Salomon (Part One)

by David Xavier

  Alta California had become a state of unrest. New discovery and struggles of possession plagued their politics. American settlers dusted themselves and looked around in the streets of Monterey and Pueblo de Los Angeles in new numbers. At this time Pío Pico had been elected for his second term as Governor. He was now a respected businessman, owned endless miles of land, and was one of the wealthiest men in the country. On a political visit to the Presidio of Monterey, he saw his cousin running in the dust of the horses, swinging a rope above his head and leaping the corral barriers.

  “What are you doing here, Sal? A man of your talents should not be wading through the stable filth.”

  His voice remained buried as it had been. A shout from underground. Pío had grown fat. His brows stuck over his sockets so that his eyes were in constant shade. His cheekbones had rounded, his lips hung and displaced when he turned his head quickly. His chin had become dimpled in its growth and appeared it might fall to his chest in his sleep. His hands had swollen to circus proportions. Yet he carried himself with a straight back and wore a decorated coat with luxurious tails. A chinaman followed him around.

  “What am I to do?” Salomon said. “I don’t have any other skills.”

  Pío checked the time. Placing his watch in his coat pocket, he squinted against the sun and dust. “But you are educated. Your mother tells me of your schooling. It is wasted here. Look around. Look at that man there, with the horses. Look how he stumbles after. Tell me you are not his equal in intelligence.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Old enough. Follow me.”

  A commander at the presidio tottered behind Pío, reading from a list of supplies. Pío checked off the items with a yes or no, and he turned and corrected numbers on the items as he saw fit. The commander repeated the corrections to a young lieutenant in tow, who appeared tortured by the changes he kept in his head and on his fingers. Salomon followed this to the gates, where Pío mounted his horse with the agility of a slim man. He steadied his horse while he lit a cigar, and spoke through the smoke.

  “Never become a commander, Sal. They think they know everything.”

  “Yes, cousin.”

  “I should know. My brother is a commander. But even the highest rank would not overstep that which comes in brotherhood. Even if I were dressed in the rags of poverty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Authority is decided in the first moment you shake hands with another man, even between a king and a beggar. Always assume it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pío looked at him, then studied the sky. “We will be gone for a week. At least. Tell your mother. I will meet you at the Puertas Blancas in ten minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was able to tell his mother he would be with Pío for the week, bending there in the kitchen to kiss her on the cheek before running back out. He could not tell her where they would be. He did not know. She held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes as if seeing him for the first time as a man. Anxious to not leave a man of Pío’s importance waiting, he kissed her again on the forehead and left, swinging his leg over his horse. He had only a minute to tell Juana, and, sprinting through the streets with handfuls of the horse’s coarse mane, shouting encouragement, he caught looks from any townspeople who happened to be out. He leapt down and continued on his own feet through the tannery door, blinded in the darkness inside. Juana was not there among the other darkeyed women who looked up blinking from stitched hides in the humid, bitter air. Other women turned from buckets against the wall, their raised arms thick with soap and yellow dye. Juana was not one of them.

  Low on horseback, Salomon again came back through the streets to where Pío Pico waited beneath the white gates of Monterey. He was leaning forward in his saddle with his forearms crossed over the pommel when Salomon pulled up. Pío smiled and untied a string from the pommel and leaned to fit a wicker sombrero upon his cousin’s head. He looked him over.

  “You ride that thing without a saddle like that?”

  “Yes, sir. She is a good horse.”

  “I have no doubt. Many a good horse find themselves riderless.”

  “I don’t own a saddle.”

  Pío nodded. “If you did, you’d be sitting on it I think.”

  “I have ridden her this way since I’ve had her.”

  “How long is that?”

  Salomon looked at the ground and moved his lips, then looked back up. “Eight months.”

  “You buy her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No need to sir me. You are my cousin. Which makes you my brother.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My brothers do not call me sir.”

  “Yes-ss. Yes, my cousin. Pío. My brother. Sir.”

  Pío raised an eyebrow. “You say it like that you’re likely to draw some looks. People will think you’re touched.”

  Salomon steadied his horse. He looked up. Pío was again studying his horse.

  “You didn’t buy it. You find it? Wild?”

  “She was wild nine months ago. The presidio was going to turn her loose, back to the plains where they found her, along with several others. She’s better when she runs.”

  “I don’t think we can run the entire way. Can you settle her? Weren’t you their horse wrangler?”

  “I just ran them from pen to pen, and pitched hay. I didn’t ride much.”

  “Will they give you a saddle?”

