He came out of the northwest on a bitterly cold day in January 1865, a sturdy, bearded man made gaunt by hunger and pain, leading a pack-horse carrying three panniers, the basket kind woven by Mexican peasants. He rode up Portrero Street and swung down from the saddle outside the provost-marshal’s office. When he went inside, he found the same short, square-jawed officer he’d met before sitting at the duty desk.
‘Captain Kerr, wasn’t it?’
‘And your name is Strong.’
‘Right,’ Jed said, taking a greasy, crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and spreading it on Kerr’s desk. It was the reward poster for Edward Maxwell. Kerr looked at it, and then at Jed.
‘So?’
Jed jerked his head at the tethered pack-horse by the hitching rail. Kerr saw the panniers and his eyes widened. He swallowed loudly.
‘Uh … what?’
‘Says on the dodger that proof of identity would be required,’ Jed said. ‘So I brought the heads.’
‘Heads?’ Kerr said weakly.
‘Old Man Maxwell and his two sons. You did want them taken out of circulation, didn’t you, captain?’
‘I … uh… I’d better report this,’ Kerr said. ‘Sergeant!’ He sent the sergeant running across to the headquarters building, then leaned back in his chair, looking at Jed the way a man might look at a horse he is planning to buy. He got a cheroot out of his pocket and struck a match.
‘You don’t, do you?’ he said.
‘Those things can kill you,’ Jed replied.
Kerr opened his mouth as if to say something, but before he could get it out, the sergeant was back, shouting ‘Ten-shun!’ Kerr snapped to the salute as a thin, elderly-looking colonel in Confederate gray came in through the door.
‘All right, Captain,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about the Maxwell gang?’
‘I killed them,’ Jed said conversationally. ‘Their heads are in those baskets.’
‘You?’ the colonel said, his eyes flicking to the pinned sleeve of Jed’s coat. ‘You killed the Maxwells?’
‘They sure as Hell didn’t commit suicide!’ Jed said, not letting his annoyance get hold of him. He had long since figured out it was no use getting steamed up when somebody implied that a man with only one arm couldn’t be any damned use for anything. He had a whole lifetime of that ahead of him. If he got angry every time it happened, he’d never have any peace.
‘Where did you find them?’
‘They were in the San Sabas,’ Jed said. ‘Living good. There’s a lot of wild cattle in the brakes up there. They got hungry, they’d just butcher another. They were eating steak three times a day.’
‘How many of them were there?’
‘About twenty, maybe one or two more.’
‘You trying to tell me that you killed Old Man Maxwell when he had twenty men around him?’
‘I’m not trying to tell you anything, Colonel,’ Jed answered patiently. ‘Only that he’s dead. Him and his sons.’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You ever seen Old Man Maxwell, colonel?’ Jed asked, sitting on his temper. ‘Would you know him if you saw him?’
‘Yes,’ the soldier assented. ‘I’d know that old bastard.’
Jed nodded. He went out to the pack-horse and opened one of the panniers. He reached in, and lifted out the head of Edward Maxwell and held it high where the soldier could see it.
‘Ah … uh … yes,’ he murmured, staring with a suddenly sickly expression at the thing in Jed’s hand. ‘You want to see the others?’
‘No. No, thank you, Mr. …?’
‘Strong. Jedediah Strong.’
‘Yes. Well.’ There was a long pause. ‘You are claiming the bounty?’
‘It’s there,’ Jed shrugged.
‘Then I’ll need to make a report. My name is Leavitt, by the way.’
‘Colonel Leavitt. Where do we make this report?’
‘The sergeant will bring you. Perhaps you’d like to … get rid of those things?’
‘All right,’ Jed said. ‘If they bother you.’
He took the pack-horse down towards the fringe of the town. There was a stinking trash pile there, the province of mangy cats and prairie scavengers. Jed unshipped the entrenching shovel strapped to the saddle. Closing his nostrils to the stench of the garbage, he dug a hole in the ground at the edge of it. One by one he took the heads of Edward Maxwell and his sons, Paul and David, and dropped them into the hole. The face of Paul Maxwell stared sightlessly up at him. Death will find you soon enough he thought, and began to shovel the earth back into the hole. When he was done, he scraped the piles of garbage down to cover the fresh-turned earth. Then he walked away leading the horse, his face like stone.
