Grace laughed. It felt good.
42
Destiny’s Destination
Rico wanted to believe that the black clouds hanging over Las Delicias meant a gentle evening rain, but he knew better. He urged Grullo into a gallop down the carriage drive. The shreds of smoke were small ones. Maybe he could chase away whomever had started the fire. Maybe he could put out the flames before they did much damage. That the blaze might have started accidentally didn’t occur to him. Fires rarely started by accident these days.
He was so intent on what he would find beyond the open gate he didn’t notice the handbill nailed to it. The house looked intact, but the ruins of the sugar refinery beyond it still smoldered. Only the mill’s stone chimney remained, like a forefinger pointing in reproach toward heaven.
When Rico went inside the house he saw that its stone walls formed a shell around chaos. Looters had taken almost everything, yet still managed to leave it littered with trash they didn’t consider worth stealing. They had set a fire at the back of the house. Rico could tell from the streaks of soot on the walls that the flames had licked upward and ignited the beams. A portion of the roof had collapsed, leaving a pile of broken tiles on the floor.
Rico put a hand on the ashes and felt the warmth from them. He waded through the ankle-deep rubbish in the maze of rooms, dim in the day’s fading light. He called out as he went in case anyone lay hurt, or trapped under a fallen beam. He didn’t bother to search for anything the thieves might have left. Nothing had remained here for him even before the looters came. He stood ankle-deep in the debris of his childhood and gave several heartbeats’ thought to his situation.
His beloved was dead. His past was in ashes. His future was smoke on the wind.
The extent of the destruction didn’t surprise Rico. He didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that although the local villagers recognized his grandfather’s authority, they did not like him. Rico had spent his entire life trying to be the kind of man his grandfather was not.
He could imagine the scene here, with the local villagers swarming through these rooms. It must have looked like Mexico City’s sprawling Thieves’ Market on bargain day. He wondered how many of his family’s treasures would end up in the Thieves’ Market or in the Bank of Pity, the national pawnshop.
He discarded his plan to recruit men for Carranza’s army. He had no way of knowing which of the locals had participated in this. He didn’t want to go to the nearest village and see his family’s furniture, knickknacks, and paintings in the houses of people he had known all his life. In any case, everyone would assume he had come to punish the culprits. He could imagine them shuffling their feet, shifting their eyes from his gaze, and mumbling to avoid answering his questions.
He would volunteer his services to Carranza. He would fight to overthrow the likes of Huerta and Rubio. He would do his best to make up for the injustices inflicted on the laborers who made the extravagance of his family’s lives possible.
When he left the house, the sun had advanced too far toward the horizon for Rico to travel. As he unsaddled Grullo he noticed the paper nailed to the front gate. In the pale light he could barely read it. The drawing hardly approximated him, but the handbill gave a good description of Grullo. He realized that would be a problem in the days to come. He could disguise himself, but he couldn’t disguise his horse.
He brushed Grullo and led him to the stream running helter-skelter over rocks at the far end of the lawn. He lay on his stomach and took a long drink, too. He hobbled the horse on the lawn where the family had played tennis, croquette, and squash. The familiar sound of him munching on the succulent grass was a comfort. Rico wished his own hunger could be as easily appeased.
He spread his blanket on the thick moss in the triangular niche between two of an ancient fig tree’s enormous roots. A dense curtain of vines covered the tree. It had started as a vine itself, twining up around the hapless trunk of another tree long gone now. The fig had grown, drawing nourishment from its host. It had expanded and hardened until it stood on its own.
Its radiating system of roots took the shape and curve of a cathedral’s flying buttresses. As a child Rico had imagined they were his castle, his fortress, his Spanish galleon, his hideaway. He lay with his head against the trunk and looked up at the canopy of leaves. A shepherd moon watched over the flock of stars grazing among the branches.
Rico was partial to irony. He drifted toward sleep with a smile on his face and his hand resting on the sleek, rounded top of the fig tree’s root. Whoever had looted the house had not been able to steal the only material thing from his past for which he really cared and that now cradled him.
