The Sweet Blue Distance, page 47
“And the bad news?”
Rosita didn’t often hesitate to express an opinion, but she was hesitating now. Eli looked at her closely and saw a combination of aggravation and worry in her face.
“There’s a problem, you should tell me about it.”
She raised both hands and dropped them to her lap. “If there’s a problem, the boy says. You want a hint? I’ll give you three. Rosita Padilla, Verena Tejeda, and Ximena Chávez.”
Eli sat back and crossed his arms. “I can only have one wife, according to the church.”
“Yes,” Rosita said. “For years now you could have had any of the most marriageable from here to Juarez, but you kept your distance. Then last night in front of half the town you made your choice. A gabacha. Did you think nobody would notice?”
Eli heard himself sigh. “So you think she’s not equal to the challenge of a few girls looking at her cross-eyed?”
Rosita shook her head at him. “I hope that’s all she has to deal with, and in that case, yes, I’m sure she is. But tell me this, how will you deal with the white men looking at you cross-eyed?”
This question had been on his mind every day for weeks, but he respected Rosita and took a minute to consider what she was trying to tell him.
“I’m aware of the stakes,” he said. “I’m ready.”
She leaned back. “Glad to hear it. If you get shot by a jealous tejano, I won’t have anybody worth feeding.”
He grinned at that. “I’m glad you like her.”
One black brow arched. “I wouldn’t go that far, not yet. But time will tell.”
If he pointed out she had just contradicted herself, she would be mad at him for days. And in fact, she was serious, and he knew it.
He got up, ready to get back to work, but Rosita pointed at his chair. He sat.
“What else?” he said.
“You need to get her away from the Markhams. Sooner rather than later. There’s trouble, and it’s only going to get worse.”
“I know about this,” he said.
“You don’t know everything,” Rosita said. “It’s not so much Mrs. Markham. I think it’s fair to say she’s unhinged—don’t wince, my boy, unhinged is the right word—but I don’t think she’s dangerous. It’s the doctor you need to keep an eye on.”
“Because he went off for a couple days?”
“Insolente como siempre.” She muttered under her breath at a volume he had no trouble hearing: “I should send you home and wait for you to figure it out for yourself.”
Eli inclined his head. “Pardon. I’m listening.”
She took a cup from a shelf, poured water, and drank it. When she spoke again, her tone was quieter.
“Since he came back from that unexplained trip, there’s something wrong. Talk to John, he can tell you in detail.”
Eli liked John and considered him a friend, so this suggestion was one he could agree to without hesitation.
“I’ll do that,” Eli said. “But what kind of trouble are you talking about?”
She shrugged. “You know the doctor has always been a reasonable man for a tejano. On the slow side sometimes. Blind the way men are—no blinder than most of you, but never mean. At first I wondered if the trouble with his wife could be turning him into a drunk, but there’s something more going on. He’s out wandering at all hours, stumbling and talking to himself. Night before last he fell asleep in the plaza. On the ground. Quincho had to hoist him up on his burro to get him home. Yesterday he was walking through the plaza as unsteady on his feet as any drunk I’ve ever thrown out on his ear.”
She pushed herself away from the table, stood, and lowered her head at an angle he recognized: do not disrespect me.
“Listen to what I’m telling you. You had best get your Carrie out of there and not waste any time.”
The idea almost made him smile. “Now I know you haven’t spent any time with her. If you knew her at all, you’d know I can’t just order her out of the Markhams’ place.”
“No?” Rosita’s brow lowered. “She won’t obey you?”
He shook his head. “Not when it comes to her work. Or anything else, for that matter.”
Rosita considered him for a long moment, her mouth pursed as if she had bitten into something unexpectedly sweet.
“Good,” she said finally. “Maybe she has a chance of surviving here after all.”
There was a lot of work he wanted to get done, but Eli took a few minutes to stretch his legs and raise his face to the sun, which was how he saw Carrie coming out of the brothel. His surprise lasted only as long as it took him to remember that any woman could have a baby, and then he just stood and watched.