‘You came back,’ she said.
‘Yes. I have done what I came to do.’
‘I heard,’ Maria said. ‘Colonel Leavitt has spoken to my father. He said he still cannot believe that a man alone could go into the mountains and kill Edward Maxwell.’
‘A man on his own often has a better chance than an army,’ he said. ‘They knew how to fight an army. They were helpless when it came to fighting only me, for I fought by no rules, and without the compunction soldiers have.’
‘Yet you were a soldier,’ she said. ‘Once.’
‘But that was in another country,’ he replied. ‘Do you like poetry?’
‘Yes,’ she said surprised. ‘Was that from a poem?’
‘I thought of you a great deal,’ he said. ‘While I was … out there.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you have always been in my mind. Or somewhere in my heart. Since that first time I saw you, all those years ago.’
‘That seems,’ she smiled, ‘improbable.’
‘You’re right. Better to say, that when I saw you again, I remembered my boyish jealousy of that man, Lopez y Hoya. And knew, as I knew then, the reason for it.’ She frowned. ‘I think you speak in riddles, señor.’
‘You are not … spoken for?’
‘No,’ she said, her dark eyes wary, wondering.
‘If I were to stay … in San Antonio. Would you permit me to call on you?’
‘That would not be … it would be very difficult. We are of different races, you and I. A Spanish woman who is seen with an Anglo, becomes … something else. Her own people spit on her. They use a word that burns the soul.’
‘I know the word,’ said.
‘Then you know why what you ask cannot be.’
‘Up over the border, past Mesilla, I found a place,’ he said. ‘High, high in the mountains, where the air is like wine. There are dark forests down the flanks of the hills, and above the tree line you ride through lupins as high as a horse’s shoulder. You can hunt wild turkey, or deer. Once in a while you see a black bear moving between the trees. You can sit in a meadow and see fifty miles in any direction. It’s wild, dangerous, beautiful country, Maria, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I want to spend the rest of my life there.’
‘You will not go back to your people in the East?’
‘I’ll do that first,’ he said. ‘There are … family matters, that must be sorted out, when the war is over.’
‘Have you a big family?’
‘Big enough.’ He looked at her and touched her shoulder with his hand, as if to be sure he had her attention. ‘I was full of bitterness, Maria,’ he said. ‘For a long time. It’s gone out of me, now.’
‘That is good,’ she said, her eyes still unsure. ‘Why have you told me all this?’
‘You said … we are of different races. That would not matter ... in New Mexico ... as much as in some other places.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But the thing would still be there. It never goes away completely.’
‘Would you care, Maria?’ he said. ‘I mean ... if you loved someone?’
‘No,’ she said very softly. ‘Not if I loved … someone.’
Something had been said. Both of them knew it. Maria felt a faint sensation at the furthest edges of herself, no more than the touch of a feather falling to the ground. Yet it seemed to tell her yes. It was something so strange and yet so powerful that she felt as if there was no breath in her body. Then, as mysteriously as it had come, it was gone.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘My father is waiting to meet you.’
He nodded. It was as if, in that moment they had shared, he had read her affirmation as she had read his. He followed her into a stone-floored room, and then into another with bright Indian blankets hanging on the white adobe walls, and colorful rugs on the floor beneath heavy oaken furniture, chairs with leather seats and backs, a roll-top desk with an oil lamp standing on it, the smell of cigarettes.
‘General Gonzales,’ Jed said. ‘I’m honored to meet you.’
Maria’s father was, a tall, spare man with a fine forehead and the same frank, dark eyes as his daughter. He wore a woolen coat, a white shirt, riding breeches. His hair was as white as Maria’s was black. A small scar split the curve of his right eyebrow. He gestured to a seat and Jed sat down.
‘So you are the one,’ he said.
Maria smiled and turned silently, leaving them alone. Jed watched her go and the old man saw the way he looked at her. He did not say anything for a while.
‘I would like to hear about it,’ he said. ‘How you caught that cabrón.’
‘Perhaps, general, you will understand me if I tell you that I would prefer not to speak of it. It was something that I … had to do.’
