The Baron War

by Jory Sherman

  “He say he was going somewheres, I think.”

  “Did he and the others just run off? Were they afraid of a fight?”

  “No, I don’t think so. They were not escared of no fight. I think they go somewhere with Anson.”

  “Christ. With Anson?”

  “That is what he say.”

  “Where?”

  “He do not say.”

  “Now, what in hell is Anson up to? He took my best men with him. Did Timo say anything about going after that white bull, the one you all call el diablo blanco?”

  “No, he do not say anything about el diablo blanco. He just say he is going to go with Anson somewheres.”

  “Bastard,” Martin said. “All right. Go on now. We’ll just have to do this without them.”

  “I think so, Patrón.”

  “Damn,” Martin said, after Eduardo went back to join the others. He squeezed his hands into fists and drew in a deep breath. He watched the men disperse, start traipsing out of the barn to take care of the chores they had to do before he would need them again. When they had gone, Martin climbed up on the wagon and poured powder into the cannon’s breech, loaded the barrel with thin pieces of jagged metal he had collected over time. He wiped the brass barrel until it shone and then he climbed down and boarded up the back after slipping the small ladder onto the bed.

  “All ready?”

  Martin turned at the sound of the woman’s voice.

  “Yeah, Ursula. I thought you’d be inside, helping the other women with the food for my men.”

  “I wondered where David and Roy were. I didn’t see them when you had all the men working with that contraption.”

  Martin walked over to her. “See that line of trees to the south of the big pasture?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got those boys stringing rope and chain across the road there. That’s where I figure Matteo will come in from. That road leads right to the Rocking A.”

  “Lucinda said you sent your Negroes to town. I was curious about why, when you need every available hand to fight Matteo.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I thought maybe you didn’t trust them to fight as good as the Mexicans.”

  “No. I just thought that if Matteo saw them here, he must kill them just for spite. They were his slaves, before I got them.”

  “Stolen slaves.”

  “Right. I’d feel real bad if they got hurt in this fight.”

  “I didn’t know you gave one whit what happened to those Negroes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought you just wanted some slaves of your own.”

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “I guess I thought that’s what most men would do.”

  “Well, I’m not most men.”

  “No. Jack told me as much. When—when he was alive.”

  “Jack didn’t know as much as he thought he did.”

  “No, I suppose he didn’t.”

  “Look, Ursula, is that all you’ve got on your mind? I’m kind of busy right now.”

  Ursula stepped close to Martin and grasped his hand, gave a slight squeeze. “I wonder how you’re managing to do all this, Martin. You’re packing around a heap of grief.”

  Martin felt his hand burning, but Ursula did not release it. He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them. They were wet. “Maybe this is a way to work through the grief,” he said. “I keep thinking about the good moments we had.”

  “Those are the memories I keep of poor Jack. I didn’t know Caroline very well, but you must have loved her very much, and I know she loved you.”

  “Yes, I think she did love me. Even after all I put her through.”

  Ursula squeezed his hand again. “Men like you and Jack put their women through a lot, Martin, but you can’t help it, no more than we can help loving you.”

  “I keep thinking of all Caroline had to endure when I wasn’t around to help her.”

  “Maybe that’s part of what a woman must bear when she loves a man—the absences, the hurts, the misunderstandings.”

  “It’s hell thinking on it.”

  “Then don’t. I don’t, any longer. I know Jack had to go his own way, and that was part of his man-ness, why he was Jack and nobody else. I even knew that when he was alive.”

  “You did?”

  “A woman knows her man. She may not act like it. She may fuss and want to punish, but deep down she knows a man can’t give back the kind of love she has to give him. Men and women just love different, that’s all. There were times when I wanted to beat Jack with my fists, and times when I cried because I thought he didn’t love me. But I know he loved me in his own way, and that should be enough for any woman.”

  “Did you think he was cold? Caroline thought I was cold to her. Mean, even.”

