Dust Devil by Parris Afton Bonds

was only too willing to lay there as he moved about the room — gracefully, leisurely, but with purpose.
    From the firepit in the room’s center drifted the mouthwatering odor of roasting mutton. The blazing pinion logs painted red shadows on the plain white walls. Above the fireplace were indented shelves where blue candles burned in their tin holders. Her gaze strayed upward to fasten on the cinnamon-colored shafts of pine which held up the low ceiling. These vigas carried with them the memory of forests—Irish forests—and Rosemary shut her eyes. Ireland. She should have stayed there. She had been foolishly willful to come to a strange country, to a strange man, and hope to make a home.
    Stephen with Magdalena. My God, the girl was only ten or eleven! No wonder so many children came and went in the Castle, both boys and girls. She recalled the strange look she had often caught in the children’s eyes. She had thought it merely the aloof attitude of Mexican and Indian children... but it had been the haunted look of fear and confusion. Why had she been so blind to what was going on in her own home?
    She opened her eyes to find Lario standing above her, watching. "You knew?” she asked.
    He hunkered down and spread another blanket over her. "It gets cold at night this high up.”
    "You knew!” she accused this time.
    "Should I have told you, Senora — that your husband likes children?”
    "Why — why do they stay?”
    He shrugged. "Hunger. Shelter. Their parents owe money. There are many reasons.”
    Lario rose before she could ask more and went to kneel at the fire. When he returned to squat before her, he had a bowl in his hands. Wordlessly he spoon-fed her as if she were a child. The mutton was delicious. When she finished the last bite, he stood up. "I will stay the night in my mother’s lodge,” he said as he crossed to the jarra and filled a gourd with water. "You will be safe here.”
    "You aren’t going to take me back?”
    He knelt at her side and offered her the gourd, saying, "That is for you to decide, Senora .”
    Over the gourd’s rim her eyes challenged him. "And if I don’t want to go back—what will you tell my husband?”
    He smiled.   A tantalizing smile that stopped her breath in her throat.  "That the Senora could not be found.”
    She tossed beneath the blankets throughout the night. There was the rattle of the wind like sleet upon the dead leaves of the tree-branch roof to keep her company, to echo her rattled thoughts.  At last, exhaustion drained her and she slept a deep, dreamless coma in the bed of her childhood enemy.
    When morning came, Toysei was at the hogan’s door with a bowl of corn mush for Rosemary’s breakfast. Behind Toysei Adala hung back like a shy doe. The girl had delicate brown skin with soft, brown, long-lashed eyes. "Lario is in the mountains with his brothers,” Toysei said without preamble. "He will return tonight.” Then the two young women were gone.
    The dust storm grew worse that day, yet a surge of restlessness agitated Rosemary into escaping the hogan where she was plagued by Lario’s unseen presence. The sight of his possessions—an anvil to one side of the doorway, his bedroll on the other, the leather vest on the wall peg—distracted her from the decision she must make.
    Muffled in the Indian blanket which she kept drawn up over her mouth and nose, She left the hogan to walk under the aged, wind-distorted cottonwoods. She followed the wagon-rutted path that led downward to the plateau rather than upward where she might encounter Lario or his brothers.  Her bruised and cut feet, which she discovered had been anointed during the night with some kind of healing balm, were still tender, and she winced all too often when not careful where she stepped.
    Just where would she go? She could return to Ireland. Stephen’s gift, her golden earrings, would buy her passage back there. She could never return to her aunt’s dominion, but perhaps she could