Blood gushed out. He pitched forward, crawled a few feet and lay twitching.
Rachel prayed Juanito hadn’t seen too much of that. Running to him, she worked off the gag, whispering as she did so.
“Stay here, chico! Don’t move. I’m going to help your mama.”
Chuey must have had the stamina of a bull, for he was atop Lupe when Rachel opened the door. It creaked.
“Wait your turn!” he bellowed, not turning.
The back, Rachel suspected, was not a good target but he might whirl before she got close enough for a sure spot. Perhaps at the side beneath the ribs, cutting deeply to the front. If she could avoid bone, rip deep enough, it should work. She mustn’t fail with this last one.
Soundless, she crept forward. The man was holding Lupe up to him, grinding into her with short rutting jolts. Keeping as much behind him as she could, Rachel plunged the blade into his side, throwing her weight forward and curving to slice toward the belly.
He had lurched back from Lupe at the thrust, but blundered into lending the twist of his waist to Rachel’s aim before, shrieking, he caught her wrists, struggling for the knife.
“Little bitch!” Pinkish foam came from his mouth, but he was gaining the knife, dragging it from Rachel’s desperate hand. It was darting for her face when Lupe uncoiled, dragging him backward.
He gave a horrible cry, strained for a moment while blood pumped from his vitals, then fell against Lupe.
The two women stared at each other. Splashed with blood, disheveled, they looked, Rachel thought, like Furies. “Juanito’s all right,” she said bracingly. “But you’d better go to him. Do you think the others will come back?”
“Why, when they can sell the cattle and keep the money?” asked Lupe.
“But later, when the money’s gone?”
Lupe shrugged. “It’s a long way here and women are not that scarce. If they got most of the cattle they won’t be back.”
She hurried to her son. Rachel, shaking uncontrollably now that the danger was past, turned to the dead man, realizing for the first time that she had killed him and two more. In a matter of minutes.
She felt no regret, only amazement at the fragility of life, and the practicality that asserted itself at even moments like this. Sheets were too hard to come by to use for shrouds, though she’d have been relieved to wrap Chuey and Rico in the stained bedding and get rid of all at the same time.
And where would they bury the men? Except for the garden patches, the ground was so rocky and hard that Rachel agreed to Lupe’s proposal to dump the bandits at the end of a shallow arroyo and cover them with rock. When they had done this, hauling the bodies in a handcart, it was time to bury Changa, who had been watched over by Juanito so that scavengers wouldn’t get at him while the women got the corpses out of the house.
For Changa, they dug a bed at the bend of the wash beyond the coyote spring. Somehow they didn’t want him out of sight, this little monkey, their brother. When they put him into the ground with his spurs, rope and hat, he looked young as the boy who’d come to them with the cattle and Quil, before the war, before all this strange life they had shared these past years. As they piled rocks on the shallow grave to keep coyotes out, Juanito helped, his face stained with dirt and tears.
When Lupe tried to comfort him, he pulled away. “Changa is gone, and Leonito,” he said sternly. “Now I am the man!”
Late that night, after the bloody bedding was soaking and Juanito was asleep, Rachel heard Lupe weeping. Rising softly, she went to her companion.
“Are you—hurt, Lupe?”
Lupe drew herself erect. “That was a he-goat, but I’ll recover. It is just that—that—” She began to cry again, a most unsettling thing, for Lupe never complained. Hesitantly, Rachel put her arms around her friend. Lupe reached out to her and sobbed. “Two times I’ve been with a man. Each time was rape. Is something wrong with me?”
“Such men are beasts!” Rachel soothed. “Quil loved you, Lupe. I thought perhaps—”
“I was afraid,” Lupe said wearily. “But if he hadn’t gone to the war, I think I was almost ready to trust him.”
“Hell come back if he can, Lupe. Then you can be happy. This will just be a bad dream.”
“Yes. If he comes back.”
Rising, Lupe embraced Rachel and summoned a valiant smile. “At least we have had each other. Thank you, amiga.”
And each returned to her solitude.
XVI
A few days later, when it seemed sure the other five raiders wouldn’t return, Rachel looked across the table at Lupe and said, “I’m taking the silver Matt got for the first cattle and riding to Tres Coronas. I’ll buy sheep from the Don, if he’ll deliver them, and I must tell Changa’s mother how he died.”
