All of them had suffered misery and heartache there. Their families had been torn apart in the unending struggle between the forces of nominal authority and the “causes” that formed and broke and re-formed again like tears of quicksilver. Fortunes had been twisted from their helpless hands. Their men had been marched before the firing squad. Their women had endured martyr sufferings.
Prison and the precise torture of the anthill had been theirs. They had tried to believe that each new fever of revolution would abate. They admired the colorful, swaggering patriots who promised to free them from the swiftly current despot on the gilded throne in Mexico City. But they longed for the good old days of benevolent tyranny.
And at last they became refugees. Some of them fled under the order of death. They sought safety in the republic to the north.
This day they were going back. They were not drawn by false hopes. There was no pledge of security. For some of them, assuredly, the return meant death. The dust of Mexico——
They breathed deeply the cool, alkali air. It had changed just in the few steps across the border. Here was the sharp taste in the air that is the smell of Mexico—that has in it, vaguely, burning, dry wood, the suffocating powder of the desert and the dripping of earthen water bottles hung just inside tall, shadowy doors.
The train crew gesticulated elaborately. Dramatically the engineer and conductor discussed whether the train desired to go. That was their way of almost personifying the engine. The engine looked as rusty and about as capable as a child’s toy engine left out on the lawn overnight.
The genius of Mexican railroading which selects outlandish hours for train startings had decreed seven in the morning for this one. The engine looked sleepy. The fireman was dozing on the coal in the tender.
It was not too early for the seller of candies. He was an ancient with a rude tray supported in front of him by ropes over his shoulders. The morning sun made a quaint green shadow of that much of his face as could be seen between the brim of his sombrero and the sarape pulled up over his nose and mouth. In the manner of Mexican peddlers he sang the advertisement of his wares. He sang without enthusiasm. A whining, impossible tenor. The newsboys in the larger cities sing with the angelic, unsexed voices of choir boys.
“Dulces! Sweets!” sang the candy seller. He fanned a dusty chicken’s wing over the dustier tray. The fierce flies had an early morning hunger.
The passengers were piling on board the dull red cars. There was an indignant squawking from geese and chickens. The Mexican family seldom travels without such symbols of its fundamental domesticity. If it’s a gamecock the man of the family may carry it. Otherwise, the wife—or one of the numerous, lovable, dark-eyed children.
Amazing bulks of luggage hampered the boarding. Mexican travellers give the impression of having escaped from a burning building with articles that might be rescued under such circumstances. The luggage going aboard looked like the excess of a badly organized picnic.
What rare suitcases there were seemed the work of amateurs, done for practice. Blankets of all colors were the most substantial carryalls. Shoe boxes tied with cord and bulging. Wicker baskets brimming with intimate revelations. A huge, framed portrait of the crayon-enlargement school. Obese potato sacks. A pair of overalls tied shut at the places where the cuffs should be and stuffed with a bulky cargo.
“Adios! Go with God!” Farewells. Brown hands and faces reaching from the windows. Fingers twinkling childishly in the Mexican salutation.
More dramatic gesticulations from the train crew. The engine snorted courageously. Madder gesticulations. The train men did an impassioned pantomime. The engine puffed. The vertebræ of the train stretched and cracked. The wheels muttered at the taste of rusty rails. An astounding jerk—and the train slowly rolled from the station.
“Adios! Go with God!”
A vicious splutter of rifle fire. And a pulse-stopping war whoop from the forward section of the train.
“Adios—Go with God!” The farewells continued with the obbligato of firing. The warlike shouts caused no excitement. It is the custom of Mexican soldiers to discharge a volley on leaving a town. They select, as far as possible, inanimate targets. Sometimes they use a burro or a stray dog. Seldom do they actually try to hit a man or woman. Although they may shoot close as a practical joke. The Mexican likes his jokes very flavory.
