The Valiant Women

by Jeanne Williams

  “Thank you, Tjúni. It was a wonderful feast!” Socorro hesitated, wishing there were some way to reach the other young woman. “When you marry, I’ll serve your feast.”

  Tjúni’s face was stone. “I think no,” she said. “I think if I marry, you no be there.” Head high, heavily laden, she departed for the kitchen.

  The remaining three looked at each other in surprise. “She must be thinking of going back to her people,” Shea decided finally. But from the glance Santiago gave Socorro, she knew he’d interpreted the words as she had—that the man Tjúni wanted would only be available at Socorro’s death or departure.

  It was a wretched notion but after the first shock, Socorro reacted by resolving that Tjúni was going to have an extremely long wait.

  She smiled with sudden brilliance at Shea, slipped her hand in his. His face paled beneath its tan. With an intake of breath, he lifted her in his arms, and carried her through the door into their bedroom.

  He didn’t undress her or himself, but held her against him, head on his shoulder. Stroking her hair, her neck, her back, he murmured love words, soft words, till she relaxed against him, made a soft sound and snuggled closer.

  “Shea, my husband, my life, I love you!”

  “And I love you, chiquita.” His voice was husky against her ear. “But this is only our beginning. We’ll love more and better as we learn how.” Light from the small window gave his head a shape but she seemed to feel the intensity of his gaze as his long lean fingers followed the contours of her face, lingered on her throat.

  “Lass, tonight, any night, I want no more than you can give; but I want every bit of that! Perhaps you won’t have to tell me, maybe I can tell from your body, but don’t let me blunder on when you want me to stop.”

  “But, Shea—” How to tell him that she doubted there’d ever come a time when the core of her didn’t turn to dark freezing at the moment he tried to enter her?

  “Promise, wench,” he whispered with mock ferocity. “Or I’ll stop this minute and you’ll miss some things that are nicer than pumpkin candy!”

  “Can that be?” she teased, trying to steady the rising beat of her heart. “Did a woman tell you so?”

  “Dozens of them, Mrs. O’Shea! Lucky you are, getting the benefit of my education.” He sucked in his breath as if someone had hit him in the stomach. “What a fool I am! That’s the way!”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Why, I can pleasure you without using that part of me which I’m so attached to and that you, poor child, wish I didn’t have!”

  “But that wouldn’t be fair!”

  “It would,” he corrected sternly. “The sooner you learn to enjoy being a woman, the sooner I can enjoy you. I’m being very selfish, my girl, so you stop arguing and just feel my hands and lips. I promise there won’t be anything else. It would be a help, though, if we could take off that dress.” When she hesitated, he coaxed tenderly, “Please, my love. It would pleasure me so to touch you without getting tangled up in skirts and bodices!”

  Ashamed to deny him that, she sat up and he helped her slip out of her things though he stayed fully clothed. His hands were trembling when he began to caress her, moving from face to throat, then slowly, fleetingly, to her breasts.

  She gasped as mixed signals of alarm and anticipation spread through her. This was Shea; Shea, her husband; Shea, her love! He kissed her mouth lightly, the pulse in her throat, stroked her lightly, exquisitely, till she moaned, pressed closer to him.

  At last, his warm hand found the place that had been all these months to her like an unhealed wound. But he touched it as if it had been a rose, a delicate flower he wanted to bring to bloom without damage. When she tensed involuntarily, he kept his fingers still, spread comfortingly upon that old mutilation.

  Warmth curled through her lazily from that quietness. She seemed to feel another heart in her very depths, throbbing softly to begin, then increasing in beat till she arched against him, wanted the hand to move, wanted—needed, oh, must have—some end to the crescendo.

  Something fiercely primitive also wanted this first time to be with him, too, not something done for her with him holding back.

  She reached to stroke the hardness straining against his trousers. He groaned. “Oh, lass, don’t!”

  “But I want you!” she whispered. “All of you! Oh, love, fill me!”

