The steely look in her eyes told him he was skunked. Dolefully he metered out the gold pieces and then the silver into her small patient hand.
“Very well,” she said. “I must give half to the church for accepting your dirty money.”
She plucked the dresses from dummies, folded them, added the hats and slippers, and thrust the bundle at him.
“You are a princess, a queen, and a saint,” he said, backing out the door.
She stared at the coins, and as he left she was biting the gold ones.
Shine was sitting on the red cart, wiping his hairy lips.
“Well, my little pirate, you have done me a service,” Childress said. “But we have more to do. This cart will never do. It is too well known.”
He drove slowly through Taos, looking for a wagon-yard or livery barn, but found nothing that filled that bill. Taos was still too rude. Then, on the southeastern reaches of Taos, parked behind a sprawling house with Chinese lanterns dangling in the breezes, he beheld an ebony calash, or maybe it was a victoria. It was a thing of beauty, a don’s vehicle, with facing quilted leather seats, a fold-up hood, and a raised bench for the driver. Two restless trotters flicked their tails at flies.
“Ah! Shine, we have success!”
He parked his red cart at the door of the stately adobe home, and knocked.
A young woman dressed head to heel in black opened to him.
“Are you the mistress of this establishment?” he asked.
“No, she’s attending Don Amelio, señor.”
“Is that his calash?”
She looked outside. “He always drives it.”
“I should like to see him, if I may.”
“He’s indisposed, señor.”
“Oh, he won’t mind. I wish to offer him a favorable trade.”
“But, señor, that is not possible until late in the day.”
“You don’t say! What is the nature of his indisposition?”
“Ah, sir, it ill behooves me to say.” She smiled. “This is the residencia of the Senora Aguirre y Canales, who lost her husband to the beastly Tupamaro Indians not long ago.”
“And Don Amelio?”
“He comes once a fortnight to console her, señor. She needs much consoling.” She laughed merrily.
“Ah! My sweet little chickadee, I don’t mean to invade paradise, but there is profit in it for you and me.”
“There is? What?”
“Ah, your name is what?”
“Carmelita.”
“Well, my dear, beautiful, holy, and faithful and blessed Carmelita, I am going to offer this charitable hidalgo my new red cart in exchange for his worn-out calash, and if he agrees, I will reward you handsomely. All you have to do is present the agreement to him.”
“I will?”
Childress pointed. “You see that monkey? He’s rare and famous. He’s yours if you can keep him.”
“A monkey?”
“He will help you in all your endeavors if he decides to live with you.”
“I’ve always wanted a monkey, señor.”
“Good! Now fetch me a pen and ink and two sheets of paper, so I may draw up an agreement for him to sign, and then you may present it to him for signature.”
“A monkey,” she said, her face ecstatic.
“Yes, and he will get a splendid red cart, and will bless me for it,” Childress said. “Lead me to a writing table, se-ñorita, and I will draft the arrangement.”
thirty-one
Sky limped, stumbled and fell. The trail turned precipitous as it wound through a giant defile toward the Rio Grande. It was soft clay one moment, razored rocks the next, and laden with sticks and prickly pear. His bandaged foot turned bloody, his right foot began to bleed also, leaving speckles of red in the dust behind him.
He willed himself forward, his legs punching pain at the base of each step, hot pain that shot up to his thighs, dull pain that eddied through his whole body; stinging pain as his abused naked feet hit sharp rock or debris. It was hard going, but he refused to quit. He thought of Victoria. He would keep going because of her. He thought of Standing Alone and her lost children, the reason he had ventured here. He had to keep on walking.
The soldiers, actually, were sympathetic. He had expected sadism, but found them to be gentle with him, and the more his feet were abused, the more they let him rest. He had expected the lances to prod him, but these were amiable Mexican boys, not hardened professionals, and they eyed him kindly, and perhaps condescendingly.
Any Indian could manage barefooted; most mestizos could too. But this tender-footed Anglo could not; he had lived his life inside of shoes and boots and the soles of his feet were without callus or thickness or hardening. They joked between them, and while Skye couldn’t grasp the words, he knew the meaning: this tough white hombre had feet as soft as a baby’s.
