Paradise Valley (20 page)

Pelao.

“I wonder what he’s doing here,” Levi said. “After what Schulman told us I hope he doesn’t think we’re going to hire
him
.”

“Well, let’s not be too quick to judge,” Caleb said to his young son-in-law. “He seems able enough, and there’s two sides to every story.”

Caleb halted the pair of Belgians near the well site and climbed down to start unloading. While he was untying the ropes at the back of the wagon a low voice behind him said, “Señor Bender?”

Pelao was standing behind him, the moth-eaten blanket still draped over his shoulders.

“I come to work for you,” Pelao said in Spanish, then glanced around at the well, the saw pit, the half-plowed field. “You need help.”

Caleb chuckled. “I never heard you speak before. I wasn’t sure you could.”

This, Pelao did not answer. He stared blankly.

“What about Schulman?” Caleb asked. “I thought you worked for him.”

Pelao’s head turned sideways momentarily. He spat on the ground, and then his steady gaze came back to Caleb.

“
Veo
,” Caleb said.
I see
. He thought for a long moment, trying to find the Spanish to say what he wanted. “It’s true, we do need help. Your troubles with Señor Schulman need not follow you here, but I expect you to do as I say and work as I work. Do that, Pelao, and you will be treated with respect.”

Pelao’s eyes narrowed. “My name is not Pelao,” he said in Spanish, speaking slowly, apparently having heard enough to know the language was still difficult for Caleb. “That name was a gift from Schulman, a callous word for someone with no education. It is his way of calling me an ignorant savage. My people are the Nahua, and in my native tongue my name is Tlacayaotl. It is a proud name, a warrior name.”

Caleb tried it, but stumbled over the first syllable.

The native smiled. “Nahuatl is difficult for a Yanqui tongue. My mother’s Spanish name for me was Domingo, because I was born on Sunday.”

“Domingo,” Caleb repeated. “That I can pronounce.”

Rachel and Miriam, unloading the shovels and hoes they would need for their brickwork, watched Domingo climb down into the cistern with Aaron and Levi to begin drilling the radial holes.

“Did Dat just hire him?” Miriam whispered. “I thought Schulman said he couldn’t be trusted.”

“Jah, but you know Dat,” Rachel said, hefting two shovels onto her shoulder. “He makes up his own mind about people. Anyway, Dat’s a good judge of character.”

Harvey and Ezra unloaded the plow and switched the Belgians over to it. Domingo had taken Harvey’s place in the cistern, freeing him to plow the cornfield.

Not more than a half hour later, mixing mud, Rachel stopped to wipe her brow and saw the Belgians standing idle at the far end of a freshly plowed furrow, and Harvey wading off through the uncut prairie grass beyond them.

She nudged Miriam and pointed. “There goes Harvey. Doesn’t matter if it’s Ohio or Mexico, as soon as he starts work in the morning he has to stop and go,” she chuckled.

Then she saw her brother leap into the air sideways, falling, losing his hat. He popped up from the grass immediately and bolted toward them, snatching at his left pant leg, running with a pronounced limp over the soft, plowed field, shouting and waving.

“Dat!” she cried out, pointing. “Something’s wrong with Harvey!”

Caleb and Ezra dropped what they were doing and ran toward Harvey, who fell to his knees as soon as they reached him.

Rachel and Miriam ran to see what happened. Harvey was screaming, and she knew pain would not have done that. It was fear – Harvey was in a panic.

“
Schlange!
” he cried.
Snake!
“It bit my leg!”

By the time she reached the little huddle in the field, her father had pulled up Harvey’s pant leg and rolled him over onto his stomach. There were two puncture wounds in the center of his calf, the skin around it already red and swelling. Aaron, Levi, and Domingo had climbed out of the hole to see what the fuss was about and now leaned over Harvey. Ada came puffing up to the group last and squeezed in between them to look. Her eyes went wide when she saw Harvey’s calf and heard the word
snake
. She flung her hands in the air and bolted back the way she came, screaming, Miriam hot on her heels to make sure she didn’t fall into the well or run off to the ridge.

Rachel’s heart froze. The locals had told them the nearest doctor was thirty miles over the mountains in Agua Nueva, and no one in the family had any experience with snakebites. The thing that scared her most was the fear in her father’s face.

Dat looked up, and his eyes swept the little circle. “What do we do?” he cried, near panic himself.

Domingo knelt beside Harvey. He’d left his own hat in the back of the wagon, and his long black hair hung loose, hiding his face.

“What kind of snake?” he asked, in Spanish.

Lying on his stomach, Harvey had to turn his head and look over his shoulder to see Domingo. At the moment, Spanish words escaped him. He held up a forefinger, twitched it back and forth rapidly and hissed between his teeth. A rattler.

Domingo’s hand slipped behind his back and reappeared with a knife in it. Without a word he slit quickly into the flesh of Harvey’s calf, straight across the two puncture wounds.

“Leave him be!” Levi yelled. Unsure of the native’s intentions and unwilling to wait and see what else he would do with the knife, Levi grabbed Domingo by his shoulders, pulled him off of Harvey and sent him sprawling backward.

