Listen to the Mockingbird

by Penny Rudolph

  “I see you have disobeyed me.” His words were slurred. He slammed the door behind him.

  I had jumped when the door was flung open, but now the familiar false calm descended upon me like an armored cloak and I looked up at him. “Winona has made an excellent stew, Andrew. I’ll get a plate for you.” I started to rise but he slammed me back into the chair.

  “You’ve told them, haven’t you! That’s why they won’t put me on active duty.”

  My telling someone something was a frequent theme, and I no longer tried to understand what I was supposed to have told to whom. “No, Andrew. I’ve only been getting to know the ladies. Captain Blair’s wife is delightful and funny and—”

  I got no further because Andrew yanked me up from the chair by my hair and dragged me toward the hearth, where he pushed me to the floor.

  Cold metal pressed my cheek. It took me some time to realize it was the muzzle of a pistol.

  “You’ve told them about old man Peters and they’re going to cashier me. Probably send me to prison. I didn’t mean to kill him, you know; but he wouldn’t get out of my way.”

  Numb with fright, I sat rock still. Well I knew the danger of trying to reason with him. He moved the gun to my temple and pulled back the hammer. Then he pulled the trigger.

  The click-click seemed to echo endlessly. I had stopped breathing and was certain I would never breathe again.

  He pulled my head back, shoved the revolver close to my face and opened the cylinder. All the chambers were empty but one. He snapped the cylinder back into the gun and pushed the muzzle into my ear. At the click of the hammer being cocked, I closed my eyes, absolutely certain I was going to die.

  “If you scream,” he said quietly, “you assuredly will be dead before anyone comes. And as it happens, I have several other bullets I can load in time to greet anyone who fancies himself a hero.”

  The click of the trigger nearly stopped my heart.

  He spun the cylinder again and cocked the hammer. “Now open your mouth.”

  999

  That night, something hot and seething rose up inside me like a pillar of liquid iron. When it had settled and cooled, I had but one purpose: to get away.

  But with Andrew still not on active duty due to the court-martial, I could never count on his being gone for a definite period of time. Day and night, I wracked my head to conceive of a way. There seemed none. My friends were back in St. Louis. I didn’t know anyone there at Fort Craig; and I figured if I told anyone, they wouldn’t believe me—they’d be sure to tell my husband, and then he really would kill me.

  I reckon he sensed the change in me because each day his rage grew. One night he swept all the china off the table, then shouted, “What are you waiting for, you slut? Pick them up.” It didn’t even occur to me to resist. I bent silently to do as he demanded. He kicked my legs from under me. “That’s better. On your hands and knees, like the dog you are.”

  He watched as I picked up every tiny chip, booting me in the ribs when I overlooked one. When I finished, he raised his pistol. I closed my eyes and waited for the end. A shot exploded, then another, and another. I felt nothing. When they ceased, I squinted beneath my lashes. A neat cluster of craters peppered the wall.

  I wondered whether anyone would hear and question the shots.

  “I am going to walk barefoot around the table,” Andrew announced. “If I cut my foot on even one sliver of china, your head is going to look like that wall.”

  999

  About a week later, Andrew arrived home from an officers’ meeting in a fury more towering than any before. He stalked to where I sat knitting some mindless article—a scarf, I think—in front of the fire. His eyes were enormous. They knew but one color: black.

  He bade me sit on the floor and bound my wrists behind me, then spun me about by my hair until I was lying face down. Then he tied my ankles, then looped the rope about my neck. This he attached to my wrists and ankles. If I made even the slightest movement, I would choke myself.

  I don’t know how many hours I lay there while he prowled about the room, shouting threats then laughing and draining a bottle of whiskey in short, quick gulps. When it was empty, he flung it into a corner and took hold of my hair. Yanking my head back, he shoved the muzzle of the pistol against my cheek and drew back the hammer. This time, I prayed that he would kill me.

  When the hammer fell, I jerked and the rope bit into my throat. But no bullet put me out of my misery.

