They restocked the ranch. First with a small herd which Salomon bought and drove himself, then more, with the help of new vaqueros hired from the streets of Pueblo de Los Angeles. They picked up where Pío Pico’s vaqueros left off with little difficulty, but they were quiet and did not smile and bow to Juana when she stepped outside as the previous vaqueros did.
“Can you trust them?”
“I would not bring them here if I didn’t.”
“I liked Pío’s vaqueros. I liked Marquez.”
“I did too. If you can trust Marquez, you can trust these men. They are good men. They are honest men like before.”
“Maybe. But they are not family.”
Salomon peeled the hacienda walls of overgrowth, and fixed and painted the shutters and replaced any rot. He fashioned a plow from an old shovel and a broken wagon axle. The men watched over his shoulder and shook their heads as he built it. They laughed and slapped his back. But Juana clapped her hands from the porch steps when he hitched the contraption to a horse and plowed the warming earth, and the vaqueros shrugged and smiled.
They had a son that spring and named him José Dolores Pico after Salomon’s father. Juana wore him in a sling at her chest as she tended the garden while chickens trampled her lines and pecked at her seeds, and Salomon held him high in the sunset when he returned from the cattlefields each night.
He rode across his land and it sprawled lush beneath him as before. It was good land, with good water and good grass, and small pockets of shadow seemed to gleam with minerals. It breathed with the healthy movement of cattle. And people.
More and more people crossed his land. He waved to the men and women on buckboards passing through, little heads peeking out the canvas of wagonbacks, and he moved out the miners who set up camp to rip up his creekbeds and break his rocks. He once found a man alone with one mule at the end of a thirty-foot dig in a hillside. The hulking man was talking to himself in the darkness and moving a shovel as quick as Salomon had ever seen before, his mule beside him in the black hole. The man would dig a few feet and pack a small charge in the earth before riding his short mule out the hole at a shouting run, a cloud of dirt and rock bursting out behind him. When the smoke cleared, he’d do it again. Salomon walked into the hole with a lantern outstretched and found the man dirtsmudged and gibbering against the back wall with a worn down shovel in his hands. He told him to get moving on. The man looked at him for a while before rubbing the back of his hand under his nose.
“Well,” he said. “I ain’t getting rich here anyway.”
He rode home one night to find a wagon in the yard and the hacienda windows alight. Inside he found Juana serving a family of settlers, six of them at the table, as they passed little José Dolores from hand to hand, hefting him above their heads.
“You are too trusting of people.”
“We don’t have many visitors out here. And they’ve come such a long way.”
“One day you will invite a thief in our doors to steal the tiles beneath our feet.”
“They had children with them,” Juana said. “And I ask if you come to our table again where our guests are eating, that you do it without a pistola in your hands.”
Then gold was discovered north at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, and the prospectors few and far between filled in. San Francisco grew from two hundred settlers to ten thousand prospectors in tents in a month. To twenty thousand the next. The streets wore down underfoot and filled in with rain, and wood pallets were strewn about for footing. Pueblo de Los Angeles went from a small town of four hundred people to an overcrowded camp of thousands. With the miners came the opportunists, people selling as needed: denim, boots, axes, short shovels, hats, oil lanterns, canvas bags, leather bags, powder, and even mules. And with everybody came a new feeling of westward expansion, and the families to follow. The mexicans in California gave up their land with nothing more than a nod and a sigh, many of them fleeing to Baja California with everything they owned.
Salomon crossed new tracks daily. Wagons left ruts in the grass until trails were worn into his land east to west by miners and settlers alike with few miles between, most of them passing through, but some finding the time to pock out a small claim that he would have to ride into and shut down before they struck. He could climb a ridge at night and see their campfires dotting his dark. He could hear their hollers across the plain and their echoes in the hills.
