Juan’s misery brought back memories of the anguish Matt had felt as a child, especially over CJ’s dying in France and Ma’s long sickness and eventual death. He knew sympathy wouldn’t soften Juan’s distress. He stood up and said, “I’m going to the grocer’s. Want to come?”
Juan wiped his nose with a sleeve to hide his sniffles, shrugged, and nodded. “Okay.”
Matt walked down the lane, with Juan silent and moody at his side. “Do you like chocolate?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s your favorite candy bar?”
Juan brightened a smidgen. “Baby Ruth.”
“Let’s go get you one.”
At the store, Matt bought two Baby Ruth candy bars for Juan, a big homemade apple pie baked by the grocer’s wife, a gallon of milk, and a bag of Arbuckle’s coffee. Next door at the butcher shop he picked out two fat, dressed chickens. He paid for everything with some of the money he’d saved from the rent payments he’d received on the Griggs Avenue house.
“What’s all that for?” Juan asked, his mouth full of candy bar as they stepped outside into the cold wind of a gathering dusk.
“I think we should have a fiesta to celebrate our family reunion,” Matt replied.
Too busy chewing to talk, but obviously in an improved mood, Juan nodded in complete agreement.
“Does your abuelo keep any beer or liquor in the casa?”
Juan swallowed. “Sí, beer he makes himself.”
“Good, that will make it a real party.” He watched Juan rip the cover off his second candy bar and take another big bite. “Let’s get cracking, kid brother; I’m cold and getting hungry.”
“Me too,” Juan Ignacio Kerney Knox replied.
***
With dinner over, the roasted chickens picked clean, and several gallons of potent homebrew consumed, Matt and all the extended family members Flaviano and Cristina invited to dine with them were in a festive mood. Calling for silence, Flaviano raised a half-drunken toast to Matt. He thanked Matt for the fiesta and announced that he had decided Matt should marry into the family. To facilitate such a union, he offered the last of his unmarried nieces, thirteen-year-old Bennia, as Matt’s bride-to-be.
Wide-eyed in shock and blushing in embarrassment, Bennia stared at her uncle in disbelief before rushing from the room, hand to mouth to stifle either sobs or giggles. Matt couldn’t tell which. All the Armijo men, including Bennia’s father, Tobias, laughed and pounded the table, demanding her return, but it was to no avail.
Over coffee and apple pie, Porter—who was more than tipsy—asked Matt if he’d heard about an emergency work program President Roosevelt had proposed to Congress. All Porter knew was that it had something to do with conservation—planting trees and so on. It would put young men to work, as well as tradesmen with certain skills. Matt liked the idea that the government was finally going to do something about unemployment. “I hope it’s true,” he said.
As the evening ended, Flaviano and Tobias cornered Matt. In a conspiratorial whisper, Flaviano said, “You can do no better than Bennia as your bride.”
Rocking on unsteady legs, Tobias agreed. “She is beautiful, no? And she is young and strong.”
“You honor me with your offer,” Matt replied. “I’ll sure think on it some.”
As he rolled into the bed Cristina had prepared for him, he wondered if he was truly the most favored prospective suitor for young Bennia. Or were the Armijos simply looking for a way to feed one less mouth in hard times?
Early the next day, Matt said good-bye to his hosts, ruffled Juan Ignacio’s hair and gave him a hug, and rode out of the village, groggy from too much beer and too little sleep. Over the next ten days he rode a wide loop, visiting the big outfits at Three Rivers, the Hondo Valley, and Lincoln, Capitan, and Carrizozo. Everyone was sympathetic but not hiring. In the tradition of ranching hospitality, Matt was always offered a meal, conversation, and a bunk for the night, which he gratefully accepted.
In the towns, once thriving businesses were shuttered, banks had gone under, and some of the swanky houses on the main streets stood empty. Warning signs posted on the outskirts advised hobos, transients, and vagrants to move on or face arrest.
On the Carrizozo Road he passed two families out of West Texas traveling in horse-drawn wagons hoping to homestead some land in New Mexico. They questioned him with interest about the Tularosa. He told them about the drought, and their keenness turned sour.
