Canyon Song

by Gwyneth Atlee

  CANYON SONG

  Gwyneth Atlee

  “And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,

  Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.”

  -William Shakespeare,

  Sonnet 119:1.11

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cañon del Sangre de Cristo, Arizona Territory

  March 21, 1884

  Anna frowned at the dead man lying on her doorstep in the snow. The Navajo were always dragging hurt things to her, as if they thought her years spent with the curing woman had conferred upon her the same ability to heal.

  Sometimes, the dead woman’s training did work. Last spring, someone had left a skinny dog with a hugely swollen leg and less hair than it took to guess the creature’s color. Against her better judgment, Anna tended the dog and nursed it through what appeared to be a dose of rattler venom.

  Notion, as Anna had named him, stepped out of the cabin and gave the man’s corpse a thorough sniff. The dog, which had filled out and grown a thick, gold coat, looked up expectantly and fanned a fringy tail.

  “Not even a growl,” Anna commented, surprised. Notion’s deep bark usually alerted her whenever anyone came near either the cabin or corral. That service, in addition to his company, was worth the trouble of feeding the big mongrel.

  Anna wrinkled her nose in distaste and stepped carefully around the pile of bloody rags that made up the prone man. She wished he hadn’t been left here, for the task of digging even a shallow grave in the frozen soil was near impossible. First, she’d have to build a cairn of stones to cover the fellow until the spring. Otherwise the coyotes or perhaps a bear would come to gnaw and scatter the remains.

  Cursing softly, she stooped to drag her pail through the snow that had drifted up against the cabin’s north side. After she melted it to make fresh coffee, she needed to saddle Canto and go check on Catalina and the infant daughter Anna had helped deliver two nights back. The child’s cry had sounded weak, so Anna had brewed a tonic to enrich the mother’s milk.

  The strains of the infant’s squalling sliced through Anna’s memory. Nothing fragile about that. Anna shook her head in wonder. What made her think that Catalina’s daughter’s cries sounded different from any healthy newborn’s? By now she should have banished the specter of this place, should have refused to let it taint the present.

  Yet she hadn’t, and something in that child’s cries still troubled her. Just as they had in the last babe she’d delivered months before. And the child before that, too. Both boys were fat and healthy the last time she had seen them.

  Anna sighed, knowing that she’d have to ride out to check this infant or she wouldn’t sleep tonight. After all, it was a girl that she’d delivered.

  She glanced to the east, toward a red cliff clothed only in juniper and desolation. Peering beneath a pall of silver, the rising sun limned the scraggly evergreens in gold. If she set out within the hour, she’d reach the Rodriguez rancho just past noon. After a short visit, she could turn back and make it home before dark.

  But if instead she stopped to cover up this stranger’s body . . .

  She thought again about coyotes and black bears, about the burden they could spare her if she but dragged the carcass from her doorstep. But she wouldn’t want to trip over any gnawed, dismembered parts, nor would she want to encourage predators who’d come back later to finish off the last survivors of November’s chicken massacre.

  As if he’d read her mind, Notion whined and pawed the dead man.

  “Don’t even think of eating that!” she warned the dog.

  The dog lay down beside the corpse and rested his head on the man’s shoulder. Anna couldn’t be sure, but she thought Notion looked insulted.

  For the first time, Anna noticed the unfortunate victim’s pale skin and light brown hair. Fairly young, too, from what she could make out of the bloody profile. She scowled at the corpse and shook her head.

  “You’re right, Notion. I can’t leave him.”

  She’d been left for dead once, six long years back. The man who did it hadn’t given a damn what beast scattered her bones or how she’d suffer in the dying. He’d just left her after he’d been done. As if she were nothing more than refuse. As if the secret that she carried meant nothing at all.

  She closed her eyes against the painful blur of memory. Even six years later, she still glanced toward a tiny mound of red soil well hidden by the snow. Then she reached reflexively to touch the part of her coat that covered the thick scar on her belly. As if she needed some reminder of how he’d tried to gut her like a deer.

