Long Knife (38 page)

They followed a path up the face of the bluff and emerged on the field where the shooting match had taken place. The splintered
willow wands still stood about, and scraps of cloth, their colors now faded by August sun and September rains, could be seen in the grass. De Leyba reminisced excitedly about the shooting as they rode over the spot where the rabbit had fallen, and George looked from the corner of his eye at Teresa, to see if there would be any vestige of her displeasure. She only smiled at him and lowered her lashes, rocking gently back and forth with the horse’s stride. Saddle leather creaked. De Leyba’s horse dropped a trail of pungent dung. The sun was going down now and the sky beyond Teresa was a gauzy backdrop of en-flamed cirrus clouds. A meadowlark reiterated its three silvery syllables. On the horizon, three other mounted figures rode in silhouette, rifles across their saddles. They were George’s ubiquitous bodyguard, staying as usual just far enough away not to be obtrusive, but always watching and alert.

By Heaven, he thought, if I am ever to be alone with this dear person, it will have to be by stealth in the night.

T
HEY DINED ON FISH THAT EVENING AT TEN
. T
HE LITTLE GIRLS
stayed close about George for a half hour before bedtime, crowding close to hear him tell about his little sisters in Virginia, and about his smallest brother William. They made him promise to bring William to St. Louis someday. Now and then Rita, the six-year-old, would reach up and touch George’s coppery hair, which was a source of constant wonderment to her. Maria Josefa, at nine already seeming to acquire the reserve of Spanish femininity, did not touch him but stood as close to his knee as she could without doing so. After they had been taken upstairs, he turned to Teresa, finding her regarding him in total absorption, apparently wrapped in a veritable cocoon of pleasure. She raised her eyebrows and sat up straighter when she realized he was looking at her.

“Teresa,” he said, his voice almost quaking with emotion, “for weeks I’ve been hearing your music in my memory, but I’m beginning to forget how the melodies went. Would it be an imposition if I asked you to play them for me again? Would you play for me as your only audience?”

“You were my only audience then,” she said, then flushed at her own audacity. De Leyba laughed.

“I knew that!” he exclaimed. “Yes, my dear. Please do.”

A
T THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
, G
EORGE ROSE FROM HIS BED.
A rhombus of moonlight lay on the floor. He had lain awake for
an hour after retiring, running the music of the
guitarra
through his heart, and finally had dozed. Now the house was absolutely still. De Leyba and his wife had closed themselves into their bedroom at the far end of the house, and this night all the men of the guard were bedded downstairs. The notion that nothing but empty darkness lay between his door and Teresa’s now lodged itself in his mind like a seed in a furrow and inexorably began to grow to occupy him entirely. Naked, he prowled the room with the cool wooden floor under his bare feet, and warned himself that he could bring disaster upon himself and disgrace upon Teresa if he were to steal into her room and somehow be discovered. I would never be admitted to this house again, he told himself. This wonderful new ally of mine who guards his sister so diligently would no doubt become the most inveterate of my enemies.

Still, he found himself gazing at the dark rectangle of the oaken door and listening like a wild animal to the silence of the house.

Besides, he thought, her door might be locked.

You wouldn’t know that unless you tried it.

What if I should enter, and she woke up alarmed—as she certainly would—and cried out? he wondered.

But maybe she’s awake now, as I am, he argued. He felt that she was. Instinct told him that she was awake beyond that wall. He imagined he could hear her mind repeating his name. I could not be this desperately awake without my wakefulness awakening her, he thought. He was as certain of that now as he was certain his heart was beating.

It would ruin everything if we were discovered, his reason insisted.

But I’ll never have a minute alone with her any other way, his heart argued.

He rubbed his palms down over his face and stared at the dark shape of the door. He shuddered. He turned away and padded to the window, to get away from that relentlessly beckoning door. A floorboard creaked as he stepped on it.

He stood by the window and stared over the darkened town while a whippoorwill uttered its throaty whistle a dozen times in the moonlight.

At last the idea became too strong to resist any longer, and the decision turned somewhere deep inside his head, turned silently but palpably like a well-oiled hinge of fate.

You just have to, he understood. There’s no such thing as
not
going to her.

