“Now, I know it’s not as much as you would like, but I promised to present it to you fair-and-square-like. He’s offering about what you paid.”
The hope whooshed out of me. I set the cup down.
“I know, I know. You’ve put a lot of work in here, Matty. I told him that. I wouldn’t rule out his being willing to pay a bit more.”
I ran my finger along a board in the tabletop, finding a sticky place where honey had spilled. “I couldn’t possibly take less than I paid, Jamie. Fact is, I would need a good deal more.”
“Understood. You give me a figure, I’ll put it to him.”
“I don’t expect he would pay twice that. But in a few years the horses alone will be worth what I paid for the land.”
“Well, that may be true enough,” Jamie said, “if you aim to hold out here that long. But the fact is between now and a number of years down the road this here is a real good offer. Land values are dropping off pretty good, what with the war and all. There won’t be anything sold till it’s over. I’m not urging you, Matty. I just want you to understand how it is.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to wait.” I took a sip of tea. It was cool now and tasted like metal. “Who is it wants to buy?”
“Don’t know exactly. Fella come to see me said he was from Austin, Texas. Said he was representin’ a gentleman who come through here a couple months ago and saw some land he wanted to buy. Then he described your ranch, right down to the springs and the cuevas.”
Choking down a rush of foreboding, I gazed into my cup. A few stubborn leaves were floating on top.
My mouth went on chatting with Jamie. When he rose and kissed me on the cheek, I forced a smile and bade him goodbye.
999
Joel Tolhurst’s coffin was dark pine shiny with shellac. Thirty or forty of us had gathered around it to give him a proper send-off. We spoke about how fine Joel looked, which he didn’t.
I had brought as many wild spring blooms as I could carry wrapped in a damp bit of calico, and others had brought whatever they could find. Only old Mrs. Grady actually grew flowers with seed she got from back East; but her garden didn’t bloom till early summer, so Joel had to make do with the wild varieties. He had teetered between this world and the next for many days before deciding things looked better on the other side. A second funeral and all the thinking I had done after Jamie’s visit had weighted my spirits with lead.
Isabel stood across from me, small and prim, dwarfed even more by her enormous skirts, draped with black lace. Her ankles were no bigger than my wrists. This morning she had greeted me at the church looking like a toy sailboat about to capsize and asked me to pay her a visit after the burial.
I didn’t know her well; but when I was new in town and still staying at the boardinghouse, she had invited me for tea and introduced me to the six or seven youngsters who lived part of the time in the long wing that had been added to her house as a dormitory for the mission school. The children were a ragtag bunch, some Indian, some Mexican. Most wore their newly learned manners like a hair shirt, but I daresay their souls were a small price to pay for three meals a day.
When the praying was over, I tied Fanny to the back of Isabel’s little carriage and drove her back to her empty house. As we came to a stop, I realized she was trembling. A rivulet of tears grew to a torrent, sliding down her cheeks and spattering her lap.
“Oh, Isabel,” I said, putting my arms around her. “It’s awful, it must be truly awful, but the worst of it will pass. Really it will.”
She just kept shaking her head, staring straight ahead while the tears dripped from her chin.
“Come,” I said, helping her down from the wagon. “Will one of the boys put up your horse?” I lifted my chin in the direction of the dormitory.
“I’ve sent them away,” she said in a monotone.
I hesitated. “Well, make me a cup of coffee, then, while I do it.”
The brew was so weak it tasted like bathwater, but I wasn’t about to complain and Isabel didn’t seem to notice. She sat, took one sip, rose again immediately like a porcelain marionette and with quick little steps went to a black pine cabinet beside me. She withdrew a large bottle of Charlotte Fotheringill’s Vegetable Compound from the drawer and poured the contents into a large goblet.
“It does help my headache,” she said, not looking at me as she took up the glass. “This is the only piece of crystal I have left.” She raised it to her lips and downed the entire contents, then began to pace back and forth in the parlor where Joel had been stricken. The floor of pine planks, stained almost black, bowed and creaked under her every step. “You can’t know how awful it has been, Matilda.”
