The Captive Heart

by Dale Cramer

  Ira Shrock’s red face clouded over with concern. “What will we do, then? We can’t build houses and barns and fences without timber, and it would cost a lot of money to get it by train from Ohio.”

  The Mexican’s face lit up with an idea. “The hacendado owns a big parcel of land twelve miles from here, up in the mountains to the west. It is very difficult to get to, and none of the local people have the horses to haul heavy loads over those roads, but your draft horses could do it. There is plenty of big timber there, señor. You can take what you need, only you must agree to pay one third of your logs to the hacienda.”

  Ira and John considered this briefly, then nodded and shook hands with Fuentes.

  “That’s a fair deal,” John said.

  Chapter 4

  Caleb’s boys were busy that week, plowing fields for spring planting while the Shrocks and Hershbergers picked out sites across the valley and started work on their homesteads. Domingo spent the entire week helping Caleb bring in the winter wheat. Miriam drove the wagon for them, watching Domingo work alongside her father, hoping for a chance to talk to him privately. She didn’t know what she would say, or even if she would have the nerve to say what she was really thinking. In the end it didn’t matter because she never had a moment alone with him.

  Until Friday afternoon. The wheat was all in, and after lunch her father stood in the front yard picking his teeth and talking to Domingo about turning the stubble under. When Miriam walked by, he stopped her.

  “Miriam, see if Mamm needs anything from the store. I want you and Rachel to take the buggy into town.”

  She had been so busy she forgot. Once a week Caleb sent a couple of his daughters into town to trade butter and cream for whatever they needed at the mercado in the hacienda village, and pick up the mail at the post office.

  “Jah, Dat,” Miriam said. She had already turned back toward the barn when Domingo spoke up.

  “Herr Bender,” he said, “I know it is only a few miles to town, but I don’t know if it is wise to send your daughters without someone to protect them.”

  Caleb pondered this for a minute.

  “Jah, mebbe you’re right,” he said. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

  ———

  Domingo took the reins, wearing a gun belt around his hips, and Miriam rode up front with him while Rachel sat in the back. It was a fine spring day, full of sunshine, the open fields dotted with clusters of some kind of little purple wildflower, the birds boasting and chasing one another on a cool breeze. Domingo spoke very little, keeping his eyes on the road as the buggy horse paced smoothly along toward the hacienda village. Miriam thought of a thousand ways she might open a dialogue with him, but she couldn’t say what she really wanted to say with Rachel right there in the back seat. She sat quietly with her hands in her lap, trying to hide her nerves. She was anxious, partly because she was naturally shy and introverted, and partly because of that gun. Guns always made her skittish, but a handgun was the worst because it was not a hunting weapon. A pistol was mostly for shooting at a man.

  When they reached town Domingo jumped down from the surrey and tied the horse to the hitching rail in front of the mercado—the grocery store. Rachel and Miriam climbed down with a block of butter wrapped in paper and a jug of heavy cream that they planned to trade.

  “You have Mamm’s list?” Miriam asked, checking to make sure her white prayer kapp was still in place after the ride.

  “Jah,” Rachel said, “but I don’t need it, really. She only wants some salt and cloves.”

  “Oh. Well then, since it’s not very much, why don’t you take care of the trading and I’ll walk down to the post office to get the mail?”

  Rachel looked at her a little sideways. “Why don’t we just stay together? We’ve got all afternoon.”

  Miriam glanced at Domingo, leaning casually against the hitching post, and Rachel’s eyes narrowed.

  “I see,” Rachel muttered. “Well, it’s your life, sister.” She hooked a finger in the jug of cream and snatched it away from Miriam, then turned on her heel and stalked into the mercado without another word.