The market town of Mazatl was the heart of the district. The Carmelite convent was the soul of Mazatl. Rico’s family had donated to its support since its founding. For the first time in a hundred years there would be no donation. Before Rico left Morelos he felt obliged to explain and apologize, two things his grandfather never did.
Mother Merced probably knew what had happened at Las Delicias, and why Rico’s grandfather had not arrived with the quarterly alms. She might have been cloistered, but she was not in the dark. The grate in the door was like the window on a confessional. People came here from all over to tell her their troubles. Very little happened in the district that Mother Merced didn’t know about.
He rode down streets empty except for old people. Weeds and vines had begun to overrun the kitchen gardens. When he came to the plaza with its palms, fountain, and Victorian bandstand he was relieved to see the sacristan sweeping the flagstones.
“Thanks be to God!” The old man dropped to one knee and crushed his battered hat to his chest. “He has answered our prayers. We knew you would come to our aid, Don Federico.”
Rico dismounted. As he helped the old man to his feet he saw his grandfather’s stick pin holding the faded bandana around the sacristan’s withered neck. A silversmith had adorned the pin with a horse’s head engraved in such detail that the individual hairs in his mane were visible. The horse was Grullo’s sire and the pin was one of a kind. Don Bonifacio wore it only on formal occasions.
Rico said nothing about it. Better the sacristan have it than some bargain hunter at the Thieves’ Market. This meant that Mother Merced must know who had ransacked and burned his family’s estate. Rico didn’t intend to ask her. Even if he did, she was unlikely to tell him. Mother Merced did not repeat the confidences whispered through the iron grate.
Rico tied Grullo to a tree, walked across the stone paving of the outer reception area, and rang the bell on the door. From infancy until he boarded the steamer for Boston, his grandfather had brought him here every three months. After they delivered the family’s gift of money, they attended mass in the church next to the convent.
As a boy Rico had been fascinated by the sweet soprano chants echoing in the darkness beyond the grate or from behind the screen in the nun’s chapel. He listened intently now, but he heard no singing. Nor did he hear footsteps because Mother Merced did not wear shoes, but he did hear the rustle of her robes amplified by the walls of the narrow corridor.
He expected the panel behind the grate to slide open as usual. When the door itself swung wide he jumped back in surprise. He almost bowled over the sacristan hovering behind him.
Mother Merced stood like a plaster statue in the doorway. Her tight-fitting coif framed the stricken look on her face. Her eyes were red and her cheeks streaked with tears. The tears started again when she saw Rico.
“What happened, Holy Mother?”
She spoke in a choked whisper. “The federales came.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.” Mother Merced swayed and Rico reached out to catch her should she faint. “They took the sisters, the young ones. Only we old women are left.”
“Where did they take them?”
“I heard someone say Veracruz.”
“I am riding north. If I can find them I will punish the ones who took them.”
“Retribution is for God, my son. But if you find them, please make sure they come home.”
“I will.” He hesitated to ask her for a favor, but he could not leave without doing it. He knelt and bowed his head. “Will you say a novena for someone?”
“For whom, my child?”
“Her name is Grace Knight.”
“The tall Englishwoman with hair like old copper?”
Rico thought he would faint and fall nose-first onto the paving. Not the sort of thing for an officer and a gentleman to do.
“You know of her?”
“She slept here three nights ago.” The arrival of a champion and holy work to do seemed to revive Mother Merced. “Why do you ask us to pray her through purgatory?”
Rico collected his wits. Crying was also not appropriate for an officer and a gentleman.
“I heard the rebels had killed her.”
“If so, her ghost is quite substantial. She came here with the women who travel with Lieutenant Angel.”
Rico was so stunned he did not feel the grind of the flagstones on his knees. His beloved had returned from the grave. He felt as if he himself had been raised from the dead. He could not believe that he, who had sinned so much, could receive such a gift.
