Shadows on the Land: A Novel of the Rio Grande Valley

By James M. Vesely

Shadows on the Land is the third and final volume of the Corrales Valley Trilogy. The story resumes near the turn of the twentieth century, and follows the final tragedy of the Bonneau brothers and the coming of age of Gaetano Perna.

After being wounded in the trenches of France, young James Parrish returns home to marry lovely Emily MacKenzie. They move a small herd onto Corrales land and put down roots as the first Anglos in the village. With the help of her husbands grizzled cowhands, Emily learns the ranching business.

In the 20s and 30s, bootlegging and racial hatred impact upon the people of the village. Little Rueben, the lame son of Amos Apodaca is helped by the infamous Al Capone, while Gaetano Pernas son, Santo, runs afoul of the ruthless Chicago gangster. The Parrish ranch is the scene of murderous vengeance as the Ku Klux Klan spread their message of hate and fear throughout the Southwest.

Finally, there is the shock of Pearl Harbor. Young friends Joe Apodaca and Holt Parrish find themselves swept up in the horror of the Bataan Death March, while Holts younger brother, Lee, pilots a B-25 over the jungles of Burma, and crippled Rueben is an awed eyewitness to the dawn of the nuclear age in the desert wastes of Alamagordo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 22, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469778518

James M. Vesely

James M. Vesely has written "Seasons of Harvest," "The Awakening Land," "Shadows on the Land," (THE CORRALES VALLEY TRILOGY) "Journey," "Unlike Any Land You Know," (NON-FICTION) "Coon Creek," "Lonesome Whistle Blow," "Cadet Gray," and "Creature." Jim was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife now live in the small, rural village of Corrales, New Mexico, just outside Albuquerque. Jim is a member of the Western Writers of America.

Book preview

Shadows on the Land

A Novel of

the Rio Grande Valley

James M. Vesely

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Shadows on the Land

A Novel of the Rio Grande Valley

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by James M.Vesely

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic,

or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping, or by any information storage retrieval system,

without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse.com, Inc.

5220 S 16th, Ste. 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

Shadows on the Land is a work of fiction based on fact.

Aside from actual historic figures and historically factual events,

all other names, characters, places, and incidents are either

products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 0-595-13799-7

ISBN: 978-1-4697-7851-8 (e-book)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

PartTwelve

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

Epilogue

This book is for Mary—who makes it all worthwhile.

Preface

Shadows on the Land is first and foremost a novel.

Book III of the Corrales Valley Trilogy, a multi-generational story of historic fiction relating the origins and history of the small New Mexican village of Corrales over seven hundred years.

The Apodaca, Bonneau, Perna, and Parrish families, as well as others whose fortunes the story follows are fictitious, as are their individual parts in the historical events described.

Much of the book is fact and some is fiction. In following the history of the settlement’s people through the centuries, I have tried to set them among individuals and events that either did exist, or reasonably might have. Occasionally it was necessary to invent historical detail, or even whole occurrences, to further the narrative.

With a wide range of characters, and with historical events and timelines as a broad canvas, Shadows on the Land dramatizes not only Spanish and Indian, but later immigrations of French, Italian, and Anglo families into the small farming community along the Rio Grande.

In general, the records of Spanish conquest and everyday life on the frontier of New Mexico are plentiful—but in particular, any written history of the Village of Corrales is virtually non-existent. Prior to the early 1820s, there is little recorded of the village, except for the original grant of land to Spanish Corporal Francisco Montes Vigil.

Montes Vigil came up the Rio del Norte in 1692, a soldier in the army of re-conquest—led by Captain General Don Diego de Vargas—and later conveyed the grant to Captain Juan Gonzales, whom both history and Spanish records recognize as the founder of Corrales.

Aside from the meticulous recording of the land grant and an interesting census taken in 1870, little is really known about day-to-day life in the settlement’s very early history. Much of the knowledge of what occurred in the Corrales of the 1800s lies buried with the viejos—the old ones—beneath the soil of the camposanto near the old historic Church of San Ysidro.

Of the many fictional families in Book III, the Apodacas, Bonneaus, Pernas, and Parrishes, all have quite common names related to their national origins. The derivations of these family names, and in the case of the Apodacas, the specific hereditary trait of clubfoot have been entirely invented for the purpose of the story.

Every place on earth, no matter its size or significance, is captive to the turn and tide of history. Corrales is no exception, and the story often ranges far from the small farming village nestled in the valley of the Rio Grande River to follow those critical events which ultimately affected the community, as they played out in the larger world.

Finally, if portions of this novel are not as history actually occurred—they are how it may have easily happened.

James M. Vesely

Corrales, New Mexico

February, 1999

The author wishes to acknowledge the following for their assistance in the research of this novel: Evelyn Losack for her gracious interview and eyewitness account of Corrales history. Barbara Pijoan, Martha Trainer and Marvin Schmaltz for their help, as well as the Corrales Historical Society for access to their archives. Don Harkins and Clyde Dyar, for their invaluable help in securing information about the 490th Bomb Squadron in India and Burma, and finally my good friend and lunch companion, Larry Kaliher, for all his input over the years.

PartTwelve

A Coming of Age

1

By early spring of 1893, the Bonneaus had not only become respected leaders among the tiny, but growing French community in the village of Corrales—but they’d made a mark for entertaining on a grand scale.

All their guests, male and female, knew and whispered of Julian and Pablita’s indiscretions. But as long as the food was well prepared and the brandy flowed freely, as long as the big house across the river was useful for establishing influential contacts or negotiating profitable business deals among Albuquerque’s prominent and powerful citizens, the Bonneaus were held in favor.

It was only when young Paul Bonneau, ten years old, left his boarding school in Pennsylvania and traveled west by train to spend another summer with his parents that their lives began to crumble.

