Chapter Twenty-eight
I walked directly over to the Rose Hotel from the jail. It was hot and the streets of San Jose and much of the town were covered with dust. Mounting the wooden steps of the hotel, I elbowed open the ornate glass door and went to the counter. There I was momentarily stymied on who to ask for. Most of the time we were together Lucinda used my last name, but it had been three years since we had spoken, so I didn’t know.
“Could you get a message to Lucinda Topo that Charlie Horn is in the lobby?” I asked the man behind the counter. He peered at the register for a minute, looked up at me and then looked at the register some more.
“I have a Lucinda Topo Horn? Would that be who you are looking for?”
“Looking for or running from, all my life,” I replied.
The clerk appraised me for a moment with curiosity and alarm. I could understand his concern. Not only was I talking crazy, but there was the way I was dressed. Lucinda had been expensively dressed when I saw her at the jail. I was wearing a worn canvas ducking coat and a sweat-stained gray hat. I had a shoulder holster with a small forty-four caliber hand gun that bulged under the coat. It had been a few months since I had shaved. Reluctantly the clerk handed me a note.
Dear Charlie,
If you were kind enough to come to the hotel please have patience. I need to rest for a few hours. If you could come back at six we can have dinner together. I hope you will come. If not, I hope and pray you stay safe.
Yours always,
Lucinda
I nodded at the clerk, ask directions to a bath house and left the hotel. After a shave and a bath, I bought a new blue silk shirt and black hat. By the time I returned for dinner the street lamps illuminated a quiet city street. The coastal mist in the air insured the dust was no longer a problem. I saw my reflection in the window of the hotel and stopped. Living on the range most of the year, I didn’t often have occasion to see how I aged from one year to the next. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
I felt a slim arm slip around my waist as Lucinda drew up beside me. We weren’t the children we had been the last time I studied our reflection, after the wedding sixteen years earlier. Now Lucinda was gaunt, with lines etched in her face. I simply looked rough and mean, with wind burned skin and a scarred face. I glanced down at her hand in mine. Both our hands showed the aging process. Mine with the veins standing out from hard work, hers looking thin and frail.
“It all goes by so fast,” she said and took my hand and placed it on her hair.
“Remember, Charlie, when I didn’t want you to touch my hair. What a vain little girl I was. Now I want you to hold my hair in both your hands. Standing next to you I am looking forward to dinner. I don’t remember the last time I had an appetite. With you, I feel at home, even in a strange city.”
When we were seated I started to speak, then closed my mouth and shifted in my seat. My hands wandered out of my lap, up in front of my chest but there were still no words.
Lucinda took pity on me: “You don’t know what to say about Patricio. I don’t either, excepting it was terrible. There is nothing you or anyone could have done. It was a freak accident and no one’s fault. No doubt the horse or mule that killed my son was kicking at another animal. Patricio was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
“How are you?” I asked, feeling even more awkward in the face of her grief.
“I think I went mad for a little while after Patricio’s death. I wasn’t much of a mother to him when he was alive and then it was too late. A priest brought me to the mission and ministered to me. I thought I had nothing left to offer the world or any reason to live, but it got better.”
“You are a convert to the church?” I asked.
“In a way. I accepted that raging against the world and the injustice a person suffers doesn’t make anything better. I have quit screaming at God for having taken Patricio. I quit hating myself quite as much. I am no longer angry all the time which makes my life easier. I know I have a purpose now.”
“So you are serving the church?”
“No, I am not going to become servant of the church. Patricio followed in Tiburcio’s footsteps and impregnated a local girl.”
“He wasn’t old enough,” I replied, sincerely surprised.
“According to the young girl who has his child, he was. Remember, in Alta California, we Spanish women have a tradition of breeding early and often. She was fifteen when she had the little boy and he has the same eyes as Tiburcio and Patricio. One look and you know he is my grandchild.”
“How did her family take it?”
“Not well, I’m afraid. They have little money and wanted to turn her out in the street rather than bring in another mouth to feed. I have since come to an arrangement. That is what I meant by purpose. I didn’t take very good care of my son but perhaps I can do better with my grandson.”
The waiter took our order and left us alone. It was a slow night. Most of the tables remained empty.
Lucinda reached into the small purse she was carrying, pulling out a heavy envelope. She handed it to me, indicating she wanted me to read what was inside. I took out a deed for property with the stamp of Monterey County embossed on the paper.
“That is a deed to twelve hundred acres at the end of the canyon where you and Genero built the cabin. Remember, your mare stuck her head through the kitchen window and caused me to drop the frying pan?” she said with a smile and I saw a flash of the old Lucinda show through her grief.
