by Win Blevins
“You’re welcome.” Sam always felt strange that his daughter spoke English with an accent that was somewhere between Spanish and Indian.
“Let me try,” she cried.
As Julia passed out cups of coffee, Hannibal coached Esperanza.
A half-dozen times she tried to make it walk and on the last time sort of succeeded. “I need to practice,” she said.
“Papa, I don’t have your present finished yet.” Their custom was to exchange gifts at rendezvous, and the family wouldn’t have left for the annual trade fair for another week or so. “It’s very special, though—may I show you?”
“Sure.”
She went to the parfleche behind the buffalo robes where she slept and got out three pieces of rawhide, each about as long as her arm. Two of them were stained. “See, I made this one blue and this one red. The other one’s going to be yellow.”
Julia said, “She spent a lot of time making those vegetable dyes.”
“When I get it done, I’m going to braid the strands into a hatband for you. Watch.” Quickly, Esperanza wove together an inch or so of the strands, just as she would braid her own hair.
“Beautiful,” said Sam. “I’ll love it.”
She took his hat off and wrapped the rawhide strings around it, tails dangling properly behind.
Sam looked his love at her.
“I want to go show the marionette to my friend Porcupine, all right?”
“Sure.”
She jumped up and bent to go out the flap. In the low doorway she saw the breechcloth and the wrinkled, veiny legs of an old man. Then, dipping down, the angry face of the chief.
She stopped cold and looked back at Flat Dog. “Papa?”
RIDES TWICE STEPPED in without a word, followed by a nephew and a grandson. The uninvited entry was a statement: To hell with courtesy, to hell with your home, to hell with your family—I am the chief.
The old man still had the bearing of a warrior, though now the effort showed. His face, on the other hand, was ruined, skin crevassed, mouth twisted with bitterness, eyes dark with fury.
I caused this, thought Sam. He took a deep breath, and the moment of the duel hit Sam again. He had stunned Red Roan by using Paladin instead of a weapon, first knocking his opponent’s horse down with the mare, then riding directly over his foe. Finally he jumped from Paladin’s back, kicked Red Roan to the dust, straddled him, and jammed the point of his knife against the man’s throat. In front of his father, Rides Twice, Red Roan asked to die and Sam granted him his wish.
Now Esperanza circled away from the chief and his relatives and slipped in between her two fathers. No one else stirred. Rides Twice and his companions were unarmed, except for their looks of hatred.
Rides Twice glared at Sam. “White Hair,” he said, “you are not welcome in this village. If your horses are staked here tomorrow evening, we will kill you.”
Rides Twice couldn’t have killed more than a mosquito, but his relatives would.
“My guest will stay,” said Flat Dog, “as long as he likes.”
A challenge thrown in the face of a challenge.
Rides Twice glared at Sam and shut everyone else out. “We will kill you.”
He ducked down and out of the tipi, his nephew and grandson at his heels.
“Papa?”
“THEY MEAN IT,” said Hannibal.
“Yes,” said Flat Dog, “but it won’t happen in my lodge.”
Sam was stunned. He couldn’t credit what he’d just heard. Flat Dog would no longer be able to live in this village, near his parents. “I’ve put you all in danger.”
“Wait,” Julia said. “Something important.” She got up and went out. Sam, Hannibal, and Flat Dog just looked at one another. Esperanza buried her face in her hair.
In moments Julia came back with her other three children, Azul, who was twelve or thirteen, Rojo, nine, and Paloma, six months. The infant was named for the Santa Fe woman who had been a great friend to all of them and Sam’s longtime lover, Paloma Luna. Now the brood was close to the mother.
Sam and Hannibal spent several minutes fussing over Paloma. A new niece, that seemed fine. Sam was touched that her name was Paloma.
He looked around at this family, his only family, and saw that he had to risk it all. He put his hands on each side of Esperanza’s head. She looked into his eyes.
