Summer Chaparral Page 3

  Although Catarina wasn’t locked into her room at night and she hadn’t been married at thirteen to a man old enough to be her grandfather. Perhaps her parents didn’t entirely live in the old California. But they certainly hadn’t accepted the new one.

  If they had, she might have found herself married to one of—any of—the boys who’d promised to come calling on her. Promised and then never showed. It didn’t take Isabel’s brain to figure something was amiss. No, Catarina could use her own inferior mind to realize that her suitors were being denied permission. Perhaps by her father, although it could be her mother’s work.

  No. It was most certainly her mother’s work.

  The Señora ruled the rancho and everyone on it with a soft voice and an iron fist. Catarina had never discerned how her mother’s opinions planted themselves into her father’s brain, but it was a trick she dearly wanted to learn.

  “Catarina. Juan.”

  As if summoned by her daughter’s thoughts, Señora Maria Dolores Alvarado Jaramillo de Moreno stood in the doorway, as serenely expressionless as the Holy Virgin Mother.

  One never heard her approach—she moved through the house with no more of a whisper than that of a snake’s scales.

  “Mama?” Catarina put on her attentive face and prayed that her mother hadn’t overheard much. Or heard anything from one of yesterday’s spectators.

  Juan smoothed the front of his shirt, then pulled his shoulders back. “Mama.”

  “Juan, there are muddy bootprints in the main hall.”

  Their mother’s tone was mild as always, but his head sank like a bloom closing for the night. “I am sorry, Mama.”

  The Señora’s gaze flicked back to her. “Catarina.”

  No more was needed. “I’ll take care of it, Mama.” One more chore to add to the list.

  Their mother folded her hands before her, and although her expression never changed, Catarina gripped the edge of the counter tight enough to bite into her palm. Her mother didn’t need to put her emotions on her face—the atmosphere charged with only the motion of her hands.

  “I heard something disturbing yesterday.” As calm as a day without a breeze, she was.

  Catarina’s skin prickled.

  “There was an… altercation in town, I understand?” And then their mother waited.

  The Señora’s silences had weight. A weight that settled hard on the chest, roosting there as it drove the very breath from one’s lungs, until the press of it tore the truth from one’s lips. One pushed out one’s confession in the hopes the weight might push off as well.

  “I was leaving the mercantile,” Catarina began. She kept her voice as still as her mother’s face. “There was a man there, at the common trough, who had arrived from the valley. He asked for directions, I gave them. Isabel came to stand with me when she saw us, and finally Juan came and finished speaking with him.”

  A few bricks of truth mortared together with a heavy coating of lies. She only hoped the wall of it would withstand her mother’s probing.

  “Hmm.” Her mother didn’t open her mouth to make that noise of disbelief.

  “Mama,” Juan put in, “you know how these things are. Someone sees a garter snake at the Whitmans’ and by the time the story reaches the Harpers’ it’s a whole nest of rattlers.” Her brother shrugged jerkily. “It was nothing.”

  Her mother’s gaze flitted between them. The weight kept pressing.

  Catarina widened her eyes a touch, trying for innocent. “I was only doing as you’ve always told us. Open hands to everyone.” She blinked once, her eyelids itching to keep at it nervously. “Did I do wrong?”

  Her mother’s hands unfolded from each other, releasing the hold of her silence. Catarina pulled the deepest breath she could without making a sound, fresh air filling the recesses of her lungs as her chest moved again.

  “I don’t like hearing such gossip about my own children,” the Señora said mildly, the words sharp as a slap to Catarina’s ears. “Please don’t allow it to happen again. Our family does not expose themselves in public.”

  No, Catarina kept her exposures for dark, secret places, where her parents couldn’t see. Except for yesterday, when she’d been so horridly jealous of her best friend that she’d tossed her good sense aside.

  “Yes, Mama,” she and Juan mumbled together.

  “That was all,” her mother concluded.

