(twenty years before Will gets back so about 1866)
Rosa was putting bread in the oven when the dogs started barking. Barking dogs was not something she normally bothered with. In fact, it was the only reason she tolerated the beasts. They had to be fed but they did warn the family when visitors approached, which was a comfort when her husband was away from the farm. But this barking was more fierce, more urgent than normal. There was something wrong.
A banditos?!
The children!
But before she could rush out the door, her son Carlo ran inside.
“Momma, come quick! Something has happened to Senor Galvez!”
Rosa closed the oven door and rushed out after her son.
Mario Galvez was half sitting, half lying in the middle of the front yard, surrounded by her four children. Maria was helping him drink from the cup that always hung by the water pump. When Rosa got close, the children parted, and she stopped, unable to move forward.
Mario was covered in blood: his shirt, his hands, the front of his pants were all smeared in red.
Rosa rushed to his side and knelt down.
“Senor Galvez, what happened? Are you hurt?
She searched for wounds, for torn clothing but could not see anything other than all that blood.
It took a moment for Mario to respond, he was breathing so heavily. He must have run the five miles between their homes.
“No, Senora, I am not hurt. But we must get help. Someone has killed my family!”
Rosa sat back onto her heels, her hands over her mouth in shock as tears pricked her eyes.
“Yolanda!?” she asked.
“Yes, and Lourdes, Consuela, and Eva Tirado, too. But my children! My children are all gone!”
Then Mario dropped to the ground and wept, his eyes shut as tears streamed down the sides of his face.
Rosa tried to blink away the tears. Yolanda was her closest friend. They had grown up together and gone to school together in Santa Maria. Yolanda’s family was much better off than her own, living on a large farm just outside of town, but that never mattered to Yolanda. Rosa lived in town with her mother, her father having died in the war with the Americans in 1847, when she was very young. It left Rosa’s mother to raise her three children alone, taking work where she could with other families. That is where she had first met Yolanda. Rosa’s mother did laundry for the Malave family and took young Rosa with her when she was old enough to be of help. Rosa would frequently find excuses to find Yolanda, and her sister, Lourdes, so they could visit the horses in the pasture or get sweet concha from the kitchen.
Rosa looked down at Mario, who had put his arm over his face to shield his eyes from the hot mid-day sun.
She had never liked Mario. He was a rough man and much older than Yolanda. Rumors were that he had been a hired gun in his past after he lost his job at the docks in Veracruz. He was a smooth talker and had married her friend before she had even turned eighteen, running away so that her parents could not protest. Rosa never understood what Yolanda saw in the man, but she never said anything to her friend. She was madly in love with him, at least at the start. But Rosa had seen the bruises, typically handed out in one of his jealous rages when he had drank too much. Yolanda always had an excuse for him: “He works very hard and the girls can be too loud when he is trying to rest” or “His dinner was cold when he got home. What man wants to eat a cold meal.” It didn’t matter that he would come home at all hours of the night and expect a hot meal.
Could he have done this terrible thing? she wondered.
Maria touched Rosa’s shoulder, taking her out of her reverie.
“What should we do, Momma?” she asked.
“Carlo, go get your father. He told me he was going to mend fence in the back pasture. Rapido!” Rosa said, clapping her hands together. “Maria and Pedro, hitch up the wagon. We need to take Senor Galvez to town.”
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