Saffire Read online

  “A mulatto shouldn’t try to reach above her class,” Mrs. Penny said, probably in a huff at being ignored and in another huff because Saffire had proven her wrong. “Next thing you know, the silver-dollar people will start wanting to get paid in gold. Here she is taking up a turn when good folks need to see the colonel.”

  Mrs. Penny crossed her arms and set her jaw with self-righteous satisfaction and spat out one more word. “Mulatto.”

  Saffire glanced at Mrs. Penny, then back at the book. I was in the middle, and I saw enough in that brief glance to understand that Mrs. Penny’s poison dart had stung the girl.

  Mulatto. Mule. Hybrid cross between horse and donkey. The girl beside me was not a mule. The girl was a girl. She had her own hopes and dreams, like Winona had hopes and dreams. Not long, I told myself, then I’d be able to begin the journey home, where I could again sit at my daughter’s bedside every evening and read to her until she fell asleep.

  Mulatto.

  I couldn’t get that word out of my head.

  Mulatto.

  Half-breed.

  I reminded myself that once you start to defend someone, it’s difficult to find a place to stop.

  But I went ahead and took that first step anyway.

  “Ma’am,” I said to Mrs. Penny, acting on a hunch. I pulled out a third novel and offered it to her. “I don’t mind sharing all around. A Room with a View. Just out last year. Story takes place in Italy. You might like it, and with appointments here moving so slowly, looks like we’ll be waiting awhile.”

  Mrs. Penny’s lips tightened even more, and I restrained a smile. I was correct.

  I pushed the book closer.

  “Please don’t trouble yourself,” she said.

  “No trouble at all.” Yes, it was petty. I didn’t care. “Try the first few pages. Let me know what you think.”

  The girl had stopped reading and was watching Mrs. Penny closely. Maybe she had the same hunch as I.

  Given no choice, Mrs. Penny accepted the book.

  “Lady,” the girl said. “Want to read us the first page out loud? Maybe it’s as good as the one I have.”

  Was that question posed innocently or as a challenge? If as a challenge, there was a nice devilish part to the girl that added to my immediate affection for her.

  “It probably isn’t a story suitable for children,” Mrs. Penny said.

  “Ma’am,” I said, “go ahead. I’m sure if you find any offensive words, you would keep them to yourself as you read to us.”

  Mrs. Penny left the book unopened. “She obviously has her own book. I’d advise her to stay with it.”

  “Of course.” I nodded to Mrs. Penny. “Just go ahead and enjoy it on your own to pass some time here.” It gave me great satisfaction to observe Mrs. Penny’s eyes as she pretended to scan the first few pages.

  A minute later, Mrs. Penny handed the book back to me. “I find this to be boring.”

  I flipped to the opening words of the novel and read in silence.

  “The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!”

  “Strange”—I tapped the page—“when something begins like this, with a sword fight between two noblemen, I’m immediately drawn by the action.”

  “Not me,” Mrs. Penny said. “I don’t need cheap trash like that to hold my attention. That’s exactly why I put it down.”

  “Of course.” I set the book back onto my lap along with my copy of The Game.

  “Sword fight?” Saffire said.

  I winked as I handed her the book. For some reason, I wanted to see how she would react when she found out that Mrs. Penny was a pitiful illiterate woman lashing out at the world. I was ready to silence Saffire with a shake of the head if needed. One public humiliation didn’t deserve another in return.

  Saffire read the opening words and lifted her eyes to me, giving me a smile that made me feel like a knight in a King Arthur story.

  “Sword fight.” Saffire gave me a return wink. “I might like this too.”

  “Not me,” Mrs. Penny repeated. “Trash.”

  “Stick with The Virginian,” I told Saffire. “Soon enough you might discover outlaws and shootouts.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “In fact, how about you keep that book as a gift from me?”

  “My tito would love that,” Saffire said. “Perhaps you could inscribe the inside of the book for him and for me?”

  “Tito?”

