Backlands Page 12

  Patrick glanced from woman to woman and figured there was no purchase in pursuing the subject further. He made his excuses and headed out the door.

  Evangelina waited at the window until Patrick entered the barn before drying her hands and joining Emma at the table. “You must tell him you are not well,” she counseled in Spanish.

  Emma shook her head and replied in Spanish. “He knows I’m dying. So does Matthew. I want them to have these last few good days together before we go home to Las Cruces without worrying about me.”

  “Why are you no longer married?” Evangelina ventured. “He seems to care about you greatly.”

  Emma shook her head as though to ward off the question.

  Evangelina dropped her gaze. “Forgive my intruding.”

  Emma took her hand. “No, please don’t apologize. He does care about me a lot, except when I rile him, which is frequently. He married me when no one else would have me.”

  Evangelina’s eyes widened. “Truly?”

  “Truly,” Emma replied. “You like it here, don’t you?”

  “Very much. I feel I am my own person, not just my parents’ unmarried, old-maid daughter.”

  “But you’re not old, and being unmarried isn’t a curse.”

  Evangelina’s smile didn’t hide her melancholy. “Everyone in my family believes I will be an old maid forever.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Sí. Are you happy living alone?”

  “Do you think only old maids and widows should live alone?” Emma asked.

  Evangelina ran a hand across her birthmark. “No, just women who are ugly.”

  “You are not!” Emma said.

  “Tía Teresa says the same, but I know better. But you did not answer.”

  “I love my independence, every minute of it,” Emma replied.

  “You don’t miss being close to a man?”

  Emma nodded. “Sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot. But that is not as important as my freedom.”

  “You are fortunate. In two days my father will come for me and what little freedom I have known will be gone forever.”

  “Only if you give in.”

  “Give in?” Evangelina began polishing a water spot on the table with her dishcloth.

  “Let your parents govern your life,” Emma explained.

  “Disobey my father?” She studied the spot on the table and rubbed harder with the dishcloth.

  Emma took the dishcloth from her hand. “You’re of age. It has nothing to do with defying Flaviano.”

  “I am not like you. I have no way to get by, no means of support except from my family.”

  “You could stay here and work for Patrick. I could see to it.”

  Evangelina shook her head. “Impossible.”

  “Because of what Flaviano believes you might do,” Emma challenged.

  Evangelina dropped her gaze. “He thinks I might give up my virtue because of my disfigurement. I must be carefully watched so I do not stain the family honor.”

  “You are not disfigured, branded, or deformed,” Emma said. “You have a birthmark, nothing more. Is your virtue truly at risk?”

  Evangelina covered her mouth and giggled.

  “Why is that funny?”

  “No one has ever asked me that before. Sometimes I think I should prove my father right. You were lucky that Patrick married you.”

  “I lived with him for well over a year before we married,” Emma said with a playful smile. “I guess you could say I suffered from a prolonged fit of weakened virtue.” A heavy coughing spell came over her, racking her body before it subsided.

  “You must rest, señora,” Evangelina said. “Let me take you to your room.”

  Red-faced, out of breath, and weak in the knees, Emma said, “No, take me to the casita. I can hide there.”

  Taking Evangelina’s steady hand, she walked slowly across the courtyard to the casita and stretched out on the bed. “You must stop calling me señora,” she said.

  “As you wish, Emma,” Evangelina said tentatively.

  “That’s much better.” Suddenly she felt drained of all her strength. The pounding of her heart was an erratic drumbeat in her ears.

  “Rest now.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you are not better by dinner, I will have to tell Patrick you are sick,” Evangelina warned.

  Emma shook her head in protest. “I’ll be fine. If they ask, tell them I am busy sewing.”

  “I will come back often,” Evangelina said.

  “I’ll be fine after a nap,” Emma replied, gasping for air.

