Safe Passage

by Carla Kelly

  One stall midway through the stable wasn’t empty. Ammon looked and glanced away quickly, trying to take shallow breaths. He thought at first they were stable boys. He peered closer, shocked to see bodies in long skirts, flung at random against the back wall of the stall. “Please, no,” he whispered. He couldn’t tell how many there were because of the advanced state of decomposition, and he didn’t feel curious enough for a closer look.

  “Why the women?” he asked, before raising his bandanna to cover his nose. Pray God they had not suffered long.

  Shaken to his boots, he continued to the far end of the stables, his heart sinking lower and lower as he suspected what had become of the beautiful, dainty-stepping horses. Whatever faction that had raged through Hacienda Chavez had likely commandeered all the blooded stock and rode it to death.

  He knew there was an acequia on the far side of the stables. He dismounted on shaking legs, leaned against Blanco for a moment, then led his horse to the irrigation ditch, choked now with weeds. As Blanco drank, Ammon looked between the other outbuildings to the hacienda in the distance, wondering who else lay dead there. He hoped it wasn’t Graciela.

  He touched his saddlebag where his mother’s Book of Mormon was stashed next to several leaves from the prickly pear that Serena had insisted he take along. He just touched the book for comfort, wondering if the original Ammon had seen sights like this in the land of the Lamanites. It was the paltriest kind of reassurance, but it kept his heart beating.

  The last thing he wanted to do was go back inside the stable with Blanco, but he did, moving more slowly this time. He got as close as he could stand to the stall with the rotting corpses, knowing that anyone snooping around would back away before they saw him.

  It could have been worse; maybe his new friend and ally Old Ammon the Nephite was watching out for him from some celestial perch. Blanco perked up, gave a low whinny, and headed for the darkest corner of the loose box. He went right to a barrel and stuck his head in. Ammon peered inside.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Blanco, you won.”

  Somehow, hungry horses and pillaging armies had overlooked a quart or two of grain deep in the barrel. Blanco strained to reach it, so Ammon tipped the barrel on its side, after moving away rancid straw with his feet.

  When he finished, Blanco left the loose box and went to the next stall, and the next, until he found another stash of grain. When he finished, he came back to Ammon.

  “Smart, smart horse,” Ammon said, tying the reins around a post. “Smarter than your rider.”

  The stench from the corpses was overpowering, but he knew he could bear it. He sat next to the now-empty barrel in the back of the stall, said a prayer, thought about Old Ammon the Nephite, and closed his eyes.

  B

  “Señor? Señor?”

  Ammon opened his eyes, alert at once. The stall was deep in shadow now, so he knew he had slept the day away.

  Serena stood silhouetted against the open stable doors. She had hesitated on the other side of the dead bodies jumbled together. A corpse or two a day keeps the guerillas away, he thought. He stood up and called her name before she shot him with her brother’s Mauser.

  “I’ll come to you, Serena,” he said. “You don’t want to come closer.”

  He untied Blanco and walked toward her, turning his face away from the death in Loose Box 14.

  There were deep circles under the soldadera’s eyes, and he knew she had kept her word, watching out for him in the field, staying awake to keep him safe. Ammon wasn’t sure he was that valuable to anyone, considering the danger.

  “Gracias, señorita,” he told her.

  He thought she might smile at that, considering that probably nobody ever called her anything so polite. Instead, she took his arm and gave him a little shake, her eyes deadly serious, reminding him all over again that she had ridden with desperate armies for two years while he ran a business, made money, and whined over his misfortunes with Adaline.

  “Señor, the army of the north is on the move again.” She shook him again for emphasis. “You have to leave, and fast.”

  He hurried with her out of the stable. “Who told you?”

  “The butcher’s boy, when I took your money to his father for some food,” she said. “He heard it from José, who sells eggs when there are any, who heard it from the man who lights the lamps at night.”

  “Impeccable sources, eh?” he joked.

