The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  “I know, Mamá, I know.” Bertha let the silence grow. “I will make sure that we keep the house.”

  “Is that it? Is that the best I can hope for?”

  Bertha’s voice came out barely a whisper. “Yes. I think it is.”

  With an eighth grade education, Bertha had already been turned away for most of the jobs in Taos. She accepted work cleaning houses but it was not a rich town; no one hired a full-time maid. Besides, her real love was healing. But the administrator at the hospital had laughed to her face when Bertha inquired about nursing work. “Get a nursing degree,” the man had said as he shut the door firmly after her.

  Two women alone. They would starve before Bertha found a husband, even if there was such a man who could immediately step in and keep their farm land productive, keep producing crops when the focus on growing things seemed to have switched to big farms owned by corporations in the fertile plains of the nation, not the tiny places of a few dozen acres where the growing season was so short and the land so arid that it was nearly impossible to bring in a crop before winter killed it.

  The man who wanted to buy the land had told her these things, and although it made her angry she recognized the truth in his words.

  Ten thousand dollars. He’d held a check out in front of her. It was more than city people made in two or three years, he’d said, more than the people of Taos County averaged in ten years. She could support herself and her mother for a long time if she invested the money properly.

  He went on about earning interest at the bank and some other things, but Bertha understood little about those ways and cared even less. On the day she slit open the last sack of beans in the cupboard, she decided to call him. He offered an extra three thousand if she would include the tractor. She bargained long enough to make him exclude the house and a city-sized lot around it from the sale. When he handed over the check she turned away.

  Tears flowed freely once she was outside the bank where she had signed papers and exchanged the paper check for cash. The 1932 Ford truck refused to start, even though she tried the various tricks Papá had shown her. She was about to abandon the stupid thing and walk home when a young couple stopped, sensing her problem.

  “Let me tow it for you,” the man offered, and before she knew it Bertha was at the car lot making a deal to trade the old truck for a used sedan and some of her newly acquired cash.

  She took a deep breath on the way to the house. This sort of thing will have to stop, she told herself. The cash had to last them a very long time. When she arrived at home, driving the new car, it was heartening to see the way Theresa’s expression brightened, and Bertha told her mother to get in—they would take a drive just for the fun of it.

  Since the war, gasoline was plentiful and cheap; they deserved a little enjoyment from life. They drove out to the Taos Pueblo, which Theresa remembered from her childhood. Bertha had never been there. By evening, when they arrived back at their small adobe house, Bertha could tell that Mamá was tired. They snacked on tortillas and went to bed shortly after dark.

  The next day Bertha was awakened by a ferocious roaring sound. Two bulldozers and a grader scraped at the land, ripping out the sage and tearing through the small, secret places where her medicinal herbs grew. She raced outside and shook her fist at the driver of one of the huge machines but he only shrugged and said this is what the boss had ordered. She went back into the house, where she rummaged through the things in the bedroom closet that her mother had never sorted, coming up with Papá’s shotgun and a box of shells for it.

  She screamed at the drivers of the big equipment but no one paid attention until she fired a shot into the air. All three machines stopped; the men stared at her.

  “Crazy old witch!” one of them shouted as they ran for their pickup truck and drove away.

  An hour later, they were back with the man who had given her the check and the county sheriff.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” said the sheriff. “This all looks legal. He bought your land and now he wants to build on it.”

  He informed her that she could keep the shotgun as long as it stayed inside the house. If she brought it out again he would have to take it away.

  Within a week, their acres of beautiful land had been flattened smooth, the raw dirt looking pitiful without vegetation. Wooden stakes with bright ribbons tied on them appeared in patterns that marked off squares. Signs went up along the road. Foundations were dug, walls of cinderblock went up. By Christmas, two dozen little houses had sprouted up and their quiet lane had cars traveling up and down it all day.

  Bertha noticed that these were young families—husbands who had been to the war, come home to marry, and babies were starting to come. She talked to two of the women who were obviously pregnant, offering her services as midwife. Both of them looked at her as if she were looney, before informing her that they would have their babies the real way, in the hospital with a doctor at hand.

  She trudged back into the house and called Donna Salazar, the friend she had known all those years ago in school, mother of the baby whose life Bertha and abuela had saved. Donna had been suffering a chest cold and Bertha offered to bring by more of her special salve.

  “It’s changing too fast for me, and I am not an old woman,” Donna complained once she had greeted Bertha and offered coffee. “Even my own Gracie—she’s going to a doctor at the clinic now.”

  They shook their heads over it. Bertha wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and looked at her slender fingers, with abuela’s thin gold wedding band on her right hand. She didn’t feel like an old woman, either, but Donna was right. Things were definitely changing.

  * * *

  Bertha pulled the carved box from the drawer in her dresser. The wood warmed her gnarled hands and she flexed her fingers. In the adjacent drawer were her bottles and bags of herbs, meticulously gathered and prepared each season, just as Abuela had taught her more than fifty years ago. She plucked out the bottle of inmortal, the antelope horns root used for respiratory and heart conditions. But she suspected Mamá would also need cota for her kidneys and persistent stomach ailments. In her nineties now, Theresa was nearing the end.

