“He doesn’t look all that wild and deadly,” grumbled Patrick.
“We aren’t bandits,” Talitha reminded him. “Come on, now, let’s see if we can’t finish Carmencita’s walls today.”
As she helped lift and stack the heavy bricks she wondered if Shea was with Baylor, if there was any chance of his being sent nearer home with some detachment. He’d been gone over two months. She couldn’t even be sure that he was alive, that he’d ever reached a Confederate post to volunteer. The only way he could get a letter to her was through a traveler, and travelers along the Sonoita were going to be mighty few.
I won’t even think he might be dead, Talitha told herself. He has to be alive. Has to come back to me—to all of us. She recoiled from the very thought of a world without Shea, and her desolation at it made her really understand for the first time Shea’s agony at losing Socorro, and why he had tried to blunt it with drink and Tjúni.
Come back, love, and I’ll make you happy. Talitha vowed it across the miles, willing him to hear, to believe. But she felt no response.
Tubac abandoned, and Fort Buchanan. San Patricio destroyed. Shea gone, then John Irwin, then Marc Revier. In all that region south of Tucson, which was seventy miles away, only, besides the Socorro, Pete Kitchen’s ranch and Sylvester Mowry’s Patagonia mine were left.
In spite of her brave words to Kitchen, this isolation was altogether different from that of her childhood. Then, like Cat now, she’d trusted the grown-ups. Shea, Socorro, and Santiago had borne the weight of decisions, of risking other people’s lives. It was that responsibility more than physical labor that exhausted Talitha. Of course, after what she and Belen had found at the San Patricio, she’d given the vaqueros another chance to leave. They’d all stubbornly chosen to hold on.
“We weren’t harassed during the siege of Tubac,” Chuey pointed out, riding squealing little Tomás on his foot while braiding a new rawhide rope for six-year-old Ramón. “It must be that Mangus’s protection still carries authority. Besides, madama,” he added fatalistically, “there’s no safe place in all this region to ranch. But we are vaqueros; what would become of us, huddling in town?”
So August turned to September. The new adobes, roofed by mesquite rafters covered with bear grass, wheat straw, and adobe, replaced the old ramadas, making a solid enclosure around the small courtyard with the well and granaries, the pomegranate and peach trees.
Red-streaked mesquite beans dried on the roofs to be stored in the round adobe granaries. Talitha, the twins, James, Paulita, and Cat made forays along the mountain slopes and draws, returning with squaw-berries, hackberries, chokecherries, wild currants, grapes, and acorns which, ground, made a tasty flour. The ranch had irrigated fields of melons, beans, corn, and wheat, but Talitha had been taught by Socorro and Tjúni to garner wild foods in their seasons.
Because of rushed work on the houses they’d missed jojoba nuts that summer, but November’s harvest of the planted fields would signal time to gather black walnuts along the creek and go into the mountains for the small but very rich and nutritious piñon nuts.
In mid-February, the first timid greens had appeared. March had offered cholla buds, the plump curving fruit of yucca palmillo, and agave hearts roasted to a sweet syrupy brown mass. May had been tender young cattail shoots, and June had brought their rich golden pollen, so good in soups and breads.
Late summer rains had also produced large round puffballs, some white, some brownish, and these succulent treasures were carried home to be sizzled in bacon grease or sliced into stews. The smaller ones could be confused with a kind of deadly mushroom, but Talitha had learned from Tjúni to cut the ball across. The mushroom showed its developing gills and shape, like a bird growing in an egg, but if the inside was smooth, creamy white, the ball could be eaten with gusto.
They celebrated Cat’s eighth birthday the twentieth of September. Chuey and Rodolfo woke her by playing their guitars and singing “Las Mañanitas” outside the window.
“On the morning you were born,
Were born the flowers …”
Oh, God, thought Talitha, rousing. Had they forgotten? Of course they hadn’t. No one who’d known and loved Socorro could forget that she’d died in a rush of blood in the dawning Cat was born.
Socorro, valiant and tender, Shea’s miracle, adored by both him and Santiago, to all of them the human, sometimes hot-tempered embodiment of the dark madonna blessing the sala. A madonna from the ranch where everyone but Santiago had been slaughtered by scalp hunters.
