Backlands (33 page)

“My boy, it's good to see you,” he said, ushering Matt to a chair next to a small office table.

“Likewise,” Matt replied with a smile.

Gus patted his shoulder as he sat. “I was sorry to hear about your father's accident. I trust he will recover.”

“Dr. Stinson says I can take him home soon, but he'll need care for some time.”

Augustus searched Matt's face. “That's good news for him, but what about you?”

“He's my pa,” Matt replied tonelessly. “There's not much I can do about it but look after him.”

“Yes, of course, a son's duty. That's very admirable, but not what I have in mind for you. The government is starting a new national program to put young men to work on a massive scale, and the college has been given the responsibility to help organize the effort in southern New Mexico. I've been asked by the college president to oversee the project and I am in need of several capable assistants. You are my first choice.”

The offer dazed Matt. Here was a job he needed, working for a man he respected. A job he couldn't accept. “I truly appreciate your offer, but I can't say yes, at least not right now.”

Gus smiled sympathetically. “Will you at least hear me out before you say no? In the next several months a quarter of a million young men will be put to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a new federal program that will build roads in the wilderness, plant trees in forests, rid rangelands of pests, create new parks, restore grasslands, and a host of other worthy projects.”

He paused to let Matt digest the information. “Here in New Mexico, we'll have dozens of camps spread across the state. Young men will be selected from impoverished families, employed for six months, and given food, shelter, training, and supervision. They'll be paid thirty dollars a month, with twenty-five dollars of their pay sent home to their parents. The army is to build and operate one thousand three hundred and thirty camps across the nation by July. New Mexico must have no less than two hundred young men enrolled within the month and in camps as soon as possible.”

“That sounds like a mighty big job.”

“It is. I've been asked to coordinate the establishment of a dozen CCC camps in southern New Mexico within the next thirty days, and I need your help right now.”

Matt shook his head. “I just can't do it.”

Gus dismissed Matt's rejection with a wave of his hand. “I'm aware of your situation. So I propose to give you two weeks' advance salary and a week's time to arrange for suitable care for your father at the ranch. You'll be headquartered here at the college. But be prepared to travel, as your first assignment will be to scout suitable locations for the camps.”

“I have a week's grace?” Matt asked, stunned by the offer of the best job he could ever hope to have since the day the stock market crashed. All he had to do was get Pa home and in good hands.

Gus nodded. “Yes, one week's grace. You'll be paid sixty-five dollars a month. Starting out you'll live on campus in the men's dormitory, rent-free. Once the camps are up and running, we'll discuss what other assignments to give you. Are we agreed?”

“Yes, sir,” Matt said. “I'm deeply obliged to you for this.”

Gus smiled and handed Matt an envelope with two weeks' pay inside. “No need for that. You're doing me an important service. Be back in a week.”

Matt smiled. “You can count on it.”

After Matt departed, Augustus returned to his desk. Neither of them had said a word about Beth. He wondered if it would ever be possible to talk about her with Matt. Knowing how much Matt had loved her, he guessed it could take years.

M
att paused in front of his old house on Griggs Avenue. It looked pretty much the same, except the new owners hadn't watered the old cottonwood in the front yard and the drought had taken a big toll on it. The top was bare of new leaves, and several of the thick, lower branches were dead, half broken off and dangling awkwardly to the ground. Still, the place didn't look better or worse than the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. The vibrant painted wood trims that adorned most of the homes were faded, once carefully tended front yards were full of weeds and litter, and the inviting shady porches where folks had passed hours in friendly conversation appeared neglected and unused.

Next door at Nestor and Guadalupe Lucero's house a public notice tacked to the front door announced that the property was to be sold at auction at the courthouse for back taxes. Matt had hoped to save the cost of a hotel room by asking Nestor and Guadalupe if he could bunk on the parlor floor, but there was no answer to his knock. He peered through the window at the empty front room. Through the kitchen window he saw only bare walls, empty counters, and the chipped porcelain sink.

Matt walked Patches two blocks away to the house where Nestor and Guadalupe's oldest son, Roberto, and his family lived. Parked outside was Nestor's horse and wagon, with a hand-painted sign on the side boards written in Spanish and English that read
FOR HIRE 50 CENTS A DAY
.

