NÁÁPIIKOAN WINTER
Copyright © 2016 by Christine Alethea Williams
All rights reserved.
PART I
Nuevo Mexico
In sofar as the taking of captives and reducing them to slaves was concerned the Apache acquired this custom from the Spaniard or Mexican, and it is safe to say that during the period of which I write there was not a settlement in the valley of the Rio Grande that did not number among the inhabitants a large number of Apache and Navajo Indian slaves.
—Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Torch Press, 1917
CHAPTER 1
Isobel, a light sleeper, woke in darkness to the sounds of her parents’ habitual nighttime dispute.
“Will you do nothing? Stupid, lazy bitch! No better than a dog in heat—you breed bastard children from different men and leave them to raise themselves. You’re like a mangy cur bitch on a leash of gold. I wish I’d never set eyes on you!”
Graciela, Isobel’s mother, said something too low for the child to decipher.
In reply, Isobel’s father, Armando, growled, “It won’t work this time, Graciela. Have you no pride? You resemble the commonest prostitute on the streets of Cádiz!”
Suddenly Graciela cried out in pain. Isobel, listening, shivered, imagining that her father perhaps twisted her mother’s arm, or pulled a handful of her long hair, both of which she had seen him do.
“Whore! Look at the paint smeared on your face.”
The sound of slaps to bare flesh resounded down the hallway. A tear slipped down the listening child’s cheek.
Then a brief silence ensued, soon replaced by the rhythmic creak of bed ropes emanating from the room of her parents, and Isobel dared to think another truce called between the combatants. Armando and Graciela often scrapped late into the night, frightening Isobel, their unintentional eavesdropper. Sometimes she thought Armando might kill Graciela, but the rasp of their bed against the wall usually signaled that her father had once more been pacified. Now that she had found out how to connect the sound to its corresponding action, she began to wonder why the act of the making of babies should cause adults to stop fighting. She thought long and hard on it, until she decided that the exertion must surely make her parents too tired to continue fighting.
At last all sound ceased, and Isobel concluded her parents must be settled in for the night at last. She had just about returned to slumber when she became aware of the sound of harsh breathing inside her small room. Her father stood over her bed, his boots in one hand, shaking with an apparent effort to stifle his emotions. He whispered, “Get up. Get dressed. We’re leaving.” She started to say, “But where are we going?”
Her father put a shaking finger to his lips to quiet her. “It’s a...an aventura. Just you and I. We will ride out of here tonight, and you will come back an educated lady someday—and show them all. No one will ever be able to look down on my daughter, Isobel Ochoa! Now, get dressed. Quietly! Don’t wake your sisters.”
He peeled back her covers and extended a hand to help her rise. Isobel placed her small hand in her father’s. She noticed a heavy leather saddlebag slung over one of his shoulders, causing him to slump. As well, he clutched a smoothbore musket in that hand. She shivered again, this time with anticipation. She got out of bed, and Don Armando retreated to the hall to wait for her. She dressed hurriedly, smiling happily in the darkness. Mimicking her father, she emerged with her own shoes in her hand. They tiptoed past Carmella’s room and that of a snoring Don Emilio on the corner opposite her parents’ room on the upstairs level.
Downstairs, Armando headed for the kitchen and proceeded to raid Almira’s pantry with abandon, piling everything in the center of the table. Isobel watched as, with a flourish, he tied the four corners of the tablecloth together and slung this package over his unburdened shoulder, settling his loads evenly. They tiptoed through the central sala with its dim outlines of furniture and out onto one of the two patios. There Armando stopped to pull on his boots, and Isobel quickly followed suit, afraid he would become impatient and leave her behind.
Father and daughter traversed the patio between the flowerbeds the housekeeper patiently coaxed out of arid earth, and headed for the horse corrals. Armando closed the gate behind them. Horses milled around inside the adobe walls. The smells of manure and Don Emilio’s prized roses mingled in the still desert air. A long-haired black apparition rose up in an outbuilding doorway as they approached. Armando leaped back, startled into a curse. The Indian asked a soft question Armando couldn’t translate, and Isobel answered in the same tongue. The man looked solemnly down at the child. Then he stepped aside.
