After Eden

by Joyce Brandon

  He lifted each blanket in turn. Father, mother, sisters, uncle, and aunt were all there, but they were not real to him. Could these waxen, inert, already stinking corpses be his family? Insulated by shock, he could not relate these bodies to the people he loved.

  Outside, he found the shovel and the pitiful hole that Tía Andrea had dug. While Antonio knelt beside his parents’ bodies, Mateo dug a wide grave. At first Antonio would not touch the bodies, but Mateo insisted. They carried the bodies from the chapel. It was a bad thing, this carrying of dead loved ones. Antonio sobbed brokenly the whole time. Mateo did not cry, but it started a terrible sickness within him. Their bloodless skin and inert heaviness imprinted itself on his outraged brain. He could feel their deadness in his head, but he could not cry.

  When they had covered the communal grave with dirt, Mateo explained to Antonio what he would do.

  “You are insane! They will kill you, too.” Cheeks wet with tears, Antonio shook his head. He did not want to lose Mateo as well. Then he would have no one.

  “The colonel must answer to someone. I will find out who, and then I will report his crimes, and he will pay.”

  Antonio Amparo shook his head in vehement disbelief. Mateo was either a fool or in shock. Men who raped and killed did not report to anyone.

  They unloaded their quarry in silence and left them with Tía Andrea. At least she would not starve.

  Bustling with activity, the fort looked formidable. At least two hundred soldiers billeted there. Trappers came and went; wagons of supplies rumbled in and out. Peónes shuffled about their business; a dozen Indian scouts lounged around the stores.

  “Let’s go,” Mateo said. They sat their horses on a rise in the road. The fort was about a quarter of a mile away.

  “I go no farther,” Antonio said. “I will wait here.”

  Mateo let his lips curl with scorn, but he said nothing. He kicked his horse forward.

  A soldier supplied the name of the man in charge: General Whittier. Mateo found the general’s office and told the sergeant at the desk that he wanted to see the general.

  Smirking and leaning back in his chair, the sergeant eyed the young man, no more than a boy, really, in spite of his size. He was a pretty one…probably one of those goddamned haughty criollos who still thought the queen ran everything…

  “The general is busy,” he said flatly.

  “Thank you,” Mateo said politely. He walked purposefully to the closed door and opened it.

  “Hey! You can’t go in there.”

  Mateo stepped inside and closed the door after him.

  “General Whittier, my name is Mateo de Mara Garcia-Lorca. I apologize for my impertinence, but some of your men have committed terrible crimes against my family.”

  “What the hell!” Blustering and turning red in the face, Whittier stood up. “Sergeant!” he shouted over Mateo’s shoulder.

  The sergeant opened the door and stepped in. “Sorry, sir. He just barged right in like he owned the place.”

  “I need to talk to you, General. My entire family has been murdered by your soldiers.”

  A look of recognition crossed Whittier’s face, and he sighed. “Very well. I’ll see him, Sergeant.”

  Mateo told the story as Tía Andrea had told it to him.

  “And what do you expect me to do?” Whittier demanded.

  Mateo blinked incredulously. All his life his father had preached to him about his responsibility to the law. Now he spoke to the man who represented the law in this region, and this man asked him what he expected.

  “I expect justice,” he said as calmly as he could.

  “Ahem.” The general sighed heavily, then stood up and walked to the door. “Send for Colonel Roundtree.”

  Exactly as Tía Andrea had described him, the colonel was fat and ridiculously blond for one so red of face. He saluted smartly. “General?”

  “Sit down, Colonel. This young man tells me that you and a troop of soldiers from this fort killed his family,” he said bluntly.

  The colonel turned and looked at Mateo. “Well,” he said with obvious satisfaction in his heavy bass voice. “I see you decided to turn yourself in.” He turned back to the general. “This is the boy we were chasing, General. He’s the horse thief you sent us after.”