  “Yes, I thought Jack was cruel at times, that he didn’t give a whistler’s whit about me. But we lived in two different worlds. There’s one thing I do know, though.”

  “What’s that?” Martin asked.

  “I know that Jack was always thinking of me when he was away, and that everything he did, he did to make me happy. He just never knew that I would have been happy with him even if we were poor. He thought he had to lay riches at my feet, that this was the only way I could love him. But even that told me how much he loved me. He wanted to please me, as I’m sure you wanted to please Caroline.”

  “I wanted her to be happy. She was so sad in her later years.”

  “A part of her was happy,” Ursula said, and released her grip on Martin’s hand. Even that loosening was a comfort to him and the heat of her touch stayed in his flesh and warmed him.

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  “Trust me, Martin. It’s true. I saw the way she looked at you. I heard the way she talked about you when you were not around. She couldn’t hide her love for you.”

  “You are a comfort, Ursula. I’m much obliged.”

  “Now, you go on and do what you have to do, but you think back to when you first met Caroline and what sparked you and what made you want her for your wife. And you’ll know that she wanted you just as much, if not more, and that’s something nobody, not even another woman, or time, or death, can ever take away. What you and she had together … that’s what’s worth remembering.”

  Martin sighed. “I feel a heap better,” he said.

  “Good. Now I’ll get back to helping fix food for all you rascals and when the time comes, me and Wanda and Hattie will fight right alongside you and your men.”

  Ursula walked away before Martin could say anything, and he watched her go in a new light. He thought of Caroline and knew that if she were alive, she’d be right there with those other women, cooking, fixing the food, and, when it came to a fight, she’d be right alongside them, loading and shooting her rifle. His heart swelled with the thought, and he turned away from the wagon and walked over to the barn, feeling considerably lighter on his feet than before.

  24

  TURKEY BUZZARDS WHEELED in the sky, spiraling upward and downward on the hidden wires of air like leaves swirling around in a clear glass funnel. Every so often, one or two buzzards dipped down low and disappeared below tree level. Then another pair would rise up from the ground and join the circling birds in a mysterious cycle of falling and rising. All this in a dead silence, as if the sound had been sucked up in that vortex of invisible air.

  The line of riders approached that place where the buzzards fell out of the sky like giant autumn leaves and others rose up as if swept there by an equally large broom. The riders were naked except for rags of tanned deerskin drooping over their loins, and boot moccasins laced with thongs. They rode their horses bareback and were so attached to their mounts they might have been centaurs, half horse, half men, joined in some odd alchemy of evolution and chemistry as to seem single animals in procession.

  They passed in and out of the trees and small clearings, their horses walking so slow
ly they did not raise the dust and their unshod hooves made only the smallest thudding on the baked earth; as if the earth, too, soaked up all vagrant sounds in order to deepen the silence across the land.

  The riders rode through the flapping buzzards surrounding the carcass of a longhorn cow, and did not regard the cloud of flapping buzzards that scattered to the sky and the trees as the men passed, leaving behind the ravaged skeleton the buzzards had fed upon, the rib cage dripping with shreds of blackened meat and shreds of tattered skin. Coyotes had gnawed the eyeless skull, leaving tooth marks on the skinless visage that resembled ancient cuneiform wedges from some lost and forgotten book of the dead. A few wisps of reddish hide still clung to the skull clogged with dirt and dried blood, matted there like dyed wool glued to a broken bust of some slain beast of burden left behind on the sands of time.

  The men rode on and, as they left, the buzzards returned, one by one, and strutted like martinets emerging from a military haberdashery in mourning coats, shifting their shoulders as if to make their clothes fit. They returned to the remains of their feast, supplicants at a supper for homeless beggars on an empty plain.

  Culebra, chief of the small band of Mescalero Apaches, raised his hand to call a halt to the column of his followers. Neither he nor his braves were painted for war, but were scouting a trail that had grown cold since they had last traveled it. Still, they could read the signs unbrushed by the wind and the few rain sprinkles, and they had the landmarks in memory.

