3

Brat and Ugly

Angela Sanchez ladled the beans onto a warm tortilla still bearing the imprints of her mother’s fingers. As she rolled it up and shoved it into her mouth like cane into a sugar press, her father beamed at her. Well, he didn’t exactly beam. He was a Spaniard. Pure Castilian, thin as a coach whip and twice as jovial. Beaming was foreign to him, but a spark of something like approval flickered in his obsidian eyes. The approval was not of Angela’s manners, but of her motives.

“See how eager the child is to go to school. I told you she would like it once she became accustomed to it.”

“I am not a child,” Angela mumbled around the tortilla and beans. “I am almost sixteen years old.” She was tall like her father, solidly built like her mother, and with a hauteur all her own.

“Daughter, have respect,” Angela’s mother murmured in Nahuatl.

Angela grabbed the satchel with her primer, slate, and lunch inside. She threw the satchel’s strap over one shoulder, and bolted past her.

“Feed the chickens before you go,” Don Miguel called after her.

“Quin tepan, Tahtli. Later, Father.” Angela knew that answering in Nahuatl instead of Spanish annoyed him. Her mother and all the workers and servants on her family’s small hacienda spoke Nahuatl. She couldn’t help but be fluent in it, so annoying him was a bonus.

This was late October but a warm breeze riffled her hair as she hurried down the long corridor. She waded through pools of early morning sunlight where the high arched openings framed the exuberance of the courtyard. Riots of bougainvillea vines and hibiscus bushes almost hid the big stone cistern there.

Heavy beams and an iron crosspiece barred the oaken doors, but she went out through the small portal cut into one of them. She found her bay mare where the stable boy had left her. Like Angela, the mare was a talker. She was small, chunky, and restless as a rat, but with good bones and a fine lineage.

Angela looped her satchel over the pommel and tugged on the cinch to make sure it was tight. She led the horse to the mounting block, pulled her long skirts up, and vaulted onto the mare’s back. With the hem of her dress riding above her scarred brown knees, she urged the mare into a canter under the canopy of eucalyptus trees lining the avenue to the house.

When she came within sight of the nine men and the yoked mule teams she slowed to a walk. She didn’t want them to think she had been hurrying to catch up with them. At the sound of her mare’s hoofbeats they fell silent. Her father had always been fair and generous with his workers. He even sympathized with General Emiliano Zapata’s renewed rebellion, but men will be human. Angela suspected they had been arguing about how they would divide her father’s estate among themselves when Zapata forced President Madero to make good on his promises of land reform.

Angela didn’t see what any of it had to do with her. The intrigues of Mexico City might as well take place on the moon for all the difference it made out here. She hiked her skirts higher and reined her mare alongside eighteen-year-old Antonio Perez.

“Ujulé, Ugly,” she said in Nahuatl, “Is it true that God made the mule to give the Indian a rest?”

“A mule like you gives no one rest, Chamaca, Brat.” Antonio replied in Spanish to make the point that Angela was his employer’s daughter and of a higher class, but he insulted her anyway. They had been doing it since they were children.

“You are the tick in the mule’s ear.”

“Bold talk from one no bigger than the flea on a tick’s butt.”

All the workers except Antonio knew that Angela was infatuated with him; and everyone but Angela knew that Antonio had loved her since she was small. They also knew that nothing could ever come of it. A gentleman might take an Indian to wife, but the reverse did not happen. Ever. And even though Angela was half Indian, she was the patrón’s daughter.

Arquímedes Guerra, the patriarch of the field crew, knew that. “We’re all made of the same clay,” he often said, “but a chamber pot can never be a vase. You, my child,” he told her, “are a vase.”

Arquímedes was no relation, but Angela called him colli, grandfather. When she wanted advice or sympathy she went to him rather than her father.

“Have you decided to go to school today, mi hija, my daughter?”

Angela grinned. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll go.” She had been saying that for months. Don Manuel’s attempts to educate his daughter had been no more successful than his efforts to make a lady of her.

“‘Para pendejo no se necesita maestro,’” Antonio observed. “‘To be a fool requires no teacher.’”

One of the men added his centavo’s worth. “All a woman needs to know is how to cook beans, sew shirts, grow corn, and make babies.”

There followed some discussion of the part about making babies. Antonio said he would rather stick a lighted firecracker in his pants than fall in love. Angela commented on how fortunate that was for the women of the world.

Arquímedes smiled at them both. “Men and women are two locked boxes,” he said. “And in each one lies the key to open the other.”

“There is no defense against love and a rash,” Antonio grumbled.

Antonio led the mules onto the lane that followed the irrigation ditch to the cane fields. Before Arquímedes followed him, he put a hand on the mare’s neck and looked up at Angela.

“You should listen to your father, mi hija. When Zapata’s revolution comes we will need educated people of good heart to make sure everything is as it should be.”

Angela shrugged. “The revolution came and went.”

“Do you see any changes because of it? Have we poor farmers received back the land the hacendados stole from us?”