  Mateo leaped to his feet. “That is a lie! My name is Mateo de Mara Garcia-Lorca. My father raises…raised,” Mateo corrected himself, reminded himself, “the finest blooded horses in the entire New Mexico Territory. I have no need to steal them.”

  The colonel smiled condescendingly. “All Mexican are generals, and every peón raises thoroughbreds, General.” Ignoring Mateo, he adjusted his bulk in the chair. “This is the boy, sir. I personally saw him take the horse. I would recognize him anywhere,” he said flatly.

  The general let his cold gaze flick over Mateo. He sighed heavily. “When will they learn? Very well, Colonel. Take him to the stockade.”

  Mateo’s eyes widened in disbelief. “This man killed my entire family! He is lying! I have been hunting in the Sonora Mountains for the past seven days. I have a witness.”

  The general lifted his eyebrows at the colonel, and a look passed between them.

  “Where is your witness? Is he here with you?” the general asked casually.

  “He…” A warning prickle of fear stopped Mateo. Something in the general’s eyes—a furtive animal cunning Mateo had seen only one time before, but it had been enough.

  “I do not know,” he said.

  They exchanged another look, and now Mateo could see a glimmer of satisfaction in the general’s eyes.

  “Too bad,” he said smoothly. “If we do not know where he is, he cannot testify on your behalf.” He paused. “Would you like time to think about it? Perhaps you can remember?”

  “No,” Mateo said. Better to suffer alone. At least Antonio would be spared more gringo justice.

  The trial was a farce that left Mateo stunned. The colonel testified against him casually, and the panel of officers blatantly ignored his charges as if he were a thieving child who was merely to be disposed of. The sentence was savage. He was to be whipped in the quad that afternoon, left to repent his numerous sins until daybreak, and then hanged by the neck until dead. To set an example for others who would steal from the army.

  The whipping was excruciating. It was administered by a sweating, muscular soldier with a black snake whip that seared into Mateo’s back like a branding iron. No amount of determination could save him from humiliating himself before the crowd of gringos gathered in the dusty, savagely hot quad. Mateo cried, then he screamed, and then at last he fainted.

  Tied shamefully to an oversized wagon wheel for all the world to see, covered with his own blood, Mateo was more dead than alive. Flies bit his open wounds and buzzed around his face. Fortunately the sun set before it could burn the life out of his tortured body.

  Sometime during the night he was awakened by an explosion. The fort was instantly in chaos. Yelling, pulling on pants, carrying buckets, men ran toward the north end of the compound. A dark figure raced across the quad and stopped behind Mateo. Warm hands fumbled with the rawhide stripes that cut into Mateo’s bleeding wrists and ankles. The cool blade of a knife sawed against them, and at last they fell away. Looking back, Mateo recognized Antonio.

  When the last soldier ran by, Antonio helped him to his feet. They ran to the wall, where Antonio had left a rope dangling down. Mateo stopped. “But how did you—”

  “I stole some of their gunpowder,” Antonio hissed. “Now, quickly, before they see us!”

  A soldier who saw them described it later to an interested barracks. “He went up that wall and over it like a damned cat…a big black cat…”

  Chapter Eight

  Antonio managed to get Mateo to Tía Andrea, who had moved to one of the Garcia-Lorcas’ line shacks in case the soldiers came back. She nursed him patiently and tirelessly, but Mateo de Mara Garcia-Lorca had died. Looking back on it now, Mateo knew that t
he young man—left pale and thin by a raging fever—who rose from that narrow pallet was not the idealist who had ridden into the fort asking for redress. Because he felt himself unfit to carry his family’s name, this man called himself Mateo Lorca, and he vowed he would never ask for anything again. He would take. He burned from within, and the fire was fed by hatred so intense that Tía Andrea crossed herself involuntarily every time she looked into his eyes.

  For weeks Mateo was too pain-racked and weakened by the fever to do anything except lie on his bed and think his bitter thoughts. Word came to him that the fat American colonel had bought the Garcia-Lorca lands at auction. That day Mateo vowed he would not rest until he had taken back all that had belonged to his family.

