She could live in this valley as long as she wished. It was off the river, unlikely to be traveled by marauders And if wild creatures were to be her only company apart from Juanito, at least they didn’t care who his father was!
No longer driven by the need to find water, she crooned a bit to little Juan, and slept in more comfort than she had known since her village died and more peace than she had felt in months.
She woke with the sun in her eyes, a crunching sound in her ears. As she sat up, clutching her startled baby, a tall shape loomed between her and the sun, casting shadow over the two of them.
A man! With gray Norteño eyes and black hair with a gleam of red. She had never seen anyone so tall. He held a pistol, and a carbine was in the scabbard of the saddle on the big grulla drinking at the pool.
The man’s face did not seem threatening, nor did his voice, when he spoke softly in a language she couldn’t understand. But when he pointed across the mountains, then at her and his horse, raising his eyebrows, she shrank away, shaking her head. He must be saying he could take her home, across the mountains she had traversed so painfully.
“No,” she said. “No!” And he understood. It was one word that meant the same in both tongues.
He shrugged, went to his horse and from the saddlebag got some smoked meat, which he put down on a boulder near Lupe.
Then, speaking slowly, he gestured that he would be back, and turned his horse. Her heart was beating fast as she watched him ride out of the passage to the valley.
Leave the water? Hide? She could not! But suppose he were evil? Suppose he brought back other men and they did with her as the Comanche had? Or as the men of the southern ranches had done in San Ysidro?
She thought of his gray-blue eyes, his long straight mouth. The memory reassured her, though he was too stern to be handsome.
Did he ever smile? Surely, had he meant her harm, he would not have given her meat, or spoken gently, or moved with quiet care, as one approaches a wild bird or animal.
She went to the spring to drink, then sat on the boulder and chewed hungrily at the cured strong-flavored javelina meat, as Juanito suckled eagerly. It was time he was weaned, and she gave him a bit of the meat.
Sun warmed the crisp air as Lupe stretched and yawned.
It wouldn’t do to be lazy. The big stranger might not come back, or if he did, it might be some days. She must collect food and make some kind of shelter. But first she washed herself and her hair.
IX
When Matthew and Rachel rode through the jagged defile into the valley, Rachel watched for the girl of whom he had told her, with expectancy and foreboding.
What would this first human be to them? What was a girl doing alone in this wild place, with a small child?
There was good grass here, brownish yellow, and trees in the towering red cliffs that enclosed the meadow, while higher mountains rose beyond but lapsed from sight as they rode further into the green basin. Matthew stopped and moved his head to the left.
Rachel followed his gaze. There in a cavelike hollow of the bluff was some thatched kind of shelter, a slanting roof of limbs, stalks and grass supported on one side by the cliff and on the other a heaped wall of rocks about eight feet long.
“She’s been busy,” Matthew said. “Yesterday all she had was a big grass nest. Look, there she is at the pool.”
Rachel peered at the young woman who had come to her feet in a swift, flowing motion, a toddler in the curve of her arm. A dark madonna, Rachel thought, glancing at Matthew with a stab of jealousy.
Any man must be struck by this girl’s soft lovely grace, her warm flesh, cloud of black hair, and dark, sad-looking eyes. Only the copper child nestled against her hinted that she was not as shy and tender as she looked—the child and that competent shelter in the cliff above.
The girl looked from Matthew to Rachel, evidently startled to see a woman. Disappointed, too? thought Rachel. But something in the way the young mother held her child stirred sympathy in Rachel, and she got down from her mare, smiled at the girl, and held out her arms for the baby. The girl smiled, too, shyly, bowing her head, then beckoned and turned to lead them to her camp.
But she didn’t give her child over to Rachel’s holding. She raked hot earth and rocks off a pit to reveal a smoking cabbagelike pulp, as any great lady might invite guests to a feast.
During the next week, Lupe taught Rachel many food secrets of the river people, using Matthew’s knife as a key to the thorn-armored treasures of the desert. In grease from the game Matthew shot, they fried pads of the prickly pear after the spines had been carefully scraped away.