“I am going to California to live. For good. I came back to ask you to go with me.”
Esperanza burst into tears, jumped up, and ran out.
Six
SAM’S MIND RAN in wild circles.
Everyone else dived inside his own head, trying to sort things out.
It was Hannibal who finally spoke. “The beaver trade is done.”
Julia answered, “Flat Dog and I think the same.”
Flat Dog pitched in, “Maybe this year’s rendezvous will be the last one.”
“California,” said Sam in a mesmerized tone.
Hannibal put in, “Why don’t you read them the letter from Grumble?”
Adventuring in California, Flat Dog and Grumble had forged the bond men make by risking their lives together.
Sam started to pull the letter out.
Flat Dog interrupted. “We need to tell you.” He looked at his wife.
Julia put a hand on his shoulder. “Flat Dog and I have talked about it. We already decided to go to California.”
Sam felt like he’d fallen off a cliff.
And then he soared.
SAM WAITED FOR Flat Dog’s words.
His brother-in-law breathed in and out. Actually, the two felt more like brother friends, relatives by choice, than brothers-in-law. Flat Dog looked at Sam, it seemed, with resignation in one eye and pleasure in the other. “I have agreed,” he said. “We were planning to say good-bye to everyone here, meet you at rendezvous, and go to California.
“Now we have some things to take care of first.”
Suddenly Julia jumped up and darted out—she had a panicky feeling about Esperanza. But the mother found her daughter in front of the neighboring lodge, talking passionately to Porcupine.
“Come home,” Julia told her daughter.
Hearing her tone, Esperanza came.
Julia eased everyone with the comforting routine of supper. They spoke little, and of nothing important. Minds were whirling, facing the important problem.
“I’m going to Porcupine’s,” said Esperanza.
Julia considered. Esperanza’s life as she knew it was ending. Talk to your best friend, yes. “Come back early,” Julia said.
“Then I’m going to stand with the young men.”
“Not tonight.”
Esperanza glared at her mother and went out.
Sam realized his daughter was courting. This was the Crow way. Teenage girls stood by their family lodge, and young men visited them, one at a time.
The adults shrugged at each other.
“Anyone special?” asked Sam.
“Two young men,” said Flat Dog. “Good ones. Well, good as they get at eighteen or nineteen.”
Julia said, “Read Grumble’s letter to us.” She spoke English but didn’t read it.
Sam unfolded the pages, which had been opened, read, and re-folded over and over. Grumble’s annual epistle, though addressed to Sam, was intended for all of them. Grumble had helped Flat Dog escape prison in Monterey and had helped Julia give birth to Azul during a storm on the banks of a raging river.
For years Sam had traded letters with Grumble and Abby in a roundabout way. Grumble gave his letter to the captain of a ship headed for Fort Vancouver. Then it made its way with one of the fur outfits to Fort Hall, where Sam picked it up and handed his to the factor for the return trip.
Sam read the letter out loud:
at Yerba Buena
Christmas Eve, 1838
To my dear friend Sam, and all friends and family—
Abby and I would express our pleasure in your adventures and successes, except that we do not
know of them. We received no letter from you this year. We’re confident that you wrote one, but these methods of sending correspondence are so unpredictable. Our hearts are sore at your absence.
When Sam ran away from his home back in Pennsylvania, Grumble helped him make his way west. Sam worked a flatboat, and Grumble lived by working cons small and large. Abby joined them at Louisville, and when they got to St. Louis she and Grumble opened a business that offered liquor, gambling, and women. Peddlers of vice, though, must always stay one jump ahead of trouble. They ended up in the capital of California, Monterey, in the service of the same sins.
We were lucky, however, to get some news. A man (no gentleman certainly) named Pegleg Smith came into our establishment in Monterey, indulged in the vices we sell, and grudgingly told us that you are well. That is little, but in the circumstances much.
