She was sore just about everywhere but especially against the saddle and very thirsty. As they crossed the shallows into Mexico she stayed alert for some means of escape — their horse missing its footing perhaps — but there were none. The Anglo riding point knew his river well. The crossing was smooth and steady.
When the fourth rider leading the pack horse from the back of which over a dozen chickens dangled reached the other side of the river Gustavo turned and said, Mexico. Is home, no? Why your people leave here?
She felt no wish to answer him.
"I see your eyes, little one," he said. "I see the way you fight. You and the sisters, I think you are the same."
She found it hard to believe that a foul-smelling dog like this had sisters of any kind so she asked him.
"What sisters?"
"Las hermanas de Lupo. Las hermanas del diablo. As old as the mountains, little one. As old as the gods are old. Just like you."
He laughed.
"You know," he said, "I think maybe they will have to kill you."
The night was moonless and starless beneath low-lying clouds and she saw the bonfires well before the settlement. There were four fires and as many wooden outbuildings on either side of an old hacienda which had seen better days and as they approached she was surprised and puzzled at how many people these mostly small buildings must have housed within, some of them soldados like the ones they rode with but most of them women, young and dirty and moving listlessly at their various chores, hauling water and wood and cooking and stoking the flames.
Even before the old crone stepped out of nowhere out of the smoke in front of them she knew there was something very wrong here because many of these women were Anglos — fragile-looking blonde women working side-by-side with Mexican peasant girls and she thought she already knew how this collection had come to be. Some of them wore little more than rags and some what appeared to be castoff dance-hall costumes badly torn and wore grotesque amounts of makeup on their bruised filthy faces perhaps to shame them and some were clearly ill and staggered under the burden of their toil. She heard moans and laughter and from somewhere a muffled scream.
Then the old hechicera stepped out of the smoke billowing around them and her fears for their safety in this place turned to something more akin to dread.
As old as the hills?No, she thought. But old enough. Unknowably old.
Beneath the black concentric circles painted across her cheeks and chin and the black crescent moons which hollowed the eyes burning up at them and the black slashings across the lips and nose, her skin hung off her face like slugs crawling. She wore some kind of thin gown, ragged and nearly transparent so it was possible to see her withered layered flesh beneath and the dugs with their huge dark nipples pointed down toward the earth. Her hair was long and matted and she smelled of brimstone and rotted blood. On her head was the sunbleached hollowed-out skull of a coyote, its top row of teeth still intact.
The coyote's grin seemed to match her own.
In each of her hands she held a living rattlesnake gripped below the heads which twisted writhing around her arms. At the sight of these or perhaps the smell of her the horses shied and whinnied and tried to move away.
Gustavo removed his hat to her. The Anglo Ryan merely nodded as they passed.
Still amazed by this apparition Elena turned in the saddle and saw two younger women step up beside her, these both middle-aged, she thought, each dressed in black. One was bone-thin and hard-looking, grim and expressionless, clean and neat. The other stocky, with cruel peasant's features.
She had just met the Valenzura sisters. Old Eva, Maria, and Lucia.
Her guardians in hell.
FOUR
"WHAT THE GODDAMN KIND OF FIRST-THINGIN-THE-MORNING HORSESHIT IS THIS?"
The calfskins layered across the cabin's floor had seemed sufficiently large for three the night before but now seemed much too small for two. I awoke to the bellowing of a huge bearded bear of a man in sweat-stained long johns staring at my feet directly across from his balding head. What had been merely an admittedly large, yet gently snoring figure in the dark was now the red-eyed face of hostility. It seemed likely as not that he would reach over and tear off my feet and beat me with them.
Where was Hart when I needed him?
Then I smelled the coffee.
"Easy, Mother. The gentleman's name is Marion T. Bell."
He was standing at a scorched blackened stove which might well have dated back to the War of 1812.
"Bell? I never hearda no goddamn Bell!"
He got up and stepped into a pair of frayed grey trousers and pulled up the suspenders and that was that, he was dressed. I couldn't remember for the life of me where I'd put my own and didn't want to move just yet. Not until he'd settled down some. I watched him stomp across the floor to Hart and Hart pour something steaming brown and nearly as thick as syrup out of a stained tin pan.
He divided the stuff evenly into three tin cups and handed one to Mother who drank it straight away.
It was possible to imagine at that moment that his lunch might be a Joshua Tree burst aflame.
"Thought we could use a third hand."
"Him? Christ on a cross, Hart. He's green. Look at him!"
He turned to me. I was up and searching for my shirt and pants. I found them easily enough, neatly folded on the only chair in the room, my boots beneath the chair. Hart's doing.
"Yer green, ain't ya! Jesus Christ, Hart. You throw this dumb green kid at me first thing in the goddamn morning and I dunno what to think, I really don't. I dunno what the hell's on your mind sometimes. You know that? God damned if I do. 'Spose we could use a third body out there, though. Yeah, I guess we could. Can he ride? He can ride, can't he? Can you ride, goddammit?"
"He rode with Scott into Mexico City."
