The Texicans Read online

  THEY REACHED SAN ANTONIO on the fifth day. Aurelia didn’t remember the city as being so big, its broad, flat crescent of land teeming with so many horses and wagons, everyone rushing along, kicking up curtains of dust.

  They passed the market, and Aurelia looked for Oscar’s figure among the produce wagons, but there was no sign of him. She thought she saw Luz sitting beside the stone wall with her jars of potions laid out on a blue-striped cloth, but it was someone else.

  The San Antonio River meandered cold and green here, a lazy serpent sunk deep in its purple bed beneath the cypress trees, only here and there glinting gold where a stray ray of sun broke through the shade. A Mexican girl, her clothes hanging in the low branches of a tree, was bathing downstream, her veil of dark hair floating wet and tangled around her glistening shoulders. Aurelia remembered bathing like that in the river, letting herself drop, unafraid, into the cold green water. She would hold her breath until she floated upward, and when she reached the air she would tilt her head back and lie on the surface and listen to the admiring shouts of her sisters and brothers as they watched her from the safety of the shallows.

  They were soon out of the reach of the river’s chill and riding through a maze of narrow hardpan streets that seemed stitched together like squares in a crazy quilt. Rows of sturdy adobe houses followed the curve of the road, lush gardens peeking out through iron grilles.

  They rode past the crumbling walls and turrets of the Alamo, and then the road became bumpier, the sturdy houses disappeared and the stone sidewalks became dirt paths. There were no lush gardens here, no iron grillework, only a wasteland of cactus and scrubby mesquite on the city’s edge, chickens and pigs wandering in dusty yards, children playing cuartillos on the porches of tumble-down shacks. Nothing had changed. If anything, Laredito looked dirtier and smaller.

  And there was the house. It was the only one in Laredito with a fenced front yard and a gate. A man with a gate to his house is a man who has something of value inside, Oscar always said. He never painted the fence, but every spring would put a fresh coat of bright yellow paint on the gate. If someone wants to know where the Ruíz house is, just tell them it’s the house with the gate that looks like a piece of sunlight.

  Tomás waited at the yellow gate while she walked up the steps onto the porch. The mesquite bench, the one the children sat on to put on their shoes, was gone. She hesitated at the door, then turned the handle and went in. Layers of dust lay like a soft cloak over everything and there was the smell in the air of rat droppings and rotting maize. Part of the roof was missing and rain had streaked the rough wood walls Oscar had painted the same bright yellow as the front gate. On the floor where Luz’s dish cabinet once stood was a pile of crimson chili peppers. The plants that Luz grew in old pots and kettles and even stuck into glass lanterns and tin ladles were gone, along with the birdcages made of twigs and twisted tin and braided horsehair. There were no beds in the alcove off the main room, merely clumps of quilting laid out on the floor. In the shadowy gloom she thought she saw her youngest brother standing in the doorway. He always stood just in that way, with one foot tucked behind the other. She dropped to the floor, light-headed, and stared at the apparition. He smiled at her and then disappeared. After a while she got slowly to her feet and wandered through the half-empty rooms, then walked out onto the porch and down the steps past the open kitchen to the rear yard.

  Luz always kept her pots in rows in the yard, their sides touching, their mouths faced upward so the mixtures inside could catch the full force of the sun. My baby birds, Luz would say as she walked along her rows of pots. Now they were scattered across the yard, upended, chipped, cracked, broken, as if they had never held anything of any importance.

  There were broken pots near the fence, with traces of Luz’s potions still clinging to the shards of fired clay. Aurelia picked up a piece and ran her finger across the white residue, then put her finger to her lips. Yarrow. Bitter and slippery on the tongue, but good for stopping bleeding.

  Where were the yarrow plants? The herb garden had been alongside the fence, where the noon sun was the strongest. Herbs need sun and water and every once in a while a little kiss, Luz would say. There was no sign of her garden now, only a shed where there had been no shed before, and children sitting in a circle in front of it, stringing red chilis onto heavy twine with metal needles. They were using shards of Luz’s pottery to cut the strings. There was an acrid smell in the yard, as if the chilis had spit some of their fire into the air.

