Soul Catcher (20 page)

Then grapeshot struck Cain's position, and he was thrown into the air and everything turned to a buzzing gray, as if he had fallen headfirst into a beehive.

When he came to he felt a dull ache in his chest just below his left shoulder, but it was his leg that howled with pain. It felt as if it had been placed in a fire, and a blacksmith was pounding it with a hammer, with the intent of reshaping it into something other than a leg. Trying to rise up, he felt his leg give way and buckle beneath him. He saw that the bone was fractured, his pant leg shredded and bloody. He found his Colt nearby and took it up, checked how many rounds he had left.

Around him he could hear the cries and screams of the wounded and the dying, the neighing of the horses lying on their sides, interspersed with other voices speaking a strange tongue. Pretending to be dead, he closed his eyes and listened as the Mexicans went from one wounded soldier to the next. Before they stuck a bayonet into a chest or slashed a throat with a saber, they'd cry out, "Recuerde Agua Nueva." Remember Agua Nueva--where the Massacre of the Cave had taken place. Cain heard them getting closer, and he cocked the hammer of his gun, prepared to kill as many of the bastards as he could before they got him.

He tried, too, to ready himself for death, for surely this was the end. He tried to remember some prayers, a proverb perhaps, something his mother had taught him long ago, something to make his passing easier, but nothing came to him. He remembered her, though, her toothy smile and those gray eyes, and her sweet honeysuckle smell when she'd lean down to kiss him good night. And thinking of her like that, he reckoned then he was as ready to die as he'd ever likely be. The pain in his leg was excruciating, and he'd do almost anything to be shed of it; and what, after all, would he miss from his life? He had no one special waiting for him. He wondered if Alexandra, when she heard, would even shed a tear, or would she think he got only what he deserved for the way he'd abandoned her?

But in war as in life, luck is often the final arbiter of one's fate. The Mexicans happened to take a siesta from their killing spree (that was the thing about his enemy, he'd learned, they didn't do anything, including killing, with the dispassionate intensity of the Americans). With this reprieve, a sudden change of heart came over Cain, and he found himself desperately wanting to live. Despite the pain in his leg, he crawled and pulled and willed himself into a narrow arroyo where he hid behind some rocks. He lay there for the rest of the scorching day, his mouth parched and cracked, his tongue swollen, dreaming of water the way some men dreamed of wealth, others of women. Circling overhead, he saw a few scraggly buzzards, harbingers of death. From his hiding place, he listened to the crying and pleading of his wounded comrades. "For the love of God, no," one voice would exclaim, and then fall silent. Another: "Please don't. I got me a--" before a bayonet silenced it, as well.

He felt an extraordinary sense of guilt. He told himself he should try to get up and fight, should die with his comrades, but for some reason he remained hidden. That wasn't quite true; he knew the reason. He was afraid of dying. It was as simple, as undeniable as that. After a while, the cries stopped altogether. Soon the Mexicans moved off, and night slowly settled in over the mountains like a black shimmery cape. Cain lay there, looking up at the flickering desert stars; he shivered in the cold night air, growing weaker, feeling the life ebbing slowly out of him. He fought to keep his eyes open. He thought if he closed them he would die. He recalled Mr. Beauregard reading from the Iliad, Patroclus's death by Hector--and his eyes were closed in death. But at last he couldn't fight it anymore, and he gave in to the pressure and let himself drift downward into what he was sure was the cool, sour-smelling embrace of death.

When he opened his eyes in the morning--some morning, maybe days, weeks later, he couldn't say--he was certain he was dead, for he was looking up into the sweet face of an angel. Albeit, a brown one, with broad cheekbones and coal black hair pulled into a single thick braid that snaked down her back. Eyes to match her hair, almond shaped, solemn. Light freckles over the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Smallpox scars. A young Indian girl, sixteen, seventeen, though at times she would seem as old and as much lived-in-the-world as the grandmother she stayed with. Much later, through signs and a crude sort of pantomime, for neither could speak the other's language, he would learn how he'd come to be there. How the girl had found him behind the rock, as she and her grandmother had searched the bodies of the dead on both sides, looking for valuables. As the girl rifled through Cain's tunic, besides finding the big Colt revolver and the silver flask with the strange writing on it that she could not read, she'd found something else--a spark of life in the dead soldier.

She'd stared down at Cain, peering at his handsome face, pulling up the lids of his eyes to see if his soul was still a resident there. It was she who'd suggested they bring him back and try to nurse him to health, while the grandmother argued that he would only bring trouble to them, that they should simply leave him as food for the buzzards. The girl, clever beyond her years and willful, said perhaps he was a rich American and that his family might be willing to pay money to have him back alive. The grandmother didn't like the idea of bringing a dead man back with them and threw her hands in the air in disgust. But she knew her headstrong granddaughter would do what she wanted. She always did. On her own, the girl fashioned a travois out of a horse blanket and some cottonwood branches she managed to find and hack into poles; she attached it behind their donkey and dragged the tall American back to their hut high in the desert mountains.

But all of this, he would learn later. In the meantime, he struggled for his life, a man swimming upward as if from the ocean's depths. For several days he was in and out of consciousness, crossing back and forth between the bright realms of the living and the shaded realm of the dead, almost like a courier carrying messages between the two. He had the odd dreams of one suspended between worlds. Some were filled with cool, green water cascading over him, others with a harsh light that blistered the skin like fire. In one he saw his mother. She was at some distance from him, standing by herself in a barren field that had been harvested of its crops. He made for her, but as he drew near she put up her hand and called, "Go back, Augustus. Go back." In another, he lay helpless on the ground as soldiers went among the wounded, administering the coup de grace with a bright silver blade. He finally regained consciousness, and that's when he saw the girl looking down at him, wiping his face with a wet rag. Her hands smelled earthy, of clay and of onions, and when she breathed on him, her breath was warm and sweet, like that of a nursing puppy.

