Rio Grande Wedding Part 1

Ruth Wind.

RIO GRANDE_WEDDING.

Prologue.

The old women always said there was a face carved upon the heart of every woman. A face half remembered on a hundred sun-glazed afternoons spent daydreaming in cla.s.srooms that smelled of chalk, a face that haunted her on nights when the full moon shone into her sweet-smelling virgin bedroom. A face mostly forgotten as husband, children,work came to take her time.

Mostly forgotten.

But the old women told each other stories of those times when a woman glimpsed, that face in a crowd of strangers, crowds like those at thechile festival, or the rodeo held in the dog days of August, crowds so large that face quickly became lost. Such women some times sickened, for once glimpsed the face of herdestinocame clear and haunted her forever.

Worse were the times when the face suddenly appeared next door or on the arm of a cousin, and it was worn by a man married to another or chained by duty to the Church.

Of such tragedies were crimes of pa.s.sion made. That face, the old women said, was the reason women left husbands who had been good to them for fifteen, twenty, fifty years, because when that face appeared, she was helpless to halt the lure of it. It was the reason women sometimes did crazy things loco! that everyone clucked about over pots of steaming tamales.

Clucked, yes, but sighed, too, their eyes raised to the misty distance, for who among them did not hope, secretly, to find that face, no matter where it lived on the earth, what upheaval it caused? It was better, they all thoughtprivately, if one never knew she was waiting. If she was never tempted.

But it did not stop her from looking.

Chapter 1.

Molly Sheffield stepped out onto her back steps, a mug of steaming coffee clutched in her hands. It washalf past sixin the morning, the freshest part of the day, and Molly wouldn't think of drinking her first cup of coffee anywhere else when the weather was fine.

Above, the sky brightened with sunrise. Pure gold light, gentle and clear, seeped into the bowl of endless sky, tipping the wings of a pair of magpies swooping over the silhouette of cottonwoods that marked the eastern edge of her nearly one hundred acres.

When her husband, Tim, died four years ago, this view, morning and evening, had often saved her sanity. There was, in the vast stillness, a sense of eternity that comforted her.

Everyone had said she would recover, and to her surprise, Molly had more or less. It had happened gradually, but now she could stand on this square of porch her husband had built with his own hands, and face the austere bluffs to the north and watch the sun rise with a genuine sense of deep pleasure,unblunted by sorrow. She missed him still, of course, the way one would miss an amputated arm, but the phantom pains grew less frequent with every pa.s.sing month. She knew he'd be glad.

As the fingers of b.u.t.tery light crept into her garden, Molly ambled down the rock path she'd laid by herself last summer. A pink and yellow rose, st.u.r.dily blooming in the unseasonably warm October, opened dewy petals to the day. Molly took a moment to bend close and smell the faintly citrusy scent,then headed up the narrow path that wound beneath pinon, juniper and cedar trees to the top of the bluff that was the northern boundary of her land.

From some hidden spot came the sound of a family of wrens, singing over breakfast, and one of the magpies from the cottonwoods dived toward his favorite perch, scolding noisily. Molly smiled and saw her cat, Leonardo,flatten himself apprehensively beneath a lavender plant.

"Scaredy-cat," she said. He made a soft trill in answer. He didn't spend much time outside because of the threat of coyotes, and as a result, he was jumpy when he did.

A flash of something bright caught her eye as she turned toward the bluff in the distance, and Molly paused, blinded for a second. She squinted and held up her hand to block the light. Probably a piece of gla.s.s. She moved toward it, worried that one of the animals that foraged around here might cut a paw on it.

Five feet away, she stopped dead.

The light was not catching on a piece of gla.s.s. It was an oblong silver medal, attached to a chain that hung around the neck of a man. A man who was either dead or unconscious at the bottom of the steep bluff.

Her land bordered an enormous farm that depended on an army of migrant workers to bring

in the harvest ofchiles , peaches and cantaloupe that grew in such abundance in the mild northernNew Mexicohighlands. As Molly edged closer to the man, she decided he must be a member of that army, mostly Mexican nationals. He wore their uniform a simple white tank top and jeans, and his skin showed the deep tan of a man who worked outside every day.

He was sprawled on his back. Red dust clouded one arm, part of his side and his legs, as if he'd slipped and skidded all the way down the bluff. A large red stain of blood soaked the denim of his left leg.

But it was his face that drew her closer, and between one step and another, she felt an odd, piercing stab of apprehension, as if she should stay where she was, run away,turn back while she had a chance.