  He should have known better. Serena gave his arm the butt end of the Mauser, which would have knocked him down if Blanco hadn’t been there to break his fall.

  “Tonto! I am trying to save your life!” she declared, enunciating as though she spoke to an idiot. “You have to ride, even though it is not entirely dark yet.”

  He was only a fool on occasion. Ammon mounted Blanco, as serious as his unlikely protector now. “Should I just go back across the open plain or detour south to throw anyone off my trail?”

  “Go across the plain to the mountains. Don’t delay by taking a roundabout way.” She handed up the Mauser.

  “I have my own rifle, Serena,” he reminded her.

  “Take this too,” she insisted. “The soldiers always roam through Santa Clarita, trying to squeeze food out of starving people. If they should find this Mauser and they realize I was in the Topia fight, our lives won’t be worth kindling in a hot fire.”

  He took the rifle and reached for her bandolera when she took it from around her neck. “Come with me.”

  She hesitated and he knew she wanted to put her foot in his stirrup again and ride with him. She stood there, indecisive, then shook her head. “You have brought me home safely, and that is enough,” she said simply.

  It was Ammon’s turn to hesitate. “If forced, will one of your neighbors tell how you came home this morning?”

  Serena shrugged. “All they saw was a man in a serape and sombrero, maybe a soldier, maybe not. If they say something, well, that is war.”

  “But, Serena, your life …”

  She shrugged and turned to go back to Santa Clarita. He leaned down and touched her head, which made her smile.

  “Vayas con Dios, Serena,” he told her. “I mean that,” he muttered in English, under his breath.

  Still he hesitated. “Chiquita, do you know what happened to the Chavez family here?”

  “My uncle tells me it was nothing good. All dead. Probably still in the hacienda. All dead.”

  Not all in the hacienda, he thought. “And you still don’t have any land!” he burst out, unable to help himself. He closed his eyes a moment against the memory of the lovely ladies sipping tea on the veranda in June.

  He opened his eyes when Serena slapped Blanco. “Go away, señor! You cannot find your wife if you never make it to the Sierras!”

  He gathered his reins and held Blanco back from the kind of gallop that would signal to any army that here was a man desperate to get somewhere, anywhere, out of his enemies’ reach. Better any advanced guard think he was just a paisano intent upon his business in the mountains, but in no particular hurry.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at the hacienda again as he passed by, but he did glance back at Serena, a smaller and smaller figure as Blanco ate up the distance in a gentlemanly fashion. For one stupid moment, he wished he could wave his hand and transport the little soldadera to a safer place where salmon spawned and ended up in cans somehow.

  B

  He saw the army’s scouts as merciful darkness found him nearing the foothills of the mountains. They thundered along at the usual breakneck speed designed to chew up horses and leave them worthless. His heart nearly stopped when two of the riders veered and wheeled in his direction. Ammon unslung the Mauser from his shoulder in a reflex action, wondering at the same time what Blanco would do if he fired the gun. He had never trained his smart horse to stand still for rifle fire. Never needed to.

  Almost afraid, he looked back at the scouts. He could have fallen to his knees in gratitude to see them arguin
g with two other vanguard riders, possibly wondering why they wanted to follow a lone rider into the mountains, where everyone knew there were Indians.

  “I like it so much better when you fight with each other,” Ammon told them softly. He turned his back on the four quarreling guerillas and continued his steady climb into the foothills. When he looked back a few minutes later, the soldados had rejoined the others.

  “Thank you, Ammon, you Old Nephite,” he said. “Now keep an eye on Serena, will you?”

  He rode steadily upward as twilight descended on the valley that stretched out far below him now. He stopped for a long moment, letting his breath out slowly, reminding himself to breathe as he watched the guerilla army that had defeated Serena’s faction at Topia on the border. It snaked along, strung out for miles. He hoped the soldiers would bypass Santa Clarita. Surely by now they knew how little remained in the village, picked over by one faction or the other, not to mention the federales.

