When Mrs. Osborne moved out of the ranch house to let Devon and Robert occupy it alone, she’d taken along her antique cherrywood desk and mahogany piano, her silver tea service and collection of English bone china, but she left the clock behind. She no longer believed that God was with her and she didn’t want to be reminded that the hours left forever.
Seven o’clock.
The Mexican workers were coming out of the bunkhouse and out of the old wooden building, formerly a barn, that was now equipped as a mess hall. Quickly and quietly they piled into the back of the big truck that would drop them off in whatever fields were ready for harvesting. There was little in their lives except hard work, and the food that made work possible.
At noon they would sit in the bleachers built by Estivar’s sons beside the reservoir and eat their lunch in the shade of the tamarisks. At five they would have tortillas and beans in the mess hall and by nine-thirty all the bunkhouse lights would be out. The hours that left forever were good riddance.
Agnes Osborne was still talking. Between the time Devon had stopped listening and the time she started again, Mrs. Osborne had somehow reconciled herself to the fact that the hearing would be held as scheduled, beginning at ten o’clock. “It will probably be better if we met right in the courtroom so we won’t miss each other. Do you remember the number?”
“Five.”
“Will you be bringing your own car into town?”
“Leo Bishop asked me to ride with him.”
“And you accepted?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better call and tell him you’ve changed your mind. Today of all days you don’t want to start people gossiping about you and Leo.”
“There’s nothing to gossip about.”
“If you’re too nervous to drive yourself, come with Estivar in the station wagon. Oh, and make sure Dulzura wears hose, will you?”
“Why? Dulzura’s not on trial. We’re not on trial.”
“Don’t be naive,” Mrs. Osborne said harshly. “Of course we’re on trial, all of us. Ford tried to keep everything as quiet as possible, naturally, but witnesses had to be subpoenaed and many people had to be given legal notice of the time and place of the hearing, so it’s not exactly a secret. It won’t be exactly a picnic, either. Signing a piece of paper is one thing, it’s quite another to get up in a courtroom and relive those terrible days in public. But it’s your decision, you’re Robert’s wife.”
“I’m not his wife,” Devon said. “I’m his widow.”
Chapter Two
the two cars moved slowly along the dirt road, the dust rising in the air behind them like smoke signals.
In the lead was the station wagon driven by Estivar. He was nearly fifty now, but his hair was still dark and thick, and from a distance his quick wiry body looked like a boy’s. He had dressed for the occasion in the only suit he possessed, a dark blue gabardine which he kept for the yearly banquets of the Agricultural Association and for his appearances before the immigration authorities when some of his men were picked up by the border patrol for having entered the country illegally.
The blue suit, which was intended to make him appear respectable and, hopefully, beyond reproach, merely emphasized his uneasiness, his mistrust of this latest turn of events. If there was to be official recognition of Robert Osborne’s death, it should take place not in court but in church, with prayers and pleadings and long somber words intoned by gray-faced priests.
Estivar had brought his wife, Ysobel, with him for moral support and because she refused to stay home. She was a mestiza, half-Indian, with high red-bronze cheekbones and flat black eyes that looked blind and missed nothing. She held her neck rigid and her body erect, refusing to surrender to the motion of the car.
In the seat behind Ysobel, Dulzura sat sideways and stretched her legs out straight in front of her in order to save her stockings at the knees. She wore a giant of a dress, with dwarf horses galloping around the hem and across the pockets. She’d purchased the dress for a weekend trip to the races in Agua Caliente, but the man who proposed the trip failed to show up. The only time Dulzura felt bitter about his defection was when she thought of the money she might have won.
“Five hundred pesos, maybe,” she said aloud to no one in particular. “That’s forty dollars.”
Beside Dulzura sat Lum Wing, the elderly Chinese who cooked for the men. He never associated with them, he merely arrived when they did, carrying a bag with his clothes in it and a padlocked wooden case containing his collection of knives, his whetstone sharpener and a chess set; and when the men left, he left, but not with them or even in the same direction if he could help it.
Lum Wing sucked on the stem of an unlit corncob pipe, wondering what exactly was expected of him. A man in uniform had handed him a piece of paper and told him he’d better show up, by God, or else. He had a premonition, based on some facts he thought no one else knew, that he would end up in jail. And when a good cook landed in jail, no one was ever in a hurry to set him free, that much he’d learned from experience. Out of nervousness he’d been swallowing air all morning and every now and then the excess would escape in a long loud burp.
Ysobel spoke to her husband in Spanish. “Tell him to stop making those disgusting noises.”
“He can’t help it.”
“Do you suppose he’s sick?”
“No.”
“It seems to me he looks more yellow than the last time I saw him. Perhaps it’s contagious. I’m beginning not to feel so well myself.”
“Me too,” Dulzura said. “I think we should stop off at a place in Boca de Rio and have something to steady our nerves.”
“You know what she means by something. Not coffee, I can tell you. And wouldn’t it look splendid to have us walk into the courthouse with her reeling drunk.”
Estivar braked the car sharply and ordered them both to keep quiet, and the journey continued for a while in silence. Past the lemon groves sweet with the scent of blossoms, past the acres of stubble where the alfalfa had been cut, and the field of ripening pumpkins which Estivar’s youngest son, Jaime, had grown to take into Boca de Rio for Halloween jack-o’-lanterns and Thanksgiving pies.
Jaime was fourteen. He lay now on his stomach in the back of the station wagon, gnawing his right thumbnail and wondering if the kids at school knew where he was and what he had to do. Maybe they were already blowing it up into something wild like he was a friend of the fuzz. Word like that could put a guy down for the rest of his life.
It was the pumpkins that had done it to him. During the last week in October he had delivered some of them to school for the fair and the rest to a grocery store in Boca de Rio. The following Saturday Jaime was ordered by his father to take one of the small tractors and plow the pumpkin vines under. The machine turned up the butterfly knife in the southeast corner of the field. It was an elegant little knife with a double handle which opened like a pair of wings and folded back to reveal the blade in the middle. One of Jaime’s friends owned a butterfly knife. If you got the hang of it and practiced a lot in your spare time, the blade could be brought into striking position almost as fast as a switchblade, which was illegal.