“Caterina! Not you—”
“I—I wanted to see you.”
She heard his teeth grit together. “So you lay in my bed and I took you for that town puta who’s been after me every payday!”
She put her arms around him, forgetting her shock and hurt in the joy of touching him, holding him like this. After all, if that was what happened with men and women, it’s what she would have wanted after they were married. She was sure it would be a lot different when he was loving her, kissing and caressing her. But even if it always hurt like that, she could stand it if he’d do the nice things first.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “What could you think, when you found a woman in your bed?”
He sat up, not touching her. “You are a child.”
She sat up, too, stung by his tone. “I’m seventeen. From what you’ve told us of Apaches, I’d probably be a mother now if I were one of them.”
“If you were an Apache girl, you wouldn’t be a child.”
“Ohhh!” She searched her fund of vaqueros’ words for something bad enough to hurl at him. “Cabroncito! Sangrón! Man because the midwife said so—”
Startled laughter burst from him. She hit him as hard as she could. It was like striking rock. Wrist and knuckles smarting, she realized her behavior had confirmed his slighting remark. She wanted to cry, but that would only make things worse. Pride warred with her love for him. Who was he, a half-breed, to attack and mock her? She should get up and walk away now, put him out of her heart. Smile at Jordan or some young officer.
But that would be a lie. Lifting her head, she tried to keep her voice steady. “Maybe I do seem a child to you. But I can learn. I love you, James. Let me be your woman.”
He was silent.
What could she say now? What could she do? A withering thought pierced her. All the time, she’d been sure he loved her. What if he didn’t? What if he cared for her only as an older brother?
She took a long, slow breath. If that were so, she had to leave him in peace, of course, without any more begging. She put her hand out to find his face.
It was wet with tears.
“Oh, James!” She closed her arms around him. “I’m sorry I’ve made you feel bad. Please …” She began to cry herself, miserable at this ending to what she’d dreamed would be a happy meeting.
He took her in his arms then, cradled her against his bare chest. “What can I do, my soft wild kitten, little gídí?” He rocked her back and forth. “I’m a warrior with power from the Sacred Mountain, but I cannot fight you.”
They lay down together, her head on his shoulder. He covered her against the cold. Though she felt his hardness against her thigh, he didn’t try to have her again; he only touched her face, throat, and breasts as if they were wonders, smoothed her shoulders, the arch of her back, and her lean rider’s hips with warm, gently fingers. Honey-fire sweetened her veins. She felt like a flowery unfolding at his touch, opening, inviting. When she tried to kiss him, he laughed softly.
“Apaches don’t do that.”
“Well, you can! Let me show you.”
It was made difficult by his embarrassed chuckles. Losing patience, she bit him lightly. He turned her over on her back and closed her mouth with his.
“Is this how? Is this how you like it, gídí?”
That bewildering part of him, swollen so that it was hard to believe it could be soft and vulnerable, pressed against her side. She’d seen enough horses and cattle mate to understand his need, and her own body craved him in spite of the ache between her legs.
Trying to ease herself beneath him, she whispered, “Please, James. Please—”
“No. You are sore where I broke your seal. I’m sorry I hurt you, gídí.”
“James …”
He lay back again, holding her so tenderly that her flaring rebellion ebbed. She found it unspeakable comfort to know the strong smoothness of his body, the deep, regular pounding of his heart against her cheek.
“Let me tell you how it would be if you were an Apache girl,” he said, and she suspected he found it necessary to force his attention from that curious, independent part of his body.
“When your ch’ich’ilwod came upon you, your first woman flow, a special lodge would be made for you. Inside this universe, during four days, you’d be made a woman by rites taking you through the mysteries of White Painted Woman. At night the Gahan, good spirits who live in mountain caves and in the four great directions, would come as masked, painted dancers. They’d come from east, north, west, and south and dance around a great fire, waving their painted wands, wearing headdresses plumed and ornamented with a black cloth to cover their faces expect for little eyeholes. They’d dance while a shaman celebrated rites in the lodge, with women attending you. On the fourth night you’d dance, too, and at sunrise run around a basket of ceremonial things, and back to the deerskins in front of the lodge, four times, while the shaman would sing. The last time you’d take a feather from the basket. Then the lodge would be taken down. Your parents would give the people gifts. And everyone would know you were a woman.”
“I should hope so, after all that!” Snuggling her head deeper into the curve of his arm, she tried to imagine the flickering fire, the towering masked dancers. “Do boys have anything like that?”
“No. We go to the Sacred Mountain for power and act as servants on four raids, but there’s nothing like the maiden’s ceremony. That celebrates the holiness of being able to give birth.” He twined a lock of her hair around his finger. “Apaches are sad if they have no daughters. It’s through them descent is traced.”
“I thought Apache women were drudges and were always getting their noses cut off!”
“Only for adultery. Our women are chaste. Of course, they work hard; there’s much to do. But they can have power from the spirits, too. Some are shamans. Some go into battle with their husbands. Of the Mexican women captured and taken to wife, I’ve never heard of one who’d go back to her people even when given the chance.”
