Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Angel sat behind Antonio and pulled him into a half-sitting position so his back rested against her chest. She gave him a long drink of tequila from the canteen, then took one herself before pushing the cork back into it. She put her arms around him, laid her cheek against his, and held him while José pulled on his foot to straighten the ankle bone.

  She kept holding him while José cut a branch from a pine tree, shaved it flat with his machete, divided it in two, and shaped it into splints. Angel folded rags to cushion the leg and José bound the splints tightly in place. They helped him stand and mount the mare.

  Angel had plenty of time to think in the corpse-strewn darkness as she led the mare back to camp with Antonio lying along the horse’s neck. She thought about how panicked she had been when he didn’t return today. She felt the icy wind that commenced howling around her heart every time she imagined burying his lifeless body. She tried not to think about how unbearable life would be without him.

  At the army’s sprawling encampment at Tres Marías she wrapped her serape around her and sat by his mat while he tossed and moaned in his sleep. She murmured reassurances and covered him when his blanket slipped off. She gave him sips of water when he woke up. She laid wet cloths on his forehead to ease his fever. She dozed a little, but most of the night she stared into his face, pale in the moonlight.

  The sun had been up an hour when Antonio awoke. Only after he attempted a smile and asked for breakfast would Angel believe the exhausted medico when he said Antonio would survive. She shared her tortillas, beans, and roast pork with him.

  “You look like you’ll live, Ugly.”

  “I’m ready to ride.”

  “That’s good, because General Zapata says we’ll be galloping into Cuernavaca soon.”

  53

  Beer and Bananas

  Leobardo rolled his belongings into his canvas hammock and tied it onto his back with one of his wife’s shawls. He opened the back gate, his last official act as the Colonial’s doorman. Socrates stood ready to close the gate behind him and the last two chambermaids.

  Leobardo held his sombrero against his chest and waited for the weeping maids to make their farewells to Grace, Lyda, Annie, and the Colonial.

  The maids had their own name for the hotel. “May God take care of you, Mamacita, and the Big House, too.”

  “You know you are welcome to stay here at the Big House,” said Grace.

  The maids looked at Leobardo, but he shook his head. Grace only recently had learned they were his nieces.

  “We have relatives in a village held by the Zapatistas,” he said. “We can find food there.”

  Socrates muttered too low for Leobardo or the maids to hear, “The Zapatistas are starving, too.”

  Grace was grateful to be relieved of responsibility for three people, but she was sad to see them go. Leobardo’s stories of misadventures with witches amused her. And she would miss the maid’s laughter and the patter of their bare feet running on the tile floors.

  She couldn’t bear to watch them walk off down the narrow side street in a forlorn little procession. Lyda waved good-bye to them, but Grace headed inside. Lyda called her back.

  “Gracie, looks like the Hoffmans have decided to vamoose.”

  Grace and Lyda watched the landau carriage stop at the gate. Three wagons pulled up in a line behind it. Each wagon held a mountain of canvas-covered possessions. Herr Gustav Hoffman’s brewery workers perched on narrow board benches along the sides. They carried rifles instead of the usual big wooden stir paddles.

  With his incorrigible yellow hair and rosy cheeks and nose, Herr Hoffman looked like Bacchus in green suspenders and short leather breeches. He wrapped the reins around the brake lever and stepped down from the carriage to supervise the unloading. His men stowed their machetes, slid their rifles around to their backs, and jumped down. They unlashed the tarpaulins and lowered the wagons’ tailgates. They put planks in place and trundled three oak barrels down the ramps.

  After they rolled the beer into a shed in the back courtyard, they carried in a dozen sacks of grain. Grace wasn’t sure how useful the beer would be, but she almost wept with relief at the gift of grain. She had faced the necessity of selling Duke and the mule or watching them starve.

  “This is very generous of you, Herr Hoffman.”

  “My dear lady, better you and your people enjoy my beer than it vanish into the mouths of rabble.”

  “We cannot begin to thank you.”

  “I do not want to boast, Mrs. Knight, but this is bock beer.”