Juana was accommodating to these travelers as before. She could not turn away a wagon full of tired, hungry people. There were several late nights when Salomon emerged from their room blinking and pulling on a shirt to find Juana answering a knock at the door with a smile and the baby on her hip. Weary travelers stood on the steps with hats in hands and broken spanish in their mouths.
“We saw the light on. We were led to believe you were a haven for the tired. That’s a mighty sweet baby.”
There was not much Salomon could do but to watch wagon after wagon of settlers come through his door, sit in his chairs and eat his food. To shut Juana’s consideration off would be asking her to shut her heart down and turn away God’s people.
“These are Americans,” Salomon told her. “People we fought in the war. Texans.”
“People are all made of the same bone underneath. White skin, dark skin, they all smile at kindness.”
She could not look at a hungry child without filling him with food and rocking him to sleep in the same arms she did her own, singing a song so quiet her lips moved without sound. Juana spoke with the travelers for hours into the night and worked hard on her English. She taught what she could to Salomon.
He walked outside after supper one night and found one of the travelers, a young boy, sitting slumped on the porch with his feet dangling over the dirt.
“What you have there?”
“Nothing.”
“In your hands. What you do?”
The boy dropped what it was and ran off into the dark and hid beneath the wagon he had come in on. Salomon leaned over the porchside and saw the crumpled body of one of his chickens, the feathers torn out of one side and scattered in the dirt. The next morning he found Juana’s garden trampled in, whole heads of lettuce kicked from their hidden shoulders in the ground.
Then their son José Dolores began to cry and could not be soothed. His eyes ran red and his nose and mouth dripped with mucus. Juana boiled roots and leaves, but still the boy kicked. One of the vaqueros had learned a trick from an indian, to smear ocotillo pulp on the chest of a sick baby, but it just gave the baby a rash to cry more about.
Salomon rode a ridgeline one night. In the grass below him a pale mound lay sprawled in the moonlight. It was the hacked body of one of his cows, hobbled between two trees so that its head and hind legs did not rest with the body on the grass. He squatted next to it and waved the roaming flies. Whoever killed it had brained it, several times by the looks of it, the head battered to paste. The rope had burned its neck down and hidden itself in folds of hide. The backstraps had been torn from it and the rest of the flesh lay undisturbed to bloat and burst in tomorrow’s sun.
He rode another crest and found a smoldering campfire below where one man sat with his legs spread and his belly lumped beneath his slack mouth and fading eyes, and one ate squatting with both hands at his mouth like a man gone back to wild. A third man stood fireside and slowly turned a spit, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Salomon walked his horse in from the night, gathering firelight against him as the men dropped their plates and stood to look about. One of them held a fork out. Salomon stopped at camp’s edge, his face given back and forth between fire and night.
“You men killed my cow.”
The men glanced at each other. “Who is that? Who’s out there?”
“You men killed my cow and I want you off my land.”
The fat man straightened up and put his fingers in his belt. “Who’s land?”
/>
“Salomon Pico.”
The fat man looked at the others and shrugged. “I don’t know ya. And sneakin up on a man is a good way to get shot.”
“You don’t have a gun. If you did you would have used it on my cow.”
“Well, go on and stay out there shoutin and you’ll find out now, won’t ya.”
Salomon walked his horse in and trampled their bedrolls. The men backed away complaining, the one still holding a fork at the ready. Salomon leaned over and took the spit from the fire, the small amount of skewered meat now aflame in negligence. He swung it swishing overhead and the men ducked and scattered. The one man dropped his fork and ran into the night.
“They are killing my cattle,” Salomon told Juana later. “They are stealing.”
“A man must eat. You have thousands in the herd.”
“They bashed its brain in with a rock hammer. We cannot feed every man crossing our land. They bring their sicknesses to our house. Look at our son.”
A pair of miners came riding in double on a small horse, a pack mule following. The horse dragged its feet with the mule rope taut behind it, the rider’s heads bouncing. They looked like they had already been digging recently and not washed, their faces all but hidden under crumpled hats crushed upon their heads without ceremony. The miner in front lifted his head. He had dust in his beard and blinked around. Salomon was there with a water bucket in his hands.
