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CHAPTER 1
Spy Wednesday
April 11, 2001 (morning)
Headdress or Shaman
When I passed away, some people swore that Padre Pettit would refuse me a proper Christian burial. Only in Taos, New Mexico, they said, would you hold a wake for a witch. In the barrio at the edge of town, my neighbors called me Abuela, which means grandmother, but behind my back, their tongues snapped like flags in the wind.
She's not a real curandera, they said. Don't be fooled by her teas and salves. If you want to know how she cures her patients, look up at the sky and watch her fly away on her broom. They said this even after I cured Baby Lucy's colic by holding her upside down under a full moon. When I popped the skin on Jesús's belly three times to move his bowels, he swore I was a saint. Ramona's bunions disappeared after I sat her beside a sink of running water and rubbed a white onion on her foot. These were trifles compared to their real problems, but I was just a country witch. The bruja they needed probably could fly on a broom.
All the same, on that slate-colored Wednesday in April — Spy Wednesday, the church calls it — Our Lady of Guadalupe was packed. In an open casket, with twelve tapers burning at each end, I lay like a doll on puffed satin, with painted lips and rouge on my cheeks. My sister-in-law, Zarita, had dressed me in my wedding clothes: a turquoise velvet blouse and a long black skirt embroidered with silver flowers. She bought some stockings at Wal-Mart and picked up the patent-leather pumps, like new, from Second Chances Thrift Store. I had never looked better.
Padre Pettit draped a rosary over my hands — the one given to me when I was thirteen by the missionaries at the Indian boarding school in Santa Fe. There I learned to speak English and pray like a white-eyes. Every night, when my empty belly began to growl, I knelt on the cold floor and asked Jesus and Mary to burn the school to the ground.
My son, Teo, the actor from Los Angeles, paid for the service. Teo, or Ted as he called himself, was not a handsome man, but he acted like one. He had the liar's gap between his big white teeth and a head full of hair. His sport coat was made of a fine black cashmere, and it hung just so. "Where is my son?" he asked, caressing the casket with his long fingers. "Why isn't Mister here to say good-bye to his grandmother?" Then, in a voice that carried out to the Plaza, he recited the Réquiem Aetérnam. People thought he might make it all the way in the Latin, but he got stuck on "perpetual light" and had to finish in English. He ran his hand through his hair, then let his fingers rest briefly on the lapel of his jacket, near his heart.
I wanted to smack him, but my eyes remained shut, and my lips did not move. Not a bead moved on my rosary as I said thirty Hail Marys and thirty-one Our Fathers, one for every year of his life.
During the Glorious Mysteries, Diputado Ernesto staggered forth and dropped a crucifix on my chest. Even a corpse could smell the whiskey on him. My little brother Ernie had never been able to hold his liquor, and when his knuckles brushed against me, I was afraid he would fall right on top of me. He shuddered at the touch of my cold hand.
When I was a girl, I had thin spidery fingers, and sometimes, to scare Ernesto, I pretended to be a tarantula. La araña, I whispered as my fingers crawled along his chest. La araña is crawling! La araña is creeping! Once, he fainted. I didn't know how else to make him mind.
Over the years, my hands grew gnarled. Two springs before I died, when I planted my last garden, my fingers were like old yellow parsnips. As I pressed potatoes and carrots into the cool ground, with the March wind blowing dust devils all around me, I had a vision: I died and was born again. In years that seemed like minutes, as my casket crumbled and my hair grew into long weeds, I curled up like a baby in the womb. With my long fingernails and toenails, I clawed and scraped through the bottom of my grave, going down, down, down. Sometimes I moved as slowly as a root, but I dug all the way into the belly of the earth where I was formed so long ago in the hands of Black Hac·ct'cin.
"Mi Dios ... mi Dios," Ernesto prayed, lurching over my casket. With his pocketknife, he sawed off the tip of the braid that hung over my shoulder — a thick, gray rope that grew shorter during the service as people snipped off pieces to put on their altars at home. Whatever I was: Spanish or Indian, nurse or nutcase, dead or alive — I would be remembered.
How they talked about me! In voices that rumbled under Padre Pettit's booming prayers, the mourners reminded each other of the mysterious disappearance of chickens and the way dogs and goats had wandered into my yard — as if they had been called. When I was alive, the women in my barrio did not insult me for fear that their hair would fall out. Storekeepers counted back my change twice since cheaters were known to lose their erections. I've swept every house in the barrio with a snakeweed broom, but the evil spirits always return, and you have to blame somebody.