Blessing and tragedy, kindness and courage, horror and treachery. Cat living out of her mother’s death; James begotten by the hated Juh. Wondering at the tangled, inexplicable threads of fate, Talitha dismissed fruitless musings and crossed the room past Sewa, who lay drowsily smiling at a sun mote, to kiss and embrace Cat, who was just springing out of bed.
“Happy birthday, Caterina Katie-Cat!”
“Oh, Tally! Don’t call me that baby name!” Running to the window, she leaned out, laughing, honey-golden cheeks flushed, and thanked the vaqueros, gracious as a queen. They departed, happy at her pleasure, and she spun dancingly across the floor. “See, they know I’m growing up! They never sang for me before. I’m not a young child anymore.”
“No,” agreed Talitha gravely. The vaqueros must have made the flattering gesture to make up for Shea’s absence, for the lack of presents obtained from the San Patricio pack trains or at Tubac. “You’re not a young child. Will you bring Sewa in? I want to start the panocha for your feast tonight.”
“Panocha!” sang Cat, still whirling. “My favorite!”
“That’s why!” Talitha laughed. “And there’s nut candy, Anita’s special tamales, and all your favorites. I hope, ancient one, that you’re not too dignified to enjoy them!”
Cat trilled with pure glee, hugged Talitha in a last caracol before she began to dress, and started to sing to the baby. May she always have a bright spirit, Talitha thought. Dressing quickly, she hurried to the kitchen and began grinding the dried, sprouted wheat.
There was wild turkey, and beef barbecued outside by the vaqueros, who would later savor by themselves the pit-roasted head, or tatema. Steaming tamales stuffed, as only Anita could do it, with spiced shredded meat, and chilis, tortillas, beans, corn soup, acorn bread, roast corn on the cob, currant and grape preserves, nut and pumpkin candies, and the panocha, a sort of pudding, made extra rich for the occasion by doubling the number of raw sugar cones. Sewa, who at fifteen months couldn’t chew most of the food, loved the panocha, and it was a mark of Cat’s love that she didn’t grudge the astonishing amount of pudding that the tiny girl devoured.
After supper came the gifts. Miguel gave her his best sombrero trimmed with silver coins. Patrick had cut down a silver-buckled belt she’d long coveted. From the vaqueros and their families came a fringed jacket of softest buckskin and a new reata. Talitha, with Anita’s help, had fashioned a gay red dress out of material in the storeroom.
Cat rejoiced, putting on all her presents, not sure whether to mince to match the dress or swagger for the hat, belt, and jacket. Then, without a word, James gave her his gifts.
There was a quiver of mountain-lion skin lined with red flannel and filled with arrows winged with turkey feathers, and an arced bow, a leather wrist guard, and a hawk carved from polished mesquite. It perched on a knotty crag, talons painstakingly carved, beak realistically hooked. In spite of its crudities, it captured amazingly the proud, free essence of the bird.
“Why, James!” cried Talitha. “I didn’t know you could carve like that.”
He didn’t answer but said to Cat, “This is a red-tailed hawk. His feathers are very good for arrows, but I didn’t want to kill him so I used some from a turkey. The bow’s of wild mulberry.”
“Oh, James!” Throwing her arms about him, Cat gave him a resounding kiss. “The hawk’s wonderful! But I won’t let him catch my little blue bird. Will you teach me how to shoot?”
“And us
, too!” clamored Patrick and Miguel.
“I’ll teach anyone who wants to learn,” James promised expansively.
Talitha watched her brother in surprise. Happiness softened the proud set of his mouth, and there was a glow about him. It came to her that he wasn’t as haughty and scornful as she’d thought.
“It was with bows that Tjúni and Socorro killed the scalp hunters and won Mangus’s friendship,” Talitha said slowly. “I’d like to learn to shoot, James.”