  Salomon pointed to the chinaman, sitting his mule as if it was a stone. “He does not have a saddle.”

  Pío turned in his mount. He turned back to Salomon. “Lee does not need a saddle.”

  Salomon looked down the street in the direction of the presidio. His horse circled beneath him. He forced it to steady and walked it back in front of Pío. “They have already given me this horse.”

  “Well.” Pío leaned and spat, and looked out to the plains. “Let’s get a move on it, before that horse of yours starts without us.”

  The chinaman followed them out on his mule. Pío led the way, the three of them. He rode with a stiff back, and though he held the reins with both hands, his arms bounced like the wings of a large mounted buzzard. Monterey shrank behind them, appearing smaller than it was, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Salomon looked several times. They did not follow the worn road. Pío had chosen to walk among the weeds where there was no trail to be found. The weeds and mesquite soon gave way to shards of cracked stone littered among the sands.

  Ahead the blue sky was halved by the onset of charcoal clouds, boiling and sublit in white flares like the deep coals of an old fire, cavernous flashes that bore the blackness naked and cut from paper. The rain appeared shortly after, curved from cloud to prairie, turning stones bleached as bone the color of skin before clouding over and blackening. Pío did not change his course, and when the first wind gusts sent their horses in a hesitating sidestep, Salomon raised his head but found the world now dark as night about him, and he saw in the lightning flashes that Pío was stooped and leaning into it, leading onward with his hand on his hat. When he looked back, Salomon saw the chinaman was wearing some sort of rain shelter made of canvas which hovered over him and turned with his head.

  Salomon spoke to his horse and rubbed its neck. He looked about and saw the cliffs light up, menacing and evil, the shadows black. Small weeds lurched huge with shadow this way and that about the sandscape. Each skyward flash Salomon gripped the horse’s mane harder, and each thunder that seemed to come from the earth he squeezed his legs against the horse, but it did not frighten. The sands ran with water and the horse’s hooves slid back with each step. The rain stung their ears and cheeks. Salomon swore against the rain. He could scream and he could not hear himself.

  Then the rain stopped and the clouds cleared away, and Salomon look
ed about to see the water shining off rock surfaces, the black clouds fleeing. The sun was overhead and suddenly baking hot. Pío Pico pulled his arms out of his coat and draped it sopping over his horse’s neck. He rode with one fist on his hip. The chinaman dismantled his rain shelter and stowed it in a small pouch no bigger than a coin purse.

  “I am glad you are still with us, Sal.”

  Salomon rode forward. “Yes, sir, I am glad too.”

  “Did she have much trouble?”

  “None. She did well.”

  Pío looked at him. “None?”

  “No, sir. She did not try to run.”

  After a pause he said, “What was all that cursing for then? Nevermind. A good storm deserves a good swearing.”

  In all directions Salomon could see nothing that resembled settlement. The sand soon became hairy with sparse grass, and as they cleared a shallow hill the floor lay green ahead. The clouds were still falling away to the east. Pío pulled his coat on again, bone dry after what seemed only a few minutes. He did not wear a pistola nor carry a rifle on his saddle.

  “You do not ride with a guard, my cousin?”

  “A guard? A guard for what? This is my land.”

  “You are the governor. I thought they would require you to travel with protection.”

  “Who would require it? I do not need a guard on my own property. As far as you can see, it is mine. The Comanche have not made it this far. Nor the Kiowa. They stay near the cattle herds. Out here there are no dangers. And Lee would surprise you with how agile he is.”

  Salomon looked back, but the chinaman held the same expression.

  “Does he speak?”

  “Only when he disagrees or is insulted. Did you tell your mother you would be gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She just looked at me.”

  “Ah. The ways of a mother. Their faces tell everything. She is proud of you, Salomon.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you sulk?”

  “Just riding.”

  “You are sulking. Look at that. Did your mother ask you to stay?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sad to leave her?”

  “No.”

  Pío stopped. “Do you have a girl? Back there.”

  Salomon did not say. Pío sat looking. His horse adjusted a step beneath him. After a moment he clicked and the horse continued. “Are you a father?”

  “No.”

  “Could you be?”

  “No.”

  There was silence between them. Salomon broke it. “I did not see her. I did not say goodbye. She will wonder about me.”

  “Is your mother friendly with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t lie. Mothers are not friendly to young women who take their sons away.”

  “They are friendly.”

