That winter turned into one long battle of resistance. She resisted his long, lingering looks, his charms and kindness. Or tried, anyhow. It wasn’t easy on the days when the cold bore down in the gorge, making panning and hunting difficult, and they all huddled in the little cabin together. Having him so near was torture. She could smell him from across the room, a musky mystery floating up her nose that made her skin fidget uncomfortable, yet it was delicious too.
Compared to Nemacio, Nate remained flat, without any taste and texture, like a piece of dry toast with no butter or jam as flavor. Both Nemacio and Álvaro were infectious, always spreading good cheer, patching up a hole that Elisabeth carried around for so long. Álvaro filled the cabin with music, his fingers flying along the frets and strings of his guitar, strumming and picking and pulling out luscious, percussive melodies with force, then quieting into dulcet longing. He tapped his guitar above the strings with the palm of his hand, drumming, like he worked two instruments. She’d never heard flamenco before, and it flowed through her, intoxicating and romantic and strange, growing into a resonate lump inside her throat. Whenever Álvaro played, she sat near him with Yellow Dog’s head in her lap and closed her eyes, listening. Nate relished the music, too, rocking peacefully to the melody with his one good leg tapping out a tempo and a slight smile settled on his lips.
When Álvaro wasn’t playing, Nate read aloud to the Californios. Nemacio encouraged him, leaning over his shoulder, asking about certain words he didn’t know or characters he wanted more information about. When Nate grew tired of reading, Nemacio took over, stumbling over unfamiliar English words, his low voice deliciously thick and sticky as sap. When Nemacio read, she didn’t so much hear the words but felt the lushness of his voice running through her, lulling, reminding her of that moment dancing on the ridge. She savored the moment in her mind, turning it over again and again greedy, like a secret cache of gold.
When the salmon run quit for the season, Álvaro and Nemacio caught trout for a few weeks. But the steelhead and rainbow were smaller than the salmon, so Elisabeth went back to hunting so they could eat rabbit now and save the salmon Álvaro had smoked for the difficult winter days ahead. When she came back from the forest with rabbits, the Californios always stopped panning, throwing down their pans, clapping and hooting in a big show of appreciation, filling the camp with a joy that thrilled her. Nemacio’s charm even started rubbing off onto Nate some, making him less uptight and more lighthearted, like he’d been back in Lowell.
In charge of the kitchen now, Nate learned to prepare rabbit with herbs that Nemacio had collected to add more flavor.
“I don’t want to interfere in your preparations,” said Nemacio.
“Please, by all means, interfere,” said Nate, handing Nemacio a knife.
“I don’t imply your cooking is bad.”
“I understand.”
“Only if you want.”
“Yes. Please. Show me how to cook like a Californio. I want to learn,” said Nate.
Nemacio clapped and rubbed his hands together.
“Then let’s do it. I’m rabid with hunger,” said Nemacio, laughing at his own funny pun.
She noticed Nate standing far too close to Nemacio as he smeared the bunny with a garlic and rosemary paste, frying it up with wild onions in a pan of pork fat. Nate studied Nemacio as he worked, learning the fine art of Californio cooking with the plants growing natural throughout the canyon. Soon Nate was experimenting on his own with inventive ways to stretch a single rabbit into a meal for four by adding flavors from herbs and plants Nemacio brought back to the cabin. Sage and bay and miner’s lettuce and wild onions and fennel. Nemacio showed him how to make a rabbit stew, rich with flavor from balsam and shooting star roots and buried tubers. Cooking suited Nate, and he seemed to relish the role, announcing new concoctions with a flourish and pride at suppertime.
“I present a supper of Bunny Shepherd Mash. Boiled buckeyes mixed with roasted shepherd’s purse seeds under roasted bunny bits,” he said, trying to impress Nemacio.
