The Turquoise Stones

You can hear a good deal about Bill Keys on this road, and hardly a word from the woman beside him. Frances Lawton was a telegrapher from Los Angeles. In nineteen eighteen she married him and rode out to his ranch in an automobile. She bore seven children. William lived five days. David, five years on, lived five days. Ellsworth lived to eleven, and they lost him in November of nineteen thirty-seven. Four grew up. The three boys are buried at the ranch. She put up preserves from his orchard. She fed her stove dried Joshua tree, because it burned even and clean. She kept tables along the garden fence, loaded with the glass she collected. The garden itself was an unkempt thing, full of herbs and home medicines, and she had one explanation for it. "The first priority of a desert family was survival and especially to get through summer and winter." Then came the shooting, and San Quentin, and the years he was gone. The cattle went. To keep the family, she had to leave the place. She went back to Los Angeles for a job, with the four children to care for, and friends checked on the abandoned ranch. Her three boys stayed out there without her. She wrote to an old friend, Erle Stanley Gardner, the man behind Perry Mason, and he took up the case. Bill came home to begin again, and she came back. She died in January of nineteen sixty-three. Bill was too ill to object, and she was buried in town, parted from those boys a second time. When he got well, past eighty years old, he got county permission and brought her home to lie beside them. "I built up tombstones inlaid with turquoise," he recalled. Turquoise never got anybody through a summer. He set it in the stone anyway.