Listen to the Mockingbird (5 page)

I mouthed some awful platitude about how terrible it must be to lose someone you care for.

“No,” she said woodenly, finally lighting like an ailing butterfly in a chair. The sky had been overcast all day and the room was dim as a cell. “I mean, it’s not just that, not just Joel’s dying and all. A missionary’s wife must give her husband a life of dignity and respect, but…” Her voice trailed off, then rose plaintively again. “The heathen children. I thought I could at least help them.”

“But you have. The mission school…”

Isabel swung her head away and looked at the wall. “They aren’t interested in the Gospel,” she said in a small, drab voice. “All they want is food. They don’t want to work. They don’t want to learn. And they are filthy. They have lice, Matty. Vermin!”

“Nothing a good head wash with kerosene won’t cure.” I tried to say it lightly, not knowing what else to say.

“I tried,” she wailed. “Believe me, I tried. But they’re such sly little beasts. They would pretend to be interested. Then they would steal food right out of the pantry and run off. Back, I suppose, to the lice-infested huts they came from.”

“Surely you and Joel…”

Isabel rose to her feet again. For a moment I feared she might topple; but she righted herself, holding her shoulders stiffly. “It might surprise you to learn that Joel Tolhurst was not a kind man!”

The words exploded from her and hung in the empty air. I stared at her, at a loss for how to respond. The words of the womenfolk of my childhood sprang to my lips unbidden: “Men are sometimes…” I faltered. “…insensitive.”

“We should have had children. But he—” She bit the sentence off, poured herself another glass of Charlotte Fotheringill, took a long draught from the goblet, sat down and leaned forward, her eyes shiny as marbles. “I have asked you here to request a favor. A very great favor.”

The skin of my arms tingled. “Yes?”

“I want to live with you at Mockingbird Spring.”

My gasp was audible.

She raced on. She must have rehearsed it. “I am passing good at cookery and I sew a fine seam…truly…” Her voice trailed off, eyes pleading like those of a lame bird.

Wordless, I blinked, stifling an overwhelming desire to bolt out the door, leap onto Fanny’s back and keep her at a gallop till I was out of sight of Isabel’s house.

She read the panic in my eyes and got to her feet, drawing herself up ramrod straight. “I understand.” Her voice was bitter as vetch. “I know you think I would be a burden.”

“It isn’t that. It’s…I have an…odd way of living,” I stammered, unnerved at the thought of someone like Isabel living with me, someone who might somehow stumble across the truth about me. As I clumsily tried to cover my fright, the next words rushed out. “I don’t think you would be comfortable. Surely the Baptists will help you to…to a more suitable life.”

“Oh, yes, the American Baptist Home Mission Society will send me to another missionary if I give my oath to marry him.” She stared at the air. “I’m sure you think I should welcome that.”

I’d had no inkling of her plight, had only envied her looks and her place, if not her husband. Her pain seared me like a brand. But if I took her in, the time would come when she would ask questions; she would have visitors who asked questions. Unable to meet the agony in her eyes, I stared instead at my lap.

“Or they will send me the funds to go home,” she was saying. “To a father who is—how did you put it?—who is even less sensitive than my husband is. Was.” With that, Isabel composed herself, with more will than I’d thought she possessed; and the woman I had known returned: prim, superficial, courteous, dainty. She escorted me to the door.

I forced my eyes to meet hers. Feeling coarse, clumsy and cruel, I muttered, “Thank you for the coffee.”

“Of course.” Her smile was raw, her mouth hard.

It seemed to me that Fanny should find the weight of my guilt too much to carry. How could I abandon her like that? I, of all people? Twice I almost turned back to tell Isabel to pack her things, that we could try to make our way together if…

But the if was much too large.

Chapter Five

Nacho sprained his wrist wrestling with a palomino gelding that didn’t take kindly to the saddle. I brought him cold water to soak the wrist, put liniment on it, bound it up in a strip of linen and told him to rest.

“But the selling day,” he protested. With the auction coming up, we’d been working every hour of daylight, and I had much yet to learn; I could do little without him. All the same, he whitened with pain when he tried to use his hand, so I insisted he keep his arm in a sling and give it a chance to heal.

