Listen to the Mockingbird (3 page)

“It wasn’t one of my hands did it. Nacho says they were all in their bunks. Must have been some vile drifter. He even killed a mule,” I finished.

Zeke grunted. “There’s always some such varmint about. Like as not drunked up on tarantula juice.” He brought one ham of a fist down on the newspaper. “I knew there’d be trouble. Horse breeding’s no fit work for a woman on her own hook.”

“It hardly has to do with me,” I sputtered.

Zeke leveled his mean gaze on me. “If you was after knocking off a Mex kid, would you do it out to your place where there’s nothing but a spindly Mex foreman or out to Jess Parker’s?” Parker viewed everyone as a potential cattle thief and ran off anyone who so much as set the toe of a boot on his land.

“That’s nonsense.” I gulped back the rest of my retort and lowered my voice. “I have plenty of men about, Zeke, and they’re all armed.”

“Knew I shoulda kept an eye on the place.” He moved his head slowly back and forth. “I knew there’d be trouble. It just weren’t meant to be. Woman jefes,” he snorted.

If there was anything I didn’t want, it was more of Zeke’s—or anyone else’s—eye on me. I stared at him, and he must have taken the look for strength because he nodded stiffly and muttered, “No Mex missing I know of. Guess you just got to dig him under.” He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.

Jamie O’Rourke’s office was just around the corner. Jamie was the government surveyor. It was he who had told me about the ranch and sweet-talked me into buying it. I’d been a stranger to the valley with no mind to stay. I was headed for San Antonio; but truth be told, I had no idea what I would do there, either. I had thought that after everything else the rest would be easy. But I’d no more than found myself and the cherrywood chest a room at the boardinghouse for the night when I suffered a terrible attack of panic. Perhaps it had to do with calling myself Matilda Summerhayes. That was the first time. And the name did not set easy on my tongue.

My heart began to beat like that of a dying bird, my breath went from me, and my thoughts rammed into each other. I slept not a wink that night and the next morning it was fair more than I could do to get out of bed. I missed the stage for San Antonio; and when I did venture out, I learned there wouldn’t be another headed in that direction for a fortnight.

As it happened, Jamie’s sister-in-law was staying at the boardinghouse. A bulldog sort of woman, short and solid, with bright brown eyes that snapped sparks, Eliza O’Rourke struck up a conversation with me over supper. She had married four times and outlived them all. Her sister, Jamie’s wife, had died some years before; but she had a liking for Jamie, so she’d stopped for a visit on her way to San Francisco.

Eliza insisted on introducing me to him, and it was that very day he had learned that Byron Cox had succumbed to a fever. Cox was a horse breeder, Jamie explained, with a ranch called Mockingbird Spring. Near the cuevas, he said, as if I knew where that was.

I was still not myself and didn’t say much, except that I was a widow with a small estate and on my way to San Antonio. Jamie, quick as he always was, discerned that nothing much awaited me in Texas. He had a silver tongue, Jamie did; and he loved the valley with a passion contagious as the pox. He could have stood on a street corner in St. Louis and sweet-talked six folk out of ten into packing up, crossing the country and settling here. He cajoled, coaxed and coerced until I thought buying the Cox ranch a brilliant thing to do.

It would have to be done quickly, he said, before the hands up and left. The foreman, he assured me, was one of the best. Perhaps Jamie turned my head when he said the valley had too few handsome, clever women. No one had paid me a compliment in nigh onto four years. When he mentioned that in a half-dozen years I could sell the ranch for twice what I paid I realized that kind of money would be enough to see me settled back East. And I confess the name Mockingbird Spring struck a wry chord; I felt a kinship with the bird that imitates others and pretends to be something it is not.

999

Jamie fixed me with his bright blue eyes as I slid into the chair next to his desk. The aroma of ink was thick and pungent. I pulled my skirt close about my legs, sitting primly, mindful of the smudges that lurked everywhere and wondering how Jamie always stayed so tidy.

“If you don’t have the prettiest eyes I ever did see. Not blue, are they?”

“Grey,” I said. Jamie’s head was ear-to-ear with blarney, but he had something about him that made you believe he had your best interests at heart. In addition to his string tie and what was likely the only set of clean male fingernails in the valley, he also sported a black-and-white sense of right and wrong.

