Blood of the White Bear

by Marcia Calhoun Forecki

  Chapter Twelve

  As Rachel opened the front door to her condo, her purse strap slipped off her shoulder and caught on the doorknob. The tangled purse pulled Rachel back when she tried to enter her home. She grabbed the strap, freed it, and threw the purse across her living room onto the sofa. She was angry and having to fight a purse was not helping at all.

  I’m an M.D. and a Ph.D. I’ve published in JAMA and the Lancet, I’ve discovered the cure for arthritis—maybe—and I can’t even get through my own front door without something trying to hold me back.

  Rachel’s first impulse was to get a glass of wine. Then, she decided the drinks she had with Ted Fuller were enough for one night. She flopped down on the sofa and let herself fall onto her side. She lay still and felt the tenseness in her body. Rachel hated feeling this way, out of control. After a minute or two of self-pity, she pushed herself back into a sitting position. She crossed her legs, breathed deeply, and listened to the silence around her. After a few deep breaths, Rachel began a focused relaxation sequence, beginning at the top of her head and moving to the soles of her feet. Soon, she was unaware of the room around her. Her body felt like a single, soft mass, without joints and opposing muscles.

  In the darkness, Rachel imagined the desert sun on her face. She listened for and heard a strong wind high above her, as if she were sitting in a deep canyon. Rachel released her thoughts from the present and let them roam. She watched the images behind her eyes but did not pull any of them close to examine in her conscious mind.

  After a few minutes, now deeply relaxed, Rachel should have gently moved through her random thoughts back to full consciousness. Relaxed, she should have gone to bed, slept restfully, and awakened, refreshed and focused on a new day. That was what usually happened. That is what Rachel relied upon when she meditated. This night, Rachel slid down onto her sofa, pulled a soft crocheted throw over her legs, and drifted into a dream.

  Rachel felt cold, and the wind above her howled. She was tightly bound in a blanket, sitting up. Someone gently stroked her hair. Rachel’s body was cradled by strong arms. She felt much smaller than her current adult size, because she fit so perfectly onto an adult’s lap. Rachel shivered but not from the cold. She was terribly frightened. Even though someone held her, she felt alone and abandoned.

  The texture of the blanket felt strange against Rachel’s arms and legs. The breath against her neck smelled of tobacco, but Rachel’s parents never smoked cigarettes. The wind that blew around her did not feel humid, like the river wind, or salty, like the ocean wind she was used to back home. This air was dry, and Rachel could smell dust, like the back of her grandmother’s closet when she crawled in to try to catch Grandma’s kitty.

  Rachel opened her eyes. In the distance, she saw a light. It was far away from her and close to the ground. It was not a car light or a flash light. The light was too yellow, and it moved around too much. It was fire Rachel felt around her when the plane fell. She tensed at the memory of the plane falling. Then, the fingers on her hair began to move again. As Rachel felt the hand softly stroke her hair, she relaxed. This fire could not be the same one that frightened her so on the plane with her parents. This fire was too small. The fire that surrounded her on the plane was huge.

  Rachel began to relax again. Her muscles loosened, and she shivered. The blanket felt soft from her body heat, and it did not scratch at all now.

  Poor little girl fell from the sky.

  No one left to love her but the baby goat and I.

  * * *

  “I will tell you a story,” said the voice of the hands that stroked her hair. “This is the story of how Rabbit tricked Wolf.”

  Rachel wiggled in the blanket. She pushed herself back into the arms that held her. She closed her eyes and listened.

  “Rabbit said to Wolf, ‘Come and see what I found.’

  “Wolf followed Rabbit, and they walked to a stream. There was a pony lying by the stream. Rabbit said, ‘Let’s take Pony away and eat it.’

  “ ‘All right,’ said Wolf.

  “Wolf pulled on Pony’s legs. Rabbit pushed on Pony’s back. Even together, they could not move Pony.

  “Wolf and Rabbit tried and tried to move Pony. They pushed and pulled.

  “Rabbit said, ‘I will tie your tail to Pony’s tail. Then you can pull, and I will push.’

  “Wolf said that sounded like a good idea. So, Rabbit tied Wolf’s tail to Pony’s tail. The Rabbit stood back. When Wolf pulled on Pony’s tail, he woke up. Pony began to run away and pulled Wolf behind him. The last time Rabbit saw Wolf, he was flying behind Pony, bumping his head on the ground while Pony ran through the canyon.”

  * * *

  Rachel woke up on the sofa. She remembered the dream and smiled to herself at the story. She thought her father must have told her the story. He was a geologist, and he worked a lot in New Mexico. She did not remember enough about her parents. They were frozen in her mind into the images of the couple in the picture on her dresser. Her mother must have been pregnant with Rachel when the photo was taken, although she was not showing.

  Rachel was rescued from the crash site by a helicopter, or so she learned later. She had no recollection of it, but lately, she had been dreaming about the crash and of being held. She could not see that person in her dream. Was she remembering someone in the helicopter, perhaps a nurse? All she really remembered was a scratchy blanket and gentle fingers stroking her hair.

