Safe Passage

by Carla Kelly

  “I’m not sure how comfortable we’ll be, riding like this, but I don’t have another horse,” he started.

  “… and I’m not much of a rider,” she finished.

  She got off as gracefully as Serena when they returned to their hiding place. Ammon used the shovel to pull the potatoes from the ashes. Addie’s face fell when she saw the blackened lumps.

  “Never fear,” he told her. “We’ll use a knife to scrape off the outside, like this. See? It’s fine inside, and I have some salt.”

  She let him put a potato on her tin plate and she did as he said to the potato, revealing an inside soft and white. “I only need one,” she assured him, when he shoveled out another potato.

  He ignored her and put it on her plate too. “Here’s the thing about adventures, Addie: You never know when your next meal is coming. Eat both of them.”

  “After we have a blessing,” she said.

  When he blessed their pitiful meal, the familiarity of that ordinary event touched a tender spot in his heart. He thought of their other meals together, and then all his solitary meals in the past two years. So often he hadn’t bothered with a blessing, not because he forgot, but mostly because it pained him not to hear her soft, echoing “amen.” He listened for it this time, and another pound of discouragement slid off his shoulders.

  Dusk had dimmed the harsh light and heat by the time they ate the potatoes and put out the fire. While he led Blanco to the water, Addie carefully poured the juice from the blackberries into their two canteens and added river water to fill them. She scooped the berries into one jar and tucked it in the burlap sack with the potatoes, cushioning it. She drank half the peach juice and ate some peaches, then gave him the rest.

  “I wish we could save this jar too,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, something she never would have done a few days ago.

  “Too big a chance it would break. This is where we take a page from Joselito’s book,” he explained. “When food is plentiful, we will eat all we can. When it is scarce, we will starve.”

  She nodded and gave that low laugh he had missed so much. “My sister in Logan is probably having a new dress made right now to wear to general conference in October.” She looked down at her dirty white skirt. “And probably complaining because it won’t be quite right.”

  He nodded, remembering Evangeline’s pointed distaste the day he drove up to the Finch’s ranch in all his freighting finery—bib overalls, rough brogans, and a sombrero—with Addie so proper beside him on the wagon seat. He reminded Addie of that day, and his wife laughed.

  “Oh, and when you quoted Psalm 37 … I can’t remember …”

  “ ‘A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of many wicked,’ ” he quoted promptly. “Made her angry enough to give me the hairy eyeball.”

  They laughed together, but he grew serious quickly. “Addie, you and I both need to look dirty and shabby and like every other revolutionary soldado and soldadera, just in case. Mostly we’ll try to stay out of sight. It’s fifty miles to San Pedro. Got the money pouch?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Can’t you smell it?”

  He nodded and mounted Blanco, holding out his hand to her. “We have a debt to discharge. Let’s ride, chiquita.”

  TWELVE

  THEY WERE FOUR days getting to San Pedro, four days of riding so close together, walking to relieve Blanco, and staying against the tree line between the river and the main road. The first day was hot and dusty, the second day cold and rainy, and on the third day, the complex woman he had married saved his life.

  When she dozed during the first night as they rode so slowly, Ammon felt just tired and groggy enough to imagine ways he could appear to some advantage with this wife of his. He was sort of rescuing her, but it wasn’t turning out to be a heroic venture at all. He had noticed quickly in his rescue of his wife—if that’s what it was—that she seemed so ashamed that she could not look at him for long. Her terrible anger, his eventual withdrawal, and the long days of watching everything crumble around her as Grandma Sada grew weaker and weaker had turned her into a woman of no confidence.

  In better circumstances, maybe he could have started visiting her in García, just sitting on the porch to chat a minute and reacquaint her with the man she had married. Ammon doubted there would have been much resistance from Addie’s father-in-law, who had been so eager to uproot his family and seek greener pastures in a safer place than Mexico.

