A Westward Love

by V. J. Banis

  She got up and dressed quickly, then went in search of them. There was no sign of either. She went through the kitchen and out the back door to the shed that served as their quarters.

  Neither of them was there; nor, she realized after a moment of glancing around, were their belongings. Blankets, pots, ornaments, all were gone. The shed was empty. The Indians had left sometime since the night before without a word to her.

  It was the first sign. The second occurred when, seeing that the Indians had left nothing for her breakfast, she set out for the trading post. She had walked only a short distance when Doña Magdalena drove by in her cart and pointedly snubbed her.

  It was then she realized that she had become a pariah, an outcast. The Californios might gossip and laugh about the friars of the missions, and they might connive with the government of Spain to rob the missions of their hard-won wealth; but their blood was Spanish, however mixed with the blood of the new land. In their veins ran the Spanish awe for the Church and its representatives.

  It was not her husband, Peter, but Friar Hidalgo, Franciscan, who had branded her a harlot. He had proclaimed her sin for the entire town to witness. Before, they had viewed the contretemps with amused detachment. His actions had forced them to take sides, with or against him. And firebrand and fanatic though he might be, he represented the Church. Though she had been an outsider, though they had clucked their tongues at her relationship with Don Hernando, they had nonetheless suffered her presence in their midst. Now the doors were closed to her.

  Yet such was the nature of things that even as the townspeople brought the weight of their censure to bear upon her, they still regarded the situation as one of their chief sources of entertainment. Those same people who had turned their heads and averted their eyes as she passed along the street watched the unfolding of events with unabated relish. They might well be prepared to snub this English woman who had somehow found her way to their town, but they had by no means lost interest in her.

  As a result, Claire was perhaps the last person to know when Peter paid a call upon her, the others having observed his progress toward her house for a considerable distance.

  He came in without knocking, entering from the front door. She was just coming in from the rear, her arms laden with wood for the cook stove. For a long moment they contemplated one another. The unaccustomed load made her arms ache, and she had to turn away to drop it in the box by the stove. Too, events had unnerved her more than she wanted to admit. She found she had difficulty meeting Peter’s coldly disapproving stare.

  “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, lifting the pot and weighing its contents.

  “I’m surprised you learned to cook for yourself,” Peter said. “You were always used to having everything done for you.”

  “You might be less pleased when you’ve tasted this,” she said, handing him a steaming mug. “I learned it over a campfire. The only real requirements, though, were that it be as strong and as hot as possible. I think you’ll find this qualifies nicely.”

  To her surprise, he clasped her hand and turned it palm up, studying it. Once she had been inordinately vain over her hands; now they were calloused and burned, and there was a nasty-looking splinter imbedded near the thumb. Unexpectedly he lifted her hand to his lips.

  The gesture made her uncomfortable, and she took her hand from his. “I’m afraid they’re not very pretty,” she said, turning away and pouring a cup of coffee for herself.

  “Have the Indians gone?” Peter asked.

  “Like everyone else, driven away by your Old Testament rantings,” she said. She lifted the lid of the stove and thrust a length of wood inside.

  Far from being offended by the remark, he seemed to find it amusing. Grinning, he glanced about the tiny kitchen. “Did he provide this house for you?”

  “Yes,” she said. She turned back to him. “Does that make you uncomfortable here?”

  His grin faded. “You can’t stay,” he said.

  “I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  “You’ll come to the mission to live. In time you can take vows.”

  “No!” She all but shouted the word at him. She turned from him again and went to stand at the back door. His suggestion had roused a storm of unpleasant memories within her. Thoughts of Lone Feather and his tribe, of her daughter, Shining Star, whom she would never see again. She thought of the morning the soldiers had come to the village, rounding up Indians like so many cattle and taking them to the mission for their “conversion.” She thought of the indignities and the cruelty suffered at the mission, cruelties she had escaped only by revealing that she was a white woman. For others, however, they could end only in the mercy of death. The very suggestion of going to live at the mission filled her with dread.

  “I cannot go there to live,” she said.

  “You cannot remain here, it’s indecent,” he replied. “I’ve already arranged for a room for you at the mission.”

  She sighed and turned back to the room. “Peter,” she said, “I don’t wish to quarrel with you, truly I don’t. So much has happened, it’s difficult to say who’s to blame. But we are still married. It may seem peculiar to you, but that is a fact I’ve never forgotten. And we are finally together once again. Perhaps if we both made a special effort, we could still make a success of our marriage. At least we could try. Why don’t you come here to live? Don Hernando won’t mind, I’m certain he won’t, he’s really a very nice person.”

  For an answer, Peter threw the cup of coffee against the wall. It shattered noisily, leaving a vivid stain. “Have you no shame?” he demanded in a loud voice.

  He strode angrily to where she was standing and, seizing her wrist in a violent grip, yanked her toward him, thrusting his face into hers.

  “The Church is my bride now,” he said, “as she will be yours. I swear by Almighty God, I will not rest until you have seen the sinfulness of your ways and taken the vows.”