Armando said, “How did you understand what he says?”
Isobel shot her father a puzzled glance. “We talk together all the time, mi padre.”
The girl blithely assumed all the hacienda’s Spanish-speakers learned Tewa as she did. When she noticed the look of pained distaste on Armando’s face, Isobel thought it better to refrain from adding she could converse fluently in the argot spoken by Don Emilio’s imported Indian/black workers as well.
“San Juan taught me to ride,” she said.
“San Juan,” Armando repeated in a voice that sounded like he had pebbles in his mouth and didn’t like the resulting taste.
Isobel giggled, pointing to the barrel-chested Indian. “When the friars told him he needed a Christian name in order to be baptized, he chose San Juan.” She crooked a finger and cupped her hand to her mouth. Armando stooped so she could whisper. “He thinks since he’s named for the saint, he must be San Juan, not just plain Juan. I wouldn’t hurt his feelings by telling him he’s wrong, and so perhaps you shouldn’t either.”
Armando straightened, shaking his head. “Isobel, we don’t have time for such silliness. Tell your saint to hurry up and get us some horses.”
Isobel wondered how her father could be in such a bad mood when they made haste to depart on a great adventure that would one day result in her becoming a refined, learned lady. But adult behavior often defied explanation, and so she chattered in Tewa to San Juan. The Indian hesitated, looking toward Armando. Then he knelt and whispered something to the child, his broad hand resting on her shoulder.
Armando, wearing a fierce frown, snatched Isobel away. She felt her lower lip start to quiver. San Juan rose to his feet, meeting Armando’s outraged scrutiny with stoic calm. Isobel whispered, “He says we should not go, padre.”
“Does he say that indeed, Isobel?” Armando’s voice flat, his gaze probed San Juan suspiciously. Armando shook Isobel by the arm. “Tell me: why does he say that?”
San Juan’s broad arms flexed as if he thought to interfere between father and daughter. Armando’s fingers tightened and Isobel held back a cry of pain. Armando fingered the musket resting on his shoulder until the Indian’s gaze locked on the weapon. Then Armando said, “Saddle the horses. And we need a pack animal as well.”
San Juan’s shoulders stiffened in response, but he turned to obey. He led Isobel’s pony from its stall, and then a magnificent black stallion of Arabian stock for Armando. In the paddock, he corralled a dun gelding packhorse, securely tying Don Armando’s bundle and two bedrolls from the barn to its sturdy body. Armando himself secured the heavy saddlebags he carried to the black stallion’s saddle.
At last all appeared ready to go. Armando slid the musket into a scabbard on his saddle and then lifted Isobel atop her fat little mare. “Warn the Indian that if anyone asks, he knows nothing.” Armando placed the pony’s reins in Isobel’s hands, glancing sideways at the silent Indian.
Isobel hesitated. “Padre, there are hundreds of eyes on the hacienda. San Juan won’t be the only one who knows we are going. The mestizos see everything that happens here.”
“What half-breeds and the spawn of slaves see—and what they tell—are two different things, Isobel. Now stop arguing with me. I said to warn the Indian to say nothing!”
Isobel recognized the pitch of Don Armando’s voice, barely controlled, the same voice he used when upset with Graciela. And Isobel well knew the firestorms of female weeping that occurred when her father became truly angry. In a low tone she conveyed his orders to San Juan. The Indian replied by shuttering his expression until his face resembled granite. Her father could not understand what she said, so Isobel felt safe in adding, “Don’t worry, San Juan. And when my grandfather tries to make you tell, just go ahead and tell him everything so that he won’t...hurt you.”
She was out of time. Her father’s horse increased its gait, and she clutched the reins of her pony lurching forward to follow the stallion. A silent San Juan melted back into the darkness. Awareness slowly crept up on Isobel that she and her father were running away. He had promised her a coveted education, just what she wanted, but for a moment she wondered if she made a mistake by following him into the night. Her stomach clenched and she suddenly felt like she might lose control of her bowels. As they left the straggling square of mud walls that enclosed the hacienda against raiding Apache, a chill ran up the diminutive spine of Isobel Ochoa y Ramírez. She’d been so happy to hear her father promise that she would go to school that she had followed him without question like one of the ranch’s happy, roly-poly puppies.
