Michener, James A. (32 page)

'Will he become Catholic?' Ybarra asked. 'The law says he should.'

'If he wants land, I suppose he must,' the judge said evasively. 'But as a mere trader . . . I'm not sure how the law stands on that.'

'But surely he must become a Spanish citizen,' Ybarra pressed.

'I'm not sure on that either. Did his papers refer to that, Captain?'

'They said nothing specific'

'You know what I think?' the priest asked. 'I think he's a spy, sent down by the americanos to see where they can attack us.'

The judge looked at the captain, who said slyly: 'We think you're right. We must all watch him . . . very carefully.'

Father Ybarra, thinking that he had the support of these officials, gloated: 'The minute he applies for land, he falls within my reach. Because we do not grant land rights to non-Catholics, is that not right?'

'Absolutely correct,' the judge said, but then he added: 'We have the law, but it's easily evaded.'

'How?'

'Foreign men marry our women and acquire their land.'

'A man like Marr will never settle down,' the priest said. 'No matter how much he wants land.'

How wrong he was! Within a week Mr. Marr was asking in his slow, patient Spanish: 'If the government allowed me to buy my shop, will it also allow me to buy land?' and he confided to five different customers at his informal store how highly he regarded the Bejar district, and as the months passed, Bejar began to accept

him as pretty much the man he said he was: 'I did well in Philadelphia. Never much money, but always had a job. Never married, but I liked an Irish girl, except that my parents weren't prepared to welcome a Catholic into the family. That and other things, they drove us apart. I tried Pittsburgh and then Kentucky and then down the river to New Orleans. And then I heard of Texas, as we call it up north.'

'How did you lose your tooth?'

'I never allow a man to call me Mordy more than once. But if you travel long enough, you're bound to meet somebody bigger than you are.' He grinned at his questioner, showing the gaping hole, and said: 'But 1 won a lot more fights than 1 lost.'

And always he came back to the matter of land: 'A man travels as much as 1 have . . .'

'How old are you?'

'My papers say twenty-eight. I guess that's about right. One thing for certain, I'm old enough to want to settle down.'

'Why Bejar?'

The man who asked this probing question one afternoon when the store was empty, except for him and Marr, had traveled a good deal in the army and by ship to Cuba, and he knew precisely the value of his town, as he explained to the americano: 'You know, this isn't Vera Cruz, where the ships come in each week. This isn't Zacatecas, with its silver mines. And it certainly isn't Saltillo . . . Why don't you go on to that town if your papers say you can? There's action and beautiful girls and real shops down there.'

'I've never been to Saltillo, which must be a fine town from what you say. But it's a far piece down the road, and I doubt it will ever have much contact with America. But Bejar! I tell you, when trade starts with the north, which it must, this town will grow like a mushroom in morning dew. I want to be here when that happens.'

'How soon can it happen?'

'Next year if cities like New Orleans prosper. Fifty years if things lag.'

'And you want to own land when it does happen?'

'I do.'

This questioner, a Canary Islander with all the tough shrewdness and character of that group, began taking Mr. Marr about the countryside, explaining who owned what: 'As far as you can see and then twice that, Gertrudis Rodriguez.' On another journey, which covered two days with camping out at night: 'This great holding, Rivas family, one of the best.' The man later remembered that at this point Marr asked: 'Is that the Rivas with the two pretty daughters?' It was.

But the trip which Marr seemed to appreciate most was one that took them along the wandering Medina: 'Perez ranch here, Ruiz up here, Navarro at the turn.' And then on the second day he was told: 'Here in the big bend of the river, Rancho El Codo. The Saldanas'. It once belonged to the Mision Santa Teresa, but somehow it got transferred to the family of the mission's saintly founder.'

'How many leagues?'

'Vast. Who has counted?'

'The Veramendis. Where's their ranch?'

'Bigger than any of these, but down in Saltillo, owned by a different branch of the family.'

