Heaven Is a Long Way Off

by Win Blevins

  She worked in firm strokes. Now she paused and looked directly at him. “I have a passion for you,” she said. “For the time you are in Santa Fe, will you live at Rancho de las Palomas and be my lover?”

  She waited.

  She poured a little oil in a heavy skillet, put it on the stove, and began browning the meat. “I do not care about appearances,” she said. “I care nothing for what the families on the rancho think, nothing about what my neighbors may think. I do not even care what the priest thinks.” She looked up at him. “As for the sin, I will confess it.” She shrugged.

  Now she took three red chiles out of a canister, washed and cleaned them, and put them on the counter. She chopped the red pods and began to mash them in a heavy bowl with water. She looked at him. “This passion,” she said, “I want to dive into it, to lose myself in it. Is your wish the same?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her eyes to the chiles and ground hard. He noticed how strong her hands were.

  “You may tell your friends who stay in town whatever you like about us, without flaunting it. They will understand.”

  “Sure.”

  She put the mashed chiles and water into a sauce pan, and put the pot on the rear of the cookstove. “It will make a sauce,” she said.

  She wiped her hands on a cloth, sat on a chair next to him, and took both his hands in hers.

  “We both must understand, then, that it will end. Spring will come, the grass will turn green, you will go to your rendezvous of beaver hunters, and I will set this passion aside. We two are”—she hesitated—“not suitable. You are beautiful. Perhaps we even make an attractive couple. But we are not in the long term appropriate.” She used the Spanish word apropriado.

  Sam’s mind tilted a little. What they’d just done in bed felt very damned appropriate to him.

  She rose and poured water into the pot with mutton. “It is best when it simmers all afternoon,” she said.

  Sam shook his head. After five years in the mountains, taking care over cooking seemed foreign to him.

  She dipped her finger in the red chile sauce and put it to his mouth. “Taste it.”

  He sucked the good taste off her finger. He’d liked chiles from the first taste, green more than red, not the heat but the flavor. He cleaned the finger well, smiling at her mischievously.

  “I’ll pour us some wine. You want to go to bed?”

  He did.

  THE NEXT DAY they rode the ranch, and she began to tell him about her life. Specifically, her husband. Coy trotted along with his ears perked, like he was listening.

  “I was a silly young girl, seventeen years old. Miguel came for me like a whirlwind. He was a handsome man with a flair for the romantic gesture. Gestures, I later found out, he had practiced widely throughout Nuevo Mexico. We married when I was eighteen and he was thirty. My father warned me about him.” Sam knew her mother had died giving birth to her sister.

  “For a year, perhaps, I kept my illusions.

  “He was good to me in front of others. He made love to me eagerly. In front of our ranch families he treated me like a queen, and to our friends in Santa Fe he showed me off as a great catch. I began to get impatient when he was gone on what he called the business of his family, which was actually to pursue other women and play at horsemanship games with his rich young comrades. His family, it turned out, had scarcely any enterprises left to run.

  “It was not until we stood beside my father’s grave that I realized, from Miguel’s new imperial manner, that he had married me only to get Rancho de las Palomas.”

  They turned the horses along the madre acequia.

  “The next years were very difficult. I hate to talk about them. The worst was that I miscarried twice. Now I am unable to bear children.”

  She grew thoughtful, and her voice changed. “Then, one morning, they brought the news. As he and his friends did their daredevil riding, his horse suddenly shied. Miguel landed headfirst against a boulder and was quickly dead.”

  She stopped, and Sam reined Paladin up beside her. Coy raised his head to Paloma. Her gaze roamed the grapes she had planted, but Sam knew they were not what she was seeing.

  “You cannot imagine. In my anger I had thought I wanted to deliver a fatal blow myself. But when it happened, I was desolate. I stayed in bed, without even a candle, for days. I drank wine, all my stomach could keep down. I crawled deep into the cave of loneliness and self-pity.

