Carlota Page 8

  "The gringos stayed on the hill all night. At dawn they put their wounded on travois and retreated down the valley to a peak, which they climbed. They camped then on the peak that night."

  "No fighting?" my father asked.

  "None," Don César said. "But the peak, we knew, was without water, and the gringos had no food. They ate some of their mules to relieve their hunger. And, though I was against it, my son Roberto insisted upon hoisting a white flag and sending them sugar and tea."

  "Sancta Trinidad, sugar and tea?"

  "Sometimes my son has a soft head."

  "That he inherits," my father said, with his first smile in many days.

  "We kept up a heavy patrol, thinking to starve the gringos out. But that night in the darkness El Lobo escaped."

  "El Lobo?"

  "That is what he is called. It is the name he was called when he was here in California months ago. His name is Carson, Christopher Carson, and he is a scout for this big Army of the West."

  "Army of the West?" my father said.

  "That is what they call themselves."

  "We defeated an army? We scattered it like rabbits?"

  "Like rabbits," said Don César.

  "But about the escape of El Lobo?"

  "Yes, about him. We had a heavy patrol around the peak that night, as I have said, but somehow El Lobo got through. The next morning we found his boots in the chaparral so he must have taken them off."

  "He took the boots off so as to go quietly?"

  "That is true."

  "El Lobo is a good name for such a man. What else did this wolf do?"

  "He walked twenty leagues on feet without boots to the pueblo of San Diego, where there are some gringo soldiers and some war vessels."

  "Then you left the peak to the gringos?" my father said.

  "There was nothing else."

  "But we won the battle."

  "Yes, amigo, we won. We scattered the big gringo army like rabbits."

  "Like rabbits," my father said. "Como los cone-jos?"

  "Yes, like rabbits, Senor Don Saturnino."

  21

  The soldier grew stronger. He left his bed and went into the courtyard to sit in the sun and watch Rosario feed the big eagle. I could not keep him from leaving his room. But I was fearful that my father would hear him there or see him.

  "Do you feel well enough to get on a horse?" I asked him on that morning, as he watched Rosario toss a mouse to Vuelo Grande.

  "You want to get rid of me?" the gringo said.

  "My father may wish to use the patio also," I said. "He likes the sun and he often feeds the eagle. He can do neither while you are here."

  "Why? I'm not in his way. We can sit in the sun together and talk. We can talk about the battle, as old veterans should."

  The young soldier was in a good mood, as if he were at home at Dos Hermanos.

  "Don Saturnino is better, as I have told you, but he needs to walk and enjoy the sun. He does not know that you are here. He does not like gringos or gringo soldiers and you are both."

  "You speak out," the young man said. "I have a sister like you. Whatever she thinks she says, no matter what."

  "Can you go tomorrow?" I said. "If you're not able to ride a horse by then we will have a cart and a pair of oxen for you."

  "I can go," the soldier said. He did not seem angry but I would not have blamed him if he had been.

  Vuelo Grande, full of mice and gophers, was dozing with his eyes half-closed. He was a handsome bird. His black-banded tail, of which he was very proud and which he spent much time combing with his yellow beak, shone in the sun.

  "I like that bird," Señor Fleming said. "He wouldn't be for sale, would he? I'd like to take him along to show my friends. I can tell them that he was sitting on a branch and I lassooed him."

  The soldier reached out and gave the banded tail a friendly twist. More from rage than from injury the eagle flapped his wings and let out one of his loudest screams.

  "The eagle belongs to my father," I said. "And he's not likely to sell him."

  "I'll ask; won't do any harm," the soldier said. "He's standing over there now." The soldier raised his hand in a greeting. "Hola, señor," he called out.

  My father did not answer. He came slowly across the courtyard. He looked pale.

  "I was asking about your eagle," the soldier said. "Your daughter says you don't want to sell it."

  I doubt that my father heard the soldier. He did not look at him. He looked at me for a long time. He was trying to control the wrathful words crowding into his throat.

