Listen to the Mockingbird (7 page)

A few clouds were building above the mountains: A good sign—I hadn’t seen a cloud since Joel Tolhurst’s funeral. But summer clouds can do that for weeks before we get a drop of rain.

I saddled Fanny, and we wandered slowly along the base of the mountains where the trees threw long shadows as the sun dipped closer to the horizon. Spindly ocotillo rose from the ground like lightning bolts. In spring tiny, vivid red blooms dot the barbed stems like drops of blood; the natives believe the crown of thorns was made of ocotillo. I made a note to cut some next spring. Foot-long sticks, snipped and stuck in the ground, root quickly. In a few years you have an almost impenetrable living fence.

A lone piñon stood in the niche that led to the spring. It looked beleaguered and weary of the heat, but its scent was spicy and cool. In fall, people rode up from town to collect pine nuts in the mountains. They say the trees don’t bear till they’re eighty years old.

My sluggishness wore off as the heat waned. Above me, a rock reared like Moby Dick frozen in stone. It marked the spring. I got down and dropped Fanny’s reins on the ground in the shade of the piñon. I had trained her myself to ground-tie. She wouldn’t budge from that spot until I returned.

Rounding the rock to the spring was like entering a shrine. Along the damp rock base clustered plants that grew scrawny anywhere else, but here they flung out their branches joyously. The spring, I saw, had slowed to the barest trickle.

Hoping we had enough water stowed in the big clay pots to last till the rains came, I cupped my hands and was catching enough for a sip when I noticed the trickle puddling in a small, half-oval depression in the dark bronze mud. I nudged the foliage away with my toe.

It was the print of a good-size shoe. Too big to belong to Herlinda or the Indian women who helped her haul water. Besides, when they didn’t go barefoot, they wore soft-leather soles. This heel had been wide and flat. Most boots in these parts had small heels. Perhaps it was Tonio.

I had been avoiding him. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure why. I caught another sip of water and splashed some on my face, holding out the collar of my shirt so it could roll down my neck. I dried my hands on my trousers.

It occurred to me that the trail Tonio had said was filled with rattlesnakes would pass above here, which would put it on the other side of the giant fish-headed rock. One of the arroyos that funneled rainwater from the mountains ran along the base of that rock. I tried to remember the dead boy’s map. I was sure there was a rather straight line that could have been this cleft in the earth. If there was a trail just over the rim of rock, there might be a way to reach it from the arroyo. At any rate, it would be a mite hard to get lost walking in a ditch, and I wasn’t doing anything else useful, so I would trek along it for a while and see.

The arroyo floor was powdery sand and going was slow. The banks of the natural ditch got steeper quickly. By the time it bent to the right I couldn’t see over them. With the sun below that high horizon, I was suddenly in dusk. The ground underfoot turned rocky as the arroyo opened into a miniature valley dotted with boulders.

I passed under the trunk of a tree that must have been uprooted in some storm and wedged between the ravine walls. Here the sun still reached the tops of the wind-etched cliffs. The bold beauty was stunning, and I had perched near one of the thick branches to admire the scene when a scraping sound came from behind me. A dozen or so rocks skittered down the wall, their clatter echoing and re-echoing.

I was turning back to the cliffs when it happened again. This time I was sure I saw something move on the arroyo rim. I watched the spot intently, but all was still. A coyote, maybe; an antelope or a wild sheep. Nothing stirred.

The sky had gone a glowering purplish-grey. This time it might actually rain. I had just completed that thought when a thundering crash careened through the canyon like some monumental god in a runaway coach.

The rain seemed to begin in mid-torrent, sluicing over the cliffs in sheets. I tried to run, angry with myself for getting caught like that. A fool of an Easterner—that’s what they would call me. The rocks made running impossible.

Another thunderous clamor rang out; and the sky above me grew white, then purple, then almost black. A dull roar behind me grew, blotting out all other sound. I stumbled and turned. A wall of water— rocks and debris at its base, almost white at the top—was moving toward me so fast I only had time to leap for a boulder before it was upon me, tearing my legs from under me, pummeling my back with rocks, swamping my head, engulfing ears and nose. It could ram me against the canyon wall, bust my bones like kindling.

