Harvest of Fury

by Jeanne Williams

  Chris couldn’t hear what was said as she hurried forward, but she saw a blast of water hit the workers. They rushed the men at the gate. Rifles barked. Three workers went down, the rest surged forward. The Metcalfs lay still when the men stabbing them finally rose from their bodies.

  Frozen, Chris stood on the slope while the fire and blood of Tomochic clouded her vision. Where was Fayte? Had the workers already killed him? Had he killed some of them?

  Some of the workers gathered up their dead, while others set fire to the lumberyard. The sight of real flames cleared the blinding haze from Chris’s eyes. The workers, carrying their dead, were moving toward the town hall. Chris kept north of them, desperately watching Greene’s house. She couldn’t guess at the number of strikers, but it must have been several thousand.

  Greene’s two autos tore through the thick crowds at unbelievable speed, scattering people in every direction, and stopped at his house. The portly, mustached colonel ran up the veranda and emerged with a rifle and several armed men at the same time that about forty company employees from the bank and store, heavily armed, made their way to the mansion, along with the water-hose cart.

  Fayte was beside Greene and got into one of the autos with him while several other company men got in the other. Apparently Greene hoped to check the mob at the bridge, but by the time the vehicles got there, the crowd had already passed.

  The autos spun about, careened up the street, stopped in the vacant lots in front of the Greene house. Fayte, the colonel, and the others jumped out, ranging themselves with the other company men to confront the strikers, who were now past the jail and surging up the principal street, led by a man carrying a red flag.

  A company man grappled with the leader. A striker fired, Greene shot one of the leaders, and Fayte and the others opened fire. Three more strikers fell.

  The mob scattered, some making for the jail. Greene signaled his men to the house.

  Fayte saw Chris then. Shifting his rifle, he ran toward her, caught her wrist, and hustled her into the house, where Mary Greene, the colonel’s lovely young wife, was trying to calm several hysterical American women.

  Eyes a tawny blaze, Fayte rasped, “What are you doing here?”

  “I—I was worried when you didn’t come home.”

  “So now you’re where I have to worry about you on top of those damned red-flaggers!” Fayte’s grasp pained her arm. “Stay inside, hear? And don’t come out unless the house starts to burn. If those strikers get hold of some dynamite they could wreck the whole town.”

  Greene called for volunteers to go guard the jail so the police could try to control the strikers. Fayte went with this detachment. Greene’s men were well armed because the night before, warned of the strike, he’d ordered a passenger car and engine to take him to Bisbee, where he collected all the guns at the Copper Queen store—ninety-eight rifles and twenty pistols—and ammunition. Getting back to Cananea about four in the morning, he’d passed out the weapons to his most trusted employees. He’d also sent a messenger to Hermosillo, the Sonoran capital, to urge Governor Izábal to send troops.

  Telegraph wires hummed messages to President Roosevelt, the Secretary of State, and the commander at Fort Huachuca. If help came, it would have to be from across the border in the United States. Mexican troops were stationed at Magdalena, as were Emilio Kosterlitzky’s feared and famed rurales, but it would take them several days to reach Cananea. Colonel Greene phoned Walter Douglas, manager of the Copper Queen mine at Bisbee who got the Bisbee marshal to ask for volunteers.

  While news of various appeals for help buzzed through the Greene mansion, shooting echoed in the streets. The strikers had broken into pawnshops and taken guns and ammunition. Some drunken American cowboys got on the roof of the hotel and fired at anything that moved, from chickens to their own countrymen.

  Late that afternoon Fayte came wearily in. “Twenty more of the bastards dead and dozens in jail,” he said, gulping the coffee Chris brought him. “A train’s taking the women and kids to Bisbee tonight. You’d better go.”

  She stared at his haggard face, stepped to one side so that she could hold his head against her without anyone noticing. “I won’t leave you.”

  Stiffening, he drew away from her. “You’ll do as you’re told.” He wolfed down some bread and meat before he went down to the streets.

  Mary Greene touched Chris’s arm. “I can lend you some clothes and a suitcase, dear. It’ll only be for a few days.”

