Teresa

by Les Savage, Jr.

  The bar was lifted from its sockets and the heavy gate, groaning and protesting, was swung open. Dolores Cavan was wringing her hands again and pleading with her daughter.

  “Teresa, do not do this thing. It is better that you stay. He is your patron. He will be your protector, the food for your belly, the roof over your head—”

  Teresa looked helplessly at her mother. Holding her dress together, she followed Kelly out. East of them, down San Francisco Street, lay the main portion of Santa Fe, a tawny huddle of flat-roofed mud buildings. At the hitchrack beside the zaguán stood a roan horse.

  “Step aboard,” Kelly said.

  She took the reins off the hitchrack. The half-wild horse shied and reared. She pulled him down, toed a wooden stirrup, and swung into the saddle.

  “Señor,” Biscara said. “You will regret this. I will have every dragoon in the province on your trail in ten minutes.”

  Without answering, Kelly swung him around suddenly, releasing him. It slammed Biscara back into the men massed in the open gate, checking their anticipated rush for an instant. And in that instant Kelly ran for his horse, vaulting up over its rump and slamming to a seat directly behind the saddle. His arms were around Teresa’s waist and he raked the horse with his huge spurs, deafening Teresa with his roar.

  “Now, you spotted bastard—light a shuck!”

  2

  At breakneck speed the horse raced down San Francisco Street toward the sun-drenched plaza. The stringy bulge of Kelly Morgan’s biceps pressed so hard against Teresa’s ribs it hurt, but they held her tight in the saddle.

  “The governor’s in that Palace on the square, ain’t he?” Kelly asked. She stiffened a little as she realized he meant to take her there. Her complete lack of response made him add, almost as a question, “He’ll protect you, sure?”

  “He will give me back to Biscara,” she said, in English.

  Her tone was metallic. He took the reins from her hands, pulling the horse out of its mad gallop. “He won’t do that. Not after what Biscara was doin’.”

  “Biscara will have another story. He is a powerful man. The governor will believe him.”

  The abysmal emptiness of her voice convinced him. He sawed at the reins till the horse came to a complete stop by the mouth of Burro Alley. They both looked back and saw a dozen horsemen galloping from the zaguán of Biscara’s house.

  “You got any people in town?” Kelly asked.

  “My people are with Don Biscara.”

  “Somebody that’ll protect you?”

  “Not here. Only a cousin in Taos.”

  He swore softly to himself. But there was no backing out now. He wheeled the horse and headed it at a gallop into Galisteo street. They passed blank walls of houses sleeping in the sun, creaking two-wheeled carretas with Indian drivers. Then they were across the Alameda and sliding down into the bottoms of the Santa Fe River. Splashing into the water to hide his trail, Kelly turned east toward the mountains.

  In a few minutes, with the horse roaring and laboring beneath them, they reached the Camino del Cañon, following the river toward Taos. They passed snowy fields of margueritas that had popped up after a summer rain; the gray bayonets of the aloe sawed at the horse and he almost pitched his riders shying at a roadrunner that darted from a clump of beargrass bushes. Then it was the first broken, rising country, where piñons grew dense and scrubby. The trapper looped and back-tracked, creating a dozen false trails, then sought the water again to hide his tracks. He followed the river up into a canyon that led them deep between the jaws of the mountains. At last Kelly pulled to a halt on a ridge, with the horse coughing and wheezing.

  Beneath them, like the surface of an undulant sea, the tops of pine and spruce and piñon billowed away toward the west. There was no sign of pursuit. The tension of flight began to slip away from Teresa. For the first time the bizarre element of all this made its impression. In the space of a few short minutes her whole world had changed completely. She had been snatched from the comfort and familiarity of surroundings that had been her life and had been plunged into the unknown with a perfect stranger.

  But she had known the implications of the step she had taken—she had known exactly what she was choosing when she opposed Biscara. It was not in her to go back now. She took a long, deep breath, pulling her torn camisa about her shoulders.

  “Where to now, señor?”

