This town like all the presidios along the border was much reduced from its former estate and many of the buildings were uninhabited and ruinous. The coming of the riders had been cried before them and the way stood lined with inhabitants watching dumbly as they passed, the old women in black rebozos and the men armed with old muskets and miquelets or guns fabricated out of parts rudely let into stocks of cottonwood that had been shaped with axes like clubhouse guns for boys. There were even guns among them with no locks at all that were fired by jamming a cigarillo against the vent in the barrel, sending the gunstones from the riverbed with which they were loaded whissing through the air on flights of their own eccentric selection like the paths of meteorites. The Americans pushed their horses forward. It had begun to snow again and a cold wind blew down the narrow street before them. Even in their wretched state they glared from their saddles at this falstaffian militia with undisguised contempt.
They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who’d followed them. Glanton and the Mexican he’d set out with returned and the company mounted up and filed out down the street until they came to an old wooden gate that led into a courtyard. The courtyard was dusted with snow and within were contained barnyard fowl and animals—goats, a burro—that clawed and scrabbled blindly at the walls as the riders entered. In one corner stood a tripod of blackened sticks and there was a large bloodstain that had been partly snowed over and showed a faint pale rose in the last light. A man came out of the house and he and Glanton spoke and the man talked with the Mexican and then he motioned them in out of the weather.
They sat in the floor of a long room with a high ceiling and smokestained vigas while a woman and a girl brought bowls of guisado made from goat and a clay plate heaped with blue tortillas and they were served bowls of beans and of coffee and a cornmeal porridge in which sat little chunks of raw brown peloncillo sugar. Outside it was dark and the snow swirled down. There was no fire in the room and the food steamed ponderously. When they had eaten they sat smoking and the women gathered up the bowls and after a while a boy came with a lantern and led them out.
They crossed the yard among the snuffling horses and the boy opened a rough wooden door in an adobe shed and stood by holding the lamp aloft. They brought their saddles and their blankets. In the yard the horses stamped in the cold.
The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness.
No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.
XVI
The Santa Cruz valley – San Bernardino – Wild bulls – Tumacacori – The mission – A hermit – Tubac – The lost scouts – San Xavier del Bac – The presidio of Tucson – Scavengers – The Chiricahuas – A risky encounter – Mangas Colorado – Lieutenant Couts – Recruiting in the plaza – A wild man – Murder of Owens – In the cantina – Mr Bell is examined – The judge on evidence – Dogfreaks – A fandango – Judge and meteorite.
It was colder yet in the morning when they rode out. There was no one in the streets and there were no tracks in the new snow. At the edge of the town they saw where wolves had crossed the road.
They rode out by a small river, skim ice, a frozen marsh where ducks walked up and back muttering. That afternoon they traversed a lush valley where the dead winter grass reached to the horses’ bellies. Empty fields where the crops had rotted and orchards of apple and quince and pomegranate where the fruit had dried and fallen to the ground. They found deer yarded up in the meadows and the tracks of cattle and that night as they sat about their fire roasting the ribs and haunches of a young doe they could hear the lowing of bulls in the dark.
The following day they rode past the ruins of the old hacienda at San Bernardino. On that range they saw wild bulls so old that they bore spanish brands on their hips and several of these animals charged the little company and were shot down and left on the ground until one came out of a stand of acacia in a wash and buried its horns to the boss in the ribs of a horse ridden by James Miller. He’d lifted his foot out of the near stirrup when he saw it coming and the impact all but jarred him from the saddle. The horse screamed and kicked but the bull had planted its feet and it lifted the animal rider and all clear of the ground before Miller could get his pistol free and when he put the muzzle to the bull’s forehead and fired and the whole grotesque assembly collapsed he stepped clear of the wreckage and walked off in disgust with the smoking gun dangling in his hand. The horse was struggling to rise and he went back and shot it and put the gun in his belt and commenced to unbuckle the girthstraps. The horse was lying square atop the dead bull and it took him some tugging to get the saddle free. The other riders had stopped to watch and someone hazed forward the last spare horse out of the remuda but other than that they offered him no help.
