They saw lizards and jackrabbits, glimpsed a coyote, watched as a crested bird with a long tail pursued some hapless insect through the cactus. As the land climbed, the sparse desert growth yielded to dwarf walnut and desert willow while pine and juniper, live oak and thick coarse grass grew along the mountain slopes. There were whitetail deer, squirrels and chipmunk, and Rachel cried out in delight at a graceful straight-horned kind of antelope with black markings on its face.
They had been rationing their water for days, but it was now almost gone. They were always thirsty.
“The animals must drink somewhere,” Rachel said.
“Yes, but only they know where,” said Matt. “It can’t be far to the river now.”
The Rio Grande, a name she had only heard, a foreign name. She shivered in spite of her dry throat, gazing around at the vast silent country. It was hard to believe that human beings, even Indians, had ever been there, and passed through that tortuous landscape.
On the eighth day from the Pecos, Matt woke Rachel early. They shared a cup of coffee he had already made, chewed a little bread.
“We have to keep going tonight,” he said. “The horses can’t last much longer without water.”
The sun gleamed purple, rose and gold off a carved range of flat-topped mountains to their left as they moved into low flats that seemed to stretch south to infinity and west to hills capped by natural fortresses like those they had ridden among.
A snake raced in front of them with startling speed, disappearing among the tumbled rocks. Lady shied. Rachel quieted her but could not still the revulsion that scaly diamond-patterned creature, slithering on its belly, had aroused in her.
Cursed be the earth for thy sake …
She stared at the parched, tortured land, overgrown with thorns, and in her mind she saw the black rich earth of Gloryoak. Thy brother’s blood cried to me from the ground.
Brother’s and husband’s blood. Rachel groaned inwardly, recalling that plea of the first murderer. My punishment is greater than I can bear.
But she must bear it or die. There was no going back to the moment when she could have stayed at Gloryoak. Now there was only this desert, shimmering, shifting distances, far-off purples colored by light that turned, as one neared them, into barren earth and stone.
But just ahead! A hint of green? Senses alerted, Rachel scanned the horizon. Beyond the monotonous grays and blue-greens of scattered desert moisture-suckers rose fresh bright forest green.
She turned her head and her cracked lips moved. “A tree!”
Matthew nodded.
They rode toward the tree, the horses moving faster, scenting water, and half an hour later, beneath the gaze of an astonished beaver, Storm and the little mare stood in the Rio Grande, drinking its waters, while upstream, Matt and Rachel sank their faces and drank.
They splashed themselves, laughing, drinking again and again, then fetched the horses to keep them from foundering. The grass on the bank grew thick and green, and the horses settled into it while Matt and Rachel, wet with the Rio’s waters, looked about them.
The great-trunked, luxuriantly fronded, giant mesquite that had signaled across the flats knotted its thirsty roots in a small stone cliff above the river, which curved back, rising in height, to bluffs following the water, bordered by rushes, grass and trees.
On the Mexican side, a sheer granite wall formed one side of a canyon through which the river ran, but this wall ended abruptly a short distance to the east, so at that point, the river looked easy to ford.
Round holes, perhaps made by wind and rain, pitted the great stone barrier. It seemed impossible that people could have lived in them, yet indentations led to some of the caves, scored with a regularity that made them seem like footholds.
Rachel’s wondering gaze followed Matt’s to a huge, angular collection of sticks and limbs jutting from one of the upper caverns.
From even higher above came a raucous scream. Out of the burning, cloudless blue hurtled an eagle, dropping on something out of sight along the towering cliff. In a moment the great bird reappeared, a rabbit in its claws, heading for the haphazard nest on the cave’s edge.
“It’s not the time of year for young eaglets,” Matthew said. His eyes reflected the wild sky, lingered on the gold gleaming bird, passed to the ford crossing into Mexico.