Elisabeth hated seeing Nate getting so friendly with Nemacio. Hated seeing him flirting, flipping his blond hair to the side, acting halting and nervous when he read aloud, just like he had back in Lowell when he was courting her. She caught him sizing up Nemacio in the candlelight, looking at his strong back longer than a man should look at a man. It made her sick seeing Nate lusting after Nemacio like that. It wasn’t right, she and her husband wanting the same man.
Nemacio never let on he knew about Nate’s peculiar tendencies with men. How he’d seen Nate at the Fandango doing something sinful behind a rock with that lady-man. Nemacio didn’t seem to hold that night against Nate the way she did. He didn’t judge but treated Nate with a respect Elisabeth thought undeserved.
One particular blistering cold afternoon, Nemacio found Henry’s old woodcutting tools and started sharpening them. He didn’t ask who the tools belonged to, simply took each knife out one by one, pulling them along a flat river rock back and forth until sharp, then fashioned a single crutch for Nate out of a pine branch, with an arm pad from a bit of rabbit skin. She watched him whittle, mesmerized by his long elegant fingers peeling the wood straight and smooth, and as he carved a picture of a snake into the length of the stick, twisting down and back up to the top where the stupid thing was eating its own rattle, devouring itself. He turned the stick round and round, creating an intricate diamond detail along the snake’s back, and burning it beautiful with the hot fire poker.
“Now you have the rattlesnake’s power,” he told Nate.
“What a gift,” Nate said, testing the fit under his arm.
He lost his balance, throwing his arms around Nemacio to stop from falling. He hung onto Nemacio’s neck awkward, pressing his chest up too close. Nemacio held Nate’s shoulders at an arm’s length, putting some distance between them as if helping him stand. Jealousy ran through her like boiled water.
“Walk around,” said Nemacio, motioning his finger in circles.
Nate hobbled around on the dirt floor, attempting a smooth gait using the snake stick.
“It’s perfect. Perfect,” he said.
Nemacio had a way of directing his full attentions toward a person, listening with rapt intensity. She’d never seen a man so generous with his spirit before, pulling out a person’s better self and reflecting it back to them in ways they didn’t know themselves before. He flattered everyone, with an earnestness she found beguiling.
He told Elisabeth she was strong and steady like an unmoving river rock in a powerful spring thaw. No man had ever said anything like that to her before, and he’d said it right in front of Nate and Álvaro. She laughed out loud at his ridiculousness, knowing he must be joking but hoping he wasn’t. Nemacio stared back, serious. She worried Nate might suspect something between them. Not that it mattered; she and Nate lived like brother and sister now, not husband and wife.
Nemacio showed a tenderness she’d never seen in a man, like when he tickled the pads of Yellow Dog’s paws, giggling to himself. Or when his eyes watered at hearing Nate read a lovely poem aloud, and his heavy brow furrowed as he stared into the fire as if he worried on something troublesome. He had an elegant strength about him but also wore vulnerability around proud like a buffalo robe, which only made him seem more powerful. When she asked why he came to dig in the river, he said it was for family.
“They are the air I breathe. I cannot live without them. So, I dig.”
He explained how the Americans were after his family’s ranch, and how they were taking over all the Californio ranches up and down the state.
“Four generations of Gabilan held our land, but the Americans now say our boundary maps aren’t solid proof. They want deeds and money.”
“How much?” Nate asked, impertinent.
“More than the Gabilans have, and we have a lot. So here I am. A desperate digger.”
“Taking your land is illegal. You should challenge the claim,” Nate said.
“How?” Nemacio asked.
Nate acted like he knew all about California law, explaining the particulars of how to get a letter to a senator. Irritated, Elisabeth interrupted, rolling up her right sleeve to show Nemacio the angry red blisters bubbling up on the inside of her right forearm.
“My arm is itching something terrible.”
“Poison oak,” said Nemacio.
“Leaves of three, let it be,” said Nate.
“I know that!” she said.
“Poison oak has no leaves in the winter. You can hardly see the sticks,” said Nemacio.
He boiled up yerba buena and manzanita, making a poultice. When he pressed the medicine gentle on her skin, she flinched with desire.