  While his wife signaled impatiently to him from the carriage, the imperturbable brewer made sure Grace understood what she was getting.

  “In Germany we call bock beer ‘liquid bread.’ In old times, the monks they brew this beer to…” he searched for the words in English “…to bear them up while fasting.”

  “We surely are fasting,” said Grace.

  “Bread in a bottle must’ve made piety more palatable for the padres,” added Lyda.

  “This beer, he is good with food, too, like roasted beef, yah. Is good even with Mexican food.”

  Frau Hoffman gave up trying to hurry her husband along and stood up in the carriage. Herr Hoffman translated her invitation.

  “They say the road to Acapulco is safe, Mrs. Knight. Better you all come with.”

  “We thank you for the kind offer, but we have seen bad times before. This storm will pass.” Grace turned to Lyda. “You and Annie should go with them though.”

  “Jake said he would come back for us. We’ll wait for him.”

  Lyda put an arm around Grace in a show of solidarity, but as the two of them waved good-bye to the Hoffmans, she muttered, “Roast beef. I’ve forgotten what that tastes like.”

  “Now, Lyda, he said it’s also good with Mexican food.”

  “When he said Mexican food, I doubt he meant bananas.”

  The Colonial’s larder held perhaps two weeks’ supply of dried beans and rice if the five of them shared a very small portion for one meal a day. They supplemented that with bananas from the trees in the two courtyards. María served the bananas fried, boiled, grilled, poached, baked, roasted, stewed and a few other ways Grace couldn’t identify.

  The evening the Hoffmans left, Annie ventured across the street to hear the nightly concert in the zócalo. She returned in tears at the misery she saw there. After that neither Annie, Grace, nor Lyda went outside the Colonial’s front gate unless necessary.

  They could not bear to watch people search trash heaps for anything edible or dig weeds in the plazas to make into broth. In the days that followed, starving Cuernavacans stripped the fruit trees bare. Litter on the street consisted mostly of sugarcane stalks chewed into fringe. Finally, even the nightly concerts ceased.

  Keeping bodies alive in a famine was one thing. Keeping spirits up was another. Herr Hoffman’s liquid bread helped Grace do both. It even earned a little income.

  With few choices for evening entertainment, los correctos and the remaining foreigner residents gravitated to the Colonial to drink Herr Hoffman’s beer and the Colonial’s wine, and play cards. Annie cranked up the phonograph for those who wanted to dance in the ballroom. When Annie’s arm grew tired, Grace played the piano.

  The explosion came during a chorus of “Jarabe Tapátio.” The shock wave vibrated the piano stool. The lights rattled in their sockets, flickered, and died. Everyone froze, waiting to see if they would come back on. They didn’t.

  Grace lit candles and showed the guests out. On her way back she heard Annie and Lyda call from upstairs. She joined them on the second-floor balcony. Flames from the electrical plant on the outskirts of town danced above the rooftops. They made Grace uneasy, but the plant had come under attack before when Madero’s rebel forces prevailed against Díaz’s army in 1910.

  The glow in the nighttime sky in the mountains to the north was a different matter. The fire must be an inferno to reflect so much light off the underside of the cloud cover. T
hen the distant rumble of cannon fire reached them.

  “Do you think the rebels have taken Tres Marías?” asked Lyda.

  “Dear God, I hope not.”

  Annie hung out over the rail, fascinated by the show. The girl was amiable and polite, yet Grace could imagine her riding off with Angel’s band of rebels. She had a tough core, a quick intellect, and a bold spirit. She was also lovely to look at and almost fourteen years old. A chill went through Grace at the thought of what could happen to her if war entered Cuernavaca.

  The nightly rain drove them back inside. No one wanted to be trapped on the second floor should a mob storm the hotel, so Lyda, Annie, and María went to bed in the rooms opening off the rear courtyard. Duke and the mule shared another room there, and Socrates took up sentry duty at the back gate.

  As she did every night, Grace sat in the big leather chair under one of the arches along the open corridor. It gave her a view of the rain splattering on the paving stones of the front courtyard, the covered entryway, and the main gate. She held the big hotel guest book on her lap and leaned the loaded shotgun against the tiled column.

