By Christopher Leeson
Chapter 7, Part 2
The letter began,
“Dearest Sister,”
“I am at my wit's end. I cannot move one way or the other. It’s like my feet are frozen in ice. When we came to Arizona, Edgar and I hoped to build a paradise, but the hardships of this harsh land confronted us on the very first day. We were determined not to fail, but every new year increased our difficulties and we made many mistakes. But there was one mistake that has utterly destroyed any chance we had for happiness.
“Irene, I need to tell you the whole story, from beginning to end. I have suffered from being locked in my own mind, lacking good advice. I am wretched. I am as King Claudius was in Hamlet when he said, ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.’”
At this point, Myra turned a page and saw spots of blurred ink upon the sheets. The woman writing these words had begun to weep.
Edgar and Addie, the handwriting informed it reader, had worked hard, but were used to cultivating the well-watered and fertile fields of Pennsylvania. They started out wrongly, choosing unsuitable crops. After two barren harvests, they had run through their savings, including what had been left over from the sale of their old farm. They found no alternative but to borrow against their land value just so that they might eat in the winter and plant again in the spring. The dry needed irrigation, which the Caldwells were forced to learn about quickly. Fortunately, there were ditches left by the Indians who had tilled the flat before the Mexicans came. The struggling couple, taking the advice of their neighbors, started to clear out those old traces and bring streams of water to their fields.
“The neighbors had good practical knowledge and helped us as much as they could,” Addie Caldwell wrote, “but their work on their own farms took up almost all their time. The lion’s share of the labor had to be carried out by hired labor, mostly local Mexicans. We took on the ones willing to work for wages so low that they only provided for a man’s bare survival. Nonetheless, we could not pay even this without borrowing more money, and this sank us ever more deeply into debt.
By the summer of 1863, the weather presented us with an actual drought, like no drought the East has ever seen. The river sank and our new ditches were left high above the water. It was a hungry winter for us and we were humbled enough to accept the charity offered by friends in the church. We ate more wild game than we did potatoes. By the spring of 1864, were we desperate, about to lose the farm and all that was on it. Soon we would be turned out onto the road, destitute. We prayed so many times for Heaven’s relief, but no rain came from the great empty sky. What was more frightening, it felt like God’s presence was not in it either.
“Then, in middle May, something happened, a thing so terrible that I dread to recall it. It was as if God’s adversary had heard the prayers that we had meant for the Lord of Creation. One night, after dark, Edgar came hurrying into the house, very excited.”
Edgar jabbered out a story. A horseman had been riding swiftly through the darkness and his mount had stumbled near where Edgar was standing. The man had been pitched forward from the saddle and had struck his head on the hard soil. Edgar rushed to his aid and found the man to be alive, but senseless. The farmer swung into the saddle of the stranger's roan, which had not been badly injured by its fall. He spurred away, intending to bring Addie back with the buckboard, so that they could safely bring the fellow to the farmstead. But as the Good Samaritan galloped along, he realized that his borrowed horse was loaded with very heavy packs. Edgar nonetheless pressed on, until he reached the house, where he started removing the packs so as to improve the beast’s speed. While so engaged, he came to realize that they were full of small, roughly-cast pieces of metal. Edgar had only had rare contact with gold, but he knew what it looked like in that form.
“Edgar fetched me and hurried me outside to see what was in the saddlebags. Not only did they contain ingots, but also bundles of currency. This was more than enough wealth to excite an outlaw to murder. We spread a canvas over the pile, weighting it down with rocks at each corner, so they the wind would not peel it away and display so much temptation to passersby on the road.
“We have to handled this carefully,” Edgar cautioned me. Was he even then thinking the same as what I was thinking? Were such evil ideas sent to us by Satan? I can only think that they were.”
The couple then made haste back to where the stranger lay, Edgar riding the saddled mount and Addie driving the buckboard. As carefully as they could, the two of them bore the injured man to the carriage. Once back at the farm, Edgar suggested, “Let's put him in the barn.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So Myron won't see him.”
