Jim Kane - J P S Brown (35 page)

"
You can do me nothing. In just a moment I will
have your good house and will go back up my staircase with it."

Victorio held to the hook sticks. He leaned out over
the bush and reached for the
panal
with one hand. He could not hold his sticks and reach
the panal. He was not long enough. He leaned back against the face of
the cliff and released his hold on the sticks. All his weight was now
on the roots of the bush. Victorio squatted on the base of the bush
and tried to pull it around. He couldn't get it around. The bees
hummed to the attack. One hit him on the chin, another on the neck.

Victorio smiled. One drove for his eye and stung him
above the eyebrow. Victorio half stood, in a hurry now, and reached
as far out as he could toward the hive and pulled the bush toward
him. The
panal
came
around. Victorio got hold of it with the other hand. It felt soft as
flannel, fragile in his hand, but heavy, abundant. He detached it
from the bush. He straightened. The bees were hitting him on top of
the head. Victorio stepped on the bush's trunk above the roots so he
could have room to turn around and reach his sticks. The bush lost it
shallow hold on the cliff Victorio twisted toward the face of the
cliff. He fell sliding on his front. The hand that had reached for
the sticks could not find a hold. His fingernails scratched the rock.
Victorio did not think to release the panal and try for a hold with
the hand that held the treasure, he did not believe he was in that
much trouble. Then he was no longer sliding but was falling free. He
fell faster, uncontrollably clear of the cliff. He turned in the air.
He saw down where he would land. He thought, I will land there, on
that spot among those rocks. He saw the spot. He watched it as it
rushed with terrible speed toward him. There was sound with a pitch
of intense dreadful alarm in his ears but he was not afraid. He was
not hurt. But then the spot hit him such a blow he could not believe
it. Who would ever have thought the spot was there with such force?
The bees kept stinging him. They had followed him down when he fell.
They arrived at the bottom just a little after he did. Some continued
to rush from inside the penal where it lay a few feet away from
Victorio's hand. Others were trapped in the ooze of honey that ran
from the crushed flimsy hull. The
panal
had been so full of honey it had not bounced.

In the night Victorio awoke. He felt he had been
crushed into himself and in the center of himself he felt the core of
pain. He wished he could draw all of himself to the core and rally
all of his parts around it so as to be able to stand the pain better.
His head was sticking out, his arms. They moved outside of him. It
was hard to stand that. He wished they were crushed up safely inside
him as were his legs. How very unfortunate that they stuck out away
from him like that. He tried to draw them down. Then he felt them
coming back toward the white core of the pain and he got them all
around it closely. He could tell he was somewhere for a very long
time but he couldn't identify where though he opened his eyes as wide
as he could in there. He knew, though, that his mother was not there.
 
Victorio's mother went to look for him in
the early morning. She did not call. He was too big, now, for that.
She walked down the trail hoping to come upon him asleep by the
trail. Maybe he had brought her some of the strong,
had begun to taste it, and it had ascended to his senses. There had
to be a time that would happen. She stepped quietly, haltingly,
begrudging each step, hardly wishing to touch her feet to the ground,
wanting to fly and find in an instant her son safe to her again, not
wanting to walk anymore to find him. She was really unable to walk
fast enough if she let herself try to walk as fast as she needed to.
She felt so earthbound, afraid to give in to her anxiety lest it
drive her all of a sudden screaming and using up the faculties she
needed suddenly, this minute, to find her
son.

She stopped going down the trail. He was not down
here. She sat on a stump. It was an old stump, friendly. She had sat
and rested there many times. She never before had realized, though,
how impersonal it was. It could only help her if she chose to sit on
it, otherwise it couldn't It could not tell her anything. She watched
the sun bask down the cliff above her. It warmed the nice face of the
cliff she had known every day of her life. Every single day. And she
did not realize it but the first clue of her son's accident passed
over her mind, for her eye noted the bush hanging differently, by the
tip of one root, on the face of her old friend, with vaguely,
vaguely, a soft reflection of a line of peeled sticks on its brow.
She kept watching the sun's rays advancing down the face as the sun
rose higher in the morning and the clue passed over her mind, over
and over again, through the unconscious photograph of her eye so that
now there was no question at all of going down the trail to the
vinata or up the trail to home anymore, although she didn't
consciously know why not. She felt that if she sat on her stump she
would sooner or later know where her son was. She liked looking at
her cliff for that reason. After a while she asked herself, "Why
my stump and my cliff? My cliff there. My stump here. Every day of my
life."

Later she stood on top of the cliff looking closely
at it from its brow. She had to read carefully the bold face which
had never on any morning of her whole life hidden anything until this
morning. She was not surprised when she found the palm frond rope,
the ladder of peeled sticks, the bush hanging starkly, the blue lump
far below. "Oh, my God, oh, oh, oh," whispered the
plaintive young-girl-again bleat of anxious love. Then the love
wrenched her scrambling off the mountain to the bursting-lunged
held-breath examination of the lump and the discovery that it lived.
What a terrible thing remained of her love. What a misshapen, uglied,
unfortunate, unfavored lump now, when yesterday it was a strong,
whole, sound son. She ran from there, fleet as a young girl, partly
from fear of the l ugly thing lying there, partly afraid her fear
would prevent her from still loving it and doing all she could to
save it.

