by Dale Cramer
“How would you find them?”
“Jake Weaver was there,” Micah said, twisting his hat in his hands. “I talked to him this afternoon. He says he will guide me to the place.”
Caleb nodded grimly, glancing at Mamm. “All right, then. You find my Miriam and bring her home.”
Miriam awoke to the crackling of a bright fire. Draped over Domingo’s inert form, she flinched and recoiled away from him, terribly embarrassed, before she remembered what had happened and where she was. Sitting up, she glanced around the little rock chamber and saw that Kyra was gone. She must have already been out and come back once because the fire had been stoked.
Domingo hadn’t even twitched during the night. Gently she felt his forehead—neither too hot nor too cold. Good. Pressing a finger under his jaw, she found his pulse. Weak, but regular. She tucked the top blanket close around him, then rose and looked up through the shaft toward the entrance.
Daylight. She felt guilty for having slept so late. Her first impulse was to go out and look for Kyra, but she thought better of it. Kyra probably left her behind on purpose. Someone needed to stay by Domingo in case he awoke while Kyra was out getting breakfast.
Miriam put on her sandals, draped her poncho over her shoulders and walked gingerly up the beamed shaft to the entrance, yesterday’s rattlesnake still fresh in her mind.
In the morning light, the valley in front of her was lovely. The night’s rain had brought out a lush green in the narrow vale, and the sun lit the limestone cliffs on the other side a brilliant white. The cliffs were alive with brightly colored birds, though they were too far away to tell what kind of birds. Apparently the place was a nesting grounds because there were hundreds of them, coming and going from little black holes in the face of the cliff. Two hawks patrolled high overhead, facing into the wind and hovering motionless as kites, waiting for a chance to strike.
There was movement among the weeds and cactus down in the bottom. For a split second Miriam’s heart froze when she saw a Mexican elbowing his way through the brush, a gun belt around his waist, a goatskin hung over a shoulder and a large bundle dangling from his hand. But it was only Kyra. The bundle in her hand was her poncho, folded over and used as a bag. Even now it was hard to get used to seeing a beautiful woman like Kyra in a man’s clothes.
A few minutes later Kyra dropped her bundles by the fire and knelt over Domingo.
“How is he?” she asked.
Miriam shrugged. “No better, but no worse.”
“ ‘No worse’ is good enough for now,” Kyra said. “I went to the creek to fill the goatskin. We will need a lot of water. On the way back I found some other things we will need as well.”
While Miriam put a pot of water in the coals to boil, Kyra spread out her poncho. To Miriam’s eyes it looked like a useless pile of garden clippings—nothing but weeds, roots, and leaves. But not to Kyra. She seemed to know a use for everything.
The first thing she did was dice a handful of some kind of green herb directly into the pot of water heating up, muttering something about it keeping down infection. While she was doing this she picked up a foot-long stem with dark purple flower petals all over it, plucked some of the petals and ate them.
“Try some of these,” she said. “They will stave off the hunger. I’m sorry I didn’t get anything else to eat yet, but I was in a hurry to take care of Domingo. His wounds need to be properly cleaned and bandaged.”
Miriam tried the flower petals. Not particularly tasty—a little sharp on the tongue—but Kyra was right. It would do until something better came along.
The next thing Kyra did seemed downright strange until she explained it. She picked up a leathery, blade-shaped leaf as long as her arm with a fine point on the tip. Putting the needlelike tip in her front teeth, Kyra winced as she bit down and snapped it off. Then, still holding the little point in her mouth, she drew the blade away from her and extracted a few long, fine fibers.
“See? Needle and thread.” She dropped it into the boiling pot, picked up another one and repeated the process. “Maguey,” she explained. “There are many different kinds, and you have to be careful not to get the wrong one. Some of them are irritating to the skin.”
“Maguey . . . Isn’t that what they call the big ones, taller than a man’s head? They look like a green fountain spewing out of the ground.”
