Paradise Valley

by Dale Cramer

  “I thought we were staying at the hacienda,” she said to her father.

  “Well, if I understand it right, hacienda has two meanings in Spanish. It means the big house, but it also means the estate – the whole of Señor Hidalgo’s property. If I’m not mistaken, everything in this town belongs to Señor Hidalgo, as well as all the ranch land for miles around.”

  “Everything?”

  “Sí,” her father said, and he was smiling. “Todo.” She had not seen him in such a light mood since before he was arrested.

  She looked about her at the adobe shacks of the peasants on the outskirts of town. Here, in the heart of Mexico, it appeared there were only two kinds of people – the very rich and the very poor.

  “Señor Hidalgo must be a very, very wealthy man,” she said.

  Diego Fuentes guided them to a little ranch where they found a tidy little adobe lean-to structure with a corral attached where they were able to turn out the livestock. There was even a watering trough with a hand pump next to it where they could draw water for themselves. The building itself had only three walls and was open on one long side as though it might once have served as a stable. Now it held a stove at one end, which hinted that it may have become a summer kitchen or a place to do canning during harvest season. The men tied up one of the tents over the opening and dragged in an empty trough they found outside. Tonight, finally, they would all have a hot bath.

  Chapter 17

  Their first full day in Paradise Valley was a Sunday, so they decided to hold a church service – as best they could without a minister. Emma, Miriam and Rachel put on their new dresses from Emma’s wedding, but nothing seemed quite right. The bells of the Catholic iglesia in town tolled while they were rearranging the makeshift benches and kitchen chairs in their temporary hovel, and everyone straightened up to listen. The bells echoed a loneliness they all felt too deeply in this strange new place. They took their seats, men on one side and women on the other, and Caleb stood before them to speak.

  “I am no minister,” he said. “I’m sorry for that, but it is a sacrifice that someone had to make. If you think about it, I guess this makes us a little like Jesus when He said, ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ We have come here to Paradise Valley to prepare a place so that others may come. Our work begins tomorrow. Today will be a day of rest and prayer. We must ask Gott to help us, to bless our hands and backs that we may not falter in our work, to keep us safe from harm . . . and to bring us a real minister. For now, as poor a shepherd as I am, you will have to make do with me.”

  Caleb read from the Bible, a long passage about Moses and how his people were delivered from bondage by the hand of Gott. And then he just talked for a little while, though he didn’t go on for an hour like a minister was supposed to do, and he didn’t even pretend to adopt the singsong cadence of a good preacher, the rising and falling of the voice like waves. He just talked.

  “We must obey Gott rather than men,” he said. “Government – any government – is but Gott’s way of keeping godless men from devouring one another like fishes. It is a necessary evil, but it has nothing to do with the children of Gott. We have a higher law, and we should have nothing to do with government. The men who rise to become rulers in this world will always be those who know the secrets of worldly power, and how to tickle the ears of godless men. As children of Gott we must live in this world, among worldly men, yet always remember that our citizenship is elsewhere. We must live not by power or might, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts. We are foreigners not just in Mexico, but also on Earth. Our time here is short, and if we are to be about our Father’s business we must learn to be in the world, but not of the world.”

  Well before daylight on Monday the family rose to get their chores done. By dawn the wagon was loaded, the horses hitched, and the men headed out to the valley to begin digging a well. Since they were shorthanded, Miriam and Rachel went with them while the married women and Ada remained behind at the hacienda to finish settling in and wash the clothes.

  Caleb had stayed up late Saturday night talking to Schulman about the right way to dig a well that would give them enough water for irrigation, and during the ride out to the valley he explained to his sons and sons-in-law what he had in mind.

  A square cistern the size of a living room could be dug out, Schulman said, and then a number of small holes drilled straight out horizontally near the bottom like the spokes of a wheel. The holes would empty into the cistern, effectively gathering water from a wide area. Meanwhile, the dirt from the dig could be used to make adobe bricks, which they would need for building houses. The idea was brilliant in its simplicity.

