Centennial (144 page)

A judgment worthy of Solomon was handed down: “Skull One is undoubtedly that of Pancho Villa, the mature man. But Skull Two, somewhat smaller, is also his, at the age of sixteen.”

After the disastrous sale of his cattle in Chicago, Beeley Garrett had put his foot down: “Your mother and I have no intention of spending another winter in this Godforsaken climate. Come October, well go to Florida for good, but before we go, we do wish you’d get things straightened out with Ruth.”

“They’re all right,” his son said evasively.

“Don’t be a damned fool, Henry. What you and Ruth have can barely be called a marriage.”

“It’ll work out,” Henry insisted. On this topic he was reticent, and he was much relieved when his parents actually packed their car.

For some years he had been making major decisions regarding the ranch, and under his tutelage Venneford bulls had strengthened their reputation as the blue-ribbon bulls of the west. Purists noted that each generation was a fraction of an inch shorter than the preceding, and they suspected that the dwarfism which Jim Lloyd had feared was operating, but Venneford publicity masked this deficiency, and the great Crown Vee bulls with their ponderous stride and drooping horns continued to bring top price at the auctions.

When Beeley and Pale Star climbed into their Cadillac for the long drive south, Ruth was not present to bid them goodbye. She was feeling poorly, and Beeley said, “I’ll give you two years, Henry. Get your marriage squared away or I’ll have to take the ranch back. It’s too valuable to let you ruin it.”

When his parents were gone, Henry had ample time to survey his situation, and the more he considered Ruth and her peculiar behavior, the more worried he became. Shortly after their marriage she had begun to act strangely, and before long she was another of those nervous, self-condemning, withdrawn women who haunted western ranches.

Beeley had said of her, “She ought to leave Venneford and live out there on the drylands for a year. Let her see what some women endure without complaining.”

“A week in one of those tipis would drive her truly crazy,” Pale Star had said. She considered her daughter-in-law’s behavior disgraceful. “You’ve been very patient with her,” she had told Henry. “Don’t let her ruin your life.”

Now, alone, Henry wondered if he had in some way failed Ruth when her parents were killed in the plane crash. If so, there were no amends he could make. When he considered his wife’s withdrawal, her complaining, her inability to pursue any interest, and especially her lack of affection toward either him or their children, he was bewildered.

It was in this mood that he started making regular halts at La Cantina on his way home from Centennial. In fact, he was finding much ranch business to do in town, and often instead of sending one of the cowboys to fetch a bucket of red paint to touch up the barns, he would ride in himself, then park his Dodge at La Cantina while he had a cold drink.

He never indicated that it was Soledad Marquez that he was stopping by to see, but when he entered the smoky, noisy room he always cast one swift, encompassing glance to ascertain the situation. If she was present, he sat and stared at her. If she was not there, the men could see that his shoulders sagged a little.

She had known, of course, from the first moment, that he was attracted to her, and this gave her enormous satisfaction. It was like the time when the family spent the winter in Denver and a singer up from Old Mexico had taken her on his knee and sung to her. It had signified nothing, really, yet she treasured the remembrance.

She knew that Henry Garrett was married, had children and was a Protestant, so there could be nothing in this for her. She also knew that her brother Triunfador watched her closely and had openly threatened to send her back to Mexico if she gave the gringo any encouragement. But in spite of these impediments she caught herself listening for the sound of the Dodge coming from Venneford as it carried Garrett into town on one or another of his missions.

Without betraying emotion, she listened as the car sped south, knowing that on its return it would not go by so swiftly, but would halt. Smiling to herself, she would clean the tables or make some refritos, and after a while she would retreat to her room, in the new section of the building, where she would comb her hair and tend her ribbons.

For half a year this desultory exchange continued; only once had the two touched hands, that day when he started to change records at the machine and she had reached for the needle. The effect had been electrifying, like the touch of disparate wires in the box which ignites the distant explosion.

One surprisingly warm day in January 1936 Henry drove into town, and when she heard the reassuring signal of his car, Soledad reacted in a new way. When he returned later and stopped for a drink, his first swift glance told him that she was not there. He drank his Coke, listened to the “Ballad of Pancho Villa,” whose words he was beginning to know, and waited till the Mexicans threw General Pershing out. Disappointed at Soledad’s absence, he climbed back into his car and drove north.

He had gone only a short distance when he saw Soledad standing boldly beside the road. Braking to a stop, he clicked open the door and she jumped in. With one wild sweep of her arms she embraced him, and whispered, “Over there. Down the road.”

They drove westward along a trail that led to a broken dam which had once impounded the waters of Beaver Creek. When the car stopped, facing a swamp-like area crowded with birds, she threw her arms about him again and kissed him passionately. They sat there a long time, indulging their hopeless affection for each other and watching the red-winged blackbirds as they alighted deftly on the tips of long-dead rushes. They spoke of conditions as they were, without magnification or vain hope, and they acknowledged how dangerous a game they had entered into.

“My brother might kill you,” she said. They are required to do that in Mexico, you know.”

“I’m not afraid of your brother,” he said. And then came the question which so tantalizes men in love with girls they cannot marry: “How is it you’re not already married?”

“I’ve been waiting,” she said, offering no further explanation.

They contrived to meet in strange places, and once when Ruth Mercy Garrett was in Denver, Henry actually spirited Soledad into the Venneford castle, where in one of the towers they pretended no longer. In a flood of passion they undressed and lay on an ancient buffalo robe brought there by Oliver Seccombe.