  “Thank you,” said Chris, choosing to avoid argument. As soon as the colonel’s gentle wife moved off to comfort a sobbing young bride, Chris quietly made her way to the back of the big house and slipped out. If she were at Robledos when the refugee train left for Arizona, Fayte would probably let her stay.

  Her thoughts were a welter as she made her way down the hill to the valley that led home. The smoke from the lumberyard lingered in her nostrils as the sight of men dying haunted her inner vision. The Metcalfs had been stabbed to death with the sharp, pointed ends of miners’ candlesticks.

  The strikers, by force of numbers, might kill all the Americans, but when the troops and rurales arrived, there’d be such bloody vengeance that Chris shuddered from the thought.

  Cruz had miner friends, even some relations. She’d tell him what was going on, ask if he’d try to reason with the men. She found the giant Tarahumare in the smithy, hammering out a prospector’s pick. Fayte swore the ones Cruz made from ⅞-inch bars of drill steel were the best to be had and would outlast any number of commercially manufactured ones.

  Face broadening in a smile, the barrel-chested Indian put down his hammer, then sobered as he read her distress. “Doña Christina, what is wrong?”

  She told him quickly. Before she had finished, he reached for his shirt. “I’ll talk to my cousins and friends. Maybe the fighting can be stopped before anything worse happens.”

  “Don’t you need your rifle?”

  “I’m not going to shoot anyone.”

  That simplicity made the giant seem dangerously vulnerable. “Let me go with you,” Chris said.

  “Doña Christina! It is not possible.”

  “Not for Señora Riordan, perhaps, but—one moment, Cruz!”

  It took her only a few minutes to shake out Sant’s old trousers and shirt, pull them on, stuff her hair up into her hat. The clothes were baggy enough to disguise betraying curves. Cruz gave her a look of dismay when she rejoined him, but she tugged at his arm.

  “Let’s go!”

  They went the other way around the mountain. The lumberyard was still burning. A group of armed men, still in their Sunday suits, begrimed now, some of them bloody, were making for the smelter.

  “There’s Jorge,” breathed Cruz. “Stay here, señora!” Striding forward, he called out, “Cousin!” just as one of Greene’s autos plummeted in front of the men, blocking their way.

  It all must have happened in seconds, though to Chris, watching as the setting sun glanced off rifle barrels, it seemed to happen in eternity, in a timeless moment when she tried to scream and nothing would come from her throat.

  Fayte was one of the men taking aim. His rifle pointed at Cruz, and his eyes must have been as they were when he killed an animal. A fusillade rang out. Bullets spun men around, sent them staggering. Cruz flung up his great arms as he pitched backward. As the unhurt strikers fled Chris ran toward him and fell on her knees.

  Blood pumped from a great hole in Cruz’s back. She tore off her shirt, trying to stuff it into the wound, even as he whispered her name.

  Then his blood was the blood of Tomochic, the lumberyard blaze the burning church, before both swirled into blackness.

  She couldn’t see, but she could hear. From the whispers of the servants, she learned that over two hundred Bisbee volunteers had crossed the border Saturday morning and offered their services to Governor Izábal, who waited on the other side, having made an all-night trip from Hermosillo. General Torres swore the men into the Mexican f
orces, and they were soon on their way to Cananea.

  When the train pulled in, Greene raised a cheer for the governor, though none of the townsfolk joined in. Apart from their dead and imprisoned men, it was a blow to their pride to see the Sonoran governor jump at Greene’s whistle. The volunteers marched to the smelter, and Greene and the governor made an inspection by auto.

  By noon, the crowd had swelled. Izábal tried to speak, but the crowd shouted him down with their grievances. Greene spoke next, telling the men he was their friend and had always tried to treat them fairly, paying them as much as he could.

  He had no answer, though, to satisfy the repeated question of the murmuring crowd: Why didn’t he pay Mexicans the same wages as Americans?

