He shrugged. “Word travels fast as wind among the natives. They are good healers themselves, especially the women; and they’re always seeking more and better ways.”
“How did you learn which berries or leaves or stems to use for which ailment?”
“From a man called Mario. Brother Mario.”
“At the monastery.”
Tonio nodded. “He had a special house of glass where he grew hundreds of species from all over the world. I thought he was the greatest man on earth because he could relieve suffering—sometimes it seemed that he could even prevent death.”
I imagined a ten-year-old Tonio contemplating such miracles and smiled. “Why did you leave, then?”
He leaned back against the stone bench. His beard, I saw, wanted a trimming. The firelight danced in his eyes as he stared at the blackened wall above the coals. “Brother Mario said there were many more plants that might be useful. When I came of age, I decided to find some of them for him.”
“So your decision to leave had nothing to do with religion.”
“There was a time when I wanted to be a priest,” he said slowly. “But I wanted to see the world. I always intended to go back.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Something in his eyes seemed to drown the fire’s twinkle. He looked down, and the pause that followed stretched out and became heavy. “I still send a packet of seeds to Brother Mario now and then.” His tone had shifted to that of casual tea conversation.
I wanted to touch his shoulder; but instead, I put my feet on the floor and rose. “I should be getting home.” Then I remembered something. “When I showed you the map you said there were two things it could mean, but you only mentioned one. What was the second?”
“If I am not mistaken,” he said solemnly, “the path marked on that map leads right through the nest I told you of. The nest of rattlesnakes. Just above that are a number of very excellent herbs.”
“You’re joking.”
He smiled. “Of course.”
Outside, the wind had swept away both clouds and rain, and the sky was blue crystal with streaks of white. I mounted Fanny and walked her along the rock.
Just before I reached the place where the rocks give way to open space, I looked back. Tonio was standing at the gap in the rocks that marked the entrance to his cave, staring after me. He raised a hand in a wave.
Something inside me stirred, something I had thought was as dead as the steer we had just butchered and hung in the smokehouse. I suddenly glimpsed myself, a tot grasping my skirts and smiling up, an infant in my arms; and on my shoulder, a hand, with fingers narrow, not tapered, the knuckles larger than the rest. Coldly, I smothered the image, aghast that my mind would conjure such a thing.
“Sunday,” I called.
Fanny slowly picked her way to more level ground. We hadn’t gone a hundred yards when the unmistakable bray of a burro made my eyes dart over the landscape in puzzlement. We had only one burro. Herlinda used it to fetch water from the springs. But the springs were half a mile closer to home. The burro brayed again, and I spotted two grey ears twitching behind a rock. I reined Fanny toward them.
Cisco, our burro, tossed his head as I approached. Hitched behind him was the water wagon, but there was no sign of Herlinda. I had no illusions about how she would interpret my past few hours in the cave.
Chapter Fifteen
When Winona met me at the door, I cussed myself for seven kinds of fool. She looked about eleven months pregnant. And something was drawing hard lines around her mouth and eyes. Any notion of her riding in a wagon all the way to church on Sunday evaporated like dew on a hot morning. I put my arms around her. “What’s wrong?” Then, even I could feel the contraction in her belly.
Clear brown eyes held mine as one small nod answered my unvoiced question. “I was starting to think there might be two of us waiting when you got back from galivantin’.”
I swallowed hard. I hadn’t seen Herlinda, but I had a good idea as to her whereabouts. Should I fetch her? Winona was already padding heavily down the hall to her room. I followed, feeling wholly unprepared for the task ahead.
The bed was open, its linen fresh. Next to it sat a straw basket piled with clean rags. A sheet had been twisted and run around the foot of the bed so that the ends lay together, like reins, in the middle.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“To pull on, of course.”
“I’ve never done this before,” I faltered. “Not with—”
“I ain’t exactly an old hand, myself. But I figure it must come natural.” She turned, and I followed her to the kitchen, where every pot we owned was simmering on the stove.
