Читать книгу San Antone - V. J. Banis - Страница 14

Chapter Eight

Jay Jay could not help thinking his father was a fool. He would never nave said so, or course, to anyone else. Like his brother and sister—it was one of the few things they had in common—he was intensely loyal to his family where other people were concerned. But in private he saw no reason for kidding himself.

He watched his father rushing up and down between the wagons, pointing out this crate and this barrel, bawling orders directing where this was to go, and that, and then shouting entirely contradictory commands the next moment.

Gregory stood in patient silence, his gaze following the pointing fingers, the waving hands, nodding from time to time to show that, yes, he did understand, yes, he had it exactly right; the contradictions seemed not to perturb him at all. When his father had gone on, Gregory went right back, Jay Jay observed, to following the same self-absorbed system he had been following before—just as incomprehensible to Jay Jay as their father’s scheme had been, though apparently clear enough to his brother.

He supposed that Gregory was a fool, too, in his own way. To some extent Jay Jay found his brother more maddening than their father was. At least their father was drunk, and the same drunkenness that muddled his thinking or sent him sometimes into rages, or clumsily falling all over himself, could just as easily turn into hilarity, or even—though this was infrequent now to the point of rarity—a maudlin sort of affection.

Foolish or not, it was possible to love his father in a way that he could not love his brother or his mother. Their very competence set them apart—you felt as if you had to reach up to them. Somehow Jay Jay never felt tall enough when he was with them.

Gregory was plodding. To see father and son together, you would have thought he was the old man and Lewis his barely adolescent child.

Most boys as they neared young manhood entered a period of rebellion against their fathers. Jay Jay felt a secret kinship with the man who had sired him, but he sometimes couldn’t stop himself from waging war on his brother. There was the time, for instance, when their father had given them rifles for Christmas. It was Jay Jay who had managed that, who had badgered and hinted and finally, with no pretense of subtlety, begged. He’d come very close to admitting that he could already shoot, had for the better part of a year been surreptitiously taking the guns from the cabinet in his father’s den and practicing in the distant fields at Eaton. Luckily his father gave in and bought guns for the boys before Jay Jay had to confess.

Of course, he’d known he would have to suffer instruction from his father, who could not even hold a gun properly, let alone hit anything. He had even practiced shooting astray to conceal his expertise. What he hadn’t counted on was that Gregory would be given a gun as well. The mere thought of his older brother, who couldn’t hit a tree throwing a rock, getting a rifle presented to him gratis, after Jay Jay had spent weeks and weeks coaxing for one, had very nearly spoiled the occasion for him.

In compensation, he had stolen into the den the night before their first promised shooting lesson and, with a hammer wrapped in one of his brother’s socks—Gregory never did understand how that sock had gotten a hole in it—he had managed to knock the gunsight well off kilter.

Gregory’s shot the following morning went right through the window of one of the slave cabins, ricocheted off Big Pearl’s cast-iron pot that she kept simmering on the hearth, and embedded itself in her wall.

“Liked to kill me with it,” she complained loudly and incessantly for several days, though as far as Jay Jay could see, to have been in any real danger, she would have needed to be hanging from the rafters.

Gregory’s gun was put away “till he was older,” and not brought out again. Jay Jay, who’d hit the target dead on his third shot (he could as easily have hit it the first time, but didn’t want to tip his hand), was allowed to keep his.

One time he took the tip of his penknife to the seat of Gregory’s best britches—this was the occasion of an enormous lawn party at Chester Glen. Chester Glen was not only the grandest of the plantations in the neighborhood of Eaton Hall, but the home as well of the Quincy girl, Diana, whom Gregory had recently been at some pains to impress. Jay Jay, with a neatness he did not often display, had carefully cut from inside every other stitch in the seam running down the seat of the trousers. The threads remaining were just sufficient to hold the pants together when his brother put them on. Gregory had alighted from the family carriage and mounted the great steps of the Quincy house in front of an army of people, Diana Quincy included, before anyone noticed his moon-white derrière protruding from a gaping wound in his velvet britches.

Then another time he had...but what was the use? The pleasure, for Jay Jay, was always short-lived. No matter what he invented to bedevil his brother, Gregory always seemed to come out a victim rather than a dunce, as intended. Even the time with the trousers, their mammy had taken the blame.

