Afterlands (41 page)

The worst fighting is at the smoking gap in the wall, flashes of bayonets and whetted farm tools, the hoarse roaring of combatants. The battle may soon end—the battle outside him. If he means to rob a distracted Luz, now would be the time. He stays where he is. He tries to make out certain faces, figures. Here and there soldiers are trying to clamber over the wall but they are thrown back, clubbed with shovels, shot by defenders kneeling on the flat roofs of houses. Most of the attackers, herded on by their sergeants, funnel in toward the gap. More shells whine in and pummel down behind the Sina wall, then another hits close behind the gap and for a moment smoke curtains everything. It clears on a scene: some attackers milling forward, others trying to recoil, like a civilian mob being fired on in a riot. A sergeant aims his pistol into a slew of fleeing men but they run him down, infected with panic and the spirit of retreat. Within a minute the whole army is in flight. Luz watches from the saddle, his body inarticulately still, though with his gloved hand he is soothing the neck of the mare.

The line of flight is straight back across the plain, the cottonwood grove remains empty. But Kruger stays in his perch. The sun’s accruing warmth is reaching him there and the soldiers at any time might sweep back down through the grove. Through the day’s rising mercury the shelling continues, while the villagers, men and women, labour to douse the fires and rebuild the wall. He strains for a glimpse of Jacinta and recognizes her repeatedly, through that semaphoric totality of posture and gesture that distinguishes someone at a distance, even years later. Then, repeatedly, he doubts it’s her. Another shell makes a direct hit on the wall and opens a new breach. Bodies, a few still moving and making pitiable sounds, clutter the ground in front of the wall. The slain in their deep, eerie siesta.

There’s curious activity on the banks upriver, around the spot where he leapt in last night.
Teniente
Ortiz is in charge of five men, who are struggling to the bottom of the bank, awkwardly rolling down a large keg. They lift and prop it on a rock and tilt it over the water. A trickle of clear fluid gleams. They seem to be taking their time, pouring very slowly; or maybe the bung is tiny. Above them on the bank stands Ortiz, smoking a cigarillo, hand on his hip, effeminate in his machismo.

Kruger lets himself down the tree, not nearly fast enough, hot now, dizzy, slipping the last few rungs and tumbling in the sand. He limps to the river and strips off his uniform, as he must, to have a hope. He stoops and drinks quickly, stopping long before he has had enough, then wades out through the shallows—the icy cold now briefly welcome. The current hooks and pulls him in and he swims hard, ahead of whatever is coming down behind him, swimming out of the grove and around the long treeless bend to where the village wall begins, a Sina with a musket standing atop the wall profiled against the sky. Jacinta’s houseboat appears ahead. It comes up fast. He grapples onto the stern deck, under the taffrail, tries to heave himself up, but he is too weak and numb. A slab-like pair of hands, red and freckled, clutch his wrists and lug him aboard. He stands on the deck naked and tottering. They look him over, a fat, bearded white man in a slouch hat and an old Sina with a whiskery undershot jaw, like some ancient river fish. The Sina aims a rusty derringer at his chest, the white man picks up a rifle. By their feet are a dozen wooden buckets—still empty.

Busco a Jacinta
, he says through clattering teeth.
I am looking for Jacinta
.

The two guards exchange a glance. The old Sina bursts out laughing.

_¡
Ah … un visitante informal!

The white man grins in his orange beard but doesn’t lower the rifle. In Spanish with a thick American twang he says, Suppose you tell us who you are.

A spy, says Kruger, with information. I am one of you.

The old Sina lends Kruger his poncho for modesty and walks him across the yard past Jacinta’s empty house, into the besieged village. Small women in bright headscarves trot past them toward the river with buckets. While keeping his pistol pressed into the small of Kruger’s back, the old man shouts affably into his ear.

Ah, the German, yes! I remember you now! There were no funerals in the month of your staying!

They pass a house crushed and gutted by a shell. Two hunched women in black weeds are splashing bucketfuls of water on the ruins, as if there were something left to salvage. Nothing remains standing but the wooden door frame.

I fear the same won’t be true this time, however, the old man says.