She was wearing a sunbonnet that shaded her face, and was about to walk by without even seeing him. He didn’t like that idea, so he called to her in a way that wouldn’t draw anybody else’s attention. On the trail they had compared birdcalls, and had some fun competing. With Rainey they had talked about birds she was seeing for the first time.
Eli watched her face, and as soon as she realized what the birdcall was—and was not—he slipped away home.
* * *
Carrie had barely got back to the dispensary when a young girl called Marieta Ocampo brought a message from her father’s ranch on the far northwest border of Santa Fe. Gertrude had been laboring since early morning but wasn’t making any progress, and could the midwife please attend?
Marieta had come on a burro, so Carrie walked over to Iñigo’s stable to saddle Mimosa. To her satisfaction Mimosa took an interest in the burro, which inspired Chico to rouse himself from a sleeping spot in the stable. He inspected the newcomer, much like a quartermaster could cast a critical eye on stock offered for sale to the military. But the jennet was a pretty frosted-white burro with near-perfect confirmation. She was larger than most jennies, in Carrie’s experience, with a spritely step. Beyond her good looks, the burro was clearly unintimidated, and that was enough for Chico. In another five minutes they were off, and he took up his usual spot trotting alongside Mimosa.
It was Carrie’s first time riding out to see a patient, and just as she expected, it was far more pleasant than hailing a Hansom cab or finding a seat in a crowded horse car.
Riding along at enough distance to avoid the dust cloud raised by the burro, Carrie suddenly remembered where she had heard the name Ocampo. At the Ocampo ranch they bred, trained, and sold burros. Day by day Carrie saw more burros than horses or mules or dogs; they were used to transport huge bales of straw, stacks of firewood, baskets of fleshy maguey leaves. The same animals were gentle enough to carry lame grandfathers to church and tired children home from the field. Nearly everyone had a burro, so a man with a talent for breeding them would make a good living.
The ranch was very large, many buildings and paddocks and stables spread out on a mesa like a rumpled blanket. Burros grazed peaceably, watched over by large dogs who took immediate note of Chico. They followed him with their eyes, and most likely would do that until he was off the property.
Later Carrie would laugh at herself that it took so long to realize that the patient they wanted her to see was not human. It seemed Marieta had assumed that Carrie would know that she was being called to birth a burro.
Pío Ocampo was a short, barrel-shaped man in his sixties, quite bald. In fact, Carrie saw no trace of hair on his exposed skin, which was the color of lightly toasted bread, tinted pink along the cheekbones. He looked, she realized, much like the gingerbread men she had liked so much as a little girl, but there was nothing childish about him. She saw in his face the same concern and worry she saw in men who never seemed to think much about what it means to give birth until they heard wives and daughters screaming.
A boy stepped up to whisk her horse away. Chico hesitated until Carrie waved him off, and then she walked with Pío Ocampo to the stables. The whole time he talked, glancing at her with every sentence to see if she understood his combination of Spanish and English, which was surprisingly easy to follow.
Gertrude, she learned, was his favorite burro. In forty years of breeding and training burros, he had never had a more intelligent animal. He talked about his burro like a man who is inordinately proud of a daughter, knows that he talks too much about her and may be inviting mockery, but simply can’t keep his delight to himself.
“Gertrude,” he told her, “understands when people talk. Spanish, English, don’t matter, she knows. You are thinking this is no more than a good sheepdog can do, but if you saw for yourself—” He broke off with a shrug of his shoulders, as if he knew what objections she would raise.
“Another time you’ll see. Right now we’ve got a nose and one hoof.”
That gave her a better sense of the problem. In the normal course of things, the head and front hooves showed themselves at the same time; if one or both hooves failed to show up with the nose, the presentation had to be corrected. Dystocia was often a fairly simple problem to solve, but sometimes it became a problem with no solution.