Isobel suddenly needed comfort and reassurance—but refrained from asking for it from the unpredictable man who led her away from her home into the night. As she settled lower on her spine in the saddle, she began to doze a bit, the comforting, familiar smells and voices of her grandfather’s hacienda surrounding her as she contemplated the reasons for following her father outside the walls tonight.
She drifted into remembrance:
“What are you doing, little one?” The housekeeper’s voice, so abrupt in the quiet of siesta, startled little Isobel. Guiltily, the seven-year-old clung to the leather-bound book.
Almira, the Spanish-Indian housekeeper, produced a dust cloth and whisked a speck of dust from the corner of a huge Moroccan oak escritorio brought over by ship nearly a hundred years before. Her dark eyes flicked just as quickly to the child. “Don Emilio probably wouldn’t like to hear you’ve been playing in his library again, Isobel.”
“I’m not playing. I’m reading.” The little girl pushed heavy waves of black hair back from her forehead and regarded her grandfather’s housekeeper seriously. Then her face crinkled into her most appealing grin. “And anyway, if you love me, you won’t tell where I spend my siesta.”
“Because I love you I try to keep you out of trouble.” Almira smiled back.
Isobel knew she, more than the rest of the don’s granddaughters, secured the housekeeper’s favor and indulgence. Isobel knew because she almost always won these little contests of wills with Almira.
“Off with you, Isobel! I’ll count to...one hundred...and if you’re not on your bed with your eyes closed by then I’ll tell your grandfather who left butter fingerprints all over the papers on his desk.”
Isobel suspected her grandfather already knew the identity of the persistent snoop in his extended family. And anyway, Almira couldn’t count to one hundred because no woman on the hacienda had ever attended school. Isobel, inveterate eavesdropper, had once heard her grandfather say with a hint of shame to a visitor from Santa Fé, “Everyone realizes our mistake a century ago in expelling the Jesuits from New Spain. There are few enough Franciscan primary schools in the New World for boys, let alone girls. The Crown sees fit to afford tutoring to the Indians, while our own daughters, creollas, grow up ignorant and unsheltered. Ah, well, friend, the price we pay for land, eh?” The men had gone on to discuss the possibility of more marauding against the settlers, Don Emilio thanking his lucky stars that he’d so far been spared, and Isobel drifted away from her hiding place.
Now she reflected: Almira might not actually speak to the don, but she could withhold the sugary sweets she passed out willingly to good girls like Isobel’s sisters. With a sigh, the child turned to put away the heavy book. “When I go to school, Almira,” she said over her shoulder as she left the tobacco-scented library, “you won’t be able to tell me what to do anymore.”
“School!” The housekeeper scoffed, her dusting cloth snicking out to connect with Isobel’s skirts. “What grand dreams you have for such a little girl. But even if you were allowed to go, a stubborn child like you would be spending many hours on her knees in front of the Virgin, and not so many looking at books!”
Isobel frowned as she pattered through cool white hallways and up dark-stained stairs until she reached the sleeping quarters of the hacienda. Her sisters slept peacefully. Carmella the oldest alone in a room, and Lucia and Lucinda, the twins, twined together on one mattress as if seeking the closeness they had once shared in the womb. Isobel sighed again. She considered sleep, especially in the afternoon, wasteful. Siesta time could be much better spent than lying abed. She thought about her conversation with the housekeeper, and her conviction hardened. Why shouldn’t she go to the Franciscans at the mission for tutoring if that was all her grandfather could afford? She rejected the notion of remaining lazy and stupid all her life, fit for nothing but raising children. There must be a way for her to attend school. Trailing her hand on the ebony bannister, she followed its smooth contours until she reached the door of her mother’s room. She waited, sure her parents didn’t sleep. She heard muffled giggles and the quiet tones of a male voice.
