by Lon Frank
At first the people were coy; the gold lived out there somewhere, it rained from the mountains when the moon woman rose late; it was birthed by spirit women who slept with warriors atop Quivira.
Then came the days of sickness.
As if a malevolent god had found the little camp, all the people fell sick at once. While the stronger ones grew weak and fevered, death quickly took the old ones and the very young. Only the tall Spaniard and his mestizo servant were spared, and so it was they who ministered to the sick, ladling weak broth into the mouths of their newfound flock. No one noticed the white powder slyly stirred into cooking pots by a smiling Salvador as he inhaled the aroma of the summer stew of squash and peccary. The same powder which was now in the broth fed by Fray Antonio to selected members of the group.
Bending near the ear of Two Feathers, the padre whispered that an evil spirit was upon the people, angered at their lies to the Spaniards about the gold. Only by revealing the location of the yellow nuggets, and solemn vows to aid in its collection, could the remaining members of the group be saved. Within the week, the bodies of the dead, mostly mature warriors, were hastily blessed by Fray Antonio, their bodies laid in an arroyo and covered with stones. The women and children were put to task weaving sturdy baskets from yucca fiber, and the two strangers walked into the shadow of Quivira, guided by a grateful and recovering Two Feathers.
The three men camped late in the lee of a ridge leading into a small and darkened cleft in the foot of the great mountain. When they rose from a fitful night of howling wind with scudding clouds across the face of the moon, they were astonished to find the entire canyon bathed in a rich golden light, reflected from where the rising sun shone upon an exposed spot high on the wall of a vertical cliff.
The next months became a nightmare for the people of the camp. Everyone was pressed into long hours of labor, gathering the loose nuggets from the floor of the dry wash while the strongest were forced to scrabble at the cliff face where a two-inch wide vein of gold surfaced within a hard outcrop of rose-colored quartz. Anyone who resisted soon fell ill and their bodies were simply thrown into the gully by Salvador, without even taking the effort to cover them with rocks. Women and children alike soon came to know the feel of the lash upon bare backs and Two Feathers toiled incessantly in order to lift this curse from the people.
At last the baskets were filled with the purest possible nuggets and ore, the burros were loaded and the tall Spaniard stood smiling before his exhausted flock.
“My people, my beloved ones, it was the will of the Great Spirit that I have come to you. To save you from sickness, to teach you proper ways of men, and to prepare you for the paradise which awaits you in Heaven. We will go once again to the cliff of the yellow stone, where I will give you my finest gifts before I depart for the camp of the Father Beyond The Water. I will leave you here to guard my treasure and I will return with things for you from afar of which you have no dreams.”
He then led the remaining people to the shallow overhang in the cliff where they labored to remove the gold. They had to climb up a series of rough connected ladders to reach the site high up on the shear rock face. The Spaniards helped each Indian to begin the climb, encouraging the women, and prodding the children on tender spots of their bodies which they calously learned to use. When all the people had gone up ahead of them, Salvador put his shoulder against the ladder base and sent it crashing down, trapping the small band of Indios huddled on the ledge high above. Frey Antonio walked far enough away from the base of the wall that the people above could see him. He looked up and held aloft his bejeweled left hand in benediction.
“Stay, my children, stay and guard my treasure until I return. Stay, my beloved ones, and fear not, for paradise awaits us all.”
The two Spaniards then calmly turned their backs and returned to the camp where the burros awaited. A single Indian, a young girl who Salvador had been privately molesting for the past three months, was tied to the lead pack animal. Fray Antonio walked up close to her until her eyes furtively rested on the silver cross hung about his neck.
“Salvador, my friend, I know I agreed to let you have your little play thing, but I must beg the favor of a turn with her myself. Now, before we start on the long road to home and fortune.”