  “We will stop here,” Culebra said. “We will rest and smoke.”

  The remains of the burned jacal lay strewn around them, the stench of wet burnt wood still strong on the air. The skeletons of burned tumbleweeds lay against stumps of buried posts that had burned almost to the ground, and pieces of charred rope were scattered like the bones of the dead in a ravaged graveyard.

  “We have hunger,” Tecolote said, pointing to the pair of jackrabbits dangling from the thong around his waist.

  “We have thirst, too,” Oso said, shaking an empty wooden canteen.

  “You are like whining children,” Culebra said as he slid from his horse, demolishing the centaur. “Your bellies are full from eating the Mexican food; you have grown fat like the women in the mountains. Cook the rabbits, then, and eat. Maybe you will not be able to cry with your mouths full of meat.”

  The men grumbled no more as they stepped from their mounts and drifted toward the shade of a mesquite grove, leading their horses in silence. Culebra tied his horse to a small mesquite where the grass grew sparse in shadow and sat down first. His followers sat surrounding him in a semicircle and began opening their leather pouches, bringing forth the little clay pipes they had traded for. Culebra fished a packet of tobacco from his fringed pouch and dipped his pipe inside, then passed the tobacco to Lobito, who was sitting next to him.

  Tecolote got up after lighting his pipe and began gathering small pieces of deadwood and dried grass. Oso got up, too, and began doing the same, while the other men smoked their pipes in silence.

  “Do you not have hunger?” Lobito asked of Culebra.

  Culebra did not answer right away. He let the smoke curl from the pipestem into his mouth, let the warmth seep through him as his thoughts drifted far away from that place. He could almost feel the smoke rise up through the little noseholes above the roof of his mouth and drift into his brain. He closed his eyes and saw the smoke swirl in his mind like the mist that cloaked the brasada early in the morning before the sun came awake, and then the smoke thickened like the fog that sometimes lay along the ocean shore at Trespalacios, so quiet, so silent, he could hear the singing of the sea, the melodious lapping of the soft waves driven shoreward by the dawn tide.

  Through the swirls of mists and smoky fog in his mind he could see the old trails he and his father and the brothers of his tribe had ridden over the long sad years. He saw the place where his father, Cuchillo, had been killed by one of the Barons, his body left to the vultures and coyotes and worms. He saw the trails they had traveled from the mountains in Mexico and the rivers they had crossed, rivers that ran with the blood of his people over the centuries, rivers that knew the sweat of their horses and carried their urine to the Gulf and their footprints left on the banks all the way to the sea.

  He felt the smoke flow through his nostrils and saw their tendrils float out in twin spirals into the air and then he went back into the darkness of his mind and watched the fog and mist part once more and show him the trail leading away from this place to another where brothers had died, and he could smell their blood as it soaked into the grains of dirt and sand and the patterns it left on the cactus and mesquite, like warpaint daubed on the face of the earth itself.

  In his mind Culebra saw the faces of those who had gone to the stars, they floated in and out of the swirling darkness like masks glowing in the firelight, and their ghostly visages seemed to be trying to speak to him, for he could see their mouths move, opening and closing, as if they had words to say but could not bring them to life, for they had no throats, only faces that wavered and shrank and stretched and grew as if they were painted on moving water.

  A great sadness came over Culebra as he sat there, dreaming in the shade. He opened his eyes to see the sunlight dapple the leaves on the trees and closed them again to see if he could find his way back to that place in his mind where he could see the spirits of the dead, see their faces float out of the smoke. Perhaps he would see his mother’s face and his grandmother’s this time, for he had not seen them before when he was dreaming like this.

