The Texicans Read online

  “Marriage is the only way,” Oscar said.

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “In the church.”

  “I’m no Catholic.”

  “In the church is the only way.”

  Willie didn’t say anything back, and Oscar turned toward Aurelia. He was pleased, she could tell that by the way he kneaded the right side of his face with his finger.

  “If you do this, we can live a whole year,” he said.

  “He doesn’t want to,” she replied.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Willie said. He hadn’t gotten up and walked out the gate yet. Aurelia thought he might even look as if the idea of marrying her wasn’t the worst thing he could imagine.

  “I’ll buy a bigger wagon with the money and haul goods for the Americans,” Oscar said. “I’ll make the money grow.”

  “You’ll spend it on the faro tables,” she said. “You’ll buy aguardiente and sleep all day and then the money will be gone.”

  “If you do this, the children can eat.”

  She thought of all the promises he had ever made and hadn’t kept. She had no reason to believe that this would be any different. She didn’t want to marry Willie Barnett. She wanted to be the one who stood up and walked out the gate and didn’t look back. And if she married Willie Barnett, who would help Luz in the marketplace and watch out for the younger girls, who sometimes stood in the plaza and didn’t know what it meant when the Americans told them they were pretty?

  “The money will last a long time, Aurelia,” Oscar said.

  “God blesses those who sacrifice,” Luz murmured.

  Aurelia looked at the sky, at the way the disappearing sun pulled the light away. A noisy cloud of grackles, bronze bodies gleaming in the lavender sky, were coming to roost in the branches of the trees, and it seemed to her a wondrous thing that creatures so small could thrash the air so violently and screech from the treetops with such passion.

  3

  May, 1844

  WILLIE SHOWED UP at the church, but he looked uneasy standing at the altar, and when the priest blessed him and Aurelia, Willie began coughing, as if he had something huge stuck in his chest, and when he was through coughing he said out loud, so everyone in the church could hear, “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have married her,” and Oscar, who was sitting with Luz and the five younger children in the front pew, came up to the altar and grabbed Willie by his calico scarf and said if Willie hadn’t already married his daughter he thought he’d kill him.

  The villagers came to the fandango after the wedding, and they said Aurelia looked beautiful in her wedding gown, with her hair parted in the middle and braided with flowers, and they ate plates of chili and tamales and frijoles and enchiladas and drank aguardiente and told Oscar he had made as good a bargain for his daughter as they had ever seen.

  The fandango went on all night, floors vibrating to the stamping of dancing feet and the walls bending and cracking in time to the music. Willie wouldn’t dance with Aurelia, but sat in a corner of the smoky hall and stared out the open door in the direction of San Antonio May, 1844 while she danced, alone in the middle of all the other dancers, flinging her arms and twirling until the flowers fell out of her hair and her braid came undone. She wanted to beckon him to come to her, that she was a girl like all the other girls he had ever seen, but he wouldn’t look in her direction.

  She kicked off her shoes and danced in her bare feet. Oscar always said the fandango was like a flower. The dancing begins and it’s like a little bud, smooth and tight, and everyone looks and holds their breath and waits to see what the bud will be. I will be a rose, Aurelia thought, with petals that open slowly so that all the other dancers will turn toward me and gasp with admiration. She twined her fingers into the hem of her white cotton skirt and turned her long neck to the right, as if someone waiting there in that spot against the wall had called to her. Then she lifted her chin and shook her hair and stamped her feet as if what he said had made her angry. She did all these things in perfect time to the music, and still managed to reach down and gather up the coins that rolled across the bumpy floor toward her feet.

  Her brothers and sisters, stomachs full of the food Aurelia’s marriage had bought, made a circle around her and clutched at the hem of her dress as she twirled and pirouetted, and she smiled at them and cursed Willie Barnett for being who he was and acting as if that could buy the whole world.

