Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Scratch—just you be careful that Taos lightning don’t whack you in the back of the head when you ain’t looking!” Caleb cried as he held out his cup for another ladle of the heady concoction.

  “Aguardiente I hear it’s called,” Bass declared with an expert roll of his r.

  “Ah-wharr-dee-en-tee! Listen to this here nigger spit that out so smooth!” Hatcher snorted. “Picking up on the Mex talk, he is.”

  “Only a little,” Scratch admitted.

  “Maybeso just enough to get yourself hunkered atween the legs of some purty senorita,” said Solomon Fish as his eyes studied those comely maids moving about the room.

  Quickly gazing over the small knots of dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked young women, Scratch wagged his head and replied, “Maybeso this child’s gonna learn enough of their Mex talk to dig hisself down into one helluva lot of trouble!”

  Slipping his knife from its scabbard hung at the back of his belt, Titus plunged the narrow tip of it into the open clay crock sitting on the table among stacks of clay cups, huge basket-wrapped jugs, and crystal bowls. Spearing some clumps of coarse brown sugar on the flat of his blade, Scratch dumped the grains into his cup, stirring a bit before he licked both sides of the knife and returned it to the scabbard—then took himself a long drink he let lay on his tongue, savoring the hearty burn.

  Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! If that Mex way to drink this here liquor didn’t make his sweet tooth shine!

  Back at Workman’s place that first night in the valley more than two weeks before, Rufus Graham had introduced him to the way many Taosenos sweetened and softened the locals’ favorite potion. As strong black Mississippi River coffee became a dessert with heapings of cane sugar, this Mexican aguardiente went down all the smoother after a man sweetened it with a coarse brown sugar transported all the way north from Mexico’s southernmost provinces.

  As new as these villages in northern Mexico might be to gringo traders from the States, the Taos valley had been settled well before the arrival of the first English to the eastern shores of North America. From the time the Spanish first ventured north to the Rio Grande country, the simple people of this valley had celebrated the annual tradition of the Taos Fair in late July or early August. Drawn by the prospect of riches, traders of many colors flocked to this high land locked beneath the dark snowcapped peaks of the Sangre de Cristos.

  To Taos came merchants from the Spanish provinces far to the south, their poor carretas piled high with the treasures of Chihuahua and beyond. Other traders laid out wares brought on tall-masted schooners to the coastal cities of Mexico all the way from Spain: cutlery of the finest Toledo steel, butter-soft leather goods, perhaps bright tin objects to dazzle the eye, or those large silver coins so valued as ornaments by visiting Indians who be-jeweled themselves in grand fashion. From all those remote provinces of New Spain came hundreds of traders who sought the riches to be bartered at these fairs. While some might bring Spanish barb horses to trade, others brought the handiwork of faraway native craftsmen—everything from earthenware and furniture to saddles, harness, and tack. Upon their trade blankets many displayed the shiniest of finger rings, bracelets, and objects to enhance the slender throat of any woman.

  And when those traders came to this land of the Pueblo dweller every summer, so came the more nomadic tribes from the surrounding region: Arapaho, Kiowa and Navajo, Pawnee and Ute, even the more warlike Apache and Comanche bands. Perhaps it was the presence of the other tribes, perhaps even the desire not to be counted out in this annual fair, that kept a secure lid on the powder keg—suspicion and hostilities suspended for a few days of merriment and bartering. Instead of raising scalps and seizing captives, the warriors had to content themselves with growling and trading, blustering and bartering. By a long-standing tradition, each of them held to a temporary truce despite the bloodiest of intertribal wars, despite their uninterrupted depredations on these same Mexican villages.

  But for that brief time at the height of summer, the tribes brought their hides: huge, glossy buffalo robes; the silklike chamois of antelope and mountain goat; the luxurious pelts of wolf, badger, and fox. And they brought slaves. Human misery, so it seemed, had become a staple of this annual trade with the Indian bands at the Taos Fair. With their prisoners stolen in raids made on rival tribes, the visitors traded their captives for trinkets, blankets, kettles, beads, and weapons … and always the Indians traded for their share of the Mexican’s alcohol.