She told him what he needed to know. “Señor Ocampo, I can’t promise you a good outcome, but I can usually get a loop on a foal’s pastern and set it right. With help. Has this never happened before in all your years—”
“It happens,” he said. “Usually my wife comes in and there’s a conversation. She talks to the jenny, the jenny talks to her. Eventually they work things out. She has a midwife’s hands, like yours. But she’s away.”
Carrie liked this small man, who was so concerned about his burros, but more than that, she liked working with animals. They required no stories about distraught mothers punching midwives, no long explanations about the medicines she dispensed. As long as there was a living creature to nuzzle when all was done, they were satisfied. More than satisfied.
She said, “I will do what I can for her, so please, show me the way.”
46
Eli stopped work midafternoon, decided he was satisfied with the new shelves in the kitchen, and walked down to Chema Tejeda’s barbershop. Most of Chema’s customers were successful men, merchants and ranchers, men whose opinions were valued by other men like themselves. There was another barber in Santa Fe, an emigrant from Arkansas called Buzz Kelly, a name Eli was sure the man had made up out of whole cloth. The thing about Kelly was, he wouldn’t have anybody in his barber’s chair with skin darker than his own, and the man was as white as chalk.
So Tejeda’s barbershop was where successful, respected men who couldn’t call themselves white met to run a kind of shadow government, though nobody would dare put that into words. They talked here about serious matters and went out into the town to get things done behind the territorial government’s back. And they gossiped. Unless one of their own family members was in a mess of some kind, they loved rumors and debated them with relish.
Whenever Eli heard somebody complaining about women’s gossip, he thought of Tejeda’s place and smiled to himself.
He wanted to show up at Markham’s door cleanly barbered, but there was another reason for this stop. He didn’t doubt Rosita’s word about Sam Markham, but there had to be more to the story, and he wanted details going in. Maybe he’d hear something at Tejeda’s that would give him an idea for how to open up the discussion with Markham.
I’m calling on Miss Ballentyne was the simplest way to get things started, but it wouldn’t be enough. Markham would blink at him, and pretend not to understand; of course Eli couldn’t mean to declare an interest in a white woman. I’m calling on Miss Ballentyne to take her walking. That wouldn’t work, either. The idea of Eli Ibarra “taking her” anywhere would raise hackles.
He needed to open the conversation on good terms, because he wanted to win them over. Right now they thought of him as an educated, polite Mestizo, one who knew his place. Whether or not they could accept him as someone who knew his own worth was the question.
Last night had been the first test. People watched him on the dance floor with Carrie; they took note of the smile she gave him and the way they moved together. It was as good as putting an announcement in the Gazette, and still it was possible Carrie hadn’t noticed that people—mostly white people—were looking at her from a different and less-than-flattering angle.
Tejeda’s barbería was the one place Eli was likely to hear more details about Markham without asking first, and so he went in, nodded to the six or seven men who lounged there as if this place were a private club, and sat down in the cracked leather barber’s chair.
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Tejeda said.
“Too busy dancing,” called Quincho Diaz. A low chuckle echoed through the shop.
From a corner Porfirio Muñoz called out, “You ready to be interviewed? Got a spot in the next edition of the Gazette.”
Muñoz was always on the lookout for things to put in the paper. It was hard going, he would tell anybody who asked, keeping a paper above water in a place this remote. Soon he’d give up and go home to San Diego. He had been threatening this since his first day, years ago.
Eli ignored Muñoz and spoke to Tejeda directly.
“Chema, if you nip my ear this time, I’m going to use that scissors on you. And not on your hair, either.”
Another low ripple of appreciative laughter, and then Chema, good-natured, wrapped Eli’s face in a hot towel, exactly as he had hoped. Hidden like this, he could listen to the talk and keep his reactions to himself.
The conversations—sometimes one, sometimes as many as three braided together—touched on the usual subjects. Crops and rainfall, wagon trains coming and going, what the priests were up to, and did anybody know the details about the fight between two ciboleros outside the Casino Taquito? Apparently one of them was in his grave and the other on the run, with the alguacil’s deputies close behind.
