by John Maclay
* * * *
Don Enrique gave his visitors directions toward a good camping place for the night. It was some miles along the road leading to Nacogdoches, and by the middle of the afternoon the wagons pulled out again. The women walked with brisker steps, and the children, full and happy, scampered about like puppies.
As Melinda’s husband led their team away, the tall woman turned to Antonia. “Thank you,” she said, her voice filled with an emotion the younger one couldn’t quite identify. “If I can, I’ll pay this back.”
Now what had she meant by that? Antonia wondered. It was unlikely they would ever meet again. And if they should, Melinda had what was in that wagon and the clothing on her back. It was highly improbable that she might ever supply anything Antonia Lucía Morales y Batista might need.
As everyone knew you must, despite the heat, Antonia slept with her shutter barred against the night air, though it meant squirming and sweating in her bed through the humid hours of darkness. The mosquito netting drooped against her and stuck. Her nightgown grew unbearably hot.
At last she rose and crept down the hall to the kitchen. A cedar bucket of water stood ready on a shelf along the wall, and she stopped to dip a cupful and pour it over her face and hands. The sudden coolness made her shiver, but she moved along past the kitchen, down the steps, and out into that area beneath the trees, where she had sat with those odd women.
The damp stuff of the high-necked gown now clung to her, and she pulled it away, fanning with the fabric. As she stood in the milky moonlight she saw something move at the side of the house. Turning, she gathered herself to run for the kitchen, for many dangers lurked in the forests about Don Enrique’s home.
Then she realized that it was a child. The little boy Melinda had called Dennis was beyond the fence.
Antonia felt a quiver of intuition. Melinda had promised to return favor for favor. Might this be the fulfillment of that promise? She had felt while they talked that there was something the woman wanted to say but dared not mention while they were surrounded by the others.
She stepped out of the tree-shadow, and the boy turned swiftly and saw her. He darted through the gate, past the house, and came up to her, his wide eyes shining in the moonlight.
“Lady,” he panted softly, “My Momma sent this for you. She told me to git it here and not to git et by no critter. Here it is, and I got to go.” He took off through the bushes along the garden fence and disappeared from her view, leaving Antonia holding a slip of crumpled paper, still warm from the boy’s pocket.
She shivered again, this time with a mixture of dread and excitement. What was so important and yet so secret that this stranger risked her son to deliver it to one she had just met?
Antonia moved out into the full glare of the moon, which had now risen high. She held the dirty scrap into the light so she could decipher the scrawl of lines.
“Deer Miz”, she made out,
Yu was kind, and I preshate that. The men they like yore Pa’s place. They alreddy sed they’d tak the 1st good land they seen. They goin to cum bak tonite and take it. Go and hide. They mite kil yu and yore fokes.
Melinda Roper
Antonia turned, her full nightgown flying, and sped to the house. “¡Padre mío!” she cried. “Hurry! Get your things, your guns, your books. Luisa, Rosa, Emilio, Pedro! Wake, wake! We must go now! Wake the children!”
Her father came to his door, his aquiline face stern. “Have you gone mad, Antonia?” he asked.
She thrust the soiled paper, which she now realized had been torn from the end pages of a Protestant Bible, into his hands. He stared down, recognizing the source of the paper, trying to make out the meaning of the ill-spelled words. When he looked up again, she saw the reluctant conviction dawning in his eyes.
When he moved it was like a whirlwind. While Antonia packed up her sturdiest clothing, the heavy skirts and shirts she wore working in the garden, the stout shoes and boots, her journal, her sewing gear, her mother’s letters and picture, she heard the servants packing necessities for this sudden move.
She met the rest of the household on the front lawn. The children had been sent to the pasture, and now the horses came snorting into the garden. There was no time to load a wagon. Everything they wanted to keep was packed onto horseback. When that was done the servants headed for the small Mexican village farther along the trail, while Antonia and her father went down into the river bottoms, leading the laden horses.
Even in the deep shadow of the forest they did not dare light torches; as they moved, Antonia heard a clamor up on the ridge. Her chickens squawked and the yard dogs began barking wildly. Six shots ended that bedlam, and she knew that the faithful watchdogs were dead.
She drew a quivering breath, and her father’s hand touched her shoulder. “We must be grateful to that señora, Antonia. We might well lie dead beside the dogs, if she had not given warning. I hope”—his voice thinned before continuing—“I hope that her warning will not be known. I hope she does not suffer for saving us.”
Antonia had not thought of the possible punishment Walter might mete out to his wife for betraying this plot. Now she shivered in earnest.
She followed the dark bulk of the mare; behind, she heard the hooves of the pack horses plopping into the soft soil that floored the bottomlands. Don Enrique knew these trails as only a devoted hunter could. He led her surely across branches running into creeks that ran, in turn, into the larger stream. From time to time they turned to follow running water, hiding the marks of the passing horses.
Her feet were wet, mud squishing between her toes. But she followed without complaint, wondering, now that hardship had overtaken her, if she could face it as well as her mother would have, even though Mamá would have been furious at such abuse of her hospitality.
Antonia could almost hear that clear voice. “My Indios never would be so ungrateful,” she would have said. “These perros are without pride and honor, and we must, in time, go back and punish them for their perfidy.”
