Liliana stood in the doorway. Her flat face showed no emotion. In her arms was an antique musket.
Mattie’s heart jumped up to her throat. After all she had been through at the merciless hands of the Netdahe squaws, she could not imagine dying at the hands of this Tarahumara Indian woman.
“I go,” Liliana said. “I go. You go. We go.”
Mattie tried to hold back her rising smile. She certainly wasn’t going to argue with a musket. “We go.”
Shouldering the saddlebags, she scooted past the Indian woman. Albert was not next door, but the room was empty of possessions. Hoping that he was already at the stables, she headed in that direction. She took a moment to lower the heavy bar across the courtyard gates behind her and the Indian woman.
Albert was already at the stables and mounted, as were Gordon and Bingham, along with their hostage, Colonel Morales. His hands were tied behind his back. “My men will find you and kill you in ways more hideous than any Apache could devise,” he said.
“I doubt that,” Mattie replied, swinging up into the saddle of her horse.
“Let’s get out of here!” Bingham said. Nervously, he kept looking toward the courtyard. She, too, was expecting the soldiers to beat down its wooden gates.
Mattie gestured at Liliana. “She wants to go with us.”
Gordon stared from her to the Indian woman and back to her. “Any more join us, and we could form our own parade. It would announce our presence in the Sierras to Nantez better than any trumpet herald.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” Bingham said and spit a wad of juice into the straw strewn across the stable floor. “Letting the woman go with us. The Tarahumaras and the Yaquis know the Barranca del Cobre better than the Apaches.”
The woman must have understood that Bingham was on her side because she grinned broadly.
“What Bingham says is true,” Mattie said.
“Get her a horse then,” Gordon told Albert.
But when Albert opened the door to one of the stalls, the old woman shook her head. “I go. I go.”
“I think she means she wants to walk,” Mattie said. “Walk?” Gordon repeated in dismay.
“Aye.” Mattie had come to learn that the Tarahumaras, hardy survivors of the pre-Spanish era, were known as ‘the running people.’ “The Tarahumaras compete in races called rarajipari. It’s sort of like several Greek marathons strung together. I have heard the Apache tell stories of watching Tarahumaras chase a deer until it collapsed and then finish it off with poisoned arrows or stones.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Bingham said again and kneed his mount.
“Where to?” Mattie asked once they were outside the compound.
“Ask the Indian woman,” Gordon told her.
In Spanish, she asked Liliana if she knew where in the Barranca del Cobre the Apaches lived.
The old woman grunted. “Lugar del Aguilucho.”
“Place of the Eagles,” she translated for Gordon.
“Does that ring a bell with you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I think that’s down river from a Tarahumara hamlet on the Rio Cusarare,” Bingham said.
“Cusarare!” the woman said, a happy expression carved briefly into her face.
“The woman must be from there,” Gordon said. He pulled back on the reins of his horse until he was even with the preacher. “How far is this Place of the Eagles?”
“From Tres Amigos?” Bingham fingered his beard. “After all these years, it’s hard to recall. Maybe fifty miles as the crow flies.”
“In this rock-jumbled land that could mean as much as three days by horseback or even more,” Gordon said.
“Aye,” Mattie said, “if that first day spent descending into a single canyon was anything to measure by.”
By tacit agreement, they rode throughout the hours of darkness. With only a sliver of a moon to light the way, the going was slow and tedious. Morales maintained a furious silence.
Mattie swayed sleepily in the saddle. Fortunately, the sure-footed horses seemed to know instinctively where to place their hooves.
Ahead of her, Colonel Morales still sat ramrod straight. But so did Gordon. No further attention was needed at the moment. Mattie let herself doze off.
Toward dawn, a thickening mist made further travel impossible. Gordon called a halt. “Ask Liliana if she has any idea where we are,” he told her.
She repeated the question in Spanish, but Liliana shook her head. Because of the fog, identification of a locale was like looking for a gnat on a burro’s rump. There was nothing to do but bed down for the remaining hours of darkness.
