Safe Passage

by Carla Kelly

  He knew how reticent Mexicans were about affection in public, but he didn’t care, and neither did la mujer feroz, who was crying now and trying to gather him close. Or maybe he was crying, because he knew no one could ever love Addie Hancock as much as he did. Their war was over.

  After a serious demonstration of affection that made Pia Sanchez cluck her tongue, Ammon remembered he was in the kitchen of Rancho San Diego and not his own half-burned house in García. Pia glared and handed him a dishtowel. “Blow your nose, señor, and behave yourself,” she declared, and stomped from the kitchen.

  He blew his nose. “I was just kissing my wife,” he called after the cook. “Thoroughly.” He sat down and held out his arms for Addie, who had returned to the bean pot to give it one more half-hearted stir. She sat on his lap, minus the wooden spoon.

  “I was going to get on the train. I really was,” she told him, her face muffled in his dirty shirt. “Am, you stink.”

  “I know,” he replied, his voice as tender as if she had told him he was her prince and favorite plaything. “What possessed you?”

  “I could not make myself put one more mile between us,” she told him simply. “If you try to put me on the train again, the same thing will happen. This is my country too, and you are most definitely my husband.”

  He had no rebuttal, no antidote. They were in this together, no matter how long the revolution lasted or whatever happened to them. Still, he hoped she understood the magnitude of their challenge. “It’s not going to be easy, mi amor,” he began.

  She kissed him to shut him up. “I gave Graciela the money her husband stole from you and told her to look up your father in the lumberyard.” She patted his shirt. “He’s more likely to help her than my father. After she left, I wrote a letter to my father, telling him to give Graciela the five hundred dollars.” She made a wry face. “I guess we’re broke. Dare we return to García?”

  Ammon shook his head. “It’s not going to be safe there anytime soon, if ever. If you’re willing, do this— write your father and ask him to deed us his ranch in Colonia Juárez. A clerk from the lumber company told me not everyone left. We’ll go there in the morning and see if it’s a rumor or the truth.”

  “I’m willing. I can talk Pia out of some bedding, and maybe a pot or two. We’re really broke,” she emphasized again.

  Ammon provided his own emphasis for a few minutes, guaranteed to keep Pia out of the kitchen. When he finished, Addie was rosy with whisker burn.

  “We can’t live on love,” she said, sounding like a wife again, which made him so happy that his scalp tingled.

  “We can try, but it might not come to that.”

  Addie cuddled close. “I suppose you’ll tell me about a magic privy in Pearson.”

  “As a matter of fact … ,” he started, and laughed when she thumped him. He looked around the empty room and whispered anyway. “When I built that privy, I built two vaults, instead of just one underneath both holes.”

  “Ammon, you are a sly dog,” she said. “What did you do?”

  “I told General Salazar I never joke about money, and I don’t. What he didn’t know is that when I stashed the strong box, I also hung a tarred rope from the back of that unused vault. I attached another cloth bag, also tarred black so you can’t see it unless you stare down into the hole, and who in the world does that, except little boys? I always look at the back wall, myself. Ay!” he said when she thumped him again. “We’re not rolling in wealth, by any means, but there is a little more capital, uh, underground.”

  It was Addie’s turn to giggle, so he wondered if she really understood how dangerous life with Ammon Hancock was going to be. He tried to tell her how hard it would be to remain neutral and not object when both sides and all factions stole cattle, grain, and chickens from them. She didn’t seem to be listening, though, and he asked her why.

  “I agree with you, Am, that it won’t be easy, but let’s try this: Name our ranch El Rancho de los Tres Pumas. Pia told me that there is even a song about me now.” She frowned. “What’s that word?”

  “El corrido,” he said.

  “That’s it! Everyone in Salazar’s army is singing it. In a bunch of verses, the woman of Ammon ’Ancock kills cougars, drives out wolves, and cures el cólera.” She folded her hands in her lap, becoming once again the serene and restful woman he loved, married, lost, and kept loving. “Any day now, there will be a verse about raising the dead, I am certain, even though poor Colonel Ochoa is dead. The song will keep us safe enough, Am, and that’s all I want for us and our children.”

  “We’ll have children,” he assured her.

  “Hold that thought,” she told him, her face rosy again, and not from whisker burn. “I’m … I’m pretty much as regular as clockwork, and I’m a week late. The Salinas’ feather bed was awfully fine. Remember?”

  How could he forget? He held her a little more gently. “Addie, was this the worst rescue ever?”

  “Probably,” she told him, unconcerned. She sniffed the air. “The beans are burning.”

