding once belonged to a beau of mine. His name was Luther Squires; he was a good-looking boy with sandy hair, and he was about my age, and on the night before he was killed, he gave that handkerchief to me as sort of a keepsake. We were both at a social down at the Presbyterian church, and when I spilled a drop of lemonade on my frock, he whipped that handkerchief out of his breast pocket, handed it to me, and told me that it was 'a favor for a lady.'
"Luther's father was a lawyer here in town, and he also had some mining interests. In some way or other, one of his interests had to do with the mine out at Fleming. As a result of that connection, on the morning after the social, he sent Luther out there to the Fleming mine with some papers that he wanted the manager to sign, and so that Luther wouldn't have to make the ride alone, he sent old Burl Edwards, the Squires' handyman, with him, and then another boy who was about Luther's age, Shorty Campbell, also decided to make the trip.
"All three of them were armed, but the Apaches ambushed them about three miles out beyond Chloride Flats, out there where the Turner ranch is today, and all three of them were killed. At the time, mind you, I was mighty broken up about it because I thought that Luther and I had what used to be called an understanding, and if I remember rightly, I cried for days. That was in 1885, so as far as I remember it. Geronimo surrendered the next year, and that's when the Indian raids ended for good, and ever since, things have been right peaceful around here.
"Whether Geronimo was responsible for killing those two boys and Burl Edwards, no one ever knew. From what I heard, Geronimo never owned up to that killing, but the fact that Apaches did it was never doubted because the cattlemen who stumbled onto the bodies and brought them into town for burial also found where the ambush had been laid and found moccasin prints around the eight or nine spent cartridges the Indians had fired in order to kill those three. According to the story the cattlemen gave the papers, after counting and studying the moccasin prints, they thought they could number the raiding party at 10 or more braves with possibly a squaw or two to cook their meat. Whatever the case, the raiders had been more than Luther, Shorty and Burl Edwards could handle, so the three of them had wound up dead, and the town mourned."
"Gee," I said, because, considering the look on Miss Hattie's face in that moment, I didn't know what else to say.
"I'll tell you one more thing that you probably don't know," Miss Hattie said slowly, not looking at me but looking at Luther Squires' three-cornered handkerchief that I still held in my hand. "When the town buried those boys back in '85, they buried them right down there where Dean Hall's store now stands. That was all Squires land in those days, so Luther's father marked out the burial plot himself. Later, when the town bought land to the east and established the new cemetery up there, the bodies were moved, but Luther's father was dead himself by that time, so it didn't seem to matter.
"This little house of mine sits right where the Squires' veranda used to be, and I've always been glad to be here because when the sun goes down and the shadows begin to fall, this place makes me think of Luther, and as the days go by, I sometimes like to think of him as being the best of all my shadows. Now, young man, now that I've bored you some, I think you probably ought to be getting back down to Hall's store before Mr. Dean begins to wonder what has become of you. "
"Yes, ma'am," I said, getting up off the chair. "And thanks for showing me your shadows, Miss Hattie."
"You come back next week with another load of groceries," she said, "and I'll show you a few more."
Once I was back outside the house, I looked through a knothole in the green gate to make sure that Roscoe Bender wasn't waiting out there to ambush me like those Apaches that had killed Luther Squires. When I saw that the driveway looked clear and that Roscoe was nowhere in sight, I opened the gate and made straight for the street, congratulating myself once I got there. Things had moderated some in my part of "The Old West," but considering what I had seen Roscoe do to Jack Hines one morning on the school playground, I thought that there were still enough savages around so as to keep even a boy my age alert to hold onto his scalp.
"So, how's Miss Hattie?" Mr. Hall asked, as I handed him the $20 bill from my pocket.
"Fine, sir," I said.
"Show you some of her shadows, did she?" Mr. Hall asked.
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Good," Mr. Hall said. "Teaches you that we live closer to the past than you thought, doesn't it?"
"Yes, sir," I said, "it does."
"That's good," Mr. Hall said, "because now she's given you a shadow of your own, something you'll be able to tell your grandchildren one day."
"Yes, sir," I said, "and do we ever make deliveries to Julia Wilson, by any chance?"
"I'll see what I can do for you in that regard," said Mr. Hall.
Phillip "Pep" Parotti grew up in Silver City during the Forties and the Fifties and has recently retired and come home after a long teaching career at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.