“No, but there’s nothing I can do about that, educated or not.” Angela reined her horse toward the river. “Ma xipatinemi.” She called over her shoulder. It was the Nauhuatl form of good-bye. It meant, “May you be well.”

She tethered her mare to graze beyond the bare dirt surrounding the roots of a banyan tree. The tree was as big around as the hacienda’s blacksmith shop and its canopy spanned the river. Angela’s great, great, great grandfather had brought it from Spain as a seedling.

In the 150 years since then it had sent down hundreds of aerial roots from its branches. They had reached the ground, taken hold, and thickened into trunks. As the trunks grew wider they crowded each other, forming a maze of nooks and crevices. As far back as Angela could remember the banyan had been her citadel, her kingdom, her refuge.

She kicked off her shoes. She tugged her blouse over her head and untied the drawstring on her skirt. She dropped it around her ankles and stepped out of it. She draped her clothes over a bush, then she took a running start onto a jutting rock and leaped off. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs, and hit the river with a force that sent water up like a geyser.

She snorted and spouted and splashed, then she walked out of the river, dripping. She retrieved the bundle she had hidden among the banyan’s roots. It contained the white cotton trousers, tunic, leather sandals, and wide-brimmed straw hat that all the farmers wore. She put them on and climbed the tree, finding footholds in the intricate fretwork of roots and branches.

She walked out on the broad limb that gave the best view of the men in the cane field and settled down where it forked. She reclined with her back against the upper branch, her legs draped along the lower one. Through the years the birds had gotten used to her presence. Anoles and chameleons commuted across her and an iguana as long as her arm dozed like a tabby cat nearby.

From here she could see Antonio guiding the plow. He had draped his shirt over the handle and Angela never tired of watching the glide of muscles in his bare back and arms. She wanted to tell him how she felt about him, but she was certain he would laugh at her.

Her eyelids were beginning to droop like the iguana’s when the squad of soldiers galloped across the field. Their horses’ hooves sent dirt flying from the newly plowed furrows. They herded the workers into a line along an old ditch, dry except for mud in the bottom.

Dread hardened into a canker in Angela’s chest. Most of her father’s men fell on their knees, but Antonio and Arquímedes remained on their feet. They were the first ones shot. Angela bit down on her knuckles to keep from screaming when the two of them pitched into the ditch.

The soldiers emptied their rifles into the rest, then dismounted to make sure they were dead before they kicked the bodies over the edge. They reined their horses around, and driving the mules ahead of them, they headed in a cloud of dust for the hacienda. Soon strands of vultures began weaving a wreath over the ditch.

Not until the sun was hovering above the horizon did Angela come down from the tree. As if to delay doing what she had to, she folded her skirt and blouse and put them and her shoes into her satchel. She rolled up her pants legs so they wouldn’t get soaked with blood. She picked up the biggest stick she could find to beat off the vultures, and led the mare to the ditch.

The bodies sprawled in heaps above the muddy water. Somewhere under them lay Antonio and Arquímedes. Angela crossed herself before she slid down the steep sides of the trench. Flies, crows, and buzzards rose in a raucous black cloud when she hit the bottom. Ignoring the thunder claps of their wings, Angela grasped arms and feet and started hauling the corpses off the pile.

When three of them proved too heavy for her, she took the rope used to dislodge tree stumps and tied it to an ankle. She climbed up the embankment, looped the other end around the saddle pommel, and led the mare along the rim, dragging the body away. She repeated the operation for the second and third.

She uncovered Arquímedes lying face up in the shallow water. His lightless eyes stared at heaven. She knew he was dead, but she knelt next to him and put her ear to his heart anyway. He groaned.

“¡Ay, Dios!” She jumped back and realized that Arquímedes had not made the sound. Antonio had.

“Dream with the angels, colli.” Angela made the sign of the cross over Arquímedes and rolled him away. Antonio lay on his side underneath, his body almost hidden by black sludge. His head was cradled on his arm as if asleep on his reed mat at home. It kept his nose barely above water.

Angela sat in the mud, lifted his head into her lap, put her arms around him, and sobbed. She was making God extravagant promises in exchange for Antonio’s survival when he opened his eyes.

“Where did the bullet go in, Ugly?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Brat.”

“Where do you hurt?”

“Everywhere. What about the others?”

“They are with God.”

“The old man, too?”

“Yes.”

“The devil take the sons of whores.”

“Why did they do it?”

“They wanted us to tell them where the men went.”

“The ones who ran into the hills to join Zapata?”

“Yes. We told the sons of bitches to look in hell.” He stared up at her face, covered with mud and blood. “Angelita, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.” His eyes closed.

Angela shook him. “Do not die, my love.” She was done with haggling with God. She looked up at a sunset sky so glorious that God must surely live there. “Do not let him die, or I will curse you. From the flames of damnation I will curse your name! Do you hear me?”

“We hear you, Doña Angela.”