I’d had what they called “a lady’s upbringing,” which sorely lacked even the merest hint about birthing. “I’ll fetch Herlinda,” I gulped. “She’s sure to know more than I do.”
“I already told that woman to stay clear.” Winona’s voice was thick, but her tone was adamant. “All them bad spirits peerin’ over her shoulder—I don’t want them in that room.”
“Tonio. You said yourself he’s a good healer. He may know what to do.”
Winona’s eyes fixed on me. They had turned a darker shade of brown. “I don’t want no man around, neither. This is woman’s doings. Eve knew a whole lot less than we do, and she got through it okay. If we can’t do as good as a lady who didn’t have nothing to wear but a fig leaf, we got no business procreatin’ in the first place.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, my voice veering toward shout. “Eve had a man there. She had Adam.”
“Now you just tryin’ to get out of this,” Winona said quite evenly. “This is my party. And I gets to invite who I want.”
“I don’t know enough. What if I do something wrong?”
“You done horses,” Winona cut me off, fixing me with those brown-agate eyes. “This ain’t a lot different. Now, I already boiled all them rags in there and dried ’em in the sun.” She waved toward the bedroom. “You just be sure that anything that touches me or the young ’un has been stuck in that boilin’ water first.” She had begun to pace slowly, back across the kitchen, through the parlor and down the hall, where she turned and started back along the same path. I trotted behind her.
“Like what? What do I have to stick in boiling water?”
“Like the knife to cut the cord,” she said patiently, waddling past me in the opposite direction. “Now I already scrubbed myself with that new lye soap. You go scrub your hands and arms real good.”
“Okay, okay, just don’t you go and faint or anything. You’ll have to tell me what to do.”
In the kitchen, I poured a little of the hot water into a pan so it could cool enough for me to put my hands into it. “Go lie down,” I called over my shoulder. “You should get off your feet.”
“Nope.” She had come up behind me. “It’s the walkin’ that drops the baby into the chute.”
“You make it sound like riding a bronc,” I muttered, scrubbing my hands all the way up to the elbow.
“It ain’t unlike it, honey.”
Winona went on pacing for another hour, with me trailing behind her, holding my hands up so they wouldn’t touch anything.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I got to lay me down. You bring a couple pots of water and that knife I put on the chopping table.”
I was swinging one of the blackened pots from the stove when I heard a shriek, followed by a bellowed groan. I put the pot on the floor fast and ran to Winona’s room.
She was lying on the bed, her eyes closed, her face greyish.
“What’s wrong?” I gasped, rubbing my arm where some of the boiling water had sloshed on it.
Her eyes flickered open. “I’m just trying out the sounds to get ’em right.”
I realized I was standing in a puddle of clearish fluid. My eyes flew back to hers.
“Water broke,” she said.
I mopped up the fluid before it could turn the floor to mud and fetched
two pots of water, the knife thrust into one like a sword. Then I washed again. My arms were beginning to redden from the lye.
A groan came from Winona—the low kind that sounds like it starts in the toes. She was rolling her head back and forth as if trying to avoid an attacker. Sweat had beaded on her temples, and the flesh around her mouth was almost white.
I patted her face dry with one of the rags, remembering when she had done the same for me. We hadn’t been able to be so clean and careful then. But we had known it wouldn’t matter.
“Do wish I had a birthin’ chair,” she grunted. Her body tightened and twisted, and she groaned again. “The pains are awful close together. Won’t be long. If something…happens…you take care of her…”
“Don’t say that!”
“Don’t give her to no one—darky, white nor Injun. A girl with no pa got to have a good ma. You give your word?”
“You know I’d raise her like my own…how do you know it’s a girl?”
“Her name’s to be Zia. Z-I-A.” She spelled the letters slowly. Winona could not read well, but she had learned her letters long before I knew her. “That meant something like ‘sun’ to her pa.” She smiled weakly. “Sunshine.”
She had never talked much about the baby’s father, but now she said, “He was a good man, her pa. Red Coyote was smart an’ brave; he was a good man.”
