I awakened to darkness, the pulsating beat of music. Guitars and maracas from the sound of it and someone was singing. I was alone, for there was no sign of Victoria, even when I swung my feet to the floor, found a match and lit the lamp. My boots were at the end of the bed. I pulled them on, went to the washstand in the corner, leaned over the bowl and emptied the earthenware jug of water over my head.
Which made me feel a lot better. I found a towel, opened a window and went out on the terrace and stood there, breathing in the cool night air and drying myself at the same time. The light from the hotel windows spilled out across the street and showed me Victoria and Nachita sitting on the edge of the boardwalk opposite.
‘Victoria,’ I called softly and she looked up. ‘Why did you leave me? Come on up.’
Her face was a pale blur indicating nothing. Nachita answered for her. ‘It is not permitted, señor.’
‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ I demanded. ‘Wait for me there. I’ll be right down.’
I found a clean shirt, pulled it over my head and went downstairs. I didn’t bother going into the bar, but went straight out through the front door and plunged across the street without looking so that a couple of horsemen had to rein in to avoid hitting me.
Victoria and Nachita rose to meet me and I took her by the arms. ‘What’s all this about?’
Nachita said, ‘She was asked to leave the hotel, señor.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ I told him.
‘In Mojada it is not so bad.’ He shrugged. ‘I know places where an Indian, especially a Yaqui, would not be allowed in town limits.’
And inside, the bastards were celebrating. The two horsemen had dismounted and were staring across at us. I recognized Jurado, but the other was a stranger to me. Jurado made some comment or other and laughed and then turned and went inside, closing the door behind him.
It was very quiet, the music muted and far away and I was no longer tired, only angry in a sad sort of way and sorry for humanity, if you understand me.
I raised her hands to my lips and said, ‘Wait for me here. I’ll get a jacket and walk back to the camp with you.’
The door to the bar was open as I went through the hall and as I passed, I heard van Horne bellow, ‘Keogh, in here.’
I paused in the doorway. I should think just about every man in the village was in there and most of them with drink taken. Four musicians were banging away briskly in the corner.
Van Horne and Janos were at a table, jammed up tight against the bar and the Hungarian raised his glass. ‘To the hero of the hour. Join us, sir, I insist.’
I stood at the bar beside them, Jurado and his friend behind me which was important in view of what happened. Moreno was dispensing free drinks, himself half drunk. Van Horne glanced up at me. ‘You don’t look pleased, Keogh, what’s wrong?’
‘I understand they threw Victoria out when I was asleep.’
He shrugged. ‘A custom of the country. She’s chosen her side, Keogh, and the plain fact is that the average Mexican can’t stand Indians.’
‘Especially Yaqui,’ Janos put in. ‘Incredibly cruel people, Keogh. When I served with that federal punitive expedition we had a colonel called Cubero who’d bought himself a harem of five Yaqui women. Women, I say. As I remember, the eldest was only fifteen. A hundred pesos each.’
‘And you call the Yaqui cruel?’ I said.
‘They ambushed him with a patrol in the mountains one day.’ Janos was as drunk as I had seen him and spoke rather slowly as a consequence. ‘God knows what they’d done to him before they finished him off, but when we found him, he had an eyeball in the palm of each hand and his private parts had been stuffed between his teeth.’
‘What do you expect me to do, vomit?’ I demanded. ‘I’d say he got what he deserved at a hundred pesos each for little girls.’
Moreno leaned across the bar, grinning foolishly. ‘Heh, Señor Keogh, we have decided to name the boy for Father van Horne. A good idea, you agree?’
‘I think it’s bloody marvellous.’ I turned to van Horne. ‘Another van Horne miracle, is that how it turned out?’
His smile died, something close to pain in his eyes and Moreno touched my arm. ‘You will drink with me, señor?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve made other arrangements.’
He seemed genuinely bewildered. ‘But I don’t understand, señor.’
