Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [2]
Journeying on in her vivid dream, Francisca kept mostly to herself. She walked barefoot the dry pebbly bed of Rio Nambé in autumn and smelled the sage that bloomed alongside it in spring. Sometimes, when the moon was new, she lay in bed beside Montoya, wrapping her arms around him after he’d fallen asleep. She admired the way he carried on the work she had begun. Itinerant workers who drifted onto the ranch were treated as confreres. A fair wage was given for a fair day’s work. And Montoya, who deplored peonage—Indian slavery practiced by local friars—took in refugees even as he managed to avoid trouble with militia and traders who passed through on their way between the Taos and Chihuahua markets.
After Nambé reservation was established, the old de Peña ranch, along with others—Ortiz, Garduno, Sena, the precious ditches still bear their names today—became islanded within its borders. Of all the Tewa pueblos, Nambé would prove to be the most peaceful and the poorest. Seasons ascended over the valley and veered away. There were dry years and wet ones. The wind blew, and then came days when the air was so still fans could not push it along. There were sick animals and those it seemed nothing could kill. Violent men ranged at every periphery, and some who were less violent, and a rare few who weren’t. All the while, Nambé watched the mountains abide and monumental clouds wheel above their summits.
At the center of all this passage was Francisca. Her nephews and nieces—Mateo’s children; Santo’s—departed the valley to seek their fortunes elsewhere, the boys having felt slighted by Montoya’s inheritance which they thought might better have been their own, the girls marrying into other families in Yuma and up in Gunnison. They never accused Juliar Montoya of stinginess. He offered them a stake in the land, on the condition that they work together with him and share. None of the nephews was ever seen again, though the girls sometimes sent a letter.
Montoya married a gaunt handsome woman from Oklahoma, had children, and died one year shy of the start of the twentieth century. Francisca was saddened that on his death he didn’t join her in the fieldhouse, but she understood her dream was not his. He was buried in Chimayó, three hours’ walk northeast of Rancho de Peña. Every year following his death, his widow, Emily, made the Good Friday pilgrimage to the santuario there. Even in the last year of her life she dug sacred healing dirt from the posito in the mission, then anointed herself and her children with it in the hope it would cure them of illness that loomed about the valley.
Emily Montoya succumbed in 1918 to the Spanish influenza, the same plague that took all of Montoya’s children but one, a kid named Gil, who had in 1895 been born with a clubfoot but was otherwise healthy, an able rider and hardworking rancher. Gil always fancied horses and kept them on the spread not only for traditional work beneath a rider or before a plow, but for breeding. He married, had two children. The elder, Carl, was his particular pride, but Delfino was well loved, too. Carl and Delfino stayed on the ranch working for their father—though Delf, never very prudent, would in later years move south to Tularosa to homestead some of the most broiling, bony, difficult acres anywhere in the desert West. As these generations went about their routines, Montoya’s land changed little beyond its slow conversion from subsistence ranching of the old days to horse ranching.
Coyote fences were woven and laid up along the boundaries of their property. Paddocks were built. A new barn was erected, bigger than the last, then a newer one was raised after lightning set the other afire. Irrigation ditches were dug and redug, cleaned and re-cleaned. Spillways were rebuilt, sluice gates refitted. The tawny land went white in winter and greened again