I run my fingers around the metal circumference, welding it into his skin. He has stopped moaning, but I know he must be faint with pain. If he appeared born with the collar before, now he appears even more so; what metal has not been folded into his skin is like a ribbon of brightness against his throat.
I grab his hands and help him to his feet; he stumbles, but I pull him behind me as I run into the darkened halls of the underground keep, the halls that lead away from the door I came through.
If I am not careful I will get us lost, or worse, captured. Khadim swallows sobs as he runs behind me, but I feel him picking up his pace as the pain lessens.
I strain my ears to hear past my loudly thumping heart, bypassing doors until I get to the one we need. The armory. I can hear the song of a thousand metal weapons call to me.
“You don’t have to do this, Eula. My men and I can take it from here. I do not want you hurt.” Khadim’s eyes are full of pain, his voice full of sincerity.
“I made my choice the moment I came for you, Khadim. We deserve more.”
I push the door open. The room is filled with lances, spears, bows and arrows, swords, short steel knives, and barrels of oil. The lone window in the room lets in enough light for me to see there are enough weapons to outfit an entire garrison. I gesture Khadim to the spears, and we slide several through the barred window. Next, we each grab a machete, and I maneuver with care to get them through the slats of metal.
I press my palms into the bars and will them to bend the metal. Sweat breaks out on my forehead, but the iron softens and stretches and creates a large enough hole for us to jump and crawl through. I pull myself up into a patch of dirt not covered with steel. I push my hand down to give Khadim assistance, but before he grabs it I hear a familiar scratching sound. He jumps and scrambles onto the field.
“What did you do?” I ask, grabbing a machete while Khadim cradles three spears in one arm.
“I lit the base of the barrel on fire.” A blast of heat behind us almost sends us to our knees.
The ingenio is burning.
We run as far as we can, until we make it to the circle of bohíos. There, Khadim’s men stand with the ladinos who raised me: Prieto, Tía, Nana, Rosalinda, Samuel. These folks who suffered through years of service in Sevilla, and then years at the Río Ozama and then years here at the ingenio, are ready to follow the youngest amongst them. Not all. Some shake their heads, afraid to follow. But my closest kin are here. Khadim and I pass out spears to the handful of men and women who do not have their own machetes. Then in unison we all turn back to the mill. The clouds above us clear, and in the moonlight I can make out the peaks of the hills, and if we keep walking, behind them are the Bahoruco Mountains.
A place to hide, to build, to create a new life.
The admiral is expecting me to come calling for my freedom, but he is not expecting me to lead everyone else to theirs. I slash the humid air with my machete, and it is feather light in my hand, whispering, onward onward onward.
From the open windows of the admiral’s house, I can hear a harpsichord being struck. The occupants have not yet realized they are on fire. We march forward, and I hum along to a brand-new song.
WHEREIN ABIGAIL FIELDS RECALLS HER FIRST DEATH AND, SUBSEQUENTLY, HER BEST LIFE
By Rebecca Roanhorse
NEW MEXICO TERRITORY. 1880S. WINTER.
Abigail Fields was dying. Slowly, terribly, the gunshot wound in her stomach leaking, her lagging heart stretching too long between beats.
The man who had shot her was named Barton Smalls. He was a coward of a white man, and he had abandoned her in the ice-crusted dirt road outside the all-Black settlement of Pueblo Libre to die, no doubt believing that she would expire in the course of time and worry him no more.
Abby hated to admit he might have the right of it.
Breath was getting harder to come by, the space between inhale and exhale as wide as the Rio Grande valley where it cut through the high desert just below town and the far shore could barely be seen. But Abby kept on breathing anyway, hoping that Mo would come. That anyone would come. But Mo, especially, as she’d like it to be her lovely brown face she saw last in this world.