As he was growing, Paul had become aware of his mother’s weakness for brandy and of her many male friends. And although still unsure about the ways of men with women, Paul had also taken note of his father’s special arrangement with their housekeeper, Dora Gallegos.

One early summer morning, alone in the house with the boy, Dora grinned and chucked young Paul Bonneau under the chin, wondering out loud how far the fruit might fall from the tree—

Perhaps someday we shall find out, eh, niño? She suggested in a mocking manner that both angered and puzzled the boy. Maybe one day when you are older—

My friends call you a dirty puta, the youngster interrupted. A bad woman who has corrupted my father, and ruined my mother’s life—I wish you would go away and leave us alone.

She’d turned on her heel and slapped him hard across his face. Spoiled little bastard, Dora spat. You’ll know not to speak to me like that.

His face red and stinging, the boy began to cry. Dora grabbed him by his shoulders, slapping his face a second time and shaking him as if he were a troublesome puppy.

Disrespectful brat—little bastard, she repeated, striking young Paul again and again until he broke from her grasp and ran from the room. When I tell your father what you said, she shouted after him. He’ll whip you even harder than that.

Some time later, Paul Bonneau came back into the kitchen. Dried tears streaked the boy’s cheeks. He was shaking in both anger and fear and carried his father’s Winchester rifle.

Dora Gallegos stood on a chair with her back to him as she hung bunches of drying grapes from the kitchen’s vigas. The boy crept silently back into the room and it was only as Dora heard the clack of the rifle’s lever action chambering a round that she turned. "Mi Dios, haven’t I taught you a good enough lesson, mocoso? What bad manners are you up to now?"

Leave my father alone, the youngster sniffed as he leveled the carbine and squeezed the trigger. The sudden blast echoed throughout the thick-walled adobe house—causing the startled dogs to bark and whine with tails between their legs, and the chickens to run about, flapping and squawking out in the yard.

The bullet took Dora Gallegos just below her left breast, blowing her heart to pieces and sending both her and the chair tumbling over backwards. She struck the floor hard on her back, already dead, mouth open and eyes staring.

I didn’t mean to do it, the boy cried out, dropping the Winchester and bolting from the room. By this time, Julian Bonneau and his daughter Julia, who’d been picking apples in the orchard, dropped their baskets and raced for the house.

Across the river in Albuquerque, Pablita was just waking up in the bed of her latest lover—a gambler, pimp and tavern owner named John Mitchell.

With an odd, pale pallor and light gray eyes, Mitchell had come west in hopes of making a fortune playing cards, and luck seemed to travel with him. John Mitchell wasn’t rich but he’d made enough money to open his own saloon, The Circus, on Albuquerque’s Railroad Avenue, and to run a small string of whores. He bought hundred-dollar suits from a San Francisco catalog, cultivated a thin, blonde mustache and favored stylish bowler hats.

Neither Julian nor the county sheriff had any reason to doubt young Paul Bonneau’s insistence that the shooting was accidental. And although she kept up properly solemn appearances, whether it was an accident or not, Pablita was overjoyed that her husband’s mistress was dead and gone. If she could have devised some way to accomplish it without being caught, Pablita thought, she herself would have murdered the bitch years ago—not out of jealousy, for she no longer had those feelings toward her husband, but only to see him angry.

Pablita had no misconception that Dora’s death would bring Julian back to her. Indeed, she no longer wanted that. Both had long ago accepted a strange sort of half-life, in which they were together, yet apart, and neither wished to see it differently. Julian would soon find another woman to share his bed, Pablita was certain, and it would matter not a bit to her—as long as he didn’t bring the next one home to share their house.

2

No different from his neighbors in the crowded tenements along Taylor Street, Frederico Bacino refused to feed and shelter anyone unless they worked to earn their keep. He himself suffered backbreaking ten-hour days in one dirty factory or another. Largely unskilled and illiterate in English, Frederico took whatever work he could get and labored hard at it. He was not a man destined to become wealthy, but neither did his kitchen lack food on the table. The three children of Frederico and Rosa Bacino—two girls and a boy—had died in one of the earlier cholera epidemics that had seemed to sweep through the city every summer.

They would have been your cousins, Aunt Rosa sadly told Gaetano. But we lost all three in the same day.

I remember mother telling me when I was a little boy, you must have written her.

Auntie Rosa could only nod, her eyes fixed, and her mind focused on the memory, the horror that robbed her of her children. They were well at noon, she whispered. And then their little bodies were taken to the lime pits that very night.

She took Gaetano’s hand in hers and patted it, smiling slightly, as if she wished the boy to understand. Your uncle is not a bad man, but he has been hard and bitter ever since that day.

Gaetano nodded. How could anyone not mourn so great a loss? As his Uncle Frederico wished, he would be happy to work and contribute what he earned, but he soon learned there were few good opportunities for a ten year-old Sicilian boy in Chicago.

At first, Gaetano was hired as a newsboy, selling the Chicago Tribune on the corner of Harrison Street and Wentworth Avenue, but he soon discovered his territory was only as secure as his fists could make it. Newsboys were everywhere it seemed, fighting one another for certain corners or profitable locations. Gaetano was small, and up against an older boy, soon lost his fight for Harrison and Wentworth.

Seeing others do it, he began hitching rides on horsecars, hanging off the wooden running boards and yelling Extra! as he waved the paper in front of the car’s crowded commuters. Just to satisfy his own curiosity and growing sense of confidence, Gaetano avoided stealing a ride on the same car more than once a week, and by the time his quota of papers were sold he’d usually find himself in a different part of the city.

After six months, the boy found he could earn much more by shining shoes than selling papers. His first and only steady customer of the day was at 122 Taylor Street, where he’d shine the shoes of the only man in the neighborhood who could afford such a luxury—Signor Carlo Ulizzi—as the Don smoked a cigar and took his little cup of morning coffee.