“It can’t hurt that much,” he said.
“No.”
“I’ll hunt with you tomorrow. Show you the sticks,” he said, still holding the compress to her skin, soft.
“If you want,” she said.
Maybe the poison caused a heat to rise to her skin, but she burned under his touch. It had been so long. Her only source of affection came from Yellow Dog nuzzling up dirty against her thigh. She’d not realized how withered up for affection she’d become, like a rotted sack of potatoes gone soggy out in the rain, spotted and ruined.
Nemacio wrapped her arm in cloth, tucking the ends in neat. When he let go she wanted to grab his hands and place them all over her body, but instead she looked away, hiding her face pinking up like a raspberry.
Over the next few weeks, the rash grew into an oozing mess that itched like Satan himself had settled in her arm, but she grew glad for it, because it meant he’d touch her. Tend to her. Each night he sat close beside her on the cabin floor, healing her pain, while Nate rocked by the fire absorbed in a book, blind to the growing affections between them. The sound of Álvaro’s dulcet guitar was a secret blanket hiding her quickening breath as Nemacio pressed the poultice down onto her rashy arm, wrapping the cloth slow, taking his time. Nemacio leaned in close, whispering.
“Does he touch you?”
“No.”
“A shameful disregard.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“A woman needs loving,” he said, his dark eyes set serious.
“I don’t need loving,” she lied.
“All women need loving.”
“Can you catch it from me?”
“Catch what?”
“The poison,” she said.
“That depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“On what sort of poison you’re talking about,” he said.
She wanted more but didn’t know how to ask.
16
“Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.”
Even on cold winter afternoons, Elisabeth hunted. She wore the dead man’s coat, tromping through the wilderness among snowflakes fluttering down light and airy, settling on the pine boughs above and into her hair and onto the forest floor in a thin white blanket. Marveling at the quietness of the winter forest, she relished getting away from the stale cabin and out in the crisp mountain air. The soft sounds of the forest rejuvenated her, the trees swaying in solace. She usually got a rabbit within an hour, stuffing it into the sack she carried over her shoulder. One afternoon, she rested by a little pool below Indian Creek waterfall. Cupping her hands through the water for a drink, she looked up to see Nemacio crossing the stream.
“You following me?”
“Maybe,” said Nemacio.
He opened his satchel for her to see.
“Pine cones.”
He tapped a pine cone on a rock, shaking out nuts, then peeled several and gave a handful to Elisabeth to eat.
“Mmmm,” she mumbled.
“You shouldn’t be alone,” he said.
“I’m not alone,” she said, patting Yellow Dog on the head.
“Your choice or his?”
She knew he wasn’t talking about Yellow Dog. Intent, he’d had a way of poking and prodding her open. His directness unnerved her.
“I do what I want,” she said.
“You should leave Yellow Dog back at the cabin if you want a deer.”
“Bunny is fine with me,” she said, holding up her sack of bunnies.
“I want more than bunny,” he said.
“Then go hunt for yourself,” she said, picking up her rifle to leave.
He pointed to a bare branch sticking out of the ground.
“That’s poison oak.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling dumb.
As she leaned down to examine the stick, he grabbed her hand, presumptuously.
“Let’s get a deer,” he said.
She wasn’t a weak woman, nor was she was led easy anymore. Even so, she let him pull her through the trees.
“I already know how to hunt,” she said, her hand still in his.
When he turned and pressed his finger to her lips, her insides buzzed crazy like a swarm of yellow jackets.
“I don’t need your help. I’m perfectly fine out here, alone.”
She followed anyway as he showed her how to walk through the forest without tramping, taking soft, quiet steps. She stared at his strong back, his broad shoulders, his dark curly hair falling out from underneath his hat. When he stopped and listened, she stopped and listened, seeing all manner of creatures scuttling about: a family of ground squirrels, a tiny pika poking a twitching nose out from a rock, a sleek pine marten crossing the path without fear. As she scrambled over a downed log, Nemacio let go of her hand. When she jumped down, he picked up her hand again, and they entwined their fingers. Tiptoeing through the forest, they didn’t see a single deer, but she couldn’t have cared less. She listened as Nemacio pointed out the names of trees and bushes and animals in Spanish and English, and watched him cut dried thistle, adding them to his sack of pine cones, careful to not prick himself.
