Paloma and the Horse Traders (15 page)

I don’t care what you think you are
,
Paloma said to herself.
Mostly you are stubborn
. She put her
hand lightly on the tight skin around his wound, stitched now with
black thread. His skin was hot to the touch, so she felt his
forehead, relieved to find it cooler.

“
Are you in pain?” she asked. He
said nothing. “Of course you are. I am going to give you some of
these sleeping powders. When you wake up, you may eat. More
broth?”

“
Food this time,
dama
,” he
said. “How will I ever get better if I only drink
broth?”

“
A wise consideration,” she said.
“Here now. Let me help you sit up.”

He couldn’t move quickly, so she helped him. He
started to protest, but she ignored him. The shadows in the room
made him difficult to see, but she couldn’t overlook his abundant
beard and long hair, a sign of the rough men who bartered and
bargained with Indians, often on the fringe of
settlement.

“
There now. Please sleep,” she said,
after she made him drink the sleeping powders. “I’ll promise you my
special
posole
and tortillas when you wake.”

“
Thank you,” he whispered, as she
helped him lie down. His eyes opened briefly, then closed. “Sorry
to be trouble.”

“
You are no trouble, Se …
Diego. Thank you for bringing me horses so I can take my children
around in a little carriage. And thank you for
Graciela.”

“
I didn’t have anything to do
with ….”

That was all; he slept. Paloma watched him a
moment, then left the room as quietly as she had entered it. She
heard familiar voices in the courtyard now and sighed with relief.
Her husband and Toshua were back.

* * *

The moon had risen by the time he woke up.
Señora Mondragón must have opened the shuttered window—maybe to air
out the room of his stink—because he could see out through the bars
to moonrise. Someone was playing a guitar in the courtyard, or
maybe the servants’ quarters. The fragrance of piñon fires was
nothing new to him, except that this was no camp in the middle of
nowhere. He was in a home where people cared about one another. No
one had told him that, but the evidence was all around.

Carefully he eased himself onto his back, ready
to grimace with pain and stiffen. Nothing. He straightened out,
stretching his legs. He no longer needed that defensive posture,
the one that wounded animals and people assumed when in pain. His
shoulder throbbed, but the sharpest ache was gone. He knew he was
healing. Something about this home reminded him of his own home
years ago, so many years that they had all run together into a
jumble of good memories and harsh ones.

He needed to piss but he was unwilling to ask
for help. Diego put out one leg from the sheets—sheets,
imagine!—and then the other and stood slowly. Keeping his back
straight, because he wasn’t sure what his wound would do, he knelt
down and felt under the bed until he found the pot. Relief was
immediate. He pushed the pot back when he finished, and sat on the
edge of the bed.

He wore a nightgown, something so alien that he
nearly laughed. It was probably the property of that tall,
long-nosed, high-cheeked Señor Mondragón, the same man who had come
to him earlier, left a pouch of money on the table by the window
and apologized for being an ass. He sounded sincere, but who could
tell?

Diego’s stomach rumbled. “I could eat lizards
and snakes right now,” he said, even though the kitchen smells
suggested something far better. Snakes, horned toads, a skunk even,
had served him well before. He had learned a long time ago that
anything which crawled or moved could provide some sort of meat to
keep a man alive. As long as he could choke it down, he would live
another day.

As he sat there, contemplating his next move,
Diego heard a man’s footsteps. A door opened and stayed open. Diego
leaned forward until he could see a sliver of a room, probably a
child’s because he thought he saw a crib. No, one crib and a little
bed beyond it. He saw Señora Mondragón holding a small child, a boy
because his dark hair was cut short. Señor Mondragón crossed in
front of her. He carried another child and sat down on the floor,
leaning his head against the bed where his wife sat.

Diego wished they had closed the door. The
scene was private and intimate, and he had no business staring like
a starving man at the nearly forgotten sight of a family preparing
little ones for bed. God help him, but he couldn’t look
away.

La Señora started to hum. The tune was familiar
to him, but he had not heard a lullaby in years. He listened, a
smile on his face. What
was
that tune? And then she started
to sing, and that made all the difference.

He knew the song, and he knew the words, a
curious little dialect of the Canary Islands. He sucked in his
breath and wiped his forehead, where sweat had suddenly popped out.
His hand started to shake. “Keep singing,” he whispered. “Oh,
please.”

It was a pleasant little lullaby. “ ‘Papa
comes soon, from over the sea, home with a king’s ransom for thee,
only thee.’ ”

She didn’t seem to know the words that
followed, so she hummed them. Diego whispered, “ ‘He’ll be
here for thy saint’s day, my child, my dear.’ ”

She knew the chorus. “ ‘Sleep, sleep, fear
nothing, my dear. The saints are around us this day, this
year.’ ” He sang softly along with her.

He went to the door of his room, unmindful of
his bare legs. He leaned against the doorframe and took a very good
look at Señora Mondragón. He had been in too much pain before, and
then too embarrassed at his disheveled, odoriferous state to really
look at her. He did so now, noticing her profile, as she sat
holding her son. Her hair was smooth and brown. When she laughed,
he knew the laugh. It was so close to his mother’s. So was the
profile.

Diego put his hand to his mouth to stop the sob
that rose in his throat. A woman in Texas had sung that lullaby,
learned from her mother who was from the Canary Islands. Mama had
sung it to his little sister in their hacienda, close to El Paso
del Norte. No wonder Señora Mondragón couldn’t really remember the
words. His mama had sung the lullaby to him, then to his younger
brother Rafael, and then to Paloma, the one he knew had to be dead,
killed in a Comanche raid.

Diego took a deep breath and another. He moved
quietly across the hall, shaky on his feet, but moving now by some
force of will that went beyond pain or suffering or any emotion he
had ever known. He stood in the doorway of the children’s room and
opened the door wider.

