Authors: Nan Ryan
“
Sí
,” answered the stocky, gray-haired woman. “
Sí
, you do! A pretty young child traveling alone across the world! Is not safe or—”
“Mag, she’s not alone, Juana is with her,” Amy interrupted. “And it’s not across the world, it’s just across Texas and the gulf to Louisiana.”
“Hmmmp! Too far for a nine-year-old! Only a
niña.
A baby. Go off without her mama to stay all summer.”
“Linda wanted to go ‘without her mama.’ She was excited to be spending the summer alone with her Auntie Meg. And Aunt Meg is thrilled to have her.”
“Sure! She thrilled. What about us? What we supposed to do around here without Linda?” Magdelena put her flour-dusted hands on her broad hips and glared at Amy.
Amy smiled and gently accused, “You, Mag, are as bad as I am. You’re not concerned about Linda’s safety. You’re thinking only of us.”
Magdelena made a sour face, then finally nodded. “Is true.” She sighed heavily. “I am lonely already and she gone only a few hours.” Tears sprang into her dark eyes.
Amy crossed to her. “There, there,” she soothed, knowing it was not just Linda whom Magdelena missed. It had been five years since her daughter Rosa’s death and still Magdelena felt the pain as strongly as if it had happened yesterday. Putting her arms around the heavyset middle-aged woman, Amy said, “Why don’t you go take a refreshing bath and I’ll get one of the vaqueros to drive you into Sundown for a nice long visit with Mary and the new baby.”
Amy knew that would lift Magdelena’s spirits. Magdelena had been fond of the quiet Mary Gonzales when Mary had been a servant at Orilla. Now Mary was a married woman with three small boys and a three-week-old baby girl and Magdelena was crazy about the little ones. Sniffing, Magdelena said, “And what about the evening meal? Who will fix it?”
Amy gave her an affectionate squeeze and released her. “Who will eat it is a better question. I’m not the least bit hungry.”
“You have to eat! I will not allow—”
“Mag, go see Mary and the kids. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure? I be glad to stay here with you and—”
Amy shook her head. “I’m going for a ride. See if I can’t tire myself out so I’ll be able to sleep tonight.” She turned and started from the room. “I’ll tell Fernando to bring the buckboard around for you in half an hour. Will you be ready?”
Finally Magdelena smiled. “I will be ready.”
Amy smiled back at her. “Have a lovely time, stay as long as you please, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Less than an hour later Amy, astride the faithful old sorrel gelding Rojo, loped across the parched rangeland, heading northeast. Her worn sombrero pulled low against the afternoon sun, she watched dust devils dance across the deserted, barren plain where once longhorn cattle, thousands of them, had grazed and grown fat on meadows of tobosa grass.
Amy laid her heels to Rojo’s flanks and the responsive creature went into a full gallop. The speed felt good to Amy. The desert, though bone dry and dusty, was not yet oppressive with the blazing heat of summer. The April winds that stung her cheeks and caused her eyes to water were cool and pleasant, not the harsh furnacelike blasts that would make riding disagreeable come June and July.
Momentarily forgetting everything save the immediate pleasure of riding a great mount across the stark emptiness, Amy smiled and lifted her face to the sun. She could feel the beating of old Rojo’s powerful heart between her knees, the pull and surge of his muscles as he galloped swiftly across the burned-up, savagely beautiful land.
On and on they thundered, and Amy hardly realized when they’d reached the Puesta del Sol, since no stand of rustling cottonwoods, no silvery willows rose on its rocky banks to meet the clear blue skies. The cottonwoods, the willows, all the lush green shrubbery had wilted and died a long time ago.
Amy pulled up on the reins and Rojo came to a swift, dust-flinging halt, snorting and blowing as she slid down off his bare back. Allowing the reins to fall to the ground, she walked around in front of the big beast, patted his muzzle, and apologized for there being no cool, clean water for him to drink.
Rojo shook his head about and whinnied loudly as if he knew exactly what she was saying. She smiled, pressed her cheek to his shiny forehead, then turned and started down the rocky banks of the Sunset River.
When she reached a smooth, flat boulder directly beside the dry riverbed, Amy sat down. After removing her sombrero, she slapped it down beside her and lifted her heavy blond hair up off her neck. She looked out at the wide, waterless river before her and felt a deep sadness.
