Salomon (Part One)

by David Xavier

  It was the second attack weeks later from Kearny on the Lancers Los Galgos, this time just outside San Diego. Mexican forces in Alta California had folded under US pressure. Surrounded, outnumbered, and expecting little reinforcements and seeing inconsistent unity in the Mexican Army, Capitán Andrés Pico surrendered, and, under the threat of a firing squad, sat days later with American commanders on the sunny porch of the city records building to sign the Treaty of Cahuenga, which saved his lancers and ended combat between armies.

  Isolated incidents of violence continued, although they were from rebels and did not represent the Californios.

  “Take one of the horses,” Andrés told Salomon, looking up at him on the same Comanche pony he’d ridden all winter. Andrés looked tired and moved in as slow a manner as Salomon had seen from him, but he did not look old or beaten. He carried his head high, and he still looked a man unflinching in the eyes when he spoke. “Mine are the best horses in the army.”

  “Think I’ll keep the one I’m on. We’ve gotten used to each other.”

  “At least take a saddle.”

  “I don’t think she’d take to it,” Salomon said. “And I’ve gotten used to riding this way.”

  Salomon rode north, alone, toward his rancho and toward his Juana. She was always running ahead of him, shimmering in the heat, but she was always beside him as he fell asleep. She came close so he could make out her features and her trembling mouth, filled with secrets. He could feel himself rise from his blankets to gain that extra inch between them so she could finally speak. On horseback he daydreamed, and he found himself leaning off the side in the same way.

  One night she came close to him and her lips parted to speak, but her attention was taken before she could. In that visual third world, that portal to another place entirely, a place men could only reach in subconscious, his Juana turned her eyes as if something dangerous stood behind him. He turned his eyes to follow and awoke in the half-light of morning. A figure sat over his fire blowing dead coals to life, and a single flame like a candle came forth as he opened his eyes, giving the shadow a face. The figure sat huge on a small stone, his feet flat on the earth and legs wide with the fire between them, his knees up by his shoulders. The firepit was infinitesimal beneath him, a giant’s plaything. He wore the blue pants of a US cavalryman and his ankles showed. He wore a buffalo hide fashioned as an uneven vest with holes for his arms and a hood. Under the hood he wore the tattered mexican infantryman blue army cap which he pulled tight over long, black hair. His face glowed broad and flat, and he must have sensed that Salomon opened his eyes in that split second, because he turned from the flame to look.

  Salomon threw back from his bedroll and rolled away with blankets trailing, and came up with nothing to point. His pistola and knife lay shining atop a stone by the fire. The indian did not move. Did not twitch. He watched Salomon come up with hands searching, and he did not smile either. He simply turned back to the flame and coaxed it alive.

  Salomon’s pony stood motionless at firelight’s edge, indifferent to the indian’s presence or unaware entirely, as if this were a part of the dream world from which it began. Standing beyond the firelight, remaining in shadow where it could exist always between worlds, the indian’s pony, massive in its way, stood untethered and seemingly untouched altogether, like a wild pony come to see.

  The indian warmed his hands over the flame, or rather tested the heat it put out, for he went to warming water in a tin cup that had the same bent handle as the one Salomon carried with him and the same dent in the lip as the one Salomon drank from each morning. Salomon stretched his neck and saw his saddlebag was open and a small wrapping of coffee had been sampled from. The Comanche did not look over, but he spoke in clear and calm spanish.

  “You are a scout for the Mexican Army.”

  Salomon did not answer. His mouth was open and his chest was heaving as he breathed, though he had done nothing but roll from his sleep. His legs numbed beneath him and his feet twitched in place, ready to turn and run. Run somewhere. But he found himself leaning toward the man, as if his next move would carry him forward instead of away. He closed his mouth and swallowed and glanced around, and his face fell openmouthed again when he looked back at the indian.

  “What do you scout?”

  “I’m going back home, is what I’m doing. War’s over.”

  The indian looked at Salomon for a moment and turned back to the fire. He stirred the coffee and nodded. “To your pretty wife and child.”

  Salomon swallowed again. A drop of sweat fell across his eyes, surprising him, and he wiped it away. “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “I don’t have a child.”

  The indian’s face remained flat, as though any muscle to articulate expression had been severed from control long ago and had been motionless for years. He looked again at Salomon. “You live on the San Joaquin, in the adobe house with the galleries front and back. You are a ranchero for Pío Pico.”

  Salomon’s breathing became heavier. His skin glistened with sweat in the early light. The indian took a sip and held the cup below his chin.

  “I do not understand the Californios. You move into a land and fight the people who were there before you, and then you give it to new people. Why fight for land only to give it up? You claim ownership of a thing that cannot be owned only to give up and be owned by someone new.”

  “I am just going home.”

  “To a home and land that is not yours.”

  Salomon wiped his hands down his shirt. He said, “We are bothering nobody. A man can live in any home he puts his mind to, so long as he leaves others alone.”

  The Comanche tipped back the cup and exhaled when he brought it back down. “What home do you think you have left?

  Salomon stepped forward, but the indian remained still. “My God, if you’ve done anything to her I will kill you.”

  Without previous hint the indian stood in one motion as if pulled by something unseen, and Salomon took a step backward, shrunken by the man’s flickering shadow beside him.

  “Good. This I like. If you fight for something, you should be willing to kill. Or die for it. Like your land. Nemenna die for their land.”

  The man stood still, the cup in his hand. They were both silent, and the indian’s face was blackened with the fire behind it.

  “Nemenna is us.”

  “The Comanche?”

  “That’s your word for us.” He stretched his head to see over Salomon’s blankets, at his feet in the burred sand. “Are you going to stay over there?”

