Crossing Purgatory (20 page)

“She's endured a difficult night.”

“All is well?”

“Si
. The niña has taken to the breast and the mother produces.”

“The niña?”

“Si
, a girl child.”

“When may we welcome her?”

“They are both resting. This afternoon, perhaps.”

Teresa took the platter from him and motioned for him to wait. She returned with a bundle double-wrapped in a flour sack. Benito accepted the flaccid package and took his pick ax and went up into the breaks above the floodplain and scarred the hardpan as deeply as he could and buried the afterbirth.

The men returned near sundown, John Upperdine leading the others, young Benjamin and Alejandro lagging shyly behind. They entered the room and found Hanna sitting in bed with the child asleep at her breast. The men huddled awkwardly near the door until Thompson came close to Hanna and looked down at the baby, nodded, touched the baby's cheek and backed away, head bowed as if in prayer.

Teresa had kept the fireplace fed and the room felt hot and stuffy, and Benito noted a dull odor suggesting decay. Hanna, although drawn, looked serene, and the baby had good color. The men inched forward and stood timidly talking in whispers.

“She's small,” Alejandro said.

“I seen catfish bigger,” Upperdine agreed.

Hanna noticed Joseph come into the room and motioned to him and he approached the bed and appraised the baby impassively. The infant, still asleep, began working her mouth in suckle.

“What's her name?” Benito asked. The others regarded him blankly. He moved beside Hanna and took her hand in both of his, cradling it like a chick, and looked into her eyes.

“The mother names her child,” he said. “Mrs. Light?” All silent, waiting. Benito's adjuration hung in the air, Hanna's muteness becoming almost a physical presence in the room with them.

“Destiny,” Hanna spoke at last, her voice raspy from disuse, and weak. Then, again, more forcefully, “Her name is Destiny Light.”

“So it is,” Benito said and backed away as the others gathered around Hanna and repeated Destiny's name, laying hands on her and remarking on her beauty. Benito, from the corner, noticed Joseph edge from the bed toward the door and ease out into the dusk.

19

T
hompson worked together with Benito into autumn. They grubbed additional land by the river for plowing the following spring. They dug potatoes that had been spared despite locusts having eaten the leafy plant above ground. They walked the river and upstream several miles, unmolested by the insect swarm, they discovered a thicket of plum trees, heavy with fruit. They chinked Thompson's shack against the elements. A growing urgency pressed them throughout shortening days.

Thompson accompanied Benito up into the rises to collect dirt for adobe bricks. The right dirt, Benito explained. Too much sand or too much clay and bricks would not cure. They scraped the crest of ancient hills, dirt that had absorbed the memories of ancient worlds; such dirt would make adobe that harbored secrets from the past, Benito said, wisdom of the earth.

Time grew dear, temperatures dropped, a chilling time that soon would signal a close to the season for brick-making. Deep frost tinged grasses bronze and red.

“Best not to lay adobe after November,” Benito instructed Thompson. Outside the placita, they dug a pit and sifted the dirt through wire mesh. “Discard any rock larger than a musket ball,” he commanded. They mixed earth with water and rolled their pants up over their knees and went down into the pit and stomped the dirt into a thick mud and then added a bit of mulched straw. The young boys scrambled to help.

They packed the mud into wooden forms and turned them out to dry flat for three days and after set them on edge for three days more, Benito praying for heat from an autumnal sun growing more fickle. Bricks in the Mexico style: four inches thick, ten inches wide, fourteen inches long, thirty pounds each.

Warmth held, and the bricks cured.

“I think we'll make do,” Benito said one day. He ran his hand over a brick they'd just finished turning from the rack. “An abundance. Enough both to wall off the placita and build Paloma a room of her own.”

Thompson looked forward to learning how bricks would be laid and cemented in place. He marveled that such simple elements could be put to such use. Except that, when he and Benito began work on the wall, every other brick crumbled in their hands or cracked under its own weight when they picked it from the stack.

“Something is wrong,” Benito said.

