Listen to the Mockingbird (30 page)

In that moment I realized that they thought Nacho was telling them that Tonio and I were not sleeping together. Perhaps Tonio and I were alone in knowing that Herlinda had uttered only one falsehood: that Winona was a witch. Another stone whizzed past my ear.

The crowd began to mill about. There were plenty of rocks scattered over the land, but they would have to search out those small enough to cast. And the sun was ebbing fast.

Four men carried a rock the size of a watermelon forward, staggering under its weight. Surely they could not think they would throw that. Three more, grunting with the exertion, brought another. I peered up at Isabel for an explanation.

She stood, arms spread wide against the sunset. “The witch will be staked to lie on the ground. The heaviest rocks found will be laid upon her.”

“You aim to crush her?” My voice rose to a shriek and broke.

“If she is truly a child of God, if she is not a witch, God will make the rocks like air upon her body.” Isabel’s voice took on a note of crazed ecstasy.

I moved forward again. I could see Tonio watching me. I did not raise my voice. I had learned from Nacho that the crowd would quiet to hear me.

“Wait.”

I prayed that I was right. Perhaps they thought they had already heard everything I had to say. But the angry mutters and scuffling feet subsided.

“You believe this woman is a witch? You believe the devil is in her?”

“Yes!” They began to stir again.

“Listen!” I said it sharply, but kept my voice low. The noise abated again. “Then you must believe that Satan can be forced to abandon her.”

At this, the mob fell completely silent. Dozens of eyes fixed on my face. Isabel spread out her arms again, preparing to say something.

I cut her off. “The Virgin is hovering above you.” My words shocked me as much as anyone, but I tossed my hand dramatically toward a point in the air just over their heads. They turned to look. “Can you see her?”

The Anglo men began to mutter angrily, but the women and all the Mexicans and Indians were murmuring.

“The Virgin is telling you that if this woman called Winona has allowed the devil into her soul—”

A few cries came from the crowd. I raised my voice a little. “Mind you, the Virgin says if this is so, Satan can be driven out.”

Now there was silence again.

“The Virgin is telling you this.” I lifted my head as I had seen preachers do. “Surely you can hear her.” With a pang, I realized that the power of the Virgin was mostly a Catholic belief and the Anglos here were probably Protestant. But it was too late to go back. “Surely,” I implored them, “surely you are devout enough and pure enough to hear her?”

At this, heads began to nod hesitantly.

“The Virgin says that you must all help in this exorcism. Say it. Say ‘exorcism.’” I repeated it again.

“Ex-or-cism,” came the chant.

I almost had them now, but I needed more drama. “There are torches in the barn,” I whispered to Tonio. “Get them.

“Say it again,” I told the crowd. If I could involve them, I might keep them.

“Exorcism, exorcism,” they crooned.

“Come, Winona.” I held out my hand toward her, and she stared at me as if I had begun to glow in the dark. Very slowly, her face a mix of fear, disbelief and trust, she crossed the space between us.

Tonio returned with the torches. There were six. “Light them and hand them out.” Whatever surprise he felt, he throttled it.

“You, with the torches,” I called as Tonio distributed them. “Come forward. Form a circle. The never-ending circle of the Trinity.”

When the six torchbearers had done as I asked, I drew Winona forward, into the circle. “Gather ’round now,” I called, bringing as much fervor to my voice as I could. The torchlight helped, giving the faces of the crowd an almost eerie look.

“Kneel, Winona, child of God,” I intoned. “Kneel before the Virgin.” I couldn’t very well ask her to kneel before me.

With both arms hugging Zia to her breast, she knelt.

I would need something to prove that the exorcism was successful. I began to sway my body from side to side. How could I prove it? Peering from side to side, I sought Tonio. He was there near the corner of the house, watching me. I beckoned and he came forward.

“There is a candle and a Bible on the table in the parlor,” I intoned loudly. “Do the Virgin’s bidding; fetch them.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “There is no Bible, only one of my account books, but it will have to do. And bring at least three matches.”

Nodding, he disappeared.

