Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  January saw the bandits and heard the shots at the same instant that the clattering rhythm of the coach-team broke. A bullet punched through the side of the coach, and the old Swiss valet on his jump-seat opened his mouth as if to protest, but no sound came out, only blood. As he toppled over, the guard’s voice yelled from above, “Bandits!” In the same moment, the coach itself lurched, swayed precariously; there was another salvo of shots and Rose dropped forward, scooping up the rifles that had been put ready in the coach at the previous night’s stop in Perote.

  One of the team’s been hit, January thought, in the second before the coach bumped, slewed, tipped in what felt like a horrible slow dream-like somersault. . . . He grabbed Rose around the waist and caught the wall-strap with the other hand—the Swiss valet pitched from his seat, dead-weight flying, smashing into January’s back as the big vehicle went over. Dillard was the only other passenger who braced himself for the impact, and the two German merchants plunged and tumbled in a whirlwind of dust, hats, and spattering specks of blood: horses screaming, a blurred jumble of dark shapes glimpsed through the reeling windows, the warning shout of the Indian guard on the box above.

  The impact of something or someone drove the breath from January’s body; gunfire cracked all around.

  He drove himself up at the windows above him before the coach stopped skidding—it didn’t occur to him till later to wonder what would have happened had the attack come in one of those places where the road swung along the brink of a gorge. Young Padre Cesario shoved a rifle into his hands, and January flipped up the window like a trap-door, and fired at one of the forms that came pounding toward him through the dust. January ducked down, caught another rifle—Rose was loading—popped up, and fired. “Where’d you learn to handle a gun, boy?” demanded Dillard, emerging like a gopher from the window beside him. Anywhere in the United States it was illegal for a black man to own or use firearms. A bullet plowed the window-frame near his hand, spraying splinters.

  “Fighting for Jackson at New Orleans.” January could almost hear the Tennessean’s brain crunch as it assimilated the hero-President’s name. “British didn’t run around like this, though.” He fired, and a looming horseback shape flung out its arms and fell.

  “Sure is like tryin’ to shoot weasels by starlight,” Dillard agreed, and spat tobacco.

  Behind the fallen coach the Indian guard yelled something: January turned and got off a shot at more ragged, wolf-like shapes clambering over the rocks above the road, heard another bullet strike the coach roof. A man inside cried out. A rider loomed out of the dust, bloody spittle stringing from the barbed Spanish bit in the horse’s mouth. January glimpsed a scarred, bearded face as black as his own under the wide-brimmed leather hat, the flash of silver on the pistol the man aimed down at him; Dillard’s gun roared in double thunder with the dark-faced bandit’s. Both shots went wild, and in the next second the coach driver sprang up almost under the hooves of the bandit’s horse, swinging his empty rifle like a club, while on the ground by the coach in a tangle of harness the two surviving horses kicked, screamed, thrashed.

  The dark bandit wheeled, plunged into the dust, shouting “Vamanos, toros!” to his men. One unhorsed bandit tried to mount a fallen comrade’s horse, and Dillard coolly shot him in the back; the animal whinnying, backing, reins tangled in a thicket of creosote-bush in the ditch beside the road. As the bandits rode off, the Tennessean swung himself up through the coach window and went to get the horse; January ducked down into the coach again. Strange, he thought, that one of the first men of African blood that he’d seen in this country had been trying to kill him.

  Then he smelled blood down in the coach and saw Rose with the breast of her dress all crimson with gore. . . .

  She was knotting one of her hat-veils around a wound in Padre Cesario’s wrist and the blood clearly belonged to him—or to the poor valet Da Ponte, crumpled in a huddle—but the sight of it nearly stopped January’s heart.

  It could have been Rose.

  Like that, in a second, everything we could have had together, all the years of our happiness, gone . . .

  He began to shake, as if with malarial chill. “Are you all right?” He hoped his voice didn’t sound as hoarse to her as it did in his own ears.

  She nodded. Her hands were black with powder and her long hair—beautiful walnut-brown and curly, more like a white woman’s than a black’s—stuck with sweat to her face and hung down in strings where it had escaped chignon and hat.