What bad thing can you say about a dead old woman? It's true that I got naked with a crazy old man, more than once, and with pleasure. If borrowing your little brother's car can be called stealing a law enforcement vehicle, I'm guilty. As for the chickens and the rabbits, they came to me. My neighbors can say whatever they want about me; I like a good story, but I have no mercy for the fool who darkens the name of Mister Romero, my only grandson.
* * *
In the parking lot of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the wind was picking up. Across the low adobe wall that separated the church from the school, the steel snaps of a halyard rang rhythmically against a flagpole.
"Rattling bones," moaned Ernesto, who had braced himself against the police cruiser to keep his head from spinning. The cruiser, known around town as El Auto, was a 1995 Ford Police Interceptor with 168,000 miles. It had been on fire twice and underwater once. The transmission slipped, and it burned three quarts of oil a day, but the real problem was the police radio. Money was tight in Taos County, and after the ten-dollar-per-hour salaries had been shelled out, there wasn't much left in the pot for equipment.
"I think you're one of those people who just shouldn't drink," said Popolo, who stood close enough to be helpful but far enough away to avoid a spray of vomit. "Remember the Fiesta de Santiago y Santa Ana? When you had to wear that bucket around your neck?"
"I was off-duty."
"You've got some puke on your tie."
Ernesto opened the back door of the car and reached for the diaper wipes his wife put under the seat. Police cars could get messy. The tails of the white dress shirt she had ironed for him that morning caught the wind like two ghosts. When the dispatcher's voice squawked over the radio, he jumped.
"Ten-one," Popolo said into the mic. "Come back." The voice returned in a hiss of static. Several jars of jam had been stolen from the backseat of an unlocked car at the Super Save Food store. There was no update on the two guns that had gone missing from Ernesto's locker yesterday.
"Move that yellow wire over the red one," said Ernesto. "Now jiggle it."
Popolo fiddled with the wires, counted to three, and slapped the box. Then he stepped out of the car, and turning his back to the wind, lit a cigarette. Flames of red dust whirled across the parking lot, and he sucked in grit with his smoke.
"¿Qué pasa, Diputado?"
"Nada," said Ernesto, wiping his mouth.
"I'm sorry I couldn't give you a ride this morning. I had a call."
"Yeah, that's okay. Zarita had to have the car, you know, because she was doing everybody's hair. Padre picked me up." Pushing his hands into his pockets, Ernesto absently fingered the silver earring he had seen glinting on the floor of Manny Pettit's Jeep. "Do we have any leads on the Glocks?"
"Not yet. Nice turnout today."
"Ignacia always drew a crowd."
"Is she really a witch? You don't have to answer that."
"I won't."
"We're missing a few guests. You know who I would like to see? I'd like to see that old boyfriend of hers, the crazy one."
"They've got Chief locked up now at a place in Santa Fe."
"What did he do this time?"
"Used the toilet in a hardware store — a display one."
"Nice place?"
"Running toilets," said Ernesto, holding his stomach. "You seen Mister or Tomás around?"
"I'm still looking," said Popolo. Where you see Mister, you see Tomás, the saying went around Taos, and where you see Tomás, you see trouble. There was a third party — Raquel O'Brien, but Tomás had run her off just before Christmas. People still talked about it — two men in love with the same woman.
The sheriff had run into Tomás's mother earlier in the vestibule, where she was checking her lipstick behind the black cloth that hung over the mirror, but the informal interview had not gone well. He and Ramona had been seeing each other on and off for over a decade, and these situations could be dicey.
She'd had her hair done for the wake; it was piled up on her head and sprayed to hell and back. Stepping up behind her, he nearly choked on the fumes as he touched a ringlet hanging stiffly over her ear and whispered, "Bueno, sexy lady." In the corner of the mirror, he saw the stringy, weathered man he'd become, not coyoteugly yet.
"Hello, Sheriff," she said, without turning around.
She licked her teeth and smiled. When she shrugged, her dress slid down her shoulder, revealing one wing of a blue butterfly tattoo.
"I thought you had to work this morning."
"I came to pay my respects," he said. "Lou Gehrig's disease — a terrible way to die. They say she wasn't paralyzed until the very end."