  “And I didn’t come back to the world for months. Months.”

  She touched her heels to her mount, and they glided on.

  “Finally, our foreman pointed out to me that the rancho was deteriorating. My people were willing to work hard, he said, but only if they knew I cared. Since I didn’t seem to care, inevitably, the rancho would die. ‘Dust, weeds, and wind, nothing else,’ he said.”

  Coy made a sympathetic noise.

  “So Rancho de las Palomas saved me. It saved my grandmother, the first Paloma. She dug the gardens with her own hands, she planted the cottonwoods by the house, she helped lay the stones of the walk from the well to the cocina. She nursed the land as she nursed her son and daughter. It gave to her as she gave to it.

  “Women are not made to be alone, Sam. We can be in connection to a man, to children, to our whole family, we can even be mother and child to the earth herself. But we are not meant to be alone. My gardens, my orchards, my vineyard, my livestock, my workers—they saved me. Saved me for this moment, this passion that makes me alive.” She looked at him for a long moment and finally tried to shrug lightly.

  He wondered exactly what she was thinking at that moment. He would have bet it was, For a short time I have this young man, this naïve foreigner. What comes afterward, what else my life may be, I will seize this.

  “Let’s ride.” She kicked her sorrel mare to a lope down the dirt track, across the road, and onto the north side of her land. They galloped across tablelands, through broken gullies, up steep hills. Coy scampered alongside them eagerly—he liked to run. Finally, when they came up into the timber, she eased her mount to a walk and came gently to the ridge. In front of them, far down the mountain, lay a lovely lake among pine trees, like a drop of dew on a green leaf. They sat for long moments and gazed. It was like drinking the cold lake with their eyes.

  The winter day was mild, and they sat on the rocks of the ridge and looked at the water and talked, or for long periods didn’t talk. Sam knew he was enraptured.

  Finally, Paloma said, “Tell me about Meadowlark.”

  Sam did. He spoke slowly and considered his words, but the words came and came. How he met her in the Crow village, left on a trapping expedition saying he’d come back, and failed to keep his promise—“I got separated from the outfit, got my horse stolen, had hardly any lead for bullets. Ended up walking seven hundred miles to the nearest fort.”

  “Seven hundred? Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought for a moment. The story about the prairie fire would hold for later, and how he crawled into the buffalo carcass and got his Crow name, Joins with Buffalo.

  “I went back to the village, and her parents said to bring eight horses for her. Getting the horses…” Here he paused, because this part of the story was still hard. “Getting the horses I got her brother killed, Blue Medicine Horse. Then her parents kept her away from me. But we ran off together.”

  He took big breaths in and out. “After a few days they came and took her back. I thought I’d lost her for good. I left, went to rendezvous.” He waited for a beat. “She showed up there with her brother, ready to get married.”

  They let that sit for a minute.

  “She wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, so we joined up with a brigade going to California. First that ever did that crossing.” He stopped for a moment, and memories moved through him like hymns.

  He shrugged. “She gave birth and it killed her.”

  Paloma considered that. Sam looked at her and thought of her childlessness. />
  Suddenly she said, “Let’s go!” and jumped onto her horse. She loped back the way they came, and then it turned into a race. They shouted at the horses in glee and spurred them—down grassy hillsides, across rivulets, through arroyos. Coy sprinted alongside and sometimes barked vigorously. Paloma laughed at him.

  At first Paladin fell behind Paloma and her mare, but Sam could feel that she was just biding her time. Few horses ran as often or as long as Paladin, and few had as much bottom. Still, the sorrel mare had sprinting speed, and Sam wasn’t sure. His thought was, Paloma wants me to beat her, but will do her damnedest to beat me.

  They roared onto the grasslands where the horses were grazing, the trappers’ hundred with Paloma’s, and the whole herd kicked up its heels and followed them. What a noise—Sam loved it, and it made him homesick for the buffalo plains, and the thunder of a buffalo stampede.