He found Nestor and Guadalupe inside, jammed together with their youngest son, Felipe, his wife, and their two children, as well as Roberto and his wife and three children. Three generations—eleven people—living in a casita with space barely adequate for five.

Warmly welcomed, Matt sat squeezed between Roberto and Felipe on a worn davenport, their wives on wooden stools, Nestor and Guadalupe in straight-back chairs, young grandchildren at their feet, the older kids with knees at their chins sitting on straw mattresses. He quickly learned that Felipe had lost his house to foreclosure, both he and Nestor were unemployed, none of the women had work, and Roberto was supporting everyone on wages of sixteen cents an hour as a laborer on a road crew. With their food pantry now empty, they ate one meal a day at the train station soup kitchen.

Although their pride hadn't been completely drained, the hardship had wiped away all optimism. They were skinny and gaunt, listless and humorless, but they did their best to keep up appearances.

As they made small talk about neighbors who'd died, gotten married, had children, or moved away, an idea came to Matt that made him smile. He turned to Nestor and asked, “Would you and Guadalupe be willing to move to the Double K ranch and take care of my pa until he recovers from an accident?”

He explained what had happened to Pa, told them about his job at the college starting in a week, and offered to hire them right away.

“You'll have a private casita, free board, and a salary of thirty dollars a month, first month paid in advance,” Matt proposed. “If you agree, we'll leave the day after tomorrow to take Pa home by horse and wagon.”

A long moment of amazed silence settled over the room. Nestor's eyes widened in astonished appreciation of the offer, and Guadalupe's smile alone dispelled a lingering gloom that had permeated the room. The pinched worry etched on Roberto's and Felipe's faces softened and their wives sighed with audible relief.

“We will gladly work for you again,” Nestor said. “
Muchas gracias, Mateo.
”

“
Maravilloso.
” Matt gave him thirty dollars. “I need to hire your horse and wagon for the journey to the ranch. How much more do you want?”

Unbelievingly, Nestor stared at the money. “This is enough.”

“
Bueno,
” Matt said as he rose to his feet. “There will be provisions for you to pick up at Sam Miller's store tomorrow afternoon. We'll leave here early the next morning. Pack what you need for a long stay.”

Nestor closed his hand over the bills. “We'll be ready at first light,
jefe.
”

Guadalupe stood and hugged Matt. “You are a saint.”

Matt shook his head. “No, it is you and Nestor who are doing me a great favor.”

He left knowing Guadalupe and her daughters-in-law would be at the grocer's buying the fixings for dinner as soon as he was out of sight.

***

T
he day before leaving for the ranch, Matt met with Dr. Stinson at Pa's bedside and went over a list of instructions, which were to be followed exactly. Stinson showed Matt how to help Pa use a bedpan, the proper way to assist him getting in and out of bed, and how to elevate his leg when he was prone. He gave Matt written instructions on how to bathe Pa and showed Pa how to use his crutches.

“I want you up and moving around on those crutches every day,” Doc Stinson said. “Understood?”

Pa nodded. “I ain't one to lay about.”

“Don't you fall on that leg before it's completely healed,” Stinson cautioned. He turned to Matt and suggested purchasing a wheelchair.

“I'll get one before we head home,” Matt promised.

Stinson turned back to Pa. “I'll want to see you in a month.”

Pa snorted. “I'll be fit as a fiddle by then.”

“No, you won't,” Stinson countered. “And if you don't do as I've instructed, that leg won't heal and I'll have to break it and reset it, which will keep you flat on your back and in that cast twice as long, with only a fifty-fifty chance you'll ever walk on it again.”

Pa shut up but continued to scowl.

After Doc Stinson left, Matt told Pa he was starting a job soon and he'd hired Nestor and Guadalupe to look after him and the ranch.

“I don't want nobody but you looking after me,” Pa groused.

“If that's your druthers, I'll fire Nestor and Guadalupe and put the Double K up for sale today,” Matt replied. “That way, you'll be sitting in that wheelchair all by yourself until the sheriff comes to auction the place for taxes.”

Pa grimaced at such an unpleasant prospect. “What's this job you've got that pays enough to hire two Mexicans?”

“Don't you go calling them Mexicans,” Matt snapped. “They've got names; use them.”

He gave Pa a nutshell version of his new job and left to find an inexpensive wheelchair. On his way, he wondered if he'd done Nestor and Guadalupe a disservice by unleashing Pa on them.