While Albert hobbled the mounts, the others stretched out bedrolls. Bingham removed his saddle blanket and offered it to Liliana for a bedroll. The thick woolen pad was rank, but Liliana took it and, wordlessly, lay down on it.
“Morales sleeps between you and me,” Gordon told Bingham with a meaningful glance at the officer. “We don’t want him to sleepwalk, do we?”
Bingham shook out his bedroll. “If he does, he better offer up a prayer to the Almighty first.”
“Mother,” Albert said, holding up Morales’ saddlebags. “Look!” He fished out a bottle from one side.
“Gin!” Gordon said. “To warm the soul!”
“Set the soul on fire,” Bingham muttered.
Not far from Gordon, she and Albert stretched out on the hard ground. She could feel the cold air penetrating her blanket. She should sleep, but thoughts and images and longings kept her awake. Every so often, she would shift her hips. She told herself it was her rocky bed that made her uncomfortable, but her continued squirming, she suspected, was a telltale sign of something more: the wanting of Gordon.
This wanting was relentless. Always within her, always prickling her. It was a physical thing. It was an emotional thing. It was everything.
There was something about Gordon that revealed to her another dimension of herself. A better self. Because of him she had great longing—and great fear—but she felt more alive than ever. He was her sustenance; she wanted to taste him until exhaustion set in.
At last she fled the disturbing thoughts and images through sleep. A sleep that was far too short and interrupted by shouts and gunfire.
Instantly, she sprang upright. A ghostly form moved past her and Albert. She lunged for it, missed. Before she could scramble to her feet, the sound of horse’s hooves hitting rock punctured her murky consciousness.
“Morales!” It was Gordon’s voice she heard. “He’s gotten away!” Gordon’s tall form coalesced in her vision briefly and then as quickly dispersed as he streaked past her in pursuit.
“I’m hit!”
She identified Bingham’s voice.
“Mama?”
“Albert, ye are all right?”
“Yes.” But he huddled closer to her.
“Wait here.” On hands and knees, she searched through the miasma, like a blind man, by feel. Here a jagged rock that pierced her palm; there a tuft of dew-damp beargrass thrusting between a fissure in the rocks, another place where a tiny prickly cactus thrust its spiny ridge into her left knee.
Bingham’s pained breathing guided her. She reached his boot, moved forward until she could see his face. His agony was reflected in the rigid lines of his craggy features. “My ribs.” He grunted. “They’re busted by a bullet. From my own pistol. Morales stole it on his way out.”
She felt along his torso until her probing elicited a sharp groan. “Good.”
“Good!” His anger was weakened by his moan. “You are the devil’s worker.”
“Save your breath, Bingham, to torture those pure souls who believe in your hellfire and damnation. The bullet ye’ve taken is on your right side. Ye don’t appear to be doing a lot of bleeding. Ye’ll likely make it. Barring infection.”
Behind her, she heard footsteps. Gordon’s. “The man got away, but not with all our horses,” he said.
“Good riddance,” Bingham
muttered.
“Morales has served his purpose—a safe conduct out of Tres Amigos.”
“Can ye fetch me medicine pouch from me saddlebags, Halpern?”
“Don’t touch me with those harlot’s hands, gal,” Bingham said.
“Ye’re not in a position to do much about it, are ye now? Think about it! At last, I can take me retribution for all your worrying and worting of meself.”
At his groan, she couldn’t keep from chuckling. Fate worked so grandly, coming in full circle as it always did. She was relieved that no blood spittled his lips, though. That would have been a sure sign of punctured lungs.
By now, the rising sun was burning the fog away. Only wreaths of it drifted through the campsite. “Can ye start a fire?” she asked Liliana in Spanish. The young woman simply stared at her.
Mattie didn’t have the patience to deal with her. “Albert, gather some twigs and cedar bark for a fire.”
Gordon returned with her pouch. After sifting through its contents, she said, “I don’t have all that I need to treat a wound like that.”
