Paradise Valley (21 page)
When Amos saw he was caught in a lie he hung his head and muttered darkly, “Oh, jah. I forgot you were there.”
Amos’s flawless deadpan delivery made the moment enormously funny. They laughed about it for three days, and the line became a standard among the family, a sly rebuke for wild exaggeration.
Aaron’s gentle rebuttal to Levi brought a smile to all their faces, but it also reminded them of Amos, who had always been the life of the party. They were quiet the rest of the way home.
Harvey didn’t make it to dinner that night, and everyone else was almost too tired to eat. Around the long pine-plank table in the little stable, every head drooped. Their elbows were on the table and their cheeks resting on their palms, all of them, as they picked one-handed at their potatoes and peas – until Mary livened things up.
“Looks like I’m going to have another baby,” she said.
Heads came up, and smiles lit tired faces.
“Well, that’s a fine thing!” Caleb said, beaming. “He’ll be the first Amish baby in Mexico.”
“Maybe not,” Emma said, smiling at her older sister. “It seems I’m going to have a baby, too. We can race to see who’s first.”
The whole mood in the stable changed then, and an air of celebration took over. When Emma went out to feed and water the pigs an hour later, Rachel went with her to talk. Emma dumped the slop bucket and hung it on a fence post while Rachel pumped water into the trough.
“Emma, what made you decide to go ahead and tell?”
Emma shrugged, admiring the stars. “I didn’t have any choice, really. Pretty soon now this dress won’t hide it.”
Harvey’s lower leg was swollen to twice its normal size that evening, and he was in considerable pain, but by morning the fever abated and he wasn’t sick anymore. By the next night the swelling had begun to subside. After two days, just as Domingo had said, he was able to walk on it. After breakfast on the third morning, Harvey put on his hat and coat and limped out to the wagon, ready to go back to work.
Rachel and Miriam were fast becoming experts on the making of adobe. With their crew of Ada and the two little sons of Mary and Ezra, they were turning out bricks at a prodigious rate. Even Hope got into the act, though she mostly provided a riotous diversion. Twice she fell into the cistern, and the newer bricks all had paw prints in them until Miriam finally tied the dog in the shade of the wagon with a bowl of water.
During lunch Domingo wandered over to their adobe brickworks just uphill from the well. He had taken off his hat and shirt to work in the well. His upper body was lean and muscular, his shoulders broad and his waist narrow, though at the moment he
looked
like a savage – covered in mud from head to toe, his long hair matted and his pants plastered to his legs. The only clean spot on him was his right hand, which he had wiped off to eat. He took a bite from a big hunk of bread as he inspected the brickworks.
Rachel and Miriam, having finished their lunch, came over and stood on either side of him, proudly surveying their handiwork.
“Bueno, no?” Rachel said.
Domingo jammed the hunk of bread in his mouth and held it in his teeth while he reached down and hefted one of the driest bricks from its plank. He held the forty-pound brick in front of him at eye level for a second, and then let go.
The brick crashed down on the plank, landing on a corner and shattering into a half dozen big chunks.
Both the girls gasped, their mouths flying open in outrage.
“
Es tú loco?
” Rachel said, figuring it was probably not the right words, but he’d get the idea from the tone of her voice.
Domingo pulled the bread from his mouth, chewing while he toed the remains of the destroyed brick.
“
Demasiada paja
,” he said.
Miriam and Rachel stared at each other, their faces twisted in confusion. Miriam’s Spanish was better than Rachel’s, but even she didn’t understand what he’d said. They turned their palms up, the universal sign for
Huh
?
“Demasiada paja,” he repeated, nuzzling the rubble with a bare muddy toe, pointing at it with his bread.
“
No entiendo esa palabra
,” Miriam said.
I don’t understand
that word
.
Domingo rolled his eyes. “
Zu viel stroh!
” he said, raising his voice.
Too much straw
. In High German.
They were stunned. It took a moment, but Rachel recovered first.
“You speak German?”
A casual nod. “Jah. I worked for Herr Schulman three years. I may not read or write, but I can hear and I pick up language quick. I have a good ear.”
He spoke with a heavy Spanish accent, but the words were right and they could understand him quite well.
“Does Schulman know you speak German?” Miriam asked. This was on Rachel’s mind too, but they had listened to Schulman enough to know it was unlikely.
Domingo flashed Miriam a devilish grin and stared at her for a moment before he shook his head. “
Nein, cualnezqui
. It was a great advantage, knowing what he said to his wife. He would never have spoken his mind if he knew I understood.”
Domingo then went on to explain about the straw. The drop test was normal, he said, a way to know if the mixture was right. If there was too little straw in the bricks, they would crack during the drying process. Too much, and they would crumble. A proper adobe brick could be dropped from shoulder height and not break –
most
of the time. It was not an exact science.
“Well then,” Rachel said, “we’ll cut down on the straw.”
Miriam was still gaping in astonishment. “Your German is pretty good,” she sputtered. “How could you work for the man three years and never tell him you learned his language?”
A sly smile lit his dark eyes. “There are two things you must know if you are to thrive in this land, cualnezqui. The first is, never tell anyone everything you know.”
Miriam’s brow furrowed and she looked at him a little sideways. “Cualnezqui,” she repeated, sounding out the syllables. “Twice you have called me this. I don’t know this word. Is it Nahuatl?”
