The women began putting up garden produce while the men finished the haying and began cutting and shocking the acres planted in corn. After drying in the field, Benito and Thompson gathered the shocks and stacked them beside Upperdine’s storage bins and each evening after supper, weary, they all collected around the growing mountain of stalks to shuck and strip the corn by the dim wash of a lantern. The dried corn went into baskets and burlap sacks, stalks and husks were chopped and pitched into the wire and wood-slated storage bins to be used as fodder over winter. Cobs were saved for kindling. After just a single evening’s work, they all suffered cramped hands and bloodied fingers.
Most evenings, Captain Upperdine easily tired of the labor and much preferred entertaining them with ditties sung by trappers and with yarns about the old days. He’d pace the yard, moving alternately within and beyond the reach of lantern light.
“I come out here with the freighters when I was no more growed than the boy here,” Upperdine pointed to Joseph, who straightened and watched Upperdine intently. “Put on blustery airs so the others might think to take my measure, but mostly they just laughed. They brought me along because they needed a hand.” Upperdine paced, and drank from the cup he seemed always to have in hand during evening hours. “Worked me into the routine from the get-go. Pulled night watch right off. Nobody needed to prod me awake. Every time the wind stirred, every titmouse moving through the grass was a grizzly or a prairie wolf or a savage. When I pulled early watch, I couldn’t hardly calm back down until about daybreak, and when I pulled late watch, couldn’t sleep at all beforehand. I was wore thin before even a week in the barrens.”
“So one night, I stationed up, hunkered down, and the night was real warmish, and I dozed a little. But even in my sleep, things seemed too still, too calm, and I jerked awake. Not five paces away they’d come up out of the dark, five, six Red Men, moving among the livestock, selecting the best of the horses. They watched me take notice, kept their eyes on me as I stood, but didn’t seem none too alarmed. I just stared at them, couldn’t move a muscle. Tried to shoulder my musket, but it weighed a hundred pounds. Thought about the long knife in my belt but couldn’t move. Stuck in place. Couldn’t call out. No voice.”
Upperdine drained his cup and the others continued with the work and waited while he searched for his jug. The night fell quiet for a while, the scratchy sound of brittle husks being pulled from ears and tossed onto the fodder heap. Then Upperdine returned and took up where he’d left off.
“It seemed they’d seen my sort before. They just watched me out of the side of their faces while they went about their business and then one of them motioned to another, hands moving all this way and that, and this savage edges close. I see that he is no older than me and the same fear showed in his eyes, except that he willed hisself forward. He’s got his hand on the hilt of his knife and he’s all jittery and dancing, and I can’t move. He gets to within six feet or so and then he just leaps, like a deer clearing a log, and before I can even register it, he come up on me and taps me on the top of the head with his open hand and runs back to the others and they are all smiling at him. They pick up the leads of the horses they done cut out and start back through the field, and all a sudden a shot rings out over my right shoulder, so loud my ear goes numb and them Indians scatter into the dark.”
Upperdine paused and looked off into the shadows and several sets of eyes involuntarily followed his gaze, searching for danger. “There was shots ringing out and men shouting and Indians giving up their spoils and running for their ponies and after all that chaos we ended up losing but a single horse. Only one. But enough that I worked the entire trip without pay to make up for it.”
Benito watched Paloma to see if she might react to Upperdine’s story, if her expression might show any hint of compassion for a young man put to the test and rendered immobile by fear. But if she was affected at all, she did not show it. She just continued with her work, as though not listening to the story at all.
“How come they didn’t kill you outright?” Joseph asked Upperdine.
“I don’t know,” Upperdine said. “Thought about it over the years. Figure maybe I was just no proper test for them. No honor to be gained by putting me under.” Upperdine chuckled and plopped down cross-legged beside Genoveva and the young boys and absently picked at an ear of corn.
