Paradise Valley (25 page)
By midday the streets of Saltillo were much warmer than the lofty fields of Paradise Valley. Miriam and Rachel found a patch of shade under the upturned end of a produce wagon and sat down to eat lunch.
“Dat’s right,” Miriam said thoughtfully as she munched on an apple. “Right now I’d like to swat every niño in this whole country with a piece of kindling, but it wouldn’t do any good. It won’t change anything. Dat’s right, the reason they steal is because they are poor.”
“We’re not rich ourselves,” Rachel said absently, polishing her own apple on a sleeve. “Anyways, I’ve seen some Amish who were really poor, but they wouldn’t steal yet.”
Miriam shook her head. “They were rich compared to these people. This is a different kind of poor. For generations the mestizos couldn’t even buy a piece of land. The haciendado owned everything, and everyone had to work for him or starve. They never had a chance.”
“I thought the revolution was supposed to change all that,” Rachel said, twisting the stem from her apple.
“How? There is land for sale now, but no one has the money to buy it, and most of them still can’t read and write. They can’t even read a newspaper. What will they do?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “All I know is, in Mexico things have been this way for hundreds of years. Are you going to change the whole country all by yourself?” She took a bite of her apple and looked absently down the nearly empty street.
“Maybe I can’t change the whole country,” Miriam said, “but I can do my little bit.”
Rachel turned to stare at her sister, a chunk of apple bulging in her cheek.
“How?”
“I’m thinking Mary’s boys will be old enough to start school in the fall, and there will be many more little ones in the spring when the others come.”
“Jah,” Rachel said, “but there’s no school here. That’s why we came in the first place.”
Miriam nodded. “I’m talking about an
Amish
school, Rachel. In Mexico we can do what we want.”
Rachel lowered her apple. “What do you mean, Amish school?”
“I mean reading, writing and arithmetic. Just the basics, and only once a week, or maybe two times for half a day. Rachel, I could teach the little ones to read and write.
I
could do that.”
Rachel shrugged. “Okay. So teach the little ones to read and write. But what does that have to do with . . . ohhh,
now
I see.”
“Right!” Miriam grinned, gesturing with a half-eaten apple as she went on. “The children will have to learn Spanish. If I can teach an Amish child to read and write Spanish, why, it ought to be easy to teach a
Mexican
child to read and write Spanish. Why can’t I start a school for whoever wants to learn to read and write? I can
do
that!”
“Do you really want to be a teacher? I’m glad to see you excited about this, but
school
? I don’t even like to
go
to school. I certainly wouldn’t want to teach it.”
“But don’t you see? Didn’t you hear what Domingo said about Pancho Villa?”
Rachel shrugged, shook her head.
“He said because Pancho Villa learned to read and write he became governor of a province. In a country like this where so many are poor, a little thing like that can make a big difference.”
Rachel stripped the seeds from her apple core, tossed away what was left and stood up, wiping her hands on her dress. “Well, just remember it’s probably not so easy. Domingo said Pancho Villa was a bandit first, then he learned to read, and
then
he became governor. Just because a man learns to read and write doesn’t mean he will become governor. He probably has to be a bandit first.”
Business in the market that afternoon turned out to be every bit as slow as their toothless old neighbor had predicted. The few shoppers who were there took their time, strolling along at a leisurely pace, enjoying the day, but the ones who stopped took time to admire the girls’ corn. They pulled back the shucks and ran a thumb over the plump yellow kernels and showed it to each other and nodded with appreciation. There were fewer customers, but those who came through bought corn by the bushel instead of only a few ears. By late afternoon, when Caleb and Domingo returned with the wagon, there were only two bushels left.
As they were pulling away, the toothless old woman in the next booth was threatening two niños with her kindling. Miriam waved to her and shouted, “Muchas gracias, cualnezqui!”
The old woman didn’t answer. She just tilted her head and frowned quizzically as they drove away.
“You should have just said
amiga
,” Rachel said. “Obviously, she doesn’t speak Nahuatl.”
An hour later the wagon – carrying four people and a heavy load of steel parts, piles of angle iron and pipe, boxes of bolts and nuts, and sheets of corrugated tin – trundled slowly down the road toward the collection of adobe and terra cotta that was Arteaga. A tall church steeple rose above the town, a white cross at its top.
Holding the reins loosely, Caleb looked over his shoulder at the westering sun. “I’m thinking there are two hours of daylight left,” he said to Domingo, riding beside him up front. “We can make a few more miles before we have to stop for the night. It will put us closer to home, but it will also put us in the mountains. Is it safe?” El Pantera was very much on his mind, though he didn’t say it out loud.
“I know a place,” Domingo said quietly, and his tone let Caleb know that he understood what hadn’t been said.
By the time the sun dropped below the western peaks, their wagon had skirted Arteaga and climbed up into the edge of the mountains, once again connecting with the main road south, toward home. Domingo took the reins and drove off the road, down into a little arroyo for a few hundred yards and then turned into the neck of a narrow canyon where they could not be seen from the road.
“We will camp here,” Domingo said, taking off his hat and staring up at the strip of purple sky between the rocky cliffs. “There are no clouds. If a storm came to the mountains, we could be washed away in this place, but the sky is quiet. I think we will be safe here for the night.”
When they had made camp and fed the horses, Domingo built a small fire in a smooth place under the overhanging rock, and they ate a meager dinner in silence while their shadows danced on the red rocks overhead.