  A woman yelled through the slats of the shed to the children to tie the chilis tighter, to pull the strings with their feet if they had to.

  “They’re too loose. How can they dry properly when they’re so loose?”

  It was Marta, the Oaxacan who sold pots of chili in the main plaza and had nine children and no husband. Luz would always buy a bowl of Marta’s chili on market days, and she and Aurelia would share it, each taking small spoonfuls between sips of water. It was so hot and spicy that if you ate it too fast it would burn your tongue and the insides of your cheeks and when you were through your mouth was sore for two days afterwards. Her chili was so fiery that even the hairless Mexican dogs turned away from the leavings.

  “Who is it?” Marta squinted in the sun’s glare.

  “Aurelia.”

  “Aurelia Ruíz?”

  “Yes.”

  Marta’s fingers were stained red from handling chilis, and she had a big square towel hanging from her waist to wipe her eyes. Chilistained fingers can make you blind if you rub your eyes with them, she once told Aurelia.

  “You’ve been gone a long time. What happened to your American husband?”

  “Indians killed him.”

  “Too bad. Was he good to you before the Indians killed him?”

  “No.

  “You see. I knew it would be no good.” She ran her hand across Aurelia’s stomach and shook her head. “You should have married a Mexican. Americans don’t like Mexicans. He would have left you even if the Indians hadn’t killed him.”

  Marta went into the shed and walked through the strings of chili. She pulled one down and brought it out into the yard and began untwisting the string.

  “Where have they gone?” Aurelia asked.

  “Who?”

  “My family. My brothers and sisters. My mother and father.”

  “Mexico somewhere. I bought the house from your father and I didn’t ask. He sold it to me for ten dollars. There were chickens walking through the rooms when I bought it. And I didn’t break your mother’s pots. Your father did that. ‘My wife died,’ he said. Then he went in the yard and threw every pot at the fence.”

  Aurelia had dreamed this, but she had shoved the dream away, had looked for goldenseal and dill and lichens and algae when she knew there wasn’t any, had tried to make time stop so she wouldn’t have to hear what she already knew.

  “Did you think I just walked in here and took this house? This is my house, and if you’re here to claim it, if you’ve come here to tell me I cheated your family, if you’re going to say that the house is worth twenty dollars, even without a roof, and that the chickens belonged to you, and what did I do with them, then you’ve come here for nothing. No one wanted to buy your father’s bird cages. People can make their own bird cages with a few twigs, why should they buy his? And his saints are no good. No one uses saints like those in their houses. You shouldn’t have come back. It’s not good to go back to where you once lived. If you don’t come back, you don’t hear bad things. Yellow fever, your father said she died of. Look at you, tears in your eyes, as if you were a good daughter and visited your mother often and worried about her health and brought her good food to eat. You married an American and ran away. You have no right to cry.”

  Aurelia leaned forward and grasped Marta’s chili-stained hands in hers and held them tight.

  “What are you doing?” Marta said. She tried to pull her hands away, but couldn’t. She began to struggle to free herse
lf, turning this way and that, shouting for Aurelia to let her go. Aurelia didn’t feel as if she were holding Marta’s hands at all, and Marta’s voice seemed far off, her words unintelligible.

  Marta’s fingers grew swollen, her neck muscles bulged as she yanked and tugged and jerked. She cursed Aurelia, called her a devil, a witch, told her she deserved all the bad things that had happened to her. Her face grew as red as her stained hands.

  Then suddenly her ravings stopped. She stood as still as the shards of broken pottery scattered around the yard, her eyes fluttery and her cheeks rolling slightly above her jaw. She looked as if she were awakening from a long sleep.

  “Mi muy amable pobrecita, my poor sweet child,” she murmured, and kissed Aurelia’s cheek. “Come and visit me when your child is born. I know that it will be as beautiful as you are.”

  Tomás, who had heard and seen everything, came into the yard and led Aurelia away.

