“Little José made you,” he said. “With his knife, he sat with Ramona and worked until he found you.”
All the other Ladies stood together quietly, their eyes looking down. Flavio leaned forward and picked up the santo that José had carved.
“Venga,” he said to her. “You can come with me. We’ll take a little walk with Felix.”
Twelve
AS HIPOLITO AND FRANCISCO and Cristóbal made their way through the rooms of this house,” Guadalupe said, “Percides pleaded with her grandfather to let her go with him to the church. Cristóbal held tightly onto Francisco’s arm, and even though Percides tore at her hair and begged him to listen, he did not say a word to her.”
Percides said that she would help Cristóbal walk down the hill and that she would be his eyes. She said that no one would dare harm Emilio if she were there. She said that if she were left behind, she would go crazy with fear. At the shrillness and the desperation in her voice, all the babies in the rooms of the house began to cry, and Percides screamed back at them until the walls themselves rang with madness and confusion.
Two of Percides’ uncles were eating cold beans and tortillas in the kitchen when Hipolito entered the room. They had come in from the weather outside and still wore their hats. Mud and water ran far up their legs. When they saw Hipolito and heard the noise from within the house, the talk died in their mouths and the ladles they held floated above the table forgotten in their hands. Hipolito hurried to where they sat, bent his head, and whispered to them, as Francisco and Cristóbal and Percides staggered into the room.
Percides’ face was swollen with anguish and her hair was wild. Her dress was ripped from where it had caught on a nail, and her knees were scraped and bleeding from falling.
“Grandfather,” she shrieked. “Please don’t leave me here. I will drown in this house if you leave me.”
“Quiet, hija,” he said hoarsely over and over again until his granddaughter fell still and her body only shuddered. “I will see this priest, whoever he is,” Cristóbal said to her, “and I will tell him that I will burn this village down. I will curse the very dirt in the walls of his church if he does not give Emilio back to us. Do you understand, hija? You must stay here. There is no place for you with us. I swear to you that I will be home before dark.”
Percides stood in the open doorway of the García house. The air was gray with rain and mist and drops of water dripped from the lintel above the door, threaded through her hair, and ran down her back. Her two uncles stood on each side of her and, as Hipolito had asked, they held her arms so tight that their fingers pressed deep into her flesh. Percides watched as Hipolito and Francisco and Cristóbal made their way slowly through the mud and down the hill. All three walked closely together, the arms of each wound around the others’ so that when one slipped, he would not fall. She watched until they reached the church and, there, became no more than shadows. They paused for a moment outside the heavy door as if catching their breaths, and then the three of them together pushed it open. They stepped inside one after another, and never in her life did Percides see any of them again.
“I BET THE PRIEST WILL HELP,” Felix said. He was lying back on the bed with one arm flung over his eyes, and the sound of his voice startled Flavio.
In spite of his uneasiness, Flavio had once again been lulled into the story Guadalupe was telling. His eyes were half closed, and he had almost forgotten the burned santo facing the wall and how deep he was inside the García house. The only fear he knew was Percides’, not his own. Felix, too, had gradually fallen quiet. After his fit of howling had passed, he had lain back on the bed and covered his eyes. For a while, his chest had occasionally shuddered, but eventually he had calmed until, now, he was once more saying the same stupid things he always said.
“Don’t you hear anything?” Flavio said. He wondered if he and Felix had even been listening to the same story. “How can the priest help if Emilio gets hung from the cottonwood tree?”
Felix moved his arm and lifted his head slightly. “That’s what you say,” he said. “I think the priest helps Emilio.”
“The priest does not help Emilio,” Guadalupe said, her voice flat and tired. “He was a weak man, and what happened at the church that day was too much for him.” The light from the lantern fell full on her face, and shadows moved in the hollows beneath her eyes, in the creases beside her mouth. Behind her, Flavio could see Emilio’s bones buried in the wall. From across the room, they looked yellow and brittle and more like the fingers of an old man.
“But maybe this time it’s different,” Felix said, and at the sharp edge in his words, Flavio jerked his eyes away from the bones and looked at his friend. “This time,” Felix went on, “you can make it so the priest rescues Emilio.”
Guadalupe shook her head. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “Which time?”
“Eee,” Felix breathed out. “This time. You could tell the story so that the priest helps Emilio and then they all go back home and eat some food with Percides. Maybe even the burro could be there, and after they eat, they could take little burro rides.”
For a moment, Guadalupe and Felix stared at each other without speaking. Then, Guadalupe said softly, “You want me to change the story of my family?”
“Just so the end is different,” Felix said. “It would be just a little change.”
“But then it would not be true. And it would make everything I’ve told you a lie.”
“So?” Felix said, and he pushed himself up on his elbows and looked at Flavio. “We don’t care, do we, Flavio? We don’t care what we believe.”
What Flavio couldn’t believe was that Felix was actually having an argument with Guadalupe García. It didn’t even occur to him that something true could be changed. If Guadalupe finished her story he could leave and then forget all about it. There was just a small pool of oil in the bottom of the lantern. The wick had begun to smoke, and the top of the chimney was stained black and there was the odor of kerosene in the room. He looked at Guadalupe and she stared back at him.