  Staring into his gleaming eyes, she thought, not for the first time, that Peter was a little mad. Perhaps he always had been. A bead of sweat inched its way over his brow. She was aware of some passionate emotion boiling within him, threatening to erupt. She would not have been surprised if he’d attempted to throttle her.

  Instead, after a moment in which the only sound was the rasp of his labored breathing, he flung her hand away from himself as if its touch dirtied him.

  He dashed from the house. Claire, rubbing her bruised wrist, stared after him in dismay. She was terrified at the prospect of going to live at the mission. What was she to do? Alone and friendless, she could hardly remain where she was indefinitely.

  Tears forming in her eyes, she sank to her knees on the hard floor and rested her cheek against the wood of the kitchen cupboard.

  What was she to do? Where was she to turn?

  * * * * * * *

  It took the better part of the day to journey on foot to the mission, separated as it was from the town by the brown hills. It was evening by the time Peter returned there, the vespers ringing as he let himself through the front gates.

  He was not a social person, and the brothers of the mission had soon abandoned their efforts at making friends with this Firebrand who had come to them out of the California wilderness. His zeal was both a challenge and an embarrassment to them. They had no doubt that he was of a truly holy character. In the short time he had been among them, he had attracted a small but enthusiastic band of supporters.

  The more moderate members of the mission, however, saw Friar Hidalgo as a danger. The missions of California stood in a state of siege, set upon not only by the greed of the crown, but by the very colonies for which they had paved the way into the wilderness. It was dangerous, the moderates among them argued, to further antagonize the townspeople. At times such as these, the argument went, it was wise to attract as little attention to themselves as possible, since the attention they would get was unlikely to be friendly.

  Peter had remained steadfastly aloof from
all such discussions. Like the fanatic that he was, he saw things in a simplistic vision, everything black and white and with no gray areas to raise questions. Let others debate. He had come to ferret out sin, and he would not rest until victory was his. And God’s.

  As he passed through the gardens of the mission grounds, some of the friars greeted him. Others steadfastly ignored his arrival.

  Near the wine shed one of the Indians was being whipped. Peter interrupted his progress to investigate.

  “Caught stealing wine,” the soldier explained when Peter asked why the Indian was being punished.

  Peter glanced down at the kneeling figure. The man’s back was crisscrossed with welts, some of them fresh, others already faded into lifelong scars. The punishment in this case was not severe, twenty lashes, and it appeared to be almost over.

  “Carry on,” Peter said. He was about to turn away when one of the soldiers administering the punishment gave a yelp and clapped a hand over his eyes.

  “What’s wrong,” Peter asked.

  “Someone’s thrown a rock,” the other soldier said, stooping to retrieve the stone. His companion’s eye was bleeding.

  They looked around, but though the compound was busy, no one else seemed to have noticed the incident. Nor was the culprit easily identifiable. A dozen or more Indians worked within throwing distance. The soldier looked alarmed.

  “These blasted Indians—” he started to say.

  “Are our children,” Peter finished for him. He took the stone from the soldier’s hand and tossed it into the bushes. “Continue with the punishment.”

  Peter turned and continued on his way, dismissing the incident. There were always some few among the Indians who could not be subdued. It had aroused yet another controversy in the mission when he had suggested that such troublemakers ought to be put to death as a matter of course.

  His thought quickly returned to Claire. Since the moment of their confrontation in town, he had been unable to banish her from his thoughts for more than a minute or two.

  Alone in his cell he extracted a rosary from the pocket of his robe. The room’s single decoration was a rosary of cut tin upon one wall. He knelt before this and began to pray in earnest.

  But try though he might, he could not erase from his mind the image of Claire as she had looked earlier, when he had gone to her house. His suggestion that she move to the mission had frightened her, though he was at a loss to understand why. He had a vision of her as she had looked when he had drawn her close to him, her eyes wide with fright, her lips trembling. The bodice of her dress had been cut low, revealing the fullness of her breasts and the dark, richly scented valley between them. In his mind’s eye her breasts seemed to grow until they were enormous, dwarfing him. His pulse began to pound in his ears.

  With a low groan Peter sank forward on the hard dirt floor. He was physically aroused by his memories of her. The arousal shamed him and he tried to will it gone, but like the breasts of his vision his erection seemed to grow until he was unable to ignore it.

  Suddenly he sprang to his feet, tearing his robe from his body. Beneath it he wore what at first glance appeared to be a tunic of armor, but which in fact was made of tin and pierced like a grater so that it lacerated the flesh at the slightest movement.

  Carefully Peter removed the tin shirt. His back and chest were bleeding in a hundred places from the lacerations. He had made the shirt himself specifically to wear when he called on Claire. The pain had been intended to purify his thoughts, but it had failed. He had been unable to control the lustful visions that had tortured him since their reunion.

  Flinging aside the tin, Peter knelt and withdrew from under his bed a scourge made of several lengths of rope braided together and tied with numerous knots. Still kneeling, he raised the scourge over his shoulder and began to beat his already torn back with it, the knotted ropes streaking his flesh with new welts.