“I'd guess as much,” observed Thompson, dryly. “You said they looked ripe the other day.”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“I don't know. Different slant to the sun here. Colder nights. Perhaps not all the bricks were properly mixed.”

“I followed your instructions,” Thompson said, stung by the accusation.

“Foreign soil,” Benito said, perhaps to himself. He seemed distracted. “Last summer, they all cured perfectly. Earlier in the season. Who knows?” They surveyed the broken and worthless bricks with disgust. Wasted labor, lost time.

Thompson realized Benito too had much to learn about this new country. Lessons remained, an insight that concerned him greatly. With the loss of crops, the coming winter months, margin for error shrunk. They could ill afford misjudgment. He watched Benito carefully inspect the bricks, set aside the properly cured, tally the results. As the rubble pile grew, Thompson watched Benito's face harden, his priority crystallizing. He needed the final wall to protect his chickens from predators and his goats against weather when it turned ugly. Thompson sensed Benito's hopes for a peaceful coexistence with his daughter during the closed winter months crumbling with the bricks.

In following days, Benito concentrated on the wall while Thompson, more keenly interested in preparing land for spring, returned to the acequia, working on the secondary ditches before the ground froze. Joseph sometimes joined one or the other, swinging a pickax or splitting firewood. He lacked enthusiasm. More often, unannounced, he went off by himself, following the Purgatoire upstream or down, or, borrowing one of Upperdine's horses, riding into the plains. Joseph took to horseback naturally and had developed in just a few months into a graceful rider. Thompson thought perhaps the freedom allowed from riding eased Joseph's restlessness but also may have served as an outlet for his unfocused anger. The jarring pace, the pounding hooves, a release.

Autumn remained mild; the weather held. They worked through days of crystal blue, the sifted light and migrating clouds shading the prairie first brown, then rust and ocher. They remained at work long as they could each day, until darkness and hunger drove them from the field. They ate, famished. Occasionally, Genoveva insisted on their company during the evening meal. As autumn deepened, John Upperdine, like Joseph, had grown more restless, spending days afield, at Bent's Fort or at one or another Indian encampment trading, visiting, passing news and gossip. So occasionally, although Genoveva understood the pull of the season, the short time before endless nights and frozen days overtook them, she desired their company. At those times, Thompson might take his rifle and walk the riverbank and return with a jackrabbit or a brace of mallards they roasted over the outside fire pit. They buried onions in coals to bake. Afterwards, they visited until drowsiness overcame them.

The final wall rose slowly and once enclosed, the placita looked fully complete. Adobe made from the valley of the Purgatoire held less red in its pigment and more yellow than that of their ancestral lands, Benito explained to Thompson. But still it pleased the eye, a soothing, soft shade. Walls rising from earth, rooms flowing from walls, a claim for permanence. A number of bricks remained after the last wall went up, but insufficient in quantity for Paloma's room. With the help of Thompson and Joseph, Benito carried the bricks outside to the southfacing wall. With his spade, Benito traced a semi-circle in the dirt radiating perhaps fifteen feet from the wall. He began digging a shallow trench following his outline.

“I'll collect a shovel and help,” Thompson said, starting back toward the gate.

“No,” Benito said. “It is not necessary. I'd prefer to work alone.”

“What are you building?” Thompson asked.

“Un santuario,”
Benito said, and at Thompson's expression added, “a chapel.” He was able to finish the trench and lay foundation bricks and two additional rows before exhausting the remaining supply.

W
EATHER FINALLY TURNED
,
COLD WINDS
from the north stripped the trees, the grass turned brittle. They began collectively storing away for winter. They picked apache plums from the thicket they'd discovered, and also sand cherries. Hanna especially enjoyed walking the riverbank and side ditches, Destiny slung to her hip with a serape tied over one shoulder. The women boiled the fruit into glue-like paste, passed the mixture through a sieve, and poured a thin coating of the liquid onto large platters which they slow-dried beside the fire until the fruit looked and felt like the cured hides of some small prairie animal. They strung the flat wafers on wire and hung them from rafters to be reconstituted in boiling water during winter. The few squash saved from grasshoppers they sliced lengthwise and draped from tree branches to dry. They picked hazelnuts and black walnuts and stored them in seed sacks hung from the roof beams as well, away from mice and squirrels. Benito took the burro into high desert to the west and collected prickly pear and baskets of sage leaves.