  The Bisbee volunteers got back on the train and stayed there till Colonel Kosterlitzky rode in at sunset with his rurales. He sent word to all parts of town that anyone, Mexican or American, found on foot in the streets after dark would be shot. He also told the Bisbee men he could handle things, and by ten that night the volunteers had left for Arizona without having fired a shot.

  On Sunday Colonel Greene went around the camps, urging the men to go back to work. He also let it be known that he knew who the Western Federation of Miners organizers were, and that they would be arrested. About three hundred union members left town. Meanwhile, Kosterlitzky searched out a score of the huelguista leaders and jailed them. He also reinforced Greene’s invitation to the men to go to work by saying that those who didn’t would be drafted into the army and sent to fight Yaquis. Next morning, all the men who were not dead, jailed, or union organizers were back at work.

  But Chris still could not see. She lay in the big bed and drank thirstily, though she refused food. When Fayte forced some broth between her clenched teeth, she vomited it.

  “I want to go home,” she said, speaking for the first time. She had heard Fayte, the doctor, the Greenes, talking to her before but had not been able to make the effort to answer.

  Fayte wiped her face with a cold cloth. “You are home.” He sat down, drew her into his arms. “You’re not really blind, sweetheart. You can see again when you make up your mind to.”

  “I never want to see your face again.”

  His body went rigid. “Cruz had no business down there.”

  “He went to try to persuade the strikers to stop fighting.”

  “How in hell could we know that?” Fayte’s hands tightened. He gave her a shake. “Damn it, you could have been killed! If you hadn’t pulled off your shirt—”

  “I want to go home.”

  His breath sucked in. His weight lifted from the bed; she heard the door closing. Then he stripped away the sheet and roughly pulled off her gown. He took her like a storm, willing her to respond to him, kissing, caressing, handling her first roughly, then with patience, but she endured his passion and gentleness alike.

  When he was through, when he lay spent, head on her breast, she felt a certain grief for him, but it couldn’t erase the way he’d looked as he fired into the men. He’d recognized Cruz. But he hadn’t given him a chance to say why he was there.

  Teresita! she thought, and tried to call up the santa’s face. But there was only darkness.

  When the doctor came again, and told her she must eat and build up her strength, she said she wished to go back to the Socorro.

  After the doctor left, she heard him arguing with Fayte, giving his opinion that she would recover much better in her childhood home. “She’s young and delicate, Mr. Riordan,” said the physician. “I understand your reluctance to send her away, but I believe the sooner you do, the sooner she’ll be restored. She’s not maliciously refusing to eat. Her body is rejecting nourishment because, temporarily, she has no will to live.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “It’s my best advice, Mr. Riordan.”

  “I won’t let her go! Damn it, she’s my wife!”

  Chris felt separated from it, as if they were talking about a stranger. Still, tears squeezed through her eyelids before she drifted into the sleep that seemed always to be waiting.

  Sant was there. She knew his hands closing warm and strong over hers before his voice touched her like balm. “Chris. Are you all right?”

  She couldn’t answer, but she gripped his hands more tightly. If only she could see him.… Why had she ever married Fayte, why had she left Socorro? Cruz would still be alive if he hadn’t followed her.

  Fayte’s tone was harsh. “You’re upsetting her, boy. The doctor says there’s nothing the matter but female hysterics.”

  Chris clung desperately to Sant and was grateful when he made no move to withdraw. “Maybe she should come home for a while. Grande Talitha’s worried about her.”

  “My wife is staying where she belongs, in my house.”

  Chris struggled up, so weak she fell back immediately. “I want to go home! I want Talitha!” I want Sant.

  “I’ll get better doctors,” Fayte said stubbornly. “I’ll do anything to cure you, but you’re not leaving.”

  “I won’t be married to you anymore, Fayte. If you keep me here, I won’t eat.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “I do. Whatever the law says, I haven’t been your wife since you fired at Cruz.”

  “Christina!”

  She turned her face from the sound of his voice. “Get yourself another trophy. Someone to decorate your house and be an admirable Señora Riordan.”

