Dust Devil (6 page)

Her
cheeks were flushed from the cold and excitement, and she welcomed the warmth of the press of people who were dressed in their best clothes. Beneath a white velvet cape she wore her best—a taffeta gown of apple green, the basque of which was almost too small for her now.

Stephen moved onto the altar’s dais and wished everyone a merry Christmas in Spanish, telling them that as a gift from the Castle each family was to receive a calf and lamb. After the applause and cheering had subsided, he pulled
her to his side. From his brocaded waistcoat pocket he produced an object wrapped in white paper.

"For
La Patrona
,” he said. "Open it.”

"Oh!”
she breathed, when she saw the exquisite piece of jewelry. The soft lines of silver encompassed four perfect turquoise stones.

"I wanted to have a sidesaddle made for you,” Stephen said, "but Lario suggested you might be preferring the bracelet.”

"Thank you, Stephen,” she said, but her gaze slid past him to Lario, who stood in the room’s far comer.

“
You mentioned having a gift for me?” Stephen prompted after she shyly kissed him on the cheek and the crowd once again erupted in cheers.

"Aye,” she said hesitantly. "But not now. Not before—” Her gaze flickered to the multitude of faces—Miguel, Consuela, Pedro, all the villagers she was coming to know.

"But now be the perfect time,” Stephen said. "It emphasizes the solidarity of Cambria and its traditions.”

Trapped,
her glance switched from Stephen to the expectant faces around them. "I — we — are to have a child early next summer.”

CHAPTER 8

As Rosemary went about her daily duties, she often marveled that Stephen could be so certain she carried a son. She hoped the child would bring them even closer, that she would come to better understand the man she married. But although Stephen was overjoyed about the coming child and almost overly solicitous about her health, checking to see that she ate properly and felt well, Rosemary saw no more of him than before. In fact, less; for he came no more to her bed at night.

And
she winced guiltily when she realized she was relieved. Then, of course, as her flat stomach gradually rounded, she was glad Stephen did not see her misshapen ugliness.

"You must get more exercise, Rosemary,” he said one morning at breakfast. "You look pale.”

She set down her cup of chocolate. She sorely missed English tea and thought she would never acquire a taste for the bitter coffee. "The weather has been so cold lately.”

"I’ll have Lario hitch up the buckboard and take you for a ride. A little sun will do you good.”

"I’d really rather not,” she protested. "There’s so much to —”

"Nonsense!” Stephen said, rising. "We’ve plenty of help here. Our first concern be the baby’s health. Besides, spring has come to the prairie. You’ll enjoy the ride.”

Instantly the newest serving girl, the Arapaho child Chela, appeared with Stephen’s hat. "It’s sorry I am you will be missing the constitutional convention, dear. But I should return from Santa Fe as soon as we’ve a delegate elected—within a fortnight I should say.” He kissed her on the cheek and took his hat from Chela, tweaking the cherubic Indian girl on the chin.

Desolately Rosemary looked after Stephen’s back. She desperately wanted to go with him. It had been so long, since Christmas, that she had talked with anyone other than to exchange a few pleasantries with the villagers who, because of their devotion to her, were terribly shy in her presence.

By now Rita would have had her baby, and Rosemary could only hope that Stephen would bring her back some word about the Sanchez household. She sighed and rose from her untouched food. She would have to consign herself to spending the next few days knitting clothing for the baby, due now in less than three months.

She stationed herself in the rocking chair before her office window. To her it was the most beautiful view from the Castle. The window faced the southwest, taking in the village below with the undulating emerald prairie that stretched out beyond the Pecos’s bend. To the far west, below the ho
rny backbone of the mountains, the firs and spruces were putting on their blue-green coats.

But it was the ugly cottonwood tree at the edge of the Castle’s knoll that always snapped up
her attention. Other than the shrubby tamarisks and poplars that marked the Pecos’s course it was the only tree for mile upon mile. Old and twisted, its main trunk burnt by lightning, it was nevertheless magnificent. Its budding branches could offer shade to a hundred people or more. There was something about its strength that attracted her so that in the previous summer’s hotter days she often had sought out its shade to read.

It was nearly mid
-afternoon, when the spring sunshine flooded her office, that a girl came to tell her that Lario waited outside with the buckboard to take her for a ride. Twice she dropped a stitch while trying to decide whether to go. Lario was only following orders, but she knew, big as she was, she would feel more awkward than ever with him. Finally she jammed her needles away. She had to get outside.

Despite the cool temperature, the sunshine felt warm, and
she stood on the veranda steps and tilted her face up to receive the sun’s full radiance.  She felt him watching her from the wagon.  She seemed to have developed an unnatural instinct about him. "Where should you like to go,
Senora
?”

She heard the deliberately provocative edge to his voice.  Turning her gaze on him, she
frowned, refusing to quail. His gaze held a smoky darkness.  She jerked her woolen shawl about her. "Where is there to go?” Her gaze swept the horizon. As far as the eye could see, mountains and prairie and desert hemmed in her narrow world. "Somewhere,” she muttered. "Anywhere!”

Hi
s hand cupped her elbow as he helped her into the wagon, and her breath caught as if she had been pricked by a needle. His unsettling eyes scanned her face, and she knew he was searching for the habitual look of dislike she could not help but wear when around him.

She allowed her mouth to form a slight smile to mitigate
her ill-at-ease feelings and pulled her shawl tighter about her to shield her greatly rounded stomach. "I must be out of breath.”

"An hour southwest is a
pueblo
— where my family lives,” He said, flicking the reins. "Would you like to visit it?”