  The street was crowded with Mexicans in rickety wagons, going and coming, buying and selling. Everyone seemed a little more animated than usual, and Miriam felt it, too. The first hints of spring brought an air of expectation and well-being. Walking beside Domingo, Miriam’s mind flitted through all the words she’d been practicing in her head, but none of them sounded good enough when the moment was actually upon her. His hand rested on the butt of the pistol at his hip, his elbow slightly extended, and she even thought once or twice of casually slipping her hand under his arm, but the thought made her blush and she knew she didn’t have the nerve. When he glanced at her he almost seemed to smile, but he said nothing. The man could be dreadfully stingy with words.

  He waited outside as she went into the post office and collected a little clutch of letters from the man at the counter.

  “Letters from home,” she said, flipping through them as she rejoined Domingo in the dusty street. “But none for me. They’re all for Mamm and Dat, from friends in Ohio.”

  Domingo grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side as a horse-drawn wagon rumbled by a little too close for comfort.

  “Thank you.” She smiled up at him while he still held her arm. “I’m glad you came with us today. I feel safe when I’m with you.”

  He smiled back. “You are welcome, Cualnezqui.”

  But then he let go of her arm and said nothing else, turning to head up the street. He went a few paces before he turned around and looked back.

  Miriam had not moved. Another wagon trundled close by, loaded with hay, but she ignored it. Her frustration welled up, and she knew she was going to say something or burst.

  “I know what that word means,” she said, in High German. “Cualnezqui.”

  He turned about and came back to stand in front of her. He seemed to measure her then, looking deep into her eyes, but in his face she saw only compassion. It was not what she was looking for, longing for.

  “Someone has told you,” he said.

  “You told us it meant friend, but then we found out from Kyra that it really means beautiful one. And you saved it for me alone. Why would you do that?”

  He looked away, and then his eyes went to his sandals. He shrugged and said quietly, “Because you are beautiful?”

  She studied him for a few seconds, confused, unsure of what to say next. She took a half step closer so that he was forced to look down into her face.

  “When a man calls a woman beautiful, it makes her think he is . . . fond of her.”

  A small nod, but he said nothing.

  “Domingo, why won’t you talk to me?”

  He took a deep breath and raised his head, again looking elsewhere, as if he could not bear to look into her eyes.

  “Respect,” he said softly, then turned away abruptly and started walking up the street, leaving her behind.

  She rushed to catch up with him, and when she did she grabbed his elbow without thinking. They stopped again, their feet crunching in the cinders in front of the blacksmith shop as a hammer rang against an anvil in the background.

  “Respect?” she said. “Is it respectful to make fun of me, calling me beautiful? Is it respectful to lie to me? There is no respect in words you don’t mean.”

  “But I did mean it. You are beautiful, and I am very . . . fond of you.” He shrugged. “But a man does not live only by his feelings. A man must respect another man’s fences.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Look around you. There are beautiful women in the village, but they are married. Everywhere, there are fences. A man who does not respect another man’s fences is not an honorable man.”

  “I am not married.”

  “No, but you are a yanqui, a white woman, and I am Nahua. Your family owns property and I am poor. Then there is your father, and your religion. Fences.”

 
“What has my father to do with it?”

  Domingo turned and started walking again, but she clung tightly to his arm and kept up. An old woman in front of the butcher shop stopped to stare at her prayer kapp. Miriam ignored her.

  “I have worked on your farm for a year now,” Domingo said, “and I have learned enough about the Amish to know that your father would not wish to see his daughter with a half-breed Mexican. I have great respect for your father and I will not betray his trust.”

  “Then you are fond of me, but you hold back because of my father?”

  “Jah, and your religion.”

  “Because I am Amish?”

  “Because you are Christian.”

  “But, Domingo, your own mother is a Christian.”

  “Jah, and it was never easy for them. Because my mother was a Christian, she saw the world in a different way.”

  “All right, then tell me. How does a Christian see the world so differently from a Nahua?”

  Two little boys chased each other down the street and dodged right between Miriam and Domingo, forcing them apart, but then he held out his arm for her to take it again as they walked.