He crossed the room again, avoiding the loose plank in the floor, took his cotton breeches off the chair and pulled them on. He went to the door, took the cold brass knob in his hand, and turned it slowly, reminding himself that his guards could be awakened virtually by the fall of a snowflake.

The door swung open silently; the musty air of the hallway came in with it. He stepped into the black corridor and moved noiselessly the six steps to her door. His elbow bumped the wall softly as he groped for her door handle and he stood stock-still and waited. The silence prevailed. As he turned the handle, all the dire arguments of his reason whispered at him again to turn back. He continued to turn the handle, until the door moved. He pushed it open and the familiar scent of her soap eddied around his face. And the breath of camphor, the whiff of lavender.

He was inside now, and strained silently to ease the door shut. Cool air on the sweat-bedewed skin of his torso made him shiver again. The rectangle of her window stood gray opposite where he paused. He could hear her breathing now, and saw the dim shape of the white bedding, the high, square canopy, the open bed-curtains.

Now you’re dead center in your own trap, he told himself. You’re utterly daft to be doing this!

His body responded by going toward the bedside; fingers and toes felt for invisible obstacles, for things that might fall over; his heart walloped high in his breast and his nerves felt the night inches beyond the limits of his skin.

He knelt beside the bed; his knee cracked. Teresa moved in her bed, inches from him, bedclothes whispering, and her breath touched his face.

Now, he thought. You’re this far, you fool. What now? Do you just look, just kneel here like a praying man, or try to wake her without waking the whole house?

Could just stay like this, he thought. You’re alone with her now, and isn’t that all you wanted?

No, that’s not enough.

Wake her and she’ll screech the whole house up, he thought.

Or else die of fright. What if she wakes up and thinks I’m an Indian? he thought.

Her name, he thought. Whisper her name.

Better, yet, just think it. Think it hard.

He thought it hard, and sweat bathed his forehead and she began
to stir. A soft waking moan came from the dark shape of her head on the pillow.
Now whisper
, he thought.

“Teresa.”

Again.

“Teresa.”

She moved her limbs and the sound of her breathing changed.

She’s awake now, he thought. Careful.
Oh, careful, man!

“Teresa.”

She gasped. She sat bolt upright, the bed creaking loudly. Her inhalation of breath warned him that she was about to scream. Quickly as a striking snake he clapped his hand over her mouth; her fingers clawed at his wrist and a high, strangled whimper sounded in her throat. Her whole body was shuddering violently; he had terrified her fully as badly as he had feared to.

“Teresa!”
he whispered into her ear.
“George! Hushhhh!”

His pulse was hammering so loudly in his head that he could hardly hear himself. He wanted to jump up and dash back to his room. But he held her mouth with his left hand and began stroking her hair with his right.

She began nodding then, stopped clawing at his wrist, and he knew she recognized him. But she was quaking like a leaf and might still cry out.

A new dread entered his mind. What if she takes this as a violation?

He had been thinking all along, in his desperate hopefulness, that she would want him here beside her and would welcome him once she was awake and calm. But what if her fear is followed by infuriation? It might well be. Even knowing it is I, she might yet give the alarm.

She was not struggling now, though she still trembled in great spasms. Slowly he relaxed the pressure of his hand on her face, ready to clamp down again in an instant.

Now I’m in a predicament, he thought.

There was only one thing he could think of to make her understand and accept his awful intrusion.

“Teresa,”
he whispered in her ear, the scent of her hair in his nostrils, the warmth of her breath on his hand. “Teresa, I
worship you!”
A moment, then he took his hand from her face and continued to stroke her hair.

For a long, long time, the vague shape of her face remained turned on him; the air was full of their rapid breathing; her hair
moved under his hand; the silence was electric; she trembled violently; an outcry, a cataclysmic outcry, seemed imminent.

Then she whispered:

“Te adoro!”

