Paradise Valley (31 page)
While Rachel devoured the letter from Jake, Emma gazed around her at the stubbly fields dotted with shocks of bundled hay.
“This place needs trees,” Emma said, almost to herself. “I miss them so, especially in the fall. Back home there were so many trees – not just the woods but shade trees by the driveway and the house and the barn. Even when the fields are ripe, this valley seems barren without trees in it. I’m going to write Lovina and see if they’ll bring saplings when they come.” Her eyes brightened with a vision of the future.
“Yes! I know just what I’ll do. I’ll plant poplars all down both sides of the driveway and one day they’ll make a lovely shady lane for anyone who comes to visit Dat’s house.” She spread her hands against a backdrop only she could see, and her eyes shined. “There will be great big oak trees on both ends of the house to hold off the summer sun, and I’ll plant a grove of fruit trees along the base of the ridge. And maples! Why, that whole ridge will blaze like fire with maple leaves in the fall. Rachel, could you and Miriam make me some adobe for a sugar shack?”
Rachel didn’t answer. The letter lay crumpled between her fists in her lap. She kept her face away from Emma, staring out over the fields and biting her lip to keep the tears from coming. It wasn’t working.
“Rachel?” Emma reached out very gently and hooked Rachel’s chin with a finger, turning her head. When their eyes met, Rachel’s freckled face crumpled like the letter and she sobbed.
“Rachel, what’s wrong?”
Rachel pressed her face into Emma’s shoulder and her sister’s arms closed about her.
“What is it, child? What’s happened?”
“He’s not coming,” Rachel whimpered, her shoulders shaking.
“
Jake’s
not coming? But why?”
Rachel didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Without moving her face from Emma’s shoulder she held up the crumpled letter. Emma took it, smoothed the paper against her knee with her free hand and read over Rachel’s shoulder. She skipped over the first part of the letter, but when she came to the middle paragraph she began to read aloud, her soft voice now sharing her sister’s grief.
“ ‘Everyone here is talking about the bandits who stole your horse. I know you must have been frightened out of your mind, Rachel, to have to face such men. I only wish I could have been there with you. Don’t know what I could have done, but I wish I was there all the same.’ ”
She stopped reading for a few seconds and muttered, “Why would Dat tell them about the horse?” And then, with hardly a pause, she answered herself. “Because he is Dat. They sent him here to find out the truth about the bandits, and he will tell them the truth even if it costs him everything he has. He is Dat.” Then she picked up reading where she left off.
“ ‘There was also an article in a magazine a little while ago about all the trouble in Mexico and how bad things are right now. Everyone was talking about it. I don’t know how to say this, Rachel, but Dat is telling everyone he can’t take his family to such a place because it’s not safe. I asked him myself, and he said no, we are not going right now. Maybe later, if things calm down, he said, but not now. Sometimes I think I will die if I cannot see you, but Dat will not budge. I am very, very sorry, Rachel, but we won’t be coming to Paradise Valley anytime soon.’ ”
Emma didn’t read any further, nor did she say anything. Rachel didn’t need words anyway – what could be said? Emma just wrapped her arms about her, pressing Jake’s letter to her back, and held her for a long time while they wept quietly together.
Rachel pulled away at last. While wiping her eyes on a sleeve she made a little backhanded motion toward the house.
“Go on,” she said.
As the surrey reached the house, Rachel jumped out and stalked across to the kitchen garden, head down, fists clenched, doing her best to hide her face. Perhaps it was an extension of her father’s stoicism that even in a family dominated by daughters – perhaps
especially
in a family of daughters – self-pity was not tolerated. Rachel and her sisters had been raised to believe that though each of the Bender women had her own personal trials and struggles, there was never a problem that couldn’t be overcome by some combination of hard work and faith. Ada was the only one in the entire family allowed to wallow in self-pity, and then only because she couldn’t help it; she was, and always would be, a child.
Naturally, at a time when Rachel would rather not face any of them, most of her family was right there in front of the barn with the hay wagon, right next to the garden. To make matters worse, she had to cross in front of the house to get there. She nearly ran into Mary when she came out the front door with the slop bucket in her hands on her way to the pigpen. Mamm’s voice rang through the open front door, telling Mary to rinse out the bucket and bring more water. Ada swept a pile of dirt out the door as Rachel stalked past, dusting her skirt with it. Beyond the house, her father was standing by the hay wagon, and Rachel passed within fifty feet without speaking to him. She dared not look up for fear that he would notice her puffy eyes and red nose, and ask why she had been crying. She did not want to lie to her father just now. Still, it seemed to her that he stopped what he was doing and watched her. Keeping her back to him, she picked up the potato fork and went back to work.
Fighting back the urge to cry, Rachel worked her way down the row, jamming the fork into the soft earth a little harder than necessary, shaking the dirt and clumpy roots from the potatoes with a bit too much enthusiasm, and throwing the potatoes into the pile a little too hard. But when she reached the far end where the dry remains of the pole bean vines hid her from view, she sank to her knees in the middle of them and gave in to self-pity. Holding on to the shaft of the fork with both hands as if it were a rope to Gott, she cried her heart out. Hope came to her all awaggle, thrashing through the vines, ducking under her arms and licking her face until Rachel swatted her away.
And then she heard the last thing she wanted to hear – the rustling of dry vines and the sound of soft footsteps behind her. Not now. There was nothing she could say to her father, no way she could even attempt to explain that she was wasting time weeping over the loss of a lover she was not supposed to have in the first place, a lover she had lost because
he
told Jonas Weaver about the bandits taking the horse.