Twice, Thompson traveled with Benito into the foothills of the Mexican Mountains to collect firewood. They hitched a team of oxen to one of John's open-bedded trade wagons and cut deadfall: piñon, soft pine, and juniper. The first time out, while they were still in the open plains, just west of the junction of the Arkansas and Purgatoire rivers, Benito guided Thompson to a small rise known as Sierra Vista and from there offered him his first sight of the Spanish Peaks, three days distant, rising from the earth, jagged and tipped in white like the canines of a fearful beast.

“I hardly know what to make of it,” Thompson said. The green of pine-covered slopes, the snow, overwhelming to him after months on the prairie.

“Si
. God's imagination is limitless, is it not?”

Thompson did not know how to respond. A permanency of sky and rock contrasted with the transience of flesh, the capriciousness of death, all so magnified in this place.

Nights cooled. A film of ice appeared in the water trough more mornings than not. Following several days of hard frost, they butchered an ox and two hogs that Upperdine had been fattening with mash remaining from his experiment with whiskey making. Beginning with the ox, over the course of three days, in turn each animal was tied to a short rope and brought low with a strike to the forehead from the flat edge of an ax. Upperdine took pride in his ability to dispatch his animals with a single blow. They flensed the ox and hung the carcass from the thick lower branch of a cottonwood to bleed out. Propping open the inner cavity by inserting a fencepost between its hind quarters, they then removed the innards, the liver and heart, the tripe and sweetbreads. Once the ox carcass was lowered for processing, John used a saw to remove the head. He knocked off the horns and tied a flap of skin around the neck to keep dirt and flies from soiling the meat. The hogs, once bled, were scalded with hot water to soften the bristles so they could be scraped off. They collected pails of lard and another bucket of organ meats. The quartered ox along with its severed head, the hams and pork slabs were hung for curing and freezing in the cold shed dug into the side of a low hill.

The opening of the animals, the scalding of the hogs, the waste offal, the smell of animal fear and excrement all created a distinctly rank and distasteful odor during the time of butchering. Blood saturated the ground beneath the cottonwood on which they hung the animals. Bits of gristle and bone lay scattered about, and each morning they found tracks of plains carnivores circling the tree: wolves, coyotes, fox, and, on the last day, a grizzly bear.

“I should a expected the bear,” John complained. “I'd a sat up waiting for him. Nothing like bear grease to keep you stout and healthy during the winter.”

T
HE MORNING FOLLOWING THE LAST
of the butchering, others began arriving at Upperdine's homestead. Alone, in pairs, they came from the north, from the Arkansas ford, and set camp in the near pasture. Traders from Bent's Fort and trappers dressed in animal skins and fur-trimmed hats. Midday, a small band of Indians crossed the Purgatoire from the east, Arapahoe and Cheyenne, the tribe Upperdine had married into so many years earlier. Tepees went up along the stream bank. Captain Upperdine greeted each group as they arrived and later he and Genoveva walked between camps, visiting, offering a taste of brandy, some tobacco. Thompson declined their invitation to join them, instead working on the acequia through the day, the ground not yet hard frozen, and the secondary ditches all but complete. Since the birth of Hanna's child, memories had resurfaced, his boys at Rachel's breast; the way a child's presence filled a room. Whenever he could, he worked alone. But he was also curious about Upperdine's guests.

After noon, Thompson met Benito at the placita and together they walked toward the encampment.

“What occasion do they celebrate?” Thompson asked.

“Harvest, the coming hibernation, the making of meat.”

“How did they know to gather here?”

“They know. Somehow word gets around that John wishes to share in his good fortune, his bounty, and those who are able come to feast, to talk, to reminisce. A rendezvous.”

“There is little to celebrate, this harvest,” Thompson said. “What is it we plan on sharing with these folks?”

“The soft meat, whatever won't keep,” Benito said.