Listen to the Mockingbird (6 page)

I was thinking that Jamie was right about the Confederacy when it came to me that men toting firearms might bode more ill than I had reckoned if the fighting turned toward Mockingbird Spring. The other hands were still in town. Save for Julio, I was quite alone. He was still standing there full of his own daring deed.

“Thank God you didn’t get yourself killed,” I told him. “Will your parents be able to get back?”

“Quién sábe?” His shrug was a perfect replica of his father’s.

I sent him to bring more water from the spring and set about loading every rifle and pistol we possessed. That done, I saddled up and rode out to see if any danger seemed headed our way.

The heat made the air thick and hard to move through. I didn’t urge Fanny to do more than her easy lope. From the shelf-land, I could see puffs of dust exploding near Fort Fillmore. These were followed a few seconds later by a dim growl of cannon. With the action miles away, the possibility of threat here seemed remote. Despite the stifling heat, I found myself oddly fascinated by it.

I had been squinting at the scene for some time when the rumble of cannon ceased, and the puffs of dust were replaced by a great bloom of black smoke. The fort was on fire.

As the Union wasn’t apt to have set its own fort ablaze, it seemed right likely that the valley, and I, had just joined the Confederacy. The fat’s in the fire now, I thought. Jamie and most of the Anglos in town would be pleased. I hoped they were right.

With nothing to see now but the billows of smoke, I turned Fanny toward home.

999

Nacho and Herlinda arrived just before dark.

“Estupido.” Nacho was raving before he even got down from the wagon. The only other time I’d heard him raise his voice was when a horse broke loose from the training rope and threatened to trample him.

From his agitated report, I gathered that the fort’s commander had been so incompetent he might as well have been wearing the Texans’ uniform. Led by a Confederate colonel named Baylor, about three hundred men had, by some apparently audacious maneuver, attacked the fort. The garrison had put up a sloppy, halting resistance, then fled. The Texans occupied and burned the fort; and within hours, they had captured most of the Union troops.

The sun had barely topped the mountains the next morning when Ruben threw open the kitchen door and announced that two men on horseback were approaching. “Tejanos,” he muttered.

“How do you know?”

“They wear the hats,” he said, his hand miming a pull on a small brim.

“What could they possibly want from us?”

His shrug was as eloquent as his father’s and brother’s.

Built as it is like a square horseshoe around the patio at its center, the house from the west looks rather like a small fort. Only two slim windows showed themselves to visitors, who usually hitched their horses at a row of posts near the barn and entered the parlor door at the corner of the horseshoe. On the tiled step in front of that door, I waited. Both the approaching men were clad in snug trousers and shirts, not standard wear in these parts but not uniforms.

They didn’t ride up to the posts and dismount but turned their horses to face me.

“Morning, ma’am. Lieutenant Tyler Morris, Second Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles.” He doffed his hat. For a moment, he looked familiar, and I tried to place him.

He was one of those men whose cocksure demeanor dares women to resist him and other men to challenge him. Apparently, he had fallen asleep somewhere with his hat over his eyes because the lower half of his face was sunburnt. On his clean-shaven left cheek were various scrape marks, and above them, a jagged scar marred his temple. I decided they must be minor wounds from some other battle as they weren’t fresh enough to be the result of yesterday’s fighting.

Still, you would have to call him handsome. His eyes were wide-set in the squarish face; the sunburned chin bore a cleft. Dark, curly hair was pushed to the left where it almost covered the scar. No, I decided, I didn’t know that face. I would well remember someone that cocksure of himself.

“This here’s Corporal Isaac Cox.” Lieutenant Morris nodded at his companion, a short, blond fellow with a mustache too big for his face.

“Good morning,” I said evenly. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard we have occupied this valley.” Morris glanced over his shoulder toward the trail that led to town.

“Yes.” There was nothing of the South in his voice, but Texas has a range of twangs and more than a few Texans were born-and-bred Northerners.

“We need some horses,” the shorter man said with the bluntness of impatience.

I stiffened. Why hadn’t I realized that an occupying army might help itself to every horse I owned? The sun was already hot, but the perspiration trickling down my neck was icy. “So you intend to rob me in the name of the Confederate Army?”

