A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García Read online

  “I don’t know,” Felix said. “Maybe I should wait a little before drinking beer. Besides, the fire’s going to be trouble.”

  Flavio turned his head and looked at him. “There’s no fire, hombre. I just looked. The only smoke in the mountains is dust.”

  Felix was breathing quietly and though his head still shook slightly, even those tremors seemed to be easing. Finally, he said, “We were just little boys, who didn’t know nothing.”

  “What are you talking about, Felix?”

  “She told us that this place was named Perdido, because everyone in this valley was lost.”

  Four

  I’M GLAD YOU CAME BACK TO SEE ME,” Guadalupe García had said.

  She was standing at the cookstove, pouring hot water steeped in mint and chamomile into three cups. The wall behind the cast-iron stove was pocked with small nichos, all of them empty and woven with cobwebs. Flavio wondered why anyone would put so many holes in a wall and then, instead of filling them with photographs of plaster saints, would leave them empty. He thought it was just one more reason that he had no business coming to the García house for a second time in so many days.

  Across the room, opposite the cookstove, a long adobe fireplace swelled out from the wall. To one side above it were three wide shelves that looked more like beds where children would sleep than a place to keep food. The ceiling was supported by thick vigas, which were spanned with gray, twisted aspen latillas. In the spaces between them, Flavio could see dirt and sharp chunks of adobe. He felt as if he were in a hole above the ground rather than a house. Everywhere about him was dirt and mud.

  Unlike his Grandmother Rosa’s house, where the kitchen walls were covered with colorful pictures of saints and crucifixes and dried flowers, the walls in Guadalupe’s house were bare. There wasn’t even a pot hanging from them. In Rosa’s house there were so many things, that Flavio seldom noticed anything in all the clutter. Here, where there was nothing, Flavio found that his eyes would rest on the slant of the doorway as it ran with the ground or on the one wall that bellid out so badly it appeared on the verge of collapsing.

  “I don’t know the last time someone stopped by here to see me,” Guadalupe said. “Other than when you boys came yesterday.” Her back was still to Felix and Flavio. Her hair was knotted and long. It looked as if it had never been brushed. “This is not a place people come to visit.”

  “Why not?” Felix asked. Flavio glanced over at him. He knew why no one came to this house, and he couldn’t believe that Felix had asked such a stupid question.

  Guadalupe carried the cups carefully to the table. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “my mother told me that people stayed away because they thought they were too good for us. But my grandmother said they didn’t come because we frightened them, even if they had forgotten why.” Guadalupe placed the cups on the table and slid one in front of each boy. Then she sat down across from them. “What do you think?”

  Felix shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m not scared.” Flavio stared down at the mint and chamomile in his tea and didn’t say anything.

  It had been Felix’s idea to come here, and somehow he had managed to do it without even telling Flavio. They had been fishing at the creek and their path home had taken them past the church and up the hill and then across the field not far from Guadalupe’s house. They had caught four small trout, which they had strung together through the gills and mouth with a thin willow branch.

  When they came near the house, Felix had stopped walking and said, “If I had been Cristóbal García, I would never have stayed here. I would have got on that burro and rode to Albuquerque.”

  Flavio, who had been thinking about how his grandmother would put the four small fish in tortillas and smother them with garlic and chile, kept walking and said, “There wasn’t any Albuquerque, jodido. There wasn’t anything anywhere back then.”

  “Still,” Felix said. “I wouldn’t have stayed here with nobody around.”

  Flavio didn’t care what Cristóbal García would have done. In fact, he had been so relieved finally to leave Guadalupe’s house that he could barely remember the story she had told.

  “None of it was true, anyway,” Flavio said. “No one could know what happened so long ago.” When Felix didn’t say anything, Flavio looked back over his shoulder. Felix was halfway to the García house, the trout flopping from his arm as he ran. Flavio watched him run up to the door and then he saw Guadalupe appear in the doorway. A few seconds later, they both stared at where he was standing. And now, once again, he was sitting in the kitchen inside the García house.

