the Lonesome Gods (1983) (13 page)

What was Tahquitz? Who was he ... or it?

I was very hungry, yet I did not want to eat. I straightened my bed, undressed slowly, then crawled into bed. For what seemed a long time, I lay still, staring into the darkness above me.

Somewhere far off there was a low rumble, and the earth seemed to shake a little. Was it Tahquitz?

Was he angry?

But this was my home. It was the only home I had. What would I do now? What could I do? Would Peter ever come again? And why should I matter to him? I was not his boy. He had business of his own to see to.

A low wind moaned around the eaves, and sand rattled against the windows and ran nervous fingers along the roof.

Miss Nesselrode had said I could come to her, but if I did, I should be close to my enemies and they would know I was alive; and that they must not know. To Los Angeles was a ride of five or six, maybe seven days. I did not know just how far.

What could I do? I could stay. I could live here, in the house of Tahquitz.

At least. until he returned....

Chapter
15

When morning came I went to the cupboard. There was bread in the breadbox, there were two jars o
f
jam, and there was cornmeal, two bottles of wine which I did not drink, and there was coffee which I did not drink either. At least, not often.

I found in the cool place under the floor a big hunk of cheese, so I cut off a piece and returned the rest to the cloth wrapping and the open jar. With the cheese and a piece of bread thickly covered with jam, I sat down by the table and ate. Until then I had not realized how hungry I was. Before, I had only wanted water.

When I had eaten, I went to the door, and Francisco was there.

"You do not see Tahquitz?"

"No," I said.

"He was here. He covered the blood." Francisco pointed to the place where my father had fallen. "Then he went away."

"What was he like?"

"I did not see him. Nobody sees him. He comes in the night, and he goes. He was heard." Francisco looked at me. "He was in the cabin."

Awed, I looked at the cabin. He was there? He had bee
n
inside?

"What do you do?"

"What?"

"You can come with us. You can become an Indian." "But I am not an Indian."

"You can live like Indian." He glanced at me from th
e
corners of his very black eyes. You can eat like Indian. At least," he added, "you can eat."

I could eat. When the bread was gone, and the jam and cheese, what would I do?

Father had told me that the Cahuilla collected acorns, that they were an important part of their diet. They also collected chia and other seeds.

"I must stay here. Peter Burkin will come. Then I will go with you and you will teach me what to do." Francisco stood up, and then for the first time I saw the buckskin bag he had. He held it out. "Is for you." He looked at me. "Jerky?" he said, as if the word were not familiar.

Peering into the bag, I could see the pieces of dried meat.

"Gracias," I said, and he smiled, showing his white teeth.

"I go now," he said.

He walked away, and after a moment I went back inside. Tahquitz had been here!

Standing just inside the door, I looked all about me. If Tahquitz was here, what did he do? Why would he come? To see his home, if this was his house? To see what we did here?

Nothing was changed, nothing was different. Carefully, going from room to room, I looked for what he might have done here, and I found nothing.

Anyway, I did not believe in Tahquitz. He was a story, like "Cinderella" or "Jack the Giant-Killer." Even the Cahuillas had not seen him; they had heard him, which was not the same. It could have been the wind, or a coyote. It could have been anything.

Papa's rifle stood in a corner, and I went to see if it was loaded. It was. His pistol belt had been hung on a peg in the bedroom, and I took it down. It was loaded, too. Somebody had loaded it, because my father had fired it. Somebody had loaded it while I was gone.

Taking the pistol belt from the peg, I hung it on the bed. It would be close to me at night, if I needed it. I ha
d
shot a pistol, but only with my father helping me. I had shot a rifle, too.

Remembering what my father had done, I got the broom and swept the cabin floor. Then I wiped the windows clean and dusted the furniture. In the desert there is much dust.

When the house was clean, I filled the bucket with fresh water and filled a water bag and let it hang in the wind to keep cool.

Chewing on a piece of the dried meat, I went to the shelf to look at the books. Quentin Dunvard was the book my father was reading. I would try to ...

It was gone!

There were twelve books on the shelves, and I had looked often at each, but Quentin Dunvard was not among them. Yet there were still twelve. I looked again, and the book that replaced Quentin Dunvard was another novel by Scott, Guy Mannering!

Hesitantly I took the book down, and as I opened the pages, I caught a faint odor of pine needles. Holding it to my nose, I sniffed curiously.

Definitely pine, but our books had been nowhere near any pine trees. Very carefully, half-frightened, I put the book down. Who had been here since we had been gone? Tahquitz, Francisco had said, but that was nonsense. There had been someone else; someone had been in our house, had taken one of our books and left another, hoping no doubt that we would not notice. Especially that I would not notice, for my father was dead.

It was unusual that a boy of my age should read such books, but my father and mother had both taught me, and I had begun reading at an early age, after my parents had read to me.

Why bother to substitute a book at all? Why not just push them together, hoping no one would notice there was one fewer on the shelf?

Again I picked up the book, slowly turning the pages. I turned almost a third of the book, page by page, but there was no clue. The odor of pine needles remained
,
and there were no pines here. The only trees here were palms, smoke trees, and a few palo verde. In some of the canyons there were sycamores.

Uneasily I put the book down again. Yet, why not read it? Quentin Durward was gone, but the new story might be quite as good.

Yet I put the book down for the time and went outside. The horses came to me eagerly, and I realized I had not fed them, and did so. They had water running into a trough, so that was something I did not have to do, yet they were my responsibility now, and I must not forget. But who had fed them when I was gone? Francisco, no doubt, or one of the other Indians.

