All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Francisco said nothing, growing ever quieter in his distress, and Antonia said nothing, growing ever angrier in her own. They were both destroyed imagining the young man who had occupied this Shrine only a few days before.

  Antonia, too, began to recall Daniel as a child. As a baby, Daniel had been as much a hellion as he had been in his teen years. He would chomp on Antonia’s breast and feed dirt to himself and tip over his cradle with himself in it and eat the hair off the barn cats if they got into the house. In many ways, though, Daniel’s terribleness had been a blessing. If he had been a sweet baby, Antonia’s grief would have never allowed her to look at him, imagining only what it would have been like for her sister-in-law to raise him for herself. But since he was awful, Antonia would say, “It was lucky Loyola died so that she never had to suckle a demon at her breast,” and spend all her moments with him and love him ferociously.

  Now these memories of Daniel choked Antonia, and she began to rage in the Shrine. Ordinarily, Francisco would have said nothing or would have removed himself, which only would have increased her anger. For years he had been saying nothing or removing himself. But now, he recalled General MacArthur and Daniel and, in the same way, put his arms firmly around his wife. He turned her to the mirror that was opposite the sculpture of Mary and held her there. She looked at herself, at her twisted face, and at Francisco’s tear-lined face, and at Mary and her owls behind them both, reminding her what the Sorias were really meant to do. Minutes passed like this, with Francisco still and Antonia rigid.

  Antonia’s anger died inside her. She collapsed against Francisco and for several minutes they wept together.

  “Look at us, Francisco,” Antonia said. “Look what we’ve become.”

  Francisco pressed his lips together. “I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”

  Daniel’s presence in the Shrine was so potent that they found themselves speaking English, as they would have if he’d really been there with them. They realized it at the same moment and shed more tears.

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  They clung to each other still. Judith had thought that if she convinced them to dance on the stage as they had when they first met, her mother and her father would fall back into each other’s arms, and she was not quite wrong. But it was not the hundredth blow of wind to knock the barn over, merely the ninety-ninth. This place, the Shrine, reminded them of who the Sorias really were. To turn away from this calling was to ruin themselves. Francisco and Antonia were both so choked up with unperformed miracles and their own darkness that they had nearly destroyed themselves.

  In this way, losing Daniel’s parents had begun to tear them apart, and in this way, losing Daniel brought them back together.

  Outside the Shrine, they could hear owls shuffling and calling, sensing the presence of a looming miracle—in this case, the untended darkness inside both Francisco and Antonia resonating against the unused saintliness inside Francisco. But they were not pilgrims, they were Sorias, and they had both seen for themselves that Soria darkness was a harder thing. Both thought of the wooden Soria family housed in another shed nearby. Of Daniel, lost in the wilderness.

  “We cannot orphan our daughters,” Antonia said wildly.

  The door to the Shrine flew open.

  Both Antonia and Francisco jumped in guilt and shame.

  “Rosa,” Antonia said. “Rosa, I can explain.”

  But Rosa Soria, her round and beautiful form lit by headlights behind her, was there neither about the owls on the roof nor Daniel in the desert.

  “Come to Eduardo’s truck and listen to the radio,” Rosa said. “Tell me who it sounds like to you.”

  It was inevitable that the other Sorias would hear the radio station eventually. In past years, when the family had stayed up late enjoying one another’s company, it would have taken no time at all, because the assembled members would have noticed the cousins’ absence. But because the Sorias had slowly parted, falling into their individual sadness, it took a late-night trip to uncover the secret.

  Eduardo and Luis had gone to Alamosa to play cards and on returning had seen the pilgrims gathered close together. It looked like a witch’s gathering, with Tony the giant at their center, a fire pit at his feet. Although he was married to Judith Soria, Eduardo Costa had an outsiders’ understanding of the pilgrims. This meant he usually did not think of them at all, and when he did, he thought about how they were uncanny, he thought about his wife’s family’s legendary history in Mexico, and he thought probably this proved that God was real, and if not God, at least the devil. Up close, they made him uneasy, and so it was with suspicion that he drew his beloved stepside truck close to them.

