by Anya Seton
He interrupted her sharply to remind her of the fifth commandment.
‘They’re not my father and mother,’ said Fey, desperately pressing her face against the grill in her frenzy to make him understand. ‘I’m an orphan.’
‘But these good people have befriended you and brought you up as their own?’
‘Yes, padre, but——’
‘All the more reason for you to show filial gratitude and obedience.’
‘But they don’t want me! ’ cried Fey.
‘Have they said so, my child?’
‘No,’ said Fey hopelessly. ‘ I just know it. I’m different from them.’
Father Etienne sighed. How often had he heard this cry from adolescents. ‘I’m different. They don’t understand.’ The age-old tussle between the generations.
‘How old are you, my daughter?’ he asked. ‘Fourteen! Exactly. Now I wish you to keep still and listen to me.’ He lectured her for five minutes and then dismissed her.
Fey walked slowly out of the church. The brilliant sunlight in the plaza hurt her eyes after the dimness inside and her throat was tight with despair. The padre had not understood; Saint Joseph, and even Our Blessed Lady, had not been interested. She thought again of her mother, piecing together the meager facts which she remembered. She did not even know the site of Conchita’s grave, since Andrew would never visit it. But somewhere, way up north past Taos, my mother’s people lived, thought Fey. She hesitated a minute, then, moved by much the same impulse as that which had moved her father fourteen years ago, she turned to the north and the road which led toward the memory of Conchita.
I’ll find them somehow, the Valdez, she thought, and even though they were so angry long ago, perhaps they’ll have got over it now, and they’ll be glad to see me. And she trudged along the road.
She had no idea of the distance which separated her from Arroyo Hondo, a difficult three-day trip on horseback, and even had she been able to get there, it would have been useless, for after the death of old Don Diego ten years back, the two Valdez women had ceased to struggle with this new terrifying country. They had made one last act of courage, endured the rigors of the Chihuahua Trail, and returned to Mexico City.
The Hacienda Alamosa was deserted, its pink adobe walls cracked and crumbling.
At seven, the swift September twilight fell over the Taos road, and at once the clear air grew cold and an evening star shone near and brilliant above Truchas Peak. A Navajo Indian, mounted on a superb black stallion, topped one of the hills near Tesuque village. His hand tightened on the bridle as he saw a small figure plodding up the next rise. The shawled head was bent, and as the Navajo pulled up his horse, he caught the sound of sharp breathing.
‘Holá, chiquita!’ said the Indian quietly. ‘Is it not late for you to be out here alone? It may be I can help you to wherever you are going.’
Fey looked up. She saw by the silver conch shells at his belt, the two braids of hair and the black hat, that he was a Navajo, and she shrank to the side of the road. The Navajos were bad Indians; even in the Barrio Analco one heard about the horrible things they did and the hard time Colonel Kit Carson was having to subdue them.
‘You needn’t be afraid of a Navajo, child,’ said the Indian, in a calm and bitter voice. ‘ My people have become weak as rabbits and our warriors no longer fight for what is their own.’
The bitter sadness of the voice startled Fey, and she looked up at the Indian again. She saw now that he had a good face. He was not young, and in the dark, regular features there were power and wisdom. Suddenly she was no longer afraid of him; there was about him a little of her father and a little of the kindly asceticism of the image of San Francisco which stood in the niche at home.
‘I am Natanay, shaman to the Navajos,’ said the Indian, ‘and I go to Tesuque pueblo for the night. Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Fey. Cold, hunger, and the futility of her trip swept over her at once in a black flood. She was still part child, and she could no longer hold back the tears which she had tried to check.
Silently Natanay leaned over and picked her up. He held her slight figure against him and wrapped his blanket around her while he flicked the bridle. The stallion leaped forward, then settled to a swift, easy pace. Warmth and comfort stole over Fey. While the two of them rode through the night to the pueblo, she did not think. Her cheek rested against Natanay’s wool shirt beside the silver and turquoise necklace and he smelt good, of tobacco and clean, sweet earth.