  Kelly was squinting down through the timber. “I guess we shook ‘em off.” Then he grinned ruefully and it etched a million tiny lines into his weather-roughened young cheeks. “It all happened so fast I still don’t know which way I’m aimed,” he said. “I guess the Morgans always was suckers fer redheaded women. We got a camp northward. We’ll decide what to do there.”

  As they rose through the Sangre de Cristos, she found her mind returning to the last half hour, to Don Biscara, to the choice she had made. Had it really been a decision, there in the room? Or was it merely the logical turning point in a road that began so many years ago? That began, perhaps, with her father.

  Johnny Cavan, green-eyed, red-headed, rakehell, gambler, adventurer. In 1812 his world wanderings found him in Santa Fe, then the capital of a province still under the colonial rule of Spain. His colorful personality and his flair for making friends won him a place in the circle of grandees, one of whom was Don Celso Biscara, the father of Don Tomas. So on one of his visits to the Biscara house Cavan saw Dolores. She was but a peon, a slave of the powerful family, but she was beautiful. With blarney and flowery promises, Cavan won Dolores, as well as a place in the Biscara trading post at El Paso de Norte, the gateway between Mexico and the northern country.

  In 1818, at El Paso, Teresa was born, a second child of the union. Through those early years, the seeds of degeneration planted in Johnny Cavan began to flower. The heat, the primitive native life, a tendency toward the dissolute—all had begun to make their mark. And the added frustration of a failing business added its corrosion. Teresa’s childhood memories were of a sodden drunk, sleeping through the day, tomcatting all night. Teresa was his favorite, and it became the custom for her to take his mind off the pangs of endless hangovers with a game of cards. She had supple fingers and a remarkable memory. As a matter of course he was soon teaching her how to memorize all the cards in the deck, no matter how they fell; how to mark the key cards and follow the markings through a shuffle; how a center dealer worked and how to make a belly stripper and how to distract an opponent with misdirection while you dealt from the bottom.

  It was a land where women bloomed early. At fourteen Teresa had the breasts and hips that would not have graced a girl in another clime for several more years. At fourteen the commander of the presidio began watching her, as she passed, and the idlers in front of the cantina made their sly remarks. And wheezing, mustached Pepe Rascon, a rival trader who had taken advantage of Johnny Cavan’s indolence to ease much of his business away. He seemed always at the Cavan house, when Teresa’s father was away, bringing little gifts of food or clothing, sitting in the corner and watching Teresa and smiling and nodding and talking with her mother. She thought of him only as a friend of the family that summer.

  It was a time of intolerable heat. Night brought little relief. With the smells of the baked earth still filling the air and the mud town beaten into a soundless hush it was a frequent thing to seek the solace of the river. One night, unable to bear the suffocating heat of their little mud jacal, she had left her pallet and had gone to the banks of the Rio Grande. Naked, in the shallows, trying to wash the grime and sweat off. Hearing the song:

  * * * *

  “Where the River Shannon meets the sea,

  A colleen waits and cries for me…”

  * * * *

  He might have passed by, for she knew the house he was heading for, farther up the river. But his eye caught on the heap of her camisa, shining li
ke a snow-patch on the bank. Her heart began to pound wildly as she crouched in the willows. She wanted to run. She seemed frozen. Then she heard the husky laugh, and the wild crackling of the willows.

  She rose to flee and the moonlight ran like silver over her wet body. A gusty sound came out of him. She felt his hand catch her arm. Maybe he was too drunk to know who she was. Struggling, sobbing hysterically, she wanted to believe it, ever afterward she wanted to believe it. She tore free and ran; she slipped and fell in the muck and got up again. She would never know when he dropped behind. In nightmares for years afterward she always ran forever through the night with the slime dripping off her naked body and the pound of his feet descending upon her till its cannon-roar jarred her awake, trembling and crying and soaked with sweat.

  The church had been her haven that night. A time of trembling and sobbing and hysterics under the protection of a bewildered priest. She was afraid to return home for days. When she did, Johnny Cavan showed no sign of remembering. But she could no longer play cards with him. Her fingers trembled and a cold sweat broke out on her face and she wanted to run again.

