42

Destiny’s Destination

Rico wanted to believe that the black clouds hanging over Las Delicias meant a gentle evening rain, but he knew better. He urged Grullo into a gallop down the carriage drive. The shreds of smoke were small ones. Maybe he could chase away whomever had started the fire. Maybe he could put out the flames before they did much damage. That the blaze might have started accidentally didn’t occur to him. Fires rarely started by accident these days.

He was so intent on what he would find beyond the open gate he didn’t notice the handbill nailed to it. The house looked intact, but the ruins of the sugar refinery beyond it still smoldered. Only the mill’s stone chimney remained, like a forefinger pointing in reproach toward heaven.

When Rico went inside the house he saw that its stone walls formed a shell around chaos. Looters had taken almost everything, yet still managed to leave it littered with trash they didn’t consider worth stealing. They had set a fire at the back of the house. Rico could tell from the streaks of soot on the walls that the flames had licked upward and ignited the beams. A portion of the roof had collapsed, leaving a pile of broken tiles on the floor.

Rico put a hand on the ashes and felt the warmth from them. He waded through the ankle-deep rubbish in the maze of rooms, dim in the day’s fading light. He called out as he went in case anyone lay hurt, or trapped under a fallen beam. He didn’t bother to search for anything the thieves might have left. Nothing had remained here for him even before the looters came. He stood ankle-deep in the debris of his childhood and gave several heartbeats’ thought to his situation.

His beloved was dead. His past was in ashes. His future was smoke on the wind.

The extent of the destruction didn’t surprise Rico. He didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that although the local villagers recognized his grandfather’s authority, they did not like him. Rico had spent his entire life trying to be the kind of man his grandfather was not.

He could imagine the scene here, with the local villagers swarming through these rooms. It must have looked like Mexico City’s sprawling Thieves’ Market on bargain day. He wondered how many of his family’s treasures would end up in the Thieves’ Market or in the Bank of Pity, the national pawnshop.

He discarded his plan to recruit men for Carranza’s army. He had no way of knowing which of the locals had participated in this. He didn’t want to go to the nearest village and see his family’s furniture, knickknacks, and paintings in the houses of people he had known all his life. In any case, everyone would assume he had come to punish the culprits. He could imagine them shuffling their feet, shifting their eyes from his gaze, and mumbling to avoid answering his questions.

He would volunteer his services to Carranza. He would fight to overthrow the likes of Huerta and Rubio. He would do his best to make up for the injustices inflicted on the laborers who made the extravagance of his family’s lives possible.

When he left the house, the sun had advanced too far toward the horizon for Rico to travel. As he unsaddled Grullo he noticed the paper nailed to the front gate. In the pale light he could barely read it. The drawing hardly approximated him, but the handbill gave a good description of Grullo. He realized that would be a problem in the days to come. He could disguise himself, but he couldn’t disguise his horse.

He brushed Grullo and led him to the stream running helter-skelter over rocks at the far end of the lawn. He lay on his stomach and took a long drink, too. He hobbled the horse on the lawn where the family had played tennis, croquette, and squash. The familiar sound of him munching on the succulent grass was a comfort. Rico wished his own hunger could be as easily appeased.

He spread his blanket on the thick moss in the triangular niche between two of an ancient fig tree’s enormous roots. A dense curtain of vines covered the tree. It had started as a vine itself, twining up around the hapless trunk of another tree long gone now. The fig had grown, drawing nourishment from its host. It had expanded and hardened until it stood on its own.

Its radiating system of roots took the shape and curve of a cathedral’s flying buttresses. As a child Rico had imagined they were his castle, his fortress, his Spanish galleon, his hideaway. He lay with his head against the trunk and looked up at the canopy of leaves. A shepherd moon watched over the flock of stars grazing among the branches.

Rico was partial to irony. He drifted toward sleep with a smile on his face and his hand resting on the sleek, rounded top of the fig tree’s root. Whoever had looted the house had not been able to steal the only material thing from his past for which he really cared and that now cradled him.

 

The market town of Mazatl was the heart of the district. The Carmelite convent was the soul of Mazatl. Rico’s family had donated to its support since its founding. For the first time in a hundred years there would be no donation. Before Rico left Morelos he felt obliged to explain and apologize, two things his grandfather never did.

