“Hola! Hello! Who is there? Quien es?” He waited for response and called again.
Thompson noticed movement in the brush immediately in front of him. The willows parted and a man backed out, hunched low, carrying a machete in one hand and a metal tube in the other. Thompson watched the thicket for sign of others. No one. Could he be alone? The man backed to within ten feet of Thompson. Thompson stood, hoe at ready, like a musket at arms.
“What is your business?”
Startled, the man whirled around and raised the machete. Thompson was positioned on the bank above the man, the distance between them loose and sandy, and he felt confident of his ability to dodge any advance, so he held his ground. The man was young, ragged, hatless, and dark-complexioned like Benito.
“Do you speak English?” Thompson asked. “State your business.”
The man eyed Thompson without answering. He seemed to be measuring the strides between them, but his eyes also darted to either side as if assessing escape routes. The man’s reluctance for battle was obvious, but Thompson also sensed a dangerous edge to him, nerves frayed, eyes sunken and hungry. He wished he’d more carefully thought out the confrontation before engaging the stranger. He could not walk away, leaving this unknown threat so close to the homesteads. But he was ill-equipped to advance on him.
A splashing from the river attracted the attention of both men. There, mid-stream, Benito crossing, unbalanced, his movements made clumsy both because of his injury and because moss covered the river rocks. Spring runoff had receded but he’d not chosen a safe ford, the water waist-high in the pools, the current swirling. He floundered, and fell, and his bad leg gave him no purchase to right himself. The stranger raced toward Benito, machete in hand. Thompson started down the bank, slipped on the loose footing, and tumbled, hoe flying from his hand, body folding into a hoop, landing at the bottom of the embankment in a flail of arms and legs. He jumped immediately to his feet but, stunned, collapsed into a sitting position and sat for a moment, dizzy and disoriented. He again struggled to his feet, looked midstream, and there, the stranger stood above Benito, machete at ready.
“Wait!” Thompson called. The stranger turned at the sound. His free hand gripped Benito’s shirtfront. He turned back to Benito and began dragging him toward the near bank. Thompson closed the distance, losing sight of them as he scraped through willows, tripping over low-growing tangles and flood-swept debris, and then he came suddenly upon Benito prone on the bank and the stranger kneeling over him, machete thrust into the ground at his feet. Beside the machete lay a telescope. Before Thompson could assess the situation, he heard a commotion to his right. Joseph broke through the brush a few feet from Benito and raised a pistol to the stranger’s back.
“No,” Benito screamed.
There sounded the sharp plink of hammer against cap followed by the dull fizz of bad powder, and before Joseph could fire a second time, Thompson wrapped him in his arms and turned him away. He felt the heave of Joseph’s chest and saw the bloodlust shining in his eyes. Instinctively, Joseph fought Thompson’s hold, a snarling from his throat, spit and a trickle of blood on his lip. Thompson did not dare release the boy, but he felt vulnerable to the stranger and his machete.
“Easy,” Thompson said. “Let go the pistol.” Joseph attempted to raise his arm, to re-aim, but after several seconds the futility must have registered and the resolve weakened, and he went limp and the pistol fell to the ground.
“Easy,” Thompson repeated, as if calming a skittish colt. He slowly relaxed his hold on Joseph and retrieved the Allen pistol and turned to the stranger. Benito now stood beside the man and rested one hand on his shoulder for support, his crutch lost to the river.
“Are you hurt?” Thompson asked.
“No. I am fine,” Benito answered.
Thompson found himself short of breath and he bent with his hands to his knees, still holding the pistol. He and the stranger eyed one another cautiously. The stranger’s attention moved between Thompson and Joseph and he appeared on the verge of bolting for cover.
“Thompson,” Benito said. “This is Carlos.”
The name meant nothing to Thompson. “Carlos de Vargas.” Benito said. “From near Plaza del Arroyo Seco.”
It came to Thompson then. Paloma’s betrothed.
