For that ten days she had let the men slide, since she had not a single trained assistant. Not that many of her clan would not be trained. Indeed, many of the young men had already gone off to train with the regular army. But they would stay in the regular army. She had the rest; those too old or those too young. And she had the women and girls.
After the ten days she had called in her sons. These she made platoon leaders. She figured, not without reason, that sons were used to obeying fathers and so based her chain of command fairly strictly on lines of clan seniority. The only notable exception was her foreman, Tomas Herrera, whom she put in charge of some of her own and all of the few residents of the area that had no blood or marriage relation whatsoever.
Digna passed the battery where her girls sweated under Edilze’s lashing tongue. That’s my girl, her grandmother thought. Such a treasure. Digna spurred the horse over to the drill field — ordinarily a flat cow pasture by the quebrada, or creek. There, the men — most of them — drilled on one of the simpler tasks, weapons maintenance. She had no time for close order drill and, given that the clan was already, in the nature of things, a remarkably cohesive unit, didn’t feel the need anyway.
Doffing his straw hat as a sign of respect, an action much more meaningful than any formal military salute, Tomas Herrera walked up and stood by Digna’s horse. Herrera was short and squat, with a brown face tanned to old leather. Muscles rippling his arms and torso told of a life of hard toil.
“You found your grandson, Dama?” he asked.
“I found the twerp where I expected,” Digna sneered. “Flat on his back and drunk as a skunk.”
Tomas smiled broadly. It never paid to balk the Lady, and blood relation would not save a man who deserved it from a lashing, be it from Digna’s tongue or her switch.
“There is one in every family,” Tomas observed consolingly. “You put him in the pit, I assume. How long?”
“As boracho as he was, I figured it would take him a day and a half to sober up. And another day and a half to realize he was being punished. Three days seemed sufficient, Señor Herrera.
“How are the others coming along?” Digna asked, eager to change the subject from one so distasteful.
“Well enough,” Tomas answered. “We’ll start marksmanship tomorrow.”
“The ammunition?”
“Not counting the five hundred rounds per man we have salted away, we have about one hundred and fifty rounds per rifleman and roughly twice that for the light machine gunners. It is enough to at least get them to point their rifles in the right direction and scare whatever they’re shooting at,” Tomas answered. “And we have over a thousand rounds for each of our two heavier machine guns, not counting the six thousand we have in the reserve stocks.”
Digna nodded her head resignedly. It really wasn’t much. But that was all they were going to have for the nonce.
“It isn’t so bad, Dama,” Tomas offered. “These are good men, in the main, and most of them solid campesinos who know how to shoot already.”
Dismounting, Digna offered the reins of her mare to Herrera.
“Your family, Tomas?” she asked with real concern.
“Well enough,” he answered simply. “My wife has taken charge of feeding. The girl is serving the big guns. Both my sons are off with the army. The wife of the eldest is assisting my wife, though my own wife never ceases her finding fault with the girl.”
“Mothers are like that, with their sons’ wives,” Digna answered with a smile. “Ask any of my daughters-in-law.”
Tomas simply chuckled, then turned and led the mare to a cashew tree footed by long sweet grass. Digna, meanwhile, turned her attention to the clusters of old men and young boys dotting the pasture.
“You’ve got to slap it hard, Omar,” she told one fourteen-year-old struggling to replace the stamped receiver of his Kalashnikov.
Taking one knee next to the boy she took the rifle and, deftly placing the curved piece of metal in the right position, delivered a short, forceful slap that knocked it into position. With one thumb she pushed in the detent button on the rear of the receiver to release it and handed both sections back to the boy.
“You try it now, again, just like I did, Grandson.”
Resting the rifle in his left hand, as his grandmother had, Omar placed the upper receiver onto the lower, holding the upper in place with his left thumb. Then he delivered a slap akin to that given by Digna. The upper receiver was knocked immediately into place, the detent — driven by the action spring — popping through the square hole in the rear.
“Thank you, Mamita!” the boy said.
Granting her descendant a rare smile, Digna rumpled his hair and continued on down the line. As she went she offered encouragement as needed, and — rarely — a bit of praise. Sometimes she stopped to provide more “hands on” instruction, though in this she was rarely harsh.
The reason she was not harsh was not immediately obvious. It was not that she was not naturally harsh; she was. But, in the circumstances, what her family needed to see was confidence, and confident people rarely showed harshness except with the most deserving.
Of course, anybody who was really confident, in the circumstances, was either drunk or too stupid to even begin to understand what was about to descend on the Republic of Panama and on the Earth.
Digna knew there were no grounds for confidence; she had seen the films of some of the off- and on-world fighting during her time at OCS. Inwardly she shivered as she wondered, perhaps for the thousandth time, if she would be able to save even a fraction of her blood from the enemy’s ravenous appetite. She wondered, too, if she would be strong enough, harsh enough, to make the sacrificial choices she knew she would have to make when the time came.
And who will I choose to live, if it comes to that? My sons, whom I love, but who are too old to bring forth more children? My now-barren daughters? Do I pick the girls to save or the boys? Do I pick myself now that I can have children again? Do I pick myself and live, maybe for centuries, with the knowledge I let my loved ones die?
God, if there is a God… and if you are listening, I am going to have some very choice words for you for what you are about to do to me and mine.
Scowling, Digna pushed the sacrilegious thought from her mind and continued on her way. Reaching the end of the pasture she came to a ford at the creek. This she crossed nimbly, hopping from rock to rock. On the other side she scrambled up the muddy bank and continued along a well-worn path to where she had ordered the mess facility set up.
The smell of roasting meat hit her before she ever saw the calf turning on the spit. As she walked nearer, near enough to see fire and smoke and pots and pans, other smells caressed her nose. She detected fragrant frijoles; savory sancocho, the “national dish” of Chiriqui; frying corn tortillas, thick and fat-laden.
One of the younger girls nudged Señora Herrera, Tomas’ wife, as Digna approached. The head cook passed to the younger girl the ladle with which she had been stirring the sancocho and turned to greet Digna. The woman, shapeless and worn now, had once been a great beauty. But the only remnants of that now were to be found in her granddaughters.
“Que tal, Imelda?” Digna asked. What’s up?