He nodded approval. “An Apache may have two good revolvers and a rifle, but he always has his bow. It makes no sound to alarm enemies when a sentry is killed, and half a dozen antelope can be killed in a herd before the rest notice and run. It’s easy to carry and can be relied on when a weapon jams or there’s no ammunition. Guns are good, but if I had to choose, I’d have a good bow and arrows feathered from the red-tailed hawk.”
And so it was that when the twins’ thirteenth birthdays came the fifteenth of October, work stopped early to give time for target shooting before the festive meal.
Of the vaqueros, only Belen had chosen to make a bow, and Talitha overheard Chuey reminding Rodolfo that their older companion was, after all, a Yaqui and thus had an affinity for uncivilized weapons.
“What about me, Chuey?” she had teased, stepping out from behind the door.
“I—uh—” Chuey strangled a moment, gulped, and then said forthrightly, “Madama, with your pardon, who can explain gringos?”
It had been fun to make the equipment, hunting for branches of wild mulberry that were straight and without knots, then stripping them of bark and working the green wood into shape with the arched center to be hung for drying.
Arrows were more tedious. Fortunately, there was plenty of the proper sort of cane growing along the creek. After these were cut, they had to be smoothed and the joints leveled out by running them back and forth across the bottom of a heated skillet. Much easier, James explained, than heating and using a grooved stone arrow-smoother.
Belen, who did the ranch’s blacksmithing, forged tips from steel salvaged at the fort. These were fitted into notches cut in the hardwood foreshafts which were then tied on with sinew. The next step was to settle down amid the canes with supplies of quail and turkey feathers, wet, softened sinews, and charcoal and an earthy reddish mineral that Talitha remembered from Marc’s geology lessons as hematite.
The part of the shaft where the feathers would go was colored red and black and covered with piñon pitch so the charcoal and hematite patterns, varied so one person’s arrows could be told from another’s, wouldn’t rub off. This was polished by rolling the shaft in a doubled-over yucca leaf. James scraped the split feathers carefully so that they’d fit close to the shaft.
“You must take parts from three different feathers so they’ll point the same way,” he explained. “If you tried to get two parts from the same feather, they’d face each other and the arrow wouldn’t travel so true and fast.”
After cutting the nocks, he showed how to bind the feathers, starting the nock end with one or two held in place with the fingers. After a turn or two of the wet sinew, he clamped the end in his teeth and wound the rest of the sinew by rolling the arrow. Then the third piece of feather went on the same way. The three lower ends could be tied on all at once before they were trimmed to the right size.
“I’d sure hate to lose one of these after all this work,” Patrick grunted, frowning with concentration as he tried to get the sinew started while holding the feathers.
“Oh, well”—James grinned—“it’s a good way to pass winter evenings.” To Cat, who was struggling determinedly, teeth tucked over her lower lip, he said indulgently, “You hold the feathers and let me wrap.”
The men and boys were hunting now, cutting most of the meat into strips for drying into jerky. At James’s instruction, they took the sinew from the deers’ backs and the back of the hind legs. For each bowstring, strips of this were dried. James then showed how to wet the ends and join them into one long string, which was looped around a stick and twisted. James chewed down the bumpy places while Miguel held the stick.
The damp string was fastened to the bow, barely tightened, and left to dry. Then it was tightened two more times before it was ready to try.
Talitha had been too young to pay much attention to Apache weapons when she’d lived among them. Now, appreciating the work and accumulated experience that went into making an outfit, she used her bow with respect and tried to practice daily, learning to reach easily over her right shoulder for an arrow in the javelina-hide quiver Belen had made for her, and then nock the arrow with the first finger above the nock, the second and third below, while the shaft rested on the side of her thumb, which was braced up against the arc of the bow. Drawing back the string, she sighted along the arrow and let it go, with varying degrees of success.
Belen had used a bow in his youth and was soon as good as James. Patrick and Miguel quickly became proficient, Patrick doing better when aiming quickly, Miguel best when deliberate. Cat, bound to make James proud of her, practiced till Carmencita said despairingly, “Ay, niñita, what kind of wild Indian are you set on becoming? If your mother—”
“My mother used a bow,” Cat reminded her pertly, but she hugged and kissed the grandmotherly woman. “Don’t scold. I’ll defend you if bad people ever come!”
