“A nigra who casts spells is a threat to us all,” she intoned and spun away to someone else before I could answer.
Two of the washerwomen left behind by the army were Negresses, and Winona happily reported she had known the cousin of one of them. Even Herlinda was in good spirits, nodding and smiling and chatting with the Mexican women who had clustered at one corner of the plaza. They may have had little reason to relish a Confederate victory, but a good party is hard to resist.
Nacho and the rest of the hands were still enjoying the revelry when the two women and I headed home, exhausted and stuffed. Herlinda had even ceased to eye Winona with dark suspicion. The day’s jubilation felt like some kind of gentle fluid running in the veins, warm and tingly. The wind was blowing my hair, and the sunset behind us was dying the organ-pipe mountains deep red. I lifted my face to the wind and let the horses have their heads.
The sky had darkened enough that I couldn’t see the house, but I knew exactly the place on the road where I should see lantern light in the parlor window. Whenever anyone was returning after dark, we always lit the lantern in the parlor. Always. Even though Herlinda grumbled about it. I pinched my eyes shut then looked again, but ahead was only darkness. I told myself that Julio had probably fallen asleep.
With no reminder from the reins, the horses clattered to a stop in front of the barn. No light came from the house at all, not even the slight blush from a lard lamp. The air was still as a grave. Fear began to prickle at the back of my neck.
Winona and Herlinda were easing themselves from the seat, faces placid and undisturbed. I forced myself to walk calmly to the back door and threw it open.
“Julio?” I called. “Why isn’t the lantern lit?” The house was utterly still.
I moved quickly through the dark kitchen to the parlor and struck a match to light the lantern. Neither Herlinda nor Winona seemed to think anything was amiss. I lit another lantern and told them I would put up the horses.
From the patio I could see the low shadowy line of the bunkhouse. It, too, was dark. The horses, still in harness, were restive. I unhitched them from the wagon and saw to their feed.
Not until I was about to leave the barn did I glance up toward the roof.
Gorge rose in my throat as I stared through the lantern light at what swung from a viga on the far side of the barn. A dark form dangled limply, almost directly over the spot where the Mexican boy had died. I lurched closer.
It was Julio.
Chapter Thirty
I could not seem to make a sound. It was as though a boulder had smacked into my chest, knocking the wind from me forever. When I did scream, it sounded like it was coming from someone else.
The face of the poor body that hung above me was horribly twisted. The fingers were bloody where Julio had clawed desperately at the rope.
In the shadows beyond that pitiful form, a dark hulk sprawled as if it had been thrown there. I lifted the lantern and moved forward, then sucked in my breath. In the straw lay my hope for the future. George Washington would sire no more fine colts.
My eyes searched his flank, his sides, his neck for the bullet hole that had to be there, but the huge and handsome body seemed unmarked. The legs were bent, as if he had died fighting. Then my lantern light reached the head.
The bullet had entered the left eye and torn the skull asunder.
A screech like that of a banshee came from behind me. I whipped around. Herlinda threw herself to the straw beneath Julio’s dangling feet and began to tear her hair.
I choked out, “Oh, God, Herlinda.” Struggling for some way to live through the next moment with my own despair, I knew hers must be greater than anything I could imagine. I leaned over her, touched her shoulder. She flinched away. “This won’t help him,” I said.
She flailed at me with her fists, a horrible wrenching sound coming from her throat.
Backing away, I felt hands close on each of my arms near the shoulder. “Mercy, mercy, mercy,” Winona breathed. “Did he do this hisself?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said shakily. “This wasn’t by his own hand. Look.” I raised the lantern toward the slain stallion.
Winona drew in a deep breath. “Lord have mercy. Who done this?”
“Get a knife,” I rasped, my voice like sandpaper. “A sharp one. We can’t let the boy hang there.”
Winona blinked at me, then backed out of the barn.
I peered into the shadows beyond Herlinda. Julio must have been forced to stand on something to be hanged. But there was no chair, no table that could have been yanked away in the final moment. Whoever had done it had tidied up.
