A Ballad of Love and Glory(14)
“Why isn’t he back yet, Nana?”
She’d ridden out to the road each day, scanning the prairie for any signs of riders, as she awaited his return. The day before, the wounded guerrilla had been well enough to leave and rejoin Cortina’s band, and she’d implored him to ask Joaquín to send her word of his whereabouts. For now, though, she had nothing to reassure her he was safe.
The roosters announced the break of dawn. She could see through the window the sky tinged crimson with the morning’s first glow. Nana Hortencia grabbed a brush and set to work on braiding Ximena’s black waist-length tresses. Once again, Ximena closed her eyes, haunted by her earlier visions. The remnants of her dream clung to her mind like sandburs—her husband in her arms, blood blossoming on his chest. Screams, the deafening sounds of a cannon. And she herself standing in the middle of a battlefield in a cloud of burnt gunpowder. Death everywhere.
When she was done getting dressed, Ximena followed her grandmother to the stables, and together they rode out to forage for medicinal plants to replenish their supplies—prickly poppy, camphorweed, wild lettuce, purple sage, toloache. With walking sticks in hand, they scouted the terrain, keeping a vigilant eye out for rattlesnakes coiled in the grasses. Drops of dew still clung to the plants, glistening under the blessed light of the sun, and the golden clusters of the agarita and guajillo perfumed the morning air.
Ximena loved the time she spent with her grandmother, learning about curanderismo and the healing power of plants. She liked the stories her grandmother told of the old ways, of her ancestral tribe, the Pajalat, who had been displaced from their homeland when the Spanish arrived, stories of Nana’s childhood in the mission along the Río San Antonio, of her forced marriage to a Spanish soldier when she and her family had tried to run away from the missionaries. But Nana Hortencia didn’t linger on the sadness of those moments. Instead, she taught Ximena to focus on the wonders and magic all around her. How to listen.
There were times when Ximena’s mother accused her of loving her grandmother more than her. Ximena couldn’t explain to her mother that Nana’s ways were simpler, her love unconditional. Ximena’s mother, a light-skinned mestiza born in San Antonio de Béxar, had expectations of what kind of woman Ximena should grow up to be—a Tejana belle with many suitors falling at her feet, who would go on to marry into a well-to-do family—expectations she’d never lived up to. Unlike her two older brothers who, with their fair skin and copper hair, took after her mother, Ximena’s features were more Indian than Spanish. She took after Nana Hortencia, including her need for stillness and quietude, her reverence for the earth and open skies, for the blessing of the Spirit, and for that, her mother resented her until the day she died.
Ximena was twelve when the cholera epidemic swept through the regions in 1833. Her mother and brothers perished, but Nana Hortencia managed to save Ximena and her father from death’s clutches. Would she be able to do the same when the time came to save Joaquín? What if her grandmother’s teas, salves, and poultices weren’t enough this time? How could she protect him from what was to come?
“Mijita, you know he won’t listen,” Nana Hortencia said as if reading her thoughts. She was carefully harvesting the seed pods of a white chicalote and placing them in a pouch. “Your dreams alarm him, but he will not give heed to them.”
Ximena knew her grandmother was right. Joaquín wouldn’t change his mind. He found her dreams disturbing, frightening even, and preferred to not discuss them with her. She’d had these strange dreams ever since she almost died from cholera, visions of things to come, though they didn’t always come to pass. Her grandmother said the dreams that helped her foresee were part of her healing gift. But to Ximena, sometimes they felt more like a curse.
The year before, she had dreamed that the baby she carried in her womb wouldn’t survive the birth. When she told Joaquín of her vision, he brushed aside her fears in his excitement, hoping it would be a boy. A boy it was, but his weak heart had stopped beating and his life had set with the sun that same day. After that, Joaquín forbade her to speak of her dreams. It was as if he blamed them. Ximena blamed herself. No matter how many times her grandmother, who’d lost children herself, said that it was the Creator who had called her baby’s spirit to return to Him, she couldn’t let go of the feeling that she had failed in her sacred duty as a mother to keep her child safe. And what good were those visions from God if there was nothing she could do to stop what she had been shown? If all they did was to prolong her pain?
“I can’t lose Joaquín, Nana. If anything happens to him—”
“Your husband knows the risks. And he is willing to make sacrifices to do what must be done to protect his home. Would you have him do otherwise?”
She sighed. “I would rather he stay with me and be a coward than a dead hero. My father once played the hero, remember?”
Ximena was living with her family in San Antonio de Béxar, which was part of Mexico back then, when thousands of norteamericanos began pouring into the province after the Mexican government gave Stephen Austin permission to settle a colony. First farmers and cotton planters came to exploit the land with slave labor, even after Mexico abolished slavery, and then restless adventurers, squatters, and armed desperados swarmed into the region looking for a fresh start. As soon as the whites outnumbered the local Mexicans, everything changed. They took over, and then they rebelled against the Mexican central government in 1835. This was two years after her mother and brothers had died.