That was the last thing she wanted to do. But wasn’t that what one was supposed to do when thrown by a horse
— get back on again? "That will be fine,” she replied primly, her chin held high, her back stiff.

She sensed that Lario could not help but be aware of her fear, which in her mind weakened her position from the outset and challenged her authority as mistress of Cambria, so her next comment was tinged with spite. "I had no idea there were Indian villages on Stephen’s land.”

A faint smile touched his lips, and she demanded, "What is so amusing?”

"My people
— the
Dine’e
— would call this their land,
Senora
.”

"But Stephen told me the land grant originally belonged to the DeVega family.”

"The Spanish and Mexican governments have been very free about giving away what is not theirs to give.”

"Oh?”
her brows arched. "I suppose the land belongs to your people by right of first possession?”

Hi
s countenance was devoid of mockery. "I think that is how the Anglo law could call it.”

She
stole a glance at the Navajo and saw the finely carved lips curve in a cold smile, and she hurried to fill the awkward silence. "Then Stephen bought the land from the DeVegas?”

He fully
looked at the woman beside him for the first time since they left the Castle,. "That is what your husband has told you?”

She was smote by his soul-seducing beauty. 
"We have not talked about it that much,” she said defensively.

He
changed the subject. "I see you wear the bracelet.”

Unconsciously
her fingers slipped up to touch the silver band at her wrist. "’Tis a lovely piece of work.”

"My grandfather works in the silver, and he taught me. You will meet him today. And my mother and sister. My brothers are higher up in the greener pastures watching our sheep.”

The buckboard followed the green-gold thread of cottonwood trees that traced the river’s course southward toward Texas and Old Mexico, until the green-gold along the banks shaded off into olive and silver and the cottonwoods shrank to juniper, rabbit brush, and wild pumpkin on a floor of bleached sand.

Then, striking westward,
the buckboard left the life-giving Pecos River for the high desert, an ever-changing land of shifting sand dunes where there was nothing. No sign of habitation or life. Suddenly it seemed they were rimmed in by the foothills of the Pedernales Mountains. Here and there the candlebush waved its flaming tapers and cholla cactus glowed silver with new growth. Rabbits scurried under the chaparral from the wagon’s approach, and prairie dogs crossed their arms as if they were praying. To the far north a spring shower blew across the sky like a torn curtain.

Immediately before
her on a rocky mesa was a pueblo of not more than a dozen hogans which looked like part of the rock. They were dome-shaped structures made of saplings plastered with sand-baked clay. In a corn field two young women were hoeing. They wore long full calico skirts that covered the top of their knee-high laced moccasins and full velveteen shirts outside their skirts, their waists hugged by brightly colored woven belts.

At the approach of the buckboard the two women stopped and looked up. The taller one dropped her hoe and ran toward the wagon. "Lario!”

"My sister, Toysei,” Lario said.

The second girl followed shyly at a distance. The two young women halted now and guardedly moved closer as their doe¬eyed gazes took in the woman with skin as creamy pale as the white flowering Spanish bayonet and hair the color of autumn’s aspen leaves
— neither red nor brown but somewhere in between.

"Adala, a neighbor,” Lario said, introducing the second young woman.
“
Es Senora
Rhodes,” he told the girl as he climbed out of the wagon.

Adala greeted
her with the Navajo two-toned, "
Ahalani
,” but Lario’s sister stiffened and spat something else in Navajo. Rosemary could not understand his reply but knew it to be a command. The young woman stalked off toward the hogan.

He took her arm, and again the weakness swept through her. Pregnancy nerves, she told h
erself. "Come inside.  My mother will have cool water for you.”

Her
heels dug in, and she held back as visions of a torch-lit night in Meerut, India, zigzagged through her mind like a bolt of lightning.

He
turned to face her. "You are afraid. Why?”

What to tell him
— that another race of people massacred her family and she was therefore afraid of all swarthy-skinned people? How silly it sounded. A tight, tremulous smile curved her lips. "Only a little—one hears about how savage the Indian is.”

"And you think we shall scalp you?”
His laugh was short. "A Navajo mother tells her children if they are not good the white man will steal them in the night and sell them for slaves.”

Her
lashes dropped to hide the shame in her eyes; for the children in her own house were slaves, though the New Mexicans called it by a euphemism — debt peonage. It came under the statutory law dignified with the title of "Law regulating contracts between masters and servants.” But what it was actually was that parents driven into a "state of slavery” because they could not support themselves had the right to bind their children out as peons, thus becoming slaves for life.

He
turned away, and she followed him through a spacious yard enclosed with a palisade of mesquite stakes. Nearby stood a clumsy Mexican cart with dislike solid wooden wheels. Inside the hogan the walls were smoothly whitewashed. A rug of gray jerga lay on the packed earth floor.

As
her eyes focused, she saw in one corner a woman weaving on an upright loom. The woman, Lario’s mother — War Blanket —nodded solemnly at the introduction he made in the Navajo tongue. She was an older version of Toysei, only the hair braided about the willow hoops at her ears was gray rather than a lustrous black.

In the next moment
Rosemary perceived the old man sitting on the floor. To her he looked terribly old. His skin was a leather layer of wrinkles, his eyes hooded; yet there was an agelessness about him. Maspha did not acknowledge her presence but quickly destroyed the painting he had created with the different colored layers of powdered rock on dirt.

"It is a curing ceremony for someone my grandfather knows is ill,” Lario said. "But no outsider may watch.”

The old man looked up then, and she was struck by the intensity of his gaze. He said something, and Lario frowned. "What is it?” she asked.