The Zigzag Way (16 page)

The men, pulling on their boots, ran up the hill too, cursing at the shortage of firearms among them. Women were ordered to remain indoors and open the doors to no one before daylight.

By dawn, the rebels had left. The works on the hill were smoking. The men were attempting to put out the fire. They returned later, black with soot and ash. Davey, one of them, sat down to pull off his boots while Betty and Lupe boiled water in cans for his bath, then began to laugh although he so rarely did. Betty, scandalized, standing by with towels, asked how he could think to laugh. Davey reported how they had passed Tough Tansy's house on their way up in the dark and seen her seated on the porch in her pink flannel nightgown, a gun across her knees, defying the rebels to approach. “And Fred?” “We found him this morning, under the bed,” Davey told her, then stopped laughing to add, “They got the wrong house: they thought it was the overseer's.”

Later in the day they discovered that all the rebels had not left so quickly; one band had gone down into the town, where they did find the overseer and trussed him up and demanded a “loan” of cash, which he had been compelled to let them have; after cutting the telegraph wires, they had released him but also sacked the police station and broke open the jail, freeing all the prisoners. They had been rounding up all the mules and the arms they could lay their hands on when the cry of
“Los federates!”
had gone out and it was as if a whirlwind swept them along in a storm of dust.

The villagers went down to drag away the dead and bury them before the heat and the turkey buzzards made the task too foul. They discovered that not all the rebels had escaped; the federals were lining up some stragglers they had caught against the wall of the Casa de la Moneda and were shooting them one by one.

Lupe's brother had watched and when he returned that night, told them how he had seen one rebel bend to remove his shoes and hand them to another before going to be executed. “He was
valiente
, valiant,” he said, his eyes shining with admiration and awe.

The management of the mines had gone into a huddle and tried to find a way of sending a message to the headquarters to apprise them of their losses and the need to arm and protect themselves against future attacks.

Instead, word came that the women were to pack essentials and prepare to be evacuated as soon as transportation had been arranged for them. They were to be taken down to the Company's hacienda below to wait. Once a train could be commandeered and an escort of guards provided, they would be taken to San Luis Potosí and from there to Mexico City.

“And the men?” Betty asked. “You?” She held onto a chair and stared at Davey. “Betty,” he replied, “it's only till things settle down again. They will,” he assured her, but she seemed stricken and would not move. It was Lupe who ran around, gathering up the small garments they had been preparing for the child and packing them in baskets, then knelt to take the slippers off Betty's feet and push on her walking shoes. Betty had never let her do that before.

The families had been ordered to gather at Mrs. Moran's since she alone had living space large enough for the Cornish community. It was not large enough for comfort though, and no one slept except for some of the small children who lay across laps or on shoulders, unconscious of the pandemonium around them. The men stood at the windows with whatever arms they could muster, in heroic attitudes they themselves found somewhat ridiculous, while some of the women tried to be helpful to Mrs. Moran, beside herself with anxiety, crying, “And I'd just put a batch of bread to rise, it's baking day tomorrow. Oh, will it all go to waste?”

Davey lost sight of Betty in the crowd that resembled an anthill someone had stoned, ants running crazily in all directions, but when the wagons the manager had obtained drew up at the door under cover of darkness that evening, he went in search of her to make sure she got on one. He found that she was lying in Mrs. Moran's bed upstairs, surrounded by panic-stricken women. She was paler than Davey had ever seen her, biting her lips and drenched with perspiration. When he touched her hand, she did not seem to see him; her eyes were glazed with pain, her yellow hair tangled about her head.

“Her time's come,” Mrs. Moran informed him. The emergency had brought her to her senses; she spoke quietly.

“It can't. It's too early.”

“Early it is.”

As they tried to bring Betty some relief by wiping her face with a wet towel and giving her water to drink in sips, the crowd in the room below began to pile into the wagons; the drivers were urging them to hurry

“I can't,” Betty wept, “I can't go, Davey.”