I had not buttoned my shirt and the silver amulet Victoria had given me swung free. Jurado reached across and took it in his fingers. ‘It is very simple, Moreno. Señor Keogh prefers other company to ours. Darker meat.’ He laughed coarsely. ‘Is it true what they say about Yaqui women?’ He followed this with probably the most obscene suggestion I had heard in my life.
I think I knew then that he was there to make trouble. Not particularly with me, but I had come easily to hand, so to speak. Van Horne started to get up and I shoved him back into his chair.
‘I’d be very happy to drink with you,’ I said to Moreno. ‘In a moment.’
As I turned and walked out, Jurado laughed. ‘Ah, the little one runs to avoid messing his pants.’ One or two of the drunks laughed dutifully.
Victoria and Nachita crossed the street to meet me. I said, ‘I’ve been invited to have a drink before I go.’
She knew what was in my mind, I saw it in her eyes and so did Nachita. He said, ‘There is nothing to be gained from this, señor, they would spit on us.’
A strange thing happened then. I went very cold, very calm, fire in my belly and when I spoke, the voice came from somewhere outside me and the sound of it would have frightened Finn Cuchulain himself.
‘You will listen to me now,’ I said. ‘I am Emmet Keogh of Stradballa and afraid of no man on this earth. We will go now and God will go with us. I will see justice done and if I must break a head or two in the process, then well enough.’
The blackness was in me then as it had been in my father, so they tell me. The violence there had been no escaping, that had sent my mother to an early grave. I turned without another word and they followed and when I reached the door, I kicked it open and went in like a strong wind. The silence had to be heard to be believed when they saw what stood behind me.
I walked to the bar, put my hands on the edge and confronted poor foolish Moreno, mouth agape. ‘I’ll have that drink now.’
I half turned, leaning against the bar, back to van Horne and Janos, facing Jurado and his friend. Victoria stood a yard or two away and smiled when I looked at her. I raised my fingers to my lips and kissed them. There was a gasp from someone in the crowd. I saw Nachita’s fingers ready in the lever of his old Winchester.
Moreno put a bottle on the bar, his good whisky, and one glass. I said, ‘You are forgetting my friends.’
There was a look of agony on his face. Poor devil, he didn’t know what to do next. Jurado solved the situation for him. His great hand wrapped itself round the neck of the bottle. ‘No,’ he said.
That close, the smell of him, his gross body, was quite overpowering. I said, ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you stink, my friend?’
There was genuine amazement in his eyes, shock that someone dare insult him so before everyone there. Especially a man so much smaller than himself.
He released the bottle in a kind of reflex gesture and I picked it up and smashed it across the side of his head. As he cried out, staggering back, I wrenched the pistol from his holster and tossed it to van Horne.
Jurado started to turn, blood on his face and I grabbed the nearest chair and smashed it across the great head and shoulders. Once, twice and then again, breaking it apart.
He fell on his knees and stayed there for a while, then got up and stood looking at me, one hand wiping blood away mechanically.
‘All right then, you bastard,’ I said, dropping into a fighting crouch. ‘Let’s be having you.’
My grandfather, they tell me, might have been a contender for the heavyweight crown had he so chosen and in his youth, had gone the distance with the great Bob Fitzsimmons himself.
From my earliest years at school, my small size earned me more kicks than halfpence. For some time this went undetected for I have always been considered close by nature, and then an ambush by a couple of tinker’s boys one fine evening sent me home with a face like raw meat.
Mickeen Bawn Keogh examined that face, his grey eyes cold and rather frightening in spite of the smile on his face. ‘Two of them, did you say, avic?’ He nodded. ‘Then it is time I took you in hand and long overdue.’
Whereupon he took off his jacket, led me out into the yard and gave me my first lesson in the noble art and no holds barred.
So, I was only five and a half feet and weighed barely ten stone, but I could punch every pound of it as Raul Jurado found to his cost that night.
He came in with a roar, I feinted with my left and smashed my right fist into his mouth, splitting the lips so that blood spurted. I followed it with a left below the breast that sounded like the crack of a whip when bone met bone.