I mouthed some awful platitude about how terrible it must be to lose someone you care for.
“No,” she said woodenly, finally lighting like an ailing butterfly in a chair. The sky had been overcast all day and the room was dim as a cell. “I mean, it’s not just that, not just Joel’s dying and all. A missionary’s wife must give her husband a life of dignity and respect, but…” Her voice trailed off, then rose plaintively again. “The heathen children. I thought I could at least help them.”
“But you have. The mission school…”
Isabel swung her head away and looked at the wall. “They aren’t interested in the Gospel,” she said in a small, drab voice. “All they want is food. They don’t want to work. They don’t want to learn. And they are filthy. They have lice, Matty. Vermin!”
“Nothing a good head wash with kerosene won’t cure.” I tried to say it lightly, not knowing what else to say.
“I tried,” she wailed. “Believe me, I tried. But they’re such sly little beasts. They would pretend to be interested. Then they would steal food right out of the pantry and run off. Back, I suppose, to the lice-infested huts they came from.”
“Surely you and Joel…”
Isabel rose to her feet again. For a moment I feared she might topple; but she righted herself, holding her shoulders stiffly. “It might surprise you to learn that Joel Tolhurst was not a kind man!”
The words exploded from her and hung in the empty air. I stared at her, at a loss for how to respond. The words of the womenfolk of my childhood sprang to my lips unbidden: “Men are sometimes…” I faltered. “…insensitive.”
“We should have had children. But he—” She bit the sentence off, poured herself another glass of Charlotte Fotheringill, took a long draught from the goblet, sat down and leaned forward, her eyes shiny as marbles. “I have asked you here to request a favor. A very great favor.”
The skin of my arms tingled. “Yes?”
“I want to live with you at Mockingbird Spring.”
My gasp was audible.
She raced on. She must have rehearsed it. “I am passing good at cookery and I sew a fine seam…truly…” Her voice trailed off, eyes pleading like those of a lame bird.
Wordless, I blinked, stifling an overwhelming desire to bolt out the door, leap onto Fanny’s back and keep her at a gallop till I was out of sight of Isabel’s house.
She read the panic in my eyes and got to her feet, drawing herself up ramrod straight. “I understand.” Her voice was bitter as vetch. “I know you think I would be a burden.”
“It isn’t that. It’s…I have an…odd way of living,” I stammered, unnerved at the thought of someone like Isabel living with me, someone who might somehow stumble across the truth about me. As I clumsily tried to cover my fright, the next words rushed out. “I don’t think you would be comfortable. Surely the Baptists will help you to…to a more suitable life.”
“Oh, yes, the American Baptist Home Mission Society will send me to another missionary if I give my oath to marry him.” She stared at the air. “I’m sure you think I should welcome that.”
I’d had no inkling of her plight, had only envied her looks and her place, if not her husband. Her pain seared me like a brand. But if I took her in, the time would come when she would ask questions; she would have vis
itors who asked questions. Unable to meet the agony in her eyes, I stared instead at my lap.
“Or they will send me the funds to go home,” she was saying. “To a father who is—how did you put it?—who is even less sensitive than my husband is. Was.” With that, Isabel composed herself, with more will than I’d thought she possessed; and the woman I had known returned: prim, superficial, courteous, dainty. She escorted me to the door.
I forced my eyes to meet hers. Feeling coarse, clumsy and cruel, I muttered, “Thank you for the coffee.”
“Of course.” Her smile was raw, her mouth hard.
It seemed to me that Fanny should find the weight of my guilt too much to carry. How could I abandon her like that? I, of all people? Twice I almost turned back to tell Isabel to pack her things, that we could try to make our way together if…
But the if was much too large.
Chapter Five
Nacho sprained his wrist wrestling with a palomino gelding that didn’t take kindly to the saddle. I brought him cold water to soak the wrist, put liniment on it, bound it up in a strip of linen and told him to rest.
