Good Water

by John D. Nesbitt

  Walt McKinney sat up straight, bringing his yellow-handled cross-draw pistol into view where it rode in its holster. He gave Tommy a slight glance as he turned his horse and fell in with Fred. The two of them rode down the slope past the other two riders, who waited and then walked their horses around to form the rear guard. None of the four men looked back.

  Tommy stood alone on the bare ground, letting the importance of the moment sink in. Vinch Cushman had drawn a line in the sand, as the saying went. As Tommy reviewed Fred’s words about how much Vinch hated these people, he wondered whether Vinch would be satisfied with running them off.

  Faustino Romero returned to the village in the evening while the people were in a bustle packing up their possessions. Tommy noted an expression of great displeasure as the man stopped his horse and looked down at those around him. He had crossed the creek and had no doubt seen that the water had quit flowing. Now he sat with his gloved hands on his wide, wooden pommel as Alejo spoke to him in Spanish in a curt tone. Tommy had the impression that among the circumstances that displeased Faustino, one was that he had not been present when the people had agreed among themselves to leave. But he himself had spoken in favor of leaving, and any moment for debate had long passed. Now was the time to decide what the people could take with them and what they would have to leave behind.

  Raimundo’s family was as busy as all the others. Tommy had offered the services of his horse, and Raimundo said Milena needed help the most. She had no horse or wagon, and her old burro had been killed. The other families were sharing their carts and wagons and burros and horses, so anything Tommy could carry for Milena would mean less of a burden for the others. Raimundo also mentioned, in an incidental way, that two of the wagons and three of the horses belonged to the Romero brothers, which left Tommy to interpret that Milena was pushed that much more to the side.

  For the time being, then, Tommy did not have much to do. He was sure, however, that Faustino regarded him as a loafer.

  The first herd of sheep arrived at the village in the middle of the morning. Two men whom Tommy had seen only in passing left the sheep on the eastern edge of the village with Gabriel and another boy his age to watch them. As they stopped on their way back for the second bunch of sheep, Tommy noted their bony horses and worn saddles. He offered to go with the men, but they said they did not need any help. They ate a quick meal standing by their horses, then left the village on a jolting trot.

  To make himself useful, Tommy saddled Pete and rode out to the ground where the sheep were grazing. The first thing that struck him was that the sheep were all faced the same way, and the second was that they were dirtier and greyer than he expected them to be when he got up close. He rode around the herd, but with fewer than a hundred head and all of them grazing to the northeast, he did not have much to do. When he rode around to Gabriel’s side, he dismounted and chatted.

  Gabriel explained the plan. The people would drive their animals and haul their possessions a few miles east to get out of Cushman’s reach and to wait until someone came to restore law and order. Faustino would go for help as soon as the people got settled in a new camp.

  Tommy went back to the village, and the place was buzzing. Hammers banged as people nailed together crates, boxes, and pens. Voices traveled back and forth. Chickens squawked as people caught them and caged them. A hog was squealing and grunting as one man held it by the hind legs and another man was taking aim with an ax.

  Tommy reported to Raimundo, who told him he could help with the hog butchering. Alejo and another man were killing two half-grown pigs rather than try to drive them. They didn’t have enough water to scald two pigs, so they were skinning them. Tommy tied up his horse and walked back to the scene of the slaughter. He told the men that Raimundo had sent him to help, so they put him to work skinning one of the pigs.

  Noise came from all around. Hammers continued to bang. Women hollered at children. Men called out questions and answers. A child cried. Chickens cackled in their cages, and one of the goats began to bleat. Hurry was on the air, while a sense of urgency and worry spread at a lower level.

  The pigskin was tight, and every quarter-inch of it had to be trimmed away with a knife. Tommy learned to lay his knife blade flat against the carcass and cut through the layer of fat with steady strokes. There would be no saving of this skin for chicharrones, nor would there be time to render the lard.

