Heaven Is a Long Way Off (14 page)

“I said you would be interested in Rosalita's story,” said Paloma. She glanced toward the kitchen. Rosalita and Juanita ate the same food at a small table, just through a wide entrance from the dining room.

“Do you know about the big trade caravans?”

“No.”

“We are a very remote province. The word ‘provincial' barely begins to describe how far away we are and how little the government in Mexico cares about us. Everything we buy comes in big caravans all the way from Chihuahua, six hundred miles to the south, and is very expensive. My father and I traveled with one of the caravans. The road, El Camino Real, is the one that passes before my front gate.

“Chihuahua itself gets traders who come up from Ciudad Mexico through the mountains of central Mexico, where the mines are. The mines get vegetables, cattle, sheep, jerked meat—everything to eat, plus manufactured goods. Mining towns,” she said with a grimace. “The men think of nothing but digging fortunes out of the ground. They don't even produce enough for themselves to eat.

“The traders do much business in Chihuahua, and a few come on to this small and insignificant place. They bring all the fine things we do not make for ourselves, delicate fabrics, shoes and boots, iron tools, copperware, pottery—all items manufactured, and some nice things, chocolate, sugar, tobacco, liquor, ink and paper.

“They take back what we have to offer—sheep, wool, salt, jerked meat, piñon nuts, Indian blankets, and the skins of beaver, buffalo, bear, and deer.”

“Piñon nuts?” said Sam, grinning.

“Yes, any kind of food. It is a poor arrangement for us. Our traders are always in debt because of it.” She sighed and looked toward the kitchen. The two women were cleaning pots and pans noisily and jabbering. “There is another, bigger item of trade. Slaves.”

“Slaves?” Sam thought of Sumner.

“Yes. The traders bring to us Mexican women and children taken by Indians from their villages in Sonora and Chihuahua. Our wealthy families buy them.”

Sam knew nothing of this.

“In return,” Paloma said bitterly, “we steal Indian women and children from the villages and
rancherias
of our Indios and send them to Mexico. Families are destroyed both here and there. It is the most profitable part of the trade on the Chihuahua Trail—by far the most. Raid a village, kill some of the men, take all the women and children you can get.” She breathed in and out. “Send Chihuahuans to this remote province, send Indians to Chihuahua.”

Sam felt slapped in the face. His father, Lew Morgan, had always said slavery was a curse.

“In former times the big caravans came only once every two years. Now, because the traffic is so rewarding, the slave traders come several times each year.”

“My friend Sumner was a slave,” said Sam.

She nodded.

“I hate that. I helped him get free.”

“It is barbaric,” Paloma agreed. “The blankets you see all over my house—beautiful, aren't they? We call them slave blankets. Our wealthy families keep some of the Navajo women as slaves here, and they weave these blankets. I love them, but it makes me feel odd to buy them. I don't know whether my purchase encourages slavery or whether it makes the lives of the woman here better.”

“I wouldn't know what to do either.”

“Rosalita is a slave.”

Sam just stared at Paloma.

“I set her free. I bought her two years ago and told her she was welcome to stay here on the rancho and work for a wage, or to go anywhere she wanted.”

Suddenly Rosalita appeared at the table and put a small bowl in front of each of them. Sam looked carefully at her face, and she threw him a good smile. She didn't look oppressed.

“This is flan,” Paloma said, “an egg custard with a sweet topping, sugar and butter melted together and burned a little. I am very fond of it.”

Sam tasted it and said, “Terrific.”

“With Rosalita this is not a fair arrangement. But it is the best I can do. As I have money to set more slaves free, I will.”

Feeling like the words soiled his tongue, Sam said, “How much does a slave cost?”

“For Rosalita I paid one thousand pesos in trade goods—blankets, corn, and wool. She is attractive, so she cost a little more than a usual twelve-year-old.” It was three or four months' wages for an ordinary working St. Louis man. “Her cousin, a girl cousin, was sold for two horses and six bushels of corn. I will buy her when I can afford her, so they can be together.”

