Word of Death

Cochise died on June 8, 1874.

I know the date precisely because I looked it up, years later, when I could. In the weeks after, I could not have told you the date. I could not have told you much.

Word came from the south. He had died on the reservation; the Chiricahua Reservation in his homeland, which he had chosen over relocation, which had been the victory and the concession in the same breath. He had died on his own land. There is something to be said for that.

I have tried to find it.

Then word came of Sings.

I will not write the details. I have not been able to write the details, in a hundred and fifty years, and I will not start now. She had met her final death in the weeks after Cochise. By her own hand. In grief.

That is what the word said.

I sat with this.

I sat with this for a very long time, in a room in a house in Tucson. The house is still standing; I own it still. It was winter, or what passes for winter in Tucson, which is to say it was cold in the evenings and the saguaro did not notice.

She had been gone since 1861. Thirteen years. I had known her for a hundred and ninety years by the time the word came: the girl in the Salem woods, the pirate century, the Revolution, the prairie years, the Arizona roads. A hundred and ninety years of someone knowing where you were in the dark.

One hundred and ninety years.

She had said she would come back.

I sat in the room in Tucson and understood that the sentence I had been finishing for a hundred and ninety years had just stopped. Not at a period. Not at a conclusion. Mid-word.

Stop.

I am not going to tell you how long I sat there.

Long enough.

I was still walking around, still managing my affairs, still performing the functions of someone in my position, in the months and years that followed. But I was not present for it. I was elsewhere, still in that room, still waiting for a sentence to complete itself that was not going to complete.

Something happened in 1875 that kept me here.

I will tell you about that next.