She imagined there weren’t too many folks like her and Mo in heaven. Nothing in the Bible they’d made her read at the old nun house said much about Black girls making it to the right hand of the Lord, at least to hear those old white spinsters at the nunnery tell it. If Abigail was honest with herself, the life she’d led so far was just as likely to land her somewhere a bit hotter anyway. Good, then. Hell suited her just fine. Just fine, indeed.
A distant howl broke her from her reverie, followed by a mob of high-pitched yips. A shiver of fear rolled through her body, but all she could do was blink up at the grey winter sky above her. Catch the snowcapped tops of the distant mountain range out of the corner of her eye. Feel the rough touch of dirt and the wet of melting ice beneath her back. And try to keep breathing.
Snowflakes fell, soft and silent. Too silent.
Silent meant everyone else in town was dead. Jolene at the schoolhouse and Francis and Lucy who ran the post. Mr. Henderson and Rose and Rose’s sisters. Oh, and their little ones, too.
Even Mo? No, not Mo. She’d been out hunting this morning, shooting grouse to fill their table. She was miles away. Should have been, at least. But she was expected back by now, wasn’t she? Oh Lord, not Mo. It would be too much.
Another howl, closer now. Coyotes, out there in the distance. Scavengers, tricksters. Likely coming to this little township that was now only a buffet of fresh death. Perhaps it would be the scavengers and not Smalls’s gunshot that took her life. Just like what had happened to her great-aunt Mary, only Mary had survived a wolf attack and lived to tell the tale. But then, Aunt Mary was a legend, and what was Abby but a sixteen-year-old girl, shot in the belly by a coward of a white man, waiting to die?
Part of her thought maybe she’d drawn Barton Smalls to her. Of all the settlements in all the places west of the Mississippi, she’d never thought to see him again. He had looked right at her when he pulled that trigger, and then looked away, her face unrecognized, unremembered. But she remembered him. There was a penny in her pocket to make sure she always remembered.
“Let me live, Lord,” Abby whispered through cracked and bloody lips. “If you let me live, I will murder Barton Smalls. I will forsake love and match him hate for hate. Save me, and I will become an instrument of your vengeance. I swear it!”
It was a bold prayer, and who was Abby to make it? She was not particularly brave. Not a gunslinger. Just a girl and not quite a woman, at that. But she was determined, and she meant it with all her heart, and sometimes, and in some places, that’s enough.
It went without saying that hate and vengeance were not sentiments she’d learned from the nuns at the convent, so their God did not hear her. But there were other things in the desert, listening. They did not mind hate; they held no fault with vengeance. They found her offering pleasing and struck the deal.
Abigail knew the moment it happened. She felt the covenant take root in her bones. Her breathing eased, the wound in her side knit closed, her heartbeat became strong and steady.
She thought to cry out, and perhaps she did, with only the scavengers and tricksters and the dead to hear her.
And that, too, was enough.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The sun crawled across the sky, and Abby faded in and out of consciousness. After a while, she felt something heavy and warm fall across her body. The smell of wool and smoke filled her nose, strong arms wrapped around her and lifted her up. They pressed her against warm skin, a wide chest. Her eyelids fluttered open. Deep brown eyes met hers, concern and relief battling in a lopsided grin. Mo’s face was blood-spattered. Her own? Or someone else’s?
“Now, aren’t you a blessed sight,” Abby murmured.<
br />
“Shhh,” Mo said, her voice as warm and soft as the blanket she had wrapped her in. “I came as fast as I could. I’m so sorry, Abby. I should have never left you.” Mo was breathing hard, fear etched in her face. Her hand hovered over the blood-soaked place on the front of Abby’s dress. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing bad,” she lied. “Only grazed.”
“I better check the wound . . .”
“No!”
Abby calmed her voice. Mo’s hand hadn’t even moved. She wouldn’t touch her without her say-so. Such manners.
“It’s not necessary for you to fuss,” Abby said lightly. She knew even if Mo looked, she’d find no trace of the bullet that had rent Abby earlier. The wound was gone; that was a fact.