She didn’t remind him that his own mother hadn’t been reconciled to her captivity, nor had Talitha. “How do Apaches marry?”
“After a man proves he can support a family by taking part in a number of raids, his parents may choose a girl for him, or he may have his eye on one he’s seen at ceremonials or about her errands. His father or uncle goes to talk to her parents, and if agreement’s reached, he leaves a gift of horses, blankets, or guns. The horses, usually between two and six, are tied near the girl’s lodge during the night. After a decent wait, if she takes them to water it means she’s consented. It’s thought bad of a girl to leave horses waiting a long time without water if she intends to have the man. If she won’t take care of the animals, the man finally gives up and takes them away.”
“It seems hard on the horses:”
“It seldom is, gídí. Since the families have talked, it’s pretty certain the girl will accept the gifts before they’re made.”
“Then what happens?”
“Often the man has made a lodge in some pleasant place a distance from the camp. He may take his bride there for a week or so. Sometimes, they just build a lodge close to the girl’s parents and live there from the start. In that case, the bride’s mother cooks for them for the first few months.”
Cat frowned. “But I’ve heard Talitha say a man’s mother-in-law can’t speak to him, look at him, or even be in the same house at the same time! That seems strange if the young couple’s expected to live close to her parents.”
“It’s how mothers-in-law and sons-in-law show their respect for each other.” James laughed. “Anyway, the lodge entrances are usually out of sight of each other. If a woman meets her son-in-law, she just throws her blanket over her face.”
For the first time Cat was thinking of Apaches as they lived together, not as fearsome plunderers. They had as many rules and customs as any people. She began to understand, a little, why James had stayed with them.
Car
essing his face, she said dreamily, “I want you to make up a lodge like that, maybe by the hot springs, where we could be alone awhile. But I want to be married in the sala, like my parents and Marc and Talitha.”
James stiffened. “Married, Caterina? It cannot be.”
“But you love me!”
“Too much to let you make such a mistake. It’s not good to hang between two worlds. Your fingers grow numb at last. You drop into the chasm.”
“We could live here at the mine,” she ventured. “Or build a house somewhere on the ranch.”
“You’ve always been surrounded by people who love you, gídí. You’d miss that, as flowers miss the sun. I can’t take everything you have and give you only me.”
“You’re all I want!”
“It’s as I’ve said,” he replied grimly. “You’re a child. A spoiled one.”
Storming at him would only harden that conviction. With tremendous effort she restrained an outburst and waited till she could speak in an even, though rather sarcastic tone.
“When will you consider me a woman?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, as if stunned. Then he began to laugh, hugging her to him in spite of her outraged resistance. “I remember your mother used to call your father a redhead burro for his stubbornness. What would she have called you?”
“She’d have had a large choice, since I was given all my great-aunts’ names,” said Cat haughtily. “She was my age when she met my father and no one ever said she wasn’t a woman!”
“She was a lady of valor and compassion.”
“And you think I can’t be?”
He sighed. “I’d call some of your bravery ignorance. Of compassion, you have too much. Always sorry for the sick or hurt or orphaned. I think that’s why you’ve thought you love me.”
“Yes, you look a lot like those little calves I feed! Stop dodging, James. When will you believe that I know what I’m choosing? One year? Two? Five?”
He was silent for a long time. At last, reluctantly, he said, “Let’s talk about it in a year. But you’re not bound to me, gídí. If you decide to marry Jordan, or if you meet some other man, my heart will be glad for you, though heavy.”
Only then did she realize she was holding her breath. Slowly she released it. A year seemed forever, but it would pass.
“Will you come for the Roof Feast?” she asked.
“I’ll try.” He sat up, bringing her with him. “Are you staying at Don Buenaventura’s? You’d best get back. It’ll be dawn soon. The card players and revelers were sleeping where they fell when I came home, and that’s been some hours ago.”
A time that had begun as nightmare ended with hope. He loved her. Knowing that, she could wait. He held her and they kissed. “You’re learning to do that very well,” she teased.
“I suppose I’ll get used to it, though it seems a dirty habit. I’d never do it with anyone but you.”
“Good!”
She clung to him. He kissed her again and told her to dress. Hurrying into her clothes, she stood with him at the door. “Remember the Roof Feast,” she said, then touched his cheek and hurried across the way to the headquarters. Belen might be sleeping in front of her door. She went around to the bedroom window, blessed the fact that it was low enough to clamber through, washed herself and threw the water, which must be somewhat bloodied, out the window, and fell into bed. The way James had taken her hadn’t been anything like her vague dreamings. But if it hadn’t happened he’d probably never have admitted he loved her.
Since few miners were fit for work next morning, it was an unofficial holiday. The twins invited James over for a big breakfast. Fortunately, Patrick talked enough for everybody.
For a while, Cat could no more have looked directly at James than she could have stared straight at the sun. She felt as if her body must glow for all to see from his caresses. That other dull pain was all but forgotten. She longed to tell her brothers, Belen, and even Don Buenaventura that in a year she and James would marry, but she knew he wouldn’t like that, would think it a mark of her alleged childishness.