  Helpless on the cot, Mateo tempered his rage on the forge of his hatred, turning it this way and that until he had killed the fat colonel in a hundred terrible ways. And a strange thing happened. As Mateo exercised his rage, it took shape within him. Where it was ugly, he made it uglier. Where it was soft, he made it brutal. The fierce hatred inside became so real to him that all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see the devastating monster rise up on his command. Then a stranger thing happened. By his thoughts, Mateo discovered that he could cause the hatred inside him to grow or to diminish. If he thought about the fat colonel, the monster swelled to enormous proportions and flushed his body with energy. If he thought about Tía Andrea, working so hard to heal him, to feed him, to provide for his needs, the monster slunk back into its corner.

  From twelve years of age, Mateo and his cousin Antonio had been invited into the library with their fathers, Castillo y Lanzas Garcia-Lorca, Joaquin Amparo, and any guests who might be visiting the Garcia-Lorca casa grande. They had listened quietly and circumspectly while the men, smoking their fine Cuban cigars and sipping their imported brandies and liqueurs, discussed politics.

  Now, slowly, as Mateo lay on the narrow pallet gathering strength, he remembered some of the discussions between his father and his uncle. Now he understood what they had been saying as they’d read their week-old newspapers and talked of war clouds forming on the eastern horizon from the border dispute between President Polk in the United States and the Parades government in Mexico City concerning the land between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River.

  In 1846, when President Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to occupy the north bank of the Rio Grande, Mateo had not understood their concern. Texas was hundreds of miles away. How could a border dispute there affect them?

  Discussing it, Mateo’s father had been furious. His finely lined face seamed with worry and anger, but he spoke quietly, cautiously.

  “General Taylor is a very hard man. His arrival on the scene can only make matters worse. His name alone jangles my nerves like a fire bell in the dark of night.”

  “It is bad…very bad,” Uncle Joaquin agreed, shaking his head.

  “They are deliberately pushing Mexico to war!” Mateo’s father said angrily. “Nothing could be more obvious. They are like small boys throwing stones. They will precipitate a war, and then they will scream ‘War! War!’ and they will move in and take advantage of the situation to steal even more land than they have already stolen.”

  When war was declared on May 12, 1846, Mateo was twelve. By the time the war ended sixteen months later, the United States had acquired not only the disputed area, but half of New Mexico as well—that portion between the west Texas border and the Rio Grande all the way to Santa Fe. When word came that Archuleta had conceded Santa Fe without a fight, Mateo’s father was livid. “Archuleta is a fool to surrender without a fight!”

  Antonio’s father nodded his agreement. “The man is too ambitious. He is making a pact with the devil. Kearny will let him pretend to rule the land west of the Rio Grande only until they can regroup. Then they will trample over Archuleta just as they did Santa Anna.”

  “Kearny is a ruthless man…a very ambitious man. He wants to be military governor of California. If he can consolidate his gains here and assure the fall of the entire New Mexico Territory into American hands, he will get what he wants.”

  When word reached them about an uprising of Mexicans in Taos, the frown lines had deepened in Castillo Garcia-Lorca’s fine, broad forehead.

  “If it is true that our people killed Governor Bent and more than twenty of his officials, then it must have been Archuleta’s doings. And if it was Archuleta leading an insurrection, it could only be because he now realizes that the Americans are going to take the territory they promised him for keeping still when he should have been fighting.”

  “I fear you are right,” said Uncle Joaquin. “And the Americans will not take this lightly. Reprisals will follow. Our people will be the ones to suffer for Archuleta’s stupidity and his greed.”

  “I wish you were wrong, but I know you are not, Joaquin.”

  “Magoffin is an excellent example of their falseness and their hypocrisy! They use him like a Judas goat! Even now he is working his way westward, preparing our people for the American takeover, telling them sugar-coated lies, promising them that all law-abiding people will be able to keep their lands. He is a wicked, treacherous man! He entertains our countrymen lavishly, lulling them into a false sense of security. He does not bother to tell them that, once in control, the Americans will be the ones who decide who is abiding by the laws and who is not.”

