as if the very words left a bad taste in her mouth.
Zak looked at her and felt pity.
In her eyes, and in the lines on her face, he saw centuries of suffering and pain. He saw the Yaqui blood beneath the skin on her cheekbones, the faint glow of vermillion smeared across the high planes, the ancient bronze of Moorish ancestors in the cast of her jaw, and the black coals of Spanish mothers so sad and haunting in her eyes.
He thought that she must have been pretty once, as a girl is pretty. With a sweet, smiling face, good white teeth, soft locks of shiny black hair. Now, the years had taken their toll. She was no longer a pretty young girl. But she was a beautiful woman, in the way that old, polished wood is beautiful, in the way a gnarled, wind-blasted tree on the seacoast is beautiful.
“You have the Indian blood in you?” she said after a while. “You do not look it.”
“Yes.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“But not full blood?”
“No, not full blood,” he said.
“That is why you do not show the Indian face of your mother,” she said, and he wondered what she was thinking, through that labyrinth her reasoning took her from, that simple black and white place she had come from long ago and journeyed through over so many years.
“Do we ever know who we truly are?” Zak said. “Do we know our fathers and mothers? Can we trace their bloodlines in ourselves? Or do we forge ourselves in their molds so that we look and act the same? If so, that is very sad, and it makes the world a sad place to live.”
“The world is a sad place to live,” she said, so softly he had to strain to hear it.
“Someday, maybe, if the world keeps growing as it is, as people mingle and marry and leave children to grow, we will all have the same bloodlines. As it was in the beginning.”
“The beginning?” she asked querulously, as if she was lost in the fabric of that world he was weaving with his words.
“Adam and Eve.”
“The first man and woman,” she said.
“Yes. We all sprung from that same seed. Or so the Bible says.”
“I do not believe that. We are not all from the same seed. That seed did not carry the blood of blacks and red men and Chinese.”
“Skin colors do not matter. A man bleeds the same red blood, no matter the color of his skin.”
“Inside, you mean? We are all the same?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“It does not matter to me. I do not think of such things. I know who I am. I know where I came from.”
“But do you know where you are going?” he asked, and the question went unanswered as Carmen drew back into herself and wended her way through that labyrinth of reasoning, that maze of bewilderment that faced each person who tried to plumb the depths of life’s true meaning.
“You could save some lives if you tell me how many men are at the next station and, maybe, what kind of men they are. We could spare their lives if they have wives and children and just want to ride on instead of fighting us.”
“I might tell you who is there,” she said, sounding almost like a pouting child.
“I wish you would. Before we get there. Otherwise, we have to assume they will not ride away and we will have to kill them.”
“They are just men. They work for Ferguson, too.” She paused. “Like my husband.”
“Do you know these men?”
“I know their names. They are—”
She broke off and he wondered what she had been going to say. He could see that she was troubled by his questions, by her thoughts about the two men manning the line shack, the way station. Perhaps, he thought, she was worried about her husband as well.
“Are you Catholic?” she asked.
“No.”
“I am Catholic. So is my husband. The two men at the little post house are, how do you call them, heathens?”
“They do not believe in God?”
“They believe in money. They bring death with them. That is why they work for Ferguson.”
Her words were laden with a sudden bitterness. He sensed that she wished things were different. That her husband did not work for Ferguson, that he did not mingle with such as those two he would soon have to face.
“You do not like Ferguson?” he asked.
She spat. “Filth. Greed. That is what he is. I do not like him.”