Addie didn’t have to ask why he should not see the person. She was already thinking thought so guilty that they startled her.
The pair threw spare blankets over a mound of hay inside the barn and laid him out atop it. The fellow -- Thomas Mifflin -- Myra knew, remained unconscious. Who could he be? they wondered. He was dressed in a suit, though not a fine one. Even by the dim lantern light, they could see that he was no prospector or adventurer. How was it that a man dressed like a bank clerk should be carrying so much gold?
“We should take him to the doctor in town, maybe?” Addie suggested.
“Old Scormann is no real doctor,” Edgar answered back. “He knows more about horses than men.”
“Maybe – maybe,” his wife volunteered, “we can take better care of...our visitor … ourselves?”
“Maybe,” Edgar agreed. He glanced over his shoulder, at the canvas that covered the gold. “It's not safe leaving it there. It'll put into into a bin inside the barn,” he said.
“I'll take the horse to the rear pen,” Addie told him. Her husband only nodded absently, his face stamped with both thoughtfulness and dazzlement at the same time.
For the rest of the night, one or the other of the pair stood watch over the man. Addie, regarding him by lantern light, thought that he must surely die. Or was it a hope? She was shocked to imagine such a thought crossing her mind.
As the morning’s light brightened the dusty horizon, Mrs. Caldwell made breakfast for Myron and then hurried him out to the buckboard. She told the boy that she wanted to shop in town and so he could ride in with her. But once he was dropped off at the school, his mother did not proceed on into town. Out of sight, she circled and returned home.
Myra, with a groan, rested back from the pages. She remembered that exact ride.
“Maybe you shouldn't read any farther,” Irene suggested.
“Leave me be,” the girl said. She had to read more. Her imagination was telling her that this story was heading toward a ghastly place and she wanted to find out that it was not going to become a crime story.
Addie, having returned to the farm, found Mifflin yet unconscious but still breathing. She tried to do a few necessary things, but frequently came back to see the sufferer’s position unchanged. The farmers knew that he needed better help than they could give him, but yet neither suggested taking him into town.
Riders came by the farm in early afternoon and identified themselves as workers from the Rexler and Colby mining company. “Did you see a small man in a suit come out of the west by this road a little after dark last night?” one asked. “He'd be riding a roan that probably would have its saddlebags stuffed full.”
“You look like a posse. Why are you looking for such a man?” Edgar asked.
One of the horsemen gave a gruff laugh. “He's a robber. He took a lot of gold from the mining office.”
“Is there a reward?” Addie asked. That question made Edgar look her way in surprise.
“We ain’t heard,” a derby-wearing horseman said. “If we don’t find him by dark, you can bet that there'll be some sort of a reward put up.” The speaker then searched the faces of his companions. “What do you think of that, boys?’” The other men laughed and some nodded. Without any more talk, the group set off toward town.
Myron came walking home at the usual hour and saw the strange horse. His folks, as rattled as they were, hadn’t remembered to hide it. “Whose horse?” he’d asked. His folks made up a story that a sick man had asked for a place to rest. When he asked to look in on the stranger, they wouldn’t let him.
The next day, the Caldwells gave Myon another ride to school. The robber had so far remained unable to eat or drink, and only his faintly rising chest and slow wheezing informed his keepers that he hadn’t died. They felt dismayed that he he was hanging on for so long. It was like they were subjecting him to torture, making him die slowly of hunger and thirst. The two of them hardly exchanged a word, so deep was their nervous state. Each felt like a nightmare was sitting on his chest, making speech impossible. Abruptly, Edgar took off with a shovel upon his shoulder, trudging to the tree-line south of the farmstead. While he was away, more people, including a deputy from town, stopped by at the rail fence to ask questions similar to the ones that the Caldwells had taken before.
Addie managed to tell the lawman that they hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual, except for the news of the robbery. As soon as the riders moved out, she started shaking like a leaf.
Once in control of herself, she checked on the thief again, lying there utterly still. Leaning in close to listen for his breathing, she couldn't hear it. The farm wife touched his face. Was it her imagination? He felt cooler than before.
