A Ballad of Love and Glory(45)
Soon, steamboats were brought up the river, and the inhabitants of Matamoros lined the banks to watch them going back and forth with their puffs of black smoke, transporting Taylor’s troops and supplies. It was such a novelty to see those vessels, one of which was named Colonel Cross, even Nana Hortencia liked to watch them go by, scattering the birds with their shrill whistles. Then one day the remains of Lieutenant Porter were found. The Yanqui whom Joaquín had killed two months before had been eaten by wolves, so it hadn’t been easy to identify him. After she watched his funeral service, Ximena asked padre Felipe to say a mass for the murdered Yanqui, hoping that his soul would now rest in peace.
The summer rains began and with them, the river swelled until its waters overflowed its banks, turning the area into a swamp. The rains also brought swarms of mosquitoes, and sickness soon spread through the city. If that wasn’t enough, the new Yanqui recruits were carrying diseases, such as measles, from up north. The pestilence spread through their regiments and through the region. Hundreds of Taylor’s men had fallen sick and were being tended to in the makeshift hospitals in the city. The death march played all day long as the Yanquis buried their dead. Soon, an outbreak of measles took the lives of many of the local children. After long days and nights ministering to them, Nana Hortencia eventually contracted the disease as well. The battles had taken a heavy toll on her. She’d given so much of herself that her body had no strength left to fight.
Ximena tended to her grandmother, who seemed to be withering before her eyes. She prayed for divine intervention to stop the approach of death, to give her, just this once, miraculous healing powers so that with a simple touch, she could rid her grandmother of the fever ravaging her body, the infection in her lungs, the rash that had spread from her face to her feet, as if consuming her one piece at a time.
“You will feel better soon, Nana,” Ximena said as she placed a chamomile compress on the old woman’s inflamed eyes.
Nana Hortencia coughed and shook her head. “Let me go, child,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and feeble. “The Creator is calling my spirit to Him.”
“You can’t leave me, Nana. What will I do without you?”
The old woman removed the rag from her reddened eyes to look at Ximena. She took her hand and smiled weakly. “You won’t be alone, mijita. Have faith.”
But how could Ximena hold on to faith when God seemed intent on taking away everyone she cared about? And what good was her healing gift when it couldn’t keep alive the only person left on earth who loved her?
The next day, Nana Hortencia told Ximena that she wanted to depart this world under the canopy of the sky. Knowing that her grandmother would be unable to bear the brightness of the day, Ximena wheeled her out of the makeshift hospital that evening on a borrowed wheelbarrow. In the twilight glow, she took her nana to the river’s sandy banks, where she could listen to the night songs of the birds. Through the treetops, they watched the moon climb, Ximena sitting on the damp ground beside the wheelbarrow where her grandmother lay wrapped in a woven blanket, lulled by the gurgling of the free-flowing waters of the Río Bravo. Toward midnight, when the moon was approaching its highest point, the old woman’s soul entered the spirit world. Her last ragged breath of life became part of the breath of the wind stirring along the river and whispering through the moonlit trees. Ximena stayed there with her grandmother until morning’s first light. She beheld Nana Hortencia’s face, noble and serene, all traces of the rash gone. Her eyes, as clear as moonlight, raised to the sky.
* * *
After she buried her grandmother, Ximena felt like a tumbleweed, defenseless against the whim of the high winds rolling her across the plains. She had nothing to hold on to now. No one to cling to.
These thoughts were weighing on her as she walked to church for evening vespers a week after Nana Hortencia’s burial. She passed by a vendor selling fruit outside the plaza and would have kept walking if he hadn’t stopped her. It took her a moment to realize it was Juan Cortina. He was wearing a sarape and a palmetto hat and selling cantaloupes out of a small cart pulled by a donkey.
“Cheno, what—?”
“Pretend you don’t know me,” he said, picking up a cantaloupe and offering it to her. “Here, se?orita, please, taste this delicious melón straight from my farm,” he continued. “I’ll meet you in the church,” he whispered, and then turned to the crowd and shouted, “Melones, melones, get your melones, ladies and gentlemen!”
She walked across the plaza to the church, careful not to look suspicious. There were Yanqui soldiers patrolling the area, and she knew Cheno would be in trouble if they suspected him. She had no doubt he was here to spy on the Yanquis. Every so often, Taylor’s men captured spies and imprisoned them at the fort across from Matamoros, which had been renamed Fort Brown in honor of their fallen major. Another spy, Jerónimo Valdez, was locked up there now.
She sat on one of the pews and waited for Cheno. Mass was beginning, and as she listened to the priest, Ximena couldn’t stop looking at the shattered walls of the church with its statues and crucifix missing. The stench of horse dung infected the air. The Rangers had desecrated the church, robbed it, and even used it as a stable before Taylor forced them out. Then they turned to looting and destroying private property instead, burning ranches, especially preying on the vulnerable peasants living in jacales on the outskirts of the city where Taylor had no surveillance.