"Where am I?" he asked hoarsely, glancing around.

She said something in a tongue he didn't understand. He then used the only word he'd picked up of Spanish in the year he'd been in Mexico, a word taught to him by the war itself. "Muerta?"

She looked down at him and smiled, showing small, white teeth.

"Non muerta," she said. And to prove it she took hold of the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger and pinched it so hard he cried out in pain. So he knew he was alive because of the pain.

From behind her, an old woman muttered something to the girl and gave her a cup with a bitter liquid for him to drink. She was an ancient crone, bent backed and toothless, her face as parched and furrowed as the arroyos that surrounded her. She wore a brightly colored serape and a floppy panza de burro hat tied under her chin. From her sunken mouth protruded a corncob pipe that she puffed on. The girl's grandmother. He'd come to learn that while the girl had brought him back, it was the old woman who had kept him alive. She knew about herbs and poultices and Indian remedies. When he looked around, he saw he was in some sort of shed that held animals. There were chickens and goats, a pig snorting nearby, in the corner eating from a pile of hay, a donkey who occasionally looked at Cain and brayed noisily, as if he'd taken his spot.

He tried to get up but found he was too weak. Whenever he breathed deeply, his chest burned from the wound there, and every time he moved his leg the least little bit, it would begin throbbing with a pain so bad he almost passed out. So he tried to lie very still on the pile of straw that was his bed. At night he could hear the whisperlike scurrying of tiny feet--mice or scorpions or snakes? He was too sick to care. He didn't sleep well. He kept thinking about his comrades being slaughtered by the Mexicans. He could hear their screams, their pleading, the hollow sound of a blade entering a chest, the mud-sucking slllppp as it was withdrawn. Even then he felt the guilt of having lived, and yet he savored his life as never before. Though he had no appetite to speak of, the young girl insisted he eat. She brought him food every morning and evening, a watery mush made of ground cornmeal and flour and milk; with one hand she held his head up and with the fingers of the other shoved food into his mouth, as one might feed a persnickety baby. When he tried to spit it out, she would push it back in until he swallowed it. He was too weak to fight her. Too weak even to get up to go to the bathroom, so he'd do his business in a clay pot that they brought him. A few times the old woman would come to him in the shed, kneel by his side, and pray, sometimes holding a set of rosary beads in her withered old hands, other times a hawk's feather. She would tend to his wounds, too, brusquely, jabbing his flesh so he cried out, putting foul-smelling poultices on them, making him drink something that tasted sour like vinegar.

But slowly the cures began to work. By the second week he was out of danger of dying; by the third he was sitting up and starting to get his appetite back; and by the fourth, with the girl's help, he was standing and hobbling the few paces across the shed. He leaned his full weight on her, and though she was slight and small-boned as a cat, she had a surprising strength. He could feel the corded muscles in her thin back, the heat of her breath against his naked chest as she urged him on. At first, only a few steps exhausted him and he collapsed onto his straw pallet again.

"What's . . . your name?" he asked, out of breath.

"Yo no entiendo."

She knelt beside him, stared uncomprehendingly with those dark, solemn eyes of hers. Around her slender neck hung a silver cross.

Tapping his chest with his fingers, he tried again. "Cain. I'm Cain." Then he reached up and touched her shoulder. "What's your . . . name?"

She frowned, then her expression cleared and she said, "Pecosa."

"Your name is Pecosa?" he said.

"St." She smiled at him and ran her fingers over the freckles across her checks. "Pecosa. Mi nombre es Pecosa."

"Freckles?" he said. "That's your name?"

"Si," she nodded. "Pecosa."

About the time he was finally able to stand on his own and move about a little, the old woman fashioned him a crutch from a weathered piece of pinon, and he used that to get around. He thought he'd been lucky not to lose the leg, that is, until he saw it. His knee and shin had been shattered. The bone, broken in several places, hadn't healed correctly, and one leg was shorter now than the other by a goodly amount. In addition, a fist-size chunk of flesh had been ripped away from the calf muscle, as if a bite had been taken out of it by a grizzly bear. The pain in his leg didn't go away either, would never completely go away, and from then on he would have a decided limp. He tried to do what little he could to help out around the place, to show his appreciation, but also to prove to himself that he wasn't a cripple. He'd scatter feed to the chickens, split firewood with one hand, tote water on the donkey from the watering hole.

The girl and her grandmother lived twenty paces away in a small mud hut on a high mesa overlooking the valley of Buena Vista. They were mestizas. Half-breeds. Cain had learned about such people during his year in Mexico. Like the Indians back in the States, they were scorned and ridiculed, made outcasts by the "whites" and their government. The mestizos didn't care about the war, it didn't concern them. Whoever was running things--Santa Anna or President Herrera or General Paredes--it was all the same to them. Not that they sided with the invading "gringos" either. They were just more white invaders to them, here to steal what they could. The two women lived north of Buena Vista, a half day's journey from the town of Saltillo. They scratched out a living raising a few chickens, some feral-looking pigs, and a couple of goats for milk, and they grew a small garden of corn and beans and squash. The old woman made clay pots, which they took to Saltillo to sell. They gathered firewood from among the ravines and arroyos and, on the donkey, toted two large clay jugs of brackish, salty-tasting water from a spring at the base of the mountain. Once a month, on a Sunday, the two would pack up the donkey and they'd go into the village to barter eggs and goat cheese and chickens for some flour and sugar and salt, and for the tobacco that the old woman smoked in her pipe. While there they would go to mass at the small Catholic chapel. The old woman was very religious. Every day she would light a candle and pray before a small clay Madonna that stood in the corner of their hut.