Woman of Light (69)

When she approached him, Pidre held her firmly in his hands, pressing his face into the lace of her dress as he inhaled along her neck. “It’s done,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

She pulled away, tears in her eyes. “How can you just accept this?” She flung her hands outward, pointed toward the theater, the red ridge, the winding creek and that landside now covered in the parasite of men.

“I don’t accept it,” said Pidre. “But I was told this would happen, and I worry it will bend into something worse.”

They looked at each other. The air smelled of food smoke and wet fields, the comforts of night. Simodecea observed the purplish rings around Pidre’s gray eyes, a color resembling stone, as if her love had been jostled from the earth. “Head inside,” he said. “I’ll finish out here, and we can start dinner.”



* * *



—

That night as they made love beneath the vigas of their dirt-walled home, Simodecea lay with her face to the ceiling, gliding beneath Pidre’s up and down movements, his rhythm singsong as a bird. The bedside table was illuminated in golden candlelight, coloring them as embers in a fire. Simodecea reached her arms behind Pidre’s broad back, pulled him to her breasts and breathed, admiring the weight of his person, the sweet cave-like smell of his follicles, airways, and pores. His prominent nose knocked into her forehead by accident, and she chuckled. They both did, pleasurably in their dance, and as Simodecea laughed into the ceiling, her neck craned and eyes opened, she caught sight of a figure standing in the corner, a hooded face shielded by night. Simodecea shouted and collected the wayward sheet onto their bodies. It must be one of the girls sleepy-eyed from the other room, but as Simodecea eased into an upward position, searching the cool corner, the blank walls in tidal firelight, she whimpered at the emptiness, the cloaked figure gone.



* * *



—

They arrived in the morning. Simodecea was readying the girls for the day, frying eggs and pouring glasses of milk. Sara was in an odd mood, eating slowly with one hand beneath her chin, like an exhausted grown-up, a girl who had seen too much. Maria Josefina was on her belly in the parlor, searching beneath the wooden benches and rocking chair for her missing red boot. Pidre was in the yard before their adobe home. He was drawing water from the well, carrying it alongside the squash and corn Simodecea kept in rows before the porch. There was music from the birds, the underwater swilling sounds of robins and finches and mourning doves. Simodecea peered out the window, where several yards away Pidre was returning to the well for another pull.

It was three of them with Mickey trotting ahead of the line. They came over the hillside of red rock and sagebrush, some ways ahead of the colony of tents, their figures silhouetted against blue sky. Two appeared to be company guards. The third man wore an elegant ivory suit, and he was sweating under the brash sunlight, wiping glistening perspiration from his neck and puckered face with a hazy cloth. Mickey was shouting to Pidre, waving his arms while his beard refracted a ray of sunlight, as though he existed as a lit match. Simodecea turned around to the girls, and they were as they had been. Everything was as it had been.

The suited man presented Pidre with a kind of document, which he held for only a moment before handing it to Mickey. There was some commotion then. Mickey tossed the paper toward the men, and then pulled Pidre by the hem of his blowing tunic. The suited man directed the guards to scoop the paper from the dirt, treating the document as if it were a mandate from God. They raised it again, an oblong contract or a shield. The guards pointed to the house, where Simodecea hoped they could not see her face behind the shadows of the cotton drapery.

She saw the mirror-like flash of metal first, the way Mickey reached for his hip and brandished the pistol she had never seen but had more than once wondered about. She knew he kept one, and it worried her because a mind like Mickey’s wasn’t too steady. He tilted the pistol, and like that, the company guards pulled their rifles and in a ricochet of gun blasts sprayed bullets across the land.

The water bucket Pidre had been holding erupted from his hands as he collapsed backward and down, heaping beside Mickey onto red dirt.

Simodecea lost the sounds of birds, her sense of the home’s interior, her daughters eating breakfast. Time had collapsed, as if those bullets were fallen stars exploding through reality. She had become a divine reflex fueled only by fury and heartache. Simodecea snapped away from the window and fetched her Remington. She walked outside onto the porch. She lifted her gun, and before the company men could catch sight of her marking eye, Simodecea fired three shots, each bullet straight into a white man’s heart. When she had finished, she screamed and fired again, but this time into the cloudless sky, as if to shoot into God.

She had never run like that before, barefoot over rocked earth, her left foot sliced on a knifing piece of quartz. She was bleeding by the time she arrived at Pidre’s side, the bottom of her gown smearing in her own blood and soon mixing with that of her husband. Though she had seen the carnage of gunfire before, Simodecea still gasped with disbelief at the magnitude of human fragility.

The .44-caliber bullet had entered his neck and carved into his throat. Profuse sprays of blood had rained over his body and land. Simodecea put her hands to the gaping black hole, felt her husband’s swampy shallows on her fingertips. She held them there, searching for a way to patch her love back together. She removed her shawl, forced the threads into Pidre’s destroyed airway, but as she pushed harder and firmer, it was clear that his life force, his inner self, his soul, was gone. With no beating heart, his body was an emptied and desecrated house. Simodecea used the sleeve of her dress to wipe blood from Pidre’s open eyes. She closed them and wailed, as if to destroy this reality with the force of her emotions. She screamed and rocked and looked to Mickey, where she saw that some of his skull and much of his brain were scattered about the dirt. She could not bring herself to look at the others, their legal document among the massacred.