Heaven Is a Long Way Off (15 page)

Coy made a sympathetic noise.

“So Rancho de las Palomas saved me. It saved my grandmother, the first Paloma. She dug the gardens with her own hands, she planted the cottonwoods by the house, she helped lay the stones of the walk from the well to the
cocina.
She nursed the land as she nursed her son and daughter. It gave to her as she gave to it.

“Women are not made to be alone, Sam. We can be in connection to a man, to children, to our whole family, we can even be mother and child to the earth herself. But we are not meant to be alone. My gardens, my orchards, my vineyard, my livestock, my workers—they saved me. Saved me for this moment, this passion that makes me alive.” She looked at him for a long moment and finally tried to shrug lightly.

He wondered exactly what she was thinking at that moment. He would have bet it was,
For a short time I have this young man, this naïve foreigner. What comes afterward, what else my life may be, I will seize this.

“Let's ride.” She kicked her sorrel mare to a lope down the dirt track, across the road, and onto the north side of her land. They galloped across tablelands, through broken gullies, up steep hills. Coy scampered alongside them eagerly—he liked to run. Finally, when they came up into the timber, she eased her mount to a walk and came gently to the ridge. In front of them, far down the mountain, lay a lovely lake among pine trees, like a drop of dew on a green leaf. They sat for long moments and gazed. It was like drinking the cold lake with their eyes.

The winter day was mild, and they sat on the rocks of the ridge and looked at the water and talked, or for long periods didn't talk. Sam knew he was enraptured.

Finally, Paloma said, “Tell me about Meadowlark.”

Sam did. He spoke slowly and considered his words, but the words came and came. How he met her in the Crow village, left on a trapping expedition saying he'd come back, and failed to keep his promise—“I got separated from the outfit, got my horse stolen, had hardly any lead for bullets. Ended up walking seven hundred miles to the nearest fort.”

“Seven hundred? Alone?”

“Yes.”

He thought for a moment. The story about the prairie fire would hold for later, and how he crawled into the buffalo carcass and got his Crow name, Joins with Buffalo.

“I went back to the village, and her parents said to bring eight horses for her. Getting the horses…” Here he paused, because this part of the story was still hard. “Getting the horses I got her brother killed, Blue Medicine Horse. Then her parents kept her away from me. But we ran off together.”

He took big breaths in and out. “After a few days they came and took her back. I thought I'd lost her for good. I left, went to rendezvous.” He waited for a beat. “She showed up there with her brother, ready to get married.”

They let that sit for a minute.

“She wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, so we joined up with a brigade going to California. First that ever did that crossing.” He stopped for a moment, and memories moved through him like hymns.

He shrugged. “She gave birth and it killed her.”

Paloma considered that. Sam looked at her and thought of her childlessness.

Suddenly she said, “Let's go!” and jumped onto her horse. She loped back the way they came, and then it turned into a race. They shouted at the horses in glee and spurred them—down grassy hillsides, across rivulets, through arroyos. Coy sprinted alongside and sometimes barked vigorously. Paloma laughed at him.

At first Paladin fell behind Paloma and her mare, but Sam could feel that she was just biding her time. Few horses ran as often or as long as Paladin, and few had as much bottom. Still, the sorrel mare had sprinting speed, and Sam wasn't sure. His thought was,
Paloma wants me to beat her, but will do her damnedest to beat me.

They roared onto the grasslands where the horses were grazing, the trappers' hundred with Paloma's, and the whole herd kicked up its heels and followed them. What a noise—Sam loved it, and it made him homesick for the buffalo plains, and the thunder of a buffalo stampede.

Suddenly Paloma turned her mare up a short, steep hill and through the underbrush into another small canyon. The herd didn't follow.
Too much work!
Sam thought happily. They crashed down a little creek, splashing themselves and whooping and hollering.

When El Camino Real came into sight, and the house beyond it, Sam slapped Paladin with his hat, and she charged. They passed Paloma the way a plummeting apple passes a drifting leaf. Sam wheeled Paladin to a skidding stop in front of the casa. When Paloma jumped from the saddle, she landed in Sam's arms. A stable hand took the reins, and Sam carried Paloma pell-mell to bed.

