We went to hear the school chorus sing some songs, and the underclass orchestra tried their best. We girls applauded, but I didn’t think I’d like to hear more. We also had to see some dancing called a ballet, and it was embarrassing watching all those men and women tromping around in their tightest underwear and spinning and leaping with their legs and arms held out peculiar. I expected any second that someone would split their britches and all kinds of buck-naked silliness could follow, but it didn’t happen. Prairie wanted to stay and sketch the dancers, but I told her I was going back to the library to study, because I’d seen plenty of boys in underwear at home.

  At the library, I straightened a stack of scattered newspapers. I read the headlines just out of casual curiosity, and I was startled to find an article that mentioned Mexico. “President sends advisors to Diaz to forestall war.” War? I read faster and faster. “Met with resistance … Lieutenant Ramirez … head of operation Colonel Hagenmeister … Germany … denies all claims yet forward observers … troop landings … Veracruz…” I read the article again. Looked at the date. Yesterday. I started to tear out the article by folding it along the lines, but instead just took the whole section to a table near the window where I could read it again. Then I had to find a map to locate Veracruz. It was a long way from my family, but we’d seen so many wagons driven south by blond-haired men, I couldn’t help but guess they were from the German government. They were certainly not Mexicans traveling to Mexico, we’d all known. I took the piece back to my dormitory to mail home to Pa.

  We went to Chicago on a train one morning for a look at an art museum. We had to make notes on seven different pieces and I nearly twisted an ankle as I scrambled through the place, trying to find the most elegant and beautiful art there. I left all my girlfriends behind and hurried, like I was looking for gold. Being in that place filled my heart with what I can only call duende, the spirit after which I’d named my horse. It was a sort of joy and anticipation and excitement along with a feeling that I’d never measure up to the paintings before me. I floated from exhibit to exhibit, admiring, and then I found myself in a room filled with statues of old generals and some Roman or other, and some of the boys I’d seen at school were gathered before a wall of photographs. Under one, a label said it was “President Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at San Juan.” I peered closely. “That one there is my uncle Earnest,” I said to no one.

  “Shoot fire, really?” a boy said. “Oh, sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to swear in front of you. Which one again?”

  I pointed.

  “That must have been a great time for those boys. All that gunpowder and glory. Riding hard through the jungle and coming back with a chest full of medals. Look at those photographs! Imagine being right on a battlefield with a camera and twenty boxes of plates. ‘And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here…’ I’d certainly like to take some plates of that. Glory and bloodshed in a fight for the right.”

  “Uncle Earnest came back with a chest full of lead in a pine box soaked in mud and ten kinds of corruption. There ain’t no glory in gunpowder.” I winced inside at my use of slang, but there were some things that proper English didn’t cover.

  His mouth hung open. “I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re that girl from Arizona, aren’t you? I heard you’d shot three people before you came here, and that you carry six-guns everywhere you go.”

  “You heard some leg-pulling tall tales then.” I walked away from him. I wasn’t dressed in my riding clothes, and I wasn’t carrying pistols. There was a glass on the wall before me and I could see that he was behind me, following, looking like a calf that just got its head banged by a bull.

  “Miss. Oh, miss. Let me apologize. My name is Nation Hollingsworth. I’m so pleased to meet you. I have heard about you, you know.”

  “Vete. Just go away.” I wished Brody was standing there with a machete. Prairie was in another room with her circle of girls, and I swooped into the midst of them, caught her arm, and whispered, “Are you still mad at me?”

  She smiled, but there was ice in her eyes. “Whyever would you ask that? We are the best of friends.”

  I lowered my eyes. “You’re not convincing me and I’ve never even been to one of your folderol parties where you learn to trick people with your words. Look me in the eyes.”

  “I am mad at you.”

