Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She had one more letter to write before she left the next morning. To Don Francisco—to Sherrod, really. But there was so little she could write; only to thank the Godwins for giving her the opportunity to come to the territory and tell them she was emigrating to Hermosillo, Mexico. So little she knew about the adventure on which she was embarking.

  She had already made her goodbyes to the Hugheses. Sam had come for her trunk that afternoon to store it until she could send for it. She and Atanacia had clung to each other, weeping, and Sam had given her a gruff peck on the cheek before the couple left.

  For the last time Catherine prepared for bed. She did not know how long it would be before she experienced that luxury again. She heated the water in a kettle over the fire and poured it into the tarred wooden half-barrel Sam had fashioned for her. After the bath, she donned the cotton night shift and braided her hair before putting on her nightcap. It was a ritual of civilization she might not know for a long time to come.

  The fire was banked, the candles snuffed. She slid beneath the light woolen blanket, thinking she would not sleep that night with the excitement of leaving occupying her mind. And she did not, for scarcely less than an hour past midnight, as she rolled to yet another position, a sound like gunfire burst through the small house. She bolted upright in the bed, instantly realizing the sound was that of someone banging open the door.

  Concurrent with the realization, a shadow loomed before her, filling the bedroom's doorway. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a masculine voice snarled before she could scream.

  “Law!” she breathed in relief, gathering the blanket up before her. Then angrily, “What do you think you're doing, breaking into my house in the middle of the night?”

  In two strides his long legs carried him to her bedside. His large hands caught her about her arms and literally raised her from the bed. With her face on a level with his, she could smell the liquor on his breath. “You’ve been drinking,” she said with disgust.

  He began to shake her. "No vayas con la expedición!" Then, realizing he had slipped into Spanish, he dropped her back to the bed. “You are not going with the expedition,” he said with a thick finality.

  “Yes, I am,” she told him as he turned his back on her and went to the bureau to light the candle. “And you can’t stop me!”

  The small light flickered and danced through the room, casting Law’s giant shadow over her bed. He advanced on her. “Now you listen to me, Cate,” he said in speech as articulate as a sober man's. “This is no pleasure trip. Danger and hunger and death will be—”

  She shot up in the bed again. “I’m a grown woman, Lorenzo Davalos. I can handle myself.”

  “Is that why some Don Quixote is always sleeping outside your door?—for all the good it does you. The one outside now is dead drunk.”

  Her lips puckered in an impish smile. “I always forget that you’re an educated man, Law.”

  He sighed and ran his fingers through the tousled butter- toasted hair. “There’s a lot you forget, Cate.” He pulled up the one chair in the room and swung it around backward, straddling the seat with his arms resting on its back. “Cate, I’m an agent for Juarez—and this is no colonization. It’s a battalion I’ve raised to fight the French, who at this moment are knocking on Sonora's southern borders.”

  “You’re not going to Hermosillo?” she asked, incredulous that her plans might be thwarted.

  “It’s only a stopover on the way to the Gulf, to Guaymas.”

  She frowned and chewed on her thumb, trying to assimilate what he was telling her. She knew, of course, that Napoleon III had put the Austrian duke Maximilian on the Mexican throne as emperor—and that it had angered the Americans, who felt the French were violating the Monroe Doctrine. But with the Civil War raging in the United States, the Americans could do nothing about it.

  Mexico and its own internal problems seemed so remote that she had never given the French intervention in Mexico's politics much thought. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. ‘‘With your Mexican heritage, why all this pretense? Why don’t you just cross the border and fight?”

  “Because,” he said impatiently, “the French have well-disciplined and well-armed troops. They're three to one over Juarez. They control three-quarters of Mexico, and they want Sonora now—mostly for its mines. And there’s nothing to stop them from taking the state except various bands of guerrillas . . . men supporting Benito Juarez who need additional men and arms.

