Carlota Read online

  "The difference is great," my grandmother said. "This I admit. You have seen to that. You have raised Carlota as a vaquero. She thinks of nothing but horses. Gray horses. Bay horses. White horses. Spotted horses. Palominos. Horses! She will not walk fifty steps. Instead, she will get on a horse and ride the distance."

  What she said was true. I had been raised as a vaquero. I had been taught to do everything a horseman could do. My father had even named me after his son, Carlos, who had ben killed by the Piutes.

  "Yris is a girl of the sala, good at needlework and the viola," Doña Dolores said. "She is not suited to Don Roberto."

  "Neither is Carlota," my father said. "Nobody is suited to Don Roberto. That he is Don César's only son is a misfortune."

  "The hairy worm," my grandmother said. "It is your fault. You might have found one of the Bandinis for her. Or even a Yorba. All else failing, one of the numerous Palomareses."

  Doña Dolores bounced up from the chair and hobbled to the window and gazed out at the rain falling. I saw her cross herself and I knew that she was praying for the rain to last forever. I walked to the door, leaving them to continue their talk, which would grow very fierce before it ended.

  It did not trouble me. I had no intention of marrying Don Roberto, with his fat cheeks and fat little hands. And whatever Dona Dolores threatened—she sometimes said during these fights that she, and she alone, was the owner of the forty-seven-thousand-acre Rancho de los Dos Hermanos—but whatever she threatened, my father would never consent to such a marriage.

  Furthermore, he would try to keep me at his side, as long as ever he could. And I did not mind the thought. I liked to ride with the vaqueros. I liked to go with my father and do the things he did. The truth was, as my grandmother often said, I thought little of anything except horses, all kinds and colors of horses. Nothing pleased me more than to be in my cordovan saddle with the big silver spurs on my heels.

  3

  After five days the rain ceased. The sun came up in a bright cloudless sky as I began my weekly inspection of our buildings. I did not care very much for this task, but it had to be done and my father wanted me to do it. I had been doing it now for more than a year.

  The ranch house was built of adobe, which is mud mixed with straw and made into big bricks and set out in the sun to dry. The walls of the house were very thick, almost as thick through as the reach of my outstretched hands. There were few windows, only two on each side of the house, and these were iron-barred and shuttered.

  The house was built in the shape of a hollow square. Each side was ninety long strides in length. The roof, which was made of tile, was proof against the flaming arrows the Indians liked to use whenever they raided us. The house was a stronghold, like the fortresses in Spain.

  I always started at the big gate. There was a small garden on one side of the gate and here my father kept his pet eagle. It was Rosario's duty, when he wasn't running errands or serving as a footstool for my grandmother, to tend the eagle. The bird's name was Vuelo Grande, which means Big Wing.

  Old man Tiburcio, who had been a vaquero but now was too old to work the cattle, gathered mice and gophers to feed the bird. He caught them in traps every day and put them in a wicker cage and early in the morning set them inside the big gate where the eagle sat.

  Vuelo Grande was screaming for his breakfast. He sat on his perch with a silver-link chain around one leg, flapping his wings and turning his neck first one way then the other, even backward like an owl. His eyes were large and hooded. They were green, with some yellow and brown spots in them. His eyes never seemed to look at you. They looked through you at something far away in the hills, in the mountains, beyond the mountains.

  Rosario came running from somewhere and picked up the wicker cage. He reached in and took out a gopher, with care because it had long, sharp teeth.

  "Holal" he shouted to the eagle. "Catch!"

  With one claw Vuelo Grande caught the gopher in mid-air.

  "You have taught him a new trick," I said.

  "Yes. And soon," Rosario said, "he will permit me to stroke his feathers."

  "The feathers are very pretty," I said, "but take care that he doesn't get the claws in you."

  "He is a brother," Rosario said. "He is an Indian bird."

  "True. He comes from the Piute country. But remember that perhaps he doesn't know that you are brothers."