These soldiers were the federalista escort. There were thirty of them in streaked and faded khaki that fitted sloppily. They were in two armored cars in back of the tender. With them were five soldaderas—the women who accompany their men into the field. Four of the women were cooking tortillas over improvised stoves. They looked like tired housewives. The fifth was very young. She wore a blood-purple flower in her sleek black hair. Her white teeth gleamed as she chatted with her man, a veteran of nineteen. Love and war come early to the Mexican.
The train was rolling toward the backdrop of hazy hills painted on the horizon. The violet shadows of early morning had been erased. The sun was filling with its glistening monotone the semi-transparent veil that hung in front of the hills.
From the windows a view of the cemetery. Wooden crosses with the color of lapis lazuli. And crosses of pink and chrome yellow. The last attempt at the picturesque
The cemetery execution wall, too. The plastering had been shot away in jagged, futuristic scraps. In other places it was pockmarked from the smack of bullets at short range.
Three days before, three men were executed there. For the killing of a gringo cattle thief. The federalista government had seen fit to mollify the northern republic with three lives. Blood on the diplomatic sacrificial altar.
There was talk in the train of how the third man died. He noticed that when his brother, who was the second, fell backward his head struck the wall. All executed men fall backward. The only one known to have fallen forward was Pablo Lopez. Lopez fell that way because at the last second he seemed ready to charge the firing squad. He did a grotesque somersault, also forward, after falling.
The third man to be shot carefully estimated the length he would make on the ground. He stepped forward two extra paces to make a generous allowance. His head did not strike the wall——
The train was panting in its slow climb. Three men swung out of the caboose door and climbed to the top of the swaying car. It is the best place for long journeys. These three were exiles, too. The cemetery wall had an especial meaning for them.
The first was one called El Humoristo by the Mexicans. That was because he laughed in time of danger and sang on the long march. He was a gringo but they liked him. The Mexican consul in El Paso had rushed into Juarez early that morning to warn him that the federalista government would not be responsible for his life if he insisted on going back.
The second was Don Roberto. He was tall. His heavy shoulders listed to the left. Lacking spectacles, his round face was the ideal portrait of a gentle school teacher. A few months before, Don Roberto had led the dynamiters of a minor rebel band in a bombing raid on this very railroad. He and a Mexican boy of sixteen, with a mushroomed bullet in his bowels, escaped when the dynamiters were surrounded in the hills. The boy rode for ten miles without a word of complaint. Then he smiled at Don Roberto, died and rolled from his saddle.
The third man to climb the side of the caboose was Don Felipe. Don Felipe came close to being chubby. Affability had cut pleasant lines in his cheeks and at the seams of his eyes. His hands gestured with stiff daintiness. Don Felipe had been a merchant, a seller of furniture. Several captures of his city and raids on his store had driven him into the field as a revolutionary. He had been exiled six months before. He was suspected now—and quite justly—of being an agent of the great rebel chief.
The dust of Mexico had settled on the hearts of these men. They were going back because the tug of it was in every fiber of them.
El Humoristo was to be captured that very night and ordered to face the firing squad. If he had known this he might have listened to the consul’
s warning. Or he might not——
Another volley from the soldiers. Their target was a stray mule with the ankles of a disdainful courtesan. Their shots were wide of the mark at a hundred yards. Except one that kicked up the dust under the mule’s belly. The mule looked up, cocked a casual, experienced ear and returned to nibbling at the gray ghosts of tough grass.
The eloquent gesture of contempt silenced the soldiers. The three on the caboose smiled in appreciation. They talked professionally of the decline of military marksmanship.
The train was almost to the top of the first ridge when it jolted and smashed to a halt. At its side drunkenly wobbled along a wheel from the engine. Other parts were strung along the right of way. Up ahead was the thrashing of a wounded and suffering mechanism.
“Bandits!” a man’s shrill voice.
But it wasn’t bandits. The engine merely had come apart. To the unexpert eye a neat half of it seemed to have dropped off and to have strewn itself along the desert. It appeared hopelessly out of action. It must have seemed so to the train crew, as well. The engineer, now wearing a huge revolver strapped to his side, and the conductor looked at each other. It was the look of unillusioned biologists telling each other that they knew from the start the chemical experiment would be a failure. The fireman, making ready for another siesta on the coal, told the brakeman that it was apparent the engine did not desire to go. He had the same desire. He was asleep immediately.