Her mind in a whirl, Addie Caldwell ran toward the path that Edgar’s boots had made through the rank spring grass. Once under the ridge, inside the tree line, she lost the trail and started to shout out her husband's name, not loudly and with a stammer. Echoes came back, but no return call.
She shouted more strongly. Additional echoes.
Her third yell was tinged with hysteria.
Edgar appeared momentarily, came up, and embraced his wife distractedly. They exchanged a few words and then walked back to the barn together. They put the body into the manure cart, hitched it to the horse, and led the beast into the trees, where there was a partially-dug grave. Addie had brought with her another shovel and together they started to expand the hole. It was hard digging, foiled by roots and stones. They worked until they were tired and then decided to postpone the rest of the labor go until morning. They dragged the corpse from the cart and left it on the littered ground, covered with a weighted blanket. Subsequently, Edgar quick-stepped ahead of Addie, who was driving the cart, and reached the barnyard first. The farm woman came up and unhitched while her husband took the robber's horse out of the corral. He intended to lead it back to the tree line, feed it there, and leave the beast tethered overnight.
When Myron came home a little later, Addie let him know that it was all right to go into the barn again, saying that the man had gotten better and ridden off.
According to the letter in Myra’s hands, the guilty pair finished the burial the next day. Afterwards, Edgar went to the bin in the barn and transferred the gold it concealed to the cart. This he drove back to the ridge line.
Throughout that day, Edgar and Addie scarcely discussed what they had done. In a silent consensus, they were determined to keep the gold. The terrible things that they had already done would make no sense, not unless they were able to profit from their crime. Before the break of the next dawn, Edgar took off for Phoenix, riding the robber’s mount and leading the farm's horse behind it. If anyone saw him traveling west under the gray morning light, nothing ever came of it. It was dark again by the time he reached Phoenix. Avoiding all human contact, Edgar tied the horse to a tree at the edge of town and then rode back east. Well away from town, he spread out his bedroll in a concealed spot, needing to sleep. After slumbering some hours, he resumed the dismal trail. Darkness had closed in by the time that the farmer reached home. To his relief, Addie was able to tell him that no visitor nor neighbor had come by during his absence. Edgar fell into bed, though he slept but restlessly that night.
As the months passed, the Caldwells, little by little, paid off more and more of their creditors, using the greenbacks. They took care not to make all the repayments too quickly, or else folks would have to wonder how they had come by so much money. Edgar made occasional buckboard trips to Phoenix, bringing back mostly canned and dried food, and making sure that he brought his load home after dark. Then he and his wife would hide what he’d purchased, mostly in the cool cellar.
When their cash was used up, the couple decided that they had to bring a neighbor into the scheme. This man, a sly and greedy sort whom Addie left unnamed, had been augmenting his meager income with a public job. Before this, he had occasionally gossiped with Edgar about how the territorial politicians were all crooks. According to him, he had seen bureaucrats and officeholders dealing with people who should have been dangling at the end of a noose. These scoundrels bribed office holders lavishly to protect themselves from arrest. Some were smugglers, and some made a good living fencing outlaw loot. A few sold guns and whiskey to the Indians. Some traded rustled cattle and some dealt in various types of contraband. The neighbor had insinuated himself in with some of the politicians; these had, in turn, introduced him to many of their civilian “associates.” One day, the Caldwells caught the neighbor alone and had asked him a few sly questions. The answers he gave satisfied them to the point that Edgar took the chance to tell him that they had come by “a few” ingots that needed to be turn into regular money.
“Where did you two get ingots?” he’d asked straight out.
“Not in any way that we’d want to talk about.” Edgar told him stiffly. Then he put an ingot into the hand of the curious farmer. “You can sell that one for yourself,” he’d recommended.
Over the next few months, with the help of certain scalawags that their neighbor knew, Edgar and Addie managed to keep their cash box full. Things were going well enough with the arrangement, but the Caldwells never told him where the main treasure was hidden, though he often argued that he should be made a full partner. Stubbornly, the couple stood their ground; they could not bring themselves to trust a man who trafficked so casually with criminals.
