“Why do you care?” he asked.
“You’re my son,” she said. “Can’t I be curious? I wonder about you.”
“I don’t go to the Apaches,” Joey said. “If I ever go to the Apaches again, it will be to kill the ones who beat me.”
Later, by accident, Maria found out the truth. Joey went down the river, as far down as Laredo, and he went to steal. He was a thief, and a gifted one. Olin Roy told her about Joey’s thieving. Olin said that Joey had found a cave, somewhere in the mountains north of Boquillas. Olin had glimpsed Joey once, at dusk, on the Mexican side of the river. Joey had been carrying a fine saddle, with silver trappings; the silver shone in the late light. Olin knew the saddle was stolen, because only two nights earlier he had stayed at the home of the hidalgo Joey stole it from. The old man thought an Indian had taken it, because there were no horse tracks leading to or from his ranch. There were no tracks at all.
It was a long way from the hidalgo’s ranch to the mountains near Boquillas. And yet Joey was there, by the river, carrying the saddle. It was a thing an Apache could do. Apaches had little use for horses. They walked, and they left no tracks.
Olin Roy camped near the river that night, meaning to see if he could find Joey the next day. But Olin didn’t find him. There were many caves in the high, limy cliffs, and the mountains rolled back for many miles into Texas, where the river made its great bend. Cougars lived in the caves, cougars and even a few grizzly bears.
Olin told Billy Williams what he had seen, and Billy told many others. Soon a legend was born, the legend of Joey Garza’s cave. It was said that Joey was filling a cave with things he had stolen: rifles, fine spurs, fancy bridles, ivory combs, and jewels, stolen from the bedrooms of rich ranchers on both sides of the river. The river was no boundary to Joey. He crossed it as he would cross any stream.
Olin told Maria what he had seen. He loved Maria, and knew that she worried about her son. He also knew that things had not been good between mother and son since Joey returned from the Apaches.
“When he left here he was on a horse, a sorrel he got from Ramon’s son,” Maria said, in response to Olin’s news. “When he came back, he was walking. He leaves on horseback—he returns on foot. Or he leaves on foot and returns with a horse. He’s a boy I don’t understand.”
“Maybe Joey eats the horses. Apaches do, you know,” Olin said, when he was discussing the matter with Billy Williams. “It’s a long way from Ojinaga to Laredo, but Joey steals from Laredo like it was a candy store.”
“If he steals horses, then it’s better that he eats them,” Billy said. He had always liked Joey. He thought he was a good boy, but strange. Being strange was not something he could hold against anyone; after all, he himself was strange.
“Life makes everybody strange, if you keep living long enough,” Billy told Maria, once.
Maria disagreed. “I am not strange,” she said. “I could be a happy woman, if I had a little help.”
“Well, I’ll help you,” Billy said. “You name it, I’ll do it.”
“If you really wanted to help me, I wouldn’t have to name it,” Maria said. “You’d be doing it right now.”
She smiled when she said it, though.
Billy Williams felt disquieted. They had just eaten a good meal, cabrito and frijoles. What could it be that Maria wanted help with? He considered asking, but in the end, he didn’t. He got drunk instead.
Maria had almost no money. She worked as a midwife for food, for herself and Rafael and Teresa. Her two brothers had run away to Texas, and her little sister had died one winter; she got a sickness in her chest and died within a week. Maria had to work hard to see that there was enough food for Rafael and Teresa. When Joey returned from his journeys, he always had money. He wore it in a belt that went across his shoulders, like the belt of the machete she had once carried to defend herself against Ramon.
It angered Maria that her son would not share his money, not even the few pesos it would have taken, every week, to keep his family in food. Besides her midwifing, Maria did washing and cleaning, so as to be able to give corn and frijoles to her children.
Joey liked for his mother to wash his clothes, because she did it well. When she did them, they were clean and soft. Joey took the soft, clean clothes as his due. He never offered to pay for the food he ate, and he took no notice of his brother and sister at all, unless he was in the mood to torment one of them.
