The Ghost of Milagro Creek

by Melanie Sumner

  People were always calling Tomás Mister and Mister Tomás. They didn’t look alike. Tomás was big and, you know, macho. He’d go into town some Saturday nights wearing a black hat. He loved his cowboy boots. He had my mother’s curls and people stopped to look at him. Mister was skinny except when he had his baby fat. And quiet. I don’t know how people got them mixed up except that they were always together. They won the three-legged race every year from first to fourth grade. Mister was smarter but Tomás had the way with women. He was just like his father. Women love a man like that. Sort of unfinished. When he was a baby he had fat little hands. C omo bolas de masa. He was so cute.

  He turned out to be a drunk like me but I didn’t raise him to beat no women. That Rocky girl was trouble. I got nothing against Anglos, but Tomás needed a Latina. A big girl. Not fat but stout. Someone to talk Spanish to him and calm him down. Half the time he was just hungry. It’s hard to be a mother. I’m not complaining. But you get so goddamned tired. When they were little—Tomás about five and Yolanda three or four—I never slept. Bisnes was muy bien that summer. The river was high and my phone rang off the hook. Armando—that’s Yolanda’s padre—he left at the peak. Took the checkbook with him. One day Ernesto brings Tomás home in the patrol car. Says he found him in town asking people for food. He said some child molester could have picked him up. I don’t know how the hell he got to Taos. You want me to take him to my house? Ernesto asks me. I should have let him; I was worn out. When he left I went into the bedroom to get Yolanda up from her nap.

  Mamá, she says to me, tengo el estigma. Catsup all over her face. All over the pillowcase. I took the thorn out of my head, she says. Blessed Virgen Maria, forgive me that’s the first time I hit her with a belt maybe the buckle hit her I don’t know. Tomás screamed and screamed, but she didn’t make no sound. Okay, so I am not perfect. I have prayed about this.

  Every year I walk to the Santuario de Chimayó, and I get on my knees before the Holy Child of Atocha. O Niño, I say to him, y o lo siento. And I put his new shoes out there beside the others, real leather ones. Sometimes they cost thirty dollars, sometimes forty. It don’t matter. Maybe those shoes help him get to some child somewhere that needs his help. Some child with some stupid tired mother. When Yolanda was older she had a lot of problems—drinking, drugs, sex, shoplifting. The judge said she had to get therapy. At first she don’t talk. Just sits there wasting everybody’s time and money. After a while I start to tell this counselor lady how things are going with me. She asks me about my santos and I’m telling her when suddenly Yolanda throws her purse at me.

  I don’t say nothing. The lady can see what I have to live through day in and day out. After that, Yolanda talks every Friday while I sit there with the checkbook, waiting for them to finish. The counselor tells me that Yolanda pretended to have el estigma so I would love her like I loved Santa Rita. How the hell was I supposed to know that when I saw her covered in catsup.

  Maybe if Tomás and Yolanda had had a father. Yo no sé. But I lost my looks. I’d go to the Weight Watchers meeting, get my hair done, go to the bar and chistar con los hombres. Maybe I’d catch one: the ex-husband of so-and-so or the one who never married. Then I’d ask myself, why are you picking up the ones that have been thrown back? Go get a Big Mac and some fries.

  But that Mister. I hope you nail him.

  I have read the transcription of my recorded statement and believe the facts stated in this witness statement are true.

  Signed:

  18

  Easter Sunday

  April 15, 2001

  Ear Extensions

  Outside the narrow window of Rocky’s cell, the Chama River lay flat and silver in the morning sun. A dog trotted along the shoal, wagging its tail, and a few minutes later, Rocky rode out of the bosque on swaybacked old Absalom. At the river, the horse bent his head to the water and snorted. If she looks up now, Mister thought, I will go out and tell her what happened. He waited, but she was looking off into the hills. Now, he told himself, if she looks at me right now, I will confess. Bending over the horse’s mane, she began to pat his neck. Her lips were moving. Impatiently, Mister tapped on the glass.