  “Yes, I think I will,” Salomon said.

  The indian stepped forward and placed the tin cup by the saddlebags. The rising dawn washed the edge of firelight so it was not an edge but a fade hardly fit to hold a shadow. The indian moved by marionette strings and mounted his horse in a way Salomon had never seen a man mount a horse before. The pony did not seem so large with rider.

  “Go to your wife. Nemenna are the least of your concerns now.”

  And he walked his horse into the prairie as slow as one could, to disappear somehow in a growing light that revealed everything else. Salomon stepped over his bedroll and grabbed his pistola, and when he looked again to where the indian had been there was nothing there, not even the sound of horse footfalls. Where all shadows dried up, the indian had become as one.

  He rode fast, stopping only when his horse began to falter beneath him or he found himself fading as a rider. He camped for a few hours at a time, always waking in a jump from his blankets, taking only enough sleep to ride again. He rode a three-day stretch before crawling into a hole at the roots of a mesquite and falling asleep as soon as he had a fire built. He slept only the hours he needed before mounting up in the dark and riding on.

  He descended a ridge, a sharp gulch that opened in the earth. Two horses were idling in the sun, and he came down the ridge almo
st on top of them. The two riders had worked themselves well into the gulch, and their curses echoed just as often as their hammer strikes. They were both crouched, looking into the rockwall as they took turns with the hammer, one looking over the shoulder of the other. They felt the strange prickle of eyes on their back and looked around. Salomon sat horseback at the entrance of the gulch, his wrists crossed in front of him.

  “What are you doing on my land?”

  One of the two men pieced together what spanish he knew, saying it in slow, Texan syllables. “Hola, senor. Miro agua.”

  “There’s no gold on my land.”

  The man blinked. He swallowed. He took a step forward, still stooped in a curve. “Miro agua.”

  “You’re no more looking for water in that rock than you are looking for permission from the owner of the rock. You’re two miners come from Texas looking for gold.”

  The man stood blinking stock-still but eventually lowered his head, nodding. “Miro oro.”

  “What’s on my land belongs to me. I want you gone with the sun.”

  He rode from there at a run. It was a good horse, as the Comanche rider before him had demanded much from it, and it was eager to run. Riding north he skirted the glow of a campfire thought to be hidden, and he walked alongside his horse to save its legs, and woke with his face in the dirt and his horse nudging him in darkness.

  Juana had come to him again in the night. She came so close he could smell her washed skin and hair, and her dark eyes and lips. She put her finger to her lips and smiled. Her secret had already been told. He had been gone six months, dreaming of his wife every night. When he rode through his land he imagined her at the door, but when he dismounted in the yard, the house looked empty. No movement in the windows, no vaqueros in the bunkhouse, no horses in the stables. There were no idle cattle in the yard, no curious calves nosing around. In fact he had seen no cattle on his land at all, just the few random campfires of strangers. A bird had built its nest in a nook on the gallery, reachable by hand, yet ignored. A frost covered the ground nearly every morning, but the front door was open despite the cold, he could see the red tiles inside. Then she appeared. Her outline in the doorway. She did not come running, not the anxious leap of a young lover off the steps. Instead she put herself through the door with one hand on her belly and one hand on the doorframe, the careful approach of a mother-to-be. She had been holding the secret since the night he left, a revelation that become less and less a secret with each day it grew inside her. He ran to her, clearing the porch steps in one stride, and held her close. He kissed her lips and forehead, her neck and shoulders. She smelled the way he remembered, the scent he sometimes thought came to him through the burnt sage, but he found only in dreams. He dropped to a knee and kissed her rounded belly, and she held his head and softly laughed. It was the same laugh he had heard as a child when he swept his father’s hat from his head in the gesture of a gentleman. Looking up he saw her face was largely unchanged from that of the sweet child’s face years ago.

  “I am home.”

  She touched his cheek. “I know.”

  The ranch may have been untouched by workmen’s hands and the hacienda chipped under weather and overgrown with weeds and vine, dried and left clinging with dead hands during the winter, but inside it had been carefully taken care of. By the door, a broom leaned against the wall. She had been sweeping the tile when he rode up. Salomon swept his wife in his arms and carried her over the threshold, kicking the door closed behind him with his heel, knocking the broom to the floor where it stayed until the next day.

  He asked her later. “Where are the cattle and vaqueros? Pío said the ranch would run without me.”

  “And it did,” Juana said. She said the men had worked hard. As hard as if Salomon were still there to watch over them. But one by one they left to join the fight as he did. They sold off the cattle in pieces, to the Mexican Army, as before, until there were no more to sell. They were not restocked. Pío had left the country.

  “Left the country? I thought he said he would check in on you. Make sure you were comfortable.”

  “He did. Several times, bringing more than he needed to for comforts. And he paid me your share from the cattle. More than your share. But he said the Mexican Army is spread too thin, with too many generals and not enough leaders. He was going to Baja California to request more troops. More unity. He is an important man, Salomon. We are but one of his many concerns. I don’t know that he will return now.”

  They sat in silence for a time, then he took her hands in his. “We will rebuild the ranch. The army is not buying, then I will find someone who is. I will hire my own vaqueros, and we will put chickens in the yard.”

  “And another garden?”

  “And a garden. Our son will have a ranch to run when he is older.”

  “Our son?” Juana smiled.

  Salomon put his hands to her belly and looked at her. “Or daughter.”

  Juana placed her hands over his and moved them. They sat still for a moment, and then Salomon’s eyes widened and Juana’s eyes smiled.

  “I think a son,” she said.