The excited passengers poured out of the train. Chickens and ducks and minor items of luggage came with them. They viewed the accident with shrugging, lenient dismay. They also decided that the engine did not desire to go. For a while they watched the debate of the train crew. All of the crew, except the fireman, were discussing the lack of the engine’s desire. The engine moaned an enduring sadness, like a major patient at a conference of medical specialists.
There was an air of resignation. It began to look as if the train would remain there forever. Nobody seemed alarmed about it.
The heat of the day was beginning to simmer. The locusts in the mesquite were singing. A monotonous, brittle song.
The passengers lost interest in the debate. Two men started lagging silver pesos at a mark in the dust. They only had two pesos between them, which made their calculations interesting and intricate. Another group assembled for a cocking main. Three of the women found stones and, with a handy bit of sheet iron, made a stove. They patted tortillas into shape and cooked them. The children, with dancing imaginations, played at bullfighting. The wreck did not mar their gracious poise.
Other men and women wandered out to where the brush reached in from the desert. They were content to have made this gesture of modesty. They didn’t penetrate the brush. They remained on the sunny side of its edge. A natural act. They gossiped amiably as they performed it.
The train crew, with no audience for its debate, had gone to work. The fireman had been awakened. Slowly they had pieced the engine together. At last there was a determined, game toot from its whistle.
The passengers scurried back from the edge of the brush. The children skipped to the train. The peso laggers argued in a respectful monotone. The cocking main ended. One of the birds had been killed. Its owner bore the feathered corpse. The sorrow of its death was tempered a bit with the knowledge of a sure meal——
The engine quivered. The train trembled. The wheels began to move—backwards! The engine had given up definitely. It was skulking back, defeated, into Juarez. It needed every lure of the downgrade to make its retreat.
There was a spirited chorus of jeers to greet the return. The seller of sweets took on a disinterested animation. He renewed his song in time to the waving of the chicken wing fan.
The engine did not desire to go. The dash through the bandit country must be abandoned. But, no! The federalista officials refused to surrender. They had heard the jeers. Out of such incidents grow revolutions. Juarez station never saw such a fever of railroading since the days when trains from the states had a regular schedule through.
Another engine, with its smoke-stack made into coarse lace by outlaw bullets, was prodded out of the shed. The fireman was shaken out of another siesta. The engineer, who had added a Mauser rifle to his armament, was thrilled by such determination. Also the consul had promised him five pesos gold if he made the trip.
From the cabin he made an impassioned speech, which he concluded with the ringing assertion that he would take the train through or perish at the throttle. The conductor, standing by him, feelingly gestured his endorsement. The fireman leaned drowsily on his shovel.
The start was made all over. The soldiers fired their salute. This time a skeleton of a dog ran howling down the dusty road with one leg dragging. Jeers from the armored cars.
“Adios! Go with God!”
Optimists. The shrivelling heat made the curtain in front of the hills waver and sway as the train rolled again to the south.
When the first ridge had been crossed it was time for the mid-day siesta. In the dull red cars the quick chattering slowly, syllable by syllable, silenced. It was as if the heat slowly suffocated the speakers. The soldier guards slept with their rifles in their arms. Fitting embrace for the rifle, the harsh-voiced, true wife of the fighting man. The soldier of nineteen rested his head on the breast of the girl with the purple flower in her hair.
El Humoristo rested alone on top of the caboose. It is simple for a campaigner to sleep on the roof of a caboose. Even when it rocks and sways like a restless, weaving elephant. It is done by wedging the body between the rods that support the caboose lookout. And by locking the arms under the runway that stretches along the caboose roof.
El Humoristo rested and the sun soaked into his lean back. He seldom slept during the siesta hour. He was always eager of life, though he seemed not to value his own particularly. His eyes noted critically the iridescent pastels of the sun glancing from the burnished shield of the desert. He watched the easy flight of a distant coyote.