  A donkey began to bray. A dog yelped as the man skinning the other pig kicked at the dog and shouted. A woman’s high-strung voice cried, “¡Ay, Fidel!” in the tone of a mother complaining to a child. In the short time that Tommy had lived among the people, he had become used to hearing someone, somewhere in the village, singing. But no one was singing today. No one was happy.

  People were loading their possessions into carts and wagons when the second herd of sheep passed by the edge of the village. Tommy caught a whiff of the pungent, greasy odor. The two men on horses drove the sheep, with the help of two dogs. Farther back, a man with a burro and a pack came hoofing along with the lead rope in one hand and a herding stick in the other.

  Milena brought out two large canvas bags with loop handles of cotton rope. As Tommy hoisted the first one to tie it onto his saddle, he realized it was a small pannier, about the size someone would use on a packsaddle for a donkey. He recalled the grey burro that he and Gabriel had found at sundown a few days earlier, and he thought, this was the way things went with a woman who had lost her man—one step at a time, downhill. He thought she handled it rather well, as if she was going on a trip and was getting her things into the baggage car. He couldn’t help feeling a tinge of contempt for Faustino Romero, but when it came right down to it, Faustino had no obligation to take care of her just because she was a widow and he was the one single man in the village.

  Tommy tied the two panniers across, then snugged his own gear on top. He had not done much with pack animals, and his knots were not those of a packer, but he knew the general rule of keeping the weight balanced and loading it high on the animal.

  People were piling their belongings high on the wagons and carts and roping down the loads. Everything went into the vehicles, from clothes and bedding to kitchen utensils to burlap bags of dried red chiles to mops and brooms. Axes and shovels and crowbars went in as well, but brooms seemed the most numerous. Tommy wondered if the people thought they were going to a place where they would have floors to sweep or if they had faith that they would come back to this village and sweep again.

  The sun was slipping in the west when the noise began to lessen and the tone of some voices changed. A couple of wagons were ready to go. Tommy could not see where anything was organized or anyone was in charge. But things began to move. A wagon pulled by one of the bony sheepherder horses rolled first, followed by a dark burro pulling a cart. A chicken coop was tied to the back of the cart, and a black-and-brown goat followed on a tether.

  Tommy waited as Raimundo and his wife stuffed a few more kitchen items among the blankets and clothes. A child standing by a nearby wagon would not stop crying. When Anita came around the side of the wagon near him, he asked why the child was crying.

  “The cat,” said Anita. “The cat went to hide. They have to leave without it.”

  Tommy still did not feel any sense of order in terms of people coordinating their efforts or agreeing who left when. When the Villarreal wagon was ready to go, it moved out, drawn by the dull-brown horse. The speckled goat and the brown-and-white goat pranced along behind, each tied by a rope, and the light-colored dog trotted by the front wheel. Tommy walked with Pete right behind his shoulder. Milena walked on the other side of the wagon, carrying a pack on her back and holding a child with each hand. Anita walked with her, also carrying a pack. Raimundo and Eusebia sat on the wagon seat. Eusebia looked back at the village and crossed herself.

  Gabriel had set out earlier, with the other boy and two men, to move the sheep. The herd was a mile ahead, a slow-moving, greyish-white mass in the afterno
on sunlight.

  People were still hollering at one another in the village as they finished tying down their loads. Tommy heard their voices, but he did not look back. He did not want to feel guilty for leaving before they did, even though they would not have accepted his help if he had offered. He also did not look back because he thought it would be bad luck.

  The last wagon came dragging into camp as the night grew dark. It took its place near the others, but as the camp did not have any definite formation, the layout was a matter of where the people unhitched the animals and dropped the tongue. The camp area was strewn with bundles and bags that people had carried, items they had taken out of the wagons for the night, and a few packs that had been carried on the backs of burros. Each family had its own little space, and the group had a larger common area where most of them gathered around a fire. Raimundo and Alejo, who had seemed to be the keepers of the wood in the village, had brought along a supply of firewood.

