Paradise Valley (28 page)
“But you’re not a teacher, Miriam. Do you really think you can do this?”
Miriam smiled. “What harm can it do to try? Anyway, how do we know I’m not a teacher if I never tried to teach?”
Domingo set his wheelbarrow down and straightened up, staring at Miriam. “You’re going to teach school?”
“Jah,” Miriam said, “but you mustn’t tell anyone, Domingo. It’s a secret. I haven’t asked Dat about it yet.”
Domingo shrugged, and Rachel looked a little sideways at her sister. “You haven’t talked to Dat about this?”
“Not yet. I will. There hasn’t been a really good time to bring it up.”
Rachel chuckled. “You’re afraid he will say no.”
A puzzled frown crossed Domingo’s face. “Why would your father say no to a school?”
Miriam almost grinned, sheepishly. “Well, we’re thinking he might not be too crazy about the idea of Amish children being in school with outsiders. After all, he brought us all the way to Mexico so we wouldn’t have to go to school all the time with Englishers, and the subject might still be a little tender with him. But I don’t think Dat minds learning, so long as it’s just reading, writing, and arithmetic. He knows how important it is to be able to read.”
“Outsiders,” Domingo said, his head tilting. “You mean Mexicans?”
“Sí.”
“You’re going to teach
mestizo
children to read?”
Miriam nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, yes – but only if they want to, of course. I just thought since – ”
“They will want to, cualnezqui,” Domingo said. There was a new light in his eyes.
“Well,” Rachel said, “it’s a month or two yet before the end of harvest – plenty of time to talk Dat into it. If you’re afraid, you can always get Emma to ask him. She can talk him into anything.”
Miriam shook her head. “I might think about that if he says no, but this is really important to me, Rachel. I want to do it myself.”
The field corn was finally ready. Caleb’s boys had barely finished building a crude corncrib when everybody took to the fields to bring in the ears. Though the crib looked like a leaky Noah’s Ark, thrown together out of leftover slats and floating on knee-high posts to keep the rabbits out, it was their only way of drying corn for feeding the animals over the winter. Caleb didn’t know for certain what their first Mexican winter would be like.
Domingo worked alongside Caleb and Aaron, pulling the field corn, tossing ears into the wagon as a pair of draft horses eased along, guided only by whistles from Caleb.
“The bandits I’ve seen so far don’t seem that bad,” Caleb said. “The only thing frightening about them is all those guns. The ones I’ve seen around here didn’t scare me nowhere near as much as that El Pantera fella. Most of them are even sort of polite.”
Domingo chuckled. “Those are the ones who were raised as peons on haciendas. From the time they are born they are taught to be respectful of anyone they don’t know, and it becomes a habit. Life is easier that way. They will smile at you and mind their manners right up until they cut your throat and steal your horse.”
“Anyway,” Caleb said, tossing an ear of corn into the wagon, “the bandit problem doesn’t seem so bad. I have only seen two groups of them since our trip to Saltillo last month.”
Domingo laughed out loud. “Then you need to train your eyes, señor. In the last week I have seen four different bands passing by or watching us from the ridgetops, and two others late at night in San Rafael.”
Caleb stopped to roll up his sleeves, as the afternoon had grown warm. “You talk as if the whole country is full of bandits. How many are there?”
“How many men are in an army?”
“So you’re telling me, now that the war is over, everyone who fought in the revolution has become a bandit?”
“Not all of them, but many. You have not seen the last of the
bandido
s, Señor Bender.”
Domingo’s prophecy proved true. As the days cooled and the hardwood trees on the ridges began to turn, more bandits drifted down out of the hills, though they were not always seen. Chickens went missing, the kitchen garden was regularly plundered, and sometimes the coop yielded no eggs when there should have been a dozen.
About once a week some ragtag clutch of armed men would wander up the driveway in the evening to water their horses. Almost always they came from the hills, out of rough, mountainous terrain, and the Bender place was the first farm they saw when they came down into Paradise Valley. From the ridgetops it must have looked very inviting with its neat quilt of irrigated fields. The Benders were quickly turning a barren prairie into an oasis that nomads could not resist.
The bandits always wanted food, and before they left they would usually ask for a sack of oats for the horses. It was an unexpected strain on the meager stores put by in one short growing season. Already Caleb feared there would not be enough to last the winter, but if his family tightened their belts a bit they could get by somehow, and next year would be better. Next year the others would be here to share the burden.
Up to now the bandits had never openly threatened anyone at the Bender farm, and so long as they harmed no one Caleb saw no reason to take action against them. He said the Bible was clear on this – when someone asks you for something, give it to him.
But then, in October, something happened on the road from the hacienda that changed his mind.