“What happened to him?”
“Got hisself killed by another Injun. Over me. And his family wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with me after. If…you tell Zia her papa—” Another fierce pain cut her off. She screamed this time, and sweat made big beads on her lip. Her hands gripped the bedclothes, white at the knuckles.
“Twist up one of them rags,” she grunted. I took one from the basket, twined it into a sort of rope and handed it to her. She opened her mouth and bit down on it. Her round cheeks had gone hollow.
I put pillows beneath her knees, and handed her the twisted-sheet reins she had devised. She pulled hard, the veins standing out on her temples. Then she gasped and began to pant. I wiped her face again and, having touched the top of the bed, re-scrubbed my hands. I had just finished drying them when Winona’s body arched, then went rigid. She screamed, the sound muffled by the rag in her mouth. And then the blood began.
The baby was no bigger than a rabbit and covered with so much mucous I was sure it would choke. I didn’t take time to cut the cord before turning it over and pounding her firmly on the back.
Zia was, indeed, a girl. And she let loose with a yell that would have put Winona, even at her most indignant, to shame.
“Nothing wrong with her mouth,” Winona grunted.
Hands trembling, I mopped the infant clean and wrapped her in one of the rags. Tiny, perfect hands clasped my thumb. For a moment, longing for a child of my own swept over me. I turned back to her mother. “She is one fine piece of work. She truly is.”
Big, dark smudges circled Winona’s eyes. “She do seem so,” she said, her voice husky.
Zia’s angry cries halted when I laid her across her mother’s now-shrunken belly. I slipped a bit of boiled yarn around the ropy cord that still pulsed between mother and infant. Pulling the yarn tight, I reached for the knife and severed the connection, freeing Zia to make her own way in the world. The baby stared at me unseeing, looking dubious about the whole process.
Winona gave me a glance of pained amusement. “You is not done yet.” Her fists tightened, her head drew forward on the pillow, and the afterbirth arrived. By scooting Winona first to one side, then the other, I changed the sheets. The skin across my knuckles was raw.
Exhausted, I stood amid the heaps of soiled rags and wiped my hands on my bloodied apron. An intense sense of pride stole over me. For all three of us. “Well, we did it.”
“Yes, ma’am, we did at that,” Winona chuckled. Little bubbly sounds were coming from the basket at her side. “But you surely do make a mess, Miss Matty.”
Chapter Sixteen
By the time Zia was a month old she could bewitch anyone just by gurgling. I spent hours by her basket marveling at her thick, dark eyelashes. In an often-sour world, she was sweetness itself.
Tonio brought juniper berries for Winona; and finding Zia suffering a bout of colic, he carried the baby about as though he were the father of ten and saw no mystery in the care of such a tiny being.
“Obviously, we’ll have to put off what we planned,” I told him.
“Perhaps it won’t be necessary. These things whip up like thunderclouds one minute only to clear off the next.” He pointed at the berries. “Mash them up and steep them for ten minutes or so. You have a timepiece?”
I nodded. My father had left me his pocket watch.
Winona recognized the concoction by its smell. “Injun women say this stuff sweeps the hearth clean an’ lays the wood for a new fire.” A grin split her face, and she swigged the liquid down.
Herlinda had prepared meals while Winona was gaining back her strength. She said little about anything, nothing about seeing me with Tonio at the cuevas.
I had urged Winona to take her time getting back to the chores, but she’d given me an arch look. “I is not rock-hard certain you is in safe hands.” By the end of the first week, she had resumed her territory in the kitchen.
With winter approaching, the need to get our meat smoked, sausages stuffed and burnt fence mended swept all other thoughts from my head. We were so busy the hands even skipped their Saturday-night carousing.
Winona interrupted one of my feverish bouts with the account books to announce, “I needs a measure of fresh white muslin.”
I stared at her dumbfounded. “Whatever for?”
“Land sakes, you think I’m gonna have that child christened wrapped in a rag?”