She was half asleep and wholly dazed when they reached the pueblo. Natanay set her gently down on the little sandy plaza, and she had a momentary confused impression of many brown faces peering at her, of soft Indian voices, and flickering rectangles of ruddy firelight from countless open doorways. She clung to Natanay, who stood beside her, tall and stern, his hand on the stallion’s mane.
‘Go with Sahn Pové, little one,’ said Natanay, and a handsome young squaw took Fey’s hand and led the girl toward the largest of the piled dwellings which surrounded the plaza. They mounted a ladder to the second floor and entered a whitewashed room, bright with fire.
This apartment belonged to the governor of the pueblo, and Sahn Pové was the governor’s wife. She was far too courteous to show any curiosity as she brought Fey hot water to wash in, then fed the girl steaming atóle gruel and meat. Color came back into Fey’s cheeks. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling timidly at the pretty brown face. ‘I don’t know why you’re so good to me.’
All the Indians knew some Spanish; it was their chief language for intertribal communication. So Sahn Pové smiled back and answered, ‘Natanay is our honored guest. You come with him, so you are honored guest too.’
‘Who is Natanay? ’ cried Fey. The tone of her voice expressed part of the feeling the Navajo had aroused in her; trust—and a wondering reverence. Sahn Pové nodded, as though she understood.
‘He is great medicine man,’ she said, sweeping her immaculate hearth with a corn-husk broom, ‘ but his heart is torn by sorrow because the Americanos have killed so many of his people in the far sacred canon across the desert, and now they drive those that are left from their homeland. They force them to go many days’ journey to a new country. They will die.’
Sahn Pové shook her head and rose from her knees. She walked across the low room to the corner by the inner door, where there hung from the ceiling a wicker basket. She lifted a tiny baby from the basket and put it to her breast. She looked down at the nursing baby and her gentle face was darkened by a fierce protectiveness. ‘If they should take me and my baby from this pueblo, which has been the home of our fathers since long before the white man came, we would die,’ she said.
Fey stared at them and looked away, thrust for an instant outside the wall of self to realization of a bigger problem than hers. Then self inevitably swept back, and the personal application. I have no home, she thought. I belong nowhere and to no one. And she envied Sahn Pové the sense of place, of a continuance worth fighting for.
There was a stir at the door, and Natanay stepped over the high threshold, followed by the governor and the cacique of the pueblo. Sahn Pové shrank into the background as a woman should, but Fey stood uncertainly by the fireplace. Natanay paused, then walked straight to her. They stood looking at one another, the Navajo shaman and the bewildered, unhappy girl. His wise eyes gravely searched her face and her heart.
The two pueblo leaders waited quietly. The room grew tensely silent.
Then Natanay put his hand on Fey’s forehead. ‘Shut your eyes, little one.’
Fey obeyed. The touch on her forehead had vibrancy and goodness. Her desolation vanished and was replaced by a tremulous sense of waiting. Her mind stilled.
‘What do you see?’ asked Natanay.
At first she saw nothing but a rushing blackness. Gradually this faded into gray mist, until through the clearing mist she saw a green, happy valley bright between encircling cliffs. While she watched, the valley darke
ned and became blood-red, and it seemed that the red heaved and bubbled around small anguished figures whose faces were upturned in supplication.
She described this in a halting voice and the pressure of Natanay’s hand deepened as he answered, ‘That is the desecrated canon of my people. Do you see more?’
She waited, and against the back of her eyelids the scene changed to a far-off place on a plain where were gathered a hushed, beaten race. In the fraction of a second in which she saw them time telescoped. She saw four winter snows drifting down on their bowed shoulders, and then the sun burst out while they raised their hands toward it and shouted thanksgiving. And they began to march again toward the west.
She opened her eyes and Natanay removed his hand. ‘It is so,’ he said. ‘ It is what the sacred voice of the canon tells me, too. After four winters my people will be freed. You have power, little white girl.’
The two Tesuque Indians murmured and nodded. From the back of the room, Sahn Pové gazed at Fey in awe.