  To his dismay, the long column turned west toward the village, where even now the egg man and the butcher’s son and Serena’s father and uncle were probably trying to hide whatever pitiful supplies remained to them. He wondered how Serena would fare, and he wondered why it even mattered so much to him.

  The answer was simple, and something his father had told him once, after federales “requisitioned” two of his best horses.

  “Just you wait, son,” his father had said as Ammon fumed watching his best horses ride away. “They’ll go home to wives and children who love them.”

  At the time, Ammon had stared at his father as though all his brains had dribbled out. He understood now, as he thought of the young girl and her dead brother, following an army that promised land and couldn’t deliver it. He had buried Felipe, ridden with Serena dozing in front of him, trimmed prickly pears in her father’s house, and made no objection when she watched over him while he hid in the stable and slept. He knew them now as people, and he worried about them.

  He continued his steady climb into the mountains, stopping finally when it was too dark to see, and he feared he had lost the trail. Feeling older than old, he gave Blanco his head and knew his smart horse would find water.

  When Blanco did, Ammon dismounted and flattened himself by his horse as they both drank deep from one of the little springs in the high mountains. The water was cold and sweet, and a far cry from the silty, warm water of the Rio Bravo that separated his country from the United States. When he finished, he lay on his back and stared at the stars high overhead. He didn’t move until Blanco nudged him.

  “No grain for you and no food for me,” Ammon said. He debated a long moment, then took off the saddle and turned his horse loose to graze. Ammon drank some more water until it filled his stomach. He could look for prickly pears in the morning and be in García by nightfall.

  The saddle made as good a pillow as he was going to find this side of García, provided guerillas hadn’t ripped open the pillows and let the feathers blow to the winds. He lay there, remembering with a pang how well Addie fit by his side in their bed in García. As water sloshed in his empty stomach, he settled back and closed his eyes, wishing for her warmth as the cold settled into his bones on the mountain, so far from the hot plains.

  B

  Addie was still in his thoughts at first light, burrowing into his side as she liked to do because he had a bad habit of stealing all the bed covers. She nuzzled, nudged, and prodded until he opened his eyes and found himself staring up at a circle of Indians staring back at him, one of them prodding him with his foot.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Ammon said in Spanish, alert and stupid at the same time. “Would any of you like this Mauser?”

  SEVEN

  AS IT TURNED out, the Indians did want Serena’s Mauser, and Ammon’s rifle too. So much, in fact, that to keep his own weapon with its high-powered scope, Ammon had to promise them five cattle from the box canyon where he and his father had hidden them before they left Colonia García.

  The trade was a fair one, considering the stories he had heard of miners and loggers disappearing in the Sierra Madre. He was acquainted with the Indian who had been prodding him in the ribs, so he did not appeal to strangers. Joselito usually came around García in the fall to do odd jobs, and Ammon’s father always hired him. Ammon saw how thin they were, almost as worn down as the villagers of Santa Clarita.

  He gave up the Mauser cheerfully, happy to have it in Indian hands where it probably wouldn’t come to the attention of any of the factions. The rifle was a hot potato, and he was glad to have it off his hands. The Tarahumara had been retreating farther and farther into the remote canyons of the Sierras since the revolution began.

  If only there was something to eat. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and looked around, but all he saw was nopal. Joselito saw his glance and sliced off a few leaves with a wicked-looking knife, handing them to him.

  In a few minutes, they were all trimming nopal. “I am getting tired of this,” Ammon said in English.

  Maybe Joselito knew some English. The Tarahumara glanced briefly at Ammon and looked away just as quickly, polite not to stare. Without a word, Joselito opened the leather pouch around his skinny waist and pulled out two or three beetles, already squashed and ready for dinner.

  Ammon gulped and carefully took the beetles from the tip of that knife. He gestured to his chunk of nopal, and Joselito nodded.