In Carrizozo, he stabled Patches in the livery, fed him a bag of oats as a well-deserved treat, and gave him a good brushing before bedding down for the night in a fifty-cent hotel room. At dawn, ten cents bought him breakfast at a diner across the street from the railway station. After a second cup of coffee, he set out astride Patches with the sun at his back, taking it slow and easy on the old trail that crossed the edge of the malpais. Stray off the path and the thin volcanic crust would give way under a horse and rider and drop them into a deep crevice, never to be seen again. Over the years, many unwary travelers and lost pilgrims had disappeared forever that way.
He arrived back at the Double K expecting Pa to be home, but the corral and pasture held no new ponies and the house was dark and empty. He turned Patches out in the pasture. Calabaza came over to greet him, and the two ponies trotted away for a private conversation. In the house, Matt lit a fire in the cookstove to warm up the kitchen and fixed a meal of canned vegetable soup and stale salt crackers. Through the window he watched dusk quickly turn to night. The ranch felt like an outpost empty of people and cut off from civilization. He resolved to look harder for work, not just for the money but for the human contact it would bring.
He tried reading, but Pa’s absence distracted him. While Matt was gone, Pa had had plenty of time to sell the truck, buy some livestock, and get back to the ranch. Where was that old man?
Matt went to bed restless, lonely, and wanting company. It was a miserable feeling that kept him awake and staring at the ceiling.
29
Matt struck out from the Double K in the morning to find Pa. Hoping he might have sent a note explaining his delay, Matt checked the mailbox. In it was a short letter from Augustus Merton asking Matt to visit the next time he came to town, as he had a matter to discuss. Matt wondered what Gus had on his mind, but the tone of his message didn’t sound urgent.
He stuffed the letter in his pocket and started Patches toward Rhodes Canyon, his thoughts returning to Pa. There was no good reason for him to be gone for so long. After he’d sold the truck, he’d planned to visit Johnny Dines at the old Bar Cross horse camp to buy two ponies and move on to the Jennings ranch to purchase two steers. He’d taken his saddle along to ride one of the ponies home and trail the steers over the mountain from the Rocking J. Even with the time Pa could have spent loitering to jawbone with Johnny and Al, he was long overdue.
He was a punctual man by nature, so Matt reckoned that either something unforeseen had happened to slow him down—such as not being able to quickly sell the truck—or he’d taken up the bottle again. Matt hoped it wasn’t liquor. If it was, he’d want nothing more to do with the man.
The east face of the San Andres was far more rugged and treacherous than the gently sloping western descent. The same was true of the road that the state had taken over but not yet improved through the pass. In places it had been crudely cut into the mountainside, barely wide enough for a horse and wagon or a motorcar to navigate. Wheels and tires ran perilously close to the edge and often showered stones and small rocks into the jumbled ravines below. On three sharp, blind curves, drivers sometimes had to back up to let oncoming vehicles through.
As Matt rounded the final curve, a burst of reflected sunlight winked brightly from the narrow ravine below the road. He slid off Patches for a closer look. The severed head of a four-point mule deer, eyes picked out by vultures, tongue and lips eaten by other critters, rested in
a large, dried blanket of blood on a narrow ledge ten feet below the roadway. Clearly, someone had field dressed the carcass and packed home a bonanza of fresh meat. Farther down, Pa’s truck was wedged between two boulders. Everything suggested that Pa had come around the blind corner, saw the buck in the middle of the road, tried to avoid it, and crashed into it anyway. Both went over the edge.
Heart pounding, Matt scrambled down to the truck. It was empty, the passenger door sprung open. There was blood on the cracked windshield and patches of deerskin, hair, and blood on the front fender. Pa’s saddle and gear were missing from the truck bed.
Around the truck Matt found a jumble of footprints: three—no, four—different sets. The bushes on the side of the ravine leading to the road above had been flattened by what might have been a board used as a litter to get Pa out of the ravine, alive or dead.