  We’re going back to New Orleans and to hell with Hannibal. . . . YOU’RE going back to New Orleans and I’ll join you there after I’ve wrung his neck for him. . . . We’ll open the school on Rue Esplanade and live happily ever after forever unless you get kidnapped by slave-traders or die in another cholera epidemic or in childbirth. . . .

  He drew a deep breath and looked around. “Anyone else hurt?”

  The two merchants shook their heads. One of them bent over Da Ponte, tried to straighten him; January and the other merchant opened the coach door above them like a trap-door, and gently helped out first the priest, then Rose, then lifted out the valet’s body. He was old and fragile and had spoken only Italian; January wondered what he’d been doing in Mexico, and if he had family back in Locarno. He’d been shot through the throat.

  It could have been Rose.

  Dillard and the guard came back, each leading a bandit’s horse. The bandit January had shot lay sobbing some distance from the coach. He’d been dragged, and then trampled, by his terrified mount. Blood bubbled from his mouth and spread over the crotch of his thin, ragged peasant breeches. His unshaven face contorted with agony; January fished his rosary from his pocket, knelt beside the man and twined the blue glass beads, the battered steel crucifix in the filthy hands.

  The bandit couldn’t speak but brought the rosary up to his lips and kissed it.

  “Your sins are forgiven you,” whispered January in Spanish, and made the Sign of the Cross. Standing, he took from his pocket the pistol he’d purchased in Vera Cruz. “Go with God.”

  And shot him through the head.

  He was wiping the blood off his rosary when the Indian coach guard came over and said in Spanish, “Don’t waste your powder on such a one, Señor. El Moro may attack us again before we reach the city.”

  “Sorry.”

  The other men were unharnessing the surviving horses, dragging the dead ones clear. Checking hocks, knees, tendons. Already the sopilotes—the gray-headed black vultures—were circling, waiting for the living to clear the hell away and let them eat. January heard, far off on the still, thin air, the ringing of church-bells. It was Sunday, he remembered. They had climbed into the diligencia at two in the morning in Perote, and he had been so sleepy, he had barely been able to murmur his prayers.

  He walked a little distance from the coach with its scattered debris of luggage, hat-boxes, letters from a burst mailsack, and the book one of the Germans had been reading, past the towering knee of gray rock that had concealed the bandits’ attack. He felt dizzy, with the sun’s heat rising off the stone and the road and the clear, brittle desolation of these oak-dotted mountains, but the air nonetheless steely with chill.

  I’ve been in this country a week, he thought, and already I’ve killed a man.

  He wondered if Hannibal was still alive at all.

  Coming to Mexico, it had been in his heart to wonder about what it would be like where slavery had been done away with, as the abolitionist Yankee driver had said.

  And now he knew.

  Born a slave, for sixteen years of his manhood he’d lived in France in a world completely free. Free to study medicine, free to study music, free to wed a woman he loved . . . free of the ghastly burden of being the black son of slaves in Louisiana that he had carried like a slab of stone all his life.

  And he’d learned that freedom made no difference whatsoever when Death came calling.

  Past the rocks the road turned, falling away steeply before h
im into dry abysses of yellow air that seemed to magnify everything like crystal. He saw below him a long dun landscape splodged with thorny green, broken here and there with anemic trees, feathery with autumn. Mountains gouged the sky southward to his left, black rock meringued with marble white, trailing drifts of white smoke. Farther off to the south and west the noon sky glared silver in sheets of water, fringed with green that was darker still.

  January felt he could see every tile of every roof of the city that rose, it seemed, from the heart of the lake, red and blue and gilt; could name every horse and cow, every burro and child and pig in the thatch-roofed villages that lay between dry rangeland and endless, gleaming acres of bird-skimmed marsh. Could distinguish every voice of those multi-tongued bells one from another as they sent forth over the lands their eternal message: each soul, no matter whose, is equally cherished, equally precious in the sight of God.

  Behind him he heard cursing—German, English, Spanish—and the jangle of harness-ware. A long whip cracked as the men righted the coach. He supposed he should go back. Padre Cesario would need his arm looked at before the wound turned nasty. And it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the bandits would return, and he was out of sight of the others. But for a long time he only stood, looking down over that high, barren valley, watching the geese and the ducks, the hawks and the vultures, free as the angels of Death in the jeweled air.

