Along the way, in the cold but unnoticed downpour, the two battered men stopped briefly in their trek across the city, Aaron suddenly aware he continued to grasp the execution gun. He stared at the weapon momentarily. This time his acts of vengeance registered in him with satisfaction, and he was unrepentant. He knew he would not hesitate to commit the same crimes again. This he was sure of even before he knew the full horror of Louisa's experience.
Chapter Seventy-nine
LOUISA had wanted, even prayed, not to survive. But she had. That she had lived through the long, long night seemed a miracle―no, a curse.
The worst of her agony was spent in the shadowfilled night, and in the early morning she finally closed her eyes and slept deeply, well beyond the reach of dreams. She slept perhaps two hours, waking stiff and cold in the crisp air. When she noticed the sky above her, the dark gray clouds threatened rain, and turning her head, she could find no promise of anything brighter on the horizon. Her mouth and throat were parched, and she thought she would welcome a downpour. It would, at least, be refreshing, perhaps even cleansing.
Louisa was very weak, nearly unable to move. I'll rest a while longer, she thought, turning her eyes to her immediate surroundings, realizing the army she'd both feared and beckoned to assist her in the terrifying night were only long rows of com stalks. And the pennants the soldiers waved were only flapping leaves. She heard something shuffling in the undergrowth beside her head, and twisted slightly to see a tiny silver mouse standing inches from her, regarding her with his enormous black jeweled eyes. He was no bigger than a large walnut, watching her curiously, his small nose twitching furiously to inspect this intruder in his domain.
Louisa couldn't help but smile at the inquisitive creature. I'd move out of your way, she thought wearily, but I haven't the strength. When she did move slightly he scurried away and her attention was suddenly focused on herself again. She felt a rush of blood between her thighs, and she wondered what would become of her, how long she could lie here unnoticed, whether she would be found alive or dead. "Does it matter?" she asked aloud and bitterly.
She lay a few feet within the rows of com, in a blood-soaked nest. Pulling herself with an effort to a cleaner patch of ground, she was too exhausted to go more than a few feet, and collapsed, finally sleeping again, but less soundly. She heard low voices, and suddenly dark threatening figures filled her head. Soon she felt something touch her body, someone touch her face, and shake her shoulders gently. Louisa's eyes flew open, and she cried without volition trying to wrench herself weakly from whatever touched her.
They saw the terror in her face and eyes, even before she saw them, and they muttered among themselves quietly. "Señora, señora," said the woman whose hands tried to rouse her. When at last she was able to focus on the woman's broad dark face, and see the gentleness of her round black eyes, when she could hear the softness of the voice, Louisa's heartbeat began gradually to slow to a normal rate.
Louisa's first thought was of Carmen, but she knew instantly she was mistaken. "What do you want?" was all she could think to say, frightened, but oddly relieved to be no longer alone. The woman's face did much to soothe her.
Then Louisa heard a gruff male voice behind her. "Hurry! She's bad luck. Gotta do it now, before it's all ruined."
Louisa had no idea what the angry man meant, but she felt herself recoil, certain he regarded her with malice.
"No, we wait for the Father!" the woman insisted.
"No!" and the man's face loomed suddenly before her. Louisa saw both resolution and revulsion in his eyes as he leaned over her, and, seemingly without effort, lifted her from the ground. He carried her quickly without another word, but not roughly, and laid her about fifty feet from the cornfield. Immediately the Indian woman silently stooped next to her, covering her with a heavy but ragged blanket, and then turned her attention to the men.
Louisa lay propped at a slight angle and watched as six men and as many children set fire to the stand of com where she had spent the night aborting Aaron's child. The strangers' hurried act and the heavy smoke made Louisa shiver, and, even under the heavy blanket, she began to tremble. Quickly she felt the darker woman's hand on her forehead. "Soon as it's done, we take you with us. Father Hidalgo comes soon."
"What are they doing?" Louisa inquired, still shivering.