Angela looked around at a line of women standing along the ditch’s rim, their faces shadowed by shawls. When they saw the bodies of their men, they pulled their shawls over their eyes and wailed. Angela should have been more understanding, but everyone had died and left her in charge. She hadn’t time for her own grief much less anyone else’s. The carnage was too horrific for her to absorb anyway. Her mind shut out emotions so she could do what had to be done.

“They are all dead but Antonio. We have to carry him out of here.”

The women slid down the slope and helped her carry him back up it. They laid him on his back in the grass and Angela began scraping off the mud, trying to find the source of the flow of blood. When Angela probed Antonio’s shoulder he winced.

Most of the women started wailing again, but one of them said, “El gobierno took your mother. No one knows what became of your father.”

Angela knew anyone in uniform was el gobierno to them. She didn’t bother to ask why the army of the revolution had turned on its own people. They wore the federal uniform now. They had become el gobierno. And anyway, men willing to murder were as easy to recruit as fleas.

One of the women ripped a strip of cloth from the bottom of her skirt so Angela could bind it around Antonio’s shoulder. Antonio struggled to his feet and swayed.

“Careful, Ugly.” Angela put an arm around his waist to steady him.

She and the women helped him into the mare’s saddle and Angela mounted behind him. The women had brought a donkey cart to carry the bodies home. Angela gave the oldest of them the few pesos she had.

“Gracias, Doña Angela.”

“God go with you, mamacita. Ma xipatinemi. May you be well.”

Angela put her arms around Antonio and took up the reins. The mare headed for her feed trough, but stopped short at the charred, smoking rubble of the stable. The corncrib, blacksmith shop, and sugar press building had also been set on fire.

With her pulse pounding in her ears, Angela rode through the big doors now standing open. No chickens wandered the courtyard, which looked as if a bomb had gone off in it. It was littered with upturned flagstones and pitted with holes the soldiers had dug in search of silver the family might have buried.

Angela left Antonio by the cistern and ran through the house, calling for her father and Plinio, the family’s mayordomo. Furniture lay overturned and smashed. Debris covered the floor, but the soldiers had taken everything of value that they could carry.

Angela went to her father’s study and waded through the scattered books. El gobierno had not considered them worth stealing. She put a stool on a chair and set the chair on a big chest. She climbed onto the stool and pushed aside a panel in the ceiling. She stood on tiptoe and felt around until she found her father’s Winchester 30-30 carbine, the 1894 model, and the box of ammunition for it. She knew how to use it. Riding and shooting were the only activities her father shared with her. She had practiced throwing knives and rocks on her own.

She replaced the panel and put the stool and chair back where she had found them. She pressed one of the carved wooden medallions at the edge of an ornate cupboard and slid out a narrow vertical drawer, invisible when closed. Inside was a wallet containing forty of the big silver pesos called bolas.

She put them into the bag around her neck and picked up the rifle and ammunition. She found a couple old shirts and two pair of her father’s trousers that the soldiers had missed. She figured she could replace her filthy clothes with one set and give the other to Antonio.

She returned to the cistern, and in the last of the day’s light she sluiced buckets of water over Antonio and herself until she’d rinsed off the worst of the dirt and blood. She took the skirt from her satchel and tore off material to change the bandage on Antonio’s wound and make a sling for his arm.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked.

“Wherever you’re going.”

Shadowy figures darker than the gathering night slipped through the gate. Angela shoved a shell into the Winchester, levered the action, and rested the barrel on the rim of the cistern with the muzzle aimed at them.

“Who are you?” she called out.

“I am Plinio, princess.” The family’s mayordomo had always called her cíhuapilli, princess. “The women told us you had come here.”

Plinio and five of Don Sanchez’s employees lined up in front of her as if for military inspection. They had armed themselves with hoes, machetes, knives, and a few ancient rifles. They carried their belongings in satchels with the straps running diagonally across their chests.

“Do you know where my father is?”

“No, but we want to go with you to fight in General Zapata’s army.”

Angela hadn’t yet decided where she would go, but now she realized that the choice was inevitable. “How do you know what I’m going to do?”

It was too dark to see the wry smile on Plinio’s doleful, wrinkled face. “Muchacha, how many years have I known you?”

“All my life.”

“Well then…”

Angela wore her hair in a braid that reached the small of her back. “Cut this off.” She held it away from her body. “Hurry. The sons of dogs could return.”

Plinio knew from experience that arguing with Don Miguel’s daughter was a waste of time. He could barely see the braid, so he measured it with his hand before he sawed through it with his machete. Angela shook her head to let her hair fall in a parentheses around her face. She ran her hand through it, disoriented when her fingers came to the ends so soon.

She took a deep breath. She was glad night had come so her father’s men could not see how frightened and distraught she was. She did not know where Zapata was and the mountainous countryside was perilous even in daylight.

Antonio must have guessed what she was thinking. “I know a cave nearby where we can spend the night. Tomorrow, we can go to San Miguel. My family will know where to hide us.”

Angela mounted her mare with Antonio behind her. The men rode double on the three mules they had been able to muster. Angela raised her father’s rifle over her head and started for the main gate.

“Vámanos, muchachos,” she said. “The devil himself cannot frighten us.”