He waited before he spoke. “I’m sorry if I’ve brought my difficulties into your house. I was at the attack on the train, but I told the general the truth when I said my intention was to find my son. I’m in your debt for speaking up to the Mexicans on my behalf.”
But she was looking at his feet and not listening, the disdain and anger in her face focusing on practical considerations. “They burned the soles of your feet. You won’t be able to walk. Stay here.”
She went out in the hallway and returned with a pan of water and a pair of socks and sheep-lined boots. She knelt and bathed his feet and rubbed them with butter, then slipped the socks over his blisters and torn nails.
“Thank you,” he said.
She raised her hand, indicating for him to be silent. She stepped closer to the window, her body perfectly still. The curtains were puffing in the wind. She turned around, her eyes charged with light. “There’s a wagon on the trail. It’s them.”
“Who?”
“American soldiers.”
“How do you know they’re Americans?”
“Their wagons have iron rims on the wheels. Mexican wagons do not.”
“Whose boots did you give me?”
“A functionary of the government in Mexico City. I watched him executed out there among the trees. He was corrupt and served the rich and betrayed his people. They made him dig his own grave. He got on his knees and gave up the names of informers in their ranks. I suspect some of the names he gave were those of innocent men. I won’t say you are like him. But you serve the same masters. You ambush and kill illiterate people who go to bed hungry every night of their lives. Does that make you proud?”
“Why is my son exempt from your scorn?”
“He’s a soldier who carries out orders he doesn’t like. You kill for pleasure and money. Mexico is full of Texans like you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Beatrice DeMolay.”
“I guess that’s the worst thing anybody has ever said to me, Miz DeMolay. You’re not fooling me, are you?”
“Fool you about what?”
“I haven’t died and gone to hell, have I?”
HE WENT OUT the back door, chambering a round in the .30–40 Krag, the derringer tucked in his back pocket. He circled behind the two cisterns that were mounted on stilts and
passed a pole shed stacked with cordwood and another shed with an iron bathtub and a wood-burning water heater inside, then cut through the trees where the bodies of the black soldiers hung as crooked-necked and featureless as wax figures that had melted in the heat.
He worked his way into a circle of sandstone formations and boulders that formed a perfect sniper’s den above the general and his men, down the grade. He positioned himself between two boulders so he would not silhouette against the sky, and wrapped his right forearm in the leather sling of the Krag and aimed the iron sights at the general’s back. Perhaps one hundred yards out on the hardpan, he could see a mule-drawn wagon with two black soldiers in the wagon box and a third riding a buckskin in the rear. They wore wilted campaign hats and kept glancing up into the brilliance of the sun, shading their eyes, perhaps allowing themselves a desirous thought or two about the brothel, with no awareness of the danger they were in.
Maybe Ishmael was riding behind them, Hackberry told himself, and even though the circumstances were perilous, he would see his long-lost son again. But he knew that was a lie. If Ishmael were with his men, he’d be out in front, regardless of military protocol. Even as a little boy, Ishmael never shirked a challenge; he’d swell out his chest and say, “I carry my own water, Big Bud,” using Hackberry’s nickname, as though the two of them were brothers-in-arms. Hackberry felt a sense of shame and remorse that was like a canker on his heart. How could he betray and fail the best little boy he had ever known? Worse, how could he betray him for a jealous woman whose only strength lay in her ability to manipulate her goddamn moral coward of a husband?
“Hey, General! It’s me again,” he called down the grade.
The general turned around. He was standing on crutches carved from tree limbs, the forks notched into his armpits, his round face bright with sweat. “Hey, mi amigo! I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” he replied.
“How about telling your muchachos to lay down their weapons?”
“Are you joking, señor? We may be under attack soon.”
“You have many more men in the hills. I wonder why they’re not with you.”
“They are guarding the country.”
“Are you conducting some business affairs you don’t want other people knowing about?”
“Your voice is echoing, señor. The glare is very bad, too. Come down so we can talk as compañeros. Maybe you can have that bath and we can listen to music on the gramophone of the puta.”