  When they left Laredito, Willie didn’t even wait until they reached the Ranger camp, but took her out in the deep grass along the San Antonio River and told her to lie down. Aurelia could see bathers in the water, young boys on log floats in the middle of the river, and she lay still while Willie yanked the lace skirt of her wedding gown up around her breasts. The young boys’ voices carried over the water, and she heard their splashing as Willie said, “Spread your legs.” He barely had time to squeeze in and out and tell her she was awful tight for a greaser before he rolled off of her and wouldn’t touch her again except to say how disgusted he was at the way she raised her hips and arched her back and didn’t cry.

  “The blood on your cotton drawers doesn’t prove anything. I can tell you’ve had many men before me.”

  “If I had a knife, I’d push it into your chest and tear out your heart and throw it away.”

  “I better sleep with one eye open,” he said, and laughed.

  She washed in the river while Willie waited on the bank. The water was warm on the surface, but cold where the sun’s rays hadn’t yet penetrated. The boys were gone, the logs they had been jumping from floating free in the river. She had married Willie because she couldn’t let her brothers and sisters starve, but she had not thought of a moment beyond the wedding, had devised no plan as to how she would live with him. And now she saw that he would make her suffer, that he enjoyed the sight of her suffering, relished unleashing his meanness on her. You will be blessed by God for your sacrifice, Luz said, but Aurelia wasn’t sure that God had noted her sacrifice, and if He had, where was her reward?

  “I haven’t had any other men,” she told him when she came out of the water. “You are the first and only one.”

  “You can tell me whatever you want, but I know what I know,” Willie replied.

  When they reached the Nueces he left her there at the river’s edge and told her she wasn’t too far from the Ranger camp, it was due west, not to worry about Indians, there weren’t any here, told her to walk the rest of the way, and if she stayed close to the river she couldn’t miss it, there wasn’t another camp for fifty miles in any direction.

  THERE WERE A FEW canvas tents in the Ranger camp, and some grimy bedrolls and saddles scattered here and there on the ground, and the men didn’t look as clean as Willie did. Their trousers were dirtspotted, and even in the night air Aurelia could smell their unwashed bodies. The cook, a Mexican who told Aurelia his name was Tomás, was preparing the Rangers’ dinner, stirring two iron pots with a wooden pole, his face a yellowish shine in the firelight. He let Aurelia sit near the fire and gave her a blanket to wrap around her shoulders.

  “We don’t see Mexican girls here,” he said. “Where are you from?”

  “San Antonio.”

  “You married Willie?”

  “Yes.”

  Some of the Rangers were playing cards, others were lounging against their saddles, dreaming. A few came over to the fire and stared at Aurelia. She stared back, ready to kick anyone who touched her.

  “Texas Rangers don’t marry Mexican girls,” Tomás said. “They buy them and keep them like pets, but they don’t marry them.”

  Horses were tethered to the huisache trees. Aurelia wanted to get up onto the back of one of those horses and ride back to Laredito. She could almost feel herself racing across the camp and jumping onto a horse’s back.

  “See Captain Hays over there near the bank of the river, talking to Willie?” Tomás asked.

  Aurelia looked toward the river. Willie was in shadow, b
ut the man standing next to him, head grazing the branch of a tree, seemed to glow in the moonlight, the silver on his spurs and badge sparkling like fireflies.

  “Right now I can tell you what the captain is telling Willie,” Tomás said. “He’s talking about you, telling him how mixing races is no good, that all Mexicans are stupid and Mexican women are dirty and can’t be trusted, that Willie better keep you away from the others or the camp will turn into something we’ll all be sorry for.” He spat into the flames. “Gringos are stupid. When I’m not cooking for them, I sell them horses the Comanches have stolen from them, I cheat them at faro, I trade them diseased sheep for coffee and tobacco. But they can be mean. Especially Captain Hays. He’s a nevero, made of ice. He has no feelings. Willie shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s not a good place for a woman to be.” He told Aurelia to stir the pot of beans while he poured more salt into the soup. “Maybe you can help me with the cooking. Do you know how to cook?”

  “I can cook anything you want me to cook. I can cure you of anything you want me to cure you of. I know about herb medicines. If someone is sick, I know the right potions to give them. Sometimes I just look at someone and I can cure them. Willie came to see me in Laredito because his stomach hurt and now it doesn’t.”

