The Captive Heart

by Dale Cramer

Miriam and Kyra picked up his litter and struggled up the shaft with him, placing him carefully on the shady slope just outside the entrance, up against the timbers.

  “Prop my head so I can see,” he said.

  Miriam went back in for the blankets, rolling them to make a pillow and raise his head so he could look out over the valley.

  Shielding his eyes with a hand, Domingo squinted. Cotton-ball clouds drifted over limestone cliffs, brilliant white in the morning sun, busy with the comings and goings of the birds.

  “El Paso de los Pericos,” he muttered. “Gracias, Kyra. You were wise to bring me here.”

  Kyra smiled. “It will be a place of healing.”

  “Parrot Pass,” Miriam mused. “I thought the birds looked like parrots.”

  “Sí,” he said. “They are called cotorras serranas. They nest in the cliffs in the summer. Beautiful birds. If you can catch one of the young ones, you can make a pet of it and teach it to talk.”

  Miriam chuckled. “I don’t think my father would allow any sort of pet that didn’t earn its keep, but you’re right, they are beautiful. I’ve never seen such birds.”

  “Well,” Kyra said, pushing herself to her feet and adjusting the straw sombrero on her head, “we have another mouth to feed. Now that he is awake there are some things he should eat. Miriam, if you need me, just yell. I should be able to hear you from anywhere in the valley.”

  She propped the old Henry rifle on her shoulder and sauntered down through the trees into the sunlight.

  “She’s amazing,” Miriam said quietly, once Kyra had gone.

  Domingo nodded. “There is more to my sister than just a pretty woman.”

  But even these words came from a darkness, a somberness that seemed to go deeper than his injuries. Kyra was right—he needed light.

  “There is more to you as well,” she said. “You saved my sister’s life, Domingo. Rachel and Jake made it back home safe and sound, thanks to you.”

  “And Aaron?”

  Her gaze dropped away from him and she choked back tears. “No . . .” It was all she could manage.

  He nodded grimly. “I was afraid of that. But I’m glad to hear about Rachel and Jake. Things are not as bad as they might have been. I am pleased.”

  He did not look pleased. The darkness hovered around him, a palpable melancholy. He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

  “What’s wrong, Domingo? Is it the pain?”

  He shrugged. “Wounds and broken bones will mend, day by day. I can bear pain . . . of the physical kind.”

  He said nothing else, but Miriam’s mind lingered on his strange words.

  “Are you suffering another kind of pain? Something not physical?”

  He didn’t answer, or open his eyes.

  After a moment she reached out and placed a hand gently on his arm. “You can talk to me, Domingo. You can trust me. What is it?”

  He sighed deeply and exhaled, “You would not understand.”

  “I can try.”

  His eyes opened, hard and unforgiving. “Have you ever killed a man?”

  So that was it. The battle in the pass. She lowered her eyes.

  He lay back and draped an arm over his face.

  “So, the fight at the Needle’s Eye . . . you took a man’s life?” She asked it very gently.

  “It was not what I expected.”

  “This was the first time?”

  A nod.

  This caught her by surprise. Domingo always seemed so at ease with violence and death that Miriam had never thought to ask him such a question. She just assumed. That day when the bandits tried to kidnap her on Saltillo Road and Domingo pinned one of them to the ground with a knife to his throat, what she saw in his eyes then was not doubt or remorse but murderous rage. She could still hear her father’s words as he tried to stay Domingo’s hand.

  “It is a great sin to kill a man.”

  And she could hear Domingo’s seething answer.

  “Not in my religion.”

  He lay still, his face hidden, but he breathed through his mouth, too deeply, swimming in troubled waters. He was human after all.

  “You are right,” she said softly. “This, I would not understand. I have felt the heft of many sins, but I pray that I may never know the weight of that one.”

  She ached for him, and with him, but he was in a place she had never visited, nor wished to, and there was nothing she could say to him now that would change anything. All she could do was listen, grant him a sympathetic ear and perhaps help him find some small measure of peace.