After this, Gaetano would take his supplies and leave the Italian ghetto. He’d either go on foot or use a portion of Don Ulizzi’s generous tip to buy a fare on the horsecars, traveling into other areas of the city that catered to other men with money to spend on luxuries and convenience.

Over and over, from Aunt Rosa and others, Gaetano heard stories of the great fire which had swept over Chicago in the early fall of 1871. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the charred results of the disaster could still be seen in some still-undeveloped areas.

The fire had leveled the central business district but did not destroy many of the things that gave Chicago its name of Queen City of the prairies. The stockyards and new packing plants on the city’s South Side survived, as well as the eighteen trunk lines connecting Chicago to the nation. Twenty miles of wharf remained intact, as did lumberyards, mills along the river, two-thirds of the city’s grain elevators, and that part of the factory district west of the O’Leary barn. The great fire only slowed the stubborn growth of the city, and by 1880 a new cycle of expansion and development had begun.

The newly developing First Ward business district was profitable for a shoe shine boy, but not nearly as profitable as another area of that same ward—although one of decidedly lower ambition—bordered east and west by Clark and Dearborn, south by Polk Street and north by Harrison. Frequented at one time or another by men at every level of wealth and power in Chicago society, this was the notorious district known as The Levee.

Crossing himself and asking God to understand his need to earn money, Gaetano would think of his mother’s horror and Padre Cascio’s certain disapproval each time he entered the neighborhood.

Here, in one small area, existed no less than thirty-seven brothels—including the infamous dipping houses—narrow closets in which victims were set upon and mugged by pimps or toughs. On his first day in The Levee, Gaetano counted forty-six saloons, as well as pawnshops, peep shows and dirty, narrow streets filled with thieves and pickpockets. He learned some of The Levee’s houses charged their customers a mere twenty-five cents, while others, such as those run by Carrie Watson and the well-known black madam, Vina Fields, were much more elaborate and expensive.

More and more, this was the world in which Gaetano found himself. A world of easy spenders who tipped generously and who were easily sold on a shoeshine. It was in the back room of Andy Craig’s Tivoli Saloon that Gaetano earned the most. There, in addition to the whores offered for sale, rat baiting was the attraction of choice.

Admission to the bloody fights—pitting a small dog against large rats—ran from a dollar, if the dog faced less than five of the sharp-toothed rodents, and up to five dollars, depending on the number of rats. For a time, dogs against raccoons had been popular sport at the Tivoli, but the rats were so numerous and easily found in the alleyways that they became the preferred game. Andy Craig paid small boys even younger than Gaetano to catch them, at a rate of seven cents a rat.

The dogs were always feisty little terriers of one sort or another, trained for six or eight months before being put in the ring to fight. A good rat dog, Gaetano was to learn, could kill a hundred rats in less than an hour.

The fighting pits were unscreened boxes, with zinc-lined wooden walls, eight feet long and four and a half feet high. At the matches, Gaetano was allowed to work, with five percent of his earnings going back to Andy Craig. The boy could usually count at least a hundred betting spectators—men who looked as if they came from all walks of life, making up purses starting as high as two-hundred dollars or more.

Aside from its crude entertainment and ever-present whores, the average Levee saloon was not a purely evil place. It was true that these establishments were scorned by most respectable women, and that family-oriented businesses avoided locating next to them. But it was also true that during the Panic of 1893, it was

Vina Fields, as well as a host of other Levee madams and saloonkeepers that fed and housed the destitute. It was well known that Salvation Army girls made their biggest collections in saloons, and working Andy Craig’s Tivoli, as well as a number of others in The Levee, Gaetano Perna never failed to come home with his pockets full of coin.

By the cold, sleet-gray New Year’s Eve of 1890, with the heavy winter snows made dirty from the chimney soot of countless factories and mills, over a million souls lived in Chicago. Most of them immigrants, it was more than a hundred percent increase over the city’s population just ten years earlier.

Gaetano grew as Chicago grew. He made close friends—most of them other tenement boys his age. At his Aunt Rosa’s insistence, he went to Sunday Mass at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Pompeii, which was the center of everything in the city’s Italian ghetto.

In the heavy, dark, and oppressing gloom of that ornate and vaulted cathedral, surrounded by the sweet smell of burning incense and accompanied by the monotonous drone of the ancient Latin Mass, Gaetano faithfully said his rosary. He prayed for his mother’s well being in far-off Sicily as well as asking God and the Holy Mother to understand that a shoeshine boy could earn more money in saloons and brothels than he ever could on Taylor Street.

After Mass on Sunday, when he wasn’t working the city, Gaetano and his friends might wander its streets and neighborhoods. With a little money in their pockets, they marveled at the sights and wonders Chicago offered.

In a similar tenement, three doors down lived a boy only a year older than Gaetano—Nicolo Carravette, who’d immigrated, with his family, from the small village of Fabrizia in Italy’s southern bootheel. Nicolo had a reputation of being tough, and the two boys once battled over newsboy’s territory. Being bigger, Nicolo won the day, but Gaetano fought so long and hard against him, the older boy soon became Gaetano’s constant companion and closest friend.

In 1892, the city’s streets were a choking mass of pedestrians, carts, wagons, and horse-drawn streetcars. Sidewalks were crowded, paving was scarce, and most streets were muddy. Ambitious promoters devised the construction of an elevated line to lift Chicago’s commuters above the crowded confusion of the streets on rails supported by a forest of heavy steel girders. Service began on the morning of June 6th, and the following Sunday Gaetano, along with Nicolo and three other boys, took their first ride on what would later come to be known as the El.

The ride was a three-and-a-half mile stretch of track running from Congress to 39th Street. It ran above the alley between State Street and Wabash Avenue—a route putting its riders at eye-level with the second story windows of buildings along the tracks. On that early Sunday morning, the boys were entertained by small bits of domestic drama usually hidden from the eyes of passing crowds.

