All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Now Francisco nodded as he sat in the church-like light Daniel had inadvertently created all those years ago, and he thought about how Daniel was somewhere in the wilderness with his darkness.

  “There must be a way to communicate safely with him,” Beatriz said. Before Daniel had gone, she had been considering telling her father about the radio station, as she thought he would have found it an interesting thought exercise, too. But now that he had vehemently shared Antonia’s feelings about connecting with Daniel, she didn’t feel confident that he would allow them to keep doing it.

  “If anyone can come up with a solution, I believe you can,” Francisco said. He had great faith in his daughter’s brain. “But I don’t want you putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”

  “I don’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger either,” Beatriz reassured him. “But the doctor still treats the patient.”

  This kind of talk would have infuriated Antonia if she had heard it. Francisco often mused about the scientific points of the miracle, but to Antonia, this was not only blasphemy but dangerous blasphemy. To treat it as something contained by logic was to get comfortable around it, which not only made such a thing more dangerous but also made it less holy and thus less important. Antonia’s kind of belief is not uncommon, but it has done both science and religion a disservice. By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.

  “Do you have any thoughts on that in your notebook?” she asked.

  Francisco sat back down at his desk, hands crossed over each other, back straight. He was a comely and poised version of his daughter when he sat like this, the same eyes, the same nose, the same obsession with the handsomeness of thought.

  “Only that there must have been a better way at some point,” he said. “Or the Sorias would have died out by now.” He turned his cunning eyes upon his daughter. “And is there something else troubling you?”

  There was, but Beatriz was less comfortable with sharing this one, as she could not quite sort out its shape. Part of it had to do with Pete and herself. And the other part of it had to do with Francisco and Antonia, and if there had ever been a possible future for them that did not drive Francisco to live in the greenhouse and her mother to live alone. Beatriz wanted to know if people like herself and her father—people supposedly without feelings—could be in love, or if they were not capable of producing the correct quantity of emotion to fill an emotional partner’s glass for very long.

  “Do you still love Mama?” she asked. This was a longer sentence in their language than it was in English or Spanish, as Francisco and Beatriz had developed several phrases to indicate all of the different forms of love they had identified in their study of humankind. The musical phrase that Beatriz used roughly translated to need of the sort that can only be fulfilled by one thing.

  “Did Judith tell you to ask me?” Francisco inquired.

  This was not an improbable question. In fact, through the window, Beatriz could see Pete at work on the stage that Judith had set him on. He was now creating upright pillars for hanging strings of decorations. While Beatriz appreciated Judith’s attempt at strategy, she did not think that either of her parents were so straightforward that they could be tricked into falling back into each other’s arms merely by re-creating the scene of their first moments together. “No. I’m not asking if you will move back in with Mama. I just want to understand why it doesn’t work.”

  “Have you asked your mother this same question?”

  “No.”

  “Would you?”

  She imagined this scenario. Antonia, angry, and Beatriz, merely puzzled, both of these expressions feeding the other. It was exactly the kind of conversation that Beatriz spent much time avoiding.

  “No.”

  “That is why it doesn’t work,” he said.

  Beatriz took this information and put it into a projected future. In this projected future, she could not tell if she broke Pete Wyatt’s heart merely by being herself. She could not tell if they would be unable to have conversations because they would both want something from the other that was impossible. She could not tell if it was safer to stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.

  When she thought this, she experienced a physical sensation as profound as the surges that had struck Pete’s weak heart. It felt like a blow, but it was actually a feeling. It was a feeling so sizable and so complicated that it would have been difficult even for someone with emotional practice to express, and for Beatriz, who was handicapped by her belief of not having them, it was impossible. The feeling was, in fact, a combination of relief that she might be able to use this conversation as an excuse to never speak to Pete again and thus protect herself from further complex emotions, and also the intense and heartrending disappointment that came from standing on the edge of something extraordinary and walking away from it. These seem like intractable opposites, but only if you are being logical about it.

  Beatriz was being logical about it.

  A tap came at the glass. This one made Francisco sigh heavily, as it was not someone who was a quiet soul. It was Joaquin, who did not wait for permission but pushed his way in instead.

  “Beatriz,” he said urgently.

  “Shut the door,” she said in her language, then, catching herself, again in English. “Don’t let the rooster out.”

  Joaquin squeezed into the greenhouse. “Wyatt the Riot said Tony found something you need to see.”

  With some difficulty, Beatriz sorted her thoughts back into their proper places. Love, especially new love, is gifted at disordering them. “I’m coming.”

  “Beatriz,” Francisco whistled. “The answer to your question, though, is yes.”