  "He knows," Rosario said, and got ready to toss him a second gopher.

  Next I visited the forge, where two young men were beating out shoes for the riding horses. Four that they had made especially for Tiburón hung on a peg. Next door was the saddlery. Here they made braided riatas and silver-studded saddles for the family and common saddles for the vaqueros. The weaving room was next. I did not go in. Through the open door I could see piles of yellow wool, still oily after the shearing. The looms were clicking and the spindles hummed. The Indian girls who tended them were in a happy mood now that they were no longer required to work on Sundays. It had been my idea to give them one day of rest. Doña Dolores opposed it, but with my father's help, I had won out.

  I went quickly past the family rooms for fear that my grandmother might see me and call me in to do something for her. She had three servants, counting Rosario, and I didn't like to be used as a fourth one. I crossed myself as I passed the chapel, where I had already prayed at dawn.

  My father sat in the sun beneath the portale. He sat here every morning when the sun shone and had his first cup of chocolate.

  "Que pasa?" he said. "Everything is in bad condition as usual?"

  "In good condition," I said.

  "How's the grandmother this morning?"

  "I have not seen her."

  "That is fortunate. You start the day well."

  Don Saturnino sat on a three-legged stool, his legs spread wide, his long black hair hanging down his back. It glistened like the tail of a horse.

  Hovering over him was Alfonso, the barber, combing his hair with a heavy horse comb. When that was done the barber braided it carefully and piled it on top of Don Saturnino's head and anchored it there with stout iron pins.

  His hair combed and braided and bound in a flashy red handkerchief with yellow tassels hanging down his back, my father strode into the kitchen, where he ate his first meal of the day. I followed him and, as was proper, waited until he asked me to sit down.

  The food came on in a flood. Pinto beans cooked with chile verde and slivers of fresh beef, sprinkled with strong goat cheese. Tortillas as thin as the knife blade in my father's garter. Thick chocolate, beaten to a bubbly froth, a haunch of venison. Tripes de leche from a yearling cow. A pot of quail. Did the King of Spain eat better, I wondered.

  My father said nothing to me until he had finished his breakfast and gone out into the courtyard for a glance at the weather.

  Off to the west there was a small cloud. The wind blew gently from the south.

  "Tomorrow," he said, "will also be fair."

  "You're always right about the weather," I said.

  "Wrong about much but not of the weather?"

  "I did not say that."

  "You did not so much as think it?"

  "No, Father. Not a thought."

  "What thoughts do you have about the wedding?" he said. "With fair weather coming, what day would you choose if it were your wedding?"

  My father often asked my advice about things, then did what he wished.

  "In two weeks is the day of Saint James. How does that suit?"

  "As well as any day," said Don Saturnino. "Do we have sufficient paper for the invitations?"

  "A sackful."

  "Where?"

  "It is in Doña Dolores's keeping."

  "Go then and tell her to begin. Take five candles of deer tallow and a handful of goose quills and a jug of ink."

  "Yes, señor."

  "Who comes to the wedding?"

  "A hundred, I fear. Maybe two hundred. Perhaps twice that many."

  "Ayee!" my
father cried. "We will have to go to the well."

  The well my father spoke of was not a well at all, as I will explain. The past year had been a year of good grass but poor prices. The best of hides brought only twenty centavos. Except for the well, the ranch would have suffered.

  "We will go and dip out a bucket of water," said my father. "We will go soon. We will go tomorrow."

  "Vámanos," I said. "Let us go."

  4

  My father wore the heaviest of his leather breeches, his thickest jacket, and a pair of high horsehide boots. It was gear for the wild country that lay between the Ranch of the Two Brothers and Blue Beach. He carried his best musket, his tinderbox, and his powder horn. I dressed accordingly, but carried no weapon except a knife.

  There were four horses saddled and waiting for us. I rode my stallion, Tiburón, and I rode astride.

  The river would still be running a torrent. It was much easier to cross close to the ranch and go down the south bank, but we had no desire to get soaked so early on the journey.

