• • • • • • • • • • •
Early one morning in July, I took the children into the woods. A rancher picked us up on Paseo del Pueblo del Sud, and we rode halfway up Taos Mountain in the back of his pickup truck as the sun rose in the dust behind us. In the sedges beside the road, desert marigolds stuck out like hitchhikers’ thumbs. Each time the tires hit a rut, the boys bounced as high as they could shouting, “Boo-yaaka!” as if they’d been gunned out of their seats, but Yolanda clung to me, shivering inside her thin pink jacket. When I saw the old piñon tree with the beckoning arm, I banged on the glass, and the rancher let us out.
We threaded our way through the mesquite and cactus until I found the trail I used to take with Ernesto on my shoulders, after I ran away from the Indian school. We lived on the lam for almost a year before an old aunt took us in, catching rabbits and foraging for nuts and berries, raiding campsites and Dumpsters. When the policeman finally caught us sleeping behind a bush beside the laundromat, in a cardboard box I’d set up to catch the heat from the dryer vent, Ernesto wrapped his arms around him and clung to his chest.
“He just likes your shiny badge,” I told the officer, embarrassed. Yolanda was about the age Ernesto was back then, but she was a fat little thing, and I was too old to carry her on my shoulders, so I let her waddle along the path behind us, stopping every few feet to poke a stick at a rock.
While I gathered my medicine—scarlet hedge-nettle for arthritis, foxglove for the heart, juniper berries for spasms, cuts, and urinary tract infections—the boys sprang about like jack rabbits, running back and forth to fill the willow basket I’d given them. At noon, I stopped at a creek to fix lunch. The trout were running; I saw their shadows mostly, flicking among the rocks, and I was sorry I hadn’t brought my fishing rod.
“The first mistake most fishermen make,” I told Ernie when we were living off the land, “is thinking that they’re smarter than the fish.” Before we cast our lines, we’d lie on the bank and think like trout. “The second mistake is thinking that all the fish are alike, and all the flies are alike.” I showed him all the different patterns flies make in the water and how to close his eyes and see lines they made etched on the backs of his eyelids. Most of the education I gave my little brother was a waste of time, but he did grow up to be a decent fisherman.
• • • • • • • • • • •
“Call the boys,” I told Yolanda as I unwrapped the newspaper from the warm tortillas and spread it on the ground for a table.
“¡La cena!” she called out in her quavering voice as she stepped carefully along the path. “Come and eat!”
Just as the blade of my knife sliced into the flesh of a plump red tomato I had picked that morning, I felt a stab in my heart.
“¡Fríjoles con carne!” called Yolanda.
A trout hanging in the current rose up to take a fly, and suddenly Yolanda screamed.
“Snake! Snake!” she cried, running toward me. Mister and Tomás flew at her heels, knocking the basket between them as they chased her with whoops of laughter.
Suddenly, I went cold with dread. A few minutes ago, I had taken off my shoes and rolled up my sleeves, but now shivers ran down my back. My hands were like ice as I stirred a stick into the basket and pushed the flowers aside.
It was a only a garter snake, black with a yellow stripe. Like a pretty ribbon, it slipped through the purple asters and devil’s lettuce and tried to hide under the mangled orchid. Still, I felt the chill of death, and when I dumped the basket onto the ground, I found it—the sacred datura plant. It looked so innocent, asleep with its white petals folded up tight. The green stalk, torn from the earth, had grown limp in the boys’ warm fists. If they had not pulled the sleeping flower, it would have bloomed at dusk, around the time the bars open. Jimson weed was another name for it. Like all evil, the flower had one face but many names: apple of Peru, devil’s trumpet, thorn apple, Indian apple, Gabriel’s trumpet, stinkweed.
“Did you eat this?” I screamed. “¡Dígame!”
I made them open their mouths—Mister and Tomás and even Yolanda, and I scraped their teeth with my fingernail checking for any sign of the plant. The cold had left me, a good sign, but now I was boiling mad, and my throat hurt from yelling. “¡No la toques!” I said hoarsely, shaking my fist in front of them. “Es poisonous!”
Yolanda began to cry, and all three children shrank away from me. I felt bad about yelling, but I was still afraid the little nincompoops would kill themselves when I turned my back.
