25

Pitted up against the slope of the closest gorge the ranch appeared as some modern-day David and the Goliath mountain rose there above it. Grimes at the column’s head held up his hand and moved his finger in a circle. He then put his horse out of the road and into a field of bluestem. The horses followed with their riders and me with all of it and as the grass spread thin the main house grew larger and the bunk barracks multiplied and I sensed this was no poor man’s hacienda. We crossed more than a mile of salt flats and in them standing water which had no doubt come down from the mountain and I walked my horse so that he might not step unknowingly into a false pool and have it deepen on him.

“You gonna twist an ankle thataway, hero-boy,” Shelby said as he slowly pulled Bullet in step.

“I was already slower than the horse,” I replied and he spit and shook his head and when some of the men laughed he rode on angrily and I hadn’t meant to make mock of him but some things are as they are and I wouldn’t apologize.

Shelby had come slinking back to the column the day after the dustup and asked forgiveness for fleeing and while Grimes allowed him to stay, the men were now hard on him. They called him coward and they called him soft and my elevating standing only served to further his feeling of outcast.

I had not spoken to Sophia since Perry Springs. She avoided me for a time, then rode with the scouts ahead to the ranch. The rest of us approached it from the north on the following day.

The ranch unfolded near the base of the mountain, pushed in from the valley with a few sand dunes and sparsely vegetated hills between the last of the structures and the red slate rock of the Sierra de Angar. The front gate alone seemed an oddity of some far-off time brought current and refusing to change. Its posts were pillars of carved stone flared out at top and bottom and upon each sat a lion and a lantern and within one lantern burned a flame but not the other. The iron slats on the gate were thick and black, and the row of Italian cypress flanking the pathway beyond stood tall and straight like sentries beholden to their post now and forever always.

The line of horses headed straight for the casa grande and then followed the path left, curving around the adobe plaster walls of the courtyard, where a host of young Mexican women peered out and watched the procession with sharp eyes, as if it might be an invading force.

I reined up and let the rest of the column pass and from the men there was either no notice or no mind and so I put my horse through the arched entry to the yard. The women turned to watch the young gringo, and I touched my hat and rode along through Bermuda grass cut short and kept green as the color itself. The desert and the mountains and the dust had stolen the color from the world and turned my eyes only to brown, and it filled me with a strange joy to see such grass and the women in white dresses which had stayed white and had been stitched with flowers of blue and red. Their black hair fell long against their pale skin and they looked at me with a great curiosity and I at them and the prominence of their surroundings.

They were preparing for what appeared to be an event of some importance. They hung streamers and lights and set out paper lanterns of all colors, some with designs cut into the bags. There was fruit by the pound cut into squares and placed in bowls and it mixed with the candles and piñon wood burning in the outdoor stove and the air smelled as sweet as I could remember. An older woman nervously oversaw the preparation from the clay-tiled porch coming off the front of the house. The woman leaned on a pillar furiously puffing at a cigarette and called to them words of direction in Spanish. When the woman saw us, the horse and me, she shooed us away from the tables and their fine silver and white cloths.

“Lo siento,” I mumbled and rode beyond the courtyard and under a larger archway connecting the main house and a smaller structure, the latter of which was padlocked and heavily chained.

There was a metal tank on the far side of the house and it was surrounded by roses of several colors and other flowers whose names I did not know. In the tank were lily pads and koi fish and the horse sniffed at both and began to drink and I let him, checking over my back for the woman. I dismounted and led the horse away from the water, lest he inhale the fish, and together we walked the fence line of the house and I could see the dust where the riders had gone and the barracks where they’d stopped.

“We could go on right now,” I told the horse, and he did not respond. “Go out to East Texas and saw on them logs. Forget all this outlawin’ business.

“I know,” I said. “I can’t leave ’em either. I don’t know which one I’m staying for, or if one’s just an excuse to be with the other. I’m pretty mixed up about everything, to tell you the truth.”

The horse tossed his head.

“Yeah, well, you ain’t exactly hating the steady food and water, are you?” I asked him. “I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna tie you to that post yonder and see if there’s somebody in that big house that can spare a biscuit or two for us.”

I stopped at a side door and knocked but no one answered. I pulled the handle and it wasn’t latched and the door swung open and the house was laid out before me in a great chain of connected rooms and hallways that disappeared in all directions.

The man was older than a man should be and he sat alone with his elbows atop a long cedarwood table and I saw him there, slumped over, and his attention tethered to his gaze, which traveled to a mantle at the far side of the room. He looked up and saw me and waved me over casually but with great care so that his delicate positioning was not compromised by his motion.