“I’ll be damned.” Thompson said. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“I did not recognize him at first,” Benito said. “Nothing to him but bones.”
Although they all had endured a difficult winter at the placita, Carlos seemed to Thompson worse off by an order. Joseph towered above him, bulky by comparison. Carlos’s hair hung straight in long tangles, and he wore a patchy beard.
“But what the hell is he doing here?” Thompson repeated.
“He helped me from the river,” Benito said. “Then you arrived. We’ve not had a chance to visit.” Benito turned to Carlos and they conversed a while in Spanish. Carlos’s voice sounded soft and youthful, in sharp contrast to his appearance. Thompson thought him too frail to have lasted any length in the wilderness. His face was fine-featured, almost feminine, with a thin nose and deep-set eyes. Ragged clothes hung loosely from narrow shoulders.
“How did you find us?” Benito asked, switching to English. Carlos responded in kind, but with a heavy accent Thompson found difficult to understand.
“I asked at the village. I traveled to the mercantile on the Arkansas, and they directed me back.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Ten days.”
“Along the river? You set camp?”
“Yes.”
“You are welcome at my home. Why didn’t you present yourself?”
Thompson knew the answer to Benito’s question as well as Benito did, and suspected he asked only out of courtesy and because he wanted Carlos to address the issue directly. Carlos looked away, stammered in English, “I. I.” and reverted to a rapid Spanish. Thompson walked downriver a few paces, and motioned Joseph to follow. He searched for Benito’s lost cane in the shallows.
“What did you think you were doing back there?” Thompson demanded.
“Just trying to help,” Joseph said.
“But for bad powder, you might have killed a man.”
“Wildman sneaks into our home, how do you expect to greet him?” Joseph asked. Thompson detected no remorse.
“He is an acquaintance of the Ibarra family,” Thompson said.
“I know who he is,” Joseph said. “Have to be deaf and feeble in the head not to know about Paloma’s trouble.” Joseph turned and studied Carlos talking to Benito. “Looks the coward to me. No man for her.”
Thompson started at the loathing in Joseph’s voice, a snarl, his face contorted in hatred and jealousy, and for a moment he was afraid for Carlos and for Joseph as well.
“You know nothing of such matters,” Thompson said.
“Enough,” Joseph said.
They continued milling downstream while Benito talked with Carlos for several minutes more, and then watched as Benito approached them while Carlos turned upriver toward his camp. Carlos had cut a staff for Benito, but the bad leg dragged uselessly behind him.
“Shame overwhelms him,” Benito said.
“It should,” Joseph said. The men ignored him.
“Did he say why he’s come?” Thompson asked. Benito nodded.
“To see her, of course. Simply to catch sight of her through the telescope. To assure himself that she is well.”
“That is plain wrong,” Joseph said. “To spy on her with the glass, like she was game he stalked.”
“We’ve spoken of it,” Benito said, sharply. “It is done.” Benito reached into the pocket of his trousers and held out the eyepiece from the telescope.
“He will not approach her?” Thompson asked.
“No.”
“How long will he camp by the river?” Thompson asked.
“I don’t know,” Benito said. “He yearns, but will die out here before r
isking Paloma’s final reproach.”
“Would she condemn him?”
“She aches deeply. Perhaps.”
“He should settle it,” Thompson said.
“He doesn’t want Paloma to know he is here until he decides on a course,” Benito said.
“If he can’t hide any better than he can fight, he’ll be discovered soon enough,” Joseph said offhandedly, out of the side of his mouth.
They made a shallow ford, but Thompson hesitated. “Can you make it up the bank?”
“I made it down on my own,” Benito said. He stood for a moment watching the current ebbing and swirling, gathering his strength. “Some know this river as El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio.”
“Long name for a small stream,” Thompson said.
“The River of Souls Lost in Purgatory,” Benito said. He clutched Joseph’s shoulder and began a hobbled climb.