  “She must see that you love her. Don’t worry, Sal. She will be fine. She will ask your mother about you and your mother will tell her. She may be mad just the same, but she will not wonder about you. I am happy for you. That makes this trip all the more important. She will be very pleased when you return as a man of property. Don’t give me that look. Don’t pretend you did not think about it. If there is one thing in this world that I am in a place to give out, it is land. People envy me for my land. And my handsome looks.”

  They rode and did not stop to eat. Salomon squirmed in his saddle and watched the earth fade to blackness, the mica winking with starlight, until all he could do was feel the horse move beneath him, and see the outline of Pío move against the night skyline ahead. The ground rose and dropped beneath them like waves and they bobbed accordingly.

  Around him the night crept back and forth, his eyes played tricks and his ears heard what was not there. A pair of eyes glowed to his left. There were many flat surfaces about and small pools of water that could take the starlight, but the eyes blinked. His horse lurched away and he rolled off the back. The hoof beats did not stop and faded fast in the darkness. Pío stopped.

  “Something spooked her,” Salomon said, standing and refitting his sombrero.

  “She was born out here. Among the eyes of night and the storms. She was not spooked. She was waiting for you to be spooked.”

  He rode double, behind Pío. The rest of the night Pío told stories. Salomon could feel him raise an arm and point to various places in the night. It seemed they would ride forever into darkness, to a part of the earth that was too distant for daylight. It was the same the next night and day and night again, until there was no count to remember. And swaying on the back of the saddle, unsure if the midnight pitch and ghostshapes left and right were dreamed or not, he saw the black outline of a small mesa climb into the night ahead, and Pío did not adjust his course. It was large enough that it would require several hours to ride around and continue on their way on the other side, but it would take riding a mountain goat to get over it. The horses picked up their pace, and with the mesa black and leaning over them, Salomon saw themselves surrounded by many pairs of shifting eyes. Pío pulled the reins in and dismounted. Lee had run ahead at some point. He stood in a doorway with a lantern held above his head. Salomon followed inside, looking back at the eyes they left in the night. Pío was still talking, disrobing as he spoke, and Lee slipped in and out of rooms, spreading light. He showed Salomon to a room with a large bed and a sofa. He pulled the blanket back and patted the bed sheets. He helped Salomon remove his clothing.

  “Thank you, chinaman.”

  The chinaman stood before him, dusty clothes draped over his arm. His forehead creased. “You call me Lee.”

  In the morning Salomon stepped into the hallway pulling his shirt on. He peeked in various rooms and found Pío leaning over a desk, answering his own questions aloud. When Salomon stepped in, he saw Lee standing on the other side of the desk, tapping places on the paper but staying silent. Pío looked up.

  “Come here, Sal. We need your approval.”

  He leaned in next to Pío. It was a map. Pío put his fingers on the map, keeping one still while the other traced a rough border back to the original spot. Salomon nodded and smiled, and after breakfast Lee had new horses saddled and stepping in place in front of the hacienda.

  The daylight proved it was a large adobe hacienda at the base of the mesa, as large on the outside as it was on the inside. Dogs roamed skulking and watching like wolves. Children played in the stables and hid from each other around corners with dirt clods in their hands. Women went in and out of doors of a low building, a separate quarters for servants, and vaqueros drifted by in the distance.

  They started out in another direction. Pío spoke without a trace of the previous day’s exhaustion.

  “It is a good piece of land. Good for cattle. You will make some money.”

  They rode all day, picking their way through the broken rocks and unending grassland, and camped for the night under a slab of broken granite against a hill. The campfire put Pío’s features inside out and his shadow on the rock behind him. He sat over the flames with his elbows on his knees.

  “You will be living in safe country.”

  Salomon’s eyes moved. He was motionless beneath his blanket, peaked where his hands were clasped and his feet were crossed.

  “Comanche are raiding every ranch in Alta California. The military is in an endless effort to rid the country of indians, but it takes more than an army. You can see we are alone for miles out here. My land. I have lost over a hundred men and hundreds of livestock to indian raids. But that is in another part of California. I will provide you your first herd. You will be safe, and you will make a living. And you will be a man of property, with a wife and many children who share the same name that we share. I would not give you this land, Sal, if I had any doubt as to the safety of you and your wife. You will make her your wife?”


  Salomon moved his eyes again. “Yes.”

  “You will be a ranchero. You will sell to the Mexican Army. I will take an appropriate percentage. You will make a proud living for both of us.”

  Pío searched his saddlebags and pulled a cigar, biting the end. He put a burning stick from the fire to the end of his cigar and soon set to drawing deep. Coyotes yipped in the distance. Salomon remained motionless. With the cigar nearing its end, Pío spoke up.

