The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  “It won’t do any good, but thank you.”

  Even subscribers to the Taos News frequented El Taosenio because along with the news in print, Andy doled out what he called gossip based on fact. This is how Mister learned that Tomás had broken Rocky’s wrist. For a moment, as the rage began to boil in him, he could see nothing but the bartender’s long, yellow teeth. Then his wrinkled face came into view, and the sunken, bleary eyes. “I always liked Rocky,” he said, “even if I couldn’t sell her a drink. Tomás shouldn’t have done that. Es terrible.” The speckled feather on his hat waved sadly as he shook his head back and forth.

  That night, Mister had stepped out of the bar into softly falling snow, intending to kill Tomás. He was drunk, and when he stumbled across the plaza, he slipped and knocked his head against the six-foot cigar-store Indian that marked the entrance to Taos Tobacco Imports. “Fuck!” he yelled up at the impassive face of the wooden statue that had posed for so many tourist photos. “Fuck you, Indian, you loser!” His head rang with the bells of Our Lady, and for a moment he saw the spirits flickering like fireflies among the snowflakes.

  Earlier he had lit copal incense at Abuela’s altar, and each candle she requested—one for Leonora Cow Horn and one for her husband, Talamante; two for her mother and father; one for the husband she rarely mentioned, Arturo Romero; and one for baby Illuminada, Tomás’s twin. Mister tried not to think about next year, when he would light one for Abuela. The doctor said she had six months to live.

  “¡Diablo!” he had yelled on the Mondragón porch. “Come out and meet your death!” By the time he dragged Tomás out of the kitchen and into the snowy yard, most of the barrio had gathered on the street to watch the show. Halfway through the fight, Ernesto pulled up in El Auto and sat with the door open, in case he was needed. Mondragón had forty pounds and several inches on Romero, but no one was surprised that Mister won. When it was over, the snow, now mixed with mud and gravel and the bright stain of blood, held the imprint of their bodies, the way it had when they were boys and used to lie on their backs, spreading their arms to make angel wings.

  “Okay, okay,” said Tomás, opening up his wallet on the kitchen table.

  “Don’t give me nothing.”

  “Just a few bucks.”

  “I said don’t give me nothing.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Tomás, scooping up the pewter milagro charms that had fallen out of his wallet. There was the flaming heart with a cross, to thank God for something, an infant, for his twin sister who died at birth, and a whiskey bottle the size of a thumbnail. “Don’t give me money. Don’t talk about Rocky. Don’t talk about Abuela.” He put his head down for a moment, then lifted it. “Let me ask you one thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You think I’m drunk?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “That’s not the one thing I’m asking. What I’m asking is … shit, I forgot. You want a drink?”

  “Sí.”

  “What I’m asking is—what are you gonna do with your perpin life, ese?”

  Mister waved his hand into the shape of a gun and rested the imaginary barrel against his temple. “Pow,” he said. Then he raised his cup to the arc of whiskey that Tomás poured from the bottle, and for a brief moment, the burden lifted.

  4

  1989

  Mirror Image

  Sometimes when a person has survived susto, the Great Spirit will give him a twin to help him bear the burden of living. To the human eye, these two humans might be as different as Mister Romero and Tomás Mondragón, but who are we to question a match made in heaven? My abuela Leonora told me the Black Hac·ct´cin first made the clay people with four arms and four legs. Joined at the navel, they spun like wheels and were so happy that the sun and moon got jealous and split them apart.

  In the afternoons, when I was hanging my wash on the line or working in the garden, Dolores Cisneros would come rumbling down the road in her dusty yellow school bus, laying on the brakes as soon as she saw the Milagro Creek Bridge. The accordion door would creak open, and then those two boys shot out like bullets—one, two—Mister and Tomás.

  Mister was small and fast; his straight black hair swung across his face, and his legs flew under him as he bounded across the bridge and into our yard with a whoop that scattered the chickens. Tomás, a stocky, handsome boy, cursed with that big, crazy Mondragón heart, pounded at his heels.