Benito studied Joseph, how he had perked up considerably at John Upperdine’s stories. Joseph was a boy just bursting to become a man, and Benito also noticed him displaying uncommon eagerness to join the work group in the evenings, sitting close by Paloma, shyly glancing from the corner of his eye, watching her hands at work, stripping the husks and shelling the kernels from the cob. Once, Benito watched Joseph attempt to engage Paloma in conversation, but she turned away with a dismissive gesture.
Most of the dried kernels would be used for posole and to grind into meal for the tortillas. But a portion Upperdine set aside to experiment with fermentation, having once sampled a local distillation in Taos and determined to duplicate it. Last year, his efforts resulted in a gut-churning concoction unfit for consumption, good only for sopping the hogs or for sale to the most desperate and thirsty of lowlifes passing by the new fort. But he claimed to be inching closer to that magic formula, that this year his confidence was high. Genoveva scolded his wastefulness, but did not begrudge his folly.
Benito silently questioned Genoveva’s generosity with the corn. The field yielded fairly, but this winter there would be additional mouths to feed. He’d worked to exhaustion the previous spring putting as many acres as possible into production, planning on his family’s arrival. The unexpected presence of Thompson and the Lights imposed an additional burden on the stores. Benito had discretely raised the issue with Upperdine, who had dismissed his concerns.
“Thompson will bring in meat,” Upperdine had said. “If our grain runs short, he’ll make up for it with game.”
“Grain keeps through the winter,” Benito had countered. “Meat can spoil.”
MORNING OF THEIR THIRD DAY hauling corn from the field, Benito stood at the end of a row, stretched the muscles of his lower back, and assessed the dwindling number of shocks. They should have the remaining corn loaded by day’s end, forenoon tomorrow at the latest. Another few evenings of husking, and the storage bins would be full. More than a decent yield, he thought. He removed his hat and mopped his head. The humidity had come up during the day and he noticed a dark cloud on the horizon. He hoped rain would hold off until the crop was safely stored. He studied the sky for an answer. The cloud seemed to undulate, to change shape before his eyes, to grow and shrink, darken in mass, a dense ball, and then lighten and thin out. He heard a horse advancing and saw Captain Upperdine galloping toward them. Thompson and Joseph came from their wagon and walked to Benito and stood beside his cart waiting for Upperdine.
“Gather in the corn, boys,” Upperdine called from his horse as he drew near. “Stack as high and as fast as you can.”
Benito and Thompson looked at one another in confusion and then at Upperdine, unsure how to respond.
“That’s what we’re fixed on,” Thompson finally answered.
“Hurry. We have two hours at most,” Upperdine shouted, pointing to the west.
“Grasshoppers.”
The three regarded the cloud with a grim comprehension.
“Son of a bitch,” Thompson said.
Speechless, Benito watched the swarm for a moment longer before leading the burro at a run toward the next row of shocks. He called to Upperdine over his shoulder, “Have the women collect what’s remaining in the garden.”
Within a half-hour, sweat-drenched, Thompson, Benito, and Joseph delivered full loads to Upperdine’s barn loft. Hay and other fodder occupied normal capacity, but they stacked corn to the ceiling and when they could wedge not another stalk, they began tossing shocks onto the barn floor, leaving Joseph and the young boys to stack it. The women saw to the garden, hauling in under-ripe melons and pu
mpkins, pulling bush beans and pepper plants up by the root, throwing everything they could gather into the house.
With each trip to the field, the swarm advanced. Benito calculated the remaining minutes, urged his strength-drained legs forward, palsied with fatigue, down the rows. He filled his cart and ran the burro to the placita and, after unloading, he and Teresa took a few minutes to chase the goats from the pen. He was unsure how the grasshoppers might harass his animals but wanted to give them opportunity to seek what relief the low hills might offer. He covered the well with a tarp and weighted the tarp with stones and hoped Upperdine thought to do the same. Arriving back in the field, he continued gathering shocks. His back ached. His shoulders and arms as well. Dizzy with fatigue, his ears buzzed. He stood for a moment to regain equilibrium, to catch his breath. His dizziness abated but the buzzing intensified. He shook his head and looked up. The cloud loomed, the air vibrating with the whirling onslaught. Benito threw bundles of corn stalks haphazardly onto the cart. Deafening, the high-pitched din coalesced into a single voice as the swarm advanced low overhead, fully blotting the sun, casting an ominous twilight over the land. His cart half-full, Benito turned for the placita as the first insects alighted.