  Guadalupe took a sip of her tea. She moved the hair that had wandered in front of her face back behind one ear. “There is a room in this house,” she said, “where bones are buried in the wall. It’s a small room with just a banco for a bed and a small table with a kerosene lamp. I would play there as a child because it was a room where no one would find me. One day, in the mud above the bed, I saw what I thought was a stone. It was hard and white and smooth. I tried to dig it out with my fingers, and as I scraped away the dirt, I found set in the wall a small bone like those in the hand.”

  Flavio felt a chill rise up his back. He looked down at Guadalupe’s hand resting on the table. Her fingers were long and thin and the nails were broken. There was a scratch across her knuckles that had healed in a dark ragged line. He looked at his own hands and then closed them into fists and put them under the table in his lap.

  “After that,” Guadalupe went on, “—every time I played there, I would scrape more plaster away and always I uncovered more bones. I think the bones are those of Emilio García the bandit. He was my great-grandmother’s first cousin, and he was hung from the cottonwood tree that stands beside the church.” Guadalupe stopped talking. She took another sip of tea and smiled.

  Neither Felix nor Flavio said a word. Then they both spoke at once.

  “Why did Cristóbal García go crazy?” Felix said

  “Why did they put his bones in the wall?” Flavio said. He thought that if he lived in a house where there were bones in the walls, he would sleep outside.

  “Tell me first,” Felix said.

  “I’m older,” Flavio said, which was true. Felix was still only eight years old.

  “You always say that,” Felix said, glancing at Flavio. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Why did they hang Emilio García?” Flavio asked, louder this time.

  Guadalupe turned her eyes to Flavio. “He was a bandit and a García,” she said. “That was enough. They hung him in the rain from the cottonwood beside the church.”

  There was just the one tree that grew by the church, and its thick limbs spread high up over the roof. In the spring, when the branches leafed out, the tree shaded half the structure, and in the summer, on hot days, people would stand beneath it and talk after mass. Flavio couldn’t even grasp the thought of someone hanging from its limbs, even if he was a bandit. On top of that, although violence was not unheard of in Guadalupe, it always came suddenly like when Andres Cortes went to shoot the dogs bothering his cows and ended up shooting his neighbor, Tito Medina, in both feet. Though this had made some people unhappy, especially Tito, who didn’t even own a dog, nothing much was ever done about it. Guadalupe was a small place, and people knew that life was easier if you ignored most things. Besides that, it was almost impossible to get those in the village to agree on anything, let alone on hanging someone. Flavio thought that Guadalupe must be mistaken, that what she was saying must be part of another village. Not this one.

  “But what about Cristóbal García?” Felix said.

  “That’s a different story,” Flavio said.

  “No,” Guadalupe said. “It’s the same story.” She looked at both boys and then stared past them, out the open door. “Cristóbal García,” she went on, “was never meant to be alone. The first mistake he made, other than leaving Las Sombras in the first place, was not following after Hipolito and
Francisco. The second mistake he made, which was far worse, was in the making of the santo.”

  …

  FOR DAYS AFTER HIPOLITO AND FRANCISCO had left the place they had named Guadalupe, Cristóbal did little more than wander aimlessly. He paced up and down the valley until he had beaten down the high grass and his trails mixed with those of animals. He walked the foothills, stumbling over loose shale and through scrub oak, looking for nothing, but all the time talking incessantly.

  He cursed Hipolito and Francisco, and he described aloud how he would shoot them and their livestock and burn their seed and leave their families hopeless. He cursed the junipers along the creek that always watched him and the mountains and hills that crowded closely around the small valley. He even cursed the weather that had remained calm and warm and without a breath of wind and made him feel as if he were in a place where nothing would ever change. And when he wasn’t cursing, he would pray. He prayed for the safety of Hipolito and Francisco and that they would shun sleep and food so as to return to him all the more quickly. He prayed that his wife was wise enough to have packed her things and that there would be no early snows to hinder their journey. Even at night while he slept fitfully, he would mumble to himself, and in the morning, he would wake to the sound of his voice. Cristóbal talked so long that eventually he became sick of hearing what he had to say. Then, he began to work like a madman.