Jamie was determined to put the Mesilla Valley on the map. He had come here as land agent five or six years before, soon after the Gadsden Purchase had transferred thousands of miles of land west of the Rio Grande to the United States.

The way he told it, people weren’t real pleased about the Purchase or about a land agent. Right after the war with Mexico, a lot of folks had up and moved from nearby communities to Mesilla. In the war, their hometowns had been lost to the U.S., but Mesilla still belonged to Mexico, which meant it was eligible for land grant. They had just secured one when Gadsden cut their new home away from Mexico and patched it neatly into New Mexico Territory. Now it was necessary to buy the land, which was where Jamie came in.

He was a charmer, all right. He managed to reshuffle so many papers that no one paid much. After that, there was hardly a soul within thirty miles who didn’t dote on Jamie. Late last year he had decided that a thriving village needed a newspaper and launched the Mesilla Times.

“Confederate or Yank?” he growled at me, then grinned. His face was pink and smooth and shiny as a baby’s, except for the bushy eyebrows. Greyish-brown wisps of hair clustered around his ears but had long ago deserted the top of his head. There was nothing Jamie loved so much as a good argument. Since he had printed the paper’s first issue last fall, he had warmed to the task of making his opinions known. His tirades were good as any preacher’s, and I’d never known him to hold a grudge against those who disagreed. He just marked them as needing a bit more instruction.

“Do I have to be one or the other?” My father had been a staunch Abolitionist, but I knew that here Anglo sentiments tilted toward Atlanta.

“Matty, you got to pay attention,” he said, leaning forward in mock solicitation. “The Convention of the People of Arizona was held right here. The folks of the Mesilla Valley and the mining companies up around Piños Altos decided to send Dan Wilbur to Alabama to ask the Confederate States of America to admit us as a Territory. The line will run right below Socorro all the way to California.” When he said “Confederate States of America” it sounded like the bass notes on a church organ.

“But what about Fillmore?” That Union fortress was only a few miles away.

He chuckled. “We’ll give them enough mountain oysters to fry.” Mountain oysters were the private parts removed from bull calves. Jamie reddened a little but didn’t beg my pardon.

I ignored it, my mind beginning to paw at something. “And the Indians?”

“Dixie, luv. Dixie will protect us. Dixie will administer law and justice.”

Slowly it came to me that this could mean many things—that I would be living in another country, for one. But more importantly, if there was war men would die, and no one would question that a lieutenant in the dragoons might well perish in a battle. My eyes flicked distractedly over the boxes of paper along the walls, the cans and trays that held the metal letters.

Jamie’s forehead furrowed into shiny, quizzical wrinkles. “You look right flummoxed, Matty.”

“It’s just that you sound like a political broadside.”

Laughter started deep in his throat and his eyes twinkled. “Look here.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a flat piece of metal. I had watched him set type once, so I knew what it was. He pushed it across the desk toward me.

There was the image of a banner waving and the words Our Flag backward, like in a mirror. More reversed words below were in short lines, like a poem. I raised my eyes to Jamie’s.

He peered at me over the spectacles that always rested on the end of his nose. “That, there, is the Stars and Bars of the Confederate States of America. Texas pulled out of the Union. Now the Yankees have gone and fired on us. Our boys were just minding their own business, and the Yanks started shooting off cannons!” His smile was as bright as the light bouncing off his bald head. He drummed his fingers on the desk and broke into a lively whistling of “Dixie.”

Mind racing, I fidgeted with the handle on my brocade bag. Did this mean that when the fighting was over I could go home? It would only require one more falsehood; and after so many, what was one more? I drew in my breath and let it out slowly. “This may be very good news, indeed.”

“It is, Matty, it is.”

I paused to consider it more then remembered what had brought me to his office. “You know anything about a stranger in the area?” Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “A man came by to ask my leave to live in the caves. Not a ruffian. Looks Mexican but doesn’t talk like it. Someone must have told him the cuevas were on my land.”

Jamie shrugged. “I heard there was some priest or holy man or some such fella.” My eyes must have widened because he patted my arm soothingly. “Sounds harmless enough. Hard on shoe leather, though. Walks everywhere. No horse, not even a burro. Hear tell he’s a healer of some sort.”

