by J P S Brown
Juan Vogel's uncle, Don Pepe, was a small man who did not smile when he saw his visitors. He was adjusting a long canal of bamboo halves that brought clear water from a spring to the copper dome of the still. He was fixing the angle of one section of the canal so that the cool water would drip at precisely the rate he needed on the dome.
A young Indian was carrying newly cooked heads of lechuguilla from a deep pit. The heads were brown and heavy. The swordlike leaves of the lechuguilla maguey had been hacked off and the heads resembled pineapples. Another Indian was pounding the heads flat with a heavy green club and carrying the pulp to a stone vat for fermenting. The young Indian, his face childlike under the black bangs on his forehead, laid the heads down and began chewing on a meaty piece of the pulp while he watched Vogel and Kane. Vogel traded for two five-gallon garrafones of the mezcal from the uncle.
The uncle caught a cupful of the wine as it dripped from the bung of the still. He handed it to Vogel, who sipped it carefully and passed it on to Kane. The stuff was warm and syrupy and did not have the tight, green kick of the cooled lechuguilla Kane knew. It made his jaws and ear canals ache slightly.
"You should sip only slowly. The warm stuff will hurt your throat," Vogel said.
The winemaker caught another cupful and handed it to Vogel and he and Kane drank again.
"Victorio, take the two garrafones to Gilaremo this evening on your burro," Vogel told the young Indian. The Indian barely nodded his head to show he understood.
When Kane and Vogel rode into the camp at Gilaremo the vaqueros were finished with their work for the day. The poles on the gate of a stone corral were tied with rawhide. Several cows and calves were in the corral. The vaqueros were butchering a javalina doe on her hide. A ramada served as a cookshack for the camp and a young girl was cooking supper.
Kane and Vogel and Vogel's mayordomo, a rosy-cheeked young vaquero, rode into a pasture above the camp to look at the rodeo steers that had been gathered and put aside there for Kane's inspection.
Very little fencing contained the steep pasture. A high cliff bounded one side; a miles-long escarpment of high precipices another; a ravine another. An old stone wall about a quarter of a mile long fenced the only natural access to the pasture near the camp. Kane saw the corrientes with horns good for rodeo in the pasture.
Kane and Vogel were at the cookshack drinking coffee when the young Indian, Victorio, drove his burro into camp. He unloaded the demijohns, set them under the ramada, poked his burro with a stick, and left the camp. That evening by the campfire Juan Vogel told the story of the Indian Victorio.
Victorio was a Guarigío, a tribe that is almost extinct. Every year in March Don Pepe Schmidt would go to the canyon at Guasaremo and use the spring to make mezcal and the variant of mazcal, lechuguilla.
Victorio and his cousin Cayetano worked as peons for Don Pepe at the distillery. Victorio had a way, almost an oriental way, of hiding so that a stranger wouldn't notice him even when he was working three feet away. He bobbed his hair in a straight line all around his head. It hung below his ears and he had a straight bang, black and shining, across his forehead. Victorio and Cayetano hunted the mountains for the ripe maguey and lechuguilla palms. When they found a ripe plant they would slice off the bladelike leaves around the thick head. They would then drive a peeled pine stick into the top of the head. The sticks they used had branch stubs on each end that served as hooks. The hook in the top of the fruit kept it from slipping off the stick and the hook on the opposite end would be fastened to a burro's pack saddle. The maguey heads are heavy with a strong acidic juice that could peel the hide off a burro or the skin off a man's hand. The hooked sticks kept the heads away from the burro's sides.
At the vinata the heads would be piled into big holes in which fires had been laid for long hours. The holes were lined with rocks that would be white hot when the heads were piled in. Then the Indians would lay date palm branches in several layers on top of the maguey heads and fill the holes to the top with mud. In this way the heads would cook in their own juice for twenty-four hours. Then Victorio would dig back down through the layers of mud and branches and throw the smoking rocks out of the hole until they came to the heads cooked light brown, their juice no longer harmful to the skin, their sections smarting, jaw-aching sweet. As they worked they would tear out large, soft and meaty sections, chew all the sweetness out of them, and spit out the tough fiber.
