While they burn the body of this gentle, noble vaquero who sang and wrote songs and was easy-going and owned no land and had no interests other than caring for herds and pleasing his masters — he thinks:
“Ay, Lázaro, you won’t survive this! You’ll never ride again, or lasso a horse or a cow by the tail, you won’t go to the mountains, you won’t eat carne asada again, you won’t sing, you won’t play the violin. You’re going the way of the buffalo (and you were never that majestic, what a fearful creature to behold, when they stampeded the earth trembled). You’re no longer what you used to be, you’re nothing, but these are your last words:
“I want one thing to be absolutely clear: I’m no troublemaker. Leave me out of your fights, your complicated entanglements.
“And I mean it. I get what happened with Shears (I admit I was wrong to get drunk) and now this — my wrist in a handcuff, how could something so unlucky happen to me?
“I didn’t come into the world looking for trouble, I went to the jailhouse because Nepomuceno asked me to fetch Ranger Neals. But Neals had flown the coop, the coward.
“What I remember is that Urritia called me over to the cell, I went to him, he spoke to me softly; I’m old and I don’t hear so well, so I went a little closer, and he grabbed my wrist … and chained me to the bars.
“That’s why Nepomuceno’s men left without me. They tried to come break me out of there, but it didn’t work out.
“And the rest was fate, wasn’t it?”
In Lázaro’s head, in his last trace of consciousness, a violin plays, and he hears his own voice, singing what was perhaps his last song:
You can’t hear his hooves anymore,
clip clop,
poor dead little horse,
clip clop clip clop.
FIFTEEN DAYS LATER, after Nepomuceno’s camp disbands, in Matasánchez, Juliberto, a vaquero’s son who learned the violin by listening to Lázaro play — he left Bruneville “to come live in Mexico, I can’t take the abuse over there anymore”—plays under the arches of the Café Central. He sings:
You can’t hear his hooves anymore…
A boy stands beside him, watching. He’s one of the kids from Nepomuceno’s camp — he carries Lázaro’s violin in one hand, he grabbed it because it was there for the taking; he’s come to watch Juliberto and learn how to play.
The Mexican federal authorities believe they’ve done the right thing. If they hadn’t taken him prisoner, Nepomuceno would have launched more attacks, destabilizing the region. Because Nepomuceno was determined to avenge Lázaro Rueda. And he would have published more proclamations — four, five, or six more — with the help of Jones, in both English and Spanish.
Nepomuceno’s imprisonment shakes the region more than Lázaro’s lynching (he was neither the first nor the last Mexican to meet that fate).
But not the whole region.
Turner (who spoke English with a Mexican accent and ate tortillas instead of bread) celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday at his country house in Galveston, as if nothing had happened. A sumptuous feast followed by an open-air dance, they put a thirteen-foot agave with gorgeous foliage in the center of the patio and adorned it with Japanese lanterns to illuminate it.
Juan de Racknitz, German captain of the Mexican army, founder of Little Germany, got himself seriously drunk while he listened to the musicians and watched the girls he had paid to dance.
Lawyer Stealman, who is deeply involved in the region, despite the fact he’s been in New York trying to get the false property titles for Padre Island completed, spends the day triumphant. He’s finally received an affirmative response from the governor on another topic that doesn’t concern us.
The Robins realize that their profits could grow if they change their line of work. They ply judges with bribes using the money from their heist on a San Antonio bank. Suddenly they are owners of hectares and hectares, yet they continue stealing livestock. They dispute with the rightful owners, accusing them of theft, and by using judges, lawyers, and witnesses — they were well-trained by King, who had taught them himself — they became wealthy without so much as dirtying their shoes. Surely that’s a better way to make a living.
Much later they became respectable. Instead of people calling them “The Robins” they become “The Robin Family”—Texan aristocracy — but the blood of thieves, not nobility, still runs in their veins.
Don Marcelino, in his search for specimens for his plant collection, has extended his territory, going so far as to use a cart to cover more ground. He enters the northernmost point of the Huasteca region by foot.
Old Arnoldo’s tug has run aground on a reef. The sea there is a transparent emerald green. And it’s there that the soul of the old captain who steered it for decades awakens. He’s never been happier: here the sea is really the sea, sunsets open the sky’s jewel-box, the seafoam white as heaven. This is eternity.
1Refined? New Yorkers? We couldn’t disagree more. We’re quoting from her diary verbatim, and this proves our faithfulness to her text. Refined! By whose standards?
THE END.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
That’s where our story ends. But others continue:
Nepomuceno spends a tiresome, filthy spell imprisoned in Tlatelolco.
The Kids’ Brigade doesn’t break up, despite the absence of Nepomuceno and his camp; they learn to live along the banks of the river by stealing from ranches or wrangling stray livestock.
The gringos kill all of the Rodriguez brothers’ pigeons, but they don’t punish either Nicolaso or Catalino.
When Catherine Anne Henry’s novel is published in New York, the critics describe it as Shakespearian, pondering the depth of its psychological dramas and the universality of its characters. One writes that Catherine “is on par with George Sand and George Eliot.” The novel is a smashing success, everyone is talking about it.
La Desconocida leaves with Dan Print — or Dan Print with La Desconocida. They don’t cross through Indian Territory — they’re crazy in love but they’re not that crazy. They take a steamboat to Galveston and another headed to New York. En route, Dan Print finishes his story, “The Proclamations of a Great Man.” He delivers it to his editor, who hates it and requires him to make so many changes that (“Thanks to these New York expurgations and embellishments”) Nepomuceno morphs from a hero into a petty thief. (The article is finally entitled “The Robin Hood of the Frontier;” the editor is happy with the title, but the journalist can’t stand it; publication is a success; the Henrys and the Stealmans pay for it to be reprinted as a pamphlet which they give to all their family and friends for the following reasons: Catherine admires the journalist’s writing; Sarah appreciates its portrayal of Mexicans; the Stealmans admire and appreciate everything about it except the title, but that was easily fixed — in the reprint it becomes “The Red-Headed Bandit.”) Carlos the Cuban moves north, the Eagles no longer mean anything to him and the only thing he really cares about is his country’s independence.
La Desconocida and Dan Print get married, infuriating the journalist’s mother.
When Snotty figures out how to escape from La Plange (with some of the negatives of the photos of Nepomuceno) he joins the Kids’ Brigade, and a photographer is born, one who doesn’t earn a living off of weddings, funerals, and baptisms, but a top-notch photographer whose name we won’t utter here so as not to tarnish his reputation with his boring past.