Listen to the Mockingbird (9 page)

“Yes,” I agreed. “Of course.”

“On Thursday next, I will take the stagecoach. It should reach Santa Fe by nightfall Monday. Meet me there. If you have been successful we can come back home.”

My mind was in such tatters that at first I couldn’t think where he meant by “home”; but of course, he meant here, this house where I had seen more horror than I had dreamed existed.

I nodded, praying for time to think. “Yes. That’s a good plan, Andrew.”

“If General Wilkinson refuses…”

I expected some threat to me if I failed to earn the general’s assistance, but Andrew peered at me earnestly and said, “I will then desert the Army. We’ll have enough money. Don’t you worry about that. I will bring Mother’s cherrywood chest with me.”

Then, as if laying out a simple plan to go to the commissary, he said, “We can’t trust any of the men here. You’ll have to go alone. After dark tomorrow.”

I started to shake my head, still trying to gather my wits. “Will that be safe?” As if anything could be less safe than where I was at that very moment.

He swung his face toward me, eyes drilling holes in mine. “You will do exactly as I say.”

I forced my voice flat. “Of course.”

Andrew brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “You’ve got it into your head to leave and never come back, don’t you?” he shouted.

“No.” The word strangled itself in my throat.

Patch chose that moment to charge at Andrew. Perhaps the poor tyke had some notion of defending me.

Andrew caught the puppy by the nape of the neck, then grasped the dog’s hind legs and lurched up from his chair. Patch yelped and let out a wail.

I stood frozen, as if my shoes were nailed to the floor, knowing with perfect prescience what was going to happen.

Andrew carried the howling pup across the parlor. “If you desert me now, when I need you most, this is what I will do to you.” And he smashed poor Patch hard against the fireplace.

“No!” I leapt toward Andrew, the first time I had tried to resist him in many weeks. I grabbed his arm but he flung me to the floor. With a roar part-rage, part-eerie laughter, he swung the whimpering puppy against the bricks again and again until there was nothing left of the dog’s poor head but a bloody pulp.

The next morning, not two hours after Andrew had left the house, I fully understood what I would have to do.

Chapter Ten

The sheets of cascading water from the arroyo’s rim had ceased, and the water that engulfed the tree was slowly but certainly diminishing. And I was alive.

I tried to think. The effort made me cough, and water sputtered from my nose. My legs were there, submerged in water to above the knee; but I couldn’t seem to move them. My arms were covered with scratches and cuts that didn’t look real on my eerily white flesh, but I could move them. My fingers were shriveled and puffy.

The torrent had dumped me onto the fallen tree trunk as if it were the saddle of a horse. If I could get my feet onto solid dry ground, surely the numbness would leave my legs.

I grasped the sodden branch above me and tried to pull myself up, but it was slippery and my arms were like a rag doll’s. I sagged back and willed my feet to push against the log. Slowly, I crept further out of the water.

How long had I been unconscious? I had no idea. Nacho and his sons would surely have begun a search when I didn’t show up for dinner. Maybe they would find Fanny. An abrupt vision of my loyal Fanny engulfed by that wall of water made me gasp. I tried to remember exactly where I had left her. Had I been stupid enough to leave her right in the path of that torrent? She would have eventually abandoned her ground-tie, of course, but would she have done so soon enough?

Squeezing my eyes shut against those thoughts, I threw my head back and tried to scream. Only a wretched rasp croaked from my throat. Even if Nacho had found Fanny and was searching nearby he’d never hear me.

“Help!” I shouted again. “I’m trapped. I need help.”

Above me on the rim of the arroyo, something scraped; and a rock skittered down the wall and plunked into the water. Was someone there? I called again.

The water stirred by the falling rock lapped rhythmically just below my feet. Then the faint sound of a horse’s hooves began, quickly picked up speed to a lope then faded. Perhaps whoever it was had gone for help, but something inside me gave an ugly laugh at that notion. Someone knows you’re here all right, it whispered, and hopes you will drown or die of exposure.

That’s ridiculous, I told myself.

The darkness above me began to change. A glow appeared above an outcropping of rock on the canyon rim. As the moon grew brighter, I gingerly lowered my legs as far as they would stretch. My toes struck solid ground, and I inched the rest of my body from the tree trunk. Water sucking at my boots, a chill raising goose bumps under my sodden clothing, I slogged to where the canyon widened. With a series of muddy niches for toeholds, I climbed the cold and slippery arroyo walls and staggered to the place I was certain I had left Fanny. It was empty.