 

“W
HAT IS GOING
on inside my lover?” said Paloma softly. They were lying twisted in her sheets, naked, worn out by love. “I don't want your mind wandering. For this time we are together let it be with me.”

He looked at the coals in the fireplace and answered truthfully, “Guilt.”

Coy seconded the motion with a whimper.

She smiled warmly at him. “It didn't arrive until the fourth day. Not bad.”

“Don't you feel guilty?”

“I feel triumphant. And so should you.”

They looked at each other. Neither knew what to say.

“But your wife has been gone only…”

“Nine months. April to January.”

Her eyes smiled at him. “Then it's time for you to be reborn, Sam Morgan. Time to emerge back into this world of the living, the world of things that still stand in the sunlight and grow.” She gave him mocking eyes. “Things that rise from the dead, things that rise in the sheets.”

“I miss her.”

“I missed my husband for perhaps two years. He was a
pendejo,
but I missed him. Sometimes I woke up in the morning and reached for him. After a while I made myself sleep on his side of the bed, facing the edge. That stopped the reaching. Though I despised him, I expected him to be around every corner, and was always disappointed when he was missing. Always missing.”

“I loved Meadowlark.”

“You still do, the memory of her. But she's dead, Sam.”

“Are you jealous of her?”

“As well be jealous of a mote of dust floating in the air.”

She rolled over, tangled her hands in his white hair, and kissed him teasingly. “Let a woman who has walked this earth for a decade longer than you tell you this much. Life is for the living.” She kissed him again. “The living. That's us. Can you let go of death for a while?”

She rolled him over on top of her.

“Yes.”

T
HE WINTER WAS
a time of rest for the ranch, and the work was much less for everyone except Sam and Flat Dog. Every day they trained horses, and Paloma watched what was different about their technique, wanting to learn. They stood with the horse belly deep in the cold Santa Fe River until they got it to accept a saddle blanket, then a saddle, then a sitting horseman. “It is faster,” she said immediately.

She sweetened the deal. “Please train as many of my horses as possible. Good saddle horses will bring me two hundred pesos more than wild ones. So I will pay you a hundred fifty pesos each.”

They worked with a will.

Sam and Paloma, though, took some afternoons to ride her land. They camped one night by the northern lake. They rode downstream and explored the valley of the Rio Grande. They visited a pueblo of Indians down that river, and Paloma traded for some beautiful pots. “Do they steal slaves from this village?” asked Sam.

“No, these pueblo peoples, they accept the Holy Church. We Nuevos Mexicanos take slaves from the Navajos, who hold to their old religion, and the pueblo peoples help in the stealing.”

They camped along the river on the way back, and since the next day was sunny, they lounged and stayed there all day.

They also established a life beyond the ranch and beyond their absorption in each other. Every Saturday morning they rode to Santa Fe. Paloma went to confession, spent the rest of Saturday with her sister and nieces, and on Sunday morning attended mass.

Sam spent Saturday afternoon at the lodgings of Hannibal, Grumble, and Sumner, working on his reading. He would recite the words out loud, and one of his mentors would offer corrections. Sam began to go from fumbling, word-by-word reading to making words into sentences that added up to something.

At first Sumner just listened with a half smile. Then he began to help Sam as well. Unlike Sam, the ex-slave had learned to read and write, and could do it very well.

Grumble always started with Sam on the Bible. Sam would sound out the sentences and Grumble would repeat them sonorously, in an actor's voice. Sam liked the big, rolling language. He also like some of the stories of the Old Testament, but others seemed strange to him. “I don't know why I should like a story about Abraham putting his son on an altar and getting ready to drive a knife into his heart.”

“A story about obedience,” said Grumble.

“I don't think much of that either,” said Sam.

“No mountain man would,” said Grumble. “Nor any con man.”

On another Saturday Sam read about how the pharaoh's daughter found Moses in a basket in the bulrushes and saved the child. “Some stories are more like children's fantasies,” said Sam.

“You're becoming a wise man,” said Grumble.

“And I hate this thing about Samson. He's strong—he can pull a whole building down. So how can a woman make him weak by cutting his hair?”

“Maybe it's not the hair, it's the larger situation, involvement with a woman. Submission to a woman.”

Sam shrugged. “Meadowlark didn't do that to me.” Neither of them said anything about Paloma.

When Grumble read the Psalms to him, Sam just floated along on the language. He liked the way words turned into a sort of music.

Another Saturday Sam told Grumble, “I don't get it about Jesus of Nazareth.”

Grumble arched an eyebrow at him. “No?”

“He strikes me as a sort of pale, holy kind of guy who doesn't know how to enjoy life.”

“I'm glad to see you enjoying life again.”

“Sometimes Jesus reminds me of one part of Jedediah, all serious and no fun.” Sam threw Grumble a grin. “Without the part of Jedediah who can go longer and harder than the toughest, who can lead men anywhere.”

“Your Captain Smith is a remarkable man.” Sam had the impression that “remarkable” carried two or three meanings. Maybe one of them was that Jedediah, yes, was tough, and maybe a little crazy.

The cherub smiled now and said, “Think about it, though. What could require more toughness than the Cross? And it's a great idea, that a God would suffer what mortals do, death, in order to give us what is immortal.”

Sam held the thought for a moment and shrugged.

With Hannibal Sam read aloud verses of Lord Byron's that Hannibal had marked:

“You could smoke the pipe and ask Meadowlark for your heart back.”

Sam chuckled.

“Or does Paloma have it now?”

Sam gave his friend the evil eye.

Hannibal took the volume and read,

“‘Become portion of that around me,'” Sam said. “I felt something like that once.”

Hannibal nodded.

“When Coy and I hid inside the buffalo cow and she saved us from the fire. Felt it strong.”

“You are Joins with Buffalo,” Hannibal said. He handed the book back to Sam.

“You feel like that?” said Sam.

“All the time,” said Hannibal.

“Me too.”

Sam took a breath and let it out. Coy squealed at him. “I felt that from the start. That's what I felt every time Dad and I went into Eden.”

Hannibal made a sympathetic noise.

“The ocean, though, to me that means Meadowlark dying. She wanted to see it, she loved it, and it killed her. That's how it feels to me.”

“Life is lived holding hands with death,” said Hannibal.

“Is that a quotation of somebody famous?”

“Probably,” said Hannibal.

Sam thought awhile, or sat in a place beyond thought, and went back to reading:

“We need some sultriness,” said Hannibal, “here in the Santa Fe winter.”

“I got some.” Sam grinned.

Sam laughed. “My mom used to give my dad soda water when he got into the whiskey.”

“Now that,” Sam said, “is a verse the fellows would like.”

“We don't need whiskey to be intoxicated,” said Hannibal.

Hannibal also promised to get Sam some more books, so he could read on his own. That thought made Sam sad, because it reminded him that he and Hannibal wouldn't always be partners. Hannibal liked too well to go his own way.

 

O
N HIS
S
ATURDAY
nights in town Sam kept his promise to Grumble and earned his share of the horses Grumble paid for—he helped with the cherub's deceptions. Here in Santa Fe, where Grumble wanted to stay for a while, that meant nothing more elaborate than card games. Certainly, though, no one could call what Grumble did either playing or gambling.

Every day Sumner worked on his card skills under Grumble's tutelage, practicing dealing off the bottom of the deck for hour upon hour. “Look here,” he said, when Sam walked into their lodgings one Saturday afternoon. He put the two black aces on top of the deck and the two red aces on the bottom. Then he dealt Sam a four-card hand—all aces. Sumner did it several times. Sam and Hannibal watched intently, but neither of them could ever see that Sumner was dealing from the bottom.

Coy barked sharply, whether in applause or protest none of them knew. Sumner chuckled. “He wants to play. That coyote be a gamblin' man.”

“Next step,” said Grumble. He told Sam to put the four aces together, split the deck, and tuck them directly into the middle. Sam did. Grumble dealt a three-card hand to each man, three cards being the right number for the most popular card game in Santa Fe, called brag.

Each man got an ace.

“You gotta be a witch to deal out of the middle,” said Sumner.

None of them had imagined such a thing could be done. They watched as Grumble did it again, and again. None could spot it.

“All right, teach me,” said Sumner.

Sam could hear lust in his voice.

“When these greenhorns aren't here,” said Grumble. “We con men want to keep some secrets within the fraternity.”

“I'll never play cards for money again,” said Hannibal.

“Best not,” said Grumble with a sly smile.