‘A personal matter?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We have a saying in Spanish. “No revenge is more honorable than the one not taken”.’
‘It was not revenge, sir,’ Jed said. ‘Merely retribution.’
The old man smiled. ‘A fine distinction,’ he said. ‘Well, you and I have been in other battles. We will talk of those instead. Will you take a glass of wine, señor?’
‘Gladly.’
They talked of battles and of soldiers. The names they spoke were the martial sound of three great wars. General Gonzales had seen the butchery at the Alamo, and what was that but another version of the butchery of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg? Young officers he had faced across the fortifications at Churubusco now led armies in Tennessee and Virginia. What one had learned in the siege of Vera Cruz, the other had discovered before the fortifications of Yorktown.
‘It is a good thing that battle is so terrible,’ the old man said. ‘Or we would come to love it better than all else.’ He got to his feet using a cane. ‘You will stay in San Antonio?’
‘For a while, general.’
‘I hope you will come and see me again. If the company of an old man does not bore you?’
‘I’ve enjoyed myself,’ Jed said. The general nodded. He was an old man and there were not many years left. But he was not so old that he did not know what it meant when a man looked at a woman the way the young Norte Americano had looked at Maria.
Slowly the days passed. There was a different rhythm to life in this part of the world. The spirit of mañana was all-pervasive. There was always time: there always would be. And if there was not, no importa, hombre. God had not meant it to happen, in that case.
Each afternoon, after the siesta, Jed would call on the old general, and they would sit on the patio and talk. Each got to know, to respect, to like the other. They talked again about the old man’s experiences at the battle of the Alamo.
‘I have heard all the accounts told by you Americans,’ he said. ‘It is as if they speak of some other battle, in some other place. They never tell that Barrett Travis sent a woman out to offer the surrender of his arms and the fort on condition that his life and the lives of his men were spared. He was told they must surrender without any guarantees. They refused. That was the evening before the battle.’
‘I never heard that before, sir.’
‘Ah, there is much you will not have heard,’ the old man said. ‘You will not have heard of the bravery of our soldiers. How Colonel Francisco Duque used his last breath to order his men on to the slaughter as he lay dying on the ground, trampled by the very men he was ordering forward. How – ah, but enough of that. Old men meander. You must forgive me.’
‘There’s nothing to forgive, general.’
‘I remember it all so well. Better than something I did yesterday,’ General Gonzales went on. ‘We burned them all afterwards, you know. I’ll never forget that smell.’ The smell of the amputated limbs burning on the orderlies’ fires, Jed thought. No, there were some things one would never forget.
‘We buried them beneath the peach trees,’ the general said. ‘I’ll show you around, one day.’
‘I’d like that, sir,’ Jed said. No point in telling him that he had walked around the ruined Alamo a hundred times, while he was stationed in San Antonio five years earlier. You learned, after a while, that old people only remembered what they wanted to remember. It was as if time filtered out of their recollection anything unpleasant. Maybe that was a kindness.
The old man’s mention of Barrett Travis reminded him of his cousin. Wild-eyed Travis, who had been willing to fight the Maxwell boys himself, if Jed didn’t want to do it. Where are you now, Trav?
‘Now, Jedediah,’ the general said. ‘Speak what is in your heart.’
‘I think you know it, sir.’
The old man nodded and poured some wine into the glasses on the table. He handed one to Jed, sipped his own, nodded again.
‘I know you see Maria every day. I know that you walk together and talk a great deal, and that she laughs a lot when she is with you, and that she follows you with her eyes when you are in my house. All these things an old man knows, so a young man must also know them. Yet you have not spoken of them, Jedediah.’
‘Then I am at fault, General,’ Jed replied. ‘And I apologize. For it is the easiest thing in the world for me to tell you what is in my heart. I love Maria. I think I have always loved her.’
‘Ah,’ the old man said softly. He poured a little more wine for each of them. ‘You know, of course, that such matters are … different, in my country.’
‘I do, sir.’
‘If a man merely wants a woman, there are … other ways. Other kinds of woman.’
‘I had hoped that we might speak ... of marriage.’
