A Woman Clothed in Sun

by Jeanne Williams

  His voice was impatient, as if he’d repeated a question. “Rachel, are you angry?”

  Angry? One word to describe all that she was feeling, the grief and sense of being deserted, her fear of having a baby with its father gone and worst of all a poisonous doubt that grew the more she brooded.

  Matt sighed, traced her jaw with his thumb. “Guess I can’t expect you to understand, honey. But you wouldn’t want the man I’d be if I stayed.”

  “The war’s gone on for a year without you.”

  “But I didn’t know.”

  And you don’t know I’m carrying your baby, our baby.

  “All right,” she said tightly, struggling to keep from sobbing out her secret. “Do what you think you should. But don’t expect me to think it’s wonderful! Don’t expect me to pant like a patriotic whore and give you a royal sendoff!” She twisted from his hands, turning her back.

  “You little witch!” He brought her over beneath him, holding her wrists, bent his mouth to hers, bruising, seeking. She kept her lips closed over her teeth, rigid, coldly aloof to his kisses. He set finger and thumb in her jaws, forcing them open, driving his tongue into her mouth, parting her legs with his knee, gripping her buttocks in his hand, lifting her to receive him fully. He thrust deep, groaning, drew back, thrust again, wreaked himself on her like a storm till, in spite of the dulled woodenness of her body, she was trembling and shaken.

  He called her name in a last surging, lay spent, one arm flung possessively over her.

  “I had to have you,” he said at last. “Had to have you!”

  “Yes.” She was astonished at the rage loosed past checking when she spoke. “You always did, didn’t you and that’s why we’re here—why, really, you’re going away!”

  For a hushed moment he lay as still as if she’d slipped a fatal blade into his heart. “What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

  One part of her wanted to cradle his head to her breast, tell him she was just upset, that she dreaded to lose him, that they were going to have a baby. But her pride, her own half-buried guilt and despair, drove her past love, even past fairness.

  “You can’t forget I was Harry’s wife—that he died because of us!” she accused. “We ran here to the end of the earth, but that wasn’t enough! You had to go spend months in Mexico getting your precious herd! And now you’ve got a good high-sounding reason to leave me again.”

  He raised himself on an elbow, and she knew he was trying to see her face in the dark. “Do you believe that, Rachel?”

  “What else can I think?” she demanded, unshed tears harshening her voice. “Since you got back from Don Celestino’s, we’ve finished the house and you’ve spent the rest of your time hunting or seeing after the cattle.”

  “What else could I do?” His tone was angrily incredulous. “My God, we’ve been making a new start!”

  “Have we?”

  He caught her shoulders so hard she bit her lip to keep from wincing. “I was! Damned if I know what you’ve thought you were doing if you really mean all this rubbish!”

  Rachel didn’t answer. Her heart beat with painful labored heaviness. “I want to build an inheritance for our children,” he went on slowly. “I want something good and proud and fine to come out of us, and what we did, and all there is to be ashamed of. Do you want what’s past to be all that’s remembered of us—an adulterous pair who killed and fled, vanished and left nothing?”

  She twisted her head as if trying to avoid invisible blows.

  “You want to save your family name! You want it to survive in spite of us. You know Tom’s children won’t amount to much even if he sires some legitimately.”

  “A man’s blood is before and after him.”

  “And if you raise up children to your name, and make that name proud even here at the end of the country, then you needn’t feel so guilty for killing your brother!” She laughed wildly. “Oh, Matt! I thought it was only in the Old Testament that men were commanded to raise up sons to their dead brother, got on that brother’s wife!”

  Catching her shoulders, Matt pulled her up to face him. “Stop that! I think you’re the one who can’t forget! Or you wouldn’t spin these crazy fancies! Of course I want children, want to leave them something as splendid in its own way as Gloryoak. But I wanted that while I was still in the army.”

  He drew her to him in spite of her resistance. “Now listen to me. I love you. In spite of everything, even if I had free choice from the whole world, I would want no one else. But I have to go to this war.”

  She collapsed in his arms and wept. After a while, they made love again. But a part of her was locked away, sealed because he was leaving. She never told him of the child.

