The Unionville Chronicles

Fifth Canto

 

Once Unionville had been by miners forsworn,

The spirits there could prey in peace

Until a new religion came to settle

Among the bushes, mines and springs that flow.

A golden cross, his chest adorned,

His shoulders warmed by his own lamb’s fleece,

His skin rough and charred like a wooden kettle,

A pious man brought a herd up from Mexico.

 

Don Alejandro Francisco Costa del Dolor

Had never been so far North before

But he built a ranch house with tiled floor

For himself and his daughter, Twyla Flor.

 

Above the new ranch Crow soared on warm winds of hope.

Behind stone corrals, skulking Coyote plotted

While Wolf and Fox ignored prayers that Jesus Christ heard.

The deer and rabbits named hope for hay in their own rites

While Don Pancho trained horses and tithed to the Pope.

He grazed cattle, horses and sheep on land the state had allotted

And read to his daughter from God’s holy word

By lamplight through winds that enveloped their nights.

 

Twyla Flor was sincere when she prayed on bent knee,

Fifteen years old and a beauty to see.

She saw a world in which angels inhabit each tree

Through clear eyes the color of mountain mahogany.

 

In his youth Don Pancho had fled the troubles of men

Into the arms of a ranch daughter he’d made his wife.

She’d taught him patience, uprightness, hard work and belief.

Before leaving as she bore his one child.

But he prospered in her family’s homestead in a Mexican glen-

Raising sheep, cattle and Twyla was his whole life.

The vaqueros he hired brought nothing but grief

So he sought civilization up North in the wild.

 

There Don De Dolor, worked, worshipped and worried

With an eye on his daughter til his vision was blurry.

Where nothing was needed and nobody hurried,

And mines lay abandoned and spirits roamed furry.

 

Near the middle of the valley was a hot mineral spring

Coyote, Fox and Wolf met there about once a moon

To answer mutual grievance by reason or fang

And to count each one’s share of creation.

Once the ranch was established you could hear coyote sing,

By the bubbling sulfur of the spring, a rhetorical tune

That if they didn’t act soon, their hides would soon hang

As a gang from the pious don’s station.

 

But Wolf, in his might, feared no man as master

And the rabbits Fox ambushed must surely be faster

Than the don, or his daughter who stayed where he cast her,

So Coyote, alone, planned for them a disaster.