  They met for breakfast in the brick kitchen. Cast-iron pots hung from hooks on the vigas, and baskets of warm bread lined the table. There was a comb of honey and fresh butter stamped in the shape of a flower. At the stove, a monk with the sleeves of his gray robe rolled up over his hairy arms stirred a pot of chocolate.

  “Good morning, Brother John,” said Rocky.

  “Good morning, Raquel.”

  “I guess you can talk in the kitchen,” said Mister, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. He was going to tell her. What if she turned him in? He had to tell her. Taking a tin mug off the wall, he poured himself a cup of the thick black coffee.

  “We need to talk,” he said when Rocky sat down with her hot chocolate.

  She smiled as she bit into a chunk of bread. “Did you know we’re going to have Easter eggs today?” With the tip of her pink tongue, she caught the thin stream of melting butter and honey that ran down the corner of her mouth. Mister’s bread had no taste. He couldn’t wait any longer; he had to tell her.

  “Tomás,” he said.

  “What?” Her face turned pale.

  “We haven’t said his name since I got here.”

  Rocky glanced back at the monk and then leaned across the table. “Hable español,” she said quietly. Mister counted five freckles on her pale nose. He shouldn’t tell her on Easter morning; he should have waited, but it was too late now.

  “Well,” she said in that same cool, quiet voice. “What about him?”

  Mister glanced toward Brother John. White puffs rose around his big arms as he floured the cake pan.

  “Yo lo maté,” Mister whispered across the small table.

  The shock made her face look suddenly naked. A vast space opened up between their bodies. Instinctively, he leaned in closer, but in the wavering green mirror of her eyes, he saw that he had become a stranger. His voice sounded unfamiliar even to himself when he told her what he had done.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  Stepping gingerly through an archway, Mister found an open door and knocked.

  “Excuse me, Sister.”

  At first, the nun did not look up from her computer screen. Biting her lip, she shot down three spaceships and took a hit from the side.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to make a confession,” said Mister.

  “The abbot is busy preparing for mass,” said the nun. She hit reverse, tearing through the defensive line.

  “It’s important.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” she cried, slamming her fist on the table as her ship blew into a thousand pieces.

  “I have fifteen minutes,” said the abbot, walking into the room. Father Roland was a small, dark man—Filipino, Rocky said. “Come,” he said, motioning his arm for Mister to follow.

  The confessional box smelled of pine oil. Kneeling on the cushion, Mister squinted through the grill at the vague outline of the priest’s face. Fil-i-peen-o … It was a round, rubbery word, bouncing in his head. He’d heard that they ate dogs, but he didn’t say that to Rocky because she would say, You are so country; you probably ran and hid from the first car you ever saw. She said that to Tomás all the time.

  “You may begin,” said Father Roland.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” A long silence followed.

  “Yes,” said the priest. “Go on, my son.” Padre Roland’s gentle singsong was nothing like the thin, irritated voice of Padre Pettit, who had listened with a fevered impatience to Mister’s elaborate boyhood confessions. Once or twice, when Mister was making too fine a point of some minor transgression, Padre Pettit had lost his temper.

  When this happened, Mister paused as Abuela had instructed, and let him blow off steam. Sometimes he ranted in Latin, which made whatever he said sound like prayer, and sometimes he held himself bac
k and said in a low voice, “Would you please quit horsing around with the story and make your confession?” When Padre Pettit had settled down, Mister would pick up where he had left off.

  “… and then I took the egg out of the nest, and I don’t know if I dropped it on the ground on purpose, or if it fell out of my hand …”

  There were three eggs in the nest; Abuela had lifted him up to see. They were a pale, speckled blue, each one slightly different from the other, as if they were already creatures. All the eggs in his Easter basket were the same even if they were different colors. He loved to dig his hand in the bright green plastic grass and pull up a smooth plastic egg, brighter than the real eggs that he dyed with Abuela. When he cracked it open, candy fell out. Tiny birds were inside of the robin’s eggs, but you couldn’t crack them and see for yourself; you had to go on faith.