“But the selling day,” he protested. With the auction coming up, we’d been working every hour of daylight, and I had much yet to learn; I could do little without him. All the same, he whitened with pain when he tried to use his hand, so I insisted he keep his arm in a sling and give it a chance to heal.
Suddenly, I had the day ahead and no plans for it. Restless, I swept up an armful of clean laundry from the table where Herlinda had left it and was stowing it in my bureau drawer when I saw that the leather pouch had slid out from under my camisole. Its owner clearly thought the content was valuable. Why?
I drew out the yellowed scrap of foolscap and studied the markings again. It was a map of my ranch, all right. And a little more. There was an odd series of X’s above the spring. Far as I knew, there was nothing up there but rocks. Below the X’s, some dim markings led like a path from where the arroyo bent as it left the mountains a little beyond the cuevas.
The morning sun was so bright it hurt my eyes. A squirrel followed me to the barn hoping for a handout. I took a pecan from my pocket and tossed it to him. He checked it over like an urchin biting a coin to be sure it’s real, nodded his approval, flicked his tail like a naughty dancer and disappeared.
“Fanny!” I called to the mare in the corral. When I had saddled and cinched her and eased the bit between her teeth, I went back to the house to fetch my pistol. As an afterthought, I slipped my flute into the brocade bag next to it. After my poor performance at the boy’s funeral, I had resolved to practice more, but there was so little time. I pulled myself into Fanny’s saddle, fumbled at my skirt so it wouldn’t bind my legs and wondered what folks would think if I sewed myself some trousers.
Along the arroyo, the junipers grew larger, and a few piñon pines wandered down the mountain to join them. Last year’s yucca blooms had turned papery above the barbed spears. Here and there new waxy-white blossoms were opening. Fanny picked her way past a patch of cholla that was all angles and thorns and tall as a man.
At the cuevas, the land becomes flat, a broad, high shelf; and you can see across the entire valley to Mesilla. Fanny followed the arroyo to where the pines and junipers congregate. The sun was razor-sharp, and I was glad for the shade.
I slipped down from the mare’s back. If the map was right, this was where the path—if that’s what it was—began.
Beyond the trees, the sun-mottled brush was thick and matted all the way to where the bare rock rose steep and straight, like the walls of a cathedral. I inspected the area carefully. If there had ever been a path, a jumble of spiny brush had long since covered it.
On a shady rock flat enough to sit on, I assembled the flute, only to discover when I lifted it to my mouth that I remembered little of the fine music I had once played. My life had grown over it like the brush. My fingers were graceless, my wind sluggish, the tones dull and flat. Doggedly, I played what few bars of Mozart I could remember; and slowly, the sound improved.
“Very nice.” A man appeared among the piñons and chucked a sack to the ground: my tenant from the cuevas, Tonio Bernini. He smiled. “I wondered if the fairies were having a party.”
“It’s not nice,” I said. “It’s awful. I’ve forgotten all the music I ever knew. And I don’t believe in fairies. I doubt I ever did.”
His beard gave him a look of patient wisdom, which for some reason vexed me. I was churlishly thinking that I owned six square miles of land and still couldn’t sit down on a rock without someone spying on me.
Unabashed, he reached into his patched jacket and brought out a pipe. “Mind?”
I shrugged, which he took for acquiescence. It didn’t smell like tobacco. It was dusky and sweet, like the juniper.
“What’s that?” I pointed the flute to the sack at his feet.
“Leaves, last year’s dried flowers, a few roots, aloe, red pepper, juniper.” He sat, quite unselfconsciously, on the ground. “There’s still a stand of Saint Ann’s-wort up there.” He gestured to a point above the springs. “I was sure it would be gone. Good for aching joints, Saint Ann’s.”
I leaned forward at that. “Would it cure a sprained wrist?” I told him about Nacho.
“Wouldn’t cure, but I wager it would help.” He opened the sack, drew out some leaves and handed them to me. “Put them in some hot water and make a poultice. If you stop by the cave I’ll give you some bark for the pain.”