She tried, but she couldn’t stop crying. She remained where she was and waited for the inevitable, for her father’s voice to ask what was wrong, and then she would have to stand and face him. But it didn’t happen. Instead, a hand lay softly on her shoulder and squeezed; then someone – a woman, Rachel could tell from the rustling of skirts – sank to her knees behind her and wrapped loving arms around her, gently enfolding her. Rachel did not look up as a white-kapped head pressed itself to her shoulder, and then Ada’s childlike voice cooed to her.
“Shhhh, little one. Gott knows. Shhhh.”
In early November Dat loaded the wagon with cabbage and made another trip to Saltillo. This time he took Domingo and Aaron with him. He claimed he wanted his son to learn the way to Saltillo so he wouldn’t have to go himself every time, but Rachel knew the real reason he chose not to take any girls along. She remembered too well the incident with El Pantera, and the bandit pulling the kapp from her head.
When he returned three days later with the cabbage still piled on the back of the wagon, Rachel could tell by the set of his jaw that something was wrong. Dat was scowling and holding his head a little sideways the way he did when he had a headache. Rachel thought surely he’d been accosted by bandits again until her mother ran out to meet the wagon and Dat barked at her.
“Make sauerkraut!” he snapped. “Make as much as the barrels will hold and we’ll feed the rest to the pigs. What the pigs don’t eat, we’ll plow under.”
Mamm tried to appease him. “What’s wrong, Caleb? Why didn’t you sell the cabbage in Saltillo?”
“I
tried
!” he shouted. “Mexicans don’t eat cabbage!”
“I tried to tell him,” Domingo said, working hard to suppress a grin.
Dat glared. “They came by the stand and poked their fingers at it,” he said, miming the action with a comical look of disgust. “They asked us what it was, and then they said our lettuce was too hard and turned up their noses. I even peeled some off and ate it to show them, but when they tasted it they just made a face and spit it out! What kind of people don’t eat cabbage?”
“Mexicans,” Domingo said dryly, and then suddenly decided he would be wise to go help Aaron unload the cabbage and pile it by the back door.
Miriam had come from the house wiping her hands on a rag, and heard part of the conversation.
“Dat, were you able to buy paper?” she asked carefully.
Some of the frustration melted from his face then. “Jah, I had a little money left over yet, from the corn. I didn’t get as much as you wanted, so you’ll have to be sparing with it. I got pencils too, and Domingo even found an old blackboard someplace. He paid for it with his own money, and he wouldn’t tell me how much he paid. He got chalk, too.”
Mamm broke out the cabbage cutter, and the women set to work filling three big barrels with shredded cabbage. Sammy and Paul had great fun stomping it down in the barrels, but they were not happy about having to scrub their feet when it wasn’t even Saturday.
Miriam put out the word, and the following Monday she held her first class in the living room. Leah and Barbara, the two youngest daughters, helped her set up the benches from the kitchen and bring in the long crude writing tables the boys had nailed together in the barn.
“I don’t know what to expect,” she told Leah. Miriam was literally wringing her hands, trying to figure out how to hang the little blackboard on an adobe wall.
“Calm down,” Barbara said. “If they see you’re afraid of them, they’ll take advantage.” She knew this from her own classroom experience. “I’ll get Harvey to fix the board for you.”
While Harvey was driving a wooden wedge into the adobe and screwing the blackboard to it, Rachel ushered in Domingo with four small boys from San Rafael. Long-haired, hatless, barefoot and dirty, terrified of the strange surroundings, the boys stood mute against a wall at first, but when Sammy and Paul ran in from the barn the new boys loosened up. Shortly after that a couple of young girls showed up, having walked the two miles from a tiny village at the end of the opposite ridge.
Miriam did her best to get them seated, but she had let them go a bit too long and the children had gotten rowdy. She clapped her hands and shouted. Sammy and Paul heard her, stopped running around and eased into their seats – they had, after all, been trained to sit still and pay attention for three hours in church all their lives. But Miriam couldn’t get the Mexican boys to quiet down and stop chasing each other around the room until Domingo snagged one of them by the back of his shirt and lifted him off his feet the way he would have picked up a puppy by the scruff. The others all froze in place, watching to see what terrible fate would befall Juan.
Domingo dangled the petrified boy from one hand and turned him so that their faces came very close together. The room was deathly quiet when Domingo looked straight into the boy’s frightened eyes like a wolf and spoke in a low voice that rumbled through them like thunder.
“
Esto es un regalo de Dios
, Juan,” he said.
This is a gift from
God
. “You will treat the señorita with respect, no?”
Little Juan’s eyes were white with fear as he nodded fervently, his lip quivering. “Sí ” was all he could manage.
Domingo twisted the child about like a weather vane and lowered him gracefully onto a bench, facing Miriam.
Standing at the front of the room, Miriam now had their full attention, and it took only a nod and a small gesture of her hand for the rest of them to file calmly into the rows and seat themselves.
Rachel leaned close to Domingo’s shoulder and whispered, “Maybe you should stay.”
Domingo switched to German so the Mexican kids would not understand, and said, “They are
outside
children, accustomed to running free all day. They will learn quickly, but you must have a firm hand.”
Miriam began with introductions. After they had all said their names she asked, “How many of you can
spell
your name?”
The kids looked at each other, shook their heads.
“By Christmas,” she said, “you will all be able to write your names, I promise.”