"Sucking bugs have come. Because of you. You're unclean. We burn the field to save the rest. Or many will starve again. A bleeding woman cannot go into the fields. Or with the stock. It is forbidden."
Louisa was startled. "I didn't know," she whispered defensively. "I didn't even know I was in a cornfield," she sighed, remembering the distorted shapes of the field. "I lost my baby in there last night," she confided to the woman. "I was very early."
The other woman frowned. "Tell nobody," she cautioned, and though she spoke quietly and without malice, Louisa was frightened. These people were Indians, and though they dressed much like other poor people in the countryside, and spoke of having summoned a Catholic priest, Louisa's pulse began to race again. The woman called her "unclean" and said she was to blame for the ruin of part of their crop. From the looks of these ragged people, they could ill afford to lose even this small plot of land.
Louisa began to sweat. What dark superstition made them believe she was responsible? What cruel practices did they have to punish one who brought such a fate on their meager existence? The woman who sat by her even warned her there was danger.
Louisa's head felt light. She was weak from loss of blood, as well as from hunger and fatigue. The wind shifted and blew smoke from the fire directly on her, making her feel even more weak and uncomfortable. Fire, smoke, pain, feelings of contamination were forever weaving through her life. She coughed convulsively in the engulfing draft of smoke, suddenly unable to breathe, feeling blood gush from inside her empty womb, and the tears that originally sprang from the irritating denseness of the air turned to tears of hopelessness.
She fainted then and when she woke again she was lying in a straw bed on the dirt floor of a small whitewashed house. Underneath a heavy multicolored blanket, Louisa lay nearly naked, with only a well-worn but clean peasant's blouse barely covering the upper half of her body.
The only furnishings in the one-room shelter were two poorly made, unpainted chairs, and a small trunk which probably served as a table as well as a bureau. There was no window, and only a blanket to cover the doorway. A crucifix hung at the foot of her straw bed. It was crudely carved, but somehow touching. Louisa thought the agonized Christ must have been rendered by someone who knew the meaning of pain, for he certainly managed to convey it. She suspected she would have many hours to reflect on the rough wood figure before her, but for now at least, she was warm and comfortable, as comfortable as her hosts could make her.
Suddenly she had no more time to contemplate her situation, for the blanket serving for a door was pulled aside and the woman who helped her earlier entered the house carrying a steaming cooking pot. She gave Louisa a shy but friendly smile, rested the pot on the floor, and reached for a clay bowl on a shelf above Louisa's head. The woman stooped and ladled a good portion of a thick stew into the bowl. The aroma was unfamiliar to Louisa, but not unpleasant, as was the actual flavor of the concoction. Propping herself up weakly on her elbows, Louisa ate it eagerly as it was spoon-fed to her in silence.
"My name is Rosa," the woman confided.
Louisa smiled. "Thank you for your help, Rosa. Is this your house?" she asked, relaxing down into the straw again when she was no longer hungry.
"No, it's empty for a long time. You must not live with others when you bleed. I bring you clean straw. I do what I can. The Father came. He come back in a while. I told him you was sick. I told him the truth." She smiled at the pale young woman. "Sleep now, and I cook up something good to make you strong."
Louisa had no strength to do other than what Rosa recommended, and several hours later Rosa woke her and brought her clean straw. "Father Hidalgo
here again, señora," she reported quietly when Louisa was settled once more in the simple bed.
At first all Louisa could do in the priest's presence was cry. He prayed for her, and when she seemed calm, he asked her questions. He seemed to Louisa as gray as his habit, and not nearly as sturdy as its fabric, but he had a quiet steady approach which helped her. "Who are you, señora, and how did you get here? There must be someone I can send for?"
"You must send for no one!" she said emphatically. "You must promise me!"
"I can not promise," he replied, a bit startled by Louisa's sudden vehemence.
"I'm sorry, Father," Louisa sighed. "Please forgive my rudeness." She gave him her name and told him of her abduction and miraculous escape. "Please don't send for anyone until I'm well. Please understand I need some time to recover, to be by myself. I can't leave here for a while anyway. It would do no good to send for someone."