They rode on, following the course of the Santa Cruz, up through stands of immense riverbottom cottonwoods. They did not cut the sign of the Apache again and they found no trace of the missing scouts. The following day they passed the old mission at San José de Tumacacori and the judge rode off to look at the church which stood about a mile off the track. He’d given a short disquisition on the history and architecture of the mission and those who heard it would not believe that he had never been there. Three of the party rode with him and Glanton watched them go with dark misgiving. He and the others rode on a short distance and then he halted and turned back.
The old church was in ruins and the door stood open to the high walled enclosure. When Glanton and his men rode through the crumbling portal four horses stood riderless in the empty compound among the dead fruit trees and grapevines. Glanton rode with his rifle upright before him, the buttplate on his thigh. His dog heeled to the horse and they approached cautiously the sagging walls of the church. They would have ridden their horses through the door but as they reached it there was a rifleshot from inside and pigeons flapped up and they slipped down from their mounts and crouched behind them with their rifles. Glanton looked back at the others and then walked his horse forward to where he could see into the interior. Part of the upper wall was fallen in and most of the roof and there was a man lying in the floor. Glanton led the horse into the sacristy and stood looking down with the others.
The man in the floor was dying and he was dressed altogether in homemade clothes of sheephide even to boots and a strange cap. They turned him over on the cracked clay tiles and his jaw moved and a bloody spittle formed along his lower lip. His eyes were dull and there was fear in them and there was something else. John Prewett stood the butt of his rifle in the floor and swung his horn about to recharge the piece. I seen anothern run, he said. They’s two of em.
The man in the floor began to move. He had one arm lying in his groin and he m
oved it slightly and pointed. At them or at the height from which he had fallen or to his destination in eternity they did not know. Then he died.
Glanton looked about the ruins. Where did this son of a bitch come from? he said.
Prewett nodded toward the crumbling mud parapet. He was up yonder. I didnt know what he was. Still dont. I shot the son of a bitch out of there.
Glanton looked at the judge.
I think he was an imbecile, the judge said.
Glanton led his horse through the church and out by a small door in the nave into the yard. He was sitting there when they brought the other hermit out. Jackson prodded him forward with the barrel of his rifle, a small thin man, not young. The one they’d killed was his brother. They had jumped ship on the coast long ago and made their way to this place. He was terrified and he spoke no english and little spanish. The judge spoke to him in german. They had been here for years. The brother had his wits stole in this place and the man now before them in his hides and his peculiar bootees was not altogether sane. They left him there. As they rode out he was trotting up and back in the yard calling out. He seemed not to be aware that his brother was dead in the church.
The judge caught Glanton up and they rode side by side out to the road.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
The judge smiled.
I dont like to see white men that way, Glanton said. Dutch or whatever. I dont like to see it.
They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cottonwoods were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street. There was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his head to listen.
They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against. They were caught up and saddled in the morning before light, all riding together, their arms at the ready. Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance. They passed abandoned haciendas and roadside graves and by midmorning they had picked up the track of the Apaches again coming in off the desert to the west and advancing before them through the loose sand of the riverbottom. The riders got down and pinched up samples of the forced sand at the rim of the tracks and tested it between their fingers and calibrated its moisture against the sun and let it fall and looked off up the river through the naked trees. They remounted and rode on.
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests. Some of the men pushed forward with their knives and cut the bodies down and they left them there in the ashes. The two darker forms were the last of the Delawares and the other two were the Vandiemenlander and a man from the east named Gilchrist. Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had suffered and died impartially.
They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight. Not a dog barked. The clusters of Papago huts seemed without tenant. The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a darkness unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind them and passed overhead and vanished silently in the void.
At dawn on the outskirts of the presidio of Tucson they passed the ruins of several haciendas and they passed more roadside markers where people had been murdered. Out on the plain stood a small estancia where the buildings were still smoking and along the segments of a fence constructed from the bones of cactus sat vultures shoulder to shoulder facing east to the promised sun, lifting one foot and then the other and holding out their wings like cloaks. They saw the bones of pigs that had died in a claywalled lot and they saw a wolf in a melonpatch that crouched between its thin elbows and watched them as they passed. The town lay on the plain to the north in a thin line of pale walls and they grouped their horses along a low esker of gravel and surveyed it and the country and the naked ranges of mountains beyond. The stones of the desert lay in dark tethers of shadow and a wind was blowing out of the sun where it sat squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth. They chucked up their horses and sallied out onto the flat as did the Apache track before them two days old and a hundred riders strong.
