Listen to the Mockingbird (14 page)

She was lying on the bed, her eyes closed, her face greyish.

“What’s wrong?” I gasped, rubbing my arm where some of the boiling water had sloshed on it.

Her eyes flickered open. “I’m just trying out the sounds to get ’em right.”

I realized I was standing in a puddle of clearish fluid. My eyes flew back to hers.

“Water broke,” she said.

I mopped up the fluid before it could turn the floor to mud and fetched two pots of water, the knife thrust into one like a sword. Then I washed again. My arms were beginning to redden from the lye.

A groan came from Winona—the low kind that sounds like it starts in the toes. She was rolling her head back and forth as if trying to avoid an attacker. Sweat had beaded on her temples, and the flesh around her mouth was almost white.

I patted her face dry with one of the rags, remembering when she had done the same for me. We hadn’t been able to be so clean and careful then. But we had known it wouldn’t matter.

“Do wish I had a birthin’ chair,” she grunted. Her body tightened and twisted, and she groaned again. “The pains are awful close together. Won’t be long. If something…happens…you take care of her…”

“Don’t say that!”

“Don’t give her to no one—darky, white nor Injun. A girl with no pa got to have a good ma. You give your word?”

“You know I’d raise her like my own…how do you know it’s a girl?”

“Her name’s to be Zia. Z-I-A.” She spelled the letters slowly. Winona could not read well, but she had learned her letters long before I knew her. “That meant something like ‘sun’ to her pa.” She smiled weakly. “Sunshine.”

She had never talked much about the baby’s father, but now she said, “He was a good man, her pa. Red Coyote was smart an’ brave; he was a good man.”

“What happened to him?”

“Got hisself killed by another Injun. Over me. And his family wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with me after. If…you tell Zia her papa—” Another fierce pain cut her off. She screamed this time, and sweat made big beads on her lip. Her hands gripped the bedclothes, white at the knuckles.

“Twist up one of them rags,” she grunted. I took one from the basket, twined it into a sort of rope and handed it to her. She opened her mouth and bit down on it. Her round cheeks had gone hollow.

I put pillows beneath her knees, and handed her the twisted-sheet reins she had devised. She pulled hard, the veins standing out on her temples. Then she gasped and began to pant. I wiped her face again and, having touched the top of the bed, re-scrubbed my hands. I had just finished drying them when Winona’s body arched, then went rigid. She screamed, the sound muffled by the rag in her mouth. And then the blood began.

The baby was no bigger than a rabbit and covered with so much mucous I was sure it would choke. I didn’t take time to cut the cord before turning it over and pounding her firmly on the back.

Zia was, indeed, a girl. And she let loose with a yell that would have put Winona, even at her most indignant, to shame.

“Nothing wrong with her mouth,” Winona grunted.

Hands trembling, I mopped the infant clean and wrapped her in one of the rags. Tiny, perfect hands clasped my thumb. For a moment, longing for a child of my own swept over me. I turned back to her mother. “She is one fine piece of work. She truly is.”

Big, dark smudges circled Winona’s eyes. “She do seem so,” she said, her voice husky.

Zia’s angry cries halted when I laid her across her mother’s now-shrunken belly. I slipped a bit of boiled yarn around the ropy cord that still pulsed between mother and infant. Pulling the yarn tight, I reached for the knife and severed the connection, freeing Zia to make her own way in the world. The baby stared at me unseeing, looking dubious about the whole process.

Winona gave me a glance of pained amusement. “You is not done yet.” Her fists tightened, her head drew forward on the pillow, and the afterbirth arrived. By scooting Winona first to one side, then the other, I changed the sheets. The skin across my knuckles was raw.

Exhausted, I stood amid the heaps of soiled rags and wiped my hands on my bloodied apron. An intense sense of pride stole over me. For all three of us. “Well, we did it.”

“Yes, ma’am, we did at that,” Winona chuckled. Little bubbly sounds were coming from the basket at her side. “But you surely do make a mess, Miss Matty.”

Chapter Sixteen

By the time Zia was a month old she could bewitch anyone just by gurgling. I spent hours by her basket marveling at her thick, dark eyelashes. In an often-sour world, she was sweetness itself.

