Listen to the Mockingbird (31 page)

“I do well understand that, sir,” I cut in. “I congratulate you on your success. And I do hope this horrid war will soon be over.”

“You have not the slightest notion,” he shot at me, “how difficult or how horrid it is.”

I drew myself up and looked him square in the eye. “I grant that I may not know war, sir, but there are things as devastating to me as war is to you. I would not be here if I did not deem it important enough to take some of your invaluable time. However, as you think my question a frivolous one, I regret having wasted my own time…” I paused to draw my breath.

Canby was staring at me, his brown eyes puzzled. “Have you no husband, madam? No father? No man to shoulder whatever burdens you?”

In a tone with as much iron as I could inject into it, I retorted: “My husband, sir, was a Union officer who nearly beat me to death, so I left him. Thank you for your help.” I turned to leave.

“Just a moment, Miss Summerhayes.”

I turned back and discovered my chin was so high my glare sailed right over his head.

“Sit, sit.” He pointed to a fine Hitchcock chair near his desk.

Stiffly, I lowered myself to the cane seat.

Canby rolled the cigar around in his mouth and strode to his desk as though he needed it for cover. “Since Christmas, more than a thousand men have died because of my decisions. I have precious few moments to think things through, and you believe I should give some of that time to you.”

“I ask it because two boys have died, and I believe it is because of what I aim to tell you.”

The bedraggled cigar bobbed very slowly and deliberately as the general examined my face, then, gruffly, “All right. Tell me.”

I made it as brief and to the point as I could. “I only wondered if there is a list of officers who were at Fort Fillmore last summer,” I concluded.

“I know of no roster.”

My shoulders slumped. “Thank you, sir.” I rose to take my leave.

“Ah…some of the officers with me now were here then. It is the dinner hour. Perhaps you would accompany me to the officers’ mess and I will ask.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

He offered his arm, and we stepped from his quarters into the dazzling sunlight. “Will there be more fighting here?” I asked.

“Depends upon the Confederates. Four or five hundred were left at Fort Bliss. I am told they still regard this valley as theirs.”

The fort had been partially rebuilt by the Texans after they burnt the Union troops out of it, and Canby’s men were busy trying to finish the reconstruction. Crossing the parade grounds amid the screeching of saws and the pounding of hammers, we passed a dozen men on stretchers. Many more hobbled about on crutches. I counted nineteen with no legs at all and at the sight of one poor fellow who had neither arms nor legs, I swallowed and had to turn away.

The general was smiling and nodding to them as if they were whole. “It is a terrible thing what minie balls and bayonets can do to a man,” he said quietly to me. “But these are the fortunate ones. And I do not refer to those who died on the field. Disease is a far more malicious enemy than the graybacks.”

I had not imagined things to be quite this squalid.

Judging from the scent of food riding on the warm air, I decided that the mess halls must be the pair of low mud-covered structures just ahead. A few officers were disappearing into the one on the left; common soldiers were filing into the other.

A low-built, square-set, plain-old-farmer sort moved to Canby’s side. His shoulder-length hair was thin and receding.

“There is a message.” The man’s voice was slow and quiet with almost no inflection. Nor did he show any formal deference to the general. “They are fourteen hundred in number. Three days march to the west.”

Canby turned sharply to the newcomer, said a few words I couldn’t hear and turned back to me. “Matilda Summerhayes, Colonel Christopher Carson. A few months ago, Colonel Carson’s regiment of New Mexico volunteers were the only well-trained men we had.”

I nodded politely. They resumed their discussion; and I gazed about the parade ground, determined not to flinch at the missing limbs. A soldier was moving past me. He looked quite unscathed.

“Could you tell me the hour?” I called.

He turned and his features knit together in such a look of pain that I wanted to reach out and comfort him. I watched bewildered as he shuffled on to the mess.

Another man drew up in front of me. “It is nigh one o’clock, ma’am.” He jerked his head in the direction of the first man. “Old Faraday, there, he couldn’t say. He took a pistol ball in the mouth an’ his tongue was near shot out. He pulled out a part of it that was hanging ragged to the edge and cut it off with his own knife, then went on fighting. That was at Valverde, it was.”

