by Steven Law
“Will he come and talk to us?”
“I’m not sure he can, even if he wanted to. He’s been coming around here for over a year. His family was killed in an Apache raid and his throat was cut. But it wasn’t a lethal wound. I’m certain it affected his voice.”
“How do you know all this?” Enrique asked.
I found him in the desert shortly after the attack. I could see the blood on his neck. He wouldn’t let me get close to him. So I left him some bread. I tended to the dead, and then took food to him each day. One day I decided to quit spoiling him and see if I could lure him here. It wasn’t long before he started coming here for the food.”
“Where does he eat now?”
The priest pointed to the other side of the garden.
“I leave the food in the stable behind the mission, but only after the stable has been cleaned.”
“Who cleans it?”
The priest grinned. “Sereno, of course.”
Enrique thought for a moment. “But how did he know?”
“He may not speak, but he hears, and he understands. He came one day and expected food but found a pitchfork instead. That’s when he realized that he must earn his keep. I came back later and the stable was clean, and I left him bread, a plate of stew, and a cup of milk. Ever since then he has come in and cleans the stable, then I leave his supper.”
Enrique looked back and forth, at the dark-eyed boy peeking out at them and at the stable.
“I could offer you the same, you know,” the priest said.
Enrique looked up at him.
“You could stay here,” said the priest, “help out in the garden, with the goats, and tend to the burros and chickens. Does that interest you?”
Enrique shrugged, thinking of his home, now in shambles. “I don’t know.”
“In return I will give you a place to sleep, feed you, and teach you to read, write, and do arithmetic. What do you say?”
“I don’t want those things. I have to go to El Paso.”
“What is in El Paso?”
“My grandfather. He went there two years ago. Said his brother was sick and needed him. Well I need him now. With his help I will find Amelia, and together we can find and kill those men.”
“Do you not know who those men are, Enrique?”
“Two Apache and one a mixed gringo. I thought I killed one, but I am not sure now.”
“I see. Well, my son, I’m certain the men that raided your home are the gang of Antonio Valdar. They will not go down easy. So you must be stronger and wiser, which means nutrition, and an education.”
“That will help?”
The priest sighed. “It would be a beginning.”
“Then you will help me?”
“I will help you be a better man, Enrique.”
Enrique’s yearning to leave for El Paso was paramount, but for some reason the boy felt the need to stick around the mission for a while. Maybe it was the priest’s promises of helping him become a better man. The boy liked being called a man.
“Okay. I will stay awhile.”
Father Gaeta put his arm around Enrique’s neck. “All right then! For now, why don’t we go fix Sereno’s supper?”
*
Enrique’s daily life along the Santa Cruz River had become routine, which frightened him, and he tried not to think about it. Though he enjoyed his duties—caring for the twenty goats, milking the does, feeding the chickens, gathering the eggs, getting water from the river, or hunting wild game for food—whenever he began to feel content, it was like a prompt to put up a front against his happiness. He was too afraid that if he loved what was around him too much, it would all disappear.
When these feelings came about him, he had learned to exercise his brain, to go on to something else. Such as during the saguaro fruit harvest, which reminded him so much of his family, but the priest told him that the memories of his family, good and bad, would never fade, so he might as well learn to live with them. It was good though, he also said, not to dwell on things and to move on. Enrique would think about his schooling, which he looked forward to each day. His lessons in biology, of the plants and animals in the Sonora, were quite enjoyable. The priest was impressed with how much Enrique already knew, and the boy assured him it was because of his grandfather.
“He must be a great man,” the priest said, with a consoling hand to Enrique’s shoulder. It was another moment when the boy preferred to go on to something else.
Not only did the priest teach Enrique to read and write, but he taught him English as well as Spanish. The boy liked learning English, as he had always wanted to know what those drummers on the trail were saying. He remembered how frustrated they were trying to communicate with his parents, who didn’t know English. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Regardless of how much his mother liked the things the men were trying to sell, they didn’t have the money for them. Even if they had, his father would not have let her buy them.
The boy’s lessons in arithmetic were past the basics and were now mostly exercised with random quizzes by Father Gaeta.
“Enrique,” the priest would say as the boy carried water from the river. “How do you calculate the volume of water inside that clay pot?”
“The easy way, Father, or the hard way?”
The priest laughed. “The easy way, of course.”
“I pour the water out of the odd-shaped pot and into a perfectly square crock. Then I calculate the volume of a cube.”
“Very good, my son.”
Father Gaeta made Enrique’s lessons enjoyable, which helped him learn. Though the priest didn’t have many books, the boy read sparingly from what was there, and not too much at once—such as the Holy Bible. Enrique often read and reread the book of Job, the Song of Solomon, and the prophets, such as Jeremiah, Daniel, Jonah, or his favorite, Nahum, the comforter, who gave a message of judgment, and a verse that Enrique had memorized:
Keep your feasts, O Judah, fulfill your vows, for never again shall the wicked come against you, he is utterly cut off.