One day when Maria was tired and angry—an old man she cooked for had tried to poke his bony hand between her legs, and when she shoved him away, he spat at her—she challenged Joey about the cave.
“I hear you have a cave full of treasures near Boquillas,” she said. “Is that true?”
Joey looked at her insolently, as he always did when questioned. Who was this woman to ask questions of him? She was a woman who had whored with four men. Perhaps there had been even more.
“Where do you go, when you go?” Maria asked, when Joey said nothing. She felt like slapping him, maybe punching him with her fist. Rafael and Teresa, her damaged children, loved her. Even Rafael would come to her bed and try to speak to her, to express his little hopes. If he had a new chick, he would bring it to his mother and offer it to her as a present, cupping it tenderly in his large hands. Teresa would come to her bed to cuddle with her every morning. If Maria was sad, if tears leaked from her eyes, Teresa would whisper to her and wipe the tears away.
“Don’t worry, Mama,” Teresa said. “I am here. Rafael is here. We will take care of you.”
It made Maria angry that her children who had no gifts—one who could not see, the other who could not reason—would help her with their love; while Joey, the brilliant one, the one whose mind was quick as a young deer, whose eyes were blue, whose teeth were so white that girls and even grown women melted at his smile—Joey gave nothing, not even little scraps of information. Maria did not really much want his money; what she wanted was his help.
“Someone saw you near Boquillas,” Maria said. “Near the cave where you keep the treasures.”
“I don’t have a cave,” Joey said. “I go to Piedras Negras, not Boquillas. There is nothing in Boquillas.”
Maria thought of following Joey to his cave. She didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t have one. She didn’t want his money for herself, she wanted it for her children. She had heard that in the City of Mexico, there were doctors who could cure many ills. It was said that there were doctors who could make blind people see. She wanted to take Teresa to such a doctor. It saddened her that her little girl had never seen the beauty of the world.
Also, she had heard that there were doctors who could help people whose minds were incomplete, or whose thoughts could not stay in order. She wanted to take Rafael to such a doctor, so that someday he could think like other people.
Maria wanted to take her children and go and seek the great doctors, in the City of Mexico, but she had no money. Joey had money. Maria wished he could be generous and give her what she needed, but she knew he never would. Joey was not generous, and not interested in her life or the lives of his brother and sister. He was only interested in himself.
“You help no one,” she said to Joey one day, bitter.
“I help myself,” Joey said.
“Are you the only one in the world?” Maria asked. “What is wrong with you?”
Joey didn’t answer. He left, as he always did if she asked questions.
The day Maria rode off to Crow Town to warn Joey that Captain Call, the famous manhunter, had been sent to kill him, Billy Williams sobered up and made food for Maria’s children.
As he cooked and set the plates, Billy felt sad. He should have gone with Maria, although he was nearly as blind as Teresa. He would have gone if Maria had asked him, should have gone, even though she hadn’t asked. He was too old for places such as Crow Town. Going there might mean his death, but it also might mean Maria’s death. He would worry now until the moment he saw her again. He wondered if Mar
ia had refused him because he was a Texan. After all, her husbands had been Mexican. He didn’t know if that had been her reason. Probably he had made some mistake and Maria had turned away from him instead of toward him. He ate his frijoles in sadness; he was old; it was too late. The large boy crooned, the little blind girl chattered. Billy thought it would be enough if Maria could just escape harm, if she could return from Crow Town to her children. His job was to stay sober and take care of her children.
Later, though, when Maria’s children were asleep on their little pallets, the power of the lost, never captured love became too much for Billy. He couldn’t bear it, not sober. And he began to get drunk again.
13.
“NOW YOU WISH you’d gone, don’t you?” Lorena said.