I stared at her, mouth open. “I flat forgot.”
“No matter, Miss Matty. You is plum tuckered. I can take me the wagon and the basket—”
“It’s too cold to take the baby out. I’ll go.”
“Nohow. I can wrap her up plenty good enough. She be a sight more sturdy than you think.”
But I won the argument. It occurred to me that the christening would be a perfect time for Tonio to accompany us to church and allay any ill will Isabel might have stirred up toward Winona.
All thought of the Mexican boy’s map had fled my mind in the wake of Zia’s birth and the haste of the ranch work. But as Fanny’s hooves drummed a steady rhythm on the trail to town, I began to dwell on it again. Why had it been drawn at all if not to mark the place of something valuable? Or had someone merely hornswoggled the boy? If the map was a fake, why was it so accurate about so many things?
My head still buzzing with these thoughts, I was paying scant attention to much else and heading for Garza’s General Store, was half way across the plaza when I realized the square was a squirming mass of people. Folks from every settlement within thirty miles, from Las Cruces and Dona Ana and Robledos and even from Willow Bar down south, must have come to town.
“Que pasa?” I asked an old man who was leaning against the front of the general store, patiently watching the crowd. “What’s going on?” I wasn’t sure whether he was Mexican or Indian.
He took a gnarled wooden pipe out of his mouth and said in passable English, “You do not hear of it?”
I shook my head and anxiously eyed the crowd, but no one looked nervous or worried. They seemed more in a mood to celebrate. “It isn’t the Yankees, is it?”
“No, ma’am.” I could see that the pipe had fit quite comfortably in the space where two teeth were missing. The teeth that remained were as brown as the wood of the pipe. He smelled like a smokehouse smells in autumn when it’s stoked up and full of fresh pig. He stuck the pipe back in his mouth. “It is the Con-fed-er-ates. The Rebs.”
My spirits shot up. The fears that had driven dozens of people to hide their belongings and wait things out in Mexico could be laid to rest. Union soldiers would not storm our valley bent on punishing us for welcoming the
Texans. People could come home.
The crowd was multiplying rapidly. Thinking I glimpsed Jamie across the square, I realized how sorely I had missed him: his good nature, his wisdom. Aside from Winona, he was the only person I could count a true friend.
The old man tugged at my arm. The newspaper he pushed into my hand was so smudged it looked solid grey. “Read, please,” he said. “I do not.”
Jamie and his press had, indeed, returned.
“‘On issuing our last number,’” I read aloud, “‘we concluded that it would be many a week before we issued another. The Abolitionists, we were told, well armed and uniformed, would advance upon us to wipe us from the face of the earth. Having hurriedly packed off our press to Mexico, cached our type, made our wills and prepared for the worst, we find the imminent stampede never occurred, no fight, nor even a sight of the enemy. The tears and partings and God knows what anguish, were for naught.’”
The old man nodded to me and limped off into the crowd.
I was thinking that with Jamie back in town I could ask him about the man who had tried to buy my land. At the least, he could describe the person who had asked him to bring me the offer.
The mass of milling bodies soon hemmed me in, but with my height, I could still scan a sea of faces. There was no further sign of Jamie; but a few paces to my left, I spied the cocky posture of Lieutenant Tyler Morris. With him, erect as a poker and seeming to swagger even as he stood still, was a Confederate colonel in full and perfect dress. Both were waving their arms, and Lieutenant Morris was smacking a rolled-up paper angrily against his own leg. Curious, I edged closer.
“It is an insult to your honor, sir. You must defend yourself. The man is a dangerous fool. You must have satisfaction.”
The colonel was agreeing, bobbing his head like a furious banty rooster. Catching my eye, Lieutenant Morris gave a sharp nod, as if to dismiss me.
Perhaps it was just to annoy him, but I smiled and held out my hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”
Morris looked away; but the colonel turned, and there was little the lieutenant could do but introduce me to his companion, so he straightened his shoulders smartly and did so. “Your governor, ma’am, Colonel John Baylor.”
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