  "I have learned this morning from one of our vaqueros that you brought a gringo to Dos Hermanos," he said at last. "I did not believe this, but now I see that it is true."

  "I'll explain," the soldier said.

  My father did not answer him. He acted as if the gringo were not there, standing not two steps away.

  "He leaves at once," Don Saturnino said. "I have given orders for a cart to take him away, to any place he wishes to go."

  The soldier said, "I can tell you why I am here."

  "I know why you are here," my father said, still not looking at the soldier. To me he said, "I will talk to you later about this." He was angry, close to silence. He was thinking of Carlos. Our eyes met.

  Always before I had done what my father wished, and I was always a loving and obedient daughter. What he wished me to do I had done, without so much as thinking about it. But as we stood there with him trying to stare me down, I remembered suddenly the moment in the meadow when I had used the lance and there was no other thought in my mind than to thrust it through the soldier's heart. I was ashamed, now, of what I had tried to do. The shame gave me courage. It is important to speak, I thought. Then I said, "This man has been wounded. I wounded him myself. The surgeon told me not to move him for a week and the week has not passed."

  My father winced at these words. "It would be better had I died at San Pasqual," he said quietly, but as though he spoke the very truth. "Far better."

  His face was white. He took a step toward the soldier and stopped, as if in pain. Thinking to help him, I put a hand on his arm but he pulled away. He parted his lips and wet them with his tongue. He tried to speak to me, to the soldier, to someone. Looking at the sky, he slowly sank to his knees. The soldier caught him and laid him in the sun on the beaten earth of the courtyard.

  My father breathed for a while, deep breaths, as if he wanted to take in the whole world. I went to call my grandmother. When we returned, my father was breathing in great gasps. I called the Indians, and we took him to his bed. He did not speak again. Late that night, as we sat beside him, Don Saturnino de Zubarán turned his face toward us and, looking at us from far away, died.

  22

  Father Barones came to the ranch two days later and we buried Don Saturnino in our chapel beside his father and his beloved son. Vaqueros played sad music on their violas. It was a windless day with bright skies. Friends came from all around, but they did not stay after the big dinner at noonday.

  After they had gone, I went to see the gringo, who had not come to the funeral because he had not been invited. He was lying in bed, looking pale and forlorn.

  "It's time for me to go," he said. "I'm not very strong, but I can't lie around here forever."

  "I understand how you feel," I said, eager that he leave. "You can travel by oxcart or by horseback. I'll send vacqueros with you."

  "I ought to go tomorrow," the soldier said, "if the weather holds good."

  "I'll see that everything is ready."

  "I ought to leave early in the morning. By horseback."

  I saw that everything was ready for the soldier at dawn—two good horses to ride and three vaqueros to look after him, and ample food for the two-day journey. But when Diaz, the mayordomo, went to call him, he was still in bed.

  "He sleeps," the mayordomo reported.

  "Arouse him," I said.

  The mayordomo went off but came back in a few minut
es.

  "He still sleeps," Mayordomo Diaz said.

  "Have you tried cold water?" I asked.

  "Is that your wish?"

  "It is my wish," I said, but as the mayordomo strode off toward the well to fill a bucket I relented. "Let him sleep for another hour."

  We waited an hour, for two hours, for three. When he continued to sleep, the mayordomo shook him awake and reminded him that this was the day he was to leave for San Diego. The soldier asked for me and, out of sorts, I went trudging off to his room.

  He was sitting up in bed, looking more forlorn than he had the day before.

  "I feel weak," he said in a very weak voice.

  "Then you do not wish to leave today?"

  "Perhaps tomorrow," he said. "I should feel better in a day or two."

  But on the morrow the soldier was still not ready to go, nor on the following day.

  "Do you want me to send for the doctor?" I asked him.

  "That will not be necessary," he said. "I feel a little stronger every day."