  Andrew disappeared and returned with a broad kitchen knife, which he waved in front of my face; and I could see my own blood spurting from my throat. Instead, he laughed and cut the ropes and lurched off into the bedroom.

  A pure, distilled hatred filled every atom of my being until it seemed it would spill out and rot away the floor. I thought about finding his pistol and killing him as he slept. But the Army would waste no time seeing me hanged. Perhaps I could just steal away in the night…but I knew full well I would be quickly hunted down like a wild hare and brought back. Might I beg aid from Andrew’s commanding officer? Andrew would certainly give some frightful account of what I had done to deserve it. Beating one’s wife, while not encouraged, was the prerogative of any husband who found it necessary to correct unseemly behavior and preserve her virtue.

  In the end, I only lay there, my cheek chafed by the braided rug, listening to his drunken snores until the sun rose.

  The next few days, Andrew’s demeanor seemed almost normal, and I began to hope if there had been some sort of poison in his system it had finally worked its way out. One morning I awoke to the short yips of a small dog. When I opened the kitchen door, a puppy bounded toward me nearly bending himself double with tail-wagging; and I laughed for the first time in many weeks. He was all white but for one black paw and one floppy ear. I scooped him up, fed him, made a bed of rags for him near the stove and named him Patch. Andrew grunted once about taking in a “fool dog,” then ignored him.

  A few nights later, Andrew came home, sank into the stuffed chair in the parlor and stared at me with tortured eyes. “They are going to arrest me for killing old man Peters.”

  I stiffened, and my breath went so shallow that I got dizzy waiting for his next move. But he only laid his head back against the chair. “They are watching me every minute.” He was silent a long moment and I stopped breathing altogether. “I’ve got orders to report back to Fort Union. We’re to take the stagecoach Thursday a week.”

  Silent relief rushed over me; I would be traveling in public.

  “I requested a change in orders, but the lickspittle bastards denied it. I asked for a pass to go to Santa Fe immediately to see General Wilkinson. No. The cursed sons of Satan said no.”

  Still I said nothing.

  Finally, he went on. “You must go to Wilkinson for me.”

  At first, I didn’t think I heard him right. I didn’t know anything about anyone named Peters. I had no idea whether Andrew had actually killed someone by that name, though he was clearly capable of such a thing. I wondered why the Army wouldn’t just arrest him here if they thought him guilty. Most of all, I was absolutely certain Andrew would not allow me to leave here alone.

  But the next night and the next, he talked of the same thing. “You will talk with General Wilkinson. Tell him what they have been doing to me here. You can persuade him to redress my situation and protect me. I know you can.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Of course.”

  “On Thursday next, I will take the stagecoach. It should reach Santa Fe by nightfall Monday. Meet me there. If you have been successful we can come back home.”

  My mind was in such tatters that at first I couldn’t think where he meant by “home”; but of course, he meant here, this house where I had seen more horror than I had dreamed existed.

  I nodded, praying for time to think. “Yes. That’s a good plan, Andrew.”

  “If General Wilkinson refuses…”

  I expected some threat to me if I failed to earn the ge
neral’s assistance, but Andrew peered at me earnestly and said, “I will then desert the Army. We’ll have enough money. Don’t you worry about that. I will bring Mother’s cherrywood chest with me.”

  Then, as if laying out a simple plan to go to the commissary, he said, “We can’t trust any of the men here. You’ll have to go alone. After dark tomorrow.”

  I started to shake my head, still trying to gather my wits. “Will that be safe?” As if anything could be less safe than where I was at that very moment.

  He swung his face toward me, eyes drilling holes in mine. “You will do exactly as I say.”

  I forced my voice flat. “Of course.”

  Andrew brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “You’ve got it into your head to leave and never come back, don’t you?” he shouted.

  “No.” The word strangled itself in my throat.

  Patch chose that moment to charge at Andrew. Perhaps the poor tyke had some notion of defending me.

  Andrew caught the puppy by the nape of the neck, then grasped the dog’s hind legs and lurched up from his chair. Patch yelped and let out a wail.