  What Tony had found was a message from Daniel.

  He had been out walking that morning, eating his breakfast on the move so that no one could see him at it, and discovered the message. The letters were sized large enough for him to spot from his impressive height. One of the e’s was written backward. Tony, who liked large things, approved, even if he didn’t understand the meaning of it.

  Now all of the Sorias stood three miles out from Bicho Raro, the various vehicles they’d used to arrive there scattered on the edge of the road some yards away. All work had halted for them to visit the site, as if any artifact of Daniel’s was now a Shrine, and they were the pilgrims. It was a rarity to see all of them together at one time, particularly the middle generation. Michael, his work paused. Antonia, without scissors in hand. Francisco, far from his greenhouse. Rosa—well, Rosa was pretty much always Rosa. They had not been all together in one place since Judith’s wedding, and before that, not for years.

  “Why would he put it here?” asked Antonia. She looked accusingly at each of them, including Francisco, who stood on the opposite side of the circle. “No one would see it here.”

  “Maybe he misjudged,” Michael said. “Meant to have it visible from the road.”

  Rosa adjusted the baby Lidia on her hip. “Who is Marisita?”

  Spelled out in stones and dried branches torn from the scrub were the words:

  Marisita

  I’m listening

  Daniel

  Because as you have already guessed, Daniel’s placement was no accident. His message was designed to be seen not by a vehicle on the road but rather by a vehicle that had left the road to secretly broadcast a radio station. And the message was deliberately cryptic as it was meant for no one but the cousins who spent time in that box truck each night, and for the young woman he loved.

  Joaquin pressed one of his water bottles to his forehead as if the chill of it might steady him. Beatriz closed her eyes for one moment, and in that moment of darkness imagined Daniel returning to them safe and sound. When she opened her eyes, she and Joaquin found that they could not exchange looks as their secret hung between them and threatened to become visible if they b
oth pointed their gaze directly at it.

  But they both felt the same. It was one thing to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone, anyone might be listening, and something else again to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone in particular would be listening. And it is a third thing altogether to send sounds out into the night and know that you are being heard by the person you meant to reach.

  “Isn’t Marisita …” Judith began, “the rainy pilgrim who cooks?”

  In a more dangerous note, Antonia said, “Why is he sending a message to a pilgrim?” But the tone in her voice told everyone there that she already knew why he would be doing such a thing.

  “Love,” Eduardo said reverentially, and Antonia flinched. Joaquin made a note of the way he said it, in order to have Diablo Diablo try it later. It was the round and splendid way that he pronounced the o, the gentle landing on the v. He did not realize that his face was soundlessly pronouncing the word until he saw both his parents frowning at him. He corrected his face, and they corrected theirs, but he was still contemplating the part of him that was Diablo Diablo, and even though they didn’t know the name for it, so were they.

  “What does it mean, Beatriz?” Judith asked. They all knew that Beatriz and Daniel were the closest of the cousins, and Judith assumed (correctly) that this also meant Beatriz knew what the message meant. Beatriz, however, said nothing. She said nothing for so long that most of them forgot Judith had asked Beatriz the question in the first place, including Judith. (People often forget the power of silence, but Beatriz rarely did.)

  Francisco marked this absence of an answer, and put it away in his mind to think about later.

  Nana said, “So he is still alive.”

  To this point, you have not seen anything of Nana besides a few minutes of her picking tomatoes in her back garden. That was because Nana was old, and like many old people, she had arthritis. It was not bad enough to completely prevent her from moving, and in fact, she had precisely calculated the number of steps she could take each day without suffering for it that night or the following day (217). She had taken 15 steps to Eduardo’s stepside pickup, and then he had lifted her in and twirled his mustache. Then she had taken 47 steps from the pickup truck to this message. That left her with 155 for the rest of the day’s tasks. It was an expensive side trip, but one Nana felt she had to make.

  “He could be close,” Judith said. “Who knows when this message was left?”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Antonia warned. “It is still not a good idea to go looking for him.”

  But Judith had not said this as a message of hope. Rather, her old fear was beginning to creep up again, complicated by guilt. It was bad enough to be terrified that pilgrims might bring darkness on you; it was worse when the pilgrim was your own cousin whom you loved. She was torn in many directions. The easiest of these directions was away, and a huge part of her wanted to retreat to Colorado Springs with Eduardo. But that felt like giving up on Daniel. And even if she was willing to do that, a small part of her still thought that she might be able to convince her parents to reunite.

  But it didn’t seem very likely, looking at them now. Francisco and Antonia were closer physically than they had been in a very long time, but they appeared farther apart than ever.