  The Indian chuckled when Ammon stared at the beetles for a long moment. He wondered if Old Ammon the Nephite had eaten bugs when he traveled into Lamanite land and figured the answer was yes. He decided that the matter probably got lost in Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon translation because it wasn’t all that important. He spread the beetles on his prickly pear chunk. He told himself to chew it and think about Addie’s crunchy toffee that she made at Christmas. To his relief, it stayed in his stomach.

  The Indians watching Ammon nodded their approval. Joselito ate a few more beetles without benefit of prickly pear, then stood up. “We will follow you to your cattle,” he said in good, workaday Spanish.

  “Then you will know where my herd is,” Ammon pointed out.

  Joselito shrugged. “We can take your rifle, if you wish.” He said it so politely, his hand on that wicked knife, ample proof to Ammon that if he wasn’t exactly a prisoner of the Tarahumara, he was as close as he ever wanted to be.

  “It appears I am turning into a philanthropist,” Ammon replied, which made Joselito smile. The Indian had no idea what a philanthropist was, obviously. Either that, or he did and he liked a good joke.

  Ammon mounted Blanco and led the way, the Indians trotting along beside him. He knew the Tarahumara were renowned for their long distance running, but he also saw how worn down they were. If he kneed Blanco into a gallop, he could put miles between himself and the Indians who wanted—no, needed— the five promised cattle. He thought about it just long enough to remind himself that Addie’s father would have done precisely that and rejected such a blatant betrayal of his word.

  He rode all day, hungry, sleepy in the warm sunlight, impressed with the steady pace the Indians set, even in their weakened state. When he slowed Blanco into a sedate walk, Joselito looked at Ammon and smiled his gratitude.

  Ammon decided to camp that night in the box canyon where he hoped his cattle still resided. Maybe he could appeal to the better natures of his Indian escort to leave the rest of his herd alone, but he doubted it. Barring that, he intended to read a few more chapters in Alma by the light of the campfire, just to get an idea of what Old Ammon the Nephite would do. Mama seemed to think reading about Ammon might give him some idea, and she was generally right. At least the Indians wouldn’t want his Book of Mormon. They didn’t read.

  They reached the box canyon while shadows rappelled down the walls, turning them the dull gold of wheat ready to harvest. The days were beginning to shorten, and he knew the night would be cool, so high in the mountains. He breathed deep of piñon pine and it settled his heart.

/>   The Indians nodded their approval when he came to a barely visible fence and tugged on it, pulling back a brush cover to reveal a narrow opening to the canyon, one of many in the area. With a smile on his face, Ammon took off his sombrero and grandly ushered them inside. He closed it behind them and walked Blanco to the head of his curious escort column, amused now more than dismayed by the upcoming loss of his cattle.

  What was that Pa had said before he left El Paso? It had irritated Ammon then because he was worried about Addie and wondering how the Hancocks were going to survive, and here was Pa, getting all philosophical. Pa did have a tendency to woolgather. Thomas Finch was not entirely wrong in that regard.

  Am, if you want to find yourself, sometimes you have to lose yourself. It says so in Matthew, Pa had told him. Ammon shook his head, reminding himself that Addie was the one he was trying to find. So far, he had helped a little soldadera bury her brother. The little soldadera had watched over him in a field while he slept, then warned him that the army was on the move. Now he was going to help some starving Indians. He was still alive, and maybe that was enough for now.

  The canyon was narrow, and he took his time. No rush. Maybe his Mexican neighbors were right about mañana. He couldn’t think of anything that would keep the Indians from taking all his livestock, so why hurry his family’s ruin?

  To his relief, the Hancocks’ cattle were right where he and Pa had left them, grazing steadily throughout the small canyon. With its stream, ample pasture, and the sheltering mountains, he knew they could stay there, multiply, and grow fat until either the revolution ended or he figured out how to get them across the border. Ammon sat there a long time, admiring the cattle, calculating right down to the penny what they would fetch in Stateside markets.

  Ammon reminded himself that if he had possessed a lick of sense, he would have holed up last night in a safe place and not just flopped down on that river bank. He kicked himself mentally a few more times, then shrugged and gave it all away.