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~Valentina~
She was still murmuring the last few words of the Lord’s Prayer, her small silver crucifix cold between her fingers, when shouting voices from the street outside the chapel rose above the noise of the windy night and distracted Valentina. She pulled her rebozo closer around herself as she knelt before the alter of the chapel, watching the guttering flames of the candles as they struggled to survive in the drafts that leaked from the chapel’s deteriorating roof. Rain would leak in later, after the storm. She had smelled the storm in the wind earlier, and knew she would just have time to pray before her aunt Dolores would grow worried about her. But now, judging by the shouting, it sounded like there was an additional storm beginning outside in the streets of the town, a storm that would inflict gunshot wounds instead of hailstone damage. This chapel had seen both types of storms before. The storm that had battered the tiles off the chapel roof one year ago had occurred the same night her uncle had been shot. She and her aunt had found him the next morning in the doorway of the chapel. Broken roof tiles had been scattered across his belly and stained with his blood, blood that had leaked from the bullet wound in his chest. They had helped clean up the chapel's storm damage before they buried him.
Valentina focused her gaze on the sputtering candles again so she would not look up at the damaged corner of the ceiling. The men who had come to help clean up that morning had washed her uncle’s blood off some of the tiles and put them back on the roof. Her aunt refused to come back to mass now. But Valentina liked the chapel, and death was present in all corners of the world. She came here to think about the next world, and she had thought about it long enough that neither storm frightened her any longer.
The shouting faded into the distance, and Valentina ran her fingers along the beads of her rosary again. Her mother had given it to her before her death years ago, and it reminded her of her mother’s faith. Her mother had wished for her to become a nun. Valentina smiled, because the pain was gentler now. Mama had been afraid when Valentina had wanted to learn about the herbs that Mama's older sister kept in clay jars on her shelves, and when Valentina had wanted to go with her aunt to help harvest snake venom. Their local priest’s eyes had narrowed at the mention of her aunt’s gift of curanderismo, and her mother had shushed her, but Tia Dolores had held Valentina’s hand, stared in her eyes, and pressed a root into her palm. Even years later, through many seasons of learning to be a curandera, that root was still nestled in her pouch. It was a promise, a symbol of faith in the same way as the rosary.
Valentina was about to slip the rosary back into her pouch when the chapel door opened. It was opened quietly, the only noise she heard was the hiss of the wind as it traveled through the doorway. She kept the rosary in her grip but also closed her hand around the knife at her belt as she turned. The door shut, clanking softly, and in the dim light of the candles she tried to identify the figure who’d entered the chapel. “Who is this?” she asked softly in Spanish. Perhaps it was only one of the women who came to clean the chapel. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to use the knife in her hand and cause more blood to spill on the stone floor of this holy place.
A man cleared his throat, and she tensed, but he replied in her mother’s language. “Senorita, I’m sorry I’m disturbing your prayers, but I need to shelter here. Got some of the townsfolk after me. You should probably leave, in case they come in here to look, so you’d be out of the way of the gunfire.”
She felt calm as she digested his words. The man sounded calm as well. She reached out with her prayers, with her faith in the grandmothers before her who had been healers, who had listened to stars before they’d listened to saints. “You need shelter because you are injured?”
His breath hitched in surprise at her assertion. “Yeah. I’ll be fine,” he said, his voice low.
She decided to stand up then, and let her hand leave the knife at her belt as she lifted a candle. The light was feeble but it let her see the man’s eyes. His gaze was fixed on her hand, on the rosary wrapped around her knuckles as she held the candle, on the silver crucifix brushing her wrist. “If you are fine, why did you come in this chapel?” she challenged.
The man grinned, but she could tell he was in pain. “I need to atone for some sins, thought maybe I could escape and pray at the same time.” He raised a hand from his side to make the sign of the cross across his shoulders, and Valentina saw that his fingers were red with blood.
She asked a silent question, and heard her answer from the storm, from the stones on the stoop of the church where her uncle had died, and saw it in the smoke from the candle. “I am the answer to your prayers, senor. Come with me now. I am a healer.”