“The priest was a weak man,” Flavio said. “He would never help anyone.” Felix gazed at him for a while, and then he let out a little moan and flung himself back on the bed.
“The inside of the church was dark,” Guadalupe said. “The light that came in the narrow windows was gray and dead and only made the room darker. Emilio lay on the floor near the altar. He had been beaten, and blood ran from his nose and out his ears. Three fingers on one hand were broken and twisted. In the church with him was the priest, Father Patricio, and three of the Medina brothers whose eyes were black and saw only what they wished. They had all come to this valley together, and they had brought nothing but emptiness.”
FATHER PATRICIO HAD BEEN HUDDLED in his room when he heard the church doors flung open and then the sound of Pablo Medina and his two brothers dragging the García boy across the floor. He had let out a soft groan and then leaned closer to his stove. The priest’s skin was so hard and creased from years of weather that, although he could feel the heat on his face, it seemed to go no deeper and only made the things inside Father Patricio even colder. He was a tall, thin man, worn down to bone, and the robes he wore were threadbare and hung loose on his frame. His gray hair was long and ragged from neglect. He often suffered from chills that racked his body and from sudden lapses of memory that would cause him to stare off vacantly as if he could see things no one else did. When he heard the sound of a bench falling over, he closed his eyes and hoped that whoever had entered would go quickly and leave him in peace.
Father Patricio had been priest in so many places before coming to Guadalupe that now, on the verge of his old age, they had become all mixed with one another so that they might have been only dreams. When he had first come to the valley, the village had rejoiced that it finally had a priest to call its own. Women had wept openly and brought even their grown children for him to bless. At each mass the church was so full that men stood outside th
e open doors on the hard-packed adobe. For a while, they tried to ignore that their priest would often forget the words of the Liturgy or that sometimes he would fall still for so long that, one by one, they would go quietly, leaving Father Patricio to stand lost by himself. At other times, it seemed as if the priest could not stop talking. He would tell them about all the places he’d been and the things he’d seen, and his stories would frighten the children so badly that they would be carried from the church crying. At night, they would sleep fitfully and cry out from their dreams. After a while, few came to mass or at any other time and the church became a place where the priest lived. What he did there, no one knew.
Outside Father Patricio’s window, the clouds had fallen so low that the priest could no longer see the mountains. The few scattered houses down in the valley had fires going, and the smoke that poured from their chimneys hung flat and thick just above the roof lines.
“I have been in this place twenty years,” he said out loud, “and I don’t know where I am.”
Inside the church, something fell heavily to the floor and the priest’s body jerked. As he looked toward the door, it was suddenly pushed open and a cold rush of air fell upon him. A man stood in the doorway with water dripping from the brim of his hat. The high boots he wore were caked with mud.
“It’s been a long time, Father,” he said, and then he smiled when the priest said nothing. “Have you forgotten so easily? You and I came here together, Father. It’s me. Pablo Medina.”
Behind the man, just before the altar, Father Patricio could see two of Pablo’s brothers, who stood looking down at the floor. Someone lay at their feet moaning, and the priest’s first thought was that some member of their family had been injured. But why they had brought him here, he didn’t know. He raised his eyes and looked back at the man in the door.
“Father,” Pablo said. “There has been some trouble with the Garcías.”
WHEN PABLO MEDINA AND HIS BROTHERS and all of their families had come to Guadalupe, they were deeded land that sat at the far south edge of the valley. It was almost all foothill covered with loose rock and scrub oak. The rest was hard washed clay where not even grass would grow. Some of the Medinas grumbled among themselves that it was because their skin had been darkened with Indian blood that Hipolito Trujillo had given them such poor land. But Pablo, like Hipolito before him, would stare out quietly at the valley. He could see how much water was in the creeks and all the fields of pasture, and he knew that what they had been given was more than enough.
They settled at the base of the foothill and, soon after, began to haul timber out of the mountains. They built a small sawmill and milled planks and skinned vigas and smoothed latillas out of slender aspens. And then they traded these things to villagers for small parcels of land or livestock. To some, they traded only the knowledge of a debt that would one day be owed. After twenty years, their fields were full of cows and their fence lines stretched over a third of the valley and now rested uneasily against those of Cristóbal García.
“I am not a greedy man,” Pablo would often say to his brothers, or to anyone else who would listen. “But when I offer the Garcías a fair trade for something they only neglect and then they don’t have the decency even to let me into their house, what am I to think? I know that I should not be saying such things, but everyone in this village knows that the Garcías have far too much. And besides, they live in this valley as if none of us were even here.”
Pablo would pass around his pouch of tobacco and, with fingers thick from hauling timber, he would make a cigarette. Then he would shake his head and go on. “I just want to know what kind of people these are who have never come to the church but bury themselves in the sagebrush like savages. I’ve been told that inside that house the García children run naked and breed with one another and that the women are passed from bed to bed. I know, too, the stories about Cristóbal García who speaks to the dead and of the santo that he made and painted with his own blood.” Here, Pablo would look at those he was talking to and smile a little. “I have lived in a few other places,” he would say, “and in none of them would things like this have been permitted.”