“The Chualar Ranch? You are giving me the Chualar Ranch?”
“Not the whole ranch. The back two sections. The cabin and springs you developed are still there.”
“Why?”
“Why not? During the last three years I have worked constantly to get the titles to my father’s ranchos perfected and clear of any liens. I have dispersed the property among my sisters and their worthless husbands. One husband drinks anything that is wet, the other would place a wager on whether the sun was going to rise. Pilar’s husband is alright, but Pilar hates me. My mother’s mind wandered after my father’s funeral and she was no help. She died last year. Everything is done. I have cashed in my part of the estate. When I was doing all of this work, it occurred to me that you have played a prominent part in keeping my family’s holdings together. Why should my lazy brothers-in-law get my father’s land and you get nothing?”
“I have large holdings in Oregon. I don’t need gifts from you,” I said.
“It isn’t charity. It is payment of debt, for all the years you gave my father. That ranch is where you were happiest, where you had your mare and swung the long riata learning to be a vaquero. The land is yours to do with what you want, no matter what you decide,” she said.
“What am I deciding? What do you want from me, Lucinda?”
“I need everything that you gave freely in the past. Your loyalty. Your love. I want you to watch over me and care for me.”
“Why not smuggle a pistol to Tiburcio and let him escape to the desert? If he shaved his beard and cut his hair short he might be able to live unnoticed.”
Lucinda sighed and looked at me with the sympathy one might extend to a child who wasn’t quite right in the head.
“The person who was your strongest advocate was not my father, Charlie. It was Tiburcio. He knew I wanted him to take me along. I would have ridden the outlaw trail, but he said for my own sake and for the sake of Patricio, I should stay with you. He said you preferred the smell of sweat from honest work to the smell of a new suit bought with stolen money. He said you had the kind of courage he would never have, the courage to face hard tasks and do things that were needed to create a respectable life. He said when you looked at me, he could see the love in your eyes, and I was foolish to scorn such a gift.”
As always, when dealing with her, I was at a loss.
“As a girl I loved Tiburcio. As a grown woman I love you.”
“Sixteen years after our marriage, you decide you love me? No doubt y
ou have a plan.”
“You act like my plans are a bad thing,” she said and laughed. I said nothing but could not help but smile.
“I want you to lease your ranching interests in Oregon and come with me to the Owens Valley. I want you to help raise Patricio’s baby. I want you to be my husband. It will be as it should have been all along. Maybe we can even get married again. This time it would be something I want.”
“We are already married.”
“I was never much of a wife to you, Charlie. Now I want to be.”
“Couldn’t we raise your grandson in Oregon?” I thought I knew the answer, but the question had to be addressed.
“I think the dry weather might be better for me.”
She sipped her glass of water, as if her throat was too dry to speak. After a moment and another sip of water she continued on.
“I have been told I have Tuberculosis. According to the doctors I will do better in the southern desert than I would on the coast. So, Charlie? Do you want to leave what you have built in Oregon for a barren desert filled with scorching heat, scorpions and large rattlesnakes? Give up all you have created for a sick woman, an illegitimate baby and a young Mestizo girl who is but a child herself?”
“Now that you have pointed out the positives, what are the drawbacks?” I replied and she laughed.
“What else are you selling besides discomfort in a hot climate?”
“I will be your wife in all ways. I will make you smile. I would take you back to my room this second but the mother of my grandchild is there. We might scare her. As it stands she is frightened to death of me and what is happening to her life now.”
“The bedroom has never been an issue with us.”
“No, it has not. Charlie, come with me and you will get the woman you hoped for when my father forced you to marry me.”
“Who would that be?”
“A woman who will wash your clothes and cook your food and turn her face away from all other men. A woman who will do what you say.”
“Why now?”
“I never thought I would need anyone. I find out that isn’t true.”
“Does what you are trying to do scare you?”
“Not if you are with me.”
The waiter brought our food and Lucinda stayed silent until he left.
“Even before I got sick I used to daydream about how it would be to have someone I could trust, who would do what needed to be done, that I could count on. I eventually realized that person was you. It has always been you.”
“I have spent so much time building up my holdings in Oregon. It hasn’t been easy It would be hard to walk away from it. I am not a child anymore. I don’t have the time to duplicate what I have created.”
She stood up from her chair and moved onto my lap. The occupants of the other tables looked away and ignored this egregious breach of social etiquette. Lucinda put her arm around my neck and used her other hand to bring my face around to look into her eyes.