Thanking him, I stowed the leaves in my bag. “These came from up there?” I jutted my chin toward the area about the tangle of brush. He nodded. “There’s a way through the brush then?”
He gave me a sharp look then his eyes slid away. “Of sorts, but one must brave the rattlers. There’s a nest of the vipers up there.”
That dampened my interest in the area. “The local rattlesnakes can be awfully mean. We’ve lost a couple of colts to bites. You’d be safer on a horse than walking about among them. If you really have the healer’s art with those herbs, I daresay you could trade your skill for enough money to buy a sturdy gelding.”
“Perhaps. But I’m comfortable this way.” Pairs of laugh lines appeared at the corners of his eyes and he glanced at his feet. “I wager these have carried me nigh as many miles as the circumference of the earth. Not all in one stretch, mind you.”
I wondered if he was having me on. “You said you were once at seminary. Where?”
Wisps of fragrant smoke curled around him like slim strips of rain cloud. “Italy.”
“Really? I’ve always wanted to see Rome.”
He gave me a slow smile and leaned his head back against a rock. “It’s full of ugly hulking buildings that cut off the air.”
“Why were you in Italy?”
The sun made a bright triangle on his forehead. “I was born there.”
That explained his not-quite-Spanish looks. “You don’t like your homeland?”
“I don’t like Rome. I was born in a village near Milan.”
“And you always wanted to be a priest?”
He peered at me quizzically as if over spectacles. “Not exactly. I happened to be a third and unnecessary son, so I was sent to the Franciscans when I was nine.”
“What does one do among the Franciscans? I’ve always imagined them just sitting about feeding birds.”
He chuckled. “There’s a little more to them than that. They taught me about plants. One of the brothers knew Hildegard’s Medicine and the Leech Book of Bald by heart and compiled his own catalog of formulas. I became his apprentice.”
“Was it very complicated?”
“A little. Sometimes a plant material’s properties change if it’s dried or heated. There’s a root from South America that is poisonous if you eat it raw. If you boil it one hour, it is safe to eat and quite nutritious; but if you boil it for two hours, it is again poisonous.”
“Eating it at all sounds a bit risky.”
“So is eating
nothing.”
“So it is,” I agreed. “Was it the Franciscans who sent you to America? Like a missionary? I’m afraid I don’t know much about how the Church does such things. I shouldn’t think they had even heard of New Mexico.”
He gazed at the branch of piñon needles above his head. “My path was not quite so direct. I left the Franciscans to see the world. Eventually, I took passage on a ship to Mexico City and found my way to Chihuahua, where I worked with a priest in a small church until a drought killed almost everyone. I went east to Pennsylvania and lived with the Moravians for a time, but I found I missed the desert.”
He fell silent, his face like that of a boy who has recounted what he ate for supper. For an odd instant I wanted to touch his cheek. How many years had it been since such an impulse had warmed me? Five? Six? I knew all too well the path that sort of feeling could set a woman’s feet upon. I had survived by becoming neuter, as sexless as if I had cut off my breasts.
Discomfited, I turned my head to hide the blood rushing to my cheeks.
“There’s something witching about these mountains,” he said. “Once they have called to you, you can never be happy anywhere else.”
Chapter Six
I watched the battle from the shelf-land near the cuevas. It was a July Sunday; and heat smothered the land like a massive feather pillow, cutting off the air. The sky was almost white, and empty save for the relentless sun, which seemed to stalk any creature foolish enough to venture out.
An hour before I had been sitting at my pine-table desk, daring to hope that I would soon be turning a profit. Our horses fetched good prices at the auction, and the mares had dropped a beautiful crop of foals. I calculated that if the war didn’t interfere it truly might be only two more years before the ranch would bring enough money to set me up back East. I was adding up the figures when Nacho’s son, Julio, burst into the room.
“Señora! They have attacked!”
I looked up from the papers and sniffed the air. It wasn’t yet noon, and already I could smell the whiskey on his breath. “Who has attacked what?”
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