by Dale Cramer
Domingo shrugged, shook his head. “I don’t know about the others, but they say El Pantera never moves at night if he doesn’t have to.”
This brought another fear to Caleb’s mind, a chilling thought. “How would we know he hasn’t gone to Paradise Valley?”
“He won’t go there,” Domingo said, shaking his head.
Miriam’s head tilted. “Why not?”
Domingo plucked a straw from the ground, pinched off the end and used it to pick his teeth. “Because, cualnezqui, he is Villa’s man. Did you never wonder why Hacienda El Prado still stands?”
“I have wondered about this,” Miriam said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “I read everything I could find about the revolution, about how most of the grand haciendas were sacked and burned, and it occurred to me – why not El Prado?”
Caleb stared at his daughter’s face, shining in the firelight. Miriam normally would never have spoken up in front of a man like this.
“Did Señor Hidalgo perhaps bribe Villa?” Caleb asked.
Domingo chuckled. “How do you bribe a man whose army can kill you and take everything you own anytime he pleases? Nein. I don’t know what passed between them, but it seems to me that Señor Hidalgo must have once done something to help Pancho Villa, some great kindness for which Villa was grateful, a kindness he never forgot. For some reason Hacienda El Prado has his protection, and out of respect – or fear – his men leave it alone. Others may come, but Villa’s men will not.”
“There are others?” Caleb asked.
“Jah, many of them, though most are not so fierce – or so evil – as El Pantera.”
“And these others – they will come to Paradise Valley?”
“They already have. I am surprised you have not seen them.”
“Then perhaps we should appeal to the government for protection,” Caleb said. “Maybe they will send policemen to our valley.”
Domingo rose to his feet, yawned, stretched and kicked dirt on what was left of the fire. His voice came from the darkness as the last of the flames flickered out.
“Do you trust the government?”
Chapter 24
At first light they were back on the road, and before noon they had descended from the rugged northern mountains. The thought of his wife and daughters back home in Paradise Valley without him lay on Caleb’s mind like a weight so that he leaned forward a little on the bench seat, shaking the reins often and urging his sturdy draft horses on. They seemed to understand, shouldering the load and picking up the pace without complaint. Caleb’s head turned constantly left and right, watching the ridgetops, hoping he would not see men on horseback – especially the big bicolor Appaloosa with the leopard spots.
As the sun settled into the western mountains they dropped off Domingo at the village of San Rafael and rounded the end of the ridge into Paradise Valley. A great weight lifted from Caleb’s tired shoulders when he came to the long driveway and turned his wagon toward the half-built adobe house up near the base of the ridge. In the dusk, the tents already glowed soft yellow from the lanterns inside.
The whole family turned out to welcome them home. Aaron and Harvey saw that the horses were fed and watered and brushed and put away while Caleb and his daughters washed up for dinner. It was Saturday night, so Mamm asked Emma and Mary to draw big pots of water and set them on the stove, which for now sat in the open behind the tent with only a short section of stovepipe out the top.
Mamm laid out dinner for Caleb and the girls while they told the story of their trip, and they could hardly eat for having to answer the eager questions fired at them from all directions. Everyone crowded into the tent to listen to Rachel as she told them all about the market street, the toothless old woman and the pickpocket niños.
Caleb filled them in on the rest of the trip, but he intentionally left out the part about the bandits. The women need not worry about such things, and Domingo had assured him El Pantera would not come this far south.
“So, you had no trouble on the road?” Emma asked. It was an innocent question – on such a trip it was not uncommon for a horse to pull up lame or an axle to break – but Caleb paused too long. He and Rachel and Miriam were all sitting at a little table with plates of beans, fresh tomatoes and onions in front of them, and when Emma asked about difficulties on the road they all hesitated and glanced at each other in a way that Emma’s sharp eyes would surely not miss. Besides, her question was too direct. If he said they’d had no trouble at all, it would be a lie.
“Well,” Caleb finally said, “there was a few fellas met us on the road asking for something to eat.”