Turning, I stared up at the looming San Jacinto Mountains, rising so steeply from the desert. If Tahquitz lived up there, why would he come down here? It was high, and must be cooler. Cool enough that there might be pines. The thought frightened me, and I went quickly inside.

My feet were very sore and there were places where my heels had chafed during the walk. I bathed them again and lay down, trying to think what Papa would have wanted me to do.

I was half-asleep when I heard a horse. I heard the clop, clop-clop of hooves and got quickly up, wide-awake. I looked to the pistol and went to stand beside the door. My heart was pounding. Then the rider came into sight, and it was Peter. I put down the pistol and ran outside. "Howdy, boy. Is it true, then?"

"Yes, sir. There were many of them. He pushed me out of the way before he got his pistol out."

"He git any of them?"

"Yes, sir. One, I know."

He dismounted and I went with him as he walked his horse back to the corral. He watered his horse, then tied it and took his rifle from the scabbard. We walked back to the house with the sunshine on the peaks.

Inside, he got out the pot and made coffee as I told him what had happened and how Peg-Leg Smith had found me and brought me in.

"He's a cantankerous old devil, but he's a good man to have around if you're in a corner." He looked at me. "How you doin', all by yourself?"

"All right. I think I shall go with the Cahuilla. They spoke of it."

"You ain't got no other folks, I know. Your pa said something about this Nesselrode woman?"

"She was in our wagon coming west. She said she would take me, but she may have been just talking. Anyway, I want to stay here."

"Here? Alone? Well, I was on my own when I was nine, and I hadn't as much savvy as you. I brought you some grub. It's in those sacks back of my saddle, but that ain't much, an' I'm not sure I can keep makin' this trip."

It is a long ride."

"I got to make a livin', boy." He looked around. "No place for you there. It's a mighty rough neighborhood where I live, and all I've got is a bunk in a cheap roomin' house with a bunch of drinkers an' fighters."

"I am all right here. I want to stay."

"Mind if I sleep here tonight, boy? I'm surely tuckered." He looked at me again. "You ain't scared they'll come back?"

"They think I am dead."

"Well, you ain't. No tellin' how long before they find out." He paused again. "You seen anything of that there Tahquitz?"

"No."

Peter stoked his pipe with tobacco, waiting for the water to boil. "Any of that bunch get inside? I mean those folks who killed your pa?"

"No. They killed him, took me, and rode away. They didn't even look inside."

Peter's chuckle was not amused. It was a dry chuckle concerned with something in his mind. "Give 'em a shock if they had," he said.

He did not say anything more, and I did not know what he meant. Sometimes I had a feeling Peter knew more than anyone guessed.

Gesturing at the books, he asked, "Can you read them? I reckon you're a mite young."

"I can read them. Some words I do not know, but if I think, I can find their meanings. Papa and Mama started teaching me when I was three. We traveled a lot and I was with them all the time."

"Well, I brought you some more. I don't know what they are, but a man in town who reads a lot, he said they were good."

He pulled off his boots and sat on Papa's bed looking at me. "Got to get you an eddication. Your pa had it. He knew everything, I reckon. Me, I never had no schoolin' to speak of. I can read a mite, an' I can cipher, sign my name, and the like.

"Read them books, boy. Learn something. I got no eddication, and all I can do is work for the other fellow. I prospect a mite, trap a little fur. It ain't much more than a livin', son, so you get you an eddication."

He dumped some coffee into the pot. "I better find that Nesselrode woman. She will know what to do."

"I want to stay here. I like it."

He smoked and we drank coffee and after a while he pulled on his boots again and went out to the horse and took off its saddle and turned it into the corral. He brought the saddle inside, then the sacks of supplies.

"There's enough here to last you awhile if you use care. You know how to make flapjacks, boy? No? Well, that's one thing I can teach you! Nobody makes no better flapjacks than I do, and I'm a fair hand with bakin'-powder biscuits, too."

He sat staring at the floor. Finally he said, "That there's work! I mean, he who done it was a lovin' man. He cared about what he did."

He glanced around uneasily. "Kinda spooky place, ain't it, boy? I mean, with that Tahquitz an' all. I never set much store by such things, Injun things, but some of them knew a whole lot we'll never know. Good people, too, although I never knowed 'em like your pa did.

"That black bird, now? Here in the floor? See those re
d
eyes? Those are garnets, boy. Some folks think they're rubies, but no such thing. Garnets. Out in the desert off to the north, there's a crater. Injuns call it Pisgah or some such thing. There's garnets there, boy. I found some." He chuckled. "I showed 'em one time to a man in a saloon, he grabbed at 'em, studied them a mite, and then, makin' like he didn't care, he offered me a price for them. "Now, I could see right through him. He figured they were rubies and I was too dumb to know the difference. He offered me a small price for them and I took them up and held 'em in my hand and told him no way.

"They were pretty red stones, and I was going to give them to a woman I knew. Make nice beads, I told him. By that time he was sweatin'. He wanted them stones so bad he could taste it.

"I told him my woman would surely like them. I said, 'Why, I wouldn't part with ary one o' them for less than a hundred dollars!' You know somethin', boy? He jumped at it. That's what he did. He fairly jumped at it. He gave me a hundred dollars apiece for three of them!

"Now, I won't rightly say I did the honest thing, but I never told him they was rubies. I never told him different. Was I, a plumb ignorant or desert rat, s'posed to know a ruby when I seen it?

"He figured he was cheatin' me, and I taken his money. Fact is, I get myself a fresh grubstake ever' now and again, just that way. I go into a saloon or somewhere, maybe an eatin' joint where there's newcomers, and I take out those garnets and study them. Soon or late, somebody wants to buy 'em.