His struggles slowed them to a crawl, but he couldn’t help it. He dreaded to put each foot down, knowing the flare of pain that would strike as his foot settled on the ground.
But they made some progress, and Skye did the best he could. He would always do his best, even if he were headed for a trial in which his fate would rest on a liar’s testimony. One could live with all the courage he could muster, or not, and Skye chose to live in hope.
By late afternoon they had pierced to the shadowed bottoms of the river, and here they met small settlements, little farms, large cemeteries, and skinny cattle. And here, at last, a peon driving a creaking carreta overtook them. The vehicle was drawn by a pair of burros tugging from within a homemade rope harness, and carried within it two squealing hogs caught inside a wall of stakes rising from the cart-bed. The squeaking wheels had been fashioned from a large tree, and rimmed with iron.
The corporal halted the wizened old farmer, who was clad in rags, and addressed him harshly. The peon eyed Skye and shrugged.
The burros began nipping stray grasses and weeds as the debate ensued.
But then the old man walked around to the rear of the cart and pulled up one of the stakes imprisoning the hogs, and motioned to Skye. Within was a carpet of urine-soaked straw and pig manure, but it looked like heaven. Skye limped to the little cart, crawled through the opening, and was smacked by the sheer stink. But he settled between the snorting hogs with his back resting on the front of the cart.
“Vamos!” cried the corporal.
The privates were grinning and making jokes. Skye would have liked to know the jokes, but he could guess well enough. He stared at his bloody feet, and suddenly the pig droppings didn’t seem so bad. The howling pain that had ripped breath out of his lungs settled into a dull ache, but his ears were soon battered by the squeaking of the wheels. One soldier walked at either side of the cart, while the corporal rode behind, his purpose to find anything out of order.
“Pig dung is worse than any other,” Skye said to no one, since none could understand him. “This is the worst offense to my nostrils since the fo’castle where I rotted for years.”
They eyed him blandly. The little old peon kept glancing at him, as if this exotic gringo would get him into terrible trouble.
The carreta creaked and groaned, the burros tugged, and the pigs pressed him restlessly, but at least he was off his bloody feet. His hunger returned and he eyed his pink and gray traveling companions, thinking of bacon and chops. The entourage proceeded peacefully until the next village, where the old peon began to argue vehemently, his gestures hot and troubled. Skye understood not a word, and yet understood everything. This had been the old man’s destination. He did not wish to go further. But the soldiers were pressing him.
Muttering, he finally surrendered to the corporal, and the party creaked south again through the bottoms of the Rio Grande. Skye’s porcine companions shrieked and pawed and wet the straw; they were all going to the butcher and they knew it.
By dusk of that day, Skye was as starved as he had ever been.
“Comida,” he said, remembering a word.
; The corporal nodded. None of these men was unkind to him; perhaps they knew he was doomed, and doomed men required the utmost courtesy.
They turned into yet another settlement, two or three adobes surrounded by crops and pastures, and the usual flower-decked cemetery because the Mexicans were so good at dying and so eager to celebrate the dead.
The corporal rode ahead to evict the tenants of one of the adobes, and soon enough a half dozen brown people, ranging from great age to infancy, hurried out of the casa with covert glances at Skye and the little swine caged behind the stakes of the carreta. Skye watched them hasten toward a neighbor’s casa, laughing and chattering as if this were a normal thing. He felt embarrassed, as if he were the cause of this dislocation of a simple country family, but it was not his doing: the corporal had commandeered the farm.
They directed him inside, and he slid to the ground while the old peon held on to the hogs. He discovered a warm and bright room, with a meal of some sort boiling in a pot and some bowls upon a rude table. He sank onto a bench, aware of how much he stank, while outside the peon and soldiers were transferring the hogs into some safe place or other, and seeing to their needs.
Skye found an olla, poured some water over his soiled pantalones, and tried to wipe away the filth, to little avail. Every step was hell, but he kept at it, wanting to cleanse himself, both body and soul.
