It looked like Marc’s claybank, and she thought he was the broad-shouldered horseman; But wasn’t that Lonnie’s spotted horse he was leading? What was that serape-wrapped bundle draped across the pinto’s saddle?
It was Marc.
Telling Carmencita to get some food ready, Talitha ran out, followed by the twins and Cat. She’d never hoped to see Marc again. What had brought him? She was terribly afraid that the answer swayed across the saddle of the other horse.
“Cat,” she panted, “you go back and keep Sewa inside.”
“But I want to see Marc!”
“You will. But right now, do What I say.”
Cat went reluctantly. Patrick called to Marc, “Where’s Lonnie?”
Marc didn’t answer till he was close enough to speak in a normal voice, jerking his head toward the shapeless huddle in the blanket. “I brought him home to bury.”
Talitha’s hand flew to her throat. Lonnie? Dead, after Shea and others had saved him? Dead, so young? When, as he often said, he felt for the first time he belonged someplace, that he had a home?
“How—” she began, but could get no further.
Marc watched her a moment, the harsh set of his face softening. “Here, boys, if you please.” The frontier hadn’t taken away his European courtesy. Handing each of them the reins of a horse, he dismounted, wincing as the weight came down on his bad leg.
Coming to Talitha, he took her hands and held them strongly. “Talitha, your husband is dead. Does that grieve you?”
She stared at him, fierce, unholy joy flaming through her, momentarily overwhelming her desolation over Lonnie. “Grieved? I’m glad—so glad! Oh, Marc, I’ve wanted to die! But are you sure? He came back once—”
“Not this time, he won’t. I found him sprawled below the third tank at Tinajas Altas. The first two were dried up.” Marc shook his head. “There was plenty of water in the third one, but he didn’t make it. He was weak from a bullet in the shoulder. I buried him there on the little slope above the wash, where so many others lie beneath crosses. His horse was dead, too. It’s terrible that so many manage to reach the tanks, but if the first one’s empty, and it often is in dry times, dozens lack the strength to scale the steep, smooth stone.”
“An awful way to die.” Much as she hated Frost, she wouldn’t have wished that death for him, “But he deserved it, if anyone ever did. What about Lonnie?”
“I wondered what Frost had been up to, so I followed his tracks down the wash. A few hours from the tanks I found Lonnie, what was left of him. He and Frost had tangled. You have a notion why?”
Talitha nodded. When she could speak, she said, “Lonnie … guessed how it was with Judah and me, even before you came. After that, I think he knew how I … feel about you.” For a moment their eyes met, and she could see his passion in his eyes.
Briefly she explained Frost’s threats, the way he’d made it impossible for her to defy him. “Lonnie knew there’d be trouble for me if Judah was killed where I could be blamed for it. That’s why he made up the story about knowing where that lost mission is.” She trembled with anguish. “And Judah killed him! It’s my fault.”
“Your fault? You gave the boy a way to pay back his captain. In the little time I was here, I could see that Lonnie was happy at the ranch, but it must have troubled him to know that Shea could have been there, but for him.”
She shook her head, blinded by tears.
With a gruff sound of pity, Marc drew her into his arms. “Oh, my stubborn darling! If you’d only told me how it really was.…”
“You’d have tried to kill him and he might have killed you!” She sobbed against the deep, regular pounding of his heart. “I couldn’t have borne that, Marc! But Lonnie …”
“Until he did something big for Shea’s loved ones, I don’t think he’d ever have felt he’d a right to be breathing. Let him go in peace, Tally. Look at what he did as Shea’s love reaching from beyond death. Now, let’s go and give his poor bones an honorable burial.”
But first Marc drew her close, gently tilted up her face, kissed her tears, then found her lips. What started as a tender kiss turned suddenly to long-denied hunger. Talitha welcomed him with her arms, her mouth, the whole length of her body, but mostly with her heart which could finally be his.
Lonnie was buried beside Shea’s cross, his remains still wrapped in the serape. Marc read some words for Talitha could not.
“‘Amen, amen, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’
“‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’” Marc paused. “Our young brother did all these things. Let us pray for him, then, and honor his courage.”
