Safe Passage

by Carla Kelly

  She nodded. “I thought you might think I was crazy. Mothers don’t send their children into danger. They pray them out of it, except that’s not what happened when I prayed.”

  “You’re not crazy. I had the same thought in the depot.” He turned to face his father. “If I just whisk Addie out of Mexico, I doubt I’ll see her again. Brother Finch will bundle her away, and I don’t want that.”

  “She made her intentions pretty plain, son,” Pa reminded him, as if he needed reminding.

  “She did. I haven’t seen her in two years and certainly haven’t lived with her in two years. Pa, I’m sealed to her for eternity, so maybe Addie and I should figure this out. Eternity is a long time to hold a grudge.”

  Pa opened his mouth to argue, then closed it.

  Here goes, Ammon thought. “I’m also going to try to get the cattle out.”

  “Going to disguise them as a herd of antelope?” Pa asked and shook his head.

  “I … I don’t have a plan yet. Maybe Addie has one.”

  “Maybe you have rocks for brains.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  B

  Pa gave him a blessing before he left El Paso. Ammon knelt in the dust of the lumber stall with all his family around, and Aunt Loisa sniffed into her brother’s handkerchief. Junebug complained that Mama was holding her too tight, and Pa told him to listen to the Holy Spirit, something he was already planning to do.

  Mama walked Ammon to the edge of the lumberyard. He waited for her to offer all kinds of advice, but she only handed him her Book of Mormon. “You’re named after Ammon for a reason,” she said, her voice small and pinched. “So far, I’ve never figured out the reason. It’s your turn to try.” She kissed his cheek. “She’s a proud woman, Ammon. I think Addie still hurts as bad as you do. She probably regrets every word she said, but it’s hard to forget what we say … and hear.”

  He had to know. “Am I a fool to try this?”

  She shook her head and moved him toward the street. “You’d be a fool not to try.” She kissed his cheek again. “I’m going to turn around now and not look back. Vayas con Dios, mi hijo.”

  There was no one on the westbound train that he knew, and Ammon was glad of it. When he arrived in Hachita, Brother Adams, whose ranch now hosted many of the Colonies’ horses, tried to talk him out of returning to Mexico. He gave up when Ammon said nothing. A tall man, he clamped his hands down on Ammon’s shoulders, forced him to the ground, and slapped his meaty hands on Ammon’s head for another blessing. Ammon knew better than to say his own father had just done that, because Brother Adams wasn’t a man who ever lost an argument.

  When he finished, he gave Ammon a slap on the side of his head. “That’s from my wife for being stupid,” he muttered.

  He started to laugh then, and Ammon laughed too, as soon as his ear quit ringing. Hands on each other’s shoulders, they went into the ranch house, where Sister Adams glared at him, her lips tight, and fed him within an inch of his life. When she gave him a handful of tortillas and a pot of beans after he finished, her eyes dared him to thank her.

  He did anyway, because he knew her heart. He also knew how hard she was working right now to help keep his friends from the Colonies fed in their encampment near New Mexico’s border. He kissed her cheek.

  “That’s from my mother,” he told her, then kissed her other cheek. “And my Aunt Loisa.”

  In what little shade remained on the porch, he told her about Addie. “I have to go back and fetch her out, if I can.”

  “You can,” Sister Adams told him. She gave his arm a little shake. “Sometimes women go a little crazy when they lose a baby.”

  So do men, he thought. So do men.

  He didn’t say it out loud, but she seemed to sense his private pain and kissed his cheek. “She was probably worn out with hearing ‘It’s God’s will,’ and ‘You’ll have other children,’ ” Sister Adams said. “Some people are idiots.”

  She clapped him on the back then, a wallop that reminded him how equally yoked Brother and Sister Adams were. “Go get your team and that smart horse that knows how to open all our gates!”

  Ammon laughed out loud. “I should have warned you about Blanco.”

  She walked him to the horse corral, keeping up a commentary about the families camped on the border, itching to return home. As they neared the corral, she stopped and lowered her voice, as though the horses would overhear and pass it on to their owners in El Paso.