"There's a doctor. You won't object to him?"
"No. You may send for him."
"I'll look in on you again, señora," he promised as he left.
The doctor did not come for several days, obviously unhappy about entering the Indian camp. Louisa wondered why he'd bothered to come at all. She'd hemorrhaged badly once more before he came, and Rosa's foul-smelling and sensation-numbing potions were as adequate as any she suspected he would ever brew. "You the wife of someone important?" he asked gruffly when he discovered there was nothing for him to do.
"Why do you ask?"
"Wouldn't have come out here if the priest hadn't insisted. He didn't say who you are, but I don't usually come all this way for just anyone."
"I'm no one important, Doctor. Sorry you came all this way for nothing," she said harshly. "You obviously misunderstood the Father."
Late the following week Louisa was on her feet. She was weak but gaining, beginning to wonder what she should do next. She was dressed like the few other women in the camp, in garments Louisa previously wouldn't have even considered worthy of the description rags. And against the caution of her "nursemaid" Rosa, Louisa sponged herself with water brought to her from the river, even washing her hair with a very diluted solution of strong yellow soap, drying the heavy mass of it in the sun, making one long braid to hang down her back when it was dry. But even though she dressed just as her newfound caretakers did, and even though she learned a few of their ways as her strength and curiosity permitted, gathering roots and skinning small game, it was obvious the slender, fairfaced, fair-haired child-woman was not one of them.
While she waited in their camp, Louisa lived from moment to moment, thinking of nothing but what she saw before her eyes, on the task of living alongside, if not actually among, a people who were in most ways very foreign to her. She neither thought of the past nor the future while her body healed its bleeding wounds.
Then one afternoon she cuddled another woman's infant while the child's mother ground com in preparation for the evening meal. Louisa held the baby naturally, without a second thought, and the infant nestled instinctively, seeking Louisa's breast through her thin dress, growing steadily annoyed when his clutching hands and mouth found only softness, but no satisfaction. Soon the infant was screaming in fury, not to be soothed by anything Louisa had to offer, and it was then Louisa knew the time had come for her to go. Now she was only a burden to her new friends―as she had been all along, she thought. She could not impose on their open-hearted kindness any longer. She was well enough to leave them.
Again there was unpleasant reality to face, even if she preferred not to face it. Her own baby had fared well enough all this time without her, according to all the news she'd had, and though she feared her child would be better off without her, Louisa felt her obligation keenly.
But before she could even go home, she had no choice but to send word to Aaron. All she had were the rags she wore, and even these did not actually belong to her. She had no means to go home, except by him. She had purposefully postponed this moment, perhaps longer than necessary, she acknowledged. She dreaded the hour she would meet him face to face, and that moment when she would be forced to confront her wildly conflicting emotions.
Chapter Eighty
THE boy José went for the priest very early the next morning, with a request that he come to camp bringing something for Señora Hudson to write on. She also sent word she must leave for home as soon as possible. Father Hidalgo did not return with the young messenger, but he sent a ledger and a stub of pencil to her in José's safekeeping.
When Louisa saw José returning to the camp alone, she at first was alarmed. "Where is Father?" she asked the boy anxiously.
"He says he cannot come today. I'm to bring back your letter to him," he said proudly.
Louisa hugged José tightly, taking the ledger from his outstretched hand. She quickly seated herself in the shade of her tiny house. She wrote three letters: the first to Father Hidalgo explaining herself and her situation a little more precisely; the second to Emma, briefly explaining her delay, knowing the woman would be half-crazy with worry by now; and the last, and the briefest to Aaron. She informed him of her whereabouts―in case he had noticed and was concerned about her disappearance. In formally polite sentences, she asked him to come for her, and it was clear she expected him to honor her request for help.