The swarthy half-breed grunted his approval, even though he did not feel particularly honored by having to share the pleasures of what he thought of as his personal property. He quickly untied the girl from the burro, and motioned for her to lie on her back in front of Fray Antonio. Lifting his dark robe above his knees, the Franciscan slowly lowered himself over the breasts of the terrified girl, pinning her upper arms with his knees. With one hand he held tightly onto her hair and with the other he retrieved a small silver dagger from his belt. Bending near to her face, he breathed in the damp warmth of her breath, and with a trembling beginning deep within him, and as her screams echoed from the lonely face of ancient Quivira, he slowly removed the lenses of her eyes.
* * *
In a cabin,
In a canyon,
Excavating for a mine
Dwelt a miner,
Forty-niner
And his daughter,
Clementine.
The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California touched off an explosion of westward expansion driven by dreams of wealth untold. Farmers with their crops on the shores of the Allegheny, bankers behind mahogany desks in New York, mountain men from the hidden coves of the Smokies; all packed up and became part of that westering madness that only gold could provoke. They became the forty-niners, and their headlong rush the vanguard for settlement of the American West. Some braved the storm-blown water at the tip of Patagonia, crowded on sleek clipper ships, some joined in groups to trudge across the great plains, and some forged a new trail, west from San Antonio through the despoblado north of the Rio Grande.
“I tell ya, boys, there’s gold in them raggedy mountains. Yelly, yelly gold. I kin smell it when the wind’s coming off ‘em.”
The speaker was Robert Elwin Sanders, known to his companions only as “Sandy”. He was sitting with four other would-be prospectors on the porch of the Red Girl Saloon in Presidio San Vicente, and pointing the neck of a bottle of incredibly poor whiskey towards the jagged peaks of the Chisos.
“I say, why wear out good shoe leather, hikin’ all the way to Californy, when they’s gold right here at my nose? Even my mule Clementine smells it; she’s been braying all morning like the wolves of Hades was after her.”
His friends tried for two days to talk him out of it, but in the end went on without him, cussing him for a fool to stay in this place where even the lizards were flat as a discarded shoe sole and wore a tiny set of devil horns on their heads. For weeks he headed out of the dusty little collection of adobe boxes and explored the dry washes and ridges leading toward the Chisos and Quivira. He found bones of men and beasts. He found alkali flats where the air hurt his lungs. He found cacti and ocotillo, the road runner and the jack rabbit, the tarantula and rattlesnake and scorpion. At night he listened to the rocks cracking as they cooled and the voices of ghosts on the desert winds. He did not, however, find any trace of gold.
One night when the moon woman was late rising, a visitor walked silently into the light of his campfire. So soft was his footstep that not even Clementine raised an alarm, and Sandy was so startled that he spilled the cup of coffee he had just poured. The Mexican, older than any man Sandy had ever seen, eased himself down opposite the prospector and stared into the fire without any show of greeting. Sandy glanced at the rifle, lying a foot from his right hand, and strained his eyes for movement in the dark surrounding the island of light the fire cast in the desert night.
The face of the old man was wrinkled as deeply as the bark on ancient willows by the banks of the muddy river, and seemed as inflexible as if it was indeed carved from dark wood. Only his eyes reflected the flicker of firelight, and he too, glanced at the white man’s rifle.
&
nbsp; “You need not the gun, Señor; I have come to help you. I know what it is you seek, the desire of your heart. I will tell you where it may be found.”
The old man’s voice was as soft as his footstep, and he spoke in a formal manner which betrayed an education far beyond the grimy streets of the Presidio. Sandy swallowed hard, but could not find words or voice to interrupt.
“Many, many years ago, when I was a niño, a little boy, there was an old woman in the mountains. She was far older than I am now, her face blackened by the sun, her hair white as the snows of winter. Her face was withered as the dry ravines, and empty, where her eyes should have been. She moved as a tree bent by the wind, her face turned down to the earth. She came to my fire as I have come to you tonight. She spoke in the old language of the indios, the forgotten language taught me by my own grandmother.”
Clementine snickered in the darkness, and Sandy suddenly remembered to take a breath. The eyes of the old man never wavered, never released his listening host.
