Listen to the Mockingbird (21 page)

“You should have a horse.”

“I have enough trouble feeding myself.” He ushered me into the cave, where a pot of water was on the fire. “So, you are now free?”

“More or less.” I sank onto the rock ledge across from the fire. “Nacho told Zeke he saw me inside the house when that boy got shot. But I still have to stand trial when the judge gets here. I had to put the land up for bail.”

Tonio was pouring boiling water into shiny bright-green cups. He handed me one. The tea smelled spicy, a little like juniper. I took a sip. It was strong and radiated warmth all the way down. I looked up at him. “I’ve come to get the map I left with you.”

“Oh?” He busied himself with the pot of water.

“The best way to prove I didn’t kill that boy is to find out who did, and I don’t know anything about him except that he had that map.”

Tonio still faced the fire, his back to me.

I took another sip of the tea and babbled on, as if trying to fill up the silence. “I was trying to remember the exact markings.” I waited.

His shoulders seemed to fold into his body.

“Maybe I could take a look at it now.”

He did not turn, but spoke his words to the flames. “I don’t have it.”

“What?” I bolted up from my seat on the ledge, the tea sloshing from my green cup, burning my fingers.

Still he didn’t move. Anger filled my throat like gorge, no more for him than for myself. Only a slack-jawed moron would have trusted him as easily as I had. “What do you mean you don’t have it?”

He turned. His eyes met mine then skidded away. He carefully settled himself on the floor near my feet and looked up into my face. “I burned it.”

My mouth froze open. It could hardly form the word, “Why?” Then exasperation exploded from me. “Are you mad? You had no right! For God’s sake, why?”

“You know that someone searched the house?”

The calm of his voice infuriated me. “Of course I know that!”

“What do you think they were looking for?”

“Anything, I suppose. A drifter might have—”

“They say nothing was taken. If a drifter was risking getting himself shot for thieving, I assure you he would have taken everything he could lay his hands on.”

I had to admit that was likely true.

“It didn’t seem very safe for me to have that map lying around here. Not safe for me, not safe for the map.”

His words made sense but there was something wrong with the whole thing, something wrong with the way he again avoided my eyes. Anger and doubt came together in my chest like thunder and lightning. “You just burned it? You didn’t even study it and memorize it first?”

“I well know every mark on it,” he said, his voice oddly quiet.

“Then draw it for me.”

“I have no paper.”

I made to leave. “I’ll find something for you to draw it on.”

Tonio was on his feet. “No.”

“Why?”

“Because I won’t draw it.”

“Why not?”

He held my eyes for a long time before he sat down again, his long legs folding up like sticks with hinges. He was still looking full into my face. “Because the map is dangerous.”

I shouted the words into his face. “There may be a gold mine marked on that map!”

“That,” he said without blinking, “is why it is dangerous.”

My anger hung in the silent air. Tonio’s face showed a deep slash of pain, but he didn’t look away. He looked like a man about to undergo torture by a master of the art of eliciting truth, and his face showed a saint’s determination not to tell it.

I wilted back onto my seat. My hands were like ice in spite of the fire. I said slowly, “You know more about this than you’ve told me.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “I reckon I do.”

Chapter Twenty-four

The fire snapped and shot a burning bit of coal past the hearth to a spot near Tonio’s feet, but neither of us moved. Shadows seemed to hover on the walls like carrion-eaters waiting for the moment of death.

“Why?” I said finally, my voice the color of disbelief. “Why did you pretend to know nothing?”

He didn’t answer.

“Have you been trying to buy my ranch or run me off it?”

“No!” he said sharply. “No.” He turned to stare into the fire with a sort of infinite sadness. I knew that look. I’d seen it once before: that first night, when he had bent over the body that lay on the straw in my barn.

“You knew that Mexican kid, didn’t you?”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the fire. “Yes. His name was Diego Ramirez. He was only a year old the last time I saw him, but he looked exactly like his father.”

I could tell he was trying to decide precisely what and how much to tell me. I said nothing and let him puzzle it out. I wanted to know what he would tell me of his own accord before I started asking questions. It was a full minute before he went on.

