Paradise Valley (18 page)
“Look!
Mercado
,” she said. “That’s a grocer, and next to it is the
carniceria
– the butcher shop. And there’s the
oficina de
correos
– the post office.”
Everything was here that a proper town should have. She identified the blacksmith shop, a tannery, and a small textile mill of some kind. At the far end of town, in the shadow of the hacienda itself, stood a beautiful little Catholic church with walls of stone and stained-glass windows. The grounds around the church were neat and clean, and beyond it lay a large fenced-in cemetery shaded by two huge old oak trees.
A little ways beyond the church stood the entrance to the grounds of the hacienda, a pair of massive arched wrought-iron gates in a smoothly finished adobe wall with decorative vines growing across the top. Rachel expected their wagons to keep going right on through the gates, but she was wrong. Just short of the church, Fuentes’s big Friesian took a left turn and led them through a winding little dirt street to the outskirts of the town.
“I thought we were staying at the hacienda,” she said to her father.
“Well, if I understand it right,
hacienda
has two meanings in Spanish. It means the big house, but it also means the estate – the whole of Señor Hidalgo’s property. If I’m not mistaken, everything in this town belongs to Señor Hidalgo, as well as all the ranch land for miles around.”
“Everything?”
“
Sí
,” her father said, and he was smiling. “
Todo
.” She had not seen him in such a light mood since before he was arrested.
She looked about her at the adobe shacks of the peasants on the outskirts of town. Here, in the heart of Mexico, it appeared there were only two kinds of people – the very rich and the very poor.
“Señor Hidalgo must be a very, very wealthy man,” she said.
Diego Fuentes guided them to a little ranch where they found a tidy little adobe lean-to structure with a corral attached where they were able to turn out the livestock. There was even a watering trough with a hand pump next to it where they could draw water for themselves. The building itself had only three walls and was open on one long side as though it might once have served as a stable. Now it held a stove at one end, which hinted that it may have become a summer kitchen or a place to do canning during harvest season. The men tied up one of the tents over the opening and dragged in an empty trough they found outside. Tonight, finally, they would all have a hot bath.
Their first full day in Paradise Valley was a Sunday, so they decided to hold a church service – as best they could without a minister. Emma, Miriam and Rachel put on their new dresses from Emma’s wedding, but nothing seemed quite right. The bells of the Catholic
iglesia
in town tolled while they were rearranging the makeshift benches and kitchen chairs in their temporary hovel, and everyone straightened up to listen. The bells echoed a loneliness they all felt too deeply in this strange new place. They took their seats, men on one side and women on the other, and Caleb stood before them to speak.
“I am no minister,” he said. “I’m sorry for that, but it is a sacrifice that someone had to make. If you think about it, I guess this makes us a little like Jesus when He said, ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ We have come here to Paradise Valley to prepare a place so that others may come. Our work begins tomorrow. Today will be a day of rest and prayer. We must ask Gott to help us, to bless our hands and backs that we may not falter in our work, to keep us safe from harm . . . and to bring us a real minister. For now, as poor a shepherd as I am, you will have to make do with me.”
Caleb read from the Bible, a long passage about Moses and how his people were delivered from bondage by the hand of Gott. And then he just talked for a little while, though he didn’t go on for an hour like a minister was supposed to do, and he didn’t even pretend to adopt the singsong cadence of a good preacher, the rising and falling of the voice like waves. He just talked.
“We must obey Gott rather than men,” he said. “Government – any government – is but Gott’s way of keeping godless men from devouring one another like fishes. It is a necessary evil, but it has nothing to do with the children of Gott. We have a higher law, and we should have nothing to do with government. The men who rise to become rulers in this world will always be those who know the secrets of worldly power, and how to tickle the ears of godless men. As children of Gott we must live in this world, among worldly men, yet always remember that our citizenship is elsewhere. We must live not by power or might, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts. We are foreigners not just in Mexico, but also on Earth. Our time here is short, and if we are to be about our Father’s business we must learn to be
in
the world, but not
of
the world.”
Well before daylight on Monday the family rose to get their chores done. By dawn the wagon was loaded, the horses hitched, and the men headed out to the valley to begin digging a well. Since they were shorthanded, Miriam and Rachel went with them while the married women and Ada remained behind at the hacienda to finish settling in and wash the clothes.
Caleb had stayed up late Saturday night talking to Schulman about the right way to dig a well that would give them enough water for irrigation, and during the ride out to the valley he explained to his sons and sons-in-law what he had in mind.
A square cistern the size of a living room could be dug out, Schulman said, and then a number of small holes drilled straight out horizontally near the bottom like the spokes of a wheel. The holes would empty into the cistern, effectively gathering water from a wide area. Meanwhile, the dirt from the dig could be used to make adobe bricks, which they would need for building houses. The idea was brilliant in its simplicity.