  “No los toques,” Abuela said, “o la mamá no regresará.” Mister understood; his own mother had left. He told Abuela that he would never, never touch one of the lovely eggs no matter how badly his hand itched to feel that delicate shape, to weigh their lightness in his palm. He would just look and believe. No touching.

  Father Pettit thought he was lying when he said he didn’t know what happened to the egg, but he was not. He could only tell him how the bright yolk looked like a sun slipping in its circle, and how the red spot scared him. He tried to cover the mess with his hand, but bits of blue shell stuck to his fingers. Even if he could put the egg back together, the bird would smell his hand on it and never touch her baby again. When Abuela saw what had happened, she pressed her lips together to keep the words in, but Mister could see them in her throat, choking her.

  Padre Pettit did not want to hear any more about the robin’s egg. He asked Mister if he’d been touching himself or watching movies with sex scenes. They were supposed to turn the movie off if a sex scene came on; turning off the sound didn’t count.

  “It has been eleven years since my last confession,” said Mister.

  “It is sometimes hard to begin after such a long time,” said the abbot, “but you must try.” The confessional box began to feel warm. Mister looked away from the screened-over face, to the walls on either side and behind him. If you pushed the walls out a few feet and stuck a latrine in the corner, you’d be sitting in a prison cell. Taking two feet off the ceiling and bringing the walls in closer would make a coffin. That was the shape of religion. With his finger, Mister drew a circle on the velvet cushion, and with his head bowed, he began to talk.

  “‘Life is a circle,’ my grandmother used to tell me, ‘but the white man’s church has corners.’ Her ancestors were the Apache and the Tiwa Indians from Taos Pueblo. When the white people first came to Taos in the late seventeenth century—‘white-eyes,’ we called them—they forced the Indians to build a church at the pueblo. They didn’t believe the Indians when they said they already had a church, so the elders decided to take them down to their Kiva. So the men led the white guys down these long ladders, to a round room that was completely dark until they lit their torches. They burned incense and prayed; maybe they told some stories and sang. Everything they did down there was sacred to them because it was a sacred place, but to the white-eyes, it was just a hole in the ground.

  “They made the Indians build a square chapel with a cross on the roof and called it San Gerónimo’s. ‘This is God’s house,’ the white men said. ‘Nothing can hurt you in here.’ They let everyone come inside, even the women and children. In secret, the men still met in their Kiva, but the women had never been allowed down there, so they loved the new church. I can’t tell a story the way my grandmother could. When she told me this one, I could smell the fresh mud on the walls inside of San Gerónimo’s, and feel the cool adobe on my hand. Abuela—that’s my grandmother—was never there, but she had heard this story from her grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother—you know how it goes—and she would describe the priest as this skinny white guy with blue veins in his wrists and beautiful white hands that fluttered like wings when he prayed. He prayed for their children and lit candles that would send the prayers straight up to God.

  “Abuela thought the women came to the chapel in the evenings after their chores were done. It would have been a quiet place to rock their babies to sleep. Maybe they hummed the Christian hymns and told the bigger kids the stories that their mothers had told them. It would have been a special place, my grandmother said, and they probably tried not to cuss or gossip or get anything dirty. This church kept the people safe for more than two centuries.

  “Then one day some American soldiers came to Taos Pueblo. Governor Bent had been killed by a mob, and the soldiers believed an Indian from the pueblo was responsible. They kept demanding that the pueblo turn this guy over, but no one stepped up. So the next day, they returned with a cannon.

  “It’s not hard to see a cannon coming down the road, and the men had plenty of time to go underground into their Kiva. The women and children went into San Gerónimo’s where God would keep them safe.

  “The first cannon ball took the roof off the church. The second one turned it all into a pile of rocks. My great-great-great-grandmother Standing Flower was thirteen years old, and she crawled out from under the rocks holding a piece of her mother’s hand.”

  The priest coughed. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and before he had a chance to continue, Mister left.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  A few hundred yards beyond the monastery gates, Mister found a footpath leading up the bluff. He read the small sign asking people to please preserve the fragile ecosystem and noted the blackened ponderosa that marked the trail. Then he pulled off Tomás’s cowboy boots and hid them under a juniper bush. Barefoot, he moved in swift silence along the sandy trail, ducking in and out of piñon groves until the bosque opened out onto the cliff.