  She kept the shotgun close at hand these days. María had told her about the rumor in town. People claimed that the Englishwoman stored tens of thousands of pesos in a chest under her bed. María said that lately, Mamacita’s treasure had grown in the collective imagination to millions of pesos. Why else, people asked each other, would a foreign woman stay here unless her treasure was too heavy to move?

  She turned up the wick in the oil lamp and opened the leather-bound guest book. Each signature summoned up a face and a personality, but Grace’s favorite entry was the first one, written by Lyda. Lyda had come bursting through the doors as soon as Grace pushed them open. She had spied the book on the front desk and had written in Spanish, “May you have love, health, money, and time to enjoy them.”

  Grace came to the end of the guests’ remarks and turned one more page, though she couldn’t have said why. She drew a sharp breath at the bold script. She could picture Rico writing it with his left hand curled over the top of the page. He said he learned to write that way so his teachers wouldn’t punish him when his letters slanted in the opposite direction from the other children’s.

  “I will find you, if not on earth then in heaven.” He had written it in English and in Spanish, but why? Did he think she was dead? Did he think he would die before he saw her again?

  It was dated May 29. Grace guessed he had made the entry in the book after he escaped from jail. Socrates said Rico had sneaked into the stable at dawn and exchanged an old swaybacked farm horse for his grandfather’s gray Andalusian. He said when General Fatso discovered the switch he had gone into the worst rage any of them had ever seen.

  Grace smiled. Even under a death sentence, Rico would play his pranks. She fell asleep with her hand resting on his words.

  The clock in the lobby had just chimed two when the sound of rifle fire and running footsteps jerked Grace awake. With heart pounding, she put the book on the floor. She grabbed the shotgun, thumbed the hammer back, and leveled it at the front gate.

  “Death to the Spaniards,” someone shouted. Then he passed on by, his footsteps fading in the distance.

  Grace lowered the hammer to half-cock and leaned the gun against the pillar. Lyda arrived, yawning, and Grace moved over to make room for her and her derringer. She opened the guest book to the last page and turned up the wick on the oil lamp so Lyda could read it.

  “What did he mean, he’ll find me in heaven?” Grace started to cry. “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “No, Gracie. He’s not dead. I’m sure of it.”

  “And neither is Jake.” Grace pushed the corn-tassel-blond hair back from Lyda’s face and kissed her on the foreheard. “He’ll find a way to return to you and Annie. He’ll make sure no harm comes to either of you.”

  With their arms around each other the two of them cried each other to sleep while the sky wept, too.

  The sun had been up an hour and already the buzz of flies from the zócalo sounded like a distant sawmill at peak operation. The wounded soldiers lying in ranks around the bandstand were not suffering in silence. They cried for their mothers and pleaded for water.

  The larger plaza just to the south filled up, too, as more soldiers and civilians streamed into the city. The able-bodied had carried their wounded comrades twenty mountainous miles from Tres Marías. They slept, exhausted, in the midst of scattered equipment, swarms of flies, and the perpetual screaming.

  The soldaderas did their best to wave away the flies, staunch the bleeding, and bind up the broken bones. They had torn so many ban d-ages from the bottoms of their skirts that they were close to half naked. When Grace gave them the bundles of strips ripped from the Colonial’s bedsheets, they murmured thanks.

  Grace and Lyda walked up and down the lines with their buckets. They lifted each man’s head and held a gourd of water to his lips. Annie had a bucket, too, but she had filled it with beer. “The men might be hungry as well as thirsty,” she said. “And Herr Hoffman said his beer was good for body and soul.”

  “¡Mamacita!”

  Grace hung the curved handle of the gourd on the rim of the bucket and stood up. “Colonel Rodriguez! What happened?”

  “The Zapatistas outnumbered us four to one. They have our artillery now. They have the weapons and supplies that were meant for us.”

  “The rebels stole them?”