  And he looked strong as he sat there in the bed, his blue eyes clear and alert. It struck me suddenly that he had chosen to be an invalid, that he was playing a game to delay leaving the ranch as long as he possibly could.

  "If you are not better by tomorrow or the next day, I will send for the doctor," I told him.

  The thought of my calling the doctor brought a shadow over his face.

  "The doctor has a lot to do," he said. "I'd feel like an old woman, asking him to make a long journey out here just to look after me."

  In two days he was back on his feet, and on the third day we sent him off with three vaqueros for the pueblo of San Diego.

  "I hope there are no hard feelings," he said as he settled himself in the saddle.

  "None," I answered. "May you go with God."

  He blew me sort of a kiss, which embarrassed me in front of the vaqueros, and said, "Hasta la vista," which means, roughly, in English words, "Until we meet." This embarrassed me also because I really did not wish to see him again.

  23

  We had no rain that winter. Wherever you dug, the earth was dry. A few showers came in April, but by June the grass and filaree had shriveled up and died. It was a bad year for us and many of our friends.

  In June, on a day when white clouds were wandering around on the horizon, my grandmother and I sat in the parlor and talked about the drought.

  "A year ago," Doña Dolores said, "we sat in this very sala and watched the rain pouring from the sky."

  "And coming down through the roof," I reminded her.

  "We caught it in jugs."

  We both tried to laugh. Rosario, who crouched in front of Doña Dolores, tried to laugh also. She told him to shut his mouth, that this business of the drought was not funny.

  Doña Dolores would have liked to blame me for the drought, but somehow she just couldn't make a connection between the weather and the way I ran things.

  After my father's death the problems of the ranch fell upon my shoulders. I had learned about the workshops and I could ride with the vaqueros, but still I was not ready to run Dos Hermanos. I had looked to my father to make decisions since I was old enough to remember. Now the decisions were suddenly mine. I could not count upon Doña Dolores, upon anyone, only upon myself.

  The worst trouble I had at this time came from the mayordomo, Juan Diaz. The first order I gave made him angry.

  "Can you take some of the vaqueros," I said to him, "and dig a new well? The one in the patio is giving us a scarce ten gallons a day."

  Diaz was part Indian, solid as a tree stump, a young man of many talents. I wanted to keep him, so I spoke softly and asked if he could undertake the task. He was not used to receiving orders or even suggestions from a woman, a sixteen-year-old at that.

  "A new well," he replied, "will yield no more water than the old."

  "Are you certain?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "Why are you certain?"

  This question puzzled him, but he said, "There are things that you know and things that you do not know."

  "True," I said. "And one of the things I know is that we need more water. Perhaps you would prefer to build a flume from the stream and bring it to the house that way?"

  The stream was half a league away. Trees would have to be felled, sawn to length, fastened together with pitch and rawhide. It would be a difficult task and a long one.

  "You can take your choice," I said, "but we must have water."

  The mayordomo turned away, grumbling under his breath, but that afternoon he began a new well outside the walls in a nearby meadow. Two days later he sulkily announced that we had a new well. It yielded more water than the old one.

  Juan Diaz never got used to taking orders from me but he did the work I gave him, as did the others: the blacksmiths, the leather-workers, the cooks, servants, and the vaqueros, the herdsmen who cared for the cattle and horses.

  It was the vaqueros who were my friends and on whom I leaned and depended. It was these men who saw us through the worst drought in the memory of anyone then living.

  The drought started early in the year, as I have said, and by June the hills were bare. Cattle began to die. Waterholes dried up. The stream shrank and we had to dig holes in the stream bed to tap small quantities of the water that ran beneath it.

  In July we began the slaughter. Because everyone, all the ranchers from San Diego in the South to Santa Barbara in the North, were forced to kill their cattle, hides sold for only a few centavos and there was no market for tallow at any price. We stored almost a thousand botas against the time when it would bring a few centavos at least. The hides we could not cure or store, so we buried them in pits.