“I’m shook up, Mo, but I’m fine. Just take me home.”
“Of course,” Mo said, abashed at her delay.
Abby slipped her arm around Mo’s neck to pull close to her. “Is anyone else alive? Jolene? Francis? Rose and her sisters?”
Mo’s face was as bleak as the Rocky Mountains behind them. “They’re all dead.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, Abby.” Her voice hitched. “It’s too lawless out here. We’ll have to move on. To somewhere with a lawman, a real town with a sheriff to protect us.”
“No. Lawmen won’t fix this. They cause more trouble than they cure, and you know that’s true. We’ve got to do this ourselves.”
Mo fell silent, as she always did when Abby got it in her head about the evils of white men. But Mo hadn’t seen that kind of ugliness firsthand like Abby had, hadn’t watched what a mob could do. Of course, there was more to it, this time.
There was Barton Smalls . . . and there was a promise.
She didn’t tell Mo of the pact she’d made with the desert. She knew Mo would disapprove of any truck with spirits. The nuns had done more of a brainwash on Mo than she cared to admit. Plus, any scheme that put Abby in danger would worry her. That was one of the things Abby liked best about Mo: her worry. And once Mo knew what she had planned for Barton Smalls, Mo would be worried plenty.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
“Take it,” Great-Aunt Mary had insisted the day Abby left the nun house where her auntie worked. “Take it and use it. This gun don’t miss.”
“All guns miss,” Abby scoffed.
“This one won’t,” Aunt Mary said, her voice made rough from whiskey and homemade cigars. “It’s special. Kept me alive against a pack of wolves.”
Abby laughed and adjusted her ladies’ hat. It was a fine piece, made all of lace and silk, and no other girl in the convent had anything like it. Certainly not her aunt, whom she loved dearly but whom Abby found a bit plain and uncouth. “Ladies don’t carry guns.”
“Take it, Abigail.” She thrust the revolver into her hands. “And when the wolves come for you, you’ll know what to do.”
Abby had taken it to be polite. After all, they were family. And perhaps she could sell the thing once she and Mo arrived in Pueblo Libre.
She’d put the gun in a box and put the box in her steamer trunk and forgotten about it, mostly. So when the predators did come for her, she hadn’t been ready.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
“Wake up, Abby,” Mo’s voice called excitedly from the other room.
The command was followed by a series of booms and bangs and a mild swear as something heavy struck the old pine floor. The dining room chair. Mo had a habit of knocking it over when she was excited.
“What in the world . . . ?” Abby murmured, sitting up in bed. It had been a month since Barton Smalls had razed the settlement of Pueblo Libre, killing all but two of its residents. In that month, Mo had begged her a dozen times to leave. To move north to Trinidad or all the way up to Denver, where the mines were bustling and there was work to be had in the laundries and saloons. But Abby had refused.
“How do you think they’ll treat us there?” Abby had asked. “Two young Black women on their own, and no proper male guardian? And not a dress in sight for you. They’ll figure us out lickety-split, and then what?”
“It’s safer there . . .”
“Safer for whom?” Abby asked, unrelenting, even though Mo was beginning to droop. “Not us, Mo.”
“But if we keep our heads down, don’t cause trouble.”
“No place is safer than right here,” she lied, thinking only of her covenant and the blood she owed the desert, “so we’re staying.”
“Abby, be reasonable.”
“You don’t like it, then you’re free to go!”
The words were an angry snarl, and Abby didn’t mean them. Lord, she’d like to die if Mo left her. But she had made promises that couldn’t be broken, and the reckoning was coming. She could feel it in the soles of her feet when she walked the open desert, in the cries of birds that circled the small graveyard where they had buried the dead, in the rush of wind through the door that Mo had left open in her haste. And when her palm cupped around her penny.
“Abby!” Mo called again as she burst into the bedroom. She had an envelope in her hand. Not too large, but not small either. Whatever was in there was making Mo dance with excitement like she had bees in her bonnet. Abby chuckled to herself. Mo in a bonnet? That would be a sight.