He, too, stared at her blankly. Then he said, “Any suggestions? I imagine the nearest field hospital is quite a walk.”
She turned to the Indian woman. “Stay.” She nudged her to sit beside the preacher, who eyed Mattie with bitter-bright eyes. She knew he had to feel a rage at his own dependency on her. And he didn’t take kindly to Indians, as she well knew. “We’ll be back shortly,” she told him.
His dry lips tightened over his bared teeth. He had to be in a lot of pain. “To do your devilish deed, eh?” She ignored him and turned back to Gordon. “You can help me.”
She saw a smile lurking beneath his mustache, which was undoubtedly prompted by her autocratic manner. But he followed her into the fading mist. By the wan sunlight, they set out to scour the bare ground for specific herbs.
“Nettles?” Gordon asked her, groping through bristly underbrush clinging to a slope.
“For bleeding.” On her backside, she was scooting ahead of him down a pine-stubbled embankment. Pebbles he dislodged tumbled down to ping against her back.
Closer to the bottom, the stubbly trees were more numerous. “And fir boughs,” she added trying to reach one.
Being much taller than she, he reached and yanked at a coniferous limb overhead. “For what?”
“Inflammation.” She was able to stand upright now. “A frog, too.”
“A what!”
Over her shoulder, she grinned at him. “I don’t know. The old shaman of the Netdahes insisted upon its addition.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“That arroyo at the bottom, we might get lucky and find a frog there.”
She could feel his gaze upon her as she stooped to feel along its stony sides for gouges where a frog might retreat. No such luck.
He was hunkered down next to her. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before. “You are truly amazing.”
She felt nervous. And breathless at the same time. “We’ll have to resort to a pinch of hemlock in place of a frog.”
She was afraid he might kiss her again. She wanted him to kiss her again. She sprang to her feet. “I can grind and boil all this together.”
She hurried ahead of him back to the makeshift camp. Behind her, she could hear his heavy step. A part of her said she could turn back, recapture that lost moment. Another part of her warned that Bingham needed her care immediately.
Except for Albert, who hunkered over the fire he was building, Bingham was alone. As she had half-expected. “Where’s the Indian woman?” she asked her son.
He shrugged. “When I returned, she was gone.”
Apparently, Liliana had taken the opportunity to strike out in search of her own people.
The fire-blackened tin coffee pot served as Mattie’s cauldron. When the poultice was ready, she bent over Bingham. A sheen of sweat across his broad forehead indicated he was already feverish. “The bullet needs to be removed. Do ye understand?
He only nodded. Those gray eyes looked as lifeless as ashes.
She unsheathed her knife from its resting place at her thigh and passed it to Gordon. “Hold it over the fire until it is blackened, then wipe the blade so that it shines like silver.”
While Gordon fired the knife blade, she and Albert stripped Bingham—not without a rounded volley of curses on his part—of his outer shirt and an inner woolen one, which was stiff with sweat and dirt.
When she was ready, Gordon passed her the knife. “You know what you are doing?” he asked.
“She damn well better know!” Bingham growled.
“Give him some gin, Halpern.”
After Gordon left to retrieve the gin bottle, Bingham fixed her with an eagle’s eye. “Why are you doing this, gal? Why are you rendering me aid?”
“You’re one of God’s creatures, are ye not now?”
“After all I did to you?”
“Why, ye didn’t do anything to me that I didn’t let ye. I did it all to meself, don’t ye see?”
He was looking at her, and at the same time staring past her. All at once, the sunlight scattered the remnants of fog. It was as if both he and she were given insight. Into themselves. Into their fellow creatures. “How did we allow this to happen?” he muttered.
From behind her, Gordon nudged her with the bottle of gin. She passed it along to Bingham. “We believed it,” she said. “We allowed ourselves to believe what others said and thought.”
He swallowed a wee draught, then another. “Get on with it.”
She made the first insertion with the knife. He flinched, his shoulder jerked. “Hold him, Halpern.”
Gordon knelt above the preacher’s shoulders and braced them. “Take another deep swig, Bingham.”