“Fellas?” Mamm asked. “What kind of fellas?”
Caleb spooned up some beans and tried not to look her in the eye. “Oh, just fellas. Domingo said they used to be soldiers in the war.”
“Soldiers! Oh my!” Mamm’s eyes widened and her hand flew up to cover her mouth. “Did they have guns?”
The two youngest daughters stood on either side of Caleb, watching his face, hanging on every word. When she heard that soldiers had stopped her father, the eleven-year-old blurted out, “Did they try to kill you?”
Everyone laughed except Rachel and Miriam. Rachel suddenly seemed to be very intent on her vegetables, while Miriam simply stared at her father. Mamm saw this, and bored in on her husband.
“Caleb, tell us what happened. What did these men do?”
Caleb knew he was trapped then, so he proceeded to tell the whole story of how they had been stopped on the road by eight or ten rough-looking men who claimed at first to only need a few ears of corn.
Miriam thumped her spoon down on the table, glaring at him.
“They were bandits, Dat, and they would have robbed us if not for Domingo. Or worse,” she said flatly, interrupting her father. Everyone in the tent sat very still and stared at her. Caleb stared the hardest. She had spoken out of turn and contradicted her father.
She looked around at the frozen faces, all turned toward her.
“Well, they would have,” she said, standing her ground no matter the cost. “That’s what Domingo told us, and one of them pulled Rachel’s kapp from her head, too. We were afraid we would be killed.”
Mamm’s face had gone ash white. “How did you get away?” she asked weakly.
Caleb dismissed the issue with a little backhanded wave as if he were brushing away a fly. “It was not so bad as all that. Domingo knew their leader, a man who was with his father in the war. Domingo asked the man to leave us be, so he did, and his men left with him. We were never in any real danger.”
Chapter 25
The Bender men never slowed down. Over the next two weeks they bolted the windmill together and got it working, hooked the pipes to it, and returned Schulman’s diesel water pump. Meanwhile, Aaron and Harvey laid the last few courses of bricks, topping out the walls of the two-story house.
Caleb and Ezra made cabinets and doors and windows while the others built the roof. The finished house was smaller than the one they’d left behind, but standing alone at the base of the northern ridge with no other buildings for miles around except for a few meager palm-thatched huts, it was an imposing structure.
Their new home was nicer than they had ever imagined a mud house could be. Once they’d been whitewashed, the walls were just walls – it was easy to forget they were made of dirt. They still had to watch out for scorpions in the house, but thanks to the tight-fitting doors they would no longer have to worry about a snake crawling under the covers with them.
This had actually happened once, to Aaron, when they were still sleeping in the tents. It was a chilly night, and the snake just crawled in and stretched itself up against Aaron’s nice warm back while he was sleeping. Inevitably, Aaron rolled over, pinning the frightened black snake underneath him and causing it to thrash about, waking first Aaron, and then everyone in roughly a five-mile radius. The snake wasn’t poisonous, but in the pitch-dark middle of the night there were any number
of ways someone could have been killed, heart attack not the least among them.
Sitting at the head of the table one evening in September, Caleb helped himself to the green beans and said, “I got a letter today from John Hershberger. He said so far they got eight families planning to come down here. There’s bound to be more, though. There’s a bunch in Kentucky who said they wanted to come, and another bunch in Lancaster. So far, all John’s counting is around home and a couple up in Geauga County.”
Rachel and her sisters all started talking at once, drowning Caleb in questions until he held up both hands for them to stop.
“Well, all right, lemme see if I can remember the names he wrote. He said the Shrocks are coming – ”
“Enos or Ira?” Rachel asked.
“The Ira Shrocks. But not the grossmammi. She’ll be staying with her other daughter . . . um – ”
“Linda,” Mamm reminded him. “Bill-Linda, Hochstetter.” This was a Dutch abbreviation for Linda, wife of Bill Hochstetter. There were several Lindas in the Amish community; it was customary to differentiate between them by prefacing Linda with the husband’s name. There was a Bill-Linda, an Enos-Linda, and a Jake-Linda just in the Benders’ circle of friends.