Footwork, timing and hitting, that was the secret and in that first couple of minutes I gave him neither quarter nor peace, circling around, evading his ponderous blows with ease, feinting and jabbing, in and away again.
The crowd scattered, most of them scrambling for the door and there was a press of faces at the windows outside. Janos still sat at the table, hands folded on the knob of his stick, face shining with sweat, but van Horne was standing now, Jurado’s pistol in his right hand.
I suppose I got careless, forgetting the rawhide quirt dangling from Jurado’s wrist. I danced in to belt him again and he slashed out blindly, the rawhide curling around my face, drawing an involuntary cry of agony from me.
Worst of all, when he pulled, I had no choice but to lurch towards him and he delivered a stunning blow to my forehead that sent me back towards the bar. His friend stuck out a foot, putting me flat on my back.
I rolled away as Jurado came in fast, boot raised to crush my face. I grabbed for that foot, twisted and he fell heavily across me. We rolled here and there between the tables trying to have each other’s eyes out and when we stopped, I was on top.
He got his knee into me before I could do any damage and threw me backwards with a powerful kick. As I scrambled up, he rose to meet me, his face a mask of blood and I was not afraid. As I circled, I saw Victoria by the door, teeth bared like any she-cat, Nachita holding her arm.
Jurado was going to kill me now, it was in his face. His hands came up, hooked into claws and he charged like a bull. I threw a chair into his path that put him on his knees and kicked him in the side of the head.
He stayed there on his hands and knees for the second time that night, and his friend at the bar, thinking, I suppose, that I would finish him off, pulled out his pistol. He was fast, but not fast enough. Two feet of steel flashed from the Hungarian’s stick, blurred in motion. Jurado’s friend dropped his pistol with a cry, blood spurting as he grabbed his wrist.
Even then, Jurado surprised me by the sheer bull-strength of him. He came in low, his shoulder sending me back against the wall. His foot slipped or I think he might have had me. As I straightened, he lurched forward again. I ducked under his arm, twisted a shoulder inwards and sent him over my hip through the window in a savage cross-buttock.
The crowd scattered in a snowstorm of flying glass and I scrambled over the sill and arrived on the terrace in time to put my boot in his face as he tried to get up, sending him back into the street.
He lay there on his back and I suddenly found it necessary to hang on to one of the veranda posts. I turned, leaning against it, and found Victoria on the edge of the crowd four or five yards away.
Her face seemed very pale, the eyes enormous. I smiled, or thought I did, though my face must have looked a sight and then, dear God above us, a miracle happened.
Her eyes filled with horror, her face shattered like a mirror breaking, the mouth opened wide in what should have been a soundless scream. Instead, she cried my name.
‘Emm-et!’ Broken in the centre, yet quite unmistakable.
I turned and swung to one side as Jurado lunged in, a knife in one hand. In the same moment, Nachita appeared from the darkness behind him and flung his own knife underhand so that it thudded into the boardwalk at my feet.
By God, but the power was in me then. Such release as I have never known to hear my name spoken by the one person who mattered most. She told me much later, that when I went down into the street to meet him, knife in hand, the look on my face was terrible to see.
Jurado must have agreed for he threw his own knife away from him and staggered into the darkness.
I swung round, challenging that sea of faces, yellow in the lamplight, fear on most of them and then van Horne stepped down and put a hand to my chest as if to stop me falling. His voice seemed to come from under the earth itself, remote, far away, but in any case, there was only one person I wished to see at that moment.
For some reason she was crying. Now why would that be? And then I remembered. I said gently, ‘My name? What’s my name?’
But there was nothing to fear for the spell was broken. ‘Emmet,’ she said. ‘Emmet.’
‘We will go now,’ I said. ‘Before I fall down and disgrace us all in the face of the world.’
She took one arm, Nachita the other and we left them there and went to our own place.