She could remember a time when cold, clear water rushed down the winding stream. A time when hundreds of thousands of gallons of clean, life-giving water flowed down the twisting turning Puesta del Sol. A time when a continuous waterfall spilled with great ferocity from the jutting rocks above.
Amy took off her boots and stockings. She pulled her hot skirts up to her thighs and wrapped her arms around her knees. She shook her head and sighed.
The rocks over her head were bone dry. The flat riverbed was only sunbaked clods of clay left from the last spring rain. It was nothing but mud that had dried and broken into pieces and curled up around the edges.
Staring at the seared dry wash, Amy decided the once-beautiful river looked much like she felt.
Inert. Used up. Shriveled. Lifeless.
Despite the fact her twenty-sixth birthday was still more than a month away, Amy knew that the best was behind her.
The best had been so beautiful. But so brief. So very brief it had almost faded entirely away. Like a glorious dream, vivid upon awakening, then growing ever dimmer until it is completely lost.
Ten years.
Ten years and try as she might, there were times that Amy could not recall exactly how Tonatiuh looked. Certainly she remembered that he was tall and slim and masculinely beautiful, but as the years passed, the face she had loved so much had become shadowy, no longer clear in her memory.
Maybe it was just as well. Perhaps by the time she turned thirty-six, she wouldn’t be able to remember Tonatiuh’s boyishly handsome face at all. Amy drew a long breath. So much had happened in the ten years since she had seen him.
The hasty wedding to Tyler Parnell less than a month after Tonatiuh had been cast into the Mexican desert. The waiting for Pedrico Valdez to return with news of Tonatiuh, waiting that had stretched on into hopelessness. Pedrico had never returned and she had been forced to face the sad facts.
Tonatiuh was dead.
The empty marriage to Tyler Parnell. Within weeks of the wedding, he was away more nights than he was home and she didn’t have to wonder what he was doing. She was aware, when she walked down the streets of Sundown, that friends and neighbors were whispering that Tyler’s young bride had failed to make him happy. No one seemed to wonder, or care, if he made her happy.
It was during that first miserable year that the river Puesta del Sol had mysteriously dried up. Almost overnight the rushing, flowing stream had turned into a dark, stagnant pond where swarms of gnats danced on its torpid surface. Within weeks even the standing puddles were gone and bewildered longhorns stood in the dry creekbed, pawing at the sand, searching futilely for a drink of water.
By the time Linda was born, thousands of cattle had died from thirst and dozens of Orilla vaqueros had left the big, troubled spread. And Tyler Parnell was starting to doubt his decision to marry her. Amy knew—had known from the beginning—that he, like her, had had a hidden purpose in marrying. He wanted to get his hands on a portion of Orilla. With the ranch’s value plummeting daily, Tyler felt he had made a bad bargain.
He used the ranch’s dilemma as a further excuse for excessive drinking and womanizing. On the warm May evening when Amy went into labor with Linda, Tyler was not at home. He was drunk. And he was with another woman. Since both Sullivan brothers were off merrymaking with their neglectful brother-in-law, Magdelena sent one of the cowhands to Doug Crawford’s bordering ranch.
Big Doug Crawford went for the doctor and sent the Orilla cowpoke in search of Tyler Parnell. Crawford and Dr. Haney reached Orilla in plenty of time, but it was dawn before Tyler arrived.
Linda, a perfect six-pound girl with light downy hair and a round face, came into the world shortly after 3:00 a.m. Doug Crawford, pacing the corridor beyond Amy’s door, was the first male other than the doctor to see the crying newborn in the arms of her exhausted mother.
The weeks that followed were happy ones for Amy. The child was a magical little person whose every gurgle filled her astonished mother with pleasure. Shirley Crawford came often to visit, bringing her own six-month-old baby girl. The two young mothers had much in common, but not when it came to husbands. While Tyler paid little attention to wife or child, the red-haired Doug Crawford worshipped his pretty wife and their daughter. And Shirley openly adored the gentle, hard-working rancher.
Orilla continued to decline as years of drought plagued the desert southwest. Baron and Lucas and Tyler, once such close friends, began to bicker, to blame each other for what had happened to the ruined ranch. Not one of the spoiled, lazy trio ever considered helping out, and it was up to Amy to make the decisions, to oversee the workers, to run Orilla.