  When he exited, he realized the pilgrims weren’t truly gathered around Tony or the fire—the real focal point was a radio.

  “Hola hola hola, it is Diablo Diablo again, tiptoeing through the night with just fifteen volts and a dream. We’ve got a great show for you tonight. Our theme is gonna be love. I know what you’re saying—‘The theme for every night on this show is love, Diablo Diablo!’—but I don’t mean love like that. Not a-kissing and a-hugging, my friends. We’re talking love like for your mother, for your brother, for your sister, for your auntie. So what have we got, what have we got coming up? I’ve got some love letters—not love like that! Not love like that! You wait—that listeners have written for me to read on air. I’ve got another entry from my cousin’s journal. And I’ve got some fresh new music shipped in from a friend back east who’s got an ear for what’s hot. I know it’s late, but stay tuned and stay awake, because here we go. Let’s get under way with a classic from Trío Los Panchos.”

  Eduardo instantly recognized Diablo Diablo’s voice. Joaquin! he thought. His fancy and useless sixteen-year-old cousin by marriage, a disc jockey! Eduardo was no fool, and he had heard some pirate radio in this time, and he knew at once that that was what he was listening to. Because Eduardo was a proper macho of the kind who was much prized at the time and because a pirate radio carried an element of risk to it, this raised Joaquin’s esteem in Eduardo’s eyes by several degrees. Before Joaquin had been merely ridiculous to him, but now Eduardo revised all of the memories he had of him to include his role as a pirate DJ. Now his strange sense of fashion seemed like a coy nod to Joaquin’s secret life. His hair was a wink. Eduardo was an old-fashioned cowboy; Joaquin was a radio cowboy. This was to change their relationship for the rest of their lives.

  “Where is Joaquin broadcasting from?” Judith asked.

  “Shhhh,” Nana hushed.

  All of the adult Sorias listened to the broadcast. Because the cousins had taken every other radio in Bicho Raro, this meant they were assembled in and around Eduardo’s pickup truck. Rosa and Antonia and Judith and Nana were crushed inside the cab, huddled together for warmth. They did not want to turn on the heater in case the blower would drown out any of the broadcast. Francisco and Michael and Luis perched in the truck bed. They were cold, too, but they suffered it alone. Eduardo sat on the hood and smoked a cigarette. He did not believe in suffering, so he felt plenty warm.

  Diablo Diablo said, “Here’s a letter from an anonymous listener. He says, ‘People always said I was lazy, a do-nothing who just took up space. My sister always thought the best of me and I feel a little bad for letting her down. She always thought I was going to turn out to be something and she used to cuss at anyone who said otherwise, and it’s too bad that I didn’t turn out to be something because I feel like all her cussing was for nothing. Of course maybe she would have cussed anyway.’”

  The pilgrims had written the letters. This was one of the ideas Tony had suggested to Joaquin during the course of the afternoon. Tony, after all, had firsthand experience with how well listener participation could boost a radio station’s success. The two of them had gotten along as well as two folks could when all communication had to go through a young man from Oklahoma, particularly when they discovered th
ey both loved the same part of radio: the intersection of music and stories.

  Diablo Diablo continued, “ ‘If she were listening, I’d tell her that I really needed her cussing. I guess it didn’t make me do anything, but it made me happier while I wasn’t doing anything. Maybe one day I still will be somebody. Maybe.’ Sounds to me like this anonymous listener needs some gas in his engine. Luckily, I’ve got just the thing, I just heard it today and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since: Here’s the brand-new ‘Loco-motion’ by Little Eva. Let’s get moving.”