  “Do you think even half of those folks will ever see their homes again?”

  Ammon shook his head. “It’s going to take people with nerves of steel to go back and face armies of desperate men.”

  “… and women,” Sister Adams added. “We went to the border and used binoculars to watch a skirmish near Topia yesterday. It looked like two different guerilla armies, fighting each other. You ever seen soldaderas?”

  He nodded, remembering the hard-faced women, some of them barely older than his younger sisters, riding alongside their men. He hoped Sister Adams hadn’t seen what they could do with machetes and shovels to a fallen enemy.

  When they reached the corral, he swung up and sat on the fence. He looked and then whistled for Blanco, who stood nose to nose with one of his teaming horses by the distant fence. With a smile, Ammon watched his gelding’s ears twitch forward. Blanco tossed his head, pranced a bit for good effect, then started toward his master with that mincing step of the Arabian he was. He took his time.

  “You old show-off,” Ammon said. “Let’s see how smart you really are.”

  When Blanco was twenty feet away, Ammon clapped his hands three times. Standing beside him, Sister Adams gasped as Blanco began to limp, the kind of limp that meant the next stop was the slaughterhouse.

  “What happened to him?” she asked Ammon, bewildered.

  In answer, Ammon clapped his hands three times again, and Blanco pranced forward, fit as ever.

  “Yeah, he’s smart enough to open your gates, my stable latch in Pearson, and most of the back doors in García,” Ammon said as Blanco stopped in front of him. “Good boy. You remembered.” Grasping Blanco’s mane, he swung onto his back. “If I do run into Red Flaggers or federales on the prowl for horseflesh, three claps, and even they won’t want a broken-down lump of future dog food.”

  In a short time, Ammon had his team rounded up and hitched to his freight wagon. He tied Blanco on the tailgate once more, blew a kiss to Sister Adams, and started for Dog Springs. He didn’t look back, because the temptation was strong to remain. He could hire out his team and himself to the army and someone else could find Addie. The moment passed, because he knew, with a dread that filled his whole soul, that someone else would be guerillas. “Please not that, Father,” he murmured in Spanish.

  In another hour, he saw the mountains of Mexico to the south, which put the heart back in his chest. Soon the late summer sun would turn them pink and then purple. If he traveled steadily tonight, he would be in the sheltering pines of the mountains tomorrow, holed up somewhere and safe until night’s cover protected him. Two days of that would see him home to García.

  He went right to the quartermaster depot when he arrived at Dog Springs, an army outpost so small he doubted it was on anyone’s map. He frowned to see the tent village there, where more of his friends and neighbors camped and waited. Drying clothes fluttered on lines strung between tents. He smiled to see garments strung discreetly between lines of sheets and towels, the better to hide them from prying eyes.

  “Yessiree, we are peculiar people,” he said out loud to his team.

  He went right to the sergeant who had helped them two days ago and offered to lease his rig to the army. “I know you’re hauling more because of us,” he said.

  The sergeant nodded and took him directly to the lieutenant in charge of quartermaster stores. In less than an hour, he had signed a six-week haulage lease, and directed any money to be sent to David Hancock, care of Walter Long’s Lumberyard, El Paso.

>   “I hear folks are living in the wood stalls there,” the lieutenant said after he blew on the paper so the ink could dry.

  “It’s true, sir.” Ammon smiled. “Do you know, my mother made salmon tamales out of government rations?”

  The lieutenant shook his head. “How long will they wait there?”

  “Until it’s safe to go back, or until they give up and move somewhere else.”

  The lieutenant looked him in the eye. “Are you going back to Mexico? I could probably detain you, if that’s your plan.”

  “You can’t, sir. I was born in Mexico and it’s my country.”

  “There was a fight in Topia yesterday. The whole region could still be crawling with rebels fighting against each other.”

  “Or they could have melted back into the desert by now,” Ammon countered.

  “Your funeral,” the lieutenant said with a shrug and turned back to his paperwork.