The ranch people knelt. Amid the murmur of prayers and soft weeping, Cat sobbed against Talitha. “Wh-why does everyone die, Tally? Die or go away?”
“They don’t, honey. Sometimes they come back or live happier than ever.”
But there were too many crosses on the hill. Though Frost’s death had lifted a crushing weight from her—though she was grateful to the depths of her being that she and Marc now could make a life together—when Talitha looked at the rough cross that spelled out Lonnie’s name and his twenty short years, she felt that parts of herself lay buried in each grave: her childhood with Socorro; the girl who’d ridden with the vaqueros, petted and spoiled, with Santiago; and with Shea, the child, girl, and woman who had loved him all those ways and all those years.
But with Lonnie, the nightmare of Judah Frost was gone. Marc raised her to her feet. With Sewa in his arms and Cat clinging to Talitha’s hand, they walked down the hill together, Marc’s limp reminding Talitha that he, too, had endured his private hells, yet had the will to love her.
“I have a lot to make up to you,” she said, touching his scarred cheek.
He smiled. “Don’t be humble, Tally. It’s not your nature.”
“I’m a better judge of that than you are!” she began, then caught herself at the wicked twinkle in his eyes. “Oh, Marc, you’re—”
“I look forward to hearing all about myself,” he assured her. “But there are many things I’ve been saving up to tell you.”
His voice was stern. Was she now to get a recitation of all her follies and shortcomings? They had reached the house. Leaving the little girls in the courtyard, Talitha marched into the sala and turned on him with her chin raised high.
“Well? Tell me!”
He touched her hair with his big hand. “I love you.” He kissed her forehead and then her eyes. “I love you,” he said, claiming her mouth. “That’s what I want to tell you. Over and over, in every way there is.”
All the grief, all the despair, all the bitter waiting melted into a foundation for this joy, this peace, this rightness. “Oh, my love,” she said, laughing through her tears. “Welcome home! Welcome to me.”
She was his woman, not second best as she would always have been to Shea. If it hadn’t been for Socorro’s death, she’d never have thought of Shea as a lover at all but would have loved Marc with no reservations, no mixed and tortured loyalties.
But she had protected the children, she had kept the ranch, she had honored the debt she owed her foster parents. At last Marc was here and she was free to love him.
As he swept her close, she caught a flash of Socorro’s smile and seemed to hear Shea laughing. Then all she could heed were Marc’s kisses, his strong, enfolding arms.
PART IV
Caterina
1869–1871
XIII
Cat woke to Las Mañanitas, yawned, smiled, and stretched. The vaqueros had started singing it by her window on her eighth birthday, the year her father had gone away, and had done it ever since. Though it seemed a bit ridiculous for Chuey and Rodolfo, who must be at least forty, and Belen, turned sixty, to be serenading a girl on her sixteenth birthday. Not knowing how to gracefully drop the custom, they’d probably keep it
up till she married, bless them. She lay there, loving them, the ranch, her life, then slipped out of bed and ran to the window.
“Thousand thanks, caballeros,” she laughed. “You give my birthday a beautiful beginning.”
Rodolfo’s elegant mustache was sprinkled with gray, and Chuey’s smallpox-pitted face was beginning to have creases reminiscent of Pedro’s, his father’s. Belen, though much the oldest, had almost unlined skin and his hair was still black. They bowed, these rawhide men who’d taught her to ride and use the reata, wished her felicitations, and left the courtyard with the awkward, bowlegged gait of men who never walked if they could ride.
On her birthday mornings, before she did anything else, she went up the hill to her parents’ graves. Father wasn’t there, of course, but his memory was.
She’d started doing that as soon as she began to understand that her mother had died giving birth to her, but it wasn’t a pilgrimage of grief or guilt. She hadn’t really missed a mother. Talitha had been that, and there was Anita, her milk-mother, and dear Carmencita for a grandmother.
Father was different. She remembered him well, his red, waving hair, the blue-gray eyes, the cheek branded for James’s sake. James! Was he never coming back? She wouldn’t let herself even think that he might not be alive. It was almost seven years now that he’d been away, but she still ached when she let herself remember. She forced her thoughts away from him.
