Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  Bettina shook her head. “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked. “I called to you.”

  “I know,” Abuela said. “I heard you. But, chica, la época del mito, it is a large place with many layers of time and myth laid one upon the other. It could have taken me weeks to find you. I thought it better to wait a few minutes first, to see if you could return on your own.”

  “A few minutes?”

  Ban laughed. “Time moves to its own rhythm in that place,” he said. “Half a day there can be but a minute here. You were gone no more than a few moments.”

  “I felt like it was at least an hour“

  “It is a confusing place,” Ban agreed, “especially at first. But come, let’s get you outside. You’ll feel better under the open sky.”

  He and Abuela started to help her out through the cave opening, but she made them wait until she could dig into her pocket and leave behind a piece of candy for I’itoi. Outside, the night lay dark upon the bajada, a hundred thousand stars peering down on them from the clear sky overhead. But there was no moon. And Ban was right. She did feel better now that she was out of the cave. More herself. More inside her own skin.

  “We’ll camp here tonight,” Ban said, “and make our descent in the morning.”

  “Sí,” Abuela said. “Tonight you will rest.”

  “But I’m feeling much better.”

  “Bueno. Still, humor your old grandmother. Tell us, what else did you see?”

  So while her grandmother and Ban readied the camp, Bettina sat on a blanket and related the whole of her adventure, from when she first heard los cadejos singing, to when they leapt into her chest and brought her back to I’itoi’s cave.

  “Cadejitos,” Ban murmured thoughtfully.

  Bettina corrected him. “Cadejos. That’s what they called themselves.”

  They had been small and cute, but somehow the diminutive felt disrespectful.

  Ban smiled. “Still, I’ve never heard of such creatures.”

  “I have,” Abuela said. “In Guatemala. But I know little more about them than what Tadai told you.”

  As they continued to talk, Ban brought out the food Loleta had sent along with them. He didn’t build a campfire, but rather took a small Coleman stove from his pack on which he heated the beans and shredded meat that his mother had cooked earlier. Garnishing them with diced tomato and cilantro, he rolled them up in soft tortillas. Bettina liked watching his hands move, shadowy shapes in the faint glow cast by the stove. He rolled two tortillas for each of them which they washed down with cups of one of Abuela’s herbal teas.

  Though insisting she wasn’t at all tired, at Abuela’s request, Bettina lay down after they’d eaten. She shifted about until the jut of her hip and shoulder settled into the small depressions Ban had shown her to dig. It was more comfortable than she’d thought it would be, lying there with a blanket pulled around her against the chill of the desert night. She heard Ban settle down as well, but her grandmother sat up, a small shadow against the starred sky, saguaro uncles and aunts rising up on the slope behind her.

  “Did you know this would happen to me, Abuela?” she asked.

  She couldn’t see her move, but she could feel her grandmother’s gaze find her.

  “I brought you here to introduce you to los pequeños misterios,” Abuela said after a moment. “The spirits you must come to know for your medicina to be potent. But I had not thought they would take you away. I always meant to accompany you on your first visit to that other realm.”

  “So these cadejos” Bettina said. “They’re to be my guardian spirits?”

  Her abuela made a tcbing noise in the back of her throat. “¿Quién sabe? They are a mystery to me.”

  “But—”

  “Sleep now, chica. We will speak of this again in the morning. Tonight you need your rest.”

  Bettina thought it would be impossible to sleep, but when she laid her head down once more, weariness rose up like a swell of dark clouds.

  “Ahorita,” she heard a small cadejo voice whisper deep in her mind, just before she fell asleep. “Tenemos una casa.”

  Now we have a home …

  Bettina woke in the hours before dawn, uncertain as to what had roused her. From where she lay she could see Ban still sleeping. He lay with his hands folded on his lower chest, face to the stars. Somewhere in the distance, one of his namesakes yipped at the moonless sky, joined moments later by a com-padre on another hill. Abuela had left her place under the saguaro and her blanket was still folded beside her pack, but that didn’t surprise Bettina. Her grandmother often wandered abroad at night—in the desert, in la época del mito, wherever los pequeños misterios took her. Bettina would have been more surprised to see Abuela sleeping on her blanket as one would expect from a normal person. She was half-convinced that her grandmother never slept.