“Diego was born here. His mother was Rosita. She and his father were from Chihuahua, a Church parish in Chihuahua.”

“A Church parish.” I was remembering what Isabel had said.

He looked me full in the eyes. “Everything I told you was true. I was never a priest.” He swallowed, looked down, then went on. “I was helping the priest. By the time I happened to stop there, a drought had wiped out most of the little farms. People were desperate. So I stayed on. We tried to help them. We petitioned the Church in Mexico City for assistance. We dug the water wells deeper. But people began to die of hunger.”

“Didn’t the Church help?”

Tonio’s eyes became hard and hot enough to scorch. “No.” He surrounded the word with silence like a tiny island in an angry sea. Finally, “Padre Francisco was an old man. He was dying of a wasting sickness. Just before he drew his last breath, he asked me to take the people north. He said a man had told him where there was gold, and I was to take his ragged little band of parishioners there. He said he was violating the confessional by telling me, but that it would save their lives and he said God would understand.”

“So you took them there?”

“I brought them here.”

The statement hit me in the chest, knocking the breath from me. Outside, the wind had come up. It was snuffling at the rock entrance to the cave like a hound on the scent. The firelight played over the planes of Tonio’s face as he gazed into it. I remembered Nacho’s story of a priest and a gold mine.

When I recovered my voice, I asked the obvious. “Where is this mine?”

Tonio put his hand to his lips as if to be certain they would not betray him.

I waited, but he said nothing. Finally, I asked, “How long were you here?”

He drew in a breath, and I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then, “A little less than two years.”

“And you found gold.” Nacho had said the people traded nuggets for food.

After a long moment, Tonio nodded.

“Then why did you leave?”

He drew a deep breath and the rest of it came from him in a stream:

“At first I thought Padre Francisco’s words were the imaginings of a dying man; but when we had buried him, I found a map among his belongings and, with it, some writing. I kept these, but I said nothing. It was coming on spring, and perhaps the drought was over. But that summer, our meager little stream dried up. They begged me to perform the Mass. I told them I could not. They knew I was not a priest, but they kept asking anyway. They had some notion I could appease God, could bring the rain. And they knew it might be a year or more before the Church sent another priest.

“A few months later, a child died, and then an old man. From hunger. I performed the rituals. It meant so much to them, how could I not? Even I began to believe I must try to talk to God. I began to say Mass. But the dying went on. The ninth was an old woman. She just crumpled over in the field.

“I called together those who were left and told them of the map and the supposed mine. I warned them the map might not lead us anywhere, that we all might die seeking this gold. And even if we somehow found ore, the work would be heavy and hard and dangerous. I asked them if they wanted to risk their lives to try this.”

“And they did,” I said to urge him on.

Tonio’s chin dipped twice. “Twenty men and fourteen women. We had three ox-drawn carts, but that was for supplies. We walked. For twelve days. It was not so bad once we reached the Rio Grande, for then at least we had water. In the villages we passed through, we heard tales of Indians who, it was said, lived in the mountains like wolves and viciously slaughtered travelers. But perhaps our little band looked too poor to be worth the trouble. We saw no Indians at all.

“The writing mentioned a place called Spirit Springs and the cuevas de vegas, the caves of the meadows, at the foot of a high cliff.”

Involuntarily, I sucked in my breath. “That’s here. Right here.”

Tonio went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “They gathered at the spring and someone laughed. I hadn’t heard laughter in so many months I had forgotten the sound of it. Exhausted as they were, they would not wait. We left the carts and climbed over rocks and branches, debris that had washed from the mountain. We found ourselves on the rim of a small bowl and at the bottom a lone cottonwood tree seemed to grow from the rock. This, too, was on the map. And three days later, not far from that cottonwood, we found the first nuggets of milk-white quartz.”

“Quartz?”