You couldn’t make him cry, either, which particularly infuriated Jay Jay, who, for all his reckless derring-do, was maddeningly tearful; sometimes they welled up in his eyes for no reason at all that he could think of, even when he was not hurt or scared—he never cried then.

“My little man,” their mother used to call Gregory, and “the man of the house.”

Jay Jay’s youngest memories of his brother were of an old man masquerading as a boy—just the opposite of him and Melissa, dressing up in their parents’ clothes. Gregory had never done that. He’d never needed to.

Melissa, of course, was the oldest, but being a girl, she didn’t count. To make matters worse, she was stubborn. And stuck-up.

And afraid of everything, from mice and ghosts to her hair coming undone at the wrong moment. (Jay Jay used to try to snatch a strand loose whenever the time seemed particularly ripe, but his sister got wise to that little trick, and these days, like as not, was ready with a sharp elbow for his ribs when he tried it; he was still trying to think of a good alternative.)

In fact, Melissa was the embodiment of everything you could think of to be wrong in a person, and it infuriated him to have to defend her to others, for no better reason than that she was his sister.

Not that he often had to. Over the years, the family had traveled less and less often to other plantations for rounds of visiting, and the visits to Eaton Hall had grown briefer and less frequent. “It’s a good idea,” their mother had informed them, “to get used to doing without others.”

Of course, she wasn’t stuck with just a sister and a stodgy brother for companions, or she might see things differently.

But the point was, people did disapprove of Melissa, which never failed to embarrass him. You could see it in other women when they looked after her, particularly when they didn’t know anyone from the family was watching. And not just the women, either; the men watched her, too, though naturally they were better at concealing their true feelings than their wives were.

Jay Jay blamed his mother for everything, if only because his father was only too obviously inept to be held accountable. If you were going to be the strong one, it seemed to him, you had to expect things to be left up to you, didn’t you? Where would Gregory be, after all, or Melissa, without his leadership?

“Papa says we own half of Texas.” Their father, in fact, had said nothing of the sort, but Jay Jay had hit upon the remark as a means of getting an accurate perspective from Gregory, who was sure to know, without the necessity of stooping to ask him directly, which Jay Jay avoided at all costs.

“Not even a fraction,” Gregory said. “Texas is enormous, the largest state in the Union. Better than eight hundred miles north to south, and almost that much east to west.”

“I think it’s awful,” Melissa said, screwing her face up into a pout. Their mother had often warned her that someday her face would freeze into such an expression. At one time Jay Jay had watched daily in happy anticipation of the event, but it had unfortunately proved one of those times when their mother had turned out not to be right—and wouldn’t it just have to be something he’d really wanted to see. “In South Carolina we were wealthy, we were somebody, and now here we are, living in a boardinghouse like Gypsies.”

“Gypsies live in caravans, not boardinghouses.”

“Well, and where do you think we’re going to be living when we leave here? It’ll be just horrible, I know it will.”

“I wish we were ready to leave,” Gregory said. “I think the journey will be interesting.”

“I’m going to ride with William Horse.”

* * * *

If Jay Jay could not exactly love his mother, he could often feel sympathy for her: Staying on top of everything was a heavy responsibility, he’d discovered that already for himself.

He felt a real pang the day she went to pay a call on Mrs. Montgomery. She had her chin thrust out and up, the way she did when it was something she really didn’t want to do, and she walked as if her black velvet dress were made of chain mail. Watching her from an upstairs window as she walked, ramrod-stiff, down the steps to the carriage, Jay Jay could easily imagine her going off to face fire-breathing dragons—which, funny enough, you could never picture their father doing.

Jay Jay admired pride greatly, it was something he just seemed to understand by instinct. Yet when his father, waking late, asked where she had gone, Jay Jay, who certainly knew, pretended ignorance. “She just went out,” he lied. “She didn’t say where.”

He felt ashamed of himself later; he hated lying, and worse yet, he couldn’t imagine why he had gone and told such a pointless lie.

He felt so bad, he would have to think of some really terrible way of tormenting his brother to work himself out of it.

* * * *

Joanna felt, too, as if she were going into battle. Since that fateful night of the hurricane, she had seen Alice Montgomery briefly on two occasions—at the funeral services for Clifford, and in court, when Alice had told her version of what had happened that night. Joanna had not approached her or spoken to her either time. The ugly memory of Clifford’s assault and the horror of what had happened subsequently were still too fresh in her mind. And she could hardly suppose the woman wanted reminding of her loss, in the form of the one who had killed her husband.