  “A man once tried to stop the Comanche. His name is Angel Reyes. He is still around, although he cannot speak. He cannot see or do much of anything anymore. He lives near the Nueces River where Texans think they are still in Texas when they cross over. He does not travel far now, but he was an able man at one time. A large man, strong as I’ve ever encountered. It was his work to run cattle to the Texas military. He crossed the Nueces every day in plain sight. He was a stupid man. Unafraid of what watched him every minute of every day from every hill around him. The Comanche want horses. They want cattle. And here this man moved both under their eyes as if taunting them. He may well have built bonfires and waved to them. They took his horses and cattle and killed his vaqueros. Cut them at the throats and took their heads with eyes wide open to post as cautions. As a warning to the Texas military to stay on their side of the Nueces.”

  Pío shook his head and looked at his cigar. “Texans will always think they are bigger than they are. Angel Reyes can be called a Texan as much as he can be called a mexican. More so. He sold his stock to the Texas military. He even gave them a fair price. There is a warrior of the Comanche. Tsunipu. Or Bone. He is said to be angular, skeletal in his movements. From another world entirely. He is taller than any man and covers ground quickly. Before you can even sit up he can be across this fire and at your throat with a blade. Tsunipu does not answer to any chief. He is a rogue, and although the Comanche claim him, it is believed that he will kill one of his own as quickly as he will a mexican or white man. Angel Reyes went after the Comanche. Alone. I said he was stupid. He rode for days tracking them. They made no attempt to hide their trail. He may have been seeking death after the slaughter of his men. It may have been that revenge drove him mad and irrational. He found them. Or rather, Tsunipu found him. It was a mistake. A Comanche will not kill you. At least not before he tortures you. You would wish you were in hell, to ease the pain. Angel Reyes woke one morning with Tsunipu standing over him. Angel wrote the story down. He woke because he smelled his own campfire beside him and heard the crackle. He woke with his arms and legs tied, that Tsunipu must have moved about him in the night as a spirit. Angel has been known to exaggerate. But what the Comanche did to him is not embellished. You need only to see Angel today to know that. He says Tsunipu may have been impatient to get started, for he did not wait. As soon as Angel opened his eyes, Tsunipu began to cut him at mid-thigh, delicately, he writes, the way one takes care to skin a hen. He cut down to the ankle and peeled his skin open as Angel screamed like an animal. Angel recalls the Comanche had no expression. His face was empty of emotions, and his heart was that of satan himself. He had no conscience. A Comanche with no conscience and no rush is a bad thing. Tsunipu filled Angel’s legs with small rocks from the fire, handling them with his bare hands and not a wince. He sewed him back up. Not the careful stitching of a seamstress, but the wide gaps of a sailor in a storm. Then Tsunipu went to work. While Angel’s legs were cooking, Tsunipu peeled away Angel’s eyelids, so he had to see the rest. So he could not blink away the sunrise, and soon his eyeballs began to shrivel in their sockets. Angel wrote that his world did not fade to black as his eyes began to wilt. Instead it was a brightness that blinded him and stayed with him as his vision went, and it is a constant light he sees now, not a blackness that blots out his world. I say the light is burned into his memory, for how can a blind man see light? It is a memory he cannot rid himself of. Tsunipu cut Angel’s lips away, so he could operate on his teeth. He extracted them one by one with his knife. He was good too. Angel did not faint. Not once. He left his tongue in place until the very end, for his screams gave him pleasure. By this time the meat in Angel’s legs was cooked, the way you see beef on your plate, Angel writes, and Tsunipu cut away the crude stitches and emptied the rocks. He sewed him up, quickly, closely. This time he was a surgeon, taking his time to get it right and make sure this man would not bleed to death. He bent his fingers back and bit them off, leaving only three on each hand. It is with these three fingers that he operates today. He removed his testicles with a blade so hot it melted the wound closed behind it. He chewed his ears away, leaving small holes on the sides of his head. He burned his nose to the bone. His nostrils are just two holes in the middle of his face, and they bleed at all times. It’ll scare you just to look at him. When the time came, he cut away his tongue, held it in the air, and lowered it into his own mouth. He did not chew, but swallowed it whole.”

  There was silence. The fire had died to coals and Pío was a mere shape moving to his story in the dark.