On to the principal matter of this letter: Abby and I urge you to remove permanently to Monterey. We are in the clover here and wish most heartily for you to share in our good fortune.
The Mexican government’s seizure of the lands of all the missions has changed everything. Now the government grants these fine holdings to ranchers, which in turn draws settlers. Abby and I wondered, at the time, what impact the settlers might have on us. Now we know. They have made us rich.
Last spring an Englishman named Anthony Strong, a ship’s captain who had stopped here several times in his global circumnavigations, located in Monterey and built a grand hacienda on the hills behind the bay. He was immediately captivated by Abby, and surprisingly, she seems to be equally taken with him.
Fortunately, she was discreet in revealing her personal history, and in the end he swept her away to his home. I attended the wedding happily.
Strong is an active man and cannot resist investing in lands, including those once owned by the mission, which you know well, and others in the Carmel River Valley. The latter are so fertile that, without doubt, Strong will eventually be an emperor of agriculture as he was a captain of the sea. In sum, in the prime of her life Abby has become a grand lady. She deserves it.
I am just as fortunate. Incredibly, I possess the Mission Dolores itself, the one on San Francisco Bay. (Abby helped me purchase it and is my silent partner.) You will guess how I savor this irony—first an altar boy, then a con man, and now the proprietor of a mission. Even more grandly than that, I have converted the holy building into what is commonly known as a low dive. Instead of consecrated wine and bread, I traffic in liquor, gambling, and whores, naturally of the highest quality. My bar traffic exceeds that of the former communion altar. If Don Antonio and Doña Abby are the apex of respectability, I am the eminence of roguery.
The mission is next to the village of Yerba Buena (though people talk of renaming the little pueblo San Francisco, after the Bay), and near enough to the presidio to supply the yearnings of the soldiers.
However, I miss Monterey. Yerba Buena is too remote for me. As the capital, Monterey draws the great ships and the multitudes of sailors, ripe for plucking, and I am addicted to its marvelous mélange of cosmopolitanism and natural beauty. Within a year or so I will sell my business here and rejoin Abby in Monterey.
Here is the news that most affects you. Abby has asked her husband to make grazing land available to you on very favorable terms, and he has agreed. You have often remarked that those Carmel hills are ideal for a horse-raising enterprise. Now they are offered.
I sent this news to your son Tomás as well, and he reports that he intends to remove to this fine land next winter. For him California is simply a new province of his native country, and one he likes.
Sam and Tomás had an on-again, off-again relationship since Sam adopted him twelve years ago, so this was good news.
Altogether, I am confident, no prospect could be finer for you.
Americans are settling here in numbers and are welcome. Many of the Mexican dons look forward with pleasure to the day when California will be American.
Oh, wanderer! Put away your life of danger. Give up your wild Indians, cold creeks, and dangerous river crossings. Come to California for the life of leisure. Come to Monterey, where American, Mexican, and Indian can live together amicably, and indeed become one people.
Abby sends her love, and I my esteem. We hope to look upon your face in the coming year.
Your entirely disobedient, but affectionate, servant,
Grumble
Sam, Flat Dog, Julia, and Hannibal looked at each other with stupid grins.
“The mission breakup . . . ,” murmured Julia.
“Lots of land available,” said Sam. And land cheap to me, he thought.
Julia was lost in the past. She loved the mission in Malibu where she grew up. When she ran away to be with Flat Dog, it was the Mission San Gabriel that offered her the sacrament of marriage and sanctuary against the rage of her father.
“No wonder Americans are settling in California fast,” said Hannibal. “Land easy to get, oceans of grass, and no winter.”
They looked at each other foolishly, wanting to mouth the good news of the letter over and over.
Sam asked Julia, “What do you think about Americans filling up the country where you were born?” You, the daughter of a don.
“I am ready to go back,” she said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I have been here twelve years, and I have loved it. This life seems to me like a romantic idyll, a life in one of the fairy tales my mother used to read to me. I love the country and the Crow people.
