The Zigzag Way (15 page)

“Oh yes,” she said, hands on her hips, “that's one day your fine manager and his wife think of the miners up on the hill. Give us a tea treat with bacon sandwiches and feel proud when they see us fall on them like beggars. Then they can go back to their Casa Grande where none of us has ever so much as set foot.”

“Now, Betty, I didn't think you'd care to visit them.”

“I don't,” she said, stamping her foot, “I don't. That is not what I meant and you know it, Davey Rowse.”

But she gave her family an account of the occasion that sounded happy enough. “Did you ever think,” she wrote, “that here on a mountain in Mexico we would be celebrating the Duke of Cornwall's birthday?” They had been taken in wagons decorated with streamers down the steep hillside to a ledge where the picnic had been spread out under a great mesquite tree and games arranged for the children, races for the adults. When the sun began to sink, Davey came and pulled Betty to her feet, asking her to come and look at the view with him. It was one of those rare days when work and responsibility did not seem to weigh on him and make him dour, and Betty, delighted to see it, agreed.

They walked down to the edge where the land fell away in a sudden precipice to the valley and a lake where egrets stepped among the reeds, herons spread their wings to dry, and pelicans sailed along as if sliding across glass. He was pointing out the different birds to her when she noticed a large solitary hacienda built against the flank of the mountain already in shadow and so dark as to be barely discernible.

“And that?” she asked.

“Oh, that was a convent built by the Spanish priests who came to convert the Indians. The Mexicans threw them out after the War of Independence.”

“So, is it empty? Did no one move in?”

“Actually, the Company did. They bought it and turned it into a kind of guesthouse for people on the board when they come to see the mines. 'Course, no one does. Come out here to the back of beyond to see the muck their fortunes come from? Not them,” Davey said, looking at her because he knew she would approve of his tone. “It just lies empty. But when the president of Mexico came to open our electrical installation, he stayed there and the owners threw a banquet for him. They had chefs come from Mexico City to prepare his meals,” Davey went on, providing the details he knew Betty enjoyed so much, “and an orchestra to play for him so he could dance with the ladies. Then he came up here to the mines and they lined the road with lanterns and trees hung with paper flowers. They lit bonfires on every hilltop and had a fireworks display to beat all fireworks. Just as if he was a king.”

“A king in a fairy story,” Betty said wonderingly. “We should go there one day.” Glancing over her shoulder at the gathering under the tree, she added, “Just us, you and me.”

He smiled and plucked a grass stalk to chew on. “How? We'd have to get a horse to take us. Shall we ride a horse together, Mrs. Rowse?”

The picture amused her. “Let's.”

Holding hands, they strolled back to where the gathering had begun to sing Cornish songs, and when they got back and rejoined them, a toast was drunk to the duke—beer for the men, lemonade for the women and children. Then Betty helped the women pick up and fold and tidy away and the men got the wagons ready to take them back.

The occasion for that excursion never did arise, and shortly afterward Davey forbade Betty to go for walks alone on evenings when he was kept late at the mine, and he actually laid down the limits beyond which she must not go, even with Lupe.

Betty was puzzled. “What do you think might happen if I did?”

“I cannot tell and that is what I don't care for, not to know what might happen. All I know is it's not safe.”

“And who told you that?”

“There's talk,” he said. “Don't think everyone is so friendly as you think.”

It displeased her that he should be suspicious of the people they lived among and whom she knew to be friendly and kind, for they unfailingly wished her a
“Buenos días”
and a
“Buenas tardes”
when they passed her and never pulled a face or made a gesture that could be thought hostile. It made her wonder at Davey's new attitude—he was often dour but never unfair—and she demanded a reason for it.

He explained that there had been trouble at the mine: one of the
mineros
, Julio, was found to have gone down the hill into town to buy kerosene for his lantern and corn for his family at the general store, not at the Tienda de Raya run by the Company. The manager, a Scotsman named MacDuff, had him hauled up and warned. When he defied the manager and did it again, saying he would go wherever the prices were fair, he was discharged and a wave of anger and resentment went through the community that Betty imagined was so harmonious. Did not all the men play football together, Scots and Cornish and Mexican? Were they not equally excited about the centennial celebrations to come? Now this was shown to be a sham, nothing but a front for what was unacceptable.