“It is often found with silver and gold, or so we believed; and it must be true because a week or so later, in one of the canyons that ran from the basin, we found the mine. It was probably dug by the Spaniards or perhaps by Indians. There were ruins of rock ore-crushers. The smelters were adobe; they had almost washed away. We rebuilt these. We hollowed out the entrance to the mine and slept there. Knowing full well that it wasn’t just Indians who might attack us, we always posted a guard. But it never occurred to me…”

He seemed lost in some recollection. I said nothing; and eventually, he went on.

“I continued to say Mass. I even heard confessions. I knew it was wrong, but the people expected…” His voice faded away.

“If there is a God,” I said, “I can’t imagine he would care much who leads his worship.”

“It was more than just the Mass,” Tonio said. “I tried to live both ways. I took a woman. I was both priest and layman.” His voice faltered.

The words stabbed at me in an odd way. “But you took no vow of celibacy.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. His voice stumbled on. “By the following spring, she was with child; and in midwinter she bore me a son. We named him Carlos.”

This time, his silence was so long I thought he might have forgotten me. After a time, I said, “What happened to him?”

“One day when I was in the village for supplies I was told a stranger was looking for me. I was astounded. Who could possibly look for me here? I went to the inn where this man was said to be staying, a Señor Pablo Rivas. He was a layman, he said, but a close friend of the Bishop in Mexico City. When the Church authorities stopped hearing from Padre Francisco, they had eventually sent this man to Chihuahua. Ultimately, he had traced us here.

“He told me he had been amazed to hear we had discovered gold. I did not confirm this, I only stared at him appalled and tried to think what to say. Señor Rivas demanded, in the name of the Church, that I deliver possession of the mine and all gold to him.”

I could hardly contain myself. “He what?”

“More precisely, he told me I would be excommunicated for impersonating a priest and ordered me to deliver everything to him as a representative of the Holy Roman Church.”

“Surely you didn’t…”

“I told him no. He was very angry when I left him. I didn’t really believe the Church could do much, but I was alarmed. We had built little huts for ourselves from the rocks we had taken from the mine. That night I insisted everyone return to sleeping in the mine entrance as we had when we first arrived. I posted three guards. Nothing happened. No one approached us. A few days later, one of the women came to see me with her son, a child about the same age as my own. He had been restless and ill for weeks. I had tried every possible remedy of my own, but still the boy ailed. She had heard there was a doctor staying in the village. She wanted to take the boy to him. So, I took them into town. I was curious as to whether Señor Rivas was still there.

“When we returned just after twilight, I knew something was wrong. The guards at the mine entrance always kept a fire going. It had burned so low I could hardly see it until I reached the clearing. Then I was horrified. A dozen ponies were grazing there. Indian ponies. I sent the woman and the boy back to the cart and approached the entrance. Nothing moved. I stepped inside. My people were strewn across the floor like kindling. They had been slaughtered.”

I gasped my own shock aloud.

Tonio’s voice, and his eyes, became hard as glass in the firelight. “Their throats had been cut, the men’s heads were bloody pulp where the scalps had been sliced away. I had never seen this before.” His voice began to shake. “It was like you skin an animal.”

“What did you do?” My own voice had grown unsteady and hoarse.

“The Indians had obviously gone into the mine. Their horses were still there in the clearing. We had used dynamite for the mining, of course, and a good many sticks of it were piled in a stone hut we built for that purpose. I set the explosives.” He stopped, his eyes riveted on the fire as if seeing it all again, there in the flames.

“The sound was like Judgment Day,” he went on. “The dust and debris blotted out the rising moon. I gave what little gold I had to the woman and put her and her son on a stagecoach south.”

For a time, I was too mesmerized by his tale to say anything. “Your woman, your son?”

“Dead.”

“The woman and the boy?”

“Rosita Ramirez. She had named the boy Diego…”

“It was her son who was killed in my barn?”

“I think so, yes.”

“But where did he come from? How did he get there?”

“I don’t know.”

“The map?”

“Before we set out from Chihuahua, I made several copies of the map. That was one of them.” And Tonio began to weep.

Chapter Twenty-five

Feeling helpless against such agony, I reached for Tonio and clung to him until his shoulders stopped shaking with the dry rasping sobs. My own face was wet with the bitter tears of my own horrors. Surely the world was meant to be a better place than this.