She felt heat rise in her throat. Anger? When had she ever been truly angry before? Antonia kept her gaze fixed on the dim blur that was her father’s mare, but she was thinking hard.
Would they ever be able to return and drive out those usurpers? Melinda had spoken of more Anglos who would come into this country. If there were too many of them, it would be mad to try fighting them. Yet it was unbearable to think of running and running, without a place to rest.
A sob caught in her throat, and the horse ahead stopped. Don Enrique, invisible in the murk, was a moving darkness as he came and caught her against him. “Hija mía,” he murmured, “do not grieve. We are alive. We have the horses, our clothing, and weapons and tools. Even some books. We will survive, Antonia. In time, we may find another place in which to settle and another bit of land to farm. Our people will come to us, when it is safe.”
She nodded against his chest and straightened. Before she could speak, there came a rustle so faint that she thought for a moment it was imaginary.
Then a gruff voice spoke from the darkness, using the guttural Spanish the Indios had learned from her mother. “Come, Señor, Señorita. We take you to good place. Back there, only death. La Señora give much to us. Now we give back, take you away. Then you be safe.”
Antonia felt her father’s astonishment through his circling arm. It equaled her own.
Mamá had sown her seed and been scolded for it. Now the two of them were reaping the harvest of her kindness.
“Gracias,” Antonia whispered into the darkness. Unlike those who had thanked her the day before, she meant that with all her being. These savage saviors would never have reason to regret their kindness. As she moved after Don Enrique, she swore to the Virgin that she would devote her time and even her life to helping them.
They followed their invisible guide deeper into the swampy country along the river, and A
ntonia knew that those they had left behind would never find them. With sudden joy, she felt that her life had changed forever. She had found a purpose for her existence, and in time she might find herself useful to these quiet people.
“Gracias, Mamá,” she murmured into the dank swamp. “Even in death, you watch over us still.”
She heard her father clear his throat. Then his voice came to her through the darkness. “So she does, Antonia. So she does.”
COLD TEARS, COLD STONE
There was a painting hanging in our bookshop of just such a barn, and it told this tale to me.
We played in the stone barn as children, half fearful in the dim light and the unnatural coolness contrasting with the brilliant summer days. Breath-stopping games of hide and seek went on there. Spies crept and Indians ambushed. Elaborate charades, most of them involving haunted castles with dungeons and torture chambers, were acted out there. It was, literally, the haunt of our youth—not constantly, but when we were in a certain half-daring mood.
As with all the other things from those long-ago days it was almost forgotten, like the farm, our grandmother, dead these many years, and the ancient pony on whose back we all learned to ride. Seven cousins, their ages ranging from six and a half to ten, lived only in occasional fits of nostalgia. The self I had been was packed away into my mental attic, along with the rest.
I was a busy woman, commuting to a job I loved from a marriage I didn’t quite know how to end without hurting a person I had thought I loved and still had tenderness for. Arthur suspected, I thought, but he didn’t say anything to me, and I certainly didn’t know how to broach the subject to him. We were jogging along together like an ill-matched team of horses pulling a wagon whose spokes were loose and whose frame was shaky. Neither of us quite dared to suggest unhitching—or at least repairing the wagon, to carry the analogy altogether too far.
The call from the lawyers interrupted the comfortable set of habits we had formed to substitute for something warmer. The estate had been settled at long last. Every one of grandmother’s offspring had rejected the bother of accepting the farm and putting it into order to sell. Situated as it was, it would bring a paltry sum. All of us were busy. Nobody wanted the old place. Would I be interested?
The will had been odd. Chester, the oldest cousin, had called each of us to let us know its content, and we agreed it was strange and let it go at that. For Grandmother had left the entire estate to whichever of us would take the farm. She knew, I suppose, how people change as they grow older. If she had offered it to us when we were ten or so we would have fought to the death over it.
They had all turned it down. I was ready to do the same when Arthur talked me out of it.
“Why not go look at it? You have some comp-time coming, and I have to go to California next week. Why don’t you take off and go up to see the place before you make up your mind? You never know—taxes aren’t all that much in that part of the state, and we might use it for a vacation home, or rent it, or something useful. A free farm doesn’t just fall into your hands every day of the week.”
He was right, of course. And, once I opened the door of that mental attic, many things fell out into my memory that filled me with pleasure to think about. Grandmother for one, with her strong brown arms and ever-damp apron, feeding the calves in the pen beside that barn. Chester and his younger siblings shutting me and my brother into the hayloft by taking away the ladder. Games and long talk and wild notions hatched in its dim recesses. It was the barn that drew me back, not the house.
I drove up on Saturday morning, taking half the day just to get there. Arthur had insisted that I take my sleeping bag and provisions, for we knew there hadn’t been anyone living there since Chester’s last tenant left and Chester died. There would be no utilities, no food, probably no furniture.