They spent that night at El Codo, where the lack of supervision once provided by the Garza family was painfully obvious; Don Ramon had moved in other families, but all they seemed to do was build stronger walls to protect themselves against possible Comanche attacks, and that very night, toward four in the morning when a moon just past full threw a brilliant light, the Indians did strike, about thirty of them. They did not try to attack the biggest of the adobe houses, in which the travelers were sleeping along with the family, but they did surround a smaller house, where they killed two mestizo men and one of the wives, and galloped away with the other wife and two of her little girls.

The camp was in futile uproar when Mordecai Marr shouted for order: i want your best horses. All your guns. Juan here will ride with me. Who else?'

He apportioned the guns sensibly; some to the people who would stay behind in case the Comanche tried to attack again while the posse was gone, but most to the five who would ride with him. One man, terribly frightened by the disaster, tried to dissuade Marr from chasing the Indians, but the big American growled: 'We'll catch and kill them and bring back those young ones.'

And he did just that. After a bold two-day run far to the west, he doubled back and took the Comanche by surprise as they came carelessly over a hill with their captives. After an opening fusillade that killed several Indians, Marr grabbed another gun and shot several more. Then, disregarding his own safety in the confusion that resulted and using his gun like a club, he dashed to the two children, dragged them to safety behind a hillock, and returned to the battle, which the Comanche were abandoning.

The other five white men had taken one Indian, and when Marr learned from the weeping children that their mother had been tortured and slain soon after their capture, he went berserk and leaped upon the Comanche, bore him to the ground, and smashed

his head with a large rock. He kept pounding at the man's chest until Juan and the other men pulled him away from the bloody mess.

'Come back!' he screamed into the emptiness, his hands dripping. 'Come back any time, you goddamn savages!' With great solicitation he started consoling the little girls, but when he saw their bruises and learned what they had suffered, he burst into tears and had to move away.

Word of his heroic rescue sped through Bejar prior to his return, carried by a workman from the ranch who said nothing to diminish the bravery of this americano who had been willing to fight the whole Comanche nation. Marr's rescue of the two children was marveled at, for only rarely did a captive of the Comanche ever return to civilized life; they were either kept in perpetual slavery or hacked to pieces over a slow fire. Dread of the Comanche permeated Bejar, and for good reason, for there had never been enemies like these fearful creatures of the western plains, and any man brave enough to chase them down, his six against thirty, and rip away their captives too, was indeed a hero.

People crowded his warehouse and helped him unpack when a fresh convoy of mules arrived from New Orleans with treble the goods he had had before. He stood beside his bales and recounted his exploit: i was a damned fool, understand that. I'd never do \t again, of that you can be sure. I went crazy, I suppose. The woman and her children . . . And I could never have done it without Juan and the others. What shots those men were.'

'But you did it!' admiring women said.

'Once, but never again.'

The people of Bejar did not believe this, because on several occasions Mr. Marr gave clear proof of his hot temper. One day a stranger from Saltillo protested that the price of cloth was too high, and Marr patiently tried to explain that he had to import his goods by land from New Orleans rather than by ship via Vera Cruz. When the buyer pointed out that the distance from Vera Cruz to Bejar was much longer, Marr politely agreed: 'Longer, yes. But from Vera Cruz you have organized roads. From New Orleans, mostly trails.'

'Even so . . .'

At this point, Mr. Marr, according to people who were there, lifted the Saltillo man by his ears, dragged him to the door, the American's face getting redder each moment, and tossed him out into the plaza, bellowing in an echoing voice: 'Then buy your damned cloth in Vera Cruz.'

Unwisely, the stranger reached for his knife, whereupon Marr

leaped upon him, knocked the knife away, and pummeled him until the captain of the presidio ran up to halt the fray. After that, people did not argue with nice-mannered Mr. Marr about prices.

After Trinidad had listened to three or four similar examples of Marr's mercurial behavior, she concluded that he was nothing but an americano bully, and she decided to have nothing to do with him. Next morning when he crossed the plaza to speak with her, she rebuffed him. But that afternoon Amalia came running to the Saldana house with news that led her to change her mind: 'Have you heard about the wonderful thing Mr. Marr's doing?' And when Trinidad went to his warehouse she found on the counter a small wooden box with his hand-lettered sign: por las ninas huerfanas. In it were three silver pieces, his own contribution to the two children orphaned by the Comanche. Soon he would have a substantial number of coins, which he intended giving to the Canary Island family that had assumed care of the little girls, who were slowly recovering.