“Sheep have good meat, give wool and aren’t stolen as often as cattle,” mused Lupe. “But Don Mateo doesn’t like them.”
“You and I can watch a flock, but we’re not vaqueros. If Matt goes to war, he can’t complain of what we’ve had to do while he’s gone.”
“Better to find sheep than nothing at all,” agreed Lupe. “Shall I go with you?”
Rachel shook her head. “Stay here with Juanito. It’s too long a trip for him.” She smiled and recast Lupe’s words. “If something happens to me, it’ll be better for my husband to find one woman in the house than no woman at all!”
Next morning she tied the silver into a rolled serape and strapped it back of her saddle with food for the journey. She put on the green riding habit she’d tried to keep presentable and quite dazzled Juanito.
“Muy bonita!” cried Juanito admiringly. “Tía Rachel looks beautiful!”
“Aunt Rachel’s going to be a shepherd—and you’ll help, won’t you, Juanito?” She gave him a hug and kiss, which he returned so vigorously that her hat was knocked askew.
“Go with God,” said Lupe. “I pray it goes well. Beware of Don Celestino. He is known to be most gallant.”
After being raped, the prospect of a flirtatious grandee didn’t trouble Rachel much. She laughed and waved and rode away.
Except for trips to the river to do laundry and the flight that had shocked Matt’s baby from her womb, it was Rachel’s first time out of the valley since entering it almost four years ago, and her first journey alone.
At the hot spring by the river, she loosened Lady’s cinch and let the mare graze while she gathered yucca root, washed her hair with it and bathed. From what Matt had told her of the Don, he was a fastidious man. She didn’t want to meet him looking more unkempt than necessary. Dressed, but with her hair left loose to dry, she filled a water skin, mounted and crossed the river, shielding her eyes to watch the eagles circling for quarry.
This would be the fifth set of eaglets this pair would have raised since Rachel and Matthew had first seen that huge ungainly nest of sticks high on the bluff. Not much had changed for the eagles, but as for their own lives …
Matt had earned a herd, stemmed the flow of Comanches and gone off to war, begetting a child he’d never known about. Quil had come to them and gone, his love for Lupe as fruitless as all their loves had been. And Lupe had helped make a home, while Juanito grew from a toddler into a lively young boy with a deft reata. There was Changa, once gay and full of tricks; if he’d held any woman, she would have been an Ojinaga whore, not either of the women he’d served with his youth and longing while the men rode off to war. It would be hard to tell Mamacita about the boy.
Rachel’s hair dried quickly. She pinned it up beneath her slouched hat, strained water from the hairy bag through her teeth, and laughed at a paisano that shot past her, rudder tail aslant, strong bluish legs flashing, shrilling its koo-koo-kook! This bird, a brisk, breezy creature similar to an angular, elongated pheasant could kill rattlesnakes.
It was a day for birds. Cactus wrens with brown-spotted white throats and breasts and white-spotted brown tails perched amid the prickly pear, making sounds as musical as a tin pail rolling down a rocky path.
Black-masked gray quail with forward-curving topknots pecked after insects, uttering querulous little plaints like a long-married couple. Toward evening Rachel saw white-winged doves as well as Inca and mourning doves, and listened to the summer migrants’ long, forlorn cooing as twilight fell.
At an outcropping of stone above a tinaja which held enough water for the horse, she unsaddled Lady and gave her a nosebag of grain. Settling against her saddle, Rachel munched dried meat and raisins. She didn’t chance a fire, and was very glad of Lady’s shadow nearby as the desert night closed in. Lying with half her serape underneath and the other half over her, Rachel roused once or twice as coyotes howled but then sank in a hollow of sleep that held her deeply until the sun burst dazzlingly above the Sierra del Carmen.
Late that day she began to see scattered herds and manadas of one color, like those Matt had praised. She camped bone-weary that night, unable to find water and giving Lady most of what was left in the hide bag.
At noon the next day she followed horses to water, let Lady drink and washed herself of travel stains. Vaqueros were surrounding her as she looked up from combing her hair. They stared at her disbelievingly! Reddening, she faced the mustached leader. “Are you of Tres Coronas?”
