With less than a week to take
care of everything needing to be done, Slade and Ellen took time at breakfast
the next morning to make plans and divide up the labor. They agreed that Slade would accompany Santos
One of the children in the courtyard
was sent to find Ramon Santiago who would bring his father to the house before
setting out to tend to the horses. Slade went to Santos Santos
Manuela had cleaned the house and
straightened things as well as she could.
The furniture in each of the rooms had been arranged neatly and cleaned
as well as the good woman knew how. The
room Don Francisco had used for his office had been in shambles. His books had been torn from the shelves and
thrown to the floor. None of the bandits
could read and had no knowledge of the value of some of the books so they had
been riffled through for any paper money they might have between their pages
and then discarded.
Manuela had no idea of what the
titles were or how they might be shelved.
She had simply picked them up and stacked them neatly but in random
order on the shelves. The ones that had
been torn apart she collected and stacked on the desk with their loose
pages. Ellen sorted through them as she
waited for Ramon and his father. Most of
the pages for each book were there. Ellen simply sorted them by volume without
trying for organize the pages in order..
When the desk was clear she began
a determined search for the stud book that had the bloodlines of the horses
recorded. She found it finally stacked backward
among several history books. Manuela had gone for neatness rather than
organization. Possibly she couldn’t read
to know how the titles should be arranged.
Ellen sat down and began reading
the bloodlines of the horses. She had no
idea of which horses they followed, but she enjoyed reading the elaborate names
that seemed to follow a pattern of sorts. Horses from a certain stud each
carried names related to the wind.
Others had names referring to bravery or colors or water or other
exceptional traits. She wondered where
the young horses and foals would fit into the lines.
When Senor Diego Santiago
arrived, she not only had the book opened on the desk but comfortable chair
arranged for him. Knowing that he would
be in pain from the ride over and then the walk into the house she had asked
the Senora to see if there was any wine left in the cellar. Of course, it had been emptied entirely
before el Viejo left, either he had drunk it all or taken it with him.
Then, out of the blue, Ellen
remembered a tiny cupboard hidden somewhere in the bottom of the Don’s built in
shelves and cabinets. She stood for several minutes thinking of the times Don
Francisco had casually opened the cupboard and taken a bottle from it. It couldn’t be that difficult to open. She went to the slender decorative posts that
divided the cabinet from the shelves.
She pulled them carefully one after another, turning it as she
pulled. One of them served as the handle
for the door of a little wine cabinet and moved easily. The door looked like a portion of the shelves
and hid the cupboard.
In side she found two tightly
stoppered decanter bottles. She sniffed
each one and chose the one which smelled most like the whisky Slade had used
for pain when the steer had stomped him.
There were tiny glasses in the cupboard also. She carefully poured one for when Diego
arrived. It would help relax the cramped
muscles and twisted bones. She placed it on the small table between the two
office chairs.
When Ramon helped the old man
into the office, Diego sank gratefully onto the thick cushions of the chair. The whisky was welcomed relief for his
cramping muscles. Ellen also offered the two coffee and the sugared tortillas
cut into small wedges that the Senora had prepared. The old man sipped his coffee and munched on
the tortillas while his son described each mare and her two young.
Ellen had originally thought that
Ramon could return to his work while she and his father sorted out the lineage
of the mares and their off spring. But
it soon became evident that although Diego knew the blood lines and could tell
the names of the mares and their descriptions he did not know which baby went
with which mama. So Ramon sent messages
to Cecil and the older boys to turn the mares out and be sure they had water in
their tubs. He was ready to stay until
the books were complete.
As Ellen tracked each mare
according to the name and blood line that Diego recited for her, Ramon gave her
an exact description of each yearling which was duly recorded with his dam’s
name and the approximate date of their birth. Ellen listened to the names of
the dams and asked for Diego’s help in assigning names that reflected their
breeding and their dispositions. When the yearlings were recorded each was
assigned a number according to their generation and the mother’s number. Then the same was done for the new
foals.
The
name she was most excited about was the name of the gray colt and his brother.