She will have gone home, I told myself rigidly, unwilling to consider any other possibility.

I struggled on through the brush, the rocks and stubble biting into my feet through the drowned leather of my boots. The darkness began to melt with the approach of sunrise. A tree appeared, and beneath it a small, thick cross. I moved toward it, confused.

Somehow, I had wandered much farther than I had realized. This was the tree above the Mexican boy’s grave. But the compact mound of rocks had been tossed aside, the coffin sat in its shallow depression, exposed. Had the water done this when it raged from the mountain?

The ground was damp, but surely this far from the arroyo the water would not have had the power to shove away the stones. Had some kin of the boy turned up, someone unable to believe he was deceased? Had his killer wanted to be certain he was dead? I squinted at the rubble, bewildered. With no apparent answer, I corrected my course and found my way home.

I lurched along the side of the house on bruised and bleeding feet that had long since gone numb again. My hand was reaching for the door when it suddenly swung wide and a voice I had never expected to hear again bellowed, “Good God, Miss Matty, it’s about time you got yourself to home!”

A lively face with cheeks the color of darkest onyx peered at me. Hands gripped my shoulders, pulled me inside; and Winona engulfed me in a bear hug.

“Just where did you get yourself off to when an old friend comes callin’? Lucky for me these people you got here let me in.” Light from the lard lamp lit gold flecks in her eyes.

“I…” My head spun like one of those bowls at the rodeo when they draw the name of a prizewinner. Even in my stunned state it was impossible to miss that her belly bulged with child.

She shook me gently. “Lordy, lady. You is bedraggled. You’re as soppin’ wet as a wad of rags in a river.”

If I had been asked to choose between seeing God or Winona at that very moment, I would have picked Winona. She had seen me through more corridors in hell than I cared to remember. “This is only the road to heaven,” she would say. “We ain’t settin’ up housekeeping till we get to the other end.”

The last time I’d seen her I had stuffed a fistful of money and a handwritten paper into her pocketbook and asked her to arrange boarding for Fanny for a couple of years. I had hoped the paper would be enough to prove she was a free woman.

I stripped, rubbed my blue-white flesh with rough towels until some of the blood ventured back to pink my skin and put on fresh clothes. Figuring Winona would disapprove of the trousers—she was prim and proper about the oddest things—I donned my old calico dress.

She had already taken over the kitchen, which had not endeared her to Herlinda; and now there were biscuits and crabapple jam and strong, hot coffee on the table. I swallowed one of the biscuits almost whole and buttered another.

“You look right pert, Miss Matty. Sure enough your hair has grown. It always was the prettiest color I ever did see.”

I ran my hand through my still-sodden locks. The braid had come loose, and it hung about me like Spanish moss. “However did you find me?”

“Nothing hard about it,” Winona chuckled. “I knew you would as soon lose your own teeth as that horse of yours. The folks I paid to look after her—”

“Fanny!” I leaped from my chair. “Did she come back?” I started for the door.

“She come moseying in this morning at first light, just before you did.”

I sank back onto the chair and wolfed down another biscuit. “How did that happen?” I nodded at Winona’s belly.

“If you don’t know that yet, you got to go back to school,” she guffawed. “It be a couple months, more or less, afore this chil’ join us.”

She was quiet for a moment then related a wild tale of falling in with a small party of Indians returning to their village from a trading expedition. The village, on a hilltop some miles west of Albuquerque, was called Acoma, which meant, she said, City of the Sky. “The menfolk was fierce as bears and beautiful as bobcats. They wasn’t mean—I never saw no scalps or such-like. They done a good deal of praying and talking to their gods, which must have tuckered them out, ’cause they didn’t do much else.

“The womenfolk, now, our life was not so fine. We done all the work, the farming, the birthing, looking after the young ones, the fixing of food and all. It was us made the pots and stuff the men traded for knives and such. The headman had made me give over my money, so when my man got hisself killed I had to steal back as much as was left. While I was at it, I took a horse, too, ’cause I had to get pretty far pretty fast.”

