to as the casas de malicia (houses of evil intent1)—was that of Maria’s father, Simon Perez de Bustillo. His home, a fortified and walled compound of over 20 rooms surrounding two enclosed placitas (little plazas) was one with the landscape. Among the rose-colored hills back-dropping the royal villa, were additional homes of the Baca and Perez de Bustillo clan. Grouped along the banks of the river where they huddled within their own adobe walls, they looked as through they had been positioned to parry an assault. Nicolas bypassed the path leading to Maria’s home and rode down to the river that raged through a narrow gorge along a boulder-strewn canyon. He longed desperately to see Maria, but he had to inform her uncle, the villa’s senior judge and leading administrator, of the impending arrival of the train.
SHELTERED FROM THE CENTURIES
The Baca home, situated among an extensive stand of spiny, tree-like cactuses, was a grand compound of many rooms. Sprawled along the southern slope of the canyon, Baca had chosen a spot outside the walls of the compound for the placement of a new cellar for his home. This is where Nicolas had first met Maria almost three years before.
* * *
Employed by Antonio Baca to excavate the soterrano, or root cellar, Nicolas had been working there with Maria’s brother, Nicolas Perez. They had been digging among a stand of cholla (a spiny tree-like cactus) and saltbush, foliage that often marked the site of a prehistoric ruin. In the work they had accomplished, they had found an incredible cache of beautiful artifacts secreted within what had been a small niche in the wall of a pit house or ancient kiva (lodge house and ritual chamber). Providentially, some of the eroding material—stone, earth, clay, and crockery—had covered the bottom two thirds of the underground structure preserving from destruction what had been hidden. Their find was additional evidence for the presence of Indian encampments and villages along the banks of their river for over seven centuries. It was in an area which the villa’s Tewa Indian informants had told the colonists was known as the “bead water place.”2 The Ortiz and Perez find, which, among other artifacts contained a Red Mesa bowl, a Wijo canteen, and several black-on-white pottery mugs, also included a perfectly preserved ceremonial jar containing a beautiful but fragile shell necklace. It was the latter find that the Nicolases had just unearthed when Maria appeared on the edge of their excavation.3
Dressed in a long, white, sleeveless dress, a short work apron, and boots of cordovan leather, she had stood quietly on the edge of their pit, a lovely silhouette against the sun. Although masking her appearance, the sun had, through the thin layer of homespun that she wore, revealed the essence of her beneath her clothing and Nicolas Ortiz was both embarrassed and disturbed by the fact that Maria’s brother, Nicolas Perez, could also see.
Maria’s brother had said, “You’d better get out of the sun,” and she had responded by drawing the skirt of her ankle-length dress tightly about her long slim legs.
“Can I see it?” she had asked her brother in a question that was just short of a command.
“You might as well,” responded her brother who knew that with his sister, to wish was to get what she wanted. “You will anyway,” he said.
She took off her new boots and placing them neatly aside, jumped into the excavation where she knelt between the shirtless men. Although she appeared to be unaware of her surroundings as she carefully examined the shells that she held in her slender fingers, Nicolas Ortiz had been acutely conscious that she was there. Her skin was white and fresh and a mass of auburn hair toned with copper was piled high atop her head where it was held in place by a large pin. Hair too fine to be worked into her bun lay in ringlets at the nape of her long, white neck. She had hazel eyes, tending toward green, a lithesome flow of arms, and legs. He could smell her; feel the cool skin of an exposed arm touching his as they knelt in the moist earth. He could almost taste her, the scent of apples on her sweet breath. She smiled at him and he was filled with wonder!
Grasping his ankles and leaning back against his calves, he peered at Nicolas Perez, pleading for an introduction. When it came, Perez had said, “This is my sister, Maria.” And when she looked up from the necklace and gazed into Nicolas’s eyes, Perez said, “And this is my friend Nicolas Ortiz.”
* * *
That’s the way it began. Three years ago when she was 13. Under ordinary circumstances, he would not even have met a girl of her social class, yet he had not only met her, but had spoken with her and been immediately smitten. Unfortunately, he knew that she was quite unavailable to him.
But the 13-year-old Maria had vigorously pursued him, ignoring her father’s admonishments that she was not to do so, seemingly unconcerned that Ortiz was an individual of meager prospects, a day laborer and ranch hand from Zacatecas, a guard and a member of the wagon escort.
Maria and Nicolas Perez de Bustillo, on the other hand, were “hijos de algo,” the “children of a someone,” individuals of gentle birth, which was first among the nobility’s claim to precedence and leadership in New Mexico. They were the children and grandchildren of Simon and Juan Perez de Bustillo, two of New Mexico’s original settlers who, upon completion of their decade of tenure as first colonists, had been given land and aristocratic titles as hidalgos, a royal designation which had been granted to them by the crown so that a memory would remain of them as first settlers. Both their titles and land, the roots of their social superiority over others in the colony, were jealously guarded by them and by the 15 or 20 other families who also held these benefices. Because of the differences in their social class, Nicolas Ortiz had not been allowed to openly pursue Maria. However, he had found that his friendship with Nicolas Perez, and his work among the wealthy and prominent Baca and Perez de Bustillo families, had given him ample opportunity to be with her. He would not be able to see her tonight, but tomorrow, after the wagon train had entered the villa, he would meet her in the woods above her home.
7
A Place as Parent
The riverside forest of cottonwood was full and cast a darkening shadow along the river corridor. In the groves the bottomlands were replete with the rich marish drift of the river, an earthy scent from which one could derive a sense of pleasure, place, and well-being. The sounds of the river could be heard far along the cottonwood passageway, its honeyed flow a roar and babble of fast water in dappled light.
The homes of several members of the Baca and Perez de Bustillo clan were clustered along the margins of the river where family members engaged in the common pursuit of ranching. Grazing in the foothills, and tended by herders from not one, but several ranches, were the families’ cattle and sheep, the numbers of which were nearly doubling every 15 months. Sheepfolds and corrals to enclose these animals when not at pasture lay near the individual compounds.1
Above these homes and lost in the upper reaches of the crystalline stream was a presa, or rock-filled dam, diverting water from the parent river to acequia madres, one on each side of the watercourse. The acequia madres, or so-called “mother canals,” were barely three feet wide and half that deep and were full of numbingly cold snowmelt from the 10,000-foot peaks in the distance. The gentle gravity-fed canals, gurgling slowly along their grassy banks, were hidden beneath tall stands of cottonwoods and lazy willows. Meandering past plots of beans, squash, chile, and alfalfa, the small streams splashed through creaking headgates on their ramble along the canyon walls. Although partially drained of their life-giving waters by their parciantes (ditch members)—all of whom were family members asserting their right to a full derecho (a share of water)—the small streams nevertheless returned sufficient amounts of water to the parent stream. The waters thus diverted were but a small portion of the full river. The main stream ran down through the canyon over a white-rocked bottom, with cottonwood, green willows, deep hay grass, and wild flowers growing in profusion along its banks. Evening primrose, fire- and butterfly weed, grew brilliantly among the sedges.