“I cannot feed you. If you want to spend the night in the stables, that’d be all right.”
“Cannot feed us? Well, what then?”
“I have a few stables open and clean. You’re welcome to them if you need them, but I cannot feed you.”
“The hell? We rode sixty miles straight.”
Salomon did not move. He looked the pair over.
“Sixty miles straight, I said.”
“On the back of that horse?”
The miner looked between his legs and back up. “Well, yeah.”
“Why don’t one of you sit on the mule?”
The miner turned in the saddle and looked at the mule. He looked back to Salomon. “On the mule? Sit on him?”
“The stables are comfortable,” Salomon said. “You can stay there if you need to and we have the fire pit here.”
“I’ll eat inside and not in the stables where horses shit. This is an inn of sorts.”
“It is not. This is a private hacienda.”
The miner pulled a pistol from his belt and held it out. Salomon put his hands out, palm up. The bucket dropped and spilled. Though it was midday, the man sitting double behind the first woke and looked around for the first time while the other shook his pistol.
“I didn’t come to California to be told by no mexican that I cain’t eat a night. I came to get rich, I came to get fat, so let’s get with it.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“Well, don’t stop us more.” He elbowed the man behind him, and elbowed him repeatedly until he dropped and rolled in a cloud of dust. “Get us some fixins.”
The man stood, coughed once, and looked around. “What do you want me to get?”
“I don’t know. Somethin from the garden there. There. Get one of them chickens yonder.”
The man yawned and swung his arms left and right and arched his back, then stood on one leg and grabbed his foot with both hands.
“What are you doin?”
“I cain’t run with these big boots on.”
“Would you just go get a hen.”
He went into a crouch and ran among the darting chickens, picking one of the many out and sticking with it wherever it went, though other chickens were less crafty. He circled it in a crablike way, his feet clopping inside his boots, until he thought he had it cornered. Salomon looked on, glancing once at the man with the pistol. The mounted man shook his head and pinched between his closed eyes with his pistol hand. At last the second miner backed out from under the porch, smiling with the squawking chicken raised high.
“I can see it. Get back up here.”
“My hens aren’t for sale, but if you must have one, they go in reales.”
The miner put his pistol back out in front of him, between his horse’s ears. “We’ll take this here as we want. I ain’t carryin no goddamn mexican money on American land.”
“This is my land.”
“This is America now, mex.” He smiled and fired into the dirt at Salomon’s feet. The miner’s horse just flattened its ears for a second, used to blasts much larger. Salomon took a step back. Two of the vaqueros came from the bunkhouse in long underwear, with pistolas raised and hands held as visors. The miners saw them coming, and the pair kicked out of sync while the hen dangled flapping in the man’s hands. The horse left the yard at a walk with the mule following behind on a taut rope.
Then José Dolores began to cough so hard he could not breathe but in the gasps of a drowning child. Sweat oozed from every pore and his sheets were soaked with it. He developed red spots on his head that spread down his body to his feet. Then Juana became sick.
Salomon sent one of the vaqueros to Pueblo de Los Angeles for a doctor. Salomon slapped his sombrero to the horse’s hindquarters and the vaquero left the ranch in a feather of dust. Salomon spent day and night at his wife’s bedside with their child. The vaqueros watched as the candleflames flickered in the window, but they heard nothing. They did not see him come from the house. They did not even see a shadow rise against the curtains.
The vaquero returned with a buggy in tow, the driver of which stepped down in a hurry with a black case in his hands, a white collar on black, looking like a cleric. The men stood from their places in the yard when he approached, but they drew back when Salomon appeared on the porch with his child in his arms, the head hanging and arms fallen outward.
The doctor looked on, blue eyes and parted blond hair. “How is he?”
Salomon looked to his vaquero who dropped his eyes and pulled his sombrero down. “He was the only doctor I could find.”