They got me to the camp and into the tent and I lay there in the cool darkness and let the night wash over me. After a while, Victoria came back with a bowl of water and a cloth. She started gently to wipe my face.
I was tired, my head adrift from my shoulders, but I was still conscious enough to need reassuring and took her by the wrists. ‘Speak to me – anything. Just let me hear your voice.’
There was a hesitation I could almost feel and then slowly, hesitantly, each word separate, the voice rather remote and more than a little hoarse, she added, ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Not another word,’ I answered and started to laugh weakly, and then the darkness really did close in on me.
I awakened to firelight flickering on the canvas walls of the tent and to voices. It took me a moment or so, not only to think back to reality, but to realize that one of them was van Horne.
I crawled out through the entrance, so stiff and sore that it was past belief and found the three of them sitting by the fire drinking coffee. Nachita saw me first and van Horne and Victoria turned in the same moment.
She was beside me in a flash, helping me stand. ‘You should be resting.’
There was still that faintly unreal flavour to her speech. Van Horne said, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Like a very old hound dog.’
‘That was quite a performance. You can use yourself.’ My Enfield in its holster was lying beside him and he picked it up. ‘I noticed you’d left this in your room. Thought you might be needing it.’ There was more to it than that, of course. Had to be.
‘Where’s Janos?’
‘Oh, he decided to have an early night.’
My head still felt swollen and somehow disembodied and I was having difficulty in thinking straight and that would not do at all.
‘I need to clear my head,’ I said. ‘And there’s only one way I’m going to do that in a hurry. I won’t be long.’
The moon was full, the cottonwoods a maze of light and shadow and beyond, the waterfall was silver in the moonlight as it cascaded over rocks.
I stripped and stood there for a moment, the night wind cold on my flesh, feeling for the bruises gingerly and any sign of real damage. My ribs and the rest of me seemed intact enough and I moved out across a patch of shingle and waded into the water.
It was cold enough to freeze the marrow in the bones or so it seemed. I swallowed a howl and swam to the other side and back again. The effects were remarkably bracing and I stood under the waterfall for a moment or so, for the pool was nowhere more than four feet deep as far as I could judge.
Ten seconds of that icy deluge was all I could stand and when I waded out to the shingle strand, van Horne was standing watching me, the Enfield in his hand.
‘You forgot this again.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what women do to a man, Keogh. The beginning of the end.’
‘True enough,’ I said, catching the blanket he tossed me. ‘But what an end.’
He smiled. ‘So your brains are unscrambled again? That’s a blessing. Do you try to commit suicide often?’
I shrugged as I rubbed myself down. ‘You know how it is.’
He paused in the act of lighting one of his cigarillos, the match flaring in his hand. ‘I’m not sure that I do.’
‘I don’t like to be leaned on,’ I said. ‘To be shoved against the wall. Brings out the worst in me and men like Jurado do, certainly. Probably something to do with my size.’
‘I had noticed,’ he replied, a touch of irony in his voice.
I pulled on my shirt and found a crumpled packet of Artistas in my trouser pocket. ‘What did you want to see me about?’
He seemed surprised. ‘Why, tomorrow, of course. What else?’
‘You still intend to go through with it, this walk nonsense?’
‘I’ll be outside the church at nine-thirty just like I said, ready to go and de la Plata will be there to stop me.’
‘With at least a couple of dozen men to back him up.’
‘And riding straight into ambush. Here, let me show you.’
He found a stick and drew a crude plan in a patch of damp sand. ‘I’ll be outside the porch waiting to go, with the image on a handcart I’ve borrowed from Moreno. I’ll have the Thompson and two or three Mills bombs handy.’
Strange what tricks the mind plays on us. For a moment, this might have been one of a hundred similar jobs I had planned and undertaken over the long dark years.
‘What about Janos?’
‘In the bell tower, same as yesterday, with the other Thompson. You’ll be on the other side of the square.’ He indicated the spot on his plan. ‘There is a broken-down stable there, no longer used by anyone. I’ve been up there tonight and left you the Winchester and three Mills bombs under an old sack in the right-hand corner by the loft door.’