Once I made up my mind I was excited at the prospect of getting entirely away from my usual round. As I drove through the rounded hills that got steeper as they approached the turnoff, I found myself inexplicably cheerful. I kept telling myself that there would be nobody there. That you can’t go home again. That the child I had been was irretrievably gone. But something inside kept bubbling away. I came around the downward curve of the drive, around the clump of birches that had now grown into fine big trees, and the house was before me. Off to the left, almost hidden by a maple grove, was the stone barn. The yard and the lot were overgrown with weeds. The rose vine that had always rimmed the front door with disciplined blossom had rambled all over the front of the house, even onto the roof.
I pulled up before the front steps and looked about. Trees that had been saplings now were as thick as my body. Had it been thirty years since I stood on this ground? The years had peeled away, and I felt no older than I had the last time I sat in Dad’s car, straining through the window for a last hug at Grandmother. And now they were all gone, even Charles, my brother. It gave me an eerie feeling of disorientation. They should have been all around me.
An old house, shut over a winter, has a distinctive smell that contains elements of generations of mice and mold, ghosts of ancient meals, dry rot and furniture polish and wood smoke—and something else I have never defined. Grandmother’s house smelled like that, and I almost felt tears come to my eyes. She had kept it smelling of lemon oil and rose potpourri and hot soup simmering on the back of the stove. How she would have hated to smell her house now!
But I opened the door wide, unfastened and opened all the windows on the ground floor, and kindled a small fire in the fireplace to dry out the damp. I’d camp down here for the time I stayed. How long that would be, I didn’t know. It was so quiet—I was used, nowadays, to the hum of traffic and the varied clicks and throbs of household appliances doing their automatic duty. A house that held only the scurryings of mice and the scrapings of the rose vine against the clapboard was entirely too still for comfort.
I went through the rooms. To my surprise some of Grandmother’s furniture was there, not too much damaged by damp and lack of care. The huge bureau, the eight-foot bed with the carven posts, the Victorian dresser with the candle sconces on either side—those were valuable pieces, and I had thought someone would have sold them long before now. Or that some tenant would have absconded with them. I was glad to see them—it was almost like having some of the family there to greet me.
The sun was low, though there were hours of daylight left. I unpacked my foodstuff, made a fire in the wood cook stove that Grandmother had kept, even after she got her good electric one, and made a stew that helped restore the smell of the place to something like its old state.
Once fed, I strolled about the fenced yard, re-creating in my mind the rose garden, in which a few hardy varieties still clung to life, the vegetable garden in the back, the rockery. Only the rockery kept its character—nothing but aeons of time would wear away those blue granite boulders Grandfather had brought down from the upper fields for his bride. Dill and Jerusalem artichoke still survived like the weeds they were in the vegetable plot.
I had the feeling I’d had when seeing films of war-ravaged cities. Where there had been order, there was now the wildest chaos. It filled me with something that wasn’t quite gloom, but it didn’t miss it by much. I went indoors as the sun sank behind the trees to the west and rebuilt my fire. It was just barely cool enough to have one, but its cheer was a thing I needed.
It wasn’t long until I rolled into my sleeping bag. The drive had been long and tiring, and the arrival worse. I didn’t sleep well—the silence kept me awake, for the few sounds of night birds and insects were alien to my ears now.
I woke early. The sun wasn’t over the wood to the east when I staggered into the kitchen and used the kindling and wood I had gathered the night before to make another fire for coffee. Only when I had a cup inside me did I feel up to cooking a good breakfast. After that I looked toward the barn. I knew that had been my goal since my decision to come. Somethi
ng drew me to it.
Pulling on my boots and heavy pants, I readied myself as if for a hard journey. Perhaps it was one—the journey back into childhood. I had no idea what I expected to find within those cold stone walls. Not even the ghost of the child I had been could lurk there still, I knew quite well. But I had to go, and now. I had put it off last night, but it could be delayed no longer
The meadow grass was long, ungrazed, and unmowed. Tangles of brier knitted it together, and I was soon glad I had worn the boots. The maple grove had grown out of recognition—the trees were now huge, whereas they had been merely large when I last walked this way.
The barn hadn’t changed a bit. The dark stone still shone warm red-brown in its surrounding of pale mortar. Greenish moss had grown in some of the cracks, but the overall effect was the same as always. Solidity. Security. Continuation in the face of time and weather and whatever else the world might throw at it.
I stopped before the structure and stared at it. Its back was to the rising sun. The front was in shadow, the single many-paned window opening into darkness. The oak door was solidly closed, but I knew that it had never had a lock.
Now that I was here, I hardly knew why. The compulsion that had brought me so far left me, and I stood for a good long while, waiting for some inspiration to come to mind. But I had come, and I might as well go inside. Into that cool, other-worldly place where my cousins and I had solved all our problems when we were young. Now I had no problems—I stopped myself. That was a lie. I had problems to make those long-ago ones look trivial. Perhaps that was why I had come.
I pushed the latch, and the door moved a bit. It stuck against the stone floor, and I lifted and pushed against the old wood, feeling its splintery texture, familiar as my own skin. Then I was inside, staring up into the high peak of the roof.
The floor of the hayloft had fallen, and the entire expanse was open. The cool light from door and window left deep shadows behind the supporting pillars and in the corners, but there was no feeling of fear there. It was as it had always been, strangely comforting in its darkness and coolness.