"Gesu Cristo, guarda— Gaetano suddenly heard Nicolo gasp as the elevated car rumbled and rocked along its way. Look at that!"

Through the second floor open window of a tenement, an unsuspecting young woman was standing naked before a mirror, brushing long thick hair that fell about her white shoulders and framed her pale breasts.

At the speed they were going, Nicolo Carravette had been the only one lucky enough to see her. When he told the rest of them, each boy knelt on the slippery woven cane seats and eagerly glued their eyes to the passing buildings in hopes of more such fortuitous sightings.

Them were the biggest tits I ever seen, Nicolo pronounced later, with the arrogant boyish pride of someone privileged to witness something the others had not.

Yes, and the only ones, Gaetano teased his friend, to the hoots and laughter of the others. Except maybe for your baby sister’s little nubs.

When they tired of the novelty, the Italian boys from Taylor Street left the elevated trains to other riders, but after Mass each Sunday, they would meet—free to play ball in the streets or wander at their leisure.

But even on Sundays, for all but Chicago’s wealthy, there was no real escape from the summer’s scorching heat or the damp, bitter cold of winter. Even those like Gaetano and his friends, with the freedom to wander away from their neighborhoods, were still forced to endure the smoke and smell of the city’s factories—a choking stench which caused throat infections and lung disease.

In the German neighborhoods on the North Side, brightly lit mahogany and brass gasthauses—different from the bleak and severe Irish stand-up saloons of South Side Bridgeport—were family gathering places, with oompah bands and vaudeville-style acts, some just for children. And in the Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovak enclaves there were polka parties on Sunday evenings in the back rooms of taverns or in the big halls of ethnic clubs.

The Jews of the old, established Maxwell Street community met in small, quiet coffeehouses, and in Niggertown, the growing black ghetto on Chicago’s near South Side was the Chateau de Plaisance, with dancing, roller-skating, food and drink. The only amusement park and pavilion in the world, it proudly advertised, owned and controlled by Negroes.

Even though the downtown buildings, jammed tightly together, caused newspapers to complain about the sunless canyons of the streets, on any fair-weather Sunday, Chicago’s Loop was still a place of color and excitement.

Here the young boys could stare wide-eyed at the parade of ornate, chauffeured carriages carrying wealthy and well-dressed men and women. Gaetano recognized a few of the men from the brothels, saloons, and dives of The Levee. Sharing the streets with the carriages were unending streams of drays, hauled by massive, heavy-breathing draft horses and directed this way and that by a small army of traffic police.

Usually there were magicians in the streets as well as acrobats and jugglers. There were also men dressed as animals or clowns who went about sandwiched by advertising boards—dentist’s signs in which sets of teeth, often six feet wide, opened and closed with a loud, clacking cadence, or optician’s signs out of which huge eyes stared and sometimes winked.

Red-coated Hussars at the front doors of hotels, bobtailed horses, graceful, daring bicycle riders, a brightly-painted waffle wagon here and there, and endless numbers of peanut vendors, flower girls, and drifters hawking magazines and shoestrings at five cents a pair.

But if Sundays were a magic time for the Italian boys of Taylor Street, Mondays brought back the harsh realities of daily life and work. In May of 1893, on the morning of Gaetano’s sixteenth birthday, Uncle Frederico called the boy into the kitchen and informed him of his future.

Nephew, you are too old to be a bootblack any longer, Frederico Bacino announced. And we need more money if we are to keep you here.

It was true. Gaetano was now old enough to do a man’s work. His best friend, Nicolo Carravette, was working in the great lumber market that stretched for miles along the Chicago River. Nicolo spent ten and twelve-hour days helping to unload barge after barge of white pine planks which had come down the lake from Wisconsin. It was hard, tiresome work, Nicolo claimed, but his wage made Gaetano’s shoeshine earnings seem small and insignificant.

There are good paying jobs for strong young men, Frederico told his nephew. At the packing yards.

His uncle had been right, Gaetano thought, after collecting his first week’s wages at the Union Stockyards. The pay was good. Yet, even though he’d been raised with the farmer’s necessary lack of compassion for animals meant for the table, Gaetano’s first week of work in the killing pens of Armour and Company had been a cruel and brutal exercise.

Even though no labor unions existed—his age, inexperience and lack of seniority led Gaetano to be hired as a floater—an all-around laborer who’d work wherever needed. Gaetano’s foreman was a middle-aged German butcher named Otto Heigel, a man who wore a heavy, leather apron cracked and stained by dried blood, with forearms as thick as tree stumps. The solid German studied his dark complected, black-haired charge with a practiced and slightly disapproving eye.

Italiener? Otto Heigel asked with a raised eyebrow.

Yes sir, Gaetano mumbled in his finest broken English. Sicilian.

"Ach, shit, the foreman cursed, shaking his big head. Dago fellas sometimes don’t vork so good. How about you?"

Good worker, Gaetano answered.

Otto Heigel only grunted. Maybe, maybe not—ve see. You ever butcher animals?

Chickens and sheep—and rabbits, too.

Vell boy, these hogs and cattle not like chickens and rabbits, Otto Heigel pointed out. But ve vill see.

Gaetano’s first job was on the hog line as a sticker. He labored in the pork plant of Philip D. Armour, a building that covered fifty acres of land—only a small part of the immense and sprawling Chicago Stockyards. Here, a force of twenty-five thousand workers, mostly Poles and Irish, processed close to fourteen million animals each year.

In the holding pens, next to Armour’s pork plant, lines of doomed and squealing hogs were driven up an inclined chute to a small open door leading into the building.