  As soon as they arrived at the shallow depression Caleb had chosen for the well and unloaded the digging tools, he sent Harvey and Levi up to the ridge to start cutting timber.

  “You’re our two best loggers,” he said. “That ridge is not on our land, but Señor Fuentes has given us permission to harvest a few trees. Be careful to take only what you need and don’t leave a mess. Try to find a few big logs because we’ll need to set aside some lumber to cure, for when we’re ready to build the house. We will have a saw pit dug before you get back.”

  With axes and crosscut saws, a couple of stout log chains and a pair of Belgians, the boys would make short work of a tree. Aaron and Ezra set about digging a saw pit while Rachel and Miriam, in their long dresses and prayer kapps, took turns with a scythe cutting prairie grass and spreading it out to dry.

  As promised, the saw pit was finished by noon, and Caleb had used the precious few planks they’d brought with them from Ohio to build a trestle over it. It was all hard manual labor, but after a week of sitting in a train car they found the work wonderfully invigorating. It was a fine clear day with a light breeze and temperatures in the seventies, a perfect day for working. When the sun was directly overhead Caleb looked up and saw the wagon returning from the ridge with six straight pine logs, and from the other direction, Emma bringing lunch in the hack.

  He wanted to sing for joy. Selfish pride was a trap, but there was nothing selfish about Caleb’s pride in his family. There was nothing worth doing in this world that could not be accomplished with common sense, hard work, and the help of a strong family.

  After lunch they started digging the well. One pair of men manned a pick and shovel while another pair went to work ripping logs into lumber. The pit saw wore them out quickly, so the digging and sawing crews swapped places frequently and a friendly competition soon developed between them to see who could get the most done.

  They wasted nothing. When they squared up a log with the two-man saw they saved the slabs from the four sides. With a few pegs drilled into them the half-round slabs would make excellent benches.

  By the end of the first full day’s work they had dug two feet of the massive hole required for the irrigation well, piled up a considerable mound of dirt, and built five ladder-like molds to be used for producing four-inch-thick adobe bricks, six at a time.

  Near sunset they loaded everything back onto the wagon, including the new lumber and the brick molds, and headed back to the hacienda. The trestle over the pit was too unwieldy, so they left it in place.

  Sitting beside Rachel on the back of the bouncing wagon, filthy and exhausted, swinging her legs and watching the red sun kiss the mountaintops, Miriam said, “It feels so strange, having to start over again.”

  “I know,” Rachel said. Miriam was a year and a half older than Rachel, so starting over had to be even harder for her. “Having to build from scratch all the things we already had back home. But maybe Dat’s right when he says it makes you appreciate the simple things more.”

  “Like a drink of clean water.”

  “Or a warm bed.”

  “Oh, yes! A bed where you don’t have to check for scorpions first,” Miriam said, beginning to chuckle.

  “An outhouse,” Rachel contributed. “I never thought I’d miss it so much.”

  “We’ll have one soon,” M
iriam said. “At least I think we will. I don’t know for sure if you can build one out of adobe.”

  “I bet it’ll be hard to move,” Rachel said.

  Miriam laughed out loud then. Harvey and his friends had been known to move an outhouse back a few feet on a dark night when they thought someone deserved a major prank.

  “But you know, Rachel, I have to admit I feel much better today. Sometimes all it takes is a little hard work to make you forget your troubles.”

  “Well then, we’re in the right place. With all the work ahead of us it may be ten years yet before we have another minute to think about our troubles.”

  The sun dipped behind the mountains, leaving the western sky streaked with colors they had never seen back home – brilliant turquoise fading into orange, orange into deep red, and deep red into a velvet black already dotted with eager stars.

  That evening the boys used a few of the freshly cut pine planks for a makeshift dinner table, and for the first time in a week they were able to gather the whole family around one table for a meal. It was a small thing, but now that they had arrived in Paradise Valley, found the place to be viable and seen the work of their hands already changing the landscape, a new kind of optimism had begun to sprout. There was a palpable feeling that each day’s work would restore a little bit more of the civilized life they had known before.