  If Ramona Mondragón was on a bender, Tomás’s little sister, Yolanda, followed the boys to my house, plodding along on her stubby legs, head down. Every year, she had a new crush on Mister, but he looked through her as if she were a ghost. When she came over with her brother, I always made up a batch of my sweet, honey-colored melao to pour over their fry bread. “Gracias, Abuela,” she would say, licking her fingers as she looked at Mister with her sad brown eyes.

  In warm weather, we ate our snack on the porch so we could watch Dolores try to turn the bus around. Poor Dolores was too short to see over the steering wheel without sitting on a stack of phone books, and she hated to drive. Before she married Jesús, she wanted to be a teacher, but Jesús was an auto mechanic with an old school bus rusting in his yard, and he decided that hauling kids to school and back was close enough to teaching them. At least twice a day, when Dolores had to turn around at the Milagro Creek Bridge, she considered other suitors she might have married.

  The bridge had been there for as long as I could remember, spanning the creek that ran between my yard and the Mondragón place. Milagro Creek, it was called, for all the miracles. The first miracle was gold, discovered by the Spanish, or so the story goes. You can’t trust history. Maybe Capitán Carlito got lucky down at the creek, for the first time in his life, and the other soldiers called it a milagro. Maybe someone saw a vision of the Virgen María, or maybe someone caught a fish. All I can vouch for are the miracles I saw myself.

  The builder had dragged tall oaks across the creek, setting them about eight feet apart, and then nailed various boards across those. He may have put up rails on both sides, but only one remained, and it was shaky. Someone had shot bullets in the rusted sign that announced DANGEROUS BRIDGE. The locals knew to drive in the middle of the bridge, but they disagreed on whether it was better to drive slowly or go fast and get it over with. Dolores had covered the school bus with dents trying to turn it around twice a day, but who could blame her?

  Every day after school, Mister and Tomás met under the Milagro Creek Bridge. They owned the cold water and the cottonwoods and every bug and minnow and bird and weed and the creaking wood and the cars that rattled over their heads. They owned the patch of sky and any stars it might hold. Down here, they were God, and they went about their work with reverence: carving on the old ponderosa beams with penknives, setting snake traps, panning for gold.

  One afternoon in late September—Moon of the Corn Harvest, the Indians call it—Mister and Tomás built a small fire on the bank. I don’t know how they thought they were going to hide the smoke from me. Even if everyone in town was roasting chiles, I could smell wood smoke in my own yard. From the kitchen window, I watched the broken spirals of smoke rise over the creek bank and knew that they were Apache brothers sending smoke signals to their scouts. When I went outside, I saw that they had built the fire carefully, ringing the pit with stones and filling a bucket with water, the way I taught them, so I let them keep it. Even though I had heard the elk bugle that morning, and the weather was turning cool, the boys had taken off their shirts. With magic markers, they drew Indian picture words on each other—the sign for corn, the centipede, the weeping eye.

  “The Apache wore shirts when it was cold, like anybody else,” I told the boys, but they always wanted to be real Indians, like the ones on TV.

  I felt a chill, so I went back inside and started to make the tortillas for dinner, but my arthritis acts up when the weather turns, and I had trouble rolling out the dough. Teo was always sending me nonsense from California, pills and Chinese medicine bal
ls, but nothing works for the joints except nettles. I had a cup of nettle tea and was rolling my glass across the ball of dough when something strange happened—the floor began to shake. It started small, just enough to rattle the spoon in my empty tea cup, and then it got bigger. My glass jumped on the counter, and flour spilled onto the floor. All of a sudden, I had to grab the wall because I was being shaken like a saltshaker.

  What happened next is hard to explain. I shed my old body there in the kitchen and went down to Milagro Creek where Mister and Tomás were dancing. As I was wiping the smoke from my eyes, I realized that my thin, wrinkled hands had become Mister’s smooth, plump ones. I had so much energy! When I danced, I had engines on my feet. Tomás and I spun around and around each other, choking with laughter until we were so dizzy that we fell in a heap, still laughing and gasping for air.