  No, she couldn’t leave this man’s corpse to scavengers. Even if covering it would take her several hours.

  Out of exasperation at the delay more than malice, she kicked the corpse’s boot.

  The dead man groaned, unmistakably, and old Notion whined once more, then stared at Anna, his great, brown eyes beseeching.

  “Reina del cielo!” Anna cried. She dropped the pan of snow on her own foot and fell onto her knees beside the man.

  With a great effort, she managed to roll the half-frozen creature to his back. She sucked in her breath so sharply that the cold air hurt her lungs.

  She recognized the man’s face. And worse yet, he knew her.

  * * *

  When Quinn Ryan relived the attack, he dreamed it different. In one less painful version, he ignored the smoke rising in the distance and never saw the flaming hogan. Or else he decided, sensibly enough, that a burning Navajo dwelling was an Indian matter, not his business. Instead of riding toward the black plume, he continued his journey to Copper Ridge, where he visited the bathhouse in honor of the completion of a weeks-long prisoner transport. He ate a thick steak in the Cattleman’s Club and chatted amiably with Stark and Ramsey about the days when he’d lived in fear of being sent to Yuma Territorial instead of accompanying thieves there to begin their terms of incarceration.

  In another version of his dream, he did investigate the smoke but remained mounted and coolly ignored Ned Hamby’s provocation. Quinn pictured himself skewering Hamby with the law-and-order glare he’d reluctantly perfected, then turning his horse toward town. He rounded up a posse and his able deputy and later returned to arrest Hamby and his fellow raiders.

  After a brief, but satisfactory gunfight, Ned was duly perforated by the bullets from Quinn’s Colt Peacemaker. The men who’d come with Quinn rounded up the other murderous thieves and later bore witness to their sheriff’s courage. The territory sent him a reward so generous that he turned in his badge and bought a ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad. First class, all the way to New York, where his family lived.

  Sometimes, his dreams took him all the way home, to air redolent with the scents of his Irish mother’s rich lamb stew, her dark soda bread. All the way to those streets, where he’d scabbed his knees playing stickball and his knuckles playing man.

  Home is years gone, and everyone that mattered there long dead . . . because I was too late. Too late. With the numbing jolt of that realization, his rational mind took hold, then began to tally all the hard ways his dreams differed from the truth.

  First of all, he had no loyal followers. His only deputy, Max Wilson, was twice as likely to crawl out of a saloon as to police one ever since his mail-order bride had received a better offer en route to Copper Ridge. And Quinn couldn’t think of any of the good citizens who would risk their lives chasing after Hamby in the canyons. Not for murdering a bunch of Navajo or even the rumor they’d killed white strangers.

  Then there was the part about ignoring Hamby when he’d waved those little scalps.

  “Once I pick the nits off, scrape the hair, and stretch ‘em, might make a decent pair of winter moccasins, I ‘magine.”

  Ned Hamby had leered as he spoke, his
grin repulsive with both his brown teeth and his meaning. One of his brown eyes stared at Quinn, while the other gazed vacantly across the clearing. There, another filthy white man and what looked like a half-breed Indian wrestled to pull back a ewe’s neck and slit its throat. They laughed as the doomed creature staggered madly and then dropped, its bright blood splashing the trampled, muddy snow.

  They cornered yet another sheep in the corral, and Quinn knew they meant to kill the whole lot simply so the Navajo wouldn’t have them. Hamby and the others with him lived this way, stealing where they could, raping and killing where they wanted. The territorial judge, Ward Cameron, made it clear Quinn ought to turn a blind eye when Indians were murdered, but the men were now also suspected in the killings of white and Mexican settlers. Indiscriminate predators, Hamby and his men did not deserve to live.

  So Quinn thought, and he planned sensibly to at least try to gather up some men and track the killers. Until Hamby swung those dripping scalps, spat his vile words, and grinned.

