The Turquoise

by Anya Seton

  On the third evening, she prepared their simple supper and sat down on the doorstep to wait. The vanished sun sent a vivid afterglow from the hills by the Rio Grande, tinting in rose and purple shadows the adobe walls and the dusty road. In that altitude even the August air chilled quickly, and Fey shivered, while she strained her eyes for the first glimpse of a horseman coming down San Francisco Street. No horseman came, only two tired burros laden with wood and a small boy who stared at her inquisitively, but did not speak. Fey watched the burros until they turned left on the Agua Fria road. If I don’t look back again until I’ve counted twenty-five, Dada will surely be here, she thought. And she played the little game with herself, counting very slowly. But when she had completed the count and turned, the street from the plaza was deserted. A moment later the Parroquia bell began to toll for vespers. It was answered by the lighter chime from Guadalupe Church across the river. The child was so accustomed to the sound of church bells that ordinarily she did not hear them. Tonight the first dong, dong, dong, from the Parroquia hammered against her ears like a warning. She sat up straight, listening in mounting unease to the measured dissonance as the other church answered. The churches were trying to tell her something and the something was fear. She knew it with a swift and terrifying certainty. ‘ Alone. Alone. Alone.’ That was what the bells said. She jumped from the doorstep and running into the house slammed the door. She flung herself down on the colchón, her fingers rammed into her ears. After a while the bells stopped, but the fear did not pass. She was too young to reason, to convince herself that it was not late, and that on a fifty-mile ride there might be a dozen simple explanations for delay. She knew only the wild, unreasoning fear which had been produced by the message of the bells. She lay rigid on the colchón for a long time, and little by little the blackness of terror lightened. She had not been taught to pray, the words of the Bible which Andrew had used chiefly as textbook did not come to comfort her, but it was a desperate prayer which she sent forth, nevertheless. And the answer came. Not in words, nor in any outward happening within the still room. It was a sensation of comfort and strength. A feeling that no matter what happened to her there would always be strength enough to meet it, a strength from without and within herself inextricably mingled. She fell at last into a deep, undreaming sleep.

  In the village of San Miguel, Andrew’s body was hastily buried outside the churchyard wall. The black cholera, legacy from a westbound caravan, had appeared in a brief fierce epidemic to strike down, as always, the least likely victims. On the night of Andrew’s arrival, he had gone with Doctor Kane to examine a patient with a severe case of bladder stones. Kane, the first man in the territory to dare a lithotomy, had heard through an itinerant peon that there was a good gringo doctor in Santa Fe. Kane had been interested and dispatched a Jemez Indian with a note suggesting consultation. Andrew had been profoundly gratified to receive this note. He polished all his instruments, packed his saddlebag, rented a horse, and set off enthusiastically. It had been years since he had talked to one of his own profession. He had agreed with Doctor Kane and they had decided to operate together the next morning. But the patient, besides stones, had the cholera, that incredibly swift form which attacks and kills in a few hours. By the next morning he was dead, and by the next evening, when the anxious Kane went to the little posada to see what was detaining his young colleague, he found the Scot already unconscious. There was nothing to be done.

  Kane fortified himself with whiskey and later intimidated the priest and a terrified peon into performing the burial, then he hurried back to his home at Mora, breathing thanksgiving for his own immunity. Andrew, with characteristic reserve, had told nothing about himself, so that Kane naturally assumed him to be one of the myriad unattached wanderers who constantly turned up in the West. He did his duty by sending the same Jemez Indian back to Santa Fe with a message and determined to forget the whole unfortunate matter. Death in one or another of its violent forms was a constant companion on the plains and one did not sentimentalize it.

  Alejo, the Jemez Indian, was bored by this second trip to Santa Fe; he was anxious to get back to his pueblo which he had left only to make the annual pilgrimage to the ruined pueblo at Pecos—the home of his ancestors. But the white medicine man had paid him with three pieces of silver, and no Pueblo Indian ever failed to discharge a debt. So he rode down San Francisco Street on the second day after Andrew’s death, and knocked at the house he had found before.

