Wild Sorrow

by AULT, SANDI

  While I lay sleeping in the delicious cloud of down, I became aware of a rhythmic murmuring noise, like the gentle snore of babies. I opened my eyes and listened, and then I rose and moved toward the sound. I walked out to the grove of pines behind my cabin, where I stood barefoot, a green blanket wrapped around my naked body.

  The trees began to sing softly. Holding on to the earth with their long, delicate root-fingers, they stretched upward toward the stars, reaching and breathing, reaching and breathing and humming the notes of a winter song, from which I felt a cold cloak of air encircle me. I realized that the trees were asleep and dreaming—animated, restless, conjuring with the night a creative vision of the morrow. Through their dreams, the substance of life force flowed fluidly between the already created world of earth where they stood and the infinite possibilities in the stars, in the air, where the spirit of longing brought things not yet created into being. The endless cycle of life’s love for itself moved through their reverie. I closed my eyes and felt my blanket slip away as I entered the dreams of the trees.

  Where my naked soles touched the earth I sensed the power in the heart-womb of the world, the center of the universe, and it moved upward through me and out the tendrils of my hair, which floated above my head like the needles on the high branches of the pines. The day was deconstructing into the night, the carbon of the earth decomposing into the outbreathing sighs of the standing people, the trees. All that was being released was material for the nonmaterial, stardust for the sacred birth of the new world that would emerge out of the nothingness the trees and I were making. The two worlds—the substance and the spirit—met in the dreampoint where everything became nothing and nothing became everything. Here was the timeless beginning and ending, the primordial feminine womb-void that birthed the world, the medicine power at the always moving dream center that could only be found where it did not exist.

  In an instant, I stopped holding on to who I was, what I was and had been, and I blissfully ceased to be. Stardust!

  34

  All That Mattered

  I have been hung over and I have been beaten down, and the way I felt when I woke up the next morning was more of both than anyone sober deserves to endure. My tongue felt like a rancid mattress that someone had shoved in my mouth. I had drooled all over my pillow, my hair was matted and stuck to one ear, and one arm and hand had gone numb. My ankles and feet had swollen up in my boots, and I ached all over—especially my head. My breath was foul and my bladder begged to be emptied. I forced myself to a sitting position and started to get up when my boot knocked into the empty shoe box on the floor beside my bed.

  I looked down with horror at the litter that covered the lambskin on the floor where Mountain slept. The wolf was rapturously snoring at one end of this, lying on his back with his hind legs spread apart, his front paws curled under on either side of his big, upturned chest, the expression on his sleeping face indicating he had reached wolf-nirvana. But across the rest of the rug sprawled the chewed-up remnants of my most valuable treasures. Multicolored bits of the pages that once had contained my mother’s poems were strewn like confetti across the long-haired mat. And beneath my boot was a wisp of shiny, colored paper. I stooped and picked it up. It was a thin strip torn from the center of the photo of my mother, the tip of it punctured with tiny piercings from the wolf’s sharp front teeth. The only likeness of my mother I had ever had was now in shreds.

  “Oh, no!” I cried, and the wolf rolled onto his side and raised his head to look at me. “Mountain, what is this?” I yelled, picking up a handful of his paperwork spit-wads. “What did you do?”

  I grabbed hold of the lambskin and yanked on it hard, bowling the wolf off the edge of it and out onto the hardwood floor. Mountain scrambled to his feet and dove toward the front door, his head down and low, his ears pointing backward and listening as I came right behind him in a fury. As he bolted past the wrought-iron coatrack, he caught the leg of it and tipped it over, the top of it knocking him on the back end and then bouncing onto the toe of my boot. I screamed with pain as the heavy iron bar struck the top of my foot, and Mountain came full about in the corner by the door, his back paws slipping on the hardwood and pedaling hard for a purchase. As he pushed away from the door, the broom that had been propped in the corner came down, too, causing him to volt to one side and make for the table, where he hoped to take shelter beneath. I grabbed the broom handle before it, too, fell on me, and limped the two steps to the table, yelling, “What did you do to my mother’s things? They were all I had that mattered!” I raised up the broom and struck Mountain hard across his back end, and he yelped with both pain and alarm. He cowered on the floor, and from beneath his quivering body, a puddle of urine spread across the dark wood planks.

  “Oh, no,” I said, realizing what I had done. “Oh, God, no.” I dropped to my knees and Mountain flinched and tried to make himself smaller, in terror of another onslaught of anger. “Oh, Mountain,” I said, reaching out a trembling hand to touch him. “Mountain, I’m so sorry!” I remembered Sica’s story of being beaten with a broom, and I felt like evil incarnate. I looked down at my beloved wolf-companion, who was now fearful of my touch and traumatized by my outburst of rage. I stroked Mountain’s back and he flinched again, so I held my hand in place for a moment, gently touching his trembling haunch. I eased into a seated position, careful not to alarm him with any sudden moves. I continued to pet him as I shook my head in disbelief, unable to fathom the insanity that had come over me. And unable to forgive myself for what I had done to my best friend, a creature whom I had sworn to protect from harm.

