Listen to the Mockingbird

Listen to the

Mockingbird

Also by Penny Rudolph

Thicker Than Blood

Life Blood

Listen to the

Mockingbird

Penny Rudolph

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2007 by Penny Rudolph

First Edition 2007

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007924782

ISBN: 9781590583487 Trade Paperback

9781615951864 Epub

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Poisoned Pen Press

6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

Scottsdale, AZ 85251

www.poisonedpenpress.com

[email protected]

Printed in the United States of America

This is for Ralph, whose steadfast confidence,
even on the darkest days, was the wind beneath my wings

Acknowledgments

The author owes much gratitude to:

Pam Williamson, for her enormous invaluable assistance with research

Bob Rich and Elizabeth K. Burton, both excellent authors in their own right, for their graceful editing

Rob Kresge, good friend and indispensable critic

Molly Murphy, author of dozens of books, for her willingness to help a beginner

Goldialu Stone, Jane Sampson, Sharon Winters, and the local Ms for their ongoing support

Betty Parker, though we’ve never met or spoken, for her extraordinary early review, which restored my faith in this book and in myself

Chapter One

Maybe I was a mite too pleased with myself.

By that night in April 1861, I had spent three of my thirty-four years answering to the name Matilda Summerhayes, or as most folks call me, Matty. I was getting used to it. The last thing I ever wanted was to run a horse ranch, but I reckoned I was finally getting a grasp on it. I was so full of myself I was pondering how soon I could put that ranch so far behind me it would seem no more than a puff of forgotten dust like you find under a bed.

All that day, the relentless spring wind had seemed intent on sweeping the ranch—if not the whole of New Mexico Territory—straight into the Rio Grande. But the blowing always went still at sundown, which had a way of gladdening the heart. So, I was sitting, chin in hand, at the plank table that served me well enough for a desk, gazing at the wall, imagining an orchestra. I could almost hear the trill of a piccolo.

A tremendous loud crack, like a felled tree before it hits the ground, sent me bolt upright. A bloodied face, mouth like a jagged hole in the dark beard, was staring blindly through the window. He tilted toward me and sagged slowly, his head grazing the pane, leaving a bloody smear. My heart near stopped dead inside me.

Leaping up, I snatched at the pistol on its hook on the wall only to see it clatter to the floor. Another crack thundered, then another; and something thudded to the ground so hard it rattled the house.

I plucked up the gun and on feet barely touching the ground fled down the hall to the parlor. Only once had the hands got drunk and shot things up. That awful face had been strange to me, but hands came and went. If Nacho had hired him in the past day or two I might not meet him till payday. If he was still alive.

I swallowed hard and held my breath till my head cleared. Few things terrify me more than a drunk with a gun.

Warily flattening myself against the wall, I eased open the front door. The moon was still low, the stars like chips of ice in a black lake. No sound broke the quiet. Near the barn, a huge shape sprawled in the rabbit grass like some chunk of rock flung down from the mountain. This was nothing human. Had some fool got himself mauled by a bear before he could bring it down with a bullet? Was the animal dead or only stunned?

For a long moment I fixed my eyes on the dark shape, but nary a sound or movement came from it. I grasped the pistol with both hands, thinking to shoot the beast in the eye if it rose. Feeling the earth hard and cold beneath my bare feet, I stepped toward it and was well-nigh close enough to touch it by the time I realized it was a horse, splayed out, legs every which way.

My eyes darted toward the window where the man had been, but no crumpled form lay there. My arms prickled in the chill air. Pulling my calico wrapper more tightly about me, I took a lantern from the patio and made my way back to the horse.

It was not a horse at all, but a mule. The saddle that had slued across the broad back looked trifling small. In the lantern’s yellow halo, the animal was the color of coffee grounds. Except where the blood had pumped from the hole in its neck. Poor beast. I hoped it was beyond pain.

The hem of my wrapper caught on the saddle horn as I edged past. Where was the man? He hadn’t seemed up to taking himself any great distance.

In the barn the air smelled of dust and dry grass. And blood. Fanny, my grey mare, poked her head over the corral gate and made a high, nervy sound. Inside, other hooves pawed the ground. George Washington was the only horse that slept with a roof over his head. He had cost an almighty sum.

Holding the lantern higher, I glimpsed something lying like a dark puddle on the straw in the corner. This shape was man-size. Like the mule, no sound, no motion came from it. My knee cracked as I dropped to the ground. The pistol felt cold in my hands as I crept in a half-crouch across the barn.