  “When Angel Reyes woke from a long sleep, Tsunipu was once again standing over him. He had stayed with him and healed him, serving him stock by the spoonful. They stayed out there night after night with wolves circling, hungry for the dying flesh but afraid to approach the demon who tendered it. Tsunipu took as much time as it needed and spoke to him. Eating Angel’s tongue, he stole his words and spoke to him in as calm a voice as Angel’s mother had when he was a child. But the words were not motherly. You are the warning to those who look to cross into Comanche territory. Instead of skulls and bones, I place you at the crossing, a living warning, a grotesque creature to turn people away. If you leave your post, I will find you and continue what I have begun. If you hire a bullet to the skull, if you starve yourself, I will hunt you down through the darkest parts of your hell and continue where I left off. Your satan does not scare me. It is I who frightens him. When Angel was strong enough to survive, Tsunipu rode him back to his spread on the Nueces River. There he moves around on legs that may as well be stumps. Below the knee is useless. A boneless weight he must drag with him wherever he goes. Which is nowhere. For where can a blind man with no teeth, no legs, and a horrifying appearance be welcome? He would frighten people. Which is what Tsunipu meant for. He sits at his post on the Nueces and stares unseeing over the crossing. But he listens. He listens for Tsunipu’s return.”

  A coyote yipped, closer now. The horses whinnied. The night was black and silent once again. The fire shifted.

  “Well.” Pío Pico rolled his legs over and put his head against his saddle. “We had better get some sleep.”

  In the morning they ate in the dark, square hunks of meat and biscuits that Lee had packed, and they drank coffee. Salomon sat perched on his haunches at the fire’s edge, both hands on the cup. He took a sip and coughed with his mouth full. He concentrated on swallowing.

  Pío looked over the fire at him. He looked at his own cup and spoke over the rim. “I like it strong.”

  They rode hard. Salomon had to kick his horse over and over to keep up. They did not wear spurs but Pío rode as fast and hard as any Texan whose ankles clanked when he walked. They rode to midday, where they stopped and rested at an outcropping of monolith stones that Pío called, Roca Tanques. In the center of the stones a pool mirrored with clouds like a portal to another world.

  “This is a good watering hole for your cattle,” Pío said. “Remember its place.”

  Salomon turned in his saddle and looked about. There were no landmarks of any kind save for these stones in the center of nowhere. In the distance he saw a grove of trees, so far away it looked as if they grew in a haze. A painting on a canvas. When the horses began to roll in the dust, they saddled and moved on.

  He dozed in the saddle while Pío carried on. When he woke they were walking on thick grass. The horses’ steps made no sound. It wa
s this absence of sound that woke him, like the clock that stops ticking in the night. In the distance he saw a short column of dust moving across the plain. It skipped and reappeared, and made its way closer. He kept his eyes on it, and soon his head was turned to watch it. It could be a rider. Pío had said Tsunipu was a rogue. Would he ride so visibly? Perhaps his horse possessed such speed that he did not worry about fleeing trespassers.

  “It is a dust devil,” Pío said. “Just the wind chasing itself.”

  “I’ve seen dust devils before.”

  Pío nodded. “They are alive out here.”

  They rode on under the sun. Salomon stood in the stirrups. He adjusted himself time and again in the saddle.

  “That is a good saddle,” Pío said. “I have them made for me.”

  “I am just not used to it.”

  They climbed a small rise and a lush earth unfolded on the other side, disappearing unto itself in the far distance. A creek glittered jagged through the rolling hills, scatterings of trees shook, long grass and wheat waved in the wind. He sat looking.

  “It is yours, cousin,” Pío told him. “We are in the middle of your land. We have been in your land for miles now, and still you cannot see the end of it.”

  Together they rode into it. Salomon knelt at the creek with his sombrero hanging on his back, and he wet his face and hair with cool, clear water as he had not seen before. Pío nudged him with a foot and he did not try for his balance. Pío jumped in after. He floated on his back.

  “I had Lee send orders after we left. Your cattle are on the way. A small herd to start. And I have a builder coming here. The same builder who built my hacienda. He will build you a humble hacienda to start, with quarters for your vaqueros, but he can return in the future, when you have made some money and have children.”

  Pío stepped out of the water, his clothing clinging to all parts of him. He transferred a saddlebag to Salomon’s horse. Then he mounted his own. A busier man Salomon may never see again.

  “And the horse is yours. Now go to Monterey and marry your wife. Bring your mother.”

  Maria Ysabel did not go. She was waiting with weary soles and a smile for his return. Juana sat beside her with her arms crossed and face in a scowl.

