by Jory Sherman
“We will live here,” Bone said. “None of the Mexicans will bother you here.”
“Is this where you lived before?”
“Yes. I did not want to live with the others. Matteo understands.”
“You are a strange man, Miguel. Or should I call you by your white man’s name, ‘Mickey’?”
“You can call me what pleases you, my woman.”
“I will call you Miguel.”
“Even that is a white man’s name.”
“Yes, but it is Spanish and I like it better than ‘Mickey.’”
“You see. They have even taken away our language. They give us Mexican names or American names and we forget the tongue we heard as children.”
“Yes. I have forgotten a lot,” Dawn admitted.
There was a small barn out back with a leaning roof and Bone rode there, dismounted. He held little Juan while Dawn got off her horse, then she took the baby and walked to the house while Bone put up the horses, unsaddling his own and setting out grain for them that he kept in a wooden cupboard. He saw that they had water and then he walked to the house.
“Did you build this?” she asked, when Bone entered the dwelling.
“Some of it. Do you like it?”
“It is better than a cave.”
“The bed is soft and you can cook here. I will bring food when I go to see Matteo.”
She roamed the two rooms and the small storeroom made of wood and adobe bricks. She saw that there were cooking utensils and coffee, flour, sugar. She tasted the sugar, put a few grains in Juan’s mouth. The baby smacked his lips until the sugar had all dissolved.
“The rooms need sweeping,” she said.
“There is a broom.”
“I saw it. Did you sweep it when you lived here?”
“Sometimes,” he said. He sat in a rustic chair made of wood and cowhide. It was big and solid and dusty.
“I will need a cradle for the baby.”
“I will bring you a cradle.”
Dawn poked around, looking for things she might use, things she needed. Bone sat there like a stoic for several moments, searching the room with his eyes, then he arose and walked over to his bedroll and unwrapped the ancient stone he had found. He walked to the wall by the door and placed the stone near the center. The light from the window streamed directly at the stone, illuminating it.
“Is that where you will keep the old stone?” Dawn asked, shifting the baby to her other arm.
“I will place it there for now. I am going to build or get a box to keep it in.”
“It is worth nothing, that stone.”
“What is worthless to one is a fortune to another.”
“Rock is rock.”
“Rock with such writing on it is something else.”
“What is it, but stone?”
“I do not know. I know this, my precious. I did not find that stone. That stone found me.”
“Has the hot sun taken away your senses, my husband? Have you gone loco?”
“I am not crazy. There is a reason that the stone found me. Perhaps it is a message from those who lived before and who have gone away. The ones Dream Speaker told me about.”
“Dream Speaker had hunger. His mind was addled like the cow that eats the crazy weed.”
“No, he was not crazy. He knew much. He knows much.”
“Do you think he is still alive?”
Bone turned away from the stone and looked at his wife and son.
“He is alive for me. He will always be alive for me.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes backward. The baby stirred and opened its eyes. It began to whimper, then to cry. Dawn went to the other chair and sat down. She lifted up her tunic and exposed one of her full breasts. The infant closed its eyes and found her nipple with his mouth. He began to suckle as Dawn swung him to and fro in her arms, slowly, gently.
Bone looked at the two of them and then sat down in his chair once again. He looked over at the stone, still struck by a thin lance of light that streamed through the window in the opposite wall. He saw the ancient markings and knew that they were meant to be read and understood by someone, perhaps by him, or another, who found it. The one who had etched the symbols into the rock did not do it for his own tribe, Bone knew, but for those who would come after his own people had gone from the earth forever.
He closed his eyes and saw the symbols there, flashing with colors, the colors of the rainbow, and he knew they were mystical signs, magical signs that had great power for one who could understand them.
“Someday,” he said, “I will know what the stone says.”
“What?” Dawn asked, her attention drawn away from her infant son. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing,” Bone said. “I was just thinking and my mouth spoke by itself.”
“Tsk, tsk,” Dawn clucked. “You had better go and talk to Matteo. Bring back some food and a baby cradle.”
Bone did not move right away. He looked at the stone again and saw the band of light shimmer and move ever so slightly as the sun changed position in the sky. It seemed to him that the archaic signs were moving, dancing, running, jumping. He strained to see if they rearranged themselves in a way that would make him understand them. But the light faded and moved away and the stone fell into shadow, and he could no longer see the etched figures.
Finally, Bone got up from the chair. He left the house without speaking to his wife, who had dozed off with the baby suckling at her breast. He did not saddle his horse, but walked to the house of Matteo, taking his time. He kept thinking about the carvings on the stone and how they moved as if they were living things, as if they were trying to speak to him. As if they were trying to tell him something important.
9
WANDA FANCHER AND her mother, Hattie, finished inspecting the little house they had helped build on a corner of Roy Killian’s property. It sat in a clearing not far from the main house, in full view, but had its own privacy since they had left oak trees standing at intervals in front of it and had trimmed back some mesquite trees that formed a kind of shrub on one side.
“All it needs is a coat of paint,” Hattie said.