  “Domingo,” she whispered.

  In a moment he whispered back, “Sí.”

  “Tell me about it. Talk to me about what happened in the Eye of the Needle. Sometimes it helps to talk.”

  Chapter 38

  Domingo didn’t move, didn’t speak for so long that she thought perhaps he had not heard her, but finally his voice came, raspy and low.

  “Before they got there I climbed as fast as I could, to a high ledge. It was my best chance. On the ground, they would have ridden over me.

  “Six bandits came through the pass, one by one. When I killed El Pantera’s horse in the narrow place there was shouting, confusion. I shot the man behind him and then another horse. When that one fell, the rider’s leg was pinned. I killed him, too. The rest took to the rocks, and there was a lot of shooting. My arm was wounded, but I kept fighting until my guns were empty.

  “After El Pantera’s horse fell, I saw no more of him until I sat up to reload the rifle. He was standing on the ledge behind me with his gun drawn. When he saw that I was empty he laughed—a filthy laugh, full of malice. He put away the gun and pounced on me with his knife, slashed my chest before I could catch his hand.”

  Domingo’s voice was steady, but he kept his eyes covered with his arm.

  “I was weak from the bullet hole in my arm. El Pantera could have killed me easily, but he did not strike to kill, only to wound. He pinned me down and whispered into my face that I would die slowly, that he would take his time and cut me up like a chicken. He said I would suffer for what I did to his horse.”

  Domingo paused then, taking several deep breaths as he relived a horror.

  “He tried to cut my shoulders so I wouldn’t be able to use my arms. I had a grip on his knife hand, but I was weak. I could not stop him. When I saw there was no other way I held on to him and rolled off the ledge. We fell a long ways. I remember nothing else.”

  “But we found you on a ledge,” Miriam said. “You didn’t fall to the ground.”

  His arm lifted from his face and he stared at her. “Then I must have caught on a lower ledge. So that is why they did not finish me. El Pantera must have missed the ledge or bounced off it. He would have been hurt from the fall too, and the others were wounded. Maybe they could not reach me.”

  He lay back then, staring at the sky through the treetops, his breathing deep and troubled.

  “This was in my dream,” Miriam said, suddenly remembering, her eyes wide with surprise.

  “What dream?”

  She told him of the vivid dream that had come to her more than once, of the stallion on the ridge, the jaguar, the desperate battle.

  The fall.

  “In the dream I was wearing the clothes of a Mexican peasant,” she said. “The clothes of a man. This was the reason I came with Kyra to look for you.”

  He listened without expression, but when he glanced at her clothes a pained look came into his eyes and he nodded. “Dreams can be cruel.”

  It was a mere whisper. He offered no explanation for this curious remark but sank back into solitude, the darkness closing around him. Casting about in her mind for a way to grant him some kind of peace, Miriam remembered the message he had sent to her through Rachel—the words he thought would be his last.

  “Domingo, you laid down your life for your friends. It’s true, what you said—there is no greater love.”

  “Noble words.”

  �
�A noble intention, no matter the outcome. What you did was heroic. You saved the lives of two people.”

  His head turned and his eyes burned into her. “I took the lives of two people.”

  “You don’t know that for certain. We found no bodies.”

  “I was there. I know what I saw.”

  “Even so, they were bandits. They were trying to kill you.”

  Wincing, he raised up on an elbow and his eyes grew fierce. “Sí, they were bandits. But they were also revolutionaries who fought alongside my father for a cause he believed in. They were not just bandits; they were men. I knew these men—the two I killed. Morales came to our house sometimes, when my father was alive. His wife’s name is Maria, and his son was born with twisted legs—pushes himself around on a little cart with wooden wheels.” He paused, breathing heavily, his eyes intense. “I shot that boy’s father through the heart. The other one’s name was Carlos, and he was younger even than me. Carlos was the one whose horse pinned him. He was screaming, trying to free his leg, looking up at me. I could see panic in the whites of his eyes right before I shot him.”