So, that is why I feel at home here, Thompson thought. And Carlos as well, perhaps. He left them and retraced his steps and came upon Carlos’s camp, a crude hut, willow branches arched over a stiffer cottonwood frame and interwoven with reeds and rushes. It blended perfectly with the surroundings. Carlos squatted beside a fire ring just outside the hut, striking a flint to ignite a mound of sun-dried moss. Thompson wondered about not detecting smoke during the past days and cautioned himself against complacency. Carlos looked up at Thompson’s approach but continued hammering the flint against the harder rock. The moss sparked, and Carlos blew softly and cupped his hand on the backside of the moss bundle, coaxed the spark to a flicker, and motioned to Thompson. Thompson knelt and took up a handful of wood shavings and let them drop onto the moss and added his breath as well. The shavings caught, Carlos added kindling, twigs, sticks, and finally a few dried limbs, and soon a flame took hold and threw off heat enough to help dry his clothes, wet from assisting Benito. He removed his outer tunic and draped it across his hut, within reach of the fire’s warmth. In his woolen undergarment, he appeared to Thompson even scrawnier, like a winter-starved coyote.
“Do you carry a firearm?”
“A pistol. But I have no shot. No powder.”
“How have you eaten?”
“I had money enough to buy meal. And there are catfish in the larger river.”
Thompson pointed to the bluff upriver on the opposite bank. “A cabin there, mostly hidden by the sumac and the scrub. Usually, I have meat enough. You get hungry, you come by.”
Carlos regarded the bluff. “I would not wish to be seen.”
“Just hang close by the underbrush. There’s no view from the placita,” Thompson said. “Paloma works the garden and the field midday, after morning chores.”
“I know.”
“Of course.”
Within the hour, Thompson rejoined Benito in the field. “Will he inform Paloma?” Benito asked, nodding toward Joseph in the distance, returning to the placita.
“I don’t think so,” Thompson said. “Not until he figures a way to use the news to his advantage.”
“Is he that cunning?” Benito asked.
“He’s that desperate, I’m afraid,” Thompson said. He turned and looked back across the river, and thought he detected smoke. A moment only, and then just the dull green of the willows, the brown expanse beyond, and he decided his eyes must have deceived.
At day’s end, Thompson walked to his cabin and found Joseph sitting outside, waiting for him.
“I thought to collect my pistol,” Joseph said.
“First off,” Thompson said, “you have no need of it. It is useless as a hunting piece, and as you recently discovered of little value as a sidearm.”
“It is mine. I want it.”
“Secondly, it is not your pistol. It belongs to John Upperdine.”
“You won’t return it to me?”
“Joseph, does it even register with you that you attempted to kill a man?”
“What registers is regret that I failed,” Joseph said as he turned to leave. His eyes still reflected the strange glint Thompson had noticed that morning, and his dispassion chilled.
Thompson entered the cabin and took the pepperbox pistol from his belt and disassembled it in the dull light. It was obvious why the piece had misfired, so clogged with dried mud and bits of leaf and twig. Luckily, the boy had little knowledge about sidearm maintenance. Thompson considered discarding the unreliable weapon, but instead cleared the barrels and wiped grime from the springs and mechanisms. He had no oil, but he rubbed the outer surfaces with a thin coating of grease. Then he reassembled the pistol and dry-fired it, watching the hammer raise against the pressure of the mainspring and drive down onto the nipple as the barrels rotated smoothly with each trigger action.
Obadiah had held this pistol when the border ruffians rode down on them, refused to raise it. Joseph had told him as much. Thompson was certain that is why Joseph so insisted on keeping the pistol, a symbol of his shame, of his anger. That day came back to Thompson in swirling flashes: the raiders turning and charging toward him hunkered in the buffalo wallow, the man raising his revolver, twisting almost sideways as he aimed, a puff of gunpowder from the barrel, the high-pitched sing of the ball past his ear. A sweet buzz. Deadly intent. And, later, after repelling the attack, coming into camp on Turkey Creek to find the mutilated body of the freedman, Ned, and Obadiah’s vacant stare. He remembered thinking that the circle on Obadiah’s forehead leaked far less red than he imagined it should. And the blood running down Hanna’s bare leg, and the death-quiet that descended upon the camp once the violence ended.