  ***

  After a morning session working with Matt and his pony, Patrick left the boy behind to practice some on his own and made tracks for the south pasture. Yesterday, a rider from Earl Hightower’s spread had come over to tell Patrick that a traveling cattle buyer with a small crew was visiting outfits on the Tularosa, buying up culls to ship to Mexico. He’d be stopping at the Double K midday next.

  The penny or two per pound Patrick would lose selling to the buyer was worth the time he’d save trailing the stock to town after spring works. Plus it would put some cash money in his pocket and he’d be able to rest the south pasture a bit longer with the animals gone.

  He found the critters clustered at the dirt tank and the salt lick block looking a tad less scrawny. He rounded them up without difficulty and moved them slowly homeward, chasing an upstart yearling or two and a disorderly steer back to the bunch every now and then.

  He had been with company of one sort or another almost constantly since the day he fetched Emma and Matt to the ranch, and he welcomed the solitude, except when the killing of Vernon Clagett still preyed on his mind.

  The day was mild with a touch of moisture in the air, but not enough to promise rain. Small puffy white clouds drifted up the Tularosa Basin, blocking the sun for fleeting seconds, pausing to hang suspended over the malpais. It made a pretty picture. Farther north at the railroad town of Carrizozo, a small spit of virga draped below a lonely, thin gray cloud, evaporating in the late morning sunlight. He couldn’t remember a day when the basin failed to show him a fresh view of things. It was a slice of the world where ordinary had no meaning.

  At ranch headquarters, he threw the stock in the corral and went to the kitchen for some grub. Matt was at the table alone, working hard on a bowl of chili and beans.

  “Where’s your ma and Evangelina?” he asked.

  “They’re in the casita,” Matt replied between bites.

  “Doing what?”

  Matt spooned in another mouthful. “Evangelina said they had some sewing to do.”

  The sound of an approaching rider kept Patrick from going to investigate what the women were up to. He stepped out on the veranda as the rider drew rein at the hitching post.

  “Patrick Kerney?” the man asked.

  “Who might you be?” Patrick replied as Matt scooted out the kitchen door to see who’d arrived.

  “Makiah Whetten,” the man answered. “You might not remember me, but I bought some cows for my boss from you and Cal Doran down in Mexico some years back. I’m here to buy what livestock you got to sell.”

  “I do remember you,” Patrick said. “Light. We’ve got coffee and some good chili and beans.”

  “I’d be obliged for a cup,” Whetten said as he stepped down from his pony and came spritely up the stairs.

  It had been more than twenty-five years since Patrick had seen Whetten. Back then he’d been in his prime, a Mormon cowboy with three wives and a passel of kids who worked for the biggest stockman on the biggest ranchero in Chihuahua, Mexico. Whetten was an old man now, still slender, a little stooped, with a bushy white mustache, but still vigorous in his manner.

  “It’s been a while,” Patrick said, shaking Whetten’s hand
. “I didn’t expect to see you again, not with that revolution going on down your way.”

  “Ten years of killing are about over,” Whetten replied with a sad shake of his head. “Since nineteen and ten, a million dead and the rangeland empty. It’s time to restock.”

  “Are you still ramrodding for old Emiliano Díaz?”

  “His son, Delfino,” Whetten explained. “Emiliano got himself killed late in the war for supporting the wrong brand of revolution. Unfortunately, he left a lot of land and very little money, so I’m forced to bargain hard for the best prices I can get.”

  “Hard times can do that, I reckon,” Patrick said. He introduced Matt to Whetten and told him to take Patches and pester the livestock in the corral while he talked business. Matt grinned, hightailed it to his pony, and jigged Patches to the corral.

  Over coffee on the veranda, the two men caught up. Patrick kept it short, mostly about how Cal died after getting mauled by a bear, and how the stockmen in the basin were toughing it out now the war in Europe was over and the Brits had stopped buying horses and beef.

  Whetten told of staying put with his family in Mexico during the heavy fighting between factions while many Mormons fled back across the border to the United States. His uncles and cousins were now homesteading along the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico. He had held on to his small ranch for as long as he could, but the revolutionary government took it away from him a year ago and gave it to a high-ranking general’s son.