  Once, that thought would have brought inconsolable sadness to Bertha but she had seen much death in her time. She carried the herbs to the kitchen and began preparing the Navajo Tea from the cota, thinking back to that first time she had attended a patient with Abuela, the time she saved the tiny infant. Baby Gracie Salazar had grown to adulthood, become a grandmother, died in a traffic accident on her way to Albuquerque to fly in an airplane to California and take the grandchildren to a place called Disneyland. Too many things had changed.

  She poured the tea and carried a cup of it to Mamá’s bedroom, setting it on the bedside table so she could lean over and help her mother to sit up. Stuffing pillows behind the crooked back, Bertha thought of the many old people—most of her patients these days—who were about the only ones in the county who believed in the traditional curandera ways. She had attended so many of them, and she knew the signs of impending death. Mamá was in her final weeks; there was really no way around it. Bertha tamped down the terrible feeling that rose in her chest. Relief. Caring for strangers was one thing; living the caregiver role day in and day out for years—it had worn her down.

  In the living room, the telephone rang. Bertha started to ignore it, then realized it was surely another patient—only her patients ever called the house and it was the only reason for getting the telephone at all. Perhaps this one she could actually help. She set the teacup down and told Theresa to rest until she came back.

  “My father is calling for you,” said the voice on the line. Bertha recognized it as Sarah Williams, a woman in her fifties who had shown an interest in studying the ways of the curandera. “I’ve given him the altamisa for his fever, but he thinks you can do more. At this point, I welcome anything you want to try. He’s driving me crazy.”

  Bertha smiled and reassured Sarah that she would come soo
n.

  “Mamá, I’m going to ask Tina Ortiz to come over and stay with you a few minutes,” she said, when she’d gotten Theresa re-settled under her quilts.

  “Who is that? Patricio can stay here with me. I’d rather have him.”

  “Mamá, you know Tina. She lives next door. She’s been here many times. Uncle Patricio is too far away.” She’d given up repeating that Patricio had died more than twenty years ago, still in Chicago, having only visited New Mexico a handful of times after he left.

  Bertha went to her own room and gathered her kit, placing some loose herbs into the carved box, carrying an assortment of bottles in the bag that she normally took on every house call. When she looked in on her mother, the old woman was sleeping soundly.

  The sedan she had bought in 1950, right after the death of her father, sat in the driveway—well-maintained and rust-free in the high desert climate. She placed her medical kit on the back seat and walked to the house next door. Tall elm trees shaded the front yard, where the Ortiz family was one of the few who had moved into the new development and stayed. Most of the other homes had changed hands several times; Bertha didn’t understand this new way people had of moving all the time for no particular reason. Her knock at the door brought no response. Tina must be shopping. Bertha left a note explaining that she should be home within a couple of hours. Theresa could not get out of bed on her own, would not even attempt it, but she might need to be assisted to the bathroom. Thankfully, Tina didn’t mind such duties.

  Bertha hurried back to the car and drove to the Williams home, where she gathered her kit and greeted Sarah at the door.

  “How is he doing?” Bertha asked.

  “The fever is down. The altamisa really helped, but he still has pain in that leg.”

  “Don’t talk about me—I’m sitting right here!”

  Bertha walked in, to find Monty Williams stretched out in a recliner chair in the living room. Close to her own age, he hadn’t fared as well health-wise. He’d let a head cold go untreated until he had a high fever, which Bertha and Sarah had been treating successfully. Today’s complaint was apparently about his right leg, which was sliced with scars from old war wounds and now gave him pain every time a new weather front moved through.

  Bertha set her kit on a nearby table and asked if she could see his leg. “You have a couple of new lesions here,” she told him. “Did you run out of the goldweed ointment I made for you?”

  But Monty Williams’s attention was not on Bertha. He was staring at the carved box.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “I’ve had it since 1925. I was a child when my uncle gave it to me.” It was the most explanation Bertha had ever given as to the box’s origin.

  “I saw one just like it once,” he said, his eyes taking on a faraway look. “Germany. Early forty-two. They sent me to Bernkastel, a little town on the Mosel River. A Nazi soldier had that box. I picked up enough German to know that he was telling his buddy the thing belonged to Hitler himself.”

  Bertha felt a chill creep up her arms.

  “Course, it couldn’t have been that box,” he said with a nod toward the coffee table, “not if you’ve had it since the twenties. Aw, who knows? There are probably hundreds of ’em out there, way they mass-produce stuff these days.”

  Bertha went through the motions of grinding more goldweed leaves and mixing them with a little olive oil in a vial, leaving the ointment with Sarah for treatment of her father’s skin condition. But her mind was on the box and what he’d said.

  There were not hundreds of them out there, of that she felt sure. But even knowing there were two, she had to wonder. Did the other one hold the same kind of power as this one?