“Coma,” I said more quietly, patting the blanket I had spread on the ground. “Let’s eat.” I scooped spoonfuls of beans and meat into their bowls and passed around a plate of sliced tomatoes. They brightened up when I passed around a bottle of root beer, so I began my tale.
“Poor Agustín,” I said, shaking my head with a sigh. “Poor kid.”
They fell for it. “Tell us,” Mister demanded, and then they all wanted to know who Agustín was and what happened to him and why I sounded so sad when I said his name. So I told them the story of that unfortunate boy Agustín who disobeyed his elders and ate the petals of the sacred datura.
“Did he die?” asked Tomás.
“A witch ate him,” suggested Mister.
“His pecker fell off,” I said.
Yolanda took my hand.
“How many petals did he eat?” asked Mister.
“Three,” I said. “The first two just made it shrink.”
“That’s not true,” said Mister, but Tomás nodded solemnly and covered the fly of his shorts with his hand.
“What happens if you chew one leaf and spit it out?” asked Tomás.
“Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth,” I said.
“Forever?”
“Of course not. The doctor can cut it out and put it in a jar for you.” The children laughed in uneasy relief and begin sticking their tongues out.
That night, I still had a bad feeling about that flower. I prayed the way Abuela Leonora had taught me to pray when I was afraid. Kneeling at my altar, I lit a bundle of sage and smudged myself with the sweet smoke as I asked the Great Spirit to take away half of my fear. “Keep half of it,” my abuela had suggested. “It keeps you moving.”
• • • • • • • • • • •
In the fall, we gathered apricots and made jars of jam that we sold beside the chile vendors in the parking lot of the Super Save. We didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a good excuse to skip school. We sat in lawn chairs beside the chile vendors and ate apples. All day, the chiles crackled and popped on the charcoal grills; the air smelled wonderful. When it got dark, we used some of our jam money to buy half-priced ears of sweet roasted corn and bottles of cold root beer. Then we wrapped ourselves up in blankets and watched the stars. The earth was facing away from heaven, and in the northeast I saw the fuzzy white light that surrounds the ancient souls and the souls not born. I had told the children that stars have twins, and they looked for them.
“Tell us about twins,” said Mister, who small enough to share a chair with Tomás. With their happy faces peering out of the blanket, they almost did look like brothers, so I rocked Yolanda in my lap and told stories of twins—the twin war gods who killed the monster that wanted to destroy the earth, the twin Apache boys who were raised by a coyote on the mesa where their parents left them to die, and the Christian twins who hated each other, Jacob and Esau. I did not tell them about Jesus’s twin, the Black Christ.
• • • • • • • • • • •
“Everyone has a twin,” I had told Father Mark one evening at the Indian boarding school, when he was testing me on the pairs of twins in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. “Even Christ has a twin.” He liked me to sit in his lap, and although I often felt uncomfortable sitting so close to him, I felt safe that night, smartly answering his questions as I rubbed the fine red hairs that grew on the back of his hand. When I pressed my hand against the glass face of his wri
st watch, warm from his heat, I felt the tick tick tick that was like a heart. He had told me the night before that he loved me like Christ loved me. Then he touched my breast.
“El Cristo Negro,” I said; I knew by his flinch that I had made a mistake, but I was stubborn and didn’t run away.
“What did you say?”
“His name is Nuestro Senor de Esquípulas,” I said. Realizing that I had spoken Spanish, I quickly added, “the Black Christ, sir.”
He pushed me off his lap and slapped me hard across the face.
“There is one God,” he said. “And he is white.” He looked down at the floor where I had curled into a ball with one arm over my head, and suddenly he laughed.
• • • • • • • • • • •
The days and nights passed, and Ramona did not come home. In October, during the last bloom of the sunflowers, just before the first snow dusted the peak of Taos Mountain, the feisty brown trout started to spawn. The rainbow and cutthroats followed them around, stealing their eggs, and we went fishing. I borrowed Ernesto’s fly rod and fishing license, and if the catch was any good, we brought it over to his place. Zarita had her hands full with Lucinda—Baby Lucy, we called her then—but she loved a fish fry. Sometimes, if we had any leftovers, we brought them over to the jail for Ramona.