  He built a small shelter out of mud and sticks on the top of a small hill at the north end of the valley. There, he felt he was far enough from the creek so that the sound of the water and the creaking of the junipers wouldn’t disturb him at night. Although the hill was not much higher than anything else in the valley, it was high enough to ease some of the dread of being alone. He dammed one of the creeks with large stones and from it spent days digging a shallow ditch that ran through the grass and along the side of the hill to his shelter.

  Each day, Cristóbal told himself that with such good weather, Hipolito and Francisco would reach Las Sombras in no time. After a week, he believed that they and their families and his own must surely have begun the journey back to Gaudalupe. He made plans to winter in the valley. At the first sign of spring, he and his family would return to Las Sombras, where they belonged.

  “My family is almost here,” Cristóbal would say every night before sleep, as if it were a prayer.

  Two weeks after Hipolito and Francisco had left the valley, Cristóbal woke to a day that was like summer. The air was dead and warm and the grass stood tall and frail and thin. The sky was streaked pale white, but above the mountains it was red, the color of fire. By midday, the wind had begun to blow, and Cristóbal could see dark clouds banked over the foothills in the west. Just before dark, it turned cold. By morning, a foot of snow had fallen and the mountains were swallowed in clouds.

  Cristóbal ran out of firewood on the second day of the storm. He tied frayed strips of leather around his feet and wrapped his blanket over his shoulders. The wind outside his shelter was howling, and there was so much snow in the air that the junipers along the creek looked like the ghosts of trees. For hours, Cristóbal walked back and forth from the river, hauling branches that the wind had torn loose. He hauled wood until his hands and feet were cracked and numb and his face was blistered from the wind. That night, in a frenzy, Cristóbal began to carve a santo, and although there was always something not at rest in Cristóbal’s soul, before then he had not completely lost his mind.

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DONKEY?” Felix asked. The sound of his voice in the kitchen startled Guadalupe and she stopped talking. She looked at Felix as if she had forgotten he was there.

  “What happened to the donkey?” he asked again. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor and he was swinging his legs slightly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She had stopped smiling and Flavio thought she had the same look on her face that his father would sometimes get when he’d been drinking heavily and one of his children asked him a question.

  “I don’t know that part of the story,” Guadalupe said.

  “Can you find out?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s no one left to ask.”

  “Maybe he ate it,” Flavio said.

  “Eee,” Felix said loudly, grimacing. “I would never eat a donkey.”

  “You would if you were hungry,” Flavio told him. “And if it was snowing and never stopped.”

  “I would eat bark first. I would have made that donkey take me to Albuquerque and then if it snowed, so what.”

  The two boys stared at each other and then Flavio shook his head. “This isn’t a story about a donkey,” he said.

  “Then why is he in it?”

  Sometimes Felix would get this way. For the most part, he was a quiet boy who would spend his time using his feet or his hands rather than his mouth. But occasionally, seemingly for no reason, he would grab on to something like a small dog and not let go until he drove Flavio crazy.

  “Do you think Cristóbal ate the donkey?” Felix asked Guadalupe.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “Maybe the burro ran away and became wild. Or maybe he stayed in the valley with Cristóbal and kept him company. I only know what Cristóbal did and on the second night of the storm he began to carve a santo of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

  SHE WAS CARVED OUT of the burned, ragged end of a juniper branch that had been ripped from a tree by the wind. Cristóbal stripped the bark from the wood and worked all night with his knife. By morning, her hands had come out of the wood and the outline of her gown could be seen. The storm continued to rage through the day, and so much snow had drifted around Cristóbal’s shelter that all he could hear from outside was the muffled echo of the wind. All day he sat beside the fire, his body rocking gently, while his knife took away one sliver of wood after another. When he was finally finished, it was dark. He stood her next to the fire and looked at her.