“My God,” I stammered. The man ambled off.

Colonel Carson was departing. Canby called after him, “How many men did you say, Kit?”

Carson shaded his eyes against the mid-day sun and took time to think about the question, then drawled, “Twelve, fourteen hundred.”

The general turned back to me in a new and obviously better humor. “To answer your earlier question more precisely,” he said, “there will be no more fighting here in the foreseeable future. A column of men has marched across the desert from the Pacific to aid our cause. Johnny Reb has his spies, of course, and we are seeing to it that they know.” He winked at me. “Unless I miss my guess, they will clear out of Fort Bliss. They sure enough will do just that.”

“You know who the spies are?”

He laughed as if I had asked a childish question. “Certainly, madam. We have the best spy company in the territories, if not in the entire Union. Have you not heard of Paddy Graydon?”

I said I had not.

“You will.” He escorted me up the single step and into the officers’ mess, which seemed dark indeed after the bright sun.

I hesitated on the threshold, unable to see much in the instant gloom. There was only one window. Next to it, a man with dark hair and a beard that made his face seem even rounder than it was spoke intently to someone whose back was to me. The hair began to rise on the back of my neck and goose bumps crept up my arms, as if someone had tread on my grave.

He was clad not in a uniform but in dungarees and a deerskin jacket. Without pausing the flow of words to his companion, the man flicked a glance at the door where I stood with General Canby.

Heat traveled up my neck to my ears, and I willed the muscles in my face to show no change. “Excuse me, sir,” I said, backing slowly through the doorway. “I fear I feel a bit faint.”

I was terrified the general would make some sound or summon aid for me; but he only followed me through the door, a look of concern on his chiseled features. His hair looked black as iron in the bright sun, and some inane part of me realized he must use bootblack to dye it.

“I’m all right. Just a bit all-overish. I only need a breath of air.” I paused, watching the doorway behind him, then added, “I have changed my mind. I do not want you to make that announcement. Please, I must get home. Could you see me to my wagon?”

Chapter Thirty-six

I flicked the reins across Fanny’s back, exhorting her to a pace that nearly upended the wagon. My hat flew off and tumbled to the floorboards, the brocade bag that held my pistol jounced from the seat. It seemed a decade before I got to the bridge. Once across it, I forced myself to slow the horse to a steady trot.

I tried to think; but my mind, less obedient than Fanny, refused to slow its pace.

I had seen before the face of the man who was sitting near the window in the officers’ mess. More than a year ago, trickling blood from the left temple, it had fallen against my window. The man sitting calmly at a table in the Union officers’ mess had killed Diego and probably Julio. I was sure he had set the range fire that nearly swallowed my house and had made at least one of the offers for my land. For the first time, I wondered why he had not, months ago, simply killed me. I rode so often alone it would not have been difficult to shoot me out of the saddle.

I should have told General Canby on the spot. I should have seen the bastard in the stockade before I left the fort. Instead, I had bolted and run like a silly schoolgirl. Now I nearly wept with frustrated fury.

I reined Fanny to a stop next to a pale-green mesquite tree heavy with bean pods and rescued my hat and bag. Should I turn back? Tell the general? I gazed unseeing at the horizon. Behind my eyes, the face swam into focus again. The beard…

My breath turned solid in my throat. I had seen that man more times than one… Something glimmered in my memory like the merest wisp of mist and was gone. I peered into my mind. Finding no quick answer, I jammed my knuckles into my eyes. Something was not right about it. A Union Army officers’ mess was not the proper setting for that face. That face. Clean-shaven. Charming. No, rude. Clean-shaven. No week’s growth of beard.

“Afternoon.”

I drew in my breath so sharply I almost choked. A palomino mare with three white stockings was moving toward me from behind the rock. On her back was a man in dungarees and a deerskin jacket.

The curtain of fog across my mind lifted. The newly grown beard had hidden the chin and clouded my remembrance; but it did not conceal the eyes, the nose, the breadth of the cheekbones.

“Lieutenant Tyler Morris,” I said softly. And with that knowledge came the realization that many, if not all, of the conclusions I had drawn over the past year had been wrong.