  It was while she was turning onto her other side that she realized what had woken her. First she smelled the cigarette smoke. Sitting up, she looked around to see the tall, lean shape of her father sitting on his haunches a half-dozen feet from where she lay.

  “Papa?” she said, whispering so as not to disturb Ban.

  “I am here, chiquita.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette on a stone and stowed it away in his pocket before coming closer. When he sat down beside her, Bettina snuggled against him. He smelled as he always did, of cigarettes and feathers, of the dry desert after a rain.

  “I came as quick as I could,” he told her. “I would have woken you, but you were sleeping so peacefully.” He cupped her chin in his hand and looked into her face. “You are unharmed?”

  “Sí, Papa. But I was frightened at first.”

  “How was it your abuela allowed you to travel so far on your own?”

  “It was an accident,” Bettina said, and then she told him how it had happened, who she had met on the other side.

  Her father had always been a good listener. Bettina had often watched him with other people, saw how he focused all his attention on them when they spoke. She knew he wasn’t the sort to wish he was somewhere else, or be thinking of what he would say when the other speaker was done the way she sometimes found herself doing—especially with some of Adelita’s friends. Anyone in her father’s company had his complete and undivided attention which, she’d also noticed, many found to be unnerving.

  But she didn’t. She held close to this rare moment of intimacy with him. It wasn’t that he neglected them, but that he was an anachronism and his life moved to a different current from that which pulled his family. Though he remained close to them, he could not live as they did, always walking on cement and carpets. He needed the earth underfoot. He needed to hunt for his food in the desert, instead of in a store; to go into the wild places where his Indio blood called him. He had never been in a car. He had never used a telephone. He saw no reason to change a way of life that had already endured for thousands of years.

  “You don’t own a home,” he would say. “You only visit in it for a while.” Though of course Mama, raising a family, disagreed.

  “These new tribes that have come to this land,” he would say, “they have no understanding of the desert, the mountains, the wild places and the spirits living in it. They have their politics, but we have the rituals. They have religion, but we live with the spirits. They live in a world without harmony, without mystery.”

  Bettina had often wondered what had brought them together, her Indio father and her mostly Mexican mother. Her abuela, her mother’s mother, seemed closer kin to her father than Mama did. But this was not something she would ever ask either of them. And they seemed content in their own way, only arguing when it seemed the girls grew too wild. Then Papa would walk off into the desert for longer than usual and Abuela would make his arguments for him. Since her grandmother had come to live with them, her father spent more and more time with his peyoteros in the desert.

  “Papa,” Bettina said when she finished relating her tale. “I think they�
��re still inside me. Los cadejos. I can feel them … shifting sometimes, against my bones. Or I hear a faint echo of their voices in my head.”

  He regarded her for a long moment, dark gaze seeming to look under her skin, into her spirit, before he gave her a slow nod.

  “I don’t think they mean you harm,” he said. “Pero, if you are worried, you must ask your abuela to take you to the shrine of the inocente. Do you know the place I mean?”

  Bettina nodded. It was north of where they lived, along the river, a crude shrine built from old adobe bricks with only the vague memory of an image in their center. On every ledge and protruding space of the shrine stood the stubs of burned-down candles, a lava flow of wax drippings that almost covered the bricks in places. A man had killed his son in this place, the story went, killed him for simply talking to his beautiful second wife, not recognizing his victim as his own son until it was too late. That innocent ghost was said to be able to chase away unwanted spirits, to take care of those who had been wronged as he was.

  “Go there,” Bettina’s father told her. “Light a candle for the inocente and pray.”

  “I will, Papa.”