“Sí, that is maguey. Some people call it agave. One of the most useful plants in all of Mexico. The flower petals you’re eating are from a maguey. When the petals are gone we can roast the stalk over the fire and chew it to get the sugar, like sugar cane.”
She had Miriam take a clean shirt from the saddlebag and cut it up for rags and bandages. The rags went into the boiling pot.
When everything was ready they stripped off Domingo’s shirt and peeled away yesterday’s makeshift bandages. The bullet wound through his arm cleaned up easily enough, though the exit wound in the back took a bit of sewing.
“He is lucky it missed the bone,” Kyra said.
The deep knife slash across his chest looked a lot angrier. Kyra cleaned it thoroughly, then sewed it up as best she could and treated it with some kind of salve she pressed out of a thick leaf before finally wrapping a clean bandage around it.
The head wound started bleeding again when they unwrapped it. Kyra put a little white root on a flat rock and pounded it into a pulp with the butt of her knife, wrapped it in a bit of rag and dropped it into the boiling pot. A few minutes later she fished it out, let it cool then wiped the wound with it.
“That should stop the bleeding,” she said. While she waited for the coagulant to take effect she sharpened her knife on a stone and plunged the blade into the boiling water to sterilize it.
“I didn’t know you were a doctor,” Miriam said.
Kyra smiled. “I’m not. But there are no doctors where we live, and most of us could not pay one anyway, so we learn how to doctor ourselves. As I said before, everything we need is already here.”
Working by candlelight, she honed her knife, shaved around the gash in the back of Domingo’s head, cleaned it thoroughly, put a couple of stitches in it and wrapped a fresh bandage around it. When she was done they rolled up what was left of the shirt to cushion the back of his head. Kyra lifted the front of the bandage and looked at his eyes.
“His eyes still don’t look right,” she said, “but there’s nothing more I can do. Now we will just have to wait. I will take the horses down to the creek and tie them where they can graze, and then I will find something for us to eat. You keep watch over him. If he stirs, you should try to get some water into him.”
———
Kyra was gone for an hour, but when she came back she brought a couple of mountain quail. The birds were darker plumed than what Miriam was used to, but still recognizable as quail.
“How on earth did you get quail?” Miriam asked.
“I heard them calling yesterday from the edge of the pine woods, so I set snares by the thick brush this morning. I was surprised to catch them so quickly, but I guess they don’t see enough people to be wary.”
Before long Miriam had the quail cleaned and spitted, roasting over the fire. Kyra had also brought some wild onions and something that looked like salad greens.
“I never would have believed that such bounty grew in this wild place,” Miriam said. “I was afraid we would starve.”
Kyra shrugged, wiping her mouth on a sleeve. “Where there is water, there is food. You just have to know how to find what God has provided. There are rabbits here, too. Tonight I will make a stew. Oh, and I brought you something special. You will like this.”
She reached over among her growing pile of green things and fished out a large leaf that had been folded to make a little purse, the top tied with twine. Miriam untied the twine and peered down into it.
“White slime,” she said. “Thank you.”
Kyra laughed out loud. “It is soap, silly. I will stay with Domingo while you go over to the
creek and take a bath. It will make you feel better.”
“But where did you get soap?”
A shrug. “From a soap tree.”
Miriam raised an eyebrow. “A soap tree?”
“Sí. It’s a kind of yucca. The soap is in the base and the roots. It’s good for your hair too—much kinder than the lye soap your mother makes.”
It almost brought a tear to Miriam’s eye. It was the little things she missed the most when she was away from home. Her wants were not complicated, but today was Saturday, and tonight the whole family would be taking warm baths. She was beginning to think Kyra was not only a doctor but also a mind reader.
———
Miriam found a secluded notch in the creek where the bank was high and the water deep enough to bathe. The water ran cold and blue and crystal clear. Kyra’s soap worked as advertised. Miriam took her time washing her hair, listening to birds calling as they flew in and out of their holes carrying what looked like pine nuts. They were lovely birds, large and mostly green, their heads and shoulders adorned with a maroon color that caught the sunlight in a surreal way. They looked like some kind of parrot, though she had never seen one in the wild.