  Suddenly Paloma turned her mare up a short, steep hill and through the underbrush into another small canyon. The herd didn’t follow. Too much work! Sam thought happily. They crashed down a little creek, splashing themselves and whooping and hollering.

  When El Camino Real came into sight, and the house beyond it, Sam slapped Paladin with his hat, and she charged. They passed Paloma the way a plummeting apple passes a drifting leaf. Sam wheeled Paladin to a skidding stop in front of the casa. When Paloma jumped from the saddle, she landed in Sam’s arms. A stable hand took the reins, and Sam carried Paloma pell-mell to bed.

  “WHAT IS GOING on inside my lover?” said Paloma softly. They were lying twisted in her sheets, naked, worn out by love. “I don’t want your mind wandering. For this time we are together let it be with me.”

  He looked at the coals in the fireplace and answered truthfully, “Guilt.”

  Coy seconded the motion with a whimper.

  She smiled warmly at him. “It didn’t arrive until the fourth day. Not bad.”

  “Don’t you feel guilty?”

  “I feel triumphant. And so should you.”

  They looked at each other. Neither knew what to say.

  “But your wife has been gone only…”

  “Nine months. April to January.”

  Her eyes smiled at him. “Then it’s time for you to be reborn, Sam Morgan. Time to emerge back into this world of the living, the world of things that still stand in the sunlight and grow.” She gave him mocking eyes. “Things that rise from the dead, things that rise in the sheets.”

  “I miss her.”

  “I missed my husband for perhaps two years. He was a pendejo, but I missed him. Sometimes I woke up in the morning and reached for him. After a while I made myself sleep on his side of the bed, facing the edge. That stopped the reaching. Though I despised him, I expected him to be around every corner, and was always disappointed when he was missing. Always missing.”

  “I loved Meadowlark.”

  “You still do, the memory of her. But she’s dead, Sam.”

  “Are you jealous of her?”

  “As well be jealous of a mote of dust floating in the air.”

  She rolled over, tangled her hands in his white hair, and kissed him teasingly. “Let a woman who has walked this earth for a decade longer than you tell you this much. Life is for the living.” She kissed him again. “The living. That’s us. Can you let go of death for a while?”

  She rolled him over on top of her.

  “Yes.”

  Twelve

  THE WINTER WAS a time of rest for the ranch, and the work was much less for everyone except Sam and Flat Dog. Every day they trained horses, and Paloma watched what was different about their technique, wanting to learn. They stood with the horse belly deep in the cold Santa Fe River until they got it to accept a saddle blanket, then a saddle, then a sitting horseman. “It is faster,” she said immediately.

  She sweetened the deal. “Please train as many of my horses as possible. Good saddle horses will bring me two hundred pesos more than wild ones. So I will pay you a hundred fifty pesos each.”

  They worked with a will.

  Sam and Paloma, though, took some afternoons to ride her land. They camped one night by the northern lake. They rode downstream and explored the valley of the Rio Grande. They visited a pueblo of Indians down that river, and Paloma traded for some beautiful pots. “Do they steal slaves from this village?” asked Sam.

  “No, these pueblo peoples, they accept the Holy Church. We Nuevos Mexicanos take slaves from the Navajos, who hold to their old religion, and the pueblo peoples help in the stealing.”

  They camped along the river on the way back, and since the next day was sunny, they lounged and stayed there all day.

  They also established a life beyond the ranch and beyond their absorption in each other. Every Saturday morning they rode to Santa Fe. Paloma went to confession, spent the rest of Saturday with her sister and nieces, and on Sunday morning attended mass.

  Sam spent Saturday afternoon at the lodgings of Hannibal, Grumble, and Sumner, working on his reading. He would recite the words out loud, and one of his mentors would offer corrections. Sam began to go from fumbling, word-by-word reading to making words into sentences that added up to something.