“What is it?”
“I got you a present. Well, us. I got us a present.” The girl was practically bouncing in place as she presented the packet to Abby. Abby grinned.
“What is it?”
“Open it!”
Abby kept a small knife in her pocket, and she slid it out now to slice open the envelope. Mo’s joy was infectious, and Abby couldn’t help but grin along . . . until she saw what was inside.
“A ticket to Los Angeles?”
“Two tickets. One for me, and one for you.”
“Mo—”
“Now, don’t say no yet,” Mo rushed on. “I know you’re not keen on Colorado, but Los Angeles was founded by Black folks just like us. It’s a place we could be welcomed. And it’s right near the ocean. You told me you always wanted to see the ocean.”
“I do,” Abby admitted.
“See? And the new train tracks that the Santa Fe Railway built go right there. And it took some doing, but I got us tickets. We leave tomorrow. We can start over. Live how we want to live.” She grasped Abby by the arms. “Come with me, Abby. Say yes!”
Abby wanted to. So much her heart hurt just thinking about saying no. But “no” is what she had to say.
“Why not!?” Mo cried, throwing her hands up in frustration. “What is so special about staying here? What hold does this place have on you?”
Abby opened her mouth, but she didn’t have to answer. The desert answered for her, with a gale of hot wind on a winter’s day, the chorus of coyote song, a low rumble of thunder across the mountains.
Mo rubbed her arms, chilled despite the gust of heat, and looked out the window. “Is someone coming?” she whispered.
Abby didn’t have to answer that, either.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
“A gun, Abby?” Mo cried.
“Not just any gun,” Abby countered, lifting the box that held the revolver from her steamer trunk, where it had lain since they’d come to Pueblo Libre. “A special gun.”
“All guns are the same.”
“This was a gift from my great-aunt Mary. She told me it couldn’t miss.”
“All guns miss.”
Abby grinned. “That’s what I told her, too.”
“Barton Smalls is an outlaw, and a sharpshooter by reputation. Plus, he won’t come alone, Abby. To face him and his men down with one gun? It’s suicide.”
“I’m not afraid of a little death.”
“There is a perfectly good train ticket to somewhere green and beautiful and safe ly
ing on the kitchen table. Pick it up and claim it and come with me!”
Abby opened the chamber of the .38 revolver. “You know they call this gun the Lemon Squeezer,” she told Mo. “On account of the way you must squeeze the grip to pull the trigger.”
Mo stared at her. “Are you even listening to me?”
“I already told you—”
“I know. Your great-aunt Mary. She would have stayed and fought. But she ain’t here. And, besides, that’s a maybe. You don’t know. She might have gone to Los Angeles, too.”
Abby smiled, sadness warring with resignation.
The other girl deflated like somebody had let the air out of her. “Please come.”
“Maybe in the spring. After I’ve taken care of things here.”
“You can’t stay here alone. Who’s gonna keep you safe?”
Abby patted the box that held the revolver. “Aunt Mary.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The walk back from the train station was long and lonely. Tearful promises had been made. Not the kind a dying girl makes to the desert. The kind two girls in love make to each other. Hopeful, full of dreams.
I have forsaken love, Abby thought to herself, for a chance at revenge.
Soon, the desert whispered. And the desert never lied.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Barton Smalls was in her dreams. Not looking as he had when he rode into Pueblo Libre, but as he had back in Texas, when Abby still lived with her mama and hadn’t been sent to Aunt Mary’s and the nuns yet. Young, light-haired and dark-eyed, a handsome man, at least in her child’s eye.
He’d been one of the men who’d come for her daddy. Not screaming and ugly like the others, their voices screeching demands for blood, but he was there just the same, guilty just the same. Smalls had watched them take Daddy away, and when he’d seen her watching him, he’d flipped her a penny. A real copper penny. And laughed as it fell at her feet.
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