  For more than two hundred years they had come here like bees to the hive—both the suspicious Mexican from Chihuahua and the wary warrior from the Llano Estacado—forging an uneasy truce while they took what they needed most from the other.

  Everyone knew the warrior bands would return to the killing soon enough. Would return to Taos for the sheep and horses, for the women and children soon enough.

  Although Don Fernando de Taos was the village’s proper name, some of the Mexicans themselves had come to call this sprinkling of whitewashed adobe huts and walled compounds by the name Don Fernandez de Taos. Still others corrupted it further to San Fernandez or San Fernando de Taos. No matter what expensive two-dollar name the Mexicans chose to hang on it … to the mountain trappers who learned of its existence—the breed who flocked here come the brutal winters raging farther north in the Rocky Mountains—this place was known simply as Touse.

  Here the residents were far more willing to trade with the Norte Americanos who brought their wares from back east in Missouri all the way down the Santa Fe Trail than they were to trade with the trappers for their pelts. After all, the trade goods came from elsewhere—items that could not be had anywhere in Mexico. But those beaver hides … now, those might well have been pulled right out of Mexican waters! So though most Taosenos enthusiastically tolerated the American traders who came with their wares, traded them off for specie and mules, then turned around for the States without lingering, these trappers were something quite different altogether. They arrived late in the autumn and stayed on until winter itself was retreating from the high country.

  Which meant that most of this reckless breed of unwashed, crude characters were underfoot and causing trouble for the natives of this sleepy village until the prospect of trapping prime beaver plews eventually lured the foreign interlopers from the valley once more.

  It was a clash of two distinct cultures—in so many-ways no different a story from when the trapper confronted the Indian’s way of life. Yet here in northern Mexico there was one essential ingredient added to the volatile mix that wasn’t thrown in when the beaver men met Stone Age Indian in those early days of the mountain west: liquor. To the Americans their beloved Taos lightning greased the wheels of international commerce, while the Mexicans found any trapper in his cups more likely than not a quarrelsome and overbearing creature all too often quick to pick a fight. In short, it didn’t take too much of the potent aguardiente stirred in with all those months of pent-up deprivation before many minor conflicts were aggravated into potentially deadly clashes.

  In the two weeks following their rescue of the captives, Hatcher’s Americans made Workman’s caverns their base camp. From time to time they would mosey into town with a handful of the pesos they had bartered off the whiskey maker for a few of their plews. With that hard money warming their pouches, the trappers looked over the rich variety of goods offered by the cart vendors and blanket traders who cluttered the open-air verandas surrounding the village square every day from dawn until just after dusk. More than any American-made goods, the gringos coveted such items as thick Navajo blankets almost impervious to water to fine hand-painted scarves; from sturdy saddles and tack to crops harvested just that very autumn; from select cuts of beef, pork, and lamb to the slimy organ meats hung from open-air racks; from coarse Mexican tobacco to the natives’ fine linen shirts, pantaloons, and stockings.

  Why, Titus hadn’t been around such a place with so many pungent odors and curious sights since he’d floated to New Orleans eighteen long years gone now.<
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  The narrow, sometimes off-kilter and mazelike, streets laid out in their tiny grid were more often than not teeming with roaming dogs, burros shuffling past beneath their loads of firewood, bleating sheep and goats being driven to a new patch of grass, and the ever-present gaggles of chickens and roosters wandering aimlessly about, feeding where they could on that refuse pitched from every door into the rutted, stinking byways. Occasionally a yoke of oxen or a brace of Missouri mules were herded past by American traders, more often by some young boys or very old men, all of the pelados dressed alike in their loose peasant clothing, a blanket serape for their only warmth.