Though there was little in the priest’s library, Enrique enjoyed what was there, which consisted of a two-century-old book on learning by Sir Francis Bacon that he thought to be rather pompous and, at times, off track and boring. There was a book of Scottish poems, partially burned, that Father Gaeta said he’d acquired from a settlement that had been ransacked by Apaches, but its content was touching, nonetheless; and another favorite was a tattered copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Enrique liked the verse, mostly for its clever wit. He often thought that if reading were like sustenance, then the Holy Bible would be the main course of a meal and the Almanac like a sweet dessert.
He liked his duties, and enjoyed his education, but what he loved most was his time alone in the wilderness. Every day he would find his favorite spot on top of a bluff overlooking an arroyo and a deer trail. Not only would he see deer, but also many other animals and birds, such as kangaroo rats, pronghorn, coyote, gray fox, ringtail, coati, quail, and porcupine, but he was there for the deer.
Sereno always accompanied Enrique on his hunts, too. On his first hunt away from the mission, Enrique sat upon the rise overlooking a bend in the deer trail. Usually before he ever saw the deer, he would hear a strange whistle, one that sounded like a rare bird, but nothing at all like any of the birds in the Sonora. It was more than a coincidence that the whistle came shortly before deer came around the bend, and once Enrique had figured it out, he started looking for Sereno somewhere among the desert plants, hiding but watching. He rarely ever saw his amigo sombra, his shadow friend, but the first time he did was also the only time he’d ever seen Sereno smile.
Father Gaeta had shown Enrique how to use a bow and arrow, a gift the priest received from a friendly Apache chief. Enrique was fascinated with the weapon. The bow, made from the wood of a mulberry tree, was painted on the inside by a red dye, and a golden dye colored the outside. An emblem of the sun was also painted on the inside, i
n the same gold color, laid on top of the red.
The arrows, which Enrique had to learn to make, were made of the same mulberry wood. He used a method that the priest had taught him, which the priest said he was also shown by the Apache. Every time the boy went to the wilderness, he looked for mulberry trees, and would break off small limbs and take them back to the mission. At the mission he would cut the limbs to approximately two-foot lengths, remove the bark, and scrape the wood, then lay them in the sun to dry. The Apache arrows that were given to him were decorated with black, red, and blue stripes, but Enrique just used red dye, the color of blood, which also symbolized the color of the justice that lingered in the back of his mind.
Feathers could be obtained from red-tailed hawks or eagles, and sometimes buzzards, but Enrique was superstitious about using feathers from a scavenger and relied solely on the others. When he found the feathers—and sometimes he would find a complete dead bird—he would cut the quill down the center, scrape out the marrow, and cut the feather into five-inch lengths. He would store the lengths in a leather pouch until it came time to make new arrows. He’d attach the feathers with wet sinew and piñon pitch, another technique the Apaches had shown the priest and that was passed on to Enrique.
Arrowheads were something else that Enrique looked out for while wandering throughout the wilderness. The Apache claimed that they were left by ancestors for their descendents to find, already shaped by nature with flat and pointed edges. Enrique had found scores of arrowheads, which he kept in another leather pouch. When he made his own arrows, or repaired them, he split the end of the arrow, inserted the flat end of the head, and wrapped it with more wet sinew. But there were times when an arrow was broken and too short to add the weight of a stone or flint to the end, and was simply sharpened to a wooden point, which was just as deadly.
Enrique’s quiver, which was also part of the Apache gift to the priest, was made of deerskin, as was the cover for the bow. He’d carry as many as ten arrows, along with his two pouches of feathers and arrowheads, and a coil of extra bowstrings. The bowstrings, which Enrique had to replace at times, were made from the sinew of a deer’s loin, or from the legs, which he saved from every kill.
The boy practiced by shooting into a target made of deerskin stretched against plank boards he’d found at the mission. He painted a red dot the width of his hand in the center. It was difficult for him at first, not only to hit his target, but to pull the string at all. The priest assured him that carrying heavy buckets of water, and lifting them as he walked, would strengthen his arms so he could pull the bowstring like a man. This challenged the boy, and he worked his arms endlessly, and within a year he could pull the string and hit his target proficiently, even much better than the priest.
The priest often challenged Enrique, too, by sitting at the table, rolling up his sleeve, exposing a pale, wiry arm, and challenging the boy to an arm wrestle.
“Let’s see if you’ve grown, my son,” the priest would say, encouraging Enrique to try and move his arm. It was a measurement for both of them, however, not just Enrique. When the day came that he was able to move the priest’s arm any distance at all, Enrique would know he was that much closer to handling the tasks of a man. The priest, Enrique knew, would also know that it was time to prepare the boy for starting his life outside the mission.
The boy had always wanted to learn all about hunting and the wilderness from his grandfather, and even though it began that way, his grandfather never taught him about hunting big game. That he learned from the priest, passed down from the Apache and Tohono O’odham, even the gutting and quartering.
One day, after a kill, Enrique was quartering the meat from a mule deer and packing it on the back of his burro when he heard a noise, and then he saw several javelina playing not far away at the base of the bluff. This was only the second time in his life he had seen these animals, and he was quite taken by their piglike appearance, with a grayish, bristly hide.