It was because of this sign that Trinidad found occasion to speak with the americano, for later when she returned to add her contribution she noticed that someone, not the one who made the sign, had changed the word por to para. Both words meant for, but in specialized contexts and to use one where the other was appropriate was almost humorous. When she commented on the editorial change, he laughed: 'Para and por, ser and estar. No foreigner can ever learn the difference.'

She was impressed that he understood the difficulty and spent some time trying to explain the inexplicable, how ser and estar both meant exactly to be, but, again, in minutely specialized applications. She said: 'It's very complicated. Yo soy means that I am, that I exist. Yo estoy means that I am somewhere.' And he said: 'I solve it easily. I use ser on three days of the week, estar on the other three, so I'm always half right.' And she asked: 'What about the seventh day?' And he said: 'Like God, on the seventh day I rest. I use neither.'

Instinctively she was repelled by this big, rough man with the missing tooth, for she was rinding him to be just what Don Ramon had predicted the americanos would be: arrogant and uncivilized, Protestant and menacing. But he was also intriguing, so despite her apprehensions she began to stop by his warehouse to chat, and one day she startled her grandfather with an extraordinary bit of information: 'Mr. Marr is becoming a Catholic'

Yes, he had gone to Father Ybarra and said with proper humility: 'I wish to convert,' and the priest, eager to bring such a spectacular man into the church, forgot his earlier animosity and

started giving religious instruction. It was a case of the brutal converting the brute, and one Sunday at service the dour priest was able to announce, while pointing with satisfaction to where Marr sat: 'Today the last unbeliever in our town has joined the Holy Church, and we welcome him. Jesus Christ is pleased this day, Don Mordecai.' And from that time on he was no longer referred to as Mister, but as Don.

On Monday morning after his conversion was solemnized, Don Mordecai visited the local government offices and started turning over four maps of the area while asking numerous questions of the custodian: 'Who owns this stretch of land?' 'On this map it refers to Rancho de Las Hermanas. Who are the sisters?' 'Who is this man Rivas?' On another day he spread four maps on the floor and pointed to an anomaly: 'The map of 1752 spells our town Vexar. Menchacha's map of 1764 calls it Bexar. This map of 1779 calls it Vejar. And the one three years ago calls it Bejar. What is our name?'

The clerk noticed with both pride and confusion that Don Mordecai was now calling it 'our town,' as if his conversion to Catholicism had also conferred citizenship: 'You can spell it however you please, but it's always something soft and beautiful.'

Marr said he did not think of Bejar as soft and beautiful, but the clerk assured him: 'You will when you've found yourself a plot, built your own house, taken a wife, and settled down with us.'

'All those things I should like to do,' Marr said, and by nightfall every one of the Spanish citizens knew what he had said, as did many of the Indians.

But Marr soon found that it was not a simple matter for a foreigner to acquire land in a frontier province, and his attempts to do so met with frustration. Either none of the good land was for sale, or he found himself ineligible to buy any of the marginal fields. Returning to the maps, he identified hundreds of thousands of acres of unclaimed land, but invariably some constraint prevented him from acquiring any. It was the same with purchasing a house in Bejar itself. There were none for sale, even though half a dozen changed hands while he watched.

It was then, in the summer of 1792, that he seriously analyzed his situation: Spain is finished in this part of the world. Within ten years Louisiana will break away. Then Mexico will break away, too. But an independent Mexico will never be strong enough to hold Tejas. And when Tejas breaks loose, everything will be in confusion.

He pondered how he could profitably fish in these troubled waters, and was guided by the folk wisdom his grandfather had

often recited: 'Mordecai, I seen it so clear in England. Them as had land, had money. Them as didn't, didn't.' At the conclusion of this silent session, Mordecai summarized his strategy: I'll settle in Bejar, find me a wife, and grab hold of some land.