Lupe showed Rachel how to cut the cabbagelike heart of the sotol and bake it in a rock pit till it was mealy and tasted rather like a sweet potato. Lupe also enjoyed chewing the stalk of the yucca cut from where the bottom leaves sprouted. Rachel tried it and found it rather like sugar cane.
As they spent time together, they learned words of each other’s language by acting out or pointing to things. To Rachel’s chagrin, Lupe seemed to remember best, or perhaps it was because Matt talked to her, too, and something in his deep voice imprinted the sounds he made.
Matt, having studied Latin like Rachel, knew many root words, and within a few weeks they could speak and be understood. Usually their conversations were part Spanish, part English, punctuated by gestures and laughter.
Reeling as if drunk, Lupe pointed to the sotol base and said, “Makes fire agua—water.” She touched a tall dull-green stalk. “Mescal makes crazy water, too.”
Matthew laughed across to Rachel. “I don’t think it’ll ever replace wine and brandy,” he said. “But spirits are useful to have around.”
This basin, Matt decided, was the best place to settle. For temporary living, he and Rachel made a shelter like Lupe’s at the other end of the semicave. Without any spoken agreement, it was accepted that the Mexican girl, for now at least, would be part of their household. There was no doubt that her knowledge of food plants and the country was as valuable as the meat Matt brought in, and Rachel won both Matt’s and Lupe’s startled respect by improvising a slingshot and bagging rabbits.
Besides the coyote’s pool, Matt found a stream, fed by several springs, running from a fissure between two sentinel cliffs at the western end of the broad valley. Digging as the coyote had, at damp places under the bluffs, he’d made two other pools, which promised to serve as water holes.
“There’s water here for cattle,” he told Rachel. “It’s far enough off the river not to be traveled much by bandits or Indians, and the grass is good. If the herd gets big, the overflow could graze on the higher slopes or spread toward the river.”
“Where will you get cattle?” Rachel asked.
“Cattle?” echoed Lupe, cradling little Juan.
Matt made horns and made a mooing sound. Lupe giggled.
“Vacas!” she said delightedly. “You—need vacas?”
Matt nodded. “I have no money—no pesos.”
She pointed south. “Many vacas—many!”
“No money for cows,” Matt said again.
Lupe’s teeth flashed. “Comanches no pesos.” She made a shooting motion of her long warm-skinned arms. “Comanches get vacas!”
“I’m no Comanche,” said Matt. He looked reprovingly at the girl, gesturing south. “Your people, Lupe! You want me to steal from them?”
“They kill—fire my town!” she spat.
Before, to explain why she and her baby were wandering alone, she had said her town was “dead.” Now, in broken English scattered with Spanish and gestures, she told her whole story, and though Rachel and Matt missed details, they understood the main burden, and that the men who had burned San Ysidro must live in extra fear now of the September Comanche raids, for the Indians would be angry to find their trading outlet and resting place destroyed.
Lupe glanced challengingly at Matthew’s pistol and rifle resting on a sheltered ledge of the camp.
“Take those,”
she said. “Go to Don Celestino Cantú. He pays pesos or cattle for you to kill Comanches—bandits. Don Celestino always need bravos—pistoleros!”
Matt’s eyes widened. “A paid killer,” he said. Then his gaze caught on Rachel’s who looked back at him. We’ve run to the end of the country, and what will you do now?
Matt turned to Lupe. “Where is this Don Celestino?”
“Cross Rio Grande. Go south. Keep Sierra del Carmen on your left but in sight, and you find Don Celestino at Tres Coronas.” She smiled. “And his vacas. Vacas Comanches steal in Mexican Moon.”
“Don Celestino burned your town?”
“Many horses wore his mark.”
“If he’s got men, why doesn’t he fight off the Comanches?”
Lupe shrugged, lifting Juanito so that he peered over her shoulder with bright black eyes. The sturdy boy was plump again, recovered from his ordeal of thirst and hunger.
“Don Celestino’s land big.” She made a wide circle with her arm. “Vaqueros one place, Comanches raid other place. Many Comanches. Too many to fight.”
