A Small Town Thanksgiving

Frustrated with my futile efforts in the garden, I went to fetch water from the stream that ran on our property. Anything to get away from the boredom and the hard work, if only for a moment.

The stream is always cool and I can take my shoes and stockings off so I can feel the water against my sweating skin.

Sometimes, when I go to the stream, I pretend I am a princess, held against my will, waiting for a prince to come rescue me and take me away to his castle in the mountains. I pretend so hard that once or twice, I thought I heard the whinny of a horse and the sound of hooves against the ground.

I am disappointed when I look to see that the sound belongs to my imagination. Or to a stray mustang running closer than he should.

There are horses here that have no masters, that run where they want to and are freer than I am. I envy them. Or I did before...

But since that afternoon, I find myself longing for the boredom of home, for the tedious labor of scratching the ground, coaxing life from the hard, dry soil. For the feeling of triumph the few times I succeeded. When you lose something, that is the time when you realize that you really wanted it and did not have the sense to value it when it was yours.

But that day, when I went to fetch the water and dreamed of princes searching for their princess, the sound of horses existed outside my imagination. They existed in the real world.

The sound belonged to the Indian ponies that came galloping at me. Indian ponies mounted with riders. When I saw them coming, I ran as if the very devil was after me because he was. Abuela and Tia and Papa all warned me to be careful, that the Mescalero-Apaches would just as soon kill us than look at us. Papa said that they thought we invaded their land. When I asked him if we had, he told me that we were making it better, but that they did not understand that. I think they do not understand that because we do not speak their language and they do not speak ours.

I was swift of foot and could beat my brothers whenever we ran, but I was not swifter than an Indian and one of the riders caught me and picked me up as easily as I could pick up one of Tia’s baby chicks.

I begged him to put me down and the rider yelled something to another rider and then at me, but I could not understand.

For the first time in my fourteen years, I thought about dying for I was more frightened than I could ever recall being.

I prayed for God to welcome me and to make my dying less painful.

* * *

LETTING OUT A long breath, Miguel Rodriguez stared at the faded ink in the worn book he had just discovered and been reading for the past half hour. The pages of the book were so dry they fairly crackled beneath his fingers as he turned them. Afraid they might tear, he was handling them as gently as humanly possible for a man with hands the size and thickness of leather catchers’ mitts.

The book was one of half a dozen or more such tattered, cloth-covered journals he had just uncovered in his attic.

He had come up to the attic driven by a sudden desire to put his house in order figuratively and literally, something he’d felt compelled to do since suffering a heart attack earlier in the year. The unexpected event had unceremoniously brought him to the brink of his existence and taught him how truly fragile life was—as if he really needed that lesson since his beloved wife had passed on all these years ago.

But with his sons Miguel, Jr. and Ramon caring for his ranch and his other four offspring volunteering sporadically whenever they had the time, Miguel found he had a lot of free time to himself now. Never one who could handle too much free time well, he decided to get busy and turned his attention to things that had long been neglected.

Things like the attic, where nonessential items far too precious to part with at the moment were sent to await a verdict about their future.

Unfortunately, “out of sight, out of mind” seemed the golden rule for dealing with the attic and he had forgotten about over half the things that had been stored up there over the years. Some he barely remembered even after having spent the past few days browsing through the storage boxes.

This particular box, however, contained the journals that he couldn’t remember ever having looked through before.

Vaguely, as he thought back now, Miguel thought he recalled his mother giving the battered old container to him more than fifty years ago, saying something about passing it on to the next generation to preserve. His mother had mentioned that they were stories that had been written by his great-great-great-grandmother, Marguerite Perez-Rodriguez.

At the time, he now remembered, he’d thought that his mother was talking about short stories, that the box contained some sort of a creative writing endeavor attempted by his long-departed ancestor.

But looking at the journal in his hand now, he was beginning to suspect that perhaps his mother had meant that they were memoirs or recollections from his great-great-great-grandmother’s youth, not some sort of stories she had made up.

Sitting here now, a lantern turned up to its maximum capacity to banish the darkness from that one corner of the attic, Miguel ran his hand along the journal’s tattered spine with reverence, as if he was touching something very precious.