  “It is an easy thing to change a law or to twist an interpretation. The Americans are very greedy, and their government is run by crooked políticos who line their pockets at every opportunity. They are too responsive to the voracious needs of their people.”

  “As are our own.” Uncle Joaquin laughed.

  “One does not complain about the hand from which one feeds,” Castillo said, scowling at Uncle Joaquin, who nodded in agreement as Mateo’s father continued to speak.

  “For them, the law is an easy thing to manipulate. The americanos appoint the judges and the juries. In this land, we are the emigrantes. We are at the mercy of their honesty or lack of it. If the men who sit on the jury would like to see the land you own auctioned off…I do not need to say more.”

  “Too bad Magoffin does not mention these little details when he praises the americanos and assures our people that law-abiding citizens will be allowed to keep all they own.”

  “The man should be arrested,” Mateo’s father said, staring gloomily into the fireplace along the ornately paneled wall of the library. “But too many of our people have already fallen under his spell. He is a very devious man. He buys his way into our midst with fine wines and lavish celebrations, but only because we are fools. How many times must the Americans deceive us before we learn the truth of their treachery?”

  When Mateo was strong enough to mount a horse, he rode from shanty to pueblo to shack, calling on the peónes who had worked for his father, seeking their help.

  “No. I cannot.” The man was always surrounded by the faces of his wife and children, poking from behind him like a bouquet of flowers, their dark eyes filled with curiosity, fear, and hunger.

  “What will you do to eat? Who will employ you?”

  “We will not need to eat if the soldiers kill us.”

  “You prefer to let the soldiers starve you to death?”

  “It is better than instantly losing life itself.”

  Now Mateo understood his father’s frustration. It was the same everywhere he went. The mexicanos were so afraid to die that they could not live. Even Antonio would not help him.

  It was not until Mateo stole an army payroll, killing the three guards, that he picked up five followers—two mestizos, two renegade Mescaleros, and an outlaw from a Chiricahua Apache tribe. He had wanted his own countrymen, but half-breeds and outlaw Indians were better than nothing.

  That was the beginning. With each raid he led against the army, he gathered followers. Now he could raise his own army—as many as five hundred men in a week’s time—for anything he wanted them to do. El Gato Negro became the patron
saint of the dispossessed. He could do no wrong. Even now. Once his band had terrorized the length and breadth of two territories, but for a long time now they had infrequently been bandits. Like farmers, they had been living in the relative safety of the pueblos. It was time to go back to the old ways, time to slough off the soft ways of women. Was this what trusting Rita and loving Tía and Andrea had done to him? Turned him into the leader of farmers?

  Looking back over the years, he could see how it had happened. He had managed to steal a little happiness for himself with his daughters. He corrected himself: his daughter and his wife’s bastard. ¡Dios! How that hurt him. The monster within sniffed the air as if checking for Rita’s scent. At night, when Mateo slept, the monster twisted his dreams. Even his daydreams had been invaded. Part of him had realized that he could not kill Andrea’s mother, but the old hatred had begun to insidiously dominate Mateo’s thoughts. He would be riding his horse and find himself filled with the vision of killing Rita in some horrible way. And no matter how hot the weather, his skin would turn cold.

  He had never actually seen the monster within, but he had talked to it, and it had talked back. Mateo had explained he would not kill Rita, but he was like a drunk who had sworn not to drink. The monster within could not be appeased by promises, and Mateo had nothing concrete to offer. The nights were the worst torture of all.

  Even waking, as now, no matter how hard he tried to stop them, his thoughts tormented him, reminding him that he had been a fool. The gringos were still robbing him blind. Rita had pointed it out to him in the most graphic way possible. His false pride—believing he could father a blonde—had been the sheerest stupidity. He should have killed Rita the moment he saw Teresa. How she must have laughed at him for his stupidity.