They would know in Engle. Matt clambered up to Patches and urged him into a fast lope to town. For the longest time he’d known Ma was gonna die, yet when she passed he wasn’t prepared for it at all. With Pa it was different. He’d never thought about him dying, although there were times he’d wished him dead. He’d figured him to always be around, ornery and indestructible. If Pa was truly dead, Matt wasn’t sure if he’d be sad or sorrowful. He doubted he’d grieve much.
***
In Engle, Matt learned from Elliot Barker, the stationmaster at the train depot, that Pa had been rescued from his truck, unconscious, with a cracked skull and a badly broken leg, and taken by ambulance to a doctor in Hot Springs.
“But there ain’t no need for you to go there,” Elliot added, handing Matt a telegram. “This here has been waiting on you for a week. I was starting to wonder if you’d ever show up. The doc in Hot Springs patched your pa up as best he could and sent him down to Doc Stinson in Las Cruces.”
Dr. Bernard Stinson had been Beth’s doctor at the sanatorium. “Why was he sent there?” Matt asked.
“The doc in Hot Springs told the boys Stinson had been an army sawbones in the war and if anybody could save your pa’s leg it was him. When they brought your pa down from the canyon, his left leg was an awful sight. Bone sticking out, his knee smashed and swollen, his ankle twisted. There was blood caked to his face like he’d fallen headfirst into a bucket of it. The old boys who rescued him said he was lucky to be alive.”
“Was he conscious when they brought him here?”
Elliot shook his head. “Nope, not even when they got him to the doc’s office in Hot Springs. He was still out cold, the boys said.”
“I better get down to Cruces.” Matt counted out the cash for a ticket to Las Cruces.
“Put that away,” Elliot said gently. “The boys who found your pa pooled money for you and your pony to get to Las Cruces. They all know your pa and wanted to make sure you didn’t have any hardship getting there to look after him.”
The unexpected act of kindness caught Matt by surprise. “That’s mighty kind. Who are they? I need to thank them.”
Elliot handed Matt a card. “I wrote down their names for you.”
“Thanks.” Matt recognized the names: two cowboys from the Diamond A, the Engle dry goods store clerk, and Ken Mayers, the owner of the livery.
“Ken over at the livery has your pa’s saddle and gear safely stored. He wants to know if he can salvage the truck. He says the engine block is cracked and ruined. He’ll split fifty-fifty whatever he gets for the parts he sells.”
“Tell him sure,” Matt said. “Have you heard anything more about my pa since he got to Las Cruces?”
“Not a word. Southbound train is due in ten minutes. Best get your pony ready to board at the ramp.”
“Thanks.”
Elliot patted Matt on the shoulder. “Give your pa my best.”
“I will, and thanks.”
Matt waited for the train with Patches at the livestock-car boarding ramp, hating the idea of visiting Pa at the sanatorium. He recalled the day Beth had pressed a note into his hand asking him to rendezvous with her at night under the cottonwood tree. How she’d snuck out of her room that night to meet him and convinced him to take her for an illicit drive. How she’d told him he was her beau. He recalled their other nights together, spooning in his car or at his casita on Griggs Avenue, and that wonderful weekend when they snuck away to El Paso and Juárez. They were all painful memories.
The locomotive chugged past him, brakes squealing to a stop. He got Patches settled in an empty livestock car and boarded with him, settling down on the floor with the door wide open to watch the countryside roll past. Why in blazes didn’t the doc in Hot Springs send Pa to a sawbones in Albuquerque or El Paso, where they had hospitals? Why did it have to be Dr. Stinson Pa got sent to? He shook his head to ward off any more questions from rattling around in his brain.
***
The head nurse at the sanatorium wouldn’t let Matt see Pa until he talked to Dr. Stinson. Within a few minutes, Dr. Stinson came into his office and nodded at Matt. “Ah, it is you,” he said cordially. “Professor Merton assured me Mr. Kerney was your father, but I wasn’t sure who from the family would show up to claim him.”
“I’m all the family he’s got,” Matt replied. “How did Gus find out my Pa was here?”
