Centennial (126 page)

“Is he that fellow with the shiny brown boots?”

“You know him?”

“I saw him shoot Frijoles’ wife.”

“You did!”

For a moment Tranquilino became a hero and he was encouraged to review the incidents that had terminated that first rebellion at the Temchic mines.

“And he ordered you shot, too?” the bewhiskered man asked.

“Yes, but Serafina guessed what was happening and sent me off to Estados Unidos.”

“How is it up there?” some of the men asked.

“Fine.”

“They treat Mexicans poorly?” the man with the whiskers asked.

“No.”

The man appeared to be a schoolteacher, and he pulled from his pocket a dirty wallet from which he took a well-creased clipping. It came from a Texas newspaper and was in English, so none of the others could read it when he showed it around:

Hilario Guttierez, a Mexican worker on a farm near Eagle Pass, made approaches to a white woman and was duly lynched.

The man translated the article, then asked Tranquilino, “How do you like that?” and Tranquilino said, “Well, if he hit the woman and threatened her ...”

“My stupid friend,” the man shouted. “He did not hit her. He smiled at her. Maybe he said, ‘Ay-ya, muchacha!’ And for this he was lynched.”

“In Colorado we wouldn’t say that to an Anglo woman,” Tranquilino assured him.

“Stupid!” the man shouted again. “The word I’m talking about is
duly
. It means
in the natural course of aff
airs
. Since he was a Mexican, he was naturally lynched. What else?”

“What else?” Tranquilino asked. The man was making no sense to Tranquilino, who was relieved when the fellow left the flatcar at Casas Grandes.

At Guerrero, where Tranquilino got off, the situation was tense. Colonel Salcedo’s government troops had recently swept through the area, burning and killing, and farmers were beginning to arm themselves with pitchforks and scythes. “If Salcedo comes this way again, it will be a different story,” one old man promised, and Tranquilino thought, It’ll be different, all right. Two hundred dead instead of twenty.

When he arrived at the Vale of Temchic and saw the four guardian peaks, with mists rising from the morning fields, he recalled the happy years he had known in this place, but when he reached Santa Ynez and witnessed for himself the deterioration of Mexican life, with the whole valley huddling in terror, he understood what the men on the flatcar had been talking about. His feelings were intensified when Serafina gathered the children to welcome him, and the oldest boy started telling him about Colonel Salcedo’s raid down the valley.

“He started at the waterfall,” Victoriano said. The people of the valley liked to give their children heroic names; the other boy was Triunfador. “At the mines he shot every man who had asked for less work, and in Santa Ynez he shot a man and a woman who had spoken against the church.”

“What did they say?”

“That it was wrong to spend so much on decorating the church when men were starving. Colonel Salcedo stood the two people against the church doors and shot them.”

“I hope you kept your mouths shut,” he told his Victoriano, an eager boy of fifteen.

Tranquilino went to see Father Grávez, now white-haired and stooped, and asked him why Salcedo was still seeking revenge on the valley, and the priest said, “He’s a madman, but all of Mexico seems to be mad these days. Did you hear that General Terrazas had to flee? Yes, he’s in exile, in Texas.”

“But he owned Chihuahua,” Tranquilino said.

“He thought he did. I thought he did. Years ago, when he was on a trip to Los Estados Unidos, a newspaperman asked him, ‘Are you from Chihuahua?’ and he replied, ‘I am Chihuahua,’ and he was. Once the American army asked if he could provide them with five thousand horses. I understand they laughed when they asked this, knowing it to be impossible that one man should have so many horses, but General Terrazas replied, ‘What color?’ ” The priest shook his head.

“Why did he run away?” Tranquilino asked. He could not visualize any man less likely to run away than General Terrazas.

“They’re all running away,” Father Grávez said. “Don Porfirio, Don Luis, Colonel Fabregas. They’re all in El Paso.” Again he shook his head. “It’s pitiful when a strong man comes to the end of his days and has to run away. It means everything he stood for was wrong.”

“Was Terrazas wrong?” Tranquilino asked.

