A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García Read online

  Sometimes, late in the day, when Flavio was done with his own chores, he would drive to Ramona’s and work a little on her house. He and José would fix the roof leaks around the stovepipes and replace the rotten boards on the porch. They cleared the weeds from around the shed and even swept out the inside so Ramona would have a clean place to store her paintings.

  The house where Flavio and Ramona had spent much of their childhood began to feel like what it once was. While it was true that occasionally there was still an awkwardness between them, it was also true that it seemed to matter little to either of them. A softness had come to Ramona along with Little José, and in it Flavio had found a place that he only vaguely remembered.

  It lasted for a full year, and then Ramona lost Little José at the river.

  During the year José lived with Ramona, the two of them would sometimes walk high into the foothills. They would pack a small lunch of tortillas and meat and hunt for arrowheads and pot shards that had been left behind long before there had ever been a village in the valley below. Sometimes they would come across markings on rocks of stick men and small deer and of women, their bellies full and rounded with child. Ramona would tell José that once Indians had lived in these hills and now all that was left of them were fragments of their lives mixed with dirt and stone. When he asked what had happened to them, Ramona would answer that she didn’t know. Maybe they became us, she would say. Or maybe they were here for so long that they grew tired and weak and were scattered as if blown by a great wind. They would spend the day walking, and when they returned home late in the afternoon, José’s pockets would be stuffed with broken bits of clay and pieces of obsidian.

  Sometimes Ramona and José would walk to the river. It ran deep in a gorge a few miles west of the village. And like the foothills, it was a place few people went. The river ran fast through boulders, and even when it flowed smooth, the currents twisted and churned just beneath the surface. Ancient junipers grew along the bank and along the hard-packed trail leading down. Their trunks were thick and weathered, and their sparse limbs were gnarled from feeding too long on rock and wind. Ramona would sit and watch the river while José would throw stones at the swollen fish that swam in the pools near the bank.

  The day Ramona lost José, she had seen a shadow out of the corner of her eye and felt the fine hairs on her neck rise. José was lying on a boulder not far away, a pile of stones on his stomach. A hawk soared high above at the rim of the gorge, and Ramona thought it must have been his shadow she had seen. A few minutes later when she looked back, José was gone.

  For days, Flavio and many from the village scoured the rocks and the waters for José. Some thought he had fallen into one of the crevices that were everywhere and that his body lay broken who knew how many feet beneath the ground. Others thought that the river had grabbed him when Ramona wasn’t looking and filled his mouth with water so that he could not even call out. But what everybody agreed upon was that Ramona was to blame.

  “She should have known better,” they said. “To take a child to such a place.” They would say these things to Flavio, and then they would shake their heads. “But your sister was always like this. Even when she was young, she thought she knew better, and never did she think she was part of this village. She shouldn’t have been allowed to keep José in the first place.”

  Flavio didn’t know what to think, and when he heard what people were saying, he chose to say nothing. He, too, knew that the river was not the place for a small boy, but to have him vanish like smoke was something he couldn’t comprehend. The first day of José’s disappearance, he asked his sister where along the river she would search.

  “I looked away only for a moment, Flavio,” Ramona said and shut her eyes. “Only a few seconds.”

  “Maybe you fell asleep, Ramona. Maybe the sound of the river confused you.”

  “No,” Ramona said sharply, and she opened her eyes and looked at her brother. “There is nowhere to look. If there was I would know it. He is not in the rocks, Flavio. And he is not in the river.”

  “But where can he be?” Flavio cried out. “He cannot be nowhere.” Ramona lowered her head and wouldn’t answer.

  For seven days, long after everyone else from the village had given up, Flavio walked the bottom of the gorge. He would yell Little José’s name into the small holes between the rocks and hear only his own voice echo back at him. He would stand on the bank of the river for hours staring at the water for a glimpse of José’s hand or the sleeve of his shirt or his hair that was too long. At night, he slept uneasily wrapped in a blanket beside the river. He thought that at least his presence would be a comfort for Little José.

  Finally, it was Ramona who returned to the river and told Flavio that it was time for him to come home.

  “He’s gone, Flavio,” Ramona said, and she took his hands in her own. “Come home now. Your wife misses you.”

  “I’m his tío, Ramona,” Flavio said. “How can I leave him here by himself?”

  “He’s gone, Flavio,” Ramona said again. “And it was me who lost him in this place. Not you. And I know in my heart he is not here to find.” She pulled gently at his hands. “So please come.”

  “But, Ramona, small boys don’t just disappear.”

  “He didn’t just disappear. La Llorona took him, Flavio. She was here and I saw her and didn’t even know what I was seeing.” She dropped her hands and began to weep.

  For a few seconds, Flavio didn’t speak. Then he said, “That’s a story for children, Ramona. There is no such thing. It was the river,” and then his own voice caught in his throat. “You should never have brought him here.”

  “Then it was the river,” Ramona said, and again she took her brother’s hands. “Come, Flavio. Please, it’s all I ask of you. Let José be still. You must come home or we’ll never leave this place.”