  “He eats fast, that’s why his stomach hurts. He doesn’t taste his food. He throws it down his throat instead of chewing it. You should have given him poison. No one would have missed him if you had. Are you a bruja, a witch?”

  “I might be.”

  “Have you ever cast a spell on anyone?”

  “I never tried.”

  Aurelia stirred the beans and felt the steam run up her arms and warm her body. Just talking Spanish to Tomás so the others couldn’t understand what they were saying made her feel better. Just stirring the beans cleared her head. Cooking comforted her, made her think of Luz standing over her pots, babies on the floor at her feet. Aurelia knew what to expect when you put something into a pot and stirred it. If you always used the same ingredients, there was never any mystery as to how it would come out. Maybe the flavor was too strong one time and too weak another, but it was the same dish. There was no one who could tell you you had made beef tamales when you had made tripe stew.

  The Rangers had gathered around the fire now, close to where the cooking pots were.

  “Come on, do a fandango for us,” one of them said.

  Captain Hays was still talking to Willie. Willie, sober-faced, nodded his head as he listened.

  The men were shouting at her, telling her to show them some dancing, do some tricks with her feet, bounce around a little so they could see her legs. The moon had laid a night blanket of shiny crystals on the river beside the camp, and Aurelia could see fires visible across the valley and hear the faint sounds of violin music, out of tune and whiny, but rhythmic. She had danced the fandango at her wedding. Every girl in Laredito knew the steps and could dance it for two days and two nights without tiring. If she danced the fandango they would leave her alone. She could bemuse them with her dancing, make them believe that if they touched her she would throw curses at them that would toss them into the sky and over the river and pound them so far into the earth they would never touch anyone else again.

  She leaned her head back, lifted the hem of her skirt with her right hand, listened for a moment to the loose chords and disjointed melodies that came drifting from someplace across the valley, and began to dance.

  4

  JOSEPH

  In dependence, Missouri

  June, 1845

  JOSEPH KIMMEL’S LIFE was a simple one. He rose in the morning, ate the breakfast his landlady had set out in the dining room the night before, then saddled his horse and rode the half mile to the Independence Missouri Boys School where he taught Greek, Latin and mathematics to thirteen-year-old boys. In his twenties he had been a mountain man, a fur trapper. He had liked trapping, had only left it because of all the poachers and Missouri farmers swarming over the river in their canoes and keelboats and because beaver hats went out of fashion and the price of pelts dropped. A schoolteacher was what he was now and it seemed to suit him. He had no wife, no children, and, since his brother Isaac’s death in Texas the year before, no family obligations. He was as solitary a schoolteacher as he had been a fur trapper.

  And then on a fine summer morning a few days before the end of the school term he received a letter from Isaac’s business partner.

  May 20, 1845

  Mist. Joseph Kimmel

  344 Peech Strete

  Independants, Misura

  Deer Mist. Kimmel,

  Yore leter of Jan’ry 3d recev’d. I disposition’d yore bruther’s belongeens like you aks’d. I wil hold boots wach and fob also locket and pitcher found on body. Also tin box. Ther was no Jew preecher so I tole the preest at San Fernando church to berry him. Ther wer litel profit in the stor this last yeer. I wil show you the acc’t books wen you arive. If ther be a profit from his shar of the bisines we wil work it out wen you com.

  If you want to stay in Texas maybe we can be partners. Jews is smarter than the rest and Im plees’d to be in bisines with them. Wimins hats wil do beter next yeer. The wimin pine for new stiles and with mor peeple commeen to Texas evry yeer we are sure to make mony.

  Ther be fine opertunitys in Texas for a yung man. Ther is land to be had. You can farm or raze livestok. Land is seleen cheep 2 dolars an aker. Les if you ain’t partiklar whar its at. I heerd of good peeces goeen for one hunerd fifty dolars. Catel are cheep a good cow and caff equl to ten dolars. Yore Brother was taken by the fever but not everbody sickens. Many Peeple prosper. Many grow old. I hav see’d it miself.