  Miriam recoiled in shock and horror. She had not seen the bodies, but suddenly it all became too real.

  “It is a hard thing to look into the eyes of a man you know and pull the trigger, Miriam. Their faces, their voices, haunt my dreams. Carlos and Morales will not be going home to their families anymore.”

  He fell back then, spent, and the two of them looked everywhere but at each other for a long time.

  After a while she could not take the silence any longer. She spoke very quietly.

  “I am Amish,” she said, “and we believe that to kill a human being at any time, for any reason, is a great sin. But you are not Amish, so I will not judge you. Anyway, I have always understood outsiders to hold a different view. You were threatened. El Pantera and his men would have killed you if they could—and Rachel and Jake, too. Does not the law excuse a man who only defends himself?”

  “The law?” A sardonic chuckle. “Law is the whim of this year’s ruler. A man must have his own law. What pains me now is not the law, but what is in my own heart and head.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “My father has often said we live by a higher law, but I have also heard you say that it was not against your religion to kill.”

  “My religion did not prepare me for what I would see, what I would feel. Facing the edge of El Pantera’s knife, everything I knew was swept away like dust. I only wanted to live, to take another breath, to see the faces of those I love once more.”

  His chest heaved deeply, and Miriam waited.

  “The Nahua gods deserted me. At the last, I saw no choice but to roll off the ledge—and take El Pantera with me. It seemed a kinder death.”

  “But you didn’t die,” she said.

  He shook his head weakly. “No, but all that has come to me since is pain and grief, with troubling dreams I cannot understand.”

  The truth of this was in his face. Up to now she had felt out of place in this strange debate, standing on the wrong side of the question—an Amish woman trying to ease the conscience of a killer. Reaching deep inside her own honest heart, she finally saw precisely what it was she really wanted to tell Domingo, and she said a silent prayer.

  “Every man is born with a conscience,” she said, “and sooner or later his conscience is grieved. Your gods have no answer for that grief?”

  His eyes wandered and a sigh escaped from the depths of his despair. “No.”

  It was a delicate moment. She sensed that the darkness of the last three days had opened Domingo’s soul like a moonflower. Too much light and he might close again. Too little and the moment would pass.

  “Mine does,” she offered, very softly.

  He lay silent for a long time, thinking. Lying back with his eyes open, looking up through the trees at the deep blue sky, he said, “I have read enough of Kyra’s Bible to know a little about your God, and I have watched your father long enough to know a little more. Yours is a God of peace. He would turn His face from one like me.”

  “Perhaps you should try talking to Him.”

  A deep sigh. His eyes wandered. “Why would your God listen to me? Who am I to Him?”

  “Domingo,” she said gently, “the thing you do not yet understand is that my Gott loves you. He always did. He loved you even as you squeezed the trigger.”

  The weather in Parrot Pass was perfect—not too cold, not too hot, plenty of sunshine, and a light breeze blowing all afternoon. Domingo slept most of the day, lying out by the mine entrance, and when he awoke in the afternoon he was feeling a little better. Physically. His leg and hip still troubled him, but some of the pain in his head had abated. His vision remained blurry.

  Kyra took the rifle with her in the afternoon and came back with a large, dull gray bird swinging from her hand.

  “Chachalaca,” she said as she tossed the dead bird on the ground. “Mexican pheasant. They are named for the noise they make.”

  “An ugly bird,” Miriam said, lifting the bird by its feet, appraising it. “The pheasants back home are beautiful, colorful.”

  “But these are just as good to eat,” Kyra answered. “A delicacy.”

  Miriam cleaned the pheasant and gathered wood for a fire. None of them wished to go back into the musty depths of the mine until it was absolutely necessary, and it was plain that the fresh air did Domingo a world of good. His spirits had lifted a little. Kyra brought him a couple of stout green limbs, both of them forked at one end. Hardly a word passed between Domingo and his sister, but he sat up against the timbers, pulled out a knife and began trimming the limbs.