‘Our council will wait,’ said Natanay to the Tesuques. ‘ First I must talk with this child and help her.’
He pulled a deerhide pouch from his belt, taking from it three curiously shaped earthen figures and several small bags of colored sand. Crouching on the spotless floor, he poured the sands, blue, black, yellow, and red, to form a geometric picture. This was not one of the traditional Navajo sand paintings; neither the place nor the occasion was appropriate for that. It was a symbolic ceremony to heighten perception, sand divination such as desert peoples have used since the beginning.
The firelight glowed on Natanay’s calm face, on the lean, brown hands skillfully and swiftly directing the little streams of sand. When he had finished, he spoke low, chanting words in his own tongue.
Fey, watching, felt the rhythm of the chant. It lulled her like the wind singing through the pines on Atalaya, and like the beat of rain on sunbaked earth.
The chant ended, and Natanay stood up. He looked down at Fey and spoke to her in Spanish, slowly, while his voice retained the deep, singing tone.
‘You are born to great vision, little one. For you they have made thin the curtain which hides the real. But there is danger. You must listen to the voice of the spirit, or your body and its passions will betray you.’
He stopped, gazing at her intensely, as though that were all. And Fey, obscurely disappointed, repeated the words to herself.
‘Why, that’s the sort of thing the padres say,’ she murmured, surprised.
Natanay’s grave mouth moved in a smile.
‘Ay, pobrecita,’ he said. ‘Do you think Truth is different on different lips? It is the same. There are many trails up the mountain, but in time they all reach the top.’
He sighed, seeing that she did not understand him. He took another pinch of blue sand and encircled the little painting on the floor. ‘You must go back to the life you are living. You are not yet ready. When the time comes for change, be certain that you go through the right door.’
He paused and looked at her again.
‘Will I really get away!’ cried Fey, her face shining. ‘Will I have a silk dress and a fine house like the Delgados? Will I be somebody? ’
Natanay passed his hand slowly over the sand picture, destroying it.
‘You will make of your life what you will,’ he said quietly. ‘And it may be that some day you will long for the simple beauties of the sunlight and the winds and the high mountains again. Crave them as the desert wanderer craves water. And you will not be able to find them.’
Fey said nothing. Reverence for Natanay kept her quiet, but he read her face. He shook his head and his eyes grew weary, full of a pitying gentleness.
He reached inside his woolen shirt and pulled out a turquoise pendant, roughly triangular, big as a sparrow’s egg. It was strung on a red wool thread. He broke the thread and held the turquoise out to Fey. ‘This is our sky-stone,’ he said, ‘sacred to my people because it is made of the color of the Great Spirit’s dwelling. I, Natanay, the shaman, give it to you, white child, that you may remember that your power comes from the Spirit.’
Fey flushed with joy. The blue stone was lovelier than any she had ever seen on the Indians; not the greenish matrix turquoise from the Cerillos mines, but a burning azure without flaw.
Natanay cut across her delighted thanks. ‘ Now go with Sahn Pové. She will show you where to sleep. In the morning a Tesuque boy can take you back to Santa Fe.’ He looked for confirmation to the governor of the Pueblo, who nodded.
‘Won’t I see you again?’ cried Fey piteously. She had been deaf to his warning; it had held too much flavor of the exhortations delivered by the padres on fiesta days, but for the man she felt hero-worship.
Natanay shook his head. ‘ I go to Taos to plead with Cristóbal Carson for my people.’ He raised his hand and uttered a Navajo blessing. He paused a moment and repeated it in Spanish. ‘ Que Dios te bendiga, muchacha.’ Then he pulled his fine woven blanket around his shoulders, and the three men gathered together around the hearth.