  “I had a sister once,” he said as he helped her up onto her horse. “She died of fever and I never had another one. I’ve been thinking that maybe you’re my sister come back from the dead. I’ve heard of things like that happening. I don’t really believe it. You don’t look like my sister. And Jesus is the only one who rose out of the grave. But there is something peculiar about you. I’ve tried and tried to figure out what it is, and I haven’t yet. One thing I know for sure, somehow you’ve muddled my mind, jumbled my head up so my usual way of thinking has turned crooked. And you did something to that woman. I don’t know what it was, but if I ran true to my feelings, I’d leave you here and not look back.”

  And then for the first time he looked straight into her eyes. He thought them the strangest color he had ever seen. Not brown or black or green or blue, but the color of warmed honey, liquid and bright.

  6

  TOMáS SAID THAT he would take Aurelia to a place where she could have her baby. A Comanche camp on the Colorado River, he said.

  “All the braves and their wives have gone north for the winter buffalo hunt. I used to supply Ten Elk with rifles, and he would give me stolen horses in return. One day he didn’t have enough horses, so he gave me his barren sister, Flying Braid. I go there once a year. I can’t get rifles anymore, and I can’t afford to feed her. She sleeps with anyone who will give her food.”

  Aurelia had heard stories about the Comanches, how ferocious they were, how they raped white women and cut off the genitals of white men before they drove spears through their hearts. Oscar always told her to be careful when she went to gather firewood along the river, that Comanches sometimes hid among the trees and carried off Mexican girls. They like the way they smell, he said. And he told the younger children if they misbehaved he would call the Comanches to come and get them and cook them in a pot. Comanches like the way little Mexican children taste, he said.

  They traveled through land so dry that Aurelia thought she could hear the grass snapping beneath the horses’ hooves. For long stretches there were no mountains, no trees, just brittle shrubs and glimmery sheaths of dry grass rolling out in every direction, with only a bank of clouds hanging over the straight line of horizon to distinguish where the land ended and the sky began. When she thought they would ride forever, when she thought they had come to the end of Texas, Tomás told her that the gray thicket in the distance was the Comanche camp.

  The village was on the banks of the Colorado, a grove of hackberry trees to the east of the encampment, the river to the south. Where the circle of tepees ended, the plains stretched out again, flat and empty. The camp was quiet, no fierce warriors with feathers in their hair and scalps on their belts, just children playing in the dirt and old women sitting in groups in front of bison-skin tepees.

  Flying Braid was asleep in her grease-stained tepee. When she heard Tomás call her name, she sat up on the soot-stained carpet, her deerskin tunic, laden with bits of tin and iron and beads, tinkling noisily. The inside of her ears were painted red, and a braided horse tail was looped around her neck. A yellow line, as bright as marigolds, was painted from beneath her eyes and across her forehead clear to the edges of her close-cropped hair. She glanced at Aurelia, greeted Tomás in Spanish, and then ignored them both and occupied herself with smoothing her hair where it stuck out from sleeping.

  “I have to sit down,” Aurelia said to her after awhile. “My legs are numb from riding all day, and I would like something to drink, please.”

  Flying Braid’s mouth quivered. She asked Tomás if this woman was his new wife, and when he said no, she brought Aurelia some curdled doe’s milk and invited her to sit on a pile of bison skins.

  “I’ve never brought anyone here before,” Tomás told Aurelia, “although I’ve seen a few white women here now and then. But they don’t stay long. The Comanches use them for trade, although I hear one or two of the other bands have white wives. Ten Elk lets me come and go because I bring him things he needs and because he’s used to me. I don’t know if he thinks I’m the same as a gringo, or better or worse, but he trusts me. As far as a Comanche trusts anyone. He says I’m his brother because he shared his wife with me on the buffalo hunt. Still, I think he would take my hair if I ever tried to trick him. Comanches don’t think the right way sometimes. They’ll loan you their wife to sleep with, but they’ll take your hair and your scalp with it if you steal their horse.”

  “I have never had a baby,” Flying Braid said, and she touched Aurelia’s stomach and said she thought there was a boy inside.