  Two days later, Matt left for San Antonio. “I may be able to send letters to Fort Davis,” he said. “Changa can ride in now and then to check and get news of the war. But don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. I’m coming back! Use as much of the money as you need. And don’t risk your lives for the stock. Whatever we lose, we can get again—except any of you.”

  He brushed Lupe’s hair with his hand, tossed Juanito, kicking rapturously, into the air, and shook Changa’s hand. Then he kissed Rachel, held her till she almost lost the stiffness in her spine that had kept her upright these past few days, swung up on his big gray horse, and was off. At the end of the valley, he stopped and waved. Then he rode out of what they’d come to think of as the Meadow. Out of their lives.

  Juanito gave a soft whimper. Changa swept him up and took him along to do chores. The two women started back to the house. Rachel sickened, had to stop. Lupe helped her, then brought a cup of water to rinse out her mouth.

  “You didn’t tell Don Mateo?” Lupe asked.

  Rachel shook her head.

  “You’re a fool!” Lupe burst out. “If you’d told him he would have stayed.”

  “And hated me for keeping him from his precious duty,” Rachel gasped. She had managed not to be sick around Matthew, but now she retched till only bile came.

  “I’ll bring you some dry corn bread,” Lupe said. “That should help. Just rest here in the shade.”

  The dry bread, chewed slowly, did quiet Rachel’s nausea, but her spirit rebelled at going in the house, lying down and resting as her body dictated. In spite of all reason, she felt deserted by Matt, abandoned; and betrayed by her having conceived when the father would not be there.

  “Noght to been a wyf, and be with childe …” Though she was tremblingly weak, Rachel felt driven to master her breeding body, defy its tyranny. In spite of Lupe’s protest, she got her bridle out of the lean-to, went along the valley where the horses ranged and whistled for her mare. Lady whickered and trotted up, accepting the bridle as nicely as she had in the days she’d been pampered, groomed and grain-fed. Rachel led her to the house and put on the saddle.

  “Don’t worry,” she told Lupe, who stood in the door with Juanito. “I’ll be back by sundown. I—I just have to get away for a while.”

  From the valley, Rachel took the right hand turning that led to the Rio, the first place they’d lived in this wild country. She let Lady go her own pace, slowly through the rocks, cantering on the flats.

  At last, Lady drank at the waters of the Rio. Rachel got down and drank, too. A bird warbled, swallows flew along their mud honeycombs of nests on the Texas side, and the eagle dropped to its nest to feed the smashed carcass of a rabbit to its fledglings.

  Here the Comanches, over two hundred of them, had died. But there was no sign now of that autumn battle. Rachel tied Lady to a willow sapling and walked along the low cliff to the warm spring.

  Dusty and hot from the ride, she undressed and washed in the water that bubbled up from the rock side of the spring, shaping a basin large enough to bathe in. As she stood to let the sun dry her body, she became aware of a dull burning pain deep in her belly. Not like nausea, not at all. It intensified. Sweat broke out on her. She sank down in the tepid water, shuddering, fighting back screams.

/>   Cramping spasms racked her, tearing loose the tiny new life. She gripped a young tree and held to it, gritting her teeth, till her body was empty of what would have been Matt’s child.

  For a while, half-senseless, she lay bleeding sick by the spring. Then she cleansed herself. She couldn’t leave the bloody mucus to be eaten by coyotes or fed to eaglets, so she found a niche in the cliff, stuffed the matter there, and filled in the hole with river clay.

  This was where she and Matthew had begun their life in the Big Bend; it was where their dead fruit belonged. It was where she would like to die someday, with water sparkling over pebbles polished smooth and round, the eagle’s nest high on the Mexican bluff and warblers and swallows nesting low. She lay down again and slept.

  It was almost sundown when she felt strong enough to climb into the saddle. There was a full moon, and Lady went carefully, as if she sensed the weakness of her mistress. Rachel’s mind floated in and out of her body. There was sticky warmth down her legs. She felt as if her life were flowing out, almost wished she had died near the fragment formed of her love for Matt.

