Four. Trace felt as if his back were on fire. The nerves and muscles convulsed. He chewed his lip, blind with agony. If the blows came faster, he’d merge with them, drown in the black flaming sea.
But that administrador—he had a watch. He counted. Signaled. Enough time between to make you feel each blow to the utmost, no running them mercifully together.
A strange metallic rasping came from Lío. He didn’t cry out as the blows fell, but that strange inhuman sound came after every lash, and as it came, so did the rope on Trace. He set all his will on not screaming.
Then he lay in a heap in the trampled grass. Something prodded him. He looked up at the administrador. “Norteño eyes,” murmured the immaculately groomed slender man. “Well—we shall see, gringo. See how you tame.”
Trace watched his polished shoes move away. His capataz, face wealed by the rope, came up and delivered a kick that sent Trace halfway over.
“Up! Since you’ve energy for brawling, you’ll cut an extra five hundred leaves today or taste the whip again.”
Trace crawled up, pulled on his shirt. His bloody back would stick to it, but it would be some protection from insects. Lío was moving away with the other workers. Someone handed Trace the ball of soured cornmeal dough that was all he’d taste till supper. His stomach revolted. He started to refuse.
“Take it,” muttered one of the old-timers. “Right now you think you cannot eat, but an hour in the fields will change that. You’re going to need your strength. They’ll be after you now.”
If the other days had been forced, driven labor, this one was torture. Each swing of the machete, each bending to add to or pick up a bundle sent pain twisting through his bruised, broken flesh. His head throbbed and the capataz never passed without slashing him with the stinging limber cane.
“Five hundred extra leaves, gringo. And mind you trim them well.”
An impossible stint even for an experienced worker in good condition. Hell! thought Trace, startled at his own bitter amazement. Gives me something to think about besides how I’d like to kill those bastards. Especially that foppy administrador—break his signal finger and cram that watch right down his throat!
Lío, several rows over, worked doggedly. He and Trace had the same goal—not to be whipped again till their backs healed. The thought of that rope laid across raw wounds made Trace sweat. If he died from the whip, that would be one thing; but what he dreaded was to be reduced to a groveling wreck whose only aim was to escape punishment.
If he saw that coming, he’d attack the bosses in such a way that they’d have to kill him. But could a man tell when he was breaking? Which whipping would be the one that snapped his hold on pride, every dream and hope that made him able to keep his spirit free?
Trace didn’t know what was happening till he came on the bundle of twelve neatly trimmed leaves, stared in amazement at the adjacent plant.
“There are thirty leaves left, exactly,” muttered the man in the next row, Tomás, one of Lío’s Yaquis. “Rosalio and I worked it while the foremen were at the other end of the field and couldn’t tell which rows we were working on.”
As Trace gaped, Rosalio, a small tough little man, whispered sharply. “Get to work, norteño! None of us can waste time if you’re to pile up that two thousand five hundred leaves!”
“Lío—he’s going slower.”
“The men next to his row are helping.” Tomás hacked off a leaf, began trimming the spikelike point. “He’ll make it. You’re the one who’s in trouble. Five hundred extra leaves.”
At noon the soured dough was gone and Trace was glad the long-time slave had urged him into taking it. Salt sweat stung his wounds but at least there was no chance of getting stiff from inaction.
And thanks to Tomás and Rosalio, who were getting some help on their stints from neighbors on their other sides, Trace had thirteen hundred leaves to his tally, a figure that made the capataz scowl and shake his head in disbelief.
“If a cleaning up makes you work this fast, gringo, maybe we should give you rope for breakfast every day.”
Trace went dizzy. What if he was given this number of leaves daily? Tomás and Rosalio might help for a while, but they couldn’t indefinitely drive themselves that much harder without collapsing.
Eight hours later he staggered from the field, legs feeling like a hay-stuffed scarecrow’s. His back was an itching throbbing misery. But his extra five hundred leaves were done and Lío had met his quota. The sweating, tedious, backbreaking work their companions had done to help them created an even stronger bond than having fought together.
