Afterlands (44 page)

But that would be to leave a vital work unaccomplished, Mr Tyson! However, I would certainly spare and protect any of those villagers who choose to surrender.

Kruger knows they won’t surrender. Those mastering, hypnotic eyes continue to hold his, and as the gun gets heavier in his slackening hand, he feels an odd visceral softening, a sort of voluptuous temptation to yield to his conqueror—this scholar of human weakness, a man bold and assured enough to give over his own weapon. The most primitive seduction. A bead of sweat stings down into Kruger’s eye. He tightens his grip on the pistol.

In fact, Mr Tyson, whatever should happen, I shall try to ensure that something does survive of the Sina people. I perceive that this matters to you a good deal. Victors do write the histories, and this confronts them with the obligation to record and preserve as much as possible.

Something distracts Luz. His mesmerist eyes release Kruger’s. His brow and lips pucker in thought, just slightly, though on his impassive face the effect is dramatic. With the bemused look of someone ambushed by a fascinating paradox, he says, The Sina tongue, for example—it cannot and will not be extinguished immediately. I myself have learned much of it, you see. In fact, should events transpire as they may have to—these Sina being so cursed with courage—then I myself might be the final living speaker of the Sina tongue!

Kruger’s finger jerks, the hammer snaps. Nothing happens. Luz blinks—a microscopic show of surprise, or something—but he doesn’t move. A slow smile dawns across his face. He has hedged his bets, the scholar not quite so sure of his experiment as he claimed. This surprises Kruger; as his own action has. Casually Luz reaches and grips the barrel of the gun. He’s still smiling, the smile of a man tickled by the spirited anger of some harmless inferior. A woman, a small child. Kruger lets go of the gun and bends and swipes up the bucket by its hinged handle and swings it up and over his shoulder and down. Centrifugal pressure retains most of the water, the weight. The bucket smashes onto Luz’s head, cracks apart, water sloshing, slats and the tin cup and little knife and now the revolver clattering to the floor. In the manner of a folding chair Luz collapses neatly. On the floor he sits drenched, his scabbard splayed, blood pooling in the hideous dent in his hair. His glasses have popped off, his pensive blue eyes exposed. He holds up a hand, the index finger raised. Brow knitted, lips parted, he seems to have one further point to make, but can’t formulate the words. There’s something he means to object to, or rebut. His torso topples straight back and his head hits the floor with a decisive clunk.

Glancing at the door Kruger kneels, grabs the revolver, pops out the cylinder, leans toward Luz’s body hoping to find bullets. Then he sees: the cylinder is not quite empty. There’s a single bullet. The Padre, it seems, had a vice after all. The door swings inward. It’s Ortiz, his mouth forming a little O of shock under the moustache. As the man gropes at his holster Kruger snaps the cylinder closed and cocks the pistol, aims, squeezes. Another click. Ortiz fumbling to cock his own weapon. The two men fumbling a few feet apart. Kruger fans the hammer, the gun fires and Ortiz pitches backward into the doorframe, the astonished look dying on his face. Something on the back of his uniform or belt must be snagged on a hinge-head; he’s still on his feet, his torso and head slumping forward and hanging, a demobilized marionette. Kruger ducks through the canvas partition into Luz’s bedquarters, where the mannequin sporting Luz’s tunic and hat, pathetic now, confronts him. He grabs the hat and returns through the partition and crosses the pooling floor of the house. With a flat, vacant feeling, he steps around Ortiz’s limp torso and polished head, outside. The sentries gawp at him, hands slack on their rifles. Others are approaching. Kruger holds up Luz’s hat like a scalp.

_¡
Señor!
says one of the child sentries,
¿Es usted el capitán nuevo?

Listen to me. The
lanceros
are all asleep. Now is the time for you to arrest and disarm them.

The sentry looks shocked and delighted. The Padre is dead?

Yes.

Then you are our
capitán!

No.

¿El yanqui es el capitán nuevo!
another soldier whispers. A crowd is quickly gathering, chattering as word moves among them. Someone says, We must arrest the
lanceros
or else kill them! So orders our
capitán!

I am not your
capitán
. Go now, disarm them. Your war with the Sinas is over. I’ll join you after I take some water to the church—you there, help me. Go, before some of them wake!

_¡
Viva el capitán nuevo!
chants a soldier, turning and holding his rifle high.

On the edge of Luz’s ruined and smouldering camp in early dawn he works beside the American miner, helping the Sinas and the peon soldiers to dig a mass grave. The Sinas and the peons—Mateo not among them—work in separate groups, communicating little. At least forty of the
lanceros
were murdered last night on their cots, or as they emerged from their billets, before the rest of them managed to form up and ride out through the broken wall and away to the south. The peons had fired after them into the dark until the last sounds of the galloping had died out.

The chilly air is pervaded with drifting odours of cordite, woodsmoke, the kiln smells of scorched adobe, the stink of shit and incipient decay. The gravediggers’ hurry is not out of fear of detection, but fear of the flesh-eating sun, soon to commence its daily onslaught. Toward a widening wound in the desert the peons drag the limp, gashed bodies of the
lanceros
by the toes and tinkling spurs of their boots, while village women, keening and shrieking, dart in to kick at the dead, lash at them with cottonwood switches, even stab and hack with knives and captured sabres. No blood flows from these cuts. How pale and null the dead faces, young now in repose, disarmed and dismounted, appear in the soft gloom.