  “Grandfather in Spanish. Well, actually, abuelito. But I like to call him Tito. Spanish is his first language, but not mine. He’s the one who sent me to school and made sure I could read in both languages. He’ll like a story with outlaws and shootouts. As for me, when I am around him, I sometimes stop worrying about what has happened to my mother.”

  I sensed that Saffire had again offered an opening, if I wanted to take it, to ask more about her, about why she was waiting for an audience with Colonel Goethals and why she expected to be sent away yet again when her name was called.

  Sensing her trust, I toyed with the idea of taking the girl into my meeting with Colonel Goethals. Given that there was no higher American authority than the man who had sent me, I had the leverage to make Goethals listen to Saffire’s story first—whatever the story was.

  But the girl’s story was not my business. Besides, Goethals probably knew the girl’s story already. Therefore, either the story wasn’t worth listening to or, if it was, Goethals didn’t care or couldn’t do anything about it.

  Instead of asking questions about the girl’s mother, I slid my journal from my valise and pulled the pencil out from the coils of the journal. It was here I recorded all the things I thought Winona would like to hear about on my return. On the steamship tonight, I’d write a description of Saffire and Mrs. Penny and how Saffire had shown a high degree of class by playing along. Winona would like the story. She would like Saffire.

  I used the pencil to spell Saffire in the front pages of the book for her, two f’s, no p or h. I saw that my attention to the correct spelling gave her satisfaction.

  “My mother gave me the name Safrana,” she said. “But nobody remembers when I was called anything but Saffire. I decided to spell it the pretty way, not the way that the jewel is spelled. A p and an h is a silly way to spell the f sound. I think the people who invented the dictionary could have been more sensible about how to spell words. Like colonel. Do you see an r anywhere in that word in the dictionary?”

  I touched my knee.

  “Yup,” Saffire said. “In my dictionary that part of your leg would be spelled n-e-e.”

  We traded smiles.

  “And your grandfather’s name?”

  “He’s not my real grandfather, but he’s just like a grandfather to me. Ezequiel Sandoval. He has always helped me and my mother.”

  She spelled out Ezequiel’s first name and his surname.

  During my exile years, show after show, I had signed thousands of souvenir leaflets for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. As I signed this novel, I forced myself not to use the automatic flourish in my signature that I once used with such misplaced pride.

  James Holt.

  I dated the inscription. Sunday, January 10, 1909.

  I gave Saffire the book, and she accepted it gravely, as if the gift was a great honor. Then she opened it and immersed herself in the story again.

  I doubted Mrs. Penny would bother us anymore.

  So I began reading The Game and stayed inside the story until Billy May told Saffire that Colonel Goethals would not see her and that since Mr. Holt was the next person in line, it was time for Mr. Holt to have an audience with the colonel.

  She would not be dismissed that easily and asked, “Did the colonel read the note I left for him last week? He’s the only person who can help me.”
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br />   “I have no answer for you,” Billy May said.

  “Then tell him I am going to keep coming back until I hear his answer. And if I don’t get an answer soon, tell him I meant what I put in the note.”

  Twenty minutes, I told myself as I stood to walk past Saffire, who said nothing to me.

  Twenty minutes. At most, that was all it would take to turn down whatever Goethals asked me to do and for me to begin my journey home.

  Two men waited in the office. The man behind the desk I recognized immediately from newspaper photos and because I had expected him there—Colonel George Washington Goethals.

  In the photos, he wore his military uniform, rounded collar fully buttoned up. Here, the uniform jacket was hanging on a hook on the wall, and he had on a white shirt already showing wrinkles from the heat and humidity, the sleeves rolled up. He had a squarish face with a thick, immaculately trimmed mustache as gray as his equally trimmed hair.

  The other man I recognized too, but for different reasons. It was the prissy man whose face was set in permanent disapproval of life. He must have gone around the building to come in through the office’s other door, at the back wall.

  “Mr. Miskimon,” Goethals said to him. “This will be a private audience.”

