Though Mountains Fall

by Dale Cramer

  “We don’t need any help,” Atlee grunted.

  Caleb bristled, his patience at an end. “I’m in no mood to pay you any mind just now, Atlee. I’m the one having to take care of your children. Get some coffee in you and see to your chores.” Then he turned and headed for Harvey and the waiting buggy.

  He didn’t look back.

  “Be gentle,” her father said when he asked Rachel to go tend Saloma, “but try to find out the whole truth about what happened.”

  It was odd, the way he said that. The Hostetler girl was five years younger than Rachel and they didn’t know each other all that well. Anyway, it should be Saloma’s family’s job to take care of her unless there was some reason her mother couldn’t do it. Odd. There was something her dat wasn’t saying, she could see it in his eyes—some unconfirmed suspicion that Rachel couldn’t begin to guess. What did he mean, the “whole truth”?

  By the time Rachel got there Atlee had already gone to work in his fields as if nothing had happened. It didn’t surprise her. Atlee could be alone in his fields, away from accusing eyes.

  Jemima didn’t want to let her in at first. She blocked the door and said, a little defensively, “We can take care of our own.”

  “I know you can,” Rachel answered, and showed Jemima her bag. “But I’ve got some salves and herbal remedies Kyra showed me—stuff that’ll make her feel a lot better. How’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know—she won’t talk. Hasn’t said a word.”

  “I see. Well, you know . . . I’m only a few years older and I’ve been mistreated by bandits myself, so I thought maybe she’ll talk to me. You never know.”

  Jemima pondered this for a minute, staring suspiciously, but she finally stepped aside and let Rachel in.

  Saloma’s mother had already cleaned her up and put a gown on her. Now the girl lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, her face turned to the side. She didn’t even look when Rachel sat down on the edge of her bed. Jemima eased out of the room.

  “So how are you feeling?” Rachel asked softly, brushing blond hair lightly out of the girl’s face.

  A tiny shrug was the only acknowledgment.

  “Any broken bones?”

  A slight shake of the head. Saloma still wouldn’t look at her.

  She touched a finger to the girl’s chin. “Can I please just look at your face? It’ll be all right, I promise. I won’t hurt you at all; I just need to see.”

  Saloma’s resistance ebbed a bit and her face turned slowly toward Rachel. The left side was one big purple-and-yellow bruise, her left eye was swollen half shut, and a thin trail of watery blood trickled from her nose. Rachel reached for the pan of water on the nightstand, squeezed out a cloth and dabbed away the blood. When her knuckles lightly brushed Saloma’s upper lip she flinched.

  “Is your mouth hurt?”

  Saloma stared blankly, then her hand crept from under the covers. Wincing, she hooked a finger in the corner of her mouth and showed Rachel the gap where two teeth were missing.

  Brutal. Whoever these men were, they were animals, and Rachel could not prevent the memory from welling up inside her—the stinking bandit manhandling her, the utter defenselessness, the sinking, hopeless feeling. Things would have gone much worse for her if Jake hadn’t intervened.

  But Jake did intervene. Rachel’s attacker had come to her in the middle of the night with a specific thing in mind, and it was only Jake who stopped it from happening.

  Now she looked into Saloma’s eyes and saw the lingering residue of that same horror, that same disgust. Her father said they’d found Saloma’s brother unconscious, which likely meant he’d tried to intervene, but failed. Suddenly she understood her father’s suspicion and knew what he meant by the “whole truth.”

  She pulled her bag up to her lap and took out a little jar.

  “This is a salve that comes from local yucca plants,” she said, opening the jar. “It will ease the pain if you’ll let me put some of it on you. Would that be all right?” she asked softly.

  Saloma nodded.

  Rachel talked to her in quiet, soothing tones while she gently dabbed salve on the girl’s face with a fingertip. “I know you’ve heard the story about when bandits kidnapped me,” she said, her eyes on her work, avoiding direct eye contact. “They treated me pretty rough, but they never beat me like this. They tied my hands and made me ride double with one of them a long way through the mountains. I slept that night tied to a tree.”