  Accordingly, we chose the north bank and followed it through heavy chaparral and patches of cactus until we had ridden for two hours.

  Where the river widened and ran knee-deep, we crossed to the south bank. It was still a good hour's ride from the Blue Beach. But it was here that we took the first precaution.

  My father and I had been coming to Blue Beach for two years. On the three journeys we had made, we had always been followed. Sometimes by one or two Indians, sometimes by more. But to this day, no one had followed us farther than this west crossing. Here we had managed to elude them.

  One thing that helped was that we never told anyone our secret—the story of the Blue Beach.

  We told none of the vaqueros or the mayordomo. Nor Rosario, though Rosario could be trusted. Nor my sister, who could not be. Nor even Doña Dolores, whom we could trust most of all. Dolores you could hang by her thumbs and still not hear one word that she did not wish to speak.

  There was no way to find the Blue Beach except by following the river, either down from the mountains or up from the sea. From the sea no one would ever find it because of a series of lagoons. From the direction of the mountains you would need to be very lucky, as lucky as we had been in the beginning.

  The river at this point, where it fanned out into the deep lagoons, ran narrow, between two sheer walls of granite, where even a mountain goat would be lost. At the bottom of these cliffs were two beaches, one facing the other across a distance of a hundred steps.

  The beaches were strips of fine sand, finer than the sand you find on the sea beach itself. Both had a bluish cast, like pebbles you see through clear-running water. But they also had another color, a lighter blue that had a look of metal, as if there were copper deposits in the cliffs that had been washed down by the river and the rain and had mixed with the lighter color.

  Someone might call the beaches green or the color of turquoise, but to us they were blue and this is what we called them—the Blue Beaches, more often, the Blue Beach.

  On this day, as on the three other journeys we had made to the Blue Beach, we tied our horses and climbed up from the stream to a towering rock. This was where we took our second precaution, for from this high place we could survey the trails, one coming along the river, and one from the sea.

  "What do you see?" my father said. He liked to test my eyesight. "Are we followed?"

  "I see nothing on the trail," I said, "either from the river or from the sea."

  "What is the brown spot among the oaks?"

  "Where?"

  "Up the river about a hundred varas."

  "I see nothing."

  "Look once more."

  "Does it move?"

  "Judge for yourself. But first you need to find it."

  I looked hard and at last made out the brown spot among the oaks. "It is a cow grazing," I said.

  "There are two, and one is not a cow but a yearling fawn. What do you hear?"

  "The stream."

  "What else?"

  "A crow somewhere."

  "Is that all?"

  "Yes."

  "Listen."

  "A woodpecker behind us."

  "Yes. And what else do you hear?"

  "Nothing."

  "Besides the stream and the surf at the mouth of the river and gulls fishing?"

  "You have good ears."

  "And you will have them someday."

  "Never so good as yours."

  "Better. Mucho mas."

  Don Saturnino was silent for a while. Then he said, "Tomorrow is Carlos's birthday. He would have been eighteen had he lived."

  "He would have liked these journeys," I answered.

  "Perhaps. Perhaps not. Who knows? It is sufficient that you like them. You do like them, Carlota?"

  "Everything, Father," I said. "Everything."

  Here we sat for an hour, to make sure that we had not been followed.

  When the sun was overhead, we crawled down from the pinnacle. We reached the Blue Beach and took off our boots and stepped out into the middle of the stream. We made our way for a distance of some fifty paces, leaving no tracks behind us. A clump of willows grew amidst a pile of driftwood and boulders at this place. Here the river divided and ran in two smaller streams on both sides of the willows.

  The boulders could not be seen at high tide. But the tide was low now and they stuck up in two crescents, facing each other and leaving a clear space between them. The water was cold, both the sea water that met the river at this point and likewise the river water itself.

  Stripped to my singlet, I splashed water on my legs, on my arms and chest. I had found that the best way to approach cold water was by small shivers, suffered one at a time.