They fed him some mutton from the black iron pot, and he took a second and a third helping, feeling the ache in his belly slowly dissolve. He wondered if the soldiers would pay the family whose casa they had appropriated or if this was simply the luck of the draw in Mexico.
The old man appeared, having secured his hogs somewhere, and with him came an odor of the barnyard. He helped himself to the last of the boiled mutton as the soldiers watched. The meat rested uneasily in Skye’s stomach, and he knew he was unwell.
Skye wanted to wash himself, but couldn’t fashion the word, but he remembered his school Latin. “Lava,” he said, experimentally.
That sufficed. The corporal nodded, led him outside alertly, in fading light, to a battered watering trough for the animals, where Skye shed his filthy shirt, washed it, scraped offal off his stained pants, and tried to cleanse his body as well. But it was futile. His toilet done, Skye limped back inside, thoroughly chilled, to the casa lit only by the coals of the dying kitchen fire. They would all be sleeping on the clay floor.
He studied the room for anything of value: a weapon or food or clothing, but then subsided. It was bad enough that the soldiers had commandeered this family’s food and shelter; he would not add to the offense by taking things not his. Oddly, he found himself wishing he could leave something for them: if he was going to die in Santa Fe, he wanted to die without debts. But there was nothing he could do: the soldiers may have been kind to a limping man, but they were no less wary of him, and alert to anything he did.
He did not sleep, but lay restlessly. The soldiers knew he could not escape, not when he could barely hobble, so they slept peacefully. The chill of the floor rose through his wet shirt, but there was no help for it. He lay taut, feeling a weariness in his body that matched the weariness of his mind. He was worn out. He had come all this way to find two abducted children, but here he was, under arrest and being taken to Santa Fe for a mock trial and probable death or certain imprisonment, his women were bound into slavery he knew not where, the man he had trusted had betrayed him, and everything had fallen apart.
He felt a turmoil in his bowels, and knew he was getting sick. He tried to ignore that torments of his body, but could not. He lay sweating and cold at the same time, feeling fever build in him and steal through his limbs. He could no longer lie quietly. Time ticked slowly, and he knew only that his body was burning, he was thirsty, his breathing was labored, and that he was gravely ill.
A convulsion twisted him, and then a rush of nausea, and he could no longer fight the violence of his belly. He crawled onto all fours, crawled away from the rest, and heaved up everything within him, a sour, vile rush of noxious vomit that swiftly stank up the dark room, and left him in tears.
He lacked the strength even to find his way to the olla and some fresh water, but fell back onto the clay, scarcely caring whether he lived or died.
And that is how he spent the night, his limbs cold, brow burning, and his spirits wavering like a guttering candle. Finally he sensed the presence of light, and opened his eyes, and stared up at solemn faces above him. There was a woman, and she was applying compresses to his forehead, and then he slid back into oblivion again.
thirty-two
Colonel Childress drafted a bill of sale in duplicate: a used calash and team for a red cart and draft horse. He waved it in the air to dry the ink.
“Now, child, I want you to take this to him. Awaken him from his slumbers, do you understand?”
“I shouldn’t do that, señor.”
“Why not, Carmelita?”
“He is not himself. He will peer at me with big eyes, black holes, as if all color has left them, and he will frown, groan, and fall back into his bed.”
“And where is the señora? Does she sleep into the afternoons like the don?”
The girl shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“My little Carmelita, chickadee, listen carefully. Tell Don Amelio that the British Viceroy of Grenadine, Grand Bahama, Great Inagua, and Rum Cay requires the calash on urgent business for Her Majesty, the queen, and in return he will receive the Order of the Garter and a handsome red cart.”
“I can’t remember all that, señor, and I’m afraid …”
“Write it down.”
“I can’t read, señor.”
“Then remember it. Queen Victoria’s viceroy. Quick now, and don’t forget the pen and ink!”
She looked ready to bolt. “Remember the monkey,” he said. “It’s yours if you can keep it.”
“Don Amelio doesn’t like to be awakened after he has been smoking the pipe, señor. I might lose my position.”