Jacinta’s son is with Luz’s troops, Kruger says.

Yes, this is known. He was in their front ranks today.

Was he hurt?

This way,
por favor!
the old man hollers above the nearing clang of the church bell, the whistle of another shell passing over. You are well remembered in this village. Though naturally you were known to be a spy of Presidente Diaz. We kept expecting you to return to us. I find you are much changed.

You have to believe me about the water.

We will see. Not to drink in such heat would be as bad as poison.

Then save what water you have—let the houses burn!

But, they are not your houses, Señor. What is there to fight for if all the village should burn?

They round the shaded corner of a house into the sun-dazzled plaza in front of the church. Four men bolt across their path, in the direction of the wall. Three are Sinas with long sticks, the tips scorched and sharpened, the fourth another white man, with a new-looking rifle. The men glance at Kruger, then at his Sina captor, but go on running. Kruger asks about the white men; again the old man politely yells, This way,
por favor!

A boy with a flintlock pistol swings open one of the church’s heavy doors and they pass into the cool and lamplit gloom. The sounds of the bell and the artillery are muted. Out of the dimness come voices moaning, sobbing, as if gripped by some violent religious rapture. Kruger’s eyes adjust. The windowless inner walls are of stone. Lamps, lampions, ranks of votive candles tremble in the corners and in niches. The altar and sanctuary are dark. Wooden benches have been pushed and stacked against the south wall to clear the floor of the nave where the wounded and dead are stretched under the low, unembellished dome. Among the bodies, small kneeling forms in black pray softly, in unison, and among them other women tread with candles, blankets, buckets. There’s a raw and complicated smell. Huddled at the front of the nave by the altar rail, a mob of whispering children.

Jacinta! the old man shouts hoarsely, and her name reverberates through the church. One of the nurses sets down her bucket and candle and pads over. Her bare feet are silent on the clay floor. She has greying braids and wears a spattered apron over a loose dress of some dull, coarse fabric. Kruger knows her now, although she is thinner and seems smaller, with scooped shadows under her cheekbones and eyes. The same faint down above her lip, the same endearingly small feet, although they’re untended, the nails curled, the skin like sunbaked adobe.

Qué milagro
, he says quietly, shivering.

She looks him over, frowning: a naked skeleton in a poncho. But something in her nimble, liquid eyes is not quite certain he is unfamiliar.

Is this man wounded? One of the Padre’s men?

No, Señora! Our spy has returned to us. The German …

As she stares at his face, Kruger nods once.

_¡
Por Dios!
she cries,
_¡
Kruger. Qué milagro!

He steps forward, extending both arms. She recoils lightly, takes his right hand in hers. Her hand is hot.

Have you come with the Padre’s men? she asks sternly.

I’m afraid I did—I was volunteered. Is your son … ?

You saw him? You spoke with Mateo?

He was in my platoon, they made me a leader. What happened today?

But—in your platoon? Then why is he not here with you? Why did you not bring him!

It was impossible, Jacinta. It’s difficult to explain …

She lets go his hand. You mean because he
wants
to be with the Padre.

I couldn’t be sure.

For a moment her eyes redden and well; then they dry, as if she has somehow retracted the emotion. Maybe she has learned to. Behind her somebody grunts and calls out in Sina, the sounds echoing liturgically in the dome. The whispering children fall silent.

They tell me, she says, that he was in the front ranks, but then retreated.

We must hope so! bellows the old man.

He was well when I saw him, Jacinta.

She says, You look as if you need to lie down.

She leads him to a blank spot on the floor among the wounded and lays out a serape. He can do nothing except sag to the ground. He curls shivering in his damp poncho while she and the old man confer ardently in Sina, their voices already starting to drift away from him. He catches Mateo’s name, the name Luz, his own name, then the name of the
caudillo
, Porfirio Diaz. Jacinta too may still believe that Kruger serves Diaz … Luz … Ortiz. … How a fever reduces all names and words to phonetic gibberish. In the end, if this is it, they signify no more than the unstable names and boundaries of nations. With a hollow booming the church shudders like a sepulchre in a quake, flakes of mortar tumbling slowly out of the dome as if to lid his eyes.
Don’t forget about the river
, a voice is murmuring somewhere. His own voice.
You have to believe me
. He floats up into the dome’s immense hemisphere as if into a cloud of clay, his eyes shut, feeling somebody is there. The bells and the shelling have ceased. Out of an ancient book beside the sleeping Padre’s cot, Marcus Aurelius is whispering, All life is a warfare and a journey in a strange land.