Tonio brought juniper berries for Winona; and finding Zia suffering a bout of colic, he carried the baby about as though he were the father of ten and saw no mystery in the care of such a tiny being.

“Obviously, we’ll have to put off what we planned,” I told him.

“Perhaps it won’t be necessary. These things whip up like thunderclouds one minute only to clear off the next.” He pointed at the berries. “Mash them up and steep them for ten minutes or so. You have a timepiece?”

I nodded. My father had left me his pocket watch.

Winona recognized the concoction by its smell. “Injun women say this stuff sweeps the hearth clean an’ lays the wood for a new fire.” A grin split her face, and she swigged the liquid down.

Herlinda had prepared meals while Winona was gaining back her strength. She said little about anything, nothing about seeing me with Tonio at the cuevas.

I had urged Winona to take her time getting back to the chores, but she’d given me an arch look. “I is not rock-hard certain you is in safe hands.” By the end of the first week, she had resumed her territory in the kitchen.

With winter approaching, the need to get our meat smoked, sausages stuffed and burnt fence mended swept all other thoughts from my head. We were so busy the hands even skipped their Saturday-night carousing.

Winona interrupted one of my feverish bouts with the account books to announce, “I needs a measure of fresh white muslin.”

I stared at her dumbfounded. “Whatever for?”

“Land sakes, you think I’m gonna have that child christened wrapped in a rag?”

I stared at her, mouth open. “I flat forgot.”

“No matter, Miss Matty. You is plum tuckered. I can take me the wagon and the basket—”

“It’s too cold to take the baby out. I’ll go.”

“Nohow. I can wrap her up plenty good enough. She be a sight more sturdy than you think.”

But I won the argument. It occurred to me that the christening would be a perfect time for Tonio to accompany us to church and allay any ill will Isabel might have stirred up toward Winona.

All thought of the Mexican boy’s map had fled my mind in the wake of Zia’s birth and the haste of the ranch work. But as Fanny’s hooves drummed a steady rhythm on the trail to town, I began to dwell on it again. Why had it been drawn at all if not to mark the place of something valuable? Or had someone merely hornswoggled the boy? If the map was a fake, why was it so accurate about so many things?

My head still buzzing with these thoughts, I was paying scant attention to much else and heading for Garza’s General Store, was half way across the plaza when I realized the square was a squirming mass of people. Folks from every settlement within thirty miles, from Las Cruces and Dona Ana and Robledos and even from Willow Bar down south, must have come to town.

“Que pasa?” I asked an old man who was leaning against the front of the general store, patiently watching the crowd. “What’s going on?” I wasn’t sure whether he was Mexican or Indian.

He took a gnarled wooden pipe out of his mouth and said in passable English, “You do not hear of it?”

I shook my head and anxiously eyed the crowd, but no one looked nervous or worried. They seemed more in a mood to celebrate. “It isn’t the Yankees, is it?”

“No, ma’am.” I could see that the pipe had fit quite comfortably in the space where two teeth were missing. The teeth that remained were as brown as the wood of the pipe. He smelled like a smokehouse smells in autumn when it’s stoked up and full of fresh pig. He stuck the pipe back in his mouth. “It is the Con-fed-er-ates. The Rebs.”

My spirits shot up. The fears that had driven dozens of people to hide their belongings and wait things out in Mexico could be laid to rest. Union soldiers would not storm our valley bent on punishing us for welcoming the Texans. People could come home.

The crowd was multiplying rapidly. Thinking I glimpsed Jamie across the square, I realized how sorely I had missed him: his good nature, his wisdom. Aside from Winona, he was the only person I could count a true friend.

The old man tugged at my arm. The newspaper he pushed into my hand was so smudged it looked solid grey. “Read, please,” he said. “I do not.”

Jamie and his press had, indeed, returned.

“‘On issuing our last number,’” I read aloud, “‘we concluded that it would be many a week before we issued another. The Abolitionists, we were told, well armed and uniformed, would advance upon us to wipe us from the face of the earth. Having hurriedly packed off our press to Mexico, cached our type, made our wills and prepared for the worst, we find the imminent stampede never occurred, no fight, nor even a sight of the enemy. The tears and partings and God knows what anguish, were for naught.’”

The old man nodded to me and limped off into the crowd.