Still, decency did dictate a call before they left Galveston. If they ever left Galveston. She had begun to wonder if they’d ever be ready. So much to be done, and redone; so many details, so many delays.

The weather grew hot, and hotter still. “Unusual for Galveston,” Lieutenant Price would say, mopping his brow with his kerchief.

The gulf breeze withered in the heat and died, leaving a flotilla of ships frozen into immobility in the harbor. Work on the wagons slowed very nearly to a standstill, and supplies for which they waited did not come.

So, on a day when even the passing hours seemed to hang suspended, too wilted to move along their way, Joanna dressed in her “severest” dress and went to see Alice Montgomery. She would not have been surprised if Alice refused to see her altogether. But the little colored girl who answered the door—unfamiliar to Joanna—said, “I’ll see,” and disappeared into the shaded confines of the house.

Joanna waited on the veranda, behind a curtain of bougainvillea, and in a short while Alice herself came through the screen doors.

“Joanna,” she said, “this is such a surprise.”

She looked—well, different, Joanna thought, though she wasn’t quite sure just in what way. Her first thought was that Alice was already going to pieces; you heard of women doing that when they lost their husbands. A wisp of hair had escaped from the tightly coiled bun atop her head; in the past, a fidgeting hand would have been continually trying to put it in its place, but Alice appeared oddly unaware of the miscreant. Her face was bare of the customary rouge and powder. She looked, in fact, frowzy.

At the same time, though, she seemed completely unharried. Her smile, while it was still hesitant and shy, was less strained than it had appeared before, and her eyes, for the first time since Joanna had known her, seemed to look out of her face at you and not around some invisible corner. Indeed, were it not for her black outfit and the widow’s weeds pinned to her bodice, Joanna would never have suspected the woman was so recently bereft, and she found herself wondering if perhaps the widow had been consoling herself with some sherry.

“I felt,” Joanna said, “that I had to come see you before we left Galveston. We owe you so much, and, of course, there’s what happened....”

For a moment, Alice looked at her as if she didn’t remember exactly what had happened. “Oh,” she said, looking far less embarrassed than Joanna felt. Unexpectedly, she said, “I was just sitting in the garden—it’s so much cooler. Would you like to.... No, no, of course, you wouldn’t.... Let’s just sit out here on the veranda, why don’t we? It gets just as much breeze as the garden anyway. If we had any breeze—though I swear, you can’t get the air to move even fanning it. Eliza, bring us some nice cool lemonade, won’t you? You will drink some lemonade, Joanna?”

“Yes, that would be nice.” To cover her confusion, Joanna asked, “Is that a new girl?”

“Yes, the other one ran off—a whole passel of them did, right after Mr. Montgomery’s accident. I expect they thought there’d be no one to come after them. Lord knows, I don’t mean to, not in this weather.”

“Ran off?” Joanna was surprised. In South Carolina, a runaway slave was enough to rouse every man in the county to pursuit. Most of those who tried were caught, and the punishment was brutal, but that had never stopped an occasional effort.

“Oh, they’re going in droves, people tell me. It’s that Mr. Lincoln and his talk of freeing them; it puts ideas in their heads. Leaving good homes where they’re treated like royalty, and like as not they end up eaten by the Apaches. I don’t know where they think they’d go—Texas is Texas, from one end to the next, is what I always say. Oh, here is our lemonade. Doesn’t that look cool and delicious? Eliza, dear, give Mrs. Harte the glass with all that ice you were so extravagant with.”

Joanna took the proffered glass with a polite “Thank you,” and sipped on the cool liquid. The ice, large chunks of it, tinkled and glittered in the dappled sunlight. It was strange—with everything else, she had all but forgotten President Lincoln, and the threats of war between the states. In that regard, at least, Lewis had been right: All that seemed so far away.

Or it had, until she’d been reminded. But the peculiar thing was, so far as she knew, they had lost no slaves.

“Now, Joanna, I want you to know, I harbor no bitterness. You did what you had to do, protecting your husband and all; any woman would have done the same thing, I’ve told I don’t know how many people already. And after what happened, too. I don’t wonder you were half out of your mind. Why, I think that I myself would have.... Well, what’s done is done, I always say.”