I swayed. My badly braided hair thumped at my shoulders as I swung my head. I was no dancer. It occurred to me that I must look clumsy and ridiculous, but the crowd was watching me, swaying, too.

Tonio returned and pressed a thick tallow candle and four wooden matches into my hand. I hoped it was the right candle. I squeezed it between my fingers. It was. This was the last of the badly constituted candles I had made during my first year here. The tallow was too soft.

I brought both hands to my chest, using the “Bible” to shield the candle from the crowd. I raised my face to the sky, hoping they would do the same, fumbled one of the matches into position and pressed it hard, down into the tallow next to the wick. Pain shot through my thumb. The match wouldn’t pierce the tallow deep enough.

Praying no one would see what I was doing, or that the “Bible” was only an account book, I carefully worked the match stick out, broke it in two, and shoved it back into the tallow.

The crowd had not seen. But they were becoming restive.

“Sister Winona, child of God,” I intoned again.

Winona looked up at me, frowning her get-on-with-it look.

“Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord.” The voice came from the back of the crowd. The people took up the chant and their disquietude disappeared.

I sang out, “I will press the Bible to this woman’s head. If the devil is there, he will not be able to bear that. He will leave.”

“Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord,” the crowd sang back.

“There is an ancient sign of purity,” I called. “I am lighting this candle.” I did so, then held it high so no one would see the match next to the wick. I thanked the God I was blaspheming that He had made me a tall woman. With the candle lit, my seconds were numbered. The timing must be exact.

“If the devil is not there…” I intoned.

“Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord.”

“…or when he has departed, the purity of this woman will flow through me to the candle and brighten its light.”

“Yes, Lord…”

I placed the book against Winona’s head.

The crowd was absolutely silent, watching the candle I still held high in my other hand.

I truly prayed, with more seriousness than I have ever devoted to the task. Then I waved the candle, causing its flame to lean.

There was a collective gasp, and then “Hallelujah!”

I looked up. The flame had caught the head of the match and it was flaring brightly. Then, the sulfur gone, it dimmed. I lifted both arms to the sky, keeping the candle high. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” I sang slowly. I had only heard the hymn twice. Now I realized I didn’t know all the words.

But the people who stood around me did. They raised their faces to the darkened sky and opened their mouths. “He is trampling out the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

And while they sang, I lowered the candle, snuffed it out, pulled the match from the tallow, put it in my mouth, bit it in pieces and swallowed it.

Zia, who had not made a sound through the worst of it, bounced now in her mother’s arms, her eyes shining in the torchlight like those of a saint. Enchanted by the music, she raised her arms over her head like I had and bounced in time to the rhythm.

I did not learn until much later that I had chosen a Yankee battle hymn. The people, at least half of them Confederate sympathizers, didn’t seem to know it either. Their voices swelled.

“His truth goes marching on…”

Chapter Thirty-five

I sat in my nightdress at my desk in the dark, my heels tucked under me, my arms around my knees, trying to sort things out. My pistol lay on the desk in front of me, and it was loaded. I didn’t think there was a need for it, but I wanted it within reach just the same.

The crowd had finished singing and quietly melted into the night. No one had said much, not even Isabel. I insisted that Tonio take one of the wagons. Winona had retired and so had I, but I was too exhausted to sleep. The deluge of events had drowned me, and I had to give them some sort of order or stay at the bottom of the sea forever. But I wasn’t doing much sorting—more like chasing colliding thoughts through an ever more bewildering maze.

I gazed blankly at the window, which was just a slightly brighter patch in the dark wall. The moon had been brighter the night that face had fallen against that window.

My mind bounced to Isabel. What had driven her to do such a thing? Would she really have seen Winona crushed until her bones broke, her ribs gave way? A gut-deep shudder ran through me.

And what of Herlinda? Would she persuade Nacho to take her away from the woman who fornicated with a priest and consorted with a witch? What more—

“Git up, real slow like!” The hammer of a gun clicked.

The doorway showed a hazy glow of something white. I grasped my pistol and moved slowly toward it.

“Lord have mercy! Miss Matty, what you doing in here at this hour?”