  “And we can’t get men and arms across the border to them without violating U.S. neutrality laws. But as emigrants who need to protect ourselves against Apaches and Yaquis marauding on both sides of the border”—he shrugged—“it’s perfectly acceptable. ”

  “So that’s where you were off to all the time you pretended to be prospecting,” she accused. “In San Francisco and those other places—”

  “I was purchasing supplies and arms,” he concluded, rising from the chair. “Now that you understand—’’

  "No, I don’t understand!" She bounded to her feet to face the man, forgetting that her nipples thrust against the thin cotton shift. Her head tilted back to meet his scowl of irritation. "I don't understand why I can’t go. You need women. Tranquilino said so himself.”

  "But these women, the young ones, will serve the men's other needs. And these aren't the gentlemen—the Jeremys and Lionels and Sherrods—you're accustomed to, Cate." He paced the room with his hands clasped behind his back, sounding for all the world like a tirading teacher. "These men are trained killers, adventurers, mercenaries. Some of them wouldn’t think twice about violating a woman.”

  She blanched but said defiantly, "I can take care of myself. Just let me go as far as Hermosillo with you. I’m sure I can find work among some of the Confederate families who have taken refuge there."

  He whirled and faced her, hands braced on hips. "And if the French overrun the state?”

  “As an American citizen I can claim neutrality," she pointed out coolly.

  “Dammit, Cate, you can’t go. It’s too—”

  “Law, I’ve got to go!” she pleaded. “I’ve no money left to support myself and nowhere else to go.”

  “Why can’t you just be satisfied with getting married like the well-brought-up young woman you are? Wasn’t that what you told me you wanted? I’d imagined by now that Jeremy—”

  "Jeremy’s dead,” she said in a monotone. "I killed him.”

  Law’s head jerked up. "You what?”

  “The night of the New Year’s Eve baile—he tried to . . . to rape me. I accidentally stabbed him with his saber.” Just saying it scrambled chills up her spine and popped goose bumps on her her flesh.

  “Santa Maria de Jesus!” Law breathed. “I left that night for Santa Fe and just got back. That must’ve been what Loco was trying to finish telling me when I stormed over here.”

  Sensing her advantage, she pressed, "Then you'll let me go?”

  He rubbed his beard-stubbled jaw. “Somehow, Cate, you manage to get around me.”

  She threw her arms about his waist. “Oh, Law, thank you!”

  Immediately he disengaged her arms. “I’m warning you now, don’t you come near me, Cate. After you, I’ve had enough of virgins to last me a lifetime. Give me a warm, willing woman and a jug of wine and you can forget the promises of heaven.” He turned to go, but at the doorway he looked over his shoulder. “That nightcap—it’s the God-awfullest thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on. Be sure to take it with you—it'll keep my men away.” He crimped a half smile. “And save their lives.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Catherine surveyed the plaza by the shafting bars of dawn’s light. Men of all ages and nationalities were everywhere, on horseback and on foot, dressed in the remnants of Union blues and Confederate grays, in serapes and tattered blue-tail coats. Some of the Mexicans wore no shoes. Their feet were as tough and gnarled as the bark of an old tree. The men were armed to the teeth with sabers, unwieldy blunderb
usses, navy revolvers, derringers, horse pistols, and knives. A motlier bunch she had never seen.

  She told herself that the journey would be no worse than that last month she had spent traveling with Governor Goodwin and the New Mexico soldiers. But this time there were no carriages or comfortable ambulances, just the commissary train, consisting of nine twelve-mule wagons loaded with forage, arms, kegs of ammunition, and camp equipment. Behind the wagons, the pack mules stood drowsily beneath their weighted loads.

  That early in the morning, before the desert sun fully rose, the air was sharp. She buttoned her riding jacket and picked up her bundled belongings. Plagued by doubts, she nevertheless crossed the plaza to where Tranquilino stood before the line of pack mules, pad and pen in hand. She would not turn back now.

  I had hoped you would change your mind,” Tranquilino said, his breath steaming with frost.