  Slowly, Flavio followed Ramona up the same trail she and José had walked down seven days before. At the rim, he stopped and looked back down at the river. From there, it seemed to flow slow and easy and the noise of the water could not be heard. It was early evening and the gorge was all in shadow. Swallows were swooping in the air beneath his feet. He took in a deep breath and let it out. When he turned to Ramona, she was already walking away. Her arms were wrapped around her belly and her face was looking at the ground.

  Ramona changed after Little José disappeared into the river or into the rocks, or into the arms of La Llorona. It was not a change so big that anyone in Guadalupe, other than Flavio, noticed. To them, she was as she always had been. The day after she brought Flavio home from the river, she packed all of José’s things in cardboard boxes. Then she took them to the church and left them sitting on the ground outside the closed doors. When she returned home, she scrubbed and cleaned each room in her house until even the wood floors were rubbed dull. Then she began to paint. To see her go about her life as if nothing had happened caused even more talk in the village than José’s disappearance.

  “The woman’s heart is like a stone,” people said. “Her nephew isn’t gone a week and she empties her house of him. And what does she do then? She sits and draws her pictures.”

  “Worse,” they would go on, “she paints this village as if it were hers, which it isn’t.” Ramona stayed in her house, and from early in the morning until dusk, she painted the village. Whatever people said about her were not things she heard or even cared about.

  For a while, Flavio stayed away from his sister. He, too, went about his life in much the same way as before. He would rise each morning from a fitful sleep and go to his fields. He would feed his cows and fix his fences. At night, he would lie awake beside Martha. He would stare at the ceiling and wonder how things could change so drastically and seemingly not at all.

  One afternoon, Martha prepared a small platter of tamales and warm tortillas and wrapped it in foil. She gave it to Flavio and told him to take it to Ramona.

  Flavio took the platter of food. Then he opened his
mouth, but before he could utter a word, Martha said, “I know what you are going to say, Flavio. But I want you to be quiet and take this food to your sister.”

  At Ramona’s house, Flavio stood awkwardly outside her door. He could smell the sweet scent of corn and pork from the tamales, and it occurred to him that whenever his wife handed him a platter of food, a request often went along with it. When Ramona finally came to the door, she looked at him for a long time without speaking. Then she took Martha’s gift and smiled and told him that the small window over the sink had swelled and wouldn’t close. And if there was a breeze, she said, it would swing open and pull the screws from the hinges.

  Until Ramona’s death, Flavio would visit her a few times each week. They would drink a cup of coffee quietly together, and then he would do small chores around her house or work on her truck if it was running poorly. For some time after José disappeared, Flavio would return home from Ramona’s and tell his wife that something had changed in his sister.

  “It’s as if,” he would say, “she has become more of what she was and less at the same time.” Although he was confused by his own words, Martha grasped the meaning of what he said.

  “You are her brother,” Martha would tell him. “For you to visit her and help her with things is more than you’ll ever know.” Then she would pat his hand. “So don’t worry yourself, Flavio.”

  What he didn’t tell Martha was that even Ramona’s paintings were different. Maybe it was true she painted the same old adobes and empty arroyos, but now there were shadows in them. Shadows in open sunlight and moving about inside abandoned vehicles. Sometimes the shadows were so subtle he could only glimpse them out of the corner of his eye. Then he would think that it was the light from outside moving on the canvas or that it was possible his eyes were getting old and he was seeing what wasn’t there. For the rest of her life, Ramona sat in her kitchen with her brushes and sought La Llorona. But not once did she ever see her again.

  RAMONA’S HOUSE WAS NOW FULL of paintings covered with dust, and the air in the room where Flavio sat was still and thick with the odor of smoke. Out the open door, he could see smoke beginning to settle over the mountains in the east. He moved his eyes to the santos standing in the far corner, and all of them, even the one he had earlier thought was looking away, stared back at him.

  “And where were all of you?” he said. “You were in this house when Little José was lost. Your job was to protect him from harm. He was just a little boy and he deserved better. I don’t know why Ramona didn’t throw all of you in her stove.”

  Flavio looked at the one standing before the others, at her lopsided features, at the grin on her face. “You are the one he made with his hands, and in return you left him by the river by himself. You should be ashamed.” Flavio took off his hat and flung it across the room. It toppled over three of the Ladies, but the rest still stood staring back at him.

  Eight

  THE COTTONWOOD TREE STOOD almost as tall as the church, and it leaned in toward the structure so close that the branches of its upper limbs reached down to trail on the old wood-shingled roof. At the base, the tree was many feet in diameter and the bark was thick and coarse. Low to the ground, where the trunk split and became two, it was stained dark with dampness.

  “It’s blood,” Ramona had told Flavio one day after mass. They had been standing together in the shade beneath the tree, and Flavio had been young enough then still to hold her hand. “At night, some of them bleed and no one knows why. I think they were hurt a long time ago and their blood comes from a wound deep inside them that never heals.”

  Flavio had stared at the patch of moisture without speaking. It was so dense that the bark had turned black and the dirt just below it was wet.

  “You have to remember, Flavio,” Ramona said, “to not climb cottonwoods. If you do and if you touch their blood, you’ll carry it with you forever. And then, who knows what will happen to you?” She had smiled slightly and then, as they often did, her eyes grew distant and she looked out over the valley.