Then the sounds ceased. They’d fallen asleep after all. Disappointed, Isobel kicked lightly at the unlatched door and it swung open. Isobel covered her mouth with one hand, waiting to see if either of her parents would recognize her presence. But neither did. She closed the door, making a little more noise. A patient child when she really wanted something, she stood silently in the hall. If she woke them up, her mother might reprimand her...but then again she might not. An unpredictable parent, Doña Graciela had never paid much attention to her daughters one way or the other. Isobel heard a heavy sigh from her father. Again, she opened the door. She stared at the curve of her mother’s spine and the swell of one naked hip where her skirt had ridden up. A limp trail of sheet covered Graciela’s legs and buttocks. “Madre?”
Lying face to face with her lover of the past eight years, Graciela didn’t bother to open her eyes or roll over. She said huskily, “What is it, Isobel?”
“I want to know when I shall go to school, Madre.”
Her father hooted with sudden laughter. His naked, almost hairless chest gleamed in the bright light from the hallway. He moved away from Graciela under the bedclothes and patted the mattress. “So it is as we suspected. Our little Isobel has been spying on us. Come here, imp.”
Isobel approached the big, heavy four-poster and climbed in happily, crawling over Graciela’s sprawled limbs to do so. She lay ensconced atop the sheet between her parents. Don Armando lifted himself on one elbow and leaned over toward Isobel. She smiled back, glad to be the center of her parents’ attention, even for a brief time.
Armando composed his features into serious lines although his eyes still gleamed with laughter. “So you want to go to school, my Isobel. Tell me, what do you think you might learn there?”
“Well, not to read, padre. I already know how to read. But there must be other things the friars can teach, like mathematics. I should like to know mathematics.”
Her handsome father laughed, blue eyes crinkling. “Little Isobel. You’re so young, a mere baby. And besides...hacienda girls don’t go to mission schools. Would you like to be sent away to Spain, then, pequeña?”
Isobel’s entire body stiffened in outrage. “I’m not a baby! Besides, soon we’ll have another baby to take my place at home and you and madre won’t be lonely when I go away to school.”
Don Armando’s handsome features tightened. He stared down at his daughter, jaw clenching so his chin jutted before he turned a suddenly icy, mistrustful gaze on Graciela. “What is this news about another baby?”
Graciela, quick fright on her face just as quickly masked, pretended languor, stretching like a cat so her full breasts lifted. The nipples stood up in milk-and-coffee colored peaks. With interest, Isobel watched Armando’s notice momentarily switch to those golden, naked mounds.
She swept a tendril of gleaming black hair from her forehead with one graceful movement of a forefinger before saying, “A baby! Of course not. Isobel, where do you get such silly ideas?”
“When sheep do what you do at night, they have lambs in the spring.” Isobel earnestly sought Graciela’s chestnut brown eyes and then Armando’s startled blue ones. “The stud mounts the mare, and then later the mare has a colt. It’s how the oxen get calves, after the bull—”
“Isobel. Enough! How do you know these things? Who’s been talking to you? Graciela, you must keep a closer eye on the child. She spends entirely too much time wandering about. She will grow up with manners as rough as a peón. Disgraceful!”
Armando’s agitation made Isobel squirm. Had she said something wrong? Would her father begin to shout at her mother again, until his voice seemed to shake the stout adobe walls?
Armando’s glance raked Graciela. “She is your child,” he said. “You must see to a proper education for her.”
Isobel turned her head to see Graciela gazing liquidly back at Armando. Graciela parted full red lips. Her voice turned pleading, almost whining, in a familiar attempt to deflect Armando’s anger. “Isobel is your daughter, too, Armando. You know she’s not like the others. She is just like you.”
Armando scowled at the mention of Graciela’s other daughters. Isobel knew her father didn’t like her sisters, although she didn’t understand why he sometimes went so far as to question her mother about whether Isobel, too, were truly his child. She felt warmth like the kiss of sunshine when he actually paid any attention to her, since he paid none at all to the other three girls. Once again reminded he looked upon his own child for certain, he smiled at her. At last he said, “You will go to school, Isobel mine. I’ll take you there myself if no one else will, and you will become a real lady. But I will burn in hell before I let the church keep you.”
