NO
PLACE TO RUN
Fredericksburg, Texas,
September 1862
It took until dark for Peter Schoenfeld to
push the runaway heifers out of the river bottom and back to the home place.
The severed ears of the longhorn bull his grandfather called the old Mexican,
the bull who had lured the heifers from their corral, swung from his saddle
horn, knotted with a thong cut from the bull’s own hide.
Tomorrow he and his grandfather would take
a yoke of oxen into the bottoms to haul out the renegade longhorn’s carcass.
Tomorrow they’d eat beef. Tonight, he looked forward to the frying pan of
squirrel his grandfather had promised for supper.
But the house was dark and there was no
smell of cooking as he penned the heifers and replaced the top pole of the
corral they’d escaped from. He unsaddled his riding mule, Schatzie, and turned her loose.
Instead of meandering into the pasture, she followed him, nipping at his shirt
as if begging for turnips. Her long ears, darker than the starlit skyline, pricked toward the house.
There was no welcoming hail from the
dogtrot house where he and his grandfather lived in isolation from their
neighbors. Neighbors whose eyes followed them when they drove to church on
Sunday, muttering against the young man who stayed safe in Texas when their
sons were dying at Shiloh or languishing in Yankee prison camps. Neighbors who
turned away without greeting since this month’s news about bloody Antietam. Old
Schoenfeld had begun to speak of joining the other German settlers who fled to
Mexico to escape the wrath of Confederates against Union sympathizers.
The night was moonless. As Peter
Schoenfeld climbed the porch, his boot toe struck an obstacle where no obstacle
should be. Something solid but yielding. The strangeness made the stubble of
his young beard prickle.
He dropped to one knee to examine the
thing, running his hands over it in the dark. It was the body of a large dog,
his grandfather’s bull terrier. He started to call out in alarm but found his
mouth suddenly too dry to form words. He was close enough now to make out the
gleam of broken teeth where someone had pried the dog’s jaws open.
And close enough to make out a figure
slumped in the doorway behind the dog. The body of a man, his homespun shirt gummed
to his chest and side with deeper darkness.
Young Schoenfeld didn’t need the smell that stung his nostrils to know
the darkness was blood.
He bent over his grandfather’s body,
running his hands gently over the dead face, over the coarseness of an old
man’s beard, over the dribble of tobacco and more blood from the mouth. The
eyes—he closed them, pressing his fingertips against the stiffened lids to hold
them down.
He didn’t think to swipe at the tears
running down his face.
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| image: wikimedia commons |
The men who killed old Schoenfeld scalped
him to hide their own identities. But he could guess who they were. And that
they would return for him.
At a singing bray from the mule Schatzie,
he looked back to the yard. Her ears swiveled toward the road. By the time he reached Mexico, swinging southwest to cross the Rio Grande, he had evaded Confederate conscription agents, a band of comancheros—the mestizo outcasts who traded with Comanches—and the ragtag forces of Mexican president Benito Juarez retreating before the army of invading emperor Maximilian.
He dropped the mule’s reins, letting her
pick a way through the thickets of mesquite and creosote. The scrub-covered
dunes were packed snug as honeycomb cells in a hive. When he had looked over
the countryside from the mountains beyond the river, the dunes covered it like
herds of gray-green beasts.
The dunes rose head high in this country
he had entered. The country in which, except for carrion birds wheeling
overhead, he and the mule seemed to be the only breathing creatures.
As the sun neared the zenith he halted.
The air was hot during the day even this late in the year. He dismounted and
unsaddled Schatzie before nicking a vein in her neck. She stood exhausted, not heeding the tiny
wound. He put his mouth to it and sucked. But he had drawn barely enough to wet
his tongue before the flow clotted and ceased.
A fly appeared as if out of thin air and
fastened itself on the last drop of oozing moisture.
Schoenfeld lay down in the shade of the
dune, his hat over his eyes, and slept until a faint breath of coolness roused
him. The mule was nowhere in sight. He lay back again, eyes closed, sensing the
ebbing daylight. When it was full dark he would rise, hoping for a star to
guide him through the cool of the night. But where it would lead him, he
couldn’t guess.