I had never learned to swim. If I couldn’t climb on something higher, I would die.

I forced myself to turn loose of the boulder, and let the water carry me. My head broke the surface and I took a ragged gasp of air before the water lunged over me again, remorselessly dragging me, thrusting me at the arroyo wall like a battering ram.

The log, the tree that had fallen across the arroyo—if I could reach that, I might stand a chance. But I had no control at all, no way to avoid a collision of flesh and stone.

My feet hit an underwater rock and I bent my knees to absorb some of the shock, praying my limbs hadn’t broken. Something clawed at my face, a branch? Yes, the tree. But the water eddied and swept me sideways, slamming my head against the stony arroyo wall.

A ball of yellow light burst behind my eyes and the world went black.

999

Consciousness came back like a sharp stick.

My legs, still bent beneath me, were numb, my entire body sodden and bruised. It seemed so dark I kept blinking my eyes to be sure they were open. But I didn’t need light to know I was snagged among the tree’s dead branches and as marooned as any caterpillar on a log in a river.

Chapter Eight

In the murky dimness, the water still roiled angrily. Big drops fell from above, slapping the top of my head like wads of chewed tobacco. There was nothing to do but wait.

The moon hoisted itself above the canyon wall and peered down at me: fat, yellow, jolly and utterly uncaring about my fate. I shivered. It was so like another cruel moon. I squeezed my eyes shut against it, but my past came at me as overwhelmingly as that wall of water.

Under such a moon, I had surrendered my honor and, ultimately, my very life.

Andrew Collins and I had married three months later. I hadn’t regretted forfeiting my virtue; I fairly reveled in it. Andrew only had to give me one of his little-boy droll looks, and my knees would fairly buckle.

I was the envy of every woman I knew, and I knew a substantial number of young women from the best families in St. Louis.

Very soon after we married, Andrew decided we must go West. I never asked why. Somehow, he wangled a commission in the regular army, I bade goodbye to Nanny and we joined a military train at Independence for the trek across the prairie on the Santa Fe Trail.

Most of the wives complained of boredom and discomfort. My carriage seat was hard and the days moved slowly; but I marveled at the thicket of bayonets, like the spiked head of some vast dragon, and the stream of wagons that seemed to trail all the way to the horizon. Mostly we followed rivers, and red-winged blackbirds often fluttered along with us.

Andrew was at his most gallant. I had not yet discovered that his high good spirits were owed to another kind of spirits. Before we left Missouri he bought me two wonderful gifts. One was Fanny, “bred from mustangs captured in the northwest,” he told me. Just a filly then, she trailed around behind me like a puppy.

The other gift was Winona. Andrew had not actually bought Winona, or so he said. He had won her in a poker game. My conscience quibbled at owning a slave, but I told myself we were doubtless rescuing her from some cruel master. Such was the state of my ignorance.

Winona was not as friendly as Fanny. She was solemn and kept to herself, but she had already made one trek with the army as a cook and she knew exactly what supplies would be needed and how to fix decent meals on the trail.

Andrew and I had lived very well and traveled in better style than most of the officers. Giddy with love and the excitement of my new life, I didn’t question that it was my papa’s money that paid for it.

Not until we reached Fort Union in New Mexico Territory did the trouble begin. Soon after we arrived Andrew did a most peculiar thing: He stole a hat from the quartermaster’s store.

“Why, Andrew? Why on earth would you steal when you have all those gold coins locked in your mother’s chest?”

That was the first time he slapped me.

Almost immediately, his face became a map of pain. Scooping me up from the floor where I had fallen, he hugged me to him. “God, Matty! I’m sorry,” he cried in a choked voice, then grabbed a hatchet from the hearth and swore to chop off the offending hand. I found myself begging him not to do so and telling him it was nothing.

He was court-martialed for the theft, but it was many months before anything came of it. And when it did, the result was far different from what I expected.

Over the next few weeks, Andrew began to antagonize his fellow officers. He flaunted authority, skating right up to the edge of disaster but not quite crossing the line.