  “Not believing that, either. Whether you are feeling like you’ve got a bur or not, we are all in this class together and I’m trying to get shed of a horsefly wearing long pants.” The girls around us gasped and looked in different directions. I shrugged and added, “Have you seen the Dutch masters’ room yet? We have to write a paper on one of them. Might as well pretend to actually earn one of those straight A grades you girls get for doing nothing. What’s wrong, didn’t you know everyone sees that you don’t turn in papers? Come along, ladies.” They let themselves be led by me, it seemed, even against their own wills. I shook my head. Bunch of ninnies without a backbone among them. By the time I was done taking notes, I had been occupied long enough that the girls had slipped away, leaving me alone. I didn’t see that cayuse named Hollingsworth when I got back to the photography room and I was glad. I just wanted to be left alone to see the art and photographs. The museum had magnifier glasses hanging by every plate and I used them until it was time to leave.

  The very next day I finally got a message from Aubrey. It was not just a letter but a packet, a wide and thick stack of something, wrapped in twine.

  Dear Mary Pearl,

  Enclosed you will find a gift for you, and a sum of money in a bank draft to help you in your studies.

  Very fondly yours,

  A. W. Hanna, Esquire.

  He mentioned nothing of missing me or loving me. Fondly yours? What kind of note was this from my betrothed? I sat on my bunk in the dormitory with all the girls around me chattering about their classwork or some fellow they fancied, and read it again, my heart pounding. At last I set down the note and looked at what was beneath it. It was a bank draft on his account in Tucson for two thousand dollars. It was enough to stay here for ten years and I’d never have to sweep another floor or sort another Dewey decimal number. Under that, in its own blue card stock wrapper, was a stack of papers titled “Deed.” It outlined a section of property giving all the metes and bounds in henceforths and thereuntos. Six hundred forty acres. Then I saw the name of the previous owner and I knew where it was. My heart soared.

  He had bought the Wainbridge ranch for us to live at. Next to Ma and Pa! And there I’d been, thinking I’d have to be stuck in town the rest of my days. My mind raced ahead at the horses we’d run, the cattle. Probably get the old-fashioned criollos from Mexico, because they did well on the scrub grass but if we get a good well, we can bring in Charolais. Chickens. I’d want some good heat-sturdy stock. Aunt Sarah said she’d been thinking of getting sheep, what a thing! Of course we’d build a house. A big, fine, two-story house with a cupola on top of the third story to pull out the heat. I read the deed again. It was in my name alone. Aubrey’s name was not on it. I reckoned he meant for me to know it was mine for the having and he’d add his name when we got married. I just wished he’d spent a bit more time on his letter to me. It was mighty slim on words, from a fellow that I’d written to nearly every day confessing my longings for him.

  I locked all those things away. I didn’t do well on my test in art history later, with my mind set square on six hundred-odd acres of desert land a long way off. He could have at least written “dearest” instead of dear. I wrote home to Ma and Pa, telling them of the gift, all the while wishing Prairie were still my friend so I could tell her in person. But I figured owning land still wouldn’t make me good enough to go to her tea parties.

  * * *

  I packed my camera gear into a box I had had made by a carpenter in town. Everything fit really well, and I could keep ten plates in one side of it. The only thing was, I couldn’t get Duende to let me hang it behind the saddle. He didn’t like the thing banging against his backside. I asked him how was I going to go out and get the pictures I wanted if he wouldn’t haul it? But the horse just turned his head back at me and showed me his upper teeth. “Varmint,” I said. Finally I went and got a sheepskin and had the man nail that, wooly side down, under the camera box, and then that snorty cayuse let me pack it on him.

  That afternoon, as I was walking him around so he could get used to the idea of being both a saddle horse and a pack mule, Prairie rode up on her sidesaddled cayuse. “Ho, there, Miss Mary!”

  I had to grip Duende’s halter. He got to sniffing her mare and put his ears back and forward real quick about five times. “Back up, Duende. Alto. Hello, Miss Prairie. Are you done attending all those parties so now you can talk to me?”

  She stiffened. “It isn’t like that. Ma makes me go to cotillion lessons. Dancing and social graces. It’s not a party for fun, it is lessons in deportment and fine dining. Elocution and refinement of one’s public bearing and demeanor. Dreadfully boring. Anyhow, I’m really sorry.”