  While she talked, her hands worked, fingertips making light circles. She finished with the bruises on Saloma’s face, wiped her hands on a cloth and kept talking as she lifted Saloma’s arm.

  “There was one of them who wanted to do other things to me. Terrible things,” she said as she slid the sleeve of Saloma’s gown up her arm. As she suspected, there were finger bruises on her wrist. Delving into memories she would rather have forgotten, she kept talking as she inched the sleeve higher. “He came to me twice, once the first night, and again the next night, in the barn. Someone stopped him, both times, or something far worse would have happened.”

  More finger bruises, and deeper, just above the elbow. She pulled Saloma’s sleeve back down, patted her forearm reassuringly. The girl kept her eyes averted.

  Rachel leaned down very close to her ear and whispered, “But Joe couldn’t stop the men who attacked you, could he?”

  Saloma flinched and her eyes slammed shut, squeezing out tears. “You must tell no one,” she whispered, her voice quavering. They were the first words she had spoken since the assault.

  “Saloma, I—”

  “My mother has enough worries already, and I’m afraid of what my father will say if he finds out.” Her swollen eyes opened and bored into Rachel. “Dat wasn’t there. He doesn’t know, and you must not tell him. Tell no one.”

  Oh, what this poor child must be going through, all alone in a house of fear, with no one to trust.

  Rachel nodded. “All right. I will keep it to myself as far as I am able, but I know my father will ask. I can’t lie to him, and if I refuse to answer he will know why. This I cannot help. I’m sorry.”

  “Make him promise,” Saloma hissed through her teeth, a heartrending mixture of shame and terror.

  Privacy was the poor girl’s only remaining right. All others had been thrown down and trampled. Invaded.

  “All right. I will make him promise. Now please, dear, tell me what happened.”

  Saloma turned her face away and closed her eyes. Rachel thought she had withdrawn again, but then she began to speak very softly in the high-pitched tremor of a little girl.

  “Joe and me heard a noise in the dark alley and went to it with the lantern, thinking it might be Dat. It wasn’t. There were two of them, in soldier uniforms, one in front of us and one behind. There was no way to run. Joe tried to tell them we were only looking for Dat, but they just laughed. And then they hit him.”

  She fell silent, eyes still closed, and took two or three shaky breaths. When she spoke again Rachel had to lean close to hear, for she whispered.

  “The big one grabbed me and threw me down. When Joe tried to pick me up the other one hit him from behind. They both jumped on Joe and beat him and beat him and beat him. He didn’t fight back or anything, and they knocked him out pretty quick, but they didn’t stop hitting him. I begged them to stop, but they kicked him and stomped him with their boots. I thought he was dead.”

  She began to cry softly. “Then they came and . . . took me. Both of them.”

  Now she opened her eyes and looked at Rachel, tears streaming. “I’m so ashamed, Rachel. I couldn’t stop them. I never should have been there. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t been there they wouldn’t have hurt Joe.”

  Rachel could take no more. She was crying herself as she wrapped her arms around Saloma and drew her up close in a careful hug.

  “Child, you didn’t do anything wrong. You only went to find your dat, and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was not your fault. There’s a lot of evil people in the world, that’s all.”

  Rachel whispered the words over and over while they cried into each other’s shoulders.

  “So much evil.”

  Chapter 23

  Caleb brought the Hostetler boy home from Agua Nueva the next day, his jaw wired shut, splints on his hands and a bandage over his left eye. Rachel watched her dat drive slowly down the main road to the Hostetler place, watched him escort Joe into the house and watched him get back in his buggy and drive home. She knew what was coming and waited for her father alone in the kitchen garden with a hoe in her hands. There, no one would hear what was said.

  ———

  “Tell me,” her father said, “did they do to her what I think they did?”

  Rachel watched her hoe mechanically chopping weeds from between the tomatoes—she couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “Dat, I promised I would not tell.”