They spent that night trying to sleep in shifts but not sleeping, really, listening to the hum outside and inside, to the pop of grasshoppers dropping from the chimney vent into the fire that Benito had stoked. He, Teresa, Paloma, and Hanna occupied the placita. Thompson and the boys remained at the main house with the Upperdines. Teresa had pleaded with Benito to retrieve the boys, but he thought they would be frightened by the insects. On his arrival earlier from the field, grasshoppers had fallen from the sky like hail, pelting him and amassing on his hat, eating through the sweat-soaked brim until it literally fell from his head. By the time he had reached the compound, his shoes were caked with the crushed bodies of insects and a stench rose up from the ground where they stacked like cordwood against the walls and overflowed the trough. No, leave the boys with Captain Upperdine and Genoveva, he’d told Teresa, and she glared at him in silent assent, accusing, as if it were through some sin of his that the plague had been visited upon them.
Sometime around midnight, grasshoppers chewed through the window coverings and began flowing into the room, swarming over the tortilla basket. The women pounded them with brooms while Benito shuttered the window with planks.
Morning, the wind that normally rose with the sun remained still. Benito lay on his bed listening to the sound from outside, the incessant clicking of mandibles as grasshoppers in numbers uncountable moved about the placita and beyond, stripping the valley of the Purgatoire. No one had slept. Eyes focused on the roof beam, Benito tried to find reason for hope. Apart from sore muscles, a few cuts and scrapes, no one had been injured in their rush to salvage what they could of the harvest. As far as he knew, the pests were not harmful to the animals, carried no disease. They inflicted no permanent damage to the soil or to the grasslands; they could not stop the river from flowing, the sun from shining. No, they could have been visited by far worse a curse. Had the locusts arrived a month earlier, the crop too green to pick, nothing could have been saved. Yet, still, in the core of his feeling, he could not help but question whether the insects had been some kind of theological judgment on his emigration from the Plaza, a foretaste of trials to come. He could not allow himself to dwell on such thoughts. He rose and went out into the morning.
Everywhere, insects crawled, carpeting the enclosed compound a half-foot deep. His chickens moved among and over them, pecking, gorging. He inspected his storage shed, found the door held firm and he confirmed that for the most part what he had been able to cram inside remained unmolested. But outside, the hay bin sat empty, not a blade remaining of what had been left unprotected; and beside the bin, a pitchfork rested on the fence, its handle gnawed to the iron shaft by the grasshoppers attracted to the sweat-infused wood. His boots crunched as he walked across the placita, insects popping. Teresa and Paloma came to the door and watched with unbelieving eyes the scene before them. Paloma had left a lace shawl hanging to dry from the line and, scanning the courtyard, she looked at it now in horror. She marched across the courtyard and pulled the shawl from the line in tatters, shook off the grasshoppers, ran to her father, slipped and almost fell in the squash of insects. She held the rag to Benito’s face, screaming, crying “Look. See what you’ve done?”
The fields denuded, the hillsides reduced to stubble, Benito crossed a naked, desolate landscape on his way to the Upperdine house to collect his boys. Birds everywhere, a feast. In his field, a coyote brazenly grazed on the grasshoppers, casually glancing up as he passed within three yards, its stomach distended, unable to flee even had it wished to. Benito inventoried the damage as he walked, an uncomplicated assessment. Nothing remained in the field.
