Santa Esmeralda

With her eyes locked on a distant target, Esmeralda stops walking to fill her six-gun half full. To her name she has only these three bullets and twice as many silver dollars. The money won’t stretch far, but the bullets are two more than she needs to take the life of Anse Weitzel, the white man who had taken Esmeralda against her will.

Raising the weapon level with her sightline, Esmeralda flicks the revolver’s chamber closed, then rotates the loaded cylinders into place so her shots will fire true.  

Biting deep into her lower lip, she begins to walk again. Though her body aches her pace is fearsome quick. In the eyes of the buzzards overheard she looks every bit like a predator stalking prey. Not daring to circle, they simply pass her by.

The Mojave yawns mighty and solemn all around her. A line of scarlet begins to trickle down the shallow curve of her chin. As Esmeralda cuts a thin line through the interminable dirt, dusts clings to the blood on her bootheels and along the hem

of her cotton dress. All is silent but for the whispered clinking of the coins in a rawhide sack tied to her waist.

The silver coating those coins is the only precious metal Esmeralda had ever laid claim to in California. After months of turning up worthless pans of rock and water in every river bend she could find, she had retreated to the small town of Tecopa

to lick her wounds. Because they wouldn’t let a woman down the mines there, she was forced to put her dreams on hold. 

During those first few days in town, her belly stayed empty and her friends were few. Most people in Tecopa were passing through, and those who remained liked her better as a novelty than they did as a source of conversation. Though her English was impressive, she spoke with an accent that made her every word a joke to anyone who listened.

Eventually, she took up work cleaning rooms at Clarence Horton's brothel. There she found infrequent company in the other poor women who helped her scrub liquor off the floors and

wring sex from the yellowed bedsheets. They all shared enemies and a common struggle but remained divided by the private dreams that had first drawn them to this land of strangers.  

When he was still living, Esmeralda’s father used to call her blanquita because she had the lightest complexion in the family. When she arrived to clean brothel rooms and found drunks still slouched in bed, she was often confused for the white women

the men had paid to fuck. Though she was groped on a regular basis, before Anse Weitzel, it had never gone further than that.

The loneliness of the rape made the curse of her previous days seem like a blessing by comparison. Unlike the plight she shared with the other penniless cleaning girls, this new hurt was hers and hers alone. More out of annoyance than sympathy, Horton gave

her two paid days off. Once the pain between her legs subsided, a much deeper ache remained.

Strangely enough, Esmeralda’s time with Anse had seemed like a good dream right up until it turned bad. When she first entered his room, he had called her desert flower in a voice as smooth as worn leather, then invited her to come sit on his lap with a gentle wave of his hand. They kissed for a while, and he danced his fingers through her curls. If the story had ended there, that might have been her best night in the cruel land of California. Of course, the story rarely ends there. For this reason, Esmeralda had been forced to write a new ending of her own.

With twenty more paces, she completes her ten-mile journey to the gates of the Weitzel Ranch. There she stands stoic as an altar saint, feeling guilty for uncertain reasons, the way she had always felt during mass as a child.

With her left hand, Esmeralda untucks the rosary beads that hang beneath her collar. Her fingers begin to tremble as she strokes the little pewter crucifix and the string of wooden pearls worn smooth by worry. The fingers of her right hand are dead still and tightly laced around the sandalwood grip of the six-gun, which hangs heavy at her side.

Both the beads and the weapon were gifts from her mother, given in a panic on the night when Esmeralda made up her mind on journeying north. Beholding her mirror image through tear-blurred eyes, Mercedes Veda-Delgado had armed her daughter as best she could. Por los males contra que Díos puede protegerte, she told her, y los males contra que no.

As the sweat on her spine begins to run cold, Esmeralda thinks of her mother, the weary land she had left behind, and the fortune she had not found in the fallow place before her. The day’s long walk has burned her skin, cracked her lips, and stolen most of the water from her body. Barely remembering how to breathe, she raises the gun at her side. Suddenly unsure of what she’s doing, she brings its long barrel to rest on the small protrusion of her belly.

Hours ago, back in town, Doc Watson refused to take the baby from her because he didn’t like her color. Besides, he argued, the procedure would be an injustice to the unborn, for the child would at least be half-human. Esmeralda used her only other bullet to show the good doctor what justice meant to her.

Breathing in deep, Esmeralda begins to strut the horse path that runs from the ranch gates to a small clapboard house. Though the house is only thirty feet away, the distance she must cross seems infinite. As she tucks the six gun between the folds of her dress she feels the ground fall away from her feet, giving way to a bottomless chasm. She floats easily above the endless dark, but wishes secretly that she were falling.

Each halting step brings her closer to redemption and further from freedom. She will either die today or hang for her crime tomorrow. While Anse Weitzel lives above the law, Esmeralda Delgado-Veda is well within its reach. 

Breathing out, she lets the pewter crucifix fall against her chest. Her throat knots itself near closed as her lungs fill with lead. Her finger twitches on the trigger.

A few miles south, halfway down a deep arroyo, a desert lily blooms without asking or being told. Here there is sun enough to keep the flower’s petals open, and shade enough to keep them from wilting away.  If only one more rain comes, the bloom will last the summer. There isn’t a god-damned cloud in the sky, though. And the girl’s eyes are too dry for crying.