The animals ended up in the catching pen, grunting and screaming in fright as if they knew what was to come. For hogs, the instrument of death was a great spokeless wheel with chains hanging from its rim. As it moved, the chains dragged on the floor—which was sticky and covered with a rank, bloody mud. Each chain had a hook at its end, and with speed and dispatch, a man fastened the hook around the hind leg of each hapless pig. When the wheel rotated, the helpless creature was jerked off its feet and into the air where it hung upside down. Terrified, the animal was carried by the wheel, screeching and squealing, kicking and biting, to an overhead railway that ran the length of the building.

Hanging by its feet from the trolleys, the hog was carried by gravity towards Gaetano, and others like him—men equipped with a thin razor-sharp blade. With a quick thrust of their knives, they cut the soft throat of the animal and a gush of blood, almost jet black, hot, and as thick as Otto Heigel’s arm, rushed out.

After Gaetano made his cut, the creature gravitated downward for ten yards, bleeding into a catch basin that preserved its contents for fertilizer. Then the bled-out hog, still twitching and often still alive, passed over a vat of boiling water, was released from the guide rail and disappeared with a splash. The scalding water softened the hair and bristles, and the pink carcass was then scooped from the tub by a rakelike device and lifted onto a table. A strong chain was then attached to a ring in its nose and the animal was pulled through a scraping machine—to emerge ten seconds later cleanly shaved from nose to tail.

The head was then almost completely severed, and left hanging only by thin gristle and cartilage. The body was hitched up again to the overhead rail where it passed over a long table flanked by a cutting gang—six men to a side—each working against time to perform a series of cuts and scrapes as the shaved and scalded carcass glided past. Hog parts flew everywhere, and each of the cutters was sprayed with blood from their head to their heels.

As the cleaned pig passed down the final stretch, it was cut down the middle by expert splitters with the halves pushed into enormous chilling rooms—thirty or forty acres of them at the Armour works—where they’d hang suspended for twenty-four hours to cool and grow firm.

The entire operation, from killing wheel to cooling locker, took less than ten minutes to accomplish.

When he returned home each evening, exhausted and still smelling of meat and gore, Gaetano could barely eat his supper, wanting only to rest and fall into a deep, untroubled sleep.

He’d been cutting the throats of hogs for less than three weeks when Otto Heigel came up and jovially slapped him on the back. Jesus, boy, the big German laughed. "For Italiener Jungen, you damn hard worker. Maybe next veek ve see how you do vit cattle."

In the Beef House the following week, the method of killing was both different and difficult to stomach. Gaetano was to take the place of a burly Irishman named Jock Quinn who missed his homeland and decided to return to it. Here there were no squeals or shrill cries from the animals, and unlike the pork plant, the work was limited to a single floor, but to anyone with eyes it looked a cursed, dark inferno of blood, steam, and sweat.

Taking Quinn’s place, Gaetano was to be a clubber, and quickly found himself upon a catwalk, gripping a ten-pound sledgehammer. The bawling cattle were led up a lime-washed gangway by an old white Judas steer which a few of the Irish butchers had oddly named Old Vic—in honor of aging Queen Victoria. When Old Vic disappeared through an escape gate, the following cattle were driven into narrow chutes, one or two to a chute—penned in so tightly they couldn’t move. On a wooden platform above, the sweating clubbers who worked in their undershirts, guided the confused animals into the stalls, touching them gently with the handles of their hammers to calm them as the scent of blood was in the air.

Then, with a sudden brutality that first caught Gaetano by surprise, the shirtless clubbers lifted the great weight of the hammerheads above their heads and brought them down with a dull, crunching thud into the forehead of each dumb beast.

If the blow was well delivered, the steer collapsed in a lifeless heap. One side of the pen was quickly raised, and the unconscious animal, breathing heavily and bleeding from its nose and mouth, was hauled by a chain onto the killing beds. Here, its hindquarters were shackled, and with the press of a button the heavy beast was lifted by a steam hoist, placed on an iron railway, and sent down the line to the slitter. A man with a knife then plunged his blade into the steer’s heaving chest and in one skilled slash, severed all the major arteries. The animal was left hanging to bleed out, and then a butcher who was called the headman severed the head with two or three well-aimed blows.

In his first day on the job, Gaetano learned that if the pig men had been spattered by gore, the steer butchers would end their shift covered in it. The thick, dark blood of the cattle was slippery and almost an inch deep, despite the efforts of other laborers, mostly Negroes, who shoveled it into holes that had been cut into the floor.

The butchery was fierce and unfeeling, as quick and efficient as that of the hog factory, except here there were many lines of hanging carcasses, and instead of the dead animals being brought to the men, the men moved from one carcass to the next, working against the foreman’s clock. Each had his specialized task to perform and when he was done, another would follow with a different job. In this way, a gang of two hundred men could stun, kill, gut, scrape, clean, and cut up over eighty steers per hour.

Learning every job there, Gaetano worked in the grim, stinking killing pens for the better part of two years, alternating between the hog factory and the beef house, wherever another man had quit or turned up too sick or drunk to work.

Although Otto Heigel thought highly of him and Gaetano had come to like the rough company of his Irish and Polish coworkers, he hated the knives and hammers and blood of the butcher’s trade, but could find nothing else that paid as much.

Then late on a warm September evening in 1895, his life was to change once more. Swinging off the trolley at Taylor Street, exhausted after another hard day at the pens, Gaetano wearily trudged up the stairs and entered the small flat to find Signor Carlo Ulizzi seated at the kitchen table and drinking a glass of wine. His uncle Frederico nervously paced the floor and Gaetano could see his aunt had been crying.

What has happened? The boy asked, putting down his lunch pail. Why does Auntie Rosa cry?

Signor Ulizzi had not seen Gaetano Perna for at least a year, and the Don was impressed at how the young man had grown. Gaetano was tall with thick, black hair that he kept closely cropped, and very handsome in the dark, Sicilian manner. Two years of swinging the killing hammer had put muscles in his arms and shoulders, and he moved with an athletic grace. A far cry from the frightened little immigrante of a few years back, Ulizzi thought.