Suddenly, I had the day ahead and no plans for it. Restless, I swept up an armful of clean laundry from the table where Herlinda had left it and was stowing it in my bureau drawer when I saw that the leather pouch had slid out from under my camisole. Its owner clearly thought the content was valuable. Why?

I drew out the yellowed scrap of foolscap and studied the markings again. It was a map of my ranch, all right. And a little more. There was an odd series of X’s above the spring. Far as I knew, there was nothing up there but rocks. Below the X’s, some dim markings led like a path from where the arroyo bent as it left the mountains a little beyond the cuevas.

The morning sun was so bright it hurt my eyes. A squirrel followed me to the barn hoping for a handout. I took a pecan from my pocket and tossed it to him. He checked it over like an urchin biting a coin to be sure it’s real, nodded his approval, flicked his tail like a naughty dancer and disappeared.

“Fanny!” I called to the mare in the corral. When I had saddled and cinched her and eased the bit between her teeth, I went back to the house to fetch my pistol. As an afterthought, I slipped my flute into the brocade bag next to it. After my poor performance at the boy’s funeral, I had resolved to practice more, but there was so little time. I pulled myself into Fanny’s saddle, fumbled at my skirt so it wouldn’t bind my legs and wondered what folks would think if I sewed myself some trousers.

Along the arroyo, the junipers grew larger, and a few piñon pines wandered down the mountain to join them. Last year’s yucca blooms had turned papery above the barbed spears. Here and there new waxy-white blossoms were opening. Fanny picked her way past a patch of cholla that was all angles and thorns and tall as a man.

At the cuevas, the land becomes flat, a broad, high shelf; and you can see across the entire valley to Mesilla. Fanny followed the arroyo to where the pines and junipers congregate. The sun was razor-sharp, and I was glad for the shade.

I slipped down from the mare’s back. If the map was right, this was where the path—if that’s what it was—began.

Beyond the trees, the sun-mottled brush was thick and matted all the way to where the bare rock rose steep and straight, like the walls of a cathedral. I inspected the area carefully. If there had ever been a path, a jumble of spiny brush had long since covered it.

On a shady rock flat enough to sit on, I assembled the flute, only to discover when I lifted it to my mouth that I remembered little of the fine music I had once played. My life had grown over it like the brush. My fingers were graceless, my wind sluggish, the tones dull and flat. Doggedly, I played what few bars of Mozart I could remember; and slowly, the sound improved.

“Very nice.” A man appeared among the piñons and chucked a sack to the ground: my tenant from the cuevas, Tonio Bernini. He smiled. “I wondered if the fairies were having a party.”

“It’s not nice,” I said. “It’s awful. I’ve forgotten all the music I ever knew. And I don’t believe in fairies. I doubt I ever did.”

His beard gave him a look of patient wisdom, which for some reason vexed me. I was churlishly thinking that I owned six square miles of land and still couldn’t sit down on a rock without someone spying on me.

Unabashed, he reached into his patched jacket and brought out a pipe. “Mind?”

I shrugged, which he took for acquiescence. It didn’t smell like tobacco. It was dusky and sweet, like the juniper.

“What’s that?” I pointed the flute to the sack at his feet.

“Leaves, last year’s dried flowers, a few roots, aloe, red pepper, juniper.” He sat, quite unselfconsciously, on the ground. “There’s still a stand of Saint Ann’s-wort up there.” He gestured to a point above the springs. “I was sure it would be gone. Good for aching joints, Saint Ann’s.”

I leaned forward at that. “Would it cure a sprained wrist?” I told him about Nacho.

“Wouldn’t cure, but I wager it would help.” He opened the sack, drew out some leaves and handed them to me. “Put them in some hot water and make a poultice. If you stop by the cave I’ll give you some bark for the pain.”

Thanking him, I stowed the leaves in my bag. “These came from up there?” I jutted my chin toward the area about the tangle of brush. He nodded. “There’s a way through the brush then?”

He gave me a sharp look then his eyes slid away. “Of sorts, but one must brave the rattlers. There’s a nest of the vipers up there.”

That dampened my interest in the area. “The local rattlesnakes can be awfully mean. We’ve lost a couple of colts to bites. You’d be safer on a horse than walking about among them. If you really have the healer’s art with those herbs, I daresay you could trade your skill for enough money to buy a sturdy gelding.”