Why? The word glanced off the walls of my mind like a metal ball in a metal box. I wanted to throw myself on the floor with Herlinda and tear at my own hair.
I cut Julio down. Standing on a table, I hacked at the rope with a cleaver.
“Get Herlinda out of the way. He’ll fall on her.” But Herlinda hissed and spit and kicked when Winona tried to move her.
My knees began to go to wobbly as the table teetered.
“Wha—?” Someone had come into the barn. I whirled, grasping the cleaver as a weapon.
Ruben was staring at the body of his brother as it swung in the lamplight next to me. “Jesús, Maria y Josef,” he whispered as he sagged to his knees and crossed himself.
“Please,” I said after a moment, and realized I was whispering. I cleared my throat and tried to speak normally. “Get your mother out of here.”
Digging his knuckles into his eyes, he nodded, then rose, crossed the barn and picked up Herlinda as if she were a child. She hammered at his chest with her fists. “Bruja,” she hissed over Ruben’s shoulder at Winona. “You kill mi hijo.” Big, strangling, choking sobs tore from her throat.
I heard those sobs all night long. Not in my sleep—my eyes would not close.
Hours after Herlinda’s keening wails had become hoarse and finally ground to a ragged halt, I paced the house, eyes scratchy, as if sand had gathered beneath the lids.
I could not have been more guilty of Julio’s death if I had held the noose. It was I who had shown that horrid little man in the plaza the drawing and told him the name of the artist. The man had seemed mean, even wicked, but not clever enough for this sort of killing. Perhaps he had passed the information to someone else. Someone who was frightfully cunning.
Julio’s killer had wanted to make certain there would be no more drawings, but he wanted to serve a warning to me. Else why would he also slaughter my prize stud, shoot him through the eye, much the same way that calf I found at the reservoir last year had been shot?
The next morning, Herlinda had Ruben lay Julio on the dining room table, and there she bathed and dressed him. To erase some of the agony from his distorted face, she wadded up some cloth and pushed it into his mouth to give his cheeks a little roundness. Then she wrapped him carefully from head to toe in a bolt of pale muslin. She made almost no sound at all, but tears streamed down her cheeks to spatter the cloth with little circles of dampness.
She refused my help, but I stood like a pillar of ice in the corner, watching. Only when she was finished did I realize my hand was covering my mouth as if to still any sounds that might leak out.
All of us were like swimmers who had ventured too far from shore, unable to do more than tread water, struggling to stay afloat. Winona’s face was set in a fearsome scowl. Ruben was so drunk that when I sent him in the wagon for Tonio he could barely guide the horse. The other hands wore an air of disbelief. Nacho’s eyes held a dreadful look. Aside from the Indian women, who seemed on better terms with death than we, Herlinda, with her doleful task, appeared the calmest of us all.
That afternoon, we laid Julio in the second grave in that corner of the ranch. Death seemed to hover on the wind that stirred the leaves of the gnarled cottonwood overhead. It had struck two youths who had not yet reached their twentieth year, and something in me feared it might not have done with us yet.
Winona knelt behind me m
urmuring prayers in an odd and rhythmic language. I hoped Julio’s mother could not hear her, that she would not mistake this for some sort of spell.
The notion that Julio had been killed because of me went on gnawing at the already frayed corners of my mind. He had died because someone wanted my land. And the days of simply turning down offers to buy it were over.
Tonio said some words I don’t remember and I tried to play the flute, but the notes quavered and died. When the men began to shovel the clods of clay into the grave, a cry burst from Herlinda, and she flung herself onto the coffin. The moans that came from her throat were sounds I hope I never hear again.
Ruben and two others dragged her away. Mournfully, he pinned her to the ground while the others filled the hollow and we covered the broken earth with rocks to ward off coyotes.
She was still keening, thrashing and tearing her hair when it was over. The others returned to the house. I sat down next to Ruben, and we tended his mother until she finally seemed to have purged the worst of her pain.