The next day Father Hidalgo prepared to send Louisa's mail, tucking her letters along with others into a leather pouch to be picked up later in the week. His attention was diverted by the scurrying of squawking hens in the yard outside his door and he looked up to see a very determined-looking man ride up, halt, and dismount from his horse in one motion. The stranger tethered his animal hastily, and approached the priest's living quarters in an obvious hurry.
The man's face was partially hidden by the hat he wore to shade his already dark skin. From his dusty appearance it was obvious he had been on the road for several days. When he saw the priest, the young man removed his hat, in what the Father thought seemed an unlikely gesture of respect, in view of the coldness of the man's eyes, the nearly brittle tension in his body.
"Father!" the man said, seeming startled by the priest's sudden and silent appearance in the doorway.
"Father Hidalgo," he informed him.
Aaron nodded, not inclined to even simple polite conversation. "I'm looking for a woman. Perhaps you've heard of her, maybe even seen her. She'd have arrived here about four weeks ago."
The priest looked surprised. "And you are ... ?"
"Her husband―Marshall Hudson. My wife's name is Louisa―she's fair, about this tall," he raised his hand to his chin, "blue eyes."
Father Hidalgo turned his head and looked at the small collection of letters he had just prepared, now lying on his desk. He smiled at Aaron. "I have a letter for you. I was just this moment preparing to send it to Monterey."
Aaron's face suddenly reflected a mixture of misery and joy, the first flash of life the priest had seen in the man's eyes. "Where is she?" he demanded in a voice that sounded more fearful than harsh.
"Not far from here. She's asking you to come to her," the priest said, reaching for his mail pouch.
"How long have you known she was here?" Aaron demanded.
"Nearly as long as she's been in the area," Father Hidalgo responded quietly.
"Why wasn't I sent for?" Aaron seemed not to believe he had not been notified.
"She begged me not to. Why? Perhaps, you know the answer better than I." It was a small challenge.
But Aaron did not take it. Instead he tore open Louisa's crisply cold letter as soon as it was handed to him. "Yes, I know the answer to that one," he muttered. He stood silently for a few minutes. "Tell me. How is she?"
The priest sat down on his unadorned, uncomfortable desk chair and motioned for Aaron to sit in the only other seat in the small, spare room, a hard bench against the wall.
"In the physical sense she seems well enough, when you know she nearly bled to death not once, but twice. In fact, my son, it is only one of God
's small miracles that she is alive." When her husband did not seem startled by the revelation, he suspected the man knew at least something of what had happened to her. "What do you know about what has happened?"
"I know she was abducted and abandoned to die."
"I assure you that is not all of it." Aaron scowled, a wave of hatred rushing over him when he thought of the men to whom he'd entrusted Louisa, despising himself, as well, for his lack of foresight. "She was brutally attacked and left to die. She has lost your child―one doesn't know whether she will ever conceive again," he added to the man he thought was her husband, and rightfully concerned about such matters. "You must not blame her for what has happened."
Father Hidalgo didn't know how to interpret the look on Aaron's face. Again his expression seemed blank and uncaring, exceedingly cold, if not cruel, and the priest worried about the young woman who recently had begged to recover anonymously and in private.
"How do I find her?"
"I will go with you."
"It's not necessary for you to trouble yourself, Father."
"I assure you, it's no trouble," he said firmly.
They traveled more slowly than Aaron wished in order to accommodate the elderly priest, who tried to draw Aaron out a little, to inform him about the countryside, and of the people who had sheltered Louisa and whom she had eventually come to trust. But the priest soon began to feel he prattled to himself, finally giving up his efforts, and they rode more than half the two-hour trip to the camp in total silence.
When they arrived, Aaron created a great deal of interest among the Indians. Except for his fine features, and his somewhat taller body, he could have been one of them. He was nearly as dark-skinned, and his hair was as black and his eyes as brown as any of those who collected silently around the priest and his companion. Everyone who was not working at some nearby ranch had returned from their own cultivated fields for the noonday meal and there was quite a gathering. When Rosa looked up to see them, she knew at once the reason for their presence, and she approached Aaron and the priest directly to answer their questions before they were uttered.
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