Señor Mondragón got to his feet immediately and
thrust his daughter behind him, the protector of his wife and
children, but Diego had eyes only for the woman. She looked at him,
puzzled but not fearful or defensive like her husband. Yes, her
eyes were as blue as his, the eyes of their father. She was a woman
grown now, and not a skinny little sister, but he knew
her.

“
Paloma Vega,” he whispered. “See me
truly.”

She did as he said, looking beyond the beard
and the long greasy hair, and the scar on his cheek. She swallowed
and her face paled. Slowly she set her little boy beside
her.

“
Those words of the lullaby you
didn’t know,” he said, as tears started down his cheeks. He sang
softly, “ ‘He’ll be here for thy saint’s day, my child, my
dear.’ ”

“
Claudio? Claudio?” she asked, her
voice high and strangled. Her eyes rolled back in her ashen face
and she fainted, falling sideways as her husband grabbed her, his
face equally pale.

“
Who … who ….”

He was too old for his voice to crack, but it
did, anyway. “Señor Mondragón, I am Claudio Vega. I did not
die.”

In
which there is another Star in the Meadow

P
aloma regained consciousness
with her head in her husband’s lap, her children in tears, and the
horse trader on the floor beside her, his head resting against her
knees. She blinked, wondering for only a second what had just
happened. Hesitantly, she put her hand out and rested it on that
shaggy head. Washed, she knew his hair would be the same color as
hers. She kissed her husband’s cheek, then leaned forward and
kissed the scraggly hair on the top of her brother’s head. Her eyes
closed as she rested her cheek where she had kissed.

“
This isn’t possible.” She knew the
words sounded perfectly clear. What came out of her mouth was that
Canary Islands dialect, a language she had thrust from her mind
after that horrible day when everyone died except her.

“
But here we are,” her brother said,
in the same dialect, his voice weary with the exhaustion of his
wound, but triumphant in a way that suggested he might not be a man
easily discouraged. They had both been through so much. Too bad
they had not been through it together.

He switched to Spanish, which banished the
puzzled expression on Marco’s face. Paloma sat up carefully, still
dizzy, and took a squalling baby from her husband, who also
clutched Soledad.

She held out her son to her brother. “We named
him after you, Claudio.”

“
Thank you,” he said, and managed a
grin. “He’s noisy.”

“
Told you he was your namesake,” she
joked back, eager to tease this man she’d believed dead.

She could tell he was functioning on his last
bit of strength. Marco saw it, too. He set their tearful daughter
close to Paloma and carefully helped Claudio from the floor where
he knelt.

“
You are going back to bed,
Claudio,” Marco said, in his
juez de campo
voice, the one no
one disputed.

“
But—”

“
Paloma and I will get our little
brood calmed down and sleeping. Let me help you across the hall.
Now, now! We will join you when the children are
asleep.”

Claudio looked at her, mutiny in his eyes, but
without the strength to do anything about it.

“
I always do what Marco says, when
he sounds like that,” Paloma told him.

“
Since when, my love?” Marco
teased.

Claudio looked from one to the other. The tears
welling in his eyes rolled down his dirty cheeks, leaving tracks.
“Paloma, you’re happy, aren’t you?”

She nodded, and felt her own tears. “Never
happier,” she wailed, which set off little Claudio
again.

“
So am I,” Marco told her brother.
He took a more careful hold on Claudio, his arm around the man’s
waist.

“
I still stink,” he said.

“
I don’t care. I think your little
sister will let us borrow her private bathhouse tomorrow. Whether
you like it or not, the hair and beard are going away.”

“
I’d like that,” Claudio said in a
soft voice.

Paloma held little Claudio close to her in one
arm, and Soledad in the other. She watched her husband and brother
slowly cross the hall. Even from that distance, she saw the relief
on Claudio’s face when he lay down again.

Sancha peeked into the room, eyes wide and
fearful, with Graciela behind her. Paloma motioned them in and
explained what had just happened. The story sounded strange, even
to her ears. She knew Claudio was dead, but here he was.
God is
good
, she thought, hoping with every fiber of her being that
her long-dead parents were somehow granted a glimpse of their son
and daughter in each other’s arms again, after a long and terrible
time.

“
Shh, shh, little one,” she crooned
to Claudito. In a few moments his tears stopped. He rubbed his eyes
and cuddled close, still upset at this sudden turmoil in his
orderly world.

Soledad burrowed close, too, but soon she
tugged on her eyelashes. In another moment, she felt heavy against
Paloma’s belly. A finger to her lips, Sancha picked up Soli and
carried her to her bed. The housekeeper commandeered Claudio next.
His protest ended in a yawn, and then he slept. Paloma closed the
door and darted across the hall.

Marco had found two more pillows to prop up
Claudio, whose face—seen through his tangle of beard—appeared
drained of all color. Whether they could blame the wound or the
shock of their reunion she couldn’t say, but she would have wagered
her own skin was just as pale.

Weakly, Claudio patted the bed and Paloma made
herself comfortable there. Marco pulled up a stool. The three of
them just stared at one another, until Marco began to
smile.

“
It was the song?” he asked, tears
filling his eyes again. “Paloma, you don’t even sing that lullaby
very much. What if you hadn’t sung it tonight?”

She crossed herself, not wanting to contemplate
the idea of them going their separate ways, unknown to each other.
It could have happened so easily, because of Claudio’s shame at his
repugnant odor and dishevelment, and his desire to be anywhere but
in the house of gentle folk.
You could have left in a few days,
and I never would have known
, she thought, aghast at the idea.
She reached out to touch his feet.

“
Would we have known each other?”
she asked finally.