He was lying face down. A perfectly round hole the size of a copper, dark and shiny as molasses, stared at me from the back of his head. I swallowed hard and forced myself to stoop over him, struggle to roll him over. He flopped back on the straw like a sack of flour. I gulped back a cry and nearly gagged.

The eyes were wide below a gaping big breach in his brow. He looked Mexican and very young, not more than eighteen. The beard must have been a recent achievement. Now it was matted with saliva and blood.

Choking on the bile in my throat, I bolted for the barn door. The moon had climbed high above the mountains. The baked-dirt trail that led all the way to the river showed pale and empty. A jackrabbit scuttled across the patio. Nothing else seemed to stir.

Poor lad. What had brought him to where there was nothing left but to crawl into my barn and die?

“Nacho!” My voice sounded dry and quavery. I moved toward the house and threw open the door.

Herlinda was plodding into the parlor, a disapproving scowl on her sleep-swollen face. She and Nacho shared a room in the back of the house; their two sons slept in the bunkhouse with the other hands.

I touched the wall to steady myself. “Ask Nacho to come to the barn.”

When she had dished up another sullen look and gone to fetch him, I grabbed a blanket from the deacon’s bench, wrapped it about my shoulders and went back outside. No matter how hot the days, the night air almost always carried a bite. At the barn door, I turned back. The poor lad was a lonesome sight. I would wait for Nacho.

My eyes swept over the house. I hadn’t much liked the place the first time I saw it and wasn’t over-fond of it now. But that mattered little. I was just a temporary resident. Foot-thick adobe walls gave it a heavy, defensive look. The round ovens where Herlinda baked bread squatted near the patio like a pair of bears ready to spring. The ovens, like the walls, were made of mud. That’s one thing we had plenty of—mud.

The living quarters had proved comfortable enough. And with some tile made by a Tortugas woman, I had fixed myself two panels, one for each side of the mud fireplace in the parlor. It was a simple thing to chip out a few adobes to make room for a small cherrywood chest. And the revolver. When the tiled panels with their painted mockingbirds were in place they seemed a natural part of the room.

The door to the house was still closed. Nacho would come in good time. To this day he is one of the best men I ever knew, but he was never hasty. The meager glow from the lard lamp on my desk was the only light inside. Oil was dear. Herlinda would likely frown at my having lit the lantern.

I brushed the heel of my hand against my cheek. Sometimes I was hard put to believe I lived here, much less that I owned nigh onto six square miles of this rude land. In all my born days I had never wanted to own a ranch. I reckon I put on a good show of it, but the more I learned, the more I met my own ignorance. There was little use for my studies at Bartholomew’s Ladies Academy now.

What use were literature and sums and writing a fine hand? What good the finest head of hair in all of St. Louis, as Mama was fond of saying? Almost every day I thanked God she would never know the sordid state I had come to. She had taken such pains to show me how to part my acorn-colored hair in the middle, braid it and wind it just so. My wide-set grey eyes had come from her, but the high cheekbones and what Papa called my “noble chin” were his, as was the broad streak of willfulness that had bedeviled my poor mama no end.

Of course, the overlarge mouth had come along with the rest, and the nose that was a mite too short, and the freckles that would not go away no matter how many times I scrubbed my cheeks with soured milk. So much for that. Freckles mattered little here.

At last the door to the house swung open. Nacho Lujan ambled toward me, his gait slow and uneven from some mishap in his youth. A short, stringy man with muscles like ropes, he had a great mountain-ridge of a nose, a face like badly tanned leather and hair like coiled grey wire. His real name was Ignacio. No better man with horses was ever born.

“Que pasa, señora?” Longjohns stuck out at the wrists of his hastily donned homespun shirt. He stopped as his gaze fell on the dead mule.

I nodded and swung the lantern toward the barn’s interior. Nacho followed me inside and across the hay-strewn floor.

“Madre de Dios.” His face didn’t change as he peered at the body. He only fastened a button on his shirt with great care. “I go to Señor Zeke?”

I blew a stream of air between my lips. Zeke was the sheriff. The village of Mesilla was nearly an hour’s ride. “I reckon it can wait till morning.”

He gave me a sober nod and started back to the house.

“Check that all the hands are in the bunkhouse,” I called after him. “Could be the rascal who did this is a drifter or one of ours on a drunk. Either way, maybe we should post a guard.”

“Sí.” And he ambled toward the bunkhouse as if this sort of thing happened every night.

In the lantern light, the boy’s eyes stared at me. Whatever I had endured, he had this night seen far worse. I bent to close the accusing eyes.