  We struggled on through the month of August. We were sad at the sight of our cattle and horses dying. September was the time our first rains usually came, but this year clouds blew up in the afternoon and then disappeared at dusk. We ourselves began to run low on food, not on beef, because our coolhouse was stacked with meat, but on tea and chocolate, flour, sugar, salt, and on beans, which the servants and the vaqueros ate, liking them better than anything else.

  Around the middle of September I took four of the vaqueros and extra pack horses and made the long journey to San Diego. Before the drought it was easy to get credit, but I found that the pueblo store now belonged to a gringo. Worried by the drought, I was afraid to buy all the goods we needed. Not knowing when I could pay for them, we packed the horses with only light loads.

  When the time came for me to pay for the supplies, I asked the storekeeper, whose name was Caleb Thomas, to charge them to Dos Hermanos.

  Mr. Thomas was a thin little man with a friendly smile, gold spectacles, and a pale nose. "You are buying lightly," he said. "Looking at your past account, I would say that you have bought about half of what you usually buy."

  "I don't know when we can pay even for what I have," I said.

  "The drought will end one of these days," Mr. Thomas said. "Until then, your credit is good. Let me give you a jug of Jamaica molasses. It just came in today."

  He led me over to a counter and showed me a length of blue cloth. "Just in from Boston. The newest material. And these shoes; fashionable New York ladies are wearing them."

  Mr. Thomas hopped from counter to counter, showing me everything that had arrived that day by ship.

  My heart sank as I signed the bill. It was for more money than we usually spent on supplies for the ranch, even in good years. But I did have a big packet of Cuban tobacco for Doña Dolores and a beautiful China shawl for myself as well as a black bombazine dress that had real lace around the collar. As I rode away from the store and Mr. Thomas waved me goodbye, I felt very lightheaded.

  24

  September passed and the drought grew worse. Every day a dozen or more cattle died. The working horses we managed to feed by cutting branches from the willow groves along the stream. Our Indians caught rattlesnakes in the heavy brush, carried them across the
barren mesa at dawn, and let them loose, telling them to beseech the rain gods. Doña Dolores and I knelt at the altar and prayed. But the rains did not come.

  On a hot day early in December, Caleb Thomas rode up to the ranch on a beautiful white gelding. His saddle sparkled with silver and the metal crickets on his bridle chirped as he trotted up to the hitching rack.

  "I'm sorry to see everything so dry," he said, after he had taken my hand. "And hundreds of cattle dying and the horses gaunt."

  He stood for a while, gazing around at the mesa, the tree-lined streams winding westward, the far blue hills that slanted away toward the sea.

  "How many acres do you have here?" he asked. He had a chirpy voice. Any moment I expected him to burst into song, like a bird. "Sixty thousand?"

  "Less."

  "Have you ever thought of selling part of it?"

  "No."

  "You have a parcel down by the coast, where the stream meets the ocean. Five hundred acres, more or less. I can make you a good offer."

  The parcel he spoke about was near the lagoon where the wreck of the treasure ship lay.

  "You will need to talk to my grandmother. But I can tell you now that she will not be interested in selling."

  "At a good price?"

  "At any price."

  "Do you mind if I talk to her?"

  I led Mr. Thomas into the patio and sent for Doña Dolores. She took her time but finally came stumping out of the sala, swinging her cane. I introduced them and told my grandmother that the Cuban tobacco she liked so much I had bought from Mr. Thomas.

  "It is the best I have smoked since some Turkish that I bought from a New Bedford whaler."

  "Had I known that you liked it so much," said Mr. Thomas, "I would have brought some along as a gift."

  He was making a good impression upon my grandmother, but it didn't last long.

  "I spoke to Miss Carlota about a parcel of land on the coast," Mr. Thomas said. "Some five hundred acres of brush and water, mostly brush not fit for cattle. But I'm prepared to offer you twenty-five centavos an acre. The going price for such land is twenty, as you know."