“So every year they steal and kill and carry back slaves?” demanded Matt. “The Mexican government—soldiers, army—why don’t they stop Comanches?”
“Mexico City far from Rio Grande,” said Lupe. She looked up at Matt. “Your soldados—they stop Comanches?”
Matt had to laugh. “They try. So far with little luck.”
Rachel felt cold inside, not only because Matt and this girl laughed together as Rachel and he no longer could but because she felt as if they were stranded on a hostile planet where the inhabitants were barbarous, alien and deadly.
“If you get cattle, Matt,” she said slowly, “you’ll have to defend them from bandits from both sides of the Rio. And from the Comanches as well.”
“Apaches, too,” said Lupe. “Some live in the Chisos.”
Rachel made a despairing sound. Comanches once a year were bad enough, along with occasional bandits. But Apaches living almost as neighbors—
“Well, shall we live in Mexico, then?” Matt stared coldly at Rachel. “Or go back to East Texas?”
Rachel bowed her head. There was no safe place for them. Their love and Harry’s death decreed that. It was just, that they begin with nothing—only their lives —and go in fear, atoning for the dead man at Gloryoak.
As if he guessed her thoughts, Matt’s voice softened. “This is where we are, Rachel. Sometime, somewhere, we have to make a new start. This land is open. It can be our home.”
Or it will make us its own, our flesh its soil, she thought, but she raised her eyes to this man with whom she had fled across eight hundred miles and managed to smile.
“All right, Matthew. How shall we begin?”
“We’ll plant those few kernels of San Jacinto corn,” he said.
So that corn, descended from the ear Sam Houston had given his men at the defeat of Santa Anna, was the first food planted by man in that valley.
Matt killed a deer and javelina before he left and jerked the meat so it would last the women along with what Rachel could get with her slingshot and Lupe with her snares. Matt removed the deer hide with great care, cutting so the leg and neck openings could be sewed up tight and the skin shaped and sewn into a large bag, rather like the goatskin water bag Lupe had been forced to discard.
“I’ll leave either the pistol or the rifle,” he said.
“Leave us your big knife,” countered Lupe. “We can open sotol and mescal with it and skin rabbits.”
“How can I leave you without a weapon?”
“You’ll need yours,” Rachel said. “Most likely no one will find this valley, but if bad men do, they’d kill us anyway. One gun in our hands wouldn’t help.”
“I’d damage some of them with the knife,” vowed Lupe.
“And I might stun a few with my sling,” said Rachel laughing. “You shouldn’t worry about us, Matthew!”
Lupe’s exultant chuckle swelled her firm breasts under the coarse white blouse. “We here when you bring vacas—first vacas of many! You make great rancho here, Don Matthew! Greater than Don Celestino’s!”
When Matt was ready to leave, he stopped before Lupe. “You’ll help my wife?”
The girl nodded with fierce intensity. “Yes, Don Matthew. We are compañeras.”
“And I’ll help her and her baby,” Rachel said, with emphasis. Matt faced her in surprise, then laughed from his belly for the first time in months.
“By God, you mean that,” he said. “Kiss me, Rachel. Wish us luck!”
In their kiss, the old sweet desire flamed again. Her body went soft, molding to his. After a moment, Matthew stepped back, steadying Rachel, and said huskily, “I’ll be back! Nothing will keep me from coming back to you!”
He mounted his big gray horse and rode off. At the mouth of the valley, he turned to wave. The women watched until he was out of sight and then walked back in silence to the camp.
During the next few days, they made bricks for their growing house—mixing mud and dry grass, pressing it into wooden forms, letting the bricks dry in the sun, then stacking them into walls. Each day they worked from morning until early afternoon at this task, ate and rested and then did quiet work or gathered food.
It would be just one room to begin with, but others could be added. Even to Rachel, with her stifled memories of Gloryoak and Tristesse, the adobe walls seemed beautiful, the promise of a real home. In the adobe they could have a fireplace, windows of some kind, furniture. If Matthew brought back cattle and got an army contract, there would be cash, in time, to buy things they couldn’t make.
If Matthew brought back cattle.
If Matthew came back.
