A Ballad of Love and Glory(3)
One of Cortina’s men was slumped over his horse, about to fall off, his blood dripping steadily onto the ground. “Bring him in,” Ximena said. “?Pronto, por Dios!”
She directed them to the rear room off the kitchen garden where she and her grandmother tended their patients. After clearing the wooden table of the medicinal roots Nana Hortencia had been grinding, they laid the man upon it. She ordered the servants to boil water and bring clean rags. Her grandmother cut off the man’s bloodied shirt, revealing a hole where a musket shot had gone through his shoulder.
Ximena turned to Cortina and asked, “Who did this?”
He took off his sombrero and wiped his sweaty face with the dirty handkerchief tied around his neck. “The Yanquis. We came upon Taylor and his cavalry and had a little skirmish. Took two of his dragoons prisoners.”
“Taylor? You mean he’s no longer at El Frontón?”
“No. He’s taking his entire force to set up an encampment on the north bank of the Río Bravo across from Matamoros. But he’s left behind some of his men in the village to build a supply depot and a fort. Our port has fallen into the hands of the enemy, and they won’t be giving it up unless we force them to.”
“Then let’s get those pinches Yanquis off our land, Cheno!” Joaquín said as he stood in the doorway.
“Claro que sí, amigo.” Cortina grinned, and the two men embraced. Ximena knew that, like her, Joaquín couldn’t get the villagers’ frightful shrieks from the day before out of his mind.
The men left the room, and Ximena followed behind them on her way to the kitchen garden to get the herbs she would need for the wounded man. While the rest of the militiamen made themselves comfortable on the patio, her husband sat at the table under the ramada and poured a shot of tequila for his friend. At twenty-two, Cortina was eight years younger than Joaquín, and his family owned the largest land grant in the region—forty-four thousand acres—as well as thousands of livestock. He had tried to recruit Joaquín into his detachment of irregular cavalry in the Mexican Army, composed of local volunteers who provided their own horses and equipment. But while several rancheros had joined him or the local guerrilla leaders, such as Antonio Canales, in patrolling the countryside and defending the northern frontier, Joaquín had politely declined and instead contributed several horses to the guerrilla bands. He was compelled to fight alongside them when Comanches and Lipán Apaches came to pillage the settlements along the Río Bravo. Joaquín’s father and two uncles had been killed and most of their livestock stolen or slaughtered during a Comanche raid ten years earlier.
But now Ximena could hear her husband eagerly discussing with Cortina the militia’s plans to pester the Yanqui general, plunder his supply wagons, and above all, do what the Mexican central government wasn’t yet prepared to do—initiate hostilities.
“The Yanquis have taken control of our port, and the Mexican military allowed it to happen!” Joaquín said. “That port is vital to trade.”
Although Ximena wanted to hear the rest of their conversation, her grandmother needed help. She cut some hierba del pollo and hurried back to the healing room, its adobe walls permeated with the scent of lavender and sage, candle wax, and copal incense. Nana Hortencia was washing the man’s wound with an infusion of llantén.
“Will he live?” Ximena asked.
“He’s lost a lot of blood, but the lead ball went through his body whole and didn’t leave any fragments,” Nana Hortencia said, rinsing the bloody towel. “Although, I see bits of his shirt in the wound, which must be taken out.”
Her grandmother was the best curandera in the area and had saved many lives, including Ximena’s. Nana Hortencia had been born with el don, the healing gift, and had been trained by her own grandmother, a medicine woman with deep knowledge of herbal medicine. A physician was a rare commodity in these parts, and so week after week, the locals, especially the poor, showed up at the rancho to seek her healing.
Ximena turned the patient’s hand over, palm-side up, and placed two fingers over his wrist artery. “His pulse is weak but stable,” she said. She brushed the man’s dirty hair off his forehead and wiped the sweat and grime from his face. He was young, no more than eighteen, with a whole life yet to live. As she crushed the herbs with her mortar and pestle to make a poultice, she prayed for God’s mercy.
After they finished tending to their patient, Ximena and Nana Hortencia transferred him to a cot. The day was waning, and Joaquín and Cortina were on the back patio with the others. From the looks of it, Cortina and his men would be spending the night at the rancho. Chickens were broiling over the open fire, and two of the house servants, Inés and María, were busy making fresh tortillas on the comal and reheating a pot of beans while Rosita handed out mugs of café, which the men spiked with the bottle of aguardiente being passed around. The men sat on pieces of a tree trunk, wrapped in their sarapes, smoking tobacco cigarettes rolled in corn husk as they talked about the Yanqui invasion. Some of them lay on the ground using their saddles as pillows.
Ximena sighed, wrapped her rebozo around her shoulders, and went to sit with Joaquín. He put his arm around her. As she leaned her head against his shoulder, soaking up his warmth, she breathed in his musky smell of sweat and horse, vaqueta, and tobacco leaves. She closed her eyes, remembering the first time she’d met him four years earlier. Her horse had been bitten by a rattlesnake and died, and her father had brought her to Joaquín’s rancho to buy a new mount. They’d been told by everyone in Matamoros that Joaquín Trevi?o’s horses were the best trained.