  During dinner, Mamm asked casually, “Did you plow a place for my kitchen garden today?”

  Dat stopped a fork halfway to his mouth and put it back down. He had not failed to notice that his wife had been sleeping better, and her cough seemed already to have abated a little. Now she was giving orders and planning her garden, perhaps the best sign of all.

  “Mamm, you know we didn’t take a plow on the wagon. We had plenty to do already, digging the well, making a saw pit and cutting timber. Anyways, if you plant a garden before we move onto the land, who will watch it to make sure no one steals your vegetables?”

  She was ready for this. “We can move tents onto the land and set up housekeeping as soon as we have a little fence and a well. This will save you the trip back and forth each day, plus you will have all your tools at hand. How long will it take to dig a well?”

  She asked it innocently, almost sweetly, but he knew he was trapped. His pride would not allow him to say his well might take longer than two weeks.

  “Oh, probably not more than a couple weeks,” he said, sensing defeat.

  “Well then, there won’t be any vegetables ready yet, so no one can steal them anyway.”

  It was decided. Tomorrow they would take the plow.

  After dinner, perhaps as a kind of apology for her little victory, Mamm brought in the trough for baths and put huge pots of water on the stove to heat. It was a rare occasion indeed when they took baths on a Monday night, but after a day of digging they were as filthy as pigs.

  Everyone used the same bathwater, so by the time Rachel got her turn there was a layer of grit in the bottom of the lukewarm brown water, and still it was heaven.

  After her bath Rachel sat at the table and wrote a long letter to Jake by lantern light. She told him about the train trip and all the wonderful sights she had seen. She described Paradise Valley for him, and the grand hacienda of Señor Hidalgo. Keeping the letter light and friendly because she knew his mother would probably read it, she ended by saying simply, “We wish you’uns were here.” Jake would understand. He would read between the lines, instinctively replacing the plural with the singular.

  And he would not fail to hear the ache in her voice.

  Chapter 18

  The first thing Caleb noticed when his wagon pulled up to the homestead the next morning was that the crude trestle he’d built over the saw pit was gone. Someone had come during the night, disassembled it and hauled away the planks.

  He stood there for a long time staring at the naked pit, his hands on his hips, his jaw working.

  “Why would anybody want to steal something like that?” he asked Levi, who knelt beside him pondering the same question, his fingers probing the footprints. The tracks in the soft dirt around the pit were small, for men, and barefoot. The big toes splayed out in the manner of someone unaccustomed to shoes.

  Levi shrugged, picking his teeth with a pine sliver. “It was good lumber. I guess they could use it for fencing, or framing a roof, or mebbe just firewood.”

  Caleb nodded thoughtfully. “Well, we learned our lesson, didn’t we? I won’t be leaving nothing else behind anymore.”

  “But what do we do with these people?” Levi asked, rising. “How can we live among thieves?”

  “It will be hard, but I believe we have to make friends of them. Like Fuentes said, they steal because they are poor – they don’t have anything. Maybe we can help them learn to live better.”

  “Generosity is wasted on a thief,” Levi said. “He will take the chicken you give him and smile and say thank you, and then when you’re not looking he will steal your horse, too.”

  Caleb chewed on this for a moment and replied, “I didn’t say we should give to them, I said we should teach them.” He turned a wise eye on his son-in-law. “And I said it would not be easy. We must be patient. Anyways, it’s not so bad. We can build another trestle.”

  It was a horrendously busy week. The whole family, even the women, came to the site at dawn each day and worked until dusk. Harvey turned over a half-acre garden plot with the plow, and it was nearly as easy as Harris had said it would be, the topsoil rich and soft as butter. There were hardly any rocks, and no stumps. As always, the biggest problem with newly cultivated ground would be keeping down weeds and wild grasses. Normally, such a field would be turned several times in the winter to expose roots and kill all the weeds, but they didn’t have time for that. Caleb hooked up the spring-tooth harrow every day and dragged it over the garden plot, but after only five days Mamm said, “Enough. I’m planting my garden.”