  The torture ended, six months later, when he disappeared. Some thought his drunken nocturnal wanderings had brought him under an Apache’s scalp knife in the desert. Dolores Cavan knew better. He had been a wanderer when he met her; a man like that could not stay in one place long.

  For Teresa, the scars healed slowly. But youth and vitality and a return to the peaceful patterns of life finally buried the marks. Three years later a handsome young lieutenant joined the garrison at El Paso, fresh from the Colegio Militar in Mexico City. Juan Esquivel, a polished scion of one of the finest families, a young hidalgo gallant and dashing enough to turn the head of every girl in town. And who could refuse his attentions if he chose to bestow them upon one of the most beautiful? It was where Teresa got her first taste for jewelry. A fabulous gautchapourri brooch from Sante Fe, a pair of solid silver bracelets set with cabochon emeralds, tinkling and clashing barbarically with the slightest turn of her wrist.

  “Teresita, I never believed in fate before. Now I must. Why else should I be sent north? It was destiny that I should find you, that I should take you back to Mexico City, that we should be together forever—”

  He had given her the betrothal ring that night. She remembered the almost unsupportable joy it had brought, the love, the first faith and belief she had known since that terrible night on the river two years before. Was that how it happened? Too immersed in her happiness and her new-found faith to mistrust Juan longer, to erect the defenses with which she had held him off before.

  Was first passion always like that? The kissing, the crying, the bittersweet struggle. Understanding what was happening yet not understanding. Knowing it should not be yet not really knowing. Trying to stop it yet desiring that it should not stop. The right and wrong of it, the joy and the hurt all running together in a sort of giddy transport until there was no will left in you and you were drowned in the thunderous pound of pulse and heart till the whole world seemed to tremble and shake and fall to pieces….

  Those following weeks were something to remember. Her life was changed. She had been told that such a thing was wrong. Yet how could it be wrong, with the betrothal ring on her finger, with love in their hearts. He explained and she believed. Love was the important thing. Juan had many fine words, as convincing while she was under his spell as had been the words of the priest who had taught her it was wrong. And when the words weren’t quite convincing enough there were his kisses again, his passionate protestations, his questing hands that she could not deny….

  They were to keep the engagement a secret till his orders came for a return to Mexico City. Then, triumphantly, he would take her with him.

  The orders came. She woke that morning to find him gone. That same week the nausea came, and she had to tell her mother. They waited together, Teresa and her mother, for word that he was returning to her. The word came via the annual conducta returning from the trading in Mexico City. Not directly to Teresa, really. Just an item in the general gossip, of how the handsome young Lieutenant Esquivel, lately stationed at El Paso, had married into the rich Molina family from Vera Cruz. A fine match. It would facilitate his rise in the army….

  3

  It was black night by the time Teresa Cavan and the yellow-haired Kelly Morgan reached the trapper’s camp. It stood in a glade surrounded by endless miles of dense timber. There were a dozen horses snorting and fretting on a rope line and then a pair of fires with a heap of gear banked up on one side—saddles and blankets and guns and the inevitable aparejos of the trapping party—the X-shaped Mexican pack saddles that were filled with food and traps and supplies now and would return laden with the harvest of swart beaver pelts.

  Around the fire were three men and an Indian squaw. Teresa recognized the one to the right of the fire. He was John Ryker, a Texas trader who had operated through El Paso and who these last two years had moved up to Santa Fe. He was a solid, bearlike figure in blackjack boots and corduroy trousers, dark with grease. He wore a knee length coat made from the pelt of a cinnamon bear and firelight glinted on the brass butt caps of two immense Ketland-McCormick pistols thrust naked through his belt.

  “You didn’t tell us you were goin’ after a squaw,” he said.

  Kelly slid off the beaten, hipshot roan. He made no move to help Teresa dismount. “Ain’t my woman,” he said. “Biscara was havin’ the holy hell whipped out’n her. I couldn’t see it.”

  Ryker glared at him. “You mean you put the kibosh on the deal over a little greaser slut like this—?”

  “Slack off,” Kelly told him. “Biscara wouldn’t make no deal.”