  Eduardo placed his hand upon the small of Judith’s back, and she remembered the way he had said love. Her fear went back to sleep.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Judith retorted.

  If Antonia and Francisco and Michael and Rosa had been paying attention, they would have marked that neither Beatriz nor Joaquin, the two most vocal supporters of actively helping Daniel, had spoken in favor of helping him now. As it was, only Nana noticed their quiet acceptance, and she took it for despair rather than secret collusion.

  “I never said this wasn’t terrible,” Antonia said, feeling the silence of the group was castigating her for upholding their rules. “I don’t know why you are always making me out to be the bad guy.”

  “I am in agreement with you, Antonia,” Michael said.

  “As am I,” Francisco said.

  There was a pause, and they looked sharply to Rosa, but it turned out that the gap in her agreement was only because she was removing her hair from the baby’s mouth. “Yes, yes, we must be cautious.”

  The adults were soon discussing logistics in Spanish, which meant they were no longer actively soliciting the younger Sorias’ thoughts. They could not leave water for him, because that was against the rules. But if he was this close, they mused, he could get water from any of the ranches if he was willing to drink with the cattle. And if he was sensible enough to leave this message, they reasoned, then he was sensible enough to be hunting down food for his body, perhaps. Which meant instead of the elements, maybe he was only having to fight the darkness.

  They were desperately wrong about just one part, however, and that was the only in that phrase—only having to fight the darkness. Yes, Daniel was fighting the darkness, but there was nothing slight about it. They were not looking for the signs of how his darkness had manifested, nor could they have, but if they had, they might have noticed how uneven the letters were, how some of them were misshapen and only legible to the optimistic. They were words crafted by a young man with fast-failing vision.

  But they needed this optimism to counteract their failure to act. Imagining that Daniel was still doing all right was the only way the adults could live with their abandonment of him.

  “‘Marisita, I’m listening,’” Rosa repeated, bouncing Lidia in time with the words, waiting for them to make more sense. “‘Marisita, I’m listening.’”

  Marisita, I’m listening.

  Finally, Beatriz and Joaquin allowed their eyes to meet, and in that look, they saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Daniel truly was listening, they needed to put on a show that felt like a miracle.

  There used to be an enormous and fine barn at Bicho Raro, capable of housing two hundred bales of hay, twelve horses, a small tractor, and twenty-four barn swallows. The siding had been amber brown and the roof was gloriously red. It was, in fact, the very barn Pete was scavenging for the dance floor’s boards. Shortly after it had been built, the wind nudged it, as it nudged all things in the San Luis Valley. Nothing happened, because the barn was very securely built. The wind nudged it for all that week, and still nothing happened. The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit.

  We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.

  Things felt different in the box truck that night; things felt like change. Some of this was because their population had altered by one. Beatriz, Joaquin, and Pete were jammed together like crayons in a box as the truck lumbered slowly out into the dark. Beatriz wasn’t much of a talker, and Joaquin wasn’t feeling like being civil, and Pete wasn’t one to start a fire in a room that didn’t seem to be in the mood for smoke, so for quite a while the only sounds in the truck were the rumbling of the engine and the squeaking of the seats and the nearly inaudible thump of hearts when Beatriz’s and Pete’s fingers accidentally jostled together.

  “Do you like music, Oklahoma?” Joaquin finally asked, more aggressively than one might have ordinarily, and more aggressively than one might have thought, considering the truck’s cramped cab was pressing their shoulders together hard in a familiar sort of way.

  Pete missed the tone. “I like Patsy Cline an awful lot.”

  “Patsy Cline,” Joaquin echoed.

  “Who’s P
atsy Cline?” Beatriz asked.

  “Oh, you know who she is,” Joaquin said dismissively. He threw a significant twang into his voice but otherwise did not attempt to make it musical. “I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for you.”

  Beatriz shook her head, no closer to recognition.

  “Craaaaaaazzy,” Pete sang.

  Technically, he was not a very good singer, wavery and low, but he was pleasantly heavy on the syllables in the way that Johnny Cash was, and Beatriz was charmed by it. Moreover, the tune was recognizable. Beatriz said, “I know that one.”

  Pete had a thing for crooners. He liked Patsy Cline, and he liked Loretta Lynn. Women with deep voices and a sense of history, singing in low, round tones over plucked and syrupy steel guitars. Once, one of his mother’s brother’s father-in-law’s friends had stayed at their house in Oklahoma after blowing the engine of his new Impala on a cross-country trip, and while there, he’d told stories of meeting Patsy Cline back in Virginia. She’d been tough and funny. She’d called everybody Hoss, and drank like a man. Pete had taken an instant shine.