One came from a mother whose bloodline was a ‘wind’ extraction. That was the gray. The named him Viento de Medianoche
“Midnight Wind’ in English relating it to the Wind lineage and to the Black
parentage. The bay colt was a Blood colt
from his mother. He was called simply
“Black Blood”- Sangre Negro. Diego approved heartily. Ellen wondered if they would use the English
or Spanish renditions oftener.
Since none of the offspring had
been branded, Ramon said he would make arrangements to do that as soon as
possible, including a Roman numeral brand on their hip below the Aguilar
brand. Since two of the men had gone with Slade and Santos
Ellen set out to tour the
household property by herself and determine what more needed to be done. Behind the back wall of the courtyard just to
the left of the gate, there was a huge mound of randomly piled wood collected
while the men were cleaning up the area around the house. That needed to be cut up and stacked
neatly.
The clay ovens that stood to the
side of the kitchen door needed to be swept and have a new layer of mud
plastered over their surface to make them usable again.
The well and its pump were in
good working order, but the cover needed replacing and the wall around its
outside needed repair. There was a long
water trough along the courtyard side of the well, but it needed a trough built
to allow it to be filled more easily than with a bucket. The old trough had been broken down. The trough had been filled with water but
needed serious attention given to the rough ground and the windblown debris at
its base.
As Ellen walked along the arbor
in front of the house she remembered the plants that Tia Margarita had tended
so lovingly along its outer curb. They
were scraggly and sprawled sadly in the last winds of summer. To the best of her memory, they had come up
every spring on their own. Perhaps she
could ask someone to water them and then tend them again in the spring so they
could again be bright and cheerful. The
vines that grew at the base of each post had fared better than the ground
plants but could still benefit from some pruning and regular watering. They
would need shallow basins dug around the base of each plant to retain moisture
until it soaked into the ground.
Ellen wove random stray shoots and trailing
branches back amid the trellis over the top.
She wondered what had become of Margarita’s pruning shears and little
tools that she used to work among her plants.
She supposed she would never know.
She glanced in the windows along
the front of the house, two in the dining room, one long one in the main
sitting area and two more narrow ones on each end.
Through the windows the rooms
looked barren and sad without their rich drapes and table coverings that gave the rooms character. The bandits had left only the heavy furniture
scattered randomly. The graceful ornaments and statuettes that had stood here
and there were gone. Manuela had straightened the furniture, but the rooms
still looked like storerooms rather than places where people had lived
comfortably. Ellen doubted if they would
ever be so gracious and welcoming again.
She opened the heavy front door
and stepped inside. The sitting room lay
to her right and a straight ahead an
open space extended back to a door into the courtyard. On her left was an arch way that framed an
area of shelves and a table, used once for reading or writing or to hold
various finds Alejandro brought in from the desert. Down another hall doors opened onto bedrooms
and other rooms whose purpose had varied according to the number of people
living in the house. Ellen left them for another time and walked to the door at
the back that she and Slade had used the night before.
The inner courtyard was
deserted. Manuela had either not
considered that it needed her attention or had simply run out of time. This inner courtyard had been one of Ellen’s
favorite places when she lived here. The house embraced it on most of three
sides. There was a tiny gate in the
left wall at the back that allowed access to the privy area on the other side
of the wall. Ellen and Slade had walked there in the moonlight. Now she looked at it in the light of day.
She peered through a larger gate in
the center of the back wall that opened into a pasture area. It was here Ellen had kept Roja and various
other horses. There was a sturdy stable
to one side that had once held her saddle and tack as well as grain for
Roja. It had room inside also to allow a
horse or two to be protected from bad weather.
Ellen shook her head as she
walked around the courtyard. The
flagstones along the house wall were littered and dusty. The leaves on the clusters of trees had
already begun to turn yellow from the dryness and coming winter. This year
there had been no flowers planted in the raised planters that bordered the
flagstones and surrounded a second small well or fountain beside the gate. There were still three benches along the wall
but they and the two little tables between them needed scrubbing. There was a wrought iron table near the inner
corner of the house where they had eaten there meals from time to time. It had been pleasant in the evenings after a
long hot day. The matching chairs had
been reduced to only three. Ellen
supposed the others had been broken and Manuela or someone had taken them away.
It needed so much attention. One
more thing was added to her list.
No comments:
Post a Comment