  While most of the squat adobe buildings strung out from the town square would never impress a traveler from the old French dominion of St. Louis, the municipal building and the towering cathedral nonetheless stood as two of the most recognized landmarks in the tiny town. Hand in hand, these institutions of church and state alone ruled the daily lives of this valley’s simple people as each was born, baptized, raised, married, sired their young, then died and were laid to mortal rest within the church cemetery. More and more it struck Bass that these were a people accustomed to accepting, a people who had learned not to ask for much from each day. To lead their simple lives, that might well be enough to ask of the divine.

  Behind each low-roofed hut sat the domed beehive of a baking oven, where each day the peasant women made their loaves of bread, where on cold winter nights the family dogs slept among the warm embers. While the poorer mud-and-wattle homes were no more than a single small room with blankets hung to section off a tiny sleeping area, most of the adobe dwellings in this village were a bit more spacious, some even built large enough to encompass a small central patio where narrow plank doors led the inhabitants to each of the few rooms. In a corner of every room sat a squat mud fireplace filling the house with the pungent fragrance of burning cedar or piñon.

  From the poorest pelado to the richest landowner, no Taoseno laid down plank flooring in his home. Instead, hard-packed earth sufficed, over which the woman of the house would throw a series of coarse, woven mats, since the thick Navajo wool rugs served only as blankets at night, rolled up each morning and used in the place of chairs during the day.

  In these mud houses each small window was paned with a sheet of translucent mica and frequently barred with wrought-iron or carved wooden bars. On the sills of many windows this winter sat empty flower boxes that come spring would display a bevy of colorful red geraniums—clearly the favorite flower of the Taosenos.

  Kinkead had explained that the villages in this valley were not always painted in such drab, dreary colors of winter. With the arrival of spring the tiny towns would burst with vibrant colors just about the time the trappers were seeing to their final preparations in departing for the mountains. Looking about now, Titus found that hard to believe, what with the pale and pasty colors this season brought to Taos: the grayish white of dirty snow smearing sun-washed adobe, the monotonous pastels of ocher and sienna earth, along with the ever-present black buckskin pantaloons and jackets favored by the caballeros in from the ranchos for a spree, or those black rebozo shawls most women pulled over their heads for warmth whenever they ventured from their homes.

  Isaac walked up to the table, pouring himself some more aguardiente. He asked, “Scratch, you wanna come see the cock fight Mirabal’s getting started back out to the stables?”

  “I’ve see’d cock fights afore,” Bass replied, sipping his drink as he continued to peer around the room over the rim of his cup.

  “Ain’t you a gambling man?” Simms inquired.

  “Scratch got better things to take a look-see at than no stupid cock fight!” Hatcher advised, wagging his eyebrows knowingly at Simms, nodding his head toward a small group of comely young women who were coyly studying the Americans from behind their lace fans.

  “Hell,” Isaac admitted as soon as he sorted out his priorities, “I s’pose a man can allays find hisself a cock fight in Touse … but there ain’t allays senoritas to gander at!”

  “Scratch, don’t want you to feel bad now if most of these here gals don’t give you the time of day,” Kinkead declared. “Their papas and mamas don’t want their daughters having nothing to do with no gringos.”

  “I knowed their kind back in St. Lou,” Titus replied. “Snooty stuff-shirts—look down their noses on the rest of us.”

  “Here it’s the ones with all the money, mostly, what look down on us,” Matthew replied. “My Rosa’s folks—now they’re better off than most, but they’re the sort who understood she fell in love with me, so it weren’t gonna make no never-mind to Rosa that I was a gringo.”

  “Bet it helped a hull bunch you getting yourself baptized in their church,” Bass commented.

  Kinkead nodded that massive head of his, smiling. “You wanna marry a Mexican gal, you wanna live your life down here in Mexico—why, a man best figger on doing things the Taos way.”

  “You’re happy, ain’cha, Matthew?” Titus asked.

  “Damn right I am,” he answered, then went solemn as he whispered, “I thank God in heaven Rosa wasn’t took by them Comanche like Rowland’s woman.”

  At that very moment Scratch was reminded that John Rowland had elected not to join them for the evening’s fandango.

  Caleb Wood finally cleared his throat and turned to Matthew, asking, “How’s he doing these days?”