  Ramona opened the door. ‘ Ay de mi! ’ she said, staring stupidly at the tall Indian. ‘We thought it was the medico come home at last.’

  Behind the woman’s fat shoulder, Alejo saw the white, anxious face of a child, and his expressionless eyes softened a trifle; the Pueblos were fond of children.

  ‘Doctor Cameron is dead, very quick,’ said Alejo, carefully repeating the words Kane had made him memorize...

  Ramona’s jaw dropped. ‘ Muerto...’ she echoed. She made the sign of the cross.

  Fey, who had learned, perforce, some Spanish from Ramona, made an inarticulate sound.

  The Indian shifted his eyes to the little face. ‘You, Cameron’s child? ’ he asked.

  She nodded, her strained eyes fixed on his.

  ‘He die of bad sickness in San Miguel,’ said Alejo, finishing Kane’s message.

  He saw the child stiffen, and her pallor become white as the wall behind her, but she made no sound, and the Indian approved. It was thus that one should receive bad news; even a child must learn courage and strength.

  He pushed past Ramona, and, looking down at Fey, said in his own Tewa tongue, ‘I feel sad, little one, to be a bearer of evil, but the sadness will pass as dry times pass when rain comes at last to nourish the parched earth. The sky spirits guard you.’

  Fey listened to the unknown musical words, feeling their intent. Her mouth quivered, but she did not move. Alejo turned and mounted his horse in one swift motion. ‘Adios,’ he said softly, and was gone.

  Ramona immediately burst forth with a long wail. ‘Ay de mi—pobrecita que lástima! ’ She crossed herself again and sobbed noisily. The fate of the gringo doctor whom she had always feared interested her not at all, but she had affection for her nursling, and besides a disquieting thought began to prick at her sluggish brain. What was to be done with the niña? She could not stay on here alone. Ramona mulled this over for a few minutes. There was a simple and obvious solution, but would Pedro beat her when he found there was yet another mouth to fill at home? She continued to weep perfunctorily while her gaze wandered around the little house. She knew that it was rented, but what furnishings there were belonged to the médico. Ramona stopped sobbing as a brilliant idea struck her. The médico was dead; therefore these fine things—the real table and chairs, the colchónes, the little trunk and the cooking utensils, even the beautiful statue of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe—" belonged to Feyita. Instead of beating her, Pedro would be glad when he got all these luxuries with the child. They would have the best-furnished home in the Analco.

  ‘Cease crying, pobrecita,’ said Ramona happily, though Fey was not crying and still stood by the door in the same rigid position. ‘You will come home with me now. I will make a good chile with the lamb Domingo so fortunately found up the cañón. A full stomach digests sorrow. Later Pedro can come on the burro and fetch these.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her thick begrimed hand.

  Fey said nothing. Her mind had shrunk into a small white kernel which nothing dented. The bells were right, she thought, I’m all alone. But the night of the bells and the terror seemed far in the past. It didn’t hurt now. Nothing did.

  She obediently followed Ramona from the house. They walked to the Rio footbridge very slowly. Ramona was fat and five months pregnant besides. They crossed the creek, ascended the path between two com patches, and across the road from the seldom-used Chapel of San Miguel, they entered the Torres dwelling. This leaky, two-roomed mud hovel was to be Fey’s home for ten years.

  Chapter T
hree

  THE MEMORY of Andrew and her first seven years sank to the lowest depths of Fey’s consciousness. Urged by the self-protective instinct of childhood, she became as like her companions as possible. These were Domingo, the oldest Torres, three months older than Fey, and her foster brother, since they had nursed from the same breast; Maria, Pepita, and Juanito, the new baby. By day she played with them, wandered the streets with them, or shared the few household tasks which Ramona’s relaxed housekeeping system demanded. This meant that the copper pot in which all food was stewed would sometimes be carried down to the river, swished out, and filled with amole—the yucca root which the children dug from the hills—until it produced suds enough in conjunction with the stream to do the minimum of laundry. Once in a while, when the leaks in the house became too pronounced, Ramona, Fey, and the two little girls would mix a fresh batch of mud and plaster their walls. Sometimes the goatskins on which all the family slept were carried out to the Torres corn and bean patch, shaken and sunned. These were occasional tasks. There was only one which was constant and inescapable: the pounding of boiled com into paste in a stone metate for the baking of the daily tortillas.