He woke to the sensation of being watched
but could see no one in the darkness.
The night air was cold on his face and he reached drowsily for his
blanket, only to find something heavy encumbering his arms and shoulders. A
fleece, he thought, from the smell of wool fat on it. As he raised a hand to
touch the fleece, wonderingly, he became aware of a darker shape beside him.
“Hola,” the stranger said.
A woman’s voice, murmuring questions. He
understood only a word here and there, but he relaxed a little. His eyes darted
back and forth, searching for others before he sat up gingerly. The woman put a
dipper of water to his lips and he sucked it greedily.
“Thank you,” he said. “Gracias.” He
put a hand on the dipper, gesturing for more water.
By her voice and figure, she was young.
But a shawl enveloped her head so that her face was hidden from him, with only
the starlight to see by.
She filled the dipper again from a jug and
offered it again.
“Where am I?” he asked. “Who are you?”
She sat silently, in an attitude of
attentive listening.
“Donde es?” he asked, struggling to
remember words, to frame them with unaccustomed lips.
She shrugged.
“Me llamo Peter,” he said, then
corrected himself, “Pedro. Pedro Schoenfeld.
Como se llama, por favor?”
She laughed softly and gestured with a
finger over her lips.
***
When he woke before daylight, he was alone
except for the mule Schatzie. “So you came back, did you, you
philandering hussy?” he said.
Schatzie dropped her head, picking at
something on the ground, something tied with a faded bandana. Before he could
stop her, she flipped the bandana end over end, scattering its
contents—tortillas and a handful of beans. She nosed eagerly through the food.
“Damn your eyes, girl, you’ve gone and ate
my breakfast.”
In spite of his hunger, his heart soared
as he vaulted onto the mule’s back. The woman, the one he half thought he had
dreamed, was real. She had brought food and the mule to aid him.
He gave Schatzie her head. At his kick,
she trotted down the trail with an air of knowing her way until whinnies from a
herd of horses milling in the corral greeted them. An encampment of brush huts
straggled along the banks of an arroyo, wisps of smoke still rising from the
cook fires.
He passed three or four women, nodding and
touching the brim of his hat to them. None returned his greeting with anything
more than a stare. Nor did he, he realized with surprise at his own eagerness,
feel any recognition for them.
Don’t be a fool, Schoenfeld. You never
even saw her face. You didn’t hear her say a dozen words. How could you expect
to know her again?
As he approached the stock corral, a man,
perhaps alerted by some signal from the women, emerged from a hut. Another,
younger man, soon followed. They sauntered toward Schoenfeld, who had
dismounted, without any appearance of alarm.
But both wore pistols shoved through their belts. The younger man
dropped a hand to the butt of his gun.
Schoenfeld was aware of his own pistol
with its empty chambers.
“Buenos dias, señores,” he said.
“You have many fine horses here. Muchos caballos.”
He tried to keep his eyes off a bay Morgan
with a U.S. Army brand, searching for words. Knowing himself in the presence of
horse thieves didn’t help his memory.
“Do you need someone to break them?” he
asked at last in English. He smiled, although his face felt as stiff and cold
as his grandfather’s that night back in Texas.
He was so intent on the men’s approach he
didn’t notice the woman who joined them until she lowered her shawl from head
to shoulders. And he knew her, knew her in his heart, in spite of his earlier
misgivings.
He swept off his hat. “Señora, gracias.
Muchas gracias.”
She took the arm of the older man at her
side. “Papi,” she said, “este es Pedro Schoenfeld."
Her voice stumbled a little, charmingly,
over the unfamiliar consonants.
“At your service, señor.” He bowed
to the old ruffian, without taking his eyes of the man’s weapons.
“Mi padre,” the woman said,
smoothing the man’s gray-stubbled cheek. "Guadalupe Obregon.”
The younger man stepped forward, still
fingering his gun. “Permit me to introduce myself,” he said. “My name is Garza.
And I see you have already made the acquaintance of my betrothed.”
The woman’s eyes—really, she wasn’t more
than a girl—flicked toward Garza. A wary expression clouded them.