As soon as they arrived at the shallow depression Caleb had chosen for the well and unloaded the digging tools, he sent Harvey and Levi up to the ridge to start cutting timber.
“You’re our two best loggers,” he said. “That ridge is not on our land, but Señor Fuentes has given us permission to harvest a few trees. Be careful to take only what you need and don’t leave a mess. Try to find a few big logs because we’ll need to set aside some lumber to cure, for when we’re ready to build the house. We will have a saw pit dug before you get back.”
With axes and crosscut saws, a couple of stout log chains and a pair of Belgians, the boys would make short work of a tree. Aaron and Ezra set about digging a saw pit while Rachel and Miriam, in their long dresses and prayer kapps, took turns with a scythe cutting prairie grass and spreading it out to dry.
As promised, the saw pit was finished by noon, and Caleb had used the precious few planks they’d brought with them from Ohio to build a trestle over it. It was all hard manual labor, but after a week of sitting in a train car they found the work wonderfully invigorating. It was a fine clear day with a light breeze and temperatures in the seventies, a perfect day for working. When the sun was directly overhead Caleb looked up and saw the wagon returning from the ridge with six straight pine logs, and from the other direction, Emma bringing lunch in the hack.
He wanted to sing for joy. Selfish pride was a trap, but there was nothing selfish about Caleb’s pride in his family. There was nothing worth doing in this world that could not be accomplished with common sense, hard work, and the help of a strong family.
After lunch they started digging the well. One pair of men manned a pick and shovel while another pair went to work ripping logs into lumber. The pit saw wore them out quickly, so the digging and sawing crews swapped places frequently and a friendly competition soon developed between them to see who could get the most done.
They wasted nothing. When they squared up a log with the two-man saw they saved the slabs from the four sides. With a few pegs drilled into them the half-round slabs would make excellent benches.
By the end of the first full day’s work they had dug two feet of the massive hole required for the irrigation well, piled up a considerable mound of dirt, and built five ladder-like molds to be used for producing four-inch-thick adobe bricks, six at a time.
Near sunset they loaded everything back onto the wagon, including the new lumber and the brick molds, and headed back to the hacienda. The trestle over the pit was too unwieldy, so they left it in place.
Sitting beside Rachel on the back of the bouncing wagon, filthy and exhausted, swinging her legs and watching the red sun kiss the mountaintops, Miriam said, “It feels so strange, having to start over again.”
“I know,” Rachel said. Miriam was a year and a half older than Rachel, so starting over had to be even harder for her. “Having to build from scratch all the things we already had back home. But maybe Dat’s right when he says it makes you appreciate the simple things more.”
“Like a drink of clean water.”
“Or a warm bed.”
“Oh, yes! A bed where you don’t have to check for scorpions first,” Miriam said, beginning to chuckle.
“An outhouse,” Rachel contributed. “I never thought I’d miss it so much.”
“We’ll have one soon,” Miriam said. “At least I think we will. I don’t know for sure if you can build one out of adobe.”
“I bet it’ll be hard to move,” Rachel said.
Miriam laughed out loud then. Harvey and his friends had been known to move an outhouse back a few feet on a dark night when they thought someone deserved a major prank.
“But you know, Rachel, I have to admit I feel much better today. Sometimes all it takes is a little hard work to make you forget your troubles.”
“Well then, we’re in the right place. With all the work ahead of us it may be ten years yet before we have another minute to think about our troubles.”
The sun dipped behind the mountains, leaving the western sky streaked with colors they had never seen back home – brilliant turquoise fading into orange, orange into deep red, and deep red into a velvet black already dotted with eager stars.
That evening the boys used a few of the freshly cut pine planks for a makeshift dinner table, and for the first time in a week they were able to gather the whole family around one table for a meal. It was a small thing, but now that they had arrived in Paradise Valley, found the place to be viable and seen the work of their hands already changing the landscape, a new kind of optimism had begun to sprout. There was a palpable feeling that each day’s work would restore a little bit more of the civilized life they had known before.
During dinner, Mamm asked casually, “Did you plow a place for my kitchen garden today?”
Dat stopped a fork halfway to his mouth and put it back down. He had not failed to notice that his wife had been sleeping better, and her cough seemed already to have abated a little. Now she was giving orders and planning her garden, perhaps the best sign of all.
“Mamm, you know we didn’t take a plow on the wagon. We had plenty to do already, digging the well, making a saw pit and cutting timber. Anyways, if you plant a garden before we move onto the land, who will watch it to make sure no one steals your vegetables?”
She was ready for this. “We can move tents onto the land and set up housekeeping as soon as we have a little fence and a well. This will save you the trip back and forth each day, plus you will have all your tools at hand. How long will it take to dig a well?”
She asked it innocently, almost sweetly, but he knew he was trapped. His pride would not allow him to say his well might take longer than two weeks.