  He ruffled her hair. “I have heard of these cadejos, you know. When I lived in Sonora, the elders still had stories of them. There were two: la cadejobianco y la cadejo negro. Like yours, they both had the feet of goats instead of paws, but their eyes were like fire, burning like the deep hearts of the volcanoes that birthed them. La cadejo bianco, it was said, was the good one, the one who helped people, while la cadejo negro made people lost.”

  “Truly?” Bettina asked.

  “ Verdaderos. In those days, many people would say they had seen them, and one of the elders once told me that la cadejo negro was the good one really.”

  “And they said only that? There was only a white and a black one in those stories?”

  Her father shrugged. “You know how stories are now—there is no one way to tell them anymore. This had already begun before I came to Sonora.” He smiled, teeth flashing in the dark. “I have never heard of your brightly colored volcano dogs. But there are so many things we have never heard of, you and I, and yet they are true, eh?”

  Bettina nodded.

  “Still there have always been stories of los perros misteriosos among our people. A dog is never simply what we think we see. He keeps us safe from the wolf and coyote, but deep in su corazón he is a wolf, a coyote. He is the one that can walk between the worlds, who leads us in the end to Mictlan.”

  Bettina shivered at the mention of the land of the dead. It could seem too close on a night so dark, with her father telling his spooky stories.

  Her father smiled at her reaction. He lowered his voice dramatically “Only the dog may go into the underworld and return. He leads us there, but he can also lead us into the other worlds, just as your cadejos. He is descended from the clown dog of the old gods, as you know, fickle and unpredictable.”

  Bettina remembered that story from another night of storytelling.

  “La Maravilla,” she said.

  “Sí. When he comes for us, we know we have no choice. We must follow where he leads.”

  “Now I’m scared,” Bettina said. “Did los cadejos come to take me back to Mictlan?”

  “No, no, chiquita. But all dogs are spirits. They carry potent brujería, so we must always be careful in our dealings with them. Death is the gift we offer to the world in thanks for the life it has given to us, but no one should seek it out.”

  “All dogs?”

  Her father shrugged. “You will know them when you see them, los perros misteriosos. And remember, they bring the little deaths, too: sleep, dreams, change, the step from this world into la época del mito. You don’t need to be afraid of them, but you should respect them.”

  “I will try, Papa.”

  “And go to the shrine with your abuela. If she can’t take you, I will.”

  Bettina nodded, then stifled a yawn, tired once more.

  “I must go,” her father said. “Do you want to come home with me?”

  They were so different, her mama and papa. Mama would never even ask such a question. But she loved them both, he for his mystery, she for the home she made in their house, in their kitchen, in her heart.

  “No, Papa,” she said. For then he would have to forsake his hawk’s flight to walk her home. “Thank you for coming.”

  “You are my blood, chiquita. How could I do less?”

  He kissed her on the brow, then stood. So tall, Bettina thought. He and all her Indio uncles. She heard him strike a match, light his cigarette.

  “I love you, Papa,” she said.

  “Te amo también,” he told her, but she was already asleep. “I will look in on you in the morning.”

  There were hawks in the sky when Bettina woke the next morning, a half-dozen of them, dark against the dawn clouds. Brujo spirits, riding the high thermals.

  “Tu papá y sus peyoteros,” Abuela said. “You called to him as you did to me—when you were in la época del mito.”

  Bettina nodded, remembering—that and something else.

  “He was here last night,” she said. “Mi papa.”

  Abuela nodded. “I was out walking among the uncles and aunts and saw him on my return, hawk wings lifting him into the early dawn.”

  “He told me to ask you to take me to the shrine of the inocente.”

  “Because of los cadejos.”

  Bettina nodded.

  “It is a good thought.” Abuela paused for a moment. “But I have been thinking, too. Had they meant you harm, they would not have brought you back to us as they did. I believe they are your medicina guides.

  “But Papá said—”

  “We will go to the shrine and burn a candle,” Abuela assured her. “If they mean you ill, the spirit of the inocente will drive them from you. But if they are your friends, the spirit will know and he will leave them untouched.”

