Sky limped, stumbled and fell. The trail turned precipitous as it wound through a giant defile toward the Rio Grande. It was soft clay one moment, razored rocks the next, and laden with sticks and prickly pear. His bandaged foot turned bloody, his right foot began to bleed also, leaving speckles of red in the dust behind him.
He willed himself forward, his legs punching pain at the base of each step, hot pain that shot up to his thighs, dull pain that eddied through his whole body; stinging pain as his abused naked feet hit sharp rock or debris. It was hard going, but he refused to quit. He thought of Victoria. He would keep going because of her. He thought of Standing Alone and her lost children, the reason he had ventured here. He had to keep on walking.
The soldiers, actually, were sympathetic. He had expected sadism, but found them to be gentle with him, and the more his feet were abused, the more they let him rest. He had expected the lances to prod him, but these were amiable Mexican boys, not hardened professionals, and they eyed him kindly, and perhaps condescendingly.
Any Indian could manage barefooted; most mestizos could too. But this tender-footed Anglo could not; he had lived his life inside of shoes and boots and the soles of his
feet were without callus or thickness or hardening. They joked between them, and while Skye couldn’t grasp the words, he knew the meaning: this tough white hombre had feet as soft as a baby’s.
His struggles slowed them to a crawl, but he couldn’t help it. He dreaded to put each foot down, knowing the flare of pain that would strike as his foot settled on the ground.
But they made some progress, and Skye did the best he could. He would always do his best, even if he were headed for a trial in which his fate would rest on a liar’s testimony. One could live with all the courage he could muster, or not, and Skye chose to live in hope.
By late afternoon they had pierced to the shadowed bottoms of the river, and here they met small settlements, little farms, large cemeteries, and skinny cattle. And here, at last, a peon driving a creaking carreta overtook them. The vehicle was drawn by a pair of burros tugging from within a homemade rope harness, and carried within it two squealing hogs caught inside a wall of stakes rising from the cart-bed. The squeaking wheels had been fashioned from a large tree, and rimmed with iron.
The corporal halted the wizened old farmer, who was clad in rags, and addressed him harshly. The peon eyed Skye and shrugged.
The burros began nipping stray grasses and weeds as the debate ensued.
But then the old man walked around to the rear of the cart and pulled up one of the stakes imprisoning the hogs, and motioned to Skye. Within was a carpet of urine-soaked straw and pig manure, but it looked like heaven. Skye limped to the little cart, crawled through the opening, and was smacked by the sheer stink. But he settled between the snorting hogs with his back resting on the front of the cart.
“Vamos!” cried the corporal.
The privates were grinning and making jokes. Skye would have liked to know the jokes, but he could guess well enough.
He stared at his bloody feet, and suddenly the pig droppings didn’t seem so bad. The howling pain that had ripped breath out of his lungs settled into a dull ache, but his ears were soon battered by the squeaking of the wheels. One soldier walked at either side of the cart, while the corporal rode behind, his purpose to find anything out of order.
“Pig dung is worse than any other,” Skye said to no one, since none could understand him. “This is the worst offense to my nostrils since the fo’castle where I rotted for years.”
They eyed him blandly. The little old peon kept glancing at him, as if this exotic gringo would get him into terrible trouble.
The carreta creaked and groaned, the burros tugged, and the pigs pressed him restlessly, but at least he was off his bloody feet. His hunger returned and he eyed his pink and gray traveling companions, thinking of bacon and chops. The entourage proceeded peacefully until the next village, where the old peon began to argue vehemently, his gestures hot and troubled. Skye understood not a word, and yet understood everything. This had been the old man’s destination. He did not wish to go further. But the soldiers were pressing him.
Muttering, he finally surrendered to the corporal, and the party creaked south again through the bottoms of the Rio Grande. Skye’s porcine companions shrieked and pawed and wet the straw; they were all going to the butcher and they knew it.
By dusk of that day, Skye was as starved as he had ever been.
“Comida,” he said, remembering a word.