Pleased, Isobel laughed and clapped her hands. “You can be so silly, mi padre. I will not stay at the mission forever. Carmella and Lucia and Lucinda might want to remain with the church and enter the convent, but I don’t.”
“And so you won’t!”
Isobel, a light sleeper, woke in darkness to the sounds of her parents’ habitual nighttime dispute.
“Will you do nothing? Stupid, lazy bitch! No better than a dog in heat—you breed bastard children from different men and leave them to raise themselves. You’re like a mangy cur bitch on a leash of gold. I wish I’d never set eyes on you!”
Graciela, Isobel’s mother, said something too low for the child to decipher.
In reply, Isobel’s father, Armando, growled, “It won’t work this time, Graciela. Have you no pride? You resemble the commonest prostitute on the streets of Cádiz!”
Suddenly Graciela cried out in pain. Isobel, listening, shivered, imagining that her father perhaps twisted her mother’s arm, or pulled a handful of her long hair, both of which she had seen him do.
“Whore! Look at the paint smeared on your face.”
The sound of slaps to bare flesh resounded down the hallway. A tear slipped down the listening child’s cheek.
Then a brief silence ensued, soon replaced by the rhythmic creak of bed ropes emanating from the room of her parents, and Isobel dared to think another truce called between the combatants. Armando and Graciela often scrapped late into the night, frightening Isobel, their unintentional eavesdropper. Sometimes she thought Armando might kill Graciela, but the rasp of their bed against the wall usually signaled that her father had once more been pacified. Now that she had found out how to connect the sound to its corresponding action, she began to wonder why the act of the making of babies should cause adults to stop fighting. She thought long and hard on it, until she decided that the exertion must surely make her parents too tired to continue fighting.
At last all sound ceased, and Isobel concluded her parents must be settled in for the night at last. She had just about returned to slumber when she became aware of the sound of harsh breathing inside her small room. Her father stood over her bed, his boots in one hand, shaking with an apparent effort to stifle his emotions. He whispered, “Get up. Get dressed. We’re leaving.” She started to say, “But where are we going?”
Her father put a shaking finger to his lips to quiet her. “It’s a...an aventura. Just you and I. We will ride out of here tonight, and you will come back an educated lady someday—and show them all. No one will ever be able to look down on my daughter, Isobel Ochoa! Now, get dressed. Quietly! Don’t wake your sisters.”
He peeled back her covers and extended a hand to help her rise. Isobel placed her small hand in her father’s. She noticed a heavy leather saddlebag slung over one of his shoulders, causing him to slump. As well, he clutched a smoothbore musket in that hand. She shivered again, this time with anticipation. She got out of bed, and Don Armando retreated to the hall to wait for her. She dressed hurriedly, smiling happily in the darkness. Mimicking her father, she emerged with her own shoes in her hand. They tiptoed past Carmella’s room and that of a snoring Don Emilio on the corner opposite her parents’ room on the upstairs level.
Downstairs, Armando headed for the kitchen and proceeded to raid Almira’s pantry with abandon, piling everything in the center of the table. Isobel watched as, with a flourish, he tied the four corners of the tablecloth together and slung this package over his unburdened shoulder, settling his loads evenly. They tiptoed through the central sala with its dim outlines of furniture and out onto one of the two patios. There Armando stopped to pull on his boots, and Isobel quickly followed suit, afraid he would become impatient and leave her behind.
Father and daughter traversed the patio between the flowerbeds the housekeeper patiently coaxed out of arid earth, and headed for the horse corrals. Armando closed the gate behind them. Horses milled around inside the adobe walls. The smells of manure and Don Emilio’s prized roses mingled in the still desert air. A long-haired black apparition rose up in an outbuilding doorway as they approached. Armando leaped back, startled into a curse. The Indian asked a soft question Armando couldn’t translate, and Isobel answered in the same tongue. The man looked solemnly down at the child. Then he stepped aside.
Armando said, “How did you understand what he says?”
Isobel shot her father a puzzled glance. “We talk together all the time, mi padre.”