  The lines in Caleb’s face deepened. “I see. So it is true. Do Atlee and Jemima know?”

  Rachel looked her father in the eye. “No. Only me. Even Joe doesn’t know for sure, because he was unconscious through most of it. Please, Dat, Saloma feels bad enough. I warned her that you would ask, and that I would not lie to you. She wanted me to make you promise that you would tell no one.”

  He nodded slowly. “I understand. I will not speak of it to our people, but someone has to go have a talk with Captain Soto. This kind of thing can’t go unnoticed, unpunished. Something has to be done or none of our women will be safe.”

  “It has to be you,” she said. “Please. You must not tell the bishop, or Atlee. You must go and talk to the federales.”

  Caleb sighed. “I really don’t like that little captain, and I am weary of cleaning up Atlee’s messes for him. But you’re right. I’m the one.”

  Caleb found Captain Soto in front of the church—or what used to be the church. He was watching from the portico while one of his lieutenants paraded a squad of soldiers back and forth in the open ground in front of him. Caleb climbed the steps with his hat in his hands, determined to give the captain the respect due his office, whether the man deserved it or not.

  Soto ignored Caleb for a few minutes, shouting orders at the lieutenant, berating his men. He seemed in a foul mood until he turned to Caleb and grinned cordially.

  “Good morning, Señor Bender. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

  “We have to talk,” Caleb said. “About a couple of your men.”

  “Which ones? At present I have seventy-four in my command.”

  “I only know the first names, and one is a nickname. The little one was called Melky, and the big one Toro. Do you know these men?”

  Soto’s eyebrows went up. “Sí, of course I know them. I know all of my men—that is my business. Melquiades Chavez is a corporal, and the one they call Toro is a new recruit. Those two are always up to some kind of mischief. What have they done now?”

  “They beat up two teenagers from our settlement. I took one of them myself to the doctor in Agua Nueva. His fingers are broken and his jaw had to be wired shut. He won’t be able to open his mouth for weeks, and he almost lost an eye.”

  “Ahh, they were fighting. Señor Bender, surely you understand that soldiers need to let off a little steam now and then. Fighting is not uncommon when they are—”

  “It was not a fight,” Caleb said. “It was an unprovoked beating, pure and simple.”

  Soto’s head tilted. “How can you know this? Were you there? The boy might have—”

  “There was a girl, too. She was beaten nearly as bad as the boy.”

  The grin disappeared from Soto’s face. He shouted one last order to his lieutenant, then took Caleb’s arm and walked him down the steps and around the side of the barracks. “We should discuss this in private,” he said, and didn’t utter another word until they were inside the little house that used to be Father Noceda’s rectory. The front room held a desk with a set of bookshelves behind it, but there were no books—only piles of papers and files. There were half a dozen chairs lining the walls, and a sawhorse on which rested a saddle that Caleb presumed belonged to Captain Soto because of the fine workmanship.

  Soto dropped his hat on the desk and sat down, running his fingers through his hair. Caleb stood in front of the desk like a penitent, his hat still in his hands, waiting.

  “They beat a girl?” Soto said.

  “Sí. Very badly.” Caleb shifted his feet, undecided about bringing up the other thing. He wanted to protect Saloma’s privacy if he could, but he would wait and see how things went.

  “Still,” Soto said with a shrug, “it is possible the boy started the fight, and the girl only wandered into the middle of it.”

  “No. You don’t understand. Our people don’t believe in fighting. This boy would never start a fight or take part in one.”

  Soto leaned back in his desk chair now, eyeing Caleb suspiciously, tugging at the corner of his thin little mustache.

  “Your people don’t fight?”

  “No.”

  A little grin crinkled the corners of the captain’s eyes. “This is what El Pantera told me the day we captured him, but I didn’t believe him. And I thought the Catholic superstitions were strange. So this is true? You don’t fight? At all?”

  “Never.”

  “But what about that young man of yours?”

  “What young man?”

