Lady Lee

MY FATHER was riding me on the saddle before him as we got near Miller Valley. "You help Lady Lee with her chores, hear? No ropin' hogs and creatin' hell like last time," he warned me.

He left me at Lady Lee's when he'd get a day's work in the valley during a round up or something like that. I was turning eleven or twelve, I reckon. We lived in Prescott. Dad mostly got odd jobs or went hunting or hired up with the scouts or did a bit of placer mining and he'd never know just what to do with me at such times. Not that there weren't a dozen families who'd have taken me in, but Dad liked to keep his eye on me and I guess he was scared that a lot of these families who thought he wasn't bringing me up right would try to get me away from him or something. Anyhow, he'd only set me down for a day with any nabor, from sunup to sunset, and then he'd call for me and we'd go back to our cabin and set the beans on the stove. I never could eat much after one of these days he'd leave me with a nabor to be taken care of because the women would feed me up to the teeth figuring I must be starving with only a man to look after my upbringing and education. What's more, no matter if it was the middle of summer, they'd pile clothes on me, and give me stuff to wear and for bedding and all, so Dad would always have a heavier load to take home than he had when he set out with me in the morning. Sometimes I'd be fed so much I'd almost be sick jogging in the saddle on the way home. And Lady Lee was a great hand at feeding anybody who happened along to her homestead.

Lady Lee wasn't her right name. She was a Simmons, an Englishwoman who had married a Southerner, and after the Civil War her husband got some homestead rights under the new laws that were being passed, borrowed some money and came west with her. All the West was being made by capital raised in the East for expansion out here, brand new clean towns were springing up Arizona Writers Project W. P. A.

But about Lady Lee. Her name was Mary. I hear they called her "Lady" because of the way she spoke and held herself. Her husband had left her and there she was, homesteading by herself, feeding the hogs, manuring her garden, doin' the chores, helping at calving and such, and all the time carryin' herself and acting as if she was Lady Bountiful of Old World Manor with servants and lackeys within call. Lady Lee was round the back when we rode up: my father dumped me on the porch. When he hollered-she came around and my father told her how I'd promised to help her this time and let the hogs alone and keep off ructions generally. She laughed and said I'd be a great help and she was glad I'd came because this was her busy day.

She looked very old to me but I guess she wasn't much over forty and not very big. In fact she was kind of skinny. She had light blue eyes, a wide mouth with lips that weren't very big and her cheekbones showed up kind of clear. She tilted her head so she could look up at my father from under the big bonnet she wore and said something I didn't catch about her being busy for someone who was coming home. Then my father said something and she gave a funny laugh and my father rode away and Lady Lee took me inside for something to eat.

It wasn't any good telling her I'd stuffed up on bacon and mush before leaving home -she had something on the fire, she said, and she knew I must be ravenous. I didn't know what ravenous was: it was a word Lady Lee was always using. So I sat at a rough table and looked at the crack in the log walls where some Indian had split the wood tryin' to get in while she was at town one day. Indians were still bothering folks in the Valley and they caused trouble for many years after this time I'm telling you about. There were bullet pocks in the outside walls and one bit of the roof was charred where Indians had tried to set it afire with burning arrows. I ate kind of slowly for I'd spoken the truth when I said my father and I had a good breakfast before sun up. But Lady Lee's cooking was a sight better than father's or mine, and presently my plate was clean although Lady Lee had filled it a couple of times and when I pushed it away and backed my chair I found I could hardly move. Lady Lee said I'd better rest myself awhile for it wasn't good to work on a full stomach which people got when they ate after being 'ravenous' and she'd call me when she needed me for the chores. She went out the back and I could hear her outside while I lay on a sort of window seat and looked across the valley at Granite in the early sunlight. Presently the sun got too bright and I looked around the room again and out the door where Lady Lee had gone.

Drawings by Ross Santee

The house was almost square and the walls about ten feet high, but it was divided into two big rooms, and the door I was looking through led out to two lean-to rooms at the back. One was the kitchen and the other a pantry of sorts. I could hear the clatter of dishes and pans. There was a nice smell of wild grapes boiling. On the shelf in the kitchen was the candle mould, opened up, and a greasy pan of fat underneath it. Lady Lee made her own candles, just as she moulded her own bullets, just like a man. I'd heard Dad say that if he was surrounded by Apaches and needed help bad, sooner than have the sheriff and a military detachment by his side, he'd have Lady Lee.

There were all these sounds in the back, but I couldn't see anyone, and presently the room got hotter as the sun rose high, and the last thing I remember was staring at the candle mould which got bigger and bigger till it filled the room and then I guess I fell asleep. When I woke my eyelids were sticky and my head thick and the room was very hot and there was someone talking in the next room. Not the lean-to, but the other half of the house the bedroom.

I heard a man's voice, sort of thick, and then Lady Lee's, and after a while it seemed she was giving some account of the homestead and talking in a low, quick, bitter tone. I knew, of course, that times weren't so good with her, nor with any in the valley except the big cattlemen, and even they were having difficulty getting credit and keeping up with expenses while their