“She told me she was the Guardian. That the great mountain, Quivira, held secret the places and the spirits of her people. She said to follow her, and I did, clinging to her garment in the darkness, as she led me deep into the base of the mountain. She left me there, before the dawn, and I slept not a moment, but witnessed the sun coming to the arroyo where I sat. It was a golden light, a glittering which painted the rocks and sand and cactus, and it came from an ancient shelter where gold metal showed in the cliff face.”
The word ‘gold’ began to rattle around in Sandy’s head, but he could not break the spell of the old man’s voice.
“All that day, I walked the floor of the wash below the cliff. I kicked yellow rocks which the rains brought down, and saw the white skulls of dead men. When night fell, the woman came once again. That night she told me of other men who came seeking the yellow stone. Cruel men with cold eyes and black hair on their faces, who drank the blood of their god and ate the flesh in silence.
“She had known the men, walked with them and freed her mind while in the prison of their arms. They made her the Guardian, and she left them on a moonless night under the face of Quivira, their hearts’ blood staining the sand on which they slept.
“All that day, I had taken none of the gold, had not touched even one yellow stone, and she led me out once again in the darkness when the moon woman hides from earthly men. Now, I am old, and soon to join the ancestors. But, this night I will take you to the hidden place, to the canyon of gold.”
With that, the old man stood and turned from the fire. Sandy jumped to lay a hand on the bony shoulder he could feel beneath the homespun serape. They walked in silence for two hours, the younger man careful to step in the footprints of the older, stumbling when the cries of the elf owls called away his mind. Before daybreak the old man suddenly turned away, his steps lost in the darkness, and Sandy once again regained his voice to call out that he was lost. But only silence answered and the sudden glow of brightening upon the eastern horizon.
As the sun lifted, Sandy first noticed the glow upon his hands, then looking into the wavering light, he saw the golden canyon and the reflecting vein in the overhang, just as the old man described. He knew he could not climb up to reach the old mine of the Indians, but there was plenty of gold to be had at his feet. Nuggets lay loose as gravel in the dry pockets of the arroyo. He ran from one to another, filling his pockets with rocks of purest gold. He could hardly look away from the treasure about him, but he knew he must fetch Clementine to carry a larger load.
As he walked away from the mountain, the wind suddenly moaned as though it carried the echoes of a people’s sadness, but Sandy did not stop to listen. He reached his camp on the flats below and loaded the nuggets into his grub sack, and tied it to Clementine’s pack frame. As he reached for his blanket roll, he failed to notice the diamondback rattlesnake coiled in uncharacteristic silence.
The snake was old, it measured a full six feet in length, and was as big around as a grown man’s biceps. The pits in its head sensed the heat of the man and it lashed out with lightning speed to sink half-inch long fangs into the arteries of the back of his left hand. Sandy’s left arm flung itself over his head, and he stumbled backwards over the stones of the campfire, falling in the ashes and dust. Clementine jerked her head in panic and broke the halter which held her to the scrub mesquite, then galloped off in terror towards the shelter of the pueblo over the horizon, in her blind flight scattering cook pots, beans, and yellow nuggets.
Sandy leapt again to his feet, clutching a rock to kill the snake, but either by some hidden hole, or by desert camouflage, it was now nowhere to be seen. The man stared at the two puncture marks in his hand, already turning a deathly mix of purple and pale yellow. He looked frantically for something to open the wound, to let the poison bleed out, the fear making his heart pump the tainted blood all the faster. Spotting a glint in the rubble of the fire, he thought he had found the carving knife of his last supper. He grabbed the blade and lifted a small silver dagger with a green stone embedded in its handle. Before he could wonder at it being there, he felt the first pang of paralysis tightening around his heart. Slicing frantically at the puncture marks, he managed to open the skin sufficiently for blood to flow. A sudden wave of nausea caused him to sway with dizziness and he knew it was no use. His mind cleared one last time, and he looked sadly towards the golden canyon of Quivira, where an old woman stood atop a little ridge like a wind-worn tree, her ancient face turned to the earth. The little knife dropped from his hand upon the sand which was now stained with his blood, the shining blade and its hilt making a silver cross on the field of Castillian red. The year was 1850, the day Easter Sunday.
