Listen to the Mockingbird (35 page)

I pushed at the mockingbird’s wing, thrust the loosened panel of tile aside and seized the pistol that lay on the chest inside the niche. I swung the gun around.

Andrew had dropped Zia. Winona was scooping her up. Gripping the revolver with both hands, I brought up my thumb and yanked back the hammer.

Andrew’s eyes flicked to mine, his face a deadly white, and I remembered the last time I had leveled a gun at him. My hands began to quiver. Only then did I realize that the front of my shirt was clinging to me, wet with blood. Tonio’s blood.

Winona was still on her knees, Zia clinging to her neck.

His face an icy mask, Andrew raised his own revolver.

“Drop the gun,” I said, my voice as cold as his eyes.

Something dull scraped against the floor. A moan, a muffled grunt. Tonio’s shoulders rose clumsily and swayed as he fought to focus on the scene.

Andrew’s gun jerked in an arc, stuttered past Tonio and stopped a few feet from Winona. I tensed my finger.

A very long time seemed to pass before my pistol bucked.

I watched Andrew’s eyes roll white and his body crumple ever so slowly to the floor, blood spurting from a jagged hole in his throat.

Chapter Forty

Tonio was in much pain, but the ball had passed clean through his chest near the shoulder. He bade me burn the places where it entered and exited. The wrenching shouts it wrung from him and the odor of burning flesh will never leave my memory.

The man I loathed more than anything in all the world did acquire a portion of the land he intended to claim as his. But his allotment was not large.

Winona and I wrapped Andrew in a sheet. Under a black, moonless sky, I hitched Fanny to the wagon and toted him to a far corner where the hands were unlikely to roam. Even the earth was loath to yield him that small patch: its clay was like iron. Winona and I had to hack at it with an axe before the spade could gain purchase. We dug as deep as we could. When we had filled it in again, she insisted on wrestling heavy rocks atop the broken earth.

“I don’t give a stump if a coyote digs him up for breakfast,” she grunted, “but this spirit not rest easy. We got to keep it down there.”

I touched my hand to my head; and chunks of charred hair broke off, cascaded down my face. I wiped them away with a filthy hand. “The last thing I’m worried about is a spirit. Do you really believe all that?”

“He believe it.”

“I reckon he did at that.” It was growing dark. A coyote yipped in a far off canyon. I leaned on the spade. “You were mortally persuasive. Did you make up those words?”

“I do own I conjure up some of them words myself.”

“What does ‘gabara’ mean?”

“She be the goddess of love.”

“You called on a goddess of love?”

“No other come to mind. Gabara not be the best—she drink rum and smoke a pipe and get herself up in fancy smells—but she be easy to call on.”

“What were the other words?”

“They not matter.”

“They don’t matter? Or you won’t tell me?”

Winona heaved a sigh. “I say, ‘take off shoes, you be messin’ up the place of voodoo.’”

“That’s all?”

“I only seen one real spell-casting, and that be a mighty long time ago.”

I fit another rock into place. “I warrant that’s enough to keep his spirit here.”

“Maybe that’s no never mind to you.”

“Why?”

“You can just up and leave this place now. You can send to the general and do your deal. You can go to your Philadelphia.”

I gaped at her, the reality dawning. “I could even go back to St. Louis.” I dropped my eyes. “But it won’t be anytime soon.”

“Why so?”

I touched a finger to my hair.

999

By the next evening, when Homer and Ruben and the other hands traipsed back from their carousing and Nacho and Herlinda arrived home from his sister’s, Tonio was installed on a bedroll in a corner of the office.

He had slept fitfully. In his waking stretches, he directed me to fetch some herbs from the cuevas and make a poultice. That done, the three of us had concocted our story.

Winona had scrubbed my head till all the burnt bits of hair came away, and I was very nearly bald. She rubbed a broken lobe of aloe into the raw places. The thickness of my hair had kept the burns from going deep, but a quick look in a mirror quite sickened me. I did not want to contemplate what might have happened if Tonio had not arrived when he did. Winona tied a big bandana around my head to hide the mess and keep the burns clean.