They rode with their rifles on their knees, fanned out, riding abreast. The desert sunrise flared over the ground before them and ringdoves rose out of the chaparral by ones and by pairs and whistled away with thin calls. A thousand yards out and they could see the Apaches camped along the south wall. Their animals were grazing among the willows in the periodic river basin to the west of the town and what seemed to be rocks or debris under the wall was the sordid collection of leantos and wickiups thrown up with poles and hides and wagonsheets.
They rode on. A few dogs had begun to bark. Glanton’s dog was quartering back and forth nervously and a deputation of riders had set out from the camp.
They were Chiricahuas, twenty, twenty-five of them. Even with the sun up it was not above freezing and yet they sat their horses half naked, naught but boots and breechclouts and the plumed hide helmets they wore, stoneage savages daubed with clay paints in obscure charges, greasy, stinking, the paint on the horses pale under the dust and the horses prancing and blowing cold. They carried lances and bows and a few had muskets and they had long black hair and dead black eyes that cut among the riders studying their arms, the sclera bloodshot and opaque. None spoke even to another and they shouldered their horses through the party in a sort of ritual movement as if certain points of ground must be trod in a certain sequence as in a child’s game yet with some terrible forfeit at hand.
The leader of these jackal warriors was a small dark man in cast-off Mexican military attire and he carried a sword and he carried in a torn and gaudy baldric one of the Whitneyville Colts that had belonged to the scouts. He sat his horse before Glanton and assessed the position of the other riders and then asked in good spanish where were they bound. He’d no sooner spoken than Glanton’s horse leaned its jaw forward and seized the man’s horse by the ear. Blood flew. The horse screamed and reared and the Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into the black lemniscate that was the paired bores of Glanton’s doublerifle. Glanton slapped the muzzle of his horse twice hard and it tossed its head with one eye blinking and blood dripping from its mouth. The Apache wrenched his pony’s head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire.
The leader was the first to speak. He gestured at the bloodied ear of his mount and spoke angrily in apache, his dark eyes avoiding Glanton. The judge pushed his horse forward.
Vaya tranquilo, he said. Un accidente, nada más.
Mire, said the Apache. Mire la oreja de mi caballo.
He steadied the animal’s head to show it but it jerked loose and slung the broken ear about so that blood sprayed the riders. Horseblood or any blood a tremor ran that perilous archit
ecture and the ponies stood rigid and quivering in the reddened sunrise and the desert under them hummed like a snaredrum. The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them.
Another eight or ten mounted warriors had ridden out from the wall. Their leader was a huge man with a huge head and he was dressed in overalls cut off at the knees to accommodate the leggingtops of his moccasins and he wore a checked shirt and a red scarf. He carried no arms but the men at either side of him were armed with shortbarreled rifles and they also carried the saddle pistols and other accoutrements of the murdered scouts. As they approached the other savages deferred and gave way before them. The indian whose horse had been bitten pointed out this injury to them but the leader only nodded affably. He turned his mount quarterwise to the judge and it arched its neck and he sat it well. Buenos días, he said. De dónde viene?
The judge smiled and touched the withered garland at his brow, forgetting possibly that he had no hat. He presented his chief Glanton very formally. Introductions were exchanged. The man’s name was Mangas and he was cordial and spoke spanish well. When the rider of the injured horse again put forth his claim for consideration this man dismounted and took hold of the animal’s head and examined it. He was bandylegged for all his height and he was strangely proportioned. He looked up at the Americans and he looked at the other riders and waved his hand at them.
Andale, he said. He turned to Glanton. Ellos son amigables. Un poco borracho, nada más.
The Apache riders had begun to extricate themselves from among the Americans like men backing out of a thornthicket. The Americans stood their rifles upright and Mangas led the injured horse forward and turned its head up, containing the animal solely with his hands and the white eye rolling crazily. After some discussion it became plain that whatever the assessment of damage levied there was no specie acceptable by way of payment other than whiskey.
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International) Page 23