Shrinking against the tree, Rachel gripped the rough bark to hold back a pleading cry. They mustn’t enter another country, wander in other deserts, or go without food and water until their skin dried on their bones! Yet if Matt went, she would have to follow. Even if she could have hoped to stay on alone, and live, she would have to go with him. This man commanded her life. Or death, if it came to that.
Could they love each other again? Could they live, here on this river, so far from home? She was asking all these things when she called to him across the little space, “Is this far enough, Matthew? Is it far enough?”
He slowly turned to her. “We’ll stay here,” he said. But he could not answer her deeper question.
They stayed a week by the river, taking shelter under a half-cave in the bluff, their blankets spread on limbs covered with rushes. Exploring their side of the river, Rachel found a warm spring filling a rock hollow not far from their camp. Here she bathed, washed her hair and scrubbed hers and Matt’s travel-stained garments.
They barely spoke, they didn’t lie in each other’s arms and Matthew wouldn’t really look at her. That day he had taken her after killing the bandits must have been the flow of life asserting itself after a brush with death.
The horses’ gaunt frames filled out with lush graze and rest. Matt shot a wild pig. Its flesh was strong and flavorful.
“Where shall we have our house?” she asked Matt one morning as they ate quail and bread from the last of their flour.
“This is too close to the river,” he said. “Indians and outlaws from both sides must come this way.”
“We haven’t seen anyone since—since those men.”
“One meeting with that kind’s enough,” he answered dryly. “Remember, we followed the Comanche Trail. They go down it only once a year, but it’s best not to be on that route.”
She remembered the hidden folds of the Chisos through which they had passed, and shuddered. Somehow, being near a river, even this boundary between two wild regions, gave her a feeling of being closer to people, for in dry country people came to water just as she and Matt had done.
And Comanches? Outlaws?
“If you find water,” she asked, “then what?”
He frowned. “This is no place to raise cotton. Once we have some kind of roof over our heads, I’ll get some cattle. Fattened up, they should sell at Fort Davis.”
“How will you buy cattle? We can’t have much of Tante’s money left.”
“I can hire out for a while to some Mexican rancher, take my pay in cattle.”
All through their conversation he looked past her, across the river, his tone as remote as his gaze. Rachel got to her feet. “And what shall I do while you’re earning cattle? Stay at this water hole you hope to find back in those awful mountains?”
“It would be the best thing.” He still wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’d shoot plenty of meat for you before I left and cure it so it would keep.”
“What if you don’t come back?”
“Rachel, life out here is one big chance, whatever we do!”
“Matthew, look at me.”
He did not. But the line of his jaw hardened and a pulse throbbed at his temple.
“That’s what I mean,” she said in a dying voice. “Oh, Matt, if you can’t even look at me, how can we live? Here, Mexico, anywhere? Why didn’t you let the bandits have me?”
His eyes came to her then, so tortured that she flinched, wished her words back. “We’ll live,” he vowed. “I’ll cover your life with mine, as I’d put my cloak over your body. But what else will happen is past my knowing.” And she dared not try to force herself into his arms.
VIII
The old coyote still had all the cunning that had kept him alive in these mountains for so long. His gray-yellow coat blended with catclaw and earth as he waited near the water for the creatures he knew would come to drink there.
He’d made the little well himself, digging several feet into the sandy earth to free water seeping down from a cleft in the towering rocks above. Here he could drink, and also eat, as the small bones scattered about testified.
Two field mice scurried forward with the speed of creatures whose lives depended on eluding the swoop of birds or pounce of beasts. The old coyote had one in a spring and a flash of teeth. The other shot into a clump of prickly pear where it had its nest, protected from the coyote and others of his soft-nosed kind.
One mouse was not enough. The coyote lolled back to wait. Suddenly, his ears pricked. Something was coming. Something with a strange strong odor he did not recognize. He moved deeper into the catclaw and waited to see whether he could eat this strange thing or whether he must flee it.