  “It will be overrun with weeds,” Caleb warned.

  “That can’t be helped,” she said. “It’s new ground. We’ll just have to use the cultivator to get rid of the weeds when they come up.”

  By the end of the week the massive central cistern for the well was finished, rows of damp adobe bricks stood like dominoes on planks just up the hill, and huge mounds of dirt stood waiting for more to be made. Even Ada and the children had helped out. They seemed to have a natural talent for brickmaking – it was, after all, a lot like making mud pies. And the work was good for Ada. She was no less depressed in the evenings but at least she was too tired to cry all night. Mamm planted her garden, and the boys made a good start on turning over a large section where Caleb planned to put in a corn crop.

  Late on Saturday afternoon a rain shower popped up and drenched everyone as they were loading the wagon to go home. Standing at the edge of her new garden watching the ground darken, Mamm paid no attention to the downpour soaking her dress. Alarmed at the sight of his sick wife in the rain, Caleb grabbed a piece of oilcloth from the back of the wagon and ran to cover her, but as he drew near she did something that stopped him in his tracks.

  Raising her work-reddened, dirt-stained palms toward the heavens, Mamm closed her eyes, lifted her face into a driving rain and said quietly, “Thank you.”

  On Sunday afternoon, after prayer and Bible reading, the Benders ate lunch and then hitched up the buggies and drove over to Schulman’s place. Everyone went except Levi and Emma, who stayed behind at the hovel to keep an eye on their belongings.

  “I don’t know why Emma would have to stay behind,” Caleb grumbled as he drove away. “Levi could watch by himself.”

  Mamm’s eyes smiled. She leaned close to her husband’s ear and whispered, “Shhh. They are newlyweds yet, Dat.”

  Where the road from the hacienda bent westward into Paradise Valley, another road forked off to the north around the tip of the ridge. This was the road to Saltillo, fifty miles to the north, the same path that the railroad would follow when the new spur was bui
lt down through Paradise Valley. Schulman’s farm lay only a couple of miles up Saltillo Road, on the other side of the ridge from where the Benders were building their home.

  Schulman’s house and outbuildings – all made of adobe, including a low barn and stable – sat a hundred yards back from the road. When the buggies turned in and headed up the driveway a pair of German shepherds charged out to sound the alarm. Caleb kept a tight rein while the dogs circled the two buggies barking, their hackles raised.

  Schulman came from the stable to see what the fuss was about, and when he saw the buggies, his face broke into a huge grin. He waved and shouted, “Wilhelm! Augusta! Kommen sie!” The two dogs instantly stopped, pricked their ears and looked, then bolted toward their master.

  Ernst Schulman was so delighted to have company he had one of his hired hands go out and kill chickens for dinner, and then took the Bender men out for a walking tour of his farm while the women got to know each other. His wife was a tiny blond woman, lively and quick to laugh. She and Mamm took to each other right away.

  Walking over Schulman’s place, Ezra pointed out something strange. Behind the farmhouse lay a twenty-acre pasture fenced in with barbed wire. In the middle of the pasture lay a full acre of freestanding bushes as high as a man’s head, and arbors laden with vines. A huge longhorn bull grazed in the shade of a lone cottonwood tree not far from the vineyard.

  Ezra squinted. “Are those blueberry bushes?”

  “Oh jah!” Schulman said, breaking stride to look with them. “And grapevines. Blueberries do very well here, and they bloom early because of the mild winter. In fact, the blueberries are ripe right now, if you’d like to pick some.”

  Ezra and the boys looked to Caleb, who shook his head. “No, not today.”

  “Really, I don’t mind,” Schulman said. “I’ll have Oquendo saddle a horse and put away the bull, then you can pick your hats full of blueberries.”