“It’s a national crisis. I am saving Mexico from conquest.”
She stared long and solemnly at him, sighed, plucked up the papers and the ink bottle and quill, and slowly headed for the stairway leading upward to—who knows what?
He hoped the señora would not appear.
It took an infernally long time, and he paced the room, oblivious of its colonial charm, the whitewashed adobe, the mission-style furniture, the bultos, and the Navajo rugs scattered about.
Then at last she slipped down the stairs, looking rumpled.
“Let me see it, child!” He snatched the papers from her.
There, in a shaky hand, was a signature, barely legible. And another, on the other sheet.
“Ah! He agrees! Take this! He gets one copy, I keep the other. Now, my child, you must tell me what happened.”
She dimpled up. “He was fast asleep, señor, so I shook him gently, and he said, ‘not again, witch,’ and I said there is a nobleman from England who wants your calash, and he said, ‘bother,’ and rolled over, and I said it was a national crisis and you were the viceroy of … all that. And he said some cruel things to me, reached for the quill and bottle, and made the signs, señor viceroy. Do I get my monkey?”
“Of course, of course, if you can keep him.”
He walked to the great front door. “Shine, fetch!”
The little beast leapt off the Clydesdale, bounded inside, evoking a squeal, and began ransacking the establishment. He fastened upon a silver salt cellar, and leaped up to a mantel to shake it.
Carmelita trailed him, twittering and laughing.
“See now, child, it is better than having a niño. Catch him if you can.”
Childress hurried outside, led the Clydesdale to a nearby pen and unharnessed it, and then returned to the calash and its weary team, studying the powerful black horses and the ebony carriage with its yellow wheels. Yes, perfect. The black calfskin leather was new and soft, the shining lacquer showed no scuffs or chips, and the hood raised
and folded easily.
He wondered how long the poor horses had been standing there, decided to do something about it, unhitched them, led them to a watering trough, where they sipped water furiously. When he judged that they were again in good fettle, he hooked the chains to the doubletree.
“Shine,” he bellowed.
Nothing happened, and at once he was worried.
But then the hairy little rascal flew out of an open window, hung on a shutter as it swung, and landed on the ground, clutching something shiny.
But now it was confused. It eyed the ebony carriage and two sleek black trotters, hunted for the red cart, and discovered the Clydesdale unharnessed.
“Shine!” he bawled, but the monkey leaped up to the Clydesdale’s broad back, patted his friend, chittered softly in the ear of the giant horse, rubbed his eyes with his free hand, combed the mane, and reluctantly swung to the ground, not happy.
The big horse nickered affectionately, and clacked its teeth.
But what did it matter? “Shine, we are the masters of our fate,” Childress said. “I am Lord Childress, viceroy of the universe.”
The spider monkey glared at him, and pitched the shiny object to the dirt. It was a salt cellar.
“I always have sat above the salt,” Childress said, cheerfully.
He discovered Carmelita at the great door, oozing tears down honey-colored cheeks, weeping sadly. That innocent child did want a monkey and was tricked, but all that could not be avoided. He snapped the lines over the backs of the two trotters and was rewarded by a swift tug and the soft sway of the calash as it rounded the long circular drive out to the dusty road. He had things to do, and little time. Within days, his friend Skye would be drawing a black bean or a white bean.
Childress drove his fine calash back to the plaza, while his monkey sat on the seat beside him, studying his new conveyance and sucking his fingers. It knew better than to jump onto the backs of the trotters.
Slowly, the Colonel drove around the plaza looking for a cobbler. He eyed the windows, and cased the few second-floor quarters, but he could not find a maker of boots. He tried each side street, wheeling up clay alleys, stirring up the floury clay, looking for anyone who might have footwear. Finally he asked an old woman, and she pointed back at the plaza. He parked his calash and undertook to survey the plaza on his bare feet, but could find no bootmaker. The Mexicans mostly wore sandals or slippers that looked very similar to Indian moccasins. The few caballeros who had boots probably had them custom made in Santa Fe. Childress sighed. Very well, it would be Larrimer, then.
The Deliverance Page 17