“Before Patricio died I would never have asked you for help. I would have never asked anyone. With Patricio’s death, it has become very clear to me that we don’t know how much time we have left in this life. If we can spend it with someone we love, helping someone who needs help, then we haven’t wasted the time we are given. I may not know why you love me, Charlie. I only know you have always loved me and I have always depended on that. My life had to become very hard before I really appreciated you. Come with me to the desert. You can run cattle, or sheep, or raise horses. It takes a brave man to do what I am asking, and you have never been afraid.”
“You have always told me I am afraid of everything.”
“If you were ever afraid, it didn’t stopped you from doing what you needed to do.”
She stood up and straightened her skirt.
“I have nearly been killed several times trying to prove my courage to you,” I said with an unexpected anger.
“I will never ask you to retrieve a kite from a tree, only to be with me and help me give my grandson a fair start in this often terrible world. The train to Southern California leaves at seven in the morning. I already bought you a ticket. If your heart will let you come with me, I will see you at the train station. If not, I understand and cherish you for all the things you have done, and all the things we have shared.”
I looked up into her pale eyes.
“I have loved you since before I even knew what love was, but I can’t quit what I have created to come with you because now, after all these years, you decide you actually want to be married. I wish I could,” I said and reached up and touched her face. To my amazement, I saw tears form in her eyes.
Lucinda walked to the door. I paid for our dinner and walked out onto the porch of the hotel. Lucinda had moved off into the shadows. She turned toward me as I came closer, putting out her hands as if to hold me away. She moved into me and laced her hands around my waist and held me very softly.
“Come to the desert, you can raise mules.”
“Why would I raise mules?
“The army will buy them at a good price and you are like a mule. You are very careful with yourself and quite stubborn.”
“Nothing about the size of the ears?”
“That too,” she said and I was glad to see a little of the spark returned.
“You make me smile when you aren’t causing me to want to murder someone. You know, I can recall every single time we were together.”
“Those times can be so numerous now, you will finally lose count.”
She reached up and gently kissed me.
“If you change your mind, meet me at the train station in the morning.”
With that, she turned away and walked down the dusty street. As usual, she didn’t look back though I watched her until she was gone from sight. I shut my eyes. Her image remained before me. I went back inside the restaurant and sat at the table for a long time, thinking about the difficulties of letting go of what I had built in Oregon. I knew I would have to sell my horses with the ranch or drive them to Southern California. I had no one in mind to sell the ranch to, and the Spring gather was right around the corner. I knew I had no way to move to a location I was not familiar with without losing much of what I had worked so hard to build. My resolve asserted itself and I went to sleep knowing for sure I would not make a sacrifice for Lucinda again.
I was not at the train station at seven. I was there at six-thirty watching the tall, still proud figure of Lucinda Topo again descend on my life with her little family in tow. She held the baby. The young girl with her tried to manage the large suitcase. When Lucinda saw me she stopped, handed the baby to the young girl and ran to me. She opening her arms and wrapping them around my neck in a death grip. I could feel hot tears on her cheek as she held herself against me.
“I am only coming south because you already bought the ticket.”
“I know, Charlie. Nothing is permanent.”
I pulled back and looked into her smiling face.
“Would you really do what I tell you to?” I asked.
“Of course not. However I have been humbled, I am still a woman. I promise to care for you and protect you the way you have always loved and protected me.”
I must have looked disappointed because after a second she went on.
“I won’t point out that you are wrong in front of other people. Really, Charlie, that is all you can expect,” she said and broke out into laughter.
###
About the Author
Juan Knecht was born into a very old ranching family in Kern County California. His great grandfather was a foreman on the famous Tejon Ranch in the late 1800’s. When his grandfather was born there were complications. A Tejon Cowboy named Juan rode fifty miles on a rainy night to get the doctor and save the mother and child. In acknowledgement of this feat, the name Juan has been given to male descendants ever since. The author has a lifelong love of horses, the cowboy lifestyle and an interest in the history of the A
lto Sierra. It is his pleasure to share his knowledge of the era and the vaquero life style with his readers.
Juan lives in San Luis Obispo County with his wife, Michele. When he’s not writing, he’s still attends brandings as well as raising and showing cow horses.
Prints of cover art by Michele Knecht, along with her other paintings are available on www.ranchoriata.com for purchase.
Michele’s colorful Pastel paintings are inspired by each animal’s unique personality, and her love of nature.
Conchos and Lace Series by Juan Knecht
Scent of Tears
Wolves in the Shadows
Five Seconds Too Long
Lucinda and the Bandit
Quarter Moon
www.ranchoriata.com
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends