The Crossings (3 page)

I can't say I ever became expert at what we did. But with Mother's help I didn't tend to make a fool of myself either. Hart and I still delivered our custom to the Little Fanny many evenings — occasionally Mother too — but with a morning's work ahead of us my habits moderated considerably. You didn't want to be riding Suzie with a pounding headache. I had money in my pockets and it more or less tended to stay there. There were nights I simply remained home at the cabin and wrote instead. My dispatches to New York increased proportionally.

So while it was Mother who taught me, it was Hart I had to thank for turning me around in the first place. And because of that, his reserve never bothered me. I figured it was just his way.

That changed when we met Elena.

Then he began to worry me.

FIVE

"
You, writer
," she said. "
Take this down
.

"
They will find it on our bodies
."

So I did.

SIX

We did well some days and other days saw nothing for our troubles but empty waterskins and dust between our teeth and on this particular evening with dark fast approaching, all we had as we rode through the scrub were two squat mustangs hobbled behind us. We'd come very far afield and you could hear the river behind us over the
click, click, click
of Hart's dice.

Mother was riding back aways with the mustangs and gnawing some dried beef he'd fished out of his saddlebag. There'd been the usual silence between Hart and I but this time I'd resolved to break it. I'd been pondering something awhile.

"The night you brought me out here, Hart," I said, "in the bar with Donaldson. Donaldson was ready to shoot you. You just sat there."

"So? What's your point?"

"So, he was ready to
shoot
you. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw."

"I guess he would have, wouldn't he."

"Hart, you looked so calm about it!"

"Guess I was. Pretty calm anyways. I'm not a real imaginative man, Bell. Most things, I walk in prepared as best I can. Then I trust to luck, that's all."

I had to wonder if part of my problem being here instead of back in Boston or Cambridge or New York was that I
was
an imaginative man. I could and did imagine rattlesnakes under the bed and scorpions in my boots and I poked beneath the bed with a stick and shook out my boots with due diligence every morning. There were a thousand ways to die out here and I'd seen many of them first hand in Puebla, Churubusco and Mexico City during the war. It didn't take much to imagine my own death courting me.

The west was not NELLIE, THE RAGPICKER'S DAUGHTER or even THE ADVENTURES OF PECOS BILL. No penny dreadful. The west was gangrene and thirst and rivers red with blood and skies so big they could crush you like a bug.

"You got family, Bell?" he said. "Never did ask you."

"Brother. Couple of nephews by now I think. Never do write one another. Why?"

He didn't really answer, only nodded.

"It's a good thing, family," he said.

We were passing some low thick scrub off left and suddenly the horses began to shy. Hart pulled his own mare to a halt and sat listening. I followed suit with Suzie. Mother rode up slow behind us.

"What we got here, John?" he said.

"Something in there. Could be a cat, maybe."

Hart pulled his Winchester out of its scabbard, cocked it and lay it across his saddle and we could hear something in there all right, moving in our direction not twenty feet away. We sat and listened and then Hart swung down abruptly off his saddle saying
that's no damn cat
and Mother and I heard it too then, a moan and labored breathing and as Hart stepped toward the brush his rifle at the ready they stumbled out practically into him. Two dark shapes one trying to support the other and failing, both going down to the earth in front of him.

I saw him step back reflexively and then for the first time I clearly saw the two women. In what little light we had it was hard to say whether it was dirt or blood that covered them but they both were naked — that we saw right away.

I swung off my horse and so did Mother.

"
Damn!
" he said.

Close up you could see that one of them was just a girl not more than sixteen, a pale slim redhead, her face pale and bloody and awash with pain, her breath coming in deep staccato gulps if and when it came at all.

The other scared hell out of me.

The look of her was savage
.

There was no other word for it. She looked up at us on her knees holding onto the Anglo girl and she was at once beautiful and terrifying — something in her eyes cold and bright as a snake's eyes or fierce as a wolf with its leg long caught in a trap and you could see the Indio blood in her broad high cheekbones but it was far more than that, something older and far more primitive. In the look of her you could almost see another world entirely.

I saw Hart flinch as her eyes went up to him and could barely believe that anything could make him do so and then saw what was perhaps the source of this woman's ferocity.

Her face had been slashed with a knife from cheek to chin. She wore the mark of the bullwhip across her back and thighs. On her left inner thigh I could make out the letter V branded into her and nearly healed. Her wrists and ankles were lacerated as though she'd been tied repeatedly and for a very long time. The stab wound in her lower back oozed blood.

And it was she who'd been supporting the Anglo girl
.

"Lord in heaven," said Mother.

He went to her and bent down and extended his hand.

"You're all right now," he said. "Take it easy. Easy."

Her eyes left Hart, who had put up his rifle but otherwise hadn't moved — it was as though he wouldn't go anywhere near this woman badly wounded though she was but there was no time to wonder about that nor any of his behavior — and went to Mother directly in front of her. Naked and unarmed she still looked dangerous as hell to me and she clutched the girl to her breasts.

Mother glanced at Hart and frowned and then looked at me.

"Gimme a hand here, Bell." And to her he said, "You got to let go of her now, ma'am. You got to let us take her. We'll take good care of her, all right? I promise. We'll take good care of the both you folks."

That
coiled
look in her eyes gradually seemed to soften. She took hold of Mother's hand finally and let the girl fall gently away into my arms and allowed Mother to pick her up which he did as easily as though she were a child. He carried her to his horse and set her down a moment beside it and then unhitched his blanket roll and wrapped it around her.

I didn't know how to handle my own part of this. The girl seemed so fragile I was afraid that the mere act of holding her might be enough to kill her somehow and I could see the deep knife wound in her ribcage steadily oozing blood and the vivid gash across her forehead. Finally Hart took the whole thing out of my hands.

"Give her here," he said.

He handed me his rifle and lifted her away.

It took us a good three hours to reach the cabin and by then the moon was full and bright. I'd been bringing up the rear leading the mustangs and the Mexican woman I'd known as Elena rode the horse's back behind Mother, her arms barely encircling his massive waist. The redheaded girl faced Hart in front of him on the saddle and he had one arm across her back pressing her to his chest and keeping her blanket in place around her, the other hand holding the reins.

I broke away from them and corralled the mustangs and rode Suzie hard to catch up with them at the cabin. Mother already had Elena seated on the rickety front steps and I saw him reach up and lift the younger girl gently away from Hart and saw that she'd bled out all over the front of him. His shirt and trousers were soaked and gleaming black with her.

Her head lolled back. Her arms dangled. Her face was pale as marble and her eyes were wide and empty. Dark blood had spilled out over her lips and chin.

"Looks like that happened quite a while ago," Mother said.

"It did."

"You should have said something."

"I did," said Hart. "I said goodbye."

He swung off his horse and tethered her and stepped past Elena whose eyes seemed to fault him personally for the girl's death and into the cabin.

It was Mother who buried her. Mother who cleaned and bandaged Elena's wounds.

Hart would not go near her.

There was something between these two that was almost as though they knew one another from some point in time previous though when I asked him about it all he did was laugh and I didn't much care for the sound of his laughter either.

By the time Mother was finished with the burying we'd tended to the horses and Elena was asleep, wrapped in blankets yet cold and sweating with fever. It was anybody's guess if she would make it through the night. Mother walked through the doorway and set down the shovel and I handed him a cup of coffee. He walked over to Hart who was arranging logs on the fire.

"Somebody branded her," he said.

"I know. This one, too."

"What the hell you make of that?"

"I don't know what to make of it, Mother."

"Me neither. Knife wound was what killed her, though. That's certain. I had myself a look at it and it was deep. I'm surprised the poor thing managed to stay alive as long as she did."

"The young tend towards living."