I told her the territory had gone Confederate. “Was there any trouble about your papers?” I had just improvised what I wrote, hoping it would be accepted as proof that she was a free woman.

“Them Texans ain’t much interested in colored folk. I only run across one, and the way I was dressed and expectin’ and all, he pro’bly thought I was a Injun gal who done sat in the sun too long.”

I propped my chin in my hand and gazed at her, so grateful to see her I was almost afraid to ask, “You’ll stay?”

“That is surely what I intend to do. I didn’t come by just to make a pan of biscuits. You need some overseein’ if you don’t know no better than to come traipsing home at pert’ near sunrise, dripping like a dunked biscuit.” She narrowed an eye in an almost-wink. “Now, tell me how you happen to get you this fine ranch. I bet that is one fine story.”

I was nearing the end of my tale when, with no warning at all, my eyes clouded and tears spilled down my cheeks and into the empty coffee cup in front of me.

She put her out her arms and pulled me to her ample bosom. “Lord, child, I done forgot what you just been through in that old arroyo. You get yourself to bed and rest up some.”

“It isn’t that,” I sobbed. “I’m just so glad to see you. Strange things have been happening, Winona, and I swear I just don’t know what to do.”

“Strange happenings like what?”

I told her about the murdered Mexican boy and his map of my ranch, about the unknown brute who had clouted me unconscious in the barn before the boy was buried, the sheer terror I felt when someone neared the truth about me, the wrong I had done Isabel. All of it came rushing out like that water down the arroyo.

“And if the Texans take many more of my horses, I’ll never get to Philadelphia.”

“What you want to do that for, anyway? You got yourself a mighty fine place here.”

“You can’t imagine how I long to hear an orchestra, to talk of something besides fodder and foaling, to wear lace, to waltz, to read books.”

She stared at me a moment. “That plan is about like nailing currant jelly to a wall. If you ever got the job done, you wouldn’t want it there. And mostly all you’ll do is make a mess on the floor and a hole in the wall.”

Chapter Eleven

It was maybe a week later that I took the wagon into town for supplies. Herlinda had sullenly accepted Winona’s presence in the kitchen. As they competed, our meals soared to standards a hotel would envy. Winona would hear of nothing less than a whole fresh collection of spices and herbs, and a trek to the general store fell to me. I took along eighteen pounds of our smoked cheese to trade.

The plaza seemed oddly empty. I left the wagon at Garza’s general store and went in search of Jamie.

He stood, sleeves rolled up and secured by black garters, sorting type. His string tie looked like he’d tied it in the dark. His thick eyebrows made a solid line above his pudgy cheeks when he saw me. “Good. I thought I’d have to send someone to you.”

“The plaza looks like a ghost town. Where is everyone?”

He nodded grimly. “We put out the word last night. Folks had to be told.”

In my stomach, little icy stones began to click together. “Told what?”

“Canby’s getting ready to march.”

Canby was the Yankee colonel at Fort Craig, about a hundred miles north.

“He’s called in a bunch of garrisons and militia and word is they’re toting a dozen cannon. Word is, a thousand Pike’s Peakers are with him.”

“Pike’s Peakers?”

“Colorado troops.” Jamie threw a piece of type in a tray so hard it bounced. “Baylor’s like an old maid, fretting and whining.”

“He claimed Fort Craig as his own. Surely, he didn’t figure the Yankees would tip their hats and move on without a fuss.”

Jamie leveled a glance at me. “That may make sense to you and me, but Baylor’s yelping that if reinforcements don’t get here soon he’ll have to evacuate.”

“But the Yankees would waste no time taking over the valley again. What would that mean?”

“At best, they won’t exactly be tickled that we welcomed Colonel Bloody Baylor,” Jamie growled, fixing me with intense blue eyes. “At worst, we could be strung up as traitors.”

For a moment, I could only stare at him. “We who?”

“Anyone they think gave aid to the Texans. Sure enough there are plenty of old newspapers around to braid a noose for my neck.”

“What are you going to do?”

A muscle jumped along Jamie’s jaw. He slung more type into a box and closed it. “I’m heading south. Everyone with fair-to-middling sense is burying their valuables and sending children and womenfolk across the border.” He propped his hands on his hips and looked about the room. “I most strongly suggest you do the same.”