Crossing Purgatory (32 page)

In the field below the placita he watched Carlos and Benito working the corn. Teresa dug in the garden beside the south wall of the placita, unearthing onions and carrots. Goats browsed the higher ground to the west. Benito had begun a future and Thompson envied him. His family would settle comfortably here, and as long as the river flowed, his field would produce. During the summer, he'd made bricks and built another room at the placita for Paloma. Already, expansion. But it was not Thompson's intent simply to homestead. He desired more, had his sight on supplying wheat to market. And for that, he'd require ten times the acreage Benito farmed. Twenty times as much. And, now he lacked funds for even a modest beginning; he lacked equipment; he lacked seed. But, if he could secure land, the rest would eventually follow.

His thoughts inward, Thompson failed to notice Genoveva approaching until she lightly brushed his shoulder. He started but quickly recovered.

“Good morning, Señora Upperdine,” Thompson said, standing. “Can I offer you coffee?”

“Hello, Mr. Grey. Will you walk?”

“Of course.”

They continued upriver exchanging small talk until they arrived at the section Thompson earlier had shown the Captain. Genoveva pointed to the wheat patch.

“This is a dry land,” she said. “And yet it prospered.”

“It did,” Thompson agreed.

“Not much prospers in this country.”

“Not without rain.”

“You've thought it out.”

“Obadiah's wheat holds promise.”

“A plan for the future,” she said.

“Fantasy, perhaps,” he said. “A child's dream. Foolishness.”

“The Captain will hold this acreage for a time,” Genoveva said. “Until you can either raise funds or give up that dream.”

Thompson heard the words but did not comprehend. He had no money, of course, but stood riveted by the proposition. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Captain will not sell the land you requested. Not for three years.”

“That is kind of you to offer,” Thompson said. “But I should come to terms with him.”

“That is not necessary.”

“I don't understand.”

“The land is mine,” Genoveva said.

Her words echoed in his mind. He remained mute, unable to form a response.

“The Captain and I have an agreement,” Genoveva said. “I leave business decisions to him. But, in this case, I intervened.”

“The land is yours?”

“Yes. Part of a land grant to my grandfather. I became heir to a tract. When the territory fell into American hands, I accepted the Captain's proposal for marriage. The prospect of retaining ownership seemed much improved by taking an American husband.”

“A marriage of convenience?” Thompson asked before thinking through his words, and immediately regretted his forwardness. Genoveva did not show offense.

“We share affection,” Genoveva explained. “The Captain courted me long before I agreed to marry him. The problem is that he too much loves his freedom, the freedom of the trail. He cares for me.” Genoveva paused, glanced at Thompson and then out over the land. “But he also cares for his trail wife in Westport, his Indian wife. And others, I am certain.”

Stunned, Thompson again fell silent for a time. “I'd taken a higher measure of him.”

“Oh, he has fine qualities,” Genoveva said. She brought a hand to his shoulder, tenderly, in comfort. “Evil men do exist in this world. Saints also, perhaps, although I've never personally encountered one. But most of us are both good and bad, don't you agree?”

“I suppose,” Thompson said.

“The test of a decent person is to elevate our saintly instincts above our evil ones, yes?”

“You possess more lofty thoughts than I,” Thompson said, and then, “Thank you for your kindness.”

“You have a difficult path, still,” Genoveva said. “Currency is hard to come by.”

“A chance is all I could hope for.”

“I do have motives,” she said. “I fear Benito will continue to be hobbled into the future. I hope Carlos will be here to assist him, but that is no certainty. And the Captain of course has neither the skills nor the interest.”

“Of course,” Thompson said.

T
HOMPSON FOUND SLEEP AGAIN ELUSIVE
that night. Genoveva's intercession bought time, but surely would alter his relationship with John Upperdine from this day forward. How to approach him? And how to make good on the opportunity presented?

When finally sleep did come, he was visited by a dream, old and familiar. He stood outside his cabin on the low bluff. An orange sun inched above the eastern horizon while the moon, pocked and full, still shone in the west. He looked out over his holdings, the wheat silver in the flanking light, stretching beyond the reach of his vision, filling the entire valley, fading into shadow. All of it, his.