  Throwing out my arms, I took in a great gulp of air, held it for a minute, counting each second. Then I let out all the air in a quick whoosh. Then I raised my arms again and took in a greater gulp.

  This air I held for two minutes, still counting the seconds in my mind—one second, two seconds, and so forth. I repeated this three times. The third time I counted up to four minutes.

  It had taken me two years to build up to where I could hold my breath for this length of time. My father had heard of pearl divers in La Paz who could hold their breath for five minutes and even longer. I had tried this but had fainted.

  Carefully we stepped into the wide pool between the two crescents of stone, beneath the canopy of willows. We inched our way to the center of the pool, cautious not to rile the sand.

  As my foot touched a smooth slab of stone, I stooped down, lifted it with much care, and set it to one side. Beneath it was a rock-lined hole filled with water, the size of my body and twice its height.

  At the bottom of this hole was something that, when we first saw it, seemed to be the trunk of a tree—a tree washed down from the mountains. Undoubtedly, it once had risen above the water, but over the years floods had worn it away to a worm-eaten stump.

  It had been the mainmast of a ship, which my father said was some seventy feet in length. It had the wide beam, the high stern, of the galleons that two centuries before had sailed the seas between China and the coast of California and Mexico.

  These ships, my father said, came on favorable winds and currents to northern California, then along the coast south to the ports of San Bias and Acapulco. They carried great treasures from the Indies, these galleons, so great that they became the prey of American and English pirates.

  Some of these treasure ships had been captured. On some, their crews had died of scurvy. Others had run aground through careless navigation. Others were driven ashore by storms. Still others had sought refuge from their pursuers by hiding in lagoons such as the one at Blue Beach.

  "This must have been a large lagoon at one time," my father said when we first discovered the galleon. "A good place to hide a ship. But when it was once inside, something happened to the ship and it never returned to the sea."

  Hidden in the galleon's hold, nea
r the stump of the mainmast, were two chests filled with coins. The coins were of pure gold. They showed three castles and the two flying doves that meant they had been struck in the mint at Lima, Peru. The date marked upon each coin that we carried away on the trips we had made was the year of Our Lord 1612.

  The two chests—each made of hard wood banded with iron straps and sealed with a hasp that had rusted and fallen off—were well beneath the surface of the water, whether at low tide or in the summer, when the stream ran low. This was fortunate, for had the chests been exposed, some passing Indian or vaquero would have discovered them.

  5

  There were many things to do before the chests could be reached. Usually it took me half a day to bring up a pouch of coins from the sunken ship.

  The place where I dove, which was surrounded by jagged rocks and driftwood, was too narrow for my father. He had tried to squeeze through when we first discovered the galleon, but partway down he got stuck and I had to pull him back. It was my task, therefore, to go into the cavelike hole. My father stood beside it and helped me to go down and to come up.

  I buckled a strong belt around my waist and to it tied a riata that was ten varas long and stout enough to hold a stallion. I fastened my knife to my wrist—a two-edged blade made especially for me by our blacksmith—to protect myself against spiny rays and the big eels that could sting you to death. In the many dives I had made, I never had seen a shark.

  Taking three deep breaths, I prepared to let myself down into the hole. In one hand I held a sink-stone, heavy enough to weigh me down. I let out all the air in my chest, took a deep breath, and held it. Then I began the descent.

  The sink-stone would have taken me down fast, but the edges of the rocky hole were sharp. I let myself down carefully, one handhold at a time. It took me about a minute to reach the rotted deck where the chests lay. I now had two minutes to pry the coins loose and carry them to the surface. We had tried putting the coins in a leather sack and hoisting them to the surface. But we had trouble with this because of the currents that swept around the wreck.

  The coins lay in a mass, stuck together, lapping over each other and solid as rock. They looked, when I first saw them, like something left on the stove too long. I always expected to find them gone, but now as I walked toward the chests, with the stone holding me down, I saw that they were still there. No one had come upon them during the seven months since our last visit.