‘Marriage?’ General Gonzales said, lighting a cigarillo. Then, as if it were irrelevant, he added: ‘My daughter will be a wealthy woman when I die.’
‘I have not spoken much of my family,’ Jed said.
‘I would be honored to listen.’
‘My grandfather was British,’ Jed began and told the familiar story of Davy Strong and the broken sword that had been the family’s talisman. ‘Someone must have taken it when the farm was looted,’ he said. ‘I looked everywhere for it. And the Bible. That was gone, too.’
‘Perhaps you will find them again,’ the old man said. His eyes were closed as if he were dozing. ‘One day.’
‘Maybe,’ Jed said. He told him the story of Jedediah Morrison Strong, born under a wandering star, who had mapped the continent with Lewis and Clark; about Big Jed’s sons, Sam the tinkerer, the gunsmith whose seven-shooter was now the most sought-after weapon in American arms, and David, who had only wanted to be left in peace to raise his horses, and husband his beloved land.
‘The land is still there, General,’ Jed continued. ‘And so is the pride. We will build Washington Farm again, my brother and I.’
‘And would you have my daughter live there?’ the old man asked. ‘In Virginia?’
‘I would like her to see it, sir. To know the place from which I spring. But it is in my mind to study the law, general. Here in the southwest. In New Mexico Territory, perhaps. It will not be easy for a few years. After that—’
‘Young people need a little hardship in their early years together,’ General Gonzales said. ‘I think perhaps it gives them something to look back upon, with pride. The cement that binds them, for a lifetime.’
‘Then you will permit me to speak to Maria, General?’
‘There are many obstacles, my boy. So many obstacles.’
‘I know sir,’ Jed said. ‘And we will overcome them.’
‘Then speak to her, my boy,’ the old man said smiling.
‘Yes, sir.’ Jed got up. ‘Thank you, sir. I will.’
He was halfway back to the hotel in town, still screeching the Rebel yell, before he realized that he had not told Maria that her father had given his permission for them to begin their courtship.
He told her next day and she smiled gravely, as though somehow his news had saddened her.
‘I thought you’d be pleased!’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Do you love me, Jedediah?’ she said, the dark eyes searching for something in his. ‘Are you sure of it?’
‘Sure?’ he laughed. ‘I was never more sure of anything in my life!’
‘It is not the same for a man as it is for a woman,’ she said. ‘We do not love the same way. You must know this of me: if I give my love to a man, it is for all time. There will be no room for anyone else.’
‘I feel the same way,’ he said.
‘Then tell me what you promised you would tell me,’ she said, drawing him into a leafy bower in the corner of the garden. ‘Kiss me, mi corazon. Then tell me about the girl, the one who was all there was in your world!’
The sickness had a stronger hold on him than he knew. He took the morphia just the way Billy Christman had told him to, but on the fourteenth day he felt the same, a strange unease he remembered from the hospital. He had been traveling at night and sleeping during the day to avoid Federal patrols. Now all at once he felt weak, reluctant to keep moving. He was out in open farm country that everywhere showed the signs of war. He skirted the old battlefield of Manassas, following the Warrenton Turnpike. He had just left Gainesville when he ran into a foot patrol. It was too late to fade back into the woods; they saw him, and one of them shouted for him to stop. He turned and ran like a deer into the woods, hearing the flat bang of a musket behind him. The slug ripped through the bare branches above his head. He ran, weaving and ducking, deeper into the woods, ran until all sound of pursuit died behind him. He was still running when the chills began. Shivering uncontrollably, eyes and mouth filled with a watery discharge, he staggered on through the woods until he came to a burned-out farm, its chimney gone, great gaping holes in what was left of the roof. He fell inside the shelter of the broken walls, teeth chattering, wrapping his arms around himself trying to get warm, his entire body wracked by vicious cramps. Got to keep quiet, he thought, got to keep quiet, damned patrol but he could not stop the groans that escaped through his clenched teeth.
‘I thought for sure I was going to die,’ he told Maria. ‘One way or the other. If the cramps and chills didn’t do it, I would give my position away to the patrol, and they’d find me. And then … there was someone there. I heard a movement, and I thought, it’s over, they’ve found me.’