Salomon fell to his knees and began to weep. The doctor knelt beside him and put his fingers to the child’s neck. He looked to the men in the yard and rubbed his eyes. The men dropped their heads. Juana cried out from inside and the doctor looked to the door and stood. He cleared his throat, fingercombed his hair back with a deep breath and stepped forward, and Salomon pulled his pistola from his belt, his lifeless child held close in one arm.
“I will have no more gringos step foot in my home.”
The doctor turned his head. “Then she may die as well.”
“You come from all over with your sickness. You are why she is sick at all.”
The doctor put his weight forward but stopped when Salomon cocked the pistola. Without looking back he said he could help, and he stepped inside.
Juana was trembling with cold despite the candles and piled blankets. The doctor leaned in and touched her and gave orders over his shoulder, his face alive in candlelight. He removed his coat and rolled his sleeves. He pulled a chair close and opened his black bag.
“Are you sure you’re a doctor and not a priest?” Salomon asked.
The doctor looked up, his hand in the bag still.
“I asked for medicine not last rites. You don’t look like a doctor.”
The doctor pulled a pair of round spectacles from the black bag and hooked them around his ears, not taking his eyes from Salomon’s. Salomon nodded. Night fell and still Juana trembled and gave no sound. She breathed in hoarse spasms, and Salomon prayed on his knees at her side as the sound of a shovel carried on from the yard along with the alternating buzz of a handsaw from the stables. The sounds of the end for their child’s life, each shovelful and hum of cut wood marking a deeper wound in their hearts.
Only when he buried their child beside their first did Juana cry out a final time from inside. He ran to her and stayed hand in hand with her as her pulse weake
ned and her eyelids failed to flutter. The life beneath them lumped around like a thing buried too soon. So when the sounds of the shovel picked up again in the yard Salomon stumbled in a run through the door to shout at the digger and throw stones. The man dropped the shovel and ran off with his hand on his hat. They sat in the room as Juana’s breathing slowed and her hands grew cold in her husband’s grasp. Salomon held the doctor off the chair by his collar and shouted at him, then he fell upon his wife in the flicker of candlelight.
The men in the yard stood and assembled when the doctor stepped out on the porch, dabbing his mouth and forehead with a handkerchief. He looked to them and crossed to the porch steps, where he stood in the night breeze and said nothing. The men dropped their heads and slowly turned one by one in the yard. Then Salomon appeared at the door. The men looked from the corners of their eyes when they heard his footsteps on the boards. He approached the doctor, who turned to face him, and something caught the moon when he raised his hand. The doctor froze, and the men turned their heads to see. With one hand outheld, Salomon reached with his other for the doctor’s hand and placed coins in his grip.
Salomon sat in the dark room with his wife for the night as the buggy drew away, and the following day he stared at the floor, unmoving. It was the following night that he straightened her dress and made up her hair before gathering her limp in his arms and carrying her in the starlight with sunken eyes to her coffin, readymade those past hours by his vaqueros who stood about and watched him place her inside and set her hands neatly clasped, her chin slightly raised. They helped him lower the lid and they nailed it shut while he looked on unblinking with tears overflowing his lower lids.
They lowered her in and filled the grave, taking occasional peeks at Salomon who stood over the work. Then they all dispersed with tools in hand to leave the man standing alone over three graves and his nightshadow behind him where he should lie someday. He stood there all night and the men thought he would never leave, then he knelt slowly beside his wife with his legs tucked under him, leaning forward as if to dig a place for himself there. Again he stayed, unmoving. The men checked on him as the hours wore on. One man brought him a glass of water and crouched with it in hand, but Salomon made no response. The man set it within reach on the dirt and stood for a moment before walking away.