“We’ll get some,” Wanda said. “Pluto, can you paint?”
The young black man grinned and shook his head.
“How about you, Julius?”
“No, I ain’t never seen paint what wasn’t already on a house.”
“Well,” Wanda said, “we’ll go into town and I’ll buy some paint and teach you. You can paint your own house. Do you like it so far?”
“Yes’m,” Julius said, “I likes it just fine. So does Pluto.”
“Do you, Pluto?”
“Yes’m. It’s a right fine house. But it ain’t our’n.”
“Yes it is,” Wanda said. “You helped build it and it’s yours as long as you work for Mr. Killian.”
They had taken in the two slave boys after Martin had brought them back to the Box B from the Aguilar ranch. They were hard workers but it was obvious to Wanda and Hattie that they had known nothing but slavery and ill treatment all their lives. They still could not believe they were truly free and Roy had given up trying to convince them. But not Wanda and not Hattie.
“Is you going to grow cotton here, Miss Wanda?” Pluto asked.
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“That’s ’bout all we knows how to do, Miss Wanda. Grow cotton and pick it.”
“Now that you’re a free man, Pluto, you can learn how to do new things. Mr. Killian will show you how to raise cattle that will feed you and your wife, when you get married, and your children.”
Pluto and Julius looked at each other with wide, white-rimmed eyes.
“Yes’m,” Pluto said, “but we’s scared to death of them cattle. They look mean.”
Wanda laughed. “Mr. Killian will teach you how not to be afraid of them, how to be boss over the cattle.”
“Boss?” Julius asked.
“That’s right. Di
dn’t your people in Africa raise cattle?”
“Yes’m, but not as big as these here and not with them big long horns.”
“Cattle are cattle,” Wanda said. “Just like people are people.”
Again the two young men looked at each other. Finally Julius grinned and so did Pluto. Hattie and Wanda smiled at each other.
“We’ll buy some paint and brushes the next time we go into town,” Wanda said. “Now, let’s get back to our house and get to work.”
“Yes’m,” the two men chorused.
Roy waved to Wanda, her mother, and the two new hands as they walked up to the Killian house. He had begun digging a well and stood, naked to the waist, sweat glistening on his tanned skin, and leaned the shovel against a rock. He was already four feet down and had begun to see seepage. Rocks and dirt lay strewn around the hole.
“Where’s your mother?” Wanda called.
“Inside.”
Wanda set Julius and Pluto to work finishing up the spare room, asking them to put dirt around the foundation and tamp it down hard. Hattie went inside the house and the two black youths went to work with small shovels. They soon shed their shirts in the hot sun.
Roy looked over at the outhouse as the door swung open and David Wilhoit, his mother’s husband, stepped out.
“I thought you had fallen in,” Roy said.
“Reading,” David said, with a slight grin.
He walked over to Roy and picked up another shovel that lay on the ground. He looked into the hole. “You’re getting to water.”
“How’d you know I’d find water here?” Roy asked.
“I looked at those trees growing yonder, and yonder,” David said, pointing, “and figured they’d send their biggest roots just about here.”
“Bullshit.”
David laughed.
“I saw you walking around here with a forked stick last night. I thought you had lost what little sense God gave you.”
“Divining rod.”
“Huh?”
“One of the tricks I picked up as a surveyor. An old man used to take a willow branch and walk over the ground, holding the two forked ends. When the straight end bent to the ground, he knew there was water at that spot.”
“I never heard of such,” Roy said.
“This man said the branch had memory and smartness and when it sensed water, it just naturally bent down toward it to take a drink.”
“Trees can’t think.”
“Well, that’s how I found water, not only here, but in other places.”
Roy grunted and lifted a lump of dirt out of the hole, threw it a few feet away. David stepped in and dug more dirt out and flung it.
“Next you’ll tell me trees have brains.”
“They might,” David said, smiling.
The two men dug deeper and more water seeped up out of the ground, in a muddy, cloddy soup. Nearby, flat stones they had gathered lay stacked neatly, as if to build a fence. The pile represented several days of work by the women, David, and Roy. They would be used to shore up the walls of the well after the men dug two feet past where the water would gush freely. They would lay the stones as latticework to keep the dirt out, but let the water from the aquifer seep through and keep the well filled. Wanda and Hattie had told Roy how to dig the well, but David had told Roy where to dig that very morning, after going over the ground with that divining rod like some crazed alchemist plucked from another century.
“You don’t like me much, do you, Roy?” David asked.
“I don’t like you at all.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, I don’t like the way you took advantage of my mother.”
“How did I take advantage of her?”
Roy leaned on the handle of his shovel, stared David straight in the eye. “She was a widow woman and I was lookin’ after her. You just come up and stole her from me.”
David stepped back away from the hole and leaned on his shovel handle. He sighed and rolled his eyes in his head. “I didn’t take advantage of her. From what she told me, your father ran off and left the two of you in Fort Worth.”
“He come back.”
“That’s not what your mother told me.”
“What in hell did she tell you?”
“She said he came back and took you away and then he got killed.”
“So?”