I am afraid I’ve brought bad news to you, the Don said quietly.

Taking Gaetano into her arms, his aunt whispered. My poor nephew, your mother is dead.

Mother dead? Gaetano could barely believe what they were telling him. How did such a thing happen?

She died of fever, Carlo Ulizzi explained. Just a month ago.

I was going to send for her, I was going to bring her to America.

You must sit down and listen, Don Ulizzi ordered. "Quella e la vita della via va—that is the way life goes. Your mother’s soul is with God now, and you can no longer concern yourself with her, capisce?"

Why do you say such a thing? Gaetano asked, confused by Don Ulizzi’s abrupt manner. His mother was dead. Would not any son mourn a mother’s passing?

What I tell you now, young fellow, Ulizzi went on. Is disclosed at great danger to myself.

Danger? I do not understand.

Two men came to see me today. These two work for Caló Vizzini in Sicily. They were looking for the son of Salvatore Perna, who ran away to America.

Vizzini? Gaetano was stunned. That was almost ten years ago.

These men do not forget, Gaetano, I assure you.

But how could they know I am here?

The priest.

Padre Cascio? Gaetano could not believe it.

Don Ulizzi nodded. For whatever reason, this bastard priest—and I would spit his name upon the ground if I were not in your uncle’s home—was loyal to your mother while she lived. But after her death, he accepted money to tell Caló Vizzini where you’d gone.

Frederico Bacino suddenly stopped his pacing to confront Gaetano. Nephew or no, we do not want this sort of trouble.

Be quiet, Signor Bacino, Carlo Ulizzi said sharply. You need have no fear of trouble. I have taken it upon myself to help the boy.

May God bless you, Don Carlo, Rosa Bacino offered. But how can we repay such a favor—

Signor Ulizzi shook his head and dismissed her gratitude with a slight wave of his hand. No, no, it is little enough—I have always had a special liking for your nephew. Caló Vizzini may be a capo in Partanna, but Don Ulizzi has some small influence on Taylor Street, capisce? And as I would not think to interfere with his interests there, neither would I have him meddle in my business here.

Don Carlo turned towards Gaetano and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. It is no longer safe for you in Chicago. For whatever reason that Vizzini had your father killed, it was across the ocean and none of my affair. But you must understand that you are Salvatore Perna’s only son, and as long as you are alive, Vizzini will always fear vendetta.

As well he should, Gaetano said coldly. I promised my mother I’d seek no revenge, but with her death, I am free to avenge my father.

That too, is none of my affair, Ulizzi shrugged. But to accomplish it you will need to live a little longer, and believe me young fellow, Vizzini’s men have other plans for you.

Then what am I to do?

There is a place where the boy will be safe, Don Ulizzi explained to Gaetano’s aunt and uncle. Far from here, among others who hold their own kind of power and influence, and who have no knowledge or fear of Sicilian ways—

Where is there such a place? Asked Uncle Frederico, who knew only of life in Sicily and on Taylor Street.

Gaetano will join the army. Carlo Ulizzi replied.

3

Three years after the shooting of his mistress, Julian Bonneau was pushed beyond the bounds of what any reasonable man might be expected to endure. He and Pablita were no longer content to let one another live in whatever manner each chose, and life in the Bonneau household had become a sad, continuous fight—more and more laced with embarrassment and public insult.

Julian had always considered appearances important, keeping his mistresses separate from his social life and making it a point to attend all local events either with his wife, or alone, if she was otherwise disposed.

Teofilo Padilla’s store and cantina had become the social center of Corrales. Inside, court was sometimes held, as well as numerous festivities and dances. It was at such a Saturday night dance that the feud between the Bonneaus stopped its simmering, and finally boiled over. On this particular April evening, Pablita had been drinking since early in the day, and feeling especially vindictive, she brought John Mitchell across the river to escort her to the dance.

When the couple entered, arm in arm, a gasp went through the room. The gay music of the little orchestra stopped suddenly and Julian, who’d been talking to one of his French neighbors, stood off to one side, a glass of his own wine in his hand, humiliated beyond reason.

Get her out of here, you fool, he ordered John Mitchell, his voice almost a whisper, yet cold and measured in its tone.

No! Pablita shouted drunkenly. I suffered your whore for years, and now you can suffer mine.

Woman, have you lost your wits? Julian asked under his breath.

It seems the lady wishes us to stay, John Mitchell said softly.

Shut your goddamned mouth.

If it’s a fight you want, the gambler offered. You can have it right here. Are you armed, sir?

No, but I shall be, you milky-eyed son-of-a-bitch. Tossing back what was left of his wine, Julian excused himself, and bolted out the door.

No more was seen of him that evening, and once the dance was ended Pablita and John Mitchell drove their rig back to the horse-drawn ferry, planning to return to his saloon so they might get a bottle of whiskey and have his Chinese cook serve them a steak.

Julian is home drinking cognac, Pablita suggested. He hasn’t the stomach for a quarrel.

But when Mitchell’s horse and rig were on the barge, Julian Bonneau surprised them both—stepping out from the shadows of a gnarled old cottonwood. As Pablita suspected, he’d gone home to drink, and now he was very drunk and cursing them both. In his left hand, he held a half-drained bottle of French brandy, and in his right, a .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver.

Julian swore at the couple and shot John Mitchell first.

Wounded and bleeding, the gambler stumbled off into the thicket, groaning and holding his side. Julian dropped the bottle to the ground, steadied himself and took measured aim, firing at his wife twice as she fumbled in her handbag, searching for her own small weapon.

Hit squarely in the neck and chest by the heavy bullets, Pablita Roybal-Bonneau was killed instantly.