  Rodriguez avoided her eyes. “The supply train’s escort deserted. And some officers have gone over to the rebels and taken their men with them.”

  Only a week ago the colonel had come to the Colonial to tell Grace not to worry. His men would protect the city. Now here he stood with his arm in a sling. His head was bound by a bloody strip of flowered calico that probably has served as a ruffle in its previous life.

  Before he went back to the task of moving the wounded to the old monastery, he said, “We will make a stand here in the city. We will not desert you.”

  Lyda put an arm around Grace’s waist and asked the question her friend could not. “Do you know where Captain Martín is?”

  “Dead.” The colonel studied the ground. “The rebels hanged him.”

  Grace heard the words, but her brain declined to process them.

  “The rebels?” Lyda asked. “Not General Rubio?”

  “They say Lieutenant Angel’s mob did it.”

  Grace screamed and swayed. Annie came running and she and Lyda supported her to keep her from falling.

  “Lo siento, Mamacita,” Rodriguez said. “I’m sorry. Lo siento.”

  He kept saying it as Lyda and Annie led Grace across the street and through the Colonial’s front gates. They sat her in the big leather-upholstered chair. Lyda gave her several handkerchiefs, but they lay unnoticed in Grace’s lap. María brought her a rare treat, a bowl of chicken-foot broth, with the foot still floating in it. Annie tried to coax her to drink some water. Grace shook her head. She sat, silent and dry-eyed, the rest of the afternoon.

  As dusk gathered, Lyda laid out straw mats and blankets in the corridor near Grace’s chair. Before she and Annie lay down to sleep, Lyda sneaked the shotgun and pistol away from Grace. She figured if her friend could make it through the night alive, there was hope for tomorrow.

  54

  Gifts from God

  To an outside observer, the hundreds of cookfires and acres of trash would have looked like open sores on the stump-studded slopes around Tres Marías. To Angel and Antonio the encampment resembled heaven. Eight thousand men and their women had gathered here. Artillery carriages and ammunition caissons sat in ranks.

  The government’s barracks lay in charred ruins. The federal army was in disarray. With this force, Zapata’s Southern Army of Liberation would take Cuernavaca, the state of Morelos, and, ultimately, the country.

  José grinned as he led the big, steel-dust stallion toward Angel. The reprobate mule, Moses, ambled along behind. No one knew how Moses
had found his way back to the Perez family. They had discovered him one morning with his coat covered in burs, grazing with the rest of the stock as if he had never left. Some people in Angel’s band said his return was a miracle. Others claimed it was a curse.

  José held aloft the new company flag his wife and daughter had just finished sewing. It fluttered in the breeze as he walked. It had a new motif—a red field with an angel in a white robe brandishing a sword. Across the top Socorro had appliquéd “Land and Liberty” in green outline in black.

  José held out the flag’s staff and Grullo’s reins. Angel took the staff, but she refused the reins, although it pained her to do it.

  “He’s your horse, Maestro José.”

  “My daughter, when you lead us into battle we have to make a good show. We cannot shame Colonel Contreras in front of Carranza’s flock of peacocks.” José waved the flag toward the men setting up tents not far away.

  The tents were so white they stood out like flares in the general disorder of the camp. One of Venustiano Carranza’s battalions had arrived this afternoon from the northern state of Coahuila. Angel and her people were glad for the reinforcements, but they envied Carranza’s men the abundance of supplies. They also resented the newcomers’ air of superiority, as if they had come to save the day from a bunch of bumblers.

  Ever the optimist, Antonio said, “Maybe they’ll share their ammunition with us.”

  “I doubt it,” muttered Angel.

  As if on cue, Rico Martín’s old comrade, Juan, strolled up. A major’s insignia decorated the starched collar of his new uniform. He stared at Angel, probably trying to decide where he had seen her before. She didn’t let on that he had flirted with her when she sold tamarind candy on the Tres Marías train platform.

  That a federal officer had joined Carranza’s forces didn’t surprise Angel. Every day more gray uniforms of the rural police and el gobierno’s dark blue ones mingled with Zapata’s men.