His shirt hadn’t been washed in so long it looked the color of damp earth. The holster tied to his leg was empty. He had either used his pistol and dropped it, or someone had taken it. I was about to leave him to his cold, hard bed when I noticed that the dirty rawhide thong around his neck led to something wedged under his left shoulder.

I pried it loose—a small leather sack, dark and stiff with dried sweat. I tugged the loop of rawhide over his head and opened the pouch. Inside was a torn piece of yellowed foolscap, cracked where it had been four times folded. Squatting next to the lantern, I peered at the odd pattern of lines and letters and arrows.

The scattered words were carefully printed in Spanish. I could make out Arroyo, Fuente, Sinsonte, and Cuevas.

Sometime in the distant past, boulders had spewed from the mountains to form, on the southwest corner of my land, the entrance to some caves. Locals called that the cuevas. Holding the paper closer to the lantern, I could see three scrawled lines, their spacing very like the arroyos carved across my land by rainwater coursing down from the mountains.

I had learned enough Spanish to know that fuente meant fountain and sinsonte was mockingbird. The place where Herlinda filled our clay water jugs had given the ranch its name: Mockingbird Spring. As I stared at the squiggly black lines, tiny icy feet began to creep up the back of my neck like a long-legged spider.

The cracked, yellowed paper in my hand was a map of my land.

Chapter Two

There is something about death that curdles thoughts and turns them backward. They converge in the chest like a jagged knot of ice in a winter stream gone dry.

We had left the boy as he was. Chilled, I lay awake thinking we should have granted him the dignity of a blanket and rose to do so, but found we had none to spare.

Still, sleep would not come. I thrashed about for hours puzzling over that strange bit of foolscap with its map. Was it really of my land?

In the morning, I woke late, the bedding twisted about my legs like snakes. My long legs had made me almost as tall as Papa. My skirts wanted an extra length of cloth just to reach my ankles. Mama had thought me too tall, but Nanny prized my height. With such legs, she told me, I would grow up to be stately. My legs did help me to cling to a horse as well as most men, but I doubt that’s what Nanny had in mind.

Faithfully, three times a year, I penned a note to my grandmother. The months between, I made up the lies.

By the time I made my way to the kitchen, Herlinda was already clearing the dishes, banging them about in some wordless accusation that I reckoned had to do with my rising at such a late hour. Still nervy from the night before, I snapped at her. She gave no ground and shot me a withering look so I put off thoughts of breakfast and took the folded bit of foolscap from my pocket.

Nacho and his sons were dragging the dead mule from the door of the barn. “Was anyone missing last night?” I asked.

“No,” Nacho grunted, dropping the mule’s hind legs.

“Must have been a drifter, then.”

“Arturo was guardador. He see nothing.”

I showed him the map. He scowled at it for a long moment then dropped his eyes, twisting the strip of harness leather that seemed always in his hand. It came to me that he couldn’t read, so I pointed out the springs, the cuevas, and pronounced the words. He scowled some more, then shrugged as only a Mexican can shrug—a slow movement of the shoulders that declares the matter beyond understanding.

“Never mind,” I said and put the map back in my pocket. “Will you ride in to the sheriff?”

He pushed his hat back and scratched his head. “Much fence is down, señora. And there is need for la sepultura.” He jabbed his chin in the direction of the boy. The local folk believe the spirit will take to mischief if the body remains long unburied. Frankly, I’m not one to say they’re wrong.

I gnawed at my lower lip, wondering whether Zeke would want to come look things over before we put the poor lad in the ground. After all, he was murdered. Most likely the burying should wait until we reported it.

But the kitchen garden wanted another branch spaded out from the acequia to water it. With no hands to spare, I would have to dig the ditch myself; and the air that morning was finally still. No telling when the wind would stir up again.

“Señora?” Nacho shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I could see by the way he looked at the sky that he would as soon chance a word with Satan as with the sheriff. Mexicans got pretty shabby treatment from the law.

I glanced up at the sky myself. The days were sunny but still quite cool. “I reckon there’s no harm in waiting. I’d best see to the spading today, but tomorrow I’ll ride in to see Zeke myself.”

Nacho was clearly relieved, but the notion did little to cheer me. I cottoned to the law even less than he. Catching his eye again, I added, “Make a good strong coffin for the boy.”

His brow rose in silent surprise. No doubt he had expected to bury the body as it was. Wood was not easy to come by.

“Somewhere he has a mother,” I said, not sure why the sadness had suddenly stabbed so deep. Perhaps it was because my own mother was gone, or because I would likely never be a mother myself. I cleared my throat to cover the catch in my voice. “She would want him to have a real coffin.”