“Yet I came here for one reason only. I love this man beyond the ability of words to say. Such a love is a gift of God. I would have followed it anywhere.
“Now, though, it is time for me and the man I love to take the best care of our children. I want more for them.”
Sam thought again, I can’t believe my luck.
“The children must be raised as Catholics,” Julia said. “Esperanza and Azul were baptized, Rojo and Paloma not yet. None of them has made a first communion. Also, I want Flat Dog back in the church, and myself.”
Silence circled through each mind.
Flat Dog put in, “You and Hannibal will do well training horses for saddle and harness.”
“The three of us could do well,” Sam said, “very well.”
“The main thing is,” said Hannibal, “it’s going to be different for mixed-blood people. When they eliminated the missions, they struck down slavery. The Spaniards and the Indians are already mixed, thoroughly. The Americans are marrying Spaniards and Indians both. It will be the first place where race won’t matter, the first place on the whole planet, really.”
Sam said, “My dad always said Americans started out to make a country free of the old ways, a New World. Back in the States, we failed. California is going to be it.”
Seven
“I NEED TO talk to my daughter,” said Julia to the men.
She ducked out and confronted the flirting pair. “That’s enough for tonight,” she told them.
Esperanza said, “Mo-other!”
Everyone inside ran funny eyes at each other. Waiting and eavesdropping was odd.
“Come inside.”
The two of them came through the flap.
“Treat me like a grown-up,” Esperanza said to her mother’s behind.
Julia took her place next to her husband behind the fire. When Esperanza was seated, Julia declared, “Our family, plus Sam your papa, Uncle Hannibal, and Tomás, we’re all going to California. We’ll live right near each other.”
Esperanza turned her head sideways to her mother, Sam thought, like a bird spotting danger and ready to fly off the branch.
“I want you to go grow up in the church. To have books. To wear fine dresses. I want a better life for you.” Julia fixed her daughter’s eyes. “You must read, and know something of the great literature of the world.”
Julia turned her head to Sam. “You don’t know it, but Esperanza has a gift for reading. I have one book in Spanish, Lives of the Saints, and s
he has read it twice this last year.”
“Mom—”
Julia interrupted her. “I want you children to live in a world with candles, wagons, crops, dinnerware, clocks, and stoves and windows. I want a life for you in civilization.”
“I want that for you, too,” said Sam.
His daughter turned her jumpy eyes at him. Up she stood again, and out she went.
Julia called for Azul and Rojo to come in. She sat Paloma on her lap. When the older kids sat down, Julia spoke to them again about what was going to happen and answered their questions.
Sam thought, My daughter acts like a young American or Californio woman, rebellious and strong willed. Azul and Rojo behave like Crows, quiet, eyes down in front of their elders. Right now Sam could do without anyone’s rebellion.
Later Sam lay in his robes and watched the lavender at the top of the tipi turn to dove gray and black. To him the simple ways of this land were magic. Occasionally, whispers of his daughter and her suitor reached Sam’s ears, but he didn’t pay attention to the words—he knew the meanings. He was still very much awake when Esperanza slipped into her blankets.
As Sam drifted off next to his daughter, he indulged in fantasies of training horses with her on the great grasslands of Monterey Bay. She was a first-class rider and worked well with horses. He would give his daughter a fine life—she would eventually be the owner of a fine rancho. As soon as he got her away from Rides Twice’s village.
Toward dawn something strange happened. For the first time since Sam was a kid, he dreamed of flying.
Eight
EARLY THE NEXT morning, before Julia had the coffee ready, Flat Dog stood up and said, “I have things to arrange.”
“I need to sweat with Bell Rock,” Sam said.
“Damn,” said Flat Dog, “I wish you were more scared.”
“Rides Twice gave me until this evening,” said Sam.
“You trust too much.”
After a moment Hannibal asked, “Want me to come with you?”