  When Lady turned into the valley, Rachel lay almost prone on her neck. By the time Lady stopped at the house, Rachel was slipping from the saddle. Changa found her there, gathered her up in his thin muscular boy’s arms. Rachel heard him shouting for Lupe, and then she lapsed into a soft dark haze.

  Rachel lived in fever dreams for a week, back at Tristesse or Gloryoak or making the journey southwest.

  “Will she live?” she heard Changa ask once, cracking his big knuckles.

  “Who knows?” Lupe’s voice held pity and anger. “To go riding like that—to lose Don Mateo’s child!”

  “He left her for the army,” Changa defended.

  “He is still her man.”

  “Ay,” said Changa slowly, and laughed without gladness. “Perhaps after all I’m lucky. You women can play with a monkey and smile at his tricks, but there’s no thought of love. Is there?”

  “What a burrito!” scorned Lupe. “A boy must heave burning sighs for a little time to dry the mother’s milk on his lips! You’re our little brother and we’re glad you are here. Now stay with Rachel and Juanito, por favor, while I hunt for blueberries! She seems to fancy them more than anything.”

  One morning Rachel woke gaunt but clear-eyed. She didn’t speak about her ride to the river or what had happened there. Nor did she speak of Matthew. She went through the house, checking everything, rode out to look at the cows and horses, and came back looking tired but resolved.

  “Tomorrow we’ll make soap,” she said. “And then we’ll gather all the blankets and clothes and have a big wash down at the river.”

  Next morning Changa carried bucket after bucket of water to pour over the ashes that had been saved through the winter. The brown potash water dripped through a small hole into a wooden trough beneath the ash bin, just as it had when Tante Aurore supervised, but there was no egg to test it with, so when a small green peach off one of Don Celestino’s trees would stay on top, Rachel pronounced the liquid ready to pour over the grease which Lupe had been rendering in the big iron kettle over an open fire. When the mixture boiled to taffy thickness, they strained it into their largest earthenware jars. Salt was too precious to add for hardening, so they would use this soft soap, which in spite of its strong smell was an improvement over the yucca root they’d used till now.

  With one jug of the soap wrapped with soiled clothes and weighted pannier-fashion against dirty serapes on the back of a led mare, the women started for the river early next morning, escorted by Changa armed with Matthew’s carbine. He held Juanito in front of him, and the small boy patted the horse’s neck, plucked at its mane and drummed it with his bare heels, squealing his pleasure at being up high on such a big animal.

  At the hot spring, Changa dug out the basin a bit more, and the women put in the clothing, beating it against the rocks and adding soap. When the clothes were clean, Lupe rinsed them in the river while Juanito played in the shallowest water. Rachel worked on the serapes. At midday Changa called them to a feast of grilled fish and berries. By the time the last serape was rinsed till its native-dyed colors were clear and bright, it was time to start home. Lupe plaited a mat of rushes to put under the wet serapes so the horse’s scruffy sweat wouldn’t get on them. The dry clothes were bundled on the women’s saddles.

  They reached home with a Juanito who had drowsed into sleep in Changa’s arms, wet blankets to be spread about for drying and a feeling of virtuous luxury at knowing the laundry well and completely done.

  It was a good thing the men had left in summer so that there was much to do and little time to regret or brood. From daylight to dark, it was a round of gathering wild berries and fruits, tending patches of melon, corn, squash and beans, peach and pomegranate trees and making ready for winter.

  Changa found a deposit of fine black soil, and this they mixed with water and sand and spread on the floors, buffing it to tile hardness. Lupe made plaster paint of red earth and Rachel helped her paint a border two feet high around the bottom of the walls where the whitewash got very dirty.

  When Changa rode to Fort Davis in August to find it abandoned, Rachel went in her room and cried for a while against the pillow where Matt’s head had rested by hers. Not to know where he was, whether he was well or a prisoner or dead! Not to know for months, maybe not ever. Supposing he never came back? She wished then, desperately, that she’d been able to carry his baby, that she’d at least had a child to remember him by.

  After a long time, feeling neither wife nor widow nor even a woman, she tidied herself and rejoined the others. When Juanito climbed into her lap, she held him close, comforted a little by the warm trusting clasp of his arms, but something cold had settled on her heart and dried up her tears.