Joanna was astonished; she had never suspected the woman sitting opposite her of any grace in concealing her feelings.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “It has been preying on my mind, the thought that you’re alone now because of what I.... Will you be all right, Alice? Have you family?”

“Oh, back in Georgia, what’s left of them. I think I told you, I come from Savannah, but it’s been so many years....” She paused, looking beyond Joanna, beyond the bougainvillea, her eyes suddenly dreamy and young-girlish, as if for a moment she had shed a great many of her years. “I was fourteen when I married.”

“That’s very young.”

“My papa was a gambler. He gambled away everything he had—his money and his horses, and the stock, and even his home. Finally he had nothing left to gamble away but his daughters.” She sighed and gave her head a shake. “Fourteen. I swear, I don’t even remember what it was like being that young, it might have all happened to some other girl.”

It came to Joanna out of the blue that this woman wasn’t concealing her feelings at all, that she really did harbor no regrets at what had happen. If anything, she was close to feeling grateful, though not even to herself could she admit that. Clifford Montgomery had been a brute of a man; life with him could hardly have been pleasant, especially for one little more than a child when she married.

Joanna felt a pang at some of the unkind thoughts she had had of this woman. No wonder she’d been so glad for some company. And what loneliness of the spirit, what unhappiness, had that tiresome volubility masked?

At the same time, she found herself wondering: Suppose.... Suppose things had ended differently, that it was Lewis who had been killed, not Alice’s husband. That came very close to happening. Would she be feeling relieved, grateful, set free? Had she unconsciously wanted her husband killed that night? It was a cruel charge to bring against oneself, and in its wake left obligations, debts, duties that inevitably bound you all the more tightly to that other person. There were things you must make up for, things you wouldn’t want left weighed against you in the balance.

But then, what did one owe oneself? Something, surely.

Alice was speaking, her voice easy and light. She was not a woman given to introspection, Joanna knew; quite likely Alice had not paused to reflect upon her feelings. Joanna found herself hoping that never happened.

“If there’s anything you need...,” she said aloud. Alice had made some mention of money; the exact statement had slipped by her. “Anything we can do....”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Mr. Montgomery was a careful man when it came to money. And his business partner—his former business partner, that is to say; I still have trouble remembering—has made me a generous offer.”

She smiled and for the first time Joanna realized she must have been exceptionally lovely, that fourteen-year-old girl, virtually sold into slavery by her gambler father.

“You know,” Alice said, looking suddenly as pleased as if she’d managed it all herself, “I really never expected to be an independent woman.”

There was a problem with the second wagon. Intending to travel from Galveston to San Antonio in the comfort of a carriage, Lewis had arranged for only one driver, William, who had driven their carriage in South Carolina. The other slaves in Texas with them were maids and household servants. Stable and field hands had been sent on the overland trek.

William, gifted with a coach and four, balked at handling the cumbersome prairie wagon. “I don’t know nothing about no oxen,” he asserted. “It’s completely different.”

“I don’t see how you could know that without even trying,” Joanna argued, without real conviction since she herself didn’t know either.

“I just know,” he said with stubborn dignity, and would not be budged.

Lewis, of course, blamed her, and seemed to relish the difficulty—it was she, after all, who had insisted on a second wagon for the slaves.

“I say, let ’em walk, the way I planned to begin with,” was his solution.

Joanna brought the slaves together to ask if there were any among them with experience handling a team. There weren’t, and none either, it appeared, eager to learn. She coaxed and questioned, pleaded, and finally threatened to leave them all behind to fend for themselves in the unfamiliar city, a threat that produced tears and consternation, but no positive results.

Joanna was about to concede that Lewis might have been right after all—but she couldn’t let her people walk to San Antonio like cattle, she just couldn’t—when their cook, Lucretia, asked to talk to her. She wanted to know if Joanna had found a driver yet for the slaves’ wagon.

“No,” Joanna admitted. “William could, I’m sure—it can’t be that much different—but convincing him....”

“I can get around that William,” Lucretia said confidently. “That man does anything I asks.” She paused, glancing sideways, and then back again directly at Joanna. “Far as that goes, I expect I could learn to drive a wagon easy enough. Don’t look to me like there’s anything to it.”