Yolanda always cried when she saw her mother, but Tomás hung back, sticking his hands deep into his pockets, dragging the toe of his boot back and forth across the floor. He liked to wear cowboy boots and make a big sound when he walked, but in the jail he was quiet. One day, he brought Ramona a butterfly he had made by dipping his palms in blue paint and pressing them onto a heavy piece of paper. It looked just like the blue butterfly tattoo on her chest. “Thanks,” she said, and asked if we had brought her cigarettes.
That night I told the children the story of Jorupa, the hag who kidnaps those who have strayed from their homes. Jorupa kept a basilisk. What a creature! It had the head of a chicken, the body of a lizard, and red eyes that would turn you to stone. But worse than Jorupa was Malogra, the witch who disguised herself as a ball of cottonwood fluff …
• • • • • • • • • • •
Sometime before Christmas, after the fish had gone to sleep but before people had set out their farolitos, candles covered with paper bags that line the rooftops and adobe walls, the dreaded call came from jail—Ramona was free. I knew she’d stop at the bar on the way home, so I mixed up a batch of my hangover cure: rice water, tomato juice, raw egg, mint leaves and stems, chrysanthemum flowers, marshmallow root powder, slippery elm bark, fennel seed, and Tabasco.
At the altar, I smudged myself and the children with a braid of sweet grass. I took the wad of black hair I had pulled from Ramona’s brush and stuffed it down a snake hole on the bank of Milagro Creek. I went through the motions of prayer, but Creator knew that I was just worrying out loud. When Ramona came off the booze, she was meaner than La Llorona, Jorupa, and Malogra put together. That evening, when I saw the light on in Mercado de Milagros, I led Tomás and Yolanda across the bridge. Mister followed us, pulling their things in a wagon.
“¡Hola!” I called when we reached the back porch. “Ramona?” No one answered the door, so I opened it a crack. The yellow light came outside, like an animal. “Anybody home?” Carrying a jug of the cure in one hand and a basket of warm tortillas in the other, I stepped inside the store, and the children shuffled in behind me, blinking their eyes under the light. Saint Teresa of Avila, who experienced God’s love like a lanza driven into her heart, watched over the cash register with Saint Martin de Tours, whose altar held a plastic cup of water for his horse. Empty beer bottles sat on the counter.
“Ramona, we’re coming up!” I called as we climbed a narrow stairwell smelling of dirty socks and stale cigarettes. In the kitchen, Mister lifted one foot off the sticky linoleum, set it down, and lifted it again to hear the sucking sound. In the living room, the TV played without sound.
“Mamá,” said Yolanda. She bent over the lump on the couch. “We’re home again.”
“Sí, hijita, sí,” said Ramona, brushing her away. When she stood up, she pressed her hands against her temples.
“Bienvenida a casa,” I said. “Do you want me to take the kids to my place for a while, to let you rest?”
“Fuck no,” she said. “They live here with me.” So I put a pot of beans on the stove, opened the windows, cleaned the bathroom, and swept the floors. Gradually, Ramona came back to life. She kicked the cat that had followed her home from the bar. She yelled at Tomás for leaving his shoes where she could trip over them and smacked Yolanda for spilling juice on the rug.
When I couldn’t find another reason to stay, I pulled Tomás and Yolanda to me and held them tight. “Be good,” I said. “Be patient with your mother; she’s tired.” I gave Ramona a long, hard look, but her eyes were vacant.
On the porch, Mister hesitated. “I don’t want to leave them,” he said. “She beats them.”
“She’s their mother,” I said.
He started to walk away, then he turned around and faced me.
“You took me from my mother,” he said, and there were tears in his eyes.
I didn’t know what to say to him. Mercedes had left a couple of years ago; I didn’t think we’d ever see her again.
We walked in silence over the Milagro Creek Bridge. On the other side, he asked, “Did you pray for her?”
“Sí,” I said. “I prayed for your mother and for Ramona.”