  Near the base, the rock was warm and smooth on the soles of his feet, but as he climbed higher, the crevices grew deep and cool. Higher and higher he climbed, gripping the wall with his fingers and toes. Could he live out here?

  When Abuela was on the lam from boarding school, she ate dandelions and crows. Rabbits, prairie dogs, snakes, beetles—there was plenty to eat if you knew where to look. He would find a cave up here, and at night, he’d go down to the river to drink. That would be a good time to hunt. He’d make a spear. He knew how to make a pot out of clay and harden it in a small fire. He climbed on, reading the rock with his hands and feet, inching along a narrow ledge and swinging himself boldly across a thirty-foot drop. “You can pray with your body,” Abuela said once. Below him, the monastery bell tolled, and his arms and legs quivered as he pressed himself flat against the rock and felt each strike of the clapper against the iron.

  When at last he heaved himself onto a ledge, he found primrose and fireweed growing in a patch of new grass. Blue butterflies flitted around the tender new shoots. Sweat stung his eyes, and his heart beat hard against his chest. I’m alive! he wanted to shout. Tomás, you didn’t kill me. I’m alive!

  Rolling over on his back to look up at the blue sky, he remembered the day Abuela had buried him on the mesa. He was four years old, she said. Most of his memory came from the story she had told him; he saw only flashes of the scene—a warm cup of Pepsi, the long brown path, and a hole that seemed to go to the bottom of the earth. “Rock, sky, woman,” Abuela said. “This is your mother,” and then he was born again.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  After the blessing, the monks sat tensely at the trestle tables and watched the kitchen door. Although talking was allowed on Easter, the refectory remained silent. Mister saw Rocky at the end of the table—she had braided her hair—but he was afraid to meet her eyes. Beside each place setting, a bright yellow marshmallow chicken sat on a nest of candy-filled plastic eggs.

  Suddenly, the door swung open; Brother John stepped into the room in his white apron, holding aloft a platter bearing one large chicken roasted to
a deep golden brown and garnished with green sprigs of rosemary. A cheer rose up from the tables.

  “Thank you,” said Mister, as the scalloped potatoes were passed to him, and then the creamed spinach. “Gracias.” The abbot himself poured the wine. Mister kept an eye on the door, in case the cops came. The tip of Rocky’s nose was pink from crying, but when he tried to catch her eye, she dipped her head, letting one braid slide over her shoulder as she buttered her roll. He tried not to shovel the food into his mouth, but he couldn’t remember his last hot meal, and the brothers had outdone themselves in the kitchen.

  He ate, and he ate, and he ate. When he finally looked up from his plate, he saw that the monk across from him had gnawed his chicken down to a pile of white bones. A dog couldn’t have gotten them any cleaner. For dessert, there was a tall chocolate cake spread with thick, dark frosting and dotted with raspberries. Mister had two pieces, and when he lifted his head, unable to slide one more forkful of food into his mouth, he met Rocky’s gaze. She rolled a purple egg across the table. Unfolding the note inside, he read, Meet me at the gift shop.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  The bells on the door to the gift shop jangled loudly when Mister entered.

  “Welcome!” Brother Boris cried, coming over to shake hands.

  “Hola,” said Mister. He glanced around: shelves of books, candles, soap, and honey—no Rocky.

  “I was just going to make some coffee. Would you like some? Or perhaps cocoa?”

  “Ningún gracias.”

  “I hope you’re enjoying your visit with us. ¿De dónde es usted?”

  “Por todas partes,” said Mister softly, stroking the wooden carving of an angel on sale for fifteen dollars. The monk was heating up a kettle of water on a single burner behind a rough, wooden counter in the corner of the room. He’d been saying something about the vow of silence, and now he told a joke.

  “Have you heard about the guy who joins a Benedictine order and takes a vow of silence? He’s only allowed to speak two words a year. After the first year, the abbot asks him for his two words. The monk says, ‘More blankets.’”