He was watching when the train stopped at the boiling point of day. This time, the shifting desert sands had swept over the rails like a lazy tide. They took the immense form of tired, exquisitely carved ocean waves——
El Humoristo smiled at the ironic fate of the fireman who, in the one legitimate hour that might have been allowed for his precious sleep, toiled to clear the track with his shovel—the only one on board.
The train puffed on. It passed a lonely grave, marked with a crucifix of wormy, weather-whitened wood. The grave was weighted with rocks. The dust of Mexico deep on another heart. A revolutionary, no doubt, killed in a meaningless skirmish. There were more graves at the side of the tracks. The train passed the mummified body of a boy soldier hanged at the crossbeam of a telegraph pole.
Along the course of the train sinister, metal serpents raised their coils in frozen contortions. They were bent and twisted rails. It was considered good tactics by retreating Mexican forces to remove rails from ties, heat them in the middle over fires and then, with a crew of men on each end, twist them into startling shapes. No magic could untwist them and make them serviceable after that. And pursuit by rail halted very abruptly.
The voices in the cars began to sound again. As if picking up syllables where drowsiness had hushed them. The train had moved suddenly from the desert into green, fertile pasture land. Once this was the home of vast herds. The air, heavy with heat, hung sluggish and dead.
The rifles forward volleyed again. The train lurched into another complaining stop. Another volley.
“Too hot for just shooting,” murmured El Humoristo. “It must be Don Pancho and his banditos this time. I wonder if he still vivas for Madero? I’m ready.”
He and Don Roberto watched the soldiers drop over the sides of the armored cars. They double-quicked to the west in skirmish order. At intervals they dropped to their knees and fired.
“That’s too much like a battle scene to be one,” said El Humoristo.
“And, of course, if it was the
enemy they’d be running the other way,” answered Don Roberto. Remember, they were federalista troops and Don Roberto had served with the rebels.
He pointed to the west. Five hundred yards away a small herd of long-horned cattle were strung out.
“The battle of the cows by Verestchagin,” said El Humoristo.
The cattle broke into a run. They were moved by the shouts of the advancing warriors and the shots that puffed into the dust near them.
The vaquero caring for the cattle reined in his mount. He contemplated the oncoming soldiers. Then, with the attitude of a plucky gambler who has lost, he turned his horse and rode slowly into the brush and out of range.
A steer in full gallop plunged into the dust. The soldiers cheered as he struggled up and tried to run with his right foreleg broken.
“A typical federalista victory,” sneered Don Roberto, the rebel. “They have vanquished a steer. Valiant ones!”
The bugle sounded the charge. The soldiers closed in on the wounded animal.
They returned to the train, prodding the bellowing and frantic cripple along with them. Their captain had decided, with military alertness, to make the meat haul itself into camp.
“It is to be an execution,” Don Roberto mocked. “Only the shot of mercy comes first instead of last.”
The captain fired his pistol between the eyes of the bony steer. It had started to bellow. At the shot it coughed surprisingly. It made a final, desperate effort to stand on its smashed foreleg. Then it dived forward.
A fire had been built by one of the soldaderas. A soldier hacked with a knife at the steer’s rump. As he sawed into the meat the steer raised its bony head in protest. Another soldier laughed and stamped his rifle butt against the head. It dropped heavily.
Ripped-out fragments of raw meat were held on ramrods over the fire. A soldadera went forward with a hindquarter dripping blood down her back.
It was sundown when the train reached a little adobe station and halted. Another seller of sweets, the replica of the Juarez ancient, sang his merchant’s song on the platform. So did a woman selling round, flat cakes of cheese made of goat’s milk. A boy offered drinks from a skin of water. El Humoristo found amusement in trying to buy the entire stock of the sweet-seller. He was refused. If the stock was all gone what would one have to sell?
The Little Tigress: Tales out of the Dust of Old Mexico Page 5