DC03 - Though Mountains Fall (33 page)

Outside, in the bright sunlight, the scene was pure bedlam. Some people were running away as fast as they could, herding their children from harm, while others attacked the soldiers as they tried to get to their horses, flailing at them with whatever they could find, cursing and shouting.

Captain Soto, the only one already mounted, drew his pistol and fired several shots into the air, scattering the angry mob. Taking advantage of the smoke and chaos, Domingo mingled with the escaping crowd, whisking the priest away before the federales spotted him.

When Miriam looked back she saw black smoke pouring from the roof vents and flames lapping around the eaves.

———

Twenty minutes later Father Noceda sat at Miriam’s kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him, rubbing his jaw and glaring at Domingo.

“It is a sin to strike a priest,” he grumbled.

Domingo shrugged, suppressing a grin. “I chose the lesser of two evils, preventing a greater sin.”

Miriam hadn’t seen any punching. “Domingo, did you hit him?”

A cheerful nod. “Sí. He tried to get up and go after Captain Soto. It seems our gentle padre has a fire in his belly.”

“I would have beaten that little . . .
What
greater sin?” Noceda demanded.

“Suicide. He would have shot you.”

Miriam gave a nod, eyebrows raised. “He’s right, Father. The soldiers would have killed you.”

“Or, if you were lucky, put you in jail for the rest of your life,” Domingo added.

“Maybe it would have been for the best,” the priest said. “I cannot live like this.”

Miriam sat next to him, rubbed his shoulder. “It was only a building, Father.”

“Sí, but the only one we had. And you have lost your school, too.”

“But I didn’t lose the children. A building can be replaced.”

“This
was
the replacement. Something must be done. If this Calles and his minions are allowed to rule much longer, there will be no church at all in this country.”

“What
is
the church doing?” Domingo asked.

“Nothing! The archbishop does not support insurrection, but it is coming whether he likes it or not. It is time for me to choose between the church and my conscience.”

Noceda sat up straight, and Miriam saw a new and terrible resolve in his eyes.

“I have seen enough,” he said. “There is no longer any choice to make.”

“What are you going to do?” Domingo asked.

“Fight.”

“Fight? By yourself, with no weapons?”

“They are raising a rebel army in Jalisco, in the hills south of Guadalajara—even
without
the support of Rome. They call themselves the
Cristeros
. The commander’s name is Vega—Father José Reyes Vega.”

“I have heard of him,” Domingo said. “They say he is a born general, a brilliant tactician.”

“A genius,” Noceda said, nodding.

“
Father
Vega?” Miriam said. “You mean he’s a priest?”

“Sí. There are many ways to defend the faith, child. Father Vega will put the fear of God into the federales, and teach them humility.”

“But you know nothing of fighting,” Miriam said. “You’re a priest.”

“I wasn’t always. I was a soldier once, and now it looks like I will be again. I’m tired of being persecuted by the federales. Sooner or later someone has to take a stand against this madness. If Vega will have me in his rebel army, I will fight.”

“Then so will I,” Domingo said quietly. “Someone has to watch your back.”

“Domingo, you can’t be serious!” Miriam cried, and her hand dropped almost unconsciously to her belly. “War is
never
the answer! Your father died fighting, and your sister’s husband. Don’t you think there are enough fatherless children in this family?”

He reached across the table, laid his hand on hers and looked her in the eye. “Miriam, from the very first I have never made a secret of the fact that I am a warrior. It is in my blood. You did not complain when I fought bandits to save your sister, or when I fought them to save
you
. Father Noceda is right—it is time to take a stand against these people. There is a time for
every purpose, Miriam. A time for peace and a time for war, and if there has ever been a time for war, this is it. It is coming. It is inevitable. Good men are going to fight and die to free us from these monsters. How will I live with myself if I hide from the fight and let others die in my place?”

She couldn’t look at him, because in her heart she knew he was right. He’d told her he was a warrior from the very beginning. On top of that she’d been taught from birth that a woman must obey her husband, and this was her husband. Her pacifist upbringing railed and cried and screamed warnings from the deepest corner of her soul, but she couldn’t let herself listen to them.

This was her husband.

She pressed a knuckle hard against her upper lip for a long moment, willing herself not to cry. When she finally looked up her eyes were clear. She took a deep breath, let it out.

“When will you go?”

There would be no school the next day, nor any day until Miriam could find another place to meet. After breakfast Domingo went off with Father Noceda to “talk to some men about where to find this rebel army.”

He was really going to do this. She had tried her best when they were alone in the night, but she couldn’t persuade him and she would never ever try to force him. Now, more than ever, Miriam missed her family. She’d lived her whole life in the close company of a bevy of sisters, and times like this—times of deep personal crisis—showed her just how badly she needed them.