  I stood frozen, as if my shoes were nailed to the floor, knowing with perfect prescience what was going to happen.

  Andrew carried the howling pup across the parlor. “If you desert me now, when I need you most, this is what I will do to you.” And he smashed poor Patch hard against the fireplace.

  “No!” I leapt toward Andrew, the first time I had tried to resist him in many weeks. I grabbed his arm but he flung me to the floor. With a roar part-rage, part-eerie laughter, he swung the whimpering puppy against the bricks again and again until there was nothing left of the dog’s poor head but a bloody pulp.

  The next morning, not two hours after Andrew had left the house, I fully understood what I would have to do.

  Chapter Ten

  The sheets of cascading water from the arroyo’s rim had ceased, and the water that engulfed the tree was slowly but certainly diminishing. And I was alive.

  I tried to think. The effort made me cough, and water sputtered from my nose. My legs were there, submerged in water to above the knee; but I couldn’t seem to move them. My arms were covered with scratches and cuts that didn’t look real on my eerily white flesh, but I could move them. My fingers were shriveled and puffy.

  The torrent had dumped me onto the fallen tree trunk as if it were the saddle of a horse. If I could get my feet onto solid dry ground, surely the numbness would leave my legs.

  I grasped the sodden branch above me and tried to pull myself up, but it was slippery and my arms were like a rag doll’s. I sagged back and willed my feet to push against the log. Slowly, I crept further out of the water.

  How long had I been unconscious? I had no idea. Nacho and his sons would surely have begun a search when I didn’t show up for dinner. Maybe they would find Fanny. An abrupt vision of my loyal Fanny engulfed by that wall of water made me gasp. I tried to remember exactly where I had left her. Had I been stupid enough to leave her right in the path of that torrent? She would have eventually abandoned her ground-tie, of course, but would she have done so soon enough?

  Squeezing my eyes shut against those thoughts, I threw my head back and tried to scream. Only a wretched rasp croaked from my throat. Even if Nacho had found Fanny and was searching nearby he’d never hear me.

  “Help!” I shouted again. “I’m trapped. I need help.”

  Above me on the rim of the arroyo, something scraped; and a rock skittered down the wall and plunked into the water. Was someone there? I called again.

  The water stirred by the falling rock lapped rhythmically just below my feet. Then the faint sound of a horse’s hooves began, quickly picked up speed to a lope then faded. Perhaps whoever it was had gone for help, but something inside me gave an ugly laugh at that notion. Someone knows you’re here all right, it whispered, and hopes you will drown or die of exposure.

  That’s ridiculous, I told myself.

  The darkness above me began to change. A glow appeared above an outcropping of rock on the canyon rim. As the moon grew brighter, I gingerly lowered my legs as far as they would stretch. My toes struck solid ground, and I inched the rest of my body from the tree trunk. Water sucking at my boots, a chill raising goose bumps under my sodden clothing, I slogged to where the canyon widened. With a series of muddy niches for toeholds, I climbed the cold and slippery arroyo walls and staggered to the place I was certain I had left Fanny. It was empty.

  She will have gone home, I told myself rigidly, unwilling to consider any other possibility.

  I struggled on through the brush, the rocks and stubble biting into my feet through the drowned leather of my boots. The darkness began to melt with the approach of sunrise. A tree appeared, and beneath it a small, thick cross. I moved toward it, confused.

  Somehow, I had wandered much farther than I had realized. This was the tree above the Mexican boy’s grave. But the compact mound of rocks had been tossed aside, the coffin sat in its shallow depression, exposed. Had the water done this when it raged from the mountain?

  The ground was damp, but surely this far from the arroyo the water would not have had the power to shove away the stones. Had some kin of the boy turned up, someone unable to believe he was deceased? Had his killer wanted to be certain he was dead? I squinted at the rubble, bewildered. With no apparent answer, I corrected my course and found my way home.