Rachel and her sisters milked four cows twice a day, which supplied the families with more than enough milk. Every day one of the women would run the fresh milk through a hand-cranked cream separator and then store the cream in the well house to let it cool. After a couple of days they would take the cream out and churn it into butter. Once a week one of the women – usually Emma or Mary – would take the surrey into the village at the foot of the hacienda and trade butter for a bag of salt or sugar or whatever they needed from the mercado. While there, they would run errands and stop by the hacienda post office to drop off the week’s letters and pick up mail. It was a pleasant little half-day excursion, and sometimes Rachel or Miriam got to go along as a treat. Dat was reluctant to let his daughters go to town unescorted at first, but the hacienda village was within sight of home, only a few miles away, and he needed his boys on the farm.
On a glorious fall day in October Rachel took an afternoon off to go to town with Emma. A little wind rustled the dry brown prairie grass and the air felt cool. Swallows dipped and dove after bugs, and a pair of large gray hawks hung almost motionless against a crystalline sky, hunting. Emma carried Mose in a cloth sling, but Rachel got to hold the baby while Emma was driving the buggy.
Everyone in the village was in a festive mood that day. Señor Hidalgo had returned to the hacienda less than a week ago to oversee the harvest and immediately declared the first three days a fiesta, during which he visited among his peons and gave them gifts. Rachel spent a wonderful day with her sister, and to cap it off there were
two
letters from Jake waiting for her at the post office. Rachel read them in the buggy while Emma drove out of the village, but the first letter made Rachel smile and blush so much that Emma teased her to read it aloud.
“Nooo, I couldn’t do that, even for you,” Rachel said, folding the letter back into its envelope.
The second letter brought a frown to her face.
“What is it?” Emma asked. “Come on, I can see it in your eyes. What’s wrong?”
Rachel lowered the letter to her lap and stared off into space.
“It’s his dat,” she said. “Jake says there are rumors of bandit trouble down here and his dat is wavering. They are afraid.”
“So write him back and tell him yourself, there is nothing to fear. Jah, there are a few bandits roaming around, but mostly they are just hungry. They have done us no real harm, and they have never taken anything of great value.
Tell
him.”
Rachel read both Jake’s letters over again as Emma drove back toward Paradise Valley, the surrey rattling and rocking gently over the rutted dirt road. As they topped a shallow swell near the fork where Saltillo Road veered off to the north, Emma tapped Rachel’s knee with a fist.
“Look,” she whispered.
Up ahead at the fork, four men stood huddled next to their horses. One of them held a left front hoof between his knees, the horse standing patiently on three legs. The other three men leaned in, examining the hoof with him. Even from a distance there was no mistaking the pinto ponies, the layered clothes plastered with road dust, the bandoliers and pistols.
Bandits. Rachel and Emma couldn’t have run into them in a worse place. There wasn’t even so much as a thatched hut within a mile of the Saltillo fork. A cry for help out here in the open would not be heard by anyone.
Emma slowed the buggy to a walk, but it was too late to turn around. They had come too far even to dash back to the hacienda village. The four men looked up at the same time, sombreros turning toward the surrey like sunflowers to the sun.
She tried to hold the buggy to the left side of the road and keep moving, but one of the bandits stepped out and raised a hand. When the horse came close he reached up and deftly caught hold of the bridle, halting the nervous horse in its tracks. The bandit who’d been looking at his horse’s hoof stayed where he was and held the reins of all four horses while the other three men surrounded Emma’s buggy.
The one on Emma’s side lifted his sombrero and slid it off the back of his head, letting it hang from its neck cord behind him while he smiled up at her. He was a wiry little man with a face like a weasel, badly in need of a shave and a bath.
“Buenos días, señorita – ” Then he noticed the tiny baby Rachel cradled in her arms, and the empty sling around Emma’s neck. “Pardon me.
Señora
,” he said. “Please, I do not wish to trouble you, but my amigo’s horse is injured – not badly, mind you, only a little.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, smiling apologetically. As he was saying this, one of his friends kept a tight grip on the buggy horse’s bridle while the other ran a hand down its slick flank.
“Porfirio’s horse has only a little stone bruise in the soft part of his hoof,” the weasel said. “But this is a big problem for us, beautiful señora. It would not matter so much, but we must get to Arteaga before morning. We have work to do there.”
The other man, the one who had been appraising their horse, now slipped back to the buggy and fixed Rachel with an openly lascivious gap-toothed grin. She tried very hard to keep her eyes straight ahead and not look at him at all.
The weasel-faced leader spoke with the exaggerated sincerity of a huckster. “Now, Porfirio’s horse is a
fine
specimen. He was once a rodeo champion, no?” He held out a hand to the other three men for affirmation of this outrageous lie.
They all nodded vigorously and said, “Sí, señora, a champion!”
“So I wondered, if it would not trouble you greatly, if perhaps Porfirio might trade horses with you – only for a few days,” he said, holding up both hands and rushing his words when he saw the rebellion in Emma’s eyes. “Only for a few days, señora, or perhaps a week, until we can come back to retrieve Porfirio’s champion stallion. Then we will return your old mare as good as new, I give you my word.”
Appraising him coldly, Emma opened her mouth to say something to him, but Rachel squealed.