The girl blithely assumed all the hacienda’s Spanish-speakers learned Tewa as she did. When she noticed the look of pained distaste on Armando’s face, Isobel thought it better to refrain from adding she could converse fluently in the argot spoken by Don Emilio’s imported Indian/black workers as well.
“San Juan taught me to ride,” she said.
“San Juan,” Armando repeated in a voice that sounded like he had pebbles in his mouth and didn’t like the resulting taste.
Isobel giggled, pointing to the barrel-chested Indian. “When the friars told him he needed a Christian name in order to be baptized, he chose San Juan.” She crooked a finger and cupped her hand to her mouth. Armando stooped so she could whisper. “He thinks since he’s named for the saint, he must be San Juan, not just plain Juan. I wouldn’t hurt his feelings by telling him he’s wrong, and so perhaps you shouldn’t either.”
Armando straightened, shaking his head. “Isobel, we don’t have time for such silliness. Tell your saint to hurry up and get us some horses.”
Isobel wondered how her father could be in such a bad mood when they made haste to depart on a great adventure that would one day result in her becoming a refined, learned lady. But adult behavior often defied explanation, and so she chattered in Tewa to San Juan. The Indian hesitated, looking toward Armando. Then he knelt and whispered something to the child, his broad hand resting on her shoulder.
Armando, wearing a fierce frown, snatched Isobel away. She felt her lower lip start to quiver. San Juan rose to his feet, meeting Armando’s outraged scrutiny with stoic calm. Isobel whispered, “He says we should not go, padre.”
“Does he say that indeed, Isobel?” Armando’s voice flat, his gaze probed San Juan suspiciously. Armando shook Isobel by the arm. “Tell me: why does he say that?”
San Juan’s broad arms flexed as if he thought to interfere between father and daughter. Armando’s fingers tightened and Isobel held back a cry of pain. Armando fingered the musket resting on his shoulder until the Indian’s gaze locked on the weapon. Then Armando said, “Saddle the horses. And we need a pack animal as well.”
San Juan’s shoulders stiffened in response, but he turned to obey. He led Isobel’s pony from its stall, and then a magnificent black stallion of Arabian stock for Armando. In the paddock, he corralled a dun gelding packhorse, securely tying Don Armando’s bundle and two bedrolls from the barn to its sturdy body. Armando himself secured the heavy saddlebags he carried to the black stallion’s saddle.
At last all appeared ready to go. Armando slid the musket into a scabbard on his saddle and then lifted Isobel atop her fat little mare. “Warn the Indian that if anyone asks, he knows nothing.” Armando placed the pony’s reins in Isobel’s hands, glancing sideways at the silent Indian.
Isobel hesitated. “Padre, there are hundreds of eyes on the hacienda. San Juan won’t be the only one who knows we are going. The mestizos see everything that happens here.”
“What half-breeds and the spawn of slaves see—and what they tell—are two different things, Isobel. Now stop arguing with me. I said to warn the Indian to say nothing!”
Isobel recognized the pitch of Don Armando’s voice, barely controlled, the same voice he used when upset with Graciela. And Isobel well knew the firestorms of female weeping that occurred when her father became truly angry. In a low tone she conveyed his orders to San Juan. The Indian replied by shuttering his expression until his face resembled granite. Her father could not understand what she said, so Isobel felt safe in adding, “Don’t worry, San Juan. And when my grandfather tries to make you tell, just go ahead and tell him everything so that he won’t...hurt you.”
She was out of time. Her father’s horse increased its gait, and she clutched the reins of her pony lurching forward to follow the stallion. A silent San Juan melted back into the darkness. Awareness slowly crept up on Isobel that she and her father were running away. He had promised her a coveted education, just what she wanted, but for a moment she wondered if she made a mistake by following him into the night. Her stomach clenched and she suddenly felt like she might lose control of her bowels. As they left the straggling square of mud walls that enclosed the hacienda against raiding Apache, a chill ran up the diminutive spine of Isobel Ochoa y Ramírez. She’d been so happy to hear her father promise that she would go to school that she had followed him without question like one of the ranch’s happy, roly-poly puppies.