Putting down her knife and fork, she exploded, “And isn't any of you standing up for him? For shame!”

When Davey kept silent and did not openly agree with her, she went on, “Don't you think it's wrong? These poor people being made to hand over what they earn back to the Company? By
order?”

“It's not as simple as that, Betty.”

“Oh but it is,” she insisted, “it is.”

 

I
N MEXICO CITY
the centennial of the Revolution was inaugurated by President Díaz. They heard of banquets at the Palacio Nacional where French cuisine was prepared for the guests and an orchestra of more than a hundred musicians played the president's favorite waltz, “El Abandonado,” under thousands of electric lights. At one such ball, he announced his intention to stand for a ninth term as president. At the same occasion he handed out ninety-nine-year concessions of copper, oil, and lead to the Americans Morgan, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Hearst.

Such news reassured all the foreigners who had begun to grow worried, and so celebrations came even to their dusty scrapheap of a town. The miners and their families were taken down to hear the
grito
, the stirring call for independence that had been made by the priest Miguel Hidalgo way back in 1810. It was read out now on the balcony of the town hall by the mayor in his polished and buttoned and gleaming best. A band played, there was a parade of floats from which beauties in Spanish dress tossed roses to the crowds, buntings and streamers blew from every lamppost, and in the evening there were fireworks in the plaza for which the entire town turned out, Mexican and Cornish alike. When they came to an end, in drifting parasols of smoke, the night sky, clearing, revealed a pale band that seemed to be the ghost of a streaking rocket. Only it did not speed away and die. It remained because it was Hailey's comet. Everyone had heard what it portended but no one wished to say on that night. Even the mines were shut and silent, no whistle blew to remind them they were there. Instead, all turned to tables loaded with great earthenware bowls filled with food simmering in sauces and gravies.

Betty turned away and asked to be taken home. Davey was concerned because it was not like her to refuse anything unusual or pleasurable. He suggested, at home, that she have a glass of milk or a slice of fruit. Pulling a face at the pineapple in the bowl on the table, she turned away, saying, “I'd give a lot for a fresh juicy apple off a tree.”

“Why, what's wrong?” Davey asked in surprise. “I never heard you say no to a pineapple before.”

She merely shook her head. The truth was that she had even stopped going to the market—its sights and aromas now made her feel quite ill. There had been a time she had wandered by mistake into a lane lined with booths where herbal remedies were sold. The bunches of dried herbs and roots had not been so bad but there were objects that mystified her—raccoon tails, squirrel pelts, dried puffers and devilfish, even a stuffed alligator and a string of emerald hummingbirds. These were all very dead and harmless but under the tables some sacks moved with mysterious life and the tail of an iguana protruded from one, the snout of an armadillo from another, making her rush away, with Lupe laughing at her squeamishness.

Davey reacted with his usual equanimity, explaining these were the ingredients used by the witch doctors to cure various sicknesses and ailments. “There's no hospital around here, you know.”

“I hope I'm not ever ill here, Davey,” she said, shuddering.

“Just don't go there again,” he advised reasonably.

“I won't,” she said, but there had been the boy who had followed her, holding in one hand a lit candle, in the other a bottle. When he saw her looking at them, he held the lit candle under the bottle and that was when she saw it contained a live scorpion. Shocked as she was, she could not tear herself away and watched, in horror, as the scorpion raised its tail over its head and stung itself to death. Laughing into her face, the boy held out his hand and demanded a peso before Lupe could push him away.

She neither told Davey nor wrote home of it.