“It makes a good tea for a sore stomach,” he said.
“How do you get around the prickers?”
“You boil the seeds. But you shouldn’t drink too much.”
“Why?”
“It prevents baby making.”
“I never heard of such a thing.”
“All women need to know about thistle blossom tea,” he said as he placed a hand on her shoulder, serious.
He filled her with mixed up feelings, both thrilling and confusing. She couldn’t quite parse his meaning. But she didn’t ask him to make himself clear either, enjoying the mystery of his intentions. She didn’t want the walk to end, wanted to stay out in the winter forest with him forever. He talked easy with her, sharing about his family, saying his father had been a great general who died in the Mexican War of Independence from Spain.
“As the eldest son, I have great responsibility. I can’t lose our ranch.”
She listened with envy as he told of a thousand acres of heavenly earth that sounded unreal, with a grand hacienda and hundreds of head of cattle, and a huge family all living together.
“If that were my home, I’d a never left,” she said.
She told him of the apples on the Goodwin Orchard back in Concord going all a blight and Henry leaving and her working at the Lowell mill and losing little Lucy to the spinning machine and Samuel studying at school in Amherst and meeting Nate and coming over on the boat to find Henry. But she didn’t tell of her mother and her madness. Nemacio listened, his eyes soft with understanding at all she’d been through.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“Nothing. Never mind,” she said.
How ridiculous! Thanking a man for paying her a spot of attention. A married woman pining after another man turns a woman wretched. Nothing good could come of it. Truth be told, she didn’t really care if Nate caught her pining after Nemacio. She actually hoped he’d notice. Hoped he’d see Nemacio was drawn to her too—a woman—and not to him.
They arrived back at the cabin to find Nate hopping around outside on his one fo
ot, swinging an axe at a log, while Álvaro gathered wood across the river. From the edge of the trees in the gloaming, they saw him struggling on his one leg, flopping and flailing, losing his balance. He fell in the mud and picked himself up slow, lurching, and reached again for the axe. He swiped at the log and fell again, hitting the ground with his fists and cursing frustrations, his hollers echoing up the river canyon. She started to go to him. To help. Nemacio shook his head, holding her back. With guilt and pity squeezing her soul, she couldn’t watch any longer, and she slipped off into the cabin, alone. She cooked up the rabbit, as a sour slab of envy ruined her appetite. She wasn’t sure if she was more envious of Nemacio for comforting Nate better than she could, or envious of Nate for getting the comfort from Nemacio she wanted for herself. Throwing the pan on the dirt floor, she swelled in a thicket of disgust at her mangled thoughts.
Music woke her in the middle of the night. A captivating rhythm, passionate and raw. She tiptoed outside and saw all three men around a bonfire, blazing hot. A dusting of snow sat still on the ground, but the men seemed impervious to the cold, passing a bottle between them, sloppy. Álvaro strummed his guitar while Nemacio sang along, matching the melody with his deep, rich voice booming above the river. Me estoy muriendo de pena. Por tu sole tu querer. Even though she couldn’t understand the Spanish, the haunting words drew her close. She opened the cabin door to see light from a blazing fire, and Nate fixed a lusty look over Nemacio, who seemed oblivious to Nate’s looking. Nemacio just kept singing and sucking on his bottle with an arm strapped around Álvaro. This looked like the sort of fraternity Nate had told her all men wanted. In that moment, she realized she was competing with her husband over the same man. She laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all and went back into the cabin, slamming the door behind her. That night, she picked up Henry’s tools, and Yellow Dog snuggled in close watching her work.
Prospects of a Woman Page 12