***

T
hey left the next morning and traveled toward a rising sun cresting the mountains. Pa was stretched out in the wagon amid supplies, the used wheelchair Matt had bought cheap at a junk shop, and several bundles of Nestor and Guadalupe's clothing and personal possessions. Up front, Nestor held the reins, with Guadalupe sitting beside him. Matt led the way on Patches. Near the long-abandoned ruins of Fort Stanton, now nothing more than bleeding adobe remnants of buildings melting back into the earth, they left the highway and followed the ruts of the old El Camino Real, forged long ago by Spanish settlers traveling deep into the uncharted territory of Nuevo Mexico.

The road, mostly forgotten and used primarily by the large ranches swallowing up hundreds of square miles, cut through the heart of the Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death—a vast, tilted tableland straddled by shimmering mountains, ribbon-cut by arroyos, dominated by flat-top mesas, and studded by mesquite now dry and dusty in the drought.

In places, the road paralleled the tracks of the Santa Fe Railway. Each time a train sped noisily by, the land soon engulfed it. The locomotive and cars vanished into the distance, the sound of the clacking wheels fading to silence.

Matt kept the little caravan going until dusk and stopped overnight at a windmill and water tank south of Engle. The next day, they rolled into town well before noon and rested in the shade of the livery, Pa fast asleep in the wagon. Doc Stinson had been right about the knock on Pa's noggin making him sleep a lot, which suited Matt just fine on the journey home.

He gathered Pa's saddle and gear from the livery owner, Ken Mayers, thanked him for rescuing Pa, and asked if the truck had been salvaged. Ken told him he'd sold the truck to a fella in Hot Springs for fifty dollars cash money and figured that with the time and effort getting the wreck out of the ravine and towed to town, he owed Matt no more than twenty of that fifty.

Matt readily agreed with Ken's accounting and gratefully took the twenty dollars. He bought oats for Patches and Nestor's horse and took Ken to the hotel for a beer, stopping first at the general store to invite Billy Baily to join them.

Outside the hotel, Pa was propped up in the wagon. Matt, Nestor, and Guadalupe watched as Billy and Ken stepped onto the hotel porch, raised their glasses to Patrick, and wished him a speedy recovery.

“Thank you for saving my hide,” Pa said. “I'd surely like to toast you in return, but the sawbones says I can't drink.”

“That's a shame,” Billy said.

“What's a busted leg got to do with drinking?” Ken asked.

“I think not drinking is a fine idea,” Matt countered, stopping further discussion of the subject as he threw a leg over Patches. “It's time to get moving.”

He started the little caravan eastward at a smart clip, eager to deposit Pa at the Double K and get on with his new job in Las Cruces.

***

P
atrick sat in the wheelchair on the veranda with his left leg stuck straight out, watching Matt and Nestor finish building a ramp on the steps to roll him up and down. He'd been sleeping a lot since arriving back at the Double K, dozing mostly. It was welcome relief from the numbness and dull ache in his head that didn't want to go away. For the last several years, he'd known that he was getting old, but now he
felt
old, and he didn't cotton to it one bit.

He'd quit bellyaching about being looked after by Nestor and Guadalupe. In fact, he didn't intend to gripe about it again. In just one day and part of another, they'd moved themselves into the casita, arranged the furniture so he could easily navigate around the ranch house in his wheelchair, fixed meals, done the critter chores, put things in order, got him in and out of bed, and cleaned him up as needed without so much as a frown or complaint. Matt had been smart to hire them on.

Hands clasped tightly in his lap to keep from digging his fingers into the cast to scratch the incessant itching of his leg, he watched Matt nail the last board for the wheelchair ramp in place.

In the back of the wagon on the trip home, he'd been awake when they passed by the Fort Stanton ruins. Years ago, his father, John Kerney, had found him there living with an army doctor and his wife who'd taken him in. As hard as he tried, he couldn't even remember their names, couldn't even remember why he'd been so scared when John Kerney came to fetch him to the Double K.

He wondered if Matt would be interested in hearing the story of how John Kerney found him. Maybe not—which might be the best, since he wasn't very good at telling yarns.

Before the day ended, Patrick would offer Matt his hand and tell him he was a helluva lot smarter than his old man and a far better son than he deserved.

He nodded off, head on his chest. When he awoke hours later, Matt had already left.