  Tommy could feel the anxiety and the fatigue that ran through the people, yet he was impressed by their cheerfulness as they sat around the fire. Faustino and his brother had set up two large cast-iron skillets and were frying quantities of cut-up pork. The tantalizing aroma drifted on the air along with smoke from the fire. As people passed around plates of fried meat and stacks of heated tortillas, they exchanged comments in a friendly tone.

  Not everyone sat around the fire. Some stayed in their little campsites and ate from their own store of food, and others took hot food from the fire back to their families. No one seemed concerned about where the food came from or where it went. Tommy assumed the meat came off of one of the two pigs he had helped butcher, and he could see that it was being served in liberal portions. Twice he had taken a count of the people, and each time he had come up with twenty-seven in addition to himself. Judging from the rate at which the pozole had disappeared, he thought they would be down to the ribs of the first pig by this time tomorrow.

  The fire burned down as people had their fill and the skillets were set aside. The embers were beginning to fade and ash over. Eusebia and her sister, Alejo’s wife, held hands and began to sing a song. It had a slow melody and a mournful tone, and some of the others joined in. The only words Tommy understood were Santa Maria, but he felt the spirit, if not the message, of the song. He felt as if he joined the people in an appeal for consolation and comfort in a time of sadness.

  When the song was ended, a muttering began to spread from the smaller groups by the wagons to the larger group around the dying campfire. Everyone had turned to the west, where a glow along the rim of the prairie was visible from a long ways off. It was the glow of a large fire, and it held the people’s attention. Tommy picked out the words pueblo, casa, and Cooshmon. The faces that had been almost happy for a little while looked stricken now, and tears appeared in the eyes of the two sisters who had sung the beautiful song.

  Tommy estimated that the group had traveled between eight and ten miles that afternoon. People would be able to see a fire at that distance, especially a good-sized conflagration with plenty of fuel. Tommy formed a picture of the weathered salvage lumber, yellow inside, crackling as the flames leaped. He imagined a large black bird in the background, flapping its wings. Cooshmon. The zopilote. The man full of hatred.

  By the time Tommy settled into his bedroll, a light breeze had come in from the west. It carried the smell of smoke. Cushman, or probably his men, had not wasted any time. Tommy tensed as he pulled himself together under his blankets, chilled on a warm summer night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tommy sat in the shade of his horse and leaned on the two stuffed panniers. He had taken off the packs to give his horse a rest at midday, but with no water to spare and no appreciable grass in the place where they stopped, Pete would have a rest and not much more. So it went with the dull-brown horse of the Villarreals. He stood tied to a wagon wheel with his head hanging low. Raimundo, Eusebia, and Anita sat in the shade of their wagon, as did Milena and her two children. The family seemed incomplete, with Gabriel off tending the sheep. The scene was quiet and morose, as no one spoke, and no other wagons had stopped nearby.

  Energy seemed at a low ebb for the group as a whole. After the flurry and nervousness of packing things up and then the push to travel as far as possible the first day, the burning of the village had knocked the wind out of the people. Tired and demoralized, they straggled from camp that morning and strung out their caravan across the rangeland. The grass was poor, losing a slow battle with sagebrush, soapweed, prickly pear, and rabbit brush. Now at midday, paused in the middle of a vast expanse, Tommy could not see a tree in any direction.

  He understood that about ten miles east of their first camp, they expected to find a creek that flowed from the north. All of the horses and burros had been pressed into service as draft animals, so no one was at liberty to ride ahead and verify.

  The people moved on in their desultory way, each group at its own speed. They did not stop together for a rest. Instead, one wagon passed another and then was passed in turn.

  In the later afternoon, dark clouds gathered in the west. Tommy wondered how much a good downpour would do, as they did not have roofs or rain barrels, but even a freshness in the air and a settling of the dust would be welcome. He looked over his shoulder every few steps for more than an hour, but the clouds did not hold together and travel east. Rather, the bank of clouds separated, with one formation moving northeast and the other mass veering to the southeast. An hour after the clouds diverged, the sky cleared up, and dry sunlight poured on the travelers again.