I was thinking that with Jamie back in town I could ask him about the man who had tried to buy my land. At the least, he could describe the person who had asked him to bring me the offer.

The mass of milling bodies soon hemmed me in, but with my height, I could still scan a sea of faces. There was no further sign of Jamie; but a few paces to my left, I spied the cocky posture of Lieutenant Tyler Morris. With him, erect as a poker and seeming to swagger even as he stood still, was a Confederate colonel in full and perfect dress. Both were waving their arms, and Lieutenant Morris was smacking a rolled-up paper angrily against his own leg. Curious, I edged closer.

“It is an insult to your honor, sir. You must defend yourself. The man is a dangerous fool. You must have satisfaction.”

The colonel was agreeing, bobbing his head like a furious banty rooster. Catching my eye, Lieutenant Morris gave a sharp nod, as if to dismiss me.

Perhaps it was just to annoy him, but I smiled and held out my hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”

Morris looked away; but the colonel turned, and there was little the lieutenant could do but introduce me to his companion, so he straightened his shoulders smartly and did so. “Your governor, ma’am, Colonel John Baylor.”

The colonel took my hand, and I looked into blue eyes that would have turned a pot of boiling coffee to solid ice. Here was more than enough temerity to claim the territory for the Confederacy and declare oneself governor, even if the top of one’s head barely reached the height of my nose.

I dusted off my best voice. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I trust you found the horses worthy?”

The lieutenant’s expression melted like warming wax.

The governor’s eyes narrowed. “Horses? What horses?”

I knew I shouldn’t say it, but I couldn’t stop. “The ones Lieutenant Morris took for you. He was good enough to pay me almost half their value.”

“What horses?” Baylor demanded again.

Lieutenant Morris looked straight into my eyes. “The horses were not for Governor Baylor.” He said it so calmly I almost believed him myself. “They were needed for quite another purpose.”

“We are in dire exigency of horses,” Baylor insisted, sending specks of spittle to settle on his mustache.

“Indeed, sir,” the Lieutenant said. “And we shall have them soon.” Just then, the jabbering of the hundreds of folk who crammed the plaza died to silence. Lieutenant Morris took the governor’s elbow and guided him through an opening in the crowd.

Voices buzzed again as all eyes swung toward the center of the plaza, where a man was stiffly mounting a narrow makeshift platform. “Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley, Confederate States of America,” someone said, and the crowd burst into cheers and whistles.

Sibley was a name I knew. He’d been a U.S. dragoon officer up north before the war. I’d heard that a number of men had resigned their commissions and joined the rebel states.

General Sibley was tall, and he stood as though a giant spike had been driven from his collar all the way to his boots. His hair was middle brown and somewhat curly. A thick mustache, darker than the rest, made a wide sweep from under his nose to his bearded jaw. Brass buttons bigger than twenty-dollar gold pieces marched in parallel lines up the front of his immaculate grey jacket toward a collar that didn’t stop till it got to his chin.

I still remember that collar. It was stiff and white with a big star flanked by two smaller stars, all enclosed in a wide oval of blue, or maybe it was green. Sibley raised a white-gloved hand and the crowd fell quiet, only an occasional scuffling foot or cough breaking the stillness.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice had the depth and strength of an orator’s. There wasn’t a trace of softness in his vowels, and I surmised he had never set foot in the South.

“It is with great pride that I tell you The Army of New Mexico has arrived at Fort Bliss.”

This drew a din of cheers.

“I have assumed command of all the forces of the Confederate States on the Rio Grande at and above Fort Quitman and all the Territory of New Mexico and Arizona.” Fort Quitman was seventy miles or so below Franklin on the Rio Grande. I began to see the source of Governor Baylor’s ill humor. His governorship was about to be usurped.

“I would have made your acquaintance sooner,” Sibley continued, “but we were beset by Indians.” The crowd roared happily, as if it were a fine feat to be beset by Indians.

It wasn’t until later that I learned the Army of New Mexico was barely the size of a brigade—about thirty-two hundred cold, lonely, bored and fretting men. And they had not been “beset” by Indians. Under cover of night, their horse herd had been raided. They had lost some badly needed mounts, but not one soldier had been attacked.

Nonetheless, for the moment, I was as enthralled as the crowd and quite willing to welcome them as heroes.