We buried George Washington the following day. I could not shake the numbness that had settled over me that night in the barn when I cut Julio down. For the next few weeks I found it nearly impossible to get up in the morning; and once I was out of bed, nothing seemed worth the doing. I could manage little more than putting one foot in front of the other, attending to one chore after another.
I was certain the same vicious person had slain both boys, destroyed the stallion and probably set fire to the range and maimed that calf as well. Very likely he had also made two offers to purchase my land at a price far below value. But for the life of me, I could think of no reason an officer in the Union Army should do these things, nor could I think of a way to smoke him out.
We had our hands full with horses to be tended, the rest of the garden to plant, hides to be tanned, butter churned. Eleven hens that had stopped laying had to be dispatched and plucked, a fence needed mending, the small stand of winter wheat was ready for cutting and milling.
And it somehow became my task to see to it that Winona and Herlinda were never together in the same room. That effort alone left me bone-tired at the end of a day.
I couldn’t bear the thought of riding into town so I sent Ruben to report his brother’s murder and the killing of our stallion. He returned with a message that Sheriff Zeke wanted me to stop by the next time I came to town.
Given the second inexplicable murder at my ranch, I didn’t like to consider why Zeke might ask to see me.
A pall of sadness still hung over Nacho, and I urged him to take some time off; but when one of the mares was about to foal he went out to the barn and, in a rusty voice, insisted on seeing to her himself.
The foal, when it came, was a sturdy little fellow and I couldn’t help but smile at his dignity as he stood while his mother licked him clean. This one, Nacho said, we would not geld, but it would be a couple of years before we would know if he would make a fit stud. I told myself the healthy little colt was a start. Perhaps we could buy a few gravid mares at the next auction.
But at best, the slaying of George Washington had set back any hope of selling the ranch for at least two additional years, four more years in all.
It turned hot the following afternoon and everyone retired for siesta. When I was sure I was alone, I went out to the barn and took a pistol from the wall where the guns hung with the tack. I loaded it, then went into the parlor, got down on my knees to the left of the fireplace and pressed on the bottom row of tiles where the painted mockingbird raised its wings.
The tile panel scraped and came away from the adobe wall. I slid the heavy panel to the side and reached in to unlock the chest that sat in the niche behind it. The wall was more than a foot thick. Andrew would have been happy to know that his “mother’s” chest was quite safe.
I pulled out a sack of coins and winced a little at how slim it had grown. Still, there was nearly two thousand dollars left. I counted it carefully. Enough to buy another stud. Enough to pay the hands, enough to be able to hang on for at least another few years. If nothing dreadful happened.
I put the sack back, closed the chest; and on top of it, I laid the pistol. Then I meticulously replaced the tile panel.
I was just getting to my feet when the shot exploded somewhere in the back of the house, followed by the sound of several pairs of running feet. I turned to start for the hall, but my feet seemed nailed to the floor.
“My God, woman, you’ve done kilt her!” The voice belonged to Jed Riley, one of the hands. He had apparently come through one of the doors from the patio.
His shout was followed by a shriek. Herlinda.
I dashed down the hall toward Winona’s room, fearing I would find her with her brains splattered over her pillow. I shouldered my way past the three men who had gathered in the doorway.
Herlinda was cowering belligerently in a corner. Winona lay on the bed, eyes wide and shiny in a pasty grey face, mouth open in a small O. Zia, tucked under her left arm and apparently unscathed, had begun an angry squalling. Sucking in my breath, my eyes darted over Winona. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Where was the wound?
She turned her head slowly to look at me and I saw where the bullet had landed. Next to her face was a mound of feathers that had burst from a round hole in her pillow. A scant inch above it, Winona’s earlobe dripped blood into the feathers.
I shooed everyone from the room, ordered Herlinda to wait for me in my office and closed the door. Then I went to the bed, picked up the hiccoughing Zia, took Winona’s hand in mine and looked into her face. “Are you all right?”
She blinked at me thoughtfully as if taking inventory of her various and sundry parts, then nodded slowly. “I appears to be okay, but I sure enough ain’t amused.”