“You must. We must,” he told her as gently as possible. With Mrs. Moran's help, he rolled her in blankets and carried her out to the last wagon to leave the village. They made room for her on a bench as best they could but there was no comfort to be found for Betty. She cried out for a doctor, her sisters, her father, and it was a sad thing that they could bring her no one. Once the wagons began to lurch their way downhill over the cobblestones, her pain grew intense. She clutched at Davey's hands, digging her nails into them so that she drew blood. She was bleeding herself, copiously. “Slowly, slowly,” Davey begged the driver, but the cart wheels trundled over the stones heedlessly.

“Sad it is to live in the midst of revolutions.”

—
JAMES SKEWES
in
The Search for Silver
by
A. C. TODD

 

T
HE PARTY OF CORNISH FAMILIES THAT LEFT
that day often told the tale of their journey—how they were taken down the hill in darkness to the hacienda below where none had ever set foot before and found that what had been spoken of in tones of awe was now little more than a blackened shell. It had been occupied by alternating troops of rebels and federáis; both had participated in its destruction: the courtyard had been used as a stable for their horses and mules, and the men had slept on soiled bedding or straw, their firearms and boots under them so they would not be stolen by their comrades, while the
soldaderas
lit fires with the furniture to cook them their stews and make them their tortillas. There had evidently been drunken brawls; shattered glass lay everywhere and had to be swept up so the refugees could spread out their blankets for the night. Fires were made of twigs and brush so they could brew tea. As they sat or slept on stone floors thick with animal droppings and dirt, they felt themselves for the first time no different from the Mexicans they had lived among.

Into this encampment, Betty's almost lifeless body was carried, causing a hush to fall upon the pandemonium. Some of the women hurried their children away so they would not see or hear, others tried to erect a screen around her of blankets and shawls so she would not be seen at all in her distressing state, and to draw Davey away from her side. Some tried to help, and by the ashen light of dawn, finally delivered Betty of her child, in the course of which they lost her, saving only the infant.

Everything appeared to happen at one time: the vehicle to take them to the nearest railhead arrived and so did the minister, Edgar Butler. Too late to minister to Betty, he led Davey away while the women washed and prepared Betty for burial, then tried to persuade him to proceed with the party and the infant, but Davey would not relinquish what he saw as his last duty to Betty and insisted on preparing a coffin for her out of crates that some of the families gave for the purpose.

Together with the minister he returned to the abandoned miners' village and from there uphill in the cart to the stony graveyard. The wheels ground over the cobblestones with an iron sound that seemed to lament the harshness of Betty's fate. They met with no one on the way but on looking back over his shoulder at the empty cottages, Davey did see a small figure slipping along the side of the street after them as unobtrusively as possible. It was Lupe, who had come out to see who went by in the cart and followed it as though she sensed what it contained. Davey halted, beckoned to her, and helped her in. So it was the three of them together that dug the grave outside the walled precinct of the cemetery with pickaxes and shovels they had brought with them. By dusk it was ready and they buried her before dark, piling rocks upon the grave to guard it from coyotes.

After leaving Lupe in the village with her family—she threw herself at her mother and they saw her being drawn into the woman's shawl for comfort—Davey seemed not to know what to do or where to go next and stood staring at the empty street as if waiting for it to fill with people again. The minister took him by the elbow, reminding him he now had a child to take care of, and escorted him down to the Hacienda de la Soledad. They found the Cornish party had left except for Mrs. Moran and the infant, who waited for his return, and that they had been joined by a circus troupe in search of shelter, all huddling around a fire made of whatever furniture remained and draped in curtains for warmth. They had abandoned their elephant, their lions, and their bears but el Gran Hernandez had brought his monkeys with him, dressed in their little frilled dresses and vests stitched with little bells that still rang. And, most fortunately for Betty's child, la Bella Isadora had given birth a short while ago herself, to a stillborn baby, and on seeing the tiny infant wrapped and mewling in Mrs. Moran's shawl, took it to her own full breast, pressing a brown nipple to its blindly searching mouth. When the unnamed child first opened his eyes, it would have been the two painted eyebrows above her dark eyes and the head of black ringlets caught up in a bright ribbon that he would have seen, and her breast in its bed of yellow satin and lace that he would have reached for. Davey was brought to a halt by the sight, and the minister and Mrs. Moran had to come to his side to assist him to a seat and assure him it was for the best. Then, keeping in mind their situation and the urgent need to join their party, they collected their belongings and helped each other into the cart that took them to the railroad station. Here they found that British or American passports were required for each traveler; the
cirqueros
had neither but when the officer in charge saw the English child being suckled by one of them, he dropped his eyes and silently allowed them onto the vehicle. Hernandez even managed to keep one monkey on each shoulder, clutching at his ears for security and hovering anxiously around Isadora and the babe as if they too would have liked to climb into her lap for sustenance.