  He took her in a way that lanced the remains of the abscess, cleansing her with the vigor and beauty and fire of his loving. Then, exhausted from their ecstasy, he who had been her man lay on her breast, suddenly her child.

  “Our marriage was blessed,” she told him, nestling her face against the curling hair that was damp near the roots.

  He said sleepily, chuckling as he patted her rump, “If it wasn’t before, it sure is now! I hope I won’t go to hell, lass, for saying I prefer this ceremony!”

  “If you do, I’ll go with you,” she whispered, holding him close, marveling.

  The splendor they’d made with their bodies! A dazzling of lightning and fireworks, spinning away into vastness where one rested in a sort of ocean, buoyed by it, feeling its rhythm that beat for eternity whatever happened to the separate waves.

  “Can it ever be that way again?” she asked. “Ever be so wonderful?”

  “Mrs. O’Shea!” he told her, and now he was her man again, gathered her in his arms, resting her head on his chest. “You’d better sleep while you can! That wasn’t anything compared to what we’re going to do!”

  There was a sound of hoofbeats. Shea tensed, relaxed as they faded. “Poor Santiago’s trying to ride off his devils, I guess. Needs a woman of his own. Do you reckon Tjúni—?”

  “No.” How blind men were. “We’ll need vaqueros in time. You must find one Tjúni would like and one with a daughter who’d be right for Santiago.”

  “How about a wife?”

  “You’re terrible! Shea, honestly, if you don’t—Oh, Shea! Yes, querido, yes!”

  This time she couldn’t believe she had ever feared his body.

  XI

  Breakfast was a little awkward next morning. Socorro couldn’t help but wish she and Shea could go on touching, laughing, kissing, felt inhibited from even smiling at him very long.

  Both Tjúni and Santiago must be having enough trouble concealing their feelings without open displays between the newlyweds. But Socorro was tremulously conscious of Shea, so filled with grateful happiness that she wanted to sing and dance and, most of all, lose herself in her husband’s arms.

  Munching a tortilla and leftover venison, Shea asked Santiago what he thought about hiring some vaqueros. “When they know what Mangus has promised, they shouldn’t be afraid to come.”

  Santiago considered for a while. Though he was no older than Socorro, he’d known frontier ranch life from babyhood, and Shea, his senior by ten years, was always ready to defer to his judgment on matters concerning the operation of the ranch.

  “I think,” he said at last, “that instead of asking those who were afraid, we should wait till spring, hoping that bolder men will hear of us and seek us out. They will work better if they choose us.”

  That made sense but did nothing about producing a suitor for Tjúni or a girl for Santiago. “Can we manage till spring?” Shea frowned.

  Santiago shrugged. “Pues, you and I can’t do as much as if we had help. But unless it’s an unusually hard winter, we won’t have much cattle work till spring when we may have to midwife for the few cows that have problems, and keep coyotes and lions off the new calves. From then on, we’ll need help. If we get a hundred and fifty calves next year, and we should, because for our herd I picked mostly heifers and young cows, we’ll almost double what we have. And of course all winter and spring, Don Patrick, you and I will be on the watch for wild cattle descended from those left here when the ranch was abandoned.”

  Shea shook his head in bewilderment. “Hundreds of cattle, thousands of acres! Seems like a dream to a poor man from Ireland
!”

  Santiago grinned. “And to me it sounds like a dream when you talk about grass so thick and rich and fast-growing that a cow can stay fat on an acre or two! The grass here is much better than at the Cantú home ranch where we figured a cow needed sixty acres for browse. But we can think it excellent if twenty-five to thirty acres carries a cow.”

  “Think your uncle might try to take over when he learns that your father’s dead and you’ve reestablished this ranch?”

  “Without doubt—provided he could inherit the protection of Mangus. He hasn’t even kept his mines running since Mangus wiped out the Santa Rita miners to the west.”

  “When did he do that?” asked Shea.