  Juan was out the door without pause, the tempo of his boots going double time once he’d reached the hall. The Señora disappeared as quietly as she’d appeared, leaving Catarina alone to remove her apron, hang it next to her sister’s, and…

  And contemplate her mother’s kitchen. She had too many chores to sit like a lump, but all of her was frozen. As frozen as her life had become.

  Juan would leave tomorrow. Isabel would leave in a month.

  Franny…

  Catarina shook her head. Franny.

  How many times had she looked over this kitchen of her mother’s and imagined having her own? Too many times. The imaginings had been easy and light at eighteen, when she’d thought marriage just behind the next kiss, behind the next meeting of eyes at a barn dance. As the years had gone on, the imaginings had taken on a sourness, a drop of quinine added each day she stayed here and the world—and her siblings—went on. Until the imaginings were nothing but bitter.

  At twenty-six, marriage wasn’t behind the next kiss, the next clasp in a darkened corner, or the next exchange of heated promises. She kept at her flirtations because she craved the power, the heady rush of turning men into panting fools. If she lost even that small power… well, she’d have none at all.

  And yesterday, with that man watching her as if he couldn’t look away while jealousy pulsed like a canker in her breast, her pride had screamed for succor. So she’d marched over to him to take it.

  She smoothed a hand down her plain brown work dress. She wondered what Mr. Merrill might think of her today, her fine dress put away, her calculating smile set aside, and her hair in a braid hanging to her hips. He wouldn’t wear that dumbfounded expression if he saw her like this. No man would.

  But this was her as well. The vixen, the toiler, the dutiful daughter—they were all her, but she couldn’t be all of them at once. She had to pick and choose her masks.

  And wearing them made her weary to her very bones.

  She grabbed a basket from the floor for the tomatoes and headed for the back door.

  Time to take up the mask of toiler.

  The summer morning carried on with no regard for Catarina’s dark mood. But her pensiveness couldn’t hold against the call of the birds, or the gentle warmth of the sun hugging her shoulders, or the tickling breeze, heavy with the scent of the sagebrush.

  By the time she came to the trail leading to her garden plot—the water in the irrigation ditch next to it burbling as it went on ahead of her—she was humming, her basket knocking against her legs as she swung it in time with her song. Perhaps things weren’t so bad after all.

  The smell hit her first.

  Her nose wrinkled. Tomatoes. Much too strong for how far she was from the garden. The scent grew stronger as she got closer, her mouth watering with it even as her brow furrowed in confusion.

  The sight of her garden stopped her dead.

  Chaos. Destruction. Carnage.

  A thunk at her feet announced that her basket had dropped from her fingers.

  That smell… that smell was this.

  Every one of her tomato plants lay uprooted, mangled. Dead.

  Innards burst from the crushed fruits, seeds and flesh ground into the dirt. All of it a complete waste. Large paw prints throughout the dark soil pointed to the culprits.

  Juan’s dogs.

  She covered her face with both hands, breathing slowly to hold the sobs off. The garden was hers, all hers, a little island of her own among this sea of her mother’s.

  And those dogs… A whimper escaped with the next breath.

  Juan was her
ally in the family, the one she could always turn to—even if he did do foolish things, such as threatening a strange man for speaking with her. That his dogs could do this…

  She raised her head, taking in the massacre again. She’d murder those dogs. And then she’d murder her brother.

  The carcasses went to the top of the compost pile, a sad mass of red and green, scent rising thickly from them—an infusion of spice and summer days that only fresh tomatoes held. Soon enough, the scent would fade as the plants rotted into rich compost.

  Catarina brushed the dirt from her hands. That was the last of the tomatoes. There’d be no canning today—no more canning tomatoes for the rest of the year. At least she could leave that chore off the list.

  She fell into the routines of the day after that. Back to the house to gather up the laundry. Hitch the donkey to the cart and off to the reservation. Scrub it all in the hot springs. Haul it back again to hang on the line.

  The rhythms of hanging the laundry were soothing, as long as she didn’t think on the fact that these linens were her mother’s and not her own. That every bit of her life was her mother’s and not her own.

  The sodden sheets slapped at her as she hefted them over the clothesline, the wind grabbing at them like a baby with a rattle. Sweat rolled down the backs of her legs, hidden from the cooling breeze by her skirts. She swung her whole body round to gain enough heft to toss the sheets over the line. The linens settled with a wet thunk before wrapping her legs in a damp embrace. She went for the pins, hidden in the weedy stubble next to the nearly full laundry basket. A burr implanted itself in her thumb as she did, leaving behind a bright red bead of blood when she pulled it free. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, a thread of copper working its way across her tongue.

  Isabel. It ought to be Isabel out here, sweating like a horse and stabbing her thumb. Perhaps Catarina ought to have been a teacher—then it would be her in the house this afternoon, indolently leafing through some schoolbooks.

  She pulled her thumb out with a wet smack. It stung something fierce, but the bleeding had stopped. She went for the pins again, being more careful this time, and began to push them onto the line, pinning the sheets in place and imagining she was pinning those dogs instead.

  “Why are you stabbing those sheets?”

  She jumped clear off the ground, spinning to face the voice questioning her sanity.

  Franny. Atop her sorrel mare, her youngest sister looked as she usually did: a complete mess. She wore a split skirt for riding, a men’s work shirt of all things, and a flat-brimmed hat better suited for a girl half her age. All of her was coated with dust, but her eyes sparkled merrily.

  “Where have you been all day?” Catarina demanded.

  Franny shrugged. “Out of doors.”

  Hardly an answer. But being their father’s favored child meant that Franny answered to no one—except their mother, who hardly ever bothered with Franny anyway.

  “You need to water the goats,” Catarina said waspishly.

  “I did this morning, and I just did again.” Franny flicked the ends of the split reins with complete unconcern.

  “And the—”

  “The chickens, I did that as well.”

  Pinching her lips, Catarina tried to find some other fault. “Well, you ought to return to the house to wash up for supper. I’ll need your help setting the table.” Franny couldn’t escape that chore—the Señora herself demanded that she help with supper.

  “I was headed there just now.”

  “Well.” Catarina huffed deep in her throat. There ought to be something she could snap at Franny about. She couldn’t have gotten all her chores done, not with how she ran wild.

  “Whatever you’re cross about,” Franny drawled, “I didn’t do it.”

  That was true. It had been Isabel and Juan—or rather, his dogs—not Franny. And yet irritation set its hard fingers against her jaw, made her say harsh things when she saw her youngest sister. Catarina had spent all day keeping her mother’s house running, and Franny had spent it doing as she pleased.

  It made her want to spit.

  By the time Franny had appeared, her parents must have tapped their last reserve of discipline with the first three children, since she’d done as she pleased as soon as she could walk. Franny’s will was a powerful thing from the very beginning, fed through the years by their father’s indulgence.

  Catarina, in almost every instance, had bent her will to the angle her parents demanded and prayed that once she was married, she’d be as free as Franny.

  It hadn’t happened yet.

  But Catarina couldn’t be angry with her baby sister. Franny was simply… Franny.

  She never wore a mask.

  Catarina looked back at the basket, linens climbing out of it like tentacles. If she wanted to start supper on time, she needed to finish soon.

  “I can help, if you want,” Franny said.

  Her expression must have been terribly melancholic for Franny to offer. “No.” She shook her head, smoothing her expression to stillness. “You’ll only drag them through the dirt, and then I’ll have to wash them all over again.”

  “You’re not the only one who knows how to do the wash.”

  “No, Isabel does as well,” she sniped.

  Isabel, who was leaving in a month to go do as she pleased. Catarina stabbed another pin into the sheet, the line sagging with the force of it.

  “It was kind of you to offer,” she allowed. “I’ll remember it when I need help the next time.”

  “You won’t need help next time,” Franny said saucily, “because there won’t be as much laundry with our siblings gone.”