He finally registered the rest of the information. Lieutenant Angel was the one Ambrozio Nuñez said had killed Grace. And Angel’s miscreants were the ones who harrassed the train on a regular basis. Rico would have bet that Angel’s men were the ones who had looted Las Delicias, but as Grace would say, it mattered not a fig now.
“Where are they headed?”
“Angel said they were going to meet Zapata’s army in Ayala.”
Rico gave her the only objects of value he had, his pocket watch and Juan’s silver belt buckle. She blessed him and promised to pray for him on his journey. He mounted Grullo in a daze.
Destiny. Destination. Destino and destinación had the same meaning in Spanish. Destiny had given Rico a new destination.
Ayala.
43
Thieves Smoking Cigars
Rico met a mule driver who was heading in the direction of Rosa’s cantina. He gave him his second-to-last peso to deliver a message to Juan, telling him to start north without him. That was just as well. Looking prosperous was unhealthy these days, and Juan would not be happy to see what Rico did to the clothes he gave him.
He tore the ruffles off the white linen shirt. He ripped the sleeves from the embroidered jacket, then turned it inside out so only the brown wool lining showed. He waded through brambles in the leather trousers, then soaked them in a stream and beat them with rocks to age them. He packed his boots into a saddlebag and wore rope sandals he found discarded by the side of the road.
He had left his rifle in Juan’s keeping. Now he stuck his knife under his waistband at the small his back. He cut a slit in the middle of his blanket so he could wear it as a serape and hide his pistols, knife, and cartidge belt under it. The only things he didn’t have to alter were the ancient straw hat the sacristan gave him and the mud that had splattered all over him and his horse.
He knew the main route to Ayala, but he couldn’t risk running into a barricade or patrol. He intended to follow mountain trails etched into the rocky soil by centuries of burros’ hooves and the soles of peasants’ feet. The problem was the Martíns had never been the sort to travel back roads.
He hadn’t ridden far into the mountains before he realized how difficult finding and following those trails would be. All he could do was keep the sun on his left and pray that rain clouds didn’t cover it. Whenever he met the occasional muleteer or peasant on a burro he asked directions. Asking for help was also a new experience for him.
He needed money, but he couldn’t bring himself to sell Grullo, his only asset. Fortunately for Rico, plenty of people wanted to steal the horse. Even more fortunately, the first band of cutthroats to accost him numbered only three.
Rico breathed a thanks to God for sending them. Most renegados traveled in larger packs. What gave them away as criminals were the cigars. From the aroma of the smoke wafting toward him on the breeze Rico knew they were imported.
The old saying was right. Pobre con puro es ladrón, seguro. A poor man with a cigar is a thief for sure.
The leader had an extortionist’s eyes and pendulous jowls that gave him a greasily prosperous look. He stroked his large paunch as if it were a pet pig snoozing in his lap. He probably considered his hammock-backed, gray-muzzled plow horse to be figuratively as well as literally beneath him, but even if he didn’t, Rico’s Andalusian would be worth the taking.
The second man perched on the rump of a stout burro. The view of him was obscured by two bulging hemp sacks lashed across the animal’s back. A rusty shovel was tied on top of them. The third malefactor sat on a heavily laden, ladder-ribbed mule that wheezed like a windlass with a case of the glanders. The man was grinning like a cheerful death’s head, probably in anticipation of trading up to the plow horse when Jowls took possession of this handsome silver-gray stallion.
Jowls waved his rusty, pepperbox pistol in Rico’s general direction, as if that were all the attention such a shabby chump required. Rico tried not to smile. The gun had been new when his grandfather was in diapers.
A smarter man would have taken one look at Grullo and suspected that his rider wasn’t whom he seemed, but Jowls probably assumed Rico had come by the stallion dishonestly.
“We will relieve you of the responsibility of such a fine steed, compadre.”
Rico raised his hands high in hasty surrender. “Take him with God’s blessing, but please don’t shoot me.”