  His tone thickened with outrage. “You can’t forget your damned family, can you? Revier y O’Shea! You’ve always belonged more to them than to me!”

  “Their blood is mine. I’m proud of it.”

  “Prouder than of being my wife?”

  “I’m not your wife anymore.”

  Fayte drew in a shuddering breath. “No use talking to you now; you’re not responsible. Go home with your cousin. In a few weeks, I’ll come to see you.”

  Drained, she didn’t argue further. He was holding himself on a tight rein and might release his anger on Sant. He rang for the women to help her dress and pack.

  “The señora requires only enough for a few weeks,” Fayte told them, and again she didn’t protest. To be free of him, free of this house, that was what mattered.

  Sant had brought Miguel’s Packard. Fayte carried her to it, crushed her against him for a long moment. His mouth bruised hers. “Get well, my love. I’ll see you soon.”

  But I will not see you.

  “Good-bye, Fayte.”

  With all her will, she fought back tears till Sant had turned the auto and they were a distance down the road. Then she wept.

  Back at the Socorro, her sight returned slowly as she talked with Talitha and her family and went around the place with Sant patiently guiding her. First she saw dim shapes, then the light behind them; then distinctness increased till she saw as well as ever.

  When she remembered Cruz falling, the bleeding wound she couldn’t staunch, blackness welled up again, but Sant helped her through those times, holding her, touching her eyes with his hands.

  So she could see her husband when he came early in July, a month after the strike, driving one of Colonel Greene’s autos. He was lean, somehow ragged-looking in spite of his expertly tailored clothes.

  “Christina!” His eyes glowed as he sprang up on the veranda and took her in his arms. “You’re all right! You can see!”

  “Yes.” She pitied him, couldn’t believe she’d ever loved him, ever hungered for his touch.

  “Wonderful! We can go home tomorrow.” He smiled at Talitha, Miguel, Juri, Patrick, and Sewa, who had all been enjoying the evening view of the mountains. “You’ve been good medicine for my wife. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Patrick, Chris’s grandfather, got to his feet, his thick mass of red hair only lightly veined with gray. “Sorry, Fayte, but—we thought you understood. Our lawyer’s started divorce proceedings.”

  Fayte’s arms tightened convulsively around Chris before he push
ed her away, eyes blazing like a cornered mountain lion’s. “The O’Shea lawyer will get the divorce because there’s a Revier in the state legislature and your family’s been here forever and owns half of southern Arizona! Isn’t that right? A latecomer from Colorado who lives in Mexico might as well keep his mouth shut!”

  The earlier trace of embarrassed apology left Patrick’s voice. “A big public show isn’t to anyone’s interest, Fayte, but if you want to try to keep a woman who doesn’t want you, go ahead. Just let me say that whatever the court decides, Chris stays where she wants to be.”

  For a terrible moment Chris thought Fayte would draw the revolver he wore buckled to his waist. His hand paused above it, then dropped heavily. Ignoring the others, he looked at Chris. Her heart wailed for the pain in his face, but there was no way back to him.

  Between them lay Cruz, dead men who’d wanted only to be paid as much as Americans, and, in an obscure but intensely felt way for Chris, the murdered of Tomochic who’d died for their rights.

  Not fair, perhaps, or rational. Fayte wasn’t an evil man. But he craved riches, and to gain them he was willing to see other human beings simply as machinery, to be maintained as cheaply as possible, and scrapped when they were worn out or broken down.

  “This is what you want?” His voice was a whisper.

  Tears brimmed to her eyes. She nodded silently.

  He turned without a word. When he was gone, she went into Talitha’s arms and cried till she was empty, light as a dead leaf.

  She hadn’t seen him again. Cananea had been one of the sparks that blazed into the still raging conflagration of the Mexican revolution.

  Eleven years later, Chris still felt as if there were a small empty hollow in her heart, though she was usually too busy to notice it. Not only did she teach the Bisbee miners’ children through the week, but on Saturdays, and several days a week through the summer, she took them walking, trying to show them what wonderful plants and creatures lived in the desert and how they managed to survive.