Chapter Fifteen
Prologue
The day began like all the days that had come before. It was too hot with too much to do and none of it to my liking. I was bored and yearning for excitement, for an adventure that would take me away from trying to coax a bit of green, a bit of growth out of the parched, dry ground that destroyed more than it yielded.
I was young and wanted to live before I was old and dried up before my time, like Abuela and Tia Josefina. Tia and Abuela came to live with Papa after Mama died. Papa said she died bringing me into the world. I have no way of knowing if that is true since she was gone by the time I started to remember things. But Papa does not lie, so I suppose it must be so.
Frustrated with my futile efforts in the garden, I went to fetch water from the stream that ran on our property. Anything to get away from the boredom and the hard work, if only for a moment.
The stream is always cool and I can take my shoes and stockings off so I can feel the water against my sweating skin.
Sometimes, when I go to the stream, I pretend I am a princess, held against my will, waiting for a prince to come rescue me and take me away to his castle in the mountains. I pretend so hard that once or twice, I thought I heard the whinny of a horse and the sound of hooves against the ground.
I am disappointed when I look to see that the sound belongs to my imagination. Or to a stray mustang running closer than he should.
There are horses here that have no masters, that run where they want to and are freer than I am. I envy them. Or I did before...
But since that afternoon, I find myself longing for the boredom of home, for the tedious labor of scratching the ground, coaxing life from the hard, dry soil. For the feeling of triumph the few times I succeeded. When you lose something, that is the time when you realize that you really wanted it and did not have the sense to value it when it was yours.
But that day, when I went to fetch the water and dreamed of princes searching for their princess, the sound of horses existed outside my imagination. They existed in the real world.
The sound belonged to the Indian ponies that came galloping at me. Indian ponies mounted with riders. When I saw them coming, I ran as if the very devil was after me because he was. Abuela and Tia and Papa all warned me to be careful, that the Mescalero-Apaches would just as soon kill us than look at us. Papa said that they thought we invaded their land. When I asked him if we had, he told me that we were making it better, but that they did not understand that. I think they do not understand that because we do not speak their language and they do not speak ours.
I was swift of foot and could beat my brothers whenever we ran, but I was not swifter than an Indian and one of the riders caught me and picked me up as easily as I could pick up one of Tia’s baby chicks.
I begged him to put me down and the rider yelled something to another rider and then at me, but I could not understand.
For the first time in my fourteen years, I thought about dying for I was more frightened than I could ever recall being.
I prayed for God to welcome me and to make my dying less painful.
* * *
LETTING OUT A long breath, Miguel Rodriguez stared at the faded ink in the worn book he had just discovered and been reading for the past half hour. The pages of the book were so dry they fairly crackled beneath his fingers as he turned them. Afraid they might tear, he was handling them as gently as humanly possible for a man with hands the size and thickness of leather catchers’ mitts.
The book was one of half a dozen or more such tattered, cloth-covered journals he had just uncovered in his attic.
He had come up to the attic driven by a sudden desire to put his house in order figuratively and literally, something he’d felt compelled to do since suffering a heart attack earlier in the year. The unexpected event had unceremoniously brought him to the brink of his existence and taught him how truly fragile life was—as if he really needed that lesson since his beloved wife had passed on all these years ago.
But with his sons Miguel, Jr. and Ramon caring for his ranch and his other four offspring volunteering sporadically whenever they had the time, Miguel found he had a lot of free time to himself now. Never one who could handle too much free time well, he decided to get busy and turned his attention to things that had long been neglected.
Things like the attic, where nonessential items far too precious to part with at the moment were sent to await a verdict about their future.
Unfortunately, “out of sight, out of mind” seemed the golden rule for dealing with the attic and he had forgotten about over half the things that had been stored up there over the years. Some he barely remembered even after having spent the past few days browsing through the storage boxes.
This particular box, however, contained the journals that he couldn’t remember ever having looked through before.
Vaguely, as he thought back now, Miguel thought he recalled his mother giving the battered old container to him more than fifty years ago, saying something about passing it on to the next generation to preserve. His mother had mentioned that they were stories that had been written by his great-great-great-grandmother, Marguerite Perez-Rodriguez.
At the time, he now remembered, he’d thought that his mother was talking about short stories, that the box contained some sort of a creative writing endeavor attempted by his long-departed ancestor.
But looking at the journal in his hand now, he was beginning to suspect that perhaps his mother had meant that they were memoirs or recollections from his great-great-great-grandmother’s youth, not some sort of stories she had made up.
Sitting here now, a lantern turned up to its maximum capacity to banish the darkness from that one corner of the attic, Miguel ran his hand along the journal’s tattered spine with reverence, as if he was touching something very precious.
For all the world, he felt as if he had just stepped into the past. A past that connected him to his family, to his roots and, in an odd sort of way, to the future and to the children who had yet to come.
His unborn grandchildren.
An idea suddenly came to him, taking hold of his imagination. The more he thought about it, the more pleased he became.
But if this was going to happen, he needed help.
Miguel sat there in the stillness and the aging dust, trying to think of who he might turn to with this, who could advise him who he should seek out in order to get started on this journey into the Rodriguez past.
And then he smiled as a name occurred to him.
For once, it wasn’t one of his children.
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