“I called Augustus wondering if he knew if Mr. Kerney was related to you.”
“Can I see him now?”
“In a minute. I first want to tell you about his present condition. He is in a leg cast from his toes to his hip. He’ll wear it for the next two to three months. It cannot be removed no matter how hard he begs. The fracture was severe.”
“Why would he beg to have it taken off?”
“His leg will start to itch, sometimes unbearably. It will drive him to distraction and cause many sleepless nights. For example, he’ll need to sleep on his back in one position without turning over. He may find it unnatural and frustrating. But the cast is all that is holding the broken bone in his leg together, so it cannot be damaged or jolted in any way. To heal, the bone needs to fuse, and that takes time.”
“Will he be able to walk again?”
“Yes, but perhaps not as naturally as before,” Stinson replied.
He explained that the ankle break had been minor, but Pa’s cracked knee might never heal properly if the torn ligaments were too severely damaged. Stinson wouldn’t know until the cast came off. He went on to say that Pa would need constant care until the leg completely healed. “He’ll be on crutches well after the cast is removed, until he regains strength in the leg,” Stinson added. “Even then, I’ll need to see him at least once a month to check his progress.”
“I understand,” Matt replied.
“Then there’s the matter of his head wound,” Stinson noted.
Matt froze. “What’s wrong with his head?”
“He suffers from some confusion and headaches, plus his vision is slightly blurry in his left eye. I’m hopeful it will clear up. Time will tell.”
“How bad is it?”
“He’s coherent and logical most of the time. But you must realize, the brain recovers more slowly than other organs. For example, he’ll sleep more than usual. That’s the brain’s way of healing itself. Also, he may get testy every now and again. With that said, he does have a lovely scar over his eye to go with the story of how lucky he was to survive that crash.”
“Will he go loco on me?”
“I can’t answer that,” Stinson replied. “But keep him away from liquor. Any kind of alcohol would only exacerbate any symptoms he develops. Who will look after him?”
“I will,” Matt answered, unhappy with the prospect. It was hard enough to take care of someone you loved. With Pa it would be twice as hard.
“Will you be able to manage?” Stinson asked pointedly, reading Matt’s worry.
“Of course I can,” Matt retorted. “Just tell me what I need to do.”
“I’ll have written instructions for you to follow once he’s released. He told me he served with the Rough Riders under Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. A brave bunch, that lot.”
“Yes, they were.” Matt hesitated. “I have no money to pay you right now.”
Stinson smiled. “Not to worry. Your father made it clear you’re not to be held responsible for his medical care. He’ll make a monthly payment from his veteran’s pension.”
Matt nodded, thinking now they were about to be worse than broke.
“Professor Merton wants to see you in his office at the college as soon as you’ve finished your visit. I’m to call him when you’re on your way.”
“Do you know why he wants to see me?”
Stinson shrugged. “No, I don’t. You can see your father now.”
“What room is he in?” Matt asked cautiously.
Stinson ushered him out of the office and down the hall. “We have a two-room ward for noncontagious patients. Your father is there.” He paused before opening the door to the ward. “We all were so sorry about Beth’s passing. She loved you very much.”
“Yeah, I know,” was all Matt could muster. Inside the ward he looked at Pa through the open door to his room. He was asleep on the bed with his head thrown back on the pillow, mouth open, snoring.
For some reason Matt felt like crying. “How long does he need to stay here?” he asked.
“You can take him home the day after tomorrow,” Dr. Stinson said as he turned to go. “I’ll see you then.”
Matt made his way slowly to Pa’s side. There was a dent in his forehead and a beauty of a scar all stitched up and starting to scab over. He counted thirty-five stitches. Pa’s broken leg was in a cast suspended on a sling held up by a pulley. It looked damn uncomfortable. Matt pulled a chair next to the bed and waited for Pa to wake, his mind churning over the fix he was in. He hoped Pa still had the money for the ponies and steers he was going to buy. If not, all they had was the sixteen dollars in Matt’s pocket.
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