  But ther be Dangers. You must pay partiklar mind to yore arangmints. Injuns are vary tuchy they hav 6 senses bout Travlrs, also Mexcans, those greesers wil steel yore shues from yore fete. Breeng bedeen and somtheen to cook in on the trale. You must breeng a good set of blaksmith tules also a good tent aganst the rane and one good pistil 2, if you can aford it.

  Yores truely,

  Cyril McCorkle

  “AREN’T YOU SCARED a wild Indian’ll get you?” Mrs. Plummer asked Joseph when he told her he’d be vacating his rooms and leaving for Texas when the school term was over. “I heard they shoot arrows at you, then cut the ears right off your head.” Her old eyes gleamed as bright as if she could already see Joseph’s wiry body, earless and pocked with arrows, hanging from the coat tree in the immaculately swept hall of the rooming house.

  “I think those are just stories,” Joseph said.

  Joseph’s fellow teachers at the Independence Missouri Boys School gave Joseph a pair of suspenders and a calico kerchief as a going-away gift. Then they all crowded into the small lecture hall to hear Joseph’s students sing two choruses of “Blow the Man Down.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to travel all the way to Texas with no companions?”

  Mr. Thurmond asked Joseph when the singing was over. Mr. Thurmond was the headmaster, the one who had hired Joseph two years before. “I think I’ll enjoy the time to myself,” Joseph replied.

  Mr. Thurmond’s wife Grace dished out slices of the cream cake she had baked for the occasion. The cake had the map of Texas traced on the beet-dyed sugar icing.

  “Give us a farewell speech, Mr. Kimmel,” Mr. Thurmond said when all the cake had been eaten and each of the teachers had come up and shook Joseph’s hand.

  “I don’t know how to make a speech,” Joseph said, “and if I tried, I’d probably fail, so I’ll just say good-bye.” He was about to stop right there, but the boys from his Greek and Latin class were looking at him, waiting.

  He had thought he could leave without much fuss. He hadn’t made many friends at the school, preferring to be left alone with his books. It wasn’t that he disliked people. It was more that with his somber personality, there was no sense inflicting himself on others. He had never snapped at anyone or shouted at any of his students, but he thought there was something inside him that, if aroused,
might not be that pleasant for others to see. A short temper is what he thought he had. A temper to be avoided. A mean streak. His brother Isaac, who was the one who knew him best and had seen him at his worst, called it a touch of selfishness, of wanting things his own way. I’ve seen no sign of temper in you, Isaac told him. You pout sometimes, and think of your own needs before that of others, but I’ve never seen anything in your nature that I would call disagreeable or describe as temper. Joseph thought otherwise, even though the whole school had turned out to bid him farewell and were treating his leaving as if they were losing the most beloved teacher they had ever had, the most even-tempered teacher who had ever sat at a desk in front of a classroom and waved a ruler.

  “I’ve been happy as a schoolteacher,” Joseph said, “and if my brother hadn’t died I would have stayed one, but he did and now I’m heading off to Texas to settle his affairs. I’m thirty years old and I’ve never been to Texas.”

  He looked around at the boys. They were listening with the absorption he’d expect if he had told them he was thinking of leaving the planet. He hadn’t thought anyone would even notice he was gone, but here they were, students and fellow teachers, headmaster and wife, paying all this attention to him, listening to his words as if they had never heard his voice before. What would they think if he were to say to each and every one of them that when he received Cyril McCorkle’s letter he had suddenly realized how tired he was of airless classrooms and spilled ink and boisterous boys, that he had suddenly been filled with the certainty that if he stayed in Independence he would one day die at his desk, a toothless old man who ate pie for breakfast and went to bed before dark?

  He picked up the new kerchief and the patterned suspenders and held them out for everyone to see.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re going alone,” Mr. Thurmond said. “There are wagon trains heading that way. With more people there’s more protection from the Indians. I think it’s fine that you want to settle your brother’s affairs, but a schoolteacher is hardly the sort of man to cross the plains alone. I don’t think you fully appreciate that there will be hazards that you won’t be prepared for, not to mention vicious Indians.”