  TWO

  Once they reached Mexico City itself, it took them hours to get inside.

  Lake and marshland surrounded it. After a night in abominable accommodations in the village at the foot of the pass, they spent most of the morning tearing along at top speed between sheets of water prickled with reeds, coming at last to one of the causeways raised by the Indians from whom the Spanish had stolen the land. These causeways being the only means to cross the marsh, they were the ideal places for the government to set up customs barriers and extract tolls from those bringing merchandise—or anything else—into the city, with predictable results.

  Familiar for years with the customs barriers around Paris and their jam of carriages, carts, pack-animals, and basket-toting vendors all waiting to be passed by the bored and overworked bureaucrats of the customshouse, January minded the wait less than some members of the party. But even Dillard, though he muttered about how Old Hickory would deal with tariffs, by God, didn’t seem surprised.

  By which January deduced the man from Tennessee had been in Mexico City before.

  He could only be glad that they’d decided to have the valet Da Ponte buried at the church at the mountain pass yesterday afternoon. Otherwise the customs inspectors would almost certainly have levied duty on the body.

  Besides the enormous lines of ox-carts, coaches, burros laden with charcoal and firewood, and herds of long-horned cattle and grunting swine, there were unexpected numbers of soldiers on the causeway, even for a country that had been in a state of internal warfare, on and off, for the past twenty-five years. When January asked his fellow-passenger Herr Groellich about it, the German replied, “Had you not heard, then? Every day new levies come in from the countryside, from as far off as the Yucatán. Generalissimo Santa Anna gathers his Army of Operations, the greatest army of the world, he says, to march north and punish the rebellious Americans who have seized the province of Texas.”

  At the mention of Texas, Dillard turned his head from gazing out at the crowding men in their red-and-blue uniforms. Watchful anger flickered in his dark eyes.

  “I understand the Texians claim that the Generalissimo’s young brother-in-law, General Cós, made concessions to them,” the German went on, nervously straightening the bow of his green silk neck-scarf. “Including that the government of Mexico would respect the rights given them under the old constitution of ten years ago.”

  “Of course, he had neither the right nor the authority to concede anything of the kind,” put in his partner, angling his head to peer over his spectacles. “If indeed he ever said any such thing at all, which he now says he did not.”

  “What does he say about Texas?” demanded Dillard of Rose. “Does he mention that we—they—don’t have the right to govern themselves as we were promised? Or that the so-called government of this country—that’s supposed to believe in independence the way we do—is so mismanaged, a man can’t hold his own property safe there anymore?”

  January knew that a reasoned discussion of governmental jurisdiction under the principles of federal union as set out by Alexander Hamilton would only serve to make the situation worse, and so held his peace. Rose replied tactfully, “Herr Groellich only remarks, sir, that the Americans at Béxar appear to have defeated one army and that General Santa Anna is preparing to send another, which certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise to Mr. Houston. Do you now live in Texas, Mr. Dillard?”

  “Er—no. M’am,” he added, clearly not sure whether to address a woman of color by even that slight honorific. “That is, I’m one of Mr. Butler’s secretaries here—the American chargé d’affaires.” But at the mention of Texas, Dillard’s face softened and his eyes lost their anger—a lover hearing the name of his beloved. January guessed that the denial of Texian—and therefore Mexican—citizenship was a lie.

  “And is it as treeless as they say?” Rose asked. “I was raised in the bayou country; everyone speaks of Texas as if it were a desert.”

  “Oh, no, m’am. Once you get above the valley of the Nueces, you’re in the high plains, with nuthin’ but sky and Comanche. But in the hill-country around San Antonio de Béxar, it’s soft and green, like paradise. It’s as beautiful a land as God made, m’am, open and sweet; a land for free men. And we don’t—they don’t—aim to be run out of it.”

  By free men January assumed Dillard meant free white men. One source of friction between the Mexican government and the Americans who had been flooding into the northern part of the state of Cohuila-Texas was that Mexico forbade the institution of slavery that so many Americans considered essential to cotton farming.