  A slight flinch crossed Miskimon’s face. He probably had not expected to be dismissed, but that was the extent of his protest. Without a sound, he departed through the rear door of the office.

  “Welcome to Panama.” Goethals gestured at a straight-backed chair opposite his desk.

  I remained standing. I wanted him to understand that while he might be the highest authority in the American Zone, I was not under his command.

  “I’ve been fully briefed on what attitude to expect from you,” Goethals said. “And it’s not my intent to change it. But let’s be gentlemen about this.”

  It was an admonishment I deserved. I sat across from him, putting my valise on the floor.

  Goethals opened a desk drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope. “As promised, this is from the man who sent you here.”

  He handed it to me. I tucked it into the valise.

  “You don’t need to confirm the contents?”

  “That would be an insult to the man who sent me. I wouldn’t be here if I did not trust him.”

  Goethals nodded. “According to that man, you can be trusted too.” He opened a file on his desk and scanned it. “James Holt. You were fourteen in the Dakotas when you and our mutual friend pursued a pair of horse thieves. That’s where you first impressed yourself upon him. Before it became fashionable to want to impress him.”

  “He was deputy sheriff. He asked for help. Didn’t take us long, and they didn’t put up much of a fight. Most horse thieves are scared, desperate, and tired.”

  Those were the golden years of cattle. A darling industry to New York investors, the shipping of fattened cattle from our prime grazing lands to the markets in the east. One of those New Yorkers—devastated by the horrible irony of enduring a Valentine’s Day when his mother and wife died within hours of the other, one from typhoid fever and the other from a kidney ailment—fled to the Dakotas, determined to build a new life. At first the working ranchers, including me, regarded him as a dandy, but his earnestness, while not exactly gaining him true respect, gave us an affection for him.

  “The summer of ’84 is what I have down here,” Goethals said. “You left the area in ’85, and he was gone in ’87.”

  So much unspoken with that date, ’87. Worst winter in a century, everyone said. Eighteen eighty-seven was less than a decade after our family had been among the first to run cattle in the Badlands, and just over a decade after Custer’s ego had led him into defeat and death not far to the south and west of our homestead.

  Eighty-seven. After that winter, the man who had sent me to Panama lost his cattle ranch and went back to New York to resurrect his political career.

  Eighty-seven. It destroyed most of my father’s ranch. Maybe it would have been different if I’d been there. But I’d left in ’85, never to be forgiven for my treachery, and pronounced myself in exile.

  “Then ’98”—Goethals kept his eyes on the file—“you and your father joined our mutual friend in Cuba.”

  “Again, he asked for help.”

  “Was San Juan everything he reported it to be?” Goethals looked up from the files.

  “He tends to color his recollections with a romantic view. Some of us were a little less gung-ho about matters. But as you know, the press favored his recollections, and that was helpful to him.”

  “Again, in Cuba, you impressed him.”

  I stayed silent.

  Goethals turned his attention to a second file on his desk. “Mr. Miskimon passed along a report from the ship stating that you played occasional illegal poker with reasonable success, did little drinking, showed politeness but nothing else to the married and unmarried women who showed interest in you, and mainly sat on the upper deck in the sun and read novels during the trip from New York to Colón. That reveals something about you, I suppose.”

  I let the colonel stew in what his report revealed about me.

  He fixed his gaze on me. “It should be clear that I need to decide for myself if I can trust you.”

  “I don’t know that your opinion will matter. My promise to the man who sent me was to listen. I’ll listen to you for as long as you’d like to talk. That will fulfill my obligation to him. Then I’m on the next train to Colón, and I’ll be off the isthmus by sunset.”

  Goethals frowned. “You’ve come a long way, and you’ve been paid for it. I expect you to listen to my request with an open mind.”

  I gave a half smile.

  “I think you are working too hard at indifference. Along with revolver, holster, and books, your valise contains a mug, brush, and safety razor, yet here you are unshaven, as if to make a point.”