  Culebra let himself float up with the smoke to his mind and he waited as he would wait by a grave for some sign that the spirits were there. He closed his eyes tight and looked and looked, but he saw only blackness and the afterimage of sunlight and shadow on the leaves of the mesquite trees and these waved away the quaking smoke and trembling mist in his mind and he saw only the bleakness of the land, the vast emptiness that had been his world for so long.

  “Culebra does not have hunger,” Oso said finally, to break the terrible silence of the shade and still leaves on the trees.

  “Not for food,” Abeja said, chuckling. “He sleeps as if he had spent himself with a woman in his blankets.”

  “Smell his mouth, Oso,” young Conejo said, joining in, “and see if he does not sleep from the drinking of the aguardiente.”

  “I will close your mouth, Conejo,” Oso said. “Nothing comes out but the shit in your bowels.”

  The others laughed and Culebra opened his eyes.

  “I have hunger,” Culebra said, and put his pipe to his mouth and drew on it until his lungs filled with warm smoke. He let the smoke out slowly and watched it curl in the windless air like a coiling spirit. “I have hunger for the blood of my enemies. I have hunger for the land that is empty of the white-eyes. I have hunger that might make me eat all of you up so that I do not have to listen to you prattle like the quail in their wallows.”

  The others sniffed the air and turned to look at the rabbits roasting over the fire. They all licked their lips and looked sheepish when Culebra glared at them. He did not look at the rabbits or seem to hear their juices boil and their small leg bones crack from the heat.

  “We only talk this way,” Oso said, “because we wonder why we have come back to this place. There are no horses here. We have taken them. There are no white-eyes here. We have driven them away. There is nothing here in this place but the buzzards and the burned jacal. We have ridden our horses until their tongues grow long. We have seen no cattle or deer. We have seen only jackrabbits and lizards. Not even the snake hunts in this country. Even the flies have hunger in their bellies.”

  “You want to go home, eh, Oso?” Culebra asked. “Back to the safe place in the mountains? Back to your woman’s blanket where she will play with your pecker until it gets mad and turns into a stick?”

  The others laughed at that, but Culebra made the mirth die in their chests as he looked at them with a withering contempt. “An
d you, Conejo, do you want to live like the rabbit you are and hide in the mountains from the hawk and the eagle?”

  Conejo looked as if he had been bitten by the snake, Culebra. He did not answer, but pressed his lips together and frowned.

  “Go and eat the rabbit, all of you,” Culebra said. “You will need the strength its meat gives you. Oso, you eat the heart for courage, and you, Abeja, eat the liver so that you have the bravery of a mouse. Eat, eat, eat, all of you. Eat the bones to make your peckers stiff and eat the marrow to quench your thirst and eat the eyes so that you can see in the dark when the owl flies from its roost to pluck you from your blankets and carry you off in its talons like the baby chickens you are.”

  None of the men moved until Culebra arose and put out his pipe and walked away to relieve himself.

  “Come, eat,” Tecolote said, and the men got up and put out their pipes and squatted near the fire and passed the rabbits around until there was nothing left but cracked bones sucked empty of marrow.

  Culebra did not return until the men had finished eating and were acting sleepy and looking for shady places to lie down and close their eyes.

  “If your horses are not too tired,” Culebra said, “ask them to come with us. I am ready to leave this place. Did you leave me any of the rabbit to eat, Tecolote?”

  “I did not think you had hunger.”

  “You are like the goat, Tecolote. You eat the grass down to the ground and leave nothing for the deer or the cattle.”

  “I had hunger; I ate.”

  “I wonder that you all did not go where the buzzards were feeding on the dead cow and shoo them away so that you could eat that carrion as well.”

  “Are we to go hungry because you do not eat?” Oso asked.

  Culebra walked to his horse and loosened the rope reins. He slid atop the mount and rode up to the others. “No, Oso,” Culebra said. “I want you to fill your bellies for the long ride ahead. We are going far this day and we will not stop until the sun has gone to sleep.”

  “Where do we go?” Tecolote asked. “To the ranch of the white-eyes?”