As time went by, Pablo’s words had grown more and more bitter. He began to claim that he had found a number of his calves butchered and left to rot in the Garcías’ fields. He said that someone was cutting his fence lines and that at night he could hear the sound of his lambs screaming from their corrals. Those he talked to would listen fitfully, and at least one would have his own story to tell. Pablo was careful to blame no one for these things. But sometimes he would fling his arm in the direction of the García house, and those around him would look that way. Little by little, what had lain quiet for so long began to weigh heavy on everyone in the valley.
“I DON’T KNOW WHERE Pablo Medina’s hatred came from,” Guadalupe said. Her head was bent now and she was staring down at her open hands. Her hair was all about her face. And sometimes, her voice would fall so low that Flavio thought she wasn’t speaking at all. He was pushed up against the wall and lay with his chin resting on his chest and his legs stretched out on the banco. The room was warm and clouded with smoke from the lantern. Felix had fallen asleep close beside Guadalupe with his arm over his face. A soft sound came from his mouth as he breathed.
Flavio looked up at the santo. Through the smoke, all he could see was her dark shadow on top of the trastero. I would never hate anyone, he thought, and then there would never be any trouble. He closed his eyes and, in his mind, he could see Pablo Medina standing at the far edge of the valley. He was not a big man, but slight and wiry. His arms were too long, his hands were callused and thick. His hat was pulled low, and he stood without moving, gazing toward the García house. The fences had been cut, and strands of wire were strewn and curled on the ground. A heavy rain began to fall, and Pablo bowed his head against it. He began to walk slowly, and behind him came two of his brothers. Flavio could hear Guadalupe talking softly, and his eyes began to burn. A knot grew in his chest, and he pressed on his tongue hard with his teeth so that he would not begin to cry.
“My great-grandmother told me,” Guadalupe said, “that the Medinas were frightened of us and that they spread this fear throughout the village. But I think it was something worse. I think that when Pablo Medina came here he could see into the very soul of this place. And what he saw was not a thing he cared for. To him, my family was no different from a tree that needed to be cut or a fence line that had to be moved. We had lived within ourselves for too long, and Pablo Medina knew this.”
THE PERSON LYING BROKEN on the floor of the church wasn’t much older than a boy. He lay on one side of his body with his knees drawn up to his chest. His nose was bent and bleeding, and blood had run from one ear and down his neck. He held one hand clutched at the wrist, and Father Patricio could see that three of the boy’s fingers had snapped and now hung slightly askew. The knuckles on each finger were flattened and scraped to bone as if they had been crushed by a rock. The boy’s clothes were wet and full of mud, and already a dark stain of blood and water was seeping into the floor.
“I don’t know this boy,” Father Patricio said. He was holding tightly onto Pablo’s arm, and his knees were weak.
“His name is Emilio García,” Pablo said. “He is a bastard, and there is no one in that house who will speak for him.”
Father Patricio leaned over and squinted his eyes. “What has happened to him?” he asked. At the sound of his voice, Emilio’s eyes moved, and he looked up at the priest.
“Only what he deserved,” Pablo said. “He is a thief. My bother Manuel found him by the carcass of one of our calves. The boy had cut the fence and then had slit the animal’s throat.”
Emilio moved his legs away from his chest and lifted his head slightly off the floor.
“No,” he said to Father Patricio, and bits of blood came from his mouth. “I was with my own cows.” His voice was clogged and shaking, but his eyes were clear and didn’t wa
ver from the priest’s face. Blood had dried on the floor where his face had rested, and his broken hand was shaking badly. Then the boy grimaced and began to breathe quickly. One of his legs jerked back up to his chest and he laid his head down. “They were together,” he said in a voice full of pain, “and they called for me to come.”
“You should be quiet now,” Pablo said. Then his foot snaked out and stung Emilio’s shoulder. “You are a thief and a García, and no one has time to listen to your lies.” He looked up at his two brothers who stood facing him. “There’s more,” he said. “Tell the priest, Manuel.”
Manuel was the oldest of the Medina brothers. He resembled Pablo so closely that the two were often mistaken for each other. Like his brother, his eyes were dark and his hair and beard were streaked with gray. His arms hung almost to his knees and his hands were large. There was a bruise high up on his cheekbone that was still raw, and a thin line of blood had run into his beard. Andamo Medina stood beside him, staring off at nothing. He was built heavier than his two brothers, and his head was misshapen and one side of his face did not move. He had been injured a few years earlier when a large branch from a pine tree had snapped and fallen on him. It had caved in part of his skull above one ear and punctured one eye. Andamo had not spoken a word since the accident, and the lid over his empty eye was scarred and sealed shut.
“Andamo and I found the boy crouched beside our calf,” Manuel said. “He had just come from Miguel Esquival’s pasture, where we could see four lambs that had been butchered. In a field not far away, a horse belonging to the Cortez family was running so scared that it floundered in a ditch and broke two of its legs. The boy has spent the day killing senselessly.” Manuel turned his eyes away from the priest. His voice fell to a whisper. “He has taken food from the families of this village just as it faces winter. There is no greater wrong.”
A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García Page 21