  When they returned home that evening, Bettina went to evening mass with her mother. She wanted to talk to Mama about her experience in I’itoi’s cave, how Papa had come to her, crossing the Tucsons and the desert on his hawk wings, but it was a conversation she couldn’t even begin. So she sat beside her mother, listening to the priest with her hands folded on her lap, and went up to the rail for communion. Afterwards, she waited with her mother by the confession booth, but when her turn came, she could no more speak to the priest about it than she could to her mother.

  Was that a sin? she wondered as she confessed to arguing with her sister and a half dozen other small transgressions. Would God understand?

  She wasn’t sure that he would, but she knew the Virgin did. Throughout the service Bettina’s gaze had been drawn, as it invariably was, to the Virgin’s statue with its blue and white robes, her serene presence. The Virgin had lived in a desert, too. Surely she had been aware of the small misteriosos, before the miracle birth of her Son.

  Later she did tell Adelita.

  “I saw Papa today,” she said as they lolled on a bench they had made in the backyard by placing a found board on matching stacks of adobe bricks. “Out in the desert.”

  There were no flowers in their small garden—only herbs and vegetables and the cacti that had been there before their house had been built. Neither Mamá nor Abuela understood the concept of watering plants that one could not eat. It was one of the few things on which they agreed.

  “He and nuestros tíos,” she added.

  “They aren’t really our uncles,” Adelita said.

  “I know that. But I like them all the same.”

  Adelita said nothing. She scuffed at the dirt with her toe, a little put out because Mama wouldn’t let her go off with her friends this evening.

  “They were in their hawk shapes,” Bettina said.

  That made Adelita laugh. “You can be such a little child.”

  “I am not.”

  “Then why do you still believe in los cuentos de hadas?”

 
“It’s not a fairy tale.”

  Adelita gave a practiced adult shrug.

  “You weren’t always this way,” Bettina said.

  “No,” her sister agreed. “But I grew up. One day you will, too.”

  “I will never grow up if growing up means no longer seeing the truth.”

  “Then they will lock you away with all the other locos.”

  Early Monday morning, when the dawn was still pinking the sky and long before Bettina had to be at school, Abuela walked with her along the river-bank to the shrine of the inocente. They walked quietly but still startled up coveys of Gambel’s quail and doves. When a roadrunner crossed the path ahead of them, Bettina stopped, her pulse quickening.

  “It is only what it seems,” her abuela told her. “A bird, nothing more.”

  Bettina gave a little nervous laugh.

  “I knew that,” she said.

  Her grandmother said nothing.

  The riverbed they walked along was mostly a dry wash now, damp in places from the spring rains, the only water puddled in the bed’s lowest depressions. Mesquite and palo verde grew along the river’s banks, sometimes hanging over the path where they walked. On the other side of the path patches of Mexican poppies the color of marigolds and purple blue lupines clustered around cholla skeletons.

  The sun rose over the peaks of the Rincon Mountains just as they reached the shrine. The white wax covering the adobe bricks gleamed in its light, highlighted by the small milagros and other metal offerings that were caught in its flow. Bouquets of drying flowers lay around the base of the shrine, tied together with ribbons and strings. Photos, curling and sun-bleached, lay among them. While Abuela lit a single candle and placed it on the shrine, Bettina knelt on the ground. All the wax on the shrine made it look as though it was melting back into the earth, she thought. There was little bird sound, little sound at all. Closing her eyes, she prayed, asking the spirit of the shrine to cast out the cadejos if they meant her harm.

  When the candle was lit, Abuela sat beside her and they remained so for some time. After a while Bettina opened her eyes, blinking a little in the light. She let her gaze travel over the shrine, then to the vegetation beyond it. Prickly pear and the mesquite. A few saguaro, one tipped at such an angle that it would surely topple over this year. The palo verde trees. A barrel cactus growing under them with a large yellow blossom growing from its thorny top.