  “They had to move us off at gunpoint,” Whetten added. “It scared my wives half to death that we’d be shot. We’re living on the ranchero now; my oldest boys and their families have stuck with us. The rest are married and have moved on. Emiliano’s son has been good to us.”

  Patrick nodded. “I’d have done the same to try and save my spread.” The road from Mexico where he’d met Makiah Whetten had taken him through the gates of Yuma Prison and more recently to the killing of Vernon Clagett. He wondered if an invisible noose from the past had settled around his neck.

  “Good coffee,” Whetten said, setting down his cup. “Let’s take a look at your cows.”

  “Livestock inspection is tight at the border,” Patrick noted as they stepped off to the corral. “How do you plan to cross them without getting quarantined?”

  Whetten smiled. “I’ll teach them to swim the river, just like you and Cal did.”

  At the corral, Whetten eyed the cattle carefully before quoting Patrick a dollar figure for the lot. Patrick haggled for a quarter cent more on the pound and got an eighth. The small wad of bills in his jeans pocket felt good.

  “Two vaqueros will be here soon,” Whetten said, checking his pocket watch. “We’ll move the cows to the Hightower outfit, where I have another small bunch bedded down.”

  “You’ll trail them to Engle from there and load them on cattle cars to El Paso, I reckon,” Patrick said.

  Whetten nodded. “After a stop at Al Jennings’s Rocking J.”

  “He’ll have a few to sell,” Patrick predicted.

  Out in the horse pasture, several colts whinnied and kicked up their heels as two approaching riders threw dust in the air. Patrick remembered back to the days when CJ rode his pony to school at the Hightower Ranch. It was in part of the San Andres Matt hadn’t seen. They could make it there and back before dinner.

  “Mind if my boy and I ride along?” he asked.

  “I welcome the company,” Whetten replied.

  Patrick called to the house for Evangelina and Emma. Evangelina quickly appeared at the courtyard wall, and Patrick told her of his plans.

  “Okay, señor,” Evangelina replied with a wave.

  “Pretty girl,” Whetten noted.

  “Yes, she is,” Patrick agreed. He went to the fence and whistled Calabaza in from the horse pasture.

  ***

  While Pa and Mr. Whetten lazed behind, jawboning, Matt rode with the two vaqueros, helping them chase an occasional cow back to the bunch. The vaqueros didn’t speak much English, but one of them, who had a star on his front tooth, said that Patches was a real good caballo. That made Matt feel proud. He couldn’t wait to tell Pa and Ma as soon as they got home.

  At the Hightower outfit, cows were spread out grazing and loitering in a large open pasture between a ranch house and a one-room school. A rope corral under a stand of trees enclosed a small remuda of cow ponies. At the nearby chuck wagon, the cook worked fixing grub for dinner. Matt spotted one cowboy busy caring for the ponies and another two out with the stock. Mr. Hightower waved his hat as he rode out from the ranch house to greet them, and Matt waved back, thinking this was the best day he’d ever spent on the Tularosa. Maybe he’d be a cowboy rather than a soldier when he grew up. Or both, like CJ and Pa.

  Earl Hightower drew rein next to Matt just as Patrick and Makiah Whetten came up.

  “Gents, my wife wants y’all to stay for dinner,” he said.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Whetten said.

  “We’ll eat early so you and young Matt here can get back to the Double K by dark,” Earl said to Patrick.

  “We’re obliged,” Patrick replied with a smile. “No sensible man can refuse a turn at Addie’s table.”

  Addie Hightower kept chickens, and at supper she served Matt a juicy thigh from a plump roasted bird and a pile of dumplings smothered in gravy. The youngest of the Hightower girls, Nellie, still lived at home. A tall, serious young woman who wore eyeglasses, she taught at the school and had eleven students this year. She questioned Matt about his school in town, what he studied, and what subjects he liked best. Finally and almost reverently, she asked him if it was true that he had a personally inscribed copy of one of Gene Rhodes’s books.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do,” Matt said proudly. “It’s a copy of West Is West. He sent it to me along with the story he wrote about my ma.”