  She looked past him to see Law riding toward them. Like the other men, he was heavily armed—the brace of pistols at his hips and the knife sheathed at his waist. Beneath the floppy sombrero his eyes were hidden, but his mouth was a rigid line in the jutting jaw. “Apparently you're not the only one,” she told Tranquilino dryly.

  Law reined in the horse. “These other women,” he began without preamble, pointing to the dozen or so women wrapped in woolen rebozos who were scattered about the plaza, “they're seasoned soldaderas-—and they’re fighting for something they believe in. Neither of which applies to you, Cate.”

  So, he had had time to repent of his leniency. She planted her fists on her hips. “You can't tell me three-quarters of the men here volunteered because they believe in the Juarez cause.”

  "No, they believe in rape and murder and plunder.”

  Tranquilino turned away in embarrassment, presumably to check a supply wagon.

  “I’ll leave you behind at the nearest pueblo if you can’t keep up with the expedition,” Law continued.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asked the man slouched in the saddle.

  “There’s nothing I’d like better.”

  Her lips curled upward. “Why, Law Davalos, I think you’re afraid of me!”

  “You bet your grammar book I am. There’s nothing worse than a woman hell-bent on marriage.”

  “Ohhh!”

  He straightened in the saddle. A few men turned around to stare. “I’m sorry, Cate,” he said in a lower voice. “But it just goes to prove I’m right. You don’t belong on this expedition. We’re not gentlemen, none of us. Go back to the States, Cate.”

  She shook her quirt up at him. “I’m going into Mexico with you, you hear me? After we reach Hermosillo, you’re rid of me—and, thank God, I’m rid of you, you—you bastard!”

  Well, there was another first, she thought ruefully as Law wheeled his sorrel away to disappear among the milling soldiers of fortune. It was the first time she had ever used such unladylike language. Her mother would have washed her mouth out with lye soap, and Margaret—her dear sister would have swooned had she heard her.

  The situation became progressively worse when Catherine realized she would not have her own mount but would have to ride in one of the wagons like the rest of the women. Buckle up, old girl, she told herself as she crossed to the wagon to which Tranquilino had assigned her. You’re as tough as the next woman.

  She passed an old woman smoking a cheroot as she strapped a canvas tarpaulin over a pack mule’s saddlebag. Well, maybe not quite as tough.

  Catherine’s day brightened considerably when she reached her wagon and found that Loco was its muleskinner. “Lorenzo cannot lose you?” he asked with a sly wink.

  She laughed. “No. And you, either?”

  The old Indian's shaggy white hair swayed about his mummified face as he shook his head. “No, Lorenzo cannot lose me. I fed him and played with him when he was a baby. And I shall no doubt bury him with this madness of his, this foolish patriota."

  By midmorning the Arizona Colonizing Expedition had left behind the crumbling presidio walls of the Old Pueblo and the desert floor and was making its way south, gradually ascending the Santa Cruz Valley. They passed the San Xavier Mission—a large white lime-plastered edifice with bell towers and domes that dominated the emptiness around it. It was a splendid monument to civilization—the last that Catherine would see for some time; for upon leaving the mission behind, the expedition passed ranch after ranch that had been devastated by the Indians.

  No white man's life was secure beyond Tucson’s twelve-foot- high walls. Between San Xavier and Tubac the road was marked with the graves of unfortunate settlers. Wheat fields with torn-down fences; houses burned, the walls lying in rubble. A deathlike silence fell on the expedition as it moved through the Santa Cruz Valley, a land of waist-high winter grass and scrub-covered hills that were strangely calm and beautiful in their desolation.

  To the left rose the nine-thousand-foot peaks of the Santa Rita range—cold, piney, spectacular in the snappy, sunny wake of winter. To the right, the shoulders of the Tumacacori and Atascoca hills. And the mountains way ahead to the left. Loco told her, were the high and rugged Mexican Sierra Madres that picked up at the ragged end of the Rockies.

  Law called camp that evening at the deserted Rhodes ranch, which was knee-deep with weeds and grass. All around, adobe walls crumbled to ruin with fallen-in roofs. Doors and windows had been carried away by Mexican vandals when the garrison at Fort Buchanan had departed at the beginning of the Civil War.