Dat snatched off Harvey’s suspenders and began winding them around the leg just below the knee.

The leg was bleeding profusely now, from Domingo’s cut. Dat slid his own pocketknife, closed, under the loop of suspenders and twisted it several times, cinching the tourniquet tight. Then he sat back on his haunches and looked up at the sky.

“Gott, what do we do?” he prayed, anguish written on his face. Rachel knelt and prayed. Levi glowered. It was Ezra who first heard a noise and looked back toward the wagon.

“Is he stealing our horse?”

After coming to the site in the surrey that morning the girls had unhitched the buggy horse and left it tied to the back of the empty wagon. Domingo, apparently taking advantage of the diversion, had untied the horse, leaped on its back and was now spurring it to a full gallop, racing away toward the ridge.

Levi glared after him. “I knew that Indian couldn’t be trusted.”

“There is no time to worry about that now,” Dat said. “Is there a doctor at the hacienda?”

Rachel shook her head. “No, I heard Señor Fuentes say the doctor only comes when Señor Hidalgo is here. He travels with the haciendado, and right now they are in Europe. There is no doctor in the village.”

“Well, we have to do
something
. Bring some kerosene!”

Ezra ran to the wagon and fetched a gallon can from the toolbox. Dat opened the can and poured kerosene directly into the knife wound on Harvey’s calf, washing out the blood and revealing red meat. Harvey didn’t even flinch.

“Maybe that will wash the poison out,” Dat said, but he didn’t look convinced. When he noticed that Harvey’s ashen face was lying on the dirt, he took his own hat off and placed it gently under the boy’s head. “We will wait and see. It’s no good to move him yet. Let him calm down and slow the poison a little bit.”

They heard hoofbeats and looked up to see Domingo charging toward them from the ridge, gripping the horse’s mane in his fists and hauling back on it as he drew near. He leaped off the horse and landed nimbly on his feet, so close by that his momentum carried him running into the little circle, where he brushed Levi roughly aside.

Kneeling by the stricken boy, Domingo leaned over, put his hands on both ends of the cut and squeezed, opening the wound like a change purse.

Then he spat.

A big mouthful of some viscous yellow substance splattered right down into the cut on Harvey’s leg – something Domingo had been holding in his mouth, chewing. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and then, without a word, pulled a bandanna from around his neck and wrapped the wound with it, tying it tightly when he was done.

It all happened so fast, none of them had time to object. Rachel could only stare openmouthed at Domingo as he rose to his feet.

“
Que es?
” Dat asked, proper Spanish eluding him in the heat of the moment.

“
Raíz negra,
” Domingo said, pointing a thumb back toward the tree line at the base of the ridge.
Black root
. “Nahua medicine for snakebite.” He pointed at Harvey’s leg. “If I was quick enough, he will walk in two days. You will see.”

Dat took a deep breath, staring hard at Domingo. “Sí,” he said. “We’ll see.”

There was nothing else to do now but send the boy back home and let his mother tend to him, so they loaded him into the buggy and hitched up the horse. Rachel drove. Harvey lay in the back, nauseated, sweating profusely. Miriam held his head and prayed.

Caleb took over the plowing, fretting constantly about his son and glancing a million times down the road toward the hacienda wishing for news, but there was nothing he could do. It would have been a waste of time for all of them to stop work, and it would only worry Harvey. If all the men of the family came home to stand over his bed, Harvey would think he was dying.

Rachel and Miriam returned in the buggy at midday, bringing lunch. They also brought good news.

“Harvey’s feeling pretty good,” Rachel said. “His leg is swelling really big, but it’s not turning black around the wound anymore. It’s not even as red as it was before.”

“And the fever is almost gone,” Miriam said, casting a curious glance at Domingo, who was leaning casually against the wagon wheel.

“The Nahua have lived with the rattlesnake much longer even than they have lived with the Spaniard,” he said, as if the two were synonymous. “When it comes to snakes, maybe savages are not so ignorant.”

Driving home that evening in the purple twilight, Caleb eavesdropped on his son and son-in-law, who were riding behind him on the wagon.

“He’s a pretty good worker,” Aaron said. “Almost like an Amishman.”

Levi, lying on his back utterly exhausted and covered in mud from head to toe, had to raise his hat from his face to reply. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right. He’s not so bad, once you get used to his ways. I still don’t like him much, but he sure knows how to work. Why, that Indian worked almost as hard as I did, and mebbe
twice
as hard as you.” Levi lowered his hat back down over a wry smile, waiting for Aaron’s comeback.

It didn’t take long.

“You’re forgetting, Levi,” Aaron said quietly. “I was there.”

Everyone on the wagon got a chuckle out of this inside joke. A few years earlier, Aaron and his twin brother, Amos, had gone on a fishing trip with some of their cousins to a river up beyond Akron. When they returned, Amos told everyone at the dinner table about how they’d gotten bored and started skipping rocks, and he was the only one who could skip a rock all the way across the river.

“Why, that river must have been a quarter mile across!” the irrepressible Amos said, to doubtful stares.

In the ensuing silence Aaron quietly pointed out, “The river I saw wasn’t more than a hundred feet at the widest place.”