  He shrugged. “Let ’um burn. It’ll just be another verse in el corrido, where the woman turns burned beans into pollo en mole.”

  She looked at him with some dignity. “You are not taking this corrido seriously.”

  “Al contrario, chiquita,” he told her, cuddling her close. “You are right. It might save our lives.”

  For just a moment, she became the uncertain woman again, afraid he could never forgive her. As he watched her expression with all the love in his heart, he saw her smile grow and her face become a mirror of his own love.

  “Who rescued whom?” she asked.

  “Well, I rescued you. Didn’t I?”

  Addie just smiled.

  EPILOGUE

  AMMON AND ADDIE walked Blanco to Colonia Juárez the next day, the horse laden with bedding and pots and one chair, because Pia liked Addie. He wasn’t aware of it until they passed Pearson—he resisted the urge to check the privy—but Joselito had been paralleling them in the shelter of the trees. Ammon beckoned to him, but the Indian just shook his head. By the time they arrived in Colonia Juárez, he was gone, fading back into the mountains that Ammon knew he would always miss, but which were not safe because of their isolation.

  They came into Juárez fearing the worst and thinking of García, but the tree-shaded town straddling the Rio Piedras Verdes was nearly untouched by the turmoil that had sent the colonists fleeing for safety. The clerk from the lumber company had been right—several of Juárez’s more contrarian occupants had never left. For a month, they and a handful of Mexican friends had patrolled the deserted streets and kept looting to a minimum.

  The Hancocks spent a welcome night under a colony roof, listening to the stories of rebels riding through town and being met by a federal force that had taken control of Pearson and drove away the guerillas.

  “It’s not much protection and who knows how long it will last,” their host said that night after Addie had fallen asleep, exhausted and leaning against her husband, but unwilling to go to bed until he came too.

  While Addie slept, Brother McDonald told Ammon he had just missed seeing Bishop Bentley and some families that had come back briefly, then left again, driven out by Enrique Portillo and his faction.

  “It won’t be safe for your wife,” he warned.

  “I’m staying, and she won’t leave me,” was his quiet reply.

  They moved into a house in Juárez belonging to friends because her father’s ranch between Juárez and Dublán seemed a little too far away for safety. When Addie fretted that their friends might not appreciate squatters in their house, Ammon just kissed her. She thumped him when he suggested that she put a note in another canning jar.

  By the time ten families returned four months later in January, Addie was showing and wearing Mother Hubbards she had “borrowed” from another house. He thought she might be shy about being seen in her interesting condition, but Addie was hungry for the society of women
, who clucked over her and glared at him for keeping her in Mexico.

  “She wouldn’t leave,” he insisted. They didn’t believe him until Addie assured them, in her quiet way, that she had created an awful scene when General Salazar himself had tried to get her on the train. “I don’t know what got into me,” she said so sweetly, but Ammon knew.

  They really didn’t believe her until the day General Salazar himself rode through Colonia Juárez after spending several months in a hospital in El Paso, recovering from wounds suffered in the Battle of San Joaquin in Sonora. The residents had been wary, but Addie welcomed him into their borrowed house. In all the colonies, Ammon’s wife was the only person who ever trusted the general who changed moods so fast. She blushed when the general suggested naming the expected child after him, if it was a boy, but when Betsy came in June, someone unknown left a christening dress on the doorstep.

  When more families returned, Ammon and Addie moved onto the Finch Ranch, renamed Rancho de los Tres Pumas. The corrido with its many verses singing of the brave woman who killed three lions, drove out wolves, cured cholera, and raised the dead kept them safe, as Addie predicted. The little song of the revolution isn’t sung any more, except in remote, mountainous areas where Indians still live.

  The fortunes of war spared no one. After Madero’s assassination in 1913, General Victoriano Huerta, The Jackal, seized power, declaring himself president of Mexico. His brief and unhappy regime unleashed more factions that raided through the colonies, stealing horses, food, and whatever appeared useful. More colonists left for a short time, but Ammon and Addie were never among them.

  The cruelest blow was the loss of Blanco, swept away with other colony horses by followers of Venustiano Carranza, who had sent The Jackal into exile in 1914. For months, Ammon waited for his clever horse to come home and went about tight-lipped. Addie made her own trip to the privy in Pearson and took out enough money to buy him another Arabian, just a colt, but beautiful. He knew better than to argue with the woman who killed three mountain lions, but took the colt to Joselito for safety and came back smiling. When the raids began to die down, the horse became his favorite mount at Tres Pumas.