They would take the heads and beat them with clubs until the pulp lay out flat. They would place this pulp, sopping with juice, in vats partly filled with spring water and leave it there to ferment. When the odor of wine could be traced to a vat the juice would be drained from it and placed under a copper-domed distiller. A long wooden aqueduct from the spring would bring a steady drip of cool water to splash on the top of the dome. Inside, the vapor would run around the curved dome to the ducts and out the spout into a big five-gallon demijohn. It would drip out warm and sweet as a hot punch on Christmas Eve but if you drank too much of it that way it would anesthetize you. When you woke up you would find the stuff had braised your throat so you couldn't swallow and everything you tried to get down would stick in close in your gullet and quiver there for a bad while.
Victorio didn't drink mezcal. He had seen it make Cayetano crazy. He liked to take a small bottle home sometimes to his mother. Don Pepe would discount it from his wages. His
mother liked a small swallow in the mornings.
In the evenings at the vinata when the fires were out and the last clear shiny drop of mezcal had splashed into a thousand pearls in the demijohn and the holes with fresh heads cooking had been well covered, he would load a burro with tasol, cornstalk fodder, or leña, firewood, and drive him up the trail to his mother's house. As he drove his burro, he would rest. His strong legs would rejoice with every tired stretch of muscle. He would anticipate each old wonder around each bend of the trail that was so like his mother's face. Then he would see his mothers lamp where she had hung it under a beam on the porch and he would know she was waiting for him. She was always so happy if he brought her a bottle of the good mezcal, of the fuerte, the strong, she called it.
Victorio had one great vice. He was crazy for the dark honey of the panal, the wild bee hive. In the seasons when honey was plentiful he spent more time hunting panelas than he did working for Don Pepe. He would risk his life for honey. He often became so absorbed in the search and acquisition of a hive and finally the eating of the honey that he wouldn't get home at all in the evening. Often he would just stay out and eat the honey and lie down and sleep, full as a bear, under a rock. When he stayed out all night because he had gone too far in the high Sierras to be able to find his way safely home in the dark he would eat all the honey and forget to take any home to his mother. Then his mother, besides being nearly lunatic with worry for Victorio, would become angry with him for not bringing the panal home with him. She was an old one and he knew she had few pleasures. He often resented the vice in him that made him crave honey so much that because of it he denied his mother something she also enjoyed.
One evening after work at the vinata Victorio turned his burro loose on the field of tasol at Guasaremo and hurried away. He went up the trail exhilarated by the knowledge that he soon would be tearing open a panal and, unmindful of the defending bees, even loving them too, he would be feeding on the dark honey. For that morning on his way to the vinata he had seen a bee in the purposeful line of flight that told Victorio he was headed to the hive. Victorio had followed the bee and with the finest of happy lucks had traced its flight to a sheer cliff. He had stood directly under the cliff for a while until he had been able to locate the panal. It was fat, gray, and untouched. It hung from the tip of a branch on a withered bush near the top of the cliff
Victorio climbed an easy slope that reached the top of the cliff. He saw the panal on the face about 30 feet below him. He carried several peeled pine hooks with him. He cut fronds from leafy short palms that grew around where he st
ood. He braided these narrow palm strips together for a rope and tied it around a jutting rock on the brink of the cliff He made several more of the short ropes and put them in his mouth. He hooked one of the pine sticks into the rope tied on the rock and lowered himself over the brink. When his hands reached the bottom of the stick he hooked onto it with another stick and braced with his feet against the face of the cliff. He held on with one hand and deftly looped two half-hitches of palm rope around the hooks where they joined, binding the sticks together. In this way he lowered himself to within five feet of the panal bush before he ran out of sticks. He was just able to stand on the roots of the old bush. When he put his weight on the roots, the old bush quivered, the panal swung precariously. Victorio saw with satisfaction that it was very heavy. A bee struck him a piercing sting on the sole of his bare foot. Victorio laughed joyously. "Ah, no, little animal," he said.
"You can do me nothing. In just a moment I will have your good house and will go back up my staircase with it."
Victorio held to the hook sticks. He leaned out over the bush and reached for the panal with one hand. He could not hold his sticks and reach the panal. He was not long enough. He leaned back against the face of the cliff and released his hold on the sticks. All his weight was now on the roots of the bush. Victorio squatted on the base of the bush and tried to pull it around. He couldn't get it around. The bees hummed to the attack. One hit him on the chin, another on the neck.
Victorio smiled. One drove for his eye and stung him above the eyebrow. Victorio half stood, in a hurry now, and reached as far out as he could toward the hive and pulled the bush toward him. The panal came around. Victorio got hold of it with the other hand. It felt soft as flannel, fragile in his hand, but heavy, abundant. He detached it from the bush. He straightened. The bees were hitting him on top of the head. Victorio stepped on the bush's trunk above the roots so he could have room to turn around and reach his sticks. The bush lost it shallow hold on the cliff Victorio twisted toward the face of the cliff. He fell sliding on his front. The hand that had reached for the sticks could not find a hold. His fingernails scratched the rock. Victorio did not think to release the panal and try for a hold with the hand that held the treasure, he did not believe he was in that much trouble. Then he was no longer sliding but was falling free. He fell faster, uncontrollably clear of the cliff. He turned in the air. He saw down where he would land. He thought, I will land there, on that spot among those rocks. He saw the spot. He watched it as it rushed with terrible speed toward him. There was sound with a pitch of intense dreadful alarm in his ears but he was not afraid. He was not hurt. But then the spot hit him such a blow he could not believe it. Who would ever have thought the spot was there with such force? The bees kept stinging him. They had followed him down when he fell. They arrived at the bottom just a little after he did. Some continued to rush from inside the penal where it lay a few feet away from Victorio's hand. Others were trapped in the ooze of honey that ran from the crushed flimsy hull. The panal had been so full of honey it had not bounced.
In the night Victorio awoke. He felt he had been crushed into himself and in the center of himself he felt the core of pain. He wished he could draw all of himself to the core and rally all of his parts around it so as to be able to stand the pain better. His head was sticking out, his arms. They moved outside of him. It was hard to stand that. He wished they were crushed up safely inside him as were his legs. How very unfortunate that they stuck out away from him like that. He tried to draw them down. Then he felt them coming back toward the white core of the pain and he got them all around it closely. He could tell he was somewhere for a very long time but he couldn't identify where though he opened his eyes as wide as he could in there. He knew, though, that his mother was not there.
Victorio's mother went to look for him in the early morning. She did not call. He was too big, now, for that. She walked down the trail hoping to come upon him asleep by the
trail. Maybe he had brought her some of the strong, had begun to taste it, and it had ascended to his senses. There had to be a time that would happen. She stepped quietly, haltingly, begrudging each step, hardly wishing to touch her feet to the ground, wanting to fly and find in an instant her son safe to her again, not wanting to walk anymore to find him. She was really unable to walk fast enough if she let herself try to walk as fast as she needed to. She felt so earthbound, afraid to give in to her anxiety lest it drive her all of a sudden screaming and using up the faculties she needed suddenly, this minute, to find her
son.
She stopped going down the trail. He was not down here. She sat on a stump. It was an old stump, friendly. She had sat and rested there many times. She never before had realized, though, how impersonal it was. It could only help her if she chose to sit on it, otherwise it couldn't It could not tell her anything. She watched the sun bask down the cliff above her. It warmed the nice face of the cliff she had known every day of her life. Every single day. And she did not realize it but the first clue of her son's accident passed over her mind, for her eye noted the bush hanging differently, by the tip of one root, on the face of her old friend, with vaguely, vaguely, a soft reflection of a line of peeled sticks on its brow. She kept watching the sun's rays advancing down the face as the sun rose higher in the morning and the clue passed over her mind, over and over again, through the unconscious photograph of her eye so that now there was no question at all of going down the trail to the vinata or up the trail to home anymore, although she didn't consciously know why not. She felt that if she sat on her stump she would sooner or later know where her son was. She liked looking at her cliff for that reason. After a while she asked herself, "Why my stump and my cliff? My cliff there. My stump here. Every day of my life."
Later she stood on top of the cliff looking closely at it from its brow. She had to read carefully the bold face which had never on any morning of her whole life hidden anything until this morning. She was not surprised when she found the palm frond rope, the ladder of peeled sticks, the bush hanging starkly, the blue lump far below. "Oh, my God, oh, oh, oh," whispered the plaintive young-girl-again bleat of anxious love. Then the love wrenched her scrambling off the mountain to the bursting-lunged held-breath examination of the lump and the discovery that it lived. What a terrible thing remained of her love. What a misshapen, uglied, unfortunate, unfavored lump now, when yesterday it was a strong, whole, sound son. She ran from there, fleet as a young girl, partly from fear of the l ugly thing lying there, partly afraid her fear would prevent her from still loving it and doing all she could to save it.
Somehow that day the mother of the Indian Victorio got help to him before he died. They lifted him tenderly, with much consideration, and sweating and grunting from exertion I on the hard, broken ground, they carried the crushed mass that once had been Victorio back to the house of his mother.
The mother, gradually, with love, herbs, and patience centuries old, separated carefully the parts of the man and extended them away, relaxed, from the core of pain one by one to their properly sane, healthy places until Victorio was no longer lumped down to himself but standing upright again, a smiling young man.
Then finally, thank God, came the day when at the vinata Cayetano held up a peeled, hooked stick and said jokingly, "In the evening after the work we go to the panales, no, Victorio?"
And Victorio smiled quietly to himself and thought with pleasure of taking a small bottle of the strong to his mother.
The next day Kane and Vogel rode on a narrow trail just before a camp called Tecoyahui in a tunnel of vainoro bushes. They leaned down over the shoulders of their mounts to keep the hard thorns of vainoro from scratching their hats, clothes, and faces. In that tunnel they met first a bronc and then Pablo Ibarra who was riding a little dun mare mule. Pablo had the bronc roped around the neck and was driving him down the trail.
The men sat their mounts and visited in the tunnel of brush while they smoked homegrown tobacco rolled in corn husks. The bronc stood
quietly in the bunch, intimidated by the brush, the other animals, and the men.
"It's good to see you and the alazanón, the big sorrel horse, again," Pablo said to Kane.
"Kane has a long way to go yet. He won't be here long. He's got to go to the border tomorrow after he cuts your cattle," Juan said.
"The border? ¡Híjuela, he can't do it!" exclaimed Pablo.
"I have to do it. You got married, eh Pablo? Pobrecito de tí, poor little you," Kane said.
"Ooo, it's been a whole year now. We already have the baby."
"How does your woman like it up here?"
"She says she doesn't like it, but she just got sane again from being pregnant."
"Do you have a son or a daughter?"
"A varón. A man.."
"How is the baby?"
"Small and helpless. Aren't they all?"
"Bueno, we'll see you. This gringo has to be in Tepochiqui to cut those cattle and get them started. We'll see you at San Rafael at dark, " Juan said.
Pablo shook hands with both of them as they squeezed their horses by him in the vainoro. He still kept control of the bronc, who saw the trail open below him when the men had ridden in.
The little dun mule braced way back on her haunches, the rocks rolling under her feet, her eyes. anxious, her ears working back and forth from her rider to the bronc as Pablo held her and let the lariat run on the six-inch horn of the A-fork vaquero saddle.
Juan and Kane soon climbed out of the brush. They stopped to let their horses blow on the first crest and they could hear the rocks rattling as Pablo passed down the trail. At noon they topped the high ridge where they could see the blue stream on the rocks of the Arroyo of Tepochiqui far below.
They went down to Tepochiqui camp, had lunch, cut the cattle, and saw the cowboys start the drive of the bought steers down the wash toward Gilaremo, where they would be joined with cattle Kane had cut that moring. Then Kane and Juan rode out toward San Rafael.