  Quinn had remembered at that moment his nights spent fighting on the Bowery years before, the feeling of his heart pumping, his fists slamming into bone and flesh. He’d been small as a boy, wiry and terrier-quick. He’d hit hard, too, hard enough that he’d made the leap from fighting with his gang for turf to fighting in a makeshift ring for money, the first step toward a career in gambling.

  He wasn’t so small now, but he was still quick. And he longed to see if he could still hit hard. He ached to feel Ned Hamby’s teeth collapse beneath his fist.

  Yet Quinn wasn’t stupid either. He knew he was impossibly outnumbered, so he tried to console himself with the thought that the Navajo would eventually catch these outlaws and deal them justice. But as he thought it, he knew the Navajo’s other troubles had them hamstrung. Nervous about the latest Apache uprisings to the south, the United States government might use any provocation to try to move them back to the reservation. Even the killings of a pack of mad-dog white men such as these.

  Yet those thoughts still hadn’t propelled Quinn from the saddle. He had years before drifted from the wager-driven world of prizefighting to less bruising forms of gambling. He’d made a decent living with his uncanny ability to judge and act upon the odds. And odds were he would die if he did anything to try to stop this now.

  Though that instinct had been right, a thin, weak wail unhinged him. Rising among the bleats of panicked sheep, it was a child’s dying cry.

  Quinn realized that at least one Indian child had been scalped alive, then left to perish in agony alone.

  He remembered little after that, for the knowledge launched him from the saddle, sent his fists flying toward Hamby’s face. He would have killed the bastard, too. Would have beaten him to death, if he’d ever reached the man.

  Beyond that, he recalled only scattered fragments: a deafening boom from an unexpected angle, a boyish-sounding shout. “Sheriff didn’t see that comin’, did he?” Last of all, he heard harsh laughter, which abruptly spiraled into a blackness far too painful for oblivion.

  Some son of a bitch had shot him in the back.

  * * *

  A chill wind whistled through the narrow canyon. Its passage rattled the bare fingers of the trees. Yet the cold did nothing to dissuade those thin, stick hands from reaching desperately toward their share of the scant light.

  The same wind stole beneath the leather brim of Anna’s hat as if seeking out her ears, her nose, her lips for stinging vengeance. Fine snowflakes rode the icy blast, then alighted on the prostrate form which still lay near her feet. She looked up from the face that had so long haunted her, up past the bare trunks of the aspen that lined the frozen creek, past even the red cliffs high above her, and wondered vaguely if this were a true snowfall. Here, in the bottom of the narrow canyon, or cañoncito as the healer, Señora Valdéz, had called it, drifts collected, spun into this shadowed realm by the winds that scoured the more open lands above.

  Here, where only narrow shafts of sunlight followed, the snow and cold would quickly blanket anything exposed. Here, a wounded man would quickly die.

  All she had to do was go and boil her coffee. All she had to do was tend to Canto as if she’d never seen the man.

  I’d be leaving him for dead. Her conscience breathed the words more quietly than the rustling of the wind. If she concentrated on the noises around her: the faint rattle of branches, the horse’s throaty nicker from the direction of the corral, the dog’s unending whine, she could ignore the murmur of those words.

  She glanced down once more at the man. Blood soaked the back of his sheepskin coat, up near the left shoulder. More blood matted his brown hair. She forced herself to look toward the horse, an ancient speckled gelding who stretched his thin neck toward her. If she left the man here and he died, he’d never recognize her. If he died, he’d never set the law on her.

  Tears stung in her eyes, then shimmered as the wind grew brisker. All she had to do was go and feed the horse or walk into the cabin.

  I’d be leaving him for dead.

  Without conscious volition, her hand left its warm pocket, then glided to the spot at her belly where her clothing hid her scar. Her gaze drifted from the old horse and slid lower, lower, until it reached the visible portion of the gambler’s bleeding face.

  Notion raised himself onto his haunches and stared at her, then howled. He might have been her conscience, given form and fur and lungs.