Something in her tone and excellent Spanish made him check a bold smile and sweep off his sombrero. “We are, madama. May we serve you?”
“I am the wife of Don Matthew Bourne,” she said, and thrilled to see how respect straightened those who had been lounging. “I must speak with Don Celestino.”
“Ay!” breathed the mustached leader. “I’ll take you to him myself, madama. Tell me, how goes it with your brave husband, and with my brother Changa, and with Quil?”
Changa’s brother? Then this was Luz.
She gave him the news as they rode. He crossed himself at hearing Changa’s end, cursed under his breath, and couldn’t hold back tears.
“Poor little brother! Tell our mother, por favor, I’d be flogged! You don’t know who the bandits were except for that sinvergüenza Rico?”
Rachel shook her head. “I only know, señor, that Changa was brave. He killed four, we killed three and five drove off the cattle.”
“Maybe they can be found,” muttered the chief vaquero. “I’ll ask Don Celestino’s permission.”
Luz took Rachel first to his mother, who seemed to wither at the story, but shook off Luz’s arms and gazed deeply at Rachel, as if trying to know all she could divine of the man her youngest had become.
“Thank you for coming, madama,” the older woman said at last. “My son had a worship of your husband.” She studied Rachel, adding slowly, “And if he had feeling for you, too, as I guessed during his last visit home, I believe you were kind to him and did not laugh.”
She saw Rachel to the door of the adobe hut, and Luz held Rachel’s stirrup as she mounted to ride to the great house. As the vaquero helped her down, the heavy door with its three crowns opened. A man who could only be the Don stood there.
An aging eagle, she thought him, magnificent, with silver hair winging back from weathered features, lines at nose, mouth and eyes clear and sharp. He stared at her in puzzlement for a moment, then laughed joyously in recognition. He came to meet her, so swiftly she scarcely noticed he was lame.
“You are Mateo’s woman,” he said, hands claiming hers. “Why do you come alone? The Monkey said—” He broke off, eyes touching her as if he could not believe she was real. “Come in, rest, Madonna! After you’ve refreshed yourself there’s time for all questions, except one. Have you word of Mateo?”
“No word, Don Celestino. As Changa will have told you, my husband went to war two years ago. Fort Davis is abandoned so we hear nothing.”
“Two years!” the Don said. His mouth curved down, and he watched her in a way that left no doubt he saw her as a desirable woman. “A long time. But here’s María to show you your room.”
A slim, pretty girl, full-bosomed, with a provocative way of walking, took Rachel’s things from Luz and led her along the hall that faced the patio, brought basins of warm and cool water, linen towels and a mug of frothy chocolate smelling of cinnamon.
“Madama,” said the girl, casting Rachel a shy glance from beneath long lashes. “Don Celestino commands you have anything you require, if it can be found on Tres Coronas. I’m to serve you while you are here.”
And whom do you serve when I am not here? Rachel wondered. She asked casually, “Do you remember my husband?”
María flushed, but gave Rachel a merry, almost pert look. “Por Dios, madama, of a certainty I remember him! We don’t often have visitors like Don Mateo! Permit me to say I hope he comes safe from the war. May I help you bathe?”
“I can manage,” Rachel said. “But perhaps you’d shake out the dress in my bundle.”
María unpacked Rachel’s few belongings while Rachel washed with soap smelling of rose leaves and spice and brushed out her hair. She slipped with Maria’s help into the yellow dress made of cloth Matt had brought from Tres Coronas. Coiling her hair into a coronet, feeling more dressed up and feminine than she had in years, Rachel, escorted by María, entered the presence of Don Celestino. He rose from a high-backed carved armchair to kiss her hands.
Again that charged current flowed strong between them. But he was Matt’s friend, old enough to be her father with years to spare. Bewildered at these sensations, Rachel was glad when he broke off his intent stare, seated her at a table gleaming with rainbowtinted handblown glass and heavy silver blazoned with his triple crowns.
“Tell me of Changa,” he requested. “Luz wants to go after the bandits, but first I should hear all the facts.”