The corporal nodded. None of these men was unkind to him; perhaps they knew he was doomed, and doomed men required the utmost courtesy.
They turned into yet another settlement, two or three adobes surrounded by crops and pastures, and the usual flower-decked cemetery because the Mexicans were so good at dying and so eager to celebrate the dead.
The corporal rode ahead to evict the tenants of one of the adobes, and soon enough a half dozen brown people, ranging from great age to infancy, hurried out of the casa with covert glances at Skye and the little swine caged behind the stakes of the carreta. Skye watched them hasten toward a neighbor’s casa, laughing and chattering as if this were a normal thing. He felt embarrassed, as if he were the cause of this dislocation of a simple country family, but it was not his doing: the corporal had commandeered the farm.
They directed him inside, and he slid to the ground while the old peon held on to the hogs. He discovered a warm and bright room, with a meal of some sort boiling in a pot and some bowls upon a rude table. He sank onto a bench, aware of how much he stank, while outside the peon and soldiers were transferring the hogs into some safe place or other, and seeing to their needs.
Skye found an olla, poured some water over his soiled pantalones, and tried to wipe away the filth, to little avail. Every step was hell, but he kept at it, wanting to cleanse himself, both body and soul.
They fed him some mutton from the black iron pot, and he took a second and a third helping, feeling the ache in his belly slowly dissolve. He wondered if the soldiers would pay the family whose casa they had appropriated or if this was simply the luck of the draw in Mexico.
The old man appeared, having secured his hogs somewhere, and with him came an odor of the barnyard. He helped himself to the last of the boiled mutton as the soldiers watched. The meat rested uneasily in Skye’s stomach, and he knew he was unwell.
Skye wanted to wash himself, but couldn’t fashion the word, but he remembered his school Latin. “Lava,” he said, experimentally.
That sufficed. The corporal nodded, led him outside alertly, in fading light, to a battered watering trough for the animals, where Skye shed his filthy shirt, washed it, scraped
offal off his stained pants, and tried to cleanse his body as well. But it was futile. His toilet done, Skye limped back inside, thoroughly chilled, to the casa lit only by the coals of the dying kitchen fire. They would all be sleeping on the clay floor.
He studied the room for anything of value: a weapon or food or clothing, but then subsided. It was bad enough that the soldiers had commandeered this family’s food and shelter; he would not add to the offense by taking things not his. Oddly, he found himself wishing he could leave something for them: if he was going to die in Santa Fe, he wanted to die without debts. But there was nothing he could do: the soldiers may have been kind to a limping man, but they were no less wary of him, and alert to anything he did.
He did not sleep, but lay restlessly. The soldiers knew he could not escape, not when he could barely hobble, so they slept peacefully. The chill of the floor rose through his wet shirt, but there was no help for it. He lay taut, feeling a weariness in his body that matched the weariness of his mind. He was worn out. He had come all this way to find two abducted children, but here he was, under arrest and being taken to Santa Fe for a mock trial and probable death or certain imprisonment, his women were bound into slavery he knew not where, the man he had trusted had betrayed him, and everything had fallen apart.
He felt a turmoil in his bowels, and knew he was getting sick. He tried to ignore that torments of his body, but could not. He lay sweating and cold at the same time, feeling fever build in him and steal through his limbs. He could no longer lie quietly. Time ticked slowly, and he knew only that his body was burning, he was thirsty, his breathing was labored, and that he was gravely ill.
A convulsion twisted him, and then a rush of nausea, and he could no longer fight the violence of his belly. He crawled onto all fours, crawled away from the rest, and heaved up everything within him, a sour, vile rush of noxious vomit that
swiftly stank up the dark room, and left him in tears.
He lacked the strength even to find his way to the olla and some fresh water, but fell back onto the clay, scarcely caring whether he lived or died.
And that is how he spent the night, his limbs cold, brow burning, and his spirits wavering like a guttering candle. Finally he sensed the presence of light, and opened his eyes, and stared up at solemn faces above him. There was a woman, and she was applying compresses to his forehead, and then he slid back into oblivion again.