Grumble said nothing about his biggest card secret. Abby had a Baltimore manufacturer make her decks of cards from her own design. Though the swirls and whorls on the back of each card looked the same, they were not. When Abby saw the backs, she knew what every card was.

Grumble possessed one of the decks, an advantage in card games that could not be beaten.

“Now, this last is what you might call an honest trick. In some games it's a big advantage to know which cards have been dealt and which are still in the deck, especially the face cards.”

He handed the deck to Sam. “Sam, pick any thirteen cards, any thirteen, and lay them face up.”

Sam did.

Grumble studied them for a few seconds. “Now pick them up. Hold them so Hannibal and Sumner can see them and I can't.”

Sam and Sumner split the cards and fanned them.

“King, two queens, ten, three eights, seven, six, a pair of fours, trey, deuce,” recited Grumble.

He was exactly right.

“Now I can memorize the face value of thirteen quickly. One day I'll be able to memorize the value and the suit.”

No one had a word to say.

“Of course, as Sam knows, winning at gambling is child's play. What's fun is what you might call the more elaborate cons. Deceptions that become works of art.”

“And we won't do those here, not while we plan to stay here,” Sam said.

“As you wish.” Grumble smiled. “Merely winning is a little dull, but we've managed to attract some monied gentlemen who see losing as a challenge to rise to. I look forward to tonight. Along about seven, as we say in Nuevo Mexico.”

 

“D
ON
G
ILBERTO, WELCOME!”
Grumble called. A Mexican gentleman bounced up to their table, fat and dressed like a fop. This man's style was to think everything in the world was funny, including losing a hand. Which was a good thing, because he lost lots of them.

“Don't you ever take the game seriously?” said the American who sat across from the Mexican. This man, whose name was Charles, or Don Carlos to the other dons, played with a fierce American competitiveness and lost almost as often as Don Gilberto, and with a good spirit. Sam thought his gravy-dripping accent was comical. The man hailed from New Orleans.

Sam had discovered he didn't much like cards or smoky cantinas. But he got a kick out of seeing Grumble play the pigeons for all they were worth.

The pigeons tonight were Don Carlos and Don Gilberto. Grumble said the men of the upper class were all disenfranchised
hidalgos,
sent to this most remote of Spanish outposts as punishment, and so treated life as a bitter joke.

Sam couldn't remember Charles's last name. A Creole and a Catholic, he had come from St. Louis with a trading outfit on the Santa Fe Trail, taken Mexican citizenship, and set up a trading company. According to Paloma, all the traders dealt in slaves.

Two pigeons tonight, then, plus Grumble and cappers, “what we in the con game call our helpers.” Grumble liked to put on the air of an elegant, wealthy alcoholic, always sloshed, and win only an occasional hand himself.

On one night Flat Dog and Hannibal would leave with full pockets, another night Sam and Sumner. And most nights one Santa Fe local would break even or win a little, and two would lose big. Which just made them more avid to come back another night and get even.

Brag was a simple game. Grumble predicted that within a decade a more complicated version called poker would dominate. Every player put a coin in the pot for ante and got three cards. Then, clockwise, the players bet—you got no more cards, and you either had to bet or fold. Sam didn't make his own decisions—he waited for a signal from Grumble. Around and around went the bets, and when only two were left, they showed their hands. The best possible hand was a pair royal, or “prial,” three of a kind.

By Grumble's minute signals—he was reading the backs of the cards—he told his cappers when to fold, when to match the bet, and when to raise.

Though Sam was bored by the cards, he was intrigued by the men.

Now Grumble dealt, and on his left Gilberto made no one wait. “I play blind,” he said. This meant he would bet without looking at his cards. “
Dos
pesos.” The fat man liked to take big chances and laugh a lot. He'd probably lost fifty pesos so far tonight, a modest amount by his standards.

Don Carlos played cards the way he carried himself, tightly and stiffly. At the table or on the street, he always seemed to have a suspicious set of mouth and an eye eager for an edge. He caught up with the bet and added five pesos.

Sam and Flat Dog watched Grumble's small signals and built up the pot. When Sumner's turn came, he made a show of it. “Ah likes this,” he said in his slave English, “Ah likes it fine, just fine. I see…how many to me, Mr. Grumble?”