Luz’s face is not among them. In the middle of the plain between the camp and the village a large pyre still smokes, fumes rising plumb into a sky spiralling with soundless vultures, buzzards, and crows. In part because of his mastery of their difficult tongue, the Sinas have long considered Luz a sort of devil whom the weight of a grave mound would never be sufficient to confine, even with stones heaped on top, as is customary with enemies. So they’ve burnt him. Beyond the pyre, by the wreckage of the village wall, torches flit slowly like bog candles as huddled clumps of women shuffle over the battlefield, searching; Jacinta and Quamhac Maria will be among them, though Kruger has explained to them that Mateo was too ill to have been in the battle. In the dark, after the Sinas had spilled out of the church and while the damaged bell was pealing the strange victory, Kruger had accompanied them on a search among the dead of the village and of Luz’s camp—where Kruger found his saddlebags, but nothing else—Jacinta herself kicking and slashing at the dead bodies once she was certain of who they were not.

Seems pretty odd, don’t it, the miner says in a subdued voice as he kneels by the water bucket that he and Kruger have almost emptied. Helping all these dark folks, I mean, bury all these white ones. His little pink eyes seem troubled and evasive, as if he fears that Kruger may intend to report him to somebody. He slurps from a dented tin cup, belches. He’s bald with a peeling scalp. His red beard hides a mouth that’s usually so silent and unmoving, you could wonder if he even has one.

Ain’t that I shovelled dirt over no lack of white faces in my life. Whiter than these ones, mostly. I was with Iron Ben McCulloch in the Texas Infantry, ’63 to the end. Course by then we’d no darkies with us, lending a hand.

He frowns and starts digging again. Dirt is seamed into the wrinkles of his fat, sunburnt neck.

Why did you come down to help? Kruger asks.

Seemed right to do. I like these Indians all right. Been dealing with them going on eight years. Trading, visiting Jacinta back when. We all love Jacinta. Mostly though I hate that tax—the tax them Mexers were trying to take out of us. I come down here to get away from governments. (He says it like “gumm’nts.”) Why did you come to fight?

I didn’t, Kruger says honestly.

A blood-orange sun soars up out of the
páramo
, the grave is fed and tons of rock piled preventively on top, and Kruger wanders off, in a trance of exhaustion, to find Jacinta. On the edge of the camp he sees a familiar auburn shape: Perra, half-hidden behind the solid wheel of a
carreta
, tubing her body like a stinging wasp and trembling as she tries to move her old bowels. Kruger approaches. She gazes toward him with moping, martyred eyes, not seeming to know him at all. As she finally finishes, recognition flattens her ears and lifts up her tail, she gives two perfunctory digs at the earth with her hind paws and waddles swiftly toward him, whimpering.

Near another trench being filled with peons, he and the dog find Jacinta, her daughter and son-in-law and other villagers bunched around a foreshortened, purple-faced man who wears nothing but Sina field pyjamas cut off at the knee. He has the medieval bowl of hair that older Sina men favour and his enormous oar-blade feet are chalky with dust, channelled with sweat. As the old man with the useless derringer questions him, he nods and tries to respond, winded, while the others in low tones gravely coax him. Jacinta catches sight of Kruger and pushes toward him through the crowd, her eyes reaching. As she gets free, she seems set to embrace him, but stops short, peering skyward and crossing herself. Formally and softly she says, Mateo must be alive, and again she crosses herself, and Kruger understands—she has to mute her joy for fear of heaven’s overhearing (heaven too has its spies), and for fear of provoking the envy of those whose sons are unquestionably dead.

This man has seen Mateo, then?

We think so, yes! He ran to us, this man, from the hamlet far downriver. Among the
lanceros
who fled past in the night were some sergeants, and some peons too, in white, riding two to a horse. He thinks five or six such pairs. One of these men was being held on by his fellow, as if he were ill, though not too ill—still awake. And Mateo is not here. Nowhere.

It must be him, Kruger says hopefully.

The
lanceros
must have captured them, and forced him to go along!

Si, claro
.

And the others here, they believe the same.

_¡
Si, si!

But clearly she herself does not really believe. Not that he left against his will. A crisis of faith made visible: a gradual dimming, a subsiding of features momentarily tautened by hope. She won’t look away from Kruger—though normally Sinas, even Jacinta, don’t stare for long—because Kruger can still abet her in upholding this wishful fiction. There’s no reason that
lanceros
fleeing for their lives would corral a few sergeants and peons and force them to join them—and especially an
indio
who was too ill to ride properly. The boy must have gone willingly. He’s a zealot, a convert, as Jacinta herself knows, to Luz’s kind of progress.

All the same, he’s alive.

Behind them a commotion as the dwarfish messenger collapses among the villagers, who press around him cooing, the women fanning him with their scarves, the old man offering water from his gourd, a puff from his calumet. The old man points at the shade under a stretch of undamaged wall and the Sinas lift and hurry the runner there, at least twenty of them pitching in with near-comic, crowding awkwardness. The old man fits the stem of his calumet between the runner’s lips and implores him to puff. The man moans and grimaces with all this help.

Kruger and Perra have been sleeping in the cottonwood grove for several weeks, Kruger sleeping longer and harder than he has in months. He walks down to the grove with Perra each evening after spending long, mostly silent days apprenticed to Jacinta’s son-in-law, helping him to make adobe bricks—dirt, water, and straw given form in pinewood moulds and sun-dried among the ruins or along the edges of the plaza. Purificación is being rebuilt. After much public debate the Sinas have decided to rebuild the village here, on its ancient site, with an eight-foot-high defensive wall on its open side, rather than moving it far up into the cold sierra. Kruger thinks this is probably a mistake; Luz may be dead and his power broken, but the railroad and the
caudillo
Diaz remain, and when word of an
indio
victory gets out, they will surely respond. But the villagers know this perfectly well, and the decision is not Kruger’s to influence. An honorary citizen is still an outsider. He can only work to fashion stronger bricks for the wall. And though briefly tempted to remain, as Jacinta has urged him, he knows he will be continuing northward once the work is done.