  The sun was slipping in the west when Tommy and the rest of the Villarreal group crawled over a low rise and headed down the slope toward water. The two wagons belonging to the Romero brothers had already reached the creek, and Faustino was holding the three horses at the water while they drank.

  Raimundo eased his wagon down the hill and positioned it about a hundred yards to the left of, or upstream from, the Romero camp. By the time Tommy had Pete unpacked and unsaddled, Alejo’s wagon had pulled in and dropped anchor some ten yards to the left. Household items spilled out of both wagons onto the area in between. Eusebia and her sister sat next to each other on two rolls of bedding and began cleaning dried red chiles that they took out of a burlap sack. They tore off the stems and the shriveled, discolored tips. The women spoke in a normal tone, not agitated and not depressed. Tommy waited until Raimundo had the brown horse unharnessed, and then he led the two horses to water.

  As he stood waiting for the horses to drink, he turned and saw that Anita had followed him with the two goats. Faustino had finished with his horses and was tying them up. Meanwhile, his brother Emilio was scraping out a fire pit with a heavy field hoe. Anita ignored them as she walked past their camp, and she smiled at Tommy as she came to a stop at the edge of the stream.

  “There’s not much water,” she said.

  “We did well by getting here when we did.”

  “You’ve been a good help to Milena.”

  “It’s not much. I’d feel sorry for her, but she doesn’t seem to want anyone to feel that way.”

  “Her husband, José, was very competent. So she is not used to having to depend on others.”

  “She has pride, all right. In a good way.” After a few seconds he said, “I guess everyone here does. This is no place for people who don’t.”

  Anita made a mild frown. “Who would they be, the ones with no pride?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know all of ’em. But people like drunks and deadbeats, or people who have sunk so low that they’ve given up. I’ve seen a few. And then there’s those who’ll do anything just to get on the good side of someone else. I’ve seen a few of them, too.”

  “You have seen quite a bit, then?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I haven’t been to a big city. But I’ve worked for other people, and I’ve been to a few towns, so I’ve met people like the ones I mentioned. A fella who works for low wages and do
es low work is going to meet low people.”

  Her eyes had a thoughtful expression as she tipped her head and said, “Do you think people have it in their destiny to be that way?”

  He wondered if she was translating her idea from a Spanish version. “Do you mean that they’re fated to become that way, or that they’ve got no choice but to stay that way?”

  “Maybe both.”

  “I don’t know. Like I said before about my uncle, he believed that he was stuck, that he was born that way and wouldn’t ever get out. So maybe some people are like that—you know, destined. But if there’s one thing we’re supposed to be able to believe in in this country, it’s that we have a chance to do better. Maybe some people have it in their blood to be low. Some of them sure seem that way. But I think, and I sure hope, that if a person has the desire, he can raise himself up at least a little way. The cook at the Muleshoe said you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, which I guess means that if someone’s born a certain way, you can’t change his nature. The cook had other sayings, too, like ‘As is bent the twig, so grows the tree,’ but then he would turn around and talk about a diamond in the rough.” At her uncertain expression, he said, “You know, like a diamond that has good natural quality but needs to be polished and refined.”

  “I see.”

  He went on. “I think there’s too much to know about for someone like me. Being young, I mean. Like what is destiny and what things we can choose or change. But I hope I’m not wrong when I say what I did, that I believe that a person who starts out at the bottom can do better for himself. If I couldn’t believe that, then I would be low.” He laughed. “I feel like I’m going in a circle. I’d better quit.” As he looked at her, so pretty, it occurred to him that she might have ideas, too. He said, “What about you? What do you think?”

  Her voice was calm as she said, “We believe that everything happens because of God’s will. That means good things and bad. Like the burning of our houses, or what happened to Red. But we also believe that everyone has to try to do the right thing, even though we are all sinners.”