  Even after Herr Groellich took up a collection toward a substantial bribe for the customs inspectors, it was still nearly two in the afternoon by the time they were led past the line of waiting beasts, soldiers, and vehicles of the poor and into the vaulted stone room where every valise and portmanteau was shaken, prodded, looked into, and levied upon. Dillard declared himself to be a resident of Tennessee and refused, as a diplomatic secretary, to have his single carpetbag searched. When the clerks insisted, causing a long delay, he grew indignant at Rose’s whispered suggestion that a bribe would settle the problem and instead simply stormed out of the customshouse into the jammed and squalid street beyond.

  “Welcome to Mexico,” murmured Rose under her breath as she and January climbed back into the coach and it lurched out through the iron-strapped customshouse gates. “I hope Hannibal is well and truly grateful to us.”

  “I’ll settle for finding him alive.”

  The Vera Cruz diligencia terminated its run in the Calle Dolores, not far from the city’s great Cathedral square. Beyond the customshouse lay a tangle of narrow streets, unpaved and trampled into unspeakable soup by the constant stream of traffic. Even in the slave-quarters where he’d spent his early childhood, January had never seen squalor such as that visible through the coach windows. The mud-brick huts that defined the lane made the two-family cabin of his earliest recollections seem palatial, and the fluids leaking from the garbage-heaps between them rendered the clay underfoot to puddled, piss-smelling, wheel-gripping ooze. Flies swarmed. Dogs tore at the half-gutted carcass of a goat. Incredibly ragged men, black with filth and clothed only in cotton breeches so thin as to clearly outline the genitals—or so ragged as to flashingly display them—crowded around the coach, reaching out groping hands to beg, or gazed sullenly from the garishly painted pulquerias that adorned every intersection.

  Twenty-five years, thought January, both aghast and deeply sad. In 1810, when New Spain first rose in revolt against the mother country o
f her upper classes, she had been one of the wealthiest lands in the world. The source of cattle, silver, gold, corn and fruits, coffee and sugar-cane. A peaceful and prosperous hinterland whose subjugation had kept Spain’s economy above hatches for centuries.

  Dillard doesn’t know how lucky his people were in the British colonies. Eight years of fighting and then it was over. Creole British rulers who were educated in government and who hadn’t been brought up with the necessity of keeping an enormous population of displaced and angry Indians as agricultural slaves. And a military commander with the integrity not to succumb to the temptation of dictatorship. Even France hadn’t managed that.

  Around them the ramshackle adobe slums gave way to taller houses of stucco and light-red tezontl stone. Pilasters, medallions, elaborate baroque arabesques of marble adorned windows and doors, bright against paintwork of cherry, orange, lapis, or green. Tiles gleamed on the fronts of the taller houses; saints stared disapprovingly down from niches. Between those tall fronts were wedged shops no bigger than closets: pulquerias abounded, gaudy with murals of flowers, bull-fights, semi-nude women, and bearing names like The Wandering Jew and With You Until Death. As they passed the open doors, January could smell the mild, yeasty pungence of the beverage, and saw figures sprawled on the benches or amid peanut-hulls on the floor.

  And everywhere, brilliant color under the brilliant sun.

  When they stopped at last before the offices of the diligencia company, January asked the young priest Padre Cesario where the Calle Jaral lay. There Hannibal’s latest known inamorata, the opera singer Consuela Montero, had her house. “You cannot mean to walk there, surely?” asked the priest, shocked.

  “If it is not far,” said January. “We can hire porters. . . .”

  “By all means, hire porters,” agreed the priest as quickly and as self-evidently as if the question were whether January should wear trousers. “But hire also a hack and a driver,” he said, and he nodded across the street to the several decrepit-looking mule-drawn coaches waiting on the other side. “Understand, Señor, that in Mexico a man is treated according to how those about him perceive him being treated by others. Even you—if you will pardon me for mentioning your race—even negros, who are everywhere treated with scorn in my country, a part of that at least is that they have no money, no family, no influence. Influence is everything here. But you and your lady are well dressed, and have money. If you lower yourself to walking, men will say, ‘See, in spite of his fine clothes he is only a negro on foot—and he may have stolen the clothes.’ If you arrive in a hack, to show that you are not poor, all will be different.”