Joanna stared at her in surprise. Her efforts to locate a driver had been directed primarily at the men among the slaves. It hadn’t really occurred to her to approach the women. The caste system among the slaves was as rigid as anything known in the East. House slaves simply did not put their hands to outside work—they would have considered it demeaning—and as head cook at Eaton Hall, Lucretia had reigned pretty much as the queen bee among the household slaves. Lucretia was the last person she would have thought to turn to for a solution to her problem.

“I have a feeling,” she said, “that you’re preparing to negotiate a deal.”

“I don’t know about no negotiating.” Lucretia’s sly glance belied her innocence.

“But there is something you want?”

“Mr. Harte, he says a slave is entitled to what he gets, and that’s all.”

“Which I suppose, is why you came to me and not Mr. Harte.”

Lucretia took a while answering, and when she did, it was to make a seemingly unrelated remark. “Folks say...the slaves, they been saying, this here Mr. Lincoln, he’s going to be freeing everyone one of these days soon.”

“He says that he means to, yes,” Joanna agreed, more puzzled than ever.

“What do you suppose is going to happen, to us, I mean, to the colored folk, when they is all freed? Who’s going to take care of us if we don’t belong to nobody?”

“Why, I don’t know. I suppose....” But she had no ready answer; it was a question she simply had never considered. People talked about what would happen to the South, to the great plantations, to the whites—and she had been as selfish as anyone in that respect, hadn’t she? Even when secretly, silently, she’d agreed with Mr. Lincoln that men ought to be free, she hadn’t really thought about how the freed slaves were to fend for themselves in a society that could no longer afford them.

“Reason I ask,” Lucretia said, indicating that she, at least, had been giving thought to the question, “is, Papa John, he been saying when he gets to this San Antone...”—she put the accent on the first syllable, giving the city an exotic, foreign sound—“...he says, from talk he hears, we’ll be owning half of this here Texas.”

“I don’t think it’s quite that much,” Joanna said, smiling. “But it is a large piece of land, certainly, more than I can even imagine, to tell you the truth. But I still don’t—”

“I been thinking,” Lucretia went on with what sounded now like a well-rehearsed speech. “If we had just a small piece, William and me, just a little land of our own—I don’t mean a garden plot like we had at Eaton Hall, I mean our own place—why, we wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen to us, do you see? I mean, if this Mr. Lincoln, say, he was to free us, why, William and me, we could just get married like we been wanting to do, and the two of us, we could just look after ourselves. And our children, too. And besides, we’d be right there, wouldn’t we? There’s nothing to say we couldn’t go right on taking care of you folks, too, at the same time. It seems to me, anyway.”

She stopped and took a long breath, watching her mistress with a look both hopeful and wary, lest she’d gone too far. It was difficult to know, even with Mrs. Harte, who was different from the rest, who’d gone so far as to allow education for some of her slaves. Even with her, Lucretia made a point of pretending that the education hadn’t “taken,” talked a pidgin English intended to reassure that her intelligence was no threat.

Joanna, too, was thinking, indirectly, of Lucretia—of her intelligence, of her education. She had known the woman all her life; they were somewhere near the same age, though she didn’t know Lucretia’s exactly. And why don’t I? she wondered.

Lucretia had worked in the kitchen of Eaton Hall when Joanna married. Joanna wasn’t even sure now whose idea it had been to include Lucretia in her own rudimentary lessons, but she had taken pride in the fact that Lucretia could read and write, accomplishments unmastered by most southern white women.

Yet, she realized she didn’t know her cook at all, not as a human being. She’d had no idea of Lucretia’s dreams, her longings, her aspirations; hadn’t even known of her involvement with William.

Why, I’m as bad as the rest of them, she thought. These people are invisible to me, as if they were nothing more than household furnishings. A chair you might know was handsome, or valuable, you might even notice that it needed dusting, but otherwise it was something you took for granted, used for your convenience and comfort, kicked when you were angry—threw away, perhaps, when it no longer suited.

Like Lucretia, standing here, holding herself empty. She realized how often they did that—you looked at their eyes, not into them, as if there were nothing behind the surfaces; your voice echoed through them, the way it did when you spoke in a cave. Only there was someone in there, someone listening, holding her breath, waiting for the bear to move on, or at least settle down to sleep.

For a moment, on the heels of this self-discovery, depression threatened her. I’m not nearly so mature as I thought, nor so bright, she berated herself.