The man didn’t move. “No, I would put you in danger.” He still spoke in her native tongue, but she could see he was an Americano. He looked away from her, then switched to English, still keeping his tone hushed. “Get out of here!”
“You pray, but do not have faith that your prayer is answered?” She stepped closer to him, feeling her peace flicker with annoyance.
The light from her candle let her see his face tighten. “They never have been before,” he said curtly. “Go. Get away from here.”
The shouting began on the street again, closer than it had been before. Close enough she could hear the words, “Check these buildings!”
The man’s hand fell to the gun on his hip. Then he swayed, his hand leaving the gun handle and reaching out to the back of a pew to steady himself.
Her serenity left her and she let it be replaced by frustration. This man might be acting more honorably than most, but he was still as stubborn as most men she had met. He would soon be as dead as most of the men she had met in her life were now, if he did not listen to her. She pushed past him and opened the door of the chapel, the wind blowing out her candle. “A man came in here, into the chapel,” she called out in the language of her father, in English. The men in the street stopped and looked at her in the gloomy light of the evening. “He saw me and ran back outside. I think he went west, down the street.”
One of the men in the street swore, and one yelled out, “What’s that? Who are you? Boys, she might be lying.”
Valentina let the chapel door shut behind her and stepped out onto the street. “Valentina Beck.”
The man closest to her in the street grunted in recognition. “I just saw your father at the Rose Palace.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Well tell him to come home, it’s going to storm.” The man would do no such thing, of course. No one told Augustus Beck what to do.
Valentina turned around and slipped into the chapel again, shutting the door firmly behind her. No one told Valentina Beck what to do either.
In the light from the candles on the alter, she saw that her fugitive was still standing upright, and she saw he had managed to draw his revolver. It was pointed at her now. “Valentina Beck? And your father was at the Rose Palace? Senorita, I think your father shot me a few minutes ago.”
“Did you shoot him?” she asked, hating herself for hoping her father was dead, because her mother would not want that. Her mother would keep the peace in her heart. But her dear Mama was dead because of him, so she let the hate for him and the hate for herself mix into her voice.
The man – a kid really, maybe a year or so older than her – stared at her. “No, he shot me in the back, nicked me in the side, I think. I know I’m bleeding, but it was a poor shot. He had my whole back to aim at.”
She nodded slowly. “That sounds like him.”
“He was cheating at cards, and I called him out on it. He got up, left the table. Next thing I know, I’m running for my life. No one stood up to challenge him.”
“He owns this town. He might not have the greatest aim, but he will keep shooting everyone in the back until they’re afraid of him.”
They were staring at each other now. Valentina didn’t look at the gun he was pointing at her, just at his face. There was suspicion in his eyes. “Why would you have helped me?” he asked. “Hell, why did you help me? You just told those men I was gone.”
“You didn’t want me to be in danger. I didn’t want you to be in danger either,” she answered. “We are not our fathers, are we?”
The fugitive let his revolver drop, then he holstered it, still holding her gaze. “No. No, we’re not. Senorita, I should go now.”
Valentina let her gaze flicker down the length of him, from his eyes to his boots. She knew she would have made a horrible nun. The only flaw she saw in this man was the blood dripping from the wound in his side, running across the fingers he had pressed to his wound, droplets plinking against the stone floor. “Why? You’re hurt. I think you’re bleeding too much to run right now. You’re safe here, and I am a healer.”
He jammed his hand harder against his side, trying to stop the flow of blood. “You’re naïve, Senorita Beck. I’m not safe here, and you’re not safe here with me.”
“Fine, I was wrong. None of us are safe until we die and see Heaven,” she told him. “Do I sound naïve now?”
A ghost of a smile moved his lips. “Alright,” he said softly. “Valentina, I’m Billy. William H. Bonney. You can put that on the gravestone if I end up safe in Heaven, if you can’t stop this blood from leaking out of me.”