At the railroad station they caught up with the other Cornish families, who could not believe their eyes when they saw Betty's child at the swarthy
cirquera
's breast. Women held their handkerchiefs to their mouths in shock, men found no words to speak to the bereaved father. But once seated in their carriages, flying British and American flags prominently, they found the novelty of it all soon dwindled beside the terrors they were certain faced them as they made their way across the plain under threat of raids by the rebels.

For fear of finding the tracks blown up, the driver took the engine at an excruciatingly slow crawl, and at one point, when the coal gave out, it shuddered to a halt. The men swarmed out into the canyon, searching for brushwood as a substitute. Steam hissed from the exhausted engine, and the families, now quite silent, waited for raiders to appear from behind the ridges or out of the arroyos. When the men returned with wood and the engine was fueled, they moved on, but that very night they were halted by raiders who were waiting behind a hill. Shots rang out and when they came to a standstill, figures out of their nightmares entered the carriages. They were strung with bandoleers and dressed in cotton pajamas and khaki coats; most were barefoot, or in rope sandals, giving away their peasant origins. Some had a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in their straw hats. They walked calmly through the carriages, politely asking for “loans” to pay for the army of the Revolution. When they came across la Bella Isadora and her fair babe, they smiled and passed on but stopped to shake hands with el Gran Hernandez's two tiny monkeys, who seemed both awed and flattered, clutching at their fingers and baring their teeth in little, frightened grins. The men and women in their seats were searching their pockets and bags for coins and watches when they heard the whistle of a train approaching at speed. It was a troop train and the raiders leaped out, springing onto their horses—some horses of blood, some nags, most without stirrups or saddles—and went streaming up the gaunt hillside from which an avalanche of pebbles and gravel poured down, deafeningly. The miners' families, seeing that the federáis had arrived, leaned out of their windows, waving hats and scarves and calling, “Hurrah!”

But the engine driver had run away and hidden and they had to wait while the troops fanned out to search for him, so they allowed themselves a break in which to step out of the suffocating carriages and boil tea in a billy and eat the bread they had brought with them, meager and gritty with sand as it was. Davey was handed some but seemed not to know what to do with it, staring at it uncomprehendingly. Around him was nothing but the sun-seared plain and its invisible cracks and rents. Night fell, and in that uninterrupted darkness, the stars surged downward till they seemed close enough to touch, and burn. Silenced, they waited, only the whimpering of the newborn and the wailing of coyotes to voice their fears for them.

At daybreak a new team of engine driver and fireman arrived, and with a roar of the smokestack and the shriek of a whistle, they were able to move on, smoke and cinders flying backward into the carriages.

 

T
IQUI-TACA, RUCU-RACA
. . . through the plains of flat brushwood and gray rubble, unbroken except for a lonely hut of adobe in a desiccated cornfield or a corral of thorn trees where a few beasts stood with their heads hanging low. And once they passed, without stopping, a railroad station that was more like a stage setting or a mirage than anything real so that they could never later vouch wholeheartedly for the authenticity of what they remembered seeing there. In a totally sere and empty landscape, a train was already standing, its carriages and engine battle-weary in the dust, armed men in sandals and sombreros sprawled on the roofs of the carriages, but seated on a flatcar painted a startling red and embellished with gilt was their captain upon a barber's chair, resplendent under a sombrero the size of a cart wheel, and his feet extended toward two bootblacks, one for each boot, polishing the cracked and filthy leather with enthusiasm. In his left hand he held a bottle of beer and the right clasped the waist of a woman in a bridal gown and a Spanish shawl. They were ringed by a band of musicians fiddling away madly what some recognized as “Adelita,” known to be Pancho Villa's favorite song.