  At first Sumner just listened with a half smile. Then he began to help Sam as well. Unlike Sam, the ex-slave had learned to read and write, and could do it very well.

  Grumble always started with Sam on the Bible. Sam would sound out the sentences and Grumble would repeat them sonorously, in an actor’s voice. Sam liked the big, rolling language. He also like some of the stories of the Old Testament, but others seemed strange to him. “I don’t know why I should like a story about Abraham putting his son on an altar and getting ready to drive a knife into his heart.”

  “A story about obedience,” said Grumble.

  “I don’t think much of that either,” said Sam.

  “No mountain man would,” said Grumble. “Nor any con man.”

  On another Saturday Sam read about how the pharaoh’s daughter found Moses in a basket in the bulrushes and saved the child. “Some stories are more like children’s fantasies,” said Sam.

  “You’re becoming a wise man,” said Grumble.

  “And I hate this thing about Samson. He’s strong—he can pull a whole building down. So how can a woman make him weak by cutting his hair?”

  “Maybe it’s not the hair, it’s the larger situation, involvement with a woman. Submission to a woman.”

  Sam shrugged. “Meadowlark didn’t do that to me.” Neither of them said anything about Paloma.

  When Grumble read the Psalms to him, Sam just floated along on the language. He liked the way words turned into a sort of music.

  Another Saturday Sam told Grumble, “I don’t get it about Jesus of Nazareth.”

  Grumble arched an eyebrow at him. “No?”

  “He strikes me as a sort of pale, holy kind of guy who doesn’t know how to enjoy life.”

  “I’m glad to see you enjoying life again.”

  “Sometimes Jesus reminds me of one part of Jedediah, all serious and no fun.” Sam threw Grumble a grin. “Without the part of Jedediah who can go longer and harder than the toughest, who can lead men anywhere.”

  “Your Captain Smith is a remarkable man.” Sam had the impression that “remarkable” carried two or three meanings. Maybe one of them was that Jedediah, yes, was tough, and maybe a little crazy.

  The cherub smiled now and said, “Think about it, though. What could require more toughness than the Cross? And it’s a great idea, that a God would suffer what mortals do, death, in order to give us what is immortal.”

  Sam held the thought for a moment and shrugged.

  With Hannibal Sam read aloud verses of Lord Byron’s that Hannibal had marked:

  Maid of Athens, ere we part,

  Give, oh give me back my heart!

  “You could smoke the pipe and ask Meadowlark for your heart back.”

  Sam chuckled.

  “Or does Paloma have it now?”

/>   Sam gave his friend the evil eye.

  Hannibal took the volume and read,

  I live not in myself, but I become

  Portion of that around me: and to me

  High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

  Of human cities torture.

  “‘Become portion of that around me,’” Sam said. “I felt something like that once.”

  Hannibal nodded.

  “When Coy and I hid inside the buffalo cow and she saved us from the fire. Felt it strong.”

  “You are Joins with Buffalo,” Hannibal said. He handed the book back to Sam.

  I stood

  Among them, but not of them; in a shroud

  Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

  “You feel like that?” said Sam.

  “All the time,” said Hannibal.

  “Me too.”

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

  There is society, where none intrudes,

  By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

  I love not man the less, but Nature more.

  Sam took a breath and let it out. Coy squealed at him. “I felt that from the start. That’s what I felt every time Dad and I went into Eden.”

  Hannibal made a sympathetic noise.

  “The ocean, though, to me that means Meadowlark dying. She wanted to see it, she loved it, and it killed her. That’s how it feels to me.”

  “Life is lived holding hands with death,” said Hannibal.

  “Is that a quotation of somebody famous?”

  “Probably,” said Hannibal.

  Sam thought awhile, or sat in a place beyond thought, and went back to reading:

  What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,

  Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.

  “We need some sultriness,” said Hannibal, “here in the Santa Fe winter.”

  “I got some.” Sam grinned.

  Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

  Sermons and soda water the day after.