She’d mourned her father more than anyone had known, for Talitha had been in such distress that she’d moved about like a sleepwalker. Thank goodness that wretched Judah Frost was gone and Talitha was happy with Marc. They had been married in the sala during the Roof Feast in December of 1863, the sala where Cat’s parents had made their vows, though no priest could be had.
I shall marry there, too, Cat thought. Making her bed and dressing quickly, she wondered if she’d already met her husband. Many girls were mothers at her age.
Paulita, her companion from babyhood, had last month married a miner from the San Patricio, which Marc had returned to operation after the war. Anselmo Lopez had become a vaquero at the ranch so Paulita wouldn’t have to leave her family, but he was the only new hand at the main ranch, though at El Charco, where Pedro and his family had returned, two brothers of Natividad’s Papago wife, Mársat, had started work. Ramón, Chuey’s son, at thirteen rode with the vaqueros, and at both El Charco and the Socorro sons were growing up to fill their fathers’ boots, daughters to maintain the households.
Some would leave, probably, but others would make up for that by marrying new people. Cat wondered again whom she herself would marry.
Lt. Claybourne Frazier was certainly handsome and gallant. Assigned to Camp Crittenden, founded in 1867 close to where old Fort Buchanan had been, the young cavalry officer stopped at the ranch more often than could possibly be necessary. Several times, off duty, he’d gone riding with Cat, her brothers, and Miguel’s wife, Juriana.
Now there was a proper romance! The French had invaded Mexico beginning in the winter of 1861–62, took Mexico City in June 1863, forced President Benito Juárez to flee, and installed Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, as emperor in 1864. Fierce fighting continued, however, and when the French landed troops at Guaymas in 1865 and began overrunning Sonora, Governor Pesqueira refuged at Calabazas, where he was shown every courtesy by the commander of Fort Mason, the new post above Pete Kitchen’s ranch that had replaced the makeshift one at Tubac.
After listening to stories of French atrocities in what had, after all, been his mother’s homeland, seventeen-year-old Patrick, who was spoiling for a fight anyway, declared that he was going south to help the loyal Sonorans battle the invaders and conservatives who’d joined with the Imperialists. Miguel thought he was quite mad but, when all arguments failed, fatalistically went with his twin. Belen had asked them, if they were near Alamos, to ask at the nearby Tres Lobos mine for his brother, Juan Leyva.
The twins, with a few of Pesqueira’s more militant followers, got to Alamos, their mother’s old home, in time to fight in Gen. Antonio Rosales’s desperate attempt to retake the old city against tremendous odds. The general and a third of his men were killed.
The survivors retreated, but they were back in a few months with Gen. Angel Martinez. His cavalry and machete-wielding soldiers took the city and pressed on. By mid-September of 1866, the French garrison at Guaymas had sailed off, leaving the Mexican Imperialists to die or make peace. Though it would be February of 1867 before, under extreme U.S. pressure, all French troops left the country, and June when poor, proud, foolish Maximilian died before a firing squad, fighting ended in Sonora that bloody September of 1866.
Even Patrick had had more than his fill of fighting. The twins started home but stopped at the Tres Lobos mine to inquire for Belen’s brother.
Juan Leyva had died in a mine accident several years before, but his daughter Juriana was constantly harassed by the mineowner’s son, who thought any pretty Yaqui girl should be honored by his attentions.
Miguel, usually so calm, had come upon the young dandy trying to force the girl. Without even knowing who she was, Miguel had, with furious, quiet efficiency, beaten her attacker senseless. They knew there would be trouble when he crawled home, so the twins decided to leave at once, asking Juriana to give Juan Leyva a message. That was when they learned that he was dead and that they’d saved his daughter.
Then Miguel, usually so cautious and controlled, had asked her to come with them and marry him as soon as they were past the vengeance of the mineowner. Juriana looked at the stranger, took a long, deep breath, and put her life and happiness in his hands. She stopped only long enough to say good-bye to her dead mother’s comadre, with whom she lived, and tell her where she was going. They’d been married in Hermosillo. Juriana would have to stop riding before, much longer. She was expecting their first child.