  “Yabba yabba yabba!” we yelled, waving our light-as-air arms as we stomped around the fire. “Oooowaaaah,” we squawked, flushing a magpie out of the bushes. “Ooooweeee!” We threw our heads back and let our voices chime with the tinkle of thin gold leaves against the blue sky. The world whorled around us—water, sky, earth, and fire. We were the Creator and the creation, blooming in the sunflowers, dying in the snakeweed, flying away with the stars that gleamed in the black night behind us. Blessed was God!

  Tomás stopped first. His breath came in quick pants, and his chest heaved, showing the ribs outlined with red and green ink. His curly black hair stood out around his head, and a line of sweat trickled down one cheekbone and ran alongside his ear. “Say it,” he said. “Say it in pig Latin. Say, ‘I will die with you.’”

  I felt my tongue twisting around words that were inside out, like sleeves inside of shirts.

  “I-ay ill-way I-day ith-way ou-yay,” we promised.

  To seal the pact, we spit three times in the fire. With his penknife, Mister made a cut on Tomás’s arm, and Tomás did the same to us. When we pressed our arms together, we were blood brothers, and when we rubbed ash from the fire into the wounds, we wore the same scar.

  The next thing I remember, I was back in the kitchen sweeping flour and broken glass up off the floor. My hands on the broom were wrinkled and knotted with arthritis.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Ramona Mondragón turned thirty-one that spring. Afraid to die an old divorcée, she went on a manhunt that terrorized Taos County. In search of a señor, she had her hair and nails done at Shear Beauty every Friday afternoon, and by six o’clock, she was gobbling down the free buffet at the Taos Mountain Casino. From there, she hit El Taosenio, and if she had found a friend, she let him pay her tab at the Adobe Bar or Eske’s. Sometimes, she ended up at Herb’s Lounge in Arroyo Hondo, or the China Garden on the south side of town. By Saturday night she was in somebody’s trailer, and by June she was in jail. Popolo called Ernesto, and Ernesto called me. Then Mister and I walked across the Milagro Creek Bridge to get Tomás and Yolanda, and that’s how I came to be the single mother of three children for almost a year.

  Ramona and the children lived in the upstairs rooms of her store, Mercado de Milagros, which was built on a plot of rich bottom land. As the story goes, in the sixteenth century, the king of Spain gave this land, on which the Jicarilla had been planting their corn for centuries, to a no-account Mondragón, and the family had been failing to make a living on it ever since.

  Piece by piece, the property was sold off to pay gambling debts, and the buildings fell to ruins. The dilapidated hacienda that Ramona wrestled away from her ex-husband lacked plumbing and insulation, but she gave it the ambitious name, Mercado de Milagros, and set up shop. Inside, depending on the current enterprise, one could buy postcards, eat a Frito-pie, or throw back a glass of whiskey. The only miracle, said the people in our barrio, is that it’s still standing.

  Ernesto had already closed up the store, so Mister and I climbed the rickety back stairs to the apartment where Tomás and Yolanda had planted themselves in front of the TV. Sometime that morning, they had raided the store downstairs; a bowl of empty candy wrappers sat on the couch beside Yolanda, and Tomás was trying to drink a beer. I took it away from him, and under the watchful eyes of Ramona’s santos, I gathered the children’s things.

  Ramona kept so many santos in her store that a tourist had once mistaken it for a church, but the real army of saints was quartered in the upstairs apartment. Everywhere you looked, painted eyes were watching. Santa Rita, the patroness of bad husbands and wayward children, held a place of honor in the niche cut into the wall beside the kiva. Dressed in a nun’s habit, Rita carried a doll-sized Jesus in one hand, and in the other, a skull. A thorn was stuck in her forehead.

  Santa Clara, the patroness of television, held court on top of the Sony beside a cracked coffee cup filled with milagros. There were tiny silver feet to help Ramona with her bunions, and arms and legs and lungs for various family accidents and ailments, and for somebody, a brain. She had a whiskey bottle to cure her alcoholism and a cigarette to make her stop smoking. The rest of the milagros promised to heal broken relationships. Standing on the mantel on a piece of gold foil, encircled by a dusty garland of pink plastic flowers, San Ramón Nonato, the patron saint of midwives and prisoners, watched with padlocked lips as I slipped into the bathroom to steal a few coarse black hairs from Ramona’s brush.