When she got back to the cave Kyra was sitting cross-legged on the floor weaving a basket with fibers she had stripped from the leaves of the soap tree.
“The rabbit stew will be ready soon,” Kyra said.
“It smells wonderful.”
Kyra shrugged. “It will do. I used what I could find—the rabbit, some wild onions, roots and herbs, a couple of peppers and diced nopales. I’m afraid we will have to share the pot, but at least we have spoons.” She held up two crude wooden spoons she had carved from a length of soft pine. Kyra’s hands were never idle.
“How is Domingo?” Miriam asked, kneeling beside him with a candle.
“He has not moved,” Kyra said, and as she paused to gaze at him the grief and worry welled up in her face. “If he does not awaken soon I fear he never will.”
“I have prayed a thousand times,” Miriam said. “I am afraid Gott will grow tired of me.”
“Pray a thousand more,” Kyra answered softly.
Chapter 37
Micah and Jake left well before dawn, hoping to find Miriam and get her back before midnight. Caleb sat up with his wife well beyond bedtime, keeping a lantern lit in the living room.
It was Mamm who first heard the hoofbeats. She looked, then jumped up and bolted out the front door into the pitch-dark. Caleb grabbed the lantern and ran after her.
He found her standing in the front yard whimpering, bouncing on her toes. Raising the lantern, he put an arm around his wife to calm her, but when Jake and Micah trotted into the light his heart sank. They were alone. Micah climbed down wearily and held onto the reins as he came to Caleb and Martha, removing his hat.
“We could not find them,” he said. “I was hoping we would meet Miriam on the road between, but when we reached the pass we still didn’t see nothing.”
“You didn’t find anything?” Caleb asked, bracing Mamm for fear she would collapse.
Micah shook his head. “No. The buzzards were feasting on two dead horses, but they were not ours. One of them was the Appaloosa we saw at the logging camp.”
Caleb’s head tilted. “Liver and white, front and back?”
“Jah, that one.”
El Pantera’s horse. Domingo must have shot it.
“But we found nothing else,” Micah said, his face full of despair. “The rain last night must have washed out the tracks.”
Mamm started to cry. “Bandits, bandits, bandits . . .” Her voice trailed off and she wept into her handkerchief.
Caleb held her tight and spoke reassuringly into her ear. “We don’t know that, Martha. We don’t know anything. All this means is we don’t know where they are right now. Let’s not make too much of it. They are in Gott’s hands, and He has proved His kindness to us already. We must trust Gott, Mamm. And don’t forget, Kyra is with her.”
He gave her shoulders a confirming squeeze and started to turn her back toward the house. Pausing, he looked back at Micah and said, “Thank you, boys, for trying to find her. You must be very tired. You should go home and sleep. In the morning we will meet for church and we will pray for them.”
When they went into the house and closed the door Micah was still standing out there holding his reins, lost in darkness.
On Sunday morning, just after sunrise, a ghostly pale column of light filtered down into the mine from the square entrance fifty feet away, outlining the beamed ribs of the shaft in shades of blue. Miriam sat cross-legged in the rock chamber beside a small fire, tending a squirrel Kyra had picked off at first light. A drop of grease fell from the browning meat and the embers hissed and flared.
Kyra had gone to the creek to fill the goatskin. When she brought the squirrel that morning she’d also brought back a sprig from a moonflower vine. There were six blooms on it, big and round and eerily white against the darkness, still open, for they had not seen the sun. No part of the moonflower was edible, and Kyra said the seeds were poison, but she hung the vine on the wall of the rock chamber. “To brighten up the place,” she said.