“So, damn it, you both left your mother. I know you brought her here, but the damage was done. She needed someone dependable to take care of her.”
“You?” Roy put a sarcastic twist to the question.
“Yes, me.”
“And, so you took her over to Aguilar’s and worked for that Mexican bastard. Now my mother’s homeless again. You call that ‘dependable’?”
“Look, Roy, I admit things didn’t work out. But I did honest work for Matteo Aguilar. I gave your mother a home. I put bread and meat on the table.”
“And now you don’t have no job. You don’t have nothin’.”
“I just couldn’t stand by and see those Negroes sold into slavery by Matteo.”
“You didn’t do nothin’ to stop him. Martin Baron got those slaves away from Aguilar. The night we come and got them slaves loose from ya’ll, I was hopin’ you’d be in my sights. I’d have dropped you like a sack of meal, sure enough. But I didn’t get the chance. You was going to take them Negroes up north and sell ’em for Aguilar. You should have been shot.”
“There wasn’t much I could do. If I didn’t go along, Matteo would have killed me, and probably your mother, too.”
“Then you run off, and now my ma’s got nothin’.”
“She has me.”
Roy glared at David. “And that ain’t much, is it?”
“I intend to get our things away from the Rocking A and set your mother up in a nice home again.”
“Shit. How’re you gonna do that? Matteo will shoot you plumb dead if you step foot on his ranch. And you don’t have no job, no land, no home.”
“I thought it was best to come here and warn you of Matteo’s plans to make war on you and the Barons.”
The muddy water gurgled in the well hole as an air bubble rose to the surface. The two men looked down at it, then at each other once again.
“Mister,” Roy said, “you made two bad choices. You went and married my ma, then you took her to the Rocking A and put her in danger. Them’s two good reasons why I don’t like you.”
“We all make mistakes, Roy. I love your mother. And she loves me.”
Roy’s neck swelled with rage. He gripped the shovel handle tightly and it appeared as though he would pick it up and swing it at Wilhoit. “Look, Dave, I don’t want to hear no more about you and my ma. You keep your damned feelings to yourself, hear?”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Roy.”
Roy’s face darkened as he glared at Wilhoit. He relaxed his grip on the handle of the shovel and his hand began to quiver as his rage subsided.
“Let’s get to diggin’, Dave, before I think of something else to do with this shovel.”
David shrugged and began digging again. Roy picked up the beat and they dipped their shovel faces into more water and mud as the hole kept filling up.
Both were so intent on digging the well, that neither noticed Ursula walk up. She came over to David and put her arm around his waist.
“My, it’s nice to see my two boys working together,” she said, a pleasant lilt to her voice.
Roy’s face turned pasty with a sheepish look as if a thin layer of cream had been poured over it from the eyes down to his chin. He summoned up a thin smile that stretched his lips, but did not show his teeth.
He tried to quell the anger that rose up in him, but suddenly he felt almost suffocated by it, felt as if the whole world were caving in on him. And in that instant, he knew it was not just David Wilhoit who spurred the fury inside him, but it was his mother strangling him—his mother, and Hattie and Wanda, the three of them, crowding him into a corner, all na
gging him to do this or that. And Wilhoit somehow a part of it, on their side, not his, and Roy felt shut out and cut off from who he was, pressured by all the women in his small house and that smug son of a bitch David, sleeping with his mother and filling her ears with lies. He was a traitor who had surveyed Roy’s land for Matteo Aguilar and found that the land Martin Baron had given Roy might not be his after all. It was like having a rug jerked out from under his feet.
“I ain’t your boy, no more,” Roy said, a surly, nasty tone to his voice.
“What?”
“As long as you’re married to this turncoat rascal, you ain’t my ma,” Roy said.
Ursula drew back as if struck. David started to step forward, toward Roy as if to strike him.
“Come on ahead, David. Just throw one punch and I’ll stuff your sorry hide in that hole there and dig me a well someplace else.”
“Roy,” Ursula exclaimed. “Whatever’s gotten into you?”
“I don’t like your husband, for one thing. I don’t like him bein’ here and moochin’ off me.”
“Roy, you’d better shut up,” David said.
“Make me.”
“Roy. David. Stop it this instant. There’s no need for you two to quarrel. Roy, you have no call to be mean to David. He’s done you no harm.”
“I don’t like the son of a bitch.”
“Oh, you’re just like your father, Roy. Now, let’s not hear any more talk like that. If you don’t want us here, we’ll leave.”
“That’s right,” David said. “We wouldn’t want to stay where we’re not welcome.”
“Well, you ain’t welcome here, Mr. Wilhoit. So just pack your bag and get your sorry ass out of here.”
“Roy, stop that,” Ursula said. “I won’t have you talking that way to my husband.”
Roy threw down his shovel and stalked off. He walked away from the house as David and his mother stood there shaking their heads in disbelief.
“Will he get over it?” David asked.
“I don’t think so. He’s stubborn, like Jack was. And he’s mad. His father stayed mad all his life.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Jack hated me and maybe my son does, too.”