She forced the whisper away and sat down to sing to little Juan, letting him clasp her fingers. He was a handsome, well-formed child, his dark hair already covering his head, and he smiled back at Rachel, showing white fine teeth.
When would she have a baby? Was something wrong with her, or was it simply that she hadn’t been with a man at the right time? Matt hadn’t made love to her since the day they’d encountered the bandits. But now that they were settling down and making a home, surely he’d really become her husband. And when they had a baby, he’d have more to think about than the past no one could change.
Rachel and Lupe got along well. They sang and talked, learning more of the other’s language and ways. Every day the walls grew higher, and they added to their homemaking supplies. They tanned hides of the animals Matt had shot by covering them with a mixture of brains and horse dung. When this mixture leached off the hair, the hides were scraped with flints and hung to dry.
From clay they found at one end of the valley, they made bowls and plates and storage jars, firing them in hot coals. Rachel’s were awkward at first, but she quickly acquired a deft touch and soon was not ashamed to put her work beside Lupe’s.
Lupe showed Rachel the various plants that could be used for remedies—lechuguilla brewed as a tea for rheumatic pains, charcoal from mesquite wood for diarrhea, sunflower seeds to poultice sprains, prickly pear pulp on the forehead to ease headaches. Rachel had a few needles and some thread, but they used bone awls and sinews to lace the hides into blankets, for the nights were chill in spite of the warm days.
When Lupe visited her snares, Rachel stayed with the baby, working near the camp. One day she was sewing rabbit skins together when Lupe came hurrying up, tossed down a rabbit and cried, “Miel! Miel!”
Rachel shook her head, not comprehending.
Lupe touched her lips and smacked them. “Sweet. Very sweet.” She thought a moment and made a buzzing sound.
“Honey!” Rachel cried. “Lupe, how wonderful!”
They stored the rabbit in the adobe larder they’d built in a niche of the bluff where food could be safe from animals and got out the deerskin bag Matthew had fashioned. Lupe collected several dry cedar limbs, then held a green slow-burning one in their banked fire to use for lighting the other torches when the
y were near their prize.
Rachel took the bag, the fire limb and the dry ones while Lupe hoisted Juanito into his sling and led off down the valley.
Where the palisades closed, bees were coming in and out of a crevice in the rock, about ten feet above the ground.
Lupe put Juanito on a protected ledge some distance from the bees, warning him to stay there, and began piling rocks into crude steps until, on tiptoe, she could reach the crevice.
“The torches!” she called to Rachel. “And hand the bag where I can reach it. Have care for the bzzz’s!”
Rachel put the bag over a rock close to Lupe, lit two of the dry limbs from the green one, handed the first to the girl, and clambered up beside her.
“I put torch in cave, you keep smoke around us to keep bees off,” Lupe instructed. She held to the rock with one hand and stretched upward, thrusting her torch inside.
Through the smoke of her own torch, Rachel saw bees pour out in an angry whirring, but she moved the torch, acrid with resinous smoke, and the bees veered away. Lupe gave her torch to Rachel, got the deerskin bag, and clambered up, till only her small brown feet protruded from the cave.
Rachel flourished the torches to ward off the bees, lighting another when one began to burn down. The last torch was halfway gone when Lupe, wriggling and panting, gradually emerged. Clinging to the rocks with one hand, she eased the deerskin bag out of the cave and lowered it to Rachel.
Mussed and smeared with honey, Lupe slid to the ground and took the torch. “I’ll carry the bag and keep the smoke around it and me,” she said, “Por favor, take Juanito and go ahead! Plenty of miel is left for the bzzz’s, but they’re angry!”
Half an hour later, they were proudly back in camp with their treasure. They hung the bag from a tree and kept it covered with skins, with a wall of prickly pear stacked high enough to ward off any raiders.
“Don Matthew will have sweet now,” said Lupe, giving Juanito a taste from her finger.
She sounded innocently pleased but Rachel turned away, fighting a swift stab of jealousy. Lupe was lissome and beautiful. She knew how to live in this country better than Rachel could ever hope to learn. Matthew’s sweet might be more than honey—
A Woman Clothed in Sun Page 12