“To abuse the people you rule is always wrong,” the priest said. “Reflections from the sun shining on the rifles got into my eyes for a while,” he confessed. “When I ordered you to work in the mines, Tranquilino, I was very wrong. I have wanted to beg your forgiveness.”

“Me? Forgive you? Father, in Dember, I lived with a girl who wasn’t my wife. I want your forgiveness.”

“You should take your family north, Tranquilino. Your son Victoriano is hotheaded, and he’s going to find himself in great trouble.” He hesitated, then added, “We all will. I told the American engineers they had better go. Now.”

“The men on the flatcar said the same thing,” Tranquilino reported. “If the trouble comes, what will happen to you?”

“That could be a problem,” the old priest said. “I always sided with the government troops. Last time when Colonel Salcedo shot the two free-thinkers, he left bullet scars on the beautiful doors of our church, and I didn’t even protest. My only excuse can be that I knew no better. No one ever told me any better.”

For the first time in his life Tranquilino felt like sharing his deepest thoughts with another human being. He had never done this with his wife, nor with Potato Brumbaugh, two people he loved, but now vast changes were afoot and he felt the need to speak. “You know, Father Grávez, in Colorado we do not work seven days a week. At sunrise and at sunset we have time for ourselves. We don’t step in the gutter when the strong man walks past, not even the sheriff. And we get paid. And when a man breaks his arm, as Hernandez did, someone takes him on a horse to the doctor and he pays nothing.”

Flies buzzed in the whitewashed rectory, and Tranquilino concluded, “It was never right for men to work so long in the mines, climbing those narrow ladders and falling to their death, and leaving no money for their families. Maybe it was the thought of those narrow ladders and the men climbing them day after day like ants that made General Terrazas run away.”

“Tranquilino!” the old priest pleaded, “Keep such things to yourself! And get your family out of this valley.”

But Tranquilino did not move fast enough, for late one afternoon a horde of barefoot men in blue blouses knotted in front came over the hills into Temchic, assembled all the American engineers, fourteen of them, and shot them.

On stolen horses they galloped down the valley to Santa Ynez, where they called for the priest who had for so many years defended the conditions imposed by the engineers. “Come out, you miserable old ...” They used a fearful word, and the old man appeared at the carved door of his church, prepared for death, but before they could kill him, Tranquilino Marquez ran out of his house and thrust himself in front of the priest, protecting him with his body, and there was a moment of confusion until a tall man rode up to ask, “What’s the delay?”

“This one. He won’t let us have the priest.”

“Shoot them both,” the man ordered, but before this could be done, Serafina Marquez screamed, “No, Frijoles! That’s Tranquilino.”

Colonel Frijoles dismounted and strode over to the resolute farmer in front of the priest. “Are you Tranquilino Marquez?”

“Yes.”

“The one who refused to shoot my wife?”

“Yes.”

“My brother!” the revolutionary cried, embracing his unknown friend. But with this gesture he pulled Tranquilino away from the priest, and as he did so, he ordered his men to seize the old man. Quickly Father Grávez was thrust against the doors of Santa Ynez, where Salcedo had executed the two freethinkers.

“Shoot him,” Frijoles ordered.

“No!” Tranquilino protested. “It’s murder ... like your wife!”

At this impiety Frijoles swung his hand and knocked Tranquilino to the ground, and he lay there as the fusillade echoed, adding its quota of pockmarks to the already scarred doors.

Only then did Colonel Frijoles kneel down and lift Tranquilino to his feet. In apology he said in low tones, “He sent too many of us to die in the mines ... too many.”

“But he repented.”

“Today everyone in Mexico is repenting. It’s too late.”

Frijoles dined that night with Tranquilino and his wife, the woman who had shielded him for three critical days, and at the conclusion of the meager meal he said, “Send your wife and the two young children to Colorado. You and this boy I need.”

So it was arranged, and Serafina took Triunfador and the girl across the hills to Guerrero, where, like many others, they caught a boxcar on the Northwest Line, leaving the war-torn country at El Paso. They found their way to Centennial, where Potato Brumbaugh gave them the shack Tranquilino had occupied. Now the positions were reversed: she and the children worked sugar beets in Colorado and wondered what was happening in Santa Ynez. The only difference was that she did not send Tranquilino any giros postales, for she had no idea where he was, but Brumbaugh showed her how to save her money at the bank, which she did.