“We will need to get an early start,” Domingo said to Caleb, stirring the embers of the fire with a stick.
Caleb nodded, worry written plainly in his weathered face. “I just hope we don’t run into any more bandits.”
Domingo shrugged, shook his head. “I don’t know about the others, but they say El Pantera never moves at night if he doesn’t have to.”
This brought another fear to Caleb’s mind, a chilling thought. “How would we know he hasn’t gone to Paradise Valley?”
“He won’t go there,” Domingo said, shaking his head.
Miriam’s head tilted. “Why not?”
Domingo plucked a straw from the ground, pinched off the end and used it to pick his teeth. “Because, cualnezqui, he is Villa’s man. Did you never wonder why Hacienda El Prado still stands?”
“I have wondered about this,” Miriam said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “I read everything I could find about the revolution, about how most of the grand haciendas were sacked and burned, and it occurred to me – why not El Prado?”
Caleb stared at his daughter’s face, shining in the firelight. Miriam normally would never have spoken up in front of a man like this.
“Did Señor Hidalgo perhaps
bribe
Villa?” Caleb asked.
Domingo chuckled. “How do you bribe a man whose army can kill you and take everything you own anytime he pleases? Nein. I don’t know what passed between them, but it seems to me that Señor Hidalgo must have once done something to help Pancho Villa, some great kindness for which Villa was grateful, a kindness he never forgot. For some reason Hacienda El Prado has his protection, and out of respect – or fear – his men leave it alone. Others may come, but Villa’s men will not.”
“There are others?” Caleb asked.
“Jah, many of them, though most are not so fierce – or so evil – as El Pantera.”
“And these others – they will come to Paradise Valley?”
“They already have. I am surprised you have not seen them.”
“Then perhaps we should appeal to the government for protection,” Caleb said. “Maybe they will send policemen to our valley.”
Domingo rose to his feet, yawned, stretched and kicked dirt on what was left of the fire. His voice came from the darkness as the last of the flames flickered out.
“Do you trust the government?”
At first light they were back on the road, and before noon they had descended from the rugged northern mountains. The thought of his wife and daughters back home in Paradise Valley without him lay on Caleb’s mind like a weight so that he leaned forward a little on the bench seat, shaking the reins often and urging his sturdy draft horses on. They seemed to understand, shouldering the load and picking up the pace without complaint. Caleb’s head turned constantly left and right, watching the ridgetops, hoping he would not see men on horseback – especially the big bicolor Appaloosa with the leopard spots.
As the sun settled into the western mountains they dropped off Domingo at the village of San Rafael and rounded the end of the ridge into Paradise Valley. A great weight lifted from Caleb’s tired shoulders when he came to the long driveway and turned his wagon toward the half-built adobe house up near the base of the ridge. In the dusk, the tents already glowed soft yellow from the lanterns inside.
The whole family turned out to welcome them home. Aaron and Harvey saw that the horses were fed and watered and brushed and put away while Caleb and his daughters washed up for dinner. It was Saturday night, so Mamm asked Emma and Mary to draw big pots of water and set them on the stove, which for now sat in the open behind the tent with only a short section of stovepipe out the top.
Mamm laid out dinner for Caleb and the girls while they told the story of their trip, and they could hardly eat for having to answer the eager questions fired at them from all directions. Everyone crowded into the tent to listen to Rachel as she told them all about the market street, the toothless old woman and the pickpocket niños.
Caleb filled them in on the rest of the trip, but he intentionally left out the part about the bandits. The women need not worry about such things, and Domingo had assured him El Pantera would not come this far south.
“So, you had no trouble on the road?” Emma asked. It was an innocent question – on such a trip it was not uncommon for a horse to pull up lame or an axle to break – but Caleb paused too long. He and Rachel and Miriam were all sitting at a little table with plates of beans, fresh tomatoes and onions in front of them, and when Emma asked about difficulties on the road they all hesitated and glanced at each other in a way that Emma’s sharp eyes would surely not miss. Besides, her question was too direct. If he said they’d had no trouble at all, it would be a lie.
“Well,” Caleb finally said, “there was a few fellas met us on the road asking for something to eat.”
“Fellas?” Mamm asked. “What kind of fellas?”
Caleb spooned up some beans and tried not to look her in the eye. “Oh, just fellas. Domingo said they used to be soldiers in the war.”
“Soldiers! Oh my!” Mamm’s eyes widened and her hand flew up to cover her mouth. “Did they have guns?”
The two youngest daughters stood on either side of Caleb, watching his face, hanging on every word. When she heard that soldiers had stopped her father, the eleven-year-old blurted out, “Did they try to kill you?”
Everyone laughed except Rachel and Miriam. Rachel suddenly seemed to be very intent on her vegetables, while Miriam simply stared at her father. Mamm saw this, and bored in on her husband.
“Caleb, tell us what happened. What did these men do?”
Caleb knew he was trapped then, so he proceeded to tell the whole story of how they had been stopped on the road by eight or ten rough-looking men who claimed at first to only need a few ears of corn.
Miriam thumped her spoon down on the table, glaring at him.
“They were
bandits
, Dat, and they would have robbed us if not for Domingo. Or worse,” she said flatly, interrupting her father. Everyone in the tent sat very still and stared at her. Caleb stared the hardest. She had spoken out of turn and contradicted her father.