“Well, it didn’t work!” he yelled. “My mother is a drug addict and a whore and Ramona is a drunk. She hasn’t even been home since last summer, and she’s too drunk to be nice to her kids.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He snorted, looking very small and distant in the dark night. “Is God sorry?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he is.”
We walked home with our heads down. It was December, the month stars are born, and too cold to watch the sky.
5
Maundy Thursday
April 12, 2001 (morning)
Heartline
Mister cried most of the morning, sitting at the kitchen table with a box of photographs. Abuela always said they didn’t need to buy a camera because Indians have cameras in their heads, but she guarded the pictures that came their way in this old cigar box that had probably belonged to her grandfather, Talamante Vigil. Until a few years ago, Mister was only allowed to open it in her presence. “Suavemente,” she would say, and he tried to be gentle as he ran finger along the peeling label, ROCKY FORD LONDRES CIGARS—50 CENTS.
Beneath these words, an Indian brave crouched on a mountaintop, shading his eyes with one hand as he gazed out on a pristine landscape. This particular Native American bore a striking resemblance to an NFL player except that he held a tomahawk instead of a football, and he wore feathers and moccasins and a string of bones around his neck. As a child, Mister felt like God when he touched the blue sky, the tall pine, the jagged mountain in the distance. Now everything in the faded image looked so small.
There were seven pictures of Abuela. Mister held them to his face to see if they still held the faint odor of tobacco before spreading them out on the kitchen table. The first one was taken at the Indian boarding school—a grainy shot of twelve girls with their hair cut off, wearing identical floor-length sack dresses. Front and center, a very young Abuela stared grimly into the lens. In another school photo, she was dressed up as an Indian in a Thanksgiving play: fringed dress, headband and feather. Here she was a scrawny teenager with a flat nose and close-set eyes, probably not pretty enough to be Pocahontas, but her cheeks were round and smooth, and she held her head high.
In the final photo of her youth, she looked out from a newspaper clipping. FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD INDIAN GIRL LIVES IN THE KIT CARSON NATIONAL FOREST WITH BABY BROTHER, TAOS COUNTY. Her hair had grown long and matted, and beneath the plaid blanket draped across her shoulders, Mister recognized her torn, dir
ty dress as the uniform in her school photo. Her eyes were wild. On her lap, a surprisingly clean Ernesto held a sucker and smiled for the camera.
Tío Ernesto was the closest thing Mister had to a father, and when he turned fifteen and refused to dig Abuela’s garden, the diputado came out to the house for dinner. Silently, the three of them dug their forks around in the pale tomatoes, canned beans, and tasteless jalapeños.
Finally, Ernesto asked, “Why don’t you have no garden this year, Ignacia?”
“Too much trouble,” she said.
“The boy can do it.”
“Mister no quiere.”
“Don’t want to?” Ernesto looked his nephew over and then narrowed his eyes. “¿Qué pasa? You sick? You can’t dig a couple a holes in the ground? You got some chica to chase or somethin?” He pushed his plate away. “Come outside, Mister. I got something to tell you.”
“I got homework.”
“Don’t make me throw your sorry ass in jail,” said Ernesto. “Vamos.”
Out on the porch, Ernesto shook a cigarette loose from his pack and turned it in his thick fingers. “Listen, Mister, I know you feel like chit. You’re a teenager. You think what I am going to say will make you feel like more chit, and maybe it will, but you need to hear it.” He lit the cigarette and stepped into the yard, motioning for Mister to follow.
“You know your abuela went to one of those Indian boarding schools, right?”
“Yeah,” said Mister. “She mentioned it.”
“They took her down to Santa Fe. I think the worst one was out in Pennsylvania—Kill the Indian, Save the Man—that guy. You listening?”
“I’m all ears.”
“Bueno,” said Ernesto, blowing out a stream of smoke. “Down in Santa, they had Ignacia working in the garden. She was maybe eleven, twelve. She told me this when she was taking care of me, you know, in the woods. Every day, she made me dig our excusado. She didn’t want people tracking us down, and it was always my job to dig the shit hole. One day, I just said no. I thought maybe it was her turn to dig. That’s when she told me about that garden at the Indian boarding school. She only told me this once. Maybe it’s not a true story; she liked to scare me.”
The Ghost of Milagro Creek Page 5