  But war had interfered. As each day passed, Ammon was discovering how little war and revolution cared about reconciliation. Where life used to be measured by a slow pace in Mexico and little acts of kindness, revolution had blown all that away with the hot winds of destruction, want, and misery.

  So he fretted and schemed to no avail as they followed slowly in the wake of a guerilla army. That first evening, they learned, to his dismay, they were following General José Inés Salazar’s army, the man most responsible for driving their family and friends from Mexico.

  They learned that when they surprised two deserters staring, dejected, at a small fire on the bank of the river, not far from García. They were only boys, brothers probably, who leaped up and clung to each other after Ammon let Addie down in the tree line for safety and rode toward their little fire, cocking his rifle as he came. The metallic sound had been enough to cause them to raise their hands high over their heads. They had no weapons.

  They must have thought he was an officer from Salazar’s army, sent to round up deserters, because they went to their knees, pleading for their lives, begging the Virgin of Guadalupe to intervene between them and General Salazar. Their fervid petition told Ammon everything he needed to know about how the mercurial Salazar dealt with youngsters tired of war.

  He kept his rifle on them as he dismounted, then told them not to worry. All he wanted was information, which they eagerly supplied in their relief to be alive. Ammon motioned Addie forward as the story of their fight on the border at Topia tumbled out, and their increasing hunger as they traveled through villages already stripped bare of provisions.

  “We are going home to Morelos,” the older of the brothers said, breathless with his tale. His frightened eyes followed Addie as she came into the light of the campfire, her shotgun held in front of her like she meant business, even though Ammon alone knew what a wretched shot she was.

  The sight of his wife calmed them further; they must have reasoned that any man traveling with a woman meant them no mischief. You just don’t look like a soldadera, he thought as he watched Addie too. Still, there was something about the set of her mouth and the way she held the shotgun that made him happy enough not to be her target this time.

  “Please, señores, do you have any food?” the younger deserter asked, his hands together.

  Ammon turned to Addie. “What about it—do we have any food?” he asked her in English.

  She didn’t answer right away but returned her calm gaze to the young boys still cowering in front of them. Ammon watched her eyes soften, and her shoulders rise and fall in the sigh of all women when confronted with want among children.

  “Am, tell them we will share our potatoes,” she said.

  No one else would have understood the sweetness of that moment. Maybe Addie hadn’t even intended it, but she had used her little nickname for him, back when days were better. He swallowed, knowing he couldn’t turn into a blubbering idiot in front of young boys, yes, but soldiers.

  He nodded and told her to keep her weapon trained on them, the shotgun he didn’t even think was loaded. He fished four potatoes from the burlap bag and handed them to the older youth. He was obviously unfamiliar with potatoes, but his mouth watered anyway.

  Ammon told them to sit by the fire and squatted there with them, explaining how to poke the skins with a knife, if they had one, and put the potatoes in the ashes for a while—un poco tiempo más o menos— he knew they didn’t have a timepiece. He took a little salt from Grandpa Sada’s handkerch
ief and set it on a smooth rock beside the fire, telling them to scoop out the potatoes and sprinkle on the salt.

  The boys watched him, their faces serious, and nodded with each instruction. When they did nothing, Ammon smiled for the first time and took out the knife Serena Camacho had given him when he left Santa Clarita.

  “Do you have a knife? A weapon?” he asked.

  They shook their heads. The older, braver one said, “We won at Topia, but somehow we lost too. How is that possible?”

  He could picture it: the boys fighting, and then throwing down their weapons and running when the tide turned, not knowing it would turn back again, as others from the American side of the border had described the fight to him. Ammon was surprised Salazar had not killed them for cowardice.

  “Were you flogged for losing your weapons?” he asked gently.

  They nodded, so sober. The younger boy turned around and raised his shirt, which made Addie gasp and look away.

  “Now you are going home?”

  “If we can find it,” the older one said. “Before this year, we had never been farther than our village.” His face fell. “We might be lost.”