She did very well at the twins’ birthday celebration, several times hitting the ball of cedar bark placed varying distances away, while Talitha hit it only once. The twins made equal scores but couldn’t hit the ball when tossed in the air, though James and Belen could.
Next there was a roping contest. Talitha wouldn’t let animals be used for sport, so the vaqueros and boys spun their reatas at rawhide bags yanked by on a pulley or at pieces of wood waved tauntingly at them.
James, taught long ago by his godfather, Santiago, was still good but no match for the vaqueros, who used their ropes almost every day of their lives. Talitha, a competent roper, was happy to watch the others and applaud when Chuey was judged the most expert.
For weeks the twins had been loudly declaring that they were grown up, nearly, and didn’t expect presents. Nevertheless, after a feast similar to Cat’s, they had begun to look the slightest bit disappointed until presents appeared from all sides.
Quivers from Belen, Patrick’s of gray fox skin, Miguel’s of mountain lion; embroidered leather vests and trousers from the ranch families; fringed leather gauntlets from Talitha; handkerchiefs painfully embroidered with their names from Cat; and from James, leather war clubs.
Carmencita and her daughters regarded the last with distaste. James explained that a long stick was stuck through a peeled cow’s tail and a rock sewed up in hide was fastened to the end. The cow’s tail was left to dangle from the handle.
“Good for close quarters,” Belen decided, hefting one. “A hard blow to the head should kill.”
James nodded. “They can be used against bears and lions, too.”
“I would prefer,” said Belen dryly, “not to be that close.”
The branding began, Talitha and the boys helping. Since they had to comb the hills, arroyos, and mesquite and oak thickets of the thousands of acres of the ranch, they took turns working the most distant stretches, going out in a group of four and camping till all the unmarked yearlings were earmarked and branded, and most of them gelded. This last went against Mexican custom, but Shea had said it was the best way to improve the stock.
While the small group was branding, the other vaqueros worked in signaling distance of the house, branding and starting to cull out the cattle destined for market. Pete Kitchen had sent a messenger to say he was driving a herd to Tucson and would be glad to take some from the Socorro if a couple of vaqueros would help his men. Talitha had accepted gratefully.
Belen, as was his long custom, brought Talitha the senales from each twentieth calf to which he, as one of the ranch’s first vaqueros, was entitled to as part wages. As she added the hair
y bits of hide to those already in a chest, James looked at them thoughtfully.
“Talitha, my sister, you have many cattle.”
Surprised, for she never thought of them as hers, separate from Shea’s, she nodded after a moment. “But half of mine are yours, James. And Santiago would have wanted his godson to have at least some of his share.” When she married Shea, James could have all her cattle, but no one at the ranch knew how things had changed the night before Shea left. She was almost afraid to talk about their intended marriage, as if the hope of such happiness might tempt fate.
James glanced at Sewa, who was edging about the room, moving from object to object till her precarious balance would lapse and she’d plunk down on the floor.
“I wouldn’t rob her,” he said, then chuckled. “It sounds funny, to own cattle. Apaches steal and save the trouble of raising them.”
They hadn’t talked of what James was ultimately going to do, make a life with the whites or go back to the Apaches. Mangus had sent him that spring to parley in case of Apache attack on the Socorro, to remind raiders that these people were friends of the greatest of all Apache chiefs. But no chief, even Mangus, could compel other Apaches to obey him. When they did, it was from free will and the force of the huge Mimbreño’s personality.
Thinking of the giant who had called her Shining Girl, Talitha realized he must be well into his sixties. He couldn’t live forever. It was not to be hoped that his protection could last from the grave; in fact, it would be a miracle if it held now, what with the Apaches seeing in the troops’ withdrawal a chance to drive out the intruders whose towns, mines, and roads had begun to spread in the past few years.
Looking up at her brother, for he was taller now than anyone at the ranch except cadaverous Francisco Vasquez, Talitha said carefully, “The Apaches can’t go on raiding forever. This war will end. When it does, no matter which side wins, there’ll be troops, miners, merchants, probably a railroad.”
The Valiant Women Page 51