Mother sipped his hot coffee and glanced around the cabin.

"How you want to do this?"

"Do what?"

"Where you want to sleep?"

"The floor. Let her have the skins, the fire. Let her sweat it out there. We got enough blankets between us." Mother looked over at Elena. He looked almost shy. "I never had a woman in my house," he said. "Not ever."

"You still don't. You got a Mex."

"You figure?"

"Don't you?"

Mother looked at her again.

"No, Hart. Can't say that I do. I was wondering. She by chance remind you of somebody?"

Then it was Hart's turn to look.

"No," he said, "nobody. Not a soul."

His voice was flat and cold as I'd ever heard it. I thought that lying didn't suit him either.

At first I thought it was the coyotes' lonesome howling that awoke me in the night but it was not. It was Elena, her voice, the coyotes providing only appropriate accompaniment to whatever strange harsh language she was speaking which was not English nor Spanish but some tongue I'd never heard before nor ever wished to hear, a violent whisper, a chant almost devoid of long sonorous vowels but which were instead described in a series of short breathy interludes between the explosive dominant consonants that clicked and hissed and barked like something drawn directly from nature, from the wild, from a
jungle
, here where there was no jungle, the rattle and slither of venomous snakes, a hive of bees, the yip of a coyote, the rustle of leaves in dense air, all of these intermingled and which repeated themselves over and over as she knelt rocking back and forth naked on her knees before the fire, sweat rolling down her long scarred back, feeding broken bits of kindling to the flames. Propped up beside her against the logs was a small crucifix made of twigs and bound with strips of cloth. Beside that a tin plate of cornmeal, another of coffee beans and a third containing two broken eggs.

She had raided our supplies silent as a ghost.

And in that flickering light you could believe she was some ghost made flesh. Some ancient Indio demon summoning her brethren.

It was three hundred years since Cortez.
Aztec, Maya, Toltec, Mexica
. All gone. Or were they?

I remembered the wildness in her eyes when first we'd seen her.

I wondered what those eyes held now.

She reached over for the plate of cornmeal and tossed it into the fire. In the woodsmoke I now smelled cornbread. She began to tremble. She set the plate down and reached for the coffee beans and did the same and now I smelled morning coffee. The trembling increased. Her head rolled side to side. The rocking became an up and down motion. Her chanting increased its pace. She reached again.

I wasn't surprised to smell fried eggs as though cooking in a pan.

She slid her legs apart and the sudden erotic charge
did
take me by surprise because in that single movement all I watched and heard clarified and I knew it was some life-force she was summoning there before the fire and I could imagine a man there all along and only this moment revealed beneath her thrusting up silent and invisible as she thrust down.

Something made me turn and steal a glance at Hart and Mother. Mother faced the far wall, asleep.

Hart's eyes were open. He was watching.

She groaned and shuddered and fell silent. Her head dropped forward and then her body so that she rested on all fours for a moment breathing hard and then threw herself to the side and onto her blankets. I closed my eyes and pretended sleep.

Real sleep was long coming.

SEVEN

She told us she remembered the day she felt the full weight of what had happened to them. Not just the rapes and the humiliations, the cramped airless foul-smelling sleeping quarters or the mule work in the yard with the goats or chickens or in the garden under the ferocious blazing sun or in the stifling laundry or kitchen, all of them hobbled like horses. Not just the bullwhip.

She remembered her first time inside the hacienda.

She has been there merely five days. She has not seen her sister Celine in the last two of those days and that is a torture too. She is drawing a bucket of water from the well. It's needed in the kitchen.

Maria, the middle sister, thin-lipped, harsh and grim is beckoning to her from the porch
. Do that later,
she says
. Come here.
Elena sets the bucket down and walks past the blackened remains of one bonfire and then another. She has trouble climbing the steps to the porch. With her ankles tied together she can only take the steps one at a time. Maria is impatient
. Hurry little bitch,
she says
.