  “Your village?”

  He knew the village they named. By the light of the little fire, while the potatoes roasted, he used the knife to draw the Bavispe River and the pass between the mountains to cross the plains and find their home. When he finished, he handed Serena’s knife to them and told them not to lose it.

  Ammon gestured to Addie and helped her into the saddle. The boys were staring at the knife, as if amazed at the smile of good fortune, which they probably hadn’t seen in a long while. He returned to the campfire.

  “I have given you a knife and food. What else should I know about Salazar?” he asked.

  “The army is hungry and short of weapons,” the younger boy offered. He ducked his head. “We were not the only ones to drop our rifles and run.”

  The older boy seemed to have a better grasp of tactics. “The army is going to join up with more soldiers at Namiquipa.”

  “Then will they head south?” Ammon asked, hopeful.

  The boy shrugged, then grinned, telling Ammon that not all the fun was gone from his young heart. “Señor, General Salazar did not take me into his confidence.”

  Ammon laughed and touched the boy’s head. “Vayan con Dios,” he told them.

  He took the reins from Addie and walked Blanco deeper into the trees.

  “Stop a moment,” Addie said, when they could still see the two boys.

  He did as she said. They both looked back to see the boys scrabble in the ashes of the fire, pulling out the potatoes that were still mostly raw. Again he heard her sigh. He reached up and gave her foot a tug, because he couldn’t speak, either.

  He mounted and they rode in silence under a full moon. Gradually, Addie began to lean back against him and he just as gradually tightened his arms around her. She was quiet, but that was Addie. Leaving out the little detail of Grandma Sada’s tablecloth covering four dead bodies at Topia, he told her about his encounter with Serena and Felipe Camacho.

  “And you prayed that Heavenly Father would take him?” she asked, amazed at what he said.

  “He couldn’t live, and I couldn’t help him,” he pointed out. “And there was Serena, so frightened.”

  “ A soldadera afraid,” she mused. “It’s hard to believe. Why did you stop to help?”

  “ You’ll laugh.”

  “I doubt it. Really, why stop? The boy couldn’t harm you, and … and Serena wasn’t going anywhere. These people are our enemies.”

  “I’ve been reading that part in Alma where Ammon …” He gave a self-conscious chuckle. “I’ve been calling him Old Ammon the Nephite—where Ammon goes to preach to the Lamanites. As near as I can tell, he just went around asking what he could do to help.”

  Maybe it did sound strange. Good thing Addie couldn’t see his face. “I thought I could help.”

  “Sounds like you did, Old Ammon. I doubt anyone helps much in a war.”

  He shrugged. “I’m starting to think that all anyone wants is just to be left alone to grow a little garden.”

  He heard the humor in her voice. “My father would say that’s what’s wrong with the Hancocks: no ambition.” Her humor changed to embarrassment as the woman of no confidence resurfaced. “I should never have said that.”

  He took a chance and kissed the top of her head. She was as grimy as he was now, but he didn’t care. And her words didn’t sting. “He’d be right. Our ambitions don’t go much beyond land and cattle.” It was his turn to feel embarrassed. “You know, Addie, I like my freighting business, but it kept me away from church now and then, didn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s hard to get started when you don’t have much capital to begin with,” she said, excusing him so gracefully that he couldn’t help smiling. “I thought my father might offer to help you financially, but he never did.”

  “He never saw me as a sure thing.”

  “That’s where we differed,” she told him, her voice soft.

  She didn’t say anything else. In a few minutes, her head lapsed to one side and he knew she slept. The night was warm, but he knew his warmth came from inside. Maybe somewhere under all the hurt and shame, she might still think he was a sure thing.

  He was so tired in the morning that his eyeballs felt as though they had been removed, dipped in sand, and shoved back in. Addie had slept most of the night, so she was wide awake. Once Blanco was unsaddled and hobbled by the small stream, Ammon yawned, sat down under a tree and closed his eyes.