  “Brat.” But there was only affection in it. It was difficult to hold onto irritation with Franny.

  “If you don’t need me,” her sister said, “I’ll be off to the house then.”

  Catarina simply waved her away. Franny gathered up the reins, nudged the mare forward, then pulled her back to a halt.

  “Who’s that man?” Franny’s eyes narrowed at something coming up the drive.

  “What man?” Catarina peeped over the clothesline.

  A dust cloud came down the drive, a cloud that slowly formed into a man on a horse.

  A familiar man on a familiar spotted cow pony.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” Catarina ducked behind the sheets, her heart thumping quicker than the rhythm of the hooves heading for them.

  “What the hell…?” Franny asked.

  “Don’t swear.” She gave Franny a scolding look, but her sister missed it, staring at the road as she was.

  Franny. Who was on a horse. And likely visible for miles around.

  More importantly, visible to that man.

  She windmilled her hands at Franny. “Get down!”

  Franny’s eyes went wide and an unholy light sparked and caught fire in them. “It’s him.” She started to laugh. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Catarina glared. “I don’t know whom you’re speaking of. I just don’t want to be seen like this.”

  A scornful puff of air flew past her sister’s lips. “It’s that man Juan caught you flirting with yesterday. He doesn’t look as if Juan beat the stuffing out of him.”

  “You weren’t even there! How do you know about it?”

  But she knew how her sister had heard. Gossip here moved fast as a brushfire and could be just as destructive.

  Franny stared at the stranger, indifferent as to how the story had come to her. “I heard it from Agnes Crivelli.”

  “She wasn’t there either.” Gossip was already burning out of control, then. Catarina sent up a quick prayer that no other tellings—worse tellings—would reach her mother’s ears.

  Franny had no such worries. “Agnes heard it from Lily Whitman,” she said mildly.

  Lily had been there, pointing and whispering behind her hand to her sister-in-law, Emily.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Catarina muttered to herself.

  “He’s c
oming this way,” Franny sang, sweet as a little bird.

  Oh yes, what a lark all this was for her.

  Her sister’s expression pinched into solemnity. “That’s a nice horse.”

  Trust Franny to notice the horse’s qualities before the man’s. Catarina didn’t care a fig for the horse. But the man…

  The beat of hooves was only slightly quieter than the drum of her heart in her ears. She crouched a little lower and put a hand to her hair, windblown strands rising to greet her palm.

  Flyaway hair, worn dress, sweat clinging to her like a second skin—if this were her punishment for her oversized vanity, God couldn’t have fashioned a better one.

  The hoofbeats came closer.

  She’d never have to imagine what Mr. Merrill’s reaction to her wearing the mask of the toiler would be—he was about to see her in all her slatternly glory. She remained frozen behind the sheet as the hoofbeats grew stronger, louder now than her heart.

  Perhaps the ground would open up and swallow her.

  Perhaps the ground would open up and swallow him.

  Fool, fool, fool, the hoofbeats tapped out.

  And then they halted.

  The silence was vast—all of creation seeming to come to a stop along with that horse.

  “He’s here,” Franny said, in a whisper loud enough to carry to the next county.

  “Howdy.”

  Oh, that voice. Yesterday, she’d enjoyed it slipping along her ears. But today, with the sheet between them, that voice floating over, deep and rasping as it was… a shiver took hold of her.

  “Hello.” Franny gave a happy little wave. “I’m Franny.”

  Catarina closed her eyes. That’s not how you introduce yourself.

  Of course, she was hiding behind the sheet, not the best position from which to criticize etiquette.

  She ought to come out, to reveal herself—there was no escaping it. But a queer idea had seized her, that if she stepped out from behind this sheet, she’d set in motion something she couldn’t stop.

  “Jace Merrill. Pleasure to meet you, Señorita.” His Spanish was terrible—flat, nasal, his pronunciation of the ñ a complete mangle. Her lip should be curling in disdain—Isabel’s certainly would have—but instead she sighed inwardly, coming perilously close to a swoon.