_¡
Amelia, mi amor … Mis niños … !

Are you awake, Kruger?
Krrugarr
, she says. He lifts himself onto his elbows. Jacinta is kneeling in her bloody apron, holding a candle to his face. As she leans over, the brawny Christ on her silver crucifix slips out the front of her dress and hangs.

You were asleep all day, she says.

She puts a small piece of something between his cracked lips: corn tortilla.

This is all we can spare.

I came to offer help, he whispers, and I seem to have turned you into my nurse.

This is often the way with men, I find—and she smiles a little, showing that grey front tooth half-capped with silver. But in fact, you have helped us.

You’ve not been drinking the water?

No—I told them to believe you. Then Sam on the houseboat began to pull dead
tuahmec
out of the river. But we’re out of water now, by tomorrow we’ll be desperate. Some believe we should start to use the water again now, but there’s no telling when they’ll poison it again.

Yes. Or if it stays awhile, this poison, on the bottom and the banks.

You can put these on. She hands him the neatly folded field pyjamas of a Sina man, loose trousers and a yellow tunic with an emerald sash. There’s a small hole ringed with blood on the right side just under the collar.

We think the Padre will attack the wall tonight, and we’re short of defenders. She sweeps her open hand around her, as if suddenly impatient with the dying and the dead. Can you stand? Can you aim a rifle?

He blinks slowly, nods.

One of the miners was badly hurt this morning. Better his weapon go to somebody who can use it.

She’s hollow-eyed, her breath stinks of hunger, but when he urges her to rest for a while she frowns at him, clucking her tongue.
Venga … apúrese
.

They emerge into the dusty heat of twilight. The western sky is coral over the snow peaks of the sierra, fires are burning low in the many ruins. He carries the Springfield rifle of a dying silver miner—one of several who rafted downriver last week, she says, to help the village, including the big American that he met on the houseboat. The others are Mexican. The priest, too, he stood at the wall with them, she says, when Kruger asks where he is, assuming, since the priest is invisible, that he has fled. Cut down this morning by one of the first shells, his cross brandished high.

I’d always thought of priests as siding with the authorities, Kruger says, chastened.

A faintly fetid sweetness wafts in off the plain. They join the threadbare rank of defenders at the wall. Next to them are the old man with the catfish jaw, then the American miner, a Mexican miner in a battered Stetson, and villagers variously armed or half-armed, women now as well as men. A Sina whose foot has been amputated and the stump roughly dressed leans against the wall, his face pale and tight, clutching a musket held together with rawhide thongs. Everywhere wounded men are propped up, one asleep with his bandaged head on his forearm on the wall.

Kruger says, Who’s caring for the wounded in the church, with these women all here?

The wounded are all here too. We left only the dead and the ones who will soon die. Young girls are with those ones and with the children. My daughter is there, for one.

In front of the Padre’s camp across the littered fields a long row of soldiers is forming under the flags. Above the line of the men’s sombreros, the heads of horses and the green coats and lances and guidons of the cavalry. And in the heart of that bristling mass, which pulsates dimly as the last of the day’s heat lifts out of the earth, Colonel Maclovio Luz can be distinguished by his hat.

On the wall she sets her long-dead father’s flintlock pistol and stares gape-eyed into the distance. The old man offers Kruger his pipe and though it contains only
macuche
he sucks on it greedily, far longer than he should, scorching his dry throat with the taste of burning cornfields.

The old man says loudly, You marched with the Padre, then, you camped with him?

Briefly, yes.

He is nothing like us! If you see him in a mirror, or his shadow on a tent wall, there are horns! And he coughs up hairballs! This I know to be so. Many have seen this.