“Perhaps. But I’m comfortable this way.” Pairs of laugh lines appeared at the corners of his eyes and he glanced at his feet. “I wager these have carried me nigh as many miles as the circumference of the earth. Not all in one stretch, mind you.”

I wondered if he was having me on. “You said you were once at seminary. Where?”

Wisps of fragrant smoke curled around him like slim strips of rain cloud. “Italy.”

“Really? I’ve always wanted to see Rome.”

He gave me a slow smile and leaned his head back against a rock. “It’s full of ugly hulking buildings that cut off the air.”

“Why were you in Italy?”

The sun made a bright triangle on his forehead. “I was born there.”

That explained his not-quite-Spanish looks. “You don’t like your homeland?”

“I don’t like Rome. I was born in a village near Milan.”

“And you always wanted to be a priest?”

He peered at me quizzically as if over spectacles. “Not exactly. I happened to be a third and unnecessary son, so I was sent to the Franciscans when I was nine.”

“What does one do among the Franciscans? I’ve always imagined them just sitting about feeding birds.”

He chuckled. “There’s a little more to them than that. They taught me about plants. One of the brothers knew Hildegard’s Medicine and the Leech Book of Bald by heart and compiled his own catalog of formulas. I became his apprentice.”

“Was it very complicated?”

“A little. Sometimes a plant material’s properties change if it’s dried or heated. There’s a root from South America that is poisonous if you eat it raw. If you boil it one hour, it is safe to eat and quite nutritious; but if you boil it for two hours, it is again poisonous.”

“Eating it at all sounds a bit risky.”

“So is eating nothing.”

“So it is,” I agreed. “Was it the Franciscans who sent you to America? Like a missionary? I’m afraid I don’t know much about how the Church does such things. I shouldn’t think they had even heard of New Mexico.”

He gazed at the branch of piñon needles above his head. “My path was not quite so direct. I left the Franciscans to see the world. Eventually, I took passage on a ship to Mexico City and found my way to Chihuahua, where I worked with a priest in a small church until a drought killed almost everyone. I went east to Pennsylvania and lived with the Moravians for a time, but I found I missed the desert.”

He fell silent, his face like that of a boy who has recounted what he ate for supper. For an odd instant I wanted to touch his cheek. How many years had it been since such an impulse had warmed me? Five? Six? I knew all too well the path that sort of feeling could set a woman’s feet upon. I had survived by becoming neuter, as sexless as if I had cut off my breasts.

Discomfited, I turned my head to hide the blood rushing to my cheeks.

“There’s something witching about these mountains,” he said. “Once they have called to you, you can never be happy anywhere else.”

Chapter Six

I watched the battle from the shelf-land near the cuevas. It was a July Sunday; and heat smothered the land like a massive feather pillow, cutting off the air. The sky was almost white, and empty save for the relentless sun, which seemed to stalk any creature foolish enough to venture out.

An hour before I had been sitting at my pine-table desk, daring to hope that I would soon be turning a profit. Our horses fetched good prices at the auction, and the mares had dropped a beautiful crop of foals. I calculated that if the war didn’t interfere it truly might be only two more years before the ranch would bring enough money to set me up back East. I was adding up the figures when Nacho’s son, Julio, burst into the room.

“Señora! They have attacked!”

I looked up from the papers and sniffed the air. It wasn’t yet noon, and already I could smell the whiskey on his breath. “Who has attacked what?”

“Tejanos! They have attacked the fort.”

I jumped up, knocking over some books. “How do you know?”

“Ruben, he was in town last night and he did not…ah, come home…”

Neither did you, I thought, but said nothing. The brothers always drank their way through Saturday night. As long as they could do a day’s work and didn’t make a nuisance of themselves, I counted it no business of mine.

“We meet the mama and papa at the church. That is where we hear the guns.” Julio’s voice jabbed at each word. The natives detested Texans, who tended to regard them as local wildlife, a step or two above the coyote.

I tried to think where Fort Fillmore was in relation to the church. “You’re sure it’s an attack on the fort?”

“Six, seven hombres come running. They say get back in the church. But Papa say to me if I can cross the river to come here pronto, so you can be warned. On the bridge are many men, so Maria and I go to the north and swim.” He beamed, relishing the feat. Maria was the mare I’d given him as a year’s advance pay.