About half the workers were married and lived in one-room huts scattered around the center of the plantation, where were located the commissary, factory, drying yard, stable, jail, corrals, stables, and homes of the administrador and mayordomos, as well as a little chapel. The unmarried men, about four hundred of them, slept in closely hung hammocks in a large stone building surrounded by a wall twice as high as a tall man, with broken glass mortared on top. At the single entrance stood a guard armed with a club, a sword, and a pistol.
Behind the sleeping quarters were a half-dozen crude stoves where women were serving out the single meal of the day. Being one of the last out of the field, Trace didn’t have to stand in line long, for most of the laborers were already squatting or leaning against the wall as they devoured their tortillas and bowls of putrid fish and beans.
On the night of their arrival at Mariposa, Trace had believed he could never force down the stinking rotten fish, but now he took his bowl eagerly, sat down where his back wasn’t likely to be jarred against, and scooped a folded tortilla into the beans.
Lío joined him a few minutes later. “I think my back will heal faster than yours. It won’t help anyone, norteño, to ask for a whipping.”
Trace nodded. Hell, he knew that. He hadn’t wanted to tackle the majador. It had just happened.
“I won’t even try to defend you if you earn another beating,” Lío growled from the corner of his mouth. “My aim is to stay as strong as I can in order to get away—go back to the sierra and fight for Yaqui lands.”
“Sure,” said Trace. “I’m going to get away, too.”
“Not if you mix into every cleaning up.”
“I’ve learned.” Trace grinned hardily. “They can cut you in strips, hang you to dry for jerky, and I won’t bat an eye.”
“That’s it,” grunted Lío approvingly. He winced. “Don’t make me laugh. Cracks open the scabs.” But he laughed anyway.
Blessedly next day was Sunday. Trace and Lío rubbed each other’s lashes with crushed aloe vera pulp one of the cooking women gave them. It stung at first but then had a soothing, drawing effect. The worst thing about open sores was attracting insects, which often ate their way half through a foot or hand. A Maya had died of blood poisoning caused by insects the day Trace arrived, and another lay in his hammock with one foot swollen to double size, already full of maggots.
Trace remembered how Cruz had saved Sewa from gangrene by taking off her foot, but even if there had been someone to do the operation, this man seemed too far gone.
Two more slaves died that week and were buried hastily in the graveyard edging the uncleared tropical growth outside the huts of the married people. The campo santo by the chapel was reserved for administradores, mayordomos, and capataces. A priest made a circuit of the plantations in the area; but except for mass solemnization of existing or planned marriages among the workers and baptism of any handy infants, he wasted no time in exhorting the plantation force to meekness. The soaked rope whip preached its message.
“You’d think that just to protect his investment, the owner would feed us better and drive us less,” said Trace one evening when the fish seemed even ranker than usual.
Rosalio shrugged. He had grown even more thin and wizened so that he resembled an elongated hairless monkey. “Yaquis only cost sixty-five dollars when the Secretary of War sells us to his good friends, and there are th
ousands left.”
“But not many are fighting.”
“No, they’re working at mines or ranches or railroads, or trying to hold on to their lands in the Eight Sacred Pueblos,” spat Lío. “And so they will be marched away by the soldiers till not a Yaqui is left in all the rich river country that was marked out for us ages ago in the singing of the saints.”
“If our women and children escaped to the mountains, perhaps they can hide till times change,” said Tomás dreamily.
“From Torres to Yzábal to Corral and all over again?” scoffed Lío. “That gang have run Sonora all my life, taking turns as governor. With Corral as Díaz’s vice-president, the federal buzzards simply devour what the Sonora wolves leave. Only a revolution will help the Yaquis.”
“You think a different government would protect Yaqui lands?” Trace asked incredulously.
Lío’s strong teeth flashed. “No. It would be my hope that the revolutionists and federales would keep each other so occupied that they’d have no time to civilize us or lust after our delta soil. That’s why we’ve held our Eight Sacred Pueblos so long, norteño. First there was war against Spain and then against France and general brawling for power. It is only when the central government grows strong that there is time and energy to bother us.”
