Joan Johnston - Texas Woman

“Thank you,” Sloan said once they were inside the adobe hacienda.

“For what?”

“For defending me.”

“I apologize for the fact that I should need to defend you. Mamá is set in her ways. It is not easy for her to accept the fact that I have chosen my own wife.”

Sloan’s limp was worse because her bruised muscles had stiffened in the saddle. Cruz simply picked her up, his eyes daring her to protest, and carried her to the bedroom, where he laid her on their bed. He removed her boots and sat down beside her while they waited for the curandera to arrive.

Doña Lucia arrived in the doorway moments later with a tray containing two silver goblets and a bottle of brandy. “I thought you might need something to fortify yourselves until María arrives.”

Cruz had to admit a brandy sounded good. His mother turned slightly away to fill one goblet with the golden liquid and offered it to Sloan, who had inched herself upright with the pillow supporting her back. Then she filled a second goblet for Cruz.

Doña Lucia waited to see Cruz take a sip of brandy from the goblet she had handed to him-she wanted no chance of a deadly mistake. This time she would be rid of that woman for good, and her death could be blamed on some injury she had acquired in the storm.

Satisfied that she had accomplished what she had come to do, Doña Lucia left the room, saying, “I will go see what is keeping María.”

Cruz sat back down on the bed beside Sloan and touched his goblet to hers, offering a toast, “To long life. To happiness. To love.” He lifted the goblet and took another sip of the fine brandy.

Sloan lifted the goblet to her lips and held it there for a moment, as she contemplated whether she could honestly drink to such a toast. But in her mind’s eyes she saw nothing of happiness and love, and despaired of a long life spent without them. Distraught by the shattered images his words had conjured, she felt the goblet slip from her hand, soaking the sheets in brandy.

“Oh no!” She stared at the brown stain, thinking how quickly what had once been pure was now unclean. “I don’t know what happened. I thought I could handle-oh, Cruz!”

All the pain she had held in abeyance during the crisis just past came flooding across her. “I can’t bear it. How could you do it? How could you lie to me just like Tonio?”

Her head fell back against the pillow, and she turned her face away from him, squeezing her eyes shut to hold back the tears, gritting her teeth to contain the sobs.

Cruz slipped farther onto the bed next to her and laid his head on the pillow beside her. He gently eased his arm across her waist and felt her flinch beneath his touch. “I am sorry for your pain, Cebellina. You will never know how sorry.”

He lay beside Sloan, holding her, until he felt the tension ease from her body. She was asleep when Cruz realized how drowsy he felt himself. He closed his eyes, just to rest a moment until María arrived.

The curandera, María, was a wizened old woman, who wore ragged clothes and generally smelled of the poultices she devised. When she entered the room, she found Sloan and Cruz both asleep on the bed.

She checked Cruz first, clucking her tongue and shaking her head as she pried open his eyelids and peered into his eyes. She rinsed the blood from the wound at his temple and decided that it would not need stitching if she pulled it together and bound it that way. With quick, sure hands she checked to make sure he was otherwise uninjured before turning her attention to the woman.

She remembered Señora Sloan well. She had first met the señora a year ago when Cisco had been knifed by a Comanche, and Don Cruz had defended the señora’s right to stay with her son when the curandera had demanded that the room must be cleared of those who had no need to be there. Doña Lucia had left. Señora Sloan had remained and efficiently assisted María as she had stitched the wound closed.

The curandera had seen the adoration for this woman in Don Cruz’s eyes when he had thought no one was looking, and she had thought then that Señora Sloan would make a worthy wife for her patrón. She wondered, as she gently woke the señora, whether the young woman had learned to return Don Cruz’s affections. If so, she would need all her courage to face the news that María had to impart.

“Señora, wake up,” the curandera said, gently slapping Sloan’s cheeks.

Sloan blinked her eyes open. “Is Cruz-”

“I have done what I can for El Patrón. Now it is time to take care of you.”

“I’m only a little bruised-”

María shook her head and clucked her tongue as though chiding a small child as she helped Sloan strip off her clothes and put on a chambray wrapper. “That is a bad bruise on your thigh, señora, and needs something to reduce the swelling.”

“What is that?” Sloan demanded, her nose wrinkling in disgust as María applied a strong-smelling poultice.

“Something that will have you feeling much better soon,” the curandera assured her. “But I am afraid I must bring you more pain, señora,” María said as she covered Sloan with the sheet.

“What do you mean-more pain?”

“Don Cruz-”

“What’s wrong!” Sloan turned frantically to look at the man who, until now, she thought had been peacefully sleeping. “He’s not dead, is he?”

“No, señora. He sleeps.”

Sloan turned back just as quickly and frowned at the curandera. “If he’s just sleeping, then what’s wrong with him?”

“It is not only his body that sleeps,” María explained, “but his soul as well.”

Sloan all too quickly realized what the curandera was trying to say. “Oh my God. You mean he’s in a coma? He’s not going to wake up?”

“Be calm, señora,” the curandera said. “I do not know how long he will sleep. It may be he will wake in the morning, his body and soul rested. But it may also be that he will take longer to wake.”

Sloan stared at Cruz in horror. “He might die?”

They were interrupted when Doña Lucia appeared at the door and announced, “There is someone here to see you, Sloan.”

“Who is it?” she asked.

“He says his name is Louis Randolph. He says he has come for Betsy.”

SLOAN FELT THE DISBELIEF GROW, SPINNING HER insides like a tumbleweed in the wind. “It can’t be. He can’t take her right now. I mean… it’s too much…”

She directed all her senses inward in an effort to calm the furor there, so she didn’t notice the astonished look on Doña Lucia’s face when the older woman realized Sloan was not the least bit sick. Nor did she see the look of horror when Cruz’s mother realized that her son lay unmoving on the bed.

“Did he-Did you-?” Doña Lucia gasped.

Sloan stared down at Doña Lucia’s hand, which had curled, like a bird’s claw, around her forearm. Sloan pulled her hand free and said, “Did he what? Did I what?”

Doña Lucia crossed to the mahogany bedstead in a haze and reached out a hand to touch her son’s pale whiskered cheek, fearing the worst. He simply could not have drunk from the poisoned goblet. She had watched carefully to make sure-and then she saw the wet brown stain on the sheets. That woman must have spilled the poisoned brandy, rather than drinking it. Doña Lucia ground her teeth in fury. She had failed again. And she had barely kept herself from blurting out what she had tried to do.

“Will he recover?” Doña Lucia asked the curandera.

“Only time will tell,” María said.

Sloan followed Doña Lucia and now stood beside her looking down at Cruz.

Doña Lucia stepped back as though Sloan was filth that would soil her gown. “You should be lying there, not my son. The blood of kings runs in his veins. He should never have married his brother’s puta!”

Sloan was in shock. Too much had happened in too brief a time. “I want you to leave this room now,” she said. “I have to dress to greet my guest.”

Doña Lucia didn’t know what to make of Sloan’s calm but firm request. Left without an enemy with whom to do battle, she looked one last time at her unconscious son, turned, and left.

Sloan pulled on a clean shirt and vest, but needed the curandera’s help getting her pants and boots on.

“You should be in bed, señora,” María said.

“I can’t sleep now. I’ll rest later.”

In the sala, Sloan found Betsy perched on one of her Uncle Louis’s knees and Cisco straddling the other. Louis Randolph was a big man. He was dressed like a farmer, in a dark gray homespun shirt, baggy denim overalls, and short, heavy black boots, all of which had seen a great deal of wear. He had shaggy light brown hair and ears that stuck out from his head like handles on a sugar bowl.