As soon as the men left, Miriam wrapped a serape about her against the chill of the November morning and went out to saddle Domingo’s horse.

Riding down the main road through the middle of Paradise
Valley she saw the men of her family—her father and Harvey, her brothers-in-law Ezra and Levi and Jake—up near the barn, loading a planter on the hay wagon. Her mother and sisters would be in the house, packing.

She rode on for another quarter mile and turned into Emma’s lane. Emma was outside in the bright morning light, hanging laundry on the line.

“You’re washing clothes on the day before you are to leave?” Miriam asked as she swung down from the horse.

Emma shrugged, took clothespins from her mouth. “It’s Monday. Anyway, we’ll need clean clothes for the trip.” But when she saw Miriam’s face she dropped the clothespins into the basket and came to her. “What’s wrong?”

Miriam broke down and cried in Emma’s arms. She had not cried in front of Domingo. Not once.

“Domingo is going off to fight,” she wailed.

“Oh, child. I’m so sorry.”

Amish never fought, so all their experience of such a thing was secondhand. Back home, English men from Millersburg and Berlin and Walnut Creek had gone off to fight in the Great War, and it seemed the only news of them that ever circulated into Amish circles after that was when one of them was killed. Amish children grew up with the matter-of-fact conviction that men who went off to war always came home in a box.

In the deepest part of Miriam’s mind it was a foregone conclusion, no matter what Domingo said. He was going to die.

“There is a war?” Emma asked.

“Not yet. It is coming.”

“Maybe it won’t happen,” Emma offered. “Or maybe he will live! Domingo knows how to take care of himself.”

“So did his father. So did Kyra’s husband. So did Elliot Burgess.”

Burgess was an Englisher from Fredericksburg—the only man the Benders had known personally who went off to fight in the Great War. He came home in a box.

Emma touched her fingertips to Miriam’s belly and her voice dropped. “Did you tell him you are with child?”

Miriam nodded. “ ‘All the more reason,’ he said.”

The sisters talked for an hour while they hung laundry and packed dishes into a wooden crate, wrapping them with towels and rags. It helped a lot, talking to Emma. Nothing she said would change the fact that Domingo was going off to war, but in times of frustration and grief it always helped to share the burden with a sister. It was as if Emma lifted part of it from her and carried it herself.

“We will pray for him,” Emma said as Miriam mounted her horse to go home.

Right after Miriam left, Emma loaded Clara and Will into a little wagon, and Mose came alongside to help pull the wagon as she walked over to her father’s house. Emma’s instinctive reaction to this kind of news was the same as Miriam’s—she had to talk to a sister.

Rachel was in the kitchen with the others, packing up. Emma hung back in the living room and made Rachel come to her so the others wouldn’t hear, but it did no good. When she told Rachel the news, she recoiled in horror.

“Domingo is going to
war
?” Rachel said, too loudly.

Leah dropped a plate. Mamm and the others looked up in shock as a deathly silence fell.

Rachel’s lip quivered. “But he’ll be
killed
.”

It got worse. Now she saw Dat, standing in the kitchen doorway. She hadn’t heard him come in.

“Is this true?” her father asked. “Domingo is going off to fight?”

Emma nodded.

“Against who? The federales?”

“Jah. The priest is going, too. Captain Soto and his men came to San Rafael yesterday and burned their church. Noceda was outraged. He said there’s going to be an uprising, and he wants to be part of it. Domingo decided to go with him.”

“They’ll be killed,” her father said, without emotion. “Who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”

Then he turned and went back out without doing whatever it was he had come in for in the first place.

Chapter 28

W
e leave in three weeks,” Domingo told her when he came home that evening. “I don’t know how long we will be gone, but I’ll write when I can. You can stay with Kyra and my mother if you wish—in fact I would prefer it. You will be safer there.”

“Perhaps they can teach me how to be a widow,” she said angrily, her back to him, flipping tortillas.

He came and put his arms around her. “I will be fine,” he said. “I’m not some child who can’t keep his head in the heat of battle.”

“There was talk among the women in the market today. They say the federales are invincible. They say this peasant army is ill-prepared, that it will be a slaughter—shopkeepers with clubs and farmers with hay scythes against battle-hardened troops with guns.”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her around so he could look into her eyes. “You must not listen to the women in the market,” he said. “They know only of fear and waiting. In their need to shelter their children they sometimes forget
the honor of their men and the fire inside them. Miriam, these
are
honorable men, fighting for a just cause—the freedom to worship as they please. Is this not why you came to Mexico in the first place?”

“Jah,” she said, “but we would never have gone to war over it. There is always a better way.”

“Is there? If no one resists them, how far will they go? If the federales persecute the Catholics, how long will it be before they come after the Protestants? The Amish?”