New Mexico seemed the stony edge of civilization. The sparse landscape, the houses that seemed little more than low mud huts, were cheerless at best. Yet the blue-blue mountains seemed to possess a sort of magic. And, as I told myself daily, all of this was temporary. Andrew would soon have his proper place among the officers and be happy again. The houses were not quite so awful as they looked—ours was quite snug. And the stout mud walls provided a place to hide.

I was nursing another blackened eye and wearied of describing the fall and my own clumsiness that had caused it. Several times a week, Andrew flew into rages followed almost instantaneously by bouts of self-loathing and pleas for my forgiveness. For my part, I was both horrified and bewildered and believed that all would be well again if I could just make him happy.

He continued to drink heavily, spend grandly and give away what seemed like vast sums of money when he was in high spirits. Even when he brought me lavish gifts, which was more and more often, I began to begrudge that he was so free with the coins—money that my poor papa strove so hard to save, money that but for Andrew would be mine.

But such thoughts were futile. Only a woman who had no man to look after her—no husband, father, brother, even an uncle—had money of her own. They said we were fortunate not to have to concern ourselves with it. Certainly no married woman I knew controlled a purse of her own, except Dora Tewkesbury in St. Louis, whose father had stipulated in his will that his fortune was to be hers and hers alone. Her father had deplored his daughter’s husband for a scoundrel and a wastrel; and from what I saw, he was right. My papa had never met Andrew, and I suppose the making of such a will never entered his mind. The wrongness of it all has gnawed at me to this very day.

One evening I returned from quilting with the other wives, and thinking myself alone, I burst into the bedroom eager to see my new creation on the bed. I was unfolding the quilt when from behind two hands gripped my arms just above the elbows and slammed me onto the bed.

“You told him, didn’t you?” Andrew snarled.

“Told who what?” I gasped.

“Told the colonel I killed old man Peters in St. Louis and took his goddam stash of coins.”

“How could I,” I faltered, bringing my hands up to protect my head from the blow I knew was coming. “I never knew anyone named Peters in St. Louis.”

He took hold of my bodice and ripped it chin to waist. “Don’t lie to me, bitch!”

An odd, exceeding calmness came over me. It was as if all that I am retreated deep inside. I suspect much of it still resides there. At that moment, I fell silent as a piece of wood. Andrew stripped my torn clothing from me and shook me. I let nothing show on my face. Even when he fell upon me and rammed himself into me I didn’t resist. Even when the pain was blinding, I just closed my eyes, hung on to the bed and thought of the mountains. His rampage didn’t last long; he was too drunk.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” He laid his head on my breast like a lost child and sobbed. “Don’t leave me, Matty. I am lost. Only you can save me.”

Dry-eyed, I patted his shoulder.

999

“Who is old man Peters?” I asked Andrew the next morning at breakfast. I felt safe because Winona was there, setting biscuits and honey on the table. She had not disguised her silent inspection of the bruises on my cheek.

Andrew’s eyes flicked to Winona, then back to me. “A greengrocer in St. Louis. Why?”

“Just idle curiosity,” I said, amazed there was no tremor in my voice.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“Someone mentioned him yesterday,” I lied. “At the quilting.”

Andrew stood up peremptorily, and the conversation veered in a direction odder still. “You know voodoo, don’t you, Winona?”

She looked down at the floor. “No, sir.”

“I thought all darkies practice voodoo.”

“No, sir. That ain’t true.”

“Whatever are you getting at?” I asked.

He ignored me. “I wager you could put a hex on someone if you had a mind to,” he said to Winona, who did not raise her eyes.

“Andrew, surely you don’t believe that nonsense?”

His eyes became small and hard. “Do not belittle what you do not know,” he said slyly. “I saw a woman once, when I was a lad. A chicken got loose from the pen. A dozen people were chasing it. The darky woman just stood there holding a knife. When the others had tuckered themselves out to no avail she raised that knife and pointed it at the chicken—only pointed it, mind you—and that bird fell over dead. Yes, indeed, I do believe in voodoo.”

He turned back to Winona. “I may one day tell you to put a spell on someone for me, and you’ll do it, you hear?”

Winona nodded stoically and backed through the doorway.

Andrew waited until he heard the door open and close and Winona’s footsteps returning to the cabin she shared with other slaves and servants. Then he leaned over me so close his nose almost touched my forehead.