It was late in the afternoon, and as the sun dropped toward the western horizon, long shadows began their march across the hilltops. Far away, the boy could see the beginnings of a fogbank forming over the ocean.
Below him, the last of his family’s servants were drifting out of the open gates of the hacienda, their meager belongings tied up in worn
Against the inside of the western wall, still protecting herself from the fading heat, his mother sat calmly on her chair, her daughters flanking her, her fingers still occupied with her needlework. Every now and then, he could see her lips move as she offered words of farewell to the departing
Finally the last of the servants was gone, and at a signal from their leader, the guards slowly swung the heavy gates closed. The officer turned to face Dona Maria. His words carried clearly up the hillside.
“Where is your son?”
“Gone,” his mother replied. “We sent him away last week.”
“Do not lie, Dona Maria. He was seen yesterday.”
His mother’s voice rose then, and the boy knew her words were for him, as well as for the man she faced. “He is not here, senor. He is gone to Sonora, where he will be safe with our people.”
“We’ll find him, Dona Maria.”
“No. You will never find him. But he will find you. We are not afraid to die. But you will not gain by killing us. We will not leave our land, senor. My husband said we will stay, and so we shall. And you will kill us. But it will do you no good. My son will come back, and he will find you.”
“Will he?” the squadron leader asked. “Get up, Dona Maria.”
As the boy watched from the hillside, his mother rose to her feet. Drawing their courage from their mother, his sisters, too, rose.
“My son will find you,” he heard his mother say. “My son will find you, and he will kill you.”
The squadron leader jerked his thumb toward the south wall. “Over there.” He stepped forward, the bayonet fixed to the barrel of his rifle jabbing menacingly at Dona Maria and her daughters.
Dona Maria stood firm. “We are not afraid to die, but we will not be prodded like cattle.” She turned and carefully set her needlework on the chair, then took her daughters’ hands in her own. She started across the courtyard, her step firm, her back as rigidly erect as ever.
She reached the south wall, still bathed in the afternoon sunlight, then turned and began to pray. As her lips began to move, the boy on the hillside closed his eyes and silently mouthed the words he knew his mother was speaking.
The first shot jerked his eyes open, and he blinked twice before he could focus on the scene in the courtyard.
His mother still stood, her head up and her eyes open, but her right hand was clutching at her breast. A moment later, blood began to seep from between her fingers, and a crimson stain spread across the bosom of her dress.
Then the quiet of the afternoon was shattered as his sisters’ terrified screams mixed with the angry rattle of gunfire, and a cacophony of sound echoed off the hacienda walls to roll over the countryside beyond.
His younger sister was the first to fall. Her knees buckled beneath her, and the motion itself seemed to concentrate the gunfire, on her. Her body twitched violently for a moment as the bullets slammed home, then she lay still in the dust.
His older sister screamed and her arms reached out as if to help the fallen child, but she only pitched forward, falling facedown into the dirt as the rifles spoke again.
Dona Maria stood against the wall alone now. She faced the squadron with open eyes, gazing down the barrels of their rifles with a calm serenity. “It will do you no good,” she said again. “My son will find you, and he will kill you. We will never leave our land.” Then she, too, sank slowly to the ground. A few seconds later the squad emptied its rifles into her lifeless body.
It was past midnight when the boy crept down from the hillside and slipped through the gates of the hacienda. A strange silence hung over the buildings; the night creatures themselves seemed to honor the dead. No guards patrolled the grounds, nor had anyone covered the corpses. The squadron had left long ago, searching out the families of the overseers to deal with them as they had dealt with the family of Don Roberto.
The moon hung low in the night sky, its silvery light casting strange shadows across the courtyard. The crimson stains of his family’s blood were faded by the half-light to nothing more than grayish smears on the whitewashed walls. The pallor of death on his mother and sisters seemed only to be the peace of sleep. For a long time the boy stood silently praying for the souls of his parents and his sisters. And then, with his last prayer, he put his grief aside.
He was changed now, and there was much to be done.
He picked up his mother first, and carried her body out of the courtyard, then up to the top of the hill, where he buried it deep within a tangle of brush.
Beside his mother, he buried his sisters, and then sat through the rest of the night, his mind numb as he relived the horrors of the day that had just passed.
As the first light of dawn began to bleach the darkness of the long night away, he rose to his feet and looked down once more on the hacienda that had been his home.
His memories, and his mother’s words, were etched on his soul, as the blood of his family and the marks of the bullets that had killed them were etched on the walls of the hacienda.
Nothing would ever erase the images in his mind, or soften the hatred in his heart.
Nor would he ever leave the village that had been his home.
And forever after, night after endless night, he would awake from the dream, shivering.
Always it was the same. Always he was in the hills above the hacienda, watching the slaughter of his family; always he heard the words of his mother clearly, and understood what it was that he was to do.
Was it real? Had it all happened exactly as he saw it in the dream? The shots. The screams. Crimson stains on whitewashed walls.
Always the dream returned. And he knew what he must do.…
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
La Paloma was the kind of town that absorbed change slowly. Tucked up in the hills above Palo Alto, it had grown slowly for more than a hundred years, yet its focus remained as it had always been, the tiny plaza of the old Spanish mission. Unlike most of the California missions, Mission La Paloma had never been converted to a museum or a historical monument, becoming, instead, the village hall, with its adjoining school now serving as a library.
Behind the mission there was a tiny cemetery, and beyond the cemetery was a collection of small rundown houses where the descendants of La Paloma’s Californio founders lived, still speaking Spanish among themselves, and eking out meager livings by serving the
Two blocks from the plaza a smallish, roughly triangular piece of land dominated by an immense oak tree lay at the confluence of the main road through La Paloma and the side roads that wandered through the ravines into which the village had spread over the years. The patch of land had existed undisturbed because the original settlers, starting with the mission priests, had elected to leave the massive oak in place and route the roads away from it. And so it had remained. There were no sidewalks or curbings along La Palomas haphazardly meandering