For all the world, he felt as if he had just stepped into the past. A past that connected him to his family, to his roots and, in an odd sort of way, to the future and to the children who had yet to come.

His unborn grandchildren.

An idea suddenly came to him, taking hold of his imagination. The more he thought about it, the more pleased he became.

But if this was going to happen, he needed help.

Miguel sat there in the stillness and the aging dust, trying to think of who he might turn to with this, who could advise him who he should seek out in order to get started on this journey into the Rodriguez past.

And then he smiled as a name occurred to him.

For once, it wasn’t one of his children.

Chapter One

Miguel Rodriguez Jr. referred to as “Mike” by everyone but his father, frowned as he sat in the cluttered room that his father referred to as his study, listening to Miguel Sr. tell him about his latest plan, the one involving not the ranch but the ranch house.

Mike could feel his frown deepening with each word that his father uttered.

When the older Rodriguez paused because he was either finally finished or—more likely—just taking a breath, Mike saw his opportunity to register and give voice to his displeasure at this newest turn of events.

“You know, Dad, this keeps up and whenever the occasional tourist passes through Forever, asking where the local hotel is, people’ll just start sending them in this direction.”

Six months ago had seen his father inviting Valentine Jones, a movie location scout who thought their property would be perfect for her studio’s next film, to stay at their house for part of the shoot. That had turned out fairly well, especially for Rafe, but that had been a fluke. The thought of another stranger living here at the house left Mike cold.

He didn’t really mind strangers, but he wanted them in his own terms. And he did value his privacy—a great deal.

“Why are we putting up this person again?” he grumbled at his father.

“Because, as you so wisely pointed out, my beloved oldest son,” Miguel said expansively, rocking back in his chair, “there is no hotel here in Forever. The woman who has agreed to go over those diaries and journals that I found in the attic needs to stay somewhere while she works.”

Mike supposed what his father said was logical, but as far as he was concerned, it was also logical not to get in the habit of welcoming strangers with open arms. At times it was hard enough having not just four brothers and a sister, but their various spouses, moving through the house. Adding an unfamiliar face to the mix was flirting with the proverbial straw that had brought such grief to the camel and his back.

“Never said she didn’t,” Mike pointed out. “But why does it have to be here?” His dark eyes narrowed as he repeated a well-known fact. “I don’t like strangers traipsing through the ranch.”

“Once you meet her, she will no longer be a stranger,” Miguel told his son, echoing an optimistic, upbeat philosophy he strongly believed in. “And since she will be working on your great-great-great-grandmother’s journals, it is only right that she stay here. That way, if she has any questions,” Miguel explained, “she will not have far to go for an answer.”

Mike knew it was futile to point out that there were such magic devices as telephones and their brethren that could easily handle any questions that might come up. Instead, he went on record and voiced a lament.

“You know, Dad, I liked it a lot better when we were all struggling to keep one jump ahead of the bill collectors and you didn’t have time for any fancy projects that had us holding an open house. What’s next?” Mike asked. “We turn the house into a bed-and-breakfast?”

His oldest had a decent heart, but Miguel Jr. had never been accused of being overly friendly. For the most part, he kept to himself. He could be counted on in an emergency, but had a tendency to disappear when all was going well. He wasn’t one, Miguel thought now, who liked to stop and smell the roses. His first-born was more inclined to walk right over the roses because as far as he was concerned, the flowers didn’t serve any practical purpose.

“Having Valentine here did not turn out so badly, now, did it?” Miguel asked, tilting his head slightly in order to look into his son’s face. He was hoping for a glimmer of a smile. He saw none.

“We lucked out that time,” Mike countered with a careless shrug. And by his reckoning, they had run out of luck. “She married Rafe and they’re happy, I get that. But Val had said that she wasn’t going to stay for more than a week. From everything that you just said, this one is going be moving in with us until we all grow old and die,” he grumbled.

“She’s not going to be here long,” Miguel protested, “just until she has your great-great—”

Mike’s hand shot up as if to push the vocalization of the woman’s full lineage back. His patience was at a premium and that premium didn’t include having to listen to an endless repetition of the word great.