  Some people in the barrio wondered how I could keep three children in my house without a television. By the end of June, when our laughter could be heard through the open windows, and they saw how my garden flourished with so many helping hands, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “What did you expect? She’s a witch.”

  Ha! You don’t have to put a spell on children to get them to play Mother May I or escondelero. They loved weeding my garden once I explained that weeds are just plants growing in the wrong place and let them transfer them to their own weed garden. They all had green thumbs then! After dinner, Yolanda dried the pots and pans while the boys took turns feeding the chickens. In the evening, I passed out my canning jars with holes punched in the lids, and we chased fireflies up and down the yard. I wouldn’t let them sleep on the porch because of the coyotes, but they sat with me on the porch swing, wrapped in blankets. “Have you heard about La Llorona?” I’d begin. “That old skank who drowned her own children?”

  “No!” they would cry. “Tell us!” Of course they were lying; everybody knows that story.

  “How she wept …” I’d say.

  “Kahooga! Kahooga!” they yelled, pretending to wipe their eyes and blow their noses.

  So I told them how this single mother on welfare, La Llorona, found herself a rich man who wanted to marry her, but he didn’t want to put up with her kids. She had lots of little snot-nosed kids running around, and one day, she gathered them all up in a sack and took them down to the Rio Grande where she drowned them like kittens. Then she went out with Old Moneybags and immediately realized that she had made a terrible mistake, but it was too late. She ran down to the river and tried to drown herself, but the river spirits would not give her the peace of death. Today, she is a ghost who walks along the banks of the river weeping for her little niños. Sometimes she waits under the water where she spreads her long hair in hopes of snaring herself some new children by their ankles.

  “La Llorona is weeping,” I said. “La Llorona is seeking. Ay, es una mala bruja, but not as evil as the witch Jorupa.” Then of course they wanted to hear the story about Jorupa. When they fell asleep listening to my stories, I carried them in one by one.

  “Why are you telling these bad stories to the children?” Ernesto asked me one day. He was pacing back and forth in front of me while I sorted beans, creaking the floorboards of the porch as he talked. Suddenly, he looked toward the apricot tree where the three of them were arguing over a village of fairy houses they had built around the base of the trunk. “That little Yolanda thinks her mother is going to come home and drown her. How is Ramona ever going to get their respect when she gets parole?�
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  “I didn’t want them to get in the river,” I said.

  “Do you know what Tomás told me the other day? He said that fireflies light up when they want to have sex with each other.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “Then he asks me, ‘Ernesto, what do people do when they want to have sex?’” Ernesto stopped to tug on the front door, which had hung crooked ever since Teodoro put it up thirteen years ago. He made the door in shop class from a junked billboard advertisement for Pall Malls, and Ernest always complained about it. He wasn’t much of a carpenter himself; Zarita kept the toolbox in that family.

  “I guess you want the kids to live with you,” I said, trying not to smile.

  “I didn’t say that, Abuela. You’re always changing my words around. I’m just thinking, you know, maybe they should have a TV.” He kicked at the bottom of the door, to knock it out of the groove it had scraped in the floor, and shook his head. “I’m gonna come out here one day and put in a new door,” he said. “When I get the time.”

  “You always say that. I like it; it reminds me of Teo.”

  “It’s trashy,” he said. “And it don’t work right. Water is gonna run in that groove and warp your kitchen floor.”

  “What water? You see any water?” As I let the beans run through my open fingers, feeling for bits of gravel, I thought about the water that ran over Lady Macbeth’s hands without ever cleaning them and how I used to stand naked and shivering over the washbasin, scrubbing the places on my body where Father Mark had touched me. I didn’t hate him anymore; you have to keep a clean heart to be a good curandera, but I could still feel his damp hands on those places, and this made me a strong mother. I knew the bad things that could happen to children, and I tried to warn them before it was too late—before their hearts cooled and that veil descended.