“You speak English real good, Mr. Garza,”
Schoenfeld said, unpleasantly aware of Garza’s glance toward the woman.
“Like you,” Garza said, “I am a tejano.”
***
January 1863
By the time the new year arrived, Schoenfeld’s status in the outlaw had risen from perro—dog, Garza called him instead
of Pedro—to fellow bandit. When he had
time to think, when he could bear to think, he wondered what his grandfather
would say. And if “risen” was a proper term to use among robbers and murderers.
But in that time also the girl Manuela’s condition began to show.
“When I find him, I will kill him,”
Obregon said, staring at his daughter across the hearth fire of the shack built
of upright posts and adobe that was the gang’s winter quarters.
Schoenfeld leaned against a far wall,
swathed in his poncho, following the conversation with his eyes on the
girl.
“Who is he?” Obregon demanded again. “Was
it a soldier?”
“Yes, father, yes,” Manuela said. “A
soldier. One of Juarez’s men.”
Good. Let your father take us all to El
Paso del Norte following Juarez’s army and we’ll escape across the river, you
and I.
“Patrón, how many months have
passed since Juarez’s men were here?” Garza asked. “And how many months does a
woman carry a child?”
No one else dared speak. Only Garza.
Manuela shuddered under his stare.
“Do you think I can’t count?” Obregon
asked. “Of course, she’s lying. It is someone here. Someone in our midst.”
His eyes roamed around the room, searching
one after another of his men, but not even the insolent Garza would meet his
gaze. Not for the first time, Schoenfeld wondered how the daughter of a villain
such as Obregon could be so unlike her father. She walked among the desperadoes
with the assurance of a queen, the assurance that made him love her.
While Schoenfeld watched her, his own face
hidden in the shadow of his down-turned hat brim, Obregon sprang. Kicking aside
the coals of the fire, he seized Manuela’s shoulder and jerked her upright.
Schoenfeld’s hand tightened on the revolver he clasped under the folds of his
poncho.
As he locked an arm around his daughter’s
shoulder, Obregon drew one of the pair of pistols he wore at his waist. Baring
the few teeth left in his mouth, he turned her to face the row of men leaning
against the wall. The muzzle of the gun in his other hand thrust upward under
her jaw.
Schoenfeld’s gaze moved from Manuela’s
eyes, their dark irises ringed white with fear, to Obregon’s. Watching the old
man’s eyes for any flicker of warning in their opaque depths that the maddened
man meant to carry out his threat to the girl, Schoenfeld straightened a fold
of his enveloping poncho so that the opening under his arm would give him a
clear shot. Manuela’s look slid over him and moved on.
“Which one is it, daughter? Which of these
cowards do you fear? Confess and his
death will be a slow one. He will live to feel you spit on him.”
Schoenfeld glanced at Garza, third in the
line past him. He guessed from the line of his arm that Garza had also drawn
his pistol and pointed it toward him.
Manuela’s face told him she knew also.
Then Garza yawned loudly. “I confess, patrón,”
he said.
The muzzle of Obregon’s pistol moved from
Manuela to Garza.
“I confess that these proceedings bore
me,” Garza said.
Manuela’s look changed from terror to mingled horror
and relief. Her eyes flicked toward the hidden muzzle of Schoenfeld’s gun and
signaled no.
“You are bored with living, perhaps?”
Obregon asked. “That can be remedied.”
“What man among us would throw his life
away for a girl?” Garza asked. “Someone seized her in the dark as she went to
the well to fill her water jar.”
“You’re saying she doesn’t know who
attacked her?” Obregon asked.
“She dares not point out a man at random
and say he was the one. That might leave her still at the mercy of her
ravisher.”
“So, must I kill you all?” Obregon threw Manuela down and drew both
pistols. “I must shoot all you miserable
vermin to wipe out the stain on my daughter’s honor?”
“Hear me,” Garza said. “What one man has
hidden may be uncovered if all search. But perhaps a reward would make the
search more diligent.”
“Whoever discovers the villain will have
my daughter as his wife,” Obregon said.
“A dishonored woman? What prize is that?”