  “What are you making?” Miriam asked.

  “Crutches,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, I will be able to move around a little.”

  “Do you think that is wise?”

  He raised an eyebrow, shaving a twig from the branch. “It is not wise to lie still too long. The sooner I can move, the better.”

  Kyra came out of the mine with the cooking pot in her hand. “That pheasant will take a couple hours to roast. I’m going to the creek for a bath before the sun gets too low,” she said, holding up the pot, “and I will bring back some aguamiel. You’ll be all right?”

  “Sí,” Domingo said, glancing at the rifle leaning against the timbers.

  While he had his knife out, Miriam had him trim a couple of forked sticks for the spit while she built a fire. Using a rock for a hammer, she drove the forked sticks into the ground on opposite sides of the fire. A half hour later the bird was beginning to brown, and smelling wonderful.

  ———

  When Kyra returned from the creek she brought the cooking pot, half full with a milky white liquid.

  “Aguamiel,” she explained. “Our first morning here I cut the heart from a maguey—the one whose flowers we ate. The hole fills with sap from the leaves. Taste it.”

  Miriam dipped a finger in the pot, tasted. “Not bad,” she said. “Sweet.”

  Kyra shot a mischievous glance at her brother. “It will give him strength . . . and perhaps sweeten him a little.”

  Before she thought, Miriam muttered, “He is sweet enough.” Then she blushed and turned away to check the fire, hoping he hadn’t heard.

  They dined on pheasant and greens that evening, washing it down with the nectar of the maguey and sharing the ripe purple fruit of the nopal for dessert. As the sun dipped behind the white cliffs, the sky faded from turquoise to crimson and the parrots ceased swarming to settle in their holes for the night. Miriam sat contentedly by the fire, poking it occasionally with a stick.

  “I could live here forever,” she said.

  Chapter 39

  Under Kyra’s constant care Domingo’s wounds healed rapidly, though the pain in his head lingered and he saw two of everything. Each morning Kyra and Miriam hauled him out of the mine on his litter so he could spend the day in fresh air and sunshine, yet his mood remained dark and he spoke very
little. While his handmade crutches were ready and waiting, Kyra wouldn’t let him get up. She said his broken leg needed to knit.

  Still, when Miriam woke up early on Wednesday morning he was gone, the litter empty, with Kyra sound asleep on the other side. Alarmed, she woke Kyra and they hurried up to the mine entrance.

  “There he is,” Kyra said, pointing.

  Miriam could just make out a shadowy figure in the gray predawn light, down in the valley, hobbling slowly through the brush on the homemade crutches. Kyra snugged her straw sombrero on her head and started to go after him, but Miriam grabbed her arm and stopped her.

  “If he went to the trouble to get up on his crutches and leave without waking us he probably wants to be alone. We should leave him be.”

  A smile slowly curled Kyra’s lips. “Is there something going on that I should know about?”

  “Sí, but it is probably not what you think. Your brother grapples with his conscience.”

  Kyra raised an eyebrow. “His conscience? He has said nothing of this to me.” She knelt by the remains of last night’s fire and sifted the ashes with a stick. Finding an ember still glowing, she began piling dry twigs over it.

  “We talked about it the morning he first woke up,” Miriam said. “While you were out gathering medicines. The two men he killed in the pass . . . he knew them. It is the reason for his dark mood.”

  The little catlike smile crept back onto Kyra’s face. As she fanned the embers, a small wisp of smoke began to rise. “It is interesting that he spoke of these things with you, but not with his own sister.”

  “Men are different,” Miriam said. “Sometimes it is hard for them to talk to a sister about deep things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Dreams. I think Gott troubles his dreams.”

  Now both of Kyra’s eyebrows went up. “You talked to him about God?”

  Miriam nodded. “Only a little.”

  “I thought it was odd when he borrowed my Bible,” Kyra said. A tiny wisp of flame licked at her hands as the twigs ignited. “I could never get him to talk about God. I think he believed it would dishonor the memory of our father.”