“Sí.”
“What does it mean?”
He chuckled. “Friend,” he said. “Or neighbor. Whichever you like.”
“Thank you,” she said, blushing. “It sounds nice.”
Domingo shoved the last of the bread into his mud-smeared face and went back to the cistern without another word. Lesson over.
“Nahuatl, Spanish, and High German,” Miriam mused. “An ignorant savage who speaks three languages?”
“That we know of,” Rachel said. “And he has a sense of humor, too.”
Miriam’s eyes followed Domingo until he went out of sight down the ladder.
Rachel sat up late Sunday night writing a letter to Jake at the makeshift table in the hovel, a kerosene lantern hissing and guttering beside her. The others had all gone to bed, most of them in the tents outside, a few in the hovel. Ada was having one of her bad nights, and Mamm lay against her in the corner, cooing to her and trying to get her to sleep. “Shhhh, little one. Gott knows. Shhhh.”
Rachel dipped her pen in the ink and paused, trying to sort out everything that had happened lately and choose the most important. She had planned to write Jake at least once a week but it just hadn’t been possible – there wasn’t time.
Dear Jake,
Gott has been good to us. The weather here is wonderful for
mid May, with sunny days in the sixties and chilly nights. It only
rained twice since we came, but the well is almost ready. Gma was
good today, though we miss having a real minister, and of course all
the others. We pray that a minister comes soon so we can have a
real church.
She stopped writing at that point and sat dawdling with her loose hair and staring into space. There were thoughts she could not express because she feared Jake’s mother might read the letter –
oh, how I miss you and long for you to hold me, to look
into my eyes
– and there were other things she would not say even to Jake. Some things were only for dreaming, but dream she did. Anyway, marriage was not even possible so long as no minister came to Paradise Valley.
Men are busy with the well, digging a basement for the house,
and planting. The sweet corn is in already, and they are plowing for
the field corn. Dat says the sweet corn is from that new seed Danny
Chupp gave him. Danny told him if it gets good water it would be
ready to pick two months from planting, but Dat says he’ll believe
when he sees. If Danny was right, we’ll have ears to sell by August.
Pretty good.
Everyone is working daylight to dark, coming home worn out
and sleeping like the dead. There’s hardly even time to write. Last
week Dat hired a Mexican named Domingo to help out. Two days
later Domingo brought two of his cousins from San Rafael and Dat
hired them, too. We all enjoy learning Spanish from them even though
sometimes they laugh at how we say things. The way they really talk
is not like in the book.
She paused again to wipe a tear from her eye because she could not write that there was only one voice she longed to hear, and his words were not Spanish.
Mamm’s feeling a little better. She stays busy with her kitchen
garden, with Mary and Emma to help. Her garden is coming up
nice and green but right now we have to carry water to it and weed
it every day.
Emma says she thinks she is going to have a baby, and Mary
too! Our little colony will be growing soon.
Emma. Lucky, lucky Emma. Life was easier now that they didn’t have to be quite so careful of their words. What must it be like for Emma, to be united with the man she loved and able to start a family together?
And what would
Jake’s
children look like? Would they have his eyes, his easy smile?
Harvey was out plowing and got bit by a rattlesnake! Praise
Gott, he is fine now, and back at work. He says it still aches a little,
and he will have a scar but it could have gone much worse. Answered
prayers!
Miriam and I have become the best adobe brick makers in all of
Mexico, with Ada and the little ones helping out – Mary’s boys like
to mix the mud and straw with their feet.
Oh, and we got a new pet, a fine German shepherd pup named
Hope. She loves Miriam, a good thing because Miriam needed a
friend just now.
Miriam. The one girl in all of Mexico with hopes slimmer than her own. Miriam hid it well, with busy hands and a placid, inscrutable face, but Rachel saw the pain in her sister’s eyes sometimes late at night, after prayers, and she knew what prayers Miriam had not spoken aloud.
Well, I’ll stop since it’s getting late. We miss you’uns terribly
and count the days until you come.
Your friend,
Rachel
We. You’uns
. Yes, Jake would read between the lines and hear the words
I miss you
. There was so much behind the words. She missed his voice, his touch, the way he looked at her. She missed the mere
fact
that he looked at her, that his eyes watched for her alone, and she fervently hoped, against all the natural angst and doubt that came with being a teenage girl, that somehow, across a thousand miles, his eyes would continue to look only for her.
In the end, she trusted Jake. He would read between the lines. Jake would understand, and smile at the closing words.
Your friend
.
Indeed.
The weeks passed and the corn sprouted, shooting up out of the ground as if it shared Rachel’s impatience. The men finished digging the well and lined the sides with rock hauled from an outcropping in the nearby ridge. Water poured in from the radial holes at a surprising rate, filling the cistern halfway to the top. They installed Schulman’s diesel pump for irrigating the fields and a hand pump for personal use, then built a tin-roofed shed over the whole thing.
By the time the corn was knee-high the men had finished digging the basement for the house. They hauled more rocks from the ridge and built the foundation walls with a wagonload of surplus lime mortar Señor Fuentes had graciously sold them from the hacienda warehouse, saving Dat a trip to Saltillo. Meanwhile, Rachel and Miriam and Ada and the children stacked up adobe bricks by the hundreds.
