Chapter 12

12

April 1846

Matamoros, Río Bravo

“I miss him terribly, Nana,” Ximena said, as she and her grandmother walked arm in arm out of the Catedral de Nuestra Señora del Refugio into the morning light. It was here, in this temple, where she and Joaquín had married. But now, she had been forced to sit through a di erent kind of service—a mass for the repose of his soul. This wasn’t the future she’d imagined for the two of them when they promised to love each other until death tore them apart. “I should have tried harder to stop him.”

“He would have resented you for keeping him from doing what honor demanded of him,” Nana Hortencia said, wrapping her rebozo around her shoulders, her silver braids shining as bright as two moonbeams. “He was a good man and a good husband. But just because he isn’t with you in the esh doesn’t mean he isn’t stil with you, mijita. His spirit wil always live.”

Ximena stared at the ground and said nothing. Her grandmother gently raised her chin and looked up tenderly at Ximena. “Let God help you to let go of your sorrow, mijita. Accepting loss and grieving what is no more takes time, but you have the strength to heal. You always have.”

“I wish I could believe as you do, Nana.”

“One day you wil . Right now, you must work through your grief.” Nana Hortencia hugged her tightly and said, “Come, let us gather some esta ate by the river, and I wil give you a limpia to lift the sorrow from your heart and restore your harmony.”

As they started down the steps, Ximena noticed the Irish lieutenant leaving the church behind them. He seemed deeply preoccupied. When he glanced up at her and their eyes met for a second, she could feel a negative energy in him, his troubled aura. Inside the church, she’d seen him lighting a candle to Saint Jude, the patron saint of desperate cases. Now, as he hurried past them with urgent steps in the direction of the river, Ximena wondered what was distressing his soul.They folowed a group of peasant women carrying empty earthen jars to col ect water. Despite the enemy’s encampment directly across, the river was busy. Several women were washing clothes and bathing themselves or their children. Ximena observed the Yanqui soldiers up in their fort, gaping at the young women splashing playful y in the water, naked to the waist. The soldiers whistled and cal ed out to them, “Little bonitas! Beautiful señoritas! Can we be friends?”

As she guided Nana Hortencia along the banks, they admired the wil ows and tepehuajes, which threw their shadows upon the river. Then the old woman pointed out the clear amber sap on the honey mesquite trees, warmed by the sun, and lamented not having a pot to col ect it.

“The trees look as if they’re crying,” Ximena said.

Nana Hortencia patted her shoulder and said, “There’s no shame in crying, mi niña. Even the trees know that.”

Ximena wanted to tel her grandmother that it wasn’t that she was ashamed to cry. It was that she couldn’t, as if her tears had hardened inside her.

“You can’t let your su ering overwhelm you, mijita. Nor your anger. Don’t let them darken your soul. Release them through your tears, your prayers. It is true that the path God has chosen for you is one ful of thorns. But to despair is to turn your back on Him.”

From the banks, they observed a patrol of Mexican mounted militia boarding the ferry from the opposite shore to cross to the southern bank. When the vessel approached, Ximena looked at the men’s faces, wondering if Cheno might be among them. Instead, she recognized another face.

“Nana, is that who I think it is?”

“It’s Juan Seguín,” her grandmother replied.

The man on the ferry was the commander who had once convinced her father to take up arms against Mexico during the Texas Rebel ion. She remembered how, six years later, in March 1842, when the Mexican Army tried to retake San Antonio de Béxar, the attack fanned the distrust the Texians felt for anyone of Mexican descent, and reprisals against defenseless Tejano families soon fol owed. Even Juan Seguín—the town’s mayor and a hero of Texas Independence—was a victim of a conspiracy to ruin him. After being physical y attacked, he had no choice but to ee south to Laredo for fear of his life after being accused of disloyalty. But he was captured by Mexico and forced to join the Mexican cause so as not to be executed as a traitor to the motherland. This is why, in September 1842, when the Mexican Army attempted to reclaim San Antonio once again, among their commanders was none other than Juan Seguín.

At the sight of him, Ximena’s father had said, “The Anglos see us as traitors, but so do the Mexicans. So where does that leave the Tejano? Mark my words, Ximena, as soon as the Mexican troops leave, the Anglos wil come for us seeking revenge. But we won’t be here when that happens.”

And so, when the occupation of San Antonio ended, Ximena, her father, and Nana Hortencia, along with two hundred other families, loaded what possessions they could into carts and fol owed Seguín and the Mexican troops south to the Río Bravo.

Ximena had once resented him for pul ing her father into the rebel ion and al ying himself with the Texians, but her father was gone now and this Tejano was her one connection to her past in San Antonio de Béxar. So when the ferry nished the crossing, and the steersman jumped o at the landing to tie the ropes and al ow the riders to disembark, Ximena rushed to intercept the group.

He was the last one o the ferry, and as he was paying the ferryman, she cal ed out his name.

“¡Don Juan!”

He turned to look at her, his face registering surprise. “Ximena, ¡pero qué sorpresa!” He dismounted and told his men, “I’l meet you at the cantina.”

“You’re stil serving the Mexican government, I see,” she said.

“It’s the only choice I have, for now.”

A scream startled them both, and they turned toward the riverbank, Seguín’s hand on his escopeta. Yanqui soldiers had plunged into the river to bathe under the watchful eyes of the sentries, and they and the Mexican women were splashing water at each other, shouting and squealing in delight. Ximena’s concern turned to relief and then anger. How could those women be playing and irting with the enemy? Couldn’t they see the Yanqui cannons pointing straight at their homes?