  She fell easily into working with Filomena, a pretty woman about the same age as she. Filomena’s husband had been working Sylvester Mowery's Patagonia mine four years earlier when he and three others were ambushed by Cochise’s Apaches. The woman, with her sloping eyes and bright carmine lips, obviously could have had many men from which to choose a second husband. Yet she had elected to keep her widow's status.

  Together the two women assisted Loco in the cooking. Elsewhere, under Law's direction, other campfires sprang up in the twilight. As Catherine stirred the coarse cornmeal and flour in a chipped earthenware dish, she studied Law, easily detecting him from the others by his extraordinary height.

  As much as she hated admitting it, she had underestimated the man, labeled him an aimless rogue; yet now he moved among the men with purposeful strides and occasional words of camaraderie. The men seemed to accept his leadership easily, though at twenty-two he was much younger than most of them.

  Imagine, an agent for Juarez! She wondered how much Juarez was paying him. She remembered Jeremy’s telling her that General Custer had been offered by Carvajao, Juarez’s representative in the United States, the astronomical sum of sixteen thousand dollars in gold to command the Mexican forces.

  More than thirty men served themselves from Loco’s campfire, among them Tranquilino and Law, who was off again as soon as his tin plate had emptied. Later one of the men broke out a Jew’s harp, and song and laughter soon dispelled the atmosphere of gloom about the deserted ranch. As the fires flickered lower, the men began to turn in. Catherine and Filomena laid out their bedrolls inside a crumbling adobe hut. The fractured walls smelled strongly of urine, but at least the partially thatched roof sheltered them from the brunt of the cold.

  Camp broke with the dawn, and the brigade prepared for the march again with all the noise accompanying such an expedition. The mules brayed as they were repacked for the trek, and the horses whinnied and neighed as tin cups and canteens and haversacks of hardtack clattered and bobbed on their flanks. Law rode down the line of men, stopping to speak or point out something before he came to a halt next to the wagon she rode in with Loco.

  She still half expected him to tell her to fall out of line, but his glance merely flickered over her attire—the durable riding habit and sturdy Wellington boots that she had heretofore deemed quite serviceable. “At least you thought to wear a hat,” he said, casting a derisive glance at the tall black hat and veil trailing behind like some knightly banner.

  With narrowed eyes she watched
him ride away and vowed she would make him eat his words about old maids. Before he dumped her in Hermosillo she would . . . what? Oh, the injustice in being a woman!

  The journey proceeded smoothly, passing near the abandoned ruins of the royal presidio of Tubac, its mud-brick walls exposed by the peeling pale-cream stucco plaster. Below Tubac the Santa Cruz River bent eastward, meandering through hill country that jutted between two stretches of forbidding desert. From there the river began its gradual climb to the Pajarito Mountains, originally called Pimeria Alta by the Spanish explorers.

  Law called a halt in the Nogales Pass, named for the walnut trees nurtured there. It was a small, chiseled canyon marked by an unshapely pile of stones which was a monument erected by Colonel Emory in 1855 after the Gadsden Purchase set the new boundary.

  As the women began to prepare the dinner, a festive atmosphere settled on the camp. Singing could be heard at every fire, and from somewhere floated the strum of a guitar. Filomena explained that the men were jubilant because they had passed from under the authority of the United States. “These men—not all of them fight for patriotism.” Her hand swept the camp of wagons and pup tents with contempt. "Some fight for the money and mostly the land that Juarez has promised them when the French are driven from Mexico.”

  Catherine noticed she said “when." Filomena and the others seemed so positive, already celebrating as if a battle had been fought and won.

  When it came time to serve the men from the kettle of stew, an American with a cadaverous face presented himself before Catherine, plate in hand. He said nothing as she ladled out the brown juice and bits of meat, but she could feel his colorless eyes sliding over her. The man reminded her of a slug, and she shivered, relieved when he had moved on and someone else took his place.