a breath, then bring the tools.”
Smith cursed loudly. “The hell I’m a’gonna bury no stinkin’ horse-thief savage!” He kicked the corpse. “Captain kin jest kiss my rosy red afore I bury this thing.”
“Leave me and the boy to do it,” the old man said. Smith stomped off. Jeremiah sucked in his breath. The injustice of the situation overwhelmed him. There was young, stinking Badger-Fur Smith, big and brawny and foul-mouthed, just ordered by the captain to dig a grave for the man he’d shot, getting out of the job; here was a sickly boy and an old man, whose first wife and kids had been murdered by Indians, left to do it in his stead.
“It’s not our job, Pap,” he said. “The captain ordered Smith to do it.”
“The captain can kneel and kiss my nethers,” Smith called over his shoulder as he lumbered off.
“Git the mattock and spade,” old Daniel said.
“I won’t,” the boy said.
THE NEXT MORNING the boy’s disobedience was never mentioned, but he felt its presence in his mother’s grimace and his sister’s smirk. For thousands of years, since the children of Israel had fled Egypt, the boy thought, rules forbidding such misbehavior had been clear and carried a severe penalty, but now, as they were heading toward a new world, they seemed open to some debate. What right did an old stranger, this man who had abandoned them all for a decade, have to give him orders, even if he was his father? He felt the conflict work its way across Mother’s features, she who had encouraged his free thinking, and prepared his defense should the subject arise, but it never did. The old man simply stared ahead as he led the team.
There was a sudden cloudburst as they trudged forward, such that the rain gathered and poured off the branches and the brims of his father’s and his own felt hats, and just as it stopped the trees disappeared. They walked in dripping silence beside the oxen, under a sky that grew huge and blue to the north and black with thunder-clouds to the south, and onto a dazzling, rolling green sea of grass such as the boy had never imagined.
There were fields near home between the river willows and the woods, which he had always loved, but here was the entire round earth turning under the endless heavens. Here was the very face of God shining before him! In all his readings of the Good Book, in all the stories of surrendered souls, he had never quite understood how small the will and acts of man were before those of God until now.
The wagon and cattle trains creaked and rattled and disappeared in the immensity. Simultaneous with this humbling first vision of the prairie came a sudden shame for disobeying his father, for the small and scheming vanity and willfulness that had caused him to abandon the old man to the work of burying the dead while he watched the young men mount horses and stood near the pretty girl with the pigtails as she waved them off. What trials and terrors had his father faced in his soul’s journey, the boy wondered as he watched the old man stride forward onto the ocean of
grass sparkling
• FIVE •
6:30 AM
with the last of morning’s dew,
the gold and green and umber stalks among clover and Queen Anne’s lace made the fallow field jewel-encrusted. He lured the mare from her grazing to the stall and saddled her. The ornate face of his timepiece indicated that it was 6:35.
He took her at a brisk trot along the carriage lane and down the hillside, across the shallow ford, and up to the wagon road toward Sonoma Town. The cookhouse smoke from the Springs Hotel came to him a mile down the road from across the valley, mingled with the sweet pine needles of the steep eastern slope. A mile after that the valley opened toward the southern horizon, where, from the higher points, the broad San Francisco Bay could be seen joining the sky.
The estate of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, called Lachryma Montis, shone like a wedding cake against the dry mountain backstop of Sonoma, between town and cemetery. It was strange to think of its owner, a kind of local royalty, being arrested thirty years ago by the likes of Jeremiah’s father and other rustics in smoky deer hide and hauled off to the Swiss rancher’s fort on the Sacramento. The New England Yankee—style house, with its elaborate filigree along the eaves, had been mail-ordered by the wealthy old Mexican general after his adobe Casa Grande in the plaza had burned to the ground. It sat back from his vineyards and cornfields, looking down on the dilapidated mission plaza Vallejo had once overseen. Behind it the mountain’s tears welled up into a reservoir dug by Chinese laborers and Digger Indians to nourish the man and his plantation.
Jeremiah had cleared a site for a similar, if far more modest, kit house to erect near his father’s ramshackle cabin, for which he and Lucinda saved a few dollars every month. A civilized place, as his wife referred to the project, and she deserved it, and they needed it since each had lost a house to fire in past years. Most of the old structures of Sonoma had fallen or burned since the days of the early settlements, and the town itself had fallen like Adam since losing the county seat to Santa Rosa nearly twenty years back. The mission had lost its Mexican charter even before the Bear revolt, and its presidios and garrisons had become barracks for the New York louts of the Pacific Division during the gold rush days, leaving the town little more than an Old West fort full of Eastern drunks.
Now the old Mexican baron’s cattle grazed the mission plaza, dropping cow pies on the site where the Bear Flag had been raised in ’46. The military drunks were gone for the most part. A few lonely old men in army issue rented rooms in the former barracks, and Chinese and Diggers squatted in the husks of ruined adobe homes. Only one general store, Miller and Pauli, and one saloon, the Pioneer, did business, but a few churches and sturdy houses, the jail, and the former newspaper office had weathered the times, and the new narrow-gauge railroad from Sacramento to Petaluma had erected a tiny station. The town hadn’t altogether kicked the bucket.
Nor had its mission returned entirely to dust. Jeremiah rode past its crumbling whitewashed walls and cracked, weathered doorway, recalling the dream of Teresa and the years he’d spent with Padre Ignacio. He heard his name hailed from across the square and saw the sheriff, Charles Danvers, waving him over.
Danvers was a round-shouldered man with a neat mustache and a thoughtful grin, as of somebody remembering a clever jest. He sat with boots up on a pine rail, relaxed. “Coffee’s on the stove,” he said. Jeremiah tied up to the rail and thanked the sheriff for a cup. The hoosegow was cool, a dark adobe square, but its small kitchen wasn’t much more than a lean-to over the woodstove out back.
“Obliged, Charles.” Jeremiah sat beside him on the porch.
“The hell brings you to town this early of a morning?”
“Guess it’s Stiles.”
“Guess?”
“Got a telegram.”
“That was you? I seen a Digger boy ride off from the station. Figured it was Western Union.”
“Kind of an oddball note. Abner must be in a fix.”
“Let’s see it.” Danvers stuck his hand out. His brows lowered as he read the telegram. “Sunup’s come and gone. That ’breed’s in the office.”
“‘Breed?”