  While he thus abused himself, he tried to direct his thoughts to prayer. To his dismay, the image of Claire returned to haunt him. Feverishly he lashed at his back with the scourge.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  For a brief period of time the town’s attention was diverted from Claire’s situation by the occurrence of an ugly incident. A soldier from the presidio, coming drunk from one of the cantinas, happened upon a family of Indians from the mission. Thinking to have some fun, the soldier approached the squaw, and when her husband objected, knocked the man to the ground. Seeing his wife being dragged behind a building, the Indian picked up a rock from the roadway and crushed the soldier’s skull. In a panic at what he had done, the hapless brave fled into the pine forests.

  Of course the matter could not go unpunished. The Californios were not likely to forget that some forty years before the Yuma Indians had risen up against the first of the Alta California settlements, killing more than thirty soldiers and four priests. Though the Pacific Coast Indians were regarded as generally harmless, it was universally agreed that any threat to the status quo needed dealing with quickly and sternly.

  An enormous posse was formed from the local men and those from the outlying ranchos, who were equally eager to keep the Indians in line. Nearly sixty men searched the forests with a fine-tooth comb, and after only a single day’s efforts the brave was flushed from hiding and brought back to the town.

  Claire, watching from her front door, was dismayed to see that the brave was Redwing. He and his wife had fled to the mission in the wake of Peter’s demagoguery.

  The Indian was hanged. Afterward his head was removed and placed atop a stake at the edge of town as a warning to others.

  Claire could see the grisly sight from the window of her parlor. It seemed to her to symbolize all the horror she felt at the treatment of the Indians. She knew, as no other white woman in the town could, what degradation and abuse the Indians suffered at the hands of the white man. A white man in the same position of defending his wife would have been regarded as a hero. Redwing had been murdered.

  On the third night after the hanging Claire was awakened by a peculiar sound from outside. Puzzled, she went to investigate and found Redwing’s widow, Summer Meadow, dragging an enormous woven basket along the street. It was obvious that the basket’s contents were quite heavy, for the Indian was struggling mightily.

  Claire quickly donned a dress and went out. Summer Meadow, hearing her approach, stopped and stood at the end of the basket, watching with wary but grief-reddened eyes.

  “Will you let me help you?” Claire asked, indicating the basket. The Indian had never spoken more than a few words of English, and Claire was not certain if she had been understood. She put a hand on the basket and made a pulling movement.

  For an answer, Summer Meadow stepped around and lifted the lid from the basket, Claire gave an involuntary gasp as she recognized Redwing’s headless body. She took a step backward. Summer Meadow carefully replaced the lid.

  Summer Meadow picked up the rope with which she had been dragging the basket. Flinging it over her shoulder, she began to strain against it, once more inching her heavy load along the rutted street.

  Claire’s initial horror gave way to comprehension; Summer Meadow was taking her husband’s body to bury it. The officer of the presidio had waited until late at night to give her the body, thus avoiding offending the townspeople.

  With an angry toss of her head, Claire came forward and took hold of the rope as well. Summer Meadow gave her a brief, unreadable glance, then resumed her own efforts.

  It was easier for the two of them. They passed the last house and Summer Meadow turned into an open field. After another fifty yards or so they came to a mound of dirt, beyond which lay an open grave.

  The two women rested at the graveside, getting their breath back. Staring down into the hole that Summer Meadow must herself have dug, Claire wondered how they were to lower the heavy basket into it, but apparently Summer Meadow had already taken this into consideration. She took hold of one side of the basket, gesturing for
Claire to do the same. Together they managed to tilt the basket on its edge over the yawning grave until the body within had tumbled out and into the hole with a loud thump and the loosening of some dirt. The basket, empty now, went in on top.

  It was macabre and frightening, and Claire would have been glad to take the shovel lying nearby and begin at once to fill in the dirt, but Summer Meadow indicated that there was something more to be done, and when she started back across the field Claire followed.

  They came to the stake on which Redwing’s head rested. Claire, her nerves already taut, could not look at the grisly sight but Summer Meadow, with no show of emotion, brought a crate and, clambering upon it, reached down her dead husband’s head. Without even looking to see if Claire was following, the Indian started back toward the gravesite. Claire for once would have welcomed the quiet and solitude of her parlor, but the sight of the hapless woman carrying the severed head to its grave unnerved her and she went too.

  They took turns shoveling the dirt. Claire’s back and arms ached from the unaccustomed exertion and her hair lay in wet tendrils over her brow.

  At last the job was done. Claire stood rubbing the small of her back with one hand, the other resting upon the shovel’s handle. She had no idea what to expect now that the burial was finished. She waited for a cue from Summer Meadow.

  For several long minutes Summer Meadow stood in silence, staring at her husband’s grave. She might have been praying silently or simply remembering a happier past. At last, without a thank you, without even so much as a final glance in Claire’s direction, Summer Meadow turned and began walking away in the direction of the mission.

  Claire watched until the Indian had disappeared into the darkness. Then, feeling oddly let down, she herself tossed aside the shovel and made her way over the uneven ground toward her house.

  It seemed as if she had spent the entire night at their eerie task, but the distant sound of music from the cantinas told her it was not so late after all, perhaps midnight or a bit later.