"Win Scott? That dry tit? Well what the hell. I'm Mother Knuckles you're Marion T. Bell. Pleased to meet ya."
He put out his hand.
It was a handshake I will not readily forget.
It was not my own horse but a young sorrel they had me on that day and I won't forget her either, because while I knew nothing of the nature of our undertaking she knew everything. We found five horses grazing in an arroyo, beautiful creatures, chestnut and bay — not at all like the tough unlovely beasts descended from the Spanish breed but tall and strong — and we herded them stricken with some primal fear of us yelping riders through a long wide wash directly into the box canyon I learned that Hart and Mother had used many times before, Mother working left and Hart working right and the horse Suzie and I center, the easiest position to hold because the wild horses would naturally want to break to either side.
Suzie did the work and all I had to do was hold on — a daunting enough proposition in itself with her darting left and right according to the horses' movements ahead of her, riding at a far faster speed than any I'd ever had need of before and then once we'd trapped them, riding back and forth across the mouth of the canyon turning on a dime to discourage three of them from bolting for freedom while Hart and Mother choke-roped the other two to the ground, looping and tying off the ropes around the forelegs first and then the back, returning to their horses to repeat the process with two of the three chestnuts until finally Mother took the fifth and last alone.
For a man the size of Mother, it was amazing to watch him work with such sheer dexterity and speed. You more or less expected it of Hart. But Mother was a revelation. The power in him was clear. The grace was not. Yet it was there in full measure.
As the weeks went by it was he and not Hart who showed me how to tie a slip knot, how to throw a rope, why and for how long to force a hard-ridden mount to wait before food and water, wiping the sweat off her ribs and backbone and brushing her down until she cooled some. Hart had a distance about him. Mother nearly lived up to his name.
I can't say I ever became expert at what we did. But with Mother's help I didn't tend to make a fool of myself either. Hart and I stil
l delivered our custom to the Little Fanny many evenings — occasionally Mother too — but with a morning's work ahead of us my habits moderated considerably. You didn't want to be riding Suzie with a pounding headache. I had money in my pockets and it more or less tended to stay there. There were nights I simply remained home at the cabin and wrote instead. My dispatches to New York increased proportionally.
So while it was Mother who taught me, it was Hart I had to thank for turning me around in the first place. And because of that, his reserve never bothered me. I figured it was just his way.
That changed when we met Elena.
Then he began to worry me.
FIVE
"You, writer," she said. "Take this down.
"They will find it on our bodies."
So I did.
SIX
We did well some days and other days saw nothing for our troubles but empty waterskins and dust between our teeth and on this particular evening with dark fast approaching, all we had as we rode through the scrub were two squat mustangs hobbled behind us. We'd come very far afield and you could hear the river behind us over the click, click, click of Hart's dice.
Mother was riding back aways with the mustangs and gnawing some dried beef he'd fished out of his saddlebag. There'd been the usual silence between Hart and I but this time I'd resolved to break it. I'd been pondering something awhile.
"The night you brought me out here, Hart," I said, "in the bar with Donaldson. Donaldson was ready to shoot you. You just sat there."
"So? What's your point?"
"So, he was ready to shoot you. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw."
"I guess he would have, wouldn't he."
"Hart, you looked so calm about it!"
"Guess I was. Pretty calm anyways. I'm not a real imaginative man, Bell. Most things, I walk in prepared as best I can. Then I trust to luck, that's all."
I had to wonder if part of my problem being here instead of back in Boston or Cambridge or New York was that I was an imaginative man. I could and did imagine rattlesnakes under the bed and scorpions in my boots and I poked beneath the bed with a stick and shook out my boots with due diligence every morning. There were a thousand ways to die out here and I'd seen many of them first hand in Puebla, Churubusco and Mexico City during the war. It didn't take much to imagine my own death courting me.
The west was not NELLIE, THE RAGPICKER'S DAUGHTER or even THE ADVENTURES OF PECOS BILL. No penny dreadful. The west was gangrene and thirst and rivers red with blood and skies so big they could crush you like a bug.
"You got family, Bell?" he said. "Never did ask you."
"Brother. Couple of nephews by now I think. Never do write one another. Why?"
He didn't really answer, only nodded.
"It's a good thing, family," he said.
We were passing some low thick scrub off left and suddenly the horses began to shy. Hart pulled his own mare to a halt and sat listening. I followed suit with Suzie. Mother rode up slow behind us.
"What we got here, John?" he said.
"Something in there. Could be a cat, maybe."
Hart pulled his Winchester out of its scabbard, cocked it and lay it across his saddle and we could hear something in there all right, moving in our direction not twenty feet away. We sat and listened and then Hart swung down abruptly off his saddle saying that's no damn cat and Mother and I heard it too then, a moan and labored breathing and as Hart stepped toward the brush his rifle at the ready they stumbled out practically into him. Two dark shapes one trying to support the other and failing, both going down to the earth in front of him.
I saw him step back reflexively and then for the first time I clearly saw the two women. In what little light we had it was hard to say whether it was dirt or blood that covered them but they both were naked — that we saw right away.