To escape the commotion, she and Juan Seguín began to walk away, farther down the riverbank where Nana Hortencia had gone ahead, until the only noise they could hear was the raucous chattering of the green parakeets in the trees.

Ximena had last seen Seguín two years earlier when he’d come to pay his respects at her father’s funeral.

“Do you think you’l ever return home?” she asked.

Seguín sighed. “I wil serve Mexico loyal y and faithful y, but one day, I wil return to the land of my birth to reclaim my property and clear my name or die trying. And you, have you been happy here with your husband and the ranch?

Have you made a good life for yourself?”

Attempting to disguise her pain, she xed her gaze on a nearby buttonbush where swal owtails uttered over its white pincushion-shaped owers. But it was no use. She gazed back at him and said, “My husband is dead, don Juan. The Rangers who came down with Taylor murdered him, burned our house, plundered our stables. I’m not sure what I wil do, but I know this much—I can never return to Béxar. There’s nothing for me there. Just like there may be nothing for me here.”

He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, Ximena, I’m sorry to see you su ering. I wish I could help you, but I’m as destitute as you are at the moment. Stil , as long as we have hope, then al is not lost. War is about to commence, and right now, al we can do is survive it.”

“Don’t you think we fought on the wrong side, don Juan? Could this war have been prevented if Texas hadn’t rebel ed against Mexico, if we Tejanos hadn’t helped the Texians win? Could this war al ow Texas to return to the Mexican nation? To us?”

He smiled and shook his head but didn’t answer her questions. He stared o into the distance, and Ximena began to feel foolish for speaking with such naïveté. But she desperately wanted to believe that the opportunity to take back Texas from the Yanquis hadn’t yet passed. The thought of her homeland being turned into a slave state sickened her.

“Don’t torment yourself with such thoughts, Ximena. What’s done is done,”

Seguín said at last. “It’s true, once the smoke cleared after the rebel ion, we Tejanos became foreigners in our own land, and I, like your father, had to leave Texas and abandon al I had fought for to become a wanderer. But you know as wel as I that the Mexican central government has never had our best interests at heart. With one political uprising after another in the capital, there has never been stability or progress, especial y here in the northern frontier. Then that vile caudil o, Santa Anna, rose to power and threatened our rights of self-government, and what else could we Tejanos do, Ximena, but to defend our homeland from his tyrannical government?”

He stopped walking, and grasping her shoulders rmly, he turned her to face him.“You wish to return to that? No, querida amiga, no. Béxar—al of Texas—

deserved its freedom, and I shal never regret playing a part in its independence.

Even if by doing so, I—we—paid the price for its liberty.” He released her and kissed her hand tenderly, then mounted his horse. “I’l be scouting for General Arista, so you might not see much of me. But if you need me, send word with my tocayo, Juan Cortina. You know him, I assume?”

She nodded and bid him farewel .

“We’l get through this,” he said. “And when I’m back in Béxar, if you wish to return home, know that you’l have a friend there.”

She watched him ride away, thinking about his words, more certain than ever that she could not return to San Antonio de Béxar. But she was Joaquín’s sole legatee and had a ful claim to his rancho here in this beautiful river delta.

Though the Rangers might have destroyed their house and stables, the land was unharmed, and as long as it was alive, Ximena and Nana Hortencia could survive, even if their home was a humble jacal made of carrizo cane and thatched with palm leaves. She refused to let those vile men prevent her from seeing the

sun rise over her land, from beholding the changing colors of the prairie through the seasons, from tasting the wind sweetened by wild owers. But if Mexico lost the war, would history repeat itself? Would she once again nd herself dispossessed?

She quickened her pace to catch up to Nana Hortencia, who was picking and eating the berries of an anacua tree. Ximena joined her and reached to pul down a branch. Just then, something blue caught her eye. At rst, she thought it was the iridescent wings of the bluewing butter ies puddling in the mud. But as she peered through the shrubs and reeds at the water’s edge, she could see a soldier in a blue uniform tangled up in the branches of an uprooted tree at the edge of the bank.

“Nana, can you see that man or am I imagining him?”

“I see him, but I’m not sure if I am looking at a dead man or a live one,” her grandmother replied.

He was wearing a Yanqui uniform, and Ximena wondered if he might be one of the foreign soldiers in Taylor’s ranks who were deserting. Had this poor man died crossing over to join her country’s army?

“Nana, go nd help! Pronto, ¡por el amor de Dios!”

While Nana Hortencia hurried away, Ximena made her way down the sloping bank, sending the hundreds of bluewings uttering into the heavens like a shimmering prayer. Please, God. Please. She waded into the water, holding on to a tree limb as she got deeper. Battling the current, she managed to reach the soldier whose hand was clutching a branch. He had pul ed himself halfway onto the tree trunk, and his head and torso rested on it, but his lower body was stil immersed in the cold water. On his forehead, she could make out two letters: HD. Who had branded this poor old man and why?

His hand felt cold and limp, and she wasn’t able to nd a pulse. She grabbed him by his col ar and shook him, already fearing the worst. “Hel o? Can you hear me?” she said in English as she shook him harder. “Hel o?” Final y, the man coughed faintly.

She heard a sudden splashing behind her and turned to see the Irish lieutenant swimming toward her. “Is he alive?” he yel ed. “Tel me, does he live?”

“Yes! Hurry, please. Hurry!”