“Bill-Linda, jah. Then of course Jonas Weavers are coming, but not Eli Stoltzfuses. I never did think they would come. The two families from up Geauga County are Roman J. Millers and Mahlon Yutzys.”
He named them all. Caleb never forgot a name. Then he told them the rest of the news.
“They won’t all be coming right away, though,” he said. “John’s are coming this winter, sometime after the new year, but only the Shrocks are coming with him this time. He said most of the others plan to be down in the summer.”
Amid all the excitement over the pending arrival of the Hershbergers and Shrocks, Rachel noticed a curious thing – Miriam didn’t really seem interested. The married folks were genuinely excited about their new neighbors, the people who would sit with them in church and work alongside them at harvesttime. The unmarried young people, a group which at this point only included Aaron, Harvey, Miriam, and herself – well, and Ada – would normally have been very keen to know whose faces they would be seeing at the singing on Sunday night. It mattered a great deal to Aaron and Harvey, though Rachel herself had already made her choice and her interest was mostly for show. But Miriam, the one who should have cared the most, never uttered a word. She didn’t seem to care who would be coming, and in fact hardly seemed to be paying attention.
After dinner Miriam went off into a corner by herself with a kerosene lantern and her Spanish book. Lately, she’d been spending every spare minute studying. Rachel wandered out into the front yard to watch the dregs of a watercolor sunset drain into the western mountains. There was still that last little bit of pearly light in the valley when she saw the horses.
They were coming down the road from the west, the direction of Agua Nueva, pacing along in that steady way of horses and dogs that are accustomed to traveling for days at a time. It looked like six or eight of them, but at such a distance in the half-light she couldn’t tell for sure. When they came to the driveway of the Bender farm they stopped and sat tall in their saddles, studying the two-story adobe house with its new tin roof and inviting windows full of the yellow light of lanterns.
In a moment the horses turned in and sauntered casually up the long drive. Rachel went back up the steps and stuck her head in the door. Dat was still sitting at the kitchen table, talking with Levi, Ezra and Aaron.
“Dat,” she said, “there are men coming up our driveway. On horseback. Mexicans.”
“How many?” Dat asked, rising.
“Six, I think.”
He picked up a lantern and his hat as he went out the door, the other three men right behind him. Rachel followed.
The six trotted up the driveway in single file, but when they came to Dat and his lantern, their horses fanned out six wide and stopped in front of him. He raised his lantern and his practiced eye swept over their horses. He didn’t say it, but Rachel knew he was looking for that big liver-and-white Appaloosa. It wasn’t there. This was not the same bunch.
“Buenas noches,” the one in the middle said. He wore a gilded sombrero. A huge black mustache hid his mouth and half his chin. Two bandoliers of bullets crossed his chest, and he wore pistols on both hips below his waist jacket.
Dat nodded. “Hola.”
They were hard-looking men, just as lean and hungry as El Pantera’s band, especially about the eyes. Dangerous men.
The leader pulled off his sombrero, wiping his forehead on his sleeve in the same motion. “Señor, my men and I have traveled far today, and we are very hungry. I wonder if we could trouble you for a crust of bread and some water.”
“We will feed you,” Dat said. “Your horses are tired, too. My boys will feed and water them while you come inside and eat, but I will have you leave your guns out here.”
The leader leaned back in his saddle and muttered something to his men. His words were too quick and slurred for Rachel to understand, but his men laughed among themselves. He wiped his smile away with the back of a hand, then put his sombrero back on his head. None of them moved to get down from their horses. The chickens cackled suddenly out back, and the man on the right craned his neck, trying to see the coop. Another leaned forward onto his pommel, leering at Rachel until she was forced to lower her face.
Their leader used his sombrero to shade his face from the lantern for a moment while he studied the ridge they had just come down – as if he half expected to see someone following them.
