Paradise Valley (29 page)
The bandit standing next to Rachel had reached into the buggy and laid a hand on Rachel’s knee. Her face flushed crimson. She shrank away from his touch, clutching Mose close to her chest, but there was nowhere to go.
“
Como una fresa!
” the man said, grinning, pointing at her face.
Like a strawberry!
“I would like to take this ripe strawberry home with me. I would make the lovely señorita the queen of my hacienda!”
Emma tried to stare him down, but he had eyes only for Rachel. She appealed to the weasel.
“Señor,” she said sharply, “surely your companion knows he should treat the friends of the haciendado with respect here in the shadow of the hacienda, especially when Señor Hidalgo is on his estate.” It was a calculated bluff. Señor Hidalgo kept a small army of bodyguards with him on the estate, and the bandits knew this.
The weasel, glaring at his man through the open front of the surrey, said to him in a dangerously quiet tone, “Go and help Porfirio with the horses.”
The gap-toothed bandit tensed. His grin vaporized, and his eyes narrowed in unmistakable challenge. But when he saw the weasel’s hand slip down to the butt of his pistol he broke the stare and stalked away.
“You must forgive my friend, señora – he has no manners,” the weasel said, but his hand remained where it was, a forefinger tapping ominously against the side of his leather holster.
“Take the horse,” Emma said slowly through gritted teeth. Rachel muttered something, but Emma shushed her and continued. “Put Porfirio’s horse in the traces for us. Then we will go, no?”
The bandit smiled broadly, pointing a bony finger at Emma. “I
knew
you would understand! You are very kind, señora. And do not worry. You will have your horse back in a week, wait and see!”
The buggy horse was as smooth a trotter as Rachel had ever seen, a prize standard-bred mare, well-trained and in her prime. The broken-down pinto that replaced her stood a good two hands shorter and his head drooped. Thin and lethargic from hard use, his ribs poked through a dull, patchy coat. Emma let him limp along at his own pace the last two miles to the house.
“Dat will be furious,” Rachel said as the lame nag grudgingly negotiated the turn into the driveway.
“Not with us, he won’t. We did the only thing we could.”
“Do you think they will bring our horse back?” Rachel asked.
Emma sighed, shook her head. “No. We have seen the last of her. I hope they treat her well.”
Dat, as Rachel predicted, was furious. He met his daughters in the driveway a hundred yards shy of the house, demanding to know exactly what his buggy was doing strapped to a half-starved painted pony and precisely what had become of his best buggy horse. When they told him, he snatched his hat off and paced back and forth a few times, then stalked away and waded far out into the thigh-deep oats, where he stood with his hands on his hips staring off in the direction of the hacienda, talking vigorously to himself.
Emma snapped the reins and marched the half-dead plug on up to the house, leaving her father to his rantings. It was his way. He would get out all of his reckless words in the open field where no human would hear, then apologize to Gott for his anger and return to civilization with his usual placid demeanor.
The next morning before daylight Caleb dressed himself in his Sunday clothes, saddled his one remaining buggy horse and rode off to the east. It was high time he introduced himself to Señor Hidalgo.
He was met at the gates of the hacienda by two armed guards who asked him his business. When he told them he wished an audience with the haciendado, they made him get down from his horse. While one of the guards poked around his saddle, the other actually frisked Caleb’s person, looking for concealed weapons. Once they decided he was not a threat they directed him through the gates and up around the curving drive to the stables, where his horse was taken from him and a stable hand led him to the back entrance of the hacienda. There he was met by another armed guard who turned him over to a butler, who took him down a maze of polished hallways to a small room with a large window and eight wooden chairs, six of which contained Mexicans who sat quietly with ragged hats on their laps, obviously waiting for an audience.
Caleb sat down and waited his turn.
After a few minutes a door opened at the far end of the room and a barefoot Mexican worker emerged, followed by Diego Fuentes, Señor Hidalgo’s administrative chief. When Fuentes saw Caleb his face lit up and he came straight over to shake hands.