But it was not the patrol. It was a girl. She wore a simple calico shift and her hair, was tied back with a piece of ribbon. She looked young. Her huge, brown eyes shone in the starlight as she crouched down beside him.
‘Who are you?’ she whispered. Her breath felt warm and smelled sweet, like fresh-cut grass.
‘Cold,’ Jed said. ‘Cold.’
The cramps hit him again and he moaned. His body began to twitch. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘Freezing.’
‘Wait,’ he heard her whisper. He swam in and out of consciousness. When he opened his eyes she was there again, and he felt the warm roughness of blankets on his face.
‘You came back,’ she whispered. ‘I always knew you would. ‘
Jed shook his head, unable to speak. The cramps wracked him; he was shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering.
‘My poor baby,’ the girl said. ‘You’re so cold, so cold. Don’t you worry, baby. Don’t you worry. I’ll get you warm.’
He felt her lift the blankets, slide beneath them. He felt the glow of her body, and her hands unfastening his clothes. The touch of her skin was like fire; warmth seeped through him like golden honey.
‘There, my baby,’ she whispered. ‘There.’
He felt the heat of her drawing the cold out of him, like chalk soaking up water. His ragged breathing eased, and for a moment the cramps ceased. His jaw felt stiff, his whole body sapped.
‘Johnny, Johnny,’ the girl crooned. ‘I knew you’d come back to me.’
Her lips found his: they were hot with wanting. He tried to tell her to stop, and then he did not want her to stop, and then it was as if a soft signal had been lit inside his body, a tiny red flame that started in the center of him and spread and spread. He was in a waking dream and nothing that he did was real. It seemed to him that his hands and arms and mouth and body moved of their own volition in a strange, slow, languorous series of arabesques that joined and parted and joined again. Her lips trembled beneath his and then, in mounting passion, yielded and gave in return. Her breasts were firm and full, their peaks erect with desire. He slid his hand down across her flat belly. Her legs moved languidly and she moaned and took her mouth away from his. He felt the quiver of her eyelashes on his neck, the soft, sweet touch of tears. The sweet litheness of her joined him, a soft inhalation that almost sounded like surprise coming from her parted lips, and then the rising crescendo of their need for each other drowned everything else. Strangers and lovers, they lived and then died the long, long moment that became a soft, slow return to silence. After a while he felt her move, as if to leave. He caught her arm and she turned her body back towards him, her breasts warm and damp against his own moistened body.
‘It’s all right, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Wait for me. I’ll be back.’
He slept. He never knew how long. Fevers came, then chills. He thought she brought him food, something warm to drink. He was sick once, twice. She washed his body and held him in her arms, rocking him like a baby when the cramps came back. And when they stopped she slid beneath the blankets, and their bodies joined again in dreamlike pleasure. How many times? He never knew the answer. One day he awoke and knew that it was over. The fevers and the cramps were gone. He felt weak, wasted and somehow strangely forlorn. He lay in the little lean-to she had made, snug in the blankets. He could see snow on the branches of the trees.
At nightfall she came back. He was sitting up, waiting for her. She looked startled, then smiled. She was a pretty girl, slender as an aspen, her long, dark hair swinging loose around her shoulders. She wore a thick plaid coat and a dark skirt made of corduroy. In her hand she carried a small basket with a lid, the kind used for picnics. Her eyes were wide, warm. She stood, poised as a deer, watching him.
‘Johnny, Johnny,’ she said. ‘You’re better!’ She ran into his arms and covered his face with kisses. ‘You’re better, my darling, you’re better!’
‘Where are we?’ Jed said. ‘What is this place?’
‘It’s our secret place, Johnny,’ she replied, snuggling against him. ‘Nobody will ever find us here.’
‘What is your name?’ he asked.
‘Johnny, Johnny,’ she pulled him down on to her. ‘Don’t talk anymore.’ Her mouth was hot oblivion and he had no will with which to resist it. He took her golden gifts as gladly as she took his, but this time knowingly, wanting, shouting silently with the final pleasure of it.
And when he tried to talk to her, she stilled his words with more kisses, and more, and, as the stars wheeled in their courses and the hours fled towards the dawn, they made love once again.