  I kneed Duende to get up beside her horse and we walked on. “I’ve never been to a party of any kind, except roasting a beef quarter in our fenced yard. Everyone brings cake or beans and salad or some tortillas. How do you have an elocution party for refinement and demeanor?”

  “Everyone dresses in their best. We sip tea and eat petit fours. I have had to have fittings for four new gowns. It takes forever. And Ma bought me three fans, but one wasn’t the right shade of rose to go with my cream and amber gown with the embroidered sash, so we had to take it back and order another. New hats and fascinators in the latest colors. The hairdresser! Oh, I could tell you things that would give you nightmares about having to sit still hours for her to do my hair.”

  “How do you keep up your schoolwork, doing all that? Or is that why you don’t really do the schoolwork?”

  “The teachers all understand the strain we’re under. Besides, school doesn’t really matter, honey. Cotillion practice is the key to my future. I’m just here until I find a husband. You’re lucky, you’ve already got one waiting.”

  I was ready to brag to her, “Aubrey bought me a ranch,” but I reckoned I’d keep quiet for now. I remembered Aubrey saying how he’d teach me to go amongst the finest societies. How I’d learn to dress and talk refined, so I asked, “If it’s so all-fired important, can I come along and learn it, too?”

  “Well, well—well, your parents have to arrange for it. You’ll have to take music lessons. Do you play the harp or the piano? Violin? Do you speak French? See, you have to start sooner. There’s dance steps, and singing, and the great works of art and composers from the Baroque period. You have to quote poetry.”

  “I’m pretty good at listening to music, although I’ve never seen a harp in person. I speak Spanish pretty fair. And I’m getting better at Latin. Why don’t you teach me some of that society partygoing, and for trade, I’ll teach you to shoot a pistol?”

  She looked positively skittish, her eyes scanning the corners of the earth like I’d laid a snake in her lap. “I don’t think I could.”

  After a minute I said, “And you ain’t inviting me to the lessons, either, I see.”

  “You see, it isn’t up to me. It’s all arranged by the society—”

  “I can pay for it. I’ve already got a handle on the great works of art. Even some of the naked ones. Let me see your drawings of the ballet dancers.”

  “Oh, Mary Pearl. There are tests. At each party there are tests. They have a person, or an incident arranged. It’s always to see how a girl reacts. Every moment you are watched and judged and graded. If you were to come, you see, they’d be watching you, too. You see, it is … I like you, Mary Pearl. I love you like a special sister.”

  “My clothes aren’t right?”

  “It’s not just that.”

  I stiffened. Did she mean my clothes weren’t right, and then some? These were the best dresses I’d ever had, never mind they were made over a bit from letting out that corset. I kept them clean. I patched the holes and I washed my hair regular. Did up all the buttons on my shoes without fail. Ironed my hair ribbons. What could she have meant, “special sister”? Was I an oddity she didn’t want her fancy friends to know about? “What is it, just, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong, how can I fix it? My betrothed back in the Territory expects me to come home with some fancy ways, I reckon. I can take a test. I got into a class only boys were in, I reckon I can learn that stuff, too.” As I heard myself say those things to her, I hated Prairie Amelia Longmore for making me beg for her knowledge. I decided that instant to write a long, long letter to Elsa, a girl like me, who I could pour out my thoughts to. And Clove. And the boys. And Pa and Ma. I didn’t need one speck of Wheaton’s foolish harp-playing cake-eating folderol. Prairie stayed quiet for a long while. So I said, “Well, then if you got nothing to say I reckon I sure do understand,” and kneed my horse ahead of her and took him into a canter. I didn’t expect her to push up next to me again, but she did.

  “No, you don’t. You see, you’re different. You say ‘reckon’ instead of ‘believe’ and you stride straight into a room as if you owned all the air in it, instead of tipping in demurely as a lady should. You’d not fit in with the other girls and it wouldn’t be because you were there to learn things. They wouldn’t give you a test because they’d think you were the test that day. The girls would be expected to react to you, be polite to you, and treat you as if you were some low sort of person who’d stumbled into the wrong door.”