  * * *

  Bertha turned off the gas burner under a pot of boiling water and realized the odd noise she’d imagined was someone knocking at her front door. Now who could that be? She couldn’t remember the last time someone had come to the door, not counting the time that young sheriff’s deputy had stopped by to caution her. Well, that was all the fault of those punks whose taunting had reached the point where they threw rotten eggs at the house and rolls of toilet paper all over the place. He had promised to catch the kids and warn them, too, and it must have worked because they hadn’t come back.

  She made her way through the living room and peered out the front window to see a shiny vehicle out front, one that looked familiar. She opened the door.

  “Happy birthday!” Two candles glowed on top of a small cake, one of them shaped like the number nine and the other a zero.

  Beyond the bright flame she made out a woman’s face. The chin-length, curly gray hair was familiar along with the short, stout build.

  “I couldn’t let your ninetieth birthday go by.”

  Bertha struggled for a moment. Finally, she figured out that it was Sarah Williams, her former protégé. She smiled, more at the fact that she’d been able to recall the name than the idea that her advanced age should be a reason to celebrate.

  Sarah took the smile as an invitation to enter. When she pulled the screen door open, Bertha stepped aside, gave a glance around the living room—if she’d known there would be company she might have dusted the furniture. She spent so little time anywhere but the kitchen these days.

  “Blow out your candles,” Sarah instructed.

  The action took Bertha back to childhood. Mamá always baked her a cake, and a few times there had even been a store-bought candle on top.

  Sarah carried the little cake to the kitchen, going on about how they should eat a piece of it right now.

  “How are you feeling?” Sarah asked as she accepted a sharp knife from Bertha and began cutting the cake.

  “Oh, you know. All right.” People really didn’t want to hear about an old woman’s aches and pains, even though she knew Sarah asked out of genuine caring and with an eye toward helping if she could. Bertha changed the subject. “How is your healing practice doing these days?”

  Sarah took a seat at the table and Bertha brought two clean forks from the drawer.

  “I actually have some new patients, can you believe it? After years of thinking that the old healing arts were dying out, I’m finding a lot of these younger ones are looking to herbal remedies and natural methods. Of course, a lot of them just want to walk into the health food store and buy up everything and try it all, willy-nilly.”

  Bertha nodded and took a bite of the chocolate cake. Her appetite may have dimmed—she knew by the way her clothes fit that she’d lost weight—but her love of sweets hadn’t gone away.

  “Remember, those of us who studied with you? It was a small group, but I think I am the only one who is still practicing. I’ve been thinking of taking on a group of apprentices of my own, teach the younger ones so the art doesn’t die out. There are two young women and one man who show an interest in learning.”

  “Not like that one who thought I wanted a red-painted room so I could practice the occult,” Bertha said.

  She couldn’t recall his name but she remembered how he had redone the back bedroom without her permission. That was in the days when she occasionally took in a student for the room and board money that helped with expenses.

  Sarah rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, yes. Damien, wasn’t it? He never quite understood the whole thing, did he?”

  “Well, I never understood those things he painted in the room. Next week, I think I shall paint it white again.”

  She caught the flash of skepticism on Sarah’s face.

  “I can bring the paint and help you,” Sarah offered. “The week after next would be a good time, after I get back from Albuquerque. The grandchildren. I’m staying with them while my son and his wife go to a conference.”

  Bertha nodded. It had probably been ten years or more that the room had been red. Since her curing days dwindled away she’d had no real reason to go in there. But it would be nice to have the walls white again, as they were in the old days when little-girl Bertha
had shared that room with her abuela.

  “I remember the days when you used to come to our house to treat my father,” Sarah said, gathering the empty plates and taking them to the sink.

  Monty Williams. The memory leaped into her head, of the day she’d carried her carved box along on a visit to that house. Monty Williams claiming to have seen it before, somewhere in Germany. The same emotion rose in her now, the premonition she’d felt when she realized there were two of the boxes. It reminded her that since leaving the practice of healing she’d not had daily contact with the box. She should look for it.

  Sarah left, after repeating the birthday wishes and reassuring Bertha she would be back for another visit. Bertha closed the door behind her and glanced into the living room. Where had she left that box?

  It used to stay in her dresser drawer, along with all her bottles of herbs. She walked into the bedroom and opened the drawer, but everything in it was different. After she stopped practicing, she remembered now, she had given her herb collection to her students. But she hadn’t given away the box ... had she?

  No, she would never part with the treasure from Uncle Patricio.

  The idea wouldn’t go away, though. What if someone had taken it? Her heart began to race. She needed to find that box, to get it into the right hands, not necessarily the hands of a curandera but to someone who would understand and properly use the power the box conveyed.

  She turned quickly and a sharp pain shot through her leg. She collapsed against the bed.

  The room was cold, the sun low in the sky when Bertha woke. She pulled the quilt over herself and drew upon her inner reserves for strength. Her eyes closed once more.

  By morning, she felt as if she could roll over. The pain was persistent and she gasped slightly as she reached the edge of the bed and lowered her feet to the floor. Gritting her teeth she used the bedside table for leverage to stand, then the footboard, then the doorsill as she made her way to the kitchen. Coffee. That would revive her.