It was probably a good thing they’d married in Mexico, for Arizona law forbade marriage with an Indian, Negro, or Oriental. Marc, a delegate to the first territorial legislature, thought it a bad law and had opposed it then as well as trying to get it repealed last time he served, the year before.
The kindest view of most of his fellow legislators was that a foreigner didn’t understand the dangers of miscegenation. When Marc pointed out that alliances took place anyway and the children were entitled to protection, he was hooted down and asked if he had his eye on some squaw. He trounced the questioner after adjournment, but the law remained.
Miguel and Juriana would probably stay at the ranch, where they occupied Shea’s old room, but Patrick was getting restless. Marc had taught him a lot about geology and mining, and he was talking of prospecting that fall in the mountains east of the San Patricio mine, shrugging at reminders that the Apaches in those parts were as predatory as ever.
“If Tom Jeffords could make friends with Cochise, maybe I can, too,” he grinned irrepressibly.
Jeffords was superintendent of the stage line that carried military mail between Fort Bowie and Tucson. After repeated attacks on his men and himself, he’d decided to seek Cochise out and ask if he’d let the mail service operate in peace. Cochise must have been astounded at the bravery of Jeffords in coming alone. After deliberating a day, he’d told Jeffords his men would be allowed to pass unharmed; and, almost incredibly, his word had been kept.
“Besides, wasn’t I carried in Mangus’s cradleboard?” Patrick demanded, eyes dancing.
“So was I,” retorted Miguel. “But it didn’t turn me loco!”
“You’re just jealous because Juri won’t let you come,” Patrick taunted. “Never mind. I’ll take Cinco and we’ll find our fortune while you’re cutting calves and fighting screwworms.”
Cinco, fourteen now, had worked at the spring branding and was due again that fall. Since their return from Sonora, he’d become good friends with both his half brothers, often went hunting with them, and silently worshiped Cat in a way she found disconcerting.
He was her brother, as mu
ch as James was Talitha’s, but she’d only seen him a few times before that spring. The shy little boy she remembered who’d given her his blue bird and whistle seemed entirely different from the tall boy who had Tjúni’s coloring but his father’s cast of feature and slim, muscular build.
I’ve changed, too, thought Cat, peering into the mirror as she brushed her hair. Tally said her hair was as black and soft as Socorro’s, her eyes as blue-gray as Shea’s. The hair dipped in a widow’s peak which, with her delicately pointed chin, gave her a heart-shaped face. A rather short nose and prominent cheekbones made her, she thought, somewhat resemble a cat. Maybe it wasn’t a pretty face, but she comforted herself that it was at least unusual and she had nice teeth and skin.
She smiled slowly, trying to guess what the effect would be on Lieutenant Frazier. That made her wonder what Jordan, Talitha’s young uncle, would think if he could see her primping, and that made her stick out her tongue, then whirl from the mirror at Sewa’s giggle.
“So you’re awake!” Swooping down on the nine-year-old, Cat hugged and shook her. “Are you going up the hill with me?”
Sewa nodded, slipping her narrow feet out of bed, taking off her nightgown, and wriggling into a cotten dress. Her father, Santiago, lay beside Cat’s parents, and for several years now the younger girl had made the early-morning journey with Cat. Poor Lonnie, beneath the fourth cross, had no children, but perhaps he knew that Talitha had planted wild roses on his grave.
And Santiago. From things Talitha had said, Cat was positive that he’d loved Socorro. Did he know that his daughter, with eyes as golden as his own, knelt at his resting place and prayed for his peace?
Cat sat between her mother’s grave and her father’s cross. Silently, she remembered all she knew about them, things she would pass on to her children and their children of this man and woman who had loved each other so much that the tall, red-haired Irishman’s heart had gone into the grave with his wife.
You’re together now, Cat thought. Please help me to be kind and brave and loving as you both were. Then she didn’t think anymore but was simply with them as the early sun warmed the hill.
Harvest of Fury Page 17