I swung off my horse and so did Mother.
"Damn!" he said.
Close up you could see that one of them was just a girl not more than sixteen, a pale slim redhead, her face pale and bloody and awash with pain, her breath coming in deep staccato gulps if and when it came at all.
The other scared hell out of me.
The look of her was savage.
There was no other word for it. She looked up at us on her knees holding onto the Anglo girl and she was at once beautiful and terrifying — something in her eyes cold and bright as a snake's eyes or fierce as a wolf with its leg long caught in a trap and you could see the Indio blood in her broad high cheekbones but it was far more than that, something older and far more primitive. In the look of her you could almost see another world entirely.
I saw Hart flinch as her eyes went up to him and could barely believe that anything could make him do so and then saw what was perhaps the source of this woman's ferocity.
Her face had been slashed with a knife from cheek to chin. She wore the mark of the bullwhip across her back and thighs. On her left inner thigh I could make out the letter V branded into her and nearly healed. Her wrists and ankles were lacerated as though she'd been tied repeatedly and for a very long time. The stab wound in her lower back oozed blood.
And it was she who'd been supporting the Anglo girl.
"Lord in heaven," said Mother.
He went to her and bent down and extended his hand.
"You're all right now," he said. "Take it easy. Easy."
Her eyes left Hart, who had put up his rifle but otherwise hadn't moved — it was as though he wouldn't go anywhere near this woman badly wounded though she was but there was no time to wonder about that nor any of his behavior — and went to Mother directly in front of her. Naked and unarmed she still looked dangerous as hell to me and she clutched the girl to her breasts.
Mother glanced at Hart and frowned and then looked at me.
"Gimme a hand here, Bell." And to her he said, "You got to let go of her now, ma'am. You got to let us take her. We'll take good care of her, all right? I promise. We'll take good care of the both you folks."
That coiled look in her eyes gradually seemed to soften. She took hold of Mother's hand finally and let the girl fall gently away into my arms and allowed Mother to pick her up which he did as easily as though she were a child. He carried her to his horse and set her down a moment beside it and then unhitched his blanket roll and wrapped it around her.
I didn't know how to handle my own part of this. The girl seemed so fragile I was afraid that the mere act of holding her might be enough to kill her somehow and I could see the deep knife wound in her ribcage steadily oozing blood and the vivid gash across her forehead. Finally Hart took the whole thing out of my hands.
"Give her here," he said.
He handed me his rifle and lifted her away.
It took us a good three hours to reach the cabin and by then the moon was full and bright. I'd been bringing up the rear leading the mustangs and the Mexican woman I'd known as Elena rode the horse's back behind Mother, her arms barely encircling his massive waist. The redheaded girl faced Hart in front of him on the saddle and he had one arm across her back pressing her to his chest and keeping her blanket in place around her, the other hand holding the reins.
I broke away from them and corralled the mustangs and rode Suzie hard to catch up with them at the cabin. Mother already had Elena seated on the rickety front steps and I saw him reach up and lift the younger girl gently away from Hart and saw that she'd bled out all over the front of him. His shirt and trousers were soaked and gleaming black with her.
Her head lolled back. Her arms dangled. Her face was pale as marble and her eyes were wide and empty. Dark blood had spilled out over her lips and chin.
"Looks like that happened quite a while ago," Mother said.
"It did."
"You should have said something."
"I did," said Hart. "I said goodbye."
He swung off his horse and tethered her and stepped past Elena whose eyes seemed to fault him personally for the girl's death and into the cabin.
br /> It was Mother who buried her. Mother who cleaned and bandaged Elena's wounds.
Hart would not go near her.
There was something between these two that was almost as though they knew one another from some point in time previous though when I asked him about it all he did was laugh and I didn't much care for the sound of his laughter either.
By the time Mother was finished with the burying we'd tended to the horses and Elena was asleep, wrapped in blankets yet cold and sweating with fever. It was anybody's guess if she would make it through the night. Mother walked through the doorway and set down the shovel and I handed him a cup of coffee. He walked over to Hart who was arranging logs on the fire.
"Somebody branded her," he said.
"I know. This one, too."
"What the hell you make of that?"
"I don't know what to make of it, Mother."
"Me neither. Knife wound was what killed her, though. That's certain. I had myself a look at it and it was deep. I'm surprised the poor thing managed to stay alive as long as she did."
"The young tend towards living."
Mother sipped his hot coffee and glanced around the cabin.
"How you want to do this?"
"Do what?"
"Where you want to sleep?"
"The floor. Let her have the skins, the fire. Let her sweat it out there. We got enough blankets between us." Mother looked over at Elena. He looked almost shy. "I never had a woman in my house," he said. "Not ever."
"You still don't. You got a Mex."
"You figure?"
"Don't you?"
Mother looked at her again.
"No, Hart. Can't say that I do. I was wondering. She by chance remind you of somebody?"
Then it was Hart's turn to look.
"No," he said, "nobody. Not a soul."
His voice was flat and cold as I'd ever heard it. I thought that lying didn't suit him either.