  Ammon left the army outpost and rode Blanco back to the tent city, knowing he’d find friends and something to eat and probably more advice than he wanted. He ate with the Rouse family, near neighbors back home, content to remain silent and let the conversation swirl around him. It pained him to hear it, but the Rouses were moving to Bluewater to start over. The Rouse brothers had pooled their slender resources to lease a farm because they couldn’t see a future in Mexico.

  He walked through the camps, listening to other conversations, blending into the shadows. When it was dark enough, he went to the tienda on the border, the little grocery store he had noticed when they rode in from Mexico. Some coins bought a few tortillas and beans to supplement Sister Adams’s parting gift, and there was a paisano eager to trade his sombrero for Ammon’s Stetson and toss in a serape too.

  “My own sainted mother wove this for me,” the man said, as he handed over a serape that had seen better days and smelled like it had last been used to line a dog box.

  “Then I will wear it in good health,” Ammon replied, just as polite. A child of Mexico, he understood the manners of doing business.

  The desert chill had settled in for the night and he pulled the serape over the scrap of quilt his mother had insisted he take along, grateful for the warmth now after the day’s furnace.

  After kneeling in prayer on the New Mexico side of the line, asking Heavenly Father to protect fools, Ammon Hancock crossed the border at midnight. The moon was bright and the desert landscape bare of any animals or people. In the silence that grew bigger with each mile he traveled, he learned that it was one thing to travel out of the country with two hundred and fifty well-armed men, and quite another to travel back alone into a country in revolt.

  He relaxed gradually as Blanco set a sedate pace not designed to attract any attention. Smart horse, indeed.

  Not a light shone anywhere as he approached Topia, the first town across the border. He felt himself relax a little more, grateful the guerillas had left. Once through the town, he planned to turn toward the mountains and not take another road until he reached García. He remembered the well in Topia’s plaza, where he could fill the canteen he had not filled in Dog Springs because he knew the water was better in the village. He turned onto the plaza and pulled back suddenly on the reins, his heart in his throat.

  Stretched before him, as far he could see by moonlight, lay a sleeping army.

  FOUR

  AMMON COULDN’T TURN back. His involuntary act of jerking Blanco up sharp had wakened the guerilla lying on the ground right in front of him.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot, Ammon thought, as the man sat up, rubbing his eyes. His heart pounding in his chest, Ammon casually pulled his leg from the stirrup and rested it across his saddle in that careless way he had seen Mexican riders do when they wanted to stop and chat.

  “Hola, hermano,” he said, hoping he sounded like a man with all the time in the world. “¿Qué pasa?”

  To his incredible relief, the man muttered something and lay down again, pulling his sombrero back over his face.

  Thank you, Lord, for blessing a stupid man, Ammon thought, as he backed up Blanco, careful not to step on any of the other sleeping men.

  Too late. Another man sat up and casually put his Mauser rifle across his lap. “And who are you?” he asked in Spanish, much more alert than the first man.

  Ammon closed his eyes, hoping there wasn’t a password. “Endalecio Salinas,” he said, perjuring himself with the name of his father’s foreman. Never tell anyone too much at a time, his father had advised two years ago, when the revolution started and men were shot for merely babbling. “The more lies you tell all at once, the harder it is to sound convincing,” Pa had said. Ammon waited, hoping his rescue of Addie hadn’t ended before it began. He yawned, trying to looking both tired and bored.

  “Where are you headed, my brother?” the guerilla asked, his tone kinder now. He rubbed his eyes.

  “Message for Captain Pepe Lopez,” Ammon said promptly, pulling a name out of his head. Brother Adams in Hachita called all Mexicans Pepe Lopez. Hopefully this guerilla had never crossed the border and worked for Brother Adams.

  The guerilla’s eyes narrowed and his hand caressed the Mauser. “I don’t know him.”

  “No one does around here,” Ammon said and gestured vaguely. “From the south somewhere.”

  He knew his Spanish was impeccable. He returned the gaze leveled at him, wishing he looked more Hispanic and hoping for clouds to cover the sudden sin of being Anglo.

  After another long moment, the guerilla nodded. “Hurry on, then.”

  “Claro,” Ammon said and held Blanco to a slow, steady walk down the street crowded with sleepers, even though he wanted to dig his spurs into his horse and make tracks. And from the way Blanco trembled, he figured he would be in good company.