  “I am too old to start again,” his mother told him. “I belong where I can feel your father’s presence around me.”

  She had moved to Monterey for Salomon’s education. Now he was grown and had acquired land and a woman willing to be his wife. It was not a mother’s place to be under the roof with newlyweds. Salomon’s older brother, José de Jesus, had become an important man at the Rancho del Rey, the land their father once lived and died upon and was buried in. Now he owned the land and renamed it the Rancho de Maria Ysabel, and he welcomed their mother home.

  Juana’s contempt for Salomon leaving without a word gave way to joy and excitement when he told her what had happened. She would be a wife, with a home and children. She brought out a pouch of stowed coins she had saved, and held them out to Salomon.

  “We can start with this.”

  They married at the Mission Santa Cruz on their way out of Monterey. Salomon stood with one fist ready while Juana’s eldest brothers, Ismael and Raul, shook his hand. Neither of them smiled. The newlyweds left riding double with everything they owned, her arms around him, and they crossed day and night in that stargazed desert to where their land rolled green between creek banks.

  A small adobe hut was built in a matter of weeks, at his cousin’s command, under the shade of the tallest oak. It was the largest home Juana had ever been inside, with a separate room for their bed. They christened it day and night and spoke of children. Salomon rode his land for hours, beginning and ending in the dark. He dismounted at various times and walked ahead on foot and tipped back his sombrero as he crouched to study the earth, the curve of the horizon and the soil at his feet. Then he rode further and did it again, and made notes about his land, so at night he could map out his property by candlelight and make marks to indicate features of the earth. Each time he crested the rise and saw the little light burning under the oak, he kicked and shouted to his horse, riding with his hat at his back, until he was warm and glistening beside his breathless wife. In a matter of months their lives had changed. Their lives together had started.

  The livestock came shortly after, a charging, ragged group tufted and glazed with sweat and dust, along with a carousel of Pío Pico’s trusted rancheros that seemed to rotate by the week, bringing in new livestock and taking out old. They were rough but friendly with each other and became loud when they drank. They lived and ate in the bunkhouse, and drank there, but the lamps went out early every night, and in the morning the men were awake and stretching in the yard, yawning skyward with their hands behind their hips, and swinging into saddles early without fail. Juana never saw them afoot during the day, unless with one foot in a stirrup, sometimes riding in from a distance and dismounting only to remount a new horse.

  Salomon soon took to riding among the herd and watching the vaqueros. He watched them cut and cull and position a herd with the upcoming landscape in mind. He came upon a cloud of dust in the cattlefield, and saw through the dust like smoke from the ground that the men had pinned a bull, its nostrils flared and its eyes white, its hide erupting in dusty spasms. The lead ranchero stirred a fire yards away and shoved a hot iron in Salomon’s hands. He stepped forward, put a foot to the bull’s hindquarters, and burned it deep, becoming as much a part of the bull as the bull became a part of him. Day and night he rode with the men, and he laughed with them as they sat their horses on ridges overlooking the herd. He stood over a felled and trampled cow with his pistola drawn and fired. He pulled cows from the mud and birthed calves. With reins in hand he watched the cattlebacks lope upon his land and pock it with marks of their traveling. When the sun was at its peak he knelt with his land in front of him and pointed out the various shades. The men looked over his shoulder and nodded. On Sundays he stood with them in the yard and threw knives at a post, taking a large step backward after each throw. Sometimes in the heat and hills he stared off at great distances, and the men elbowed each other and smiled, for their wives had been new to them once too. At night he held Juana close and closed his eyes as her hair fell over him.

  Rains set in each night and he watched his wife look long into the fireplace, the flames in her eyes. She paced through the house with her hands clasped at her belly, her chin high. One night he caught her glance and saw her smile.

  “Is it true, then?”

  She nodded.

  The men in the bunkhouse rolled from their beds to wild yells in the yard. They ran out in the rain with guns drawn. Salomon ran across the mud and jumped atop the stables fence. On the top rung, with his hand on the post, he howled and thanked skyward. Smiling, the men put their guns away and clapped, whistling and calling.

  The mornings after, Juana found gifts of flowers at her door. She asked the men about them but they just smiled and carried on.

  The lead ranchero, a man named Marquez, caught up to Salomon in the cattlefields. He rode beside him.

  “You must be very excited.”

  Salomon looked at him. “You don’t think I’m too young?”

  “Too young?” Marquez looked ahead for a moment. “How can a man and wife be too young?”

  “I don’t know. My father was old. Older than I am, anyway.”