“Of course deputies,” said Chema. “Our illustrious alguacil isn’t about to risk breaking into a sweat over a lowly cibolero.”
“I still haven’t heard how it is that Chucho managed to get himself named sheriff,” Eli said.
“Nobody has,” Miguel Álvarez said. “And we were here when it happened.”
Muñoz cleared his throat to call attention back to himself.
“I made up my mind, I’m going to see the governor tomorrow about Markham.”
“The acting governor, you mean,” said someone from the back. “Meriwether is on his way back to Kentucky, so until Buchanan appoints somebody—”
“Bill Davis is what we’ve got.”
There was a pause, and then the floodgates opened. From every corner came commentary, most of it critical. Had Porfirio Muñoz lost his mind? He published the Gazette, he should know that Davis and Markham played chess at least once a week. How did he imagine it would go over with the rest of the tejanos if the Mexican Muñoz managed to get lily-white Markham booted out of Santa Fe?
Muñoz stood firm. He didn’t list his grievances with the doctor, but Eli was sure that it had to do with something more than drink. He waited, impatiently, for somebody to say something specific, but the discussion went in a different direction.
“If Markham goes, it will take six months to replace him.” This from Miguel, who had three boys who would not stop beating on each other; every week at least one of them ended up at the dispensary.
“Miguel is right, it will take too long.”
Tejeda flinched, and Eli realized it was Diego Martinez talking. Martinez owned the smaller of Santa Fe’s two import-export businesses and made a lot of money trading with Mexican merchants. He was also a Criollo, a son of a son of Spain, pure-blooded and, as he saw things, superior in every way to the men around him.
It was a temptation to point out to Martinez that he sat here with the Mestizos and genízaros and other full-blooded Mexicans and Indians because Buzz Kelly—the white barber—would not have him, Criollo or not, as a customer.
Martinez was saying, “Where do we go in the meantime? The army surgeons want nothing to do with us, so it’s the Mexican bloodletter in Albuquerque or rattles and chants.”
The deep silence he got in response to the casual insult to the tribal healers should not have surprised him, as most of the men here were some part Indian. A full three minutes passed, and then Eli heard him getting up and making his way out of the building.
“So long, Martinez,” Tejeda said.
“Pinche cabrón,” muttered Quincho, who had a Navajo grandmother.
After a long moment, Muñoz said, “There’s Benenati.”
Tejeda whipped the towel from Eli’s face and turned to face the room, holding his scissors up high as he made his opinion known. “Enzo Benenati is ten times the doctor Markham ever was. And he still is.”
Nobody could deny the truth spoken plain. The rest of the truth— that Benenati would most likely refuse to come out of retirement—didn’t need to be said, either.
“I am going to talk to Bill Davis about it,” Muñoz said. “Maybe he can persuade Benenati to step in until we can get another doctor.”
Somebody came in, and the way the mood shifted and discussion came to an abrupt end made it clear that the newcomer wasn’t much liked.
It was Pato Estrada standing in the doorway, studying the room as if there were treasure hidden somewhere. As alguacil, Chucho was bad enough, but Estrada, one of his deputies, was worse: a blowhard, one who kissed tejano ass if it did him any good, or maybe, the rumor went, because he liked the taste.
“Ibarra,” the deputy said, pointing at him with a jerk of the chin. “I hear you’re courting the tejana midwife.”
Eli let his face go blank, nodded his thanks to Chema, and walked out into the plaza. Estrada hated to be ignored, and he would look for opportunities to pay the insult back, but at the moment, Eli couldn’t make himself care.
Before the deputy came in, nobody had wanted to offend Eli by mentioning Carrie, but now they were talking about it. He reminded himself that none of what they had to say mattered. He didn’t know yet how his conversation with Markham would go, and saw no value in anticipating trouble.