Balancing Zia in one arm, I tended to Winona’s ear with a drop of whiskey, and she screwed her face into such a fierce expression that I almost laughed. “It could have been worse,” I told her. “A lot worse.”
“Could have been a mite better, too,” she grumbled, pushing my hand away and getting out of bed to stomp across the room to the bureau. She stabbed her finger at the door. “I tell you true, for myself, I can put up with most anything. But if that woman harm my chil’, I break her in halfs and use her for kindling.”
Herlinda sat sullenly in my office while I spoke to her blank face. “You are a fool. You could be put in jail. Winona is no bruja. You cannot blame her for…” My voice hitched. “For God’s sake! She was in town with us that day.” I almost choked on the memory of Julio. “If you have to blame someone, blame me. If you can’t live here peaceably, leave. Leave now.”
All the while, I was praying she would not leave. I knew full well that Nacho would not let her go off alone, and I needed him desperately. No one had his art with horses. She stared at me woodenly until, in exasperation, I sent her back to the kitchen.
That night I sent for Nacho. Perhaps he could talk some sense into her.
“Señora?” he said from the doorway. He was pale and haggard, and there was an awful look about his eyes that shot a knife of panic through me.
He took two staggering steps and wilted to the floor. His old sweat-stained hat rolled drunkenly toward the stove.
Chapter Thirty-one
Winona and I reached Nacho at the same time. “Holy God,” I said, rolling him over, searching for the bullet hole, praying it wouldn’t be in the chest or the gut. But there was no blood, no wound.
Winona touched his face with her fingers and drew in a sharp breath.
“What is it?”
“He be on fire. He burning up.”
I laid my hand across his forehead. The flesh was dry and papery and hotter than caliche in the worst heat of July. “My God.” I stared into Winona’s eyes. “What is it?”
“Don’t know. Maybe the pox.”
I tried to unbutton his shirt with fingers gone thick and wooden.
Winona shoved my hands away. “You back off, now. I had me the po
x when I was a little gal.”
We both knew no one got the pox twice. If you lived through it, you were safe from it forever. She undid the buttons one at a time. It was all I could do not to tear the shirt open.
But no telltale blisters dotted his chest.
Nacho moaned and his head lolled to the side. He began to shake with an ague the like of which I’d never seen. He pulled his arms across his chest, and his whole body twitched with shudders.
“Herlinda,” I called, fearing he would die on the spot. “Herlinda!”
Something in my voice must have told her not to dally because she appeared in the doorway almost immediately and, seeing Nacho’s shaking body, threw herself across his chest, as if his cure lay in keeping him pinned to the floor. A howl, like that of an animal when first the trap springs, filled the room. Her head lolled from side to side, her black eyes like death itself.
But he was not dead. Not yet. Death may command resignation; illness is something to pit oneself against.
“Stop it.” I bent over her, clasped her shoulder. “Get him to bed,” I said gently but firmly, as to a frantic child. “Keep him warm.” I straightened and headed for the door. “Herlinda, you cannot move him by yourself. You must allow Winona to help you. Do you hear? You must do as I say. I’m going for Tonio.”
Listening to Fanny’s hoofs beat along the path to the cuevas, I didn’t know my breaths were coming so shallow until my head began to feel full of feathers and I had to grab the horn to keep myself from pitching from the saddle. I was less sure there was any hope in pitting myself against this horrible disease, whatever it was. Tonio was wise in the ways of medicines, but he could not perform miracles. I well knew I couldn’t run the ranch without Nacho, and that without his steadying influence I even feared Herlinda a little.
But all that aside, with Jamie gone, other than Winona, Nacho was my only real friend. And I was frightened not only for him but for myself.
Faithless as I knew I was, I prayed, Please, God, deliver this good man from such a fate as this.
999
They were not able to get Nacho into a bed. When I returned with Tonio he was thrashing about on the floor where he had fallen. Herlinda and Winona were desperately trying to keep him covered him with blankets; but as soon as they wrapped one around him, he kicked it away. His eyes were tight shut, his hands defensive in front of his greyish face, like a small child trying to protect itself from an attacker.
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