  I lurched along the side of the house on bruised and bleeding feet that had long since gone numb again. My hand was reaching for the door when it suddenly swung wide and a voice I had never expected to hear again bellowed, “Good God, Miss Matty, it’s about time you got yourself to home!”

  A lively face with cheeks the color of darkest onyx peered at me. Hands gripped my shoulders, pulled me inside; and Winona engulfed me in a bear hug.

  “Just where did you get yourself off to when an old friend comes callin’? Lucky for me these people you got here let me in.” Light from the lard lamp lit gold flecks in her eyes.

  “I…” My head spun like one of those bowls at the rodeo when they draw the name of a prizewinner. Even in my stunned state it was impossible to miss that her belly bulged with child.

  She shook me gently. “Lordy, lady. You is bedraggled. You’re as soppin’ wet as a wad of rags in a river.”

  If I had been asked to choose between seeing God or Winona at that very moment, I would have picked Winona. She had seen me through more corridors in hell than I cared to remember. “This is only the road to heaven,” she would say. “We ain’t settin’ up housekeeping till we get to the other end.”

  The last time I’d seen her I had stuffed a fistful of money and a handwritten paper into her pocketbook and asked her to arrange boarding for Fanny for a couple of years. I had hoped the paper would be enough to prove she was a free woman.

  I stripped, rubbed my blue-white flesh with rough towels until some of the blood ventured back to pink my skin and put on fresh clothes. Figuring Winona would disapprove of the trousers—she was prim and proper about the oddest things—I donned my old calico dress.

  She had already taken over the kitchen, which had not endeared her to Herlinda; and now there were biscuits and crabapple jam and strong, hot coffee on the table. I swallowed one of the biscuits almost whole and buttered another.

  “You look right pert, Miss Matty. Sure enough your hair has grown. It always was the prettiest color I ever did see.”

  I ran my hand through my still-sodden locks. The braid had come loose, and it hung about me like Spanish moss. “However did you find me?”

  “Nothing hard about it,” Winona chuckled. “I knew you would as soon lose your own teeth as that horse of yours. The folks I paid to look after her—”

  “Fanny!” I leaped from my chair. “Did she come back?” I started for the door.

  “She come moseying in this morning at first light, just before you did.”

  I sank back onto the chair and wolfed down anoth
er biscuit. “How did that happen?” I nodded at Winona’s belly.

  “If you don’t know that yet, you got to go back to school,” she guffawed. “It be a couple months, more or less, afore this chil’ join us.”

  She was quiet for a moment then related a wild tale of falling in with a small party of Indians returning to their village from a trading expedition. The village, on a hilltop some miles west of Albuquerque, was called Acoma, which meant, she said, City of the Sky. “The menfolk was fierce as bears and beautiful as bobcats. They wasn’t mean—I never saw no scalps or such-like. They done a good deal of praying and talking to their gods, which must have tuckered them out, ’cause they didn’t do much else.

  “The womenfolk, now, our life was not so fine. We done all the work, the farming, the birthing, looking after the young ones, the fixing of food and all. It was us made the pots and stuff the men traded for knives and such. The headman had made me give over my money, so when my man got hisself killed I had to steal back as much as was left. While I was at it, I took a horse, too, ’cause I had to get pretty far pretty fast.”

  I told her the territory had gone Confederate. “Was there any trouble about your papers?” I had just improvised what I wrote, hoping it would be accepted as proof that she was a free woman.

  “Them Texans ain’t much interested in colored folk. I only run across one, and the way I was dressed and expectin’ and all, he pro’bly thought I was a Injun gal who done sat in the sun too long.”

  I propped my chin in my hand and gazed at her, so grateful to see her I was almost afraid to ask, “You’ll stay?”

  “That is surely what I intend to do. I didn’t come by just to make a pan of biscuits. You need some overseein’ if you don’t know no better than to come traipsing home at pert’ near sunrise, dripping like a dunked biscuit.” She narrowed an eye in an almost-wink. “Now, tell me how you happen to get you this fine ranch. I bet that is one fine story.”