That was no vaquero, no peón, no common messenger with urgent news. A ranchero slowed to a canter before la casa mayor, flinging himself from the saddle and passing the reins to one of the boys who leaped up from Abuela’s feet to assist him.
“Don Severo!” Mamá cried, coming forward from the open-air kitchen. “Please, come sit! Whatever is the meaning of this?”
Something was wrong.
The Serranos’ neighbor Don Severo owned Hacienda del Sol, a rancho nearly twice the size of Los Ojuelos. Even with vaqueros in the chaparral during the day, he had dozens of peones to call upon to carry a message to Los Ojuelos for him.
Nena lifted her skirts and broke into a run.
“I had to come,” Don Severo was saying as he removed his fine hat and wiped sweat from his brow. Javiera was ushered off the patio with the mending and Nena urged to get refreshments from the kitchen in the same brusque gesture from Mamá. Nena obeyed, but kept one ear turned to the patio as her cousins helped her prepare a tray of cool water and fruits and coffee and breads for the unexpected guest.
“I must speak with Don Feliciano immediately,” Don Severo said. “It is of the utmost urgency.”
“He will already be on his way,” Mamá assured the ranchero. “Look, there he is now!”
Taking a heavy tray of refreshments in her arms, Nena turned to see Papá and Félix striding up to la casa mayor from the corral.
“Don Severo!” Papá boomed, his voice filling the patio a few steps before his presence did. “A hundred men at your command and you could not send a messenger?”
Nena brought the tray to the table on the patio and served refreshments to the men, settling her face into a docile, innocent expression. She moved her hands at a deliberate pace as she poured cold water into cups and set them down, purposefully lingering to hear Don Severo’s news.
“It’s the Yanquis,” Don Severo said.
Nena paused as she set the pitcher back on the tray, anxiety prickling in her chest. News of Yanquis was never good. News that brought a ranchero racing to speak to Papá instead of sending a messenger? It had to be urgent. It could even be dangerous. She could not go back to the kitchen until she knew what was wrong.
“They’re saying everything from the Nueces to Río Bravo is theirs,” Don Severo added.
Papá snorted, dismissing this with a sharp wave of the hand. “Let them talk!” he said.
“It’s not talk. They took Puerto Isabel.” Don Severo leaned forward, eyes bulging as he brought his hand flat against the tabletop for emphasis. Nena started at the sound. Don Severo’s face was still darkened and sweaty from the midmorning ride to Los Ojuelos, giving him a desperate look. “They’re building a fort across the river from Matamoros,” he said. “Don Hortensio’s vaqueros saw it with their own eyes, te lo juro. There are already thousands of soldiers, and more arrive daily. They mean to take the land by force.”
A hush fell over the table. Not even Papá spoke. All Nena could hear was the crackle of the kitchen fire, the faraway whinny of a horse. It was as if even the chickens and the crickets fell silent.
The chapel bell tolled. An hour to noon. A group of children poured from the shadowy interior of the chapel as they did every morning, freed from their lessons. Their laughter was hollow and tinny when it reached Nena, as if it were carried on a wind from far away. In her mind’s eye, she saw a whiplike, dark boy running among them, his black hair falling into his eyes, his hand-me-down, too-large trousers bunched where they were belted around his slim waist.
I still dream about that day, Nena, Néstor once whispered to her, many years ago. I wake up certain they’re coming.
All her life, Yanquis circled overhead like vultures. First, they tore off pieces at the edges of her world. Néstor and his family fled from San Antonio, bringing nightmarish tales with them. Then came news that Anglos had declared Tejas independent of México, its own nation. Now that they were a part of the United States and set their eye further south . . . Would they sink their talons into Los Ojuelos next?
She took the tray, gripping it hard, hard enough that she knew the wood would leave pale indentations in her palms. She would never forget the men who, long ago, came to speak to Papá in their broken Spanish, asking after land for sale. How shifty their pale eyes were. How untrustworthy. Loathing stretched and grew under her skin, flushing her cheeks with heat.
This was her home.
She knew every tree that grew between la casa mayor and the spring: the oaks, the anacahuitas, the laurels. She knew which ones grew over her grandparents and infant siblings’ graves and which ones protected the carefully buried afterbirth of her siblings and cousins.
She hated the presumption that her home could be bought and paid for. They could no more take it than they could take the bones from her body. They would have to kill her before she let them get close to la casa mayor.
A cool realization unfolded in her mind.
They might.
I didn’t see them shoot him, Néstor had said the afternoon he told her how his father died. They sat in the shade, far from la casa mayor, watching the sheep. Néstor lay with his head in her lap, looking up at the sky. Branches and clouds were reflected in his eyes, in irises so dark and liquid they were almost black. The weight of his head pressed her thighs against the earth; his warmth was right there, but she had never seen him so distant. It made her want to find where his mind wandered and snatch it back, to cradle it safely in her arms. But I saw him in the corral. You know how pigs are when they’re butchered? People bleed like that too.
Anger lifted in her chest like an October storm: with wind like the lick of a whip, with crackling, with the promise of thunder.
“But this is our land,” she spat. “They can’t take it. We live here!”
Don Severo looked startled to see her standing there, even though she had been placing food and drink before him since he arrived. “Indeed, se?orita,” he agreed.
From the corner of her eye, Nena caught the edge of a severe look from Papá.
“That is enough, Magdalena,” he said. “Leave us.” His tone was a stinging dismissal—if she ignored it, she risked kindling his temper, and nothing good could come of that.
Her outburst was inappropriate; she should not be listening to the men’s conversation, much less interrupting it. Mamá would be mortified that Papá had had to raise his voice at her before a guest.
For once, she found she didn’t care. How could she not react as she did? She retreated to the kitchen as Papá began to volley question after question at Don Severo about the news. Instead of setting the tray down where it belonged, she slammed it with a resounding clatter, causing the tías to startle and scold.
They mean to take the land by force.
Through the lazy smoke of the kitchen fire, the rancho moved as if a wildfire had struck. It bucked and crawled with the news, as if a thousand ants swarmed forth from their hill, stirred to agitation by a malevolent child’s stick.
For years, the vultures had circled, carried high on a hot updraft.
Now, they were close enough for her to hear the rustle of feathers, the click of talons. Close enough to feel their fetid breath on the back of her neck.
“Nena?” Javiera’s voice broke through the agitated humming in her chest. Mending was still clutched to her chest. She had been frozen in the kitchen ever since Don Severo arrived with the news, her eyes wide as a deer’s. “Nena, are we in danger?”
“No.” She took the mending from Javiera and planted a firm kiss on the side of her younger sister’s head. She was not sure if this was true, but the coals that burned in her chest brought the words to her lips all the same. “Not as long as we fight, we’re not.”
* * *
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