It is all over, he told his wife, staring down at her lifeless body.

Then, disregarding John Mitchell, Julian picked the bottle up again and ran—fleeing to a nearby barn where he might rest and hide.

Reloading three rounds back into his pistol, he felt lightheaded from the brandy, as well as weary and sick to his stomach—the same sickness he’d known years before in Ludon-Médoc when he’d been forced to kill his father. There was a pounding in his head, and the mud walls of the little barn seemed to squeeze in on him. Julian shut his eyes against the closing walls and let his head fall back. He’d never allow himself to be hanged, he swore as he drifted in and out of fitful sleep—no matter how many came to take him.

Early the next morning, he woke to the crow of a rooster, shook off sleep and shivered himself warm in the chill morning air. The ache in his head was still there and he shut his eyes tight against it. He’d missed his breakfast and was hungry.

Pablita was dead, he suddenly remembered, and maybe John Mitchell, too. He’d be a wanted man now, and spending the night in the barn had been a foolish mistake. Last night he should have saddled a fast horse and rode.

As it came full daylight, more than three dozen armed men could be seen, hunkered down behind any cover that was available, forming a circle around the barn. One was Gregorio Apodaca, who felt that Julian was somehow kin through marriage. Most of the others surrounding the barn were Julian’s neighbors—men who’d known him for years and hoped he’d let himself be taken in to stand trial and state his case before the judge in Bernalillo. Some were at last night’s dance and believed no man could suffer such humiliation as he had done. All agreed Pablita Roybal-Bonneau was a whorish woman who’d gotten what she deserved and they would testify to that on his behalf.

Hello, the barn, a voice called out, breaking the hushed quiet of the morning. I’d be grateful for you to surrender your weapon and step outside. Julian recognized the voice as that of Sheriff Tom Hubble.

Hubble had been awakened in the middle of the night and forced to ride upriver, eating a cold breakfast of tortillas and beans in his saddle.

Tom, this is Julian Bonneau.

Yes, I know that, the sheriff answered.

I won’t be taken, Tom.

Well sir, Sheriff Hubble offered. John Mitchell was only bad hurt, but your wife is dead, and I mean to take you in.

Julian slumped, his back against the wall. It really was over, he told himself—just as he’d told Pablita, lying dead on the ground the night before. All of it gone. Their sad, sick marriage, the vineyards, the winery—all ended. Yet for some reason, he didn’t care. What was left of the brandy went down easy and warmed his stomach.

Moving out into the open doorway, Julian called out. Then come and take me, Tom, if you’re such a big man.

As Tom Hubble stepped out from behind an adobe wall, Julian raised the Smith & Wesson and began to shoot. His aim was drunkenly off target, and the shots went wild.

Well, I’ll be go to hell, Hubble said, ducking back behind the wall. He motioned to a half-breed Navajo who everyone knew as José de la Cruz, a more than competent marksman—even though the man only had one eye. "Indio—matar a ese hombre—kill that man."

Grunting, the Indian stood up quickly, snapping his old Henry rifle to level and firing once. The heavy .44 slug smashed into the middle of Julian’s forehead just as he was raising the bottle to take another drink. The bullet knocked him backward into the darkness. Outside the barn, Gregorio Apodaca lowered his head and made the sign of the cross.

Tome su alma a cielo, Gregorio asked God. Take his soul to heaven.

Three days after José de la Cruz killed Julian Bonneau, and due to the violent circumstances surrounding the deaths of he and his wife, the priest from Bernalillo denied them Catholic burial in the cemetery of San Ysidro. With the two children watching, and almost all of Corrales at the brief service, their bodies were lowered into unsanctified ground in the orchard behind the house.

At the priest’s order, the graves were left unmarked.

4

In his stocking feet and dressed only in long drawers, Pvt.

Gaetano Perna and another young recruit named Tim Fahey lounged on their barracks veranda. The two smoked and enjoyed the quiet of the night as it settled about Fort Bayard. Neither talked at first, two young men far from home, but only listened quietly as the distant trumpet sounded the slow notes of tattoo.

Opposite the barracks and far across the long expanse of parade ground they could see the soft yellow-orange gaslight lamps of Officer’s Row flickering pleasantly in the moonless dark. Even as the last note of the bugle lingered in the crisp night air, they heard the guardhouse sentry’s call—Nine o’clock, all’s well. That reassurance was then picked up and repeated post by post, until it had traveled the circle of the fort. It was a nightly routine that made Gaetano feel secure, a protected part of something much bigger than himself—distant from the men who’d stalked him in Chicago and the danger which would always wait across the sea in Sicily. As Don Ulizzi planned, Gaetano was now safe and far removed from the old life he’d been forced to flee.

Do ye miss yer people, then, Gay? Tim Fahey asked, finally breaking the stillness of the night. He used the softest of Gaetano’s new nicknames, the other being merely dago.

Just my mother. She died of fever in the old country but I’d hoped to bring her to America one day.

The loss of a mother was a thing to bring a tear to any Irishman’s eye, and young Tim Fahey was no exception. Aye, it would be a terrible, terrible sadness to lose one’s ma, he commiserated. But what of the other folks—them that took ye in?

No, I seldom think of them, Gaetano admitted. He was grateful to Aunt Rosa and Uncle Frederico for their kindness and hospitality, but rarely missed them and often thought that fact somewhat strange. He felt the same about the city, but that was understandable. Both life and work had been hard in Chicago, and he’d formed no lasting bond to it.

A month earlier, with the assistance of Signor Ulizzi, and once again by cover of night, Gaetano was taken from his home to await the early morning opening of an Army Recruitment Office on Wabash Avenue. Not wishing to be seen himself, Ulizzi presented Gaetano with a gift of fifty dollars cash. Don Ulizzi hurriedly wished the young man good fortune and godspeed, and left him hiding in an alley.