  I took Mountain to Tecolote’s house, and the wolf and I climbed the slope against an icy gale. Esperanza opened her door and looked out just as we approached the casita, but she was wise enough not to wait out on the portal in the arctic air. Once inside, seated at the plank table near the comforting fire, I asked the old bruja for help. While the wolf lay on the floor at our feet in her warm little dwelling, Esperanza rubbed a thick salve on my sprained wrist and listened to my story of the dream experience with the trees, and then of my striking the wolf with a broom.

  When I finished, the old woman was quiet.

  “Tell me what to do, Esperanza,” I said.

  “What to do? It seems you are doing too much already! Maybe you should try not to do.”

  I pressed my lips together. “Maybe so,” I muttered.

  “You must leave Montaña here with me for a little time, only a few hours, or maybe a day. I will keep him safe for you during that time, and I will give him a cura so that he can forgive you.”

  “Can you give me a cura so that I can forgive me?”

  She gave a sad, toothless half smile. “That one is beyond my humble powers.”

  The salve on my hand had begun to create an intense heat and I wanted desperately to rub it off. “You told me to listen to the trees and watch the sky. I was dreaming with the trees last night. The sky was—”

  “¡Ya chole! Stop talking, Mirasol!” The bruja held up her finger. “You lose the power that has been given to you when you talk about it all the time.”

  “But I don’t have any power. I don’t know what the dream means.”

  “You will not find its meaning outside of you. There is no need to speak of it.”

  “But—”

  “Wait!” she said. “I know you want to rub it, but you must leave it alone. Even though you do not understand it, the medicine is working. You do not need to understand everything for it to work for you.”

  I hesitated. “Are we talking about my wrist now?”

  “I can tell you this, Mirasol: you are traveling the path of the heart. You must get your heart straightened out! It is the first thing you must do.”

  On the way into Taos, I stopped alongside the road and phoned Charlie Dorn.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “It will have to be after Christmas. Probably going
to take a couple of guys to do it right.”

  “Just tell me when, and I’ll arrange to be there.”

  “You’ll need a good three feet of digging wire all around the inside, and probably at least a nine-foot-high fence for the enclosure. Wolves are escape artists.”

  “I know. Let’s make it as big as we can. And we’ll need a sturdy gate with a good latch. Mountain can chew through almost anything, and he’s really smart.”

  “Your mama cat made it through surgery all right,” Charlie said. “They got the bullet out, packed it with antibiotics, and they’re watching her, but it looks like she’ll survive.”

  “And the cubs? Any news?”

  “We scattered some meat. No one has seen them, so we don’t know anything. With the holidays coming, I gave the Coldfires your cell phone number in case they can’t get hold of me. They’ll call one of us if they spot them.”

  “Thanks for the update, Charlie.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry you’re going to have to confine Mountain. We were all surprised he was acting like a pet for so long, following you around more or less like a dog.”

  “He’s no dog,” I said.

  “No, I know that—now especially. I guess his instincts finally won out.”

  “Yeah, they won all right. Big prize. Life without parole.”

  35

  Injustice

  I met Diane at the courthouse. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m better. My wrist, it was really swollen last night, but it’s quite a bit better now.”

  “Good. Listen, Oriando Abeyta had an airtight alibi for the time when your car was smashed. We had to cut him loose.”

  “An airtight alibi? What was it?”

  “He and another lineman from the power company were installing two new transformers, replacing the one that blew at the junction a quarter mile down the road from you and the one that feeds your house.”

  “But Oriando was supposed to meet me—”

  “They got out there early, drove down a couple nearby roads, and saw the sign at the end of your drive. So, instead of meeting you as agreed, they just started working on restoring your power. According to their written report, they also removed limbs that had blown down onto the line, probably during that windstorm that trapped you out on the mesa last week. There’s no way they could have been anyplace else. One guy was in the truck running the lift and the other was in the cherry picker. They ran two digital tests on the new transformers a half hour apart. The power company had a computerized readout with the times on it.”

  “What about Rule Abeyta?” I asked.

  “We retained him in custody because of evidence we found at his home. We got a search warrant last night. He had this effigy of a nun that was marked and painted to look the same way that Cassie Morgan’s body had been desecrated.”

  “That’s the monito,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s . . . never mind. I hope that’s not all the evidence you had.”

  “No. He had some papers where he had written out the abuses that Cassie Morgan and others had heaped upon him as a child. And beside each thing on the list that Morgan had done, he wrote that he hated Cassie Morgan and wished her dead.”

  “That’s still not hard evidence, is it?”

  “Not hard enough. But if we have the murder weapon—and I think that rope you found might be it—then, we have him good. We’re just waiting for the DNA evidence to come back from the lab in Albuquerque to lock that down. In the meantime, we’re running down his story about where he was on the day that Cassie Morgan died. He better be able to account for every minute of it.”