The three of us told our shocked listeners of an outlaw drifter who had burst in on us at suppertime, who had flung me against the open stove when I tried to stop him from ravaging our belongings. Tonio had run the man off but had taken a ball through his chest for his trouble.

Canby was busy running the rebels all the way to the border. He did not press me for an answer.

In a fortnight, Tonio was well enough to return to the caves.

Despite the urgency of the never-ending chores, I found myself snatching moments in the early morning quiet to sit on a rock and ponder the future. For the first time in a lot of years I actually had a real future to think on, and it looked oddly different from the pretend one.

So much rain had fallen that year there were daubs of color everywhere, as though the desert were a fairytale princess waking from a twenty-year sleep. Just beyond the house the mountains rise quick to become as furrowed and craggy, as full of strength and beauty as the face of God. When you sit very still, beyond the silence you can hear the water. The mountain spreads its apron to catch the rain, and the water burrows through the rock to seep out in little splashes, to make a dripping spring.

Somewhere beyond that ridge was a gold mine.

I sometimes mused on the ripples of change in my own life loosed the night that Lieutenant Tyler Morris killed Diego Ramirez.

Now and again I would return to that rock when the sunset was painting the organ peaks crimson. Sometimes a mockingbird would perch on a branch of mesquite, twitch its white-striped tail, open its slender bill and pour out its stolen songs. A scrappy little critter, it was not a foot long; but I’ve heard tell they will fiercely defend their territory, even against a bobcat.

It was on that rock I discovered that it was not having been in a dark place but leaving it that matters.

Winona found me there one dusk. “You be wanting to pack up soon?”

I gazed at her, not comprehending.

“St. Louis.”

I didn’t answer for a moment, then, “No.”

“It still be Philadelphia, then?”

I shook my head. “There’s something witching about those mountains, Winona. When they pull you to them, they don’t let you go.”

Winona’s face split in a dazzling grin. “I got to say you takes your own sweet time learning that.”

When I got back to the barn, Nacho was waiting.

“Tomorrow the walls,” he said. “New mud is needed.”

“All right.”

“Es verdad, señora?” he asked. “Is true? You stay?”

I nodded.

Nacho gazed at me a moment, then, “Muy bien.” Very good. For him, it was almost a shout.

“Thank you,” I said, touched. “But you could have found other work. Better work.”

“Other, yes. Better, no.” He ducked his head and ambled into the barn.

999

Tonio, his arm in a sling made from an old quilt, found me mixing straw into a big basin of mud. For the walls.

“So, you will stay on,” he said.

“I suppose I shall. I reckon that after all this I’m not fit for much else.”

“You will not pine for the orchestra?”

I stirred the mud with a hoe. “I expect I will, some.” The loss of that dream had left a little hollow place.

“You would not be happy there, with naught to think of but petticoats and pretty music.”

I glanced at him.

“They do say that the further east one journeys, the fewer the wildcats.” He chuckled. “Nacho seems pleased. Even Herlinda smiled when I asked for you.”

I put the hoe down. “You could marry them. Nacho and Herlinda.”

He flashed me a look of exasperation. “You still think I’m a priest.”

“Why can’t monks perform marriages?”

“I’m no monk, either. I was excommunicated.”

“People know nothing more of that than some half-remembered rumor.”

“You mean I should lie to them?”

I finished smoothing the mud with a board. “At bottom, what difference does it make? Does God himself bestow the right to join a man and a woman in marriage?”

“That is what they say.”

“Do you believe it?”

He shrugged.

“Then do it. Surely, it’s harmless enough. Give Herlinda something she has wanted these many years.”

He slipped his good arm around me and brought his lips down on mine. His damp beard smelled of spring water and damp earth.

999

In the end, Tonio agreed.

I could hardly wait to tell Herlinda. She denied any importance to the matter, but I did not miss the flash of joy in her eyes. Together, we planned the wedding.

She slaughtered one of the pigs herself and dug the pit to roast it in. Then she busied herself in the kitchen boiling pinto beans and peeling chiles. She even taught Winona how to make tamales. A couple of drifters caught a whiff of the aroma and offered a week’s work if they could just have some of those vittles.