MIDMORNING THREE DAYS FOLLOWING THEIR arrival, the locusts rose in a mass, hung like a low mist over the valley, and drifted southeast with the prevailing wind. Dead grasshoppers crushed under the feeding swarms littered the countryside, rotting in the sun. Birds, raccoons, skunks, all came into the fields day and night, but they could not eat fast enough and a great stench rose from the ground. Benito shoveled three cartloads of the insects from his courtyard and buried them in trenches he’d dug along the rows of his fruit trees. The trees, barren of leaves and fruit, gave the orchard the feel of midwinter. Benito prayed the trees would recover, and he fertilized with the remains of their tormenters.
Afterwards, Benito’s chickens laid eggs with red yokes that smelled of the insects on which they had gorged, and the two boys and Paloma gagged the first time they tried to eat one. But Benito knew hard times were ahead and he refused to waste the eggs, so Teresa experimented with pepper flakes, goat cheese, anything to make them palatable.
Over the course of another few days, they cleared the areas surrounding their living quarters and the winds carried off the stink. Benito and Thompson retrieved the salvaged corn from indoors and they all resumed the work of preparing it for grinding. They toiled in grim silence, the adults among them fully aware of their lack. They’d all endured hungry winters, times of famine and scarcity, and the possibility again loomed on the horizon, dark and foreboding as the locust swarm. Grasshoppers had found their way into Upperdine’s storage shed through knotholes in the planks and from beneath the ill-fitted door. Several bags of grain had been lost before Thompson noticed the incursion and plugged the entrances. On final tally, Benito calculated they had saved perhaps one-half of the harvest. Bitterly, he thought of his labor that past spring. While Upperdine had been on the trail, he’d worked to exhaustion, sowing more acres than he thought possible for one man. And now, half lost to pests. He’d brought his family, his young boys north for this? On the Plaza del Arroyo Seco, in times of trial, the community would have come together as one to pool their foodstuffs, suffer and survive together. No one would have greeted summer with fat on their bones. But the Americans he knew little about. Genoveva, he trusted and loved. John he respected. The others? Who knew how they would react to hardship?
Teresa understood Benito’s worries, intuition and years of marriage conspired against his intent to keep private thoughts private. When they had completed the harvest, when they had surveyed the bags of meal, the sacks of dried pumpkin and squash they’d wrestled from the grasshoppers, calculated the dressed-out weight of the hogs and the ox they would fatten for slaughter, with what no one had a clue, when Benito and Teresa had returned home and slumped onto the porch step, discouraged and disillusioned, she put the question to him.
“Perhaps,” she paused, and continued, “perhaps best to return home. Maybe try again next year.”
Benito bristled. Home, she’d called it. After all his work to build the placita, it stung that she still considered the Plaza home. And he hated to hear spoken the thoughts he’d been silently debating.
“It is not possible. No.”
“You spoke before even thinking through what I
’ve suggested,” Teresa said.
That was inaccurate. Benito had been mulling the option since the first grasshopper dropped onto the brim of his hat. But hearing Teresa proclaiming the Plaza “home” had set his mind. If they sought winter refuge in the Plaza, they would never return. One branch on the pear tree. How does one branch divide between two boys? Or, should Paloma never marry, two boys and one daughter? Here? Chickens, goats, good water, three rooms and more to build. A field, a garden. Return to his one branch on the pear tree?
“Never,” Benito repeated, more to himself than to Teresa. “I will be buried here, on this land.”
18
They met at Upperdine’s the following week to decide how the harvest would be split. After an early supper, light, just a thin soup and tortillas, as if already training their stomachs for shortage, Captain Upperdine stood and leaned heavily against the table.
“We’ll require rationing,” Upperdine said, a foregone and obvious conclusion to Benito. But the Captain had assumed the role of trail-master in time of crisis, so Benito knew enough to not interrupt.
“Way I see it,” Upperdine continued, “only fair way is to split it up according to bodies. Now, the two young ones we’ll count as one full growed man, so that means Benito gets a four-tenths share, two tenths for me and Genoveva, one tenth to Thompson.” Upperdine paused to glance at Hanna, her swollen belly. “Two and a half to the Lights and the final one-half to next spring’s seeding.”
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