Pea was standing just outside their back door, looking across the plains. It was past time to get the team hitched, to begin the day’s work, but he was just standing there, looking across the plains. A norther had blown in around morning, and it was going to be a cold ride to school. But that wasn’t what worried Lorena. For nearly a month after sending Call off without him, Pea Eye had worked with a will. But then, his will began to falter. Usually, he was out of bed and at work in the kitchen, getting a fire started or the boys up or making a beginning at breakfast, before she finished feeding Laurie and hauled herself from under the covers. Ten minutes more in bed, to gather her energies for the day, was something Lorena had come to count on, but she was able to count on it only because Pea was so good about getting up and getting started with the early chores.
He still got up and made a start on things, but with only half a will. He made mistakes, put one boy into another boy’s clothes, burned the porridge; he seemed to be distracted, or in a daze, or something. Instead of saving her time, he cost her time, all of it spent correcting his mistakes.
The same distractedness stayed with him throughout the day. Clarie complained that he gave hay to the horses, but forgot the milk cow. He went off to work, as he always did, but instead of working from dawn until dark as he had to if the farm was to flourish, he would come home in the middle of the afternoon. Often, she would find him in the barn, when she returned from school. He would have taken a harness to the workbench, meaning to repair it, but then he didn’t repair it. He would just hold it, and go into his daze.
Lorena let him be for three weeks. She had days when she didn’t concentrate so well, either. Sometimes, she forgot things too, or did them badly, or just felt lazy. She didn’t fret that much about human inconsistence, for she was human, and inconsistent herself.
But after a time, Pea’s distractedness began to irritate her. They all had their work; she wanted him to do his, as she did hers. Hard work was the basis of their life. In the past, when Pea had gone off with Call, she and Clarie had worked harder than ever, so they would still have a life and a farm when Pea got back. They did well, too. They couldn’t do all the fieldwork, but otherwise, they kept things going so well that sometimes, it took a week or two to adjust to having Pea back. None of the stock died, the barn didn’t burn down, and the essential things got done.
Picking up the slack when Pea Eye was gone was one thing; having to pick it up when he was there was vexing. Even more vexing was the cause of his distraction: he wished he had gone with Captain Call.
Lorena stepped outside, in the cutting wind, and repeated herself.
“Now you wish you’d gone, don’t you?” she said again.
“I wish the Captain hadn’t gone,” Pea Eye said. “I wish he’d quit.”
“Quit and do what?” Lorena asked. “He doesn’t know how to do anything but kill.”
“That ain’t fair, Lorie,” Pea Eye said. If there was one thing he hated to do, it was argue with Lorena, his wife, about Captain Call, his old commander. Yet that was exactly what he was doing, and in a cold wind, too.
“It is true,” Lorena said. “Maybe in the days of the Indian troubles there was a need for a man like him.”
“You know there was. Look what Blue Duck did, and he was just one man,” Pea Eye said.
“I don’t need to remember what Blue Duck did,” Lorena said. “I taught myself to forget it. Clara taught me about forgetting things like that.”
“Why, he never bothered Clara,” Pea Eye said. He, too, tried not to think about the terrible time when Blue Duck, one of the worst outlaws ever to terrorize the plains, had kidnapped Lorena. Gus McCrae had rescued her and she had survived; she had recovered, and become his wife. What had happened with Blue Duck was the kind of thing that happened to people all over the frontier, in those days. He himself had fought over twenty engagements with Indians, and the first one had frightened him the most. It was known to locals as the Battle of the Stone Houses. The Indians fired the grass and stole the Rangers’ horses, putting them afoot in territory where it was easily possible to starve. They hadn’t starved, but Pea Eye had been a little deaf in his left ear ever since, the result of a terrified Ranger firing his rifle into the smoke, when the smoke was so thick he was unaware that Pea Eye was kneeling only a yard away.
Those had been hard times. Without the Captain’s and Gus’s leadership, Pea Eye doubted that he would have been alive to try dirt farming on the plains.
Clara Allen, though, lived in Nebraska. So far as he knew, she had never been taken by anyone as bad as Blue Duck.
“Clara has things to forget, too,” Lorena insisted. “There’s other kinds of bad things besides what happened to me. All three of her boys died. We got three boys. How would we be if all three of them died?”