  Her gown was black from the ashes he had rubbed into the wood. Her body and face were scarred with gashes and stained with blood from where the knife had slipped and cut Cristóbal’s hand. Her hands pressed together at her chest, and although she stared forward, her head was bent slightly. Her mouth was severe and coarse, as if she had already seen too much. Cristóbal took her in his arms and then he prayed to her. He asked only one thing of her—that his family be safely delivered to him.

  That night, while the storm broke and a bitter cold fell upon the valley, Cristóbal dreamed. In this dream he saw his wife and eight small daughters huddled silently together in the sagebrush. They were without shoes and were clothed in thin garments. Snow was in their hair and in their open eyes. Their faces and hands were frozen white in the image of the santo.

  ONE CHRISTMAS EVE, Flavio had stood at his window, his head just above the sill, and he had seen the abuelos coming. There were five of them, and they were dressed in bulky clothes and wide dark hats and their faces were swollen and misshapen. In one hand they each carried willow branches and in the other was a burlap bag. They walked unsteadily, stumbling against one another, and they were singing a song so out of tune and so disjointed that it seemed as if all five were yelling something completely different. Flavio had stood at the window without breathing. As he watched them walk to the house, he remembered everything his sister had told him.

  “They will come for you on Christmas Eve,” Ramona had said. “They will carry whips and when they’re done beating you, they’ll stuff you in their bags and take you so far away no one will ever see you again.”

  Ramona had a way of telling Flavio these things when she was angry, and as far as Flavio could tell, it didn’t matter if she was angry at him or at nothing. She would make him sit in the kitchen and then, gleefully, tell him things he would rather not have known. She told him about La Llorona, who walked the ditches and riverbanks in search of her dead children. Her voice is like a coyote’s, Ramona would say, but you can’t hear her until she is behind you, and then it’s too late. She’ll grab you and hold you un
der the water until you drown.

  Ramona told him that their neighbor, Emilio Silva, an old man who lived alone, was in truth a witch who could change himself into an owl or a feral dog. At night, she told Flavio, he looks in your window while you sleep and tries to pry open the glass with his teeth. And she told him about the abuelos who would come for him on Christmas Eve.

  When the abuelos had come close to the house, Flavio’s father had gone outside with a bottle of whiskey. Flavio had watched as each abuelo lifted his mask and drank from the bottle. After a while, they had left, shuffling back down the road. Flavio’s father had come back inside, carrying cold and the smell of whiskey with him, and stood beside his son. He had placed his hand on Flavio’s head and said, “Don’t be frightened, hijo. You are a good boy. Nothing bad will ever come to you if you’re good.” At the end of the drive leading to the Montoyas’ house, one of the abuelos had fallen into the snow. The other four helped him to his feet and they had gone off into the night.

  The story Guadalupe García was telling made Flavio feel the same way he had on that Christmas Eve, that it was possible his father had been wrong. Things could happen, good or bad, for no reason at all.

  “Were they dead?” Felix asked. His voice trembled slightly and Flavio thought that he was close to tears.

  “No,” Guadalupe said. “What Cristóbal dreamed wasn’t true. His family, at that time, was safe in Santa Madre, not wandering lost in the snow. What the Lady showed him were either things deep in his own mind or it was a trick she played on him.”

  Felix slapped the table with his hand. “He should have chopped her up and thrown her in the fire.”

  “He did not have time,” Guadalupe said. “Because not only did the Lady steal his family from him, but then she gave them back.”

  When Cristóbal emerged from his shelter the next morning, he thought his family was dead. His face was black with soot from the fire and his eyes were meshed with blood. His hands were crusted with dirt and covered with gashes from his knife. He was so thin that the bones of his ribs could be seen even through his clothes and his legs were like sticks. It was so cold that his breath made ice in his beard. The snow came to his waist and for a moment, in the sunlight, Cristóbal was blinded.