Paradise Valley (19 page)
“Oh, probably not more than a couple weeks,” he said, sensing defeat.
“Well then, there won’t be any vegetables ready yet, so no one can steal them anyway.”
It was decided. Tomorrow they would take the plow.
After dinner, perhaps as a kind of apology for her little victory, Mamm brought in the trough for baths and put huge pots of water on the stove to heat. It was a rare occasion indeed when they took baths on a Monday night, but after a day of digging they were as filthy as pigs.
Everyone used the same bathwater, so by the time Rachel got her turn there was a layer of grit in the bottom of the lukewarm brown water, and still it was heaven.
After her bath Rachel sat at the table and wrote a long letter to Jake by lantern light. She told him about the train trip and all the wonderful sights she had seen. She described Paradise Valley for him, and the grand hacienda of Señor Hidalgo. Keeping the letter light and friendly because she knew his mother would probably read it, she ended by saying simply, “We wish you’uns were here.” Jake would understand. He would read between the lines, instinctively replacing the plural with the singular.
And he would not fail to hear the ache in her voice.
The first thing Caleb noticed when his wagon pulled up to the homestead the next morning was that the crude trestle he’d built over the saw pit was gone. Someone had come during the night, disassembled it and hauled away the planks.
He stood there for a long time staring at the naked pit, his hands on his hips, his jaw working.
“Why would anybody want to steal something like that?” he asked Levi, who knelt beside him pondering the same question, his fingers probing the footprints. The tracks in the soft dirt around the pit were small, for men, and barefoot. The big toes splayed out in the manner of someone unaccustomed to shoes.
Levi shrugged, picking his teeth with a pine sliver. “It was good lumber. I guess they could use it for fencing, or framing a roof, or mebbe just firewood.”
Caleb nodded thoughtfully. “Well, we learned our lesson, didn’t we? I won’t be leaving nothing else behind anymore.”
“But what do we do with these people?” Levi asked, rising. “How can we live among thieves?”
“It will be hard, but I believe we have to make friends of them. Like Fuentes said, they steal because they are poor – they don’t have anything. Maybe we can help them learn to live better.”
“Generosity is wasted on a thief,” Levi said. “He will take the chicken you give him and smile and say thank you, and then when you’re not looking he will steal your horse, too.”
Caleb chewed on this for a moment and replied, “I didn’t say we should
give
to them, I said we should
teach
them.” He turned a wise eye on his son-in-law. “And I said it would not be easy. We must be patient. Anyways, it’s not so bad. We can build another trestle.”
It was a horrendously busy week. The whole family, even the women, came to the site at dawn each day and worked until dusk. Harvey turned over a half-acre garden plot with the plow, and it was nearly as easy as Harris had said it would be, the topsoil rich and soft as butter. There were hardly any rocks, and no stumps. As always, the biggest problem with newly cultivated ground would be keeping down weeds and wild grasses. Normally, such a field would be turned several times in the winter to expose roots and kill all the weeds, but they didn’t have time for that. Caleb hooked up the spring-tooth harrow every day and dragged it over the garden plot, but after only five days Mamm said, “Enough. I’m planting my garden.”
“It will be overrun with weeds,” Caleb warned.
“That can’t be helped,” she said. “It’s new ground. We’ll just have to use the cultivator to get rid of the weeds when they come up.”
By the end of the week the massive central cistern for the well was finished, rows of damp adobe bricks stood like dominoes on planks just up the hill, and huge mounds of dirt stood waiting for more to be made. Even Ada and the children had helped out. They seemed to have a natural talent for brickmaking – it was, after all, a lot like making mud pies. And the work was good for Ada. She was no less depressed in the evenings but at least she was too tired to cry all night. Mamm planted her garden, and the boys made a good start on turning over a large section where Caleb planned to put in a corn crop.
Late on Saturday afternoon a rain shower popped up and drenched everyone as they were loading the wagon to go home. Standing at the edge of her new garden watching the ground darken, Mamm paid no attention to the downpour soaking her dress. Alarmed at the sight of his sick wife in the rain, Caleb grabbed a piece of oilcloth from the back of the wagon and ran to cover her, but as he drew near she did something that stopped him in his tracks.
Raising her work-reddened, dirt-stained palms toward the heavens, Mamm closed her eyes, lifted her face into a driving rain and said quietly, “Thank you.”
On Sunday afternoon, after prayer and Bible reading, the Benders ate lunch and then hitched up the buggies and drove over to Schulman’s place. Everyone went except Levi and Emma, who stayed behind at the hovel to keep an eye on their belongings.
“I don’t know why Emma would have to stay behind,” Caleb grumbled as he drove away. “Levi could watch by himself.”
Mamm’s eyes smiled. She leaned close to her husband’s ear and whispered, “Shhh. They are newlyweds yet, Dat.”
Where the road from the hacienda bent westward into Paradise Valley, another road forked off to the north around the tip of the ridge. This was the road to Saltillo, fifty miles to the north, the same path that the railroad would follow when the new spur was built down through Paradise Valley. Schulman’s farm lay only a couple of miles up Saltillo Road, on the other side of the ridge from where the Benders were building their home.
Schulman’s house and outbuildings – all made of adobe, including a low barn and stable – sat a hundred yards back from the road. When the buggies turned in and headed up the driveway a pair of German shepherds charged out to sound the alarm. Caleb kept a tight rein while the dogs circled the two buggies barking, their hackles raised.