When the recruiter, a sergeant major, came on duty that morning, he was pleased to find a fresh fish already waiting. Gaetano was asked to state his name, age, occupation, and whether or not he’d ever served in the United States Army. When he’d supplied acceptable answers, he was ordered to strip, bathe, and prepare himself for physical examination.

This was accomplished by a short, nervous medical adjutant who wore thick spectacles and scrupulously followed the military manual:

—the recruit should be examined stripped; to see that he has free use of all limbs; that his chest is ample; that his hearing, vision, and speech are perfect, and that he not have false teeth.

That he is free of tumors, ulcerated or extensively cicatrized legs, no rupture or chronic cutaneous affection; that he has not received any contusion, or wound of the head, that may impair his faculties; that he is not a drunkard; is not subject to convulsions; and has no infectious disorders, especially venereal, nor any other to unfit him for military duty—

Once Gaetano, shivering in his nakedness, passed his examination, he was told to get dressed and was then duly enrolled, raising his right hand in the oath of allegiance. He was issued ill-fitting recruit clothing and allowed to sleep on a sagging bunk at the recruiter’s office for another three days until a sufficient number of men were enlisted and sworn in. Under the eye of a watchful corporal, they were then marched to Dearborn Street Station and told to board a land-grant railroad car destined for the cavalry recruit depot at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri.

Upon arrival at Jefferson, the recruits were given standard issue equipment, and Gaetano emerged from the quartermaster’s supply room barely able to carry his load of underwear, socks, field boots and garrison shoes, blue trousers, blouse, and two wool shirts. He’d also been issued a wide-brimmed, black campaign hat, a flat-topped forage cap modeled after the French kepi, and a dress helmet with plume for parades. The quartermaster issued him a saber and sling, Springfield carbine, a Colt .45 single-action Army revolver—along with ammunition, cartridge belt, canteen, mess outfit, entrenching tool, saddlebags, sewing kit, bridle, lariat, hobbles and picket pin, a razor and mirror, a cake of soap, a comb, two army blankets, a box of shoe polish, overcoat, a rubber poncho with a hole for his head, heavy wool gloves, a bacon can, currycomb and brush.

When he was later assigned to a post and unit, Gaetano received a pair of shiny brass collar ornaments with crossed-sabers, the regimental number 6 above and the troop letter D below.

That’s D Troop, Sixth Cavalry—Fort Bayard, the quartermaster grinned. A decent enough regiment from all I’ve heard.

Where is the post? Gaetano asked.

In the New Mexico Territory, the quartermaster told him, biting off a plug of tobacco. It’s lazy duty though. Mostly just Mexicans and tame injuns in that part o’ the country now.

Indians?

Jus’ reservation Apaches, and those farmer injuns which live along the river growin’ corn and beans.

Quartermaster Corporal Starch was a short, easy-tempered, twenty-three year veteran with only two years left on his fifth enlistment. He’d served with the 3rd Pennsylvania at Brandy Station, and later fought his Indians in Texas after the Civil War—when the Kiowa and Comanche had once again rose up singing, killing, and burning out whole counties before the government could station enough troopers there to turn back the tide of Indian war. Corporal Starch didn’t much miss the old days on the frontier, but he enjoyed telling the new recruits about them.

"They ain’t too troublesome anymore, lad, but twenny years ago, when old Geronimo and his hoodlums was about, why them same Apaches be just as happy to cook yer balls fer breakfast as bid you a fine good day. Yessir, soldierin’ was a harder row back then.

Oh, I been told there’s still a few broncos what get drunk an’ uppity now and again, Starch continued. But they ain’t the fighters they once was. You just listen to your sergeant, lad, and you’ll keep yer hair.

At Jefferson, Gaetano’s bunkmates were three other new recruits—all Irish—Timothy Fahey, a tough little teamster from the slums of New York City, Privates Liam Cavanaugh and Tommy Burke from the streets of south Boston. These three, along with Gaetano Perna, ex-hog butcher and late of the Taylor Street ghetto in Chicago, soon became fast friends.

For the first seven days after their arrival, they were given little or no military training. The four were quickly singled out for cook’s police. Assigned to kitchen detail, their first week in the army was spent carrying food to guardhouse prisoners twice each day, allowing no time for drill or instruction.

What guidance they did receive was designed to teach obedience, subordination, and a crystal clear idea of their lowly place in the army’s chain of command. One of their first lessons was the respect and absolute obedience due at all times to both commissioned and non-commissioned officers alike.

By their second week of training, recruits were doing calisthenics every morning, close-order drill by squads and companies, the manual of arms, and finally the rudiments of the care and use of equipment other than small arms. They trained from eight o’clock in the morning to twelve noon, at which time they broke for the midday meal. The afternoons were spent in policing the grounds and numerous work details.

You’ve only four hours of hard work a day, lads their depot sergeant told them. So yer gentlemen now, fer the first time in yer lives!

Like most of the other recruits, Gaetano was eager to leave the depot and be assigned an active unit. From the noncoms they’d heard the food and living conditions were better at regular posts, and as long as he remained at Jefferson Barracks, a recruit could only draw half his monthly pay, and was not really considered a soldier until he’d joined his assigned company.

By army tradition, Jefferson Barracks was a cavalry recruit depot and Gaetano should have been taught both mounted and unmounted saber drill, equitation—regular and bareback—as well as marching and the handling of pistol and carbine. But in that September of 1895, the post’s Master-Of-The-Horse, one Sergeant Major Kelleher, cursed with what he liked to call the whiskey demons, was usually too ill or too drunk to do much but lay in barracks and sleep his vice away.

When their recruit training at Jefferson was ended, the trip west by train was long and tedious. The land-grant railroads were required by law to furnish transportation to the army, but comfortable accommodations were seldom specified. Gaetano