  That night Tomás and Flying Braid slept together on a pile of bison skins in one corner of the tepee and Aurelia slept in another corner. And all night she could hear Tomás grunting atop Flying Braid’s body.

  Tomás left the village the next morning. Before he rode off he told Aurelia that she would have to leave before Ten Elk and his braves returned.

  “If he finds you here, he’ll kill you and your baby,” he said.

  FOOD GREW SHORT in the village, and still the braves had not returned. Flying Braid and the other squaws who had remained in camp scavenged for rats and skunks and insects, which they shared with those who were too weak or too old to scavenge for themselves. Aurelia had never eaten rat before, or lizards or grasshoppers. No matter how hungry she had ever gotten it had never occurred to her to eat such things. Those were the things starving dogs ate in Laredito. People didn’t eat them.

  “You will die and your baby will die unless you eat what I give you,” Flying Braid said.

  “I want to eat what you eat, but there is something in my head that keeps me from it,” Aurelia replied.

  Each day Flying Braid brought Aurelia some of what she had found on the perimeter of the camp, and each day Aurelia refused to eat. Not eating made her dizzy, and sometimes she wandered out toward the river and thought she saw her mother boiling herbs in a pot, and she would call to her, and when her mother didn’t answer she thought it might be because she had done something to displease her. Without food, her legs began to shake when she walked and so she lay most of the day on the bison skins in the corner of the tepee. One day she slept all day, not even waking to go outside and pee, and when Flying Braid shook her arm and asked her in a rough voice if she was dead yet, Aurelia replied that she wasn’t. But she couldn’t remember whether she was in Laredito or in the Ranger camp, and while she was trying to remember, Flying Braid said she thought Aurelia’s stomach was shrinking and that the baby would probably die inside her. Then Aurelia remembered where she was and that she hadn’t eaten since Tomás left.

  “Something keeps me from eating, and I don’t know what it is,” she said, and Flying Braid told her she could do what she wanted, eat or not eat, it didn’t matter to her.

  So Aurelia slept the days away. Sometimes she dreamed that Oscar had brought her to the Comanche village to cure the Indians of cholera, and she would get up and crawl out of the tepee and sit in the dirt waiting for sick Indians to come to her, and the sun would beat down on her head so hard she would forget why she was sitting there, a
nd then Flying Braid would pick her up and bring her inside, and she would go to sleep again.

  One day Aurelia dreamed she was in Laredito with her brothers and sisters, and they were swimming in cool green water, and she got up and walked toward the river, dropping to her knees in the dirt every few feet to rest, and when she got to the river there was no one there, and she thought if she lay down in the weeds for a while and waited, her sisters and brothers would appear. She waited all day in the hot sun, unable to move, her head turned toward the water, just watching the way the sun licked its surface and made it sparkle. Once in a while an Indian woman would come to the water’s edge to fill her water jug, and would jab at Aurelia with a foot or a stick. One woman bent down and shouted in Aurelia’s ear. One poured water on Aurelia’s head. Aurelia tried to say something to them before they walked away, something about her brothers and sisters and how they liked to swim, especially when the water was this warm and sparkly, but she couldn’t make any sounds come out of her mouth. Toward evening Flying Braid came. She picked Aurelia up in both arms, and Aurelia marveled at the easy way she swung her up into the air, with hardly an extra breath, and carried her back to the tepee as rapidly as if she were carrying nothing at all.

  That night Aurelia lay in her corner and watched Flying Braid eat. It was a curious sight, the way she ate, filling both hands with parts of rodents and lizards, legs and heads all mixed up together, and then placing them against her mouth and somehow shoving them in, then licking her palms up and down to get every last bit before she picked up some more. Aurelia couldn’t see how the food got from her hands into her mouth, and she watched Flying Braid eat with the same interest she had watched the water in the river, and she wanted to ask Flying Braid if she tasted her food before she ate it, or if it just slid down her throat unchewed, but when she tried to speak, no words came out, and it was then that she knew she was dying.