Garza asked.
“Then I will add this for her dowry.” Obregon
tore open his shirt, pulling out the great diamond and emerald ring he wore on
a chain around his neck.
***
“You should have named him before he
spoke,” Schoenfeld said to Manuela the next morning as he lifted an olla of
water from the well.
“He would have killed you if I had. You
saw that.”
“We must run away,” Schoenfeld said, knowing
as he spoke that it was too late to run.
Since Obregon had pledged not only Manuela but the great diamond and
emerald ring as reward for the name of the man whose child she carried, the
eyes of every bandit followed her to the well, followed her as she drew water.
But avidly as they watched her, their eyes slid away from hers, fearing some
sign of fear or favor by which she might betray a man to death.
“No, my darling,” Manuela said. “You must run.”
With that, she slapped him, walking away
to complain loudly that now every rogue, even this cursed yanqui, thought
he could accost her.
***
Schoenfeld sat on his mule, a coil of rope
at his saddle horn, as Obregon conferred with Garza at the end of that day.
Manuela stood beside her father, her eyes cast down. He and Manuela should flee
now, Schoenfeld thought, before lying Garza had a chance to name him. But they had no place to run, caught between
Juarez’s army and the French, a price on their heads from both side as members
of Obregon’s bandit gang. To the north there was only Texas, where his
grandfather had died.
Schatzie sidled uneasily beneath him. He touched the mule’s sides with his
spurs. He would do it after all. He
could spur the mule forward and seize Manuela. They would be gone before the
others mounted.
“And you have found the man?” Obregon
asked.
“I have found him,” Garza said.
“How do I know you will not point the
finger at someone else to save yourself?” Obregon asked.
Garza grinned as if in answer to Obregon’s
question, but as he spun his pistol’s chamber, its muzzle pointed toward
Manuela. She would die before Schoenfeld could lift her to his saddle.
“All of us have been with you for years,”
Garza said, “and your daughter has walked among us without harm. Until now.”
Schoenfeld couldn’t look away from
Manuela. As if she felt his gaze, she raised her eyes to the rope at his hand.
Garza pulled off his hat and held it over
his heart. “As God is my witness,” he said, “The name of the man is—”.
“Sing, Schatzie,” Schoenfeld said in
desperation. And Schatzie brayed.
The sky-rending sound drowned whatever
Garza had been about to say. His mouth made the shape of a curse, unheard in
the din, as he turned to the mule—turned away from Manuela—and raised his
pistol.
A rope loop flew from Schoenfeld’s
outstretched hand onto his enemy’s shoulders and he whipped the mule to a
gallop. Garza screamed as the rope jerked him from his feet.
Reining the mule toward the sunset so that
the eyes of those who pulled their guns were dazzled, Schoenfeld flung himself
onto Schatzie’s far side, clinging with one hand and foot hooked over the
saddle. A bullet whined past, close enough to singe Schatzie’s brush of mane.
He dared not look back, not at Manuela, not at the thing whose weight tugged at
the rope trailing behind him, the thing whose screams finally stopped as it
became only a bundle bounding at the rope’s end behind the mule, caught in the
mesquite thorns and torn loose to be caught and torn again.
At last, at Obregon’s yell, the shooting
stopped. Obregon stroked his mustache appraisingly as Schoenfeld returned,
waving down the guns of his men, and glancing at the bloodied nakedness
dragging behind his mule. Only the scraps of boots marked that it had once been
a man.
“I suppose Garza was the villain, then,
daughter?” Obregon asked.
She nodded, smiling at Schoenfeld but he
couldn’t smile back.
She was beautiful and he loved her more
than his life. But a cold wind struck his back as he searched her face in vain
for any sign of pity, any sign of remorse for the man, terrible though he was,
who had died so violently for her sake.
She looked at Schoenfeld, at the thing he
offered Obregon in return for her hand.
He was tied to her now, more tightly than Garza’s body was tied to his
saddle horn. She had recognized in him a man who could do this thing, who could
free her, no matter what the means, from someone she hated. They were alike, he
and she. The thought chilled him more than the winter wind.
THE
END
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