  Joselito visited the ranch several times a year. He listened to what both Hancocks had to tell him about the Book of Mormon, but he remained too skeptical. Two of his sons were not so skeptical. Neither was his daughter, who married one of the Hancock boys and was sealed to him in the Mesa Temple in 1940.

  A better businessman than a stockman, Ammon changed Hancock Haulage’s name to Tres Pumas, and got his horse and team back from the US Army. After a visit to the privy in 1914, he bought two more wagons and teams, one of which he had to surrender to Pancho Villa or die by firing squad. Two years later when General John Pershing and his expeditionary force went on their fruitless pursuit of Villa, the firm of Tres Pumas and Son (only two years old, but Ammon was optimistic, as always) hauled for the US Army in Mexico and gradually mechanized. By 1920, a fleet of Tres Pumas trucks traveled the gradually improving roads of Chihuahua.

  Thomas Finch had been happy to deed over his ranch to his daughter. He never returned to the colony, like others who created new lives in the United States. Ammon’s parents put down roots in Springville, Utah, their resettlement made possible by the five hundred dollar down payment Ma extracted from Thomas Finch in return for her son’s rescue of his daughter. Finch grudgingly gave the other five hundred dollars to a Mexican woman and her husband, a doctor, who were last seen quarreling with each other on the westbound train from El Paso to Los Angeles.

  Addie settled into life on her ranch with her usual serenity, keeping her fears to herself when Ammon freighted for one side or the other, and logging lots of hours on her knees when he was gone. She discovered a certain talent for stock raising after Joselito brought down a portion of the herd hidden in the box canyon in the distant Sierra Madres. Ammon wasn’t surprised at her ability. He knew she could do anything she set her mind to. She never became really comfortable with Spanish, though, but her husband and children were good natured about translating.

  With the election of General Álvaro Obregón in 1920, after Carranza’s assassination, the ten-year revolution tapered off. Life in Colonia Dublán and Colonia Juárez became more stable. On one of his freighting trips west, Ammon stopped in Santa Clarita and asked about Serena Camacho. No one had anything to tell him. Hacienda Chavez had been divided into small farms, as the revolution originally intended; he had to be content that maybe somewhere, Serena la soldadera had found her own piece of land.

  His greatest joy in life remained Addie Hancock, the woman he loved, married, lost, sort of rescued, and loved again. When he came home from freighting trips, she always seemed to hear his truck and was usually standing on the porch, hand shading her eyes, watching for him. Even when he was gone, she always remembered to run the Mexican flag up the pole by the house and take it down at night.

  She had patched the flag he saved from the broken staff in Encarnación, reattaching the snake to the eagle, smoothing the fabric, and sometimes just sitting with it in her lap, remembering desperate days and the kindness of strangers. When the flag wore out and had to be replaced, she kept it in the cedar chest at the foot of their bed, next to the christening dress General Salazar had left for Betsy. When she learned of the general’s death by ambush in 1917, she mourned him in her quiet way, even though no one else in the colonies did.

  Ammon understood, sitting with her on the porch steps long after the children were sleeping, his arm around her. He could have composed more verses for his wife’s corrido, verses honoring the brave woman who climbed the steps at Hacienda San Diego and held out her hand to General Salazar, probably saving all their lives; the woman who picked up his Book of Mormon from the dust; the woman who sat with Colonel Ochoa until that good man died.

  His woman.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Marie Bryner-Bowles, Bryner Photography

  CARLA KELLY IS a veteran of the New York and international publishing world. The author of more than thirty novels and novellas for Donald I. Fine Co., Signet, and Harlequin, Carla is the recipient of two Rita Awards (think Oscars for romance writing) from Romance Writers of America and two Spur Awards (think Oscars for western fiction) from Western Writers of America. She is also a recipient of Whitney Awards for Borrowed Light and My Loving Vigil Keeping.

  Recently, she’s been writing Regency romances (think Pride and Prejudice) set in the Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars between England and France. She comes by her love of the ocean from her childhood as a Navy brat.

  Carla’s history background makes her no stranger to footnote work, either. During her National Park Service days at the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, Carla edited Friedrich Kurz’s fur trade journal. She recently completed a short history of Fort Buford, where Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881.

  Following the “dumb luck” principle that has guided their lives, the Kellys recently moved to Wellington, Utah, from North Dakota and couldn’t be happier in their new location. In her spare time, Carla volunteers at the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah. She likes to visit her five children, who live here and there around the United States. Her favorite place in Utah is Manti, located after a drive on the scenic byway through Huntington Canyon.

  And why is she so happy these days? Carla doesn’t have to write in laundry rooms and furnace rooms now, because she has an actual office.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Proverb

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen
>
  Nineteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Back Cover