“Señor Bender! Buenos días! It is good to see you again. I have heard very good things about your farm. Everyone says you are doing very well indeed!”
“Muchas gracias,” Caleb said. “We do what we can as hard as we can and trust Gott to do what we cannot.”
Fuentes waved an arm toward the door. “Please, Señor Bender, we must not keep you waiting. Come into the library and let me introduce you to the haciendado.”
The half-dozen Mexicans who had been there before him said nothing as Caleb walked between them into the library and Fuentes closed the door behind him.
Caleb had never seen anything remotely like the grand library at Hacienda El Prado. Three walls of the cavernous room were lined with ornately trimmed mahogany bookshelves twenty feet high with a narrow balcony halfway up, its delicate handrail supported by hundreds of curved spindles of exquisite design. The outer wall held a solid bank of windows facing east over a splendid garden that must have covered five acres, with lawns and shrubs and ponds and shade trees and vine-laced trellises over neatly paved walkways. The frescoed ceiling of the library looked like something out of a museum, each of its gilded sections framing a different painting, indecipherable scenes that Caleb figured must have been drawn from Mexican folklore. Persian carpets covered almost the entire polished stone floor.
A man who looked to be in his forties stepped out from behind a massive cherry desk at the far end of the room as Fuentes bowed slightly, made a sweeping gesture in Caleb’s direction and said grandly, “Señor Hidalgo, may I present to you Señor Caleb Bender. Señor Bender, Don Louis Alejandro Hidalgo.”
The haciendado greeted him warmly with a firm handshake. Hidalgo was ten years younger than Caleb, and slightly smaller. Señor Hidalgo’s clothes were nothing like those of a farmer; he wore a perfectly fitted three-piece wool suit, tailor-made white shirt, and an ascot in place of a tie. Clean-shaven, with dark hair slicked down and neatly parted on one side, he looked like the pictures of movie stars that Caleb had seen on the covers of glossy magazines in the store racks.
And he was well-spoken. He offered to speak English or German if Señor Bender preferred, but Caleb politely declined, explaining that he lived in Mexico now, and though his Spanish was very coarse, it would only improve through use.
Señor Hidalgo offered him a cigar. When Caleb declined, Hidalgo lit one for himself and puffed away as he made small talk. Hidalgo wanted to know all about the farm and how the irrigation system worked, and then he asked after the others – when they would come and how many. When he finally asked if there had been any problems with the local people, Caleb took a deep breath and drew himself up.
“Well, sir, that’s what I came here to talk to you about.” He informed Hidalgo of the increase in visits his family had been getting from small groups of outlaws of late, the pilfering of eggs and chickens and vegetables. Then he said, “But that’s not the worst of it. Yesterday, they took one of my horses and threatened my daughter.”
Hidalgo pondered this with a frown, a fist containing a huge cigar pressed against his cheek in thought. “What kind of horse?” he asked.
“Standard-bred,” Caleb said. “Best buggy horse I had, a mighty good trotter.”
Hidalgo’s eyes lit up. “I have heard of those! There is no talk of them here, but in New York everyone knows about the fine, fine, standard-bred trotters of the Amish in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. I would love to have seen this horse.”
“I have another almost as good,” Caleb said. “It is in your stable as we speak.”
“Well then, let’s go! I must look at it. Come, Diego!”
Diego Fuentes and Caleb Bender followed, hat in hand, behind the haciendado as he hurried down the labyrinthine hallways of his palace and out the back door to the stables. They found Caleb’s horse housed in a paddock right next to the splendid Friesian he’d seen Fuentes riding that first day. Hidalgo opened the barred door and went right up to the horse, patting and rubbing it, talking to it in soothing tones.
“You can ride him if you want,” Caleb said. “He’s kid broke.”
Within minutes the impeccably attired master of the estate was gliding around the show ring beside the stables, putting Caleb’s horse through his paces and grinning from ear to ear with that cigar clenched in his pearly white teeth. When he was satisfied he dismounted and turned the horse over to a stableboy, saying, “Give this excellent animal the royal treatment.”