‘What kind of a field of fire?’
‘Couldn’t be better. Forty yards from the stable to the church. I paced it out. You can’t miss from the loft door at that range. They’ll ride straight into the crossfire.’
I thought about it for a while, but could find no real flaws beyond the usual one that you could never depend on anything in this life, which meant that something unexpected was almost certain to happen.
‘One thing,’ I said. ‘I’ll be firing in your general direction. I hope you realize that.’
‘Son, I’ll be inside that porch so fast you’ll wonder if I was ever there in the first place.’
A fine, light-hearted attitude. I said, ‘It’s funny, but you had Janos and me worried back there at the church when you threw down the gauntlet to de la Plata. We thought you might be taking your role a little too seriously.’
He seemed genuinely astonished, then laughed harshly. ‘Sure I take it seriously, Keogh. Fifty-three thousand dollar’s worth.’
I could have taken him up on that, because in a way, he was protesting too much, but I had no choice for Nachita appeared from the cottonwoods like some grey ghost. Even allowing for his usual impassivity, I sensed there was something.
‘What is it?’
‘We have a visitor, señor. For you, father,’ he added, turning to van Horne. ‘The Señorita de la Plata.’
A night for surprises.
She stood holding the bridle of her horse just beyond the firelight. One could not see much of her face, but she seemed calm enough at first when she spoke. ‘Forgive me, father, but I had to speak with you. I saw Señor Janos at the hotel who thought you might be here.’
Van Horne took the reins from her and handed them to Nachita: ‘What can I do for you?’
Her voice was still calm when she said, ‘Father, I know my brother and I can tell you this. He and his men will be at the church in the morning at the time you have indicated. If he finds you there he will kill you. Nothing is more certain.’
Van Horne took her hands and was obviously about to reply when she cracked wide open and stumbled against him as if for support.
‘Help me, father. In pity’s name, help me. I can no longer carry this dreadful burden alone.’
He glanced over his shoulder at the three of us, hesitated fractionally, then led her to the tent and they went inside.
For quite some time there was bitter, agonized weeping, which finally subsided, to be followed by the low murmur of voices. It was strangely embarrassing, as if one were eavesdropping on something essentially private. We squatted by the fire without talking and drank the bitter coffee Victoria provided.
It must have been at least half an hour before the tent-flap was thrown back and they emerged, Chela de la Plata first. She avoided my eye rather obviously and hurried to where Nachita had tethered her horse to a tree.
Van Horne went after her and she turned and asked for a blessing. He responded without the slightest hesitation, the words clear on the night air as his fingers traced the sign of the cross.
‘Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus.’
She mounted and galloped away and he stayed there looking after her. I moved to his side, but before I could speak, he said, ‘I expect you and Janos to be in position by nine in the morning, just in case. No need to meet again before then.’
He actually started to walk away and I grabbed his sleeve. ‘Just a minute, what was it all supposed to be about?’
‘You heard, she came to warn me.’
‘Not that, I mean the other business.’
‘She had a lot on her mind. She hadn’t spoken to a priest in a long time, that’s all.’
I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me you confessed her?’
He turned on me, eyes starting from his head and grabbed me by the lapel. ‘Does the thought amuse you, Keogh? What was I supposed to do? Say no?’
If ever I have looked at a soul in torment it was then. He pushed me away and snarled, ‘Anyway, what’s the odds? We could all be dead by nine-thirty-five in the morning.’
I watched him walk away, clear in the moonlight. For some reason filled with the most terrible feeling of desolation I have ever known. But no, that isn’t quite true. I had known it once and once only. A century or more before. The square at Drumdoon in the rain, my brother dead before me.
I went and lay on the blankets in the tent, staring into the dark and after a while, Victoria brought me a warm drink which obviously contained a sleeping draught of some description, for within minutes of taking it I was asleep.