  He clearly wanted me to know that he had arranged for a search of my belongings during my time on the steamer. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I understood that.

  I shrugged one shoulder.

  “You’ll keep an open mind?” he asked.

  “You have a canal to build. I have a ranch that needs tending. Cows generally begin to calve toward the end of February, and I’m looking at three weeks to make it home. Most of all, I miss my daughter. So, at the end of today, I intend to be on the evening sail out of Colón.”

  Goethals said, “I asked our mutual friend for someone tough and smart and someone outside of Washington circles with good moral character whom we could trust. So far, with the exception of your indulgence in poker, I happen to agree with his opinion of you. However, given your attitude, I now wonder if he sent you simply to appease me.”

  “Or maybe he knew that I needed the bank draft in this envelope to make all the delinquent payments on the mortgage to my ranch, and he was looking for an honorable way to get it to me because of how my father and I helped him on occasion.”

  “That you’re okay with charity like that surprises me,” Goethals said. “I had been starting to form an entirely different opinion of you.”

  “He knows me well enough to know it’s a loan. The sooner I get back to my ranch, the sooner I can begin working in order to return him the money. With interest.”

  “Unless I decide otherwise.” Goethals leaned forward. “With just a couple words, I could ensure you’d spend a year in the Zone penitentiary—located, conveniently enough, here in Culebra—for any one of a list of reasons. You would not be working your ranch.”

  Now it was I who fixed my gaze on him. “I recall you suggested we proceed with this meeting like gentlemen.”

  “The man who sent you also put me in charge of completing this canal at any cost. And he gave me complete and unquestioned authority. Putting you in the Zone penitentiary is the act of a gentleman, compared to the alternatives at my disposal.”

  We had now hit a stalemate. “I have discovered the hard way th
at one of my weaknesses is the unwillingness to be pushed around, no matter the cost. I’d suggest you either call in your assistants to arrange for my prison time or watch me walk out the door.”

  Goethals leaned back and smiled. “Does that weakness of character explain why your nose looks like it’s been busted once or twice?”

  “Just once. One punch. Not that I learned from it.”

  “What if my threat to send you to jail was a test and you just passed?”

  “Do you have anything else you want me to listen to? If not, then I consider I have fulfilled my obligation to the man who sent me.”

  “Our conversation isn’t quite finished, Mr. Holt. Someone else will join us. He’s furious already that I did not allow him here immediately. I expect he’ll be petulant as a result, so don’t take it personally, especially because the petulance seems to suit his character and station in life. And, given his lack of stature, I find it adds an element of amusement when I am forced to deal with him.”

  “I am obligated to listen only to you.”

  “On the other hand, petulance diminishes you. I’m guessing you’re aware of that and already regret it.”

  I sighed. Would I ever be successful at reining in my spitefulness? “My apologies.”

  “Accepted. Let’s be clear on something before he joins us. Only you and I know who arranged for your trip to Panama. I think it would be wise to keep it that way.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. Now let’s bring in Cromwell.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “William Nelson Cromwell?”

  “Mr. Holt,” Goethals said in his even tone, “by now you should have realized this is a high-stakes situation. Why else would you have been sent here by President Roosevelt?”

  I well knew of William Nelson Cromwell, as did anyone in America who followed headlines in regard to presidential politics and the Panama Canal, two of the most popular subjects in the media. After all, if one takes delight in observing vitriol, blatant lies, character assassination, cronyism, and corruption, then American presidential elections provide first-class entertainment—happily repeated by newspapers of all stripes. We read those headlines and tut-tut with the delicious sense of self-righteousness that it allows us; it would be hypocritical to suggest I had been any different during the campaign the previous fall. In the Dakotas, where I saw a newspaper only once a week, those headlines drew me into the pre-election battles as if I were watching our locals compete for a mayoralty. As a result, like most Americans, I had a thorough knowledge of the running battle between the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, and his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who was making a third attempt to secure the presidency.