Tranquilino and his son were not at Santa Ynez. When word of the massacre of the fourteen American engineers from Minnesota, and the murder of Father Grávez, had flashed across Mexico and southern United States, an outcry had been raised, and the Mexican government, such as it was, felt obligated to prove that it did not countenance such barbarities. It placated the North Americans by sending Colonel Salcedo into the Vale of Temchic to exterminate the entire population. They also burned both Santa Ynez and the visible structures at the mines and produced photographs to prove how complete their pacification had been.

This dual action—Frijoles’ murder of foreigners and Salcedo’s destruction of the valley—led to a point from which retreat was impossible. Now two resolute and remorseless adversaries, the self-appointed colonels, rampaged back and forth across northern Mexico, using the trains as their cavalry.

There had never before been anything quite like this, and there never would be again—two armies who moved only by train. Tranquilino and his son Victoriano joined a group of wild-eyed, fearless peasants who crept north to the tracks at Guerrero, where they waited until a government-occupied train stopped to take on water. Then, with howls and blunderbusses, they stormed the flatcars, massacred the soldiers and took possession of the train, sending it north toward Casas Grandes. From time to time they would order the engineer to halt, and they would sweep out like locusts to destroy some remote hacienda that had belonged to General Terrazas, killing all they found, then setting fire to the buildings and dancing to the flames as they drank the general’s wine. At such celebrations Tranquilino could always identify which of the peasants had worked in Los Estados Unidos. They wore shoes.

Sometimes their train would be riding along when government troops would ambush it, firing directly onto the flatcars, killing scores. The train would chug on ahead, and slowly the cars would be hauled out of rifle range; then they would count the dead, throwing the bodies off the cars as the train moved on.

The most dangerous spot in this weird caravan was the solitary flatcar which ran in front of the engine. Its purpose was to detonate any mines before they could damage the engine, and a hardy group of men rode this car, aware that they might be blown to bits at any moment.

Colonel Frijoles, who was taking the train north to combine his forces with those of a redoubtable warrior new to the field—a man named Pancho Villa—asked Tranquilino if he and Victoriano would volunteer to ride the first car. Without hesitation Tranquilino said he would do so, but he refused to allow his son to share this considerable danger, and that was why Victoriano was riding in the fifth car when the federal troops sprang their ambush on a curve south of Casas Grandes.

They had hidden a large mine under the track, and Colonel Salcedo, who crouched beside the man who would plunge the handle to explode the dynamite, whispered as the train approached, “Remember. Let the first car go past. At my signal, blow up the engine.” The flatcar containing Tranquilino and the other brave men did get safely past, but the man with the plunger failed to respond quickly to Salcedo’s signal. The mine did not destroy the engine; it caught the following two cars instead.

There was a tremendous explosion, with bodies flying in the air, and for one anguished moment Tranquilino thought the blast had struck the fifth car, but that was not the case, and with relief he looked back and saw that it was still on the tracks.

However, the trailing cars were now motionless, and federal riflemen began picking the rebels off, one by one. In despair Tranquilino watched as man after man twisted when the bullets struck him, or fell sideways in twitching movements.

“No!” he screamed, but the procession of bullets went savagely on, and he saw Victoriano leap sideways as the bullets ripped into him. Six or seven must have struck him, tearing him this way and that until his body crumpled and fell.

“Get the engine forward!” Frijoles shouted, and the train moved north—an engine, a tender and. one flatcar in the van. The whole body of troops on the abandoned cars behind had to fight off the soldiers as best they could, and with whatever weapons they could improvise.

From that moment on, Colonel Frijoles and survivors like Tranquilino Marquez became avengers without pity. They failed to make contact with Pancho Villa, but they did succeed in assembling a new train and more men than they needed. They rampaged up and down the Northwest Line on their iron cavalry, destroying and killing. Tranquilino, who had once been unable to see a woman shot, or a priest, now participated in frenzies of slaughter in which whole haciendas were wiped out.