~Billy~
He knew the bullet wound wasn’t horribly bad, but he also knew that he’d seen men die from wounds that didn’t seem bad either. Hell, he could look back at how his own family had died and know that his reckoning with the Almighty could occur at any time.
“William H. Bonney. You can put that on the gravestone if I end up safe in Heaven,” he had just told the girl, Valentina. Most of that statement had been bluster, he could admit to himself, to cover his own fear. Part of him doubted there was a God now, and that part of him, the part that remembered the eyes of the men he’d killed, hoped that there wasn’t anything after this life except sweet oblivion and a chance to forget. Another part of him knew his Ma’s faith was strong enough to drag even his sinful soul out of Hell and into Heaven.
God, why was he thinking of death now? He usually didn’t think this much, even in the past when he’d been pretty sure his ticket had been punched. Maybe it was because he was in a chapel, with a girl who glowed like she had a powerful connection to something otherworldly. She’d said she was a healer, and he didn’t doubt her. But her eyes had his mother’s faith in them, and it made him want to run, because those eyes made him remember death.
He took a step away from her, just to see if he could run, and nearly collapsed on the floor. Suddenly she was beside him, pushing her shoulder up under his arm to keep him upright. Well, if there was one thing the women in his life had taught him, it was that women were stronger than anyone ever assumed. He let himself lean on her until his vision cleared.
“There’s a back room, through the door behind the altar,” she whispered, grunting as she pushed him forward. “Our priest died of consumption a month ago, he used to sleep back there. I think the bed is still intact.”
Even priests died. At least priests had a congregation to pray for their souls, parishioners to mourn them. The words of the song filled his mind, “Where there's not a soul that will care for me, Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie.” The pain in his side rose with the song in his mind, and he stumbled against the doorframe of the back room as his legs refused to work.
Valentina drew in a deep breath. “Good, there are spider webs,” she said, or at least, he thought she said. It didn’t really make any sense to him, so he hoped wasn’t getting delusional from the blood loss. He got his legs back under him and moved to the bed, biting back a cry as she helped him sit down on the narrow cot. The girl reached into the corners of the room and under the bed, and opened her hands to reveal clumps of cobwebs. “We need to get your vest off, take off your shirt, let me look at the wound so I can use these,” she instructed firmly.
“What? How – what are you doing with those?” he stuttered, wishing he had the wherewithal to make some kind of sarcastic comment as she pulled his vest off his shoulders. Or a flirty comment, anything to make him feel more like himself and not so vulnerable. But his mind was consumed with confusion and trying not to pass out.
She was pulling open his shirt now, gently moving the bloody pieces of cloth that were sticking to his torn skin. “Get all the – please get all the cloth out,” he muttered. He’d rode with a Civil War veteran last year who’d told him stories of how bullets had carried pieces of soldiers’ uniforms into the wounds suffered on the battlefield, and how surgeons knew now that the cloth particles in the wounds needed to be removed or the wound would fester. He didn’t know how much this girl knew about current medical practices.
“I just want to stop the bleeding right now,” she told him, and packed the spiderwebs into both the bullet’s entry and exit wounds. “Hold them there while I get some bandages,” she ordered, and he moved his hands to cover hers. She slipped her hands away while he continued to apply pressure. Out of the corner of his graying, blurry vision, he saw her lifting up her skirt and ripping strips from her underskirt for bandages. The use of spiderwebs was confusing to him but something kept him trusting her.
After the bandages had been wrapped around his middle to hold the spiderwebs against his wounds, the girl sat back on her heels and wiped at her forehead. There were smears of his blood across her cheek, and staining her fingers. Billy leaned his head back against the wall as the room spun, and waited until he could breathe easier before saying, “Thank you.”
She was looking in her pouch, but glanced up when he spoke. “You’re welcome. Just don’t move right now, or else it will be for nothing. Give the spiderwebs some time, then we’ll clean out your wounds and I’ll get the herbs I need.”
“My Ma must have sent you,” he said without thinking. She looked up again at him, her dark eyes intense. He looked away. This girl was so direct and matter-of-fact in the way she spoke that he couldn’t help but think of Kathleen.