My name is Flaka Garcia Hasani Kedar, and it’s my fault my husband is dead.
Sure, folks say it weren’t my fault, they say it was his own damn fault, but I know better. They tell me that just so as I feel better about that empty spot on the bed next to me, and so as I don’t get crushed by that overwhelming guilt when I wake up to an empty house, on top of all the other struggles of running our little patch of land in this godforsaken stretch of desert all by my lonesome. But I ain’t stupid. Oliver Kedar would still be alive today if it weren’t for me.
Oliver was a good man. I felt that the first time I laid eyes on him—the moment I saw those little crinkles in the corners of his eyelids and knew he was smiling at me from behind that bandana. He was a good man and he liked me. No. He loved me. Oliver loved me. I think he loved me the very first second he looked at me, that broiling hot day in August of 1880, when he rode onto my family’s little hacienda, scattering chickens in his wake, yelling out for help in a piss-poor mix of Spanish and English.
He pulled up by the house, clouds of dust rising around him as he hauled his big, sweaty bay to a halt. I had been on the porch, husking corn, and I didn’t stir. Perhaps I should have. Out here, you never know what’s coming when you see that rolling cloud in the distance, but something made me hold still. It were something about the way he rode that horse, like he was born up there, with that lazy, confident grace of his. I could see it from a mile away, long before he galloped into my parents’ yard.
He just stared at me for a minute, and I saw that smile in the corners of his eyes, as if he had plum forgotten whatever he had been yelling about a minute before. Then he seemed to remember and glanced over his shoulder, far off into the distance. He jumped down from his horse, tossed the reins over the hitching rail, and came dashing up the steps, stomping with his boots, his spurs jingling. I ain’t never forgot the sound of his boots thudding and that jingling, like the bells in that old “One Horse Open Sleigh” song. He came at me holding his arms out wide, as if he were going to herd me back into the house and wanted to stop me from getting past him. I didn’t feel afraid then. Somehow I felt safe with Oliver, right from the start. He walked just the same way he rode, with that same lazy easiness.
“Spreckenzie inglés?” he asked.
I laughed at that and then said, “I spreckenzie English, I reckon.”
“Oh.” His brows knitted across his forehead, just the way I grew to love so much months later, showing his confusion. He didn’t know he was mixing Spanish and German, I thought. I suppose he had as much a chance of finding a German speaker on that porch as a Spanish speaker, so perhaps he meant to say it that way. Still, I don’t think I’ve got the look of a German, with my tan skin, my brown eyes, and my wavy black hair. I noticed his voice was low and husky, the kind of quiet voice that sounds like it might break if it’s raised any higher. I think that voice of his was the first thing I really loved about him, the first thing that set butterflies fluttering around in my stomach, anyhow. It was so soft and even, like the gentle hiss of golden red embers in a fireplace on a chill winter’s night. For a second, just a second, I found myself remembering some tale my older sister Martha had read me years ago at bedtime, about a man in shining armor that had rescued a fair lady from a dragon or some such monster.