The next morning Fey returned to the Barrio Analco, having jogged back the fifteen miles on an Indian burro. Ramona was exceedingly glad to see her, and Fey was touched by the children’s greeting. They had imagined dreadful things; she had been eaten by bears or wildcats in the mountains, a rattlesnake had bitten her, or, worse yet, a band of wicked Indians had kidnapped and ravished her. To all this Fey gave no answer except to smile and tell them she had been lost. She never mentioned Natanay or the night in Tesuque pueblo, knowing that Ramona would be horrified at such heathen doings. And she explained the turquoise only by saying that she had found it. She strung it on a. gilt thread filched from the altar cloth La Gertrudis was penitently embroidering, and she wore it constantly, not for the symbolic meaning which Natanay had tried to give her, but because it was beautiful and the first thing of value she had owned.
Chapter Four
IN AUGUST OF 1867, when Fey was seventeen, Natanay’s prophecy came true, and the first phase of her life ended. Escape offered itself through two doors, but so eager was she to rush through the first that it was not for years that she discovered the other one had been there.
From time to time, during these past years, Fey had gone to rico homes near the plaza to help in the kitchens or dining-room when the Delgados or the Señas or the Garcías were entertaining. In the beginning she had been rebellious and accompanied Ramona with ill grace, but gradually she became used to it, and she learned many things which she stored away for the future. Not only the material secrets of fine living—such as the proper preparation of rich foaming chocolate and the frying of the delicious sopai-pillas which accompanied it, or the perfuming and pressing of the lace mantillas from Spain—but really helpful knowledge. She went silently and efficiently about her duties. None of the families who employed her ever noticed her particularly, but she watched and learned. It is so, with downcast eyes and a half-smile, that a young lady encourages a lover, even under her mother’s disapproving nose. It is so, with a barely visible twist of the fan, that a dona warns an admirer that the husband is coming. It is thus, with tears and blandishments and little counter-accusations, that one raises such a cloying fog that a husband cannot penetrate it when one has lost unconscionable sums at monte and baccarat. Fey went back each time to the Barrio Analco and pondered these things. She neither approved nor disapproved, but she was intensely interested, and always there was the sensation of marking time.
In July, she had her first association with an American. The same Mrs. Wilson who, together with Mrs. Bray, now transferred back East, had been the unwitting causes of Fey’s rebellion.
This time Mrs. Wilson crossed the river alone in search of a maid, and this time she was successful. Mrs. Wilson, too, had learned much in three years, and in this encounter with Fey she was tactful and courteous. Neither remembered the other and Fey went back to the garrison out of simple curiosity. It was a good thing, perhaps, that she should discover somethin
g about the Americanos, because, incredible as it was, it appeared that the greater part of the country outside was composed of women exactly like Mrs. Wilson.
From the first Minnie Wilson was delighted with her, and Fey was forced by excited questions into telling her fascinated employer something of her history.
‘My dear——’ boasted Mrs. Wilson to the other officers’ wives. ‘The girl tells the most extraordinary story. I know one can’t ever believe anything they say, but really it rings true. It seems she isn’t related to those peons at all; her father was a Scotch doctor here and her mother positively from a good Spanish family. I do feel we should do something for her. She isn’t the servant type at all, and she does speak quite a Scotchy kind of English with a little Spanish accent, it’s too romantic for words.’
Mrs. Wilson talked so much and so long about her find that her husband was moved to come home early one day and view this treasure. Mrs. Wilson flutteringly ushered him out to the kitchen where Fey sat on the floor expertly shucking blue com into a brown earthenware dish.
‘Here’s Captain Wilson come to see you, Fey,’ said the lady importantly.
Fey raised her lids; the gray eyes looked up at the captain, her full red lips parted in a faint smile. ‘How do you do/ she said carefully.
‘Howdy do, I’m sure,’ said the captain in a startled voice, his hand flew to glossy side whiskers and patted them. He straightened his shoulders.
Fey lowered her lashes and went on shucking com. She wasn’t interested in the captain; she was thinking not very happily about the baile tonight. She loved the dancing, but it was getting harder and harder to parry the assaults of the men. Lately they had taken to pinching her breasts or buttocks, to pressing thick wet lips on her neck. There wasn’t one of them that she liked and she had not the faintest intention of acceding to Ramona’s pleadings or Pedro’s commands that a great girl of seventeen better get herself a man while she could. But the bailes were getting impossible.