“But I thought Yaquis fought in the other wars.”
“To be sure,” said Rosalio. “Very often we fought on both sides, too, depending on who made us the best promises. It’s nothing to us who governs from Mexico City as long as they leave us in peace. We have our own laws, our own warrior societies, our own ways. We shall keep them as long as we live.”
“Not when we are slaves,” said Tomás bitterly. “How would we give the Easter celebration here? Or hold a novena or even make a decent funeral? And though there are many Yaquis here, you will notice that the families have all been broken up and Yaquis cannot marry each other. The women, even those with living husbands, are forced to marry Chinese, and if any of us were allowed a wife, she would be Maya. The government wants to destroy us as a nation.”
“They will not do it,” vowed Lío. “Our pueblos are holy, each located according to a vision. Prophets sang the boundaries of our land. It is not the government’s right to change them.”
Trace didn’t say anything. That was how Indians in the United States had felt, but all of them, even the ones left in their homelands like the Navaho and Papago and Hopi, had been forced to terms with a completely alien government.
The Yaquis talked on about their home pueblos, about their great military leaders. And you? Trace asked himself. Where’s your homeland, your sacred boundary, your holy city?
Texas? He belonged to his birthplace as he did to his family, but he doubted he’d ever go back. Las Coronas? Jonathan Greenleaf and Doña Luisa were dead. If he were ever to go back, he’d have to start all over to make it seem home. Yet there was a center to him and he suddenly knew what it was.
Miranda. She was his homeland, rest, the heart of his life. The song and boundary, his blessed place. Was she alive? Surely he could feel it if she weren’t. Court Sanders would look out for her.
Too well?
Trace clenched his jaw. Couldn’t think about such things. No. Just of Miranda, the fierce beautiful way she’d given herself to him, the sweetness of her. Dream about that and stay alive. Alive to go back.
Both he and Lío had been lucky. The rope wounds healed clean. And at the next whipping, of a Maya for missing roll call, Trace stayed at the back of the crowd and managed not to look, though there was no way he could shut out the sound of wet rope on flesh, the screams that began with the third lash and dwindled to gasping whines. Each blow reverberated through Trace’s body. His guts twisted and sweat broke out as he fought the need to retch.
How long could this go on? Trace had thought measuring of the time between strokes by a watch was hideous, but this enjoyment of a cigar while a man was beaten.…
God damn the little bastard administrador—
With a flip of his wrist, the manager tossed away the cigar. The lashing stopped. A sigh floated up from the hypnotized throng. The administrador’s gaze hooked abruptly into Trace’s. Above the heads of scores of workers, beginning to shuffle toward the fields, Trace felt those dark eyes pushing, appraising.
Turning swiftly, Trace started off with his fellow slaves, but before he could sever the first leaf, his capataz approached with an envying sneer.
“Don Enrique commands that you report to his house.”
“Don Enrique?”
“The administrador, dolt.”
Trace went cold. Had that runty little dandy decided to punish a gringo for looking disgusted at his entertainment? “Get moving!” Snapped the capataz.
Questions would bring the long slender cane. Anyway, whatever the bad news was, Trace knew he’d get it soon enough. “The largest house,” instructed the capataz. “Opposite the chapel.”
A private whipping? Some more elaborate torture? Trace had heard there was a small dungeon at Mariposa, a cave where rebellious slaves were thrown to repent or die. They usually died after being hung up by their thumbs for a day or two.
The capataz took his machete. “You won’t need this.” He chuckled, running his tongue over his lips, again darting that curious half-jealous glance at Trace. “Get along now. Don Enrique’s not a patient man.”
Ordinarily an order repeated twice was accompanied by a few slashes of the cane. Trace moved off, puzzled by the foreman’s manner but too apprehensive to think much about it. He passed the corrals and the factory, where an elevator sent henequen leaves down a long chute to the stripping machine that tore them apart, yielding strands of green fiber that would turn golden in the drying yard before it was baled and sent to the port where United States interests would buy most of it.