This time the voice registered. “Winona, for God’s sake.” I set the pistol back on the desk. “I couldn’t sleep, you no-account fool. You scared the peewadden out of me! I dang near shot you!”

She padded over to me in bare feet and leaned the rifle against the wall. “Well I be go-to-heaven,” she said. “I be thinking one of them folk got herself halfway to home and then it come on her that you don’t never go to church much so it ain’t real likely you would know how to cast the devil out of some poor helpless soul. Sleep ain’t rightly coming to me this night, either.”

She fumbled in the dark for a chair and sat down. “If you ain’t something. I sure enough thought I was a going to meet my Maker this very night. How you make that candle rise up?”

I explained about the match.

“Honey, you was touched by the hand of God Hisself. Why you almost made me believe I was all pure as fresh-picked cotton inside. Where you learn that stuff?”

“I made it up as I went along. I cheated and I lied.”

“It do not bear thinking about, what they do to me if you wasn’t such a fine cheater and liar.”

999

News from town filtered back with the hands who always rode in on Saturdays about noon to drink themselves stupid and lose their pay at poker. I might as well have issued their pay to Martin Dance, the card sharp who lay about in the boardinghouse all week living on his Saturday night winnings.

Without Homer Durkin and Eliot Turk, who was no more than five-foot-three with his boots on but wiry and tough as a coyote, I would not have heard much. Nacho was his old self again, but he had scant interest in army news. Ruben was seldom sober long enough these days to remember anything, and Herlinda had scarcely spoken to anyone since the day she tried to kill Winona.

I had just settled down to do my accounts when I looked up to find Homer standing in the doorway. He must have just been to the barber because there was precious little of his curly carrot-top left and his ears stood out like jug handles.

“Thought you might want to know, ma’am, General Canby took over the fort last week.”

I motioned to a chair; but he just rocked from foot to foot, twisting his hat in his big raw-boned, fresh-scrubbed hands. Homer was never one to feel comfortable in a house.

“Thank you. Anything else?”

“Not rightly, ma’am.” Homer fiddled with his hat some more. There was a big dent in his head where it had sat. “Except they say that this Canby seems a right decent feller. At the field hospital in Socorro, a lot of Texans there had been pretty well fixed up by the doc. Dang if Canby didn’t parole them. Turned them all loose with six days’ rations. They say he went down to Franklin with a flag of truce and told Sibley to get his sick and wounded out of New Mexico as there’s no provisions for them.” His face flushed with the effort of such a long speech.

I thanked him again; and when he’d shuffled off, I went back to the accounts, but my thoughts wouldn’t focus on the figures. Here in the valley was the man in charge of all the federal troops in New Mexico Territory. Might he have a roster of Union officers who had been in the area when the offer on my land was made?

A knock on at the front door disturbed my thoughts. I opened it to find Homer, who snatched off his hat again.

“Forgot to say one thing, ma’am. The bartender at the Silver Spur said someone had been asking around town for you.”

“Oh?” The hair on my arms began to prickle. “Who?”

“He didn’t remember the name, ma’am. He just said it was some Union officer.”

999

The following morning, I put on my blue dress with the tucked bodice and the bone buttons, asked Homer to hitch Fanny to the wagon and was on my way to Fort Fillmore by noon.

Brigadier General Canby rolled his cigar to the corner of his mouth. The cigar wasn’t lit, and it had the look of something that had been chewed upon for many days. He was a big, fine-looking man with features chiseled on a rock of a face—and the carver had carefully notched the clean-shaven chin. Standing at least six-foot-three, he towered over even me. He neither sat nor stood still, but there wasn’t a black hair out of place in his beard or on his head save one small forelock that dared to jut over his right eye.

That hair, a flat black without a single grey hair, no variation in color at all, puzzled me. His years could hardly be called advanced, but he was surely nearing fifty. When it came to me that he used hair dye, I had to close my mouth tight lest the titter in my throat get loose.

Despite this vanity, I daresay he was a tough taskmaster, quick to make decisions and quick to change them. He looked every inch the gentleman, though at this particular moment he was a mite annoyed. “I do not have the time, Miss Summerhayes, to—”