He woke. Clammy, acutely aware of his heart, a furiously beating otherness; his heart, betraying his deepest fears, exposing him to his truth. A truth he denied.

W
HEN
T
HOMPSON FIRST BROACHED HIS
request, Benito continued hoeing in the bean field as if he had not heard, but Thompson could see the impact, the muscles of Benito's jaw working. The bean plants were knee-high and the pods swollen.

“I do not covet your land,” Thompson said.

“So you've said.”

“You do not believe me?” Thompson asked.

“I believe that you believe yourself,” Benito said. “But I see you afield, pacing off your domain. I see you staring off into the distance, laying out crops, pasturing animals in your mind.”

“Your vision is more acute than mine,” Thompson said. “My design is more modest. I want only to trade my share of the corn harvest this autumn for produce now. To sell. To buy a small parcel from Captain Upperdine.”

“Then you will be without cornmeal for winter,” Benito said.

“I made do largely without last winter.”

“We have so little to spare,” Benito said, talking to the hoe.

“Think of it as an investment.” Thompson knew that every egg he begged, every pound of butter, of cheese, would deprive Benito's family until the full harvest began. But his plan depended upon it. Eggs, cheese, butter. A few half-ripe melons, this constituted his capital. Hungry miners his market, clamoring for fresh food and willing to pay dearly for any small morsel not looking or tasting like hardtack or rancid fatback.

“You won't have to sacrifice,” Thompson continued. “One-tenth of the proceeds will be yours plus the additional corn. With your share, you can buy flour at the mercantile, coffee, a little sugar, perhaps. The boys would love sugar.”

Without giving it voice, Thompson knew the leverage he exerted over Benito, counted on it. Without Thompson's help, only a fraction of the crops could have been planted last spring. A piddling harvest, another cold and hungry winter to dread. Thompson could see the weight of these obligations settle on Benito as he worried his hoe between the rows.

30

T
he wagon loaded, Thompson climbed aboard and slapped the haunches of the team Upperdine had chosen for the trip. The Captain insisted that he employ horses. “You carry perishables and you travel alone, both arguments for speed.” Thompson was more accustomed to mules or oxen, but could not fault the Captain's logic. His destination: the near goldfields, the Fountain Creek stakes, and other rough camps pitched beside the rivulets and streams veining the foothills. He did not know what to expect, only that with luck he'd meet prospectors with a few flakes of gold and large appetites.

As he guided the wagon from the Upperdines' compound, Carlos approached, calling, leading the burro and, in the cart, Benito. Benito climbed down with Carlos's help and held out a cloth package. “More butter,” he said. “Fresh-churned.” Thompson halted the team. Benito passed the butter to Thompson and caught hold of the wagon siding and hitched onto the bench and fit his broad hat about his head, pulling it firm, and propped his walking staff against the front board. Carlos handed up a rucksack, which Benito stored beneath the bench.

“This is not a good idea,” Thompson said. “Sitting for long stretches will stiffen your leg. The road will jostle.”

“My leg will be fine.”

“The mining territory is rough, and the tolerance for Mexicans is not high. Or so Captain Upperdine reports.”

“I think tolerance increases with the value of the goods you carry,” Benito said.

T
HEY TRAVELED EACH TO HIS
thoughts, the clump of hooves on packed dirt stupefying, the creaking sway of the wagon over gentle swells and troughs. The breeze wandered across the tableland, occasionally raising dust devils that swirled up from the trail like snakes coiling to strike. Thompson studied the rising dust. An omen? He and Benito riding alone, his senses peaked. He noticed bends in the trail, rifts in the land, hiding what? A vast, open wildness. If Benito shared Thompson's heightened vigilance, he did not show it. He rested behind the cover of his hat, low over his eyes. Thompson followed the trail for as long as it paralleled the Arkansas River. When the passage dipped southeast, Thompson kept to the river with plans of locating Fountain Creek and turning north, hugging the low hills, all the way to the diggings at Cherry Creek if need be.