María and another woman brought food while Rachel told how Changa had died. Of the ordeal she and Lupe suffered, she said only that they’d managed to conceal a knife and kill their captors in an unguarded moment.
“One blade and two women against Rico and a pair of rogues?” the Don murmured. “You and this Lupe must be very brave and very clever.” It was clear he suspected the truth but didn’t press since Rachel was clearly distressed. “And Changa! Well, I must permit Luz to try and find those other bandits. They shall die for Changa’s sake and yours. They might one day decide to return to your meadow. That must not happen.”
“So you wish to raise sheep instead of cattle,” he said, as they rose from the table. “We’ll talk more about this at dinner, after you’re rested.”
He seated her in one of the massive chairs by the great fireplace tiled with scenes from the lives of the saints and clapped his hands. Maria fetched brandy in crystal goblets.
Rachel sipped the delicious peach-flavored drink, relaxing, though her chair was far from comfortable in spite of its crimson velvet cushion. This house was stark, despite its grandeur, stunning in its contradiction of rich, costly dishes on a hand-hewn table, an alabaster Virgin enshrined in a niche of native clay. The house was a mixture of native simplicity, materials and color, given austerely elegant point and style by imports from Spain and the Orient.
Rachel sensed in Don Celestino a similar contrast. His iron will, the habit of command, strong beneath the paternal kindness with which he treated his people, the courtesy he showed to Rachel; his virile though aging body chained to an injured leg; his hand-tucked, flowing-sleeve shirt of finest linen belted into leather trousers trimmed with silver conchos. She would not have been surprised to glimpse a hair shirt beneath the linen—or one of chain mail, either, so perfectly was he the Spaniard, possessive, desiring women, land, proud horses and horned cattle, but knowing throughout his struggle to achieve power and glory that his spirit was encased in a body that was only mortal.
He raised his goblet now and drank to her. “Is the brandy pleasing to you, Madonna?” He used the archaic form of “my lady,” but it did not seem affected coming from him.
She sipped the sweet, slow-burning liquor and smiled her approval. “It’s very good, Don Celestino. My husband told me of it. Remember you sent peach trees with
him.”
“Do they thrive?”
“They’re starting to bear good fruit, but we’ve made no brandy.”
“That will come.” He inclined his head, and in the cool darkness of the room the lines in his face did not show, and his hair shone a silver more alive than any color of youth. “I trust, Madonna, that you, with my friend, Don Mateo, will drink many glasses from the fruit of my trees.”
Did he, on purpose, remind himself and her of Matt? He rose abruptly. “Will you rest now? In the cool after sunset we can drive to look at the sheep. Then we will have dinner and my sister will join us. She says, Madonna, that you’re welcome to borrow some of her dresses during your stay.”
Sister? Rachel remembered now that Matt had mentioned a Doña Anatacia so briefly she’d pictured an elderly widow. If the lady shared at all the magnetism of her brother, age wouldn’t make much difference.
“Thank your sister,” Rachel said, feeling as if a shadow had fallen across her heart. “But I’d better use my own things.”
The Don smiled. “That’s the simplest rule,” he said, his tone deepening with male amusement. “But one must be disciplined indeed or nearsighted to never be tempted by that which is not his.”
The pulse hammered in Rachel’s throat. He held her with his eyes. Then he bowed. Before those piercing knowledgeable eyes could confound her again, Rachel escaped.
It wasn’t for, this, for a man, that she’d come to Tres Coronas, yet here he was.
It was hot, and the sheep that could found shade by the brush or stunted trees while others shaded their heads under one another’s bellies, facing the wind so it didn’t ruffle their grayish-black greasy fleeces. Bare-bellied and long-legged, some with brown curling horns, they were far from pretty, but their shepherd watched them as closely and fondly as if they had been his children.
“Inocencio leads them to peaceful waters and lets them lie down only where it’s safe,” Don Celestino explained. “He finds the best graze he can in this thorny land, and protects them with his slingshot and throwing stick. He’s a good shepherd, like David before he became King and beset with troubles.” Don Celestino turned suddenly to Rachel, probing her with his dark eyes. “Madonna, do you think these ugly sheep are worth such care?”
A Woman Clothed in Sun Page 20