  “You’re crazy,” Ryker said. “The last time I saw him he was willing to go in with us. He’d guarantee our duties would be cut in half if we’d take his hides to St. Louis with our furs.”

  “He’s afraid to ship his hides out, with this trouble around Taos.”

  “What trouble?”

  Kelly shook his shaggy head. “How do I know? Somethin’ about the Pueblos uprisin’.”

  Another of the trappers moved from the fire. He was a giant of a man with an unruly mass of hair as red as Teresa’s and a hoary red beard that curled and spread all over his chest, filthy with grease, matted with dirt and burrs.

  “All this palaver while the lady ain’t even off her horse yet.” He stopped at the horse, smiling up at Teresa, and held a hand out to help her down. “Cimarron Saunders, honey, with apologies fer these varmints fergettin’ their manners.”

  She regarded Saunders, a moment from uptilted, heavy-lidded eyes. Then she accepted his hand and let him help her off the horse. Ryker was regarding her with black, angry eyes.

  “So you got mad?” Ryker said to Kelly.

  “Wouldn’t you be, see ‘em whippin’ a gal like that?”

  “So you charge in there like a bull in a china shop, busting up everything that gets in your way, all over a little slut that don’t mean no more to you than pinto beans.”

  “Now, hold off, Ryker—”

  “You just pulled the whole damn province down on our heads, that’s all. Biscara’s one of the most powerful men in Santa Fe. He’ll have every dragoon in the palace out after you.”

  “Ain’t that a sack o’ hell,” Kelly said.

  “We won’t be able to show our noses within a hundred miles of Santa Fe.”

  “Fearsome.”

  “There won’t be a foot o’ mountains we can trap in from Colter’s Hell down to Chihuahua!”

  “Plumb sergiverous.”

  “All because some damnfool kid lost his head over a—”

  “Goddamit, shut up!” Kelly shouted. He towered above Ryker like an angry god.

  Ryker’s eyes glittered and the blood ran into his face, staining his leathery cheeks like dye. For a moment t
he tension shimmered between the two men like a live thing. Then Ryker’s weight settled back on his heels.

  “That’s the last time I’ll put up with your temper, Kelly. I’ve got too much at stake to risk it on a man with a hair trigger like you.”

  Sullen as a bear, he turned and shambled to the fire. Kelly watched him a moment, face bleak and raw. Then he seemed to become aware of Teresa. He looked at her. His anger fled as swiftly as it had come. He grinned broadly.

  “Git over to the fire. Black Blanket’ll take care o’ you.”

  She walked ahead of them toward the fire. Its flickering light played across the stir and ripple of her buttocks, so tantalizingly outlined by the wool skirt. When she looked back she saw that both Kelly and Saunders were watching.

  Black Blanket was Ryker’s Arapaho squaw, a tubby, buckskin-faced woman with hide wrappings to her knees and an elkhide dress glittering with beads and quills and dripping long fringe. She nosed around in the timber till she found some black root, chewed it to a pulp, and then applied it like a poultice to Teresa’s wounds. It burned like salt, drew like fire, and then settled down to a low throbbing that soon seemed to cover Teresa’s whole back. The squaw loaned her one of her own buckskin shirts to wear over the poultice and then went back to cooking.

  Teresa learned that the fourth man in the trapping party was Turkey Thompson, a tall, unbelievably skinny man with an Adam’s apple that bobbed like a cork on a string every time he looked at her. He had shot the buck they ate; they had venison steaks and crumbly pemmican and a cup of precious bitter coffee apiece. Kelly Morgan took off his shoulder belt before sitting down. It was laden with the incredible assortment of tools so typical of the mountainman—an awl with a deerhorn handle, a worm for cleaning his rifle, a squat bullet mold with buckskin-wrapped handles to protect the fingers when running balls, an antelope-horn phial containing the beaver medicine for baiting traps, a cowhorn scraped transparent to reveal the black DuPont gunpowder inside, a tiger-tail bullet pouch, and finally a buckskin bag for flint and steel and tinder. Laying this heap of gear beside him, Kelly lowered himself cross-legged into the dirt, speared a steak off its spit with his Bowie knife, and began to cut off huge bites.