  “The one who was there when I hung El Pantera. He was with you—the one El Pantera said killed one of his men.”

  “You mean Jake Weaver.”

  Soto leaned forward and pointed at him, warming to a debate. “You were there, Señor Bender, in the churchyard. I remember, El Pantera said this Jake surprised his man from behind while he was unarmed and strangled him with a chain. Is this not true?”

  Caleb shifted uneasily and gave a shrug. “Sí. It happened, but not without reason. The man was attacking my daughter, and Jake pulled him off of her with his chain. He never meant to kill the bandit.”

  “Oh, I see. He didn’t mean to kill the bandit, but he did fight. So how do you know this boy in the alley didn’t do something to provoke my men? Did he tell you how the fight started?”

  “No, he still can’t speak, but the girl told my daughter. She said two drunken soldiers jumped them in an alley, without provocation. The teenagers were looking for their father, Atlee Hostetler.”

  “Ahh, I know this Atlee. A strange little man who comes to town and drinks mescal with my men—and tequila, when they have it. It was his children who were beaten?”

  “Sí.”

  Soto sat for a minute with his chin in his palm, staring out the window. Finally he turned back to Caleb with a sigh. “Well, I don’t doubt that what you’re saying is true, señor, but if you were not there and didn’t see what happened you have only the word of these two about what really took place, and my men will undoubtedly tell a different story. Perhaps you should tell this Atlee not to let his children wander the streets at night alone.”

  Caleb could see how this would go. It was Saloma’s word against the soldiers. Those two monsters would simply lie and walk away. Nothing would be done to control the soldiers, and then what? What would happen next time? Caleb saw that he had no choice; he was going to have to raise the stakes.

  “I have spoken to Atlee, for what it’s worth,” Caleb said. Then he leaned his fists on the front of the desk and looked the little officer cold in the eyes. “But it seems to me it would be the responsibility of the officer in command to see that his men don’t roam the streets at night, raping innocent girls.”

  Soto’s head backed away and his eyebrows went up. “Rape? You did not tell me they raped the girl. Did she tell you this?”

  “She told my daughter. No one else knows. It’s not the kind of thing we talk about.”

  “You should have told me this from the beginning. A little fun, a little drinking, maybe a good-natured fistfight—these things
are to be expected from off-duty soldiers in any army. But I cannot allow my men to rape civilian women. It stirs resentment among the local people, and we must live with them. You are sure about this? It is a very serious charge.”

  Caleb nodded. “Es verdad.” It is true.

  “Can the girl identify the men?”

  Caleb took a deep breath, let it out. “I would not want to put her through that. She is very hurt, very fragile.”

  Soto gave this a dismissive wave. “No matter. In a case like this there are ways I can persuade Melky and Toro to tell me the truth. I will not have my men doing such things.” He rose from behind his desk and straightened his tunic. “Leave the matter to me, Señor Bender. I will get to the bottom of it, and when I do I will let you know the outcome. Buenos días.”

  Driving home, it seemed to Caleb that Captain Soto had been extraordinarily civil, almost sympathetic. Perhaps there was a decent side to the captain after all. Maybe all it took was a little respect.

  But we will see, he thought. Soto’s actions would reveal far more than his words.

  Three days later, as a squad of federales passed through the valley on their way home to El Prado after their daily patrol, one of them split off from the others and rode up Caleb’s lane. Caleb saw him coming and met him in front of the house.

  The soldier looked to be about seventeen years old. A frayed secondhand uniform hung on his thin frame rather loosely so that he looked almost as ragged as the swaybacked paint he was riding.

  “Señor Caleb Bender?”

  “That’s me. What is it?” Caleb braced himself, expecting the young recruit to pilfer some vegetables from Mamm’s kitchen garden, or eggs, or a sack of oats. But he was wrong.

  “Captain Soto wishes to see you,” the boy said. “At first light, mañana.”

  Caleb nodded. “Tell him I will be there. Is this about the men who beat up the boy and girl?”