But Edgar and his wife still worried that they were buying too much in plain sight. Their confederate, accordingly, put them into contact with shyster lawyers. These men were apt at forging paperwork to make it appear that they had received modest legacies from deceased relations 'back East.' A year after the robber had died, the Caldwells managed to get their loans and the mortgage paid off without having attracted much attention. Their next move had to be building up the farm.
“We erected the windmill, which Edgar had wanted since the day we’d arrived at Eerie,” wrote Addie. But the Caldwells decided not to fix the house much. The best way to look poor would be to continue to live in a plain and homely settlers’ house. But, inside that structure, there were some luxuries hidden from view.
Addie ended the letter by saying, “We did only what we thought was necessary and we harmed no one. But simply avoiding the most evil of deeds gave us no peace. It is a bitter thing to walk in wickedness while knowing that God is seeing everything. I cannot express how terrible it was to carry around so much shame, but we are not brave enough to climb from the pit that we have dug for ourselves. We are most ashamed of living such a lie before our son’s eyes. We do not socialize very often, feeling unfit for decent company. We are not even comfortable with the neighbor who has helped us. We cannot look at him without knowing that we have tempted a flawed man and have made him worse than he was before. The reverend says that worst of sins is the causing of others to sin. How our helper’s good wife and children would grieve if they ever found out about the dishonest things that their man has been doing for bribes. God will punish us terribly for his sins, as well as for our own.
“I am not binding you to secrecy, deal sister. I trust that you shall do the wise and decent thing according to our teaching back home. Do as you must, now that that I have, told you about our our shame and our wrongs. I am not the person that I was, and neither is Edgar. Irene, never do anything that might take away your self-respect. You cannot imagine how unsatisfying are purchases that are made with ill-gained money. I can't recall seeing as much as one smile on my man’s face since this long ordeal began. Even in the worst days of our poverty we could still find moments that made us smile, but we cannot smile at all in the midst of this wickedly-acquired prosperity.
“I can’t bring myself to look at my own face in the mirror, except fleetingly. I avoid meeting the glance of my own eyes. I cannot understand how criminals are able to endure living such a life. Doing constant evil must kill something inside a human being, something that every day makes it easier to do more wrong. I have given up praying, which is a horrifying thought. But I feel like my prayers mock God. How can He possibly hear us repenting wickedness while every day we feast off the fruits of that very wickedness? We have not turnd ourselves in because we care too much about what the people of the town would surely think. We almost forget what God thinks. I don’t know what is wrong with us. It is not that we do not know that if we die unabsolved we shall be cast into the flames. But we are daunted by the idea of prision. To confess in secret is useless, because the Lord cannot wash us clean unless we first give back all that we have taken. Yet how can we give back the life that we allowed to be lost?
“How I wish that we had been willing to stay poor but blameless. It would have been better to be turned out homeless, bearing all we own in packs upon our backs, living by the side of the road, eating what we could snare, rather than endure the shadow of God’s condemnation.
Your loving sister,
Addie”
Friday, December 29, 1871
Myra was able to sleep only fitfully that night. She kept hearing the words of that terrible letter speaking with her mother’s voice. The niece avoided her aunt's glances at breakfast and neither of them attempted to begin a conversation. Afterwards, the girl went out to do her morning chores.
When she was finished, Myra lingered in the chilly air, sitting on a keg and staring at the trees of the southern ridge line. She was thinking that she had known her parents so well, but now it was as though as if she had been reared by two strangers. The life she had shared with them, here on this troubled little farm, now seemed to have been a false and empty thing. She felt she was in danger of losing her love for the people who had brought her up with kindness and caring.
The pain she felt didn’t exactly come from knowing that her parents had stolen from a thief and then had let him die. It was hard for Myra to get worked up about thieving, and everyone knew that it was a kill or be killed world. She remembered well enough that she had herself robbed and, at times, had come very close to killing. It was something else. It was the fact that the life she had lived had been no more than one long lie. All the memories that she retained of her ma and pa now seemed tainted, as if by walnut juice.
