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.
He gripped the butt of his revolver. His
empty revolver.
