Liria had cried not because the rattles and gasps from the old man’s mouth were becoming less frequent, but because the old man had dictated that Sarita, as the elder, must marry first, and must marry Calabazas. Sarita had not wanted to marry Calabazas. She had not wanted to marry anyone, she told Liria. Liria cried because now the old man was leaving them, but their lives would never be their own. Calabazas had been the old man’s tool, someone to carry out his orders, to guard the land holdings, to keep the keys to the locks. The old man had had that kind of power over the lives of all of them. Something was ruined now the old man was gone. Liria could feel it. The old man had been the only reason Sarita, and not Liria, had Calabazas for her husband.
Old Brito’s entire body jerked once, then went rigid for a moment, then lay still. Liria lay his hand on his chest. A circle of dampness darkened the front of his trousers and spread wider between his legs.
THE MONSIGNOR
CALABAZAS WAS OUT OF BREATH and his voice sounded too fast and too loud. The women had been working in the pantry off the kitchen area of the priests’ quarters when he had pushed open the door. They were starching and ironing white cassocks and white linen altar cloths. Calabazas recognized them only as the older women, most of them widows, who knelt at the front of the cathedral and took Communion at every Mass. They looked startled, as if caught in an illicit act. Calabazas had to ask twice where Sarita was. The women had looked at each other, and by the expressions on their faces Calabazas felt they required some explanation. He told them that old Brito was dying. One of the women pointed in the direction of the monsignor’s apartment across the big courtyard, hidden behind a row of oleanders thick with white and pink blossoms. Later Calabazas would recall that the ladies of the altar society seemed to turn and hurry away abruptly, but at the time Calabazas had thought it was because they did not want to miss the drama of old Brito’s death.
Calabazas strode across the bricked patio and past the small fountain with white water lilies half closed and clusters of tiny golden carp. Calabazas did not think the monsignor would remain in his apartment during cleaning and dusting. The massive oak carved door was not locked, and Calabazas did not knock or wait, but called out once for Sarita as he pushed open the door. Sarita’s purse and shoes were on the floor next to a long wine leather couch in the room that served as the monsignor’s library and parlor. Bookshelves from the floor to the high, whitewashed ceiling were lined with black-leather-bound volumes. The monsignor’s desk was cluttered with envelopes and letters, and a gold-trimmed, black fountain pen with the cap carelessly left off. The polished wood floors were covered with Persian rugs in deep blues and dark reds, and the luxury of the room reminded Calabazas that parishioners and priests in the diocese had complained about the monsignor, who was, after all, a Jesuit.
The monsignor stepped out of the bedroom while Calabazas was facing the writing desk, and when Calabazas turned, he had expected Sarita, not the monsignor. The surprise left Calabazas speechless. The monsignor had closed the bedroom door behind him. Calabazas realized the long, dark-red robe the monsignor was wearing was not a cleric’s robe but a bathrobe, and the monsignor’s hair needed combing. Calabazas apologized for entering without knocking and explained there was an emergency at home and Sarita was needed at once. But the monsignor seemed preoccupied with something other than Calabazas’s words. The monsignor watched intently as if he were examining each word as it came out of Calabazas’s mouth. Calabazas could see the small kitchen through the doorway behind the monsignor. The sink and round glass-top table were spotless. The monsignor had still not spoken. Calabazas did not think he looked angry for the intrusion, but Calabazas mumbled an apology and turned to leave because he was not familiar with the ways of priests. But before Calabazas reached the door, he heard the bedroom door behind him open. Even after he saw the expression on Sarita’s face, Calabazas still had difficulty understanding what had happened. It was as if a part of his brain was tossing bits and pieces of information at him but he could not hold them together. They kept scattering—skittering away before Calabazas could form any coherent idea. The monsignor’s messed hair. The monsignor’s bathrobe. The monsignor’s silence. Sarita’s stricken expression. Sarita’s emerging from the bedroom. Then suddenly it was all there. At that moment Calabazas had not laughed. He had barely been able to swallow. But years later, when he thought of himself as the cocky young stud, so certain he knew the score on everything and on everyone, Calabazas had to laugh. He could imagine himself standing in the monsignor’s study, Persian rugs on the polished wood floor, the white-headed monsignor in his bathrobe with Sarita at his side. Calabazas liked to laugh now when he remembered his absurd pride, his absolute belief in himself and in his little world. Later Calabazas thought he and the monsignor might have stood paralyzed, staring at each other indefinitely, if Sarita had not pushed past both of them and run out the door. Calabazas followed her. The monsignor did not move.
The monsignor sang a High Requiem Mass for old man Brito. The vaulted ceiling high above the altar enveloped all of them in the monsignor’s baritone, and Calabazas realized how Sarita as a Catholic schoolgirl had been attracted to him. They had never talked about that day. Sarita continued with all her ladies’ altar society activities. Calabazas had never gone to Mass or confession anyway. Calabazas would get occasional glimpses of the monsignor driving one of the new Cadillacs donated each year to the diocese by wealthy car dealers. The last time Calabazas had seen the monsignor, walking near the cathedral, the purple-edged cassock had been hanging loosely and Calabazas realized Sarita’s old lover was sick. When the monsignor died, the newspaper gave his age as sixty-four. Sarita had moved on to radical young priests smuggling political refugees across the border, so the death of the monsignor did not sadden her.