  “Has him better times, and he has him some low times … when he’s down in his mind over losing her,” Kinkead replied. “Ever since we got back, Rosa and me had him stay over to our li’l house so he won’t have to lay up in no place gonna remind him of his Maria.”

  “Damn fine of you, Matthew,” Scratch said. “Keep a friend under your wing till his heart heals up.”

  Kinkead responded, “No more’n what ary man does for them he cares for.”

  “When you figger a man gets over grievin’ for a woman?” Rufus asked quietly after a few moments of quiet and contemplation.

  It was a question that struck the others dumb, many of them staring at the floor, or into their cups, reluctant to let their eyes meet another’s.

  Finally Hatcher whispered, his voice clogged with sentiment, “I figger the only way a man gets better is with time. After all what his friends can do … and a lot of time.”

  Bass had come to this celebration bent on having himself a good time: to drink until he was numb and to pound his moccasins on the floor until he could no longer stand. To hop and whirl and bounce wildly to the music the others explained was a major part of these gatherings.

  But now the Comanche raid and the kidnapping and that final, bloody, all-too-quick fight of it came flooding back over him. Maybe it was Rowland’s own damned fault, he brooded as he turned from the others and moseyed toward the other side of the room, where a knot of young doe-eyed women had been watching him over their lace fans. No two ways of Sunday about that: it was a man’s own damned fault when he let a woman get down under his skin and something terrible …

  Long as he didn’t let that happen to him, Scratch figured he’d never have to go through all what he knew John Rowland was suffering.

  From time to time he stole a glance at one or the other of those five women who whispered to one another behind their fans, nodding their heads slightly as they spoke, the mantillas on top of their heads swaying gently, the long lace scarves brushing bare brown shoulders. He finally had to admit he wasn’t all that good at sneaking a look without being caught.

  Reluctantly, Titus moved away a few feet, sipping from his cup and trying desperately not to turn around and gaze at the senoritas again. Better to study what was hung on every wall completely encircling the long sala: joining the many portraits of the governor’s family ancestors were those customary portraits of famous religious figures and dramatic biblical scenes. From a large central chandelier and just overhead on all the walls blazed a dizzying assortment of colorful candles, their light fluttering gently as the guests moved about the
room, stirring currents of air that caused the soft light to dance.

  Titus turned back, recrossing the room to his friends, doing his best to keep his eyes from climbing to the wall right over the table bearing the liquid refreshments. It was enough to give serious pause to any drinking man bent on having himself a real spree—for right there above the clay jugs and crystal bowls hung the biggest wooden crucifix Scratch had ever seen outside of a church. On it hung the naked Christ, His side and forehead vivid with the red paint of His final tortures, His head hung in the final release of death.

  Indeed, the sacred holiday celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus was fast approaching, little more than a week away now. Festive decorations were already hung at the front of most shops and carts in the village square where traders sold their wares and vendors offered a warm tortilla made from blue Indian corn filled with a ladle of frijoles spiced with green chiles. More than anything else here in Mexico, it had been the food that Bass took an instant liking to—far different from anything he had ever known back east, even since reaching the Rocky Mountain west. Never was it dull to the palate. Scratch had yet to find anything handed him on a plate that he didn’t care for, all of it either spicy or sweet. Truth be, as the minutes rolled past and the room grew all the more crowded, Titus wondered if he might be wearing down a groove in the earthen floor between the table bearing the Taos lightning and another table weighed down with trays of sugar-coated treats.

  “Here comes the music, boys!” Caleb suddenly yelled.

  Hatcher slapped Scratch on the back of the shoulders as Bass whirled in surprise. Jack hollered, “Time coming to let the wolf howl!”

  “You dance, Titus?” Elbridge Gray spoke up for the first time since they had arrived.

  Jack snorted, wagging his head. “Hell, don’t ye remember this here nigger didn’t wanna dance with us for his last birthday?”

  “Ain’t never felt like dancing when I got me a hangover,” Bass grumbled. “And you boys just wouldn’t leave a man alone to sleep off his case of the shakes.”