At the spring, where the water slips between the rocks to feed the chaparral, under the scrub oaks that crowd round the little pool, we held the ceremony. Herlinda’s lace gown had browned with age. Except for two new panels of bleached muslin, the dress was her mother’s, she told me proudly; she had kept it for nearly forty years.

I played the flute. My fingers were stiff on the keys, but no one seemed to notice.

To the steady drip-drip-drip of the springs, Tonio spoke the words of the ritual he had no right to perform. Nacho stood arrow-straight with his hand in Herlinda’s. He had scrubbed his face so hard it was still red. Ruben stood with them, holding a silver ring the blacksmith had fashioned.

Winona had baked a big teacake drizzled with honey and applejack. Zia blew bubbles and stole everyone’s attention by taking her very first steps and nearly walking out of her diaper. The wine we opened was not quite ripe, and I daresay we all drank a mite more than we should have.

When the sky was purpling and we had talked and laughed ourselves hoarse, the others made their way back to the house, leaving Tonio and me to dismantle the makeshift altar.

“I’ll be moving on soon,” he said.

I stared at him over the cloth I was folding. Somehow, it had never entered my mind that he would ever not be there. “Is it the cave? We could build you a house, we could—”

“It’s time for me to go,” he cut in quietly.

“But why?”

“It’s many years since I’ve lived long in one place.”

I licked at dry lips. “But where…where will you go?”

“California, I reckon. I have yet to see the Pacific. And the trees, as I hear it, are nigh as high as this mountain.”

“But I…What will I…?”

For a long moment, he was silent. “It would only be a matter of time, Matty, before you would want me to take you to the mine. Already you have persuaded me to conduct a dubious ceremony for a marriage I had no sanction to perform.”

“No, I—”

“You’re an ambitious, capable woman who scarcely knows how many wildcats she can whip.” He gave a dry chuckle. “Do you deny you’ve thought of the mine?”

“I own to thinking of it, yes, but you must have a surpassingly low opinion of me to think I would—”

He stopped my mouth with his own.

999

I sent word to Canby that I would not be selling the ranch. The general sent back a message that my decision perplexed him, but he wished me the best. He appended a warning about Indian trouble: the night Mrs. Canby had arrived to join him an officer had gone missing and hadn’t been seen since.

Not long after that he departed the Mesilla Valley, taking the war with him. It was a long time before it was over, but we saw no more of it ourselves.

Isabel agreed to marry a Baptist missionary she had never met and was sent to Oregon. There was no more trouble over Winona’s so-called witchcraft.

Zeke rode out to the ranch and, taking swipes at his head with a crumpled bandana, told me the charges against me had been dropped.

So far as I know, no one ever took note of Andrew’s seven-by-four-foot piece of land.

My hair grew out very slowly. It was many months before I could bear the sight of myself without the bandana.

After the livestock auction, which brought us nearly three times the profit I had expected, I wrote again to Nanny. I didn’t own up to the whole truth, but I did tell her about the ranch and that I wouldn’t be going to Philadelphia—or anywhere else for that matter. I even suggested that when the war was done she and the haberdasher might like to come for a visit.

I went often to my rock. Once or twice I rehearsed little speeches to Tonio, giving him my solemn oath I would never so much as mention the mine, asking him—maybe even imploring him—to stay. If I could say that much, could he say no? I asked the mountains, but they wouldn’t answer.

I suppose the Organos had got their name because they put some early Spaniard in mind of organ pipes. But for me, it was not their look. It was the way the sight of them makes your breath catch, makes the hair lift along your arms and your spine tingle all the way to the top of your head like it does when the bass notes of an organ swell and you believe you are in the presence of God.

999

When the first sharpness of autumn was in the air, Tonio appeared one early morning at my door, the worn old knapsack strapped to his shoulders.

“There’s a desert to cross,” he said. “This time would be the best.”

“So soon?” I gaped at him, the earth seeming to turn under me. “You are wrong,” I said when I finally came to myself. “I might try to find the mine on my own, but I would not ask that of you.”

He gave me a sideways glance. “Remember the rattlers. The nest on the trail grows bigger each season.”

I swore again I would not be tempted and tried to say the rest, but the words would not leave my throat. Instead, I insisted he take one of the horses, but he refused.