Trace grimaced to think of all the rope he’d used, never dreaming of where it came from, of the misery of those who harvested the raw material. He was sure that very few southern slaves had led such cruel lives. Slaves had been costly in the United States; there hadn’t been an unending supply of cheap new ones provided by the government. Sharecroppers, white or black, often barely scratched out a living, but they couldn’t be flogged to death. No, the henequen plantations were like vast prison-punishment farms; he didn’t think they had improved a bit since the sixteenth century. Yet foreigners thought Díaz had brought such prosperity and advancement to this country.
Díaz’s age was golden for the rich and powerful; for all but that handful, it was perpetual hardship, and for many it meant slavery for debt, serfdom as savage as that of the Middle Ages.
Trace saw the sick laborers working in the drying yard along with small boys. He knew this was Mariposa’s hospital; those with fever or other ailments could work here at half-pay. Not that pay mattered since it was absorbed by food and lodging. No one had ever paid off his “debt” and regained his freedom.
The administrador’s stone house was the most imposing building on the plantation. The owner didn’t live here, of course, but had a mansion in Mérida and seldom visited the several green hells from which his luxuries came. A young barefoot girl dressed in a flowing white dress, embroidered in blue about the hem, stepped out on the long veranda and said softly, “Come.”
Small and graceful, she had olive skin and the Mayan features that Trace thought were like a mingling of Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese. She was no taller than Sewa, but firm little breasts suggested that she was biologically a woman. She led Trace through a broad hall and into a bedroom where a copper tub of water set on a rug near pails of water and a bench where towels were folded next to soap and a brush.
“Bathe yourself,” said the girl, eyes downcast, keeping her distance as if afraid of him. “Then put on these.” She touched soft dove-gray trousers and a linen shirt draped over a chair. Trace stared from the tub to the gentleman’s garments. “What is this, little one?” he asked, keeping his tone gentle so as not to frighten her..
&nb
sp; “Hurry,” she begged. “Or he will think it’s my fault, he’ll whip me.”
Whip this fragile little butterfly? She backed out of the room and her alarmed face lingered in Trace’s mind as he peeled off his filthy shirt and trousers and stepped into the tub. Whatever happened, it was wonderful to get clean again! He dried on the thick soft towels and pulled on the clothes. Almost a perfect fit. Now how did that happen? Though the clothes were in excellent condition, they weren’t new. Which made Trace even more uneasy. Even the woven sandals fit fairly well.
Glancing around the room, he tried to find some clue to its occupant, but there were no personal belongings visible. The bed and dresser were of mahogany and the coverlet and curtains were white.
An anonymous room. Why had he been brought here?
Thirstily he drank from one of the pails, sure that it was cleaner than the water put in cans for the slaves, and certainly much cooler. A tap came at the door. Answering, he saw the girl, who blinked at the change in his appearance.
“Better?” He grinned.
She tittered behind one slim hand and motioned him to follow. In a large pleasant room facing a patio where a fountain played among lush trees and flaming hibiscus and bougainvillea, Don Enrique sat in an easy chair, shapely feet extended on a large footstool. On a table next to him was a basket of fruit; a bottle of wine stood by two goblets. But what really caught Trace’s eyes and set up a clamoring in his belly was a small tray of sliced chicken and fresh-baked rolls.
“Be seated,” said the manager with a wave of that hand that could signal beatings. “I am sure you would relish some refreshment Will you have wine?”
“Thank you, no.” Trace sat down in the empty chair on the other side of the table.
What was the manager’s game? Trace would think he was being set up as a spy, only that didn’t make sense. Scores of them could have been bought by adding a little better food, a shorter stint in the field. Maybe Don Enrique thought the U.S. government or Trace’s family might pay a nice ransom.
“Your Spanish is good,” he said as Trace polished off the last of the chicken. “But you are not Mexican, nor, I think, a ruffian who deserves this fate. I would like to help you.”
A Lady Bought with Rifles Page 25