Why did she so much care about having been deceived? She couldn't put it into words. The people whom she had loved most had pretended to be something that they were not. But, yet, didn’t everyone do that? Maybe that was it. Maybe the unbearable things was to know that they had been like everyone else. Some good, a lot of bad. Knowing that left her with nothing special to hold on to. The rocks that she had built her life upon were, she realized, were no more real than the wistful shapes that moved through a morning fog.
Aunt Irene, Myra supposed, surely believed that her sister and brother-in-law were in Hell. It frightened the girl to comprehend that not even her optimistic aunt was holding out any hope for them. Myra didn’t know what to think. She found herself hoping that God didn’t exist, that He was no more than some character from a story book. She wanted to believe that if He didn’t exist, the devil didn’t exist either. If there was no devil, then her parents wouldn’t be suffering like prisoners inside a medieval torture chamber. They would simply have returned to the same non-existence that everyone experienced before birth. If so, their dying would amount to nothing painful. It was better to think that there was no such thing as a soul. After all, there was no Hell for a dead badger that was caught by his head in a trap.
How strange it was to think that a disbelief in God was her last hope for inner peace.
Not wanting to contemplate the dark history that she’d learned, Myra stood up. She remembered how the letter had spoken of Thomas Mifflin being put into a grave. Might her parents have thrown the gold into the same hole? A moment of thought told her no. They would never have wanted to look at those bones when they went to take out some treasure. And they wouldn’t have wanted to put in the same place both the fact of a murder and the evidence to prove it.
But what other spot would have made a better hiding place? If her pa had gone directly back to the ridge from the barn, he probably would have buried the man right there. But would he have chosen to conceal the gold under the trees or in the nearby field? Probably the former. If it were in the field, snoopy people, like Tully Singer, might look over the boundary line and see them visiting the gold hole repeatedly. It would have been better to hid the horde behind the screen of the trees. The arboreal area was relatively restricted. That would reduce the area to be searched.
But on which side of the gave might the gold be best hidden? Upon reflection, she realized that the ingots had to be hidden east of the grave. Her pa would never have buried gold on the right side, because the grave wasn’t far from the line fence of Tully Singer. That boundary had ling been in contention and her father would never have risked burying something valuable in a place that Singer might eventually end up owning.
What other clues did she have? Her mother had also said that she and her pa had gone back numerous times to retrieve more ingots. That meant that the treasure could not have been buried deep. Instead, they would have reasonably preferred to hid it under little soft ground, or in a rock hole, or under a pile of stones.
It further occurred to Myra that the ridge line was near the places where Myron had caught Grimsley trespassing several times. The man’s information, wherever it came from, had sent him to the very same area that the letter had pointed out to Myra. Was that a coincidence or a confirmation?
Myra suddenly felt excitement. But, just as quickly, she realized that she had Irene to worry about. The girl couldn’t believe that her aunt would ever let her hold on to stolen gold. If she was ever going to find it and keep it, Myra had to keep Irene from ever suspecting that she was treasure-hunting. Otherwise, her aunt could easily question her and she’d be forced to confess all. If that happened, Myra would be told to stop looking for the gold. She couldn’t let that happen.
Myra reasoned that she’d have to cease quarreling with her aunt. She had to stop giving her any reason to look her way, keeper her from wondering what she was up to. The girl needed to wine Irene’s confidence, to let get her mind focused instead on a thousand other problems, not upon her. The best way to do that would be leave off being trouble-making. One way to do that would be to act friendly and cooperative. It would mean working the farm as if she actually liked doing it. It would also mean building up trust so that her aunt would take away the spell that was keeping her close in. That would be absolutely necessary if she were to get away with the gold. It was going to take some fancy play-acting to bring all that off, but the dream of having so much gold would be enough to make all the trouble worthwhile.
All of a sudden, Myra started to think better of her parents. They had always wanted a prosperous life for her, had wanted Myron to become someone important, someone respected. Well, fine. Myra planned to bear down hard and do her level best to see to it that the people whom she loved best got their fondest wish.
TO BE CONTINUED...