But self-abasement was simply another excuse, wasn’t it? It’s all right to do this, so long as I whip myself for it periodically. I shall punish myself for them, and feel justified in my sins.

No, I shall have to do better, she told herself, and smiled at the apprehensive woman before her. “Yes, I do see,” she said. “I can’t promise you, you know, what we’ll find when we get to this San Antonio, but certainly there will be land, and plenty of that. And I can promise you, some of it will be yours, yours and William’s, to do with as you wish.”

Lucretia stared, her eyes searching; she gave the impression of someone looking out for a trick, some catchphrase that would take all the good from what she had just heard.

Then a great, wide smile burst upon her face, and in her eyes, too, like sunlight splashing on the surface of a pool.

“That would be mighty nice,” she said, and Joanna had just the faintest inkling that something had changed in Lucretia’s speech, a discovery that came and went too quickly for her to seize upon it. “I’d best get William started with that team,” Lucretia said, “if I’m going to learn to handle it by the time we start out.”

“Whenever that may be,” Joanna said ruefully; but at least one problem was solved, in a way that she could feel good about.

* * * *

Then, as if it were overnight, their time in Galveston had vanished, the frozen days melting into a pool of yesterdays. They would be going soon—any day now—tomorrow....

And now, Joanna found herself longing for some of that time that had so recently hung on her hands. Every moment seemed short of its appointed duration; the hours sped by. She heard conversations in broken fragments that barely penetrated her consciousness; her days were kaleidoscopes of fleeting impressions:

“...Not a damned darky fit to.... Have your things moved tomorrow for loading, this is.... Doña Sebastiano, how nice to know.... I’ve been invited to ride with.... William Horse, Lieutenant Price says we...were part of the Haisini Confederacy, and besides that.... Dammit, I know they were fourteen trunks, Joanna, are you trying to say...? Mr. Hansen owns a general store in San Antone...has an average rainfall of...plenty of room, and I don’t want to travel from...sunup, or before, we can get several miles ahead of the...sunbonnet? But it’s so ugly, I can’t.... Ride one of these, the saddle is so much bigger than...better than...harder...faster...almost...tonight...tomorrow...today....”

* * * *

“...Now,” the lieutenant was saying, while Joanna took a last, sweeping look around—Gregory, sitting rigid beside his father in the driver’s seat of the family wagon; Jay Jay, forbidden to ride with the Indian, William Horse, glowering petulantly from the seat beside William in the slave wagon. Melissa was with the Sebastianos in their wagon, though for herself Joanna could not see much to choose from between the Sebastianos’ wagon and their own.

“Where’s Jay?” Lewis asked.

“He’s protesting the world’s refusal to see things his way,” Joanna said. “Never mind, he’s with William and Lucretia, he’ll be all right.”

“Riding with the niggers?” Lewis asked, but Joanna ignored him.

“All set?” Lieutenant Price asked.

“Have been, dammit, for half an hour,” Lewis said, and got only a polite glance for his trouble.

“Yes,” Joanna said, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Yes, I believe so.”

“Well, then....” The lieutenant nodded, and gave a signal to one of the horsemen at the front of the long column.

A moment later the call came back, from wagon to wagon, like an echo bounding off their canvas roofs—“Let’s move out!”

Joanna climbed up beside her oldest son, taking a tight hold of the seat as Lewis got them off to a jerky start.

“We’re on our way,” he said. His laugh was high and giddy, like a child keyed up on nervous energy.

He was not the only one. In all the wagons, people were laughing or talking loudly. Voices shouted back and forth, and toward the rear of the train, someone was singing “Did you ever hear of Sweet Betsy from Pike?” in a bawling, off-key baritone. “Crossed the wide prairie with her husband, Ike....”

Like syrup dripping from a spoon, the tight ball of wagons and horses and oxen spun itself out slowly into a long, thinning strand across the flat Texas earth, stretching, stretching, until you expected actually to hear the snap of the thread that held them.

At the head of the train, one of the cowboys suddenly gave a nasal yell—“Ahhh-haaa, San Antone!”—and larruped up his horse. Behind him others took up the shout. Horses galloped, and the wagon drivers whipped their animals to a brief burst of speed as well—pointless, foolish even, but spontaneous and exhilarating.

The dust rose up from the ground in raucous clouds, and the cries came and went:

“San Antone! Ahhh-haaa, San Antone!”