He fell out of the saddle as though in a panic, and landed on Grullo’s far side. He knew the bandits would kill him without blinking, but they would hesitate to harm the fine horse serving as his shield. He pulled both Colts from under his blanket and extended them around each side of Grullo’s neck. Grullo didn’t so much as twitch. Rico sighted across the horse’s whithers to take aim at the leader.
“Throw your weapons into the arroyo.” He used the parade-ground voice that always snapped the rowdiest troops to attention. “Knives, too.”
Jowls’s partners patted themselves down. They produced hardware from holsters, hats, serapes, shoes, and shirts and lobbed them over the side of the cliff. Jowls hesitated and Rico shot off his new sombrero to chivvy him along. Jowls muttered a rendition of Rico’s lineage to the counterpoint of his rifle, pistols, and cutlery clanging against the side of the cliff.
Rico knew he shouldn’t waste time. Another gang of sin verguenzas, shameless ones, could round the bend at any time.
“Put the sacks there and pile your clothes next to them.”
“Shoes, too, señor?” asked one of the cronies.
“Shoes, too.”
Crony Number Two surveyed the rocks and thorns that carpeted hundreds of square miles. “For the love of God, señor, not the shoes.”
Rico smiled like a wolf at a plump deer. “You may throw your shoes over the cliff empty or I will throw them over with your feet inside them.”
With a pistol still pointed at Jowls, Rico walked out from behind Grullo and hefted the gunny sacks. The bandits had reaped a rich harvest from some haciendas. When threatened with disaster, the well-to-do’s first impulse was to bury their valuables. The flaw in that plan was that most bandits were peasants, and if peasants knew anything, it was how to dig.
Rico upended the sacks and spilled out the bounty. The silver candlesticks, Greek statues, porcelain shepherdesses, and mirrors framed in gilded plaster cherubs looked familiar. These were at least three of the looters who had plundered his family’s home. He gave them a wolfish grin. God did have a sense of humor after all.
With a pistol trained on the bandits, he bundled their clothes with his other hand and flung them into the abyss. Then he kicked the booty after them. He couldn’t say why doing it gave him such joy. Maybe it was because they represented afternoons spent sweltering in
a starched collar in parlors that were burlesques of London drawing rooms. The stench of camphor and the jumble of useless gewgaws had always given him a headache.
The bandits groaned as their treasure rattled to the bottom a thousand feet away. Rico imagined some farmer in the canyon, standing bewildered in his rocky field while riches fell around him.
He mounted Grullo and rode off leading the mule by a rope. The plow horse and burro followed. He would have bet all the loot lying at the bottom of the canyon that Lieutenant Angel could find a use for the extra mounts.
Angel put great faith in the apocryphal belief that, like lightning, the federal army would not strike twice in the same place. So her company returned to the caves in the high cliff below San Miguel. The men slept in the largest cave and the women and children in the smaller ones. They were hard to reach and easy to defend and Angel’s people felt safer than they had in a long time.
Angel and Antonio sat on a ledge and watched the swallows dart in and out of the spray and mist where the hundred-foot-high waterfall hit the river. They leaned back against the limestone wall with their legs dangling, and enjoyed two of Don Bonifacio Martín’s habano puro cigars, imported from Cuba.
Everyone knew that Cubans made the best cigars. The word cuba itself meant casks of the sort that contained tobacco. Angel preferred habanos puros for their symbolism as much as for the euphoria their smoke caused. Cubans believed that slaves could produce sugarcane, but only free men cultivated tobacco.
In a little while the band would leave for General Zapata’s headquarters in Ayala, but Angel was enjoying this early morning respite on the ledge. For a few minutes she could pretend that life was always like this, with rare June sunshine, waterfalls, and the finest of cigars. Then small stones rattled down the slope. With regret, Angel and Antonio tossed the puros into the river and drew their pistols.
Last Train From Cuernavaca Page 25