Schulman came from the stable to see what the fuss was about, and when he saw the buggies, his face broke into a huge grin. He waved and shouted, “Wilhelm! Augusta!
Kommen sie!
” The two dogs instantly stopped, pricked their ears and looked, then bolted toward their master.
Ernst Schulman was so delighted to have company he had one of his hired hands go out and kill chickens for dinner, and then took the Bender men out for a walking tour of his farm while the women got to know each other. His wife was a tiny blond woman, lively and quick to laugh. She and Mamm took to each other right away.
Walking over Schulman’s place, Ezra pointed out something strange. Behind the farmhouse lay a twenty-acre pasture fenced in with barbed wire. In the middle of the pasture lay a full acre of freestanding bushes as high as a man’s head, and arbors laden with vines. A huge longhorn bull grazed in the shade of a lone cottonwood tree not far from the vineyard.
Ezra squinted. “Are those blueberry bushes?”
“Oh jah!” Schulman said, breaking stride to look with them. “And grapevines. Blueberries do very well here, and they bloom early because of the mild winter. In fact, the blueberries are ripe right now, if you’d like to pick some.”
Ezra and the boys looked to Caleb, who shook his head. “No, not today.”
“Really, I don’t mind,” Schulman said. “I’ll have Oquendo saddle a horse and put away the bull, then you can pick your hats full of blueberries.”
“
Danke
, but no,” Caleb said. “We don’t pick on Sunday.”
“Ohhhh, I see. Sorry, sometimes I forget about your religion. Well, that’s all right then, you can come back another day or send the women up here – anytime.”
Ezra pointed, curious. “Why would you have to lock up the bull to pick berries?”
Schulman laughed. “Satan is the meanest animal I have ever known. If he gets the chance, he will kill you and trample your corpse.”
“Then why would you have him loose around your vineyard?”
A devious smile stayed on Schulman’s face as he pointed at the vineyard. “Would you go in there with Satan, on foot, for a handful of berries?”
Ezra shook his head, his eyes wide. “Noooo.”
“Neither will the Mexicans. He makes an excellent watchdog.”
Schulman’s fields were thick with oats and wheat, and at dinner they learned that not only did his garden yield a bounty of vegetables but his wife was an excellent cook.
“Oh!” Schulman said suddenly, his mouth full of chicken. “By the way, Augusta has pups! There are four left, already weaned, and you must choose one to take with you.” He pointed at Caleb with his fork. “You will need a good dog, Herr Bender, to watch your chickens.”
Schulman’s table, built only for him and his wife, would not hold them all, so the younger ones were eating in the kitchen. All of them broke into excited chatter over the new pup, rushing through the rest of their dinner so they could hurry out and pick their new dog.
After dinner the grown-ups strolled out to the stable, where the younger ones had already gathered around the pups. Walking across the backyard Caleb said, “I have not seen Pelao since we came. Is he not here today?”
“Pah!” Schulman spat, glowering. “I chased him off. Two days ago I found one of my peons sleeping in the barn when he was supposed to be working, and I woke him with a buggy whip. Pelao snatched the whip away from me and threatened me with it, so I ran him off. Good riddance. I never trusted him anyway. There’s nothing worse than an uppity Chichimeca.”
The four shepherd pups bounded and tumbled in a furious heap with the children.
“Sammy! Paul!” Mary shouted, bending to snatch her sons’ Sunday hats from the dirt, but Schulman’s booming laugh overruled her.
“They’re boys!” he said. “Let them play.”
There were three male pups and only one female, the smallest of the four. Miriam and Rachel squatted among them, running fingers through the rich puppy fur and getting scratched by needle-sharp puppy teeth, testing their personalities. The little female took an instant liking to Miriam, who clutched it to her chest, heedless of her new white apron. She looked up at Caleb and said, “I want this one.”
“Ach, that’s the runt,” Schulman said. “You can have the big one if you want. He’s going to be a fine dog.”
Rachel intervened. Like Emma, she knew her father’s mind. “A female can have puppies,” she said. “We have only to find a suitable mate, and then there will be more dogs to come.”
Caleb’s eyes softened, and she knew she had him.
“All right,” he said. “The female it is.”
On the ride home, in the purple light of a mountain dusk, Miriam held her new puppy on her lap and hugged it to sleep. By the time they reached the hacienda she had given it a name.
Hope.
Schulman said when we finish the well we can borrow his diesel pump for irrigation until we can get a windmill,” Caleb said, thinking out loud as he drove the wagon out to the homestead in Paradise Valley with the sun just beginning to rise behind him.
Levi nodded, sitting beside him on the wagon seat. “We can probably buy a windmill in Saltillo.”
“Jah, but it will take most of my cash, and if we use his pump for a while we can put off the windmill until we can raise a cash crop to sell. In the meantime, I’m thinking we need to hire a couple of the locals to help us build the house and fences. Already we don’t have enough men to put up a house, dig a well and work the fields all at the same time. It’s a hard question. If we don’t get a cash crop in the ground soon, we won’t have enough money to make it through the year, but on the other hand I don’t know if it’s wise to spend money on hired hands.”
“The train wasn’t cheap, either,” Levi said. He had paid his share of the passage, as had Ezra. “But me and Ezra have a little money put by yet. We can pay the Mexicans. Anyhow, they will work for almost nothing . . . if we can get them to work. Schulman says they are lazy.”
As they drew near to the farm they saw a lone figure at the base of the ridge overlooking their property. He was sitting on the ground with his knees drawn up and a blanket about him, but they recognized the wide, brown flat-brimmed hat even from a distance.