He found the ride invigorating, and rather than going back into the library Hidalgo decided to show Caleb around his gardens. He was profoundly impressed with the horse, and in fact tried to buy it, but Caleb refused to sell.
“It’s the only buggy horse I have left. I don’t see how we could get by without it,” he explained. But the horse had left a deep impression, and Hidalgo treated Caleb as an honored guest.
“So, what can we do about these bandits?” Caleb finally asked as they strolled past a pond full of some kind of bright orange fish.
Hidalgo’s face fell. “Alas, my friend, there is little I can do anymore. There was a time . . .” Then he shook his head as if to clear it and said, “Ah, but those days are gone, my friend. Mexico is in a time of change, a time of chaos. Old things are passed away, but new things have not yet come. I’m afraid the day of the hacienda, as glorious as it once was, is past. For centuries the haciendas ruled the land, and the pure-blooded Spaniards who owned them brought peace and morality and culture to this impoverished country.”
He sighed heavily, glancing up the hill toward his grand mansion. “But all things must pass, Señor Bender. History tells us that there will always come a day when the peasants band themselves together – as they did in Russia a few years ago, and in Europe before that – and arm themselves and overwhelm the nobility. Now it has happened here. This misguided egalitarianism has spread like a plague through Mexico, and now the hacienda will go the way of the plantation in the American South. The passing of our way of life is a shame, but we must face the fact that the revolution has come and things have changed. We are entering a new, more democratic time. This is why I have sold part of my pastureland to you and your people. I have decided to liquidate some of my family’s estate and invest in anonymous business and industry. Oil is the future of Mexico.”
With his hands clasped behind him, Hidalgo strolled slowly down a brick-lined path between high banks of exotic flowers and pampas grass, into the shade of a towering oak whose autumn-browned leaves fluttered lightly down to collect in little drifts on the path.
“I have said all this to say I am sorry, my friend, but I cannot help you with the bandit problem. I can no longer defend my own lands for fear of triggering an uprising. Hacienda El Prado only stands today by the favor of Francisco Villa, who once swore an oath of friendship to my father. Now that the war is over, there are far too many armed men scattered through the mountains for me to risk provoking them and uniting them against me. My advice to you is to make peace with them as best you can.”
“But there must be
law
,” Caleb said. “There must be some police or sheriff or soldiers
somewhere
who will protect us. Surely we will not be left at the mercy of these criminals.”
Hidalgo shrugged. “Well, you can appeal to the government, but I don’t know if they will help you. When we get back to the library I will give you the address of an official in Monterrey who controls the allocation of government troops in Nuevo León. Perhaps you can persuade Señor Montoya to send a detachment to live here in the valley, and then the bandidos will go away. They will become a thorn in someone
else’s
side.”
“Well, I’m not the best letter writer,” Caleb said, glancing sideways at Hidalgo. “I’m wondering if it might be better for this letter to have
your
name on it. After all, this government official wouldn’t know me – ”
“But that is the problem, Señor Bender. He
would
know me. As I said, times have changed. For the men who now rule Mexico it is not politically expedient, and may even be perilous, to be seen as friends of the haciendados. I am afraid my name might do your cause more harm than good.”
Miriam, with her intense studies over the last couple of months, had become the family expert on the Spanish language, so it came as no surprise to her when her dat asked her to help him with a letter. The two of them sat up late at the kitchen table, by lamplight crafting a letter to Señor Montoya, the government official in Monterrey. Even the actual printing of the final draft fell to her, as her dat doubted that anyone could decipher his herky-jerky farmer’s hand. When she had finished, he signed it.
“Mebbe now they will help us,” he said as Miriam sealed the envelope.
Everyone else had gone to bed. It was just the two of them bending over the letter at the table. Dat yawned and stretched and started to reach for the lantern, but Miriam stayed his hand.