For it was the most singularly perfect face she had ever seen. Not perfect in terms of photographs or movie stars. The angles were too sharp, his nose too aggressive, his mouth too wide for those things.

But as she knelt, the trained nurse cataloguing his obvious wounds, she found herself thinking that if she'd drawn the face of a man, if she'd had the talent to paint someone into existence, her man would have worn this dark and sensual face. She would have used these strong colors, his flesh the reddish copper of the earth itself, his hair and eyebrows like the tail feathers of the magpies sweeping overhead. She would have painted his lashes just so, luxuriant against the arch of bone in his cheek, and used a generous hand with the mouth because the softness in such a hard face pleased her.

Yes, if her skill equaled her heart's eye, which it did not, she would have painted this man for herself.

Her cat crept up to the downed man, sniffing with worry and curiosity, his extraordinarily long whiskers wiggling, his yellow eyes wide and bright. When the man shifted slightly and let out a low noise, Leonardo jumped a foot in the air and bolted for the house.

It shook Molly from her daze, and with a frown, she ticked off his wounds the face was bruised and very dirty, and one cheekbone showed a long sc.r.a.pe, giving credence to her theory of a fall down the bluff.

She glanced upward. Maybe thirty feet. It wouldn't be hard to fall if he'd been up there at night he might not even have seen the drop in time to do anything to stop himself. The desert on a moonless night was a very dark place indeed.

There must have been a raid at the farms last night. Not an unusual occurrence. In his flight, this man must have missed seeing the abrupt end of land, and tumbled down the bluff.

She looked back at him, a.s.sessing. No limbs at odd angles. No visible head injury he'd probably taken a bullet to that leg, and pa.s.sed out from loss of blood. He or someone had packed gra.s.s and mud into the wound. Molly half shuddered at the likelihood of infection, but the move had probably saved his life.

For the moment, anyway.

Her training did not allow the option of simply leaving him there while she called for an ambulance. She rose from her crouch a few feet away and stepped forward; the sound of her feet or maybe the shadow of her body falling on him made the man stir.

Barely. He made a low noise of pain, and his head moved as Molly knelt next to him.

"Can you hear me?" she said, and touched his forehead. Definitely feverish.

His eyes opened as she reached for his wrist to take his pulse, and he started, protesting in mumbled Spanish so jumbled Molly couldn't make out the words.

"Shh," she murmured, and put her finger on his wrist, automatically looking at her watch to count the beats. Not bad. "You're hurt. I need to get you an ambulance."

"No!" His hand gripped hers with surprising fierceness. "No,senora .Por favor.No hospital." He licked his lips. "I have to find Josefina." His eyes were as dark as coffee. "She is alone," he said. "Please no hospital." He gripped her hand urgently.

"Please."

If she needed additional proof that he'd been running from a raid lastnight, that cinched it. If she called an ambulance, the authorities would be alerted and he'd be deported.

"Can you walk?" she asked, choosing to sidestep the request. "With my help? I'm a nurse. Maybe I can look at the wound myself."

He swallowed."Si."

He struggled to sit up, but the strong ropes of muscle across his arms and chest were little help to him now. A ghastly grayness bled the color from his face, and Molly bent down, looped his arm around her neck and anch.o.r.ed it with one hand. Bracing herself on her thighs, she locked the other arm around his waist. She was accustomed to a.s.sisting barely mobile patients, but this was not a small man he was a solid six-two and even though he was a little thin, she'd guess a hundred and eighty pounds of the kind of wiry muscle farm-work gave a man.

They staggered a little together before he found some steadiness. A choked noise of pain came from his throat before he could swallow it, and the effort of standing made him tremble from shoulder to hip.

Molly braced her body against the ground and held on. She waited for him to catch his breath, thinking of the Josefina he couldn't leave behind. A wife? A child?

"Ready?" she asked quietly when the trembling had eased a little.

He gave her a grim nod. Inch by inch, they made it down the last yard of slope, into the level garden. She watched his face for signs of impending disaster, but though his color remained gray, and sweat beaded his lip and forehead, he managed to stay upright and struggle toward the house. By the time she got him inside to the living-room couch, he was trembling visibly, and she didn't think she had long before he pa.s.sed out entirely.

"Senor," she said urgently, breathing hard with effort. "Who are you looking for?"

His breath was ragged and he clutched his leg. "She ran ... when the..." He blinked, and swayed dangerously, but she saw the finely cut jaw tense, and after a moment, he said, "When themigra came." He closed his eyes, and the cords on his neck showed the struggle he mounted to speak at all."Dios!" he whispered, a voice broken with worry and love, and he squeezed his eyes shut. "Josefina."