The tempo, the tenor of life on the mountain and around the mine began to change as news filtered in—that a General Madero had declared an end to thirty years of Porfirio Díaz's rule, that the president had fled to the United States. All of this was incredible to those who had not known anything or anyone else in power for all or most of their lives. Then stories began to buzz like swarming bees, of Emiliano Zapata in the south, and Pancho Villa in the north. Zapata had once cleaned horse dung from floors of Carrara marble in President Díaz's stables, it was said, and now led a troop of mounted Indians against his troops. As for Pancho Villa, he was never without a gun at all, saying, “For me the war began when I was born.” New heroes for new times: their stories began to acquire a reality, and immediacy.

Then the
mineros
began to disappear from their own mine, without a word. When the manager sent for them, it was to find their huts abandoned, thorn bushes stacked in the open doorways. They had been recruited—some by the rebels, others by the federals—and gone to fight for their country. Their women had gone with them,
soldaderas
of the Revolution. The village on the hill below the Cornishmen's cottages had only a few old people left in it, to mind the children and some whining, hungry dogs.

The railroad trains that President Díaz had only lately inaugurated still creaked and rattled over the vast plains of Mexico. They had escorts of armed guards, but were watched by men in sombreros from behind the red and purple rocks of the sierra. Whistles sounded in the stillness, accentuating the silence.

Tiqui-taca, rucu-raca..
.

 

T
HEN THERE WAS
a night when the hills, usually silent mounds of darkness, echoed with a sudden volley of shots, shocking and splintering. When the men went out to see what was happening, they saw flames leaping up over a neighboring mine on a distant hilltop—it might have been a celebratory bonfire. At dawn the news came that the rebels, the
insurgentes
, had looted the warehouse, emptied the vaults, and, after tying up whoever they found on the premises, vanished along with the Company's mules. There was panic at the news.
“Insurgentes?”
people asked. “From where?” And some went over to release the trussed manager and supervisor and assess the damage. A party of federáis rode into the town soon after—grim, dusty, saddled officers of the government—asking for leads. Had anyone seen the rebels? No? They were warned to be on guard and report.

Everyone watched constantly. By daylight, a cloud of dust raised along a path could give away the approach of troops—rebels or federáis—but by night there was no such sign; they could only strain their ears for the telltale clatter of hoofs or a shot and the hiss that followed a bullet. Men stayed up at night, smoking, drinking, playing cards, waiting.

They were to wait for the hoot of an owl. “An
owl?”
Betty asked when told. It would be a man, Davey informed her, with the message: “
La muerte viene con el tecolote.”
Betty thought that the foolishness of grown men playing boys' games. “Death comes with an owl!” she sniffed.

Older men, who had been in the mining towns in the desert and the sierra for decades already, recalled the raids of the Comanches and the Apaches. This, too, made Betty sniff. “Comanches! Scalp hunters! They've been hearing too many of those Wild West stories, I think.”

Ignoring her scorn, when he was put on a night shift, Davey engaged a boy, Lupe's brother, to keep guard over the house. Betty could not sleep for the awareness of his presence on their doorstep.

She begged Davey to send him away. “Then I'll have to send you to San Luis Potosí for safety. Some of the women have already gone,” he told her, and when she opened her mouth to protest, added, “You can't take risks, Betty, in your condition.”

It was the first time they had referred to her “condition.” Betty shrank from the word, and recovered only to say, “And you? What about you taking risks? Aren't you the father?”

They stared at each other in bewilderment, each wanting to make something of this moment, something memorable. Instead, neither could make the gesture: it was not the moment for one so private.

 

T
HE PACE OF LIFE
, once a steady jog through the familiar routine, underwent a change, now seeming to race as if to a finish. Only no one thought about the finish because it was unthinkable. Something had been exposed—the stupidity of their presence here—and it was like a new rift, open and raw, that had been suddenly revealed at their feet.

Yet when the attack came, no one was in the least prepared. Horses galloped over the cobblestones in the night, there was a wild banging at the doors, but if anyone dared open their shutters a crack to look out, only shadowy figures wrapped in blankets were to be seen and no one could tell if these were their own
mineros
in rebel dress or strangers from the outside. Lighting flares, they moved on up the hill to the mine. Once there, the flares emerged and multiplied, fire springing up and spreading like a lighted screen.