Two days later, when Clementine stumbled, lathered and alone, into the street of the Presidio, the men knew immediately what had happened. They knew that the body of the gringo prospector was lying in some ravine, his leg broken or snake-bit. They knew his would be another unmarked resting place in the fastness of the despoblado. They filed into the saloon to drink to his passing and carried with them the remnants of his pack. As they were lifting glasses to their lips, the saloon keeper lifted the grubsack and a dozen yellow nuggets rattled upon the wooden plank that served as a bar.
For generations to follow, men would tell each other the story over campfires and poker tables. They would whisper it to sons falling asleep on winter nights when the wind rattled at the windows and repeat it to fathers on their deathbeds; the story of the lost mine of Clementine, where nuggets of pure gold were just waiting to be picked up, watched over by the ghosts of the Chisos.
* * *
“Major attractions include the Telephone Museum, housed in the building of the county’s first jail, and the giant peach statue located on the courthouse square. Local restaurants include a variety of delicious choices, including Bob’s Brisket Basket, Juan’s Speedy Tacos, and for the sweeter tooth, the Tastie Freeze Café.”
—Visitor’s guide to Fairfield
Emma Augustine was fed up. She was fed up with the Tastie Freeze, she was fed up with Bobby Ray Paterson, and she was fed up with Fairfield, Texas, in general. She was fond of saying that she lived just fifty miles and one hundred years out of Dallas. But today she read the handwriting on her particular wall and it wasn’t encouraging.
“I’m tellin’ you, Glory, this town’s just one giant speed bump in the highway of my life. And it’s about time this girl did somethin’ about it!”
Glory was Gloria Whitcomb, the assistant manager at the Tastie Freeze, which meant she had to count the money at closing and therefore made fifteen cents more per hour than Emma. They had been best friends since the second grade and Emma was absolutely the only person in the world who knew about the little butterfly tattoo which fluttered two inches southwest of Glory’s navel. The two girls despised the fact that they were still teenagers even though they each had worked since they were fourteen, but only Emma felt the sting of the reality that college was an expense she just couldn�
�t afford.
Emma was taller, leggy and brunette; Glory, blonde and petite. It was natural that the girls were close friends, as they shared much in common. Both lived alone with their single mothers; both were good students, graduating just four months earlier, and both had been, at one time or another, the object of attention for Robert Raymond Paterson, III.
It was 2:30 in the afternoon, the slowest time of the day at the Tastie Freeze, just before school let out. Only two elderly ladies shared a green vinyl booth, the blue of their hair clashing gently with the purple jumpers they wore today as volunteers at the Fairfield Memorial Hospital. Glory wiped the stainless steel countertop as she spoke.
“Oh, I know! I’ve been tellin’ you to go to the city for three months already, an’ find us good jobs an’ go on to UT at Arlington. We could live together, like I said, and it wouldn’t cost so much.”
Even though Fairfield was a day’s drive from places like Houston, San Antonio or Fort Worth, whenever anyone talked about “The City”, it only meant one thing - Dallas, the Big D.
“Oh, Glory, don’t you see? If I go to Dallas, it’ll be just like staying over at Aunt Jenny’s. Mom would expect me home ever’ blessed weekend, and every Friday night I’d probably run into that snake, Bobby Ray. At least every Friday night that he wasn’t playin’ patty cake with Melissa Jordan, that is. I’d probably end up strangling them both with my bare hands, and become famous as the first woman from Fairfield to get the chair.”
Melissa Jordan was the proverbial straw that broke the back of Emma’s camel. She had almost reconciled herself to a life in Fairfield, married to the ex-quarterback and raising little Bobby Ray the fourth, when two nights ago she called Bobby’s cell phone which was answered by the unmistakable, sugar-coated voice of Melissa. Of course, the other girl didn’t say it exactly, but Emma could hear the voice in her head; ‘Hi, this is Melissa, three years head cheerleader, two years Honor Society, co-captain of the championship girl’s volleyball team, currently Senior Homecoming Queen, and the future Mrs. Robert Raymond Paterson, III.’