  There was no reason to try to remember events that happened before Rachel had the neurological capacity to imprint more than unclear images in her memory. Her scientific mind rejected such memories as unreliable. The best remembrance of her parents was in her DNA. She knew her mother loved the water. Rachel shared that love. Whether there was a gene for “hydro mania,” she did not know. Rachel decided to go to the river. It was very late, but after her meditation and short nap, there would be no quality sleep soon, and her mind was calm. She was in the best possible state for clear thinking. Rachel grabbed her keys and her jacket and left her condo. She rode her bicycle to a favorite spot on the river and sat under the stars and listened to the water whisper to her to “be still, be still.” In time, if she was still, the answers would come.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Valentín Bravo had been awake since just before dawn. He lay on a single bed under the window in his son’s dining room. The window faced the kitchen window of the house next door, which faced the dining room of the next house, and so on down the block of identical houses. These houses were different colors and in different states of repair. The neighborhood was old, and all the houses were owned by people in Colorado Springs. None of the owners lived in Valentín’s neighborhood. Greeley was a meat packing town. The residents were Hispanic, mostly. They did grindingly hard work, and held their families close. Many were not legal, but most had their green cards. They struggled to raise children in deep traditions, children who were pulled away from them by language and by the new, modern culture.

  The adults stayed in their vecindario, their neighborhood. They spoke Spanish, cooked the same few, simple foods their ancestors in Mesoamerica had always eaten. Some lived in the U.S. for ten, fifteen, and twenty years, and still spoke only survival English. As long as they stayed in their community, there was no need to change.

  Valentín Bravo was a newcomer. He crossed the border in 2006, hobbling through the Sonoran desert on arthritic knees. He forced himself to ration the two gallons of water he carried, although his kidney stones made him want to scream.

  He came to see his grandchildren before he died. Once in Greeley, a doctor gave him medicine that dissolved his kidney stones and shot cortisone into his worst knee. Valentín felt renewed and wanted to work.

  For the time being, Valentín’s work was caring for his son’s youngest boy. Little Aldemar had just turned two years old. Carmen was in first grade, and Daniel was in the second. Valentí
n’s son and daughter-in-law worked nights. The shift differential put an additional $1.80 per hour in their paychecks. It was too much to pass up, now that Abuelo Valentín could look after the children during the day.

  Valentín made scrambled eggs and warmed tortillas for the children’s breakfasts. He sliced an apple or a mango for them. Carmen chattered non-stop in Spanish. Aldemar ate silently, his dark eyes fixed on his older siblings. Valentín braided Carmen’s hair and tied the two uneven pigtails with a green twist tie from the kitchen drawer. Daniel wiped his little brother’s mouth and finished his milk. He already knew waste was a sin.

  As the older children left the front steps to join their friends at the bus stop, Valentín called to them. “Pay attention to the teacher. Nothing else in the class is important.”

  Valentín always issued the same advice to the nietos, his grandchildren. He learned from Carmen that the children’s classes went to the zoo, to the park, and even to the mall for field trips and community experience. Valentín thought such things were nonsense. The family could take the children to parks and malls. He had only attended school in Mexico for a few years. He and his classmates sat on rough benches and only played fútbol at lunch time.

  That afternoon, Valentín’s eight-year-old grandson, Daniel Martinez was admitted to a hospital in Greely directly from school. An ambulance parked right on the playground. All the children were taken to the school auditorium to watch a movie, so they would not see Daniel loaded into the ambulance through a classroom window. The school nurse rode with Daniel to the hospital, and his parents met him there.

  Daniel’s body temperature measured 105° F. on the school nurse’s thermometer. It was nearly 106° when he reached the hospital, in spite of being packed into bags of ice from the school cafeteria. He had a harsh cough, and his mouth was full of blood. The emergency department doctor who listened to the boy’s lungs thought he was listening to a ninety-year-old COPD patient. Daniel’s lungs were so congested, the doctor assumed he must have been sick for days. “No one gets that sick so fast,” he muttered through angry, clenched jaws. Daniel’s parents swore the boy was fine the night before. The school nurse reported that his teacher said he was all right until story time. Daniel put his head on his desk at 10:30 a.m., and when she checked him at 11:15, he was burning with fever. There was bloody saliva on his sleeve.

  Daniel was sent by helicopter to the University Hospital in Denver. He was on a ventilator by midnight. By noon of the second day, barely twenty-four hours since his first symptoms were noticed, Daniel Martinez was dead. Lung and brain tissue was on its way to the Centers for Disease Control before the interpreter could explain to Daniel’s parents that they could not take Daniel’s body back to Greeley until an autopsy was performed. In such cases, the law could step in and compel the family to consent. Daniel’s parents returned to their other children without him. Valentín Bravo prayed that night for the first time since he left the Sonoran desert.