Sam tried to equate horses and corn to a human being. “Why doesn't Rosalita leave?”

“She would want to go back to her village, her family. But how can she get there? With one of the caravans that brought her here? They would sell her as a slave. Walk alone for six hundred miles? A girl?”

“I don't understand slavery at all.”

Paloma looked at him for a long time before speaking. “You have a certain innocence. It is one of your charms. May I show you the rest of the house?”

The kitchen had what she called a shepherd's bed fireplace, something new to Sam. He'd sat in the
cuarto de recibo,
which seemed to mean room where you receive guests, but hadn't noticed the pen and ink sketch of the casa made by her grandmother. He also hadn't noticed the multitude of blankets, large ones on the floor, smaller ones on the sofas and chairs.

“Yes, slave blankets,” said Paloma.

“Thank you for letting me look at the books,” he said. She nodded. He'd looked at some verses in a collection of English poetry. Though they'd been too difficult for him, he liked to parse them out. He liked the sounds.

“Notice the stencils of birds on the walls,” Paloma said. The walls were plastered, white-washed adobe. “Palomas,” murmured the señora. “The technique is called
tierra amarilla.
I love it.”

He was enchanted. Her spirit was so intense, but she was utterly without guile, always direct.

“Now something special,” she said,
“mi alcoba de dormir.”
They went down a short hall and into a bedroom. A fire was burning in the small fireplace—Rosalita must have laid it. The room held a bureau, a vanity, a full-length mirror, and her high four-poster bed. She lit wall-mounted candles on each side of the bed, and two more candles on the vanity. The room took on a beautiful glow.

“Look at yourself in the mirror,” she said, smiling. It was a full-length mirror with an ornately carved frame. He picked Coy up, but the coyote showed no interest in his reflection. Paloma stood close to them, and they all smiled. Paloma stroked Coy's head, and he nuzzled it into her hand. “You are handsome,” Paloma said.

Sam was lost for words.

The señora took Coy out of Sam's arms and set him down. Then she turned back to Sam and kissed him fully on the mouth.

She took a step back, holding his gaze and her eyes holding the warm candlelight, and began to take off her dress.

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
about noon, when they finally got out of bed, Coy whined desperately to be let out. They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and ate sweet breads. Juanita worked at grinding corn, which Sam imagined was a never-ending job, and Rosalita cleaned the dining room. Sam felt a little uneasy, but the two servants acted like nothing was unusual.

Paloma saw the question in his face and said, “You are the first man to touch me since my husband died. I have been…in reserve for five years.”

They went outside and to the casita to check on Flat Dog and Julia. “You are settling in well?”

“Fine,” said Julia. It was one big room. Sam's guess was that she was relieved to be in a house instead of a tipi.

Paloma looked around the part of the room used for cooking. “Let me know if there's anything you need.”

Sam picked up Esperanza and Azul and twirled around with them in his arms. The infants cackled.

Paloma came and looked closely at Esperanza's face. “She will be handsome, like her father. It would be perhaps better if she were beautiful.” They all smiled broadly, and Sam and Paloma walked back to the kitchen of the main casa.

“Juanita, I will cook supper. Take the afternoon with your family. Rosalita, go do whatever you like.”

Both women murmured
“Gracias”
and left immediately.

When they were alone, Paloma said, “Rosalita is being courted by one of the young men who works for me.” She stood, came to Sam, and cupped his face with one hand and kissed him lightly. “You are a beautiful man. The crook where your nose must have been broken, it only makes your face interesting.” She kissed him again. “Now I will start supper.”

Sam sat in the kitchen with her and watched. First she cut the kernels off an ear of dried Indian corn. “
Chicos,
we call these.” She covered them with water, and set them on the cooking stove to simmer. The fire in the stove was strong, and the
cocina
felt good, a warm radiance in a cold house in January.

Now she took meat from a box cooled by ice in the bottom and began to dice it. “Mutton,” she said. “This is a dish of the conquistadores.”

She worked in firm strokes. Now she paused and looked directly at him. “I have a passion for you,” she said. “For the time you are in Santa Fe, will you live at Rancho de las Palomas and be my lover?”