“That must be him,” I said and got to my feet.

“Before you go, you hear about Joel Tolhurst?”

“What about him?” Joel was a Baptist preacher, a missionary. A good man, I suppose, but sort of stiff and disapproving; and I can’t say I liked him much. His wife Isabel ran the mission school. The white women in town, their virtue as rigid as the stays in their corsets, were mighty curious about me. No doubt they thought I’d earned my money as a strumpet and planned to turn the ranch into a bordello. Isabel had tried every conceivable gambit to maneuver me into talking about my past.

“Joel’s in a bad way,” Jamie said. “Real bad. Ate his dinner, went into the parlor, sat down to read the Bible and never got up. Not by himself, anyway.”

“He’s dead?”

“Not yet, but I reckon he’s good as.”

I thanked him for all the news and moved toward the door, half ashamed for not telling him about the dead Mexican boy. Jamie’s intentions would have been the best, but I didn’t want anyone poking about in my life.

“Mark my words,” he called after me. “This will be the Confederate Territory of Arizona.”

I took my leave, beginning to hope he was right. But that was Jamie. He could make you want the rope at your own hanging.

Fanny lowered her nose and watched me approach. Turning her toward the ranch, I let her have her head as soon as we were out of town. A gust of wind whipped at my face and tore the leather thong from my hair, which was now the color of rabbit grass after a rain—a red that’s almost brown. I still troubled to care for it, had brushed it properly and braided it that morning; but it would be full of knots by the time I got home.

Racing into the wind, I didn’t have to hide my thoughts. Surely there would be no fighting west of the Mississippi. But suppose there was. My heart leapt in my chest. I might be able to go home. Really home. To St. Louis.

I was still muttering to myself when the ranch hove in sight. The sunset was painting the organ peaks crimson. It was easy to see how the mountains had got their name; they resembled nothing so much as the massive pipes of a cathedral organ. The sight quite made my breath catch.

Fanny was anxious to get to her feed. I swung down from the saddle and followed her. She was barely inside the dim barn before she made a sharp sound and tried to turn back.

I was putting a puzzled hand on her flank to calm her when something hard slammed across my shoulders. Another blow rammed the back of my head and I sank like a stone.

Chapter Four

I opened my eyes slowly. Fanny stood above me, her breath hot on my neck. A faint ugly smell crept up my nostrils. Confounded that I must have been sleeping in the barn, I lifted my head, picked a strand of straw from my cheek. A white pain erupted behind my eyes.

The lump on my head was the size of a jay’s egg. Someone had coshed me from behind. Who? How long had I been lying there?

Steeling myself against the pounding in my skull, I dragged my aching body upright and hobbled to the door. The sun was still high. A saw rasped at wood somewhere nearby but nothing untoward seemed to be stirring. Who had hit me? Was he still lurking in the barn?

I twisted my neck to look back across the barn, and a wave of dizziness lapped at my senses. Something dark swam into focus, something lying on the hay like a strewn heap of dirty laundry. It was a moment before my dazed mind recollected the dead Mexican boy. Had his killer come back for me?

The odor was ripening, and I almost retched. Then a chill pricked across my scalp. The body’s chin was in the hay. I could see the blood-matted hair on the back of the head where the bullet had rammed through. But I had turned him over, hoping he somehow still lived. Nacho would not have touched him. Nor the hands. And most assuredly the boy had not turned himself back prone again. My breath seemed like a dead thing in my throat.

Why had he been carrying a map of my land? And why in a pouch tied round his neck, as if it were especially dear? A rancid fog of panic wrapped itself about my soul. I could not live like this. No lady could. I squeezed my eyes hard shut, and a salty tear drizzled down my cheek to my lips.

I steadied myself against the barn door, drew my wits about me as best I could, raised my chin and stepped outside.

Nacho and the hands had finished the coffin. They had seen no stranger hanging about. Nor had Herlinda. All were dumbfounded that someone had struck me down in the barn.

My head still pounding, I tried to puzzle it out; but my mind rebelled. I couldn’t bring myself to think about it. Like as not, I had surprised a drifter in the act of stealing some tack. I sent the men back to work. The boy had to be buried as soon as possible.