“Oh, Lord, don’t even mention it,” Pea Eye said. “Let’s get back in the house.”
He felt chastened. Of course, losing children was worse than being half deafened in a fight; the thought of his children dying was not something he even wanted to let his mind approach. Lorie, as usual, was right. Life was hard for women, too, even though they didn’t often have to go into battle.
“Clara has more to forget than I do,” Lorena said, saddened by her own statement and by the memory of Clara’s kindness—and Clara’s sadness, which, now that Clara was older and had seen her girls marry, only seemed to sit on her the more heavily, judging from the letters she wrote Lorena. At least Clara loved horses, and had her herd to work with.
“If I was to lose three children, I’d give up,” she told her husband. “If I even lost one child, I might give up. But Clara lost all her boys, and she didn’t give up. And everything she did for me she did after her grief.”
“I wasn’t saying anything bad about Clara,” Pea Eye said. “I guess if it hadn’t been for her, we might not have come together, and I wouldn’t have none of this. I’m obliged to Clara, and I always will be. I didn’t have nothing but the clothes on my back, and she helped me. I ain’t the kind of man who forgets the folks that helped him.
“It’s just that Captain Call is one of the folks who helped me,” he said. “Now he came asking for my help, and I didn’t go. I can’t not feel that’s wrong, even though I know I’d feel wronger if I went.”
“Not wronger—more wrong,” Lorena corrected.
All of a sudden, without her wanting it or even expecting it, tears flooded her eyes, tears of anger and hurt. It would never be finished, the trouble over Call, not while the Captain was alive, it wouldn’t.
“Go!” she said, vehemently. “Go! I want you to. I’ll never really have you while he’s alive, and neither will the children. Go! And if you get killed, good riddance!”
Pea Eye looked at her, stunned.
“I don’t want to go,” he said. “I told you why and I told the Captain why. Since we been married, I ain’t really wanted to go.”
“Haven’t really wanted to go!” she corrected him, again. “Haven’t!”
Pea Eye just looked at her, bewildered. He saw her tears and her anger, but didn’t really understand that she was trying to correct his grammar.
“I didn’t go,” he pointed out. “I didn’t go. I didn’t want to, neithe
r. It’s just that I feel bad for the Captain. I can’t help it.”
Lorena turned away. It was a subject she was sick of. She didn’t speak another word to Pea, before leaving for school. But the sad look in his eyes, when she and the children left, made her feel sorry all day, and as soon as she got home she went down to the barn, where she found him trying to straighten a horseshoe. He was not that good with tools, Pea wasn’t. Clarie could often fix things that left Pea Eye at a loss.
But seeing him holding the shoe in his hand—it seemed to Lorena that he was just making it more bent—touched her. He was not mechanical, or even very competent physically. It was a wonder he had survived, in a place where physical competence was so important. Yet his very lack of skill in areas where most frontiersmen excelled, moved her. It always had. Pea Eye was a man she could do things for, and he would let her do things for him. He accepted her instruction gratefully, whereas most men she had tried to instruct, in even small, unimportant matters, had usually bristled and become angry; in some cases, even violently angry. But Pea Eye had no violence in him, and he surrendered meekly and tried to pay attention when she or Clarie was trying to show him how to do some simple task.
“I didn’t mean that about good riddance if you didn’t come back,” she said. “I’m sorry I said it. I was just mad.”
When Lorena apologized to him, which she did almost every time she got mad at him, and she got mad at him fairly often, Pea Eye felt even more unhappy. Lorena oughtn’t to be having to apologize. In his eyes, Lorie was never wrong. If they disagreed, he was the one who was wrong. In the matter of the Captain, he had to feel doubly wrong: in relation to Lorena and his family, if he went; in relation to the Captain, if he didn’t.
But this time, it seemed, he felt even worse. The Captain had looked old, when they met by the train. In fact, the Captain was old. He oughtn’t to be chasing bandits, at his age. Of course, ordinary bandits, of which there were a great many still running loose in the West, would give the Captain no trouble, even at his age.
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