  I felt like she’d just slapped all my teeth loose. My chin hurt from trying not to cry.

  Tears slipped easily down her cheeks. She said, “I don’t want you to be hurt. It’s all silliness and etiquette, but my mother sets a great store by it.”

  “Your ma seems to like me all right when I’ve come to supper.”

  “She does, you see. But the other ladies, well, we know their sort. They’re dreadfully judgmental about the ladies with whom their daughters associate.”

  “You make it sound like you only ‘associate’ with me same’s you would some orphan in bare feet at a revival meeting in a bean field. My pa calls that ‘love ’em with a stick.’ You’re building up a fine herd so’s you feed ’n water a stray and then drive ’em out from your fence before they have a chance to get served by your prize bull.”

  Prairie clamped her hand across her mouth. “What a thing to say.”

  “Well, don’t forget I pack a shooting iron and talk with an accent, too. I have homework to do. Reckon you’d better just get along now.”

  “Mary Pearl? Please don’t be angry. I just didn’t want you to think it was because you aren’t welcome. It’s because the others would treat you poorly.” Tears flowed in earnest down her face.

  I stared hard at her. “I don’t understand you at all. I know when I’ve been insulted, though. I’ve got family. I’ve got a fiancé. I own a section of land all to myself, one hundred percent. I don’t need any blasted electrocution lessons.”

  She looked at me, real startled. She smiled through her tears. “It’s elocution. Electrocution is when someone touches a wire and there’s a spark of electricity that kills you.”

  I didn’t smile with her. “I’m not a low person.”

  “I know you’re not. You are just different. I liked you the first time I met you. My mother and father do, too, and they think I’m destined to be a wild hooligan. They tell me you are more ladylike than I am, even though you speak differently. I used to slide down the banisters in my drawers and once I put a whole box of salt in my bathwater to play that I was in the ocean. It plugged up the plumbing for a week.”

  “That doesn’t sound so wild.”

  “I bit my piano teacher when I was eleven.”

  I stopped feeling bad for a minute, and almost laughed. “Why?”

  “He kept reaching over my shoulder and smacking my fingers with his pointing stick. He had body odor that made me ill and he reached over one too many times.”

  I didn’t laugh, but I didn’t feel like crying anymore. I added, “My cousin Charlie put glass eyeballs in a skull and wired them up so the jawbone laughed and the eyes rolled when a telegraph came to the stage station. Then he stuffed his old shirt and pants and used it to scare the lights out of my brother Clove.”

  “What about you? Didn’t you ever do anything sassy?” she asked.

  I thought a bit. “I got bit by a rattlesnake once. Lived over it. Worst thing I ever did was coming here. Ma didn’t want me to come. Pa said it was fine, though.”

  “That doesn’t seem so wild, either.”

  “When I was learning to brand, a couple of times I got the iron upside down. Pa said that cow had better learn to sunfish so the neighbors would know it was ours.”

  “How does a cow go fishing?”

  This time I laughed right out loud. “It’s when a horse jumps up so much his belly gets more light than his back.”

  “Let’s go riding.”

  “I have schoolwork.”

  “Can’t you leave off it for now?”

  Against my better learning and all my inner leanings, I agreed and rode to the surrounding farms alongside Prairie, her on a sidesaddle, and for a while I thought of breathing in all the air just like I owned it. That part she said, well, if it were true, I was glad of it. I knew where I wanted to go, a place we’d seen before, where I could set up my camera and get a couple of plates of the trees all turned colors. There was one already bare that seemed to reach for the branches in the others, the way it sat all black against the bright leaves. I liked the stillness of it. The lonesomeness.

  Prairie came along and just handed me things and moved a rock when I saw my camera was off-kilter. We didn’t talk much. I had to figure things out. I didn’t feel angry so much at her as at the way of life here. What a wagonload of nonsense was life in this big city. Not a speck of interest in where their water came from, nor whether there was enough for their neighbors to eat. Just busy with doing things and having things I wouldn’t even know I didn’t have, which included crystal punch bowls and harp lessons.