Another hour went and one of the men looked out the window and saw only the glass of water in the dirt. Salomon and his shadow were gone, and the man spoke out so the other men gathered behind him at the windows. They heard the hoof beats and then they saw him crossing the yard, riding bareback into the night, following the buggy tracks with pistolas in his hands. They ran outside and shouted, but Salomon did not look back.
The miners left an easy trail to follow in the night, and alongside them were the wheel tracks of the buggy. Salomon rode between the cuts in the well-worn trail, glinting on the edges like a railroad. His pony ran without his suggestion, staying between the cuts and running hard. He did not stop to rest, and neither did his horse, spurred by his vengeance she ran as if fueled by some intervention, hellish or otherwise. He caught up the next day. The doctor had fallen in behind the pair of miners riding double with the lagging mule on the rope. The lead miner turned in his saddle but kept on, and again as Salomon came near at a full run. The miner put his horse sidelong and put his face forward in a squint. He leaned and spat tobacco into his beard. The doctor pulled up and turned in the buggy seat.
Salomon pulled up with his hands empty, his pistolas at his waist. His face was sweating and dark, his lips were windburned. His eyes were black.
“Give me back my hen.”
“Your what?” The miner chinned his beard against his shoulder. “You rode all this way for a hen?”
“Give it back.”
The miners looked at each other, then back to Salomon. “It’s back along the trail, what’s left of it. We et it.”
“Then gather the bones and give them back to me.”
“You lost your mind? What do you want with the bones for?”
“Then pay me for it.”
“Cain’t you keep that horse still?”
The second miner pointed. “Look at his eyes. Look at there. He’s sunstroke.”
The doctor slid to the edge of the buggy seat and put a hand in his black bag. “Allow me to pay for you. This man’s had a day, gentlemen.”
“You won’t pay for me. Sure as hell won’t pay no mex for me. Sure as hell.”
The miner pulled a rifle from the scabbard. As the barrel steadied he was shot from his saddle and fell dead when he hit the ground, his foot caught in the stirrup. The second miner looked between his fallen partner and Salomon twice before kicking his horse and reaching for a saddlebag. He pulled a pistol and Salomon fired again from a second pistola. Dust billowed from the man’s jacket and he threw his arms out. A red slit appeared on his chest and back, and he rolled from the saddle, as dead as the first. The doctor stood in the buggy with mouth agape and spectacles gleaming as Salomon swung his horse. He steadied both pistolas. The doctor put his hands up and sank away, crying out and falling off the buggy. He kicked his feet and scooted in the dirt on his backside, his hands moving about to catch a bullet. The guns clicked. Salomon wheeled his horse above him.
“They stole from me.”
“Please.”
“They pulled their guns.”
“Here, here.” The doctor pulled the coins Salomon had paid him. He held them jingling in a small, tied pouch. “Take it, please, take it.”
Salomon looked at him. “I didn’t ask for it back.”
The miners’ horse took a few steps with the miner dragging alongside and the mule still taut on the rope. The buggy horse stamped in place and the doctor sat up and looked on. Salomon looked both ways on the trail and dismounted. He pulled the miner’s rifle and rummaged the pack mule. A water bladder hung from the saddle, and he tore at the opening and put it up. His throat moved up and down and water poured down his neck and chest until he staggered back and sat catching his breath. He gathered himself and slung the bladder over his shoulder and stood at the mule’s flank. He found a pouch of musketballs, powder, and paper cartridges, and he found something else. A pouch with a few stones and a gold nugget that looked like a molar. He held it to the sun in his thumb and forefinger.
The prairie had returned to silence. He swung a leg over his pony and looked again at the dead miners. The doctor had crept forward on hands and knees and watched through the buggy wheel, clutching the spokes like a prisoner. Salomon kicked his horse and shouted, riding off the trail, into the ragged brush and weed in a boil of fading dust, away from his hacienda and away from any known destination.
End of Part One
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~ David
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This book is a work of fiction. All people and places are fictional and any resemblance to any person, alive or dead, is a coincidence.
Copyright 2015 by David Xavier Pico
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