Everyone knew the appearance of a few Anglos was the harbinger of worse to come.
Worse still, Nena thought, was the manner in which everyone agreed to protect Los Ojuelos.
“It’s time for Félix to marry,” an uncle’s voice cut in. “Marriage is the surest way to an alliance with a strong hacienda.”
Félix did not reply. She yearned to know what he was thinking. She would be horrified, or filled with rage, if Mamá’s brothers talked about her future so callously.
“Exactly!” Another voice rang with agreement. “Family defends family. If I had daughters, I would give them gladly.” That would be Tío Julián, who had no children. “What of Magdalena? Surely she’s old enough now.”
At the sound of her full name, Nena’s heart dropped through her stomach.
When Félix raised his voice and pointed out that it would be six or seven years until it was appropriate for Nena to marry, the men began to argue about which rancho to marry her off to when the time came. Which had the most sons, or the ones who showed the most promise? Which had the strongest vaqueros, the most cattle, the most land?
Names slipped through the crack of light that lined the underside of the door, twining around Nena’s ankles, ready to drag her away from Los Ojuelos and her family. Away from Néstor. She could not let that happen. She would not.
But if Papá insisted, if Papá shouted the way the tíos were shouting now . . . she would freeze like a rabbit spotted by hunters.
And what would happen then?
If she told Néstor about that night, he would listen. He was the only other speaker of their shared, silent language, the only person on the rancho who listened to more than her voice: he read her shifts in energy, her expression, the way she held her weight. She loved him fiercely for it.
Now, he sensed her unease. He reached into the dark and took her hand. “Was your mamá mad about something?”
His words touched a familiar ache, sore as a day-old bruise.
If Mamá was angry with Nena, it was going to be about Néstor.
She and Néstor had met when they were eight, when Néstor first came to Los Ojuelos with his family. Within days they were a matched set, inseparable as a pair of old boots as they fetched water, fed the chickens, and watched the sheep with the old shepherd Tío Macario in the chaparral. For years, no one noticed or cared—Nena losing herself in the pack of the rancho’s children meant she was out of Mamá’s hair as she cared for the baby, Javiera, and so Nena did as she pleased.
But lately, Néstor had grown taller. He began to work with the other vaqueros, heading into the chaparral for days at a time. As Nena outgrew dresses and inherited some of Mamá’s, the tías began to exchange whispers about her attachment to Néstor. Overnight, their time together was halved by his work, then halved again by Mamá and her obsession with propriety and honor. First, Mamá insisted that Nena was too old to be playing with the peones’ children barefoot in the courtyard; then, when her first blood came last month, Mamá forbade her outright to be seen alone with a young man. Much less the son of a vaquero.
During the day, Nena obeyed. Mamá and Papá’s love was a fragile thing. Lately, she felt that if she moved too quickly, it might snap.
She hated it. Growing older felt like holding water in cupped hands; the harder she pressed her fingers together to keep life with Néstor the way it used to be in her grasp, the faster it slipped away. So she held Néstor’s hand tightly. With him, there was no Papá or Mamá, no work or tías casting sharp glances at how she behaved. There never had been. Tonight, the moon was high, the night cloudless; they were blissfully alone, their only company a corona of stars that winked like flint.
If they found Spanish silver, perhaps they could keep it that way forever. With that money, Papá could hire double the vaqueros he currently had. Los Ojuelos would be safe. There would be no reason to marry Nena away to a stronger rancho or hacienda, and she could live her life as she pleased. Marry whom she pleased.
But if they failed? Once Papá had decided which path was the best to ensure the safety of the rancho, there was no changing his mind. Félix was already engaged to the daughter of a powerful hacendado. Nena had no desire to think about what lay in her own future, nor did she want to talk with someone like Néstor about marrying a stranger.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s go find some silver.”
In the moonlight, Néstor’s grin was like mother-of-pearl, bright and eager.
Nena knew the story from Abuela, but recently, Néstor had heard another version of the tale. It was one of his first nights in the chaparral, and the vaqueros gathered with a group of itinerant carreteros, merchants who left the distant capital and crisscrossed México with their ox carts to the ranchos north of Río Bravo. They came bearing cotton and silver and china, yes, but when vaqueros encountered them on their curving paths north to las Villas del Norte, stories were the currency of the chaparral.
Néstor had listened in reverent silence to the tales of a Spanish count who fled north with his wealth during the war against the crown, thinking he could make a new life for himself in El Norte. But he was not strong, not like the carreteros and vaqueros and the Indios who made the broad, arid wilds of the north their home. The burden of his silver was too great; unless he lightened his load, he knew he would stumble and become food for coyotes and vultures. He chose a secret place to bury his treasure, blessed it, and carried on. Legend said he died in the chaparral anyway.
That was where Abuela’s version of the story ended. But the carreteros spun the story further: if you saw a winking orb of light deep in the chaparral at night, they said, it hovered over the place where the Spaniard buried his treasure.
When the vaqueros returned to the rancho, Néstor came rushing to meet Nena in the anacahuita grove before evening vespers, his eyes alight with a look she knew well: he had a secret, and he was dying to share it with her.
“There are lights by the springs at night,” Néstor whispered. “I’ve seen them. Casimiro didn’t believe me, but I swear I saw them before dawn.”
“Mamá once said that my abuelo told stories of Spaniards passing through Los Ojuelos, years ago,” Nena had said. “Maybe it was them.”
So tonight, they passed the smaller, wooden jacal houses of the vaqueros and other workers and slipped through the gate of the high fence around the central grounds of the rancho. Néstor carried a shovel in one hand; Nena had left a second for herself near the springs during the siesta, when no one would notice.
“I wonder if those Anglos were here because they were looking for it,” Nena mused.
“They’d better not be,” Néstor said, voice dark.
Anglos were why Néstor, his uncle Bernabé, his cousin Casimiro, and his abuela had come to Los Ojuelos five years ago: they shot the ranchero for whom Néstor’s papá worked to steal the land and the cattle. Over the course of long afternoons, while watching the sheep with Tío Macario, Néstor had told her what it was like to see his home in flames. It was as if the whole world—everything he had ever thought of as safe and permanent—were turning to ashes. How he saw his own father’s body bleeding in the corral, shot by Anglos.
How in the midst of the chaos, Bernabé packed what few things he could carry, took Abuela and the boys, and fled. How every day since then, he had felt like a burden to his uncle. An outsider in his own family. This was why he wanted his own rancho, Nena knew: to belong. To never be powerless again.