She waited.

She poured a little oil in a heavy skillet, put it on the stove, and began browning the meat. “I do not care about appearances,” she said. “I care nothing for what the families on the rancho think, nothing about what my neighbors may think. I do not even care what the priest thinks.” She looked up at him. “As for the sin, I will confess it.” She shrugged.

Now she took three red chiles out of a canister, washed and cleaned them, and put them on the counter. She chopped the red pods and began to mash them in a heavy bowl with water. She looked at him. “This passion,” she said, “I want to dive into it, to lose myself in it. Is your wish the same?”

“Yes.”

She lowered her eyes to the chiles and ground hard. He noticed how strong her hands were.

“You may tell your friends who stay in town whatever you like about us, without flaunting it. They will understand.”

“Sure.”

She put the mashed chiles and water into a sauce pan, and put the pot on the rear of the cookstove. “It will make a sauce,” she said.

She wiped her hands on a cloth, sat on a chair next to him, and took both his hands in hers.

“We both must understand, then, that it will end. Spring will come, the grass will turn green, you will go to your rendezvous of beaver hunters, and I will set this passion aside. We two are”—she hesitated—“not suitable. You are beautiful. Perhaps we even make an attractive couple. But we are not in the long term appropriate.” She used the Spanish word
apropriado.

Sam's mind tilted a little. What they'd just done in bed felt very damned appropriate to him.

She rose and poured water into the pot with mutton. “It is best when it simmers all afternoon,” she said.

Sam shook his head. After five years in the mountains, taking care over cooking seemed foreign to him.

She dipped her finger in the red chile sauce and put it to his mouth. “Taste it.”

He sucked the good taste off her finger. He'd liked chiles from the first taste, green more than red, not the heat but the flavor. He cleaned the finger well, smiling at her mischievously.

“I'll pour us some wine. You want to go to bed?”

He did.

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
they rode the ranch, and she began to tell him about her life. Specifically, her husband. Coy trotted along with his ears perked, like he was listening.

“I was a silly young girl, seventeen years old. Miguel came for me like a whirlwind. He was a handsome man with a flair for the romantic gesture. Gestures, I later found out, he had practiced widely throughout Nuevo Mexico. We married when I was eighteen and he was thirty. My father warned me about him.” Sam knew her mother had died giving birth to her sister.

“For a year, perhaps, I kept my illusions.

“He was good to me in front of others. He made love to me eagerly. In front of our ranch families he treated me like a queen, and to our friends in Santa Fe he showed me off as a great catch. I began to get impatient when he was gone on what he called the business of his family, which was actually to pursue other women and play at horsemanship games with his rich young comrades. His family, it turned out, had scarcely any enterprises left to run.

“It was not until we stood beside my father's grave that I realized, from Miguel's new imperial manner, that he had married me only to get Rancho de las Palomas.”

They turned the horses along the
madre acequia.

“The next years were very difficult. I hate to talk about them. The worst was that I miscarried twice. Now I am unable to bear children.”

She grew thoughtful, and her voice changed. “Then, one morning, they brought the news. As he and his friends did their daredevil riding, his horse suddenly shied. Miguel landed headfirst against a boulder and was quickly dead.”

She stopped, and Sam reined Paladin up beside her. Coy raised his head to Paloma. Her gaze roamed the grapes she had planted, but Sam knew they were not what she was seeing.

“You cannot imagine. In my anger I had thought I wanted to deliver a fatal blow myself. But when it happened, I was desolate. I stayed in bed, without even a candle, for days. I drank wine, all my stomach could keep down. I crawled deep into the cave of loneliness and self-pity.

“And I didn't come back to the world for months. Months.”

She touched her heels to her mount, and they glided on.

“Finally, our foreman pointed out to me that the rancho was deteriorating. My people were willing to work hard, he said, but only if they knew I cared. Since I didn't seem to care, inevitably, the rancho would die. ‘Dust, weeds, and wind, nothing else,' he said.”