  When he opened his eyes, the sun was high overhead. He lay on his side, his hands tucked under his cheek like a child. He heard a splash from the stream so he turned over quietly in time to see his wife washing herself. She was as lovely as he remembered, even though it was obvious that the last few weeks of deprivation had taken a toll on her. He could clearly see the vertebrae in her spinal column. When she raised her arm to wash under it, he could have counted her ribs.

  Considering the current tentative nature of their relationship, if there even was a relationship, he turned over again and devoted his attention to the tree he slept under. She splashed a little more and then was silent. When he heard the rustle of her clothing, he yawned and then coughed. After a few more minutes, he yawned again and rolled onto his back. When he looked in her direction this time, she was dressed and combing her damp hair with her fingers.

  When she finished, she came closer, holding out several prickly pear leaves. She had trimmed them, but he would have known that just from looking at her fingers, which were pricked and bleeding.

  “I’m not too good at this yet,” she apologized.

  He examined one of the leaves elaborately, which made her smile. “You’re being silly,” she said. “What do I do now?”

  “I cut mine in chunks, but Serena Camacho cut hers into strips. Your choice. Are the potatoes gone?”

  “We’re saving them,” she said as she cut the nopal into strips. “If you want to wash in the river, it’s shallow there by the bank.” She sniffed. “In fact, I recommend it.”

  She looked at him with just the hint of a twinkle in her eyes, which made him want to wriggle like a puppy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said promptly. “I’ll do it for you, but would you take off the bandage? Maybe I should let some air get to my arm.”

  She helped him out of his shirt and untied his garments and helped guide his arm out of the sleeve, wincing as he winced. Her face was serious as she unwrapped the dirty bandage. They both looked at the wound, which had started to granulate, to Ammon’s relief. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I could have killed you.”

  “Not with that shot,” he replied, keeping a light tone. “Let me give you some advice, in case you decide to fire that shotgun again: keep your eyes open and hold your breath, then just squeeze the trigger.”

  “How did you know I had my eyes closed?” she accused.r />
  “I was watching your face.”

  He went to the river’s edge and unbuttoned his pants. “Well, to quote the punch line to a bad joke my father told me once, ‘Close your eyes, ladies, I’m coming through.’ ”

  He stripped and waded in, glancing back at the bank to see Addie looking the other way. He chuckled and sat down where the river was sandy, using some of the grit to scrub away more grime than even he was used to. Freighting was dirty business, but war even more so, he decided. He hummed to himself, remembering a few memorable moments in a tin tub with Addie scrubbing his back. He wondered if she ever thought of those times he knew he would never forget, since they were all he had now.

  When he finished and looked around, Addie was still facing away, but she must have tossed her shawl toward him to use as a towel. It was still damp from her efforts in the stream. When he was dressed, he joined her in the shade. She had a pile of prickly pear leaves. Like the good Relief Society sister he knew she was, she had arranged them, spoke-like and organized, on the tin plate.

  She asked a blessing on their pitiful breakfast and handed him the plate. “Evangeline tells me that her husband is getting flabby,” she told him, maybe aiming for some breakfast table conversation.

  It amazed him how quickly some women could adjust to life’s bare bones. He hadn’t really known that about Addie. What she said also made him laugh inwardly.

  Maybe not so inwardly. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “You are,” he teased. “You know I’m not flabby. Confess: did you peek when I dried off?”

  Her face turned rosy. “I was merely wondering if you might need some help getting into your clothes again,” she told him with some dignity. “You will never be flabby.”

  Well, a compliment. Funny how it made the tasteless nopal go down better. “He was flabby before Evangeline married him. I don’t think bankers work too hard outdoors.”

  He could barely keep his eyes open after they finished breakfast, but Addie was still alert, and he wasn’t about to shut her down by going to sleep. After he assured himself that Blanco was well-hidden, he found a comfortable-looking spot that a deer and fawn must have vacated, and moved them in.