Isobel suddenly needed comfort and reassurance—but refrained from asking for it from the unpredictable man who led her away from her home into the night. As she settled lower on her spine in the saddle, she began to doze a bit, the comforting, familiar smells and voices of her grandfather’s hacienda surrounding her as she contemplated the reasons for following her father outside the walls tonight.
She drifted into remembrance:
“What are you doing, little one?” The housekeeper’s voice, so abrupt in the quiet of siesta, startled little Isobel. Guiltily, the seven-year-old clung to the leather-bound book.
Almira, the Spanish-Indian housekeeper, produced a dust cloth and whisked a speck of dust from the corner of a huge Moroccan oak escritorio brought over by ship nearly a hundred years before. Her dark eyes flicked just as quickly to the child. “Don Emilio probably wouldn’t like to hear you’ve been playing in his library again, Isobel.”
“I’m not playing. I’m reading.” The little girl pushed heavy waves of black hair back from her forehead and regarded her grandfather’s housekeeper seriously. Then her face crinkled into her most appealing grin. “And anyway, if you love me, you won’t tell where I spend my siesta.”
“Because I love you I try to keep you out of trouble.” Almira smiled back.
Isobel knew she, more than the rest of the don’s granddaughters, secured the housekeeper’s favor and indulgence. Isobel knew because she almost always won these little contests of wills with Almira.
“Off with you, Isobel! I’ll count to...one hundred...and if you’re not on your bed with your eyes closed by then I’ll tell your grandfather who left butter fingerprints all over the papers on his desk.”
Isobel suspected her grandfather already knew the identity of the persistent snoop in his extended family. And anyway, Almira couldn’t count to one hundred because no woman on the hacienda had ever attended school. Isobel, inveterate eavesdropper, had once heard her grandfather say with a hint of shame to a visitor from Santa Fé, “Everyone realizes our mistake a century ago in expelling the Jesuits from New Spain. There are few enough Franciscan primary schools in the New World for boys, let alone girls. The Crown sees fit to afford tutoring to the Indians, while our own daughters, creollas, grow up ignorant and unsheltered. Ah, well, friend, the price we pay for land, eh?” The men had gone on to discuss the possibility of more marauding against the settlers, Don Emilio thanking his lucky stars that he’d so far been spared, and Isobel drifted away from her hiding place.
Now she reflected: Almira might not actually speak to the don, but she could withhold the sugary sweets she passed out willingly to good girls like Isobel’s sisters. With a sigh, the child turned to put away the heavy book. “When I go to school, Almira,” she said over her shoulder as she left the tobacco-scented library, “you won’t be able to tell me what to do anymore.”
“School!” The housekeeper scoffed, her dusting cloth snicking out to connect with Isobel’s skirts. “What grand dreams you have for such a little girl. But even if you were allowed to go, a stubborn child like you would be spending many hours on her knees in front of the Virgin, and not so many looking at books!”
Isobel frowned as she pattered through cool white hallways and up dark-stained stairs until she reached the sleeping quarters of the hacienda. Her sisters slept peacefully. Carmella the oldest alone in a room, and Lucia and Lucinda, the twins, twined together on one mattress as if seeking the closeness they had once shared in the womb. Isobel sighed again. She considered sleep, especially in the afternoon, wasteful. Siesta time could be much better spent than lying abed. She thought about her conversation with the housekeeper, and her conviction hardened. Why shouldn’t she go to the Franciscans at the mission for tutoring if that was all her grandfather could afford? She rejected the notion of remaining lazy and stupid all her life, fit for nothing but raising children. There must be a way for her to attend school. Trailing her hand on the ebony bannister, she followed its smooth contours until she reached the door of her mother’s room. She waited, sure her parents didn’t sleep. She heard muffled giggles and the quiet tones of a male voice.