I walked to the table and he patted an empty chair with a shaking hand.

I sat.

“You follow the man Grimes?” he asked and his English was for most intents and purposes better even than my own.

“I don’t follow no one in particular. But I’m riding with him for now.”

“You follow God?”

“I tried a time or two. I got dipped in the water, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The man nodded.

“The man Grimes believes he follows some higher calling. Higher even than God.”

“You don’t reckon he does?”

“A man follows himself and calls it what he will.”

I nodded and leaned back in the chair and motioned to the house and beyond.

“You own all this here?” I asked.

The man shrugged.

“A man owns only his decisions,” he said.

I stared at him for a while. If he was wondering who I was or bothered at all by my presence he didn’t once show it.

“I ain’t what you think,” I said. “I ain’t no outlaw like him.”

The man nodded as if he accepted this as truth just by my saying it.

“And me?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“You think me an outlaw like Grimes?”

“Well, if you’re the man pulling the strings—the one Grimes talks about—then I guess you’re as much a part of it as any.”

“I pay for horses, for food, for other things. What do you do?” he asked.

“I don’t do much of anything,” I replied.

“You have not killed for the man Grimes?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“And yet you say you are not an outlaw.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Nothing is fair, boy. Do you agree?”

“I’m not sure I can speak to that, señor.”

“And yet you are speaking. You say you do not follow God, nor the man Grimes, but here you are and so you must be speaking to something, yes?”

The woman from the porch entered the room and was aghast at my presence and she stepped forward with a flurry of Spanish but the man simply raised his hand and she stopped.

“Huevos rancheros,” he said, and the woman turned and huffed and disappeared.

We set there, the old man and me, him slumped over the table in a frail arch which looked as if it might collapse at the slightest weight upon his back, and who knew what weight it might already bear. Behind him on the buffet was a handful of books titled in Spanish and a picture of a young man in Mexican military dress.

“That’s you, yonder,” I pointed, and the old man didn’t turn but raised his head and lowered it in some motion akin to a nod.

“They took this country from us,” he spoke and he closed his eyes as if there was a memory there he was trying to find or perhaps trying to hide from.

“Who did?” I asked, but the man did not answer, he only lifted a hand and waved it once through the air.

“Do you know of revolution?” he asked, his eyes raising just enough to find mine.

“Schoolmarm read to me once about the fighting with the British. I seen a bit of the trouble brewing down south.”

“Do you believe one is like the other?”

“Sir?”

“The fighting changes, yes—the land and the weapons and the color of the flags—but is it not all one revolution?”

“I imagine the cause separates things some.”

“The cause.”

“Yessir.”

The old man paused and seemed to consider this for a while and then a while longer, and then the woman returned to the room and brought with her two plates of bone china with yellow and blue birds painted round the rim and a gold line encircling it all.

The woman’s presence or perhaps the plate in front of him seemed to reanimate the old man.

“There is one cause,” he said, and he spoke with the certainty and sadness of the old.

“What is it?”

The woman came again into the dining room and placed on the table a silver bowl filled with scrambled eggs and another bowl filled with black beans. From a clay warmer she produced a slightly burnt tortilla and set it on the old man’s plate and used a silver spoon to scoop eggs and beans on top of it until the man raised his hand.

A young girl hurried into the room and the woman gave her a stern look and took from her a small bowl of salsa and ladled a single spoonful onto the man’s plate. She placed the salsa bowl on the table among the rest of the grub and turned to me. She let the spoon fall from her hand and it clanged noisily onto my empty plate and the woman raised her head high and looked down at me with spiteful eyes.

The man groaned and spoke to her in Spanish and she spoke back rapidly and with much frustration and pointed at my hat. I imagine she would have gone on at some length had the man not brought his fist down upon the table with what I thought to be considerable strength for his specimen.

“Enough,” he said, and the woman was gone again and there we set, young and old, and he motioned to the food and insisted I eat and I did so with a great fervor, the juices from the beans soaking into the eggs and muddying their color. When I had finished I used a second tortilla from the clay pan to soak up the salsa and beans left on the plate and this seemed to please the man who nodded his approval. He had only had a few bites of the food in front of him, but he seemed satisfied nonetheless, and it was the young girl who returned to clear the table and she looked at me and smiled a shy smile and I tipped my hat in return. The old man spoke to her in Spanish and whatever he said caused her to giggle and blush and the old man smiled and seemed pleased with this outcome.

“What’s the one cause?” I asked.

The man was still smiling and he nodded absentminded and looked down at where his food had been as if expecting to find it still there.

“Sir?” I said.