“Oh, no, ma’am.” Lieutenant Morris gave me a smile that might have charmed a bobcat. “No, no, no. Not at all.” He dismounted and came toward me, his face open and devoid of cunning, his eyes almost merry. He held out his hand.

I didn’t offer mine. I was no bobcat.

“Come now, ma’am. Colonel John Baylor, my commanding officer, is hardly a thief. We need a few horses. We asked around and heard you had the best. We’re prepared to pay for them.”

Atop his horse, Isaac Cox swung his head around to stare at Morris.

“We’ve already sold this year’s lot,” I said. “We have few left beyond breeders and our own mounts.”

“Ma’am, it sure would be of great assistance to the Confederate States of America…”

I eyed him, trying to conceal my fears and wondering whether I could say no. Did I have any choice or was this was just a game? “How many horses? And how much are you willing to pay?”

“Depends on the merchandise,” he said with the faintest mock bow.

“An average good horse is worth a hundred and ten dollars,” I said. “Ours are not average.”

“So I’ve been told,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

Of course, he didn’t pay anywhere near two thousand dollars for the eighteen horses he took, but I was relieved to get the fifty-one dollars apiece we settled on.

And I wasn’t sorry to part with one of the mares: a palomino with three white stockings. She was a sturdy horse, and we had thought to sell her at auction; but when Nacho, using a stick as a pointer, had barely touched her chest she had gone quite wild and queered the sale. The same thing happened later in our own corral. She might have become a good breeder, but none of the hands trusted her for serious riding.

Nacho and I watched the two men ride off, our horses trailing in strings behind them, the palomino bringing up the rear. The foreboding that had risen in me like a pillar of ice did not thaw.

“Is no matter, señora. He pay more than I think. We do not need those horses.”

“I just don’t like not having a choice.”

“Choice, señora, es peligroso.”

“Dangerous?” I chuckled. Nacho was not much given to philosophical notions. He divided his world into blacks and whites and proceeded accordingly. “But it’s the only control we have over our lives.”

“Si?” That may be the first time I ever saw amusement on his face.

“You don’t think there’s such a thing as choice?”

He lifted one shoulder stiffly. “If I have choice, I be muy rico, very rich. If Herlinda have choice she have matrimonio.”

I opened my mouth to explain the difference between choices and wishes, then frowned. “Herlinda is married. She has you. She has two big sons.”

The shake Nacho gave his head had a hint of machismo.

“You two aren’t married?”

“How can it matter, I tell her. We have sons, we have work, we have food. Matrimonio, it means nothing. But she say we must go to El Paso. We must find a padre. I tell her that would take three, four days. There is not the time.” El Paso is just beyond Franklin, on the Mexican side of the river.

“But there’s a priest in town.”

“Padre Ramon is a fine man, but his tongue is loose at both the ends. Herlinda, she will not even do the confess.”

I smiled. A short, rotund fellow with a few tufts of white hair on an otherwise bald head, Father Raymond had a perpetual sparkle in his eyes that I suspect had to do with his fondness for the communion wine. He grew the grapes and fermented the juice himself. So, Herlinda believed she was living in sin, and the padre who could remedy that could not be trusted.

“There’s no other priest closer?”

Nacho shook his head. “Padre Ramon is the first. Except for the priest at the gold mine.”

“You mean at Piños Altos? That’s silver.” Piños Altos was the mining camp at least as far to the northwest as El Paso was to the south.

“No,” Nacho said. “Here. People come from Chihuahua. A padre, also. They find gold. Then they are gone. The serpientes de cáscabeles run them away.”

“Rattlesnakes?”

He nodded. “Muchos serpientes.”

“When was that?”

He thought for a moment. “I was a man but not old. Maybe twenty year.”

“Maybe they left because they didn’t find any gold.”

“Si,” Nacho said. “They find it. They trade little stones of it for provisiones, for supplies.”

Chapter Seven

Not a lot seemed to change under the Texans, although I watched the road obsessively, slipping away from whatever I was doing to peer across the valley. I was sure Lieutenant Morris would return and take the rest of our horses. And this time he wouldn’t pay.

The hands, once they recovered from their Saturday nights, gave whatever news they could remember, which was mostly gossip. Lieutenant-Colonel John R. Baylor seemed to be spending a good deal of time striding about the plaza surveying his kingdom. He had claimed the southern half of New Mexico Territory as the Confederate Territory of Arizona, with Mesilla as its capital, and installed himself there as military governor.

His troops had skirmished with Indians who were making raids in our valley. The local Indians, who lived in a mud-hut village and farmed the land around it, were quite peaceful. But every so often a wilder bunch—Jamie said it was Apaches—would wreak havoc on a stagecoach or an outlying ranch.

We were cut off from the old capital, Santa Fe, but the difference was hard to notice. Santa Fe, and its trails to Colorado and Kansas, was almost three hundred miles away. Our news, travelers, supplies and mail had generally arrived from Texas and the South anyway.

Jamie, as he put it, was happy as a pig in clover. So were Jeremy Neuman at Farmers and Merchants Bank and Jacob and Moses Fountain, Zeke’s cousins, who owned most of the land around Mesilla.

Word was that folks were leery about the Union forces at Fort Craig, the federal post guarding what had been central New Mexico Territory. The fort sat on the Rio Grande about a hundred miles upstream from Mesilla. On the maps he sent to Atlanta, Baylor had claimed the very land Fort Craig stood on as Confederate territory. Doubtless this miffed the commanding officer, a Colonel Edward Canby.

And we had our own troubles. The ruthless summer sun was scalding a vacant sky and frying everything beneath it. The first rain usually arrived in early July, but we hadn’t had a drop. It was hard for the farmers along the river to divert enough water to keep the tomatoes, corn and beans from shriveling.

At Mockingbird Spring, the only news was that I had made myself some chambray trousers. I still had not dared to wear them into town.

Here, above the valley and some cooler, it was still all we could do to keep our kitchen garden alive. To save the few acres of grain we’d planted for fodder, we had to irrigate ceaselessly. With only the early morning and evening hours fit for work, we ate supper very late, slept only five hours at night and devoted mid-day to siesta. And worrying at the edge of my mind was the fear that the spring would dry up.

In a way, I suppose I was grateful for the hardship. It swept Isabel, the murdered boy and his map out of my head along with everything else I didn’t want to think about. Whoever had clubbed me on the head in the barn must have been a drifter and long gone. There was precious little time for fretting.

But one wretched afternoon, after trying to sleep but only tossing about on the bed like a drop of water on a hot griddle, I rose and went to my desk and took out a sheet of the special stationery I kept for letters to my grandmother.

I’d put off writing to her for so long she might, at the least, worry. At the worst, she might begin to feel she should come for a visit; and that, above all things, must be prevented. Because I never received whatever letters she wrote to me, I never knew when that thought might cross her mind.

Dear Nanny, I wrote. We are making plans to go to Philadelphia as soon as this silly war is over. When I can logically claim to be a widow, I thought. All is well here, though I still find the West a rude place and long to return to the civilized world. I am weary of gowns that look like potato sacks, which are all we can get here. Nothing I owned could be called a gown at all, I thought peevishly.

I laid down the pen and waited for the ink to dry. A single velvet dress could cost as much as five hundred dollars and all the laces for flounces might total in the thousands. To be accepted in the right circles in Philadelphia I feared I should need at least twenty dresses—not all of them velvet, of course, but the cost would be at least a hundred dollars each—not to mention dresses suitable for the horse races and yacht races, the evening robes and garden robes. I would have to sell the ranch for more than twice what I paid for it. Now it seemed even more loathsome to be living in a place where most new dresses were faded old ones made over.

I picked up the pen and dipped it into the ink. P.S. Andrew is well and sends his love. Writing the letter left me even more peevish. Lying about it all always did. I folded the letter and opened a bureau drawer. I couldn’t very leave such a letter lying about until it could be posted. Shoving things around in my bureau drawer for a place to hide it, I saw another piece of foolscap I had squirreled away: the boy’s map. I drew it out and studied it again. Poor lad. Hardly more than a child. Why had he been killed? Why here? And above all, why had he been carrying this map? The X’s above the springs clearly had some meaning. But what? More hot and restless than ever, I stowed the map again and went outside.