  This time, its voice was too loud to do anything but heed. She’d try. From the looks of the gambler, he’d probably die anyway and resolve her dilemma. If she did what little she could, at least she wouldn’t have to add his death to her guilt.

  Though she was quite tall, Anna had never been particularly strong before she came to live with the old woman. Her life had been hard in many ways, but not in those which conferred power. When she’d come here, badly wounded, she’d been weaker still. Yet as soon as she was able, the curing woman had demanded she adapt to the rigors of this place, to help earn her food.

  Gradually, Anna grew into the work as if she had been born to it. She chopped wood throughout the year for heat and cooking. In the winter, she chopped holes, too, in the creek ice to draw water. She planted corn and beans and squash. She tended these throughout the growing season, along with chickens, when she could keep the foolish creatures safe. She had a few goats, which were smarter than the chickens and at times required milking. Along with these responsibilities, she had been expected to dig the various roots, scrape bark, and gather leaves for the old woman’s potions.

  All of this made Anna stronger than she’d ever been before. Even so, she struggled to drag the wounded man inside the cabin.

  Groaning at her aching right knee and her cramping muscles, she cursed the Navajo who’d brought him. They could have saved time and the strain on her muscles by bringing him just this much farther. But the idea of Indians knocking at her door was almost beyond imagining. The Navajo might have a grudging admiration for the skills of Señora Valdéz, but they still avoided her as an outsider, a non-person in the terms of their beliefs. She rarely caught a glimpse of a foraging squaw or child or hunting warrior. In lieu of either attacks or friendship, they sometimes left strange tokens of acceptance: a clay pot filled with honey, a pair of moccasins. In accordance with the curing woman’s wishes, she left a skin of Señora’s smelly goat’s milk unguent upon a certain split rock on the plateau twice a year at intervals marked by the moon and season. Anna had left her strange offering only twice since the old woman died in her sleep last spring.

  She’d have to use the unguent now to try to help this man. Notion watched expectantly as she pushed the limp form closer to the fire. The gambler’s flesh felt cold beneath her hand, but he’d groaned several more times as she’d moved him, enough to let her know that he yet lived.

  Funny, how she didn’t find that reassuring.

  She thought of bringing him her blanket, but decided instead to check his wounds. First, she retrieved the
pan. After refilling it with snow, she hung it on a rack beside the fire, which she had just rekindled. Though she’d prefer to cook her coffee, right now she’d need warm water to bathe the half-congealed blood from his injured body.

  Next, she slowly, carefully removed his bloody clothes.

  * * *

  She had to be a nightmare, Quinn decided, some phantasm brought on by his body’s desperate struggle against pain, blood loss, and cold. She couldn’t be real, couldn’t, for if she were, he must be dead.

  If she were, he must now be in hell.

  Curled up on his side, he watched her furtively through slitted eyes. Because he suspected his wounds of playing havoc with his reason, he catalogued her features: the tall, slim build, the sun-streaked, straight blond hair, which fell loose well past her shoulders, the broad cheekbones and straight nose, and the pale eyes, which looked smoky inside the dimness of this cabin. She looked no less beautiful, but she had changed in many ways. The bright blue silk dress had given way to a rough shirt and what looked like miners’ Levis, which molded to her body in a manner he found surprisingly provocative. But beyond that, her merry smile had vanished; the flirtatious gleam had fled her eye. Instead, she now looked chiseled by hardship or the elements, or perhaps by her own sins.

  As she withdrew a long and vicious-looking knife, he decided that this must be hell indeed, for she clearly meant to add more mischief to all she’d wrought already, years before. Did the demon mean to flay the flesh from him, too, now that she’d stripped him of all else he had owned?

  Though he swore to remain still, feigning death, the memory of the last time he’d lain helpless while she worked drew forth a shudder, excruciating in intensity. He groaned against his will.

  “Paz, mi amigo.”

  The honeyed richness of her voice convinced him beyond all doubt that this was really Annie Faith, despite her use of Spanish. Her words flowed as sweetly in that tongue as in the English she had spoken years before.