S
HE HAD AWAKENED IN MORTAL TERROR.
S
HE HAD THOUGHT HER
heart would stop. Her oldest nightmare, that of a dark, live intruder in the privacy of her room, had come true. A steel-hard hand had stifled her outcry. She had struggled in vain; her body, every vulnerable inch of it, had flinched in anticipation of the knife. She had prayed
Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen
in the wild rushing in her brain, certain that this was the very hour of her death. But then through the panic she had heard the intruder whisper the name of the man she had just gone to sleep thinking of, and had felt the hand gently caressing her hair, and then she had heard him whisper, “Teresa, I worship you,” and she had known then that it was not her oldest nightmare but her newest dream that was coming true.

But even that was little less frightening; she was here almost naked without the armor of her hooks and stays and buttons and layers and layers of linen; here was this madman who had invaded the sanctity of her room; here he was inviting almost certain discovery by Maria or Fernando who were awake at any hour because of Maria’s lungs; here was this man, kneeling by her bed and straining toward her, obviously undressed himself; but most frightening of all was the excitement, the desire, her delicious awareness of their proximity and dishabille. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened; no man had ever been this close to her, and she wavered between shame and this tingling desire for touch that was spreading over her.

That hand had continued to stroke her hair, sending chills of pleasure through her, stroking so gently. He had removed his hard hand from her mouth at last and now she breathed the man smell of him, and finally all the tenderness and longing that she had cultivated through the long, lonely weeks welled up in her until her breast was swollen with it, and she had whispered to him:

“Te adoro!”

***

H
E TOOK A DEEP BREATH AND SIGHED.
H
IS LEGS BEGAN TREMBLING,
twitching, from the awkward, tense kneeling. The house remained still. It was incredible that this enormous uproar of heartbeats and shrieking nerves had not roused the whole town; but it had been, of course, only a storm of rustlings and whispers, no more than a restless sleeper makes at any time in the night. The crisis of his intrusion was past. And she had whispered that she adored him!

His heart grew huge, and shivers raced around his temples. You, he told himself, have more blind good fortune than any man deserves!

He took her right hand now, and kissed the back of its fingers, turned it and kissed the fragrant pads of the palms. The fingertips touched his cheek.

Leaning then with his knees on the floor and his elbows on the bed, he cupped her face in his hands, tried to pierce the darkness to see what was in her eyes, memorized with his fingertips the tiny miraculous convolutions of those ears he had so often studied from a distance, those artfully sculptured ears which so often flamed with her embarrassments.

Though her panic surely by now was past, she continued to tremble in waves of intensity, causing such a tide of pity in him that tears burned his eyes and traced cool paths down both sides of his nose.

Teresa felt a teardrop fall on the skin of her bare arm—a teardrop, something she had so little expected ever from this hard man that at first she didn’t know what it was; then she understood and was so moved by it that without thinking she reached out to embrace him like a child. The flesh under her hands, though, was not a child’s flesh; it was smooth and rock-hard. Her thoughtless fingers wandered over the muscle-knots and the hollows of his back and shoulders; under the night-cooled skin his flesh was hot and hard as the powerful neck and shoulders of her riding horse. She felt gooseflesh rise on the skin of his upper arm and her fingers explored it with a curiosity of their own. Now her trembling had ceased and she was hot in the face and breast.

“My one,” she whispered. “My one!”

George was growing weak from the sensation of her fingers moving on his back, weak and desperate for warmth; drawing his arms close to his chest he slumped until his cheek lay on her rising, falling bosom and her rapid heartbeat thudded against his right ear. The warm musk of her body bathed him now and the
fragrance, the faint floral and spice fragrance of her bedding and thin nightgown, enveloped him. Her hand was stroking his temple now and exploring his hairline. Her breath sighed in and out of her nostrils, her breast rose and fell and her heartbeat raced in his ear. It seemed that this was home; this was the place to which all his wanderings should have brought him to stay: here upon this bosom where he could hear and feel the very life of her beating and flowing and burning. Here seemed to be the center of the universe toward which his restlessness had been bringing him even though he had not known it. There was nothing more central to his soul than this; all about lay a cold room hushing with the gray atoms of night, a sleeping village, an infinity of black and hostile wilderness, an icy blank moon and shivering stars. But here was the hearth where he could warm himself and rest and turn his back upon the doubts and dangers that had preoccupied him for so many weeks. Now he doubted that he could ever gather the strength to rise and go from here.