“At your service, ma’am,” he said, his broad smile confirming my thoughts. “The general said you were ill, asked me to follow you to be sure you got home safely.”

“How kind of him.” I yanked hard on the reins, startling Fanny. She reared, straining the traces and nearly overturning the wagon. The palomino whinnied and shied, unseating Morris. Fanny bolted into an instant gallop, throwing me to the floorboards and loosing my grip on the reins. Clinging to the wooden slats, I frantically struggled to regain my seat as the buckboard jounced over the hard ground.

Daring a glance over my shoulder, I saw Morris had regained control of the palomino. I flicked the reins, and Fanny surged into full gallop. The wagon teetered, slinging me from the seat again. I prepared myself to be thrown, but it righted itself. Kneeling on the floorboards, I tried to melt myself into the wagon box. There, I was safer but could see nothing but Fanny’s hindquarters. I would have to trust the direction to her.

A bullet whizzed over my shoulder so close I could feel the air it stirred against my cheek.

I groped for the brocade bag; but it skittered across the floorboards, carrying the pistol it held beyond my reach. The thudding of hooves behind me announced that Morris was closing in.

Fanny’s speed was astonishing, but she would be no match for an unfettered horse.

The crack of a rifle frightened her, and she lurched to the right as a little spray of dust leaped up to my left where the bullet hit. The pounding hooves and my own blood thundering in my ears began to make me lightheaded. The earth turned sandy. Fanny staggered, and I felt myself begin to pitch helplessly forward. If I were flung that direction, I would surely be trampled. Fanny snorted and swung to the right, catapulting me upward then flinging me back onto the hard seat.

The wind swept toward us in gusts, and I almost choked on it. The ranch was miles away and the wind was against us. Fanny was laboring against it when the unrelenting gale began to twist, digging into the ground like a spinning spade, kicking up as much dirt and dust as a stick of dynamite. The air was so thick with debris I could see nothing.

Sand bit at my flesh. I hadn’t noticed the sky darkening; but rain began to come now, not in drops but in sheets, as though a river were plunging over some cliff in the sky. Fanny was gasping for air; and I clung to the wagon seat like a burr, eyes squeezed shut, hair and clothes now sodden.

Something hard thumped my back, then another, then a dozen more, like a handful of stones. Bullets. Dear Lord. I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter waiting for the inevitable throe that would be the last thing I felt on earth.

It didn’t come. The stings on my back didn’t erupt into blazing pain. I opened my eyes to see big white pebbles striking the ground and bouncing. Hail.

I forced myself upright and twisted to peer behind me. The rain, leaden with hailstones, was still coming in torrents. I could see little. The storm must have slowed Morris. Fanny’s gait had become ragged, and now she made a high-pitched sound of fright and reared. The reins, slick with rain, began to slip from my fingers. Fanny’s forelegs plunged back to the ground, and she shot through the downpour as if possessed, the wagon lurching drunkenly behind her.

If I risked a stop I could whisk the traces from Fanny. I’d have to ride bareback in a skirt but leaving the wagon behind would even the odds. Was Morris far enough behind to give me time?

Ahead and to the right, my barely open eyes saw a formation of wet red rock. With that for cover, I might shed the wagon. There was even the possibility that Morris, blinded by the storm, might dash on by.

As we neared the rock, I sawed at the reins to turn Fanny; but the moment she veered toward it I knew I’d made a mistake.

Just beyond was the mouth of an arroyo, flooded and awash with debris and small rocks. Fanny careened away sharply; the wagon jackknifed, tilted and flung me through rain and hail to the ground. Just before the buckboard broke its skid and crashed atop me, a narrow strip cleared in the purplish fog.

Bearing down on me across the rain-swept mesa was the palomino.

999

An icy metal rod prodded at my rain-slick cheek. My eyes fluttered open only to be blinded by a searing pain in my head.

“That’s better,” a voice said. I didn’t have to see him to know it was Morris.

Heart hammering, every breath rasping at my throat, arms aching, hair dripping, nerves stretched to the cracking point, I waited. Rain slapped into my face and ran from my chin.

“Can you sit up?” His tone was almost kindly.

“I don’t know.” I could see him now, his rifle barrel down but ready.