Days of the Dead.pdf - Upgrade Systems

T H R E E
They left Mexico City as soon as it was light enough to see. Consuela and Rose rode in an
old-fashioned traveling­-coach shaped like a tea-cup and slung on leather straps that made it sway like a
ship in a gale, while January rode beside them, surrounded by an armed assortment of male servants and
profoundly thankful not to be in the heaving coach it­self. Though Rose had evidently been deemed
sufficiently respectable to play dame de compagnie to a lady going to the home of her father-either that,
or Doña Gertrudis, like John Dillard, objected to riding in a coach with los ne­gros-both women were
accompanied by their maids.
"Of course Rose must have a maid," Consuela had de­clared after siesta yesterday while supper was
being laid on the table. "Your Padre Cesario was absolutely right. And you, Señor Enero, must have a
valet." To January's protest that it would not be possible to locate servants of any kind-much less reliable
ones-before departing for Mictlán in the morning, Consuela had replied with an airy wave of her hand
and the words "We will leave that to Sancho. Sancho is my footman and he knows everyone in town. He
will get you servants."
He had, too. For Rose, the wiry, rather wolfish Sancho had located-and vouched for-a slim, dark
zamba girl named Zama, and for January he had produced a leathery, silent, elderly Yaqui Indian called
Cristobál. At a reale apiece a week, with shabby livery thrown in from the trunks in Consuela's
box-room, it was a cheap enough means of establishing their credentials among the re­spectable: January
was amused to see that while Cristobál fitted silently in among Consuela's mounted henchmen,
Consuela's mestizo maid Pepita looked down her nose at the darker-skinned Zama and refused to share
the same carriage-seat with her.
He wondered how he and Rose would have fared on this journey had they not-through a strange chain
of luck and circumstance the previous summer-stumbled upon a moderate-sized pirate cache in the
bayous near the home of Rose's white relatives, in the swamplands south of New Orleans. Perhaps, as all
the saints attested, money could not buy happiness, but it certainly made the misery atten­dant on being
born of African parentage in Louisiana much easier to deal with.
So they rode out of Mexico City like lords, with ser­vants and a coach, as the flower-sellers were
gliding into the town on their barges covered with poppies, singing strange songs in the old Nahuatl
tongue.
Within a few miles of the end of the northern cause­way, January better understood how his friend
could be held prisoner in a private home fifteen miles from the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.
Once away from the city and the lakes that surrounded it, the deforested land was utterly desolate.
Across the chewed green mantle of what remained of the rainy season's grasses, cattle wan­dered at will,
save where horrific hedges of cactus kept them out of dusty village cornfields. Sopilotes circled lazily in
the sky. Brush-choked gullies slashed the earth that the coach had to descend, rattling in every joint and
trace, then heave free of again; with all his heart January pitied the women inside. Sometimes he would
glimpse riders, half-­seen in clouds of yellow dust. Free rancheros, probably, who held small farms along
the few stingy watercourses, or the vaqueros of the wealthy cattlemen in short jackets and leather
knee-breeches unbuttoned halfway up to the thigh, their long hair tied in silk kerchiefs beneath
low-crowned leather hats. But the sight of them made January's heart quicken with dread as he recalled
the bandits in the pass: as he recalled Rose kneeling in the overturned coach, with blood staining her
dress.