  “Well, fathers get old. Just as mothers do.”

  “My mother is not old. Or she didn’t seem old.”

  Marquez nodded. “My father was also an old man when I was a boy. It wasn’t until I was older and saw other boys with their fathers that I realized he was old. People looked at him and thought him to be my grandfather. I asked him one day why he was older than the other fathers. You know what he said?”

  Salomon looked over.

  “He said, my son, I trie
d to have you early in life, but you would not stay. You decided many times to leave this world before you even saw it. So I waited until you were older and smarter to have you.” Marquez reached out to Salomon and laughed. Salomon swayed in the saddle.

  “People might look at me and think me to be his brother.”

  “No,” Marquez said. “You have brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “There are thirteen of us. Nine of us are brothers.”

  Marquez stopped. “This is why your father was old.” They kept on. “You are the youngest then?”

  “Yes.”

  “When your father brought his first child into the world, he was as old as you are now. You too will grow old, Salomon. Let your last child think you to be old. Be young until then.”

  A herd of antelope grazed to the east, raising their heads periodically and watching back with dull eyes. When the riders stopped to watch, the antelope hurried away, bounding across the short grass in a jagged pattern.

  Juana opened the door one morning and caught Marquez with a handful of wildflowers. He bowed and held the flowers forth.

  “It is your child we joyously await, señora Pico.” He glanced around, then at the floor, and he bent his knees and lowered the flowers before Juana stepped forward and took them with a smile. Marquez stepped back, holding his hat with both hands. “I am sorry to approach the house this way. It is not appropriate. But the news of a child moves me so.”

  “Come inside, Marquez.”

  He stood in the doorway. “Is Salomon inside?”

  Juana nodded. Marquez stepped inside. The three of them spoke over coffee mugs.

  “Are you married, Marquez?”

  “No, señora. And not for lack of trying. There is only so much time one can put into finding a wife and finding a living. When you choose the life of a ranchero for Pío Pico, that time becomes nonexistent. But I have always wished for a child.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I am forty, señora. A long time to wish. You may think it odd of me, my happiness for you. But when a man has a child, it is a chance to live life again. A chance to correct any mistakes. To correct the ways you have harmed others under the watch of our Lord.”

  He closed his eyes momentarily and crossed himself.

  “What harm could a man like you have done, Marquez? I see only kindness in your eyes.”

  “They are the eyes of a pig. You see what you choose to see. The mind of a good person is a gullible one. But I cannot rid myself of the part of me that I fear most. For me there is no redemption but by that of a child. A new being that sin has not struck. A new heart that satan has not stained with his evil and smiles at in dreams. Forgive me for saying such a thing.”

  “Did you steal?”

  “Please, don’t ask me to tell.”

  “Marquez, I must know.”

  “You will regret it.”

  Salomon spoke. “You are like a brother to us, Marquez. We could hold nothing against you. The past is another life entirely. But if you are to be here, with our child, I need to know.”

  Marquez looked from Salomon to Juana and back.

  “I murdered.” At this, Marquez dropped his eyes and his brow creased. His lips trembled, but he caught them and settled. He continued. “You must understand it was not me. I do not know how it happened, but I know I am to blame. I was a young man. A boy with a mind too young to make sense of this world. There is violence I still do not understand.”

  Juana put her hand on his. “You don’t have to say.”

  “I do, señora. You will think the worst of me otherwise.” He took a deep breath and wet his lips. “My father and mother and sister were murdered in front of me by indians in our yard without a flinch on their part. One of them walked about and lined us up in front of the stones at our well as others rode around, behind us, near us, all about on painted horses. They scattered our chickens and chased them through the yard with pikes, tossing them dead, one by one at our feet. The one indian pointed to the well and had me pull up a bucket of water. He then pulled a blade as big as I had ever seen, one that shone white with the sun. He washed the knife, then slit the throats of my family and washed his blade again. He dumped my father’s body in the well, then my mother and my sister. He leaned in close to me and spoke words that I can still hear but words that I cannot translate. They sound like babble but it was a curse he placed on me. He controlled me after that. I was his puppet to walk against my own people with strings on my hands. He put his blade in my hands and took me by my shoulders and turned me and sent me walking. I don’t know how long I walked, or how I did not die of thirst and hunger. I don’t know how I came upon a home without changing my course. This home was dark in the night. I found the breathing bodies inside and in the darkness I did what I still do not believe. It could not have been me unless directed by the strings of the indian. Three people in all, and I stayed until the sun showed me what I had done, and when I ran from the steps, my feet left their blood in the sands. I told this story to those who would hear it. I told this story long ago so that I may be hanged for my crimes, so my mind can cut off the curse that plagues it like a fever still. But when I told the story then it was unbelievable. I led the way to the site, only to find that it did not exist. I searched the sand for the blood, only to find the sand had been undisturbed by any prints at all. I said you saw my hands, you saw my clothes when I came to you. They were red with blood. They said it was the blood of my own family and that I had been changed because of the massacre. That my mind was not working correctly. They found my family’s home and they found their bodies, one atop the other in the well water, and they saw the pony tracks all around and the slaughtered chickens. They said the indians had done it. But now, years later, I ask myself, was it me? Was it my hands that killed my own family? Was my memory erased and built again for me?”