After breakfast, the twins and James went hunting. Cat complimented the old woman on breakfast and, though her help was refused in the kitchen, she tidied the bedroom and then, heart thudding, walked over to James’s little house.
His home consisted of a single room with a window facing the western mountains. There was a stone fireplace built into the adobe with adobe bancos on either side of niches for cooking needs: a cast-iron skillet and several clay cookpots, one half full of dried-up stew which Cat, wrinkling her nose, carried to the edge of camp and scraped out for the dogs.
She put the pot to soak and then finished looking around James’s home. A table of rough wood, a washtable with a basin, garments on pegs, riding gear in a corner. And the bed where they’d been together and talked, the sweetness of that blotting out those frightful moments when James had thought she was that persistent whore.
Doubtless lucky it had happened that way, breaking down his reserve, forcing him to be honest. Cat smiled as she carried the serapes outside and hung them across some manzanita bushes to air. She scrubbed out the stewpot, cleaned the rancid skillet, and went across to the company store, where she bought several strings of red chilis which would be decoration as well as seasoning, a chicken ready for the pot, apples, rice, cinnamon, cones of raw sugar, tortillas and sweet breads just made by the storekeeper’s wife, and other things to make the house more homelike: several bright cushions, colorful mats, handblown glasses and a jug, candles and pottery candleholders, several woven baskets, a mirror, and a blue-robed Guadalupana standing on a crescent moon. She charged these to her percentage of the mine’s revenue, telling the storekeeper to take his bill to the bookkeeper.
Returning to the house with her booty, she arranged her purchases for utility and ornament: the mirror above the washtable where it reflected the smiling Guadalupana fitted in a niche above the bed; the chilis beside the fireplace; cushions and mats on the bancos; one candlestick in a niche near the bed, the others on the table.
In the meadows beyond the camp, where children were having a hilarious game of seeing how many could pile on a gentle burro before the last was pushed off, Cat watched and hoped she and James would have, oh, at least four children, two boys and two girls, with one to carry her father’s flaming hair. She gathered golden-rod and asters, then wandered to the trees along the stream, collecting yellow aspen and flaming maple leaves to complete the bouquet she arranged in one of the clay pots.
At Don Buenaventura’s for a light noon meal, she explained her morning’s labors to the old woman by saying that James was her foster mother’s brother and she’d promised to do what she could to make him comfortable. At this, the woman’s nose-twitching, disapproving manner vanished. She said that in the future she’d see that the young man, who was decent and civil though he kept to himself, was eating properly. There was always food left from Don Buenaventura’s table, so it would be no trouble.
Cat thanked her warmly and went back to the store, where she bought the finest rebozo and gifted the housekeeper with it before she went to the little house she loved to be in where she could think of James.
Someday his bed would be hers, too, for all the rest of their lives. Till then, when you lie here, remember me, querido, the way we were last night.
Everything was done. She added wood to the fire to keep the chicken cooking, stirred the rice for the stew she was making him, and felt like a woman able to manage a house and care for her man.
She’d hoped to be at the house when he saw all she’d done, but she also wanted to look fresh and comb her hair, and so she didn’t see him till supper.
“The Three Kings must have gotten mixed up and visited me today,” he said when he joined them for supper. “I thought I’d gone into the wrong house or was dreaming; but when I rubbed my eyes and looked again, it was all still there.”
Cat flushed as her brothers looked at her in surprise
. Miguel laughed. “You’re the one who worked the miracle, James, if our wild one set your house to rights. Talitha says Cat never threw out anything in her life—or put it up, either.”
Cat kicked him under the table and said sweetly, “That’s what Juri says about you.”
Belen said, “Young birds don’t furbish their parents’ nests, but when the time comes they know how to make their own.”
Patrick plunged through the banter to ask Don Buenaventura if it were true that rich copper ores had been spotted in the Mule Mountains to the south.
The manager shrugged. “Much copper. I’ve seen it myself. But only silver or gold is worth the risk of Apaches and bandits, Don Patricio.”
“That’ll change. Marc says more and more inventions will need copper parts.”
Miguel sighed. “You’ll never be happy, will you, as long as you have your skin in one piece?”
“I just like hunting for hidden things,” retorted Patrick. “Branding calves and fighting screwworms isn’t how I want to spend my life!”
“Get married,” advised his twin. “That’ll keep ranch life exciting enough even for you.”
Patrick snorted. “I’d have married Juri, but you beat me to her, and I haven’t met another girl I’d want to settle with. Reckon after Christmas I’ll just have to go see what I can find. Like to throw in with me, James?”
For a moment James hesitated. Then the interest in his eyes vanished as wind might snuff out flame. Cat knew he was remembering that, traveling with a white, he’d be expected to side against his people in case of any conflicts. “I’ll stay here,” he said.
Cat was sorry he felt trapped but relieved that she’d at least know where he was. Once they married, she was sure, she could make him feel that with her he had a place, a home where he belonged.
Everyone was tired. James went to his house shortly after supper, and the twins began to make down their bedrolls. Cat went to the bedroom. After she’d brushed her hair and washed, she blew out the candle and leaned against the window, waiting till her eyes could make out the vague outlines of James’s house.
Harvest of Fury Page 23