Obadiah had refused to use the pistol. Could that explain Joseph’s eagerness to pull the trigger? What if Thompson had returned to camp an hour earlier, might he have altered Joseph’s future? He lay on his robes and stared at the ceiling for several hours before drifting off. In the morning, he collected his spade and his hoe from the corner and started for the near field to cut water from the acequia, and thought as he walked how much more comfortable the tools felt in his hands than the weapon.
26
“A boy,” Thompson said. “Just sixteen.”
“Still,” Carlos said.
“And Anglo,” Thompson continued. “Paloma barely tolerates him.”
“She’s thin,” Carlos said.
“She is sturdy.”
Thompson realized that even without a telescope, Carlos could not help but keep Paloma within sight. He must be taking chances. He imagined Carlos on his belly in the low grass, moving on his elbows, edging ever closer. Surely he’d seen Paloma in the fields with Joseph. Was he working up to something?
They walked together to Obadiah’s wheat patch. Something in the air, the dry wash of the wind across his face, a scent of ripeness perhaps, triggered in Thompson the notion that the time for harvest approached. Out of sight of the placita and the irrigated fields, Carlos walked easily beside him. Settled in his camp and benefitting from Thompson’s offer of food, Carlos had gained weight over the past month, and gone was the abject hollowness of his face. Thompson had grown fond of Carlos: his earnest devotion to the ideal of Paloma, so foreign to Thompson’s own assessment of her in the concrete; his self-denial; his guilt, which Thompson painfully understood.
“Yesterday, she worked without a hat.” Carlos made a motion with his hand covering his head.
“A bonnet,” Thompson said. “She wears mostly what she pleases.”
“Caution her about the heat,” Carlos said.
Thompson laughed. “My warning would carry little weight, I assure you. Why don’t you reason with her?”
Carlos went quiet.
They came to the wheat field, golden in the sun, the stalks brushing against Thompson’s waist, heads bulky with seed and bowed. Heat of summer, Thompson thought, a strange time to harvest. He possessed little knowledge about this wheat other than what Obadiah had passed to him in conversation and what Benito knew from growing a different variety in Plaza del Arroyo Seco’s community field. He picked a grain and te
sted it with his thumbnail. Firming up, it could be dented but only with considerable pressure. Let the wind dry it for another day or two, Thompson thought. A small field, but it would yield well. Obadiah’s wheat indeed appeared suited to this land. Rain had been scarce and had not fallen at opportune times, and autumn harvest would suffer for it. But this wheat prospered. Obadiah had guessed correctly. Benito as well. With good fortune and proper management, this land could produce. He imagined acre upon acre spreading the full sweep of the valley. He’d require seed, land, tools. Was he seeing the future, or a fool’s dream?
“Time to make ready,” Thompson said.
“I wish I could help,” Carlos said. He mimicked a cutting stroke with his right arm.
“Perhaps it’s time,” Thompson said. “Show yourself. You can’t stay in the brush forever.”
“I cannot.”
“Then leave,” Thompson said, his tone harsher than he’d intended. “Get on with your life.” He watched Carlos for a reaction. Carlos remained impassive, eyes downturned.
“I cannot,” Carlos said. “I cannot stay. I cannot leave.”
“Benito told me something of your story,” Thompson said. “A tough fix.”
“I handled it poorly.”
“Sounds to me like you did what you needed to stay alive.”
“Alive for this?” Carlos said, pointing in the general direction of his camp.
“That one moment will consume you if you allow it,” Thompson said.
“I have no control,” Carlos said.
Thompson understood the feeling.
“That soldier’s pistol,” Carlos continued, “at my face?”
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