And it did. The ghostly blooms in the pale firelight brought a smile to Miriam’s face as she sat combing through her hair with her fingers. Kyra was right about the soap, too. Her hair had never felt so soft and shiny and pretty. Rising, she pinched a flower from the vine and set it in her hair over her ear the way she’d seen Kyra do. If only Rachel could see me now, she thought, and it brought a smile to her face.
A groan came from the darkness on the other side of the chamber and Miriam’s head turned, squirrel and moonflower instantly forgotten. She grabbed a candle, held its tip in the fire until the wick caught, then shielded the flame with her hand as she rushed to kneel over Domingo.
His lips moved silently and his head rolled from side to side, tilting back a little, trying to see out from under the bandage. Carefully she lifted the rag clear of his eyes, folding it onto his forehead. He clenched his eyes shut at first, but in a moment he adjusted to the candlelight and opened them halfway.
“Domingo,” she whispered.
His head turned slowly and he held her gaze. He blinked, confusion furrowing his brow, staring as if he didn’t recognize her. His eyes traced the dark hair cascading over her shoulders, lingered on her face and the blue-white moonflower in the flickering candlelight.
Miriam held perfectly still, anxious, watching.
A hand rose slowly, weakly, from his chest and reached out toward her, probing. His fingertips brushed her cheek as his fingers pulled back the curtain of hair. The confusion never left his eyes, but his hand gently caressed her face before collapsing, spent, to his chest. The tenderness of the gesture made her blush.
Heavy eyelids gave up the fight, and as his eyes closed a single word formed in the faint whisper of his exhalation.
“Dulcinea.”
Miriam leaned closer, listening, but Domingo said nothing else. His breathing became deep and regular as he lapsed back into sleep.
There was a noise of sandaled feet coming down the shaft—Kyra returning. When Miriam turned to look, the moonflower fell from her hair and she felt a pang of guilt, suddenly ashamed of her vanity in such a moment. She picked up the flower and tossed it quickly into the fire. Kyra bustled in, and when she saw Miriam with her candle hovering over Domingo she dropped the goatskin and rushed to her brother’s side.
“He was awake just now,” Miriam said. “He turned his head and looked at me.”
Kyra squealed, the news filling her face with light. “Did he say anything?”
“Only one word. I think it was someone’s name—Dulcinea.” She glanced sideways at Kyra, her face darkening, a touch of something alarmingly close to jealousy pinching her heart. “Is this someone you know, this Dulcinea? A friend, perhaps?”
Kyra shrugged. “No. I know no one by that name. He must be out of his head, but at least h
e speaks. This is good. He is getting better, no?”
“Sí. He is delirious—that must be it.” Miriam’s eyes turned back to Domingo, but her hand drifted up almost unconsciously so that her fingertips touched the place on her cheek.
———
An hour later he awoke again, and this time he was more coherent.
“Water.” It was a hoarse whisper, his tongue searching, clicking against the roof of a dry mouth.
Kyra brought the goatskin and poured a little between his lips while Miriam held the candle.
“More,” he whispered.
“How is your head?” Miriam asked as Kyra gave him another sip.
“Hurts,” he rasped, clutching at the goatskin. “More.”
“Easy on the water.” Kyra spoke gruffly, but her eyes betrayed her true feelings. She could not deny her brother.
“Where else do you hurt?” Miriam asked.
“Arm, chest, hip, leg,” he said, finally pushing away the goatskin. He tried to raise his head to look down at his broken leg, but he winced and gave it up at once. “My leg hurts all the way to my chin.”
“Your leg was badly broken, bruised from hip to knee, and your head is wounded. I set the leg and splinted it, but you should not move. Rest,” Kyra said.
He moaned. “How long have I been out?”
“Three days. We were very worried.”
“I’m hungry.”
Kyra smiled. “That’s a good sign. There is a little rabbit stew left from last night. I’ll warm it for you. Lie still!”
———
Later, after Domingo had eaten the remains of the rabbit stew and drank half of their water, he looked around and said, “This place is a tomb.”
“You need sunlight,” Kyra said. “Miriam, let’s get him outside.”