  One late afternoon Flavio and Felix stood on the loose dirt beneath the tree. They were both gazing up into the branches, and their mouths hung half open. The limb that Emilio García must have been hanged from grew out of the trunk of the cottonwood about twenty feet above their heads. It was some two feet thick and ran parallel to the ground before its own weight bowed it low toward the earth. It was mid-September, and though the leaves had not yet begun to fall, they had yellowed and were as thin as paper.

  “I would never want to be hanged,” Felix said softly. “With your hands tied behind your back and everybody watching.”

  A slight breeze rustled the leaves, and the fragile sound they made was like voices to Flavio. Shadows moved about him and he thought that he would not want to be standing in this place once it grew dark, even if it was next to the church.

  “We should cut that limb off,” Felix said, his voice a little stronger, “and drag it away where it won’t bother anyone.”

  “Maybe it was just a story she was telling us,” Flavio said slowly. “A priest would never hang anyone. Especially so close to the church. All they do is stay inside and say mass and pray for everyone.”

  “Oh sí?” Felix said. “What about your grandmother? She said there was a priest here who used to whip himself naked and hang goat’s feet full of blood on all the branches. I bet you he didn’t pray so much. I bet you if we climbed up on that branch we’d find a burn mark on it from the rope. There’s probably old rotting goat heads buried in the dirt and gold coins that fell out of Emilio’s pockets when they hung him.” Felix kicked at the ground and then bent over and picked up a small piece of wood he had uncovered. It was smooth and burned. He rubbed his fingers over it, and they came away smudged black. “See,” he breathed out and held it up.

  “Eee,” Flavio said, looking at it. “It’s just a piece of wood from a stove.”

  “That’s what you say,” Felix said. “I think Emilio was holding it for good luck just before they hung him.” He clenched it so tight that his hand shook slightly and his knuckles whitened. “It’s still almost warm,” he said, and then he shoved it deep in his pocket. He looked back up at the branch above him. “I would like to be a bandit,” he said softly. “They would never catch me.”

  Flavio grunted. “There’s nothing to steal here,” he said, and he, too, raised his face.

  “Then what did Emilio steal?”

  “Who knows,” Flavio said, shrugging slightly. “Maybe he stole sheep from the ranchitos. Or maybe he stole somebody’s horse.”

  “A horse? You must be crazy. Nobody would steal a horse. Where would he ride it? Back to his house? I think he stole gold and silver and if we cut off that limb then they won’t be able to hang us if they catch us.”

  Flavio looked over at him. “Us?” he said. “I don’t want to be a bandit. I want to grow alfalfa and have so many cows that my fields will be bursting. No one likes bandits and they always sleep outside.” He also thought that if he even considered being a bandit, his grandfather would beat him with a stick. “Besides,” he went on, “if we cut that branch, Father Frank would find out.”

  Father Frank had been priest in Guadalupe for the past year. He was a small, round man who had planted irises and tulips and climbing roses in narrow beds all around the church. During mass, he would often use his flowers and the cottonwood tree as examples of rebirth and hope and enduring beauty. Flavio had a feeling that the moment their saw sliced into the bark, Father Frank would come rushing from the church yelling, his arms waving frantically in the air.

  “We could do it at night,” Felix said, “when it’s dark. And wear bandannas. Then he wouldn’t see our faces.”

  “I’m never coming here at night,” Flavio said. Even the thought made him uneasy. “Besides, my sister told me not to mess around with cottonwood trees because they bleed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Felix said, shaking his head. “You believe everythin
g. Trees don’t bleed.” He pointed to the base of the tree. “That’s just sweat. My father told me that trees sweat when it gets too hot.”

  “How can a tree get too hot?” Flavio said. “All it does is stand around in the shade.”

  Suddenly, from the other side of the church, came the flat sound of breaking glass. At first, neither boy knew where it had come from. They stared at each other, vaguely frightened, as if they had somehow been responsible.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Felix said quickly, hunching his shoulders so much that he looked years younger and smaller than he was. “You’re older than me, Flavio,” he said. “You should tell Father Frank that we didn’t break anything.”

  “Come on,” Flavio said. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s go see what happened.” He grabbed hold of Felix’s sleeve and pulled him over to the corner of the building.

  The church had been built on the side of the hill almost two hundred years before. Below it, the hillside sloped gradually down to the base of the valley where alfalfa and crested wheat grew. Irrigation ditches, overgrown with weeds and white clover, wove along fence lines. Branching off of them like tendrils were the smaller ditches that fed the fields. It was already late in the season, and the alfalfa and wheat had been cut for the last time. The fields were only sharp stubble, and when the cows straggled down out of the mountains after the first snow, it was there they would be wintered.

  Above the church, the hillside was covered with patches of sparse grass that had yellowed and gone to seed. As the hill rose, the grass grew smaller until it finally gave way to tall spindly sagebrush whose branches reached as high as a man’s chest. In the midst of that brush sat the García house, and standing in the sage, not far from one wall, was a young girl.