  Daniel’s original medical chart went to Dr. Blackstock at the university. He was the chairman of the Mortality and Morbidity Committee. Copies of the chart were made for other members of the committee and for the CDC. A flag was entered into the computer record that the original chart was in Dr. Blackstock’s custody. In the original file was a drawing Daniel made in radiology. A nurse gave him the paper and a crayon to occupy him while they waited for his MRI to be read. The drawing was all in blue, the only color Daniel was given. The figure in the drawing was a squarish mask with jutting ears and slits for eyes. The face was striped across the cheeks, and a few crooked lines on the top probably stood for hair. The radiology nurse thought the mask looked like a kachina. When Daniel left radiology to be admitted to ICU, she folded the drawing and put it in the back of the chart where it remained, forgotten.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the Iglesia San Bartolomé, Carmen Martinez followed her brother Daniel’s coffin down the center aisle. She insisted on being the first one to follow him. Her parents and Abuelo Valentín walked behind her, slowly and solemnly. The white cotton cloth that draped the small coffin was embroidered with tiny red roses and yellow butterflies. Daniel’s grandmother, Valentín’s beloved wife, had done the sewing years ago. The cloth covered the coffins of the children she lost in infancy and childhood. It was used by Valentín’s other children in Mexico, who also lost babies and toddlers. Valentín’s oldest daughter sent it to Daniel’s mother, when she became pregnant with him, just in case. It is not so unusual for a Mexican family to have a shroud, to use it, and pass it on to children and grandchildren. It is a way of accepting death, of meeting it face to face. It is part of the culture, like the sugar skulls sold on the streets on the Day of the Dead.

  Valentín handed a few damp fifty dollar bills to the priest.

  “You are blessed with a loving and generous family,” the priest said.

  “We want Daniel to be with God,” the old man muttered.

  “He shall be, one day. The prayers of your family in Mexico and of your fellow parishioners here will be rewarded.”

  “Daniel should not need masses or candles or even prayers. God should see for himself that Daniel was a good boy.”

  “The prayers benefit the living as well,” the priest replied.

  “In my village, if the family had no money or if there was no priest, a baby was buried without sacrament. Later, when a priest came, masses were said, the dead consecrated, couples married and their children, boys and girls some as old as my Daniel, were baptized.”

  “Even in hard times, God’s mercy is great,” the priest said.

  Valentín did not care much for the Christian church. It was centuries since his ancestors were first evangelized, by priests who accompanied the Spanish men who brought God and disease and took everything else. Valentín thought if God were so strong, He should have come on His own and not depended on weak, cruel men to deliver Him to the people in America. Men needed a god to maintain the natural world, to keep the sun rising and the rains falling. The Spanish god served as well for that as had the old gods. The sun had risen every day of Valentín’s life, so far.

  Before the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the priest paused in Daniel’s funeral proceedings. He walked to Daniel’s coffin and stood behind it. He pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his vestment robe and unfolded it reverently. He held the paper up to the congregation, grasping it on either side and thrusting it at the people on the left, then the right, and then the center. Speaking in formal Spanish, different from the fatherly tutear he normally used, the priest said:

  “This paper is the autopsy report of Daniel Martinez Bravo. Shall I read it? Are you strong enough to hear how this angel died? Are you? It says, ‘the lungs were filled with blood.’ It says ‘the blood was black in the lungs, and the surrounding bronchial tissues were reduced to a mush.’ The cause of death was ‘suffocation.’ This child drowned in his own blood. His was not a fast death. His was not an easy death.

  “Little Daniel was only eight years old—he had not made his first Holy Communion. He had started to read, count in both English and Spanish, and kick a ball. His mother said he could sing lots of songs, and he loved to play video games, but none of that mattered if he could not breathe! And now he is dead. His chest was cut open, and they found it was filled with black blood, and yet, this paper means nothing, for Daniel is this day with the Virgin and the saints. This day! He is with Jesus Christ because his parents gave him the greatest gift parents can give their children. They brought Daniel to be baptized.”

  The priest walked across the front of the church. He pointed at people he recognized in the congregation. He called them madre and padre.

  “Madre, if your son’s body were lying in a box, would the saints be rejoicing? Padre, if your daughter—I see her sitting there—if her lungs filled with blood, would she be sitting in the Virgin’s lap? Madre, if your baby’s brain dried up and
she died from a fever, would she be with Jesus, our Savior? No, madre. No, padre. Your children are not baptized. Do you think your child can wait? Daniel survived eight years, by the grace of God. He could have been taken at any moment. Daniel Martinez Bravo went to school one day and never came home. Madres, baptize your children. Padres, baptize your children. This parish has more unbaptized children than any in the diocese. God is sending you a warning. Little Daniel is in Heaven. Will your children join him or suffer eternally in hell, alone?”

  Valentín thought the Host tasted salty. The priest’s hands were sweaty. The church was hot. There will be many baptisms, Valentín thought, as he returned to his seat. There will be many tamales and tortillas and tortas de tres leches, and cerveza. Many parties. The priest was smart to remind the people of the dangers of not baptizing their children early. Death comes as quickly for the young as for the old. It would be good to have more baptisms. Good for the children, for the people who sell the tortillas, tortas, cerveza, candles, and photographs—everything that goes with the baptism party, but the priest did not have to say that Daniel died in agony. The priest could have kept that part secret. Now, Valentín would always see his grandson with a black chest, coughing and choking, drowning mercilessly. En nombre de Dios.