48

A High Horse

Lyda’s old horse, Duke, proved that what goes up does not necessarily come down. Annie led him to the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor outside her bedroom. There, he planted his front hooves and rocked back on his haunches.

He weighed almost three times as much as Annie, Lydia, Grace, and Socrates combined, so hauling on his lead line and shoving on his caboose proved futile. All of their reassurances, bribes, and cajolery couldn’t persuade him to risk plummeting headfirst to the flagstones of the courtyard. He also refused to back down them.

The house that Lyda rented was a modest one made of the local volcanic stone with terra-cotta tiles on the roof. It was built in a square around a small, weed-grown courtyard. The exterior stairway leading from the courtyard to the second-floor corridor was wide but steep.

Grace assumed that if Duke had been born with two legs, he would have become a philosopher. He stood at the top of the stairs and gazed down at Lyda and Grace in that thoughtful way of his. Lyda called up to Annie.

“Send his girlfriend down. Maybe he’ll follow her.”

Annie ran inside and reappeared leading the goat. Lyda waved an ear of corn at her and the goat almost fell head over hooves in her hurry to reach it. Duke looked stricken by her betrayal.

He threw his muzzle into the air and neighed as if his heart were breaking. He shifted his soulful gaze to Lyda, rolled back his lips, and whinnied so long and loudly that passersby looked in at the open gate to see what the commotion was about.

“Try putting a towel over his eyes,” suggested Lyda.

Annie shook her head. “He might fall and break a leg if he can’t see.”

“Miserable damned cayuse.” Lyda planted her fists on her hips and glared up at him. “Hammer-headed, cat-hammed plug.”

“I thought you knew about horses, Lyda, you being a cowgirl from Texas.”

Lyda swiveled her gaze to Grace, then resumed her stare down with Duke. “We don’t stable them in the attic in Texas, Gracie.”

“I have an idea.”

“Then have at it, because I’m plumb out of ideas.”

“Plums have something to do with it. Annie, come down here, please.”

Annie scampered down the stairs, took the handful of dried plums, and listened while Grace whispered in her ear. With food so scarce, even fruit was precious, but not so valuable as Duke.

Annie went back to the second floor to confabulate with her love. He pricked his ears forward and listened intently. Annie held a plum out over the outer half wall of the stairwell. Duke’s muzzle followed until he was standing sideways on the landing and no longer looking straight down. She gave him the plum, moved down a step, and held out another, still over the edge of the wall. Duke sidestepped to put one hoof on the first step, then the other, and craned to reach the treat.

Annie moved backward and lured him down another step so that his rear hooves had to follow. Crab-stepping sideways, with his neck still over the wall, he and Annie reached the courtyard. Annie hugged him.

“What made you think of that, Gracie?” asked Lyda.

“The back stairs of the theater where my parents worked were steep and dark. When I was a very young girl I imagined hellfire and Old Scratch waiting for me at the bottom. The only way I could descend was to hold on to the rail, step sideways, and not look down.”

As Annie led Duke out into the street, Grace scanned the neighborhood. She noticed that a few other horses and mules were looking out of second-floor windows. She wondered how their owners intended to get them back down to earth.

Socrates tied Duke’s lead to the back of the hired victoria cab and loaded his tack and sacks of feed into the boot. He helped Grace, Lyda, and Annie up the steps, then climbed in next to the driver. He braced the shotgun on his knee with the muzzle in the air, clearly visible to anyone with evil intentions.

Three samples of the skulking sort formed a clot on a corner and watched them pass. The wide brims of their hats shaded their eyes, but Grace could tell they were deciding how best to attack the taxi. The sight of them saddened more than alarmed her.

Grace had always felt safe in Cuernavaca, except for a brief time at the beginning of the rebel army’s occupation of the city in 1911. And then she only had to go to Zapata’s headquarters in the Governor’s Palace and protest the rowdy behavior of some of his men toward her chambermaids. The problems ceased.

From time to time, in the back courtyard, Socrates still told the story of when Mamacita pushed her way past Zapata’s heavily armed guards and demanded an audience. Socrates had gone with her. He said he had been sure they both would end up shot, skewed on bayonets, and carved into little pieces by machetes.

Grace wished that a word in some official’s ear would make things right these days. Besides waylaying cars and carriages, the usual methods for today’s thieves were armed break-ins, kidnapping, and snatch-and run. Sometimes they took their victims’ money, jewelry, and clothes and let them go, but now and then the rays of the rising sun fell across dead bodies in the bottoms of the ravines.

Lyda pointed her derringer at these banditti and gave them the look she called “arsenic and chained lightning.” They ducked into an alleyway.

Lyda watched them go. “Why is it that the bad eggs tarry after the decent folk exit?”

“‘Opportunity makes a thief.’”

Annie looked ready to throw rocks at them. “Thieves aren’t getting Duke!”

Lyda put an arm around her, maybe to comfort her, maybe to keep her from yelling at the men and irritating them. “You know what President Lincoln once said.”

“What did he say?”

“When he heard that Confederates had captured a brigadier-general and a number of horses, he said, ‘Well, I’m sorry for the horses.’ The Secretary of War exclaimed, ‘Sorry for the horses, Mr. President!’ ‘Yes,’ said Lincoln. ‘I can make a brigadier-general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses.’”

Now that Duke was safe, Annie settled back against the seat. She had heard that the prisoners had escaped when the troop train blew up. Now that Socorro’s father was safe and her horse could stay at the Colonial with her, Annie was happy.

Lyda went on chatting as though war and disaster weren’t breathing down their necks, but Grace didn’t relax until she saw the graceful roof of the bandstand among the greenery of the zócalo. The zócalo meant home. It was an oasis of tranquility, a remnant of gentility.

She dismissed Jake’s dire predictions about the train no longer running. Mexicans would take their time about it, but they could repair anything. She wondered how long the rail crews would require to fix this latest damage.

The worst part of it was the cruel murder of so many people. She was glad that José and the others had escaped, but she had a feeling that Angel was the cause of those deaths.

In the rebel camp, Grace had seen Angel gambling, smoking cigars, swearing, and washing down dashes of gunpowder with tequila. But that wasn’t her parting image of her. Grace hoped she was wrong, but she feared she wasn’t. She wondered how that sweet-faced young woman could have commited such a heartless act.