  The men slept where they had dismounted, their horses nearby. Some of the soldados had wrapped their reins around their wrists, ready to mount at the slightest necessity. The horses looked well-ridden, but that was nothing surprising. The Hancocks and their mountain colony neighbors had lost many horses to guerillas and federales alike who had roared up on shaky mounts practically walking on their knees, leaped off their jaded horses, “borrowed” the Mormon horses, and raced away, leaving behind lathered and quivering animals that Ammon usually ended up shooting.

  “That’s the way they are,” his father had said. “They’ll ride a horse to death, bite it on the ear to get it up, then ride it another twenty miles. Just life during a revolution, son.”

  The street was endless, like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. Soldiers slept everywhere, some on the board sidewalks, others even curled around the town’s well, where Ammon had hoped to fill his canteen. Good thing he wasn’t thirsty anymore.

  Blanco picked his way carefully among the sleepers, his hide quivering every time a man rolled over or coughed. The horse seemed to sense that this was no ordinary situation. Ammon kept his hand on Blanco’s neck and whispered to him in Spanish.

  Ammon looked around. The soldiers had obviously just come from a raid. Their saddlebags bulged, and some of the horses even had sausages and hams tied together and draped over their necks. Colony food, Ammon thought; food his friends and neighbors had worked for. He thought about his folks in the lumberyard with their army-issue hardtack and canned salmon.

  Ammon let out his breath slowly as he came to the end of the street. He kept Blanco’s pace deliberate until he noticed a row of bodies lying under a pepper tree. They could have been sleeping, but they were laid out so straight. He rode closer out of curiosity.

  Three dead men lay there—four, if he counted the young boy lying with them. When he got closer, he realized what had attracted his attention. They lay close together under a white tablecloth. The cloth was blood-stained, muddy, and torn, but even in the light of a waning moon, he recognized the blue border of cross-stitched flowers.

  His heart began to thump in his chest as he dismounted and walked closer. Ammon squatted on his haunches by the bodies and
fingered the tablecloth. It was the same one that had covered Grandma Sada’s dining room table when Addie threw her wedding ring at him.

  So the rebels had been to García; maybe some of them were still there. He thought about his wife and closed his eyes. “Addie, please be the resourceful woman I married,” he whispered as he mounted Blanco and continued his deliberate pace until he was out of town. When he reached the small river that fed the town’s acequias in wet weather, Ammon gave Blanco his head. The gelding leaped the river, which was just beginning to flow again with fall rains, and lit out for the mountains.

  Ammon knew Blanco couldn’t continue that pace for long. He had already ridden him quite a distance from Hachita, and they were still one hundred miles from home. He let him run, though, alert for a good place to hide for the day. He wanted to ride Blanco farther, but daylight was coming, and he wouldn’t be deep in the mountains on those unused Indian trails until tomorrow evening. Just the purest chance had gotten him through Topia alive, and he knew he couldn’t count on that kind of luck again.

  As dawn made its usual way to Mexico, Ammon felt his uneasiness grow as his instinct to hide increased. He halted Blanco and dismounted, gathered the reins and walked, even though he wanted to ride as hard as the guerillas. His horse nudged him.

  “Sorry, Blanco. One of us has to see a bit of reason, and it’s more likely going to be me,” he said. “I don’t have any grain for you, so we’d better take it easy.” He grinned as Blanco nudged him again. “Want to share some salmon?” Over his protest, Ma had slipped several cans in his saddlebags.

  He found what he was looking for a mile down the trail: a small spring set back in the pepper trees a short distance from the almost-dry river that flowed nearby. The river itself still contained enough water to satisfy anything but small armies, while the spring was set farther off the main route. He could stake out Blanco behind the screen of pepper trees and sleep until nightfall.

  As he walked toward the spring, he felt exhaustion settle around his shoulders like concrete. What with traveling out of Mexico, taking the night train to El Paso, trying to sleep in a noisy lumberyard, then taking the train back to Hachita, he hadn’t had a peaceful rest in more than a week.