JOURNEY OF THE ANCIENT ALMANAC
LECHA REACHED UNDER the pile of pillows beside her and found the wooden ammunition box with the notebooks and fragments of the old manuscript. Her medication left her feeling as thin as an air current a hawk might ride. She sank back on her pillows with her eyes closed and thought how easily she could imagine the gliding and soaring of the red-tailed hawks that often flew near the ranch house. What she needed was her late-afternoon injection so she could be up and around and doing something. She called for Seese although she was perfectly able to get herself moving. It felt nicer when someone else did it. Seese had made friends with the New Mexico Indian Ferro had hired. The gardener. The handyman. The hired man. She called for Seese again and tried to see the face of the little travel clock on the bureau, but its face was turned away from her. No matter.
The injection got everything under way. She was up and out of the pale blue satin nightgown and into her white garden caftan. Shoes were not important. She seized the wooden ammunition box full of notebooks and the loose squares of the old manuscript; the strange parchment got drier and more curled each season until someday the old almanac would reveal nothing more to an interpreter. She headed for the chaise lounge on the patio. Lecha had never been able to get old Yoeme to say much about the old notebooks, except all of the material transcribed into the notebooks had been on thin sheets of membrane, perhaps primitive parchment the Europeans taught the native Americans to make. Yoeme had told them the skins had been stretched and pressed out of horse stomachs, and the little half-moon marks were places the stomach worms had chewed.
• • •
“A number of the pages were lost, you know,” Yoeme had intoned, with her eyes half-closed so she could recall the details clearly. “On the long journey from the South. The fugitives who carried the manuscript suffered great hardships. They were the last of their kind. They knew that after them there would no longer be human beings who had seen what they saw. A dispute erupted among those few survivors of the Butcher.”
They argued whether they should send the strongest to make a run for it, or whether they should give up and all simply die together. Because they were the very last of their trib
e, strong cases were made for their dying together and allowing the almanac to die with them. After all, the almanac was what told them who they were and where they had come from in the stories. Since their kind would no longer be, they argued the manuscript should rightly die with them. Finally, the stubborn voices prevailed, and three young girls and a small boy were chosen to carry the almanac North. The pages were divided four ways. This way, if only one of the children reached safety far in the North, at least one part of the book would be safe. The people knew if even part of their almanac survived, they as a people would return someday.
Flight to the North had begun after the occupation by the invaders. The people in the South had heard about the tribes far, far to the North from the traders who spent their lives walking north and south along trade routes. Traders carried parrots and orchids north and returned with turquoise and white buckskins. That had been the final argument: somewhere in the North there might be a few survivors of their tribe who had been given refuge by the strange people of the high, arid mountains.
According to the story, the four children left at night with pages of the almanac sewn into their ragged garments. The eldest girl carried a flint knife. The young boy was given a torn blanket. They were told their only hope was to avoid the slave catchers on horseback with dogs. They must find people in the villages who were not afraid to associate with fugitives. They were carefully instructed before they set out. They were told the “book” they carried was the “book” of all the days of their people. These days and years were all alive, and all these days would return again. The “book” had to be preserved at all costs.
“The story of their journey had somehow been included in these notebooks,” Yoeme said, thumping the notebooks with her bony forefinger. “They set out at night and traveled a great distance before day-break. They slept until sundown and set out once more. They were only young children. The eldest girl was twelve. Perhaps that is why the people in the places they passed were merciful and did not alert the local authorities. The story is all here in the notebooks.”
Many weeks into their journey, as they began to enter the edge of this stern motherland, they were weak with hunger. All along they had managed to find water and to ration what they each carried in the canteen gourds. Finally, early one morning as they prepared to sleep until dark, one of the younger girls burst into tears. She was so hungry, her stomach hurting and hurting worse than the “spike.” But the eldest girl was suspicious of these tears because only the day before they had each got a handful of gourd seeds from a man tending his garden.
They had entered a dry, barren terrain of sharp stones and steep hills cut by gullies. Few people were to be found anywhere along the trail they followed now. When they had met people, they saw there was little food to be had. They were told the aliens had stolen their modest harvests year after year until the people could hardly keep enough to seed the gardens the following season. The children saw few birds or rodents and no large animals because the aliens had slaughtered all these creatures to feed themselves and their soldiers and their slaves. It had been many weeks since the four children had seen meat of any sort. So the eldest girl became suspicious and asked the younger girl to lift the sacklike cotton garment she wore. But the younger girl refused. The eldest knew then what had happened, and she jerked up the ragged dress. The other children were horrified to see the younger girl had torn an opening in the hidden pocket, exposing the edges of the almanac pages.