The man did so, then focused his slightly glazed eyes on her. “It wasn’t you I hated, Mattie. It was myself. I hated what I thought I had become. The worst of sinners.”
She noted he had called her by her given name. It was a first. “An illusion, the Apaches say, Bingham. The ghost of our dark side.”
She made a deep incision. Her knife grated against either bone or bullet, she wasn’t sure which. It sounded to her as if Bingham sighed. She glanced at his face. He had passed out.
She felt squeamish herself. A little more probing, and she determined she had located the bullet. Her fingers squished in the pulpy tissue of his flesh and retrieved the deadly piece of metal. “The poultice,” she said to Gordon and realized her voice sounded faint in her ears.
Before he could hand it to her, she felt herself falling from a great height. Sliding into an abyss. Her last recollection was slumping over Bingham’s inert body and hearing her son’s fearful outcry.
When she came to, she was lying once again on her bedroll. Bingham was stretched out on the far side of the fire. He was alternately singing a lewd ditty and muttering Bible verses. His wound had been covered in a makeshift bandage of strips of fine linen.
Albert squatted Indian fashion beside her. His full lower lip was pressed flat. She knew he was worried. He had never seen her demonstrate physical weakness. In all of Nantez’s blows, she may have fallen or reeled, but she always got back up or regained her balance.
She raised upon her elbows. Her blouse fell open, revealing the valley between her breasts. Her fingers flew to the buttons. “What happened?”
“You fainted,” Gordon said from somewhere beyond her vision. “I took the liberty of relieving you of some of your uhh . . . constraints.”
“What the hell does that mean, Halpern?”
He came into her view. “I made it easier for you to breathe, damnit, Mattie. I didn’t know what else to do. I certainly wasn’t going to take advantage of you, not with your son sitting here guarding you like a Wells Fargo agent does a strongbox.”
At that she had to smile. She had a fleeting sense of feeling cherished. She glanced over at Bingham. “How is our patient doing?”
Gordon frowned. “All rig
ht for now. But we’ll never get him down and up canyon walls. Not in that condition.”
She thought for a moment. “Liliana’s people. The Tarahumaras. They can’t be too far—their village is on the Cusarare, Bingham said. At the head of the canyon. They could take him in. With Albert to stay with him, he will do fine until we can return. We should be back this way within a week at the most. By then, he should be fully mended.”
The solution had come more easily than its actual accomplishment would. Mattie had liberally dosed Bingham with a quantity of mountain tea—white root, water brier, and unkum root. At Gordon’s suggestion, she had added a liberal dose of the gin.
With jauntily delirious Bingham strapped to a litter pulled by the pack mule, the trip to the village on the Cusarare took half the morning. They wanted to jar him as little as possible, so the mysterious, challenging territory made travel slow.
Vultures and bald eagles were drawing high, lazy circles in the hot, blue sky by the time she and Gordon crossed a wooden footbridge over deep green pools. Birds twittered in jade green trees. An iguana, reminiscent of the prehistoric past, slithered away in underbrush.
They followed a creek to where Tarahumara Indian women were scrubbing laundry in the shade of orange trees. They were so shy they didn’t look at her and her companions as they passed by. But the Tarahumaras’ tittering could be heard, light as the mountain air.
The sojourners came to a halt in a dusty, rough-edged little village. It was a cluster of wooden huts with corn drying on their roofs in the sun. Besides corn, beans and squash as well as worms and insects served as diet for the hardy people.
The village was dominated by a seventeenth-century Jesuit mission. Its tumbled-down, deep-ochre walls were still graced here and there by a candle, a garland of flowers, amber beads, and other articles that testified to its continued, although maybe occasional, use by converted Tarahumaras.
The travelers’ arrival must have already been communicated somehow, because Liliana stepped out from one of the huts’ shadowed doorways.
Mattie gestured at Bingham. “Can he and my son remain with you for a week?” she asked in Spanish. “We will pay you to care for them.”
Tame the Wildest Heart Page 15