Crack in the Sky

with growling and trading, blustering and bartering. By a long-standing tradition, each of them held to a temporary truce despite the bloodiest of intertribal wars, despite their uninterrupted depredations on these same Mexican villages.

But for that brief time at the height of summer, the tribes brought their hides: huge, glossy buffalo robes; the silklike chamois of antelope and mountain goat; the luxurious pelts of wolf, badger, and fox. And they brought slaves. Human misery, so it seemed, had become a staple of this annual trade with the Indian bands at the Taos Fair. With their prisoners stolen in raids made on rival tribes, the visitors traded their captives for trinkets, blankets, kettles, beads, and weapons … and always the Indians traded for their share of the Mexican’s alcohol.

For more than two hundred years they had come here like bees to the hive—both the suspicious Mexican from Chihuahua and the wary warrior from the Llano Estacado—forging an uneasy truce while they took what they needed most from the other.

Everyone knew the warrior bands would return to the killing soon enough. Would return to Taos for the sheep and horses, for the women and children soon enough.

Although Don Fernando de Taos was the village’s proper name, some of the Mexicans themselves had come to call this sprinkling of whitewashed adobe huts and walled compounds by the name Don Fernandez de Taos. Still others corrupted it further to San Fernandez or San Fernando de Taos. No matter what expensive two-dollar name the Mexicans chose to hang on it … to the mountain trappers who learned of its existence—the breed who flocked here come the brutal winters raging farther north in the Rocky Mountains—this place was known simply as Touse.

Here the residents were far more willing to trade with the Norte Americanos who brought their wares from back east in Missouri all the way down the Santa Fe Trail than they were to trade with the trappers for their pelts. After all, the trade goods came from elsewhere—items that could not be had anywhere in Mexico. But those beaver hides … now, those might well have been pulled right out of Mexican waters! So though most Taosenos enthusiastically tolerated the American traders who came with their wares, traded them off for specie and mules, then turned around for the States without lingering, these trappers were something quite different altogether. They arrived late in the autumn and stayed on until winter itself was retreating from the high country.

Which meant that most of this reckless breed of unwashed, crude characters were underfoot and causing trouble for the natives of this sleepy village until the prospect of trapping prime beaver plews eventually lured the foreign interlopers from the valley once more.

It was a clash of two distinct cultures—in so many-ways no different a story from when the trapper confronted the Indian’s way of life. Yet here in northern Mexico there was one essential ingredient added to the volatile mix that wasn’t thrown in when the beaver men met Stone Age Indian in those early days of the mountain west: liquor. To the Americans their beloved Taos lightning greased the wheels of international commerce, while the Mexicans found any trapper in his cups more likely than not a quarrelsome and overbearing creature all too often quick to pick a fight. In short, it didn’t take too much of the potent aguardiente stirred in with all those months of pent-up deprivation before many minor conflicts were aggravated into potentially deadly clashes.

In the two weeks following their rescue of the captives, Hatcher’s Americans made Workman’s caverns their base camp. From time to time they would mosey into town with a handful of the pesos they had bartered off the whiskey maker for a few of their plews. With that hard money warming their pouches, the trappers looked over the rich variety of goods offered by the cart vendors and blanket traders who cluttered the open-air verandas surrounding the village square every day from dawn until just after dusk. More than any American-made goods, the gringos coveted such items as thick Navajo blankets almost impervious to water to fine hand-painted scarves; from sturdy saddles and tack to crops harvested just that very autumn; from select cuts of beef, pork, and lamb to the slimy organ meats hung from open-air racks; from coarse Mexican tobacco to the natives’ fine linen shirts, pantaloons, and stockings.

Why, Titus hadn’t been around such a place with so many pungent odors and curious sights since he’d floated to New Orleans eighteen long years gone now.

The narrow, sometimes off-kilter and mazelike, streets laid out in their tiny grid were more often than not teeming with roaming dogs, burros shuffling past beneath their loads of firewood, bleating sheep and goats being driven to a new patch of grass, and the ever-present gaggles of chickens and roosters wandering aimlessly about, feeding where they could on that refuse pitched from every door into the rutted, stinking byways. Occasionally a yoke of oxen or a brace of Missouri mules were herded past by American traders, more often by some young boys or very old men, all of the pelados dressed alike in their loose peasant clothing, a blanket serape for their only warmth.

While most of the squat adobe buildings strung out from the town square would never impress a traveler from the old French dominion of St. Louis, the municipal building and the towering cathedral nonetheless stood as two of the most recognized landmarks in the tiny town. Hand in hand, these institutions of church and state alone ruled the daily lives of this valley’s simple people as each was born, baptized, raised, married, sired their young, then died and were laid to mortal rest within the church cemetery. More and more it struck Bass that these were a people accustomed to accepting, a people who had learned not to ask for much from each day. To lead their simple lives, that might well be enough to ask of the divine.

Behind each low-roofed hut sat the domed beehive of a baking oven, where each day the peasant women made their loaves of bread, where on cold winter nights the family dogs slept among the warm embers. While the poorer mud-and-wattle homes were no more than a single small room with blankets hung to section off a tiny sleeping area, most of the adobe dwellings in this village were a bit more spacious, some even built large enough to encompass a small central patio where narrow plank doors led the inhabitants to each of the few rooms. In a corner of every room sat a squat mud fireplace filling the house with the pungent fragrance of burning cedar or pinon.

From the poorest pelado to the richest landowner, no Taoseno laid down plank flooring in his home. Instead, hard-packed earth sufficed, over which the woman of the house would throw a series of coarse, woven mats, since the thick Navajo wool rugs served only as blankets at night, rolled up each morning and used in the place of chairs during the day.

In these mud houses each small window was paned with a sheet of translucent mica and frequently barred with wrought-iron or carved wooden bars. On the sills of many windows this winter sat empty flower boxes that come spring would display a bevy of colorful red geraniums—clearly the favorite flower of the Taosenos.

Kinkead had explained that the villages in this valley were not always painted in such drab, dreary colors of winter. With the arrival of spring the tiny towns would burst with vibrant colors just about the time the trappers were seeing to their final preparations in departing for the mountains. Looking about now, Titus found that hard to believe, what with the pale and pasty colors this season brought to Taos: the grayish white of dirty snow smearing sun-washed adobe, the monotonous pastels of ocher and sienna earth, along with the ever-present black buckskin pantaloons and jackets favored by the caballeros in from the ranchos for a spree, or those black rebozo shawls most women pulled over their heads for warmth whenever they ventured from their homes.

Isaac walked up to the table, pouring himself some more aguardiente. He asked, “Scratch, you wanna come see the cock fight Mirabal’s getting started back out to the stables?”

“I’ve see’d cock fights afore,” Bass replied, sipping his drink as he continued to peer around the room over the rim of his cup.

“Ain’t you a gambling man?” Simms inquired.

“Scratch got better things to take a look-see at than no stupid cock fight!” Hatcher advised, wagging his eyebrows knowingly at Simms, nodding his head toward a small group of comely young women who were coyly studying the Americans from behind their lace fans.

“Hell,” Isaac admitted as soon as he sorted out his priorities, “I s’pose a man can allays find hisself a cock fight in Touse … but there ain’t allays senoritas to gander at!”

“Scratch, don’t want you to feel bad now if most of these here gals don’t give you the time of day,” Kinkead declared. “Their papas and mamas don’t want their daughters having nothing to do with no gringos.”

“I knowed their kind back in St. Lou,” Titus replied. “Snooty stuff-shirts—look down their noses on the rest of us.”

“Here it’s the ones with all the money, mostly, what look down on us,” Matthew replied. “My Rosa’s folks—