  It was an uncomplicated life, and on the whole a healthy one. Ramona was placid and kind enough. Pedro was neither, es pecially when drunk, but though he beat his wife and children whenever he felt like it, he never touched Fey. The extraordinary fact of her being able to read and write English awed him, and he had, as Ramona expected, felt that the dowry she brought with her repaid him for the bother of feeding her.

  He had been an important man in the Barrio Analco for months after Fey’s arrival. People had come from as far as Agua Fria to stare at the pine table and chairs made just like those in the houses of the ricos. They had poked at the colchónes and wool blankets, genuflected enviously before the elaborate figure of Guadalupe. El Pedro was a lucky hombre, por Dios! He sold the cowhide trunk in the plaza. An American soldier bought the Cameron dirk, and a captain’s wife paid four pesos for the sporran, which she considered a truly elegant pocketbook and thereafter carried to market. For the moth-eaten kilt there was no sale, and Ramona used it to swaddle the baby whose earliest amusement was the chewing of new holes in the proud Cameron tartan.

  For a long time Pedro was relieved from the tedious necessity of earning a living. Instead of trips to the mountains for wood, he could now spend his days in the saloons, or sprawled under the portales playing monte, or gambling on the cockfights like a caballero. And when the first cash had gone, the fine new furnishings went after it, one by one. In a year the Torres home had reverted to its original state of nudity. Only the Bible and the figure of Guadalupe were spared, because for these he had a superstitious veneration. He had never before touched a book, much less a Protestant Bible, but it was an awesome thing full of little black marks which the gringa child could translate into words. So it went in the nicho with the statue of the Virgin and a wooden bulto of San Francisco.

  Fey was too young and too much bewildered to make any objection to the disappearance of her property. With the other small Torres she ate and slept and played like a healthy puppy. It was only at night, sometimes, that she would wake up suddenly to find herself crying for no reason and Maria, next to her on the goatskin, would say crossly, ‘Stop making that noise, Feyita. It woke me.’

  When she was nine, she made her first communion with the other children, and by now so perfect was her Spanish that the busy priest never was aware that this child was any different from the rest of the little Mexicans. On the surface, Fey herself was not aware of any difference, but the knowledge was there, and when she was fourteen an episode awakened her.

  She was still small for her age, but the first physical signs of womanhood were approaching. To her astonishment her breasts, under the chemise which she wore day and night, had suddenly grown large and firm as gourds. Strange new pains that were partly pleasant attacked her body, just as strange new thoughts assailed her mind. Her mouth, always wide, lost its childish innocence, and the lips revealed a passionate curve. Her skin grew moister and more glowing; beneath the dirt and tan shone the velvety whiteness of her Castilian inheritance.

  She was still a thin, ugly child, her gray eyes were still too big for the small face and gave her a goblin look, but she now sometimes showed the first indications of the sex magnetism which was later to give her an illusion of beauty more seductive than actual symmetry.

  It was on a June day that Fey experienced her first awakening.

  Two American officers’ wives, Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Bray, having put on walking boots and their shortest hoopskirts, decided to cross the river on a slumming expedition to the Barrio Analco with a view to discovering some woman who might be hired as extra maid for the Fourth-of-July party they were planning.

  Way back in the States the Civil War was raging, but its brief comic-opera contact with New Mexico had occurred two years ago in 1862. For Santa Fe and the majority of its population the excitement had been very mild, indeed, and very hard to understand. On March the tenth, General Sibley and a great many gray uniforms marched into Santa Fe without the slightest opposition. It developed that this meant that New Mexico was now something called ‘ Confederate.’ Nobody cared particularly, except that there were more soldiers around than usual, more fandangos, and bailes, more gaiety. On March twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth there were skirmishes in Apache Canon and at Glorieta. The Confederates were defeated. On April eighth, the populace lined the streets, waving farewell, and watched all these soldiers march out of Santa Fe. There were three days of quiet and American uniforms of any kind were scarcer than they had been in years. Then on April eleventh, there came once more the tramp of marching feet along the Pecos road. ‘Otra vez los soldados!’ cried everybody, much interested in this new development. These soldiers were in blue uniforms, and many of their faces were familiar, for they had been stationed here before. The townspeople flocked to the plaza and watched the Stars and Stripes replace the Confederate flag on the central pole. The band played and there were polite huzzas. There was a speech, too, and now it seemed that New Mexico was something called ‘Union.’