  Santiago’s brow furrowed. “It must be about seven years ago, in 1840, but the story begins before that.” And he told how, in the ’20s, the Santa Rita copper mines, which must be nearly two hundred miles east, were under constant pressure from Apaches. The first American fur trappers to travel along the Gila, a father and son named Pattie, stopped at the mine, after earlier talking with Apaches who said they had no quarrel with the Americans, only with the Mexicans. The mine operator, Juan Unis, asked the Americans to stay on as guards and when they weren’t interested in that, he suggested that they rent the mines for $1000 a year.

  The Patties agreed and the elder stayed on for a time, parleying with the Apaches and getting them to promise not to raid the mines. In return, the miners were not to establish a permanent settlement or bring in families. Even after Sylvester Pattie left, the agreement was fairly well observed by the Apaches though miners had brought in their women and the village had four hundred people and a plaza.

  When it became a hangout for scalp hunters, Mangus Coloradas accused the miners of violating their promises and in 1840 the truce broke.

  The mines depended on supplies from Chihuahua which were brought in by the long mule trains, conductas, that also took out the copper. Mangus ambushed two of these supply trains. There was no stored food in the village since the regular plying back and forth of the conductas had furnished a steady supply.

  Within a few weeks, even though miners went hunting, the people were on the edge of starvation. They didn’t know what had happened to the conductas, but it was plain they weren’t coming. So, loading pack mules and wheelbarrows with their belongings, carrying all they could on their own backs, four hundred men, women and children started the long trek to Chihuahua.

  As they passed through a narrow gorge, Apaches attacked. The ones who escaped that onslaught were wiped out in the next defile except for five or six who managed to escape with their terrible news. The mines had been deserted since then.

  “And so have been Don Narciso’s, forty miles west of here,” concluded Santiago.

  Small wonder, thought Socorro, and in spite of Mangus’s promise, she felt cold.

  Now that the house was livable, the men began cutting wood, taking dead limbs off mesquite and thinning the bosques, thick groves of the trees, which gave shade for the cattle in hot weather. Socorro and Tjúni collected walnuts, dumping them in a corner of the sala till the darkening hulls dried enough to be taken off more easily.

  All of them went on the piñon expedition, taking Viejo to carry their supplies for they’d spend three or four days in the mountains. They found several thick stands of the short-trunked pines and there, in spite of foraging squirrels and chipmunks, they collected quantities of the small fallen nuts.

  Where piñons grew mixed with juniper, their harvest slowed, but the clear cold air, the smell of pine, and sudden vistas that stretched away across mountains and valleys to more mountains, purple, pink or dark or soft blue, according to distance and vegetation, were a tonic change from the lower country, pleasant though it was.

  They all felt on holiday and one time when the afternoon sun had warmed pine needles to give off an even heavier aroma, Shea’s eyes met Socorro’s in a way that sent her pulse leaping. In a few minutes they wandered off together, found a sheltered sunny place and made love.

  “It’s our wedding trip,” Socorro laughed, idling her fingers on his collarbone.

  He kissed her slowly, sweetly and with appreciation. It was one of the special things that made her love Shea so much more all the time that she could scarcely believe she’d dared call love that vague, timid, contradictory feeling she’d had before marriage.

  Shea never just turned his back and went to sleep. The hunger and fierceness with which he took her melted in their passion but his loving didn’t. He held her close while they rested. Then he always kissed and caressed her again, making her feel not only desired but tenderly loved. Cuddling her against him now as he sat up, he gazed across the vast country.

  “It’s a grand place, chiquita, magnificent past words.”

  She tightened her arms around him at the sad note in his voice. “Do you miss your green island, my husband?”

  “Yes. But my mother is buried beside my father under its sod, my brother’s bones are in the desert, and there is no going back.” He cupped her face in his hands. “My life is here with you. My life is you.”

  Their lips met, the fire kindled.

  They gathered piñons steadily the rest of that day to make up for their truancy. Socorro was sorry to start down from the high country next day, but it was well they did, for snow began in flurries, diminishing as they descended and stopping entirely before they reached the valley.