“We are very sorry we must decline your kind invitation,” he said, “but we are in a little bit of a hurry just now. We will water our horses at your trough, but if you could only give us a little bread and whatever else is handy, we will eat while we ride.”
Caleb nodded to Rachel. She ran back to the house for food.
“The trough is over here,” she heard her father say, and the lantern moved off toward the corral.
Five minutes later Rachel went out to the corral with two big loaves of fresh bread, three ears of boiled corn and some tomatoes. The bandits divided the food between themselves, muttering “Gracias” over their shoulders as they turned their horses about and trotted down the driveway.
“They didn’t seem so bad,” Levi mused, watching them leave.
“Jah, maybe, but you only saw them on their best behavior,” Rachel said, staring at her splayed hands. They were still shaking when she heard distant shouts and looked up to see a larger band of horses charging hard down the road from the west – the direction the bandits had come from.
The bandits turned into the main road and spurred their horses into flight. As the second group flew past the farm, leaning forward in their saddles and galloping flat-out in pursuit, Rachel counted a dozen men. They were all wearing dark uniforms. Federales.
The desperate chase had passed out of sight in the darkness to the east when they heard the unmistakable echo of distant gunshots from somewhere near the end of the ridge.
They all ran for the house then, but halfway across the yard the front door flew open and Miriam’s head popped out.
“Rachel!” she shouted. “Come quick! Something’s wrong with Emma!”
Chapter 26
Levi outran her to the house and bolted down the steps into the stone-walled basement. His and Emma’s bed lay almost underneath the stairs – they occupied the front half of the space, while Ezra, Mary and the boys slept in the back half, which had been sectioned off for privacy by hanging a tent-canvas curtain from wall to wall.
By the time Rachel ran down the steps Levi was already there, sitting on the side of the bed, leaning over his wife, still wearing his hat and coat. Mamm stood by the side of the bed holding a handkerchief to her face, coughing. She’d been much better lately, but her cough returned sometimes when she was stressed. Rachel put an arm around her mother, who glanced at her with tears in her eyes but sa
id nothing.
“It’s too early,” Levi said, leaning over his wife, face-to-face, and speaking to her as if he was giving orders. “You can’t have it now; it wouldn’t be ready yet.”
Mamm shook her head and leaned close to Rachel, whispering, “No. The baby can’t live if it comes so soon.”
Emma lay on her side on top of the covers, still in her dress and kapp, holding her abdomen and breathing hard through pursed lips. Her head turned when she saw Rachel, and she held out a hand, beckoning.
“Is the baby coming now?” Rachel asked, kneeling to take Emma’s hand.
“I hope not. I’m trying to calm him down.”
“It’s not time!” Levi said, his face twisted with anxiety, confusion, and maybe a little anger. Emma looked at Rachel when he said this, just a brief glance, the slightest turn of her head, but Rachel saw the pleading in her eyes.
“Don’t let it come now!” Levi commanded, his fists gripping the sheets in frustration, his eyes fierce.
Rachel put a hand on his shoulder and leaned a little lower to look up into his eyes. “Levi,” she said gently. His eyes didn’t move from Emma’s face, so Rachel said his name again. “Levi.”
This time he looked at her.
“Please,” she said. “Go upstairs with the men. It’s better if you leave this to the women. Everything will be all right, but you must trust us. Let us take care of her.” The words sounded ridiculous to her own ears, knowing she had no experience at all.
Her sister Mary had tiptoed down the stairs with a lantern and stood on the other side, the lantern up-lighting her swollen belly so that the shadows made it look twice the size of Emma’s. Levi looked up at Mary, who nodded. His hat turned and he looked up at Mamm, who also nodded, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth.
“You’re right,” he said, appearing to deflate just a bit as he said it. “It’s not good a man should be here just now. I’ll go and pray.” The anger drained out of his face, leaving only a pitiable desperation as he stared into his wife’s eyes. “I must beg Gott not to take this baby,” he said very softly, then shoved himself to his feet and hurried up the steps without looking back.