Guadalupe’s breasts had dried up, so though her child tugged at her nipples till she could have screamed from the pain, he got no milk. He’d wailed with hunger and thirst, poor little thing, till she’d almost left him in order not to have to hear him or watch him die. Only the stubborn hope she might find water had kept her moving.
Today, she crawled more than walked, the two-year-old slung behind her in her shawl. His tiny bones must be as hollow as a bird’s. He was in a stupor that was surely next to death, and if he died, she’d lie down with him cradled at her breast, and Mary Mother would be merciful to them, though people had not been.
She was from the village of San Ysidro, on the Rio Grande, one of several river villages that had immunity from Comanche raids in return for hospitality and trading guns and ammunition for stolen mules and livestock.
Such places were hated by ranches and settlements which suffered the annual Comanche scourge, and they considered the people of San Ysidro traitors. Ten days ago, San Ysidro awoke to knives, fire and slaughter. A force of men from southern ranches and towns, most of them mounted on horses marked with Don Celestino Cantú’s Tres Coronas brand, had destroyed the little river village and every living thing in it, even the dogs and chickens.
Only Guadalupe and her small son, through the irony of being outcasts, had survived. Juanito was a beautiful little baby, though he had been sired by a Comanche autumn before last, a warrior who’d found Guadalupe bathing in the river and took her in a manner savage as he was.
Guadalupe’s parents were dead, and when her body began to swell and she told the old aunt with whom she lived how it had happened, she hadn’t been believed. Women would not speak to her. Men made signs and accosted her till she wouldn’t go out except to visit the church and pray, early in the morning, before the village was awake. For San Ysidro had a church with a fine bell from Chihuahua, though a priest seldom traveled to the isolated village.
At first Lupe had prayed for the people she’d known all her life to be kind to her again; then she’d prayed for the baby to be stillborn, and after he came, so lovely and perfect that her sad heart smiled to see him, she began to ask the Virgin’s help to leave the village and journey to some new place where she could bring up little Juan in peace.
That had been her prayer on the morning the raiders came. She’d hidden in the confessional, at first thinking the horsemen bandits or Apaches, but then she heard shouts in Spanish, taunts of the men from the south and the useless pleas and screams of the people of San Ysidro.
Because of the early hour, no one even looked in the church. When the attackers were gone, driving cattle and horses laden with everything of value, Guadalupe crept out of the church.
A horrid stench came from a pile of blackening corpses burning in the center of the village. Most had been stripped so that old and young, male and female, lay twisted together as if blown there by a terrible wind. Dogs, cats and chickens sprawled among the broken bodies. Guadalupe’s old aunt lay across the threshold of her one-room adobe house, naked, one arm lopped off. Guadalupe choked back nausea. Her aunt had treated her like a drudge, but to die like this … Closing her aunt’s staring eyes, Lupe dragged the body inside the hut, covering it with their old straw sleeping mats.
Crossing herself, Guadalupe moved on, peering in each house. No one lived. When the Comanches stopped here in the autumn they would find ruin worse than they were used to spreading. It would not go well, next Comanche moon, with those brave men of the ranches and towns who had plundered San Ysidro.
Guadalupe went back to the church and gave Juan her breast while she tried to think. She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t try to shelter with those who’d killed her people or hope to make her way to a large place like Chihuahua or Durango. If thirst, hunger or Indians didn’t kill her, bandits surely would.
But she could go over the Rio Grande to search in the mountains for a sheltered place where she could raise little Juan. Some Texans had once stopped to eat and drink in San Ysidro and they had paid silver money and done no harm. They were said to have horns, but she’d glimpsed none, and even if there were Texans in the mountains, they couldn’t kill her deader than the men of the south had killed those of San Ysidro.
She hunted till she found a little corn the raiders had missed or scorned, dragged a smoldering but reasonably good serape from a body that had rolled a little way from the pyre and hunted through the houses again till she found a goatskin water bag. There was nothing else left of any use. The raiders had taken blankets and clothing, smashed furniture and pottery, destroyed what they could not carry.