  What did it matter as long as one must put up with gringo soldiers, anyway? There were virtually no Negro slaves in the territory, and the internal disagreements amongst these Americanos thousands of miles away concerned nobody. On the whole, though, it was probably better to be ‘Union’ because the rumor got around that the soldiers in gray were friendly to the Texans. And no one liked the Texans. So there was a further week of merrymaking; then Santa Fe settled back to its normal pace, and for them the war was over.

  For Mrs. Captain Bray and Mrs. Lieutenant Wilson, exiled so far from civilization, the war was over too. They talked of this desultorily while they picked their way over the wooden footbridge to the Analco. ‘How strange it seems,’ said Mrs. Wilson, influenced by the sun on the stream, the languid murmur of the cottonwood trees, and the sight of a peon fast asleep in his com patch, ‘that there should be such dreadful fighting going on in the States. Don’t you think so, love?’

  Mrs. Bray, who was fatter, stepped carefully off the bridge before nodding. ‘Hard to imagine when one gets so little news through from home these days. Mv Ned quite chafes to be in it, but I tell him that someone has to guard these poor people.’ She waved her plump gloved hand in a vague circle. ‘And besides, there’s always danger from those horrid Indians.’

  Mrs. Wilson gave a delicate shudder. ‘Very true, love.’

  Both ladies, who were unused to exercise and found that their hoopskirts continually caught on the bushes, breathed a bit heavily as they climbed up the path to the Cañón Road.

  ‘Squalor,’ said Mrs. Bray, with distaste eyeing the cluster of tumbledown ’dobes around the walls of San Miguel’s Chapel. ‘I suppose the lazy things’re all taking a siesta as usual.’ For the road was deserted.

  ‘There’s a child over there,’ said Mrs. Wilson, pointing. ‘We might ask her if she knows
of anyone—or perhaps her mother-’

  The ladies moved majestically toward the end house. The child was Fey and she was kneeling beside the Torres door while she mixed earth and water in a pan. A sharp rain last night had developed a particularly violent leak in the roof. Ramona had yawned and said that it must surely be fixed mañana, but today the sim shone brightly, it probably would not rain again for days, so why bother. Domingo and his father were off wood-chopping, so Ramona and the small children had gone to the plaza in search of diversion. Fey was cut to a different pattern. If one didn’t like water trickling on one in bed, one must do something. The bright sunlight was necessary to harden the mud, and by the time it rained again, the roof would be tight. Besides, she enjoyed moistening dirt to just the right consistency, then smoothing and patting it into the wall with the square of sheepskin which was reserved for the purpose.

  While she stirred and kneaded the mud, she hummed a little time to herself.

  Me gusta la leche,

  Me gusta el café,

  Pero más me gusta

  Bailar coa usted.

  This silly jingle, ‘I like milk and I like coffee, but better yet I like to dance with you,’ gave her a festive feeling because Juan Perez, who was a big man of twenty, had sung it to her last Sunday night at a fandango. She didn’t particularly like Juan, who smelled bad, but it was the first time she had been singled out in a grown-up way. Old and young, and within certain limits rich and poor, all mingled at the dances. Of course, one did not go to the private bailes given by the ricos or the elegant public ones at La Fonda. The Barrio Analco had its own fandangos, held in a loft over a store. Fey had always loved the dancing; it was just recently she had discovered that she was even better at it than many of the older girls. Perhaps, she thought, stirring her dirt and humming, at the next fandango some young man would ask her again and she could startle him with her quickness at whirling through the ‘cura.’