Mother Merced probably knew what had happened at Las Delicias, and why Rico’s grandfather had not arrived with the quarterly alms. She might have been cloistered, but she was not in the dark. The grate in the door was like the window on a confessional. People came here from all over to tell her their troubles. Very little happened in the district that Mother Merced didn’t know about.

He rode down streets empty except for old people. Weeds and vines had begun to overrun the kitchen gardens. When he came to the plaza with its palms, fountain, and Victorian bandstand he was relieved to see the sacristan sweeping the flagstones.

“Thanks be to God!” The old man dropped to one knee and crushed his battered hat to his chest. “He has answered our prayers. We knew you would come to our aid, Don Federico.”

Rico dismounted. As he helped the old man to his feet he saw his grandfather’s stick pin holding the faded bandana around the sacristan’s withered neck. A silversmith had adorned the pin with a horse’s head engraved in such detail that the individual hairs in his mane were visible. The horse was Grullo’s sire and the pin was one of a kind. Don Bonifacio wore it only on formal occasions.

Rico said nothing about it. Better the sacristan have it than some bargain hunter at the Thieves’ Market. This meant that Mother Merced must know who had ransacked and burned his family’s estate. Rico didn’t intend to ask her. Even if he did, she was unlikely to tell him. Mother Merced did not repeat the confidences whispered through the iron grate.

Rico tied Grullo to a tree, walked across the stone paving of the outer reception area, and rang the bell on the door. From infancy until he boarded the steamer for Boston, his grandfather had brought him here every three months. After they delivered the family’s gift of money, they attended mass in the church next to the convent.

As a boy Rico had been fascinated by the sweet soprano chants echoing in the darkness beyond the grate or from behind the screen in the nun’s chapel. He listened intently now, but he heard no singing. Nor did he hear footsteps because Mother Merced did not wear shoes, but he did hear the rustle of her robes amplified by the walls of the narrow corridor.

He expected the panel behind the grate to slide open as usual. When the door itself swung wide he jumped back in surprise. He almost bowled over the sacristan hovering behind him.

Mother Merced stood like a plaster statue in the doorway. Her tight-fitting coif framed the stricken look on her face. Her eyes were red and her cheeks streaked with tears. The tears started again when she saw Rico.

“What happened, Holy Mother?”

She spoke in a choked whisper. “The federales came.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.” Mother Merced swayed and Rico reached out to catch her should she faint. “They took the sisters, the young ones. Only we old women are left.”

“Where did they take them?”

“I heard someone say Veracruz.”

“I am riding north. If I can find them I will punish the ones who took them.”

“Retribution is for God, my son. But if you find them, please make sure they come home.”

“I will.” He hesitated to ask her for a favor, but he could not leave without doing it. He knelt and bowed his head. “Will you say a novena for someone?”

“For whom, my child?”

“Her name is Grace Knight.”

“The tall Englishwoman with hair like old copper?”

Rico thought he would faint and fall nose-first onto the paving. Not the sort of thing for an officer and a gentleman to do.

“You know of her?”

“She slept here three nights ago.” The arrival of a champion and holy work to do seemed to revive Mother Merced. “Why do you ask us to pray her through purgatory?”

Rico collected his wits. Crying was also not appropriate for an officer and a gentleman.

“I heard the rebels had killed her.”

“If so, her ghost is quite substantial. She came here with the women who travel with Lieutenant Angel.”

Rico was so stunned he did not feel the grind of the flagstones on his knees. His beloved had returned from the grave. He felt as if he himself had been raised from the dead. He could not believe that he, who had sinned so much, could receive such a gift.

He finally registered the rest of the information. Lieutenant Angel was the one Ambrozio Nuñez said had killed Grace. And Angel’s miscreants were the ones who harrassed the train on a regular basis. Rico would have bet that Angel’s men were the ones who had looted Las Delicias, but as Grace would say, it mattered not a fig now.

“Where are they headed?”

“Angel said they were going to meet Zapata’s army in Ayala.”

Rico gave her the only objects of value he had, his pocket watch and Juan’s silver belt buckle. She blessed him and promised to pray for him on his journey. He mounted Grullo in a daze.

Destiny. Destination. Destino and destinación had the same meaning in Spanish. Destiny had given Rico a new destination.

Ayala.