  They had prepared for winter all that summer, but there was no way to prepare for the winter in her heart.

  XV

  Though the women still treated him like a boy, Changa was now a well-muscled, virile young man. He was increasingly restless, sometimes irritable, and frequently disappeared on hunting trips that lasted several days. He returned from one of these with a mountain lion’s skin wrapped around something that wriggled as he walked in.

  “Look, old one!” Changa called to Juanito. “I’ve brought you a playmate!” He unrolled the tawny skin, which still needed tanning, to show what looked like a small spotted kitten.

  Juanito screamed with glee, squatting to grab the pretty creature, but Changa muffled its outsize paws in the hide, and Lupe snatched back her son.

  “That’s a leon cub!” she said. “Changa, are you crazy? Even a real monkey would have more sense than to bring home such a creature!”

  “I killed the mother before I saw the cub,” Changa sounded penitent. “This small one spat at me like a real warrior. I couldn’t kill it! People have made pets of them.” He let the kitten go. It eyed them a minute, then began a thorough exploration of the room, batting at Juanito’s ball with its dexterous paws, chasing it as it rolled.

  Charmed, Rachel trailed a length of rawhide before it. The cub puzzled and pounced, pursuing it till she laughed and let the cord drop. The small lion crouched and began to chew the leather. Juanito clapped and even Lupe had to laugh.

  “Mamacita had one once,” ventured Changa hopefully. “It made a good watchdog.”

  “For how long?” demanded Lupe.

  “Till it went back to the monte,” Changa admitted.

  Juanito struggled to get down. “You may watch the cat,” Lupe told him. “But don’t touch him. He’s wild.”

  The adults hovered near in case either cub or four-year-old boy presumed too far. Juanito crouched down several feet from the kitten, which chewed the rawhide, a warning buzz in his throat, vigilant eye cocked on the child. Juanito hugged himself with delight.

  “Leonito!” he crooned to the beast. Juanito spoke Spanish and English interchangeably, seemingly unaware they were different tongues. �
��Pretty gato! Cat lindísimo!”

  He rolled his ball to the cub, which watched intently, furling its tail. Changa pushed the ball the other way with his toe. The cub sprang on it, batting it and sniffing.

  “Mamacita!” wheedled Juanito, tugging at her skirt. “Can we feed him? Please, can we feed pretty gatito? Por favor, Mamacita!”

  Lupe turned up her hands, glancing from Rachel to Changa, who watched her hopefully though they let the decision be hers. “You may feed him,” she said. “But you mustn’t play with him yet. If he’s naughty, he must go.”

  “He won’t be naughty!” Juanito promised, dancing along to the cupboard where Lupe gave him some scraps. “He’ll be a good leonito!”

  Leonito grew with the weeks but stayed playful and lost all wariness of humans. Soon he and Juanito were tumbling on the rug made of Leonito’s mother’s skin, the cub pulling in his claws. When he tired of the game, he slipped outside, disappeared among the rocks. At first when this happened, Juanito would cry, afraid of losing his playmate, but Leonito always returned. As fall changed to winter, he spent hours by the fire. One day he brought home a rabbit. After that, he seldom returned from his roving without fresh-killed prey.

  “He means it for us,” said Changa delightedly. “Otherwise he’d eat small game and bury bigger kills to feed on later.” Certainly the cat made no protest when the humans cautiously appropriated his offerings.

  “A lion won’t eat carrion unless he’s very hungry,” said Changa. “And he prefers prey he kills himself, so whatever he brings us will be as clean as what I get.” He grinned at the long sinewy golden-tan creature. “Now you’re the hunter, eh? There’ll soon be no use for me around here!”

  The cat stretched and made a deep lazy sound in its throat which deepened as Juanito scratched between his ears.

  Spring brought such a good calf increase that the herd numbered over three hundred, and half of them had to be shifted to one of the outer pastures.

  “I wish we didn’t have to put them out there,” Changa said. “Thieves or Apaches may run them off without our even knowing it for days.” Then he asked a question that had been in all their minds. “Shall I ride to Fort Davis again and see if soldiers are there again, or anyone who might have word of Don Mateo and the war?”