While the other three had slept, the younger girl had lain next to the others secretly chewing and sucking the edges of the brittle horse-gut pages. The eldest led the others, and they began slapping and kicking the younger girl until she collapsed on the ground in tears. But they were weak from hunger, and soon they stopped and sat on the ground beside her and cried too.
Of course nothing had been lost because the little girl had eaten only the edges of the pages. But as the children continued on, they began to find entire villages that had been abandoned, where the people had not even bothered to carry grinding stones or cooking pots with them. Finally they reached the point on the river where the village known as “the Mouth” is now located, but at that time, all that marked the place was the big grove of cottonwood trees there. The children found the houses empty, but fortunately they found water in a seep dug by coyotes under the cottonwood trees. The children thought they were alone in the village and had just settled themselves in a huddle to sleep when they heard the sound of a woman singing. The voice sounded happy and the children hardly knew what to make of it. She was a hunchbacked woman left behind by the others when they fled the invaders and their soldiers. The woman moved along the ground like a spider to get around in the village and could even reach the water. But of course she could not have fled to the mountains with the others.
The woman began to smile and talk rapidly to them in a language they had never heard. When they did not respond, she smiled again and gestured for them to come closer to her, and to the cook fire she had kindled in front of her house. She pointed into the big soot-layered cooking pot that was beginning to simmer. Bulbs and roots the woman had dug along the dry riverbed floated in the water like the severed arms and heads the children had seen in a lake near their home in the South. Ferny green leaves floated among the bulbs and roots, and the woman brought out a flat, small basket with crystals of rock salt.
The little boy fell asleep in the shady doorway while the girls sat staring at the hunchbacked woman whose face seemed as big as her body. They had been traveling for months and they had met people who were afraid of them—afraid of who might be tracking the children and of the disaster that contact with fugitives might bring. The girls studied the crippled woman for a while and whispered to themselves. They concluded the woman had been abandoned, left for dead. She seemed so happy to have them. She must have been alone a long time. Here was a place they might stay awhile. To rest up and prepare for the mountains. The children had concluded the bright blue mountain range below the higher and bluer ranges were the mountains they had been instructed to find. They discussed it and decided that since they were almost to their destination, they could afford to rest awhile with the crippled woman.
The woman dropped tiny pinches of the rock salt into the stew and adjusted the level of the fire carefully. She was listening to the girls whisper, but did not speak until they had scooted themselves into the shade with their backs against woven-river-reed wall. The eldest girl could understand nothing the woman was saying, but decided the woman had asked about their destination. So the eldest girl stood up and stepped into the sun, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing with the other. The woman dragged herself past the little boy without waking him and moved around the fire until she could see exactly where the girl was pointing. The woman had then pointed at all the empty houses and had nodded her head, then had pointed back at the blue mountains that filled the entire horizon from the west to the east and as far north as it was possible to see. As the sun went higher and the heat of day descended, the mountains became less distinct and their color a hazy blue.
While the others slept and the woman watched the stew, the eldest girl had slipped away as if she were going to the bushes to urinate. But once hidden, she had carefully unknotted the threads closing the hidden pocket. Although she could no more read the writing than she could understand the language of the hunchbacked woman, she looked carefully at each stiff, curled page. When she returned to the little cook fire, she glanced over in the shade to be sure the other three were sleeping, and then she dropped a page of the manuscript into the simmering vegetable stew. The girl had done it so quickly the hunchbacked woman had no chance to protest. The woman watched the stew for a long time. The girl watched beside her. The thin, brittle page gradually began to change. Brownish ink rose in clouds. Outlines of the letters smeared and then they floated up and away like flocks of small birds. The surface of the page began to glisten, and brittle, curled edges swelled flat and spread until the to
p of the stew pot was nearly covered with a section of horse stomach. Well, it was a wonderful stew. They lived on it for days and days, digging up little round bulbs in the soft, white river sand, and gathering ant eggs and other things the crippled woman directed them to get. Food was difficult to find, but with the four of them they managed very well, and gradually they realized if they had not come along, the crippled woman would have starved as soon as she had gathered all the roots and bulbs she could reach.
They all began to gain strength from just one potful of stew. Only the younger girl who had chewed and sucked the edges of the pages she carried knew the source of the wonderful flavor in the stew. Then, in a quarrel, the little girl who knew the secret of the stew had told the others. The little boy began to cry. He said he would not eat another mouthful because he might be eating the part of the book in which the alien invaders are wiped out forever. He might be eating the passage of the story that describes the return of the spirits of the days who love the people. The eldest girl had shared the shock of her companions at her thoughtlessness. It must have been the hunger—hunger affected the brain. They had all seen what hunger did during the last months the Butcher had starved and slaughtered their people. But then the eldest stopped crying and said, “I remember what was on the page we ate. I know that part of the almanac—I have heard the stories of those days told many times. Now I am going to tell you three. So if something happens to me, the three of you will know how that part of the story goes.”
The Almanac of the Dead Page 29