They made love for two hours, and when they crept out of the castle, praying that no one had seen them, their lives were tangled and lost. Now, when Garrett entered the cantina, he made no attempt to hide his savage disappointment if she was not there. They drifted into playing certain records, particularly “Serian las Dos,” about the girls who no longer were content to eat tortillas.

In this accidental manner Henry Garrett became the first Anglo in Centennial to discover that the Mexicans had their own sweet, stable patterns of society, and that in some strange way they tended to find a happiness with nature that the Anglos missed. There were not many men in the region as totally stable as Triunfador Marquez, not many young women who vibrated to the whole of life the way his sister Soledad did. Off to a wretched corner by themselves, living in hovels, these quiet people arranged a world that gave them dignity and a kind of rude repose. In places like Denver, Santa Fe, San Antonio and Centennial they evolved a placid, self-sustaining pattern of life, creating values of peace and joy which in years to come the Anglos would seek and not find.

A marvelous symbiosis of English and Spanish culture might have evolved in these decades if it had been encouraged or even permitted to flourish, but there was almost no Anglo who could even comprehend that such a thing was possible, so the two races lived apart in deepening suspicion.

Still rejected by white Catholics, the Mexicans turned inevitably to exotic religions, and Henry Garrett would never forget the wintry Sunday afternoon when the Children of God in the Mountains outraged the honest citizens of Centennial by appearing with a brass band in the public square to conduct religious worship.

Soledad Marquez was there in a long white dress decorated with cheap red roses purchased from the J. C. Penney store. She was exquisite, there was no other word for it, Henry thought, a slim vision of a strange way of life. She marched arm in arm with two other girls almost as pretty as she, and they were followed by other trios of men and women, and as they swirled their way in a great circle around the square, the band played and they chanted the hymn that best summarized their hopes: “Con Cristo en el Mundo Otra Vez.”

The hymn had a compelling rhythm and many verses, all telling of how life would be when Christ returned to the earth the next time:

“
There will be justice then,

And bread for all.

And I shall have a new dress,

And my sister shall have shoes.
”

It would be such a different world when Jesus came back and looked at the injustices under which his children labored. Then his brown-skinned Mexicans would stand free of their oppressors, and there was even a crude verse about the beet workers:

“
With Ch
rist in the world a second time

There
will be no short-handled hoes,

There wil
l be no telephone in the night,

‘
Send G
ó
mez back and steal his pay.
’
”

Fortunately, the Anglos who watched the rhythmic procession did not understand the words, but they nevertheless sent for the sheriff, and he watched for just long enough to convince any sensible man that if these Mexicans kept this up much longer, there was bound to be trouble.

“All right, all right!” he said amiably as he moved down the line, pulling people away. “We don’t conduct religious services in the street in this town. That’s what we have churches for.”

He wanted no trouble, certainly not on a Sunday, and he did nothing to cause any. He merely tugged and pulled at the marchers, breaking up their pattern while three of his men hustled the band onto a truck.

He had started in the middle of the procession and now the leaders were coming past him. “You there,” be called as he grabbed at the girl on Soledad’s right. “You nuts stop this.”

He yanked the girl away, and this left Soledad alone, facing Henry Garrett. To the established rhythm of the hymn she sang:

“
With Je
sus in the world a second time,

Oh, things will be so different!
”

He never saw her again. That night her brother bundled her into a car and sent her out of Colorado.

When Garrett stopped at the cantina, looking for her, Triunfador told him bluntly, “You’d better not come in here any more, Mr. Garrett. This is for Mexicans.”

“Where’s Soledad?”

“It was you who forced her to leave.”

“Where ... is ... she?”

“Mr. Garrett, go home to your wife. She’s crazy. But she’s an Anglo.”

“I love your sister.”

“Well, she’s gone. And what can we do about it, either of us?”

January 1936 was a time of great excitement for Timmy Grebe. His steer Rodeo had filled out handsomely and both he and Mr. Bellamy, who was coaching him, felt that the beautiful big Hereford might even have a chance to win top prize among the steers at the Denver show.

“It would mean a great deal to your parents, I needn’t tell you,” Mr. Bellamy said as he helped Timmy groom the steer. “The big restaurants in Denver like the publicity. They buy the prize steers and pay over a hundred dollars for them. To get their names in the papers ... so that cattlemen will eat at their table, knowing the steaks will be good.”

Better than Mr. Bellamy, Timmy Grebe appreciated what the prize money would mean to his family. There never had been a year worse than this one. The whole world had gone wrong, Timmy thought, and he listened with dismay whenever his family gathered to discuss what might be done.

For his father he felt the deep shame that only a son could when he watched a man he loved unable to do anything right. “The banks certainly won’t lend us money,” Earl said, “not after that sale.” They were grateful to Calendar, a man they scarcely knew, for having given them a second chance. “But we still have no money to operate,” Grebe said to his family. “What in decency can we do?”

For his mother Timmy felt only a deep burning compassion. It caught at his guts to see her working so hard, to see her gaunt thinness and the lack of joy in her deep-sunk eyes. Oh, dearest God, he prayed each night. Let me win so that I can give her the money.

Once he left his bed around two in the morning and went to his mother, and he lay beside her for some time, telling her that he was going to do something for her, but he felt her trembling the way she used to do, and he crept back to his own bed bewildered, for she had said not a word to him.

The week before the Denver show he cut school altogether and stayed at home, polishing the hoofs of his steer, grooming him and trimming his hair. The animal looked so handsome, his white face gleaming against his red body, that on the last afternoon Timmy grabbed him around the neck and whispered, “Last year I didn’t do much, but I sure wasn’t scared. You aren’t scared, are you?” Rodeo chomped away, his big bland face and wide eyes indicating that he had never known fear.