Somehow that day the mother of the Indian Victorio
got help to him before he died. They lifted him tenderly, with much
consideration, and sweating and grunting from exertion I on the hard,
broken ground, they carried the crushed mass that once had been
Victorio back to the house of his mother.

The mother, gradually, with love, herbs, and patience
centuries old, separated carefully the parts of the man and extended
them away, relaxed, from the core of pain one by one to their
properly sane, healthy places until Victorio was no longer lumped
down to himself but standing upright again, a smiling young man.

Then finally, thank God, came the day when at the
vinata Cayetano held up a peeled, hooked stick and said jokingly, "In
the evening after the work we go to the
panales
,
no, Victorio?"

And Victorio smiled
quietly to himself and thought with pleasure of taking a small bottle
of the strong to his mother.

The next day Kane and Vogel rode on a narrow trail
just before a camp called Tecoyahui in a tunnel of
vainoro
bushes. They leaned down over the shoulders of their
mounts to keep the hard thorns of
vainoro
from scratching their hats, clothes, and faces. In that
tunnel they met first a bronc and then Pablo Ibarra who was riding a
little dun mare mule. Pablo had the bronc roped around the neck and
was driving him down the trail.

The men sat their mounts and visited in the tunnel of
brush while they smoked homegrown tobacco rolled in corn husks. The
bronc stood quietly in the bunch, intimidated by the brush, the other
animals, and the men.

"
It's good to see you and the
alazan
ó
n
,
the big sorrel horse, again," Pablo said to Kane.

"
Kane has a long way to go yet. He won't be here
long. He's got to go to the border tomorrow after he cuts your
cattle," Juan said.

"The border?
¡Híjuela
,
he can't do it!" exclaimed Pablo.

"
I have to do it. You got married, eh Pablo?
Pobrecito de tí
, poor
little you," Kane said.

"
Ooo, it's been a whole year now. We already
have the baby."

"
How does your woman like it up here?"

"
She says she doesn't like it, but she just got
sane again from being pregnant."

"
Do you have a son or a daughter?"

"A var
ó
n.
A man.."

"How is the baby?"

"
Small and helpless. Aren't they all?"

"
Bueno, we'll see you. This
gringo
has to be in Tepochiqui to cut those cattle and get them
started. We'll see you at San Rafael at dark, " Juan said.

Pablo shook hands with both of them as they squeezed
their horses by him in the
vainoro
.
He still kept control of the bronc, who saw the trail open below him
when the men had ridden in.

The little dun mule braced way back on her haunches,
the rocks rolling under her feet, her eyes. anxious, her ears working
back and forth from her rider to the bronc as Pablo held her and let
the lariat run on the six-inch horn of the A-fork
vaquero
saddle.

Juan and Kane soon climbed out of the brush. They
stopped to let their horses blow on the first crest and they could
hear the rocks rattling as Pablo passed down the trail. At noon they
topped the high ridge where they could see the blue stream on the
rocks of the Arroyo of Tepochiqui far below.

They went down to Tepochiqui camp, had lunch, cut the
cattle, and saw the cowboys start the drive of the bought steers down
the wash toward Gilaremo, where they would be joined with cattle Kane
had cut that moring. Then Kane and Juan rode out toward San Rafael.

They arrived at the oak grove near the pasture fence
of San Rafael just at dark. Pablo was waiting at the gate, a slight,
wiry figure in dusty, scuffed leather. He was standing holding the
reins of a brown mule with
tapojo
,
the blind carried on the headstall over the eyes that identifies the
bronc.

He had let down the poles of the gate and was
standing there relaxed and smiling with an orange crush bottle full
of
lechuguilla
.

He uncorked the corncob top and handed the bottle up
to the men.

"
Let's see if you like it," he said.

They drank sparingly, carefully, with respect. It had
the taste and content of the hot-sunny, green-spiny, rock-hill
country that mothered it. The three horsemen passed the spirit again
after Pablo had closed the gate and mounted.

"
This horse Pajaro sure revives with the
lechuguilla,
"
Kane said as they rode on. "He walks so much smoother it's like
I just got on him fresh in the morning."

The dogs of the hacienda ran to meet them as they
rode through the camp of Chon the Tarahumara, Chon the hunter. He
stood leaning against a beam as the horsemen went past.
He
smiled and greeted them.

There were cowboys waiting in front of the main
building of San Rafael to welcome them. They took the reins,
unsaddled the horses, and led them to water, and then measured out
corn for them in troughs of hollowed logs.

The vaqueros admired the big sorrel horse.

"
We'd forgotten how big that Pajaro really is,"
one of them said.

It was a joke in the Sierra that the first time Kane
had made a buying circle up there he had been preceded by the
announcement, "Here comes a
gringo
buying
alacranes
,
scorpions (a name for the common native cattle of the Sierra,
describing their big horns), and he is riding a horse so big his
shoes weigh a kilo apiece."

They sat out on the porch of the big house of San
Rafael passing the orange crush bottle and recalling horses and men
they had known. The house was on top of a small hill on the edge of a
draw that had been cleared for the hacienda. Oak and pine jutted in
silent silhouette on the ridges all around them. The clearing was
surrounded by a squat, square fence made, in the manner of the
region, of rocks stacked tightly together. The herd of cattle Kane
was to sort and buy were grazing in the clearing.