  A mixture of emotions filled the space around the radio in Eduardo’s truck: shock, anger, delight, pride, and finally, as owls began to circle the pilgrims, anxiety. Unperformed miracles hung thick in the air and the birds were going mad with it, swooping and calling, feathers drifting all around. There were second miracles choked up in the pilgrims and first miracles in the Sorias.

  “Let’s have another pair of letters from two more anonymous listeners. Remember, those of you pricking your ears to us from home, the theme for tonight is love, and these are love letters, letters about all the strange kinds of love we feel for our family and friends. While you’re listening to these words, friends, think about what you would tell these anonymous writers. Would you give them comfort? Advice? Agreement? Or maybe just a swell little song from the Shirelles. Ah, you know what, I’m gonna spin that and we’ll be back to read the letter on the other side.”

  The Sorias said nothing for the two minutes and thirty-eight seconds it took the Shirelles to ask if they would still love them tomorrow. They waited with rapt attention until Diablo Diablo returned with the letter he had promised.

  “ ‘I don’t know if I love my sister or if I have to love her because we’re basically the same person. People are always saying we look alike; it’s the first thing they say. Then everything else is measured by comparison. You’re actually a little taller than your sister or She ate more than you or You read longer books than her. Nothing ever happens that’s just about me. I guess that makes me selfish, so that’s stupid. I’m glad these are anonymous.’ Have you ever felt like that, listeners, like you only exist in relation to someone else in your life? It’s a terrible feeling. People are like sweet, sweet chords—we love them when they’re playing all together nicely, like in the pretty number I’m going to spin next, but it would be a crying shame to forget what a lovely little noise a D major makes strummed on a single guitar.”

  All of the Sorias in Eduardo’s truck imagined themselves first as part of the Soria song, and then as individual chords. All considered that the song they had been playing collectively was not a very harmonious one.

  Diablo Diablo continued. “Hold that thought … I’m gonna read this second letter now, because it’s also from a sister to a sister. ‘I love my sister, but I also hate my sister. We fight all the time. She knows everything about me and I know everything about her, so we don’t really have anything to talk about. We just fight. Sometimes, I pretend that I have gone out and gotten myself a very exciting life with exciting friends, and at the end of the day I’ll come back to her and be able to tell her all about it and it will be nice again, but I’m too afraid to do that, actually. She likes me because she has to like me. What if nobody else does?’ ”

  Nearer to the fire, Robbie and Betsy were squirming a little. They were the authors of these twinned letters, of course, and it was hard to look each other in the eye, hearing them read out loud. It is often easier to be truthful with yourself and others in writing, and that was the case here.

  Diablo Diablo said, “I’ve got a song for these two sisters, but I’ve also got a piece of advice. I know what you’re saying: ‘Nobody asked you or your mama for advice.’ I know it, I know it, but it’s not from me or your mama, it’s from Frida Kahlo, offering some truth to everyone out there who can’t let go. Here’s what she said: ‘Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.’ Sisters, I want you to think about that while I sing you a song that’s a lot about love but also just a little about liberation. Here’s Brenda Lee’s ‘Break It to Me Gently.’ ”

  As Brenda Lee began to croon through the speakers, Francisco suddenly put it all together. The radio, the letters, the owls swooping overhead.

  He said, “The pilgrims are the listeners. They wrote the letters.”

  And now, for the first time, the Sorias were directly answering their questions.

  Because Beatriz’s mind was a busy and practical thing, she had played over the possibility of her family discovering the radio many dozens of times. She had considered all sorts of possible outcomes, both positive and negative. She had prepared herself for Joaquin’s unbearable smugness if he received a compliment from any of the family. She had developed persuasive arguments for why the radio was probably not truly a bait to the FCC here in the wilds of southern Colorado, where the radio waves were not worth enough to send city folk out to take them back from young pirates. She had decided how she would describe the building of the radio to her father so that he would be delighted by the process. She had considered how to defend the use of the otherwise pointless box truck in this way.