Then the sounds ceased. They’d fallen asleep after all. Disappointed, Isobel kicked lightly at the unlatched door and it swung open. Isobel covered her mouth with one hand, waiting to see if either of her parents would recognize her presence. But neither did. She closed the door, making a little more noise. A patient child when she really wanted something, she stood silently in the hall. If she woke them up, her mother might reprimand her...but then again she might not. An unpredictable parent, Doña Graciela had never paid much attention to her daughters one way or the other. Isobel heard a heavy sigh from her father. Again, she opened the door. She stared at the curve of her mother’s spine and the swell of one naked hip where her skirt had ridden up. A limp trail of sheet covered Graciela’s legs and buttocks. “Madre?”
Lying face to face with her lover of the past eight years, Graciela didn’t bother to open her eyes or roll over. She said huskily, “What is it, Isobel?”
“I want to know when I shall go to school, Madre.”
Her father hooted with sudden laughter. His naked, almost hairless chest gleamed in the bright light from the hallway. He moved away from Graciela under the bedclothes and patted the mattress. “So it is as we suspected. Our little Isobel has been spying on us. Come here, imp.”
Isobel approached the big, heavy four-poster and climbed in happily, crawling over Graciela’s sprawled limbs to do so. She lay ensconced atop the sheet between her parents. Don Armando lifted himself on one elbow and leaned over toward Isobel. She smiled back, glad to be the center of her parents’ attention, even for a brief time.
Armando composed his features into serious lines although his eyes still gleamed with laughter. “So you want to go to school, my Isobel. Tell me, what do you think you might learn there?”
“Well, not to read, padre. I already know how to read. But there must be other things the friars can teach, like mathematics. I should like to know mathematics.”
Her handsome father laughed, blue eyes crinkling. “Little Isobel. You’re so young, a mere baby. And besides...hacienda girls don’t go to mission schools. Would you like to be sent away to Spain, then, pequeña?”
Isobel’s entire body stiffened in outrage. “I’m not a baby! Besides, soon we’ll have another baby to take my place at home and you and madre won’t be lonely when I go away to school.”
Don Armando’s handsome features tightened. He stared down at his daughter, jaw clenching so his chin jutted before he turned a suddenly icy, mistrustful gaze on Graciela. “What is this news about another baby?”
Graciela, quick fright on her face just as quickly masked, pretended languor, stretching like a cat so her full breasts lifted. The nipples stood up in milk-and-coffee colored peaks. With interest, Isobel watched Armando’s notice momentarily switch to those golden, naked mounds.
She swept a tendril of gleaming black hair from her forehead with one graceful movement of a forefinger before saying, “A baby! Of course not. Isobel, where do you get such silly ideas?”
“When sheep do what you do at night, they have lambs in the spring.” Isobel earnestly sought Graciela’s chestnut brown eyes and then Armando’s startled blue ones. “The stud mounts the mare, and then later the mare has a colt. It’s how the oxen get calves, after the bull—”
“Isobel. Enough! How do you know these things? Who’s been talking to you? Graciela, you must keep a closer eye on the child. She spends entirely too much time wandering about. She will grow up with manners as rough as a peón. Disgraceful!”
Armando’s agitation made Isobel squirm. Had she said something wrong? Would her father begin to shout at her mother again, until his voice seemed to shake the stout adobe walls?
Armando’s glance raked Graciela. “She is your child,” he said. “You must see to a proper education for her.”
Isobel turned her head to see Graciela gazing liquidly back at Armando. Graciela parted full red lips. Her voice turned pleading, almost whining, in a familiar attempt to deflect Armando’s anger. “Isobel is your daughter, too, Armando. You know she’s not like the others. She is just like you.”
Armando scowled at the mention of Graciela’s other daughters. Isobel knew her father didn’t like her sisters, although she didn’t understand why he sometimes went so far as to question her mother about whether Isobel, too, were truly his child. She felt warmth like the kiss of sunshine when he actually paid any attention to her, since he paid none at all to the other three girls. Once again reminded he looked upon his own child for certain, he smiled at her. At last he said, “You will go to school, Isobel mine. I’ll take you there myself if no one else will, and you will become a real lady. But I will burn in hell before I let the church keep you.”
Pleased, Isobel laughed and clapped her hands. “You can be so silly, mi padre. I will not stay at the mission forever. Carmella and Lucia and Lucinda might want to remain with the church and enter the convent, but I don’t.”
“And so you won’t!”