The man’s face went serious again and he looked up at me and then reached toward me with his hands and I gave him one of mine and he held it there on top of the table.

“Did you see the vacas when you rode in?” he asked me.

“Yessir, I saw quite a few many head.”

“This is how I am rich because this is how my grandfather was rich. You understand. The wars happen and different nations are drawn and undrawn and none of them own me because of these cows and the things they buy me. Do you know what money can buy?”

“Nossir,” I replied. “I can honestly say I don’t know much in that direction a’tall.”

The man waved his hand back and forth in an exaggerated motion of sweeping, and I couldn’t say if he was dismissing his own question or illustrating the vastness of the answer.

“Americans have their revolutions, Mexicans have begun theirs, the men fight for freedom and independence and honor and all of these things, but I am rich from animals. What do I care about such things? Do you know how men will be rich in the future?”

“If I did I imagine I’d be getting started on it myself.”

“They will be rich from the land,” he said.

“No offense, señor, but that ain’t exactly news. Plenty of folks been getting rich off the land for longer than you or your granddaddy been around.”

“Yes, yes. Men have long fought for dirt and been rewarded by it,” he waved his hand again. “But now they want what is under the dirt. They want to bleed the earth and harvest the black blood in its veins. And they will. And they’ll do it on land that belonged to my ancestors and even my cattle will not change their minds.”

“So you aim to have Grimes and them boys fight the oilmen?”

The old man laughed and coughed and smiled and regarded me as if I were a caricature of a child repeating phrases meant to amuse. He closed his eyes and held a napkin to his mouth and coughed vicious and then was still. When he spoke again it was quieter.

“Grimes cannot fight the oilmen, no more than the leaves can fight the changing of the seasons. It is a nasty business, progress. But it is a business. This rebellion Grimes believes in will never come to pass.”

“Then how come you back him?” I asked.

“How many people were killed in this town, Perry Springs?”

“A good many.”

The man nodded.

“And do you believe this was the first?” he asked. “How many towns do you think Grimes has gone to? How many towns sit atop rivers of oil?”

“So you just want the land? Why kill for it? Why not buy it? Seems you got plenty of dinero.”

“How much would a man pay for land?” he asked.

“Whatever price is fair, I guess.”

“What price is fair for land where outlaws and murderers run loose?”

“You’re trying to drive the price down,” I said.

“Not trying,” Grimes said from the doorway into the hall. “Succeeding. Abe just bought up almost ninety percent of the deeds in Perry Springs at half the price they cost last week.”

Grimes knocked his fist on the wood table in victory.

“Caleb,” he said. “I see you’ve met Señor Abel Guerrero. Abe, this young fella is Caleb Bentley.”

Grimes removed his hat and placed it on a hook near the doorway, then raised his head high and looked down at me.

“This,” he said, “is the man who saved my life.”

He pulled a chair from the table without being asked and Señor Guerrero nodded as he sat.

“Abe here is gonna buy the land, and he and those oil boys can go on and make money come up from the ground or fall from the sky or whatever suits their fancy.”

“And you’ll have a chunk of the country to grow your new world.”

Grimes smiled and gave one long nod.

“Still a smart boy,” he said. “Now tell me, how come it is you’re setting here in the first place?”

I looked to the old man, who looked to me, both of us wondering what I was going to say.

“You see them señoritas out yonder? I was trying to get lost and have one show me the way home, if you get my meaning.”

“Does this mean you’re not still enchanted by my daughter?” Grimes asked.

“To tell the truth, it ain’t my enchantment that’s the problem. She don’t want nothing to do with me, and I ain’t much for begging.”

Grimes leaned back and considered the news and then smiled again.

“Well, she’s always been a tough one to break. Probably for the best. When we ride out, Sophia’s gonna stay with Abe here.”

I watched the two men exchange looks; their meaning I could not place.

“Alright then,” Grimes said. “Go on down to the barracks with the other boys and we’ll send some girls down shortly to call y’all up for supper.”

“All that out there’s for us?” I asked.

“Sí, señor, I hope you’re hungry.”

I rose and looked again at the old man.

“The leaves don’t have to fight,” I told him.

“Qué?”

“The seasons change, but it’s always the same. The leaves come back around the next year. I hear what you’re saying about progress, Señor Guerrero, and I know the world out there might look a good bit different than when our granddaddies were young in it, but things have a way of coming back. Triumphs and mistakes alike.”

The old man considered this.

“Do you know the one cause?” he asked.

“I know what yours is, but that don’t mean it’s everybody’s.”

I tipped my cap and walked back out into the yard and to my horse and rode down to the barracks and left the two men to discuss their plans of progress.