  “In ancient days,” he said, “the Nahua earned the favor of the gods by conquering other tribes and offering the lives of their prisoners—their enemies—as a sacrifice. Ours is a religion of the strong, and in Mexico it is good to be strong. But the Spaniards brought with them a new religion that tells us we should be kind to our enemies and sacrifice ourselves. Their priests tell us we should be content to be poor and enslaved, that we should turn the other cheek, that we should grovel in the dust and bear insult with meekness and gratitude—insult at the hands of the very Spaniards who brought us this religion.”

  “But the Bible says—”

  “Your bible. Not mine.”

  She stared at him then, at the fire in his eyes.

  “You are full of anger.”

  “Three hundred years’ worth,” he answered.

  The truth of this was in the set of his jaw. A history of conflict and oppression lay deep in his bones. He was too close to it. Only an outsider, a yanqui with the pacifist underpinnings of the Amish, could see the whole picture, and she had to try to make him see it. She squeezed his arm and spoke softly.

  “Where will it end, Domingo? The Nahua conquer other tribes, the Spaniards conquer the Nahua, the revolutionaries conquer the Spaniards, and one day someone will conquer the revolutionaries. Bloodshed begets only anger, and more bloodshed. Don’t you see? Ours is a Gott of love. The only way for men to live in peace is to conquer anger itself, and the only way to do that is through forgiveness—through love. You will not find forgiveness with a gun in your hand. Sooner or later someone must say enough. When men find the courage to lay down their weapons and listen to each other, then they will find peace.”

  His expression did not change. “Spoken like a Christian,” he said, and it did not have the ring of a compliment. “But this is Mexico. Here a man must fight or die. In the end, I think Mexico will tell us whose god is right, Cualnezqui. Your father would die for what he believes, and I admire him for that, even if I do not understand him. I admire you too, for you are not only beautiful, you are wise and good. But this is a very high fence, Cualnezqui, and you must understand that my feelings are not important. I will respect your father’s fences, no matter what I feel.”

  His reasons were sound and his words well chosen, but they still stung. Maybe it was the pain of rejection, or maybe it was because they were nearing the mercado where Rachel might see them, but Miriam let go of his arm. Warring emotions raged inside of her as she pulled away and withdrew behind the safety of a blank stare. Her lips tightened into a thin line and the words came out flat and colorless.

  “Then please stop calling me Cualnezqui. My name is Miriam.”

  Chapter 5

  While Ira and John mapped out their plots and broke ground for houses, their sons started digging a huge irrigation well just like the one Caleb and his sons had dug the year before. Miriam and Rachel spent the next week teaching the boys how to make adobe out of the dirt from the well; the girls had become experts while making all the bricks for their own house and outbuildings. John Hershberger put Jake in charge of the brickmaking crew, and Rachel took singular delight in showing him how it was done.

  Miriam watched them together, saw the way Jake looked at her younger sister, the way he listened to her, respected her. The way he smiled at her. They were very good together, and it was a little irritating after what had happened with Domingo.

  Fortunately, she didn’t see Domingo very often. He was only a hired hand, so most of the time he was off somewhere plowing or planting or helping build one of the new houses. Her heart still leaped when she saw him, even at a distance, but her face kept her feelings secret. Domingo probably didn’t even know he had torn a hole in her heart. She would wait, and take whatever came. Either Domingo’s heart would change or the pain would wear away over time.

  Twice a week Miriam taught school for the Amish kids, as well as any of the local Mexican children who wished to attend. Through the winter Domingo had attended her class regularly, pretending to ride herd over his two boisterous nephews while he learned to read along with the children. But when the planting started in late February, he stopped coming to class. What with the building of two new houses across the valley and the planting of oats and wheat and corn and clover, he claimed he didn’t have time for school, but Miriam suspected he was avoiding her. In spite of her own discomfort, she fervently hoped he would continue to sharpen his reading skills, if only by reading the copy of Don Quijote she had given him at Christmas.

  In her spare time Miriam helped Emma plant trees. Levi and Ezra, Miriam’s brothers-in-law, had finished both their houses in late fall and now were busy plowing their own fields, turning the new soil again and again to let the sun kill the weeds. Her sister Emma, Levi’s wife, grew bigger by the day that spring, her second child due to be born in late summer. Emma kept house for Levi, tended her kitchen garden, cared for little Mose, and spent what little spare time she had putting out trees. The trees were Emma’s passion. She missed the forests of home, and when she wrote to ask the newcomers to bring trees they overwhelmed her with saplings and seeds and nuts from Ohio. Every day she and her growing belly could be seen planting oaks in strategic spots around the houses so they would one day provide shade, planting lines of poplars and elms along the driveways and scattering an army of maples and fruit trees along the edge of the woods at the base of the ridge.

  Miriam kept very busy that spring, telling herself in dark private moments that Domingo was right about the fences, and it was for the best. But the dream of the stallion and the jaguar came to her again one night, as vividly as the first time, and it haunted her. Try as she might she could not banish him from her heart. She could not stop herself from hearing the whispered word cualnezqui, and she could not shake the feeling that the recurring dream was a veiled premonition of things to come, a disturbingly clear vision from Gott himself. All her life her religion had taught her to be careful of what she wanted, but now she was learning that the wanting itself was not always a choice. Most of the time a girl could choose what she would have, but she could not always choose what she wanted. The wanting simply would not go away. Domingo had captured her heart, and like it or not, she wanted him.

  But he made no move toward her. Domingo stopped by at Hershberger’s once while she was helping the boys make bricks, and she couldn’t keep herself from making eye contact. When he made a little joke she couldn’t keep herself from laughing a little louder than the others, and when he made a casual observation about the bricks she was the first to acknowledge his expertise. But he made no move toward her. He was polite and treated her exactly the same way he treated everyone else, but nothing more.

  And he no longer called her Cualnezqui.

  The spring had passed and the trees on the ridges had leafed out by the time Ira Shrock looked up a
nd realized they were very late in getting the lumber they needed from up in the mountains.

  “We should go soon,” he said to John as they were lunching on leftovers on the back of the wagon one afternoon. “We’ll be needing lumber to build barns before harvest, and we don’t have any laid by yet.”

  “Jah, that’s right.” John took a bite of a biscuit loaded with salt pork and gazed up at the mountains as if he could hear the timber calling him. “It’ll need to cure for a couple months, at least. Caleb, do you think we could mebbe borrow your wagon and team one day next week?”

  Caleb smiled. “Only if you let me drive it. I’m thinkin’ we should let some of the girls go, and make a picnic of it. The mountains ought to be beautiful this time of year. It will be a nice outing for all of us.”

  “You hear that, Ira?” John’s long face split into a grin. “It’s a mighty stout old man that calls a day of logging a picnic. Caleb, we’d be glad to have you and your boys along, and bring the girls, too. Many hands make light work.”

  Miriam had just finished teaching school for the day when Kyra arrived in the oxcart to pick up her two boys. Kyra was helping stack desks against the back wall and straighten up the buggy shed when Rachel ran in, literally skidding through the doorway, giddy with excitement.

  “Miriam, we’re going on a picnic in the mountains!” she chirped, bouncing with glee, unable to contain her excitement. “Jake’s going, and Dat said we could ride together on the hack, so long as we have a chaperone. Just think, Miriam, a whole day together!”

  Miriam smiled. Her younger sister hadn’t quite gotten used to the new freedoms that came with being seventeen and able to court openly.

  “That’s nice. So who else is going?”

  “Dat said all the men are going except for Levi and Ezra—somebody has to stay here and keep watch. The children are staying behind with their mothers, but the teenagers are going. It’ll be great! Oh, I can’t wait to tell Jake.”