‘We’ll go home tomorrow, Johnny, my darling,’ she whispered, as she nestled contentedly at his side. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Home?’ he said.
She did not answer him and when he looked down she was sleeping, her face as innocent as a child’s. She had the faintest trace of summer freckles across the bridge of her nose. He kissed her slightly parted lips and she sighed, stirring. After a while he slept.
She was already dressed when he awoke. He got to his feet and took her hand in his. ‘You have to stay,’ he said. ‘You have to tell me where we are, who you are!’
‘No!’ she said, and he thought he saw fear in her eyes, ‘I’ll come back for you tonight. Tonight, Johnny!’
‘Not tonight,’ Jed said. ‘And I am not your Johnny.’
She shook her head, as though he was a child talking nonsense. ‘Leave me go, Johnny,’ she said.
‘Who are you?’ he asked her. ‘What is your name?’
‘My name is Deborah Hawkes,’ she replied, pulling her hand free. He watched her running through the trees like a deer, almost soundless, and thought for a moment to go after her. The silence of the woods returned. Birds flicked through the bare branches. Somewhere he could hear the raw cawing of crows. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground and the wind had a warning edge on it: snow in the air, Jed thought, and shivered. He ate the food she had brought and felt the strength growing inside him. He wondered how long he had been in this place: A few days, a week, more? He would have to move soon.
She did not come back that night, nor the next, nor the next. On the fourth night he knew she would not be coming again.
‘I didn’t know how I knew that,’ he told Maria. ‘But I knew it, as sure as if she had told me herself.’
He found a path that led out of the woods and back to the turnpike. A few miles down the road he came to a tavern. He looked inside. It was empty, except for two old men drinking coffee at a table. He went in and bought some bread and cheese and a mug of coffee, forcing himself to eat it slowly. He asked the woman who had served him a question.
‘Hawkes?’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Hawkes?’
‘You remember them, Maggie,’ one of the men at the table said. He was old and grizzled with bright, mischievous blue eyes. ‘Marcus Hawkes. Had a farm back aways, in the woods. Pretty wife, name o’ Susan. They was burned out, back in ’62. Old Pete Longstreet used the place as his headquarters during Second Manassas.’
‘Did they have a daughter, sir?’ Jed asked.
‘Hell, son, can’t say as I’d know,’ the old man said. ‘Mebbe they did. If I was married to a purty li’l thing like that Hawkes gal, damme if I wouldn’t have a houseful!’ He cackled with glee at his own joke and gave his companion a dig in the ribs with his elbow.
‘That the farm up there by Pageland Lane?’ the other man asked. ‘That the one, Lemuel?’
‘Aye,’ Lemuel said.
‘They was all killed that lived there,’ the second man said. ‘Every damned one of them.’
And that was all he ever found out.
‘I must have been no more than a mile away from that house when we went to Manassas for the second time,’ Jed told Maria. ‘We’d moved out of Manassas Junction and taken position on Sudley Mountain. Stony Ridge, some called it. Longstreet brought his corps up along the line of the Manassas Gap railroad and swung left on to the Warrenton Turnpike to join up with us. They must have marched right over that place.’
You could see it in the mind’s eye: the skirmishers going forward, the long waves of infantry coming in behind them, the artillery shells bursting in the waiting lines of Federal blue, company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division after division going forward. The little farmhouse in its forest glade caught in this maelstrom like a matchbox in a flash flood.
‘It is a strange story,’ Maria mused. Her head was turned away from him. There was a long silence between them.
‘And she was all there was in your world,’ she said, so softly that he hardly heard the words. ‘I see, now, what you meant.’
‘I have never told anyone else about her.’
‘It was not … love, Jedediah.’
‘I don’t know what it was,’ he said. ‘I needed her. I wanted her. If she had come back—’
‘Ah,’ Maria said. ‘All our lives are conditional upon that tiny word.’
He reached out and took her hand. She turned and came into his arms, her lips close to his.
‘Close the door on yesterday, mi amor,’ she whispered. ‘Close it now, forever.’
He closed his eyes and saw the girl. ‘My name is Deborah Hawkes,’ she said, and then she vanished in the warmth of Maria’s kiss. The door was closed. Forever.