  “I think everyone in New Mexico has read that story,” Nellie said. “Your ma is famous.”

  Matt blushed with pride.

  “I’d surely like to see that story,” Mr. Whetten said.

  “I’ll fetch you our copy to read,” Addie Hightower said, rising from the table.

  After Mr. Whetten read “Emma Makes a Hand,” a discussion started about Gene Rhodes, his life on the Tularosa, and the various facts and fictions of his supposed outlaw past. Patrick told the story of how Gene came to the Double K with the law on his trail after getting into a brawl in a mining camp. Mr. Hightower told of Gene hiding out in the San Andres with the two men accused of killing Albert Fountain and his young son, a crime that remained unsolved. Stories about Rhodes’s bronco-riding skills, his love of the game of baseball, and his habit of eating only other ranchers’ beef kept folks anchored at the table for a good amount of time. When the conversation slowed, Earl Hightower eyed the remaining daylight outside the kitchen window and invited Patrick and Matt to stay the night.

  “We appreciate the invite,” Patrick replied, “but we’ll mosey on home.”

  With thanks to Addie and Earl for a fine meal and good company, and a farewell handshake with Makiah Whetten, Patrick and Matt left, jigging their ponies to a fast trot to take advantage of the fading daylight. At dinner, Patrick had had an anxious moment when Whetten reminisced about first meeting Patrick years ago, but thankfully he’d steered clear of any mention of the trouble Patrick had caused in a Juárez whorehouse. His shameful behavior and quarrelsome nature that day cost him a beating and almost lost him Cal Doran’s friendship and the Double K.

  The lag between nightfall and moonrise slowed their progress, and when they raised up the ranch house, Matt was asleep in the saddle, his head bobbing against his chest. Lamplight spilled through the kitchen window, but all was quiet when Patrick dismounted at the hitching post. He carried his sleeping son to the veranda, pulled off his boots, wrapped him gently in his bedroll, and tended to the horses before returning
to the house. In the kitchen, slices of bread and thick slabs of beef had been left out on a covered plate. Next to it was a note from Emma.

  We waited up late for you two cowboys to come home and finally decided you either stayed over the night at Earl and Addie’s or got in a wreck on the way back. If you got in a wreck, don’t wake us unless you need patching up. If you’re hungry, have a bite and put your dirty dishes in the tub.

  Emma

  He put the note in his pocket, carried the lamp into the living room, and paused for a moment at Emma’s bedroom door to listen. All was silent. He suppressed an urge to look in on her, went to his room, shucked his clothes, and sank down on the bed. He could still work hard day and night and spend long hours in the saddle, but now there were aches and pains in his joints and muscles that sometimes kept him awake. He fell asleep within minutes, only to be roughly shaken awake by Evangelina, who hovered over him, the lamp in her hand shining in his eyes.

  “You must come,” she said, the words spilling out of her. “Come now. Emma is very sick.”

  He sat bolt upright, his head sluggish. “What’s wrong?”

  Evangelina grabbed his hand and yanked him to his feet. “She can’t breathe. I’m afraid that she is dying.”

  9

  In the morning, Emma sat propped up in bed and in a raspy, breathless voice asked Patrick to take her and Matthew home to Las Cruces.

  “I’m not carting you anywhere,” Patrick countered. He’d spent the darkest hours before dawn with her, wiping sweat from her brow and listening to her labored breathing.

  “I’ll see my doctor as soon as you carry me home,” she promised.

  “I’ll fetch him to you,” Patrick countered.

  “You don’t have to do that.” Emma stroked Matthew’s cheek as he snuggled close to her. “We’ll be fine once we’re home. Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

  “You should do as Pa says,” Matt said sternly.

  Emma wrinkled her nose at his disloyalty. “Bringing the doctor here won’t do me one bit of good.”

  “Then why did you say you’d see him in town?” Patrick demanded.