  But she had not ever, before that night, thought about how she might defend herself after breaking the most serious rule the family had. She had not thought about it because before Marisita, Joaquin and Beatriz had not ever used the truck in such a way, and before Jennie, they hadn’t realized they were going to do it again. Beatriz was not particularly a rule breaker, as she didn’t mind following a rule as long as it didn’t get in her way, and she didn’t get into arguments, as she never raised her voice, and she didn’t interfere with other people’s lives, as she herself didn’t like to be interfered with, so she was not used to being in trouble. The last time she had gotten in serious trouble had been when she’d been born because she was supposed to have been a boy. (Alexandro Luis Soria was the name both Francisco and Antonia had chosen for her, and Antonia had imagined her to be a garrulous and dashing man like Antonia’s father had been before he’d died early in a freak airship accident. Francisco had imagined her as a clever and intelligent scientist, assuming thoughtlessly at the time that only a man could be so rational.) Everything else since the shock of her femaleness at birth had been minor dispute in comparison, so it was not a consequence that readily occurred to her when predicting the future.

  But now she was in trouble.

  As soon as the truck pulled back into Bicho Raro and parked, its lights turned off for secrecy, figures appeared in front of the truck like spirits. All of the Sorias had turned out to confront Beatriz and Joaquin and Pete. Beatriz had never seen their faces the way they looked tonight, not even when they were looking at Daniel’s message to Marisita. She understood now that this was not going to be about the disobedience of a pirate radio station. There was a taboo, and it came with real consequences, and Joaquin and Beatriz were experimenting on the ragged edge of it.

  “Do you hate us?” Rosa said. She had believed that Joaquin had broken the taboo the moment he read the letters out loud from the sisters, and now was crying from fear and relief on seeing that he was unchanged. Merely disobedient, not lost to darkness. “Why would you play with this, Joaquin, like it is nothing, when Daniel has lost everything for the same price?”

  Joaquin stood frozen. He had been suspended in the high of the show. He had thought it was good while he was writing it, and he had thought it was even better with Tony’s notes, and he had thought it was very good when he recorded it, but when he heard it broadcasting from the radio, he had thought that it was great, and he was not wrong. He was still suffused with the powerful sensation of doing exactly what he had been designed to do. This was his miracle and he was drunk with this electric holiness. For the entire drive back to Bicho Raro, the thrill and correctness of it had left him unable to contemplate anything else.

  So when he found himself confronted, he could not think of what to say
. It was too opposite to how he had just been feeling.

  “And you!” Antonia said to Pete. “I trusted you and thought that you respected my family. Instead, you’re throwing us into danger like we are nothing.”

  This struck Pete hard, as everything she said was true, both the good and the bad. He had passed messages between Tony and Joaquin all day. He had coordinated the pilgrims’ letter writing. He had come along and pounded ground stakes into the ground and helped Beatriz to erect the ever taller antenna and then hurriedly packed it all back up again when they were done. He had known from the beginning of his time here that the Sorias were not to interfere with the pilgrims, and yet he had let himself be used—joyfully, gladly!—as a conduit between them. He was as guilty as the cousins.

  “I want you gone at first light,” Antonia said. “This is unacceptable. How could I trust you again?”

  Beatriz could bear neither Joaquin’s expression nor Pete’s expulsion. She said, “It was my idea.”

  “But why, Beatriz?” Judith asked.

  “It was a calculated risk,” Beatriz went on, already knowing how these words would sound to her family before she said them. Daniel’s decision had been a calculated risk as well, and now he was gone. “We thought there had to be a better way.”

  “And what if it had come for you, Beatriz?” said Francisco, and she knew he was angry because he spoke this instead of whistled it. “What if the darkness had come upon you while you were out in the desert performing this secret experiment, this calculated risk? What if Judith came to look for you and also fell prey to it, and then your mother came to look for you and fell prey to it, and so on and so forth? Did you calculate that?”