  He shook his head. “I am still cursed. By memory if not by strings. For me there is only salvation by that of a child, even if it is not my own. Even if I do not raise it. But to see that there are pure hearts in the world, it gives me great joy.”

  Marquez put his coffee cup down. “I can see that my story has disturbed you. It is not my wish to alarm you at such a time, or at any time. You did not ask to hear such horrible things. My wrists are still bound in strings. I cannot help but to tell it, against my will. Excuse me.”

  He pushed back his chair, but Juana reached out and held his hand. He looked at her and she saw his eyes like that of a doe begin to weep.

  It was months later when Juana woke screaming three nights in succession, holding her belly each time.

  Days later Marquez dug a small grave in the yard, and the men stood around with hats at their chests as Salomon held his tearful wife. As they tossed dirt over the tiny box, Marquez collapsed to his knees and rose again, wiping his eyes and looking to each face.

  Believing it was his fault, Marquez rode out before Salomon and Juana left the graveside. Salomon reached out and took the reins as the other men looked on.

  “Only a fool would tell a woman such a story,” Marquez said. He put his hat on. “I am headed that way. You will not run into me over there. I can do no harm over there.”

  Juana approached and put her hands on the ranchero’s leg. Her face filled with sadness and tears and she looked again to see Marquez had only kindness in his eyes. She turned to go inside, allowing her hands to linger and fall last. Marquez nudged his horse forward and Salomon watched until the sound of hooves deadened and died away. He turned to the men and raised his hands slightly at his sides and the men scattered with heads down.

  They lost themselves in work. The rancheros spoke very little around Salomon, and Salomon did not speak at all. They heard him only in cattle shouts and calls. He dismounted and threw roped cattle to the ground. He branded them without a wince.
At day’s end he wore dust like a color. He rode fast to his door each night, but he did not find Juana moving through the house in the dreamlike state as before, nor did she let a secret smile slip. Her hands stayed busy with chores, with a garden, with the stables. Whenever the men saw this they set down their things and rushed to her, taking her tools from her hands and continuing her work for her.

  The herd moved across the land and back again, from grassland to grassland, and lingered in the creekbeds. Salomon watched the bulls shift back and forth and stir dust between them. He rode in the moonlight and shot a pale stalking wolf on the run. He searched for his pack and found none, but found their tracks. He rode close to the hogbacks on the windward side and put his ear to the rocks, swept of features, and he crawled where only wind and roots had been, a thousand years between split granite and shale, and he found water bubbling in the cracks cool and clear, setting the stone cave to glittering. A thin wire glowed within the rock. He touched the damp rock walls and looked at his fingers. He looked at the rock again. He cut the ocotillo and ate of its fruit, and he chewed the spongy roots of the torreyana. He watched the wild horses cut the night in the distance, hooves pounding the earth to rumble in the prairie and quiver small stones at his feet.

  Salomon sat his horse in the dusk silence to find his herd strolled before him at a slower pace. They shouldered each other, tossed their heads and moved about, directed not of their own minds but of the movements of the herd. They were so thick and plentiful that Salomon could not see the ground between them, but only their backs, and they moved in the half-light and faded to distant shapes.

  One morning a rider came fast and dismounted in the yard. He stood by his horse with reins in hand, pacing the yard and gathering looks from the men at the bunkhouse who assembled one at time halfdressed in the dawn, until Salomon stepped out, tucking in his shirt. Word came from Pío Pico to move the herd. The Mexican Army was buying horses and cattle alike.

  “Good. We will go to Mission San Gabriel.”

  The rider removed his sombrero. “Pío wishes for you to take them to Mission San Fernando.”

  “San Fernando? What for? San Gabriel is closer.”

  The rider shrugged.