Though this sighting was somewhat treasured as a rare moment, their initial sound was almost haunting, and before long something disturbing brought Enrique to a moment of despair.
The largest of the javelinas, a boar, kept jumping on top of another, smaller one of the species. From the noise the smaller one was making, the boy could tell it did not like the activity that was taking place, and that the boar was forcing the other to play his game. There was only one other circumstance where Enrique had heard similar noises, and that was before he had seen Valdar with Amelia. The noisy grunting—he wondered if Valdar had learned those noises from a javelina, even though Enrique still did not know what it was all about.
On his return to the mission that day, Father Gaeta met Enrique to admire his kill.
“Ah, what a fine sack of meat,” the priest said and patted Enrique on the back. “You have perfected the art of hunting, my son.”
Enrique did not answer, only unpacked his burro and went inside the mission to put away his things. For a moment Enrique stopped and closed his eyes; then he lay down on his bed and stared up at the adobe ceiling. The priest had followed him inside, and came up to his bedside and sat at his feet.
“What is troubling you, my son?”
Enrique lay with his eyes closed. “Today I saw two javelina. Pecari angulatus.”
The priest smiled. “Ah, hunting is not your only strong point. You know your animals well, too.”
“But there is something that I still don’t understand.”
“What is that, my son?”
It had been more than a year since the massacre of his family, but the scenes were always as vivid as the day they happened. He thought more, however, of Amelia and what might have become of her, though his thoughts rarely reflected any hope. It was something about which he often wondered what the priest thought, but he never had the courage to ask, in fear of hearing a hopeless answer.
Enrique opened his eyes and looked at the priest, at his full brown beard and studious green eyes. For more than a year Enrique had learned to trust those eyes, and like his grandfather, the priest had become a man whom the boy admired. He also feared getting too close, but now, more than ever, he felt the need to open up to the father.
“What do you think happened to Amelia?” the boy asked.
The priest swallowed and looked away, scratched his beard and shrugged. “I can’t be sure.”
Enrique kept looking at him and noticed a bit of fear in his eyes. “I’ve been wondering about something.”
“What have you been wondering?”
“During the deer hunt, when I saw the javelinas, this boar, with tusks, jumped on the back of a smaller one. It reminded me of the last time I saw Amelia. She was with this man you call Valdar, and before I saw him, he was making very strange grunting sounds. When I saw him leading her away, I could tell she was not happy, just like the small javelina that squealed and tried to get away.”
A brief silence fell between them, and the priest looked intently at Enrique.
“That is something we’ve never talked about in our education,” the priest said. “And I apologize for that.”
The boy only looked at the priest, anxiously awaiting his explanation.
The priest looked at the floor and kept rubbing his beard. “Have you ever noticed, Enrique, the power that certain animals have over others?”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Father.”
“Take the eagle, for example. A rabbit is doomed if the eagle sees it with its exquisite eyesight and calculates that it can swoop down in time to grasp it in its claws before the rabbit can reach cover. And the rat has a similar power over insects, and the insects over smaller insects. But the eagle, its only predator is man, which would mean that man’s only true predator is himself. The basic difference between man and animal is their ability to feel levels of emotion and consider consequences. Antonio Valdar is an evil man who cares nothing of either and thinks more like an animal. That is why he treats other humans the way that he does.”
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br /> “I see what you mean,” the boy said, “but what does that have to do with Amelia?”
The priest reached and put his hand on the back of Enrique’s. “Do you remember when I taught you biology and the characteristics of life?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“One characteristic, reproduction, is what the javelinas were doing. They were making little javelinas. Humans do the same thing, only it is to be done with compassion and desire from both man and woman. One thing that humans can do, that animals cannot, is take the act of reproduction for pleasure, and some force it on other humans for selfish pleasure. There is no desire from the other, nor is there any compassion. It is an act of lust and not love. It is an act of evil.”
“And that is what Valdar was doing to Amelia?”
“Yes, my son. I’m afraid that is right.”
“What will happen to her?”
“It is hard for me to suspect, and you are very young to be told such things.”
“I am old enough to see it happen, but not old enough to understand it?”
The priest sighed and gently patted the boy’s forearm. “Yes, right. Well, Valdar, he looks for ways to feed his evil desires. A young, innocent girl is one of those ways. There are people who like to enslave such girls for that same selfish pleasure and will pay money for them. Valdar has likely captured your sister to take her and sell her into such bondage.”
Though Enrique trusted the priest’s explanation, Amelia’s fate still wasn’t clear to him. He had never felt the desires or compassion that caused a man to feel that way toward a woman. Nor had he ever felt the lust that the priest spoke of, and knowing what it had done to his hermana, he was certain he never wanted to.
“I just hope she is okay,” the boy said.
The priest tightened his lips and nodded. “I do, too, my son.”
A sound of a stone hitting the windowsill prompted them to look out. The priest peered out first then Enrique joined him. Enrique spotted Sereno dashing into a stand of willow near the riverbank.