  “But then who smashed my Jeep? You think that was Rule? Does he have a truck like the one that did it? Did you question him about me?”

  A clerk stepped out of the courtroom and announced the next hearing on the docket. Diane stood and gestured for me to come with her. “Come on. Let’s go get my landlord.”

  Once we were seated in the front of the courtroom, I saw Eloy Gallegos come in behind another man. He gave me a nervous smile when he saw me, and went promptly to the table on the opposite side at the front. “He’s your landlord?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  The judge, a Hispanic woman in her fifties, suggested that each side should present its case in its entirety, and that afterward—should it be necessary—there would be an opportunity for cross-examination of any witnesses.

  Diane presented her own case. She had kept meticulous notes of times and dates when she had called for requests for repairs, of the slow response from the landlord in having someone come out, and of the time she had taken off from work and the hours that she had spent at the house while the landlord’s cousin, Benny, was supposedly making those repairs. She presented lengthy receipts for replacing all her groceries which froze or spoiled due to the refrigerator not working, showing three repeat purchases within a matter of a week of nearly every item, from commonly long-lasting condiments such as mayonnaise and hot sauce to staples such as eggs and milk. She had prepared a list of the four different complaints in particular with respect to the oven not working. She showed photos of the house after the explosion and fire, and a list of her losses from the claim she had filed with her renter’s insurance, along with the deductible she would be assessed out of pocket. She called me as a witness concerning the incident when the oven pilot light went out, and of course for the explosion. She even produced the medical report from the paramedic who had treated me on scene.

  Gallegos’s attorney called a service technician from the local natural gas company—a company which was not in any way involved—since the landowner leased a propane tank for the property. The serviceman nervously responded to the counselor’s leading with grunts, nods, and one-word replies in such a manner that the explosion was made to look like an isolated incident caused by a leak in the external propane line, probably due to the series of recent hard freezes in the Taos area—thereby shifting any responsibility for the blast that might have befallen the landowner onto the propane company, which wasn’t there to defend itself.

  The lawyer then presented papers that indicated that every repair Diane had requested had been made, flourishing them in a bunch as if they were proof positive that she had recklessly harangued the landlord into mounds of unneeded expense. Next the attorney produced a notarized statement from someone who had claimed to be a witness to a conversation two months before in which Gallegos had informed Diane of a raise in the price of the monthly rent. Then the counselor exhibited receipts wherein Diane had underpaid that amount by several hundred dollars a month. The attorney claimed that Eloy Gallegos had only let the tenant remain there in spite of the discrepancy in the rent payment because he was such a compassionate man.

  While the attorney was performing this circus, Gallegos sat quietly in his seat, his face completely without expression, looking straight ahead and never glancing in our direction. Diane was seething, fidgeting in her seat, and—more than once—whispering under her breath to me, “That’s a lie.”

  After the two sides had each presented its case, the judge was quiet for a moment, writing on a legal pad. Without offering the opportunity for any further discussion or the previously mentioned chance to cross-examine, she said, “I think it is obvious, from the body of evidence we have here, that there is a misunderstanding between the parties about the price of the rent and the desired condition of the rental property. I am going to dismiss the complaint brought by Miss Langstrom. I will not award any compensation to the landlord for the loss of rent for which he is undoubtedly due, because there was no request on his part that I do so. It is unfortunate that both Mr. Gallegos and Miss Langstrom suffered losses because of the incident with the propane leak, which seems to be due to an act of God, and I do not find any cause for a finding of negligence. Costs for this proceeding will be assessed to Miss Langstrom.” At that, she smacked her gavel on the bench, and the clerk instructed us al
l to rise.

  Diane rose and cocked her head slightly to one side, one eye narrowed, her expression on the verge of a sinister smile. Her eyebrows toggled up and down at me, and she bit on her lip and did not speak. I watched the judge leave the bench and go through a door into her chambers. I turned back to console my friend, but when I saw her expression, I thought better of it. With her eyes, Diane was drilling a hole through Eloy Gallegos’s skull.

  Gallegos and his attorney were shaking hands and smiling when the door to the judge’s chamber opened again, and the woman who had presided over the sham of a hearing came through the door minus her black robe and dressed as a civilian. Diane and I watched with amazement as the judge threw her arms around Eloy and hugged him. “You look just like your mother,” she exclaimed, holding him at arm’s length and then embracing him again. “You don’t know how much I miss her. We were just like sisters when we were young.”

  “Come on,” Diane said as she headed for the door. She walked so fast I had to hurry to keep up.

  “What’s our plan?” I said. “Can we appeal this in district court?”

  Diane just kept walking and didn’t speak. Outside the courthouse, she pulled up short on the steps to one side of the doors and said, “Wait here. Stand over to the side here where you can’t be seen through the glass.”

  There was a steady stream of foot traffic coming and going from the parking lot up and down the steps and through the glass doors. We stood in the cold for a minute before Eloy Gallegos came to the doors and peered through. “Watch this,” Diane whispered.