Along the route, almost immediately they encountered men eager to trade gold or currency for fresh food: eggs, a dime apiece, a goose quill packed with gold dust for a fist-sized lump of goat cheese. They arrived at a collection of rough, brush-roofed cabins along Fountain Creek, windowless, wagon canvas for doors. It seemed an entirely foreign place to Thompson. A reminder of ancient ancestors, scratching the earth, living one day to the next, each day brutal, life tenuous. The miners were gaunt, sunken-eyed, and hungry. A whore's tent sat off from the line of cabins, a sign painted in red on the canvas: Come, all who are weary. The stream banks were gouged into pits, and mounds of waste rock towered over the men. An ugly scar, an obscene monument. A latrine was dug beside a hillock but left unconcealed, and Thompson noted men squatting over the pit.

He and Benito set camp to graze the horses and to sell what they could before working north. The miners had found little gold, but several who had resisted the call of the whores still carried hard currency from the east, and were eager to trade for their produce. By evening of the second day, prospectors wandered in from nearby camps to buy fresh butter for their mush. Benito set up a stove and men stood in line to pay a dollar for a meal of eggs, cheese, and fresh tortillas that he made from the masa dough Teresa had wrapped in cloth and sent with him in his rucksack, the last of the family's corn stores until harvest. The prospectors, to a man, looked haggard and short-tempered. Not everyone paid without complaint.

“You asking a dollar?” one gangly man accused. His thrusting point of a chin reminded Thompson of a beak. “A dollar give up to that greaser for a few eggs?”

“I'm not asking a dollar from you,” Thompson said, bristling. “I'll ask nothing from you except to be out of my sight before I take this fry pan to the side of your head.” Benito remained bent over the stove, cooking.

Grumbling, the man sulked off. A companion held out his dollar, grinning. “He's just boiled over on account he had hisself a couple of layers this past spring. Making his own money from the eggs like you is, but he lost them.”

“Foxes?” Thompson asked.

“Nah. Got drunked up one day and et 'em.” The man took his plate of eggs and cheese and a stack of tortillas. “Didn't share a lick. Not one stringy wing. Them chickens had no more fat on 'em than a snake, but I sure would a loved to gnaw a bone.”

A man with a seeping bandage on his forearm and a soft accent from the South bought the last melon for a dollar and a quarter. The man casually remarked to Thompson that he'd gotten into a knife fight with someone who had designs on that same melon.

An acre of land, Thompson thought as he took the money, for the price of an unripe melon.

After another day, the supplies ran out. The wagon sat empty except for provisions to fuel their return trip. Thompson's purse held twenty-seven dollars in hard currency, approximately twenty dollars in gold flake, and a few nuggets the size of a corn seed. After Benito's share, sufficient for his initial acres with perhaps enough left for a plow. Working alone with Upperdine's oxen, he might break eighteen, twenty acres that first season. He'd plant as much in wheat as the seed allowed and however many acres remaining in produce dear to the emigrants: watermelons, cantaloupe, and sweet potatoes. For whatever reason, they'd craved sweet potatoes and were disappointed he had none. He'd plant for market and live off of game and the yield from a small garden he'd sow in potatoes and onions. And he'd buy more land with the harvest proceeds, begin to hire tenants or wage labor from Bent's Post to put additional acreage into production. Glancing about, Thompson felt sure there would be no lack in the foreseeable future of men with empty pockets looking for work. This new land swarmed with opportunity.

T
HEY LEFT EARLY
,
BEFORE LIGHT
, not wishing to call attention to their departure. Thompson eased the horses from camp and then pushed them hard, whistling encouragement and slapping at them with the reins until they panted and frothed, hides gleaming. Driven by vague uneasiness about separating prospectors from gold and their disposition upon the realization that their stomachs once again were empty and their pockets lighter, he wished to put miles between them and the miners. Earlier, Benito had irritated him with his deliberation at breaking camp, his careful stowing of supplies, the harnessing, and a pause off by himself for devotion while Thompson fumed.

Five miles out, the day just opening, two riders came up from the arroyo and blocked the trail. They rode mules, and later, much later, when Thompson relived the incident, he pieced together that they must have been waiting in ambush. The mules could not have outpaced his horses, even with the wagon in tow. The riders carried muskets and leveled them on Thompson and Benito from ten yards. Thompson reined his team. He considered trying to pull around, run for it, but the arroyo guttered one side of the trail and to the other, thick scrub confounded the route.