“I can’t take you to a worse place,” she told Juan, balancing him in a sling made of her shawl.
At the Rio, she filled the water bag, and though the taste of goat grew stronger as she traveled north, and she held her teeth together to strain out the hair as she drank, the water kept her alive and she blessed it.
She was hungry but in no danger of starving. She ate the smallest, most tender pads of prickly pear, and twice she made a hole in the earth, lined it with stones and made a fire in the Apache way her people knew, whirling the point of chaparro prieto in the dried bloom stalk of a sotol till it burst into flames. When the earth oven was hot, she trimmed the heart of a sotol from its stalk with a sharp stone, then covered it with more hot stones, and let it bake overnight.
Once, she spotted large black honey ants and followed them to their nest where the workers deposited sweet juice secreted by gall wasps in the crops of storage ants who hung from the top of their chambers, too swollen with honey to move. She dug out many of these tiny storehouses and ate them, squeezing some of their juice into little Juan’s mouth.
But water was giving out, and when she could not drink, she could make no milk for the baby. She was a week from the Rio, apparently far from any help, and now she couldn’t find her way back to the river where at least there was water.
One gorge looked like another, and it seemed she had been down all of them, but she found no charco or tinaja, no creek or river, though she followed two dry streambeds for miles to find their sources dried up, as were the dirt or rock-bottomed holes which rains would turn into ponds.
But she must find water while she could still move or they would die. She threw away the useless water bag because of its weight, half-crawled along a ravine, found that it opened into a high, broad valley rimmed with peaked red sentinel cliffs.
She hadn’t been here. She would have remembered such good grass stretching for miles between the jagged walls. Water was more likely to be near the rocks. Painfully, she made her way along the cliff, but the dull red granite was dry as dead fire. No damp showed anywhere.
Then she heard the sharp, quick-stifled cry of some creature, saw a yellow-gray flurry of motion subside into the brush, the glint of sun on water.
That gave her strength. A few minutes later, she fell by the coyote’s pool, sprinkling her baby’s parched face and mouth wi
th the cool miraculous water, sipping it herself, not minding the sand she got with it.
“Juanito! Juanito!” she croaked as he stirred and sucked toward the water she dribbled from her fingers into his mouth. “We will live! With water, we shall live!”
The coyote trotted away. No thirsty prey would visit the pool while that strange creature splashed about. He must fill his belly someplace else.
All Lupe did that day was rest and rejoice in the water, though she was careful to sip slowly, not too much at one time. A tree had fallen near the pool, and under its bark she found slugs and ants, which gave her food without effort. Her milk began to come back, responding to little Juan’s tugging, which grew stronger as he drew in nourishment.
She was very lucky! The Virgin must have listened and guided her to this tiny, precious pool, which replenished itself from some underground seepage; there was no fear of it going dry since it held water even during this season of no rain.
If this was the only water hereabouts, there must be other thirsty creatures. Lupe found a half-cave under the bluff, where powdered dust was warmed by the sun, and she drowsed there with her baby in her arms, in between trips to the pool.
Sometimes she heard a sound and opened her eyes to see dainty pronghorn water. Squirrels came, chipmunks. rabbits. foxes both red and gray, and once she saw the sharpnosed black mask of a racoon. Tomorrow she might set snares to add meat to her food, but on this day she was content to sleep on the age-old dust and now and then glimpse the animals who shared this wild place with her and lived from the pool’s refreshing waters.
As the sun dropped behind red pinnacles, turning the opposite clifls a glowing gold, Guadalupe gathered bunches of long grass and made a nest for herself and Juan where the rocks of the cave would hold their sun heat longest, for mountain desert nights were cold. After a last drink, she cuddled Juan close, settled in the grass bed. and pulled serape and shawl about them as best she could, covering them over with more grass.
A Woman Clothed in Sun Page 11