Baron was the first to leave. In the fall of ’60 he packed up and headed for the gold mines of California, and the way Rosa moped around after his departure, it was evident that the pair had been lovers. When, not three months after he’d gone, Baron sent for Rosa, the overjoyed young woman ignored her mother’s tearful pleadings and went to join the man she loved.
It was that same autumn that the string of tragedies that had begun with the death of Walter Sullivan continued. Shirley Crawford and her young daughter were killed by renegade Apaches within sight of their small adobe ranch-house. Doug Crawford had not been at home that fateful Saturday morning. He was in the village of Sundown buying a doll for his daughter.
It was little Nell’s fourth birthday.
The next spring the War Between the States broke out, and a lost, heartbroken Doug Crawford joined the Confederate Army. Lucas went down to Mexico, and Magdelena received a letter from Rosa in California saying she wanted to come home but had no money. Baron, Rosa admitted to her mother, had sent for her to use her for his own gain. He had forced her into prostitution. Magdelena, distraught, tearfully showed the letter to Amy. Amy sent Rosa the money to come home, but the young woman never made it. After weeks of waiting and watching, a brief letter arrived from Baron stating that his “poor, darling Rosa” had become sick and had died.
He did not mention the fact that the once-pretty Mexican girl had died of the disease common to prostitutes. But her mother blamed Baron for her baby’s death all the same.
The calculating Tyler Parnell, waiting to see which side had the better chance of victory, enlisted in the Union Army in the spring of ’62 and perished a year later at the siege of Gettysburg. Around that same time, heavily decorated Confederate war hero big Doug Crawford was sent home to Texas to recuperate from wounds sustained in battle.
Amy and Magdelena visited Doug daily, taking food to the sickly man. Many afternoons Amy would stay on after Magdelena returned to Orilla. She’d read to the big, lonely man and listen attentively as he reminisced about the war, the loneliness, the past. By the time he was fit enough to return to action, Amy could see in his eyes that he had fallen in love with her. When Doug Crawford shyly asked if she would wait for him, she agreed.
Letters came from him gratefully professing that she had given him a reason to live again after he thought there was none. He wanted her to be his wife when the war was over, he wanted to take care of her and little Linda. Far more fond of him than she’d ever been of Tyler Parnell, Amy accepted his proposal.
Word came that her brother Lucas was dead. There were no particulars other than the fact that he had been killed in a knife fight in a Paso del Norte saloon by a crazed Indian. She knew she should let Baron know their brother was dead, but she had no idea how to contact him. She’d heard nothing from Baron in over a year; for all she knew he was dead too.
The war finally ended and a beaten, bedraggled Doug Crawford came home on foot. He walked straight out to Orilla, and his thin face lighted up happily when Amy ran out to meet him. Sweeping her up into his arms, he made her promise to become his wife just as soon as he could make enough money to take care of her. Desperately lonely, sincerely fond of Doug Crawford, she agreed. And looked forward to a degree of peace after so many years of turmoil.
But Doug had been dead serious when he spoke of making some money before they were wed. Not three months after he’d come home, he left again, heading south for old Mexico. A highly paid mercenary officer in Maximilian’s army, each month he sent back money and promised he would soon be home for good.
He’d be back to take care of her and little Linda. She’d never again be alone.
Never be alone again. …
A sound, very faint but intrusive in the desert silence, brought Amy abruptly back to the present. Startled, she turned her head and listened. She heard nothing. But a sudden feeling of unease washed over her. The downy hair at the nape of her neck rose. Her throat grew inexplicably tight.
Amy slowly lifted her eyes.
T
HE INDIAN STOOD NAKED
in the sunlight.
Too stunned to move, too frightened to scream, Amy completely froze, transfixed by him.
A long white scar slashed down his chiseled face, from high prominent cheekbone to firm jawline. His bare feet were apart, muscular arms crossed over his smooth, hairless chest. A wide cuff bracelet of gold and turquoise gleamed on his dark right wrist. Naked save for a brief loincloth covering his groin, his thick raven hair falling to his wide, bronzed shoulders, the tall, lean Indian stood like a magnificent statue on the rocks above.
Calmly watching her.