  To keep the piñon nuts from decaying or getting wormy, Tjúni showed Socorro how to roast them in baskets with live coals. The trick was to shake the basket so that it didn’t scorch while the nuts were roasting. Stored in baskets and jars, the parched nuts made a rich and tasty addition to their food stores.

  The husks of the walnuts had turned black. Now they could be trampled till the pithy covering flaked away, leaving the tough shell. These were hard to break. Santiago or Shea cracked some outside between two stones each evening. These were placed in the center of the mats by the fire and, after supper, the four used yucca spikes to pick out the meats. The shells were so thick that the meats were small, but they were excellent food, good alone or added to bread and soups.

  Santiago saved the husks. “Soaked with a little water, these make a good medicine for cleaning wounds or getting rid of lice on cattle and mules,” he explained. He grinned at Shea. “And should you want to disguise that fiery mane of yours, Don Patrick, the juice would give you nice brown hair.”

  Shea lifted an eyebrow at Socorro. “Would you fancy that?”

  “No!” she said vehemently. “But I may use it when I start going gray.”

  “Wouldn’t worry about that yet,” Shea said.

  They told stories on these nights by the fire. One of Tjúni’s was of Earth Magician, born during chaos, who separated earth and sky, thus causing the birth of Iitoi, Elder Brother. This son of earth and sky helped Earth Magician make the sun, moon and stars and by the light of these, they continued to create.

  From two drops of sweat Earth Magician made two spiders who crawled four times around the world, laboriously webbing earth and sky together at the edges. Next the creators made people, but these fought each other and were so bad that the makers destroyed them. The next lot were just as evil. Four times man was shaped and done away with. Earth Magician’s last crop of people were so misshapen that he went off to the underworld and stayed there, and Iitoi at last made some humans in his own image that he was satisfied with, but on some he dropped blood and these became Apaches.

  His people killed Iitoi, though, four times they killed him, but he was always alive the next day. He was a fine singer and made the deer, birds and other animals as well as trees bearing fruit. Coyote helped with this, when he wasn’t playing tricks.

  “And Iitoi lives on Pinacate?” Socorro asked.

  “Yes, and at Baboquivari, maybe three days’ journey northwest of here.” Tjúni looked at Socorro in the flickering light. “Now it’s your turn, lady.”

  Socorro told of La Llorona, the hor
se-headed night spectre with an enticing woman’s body. Men who followed her died of fright when she revealed her countenance. Once she’d been a lovely woman whose nobleman lover deserted her and their children. She killed her children and herself and since then was doomed to wander the earth, wailing for her slaughtered babies.

  “That’s a sad tale, lass,” muttered Shea, but his were just as sad though lit with the glow of myth and heroism.

  Deirdre of the sorrows, Cerridwen’s cauldron which restored dead men to a sort of terrible life without soul or mind, Cuchulain betrayed and dying bravely. There was the bright proud victory of Brian Boru over the Danes, but the later history of Ireland was far sadder than its days of warring tribal kings.

  What could touch the horror of Drogheda when Cromwell’s soldiers killed thirty-five hundred men, women and children, then sent thousands more to slavery in the West Indies and Virginia? And there was Wolfe Tone’s revolt, put down by that same Lord Cornwallis who’d been defeated at Yorktown by George Washington. Wolfe killed himself in his cell rather than meet the dishonorable fate of hanging.

  Santiago sang corridos or ballads, and songs of love. His stories were short, usually fables with a commonsense moral, but he told one haunting story of Godmother Death.

  A peon besought Death to be godmother to his son. She consented and taught the boy many secrets of healing so that often, as he grew into manhood, he was able to save those his godmother would have otherwise taken. She had told him it was all right for him to treat people so long as she hadn’t entered the room, but if she appeared, he must leave the patient to her.

  He fell in love with a beautiful girl. They were very happy, till she fell sick. The young man did everything he could for her but she grew worse and at last he looked up to see his godmother at the foot of the bed.

  He refused to yield his girl to her. Forgetting all Death’s kindnesses to him, he called her fearful names and defied her. She looked on him silently, then left without a word.