"She lost her voice early on," said Ramona, "and you know how she liked to speak her mind."
"Don't we all," said Popolo. Then, looking down at his feet, he cleared his throat and said, "I was wondering if you'd seen Tomás this morning. We're missing two guns down at the station."
"My son didn't steal no guns."
"I just wanted to ask him a few questions."
"No está aquí," she said with a snort.
"So I guess Mister is not on the premises either," he suggested, but she ignored him. It was hard to believe that they had been intimate only hours before, but females could be that way. He hung around for a minute to see if the butterfly would fly out again. When it did not, he gave Ramona a little salute and walked out to check on his deputy.
In the parking lot, Popolo watched the half-staff flag whip around the pole and wondered if God had made women meaner than men, or vice versa.
"It's hard to believe she's gone," said Ernesto. "I mean, really gone."
"She raised you, didn't she?"
"Oh shit."
"Ernie?"
Awkwardly, Popolo slung one arm around the deputy's big shaking shoulders. "I don't know what to say, man. You know I'm no good at this stuff." A paper cup rolled toward his feet, and he kicked it away.
CHAPTER 2
1986
Emergence
My grandson, Mister Romero, was four years old when I buried him on the mesa. He was alive, but he had lost his soul — susto, we call it in Spanish. Sometimes even the best curanderas cannot cure susto. My grandmother Leonora Cow Horn, who taught me the art of curanderismo, never had much luck with it.
"It's not enough to have the don," she told me. "Like you, I was born with the gift, but I am not educated." When I was thirteen, the white-eyes came to the pueblo to take me to the Indian boarding school in Santa Fe. My mother cried and held on to me, but Abuela Leonora said I must go. For a long time, I thought my grandmother sent me to school to learn English, but now I know that she was giving me the gift of pain. You cannot heal unless you have been wounded.
To teach me curanderismo, Abuela Leonora enlisted the help of Doctor Corazón, who broadcast a radio show from Mexico City on Tuesday nights. In the evening after our chores were done, we sat by the yellow light of our kiva, listening to his deep voice on the transistor radio we bought with green stamps from the grocery store. The doctor explained how to cure the night disease called mal air — wet the top of the head and say four Hail Marys. When a pretty child suffers from mal ojo, the evil eye, you rub an egg over her while praying, and if that doesn't work, use the deer-eye charm, ojo de venado.
Mister's susto came from his mother, Mercedes — a green-eyed mulatto from Georgia. Teo found her out in California, where they were both trying to be movie stars, and brought her back to Taos when she got pregnant. "Mercedes is a beautiful woman when she is sober," he said, but she always looked like a regular old puta to me.
"Stick around," I told Teo. "Raise your son." But he went back to Los Angeles right after the baby was born. My son was a loser like his father, but I blame myself for letting Mister stay in that trailer with Mercedes and her boyfriends.
"You gotta have custody," Ernesto said whenever I tried to take the kid home with me. "Without custody, you go to jail. In jail, you can't do nothing." Yeeeeeeee! Since when do I listen to that potato with a badge on?
I buried Mister on the last day of the waning moon in April 1986. Late that afternoon, Diputado Vigil rolled El Auto into my yard. Siren, flashing blue lights, mirrored sunglasses and holster — the whole show. Everyone in the barrio came outside to watch him try to arrest me. Even the chickens crowded around the fence to see him march his fat little legs up to my porch.
"In the state of New Mexico," he declared when he reached the top step, "it is against the law for any person or persons to bury a child alive; it is against the law for any ... shit." He stooped down to get a better look at Mister, who had crawled under the chair where I sat splitting reeds to make a basket. "Ignacia? Did his mother do this?"
"Mercedes is too lazy to beat a child. It was the boyfriend. Car antenna."
"How long ago?"
"Three days."
"Mi Dios."
Holding the willow between my fingers, I set my teeth on it just right and bit off three long strips. You weave the dark with the light. Abuela Leonora Cow Horn was Jicarilla Apache, and Jicarilla means basket weaver. She taught me where to find the best willows and how to grind their bark into a tea that works like aspirin. For abrasions like the ones Mister had suffered, I prescribed four cups of willow tea and regular application of my favorite liniment: a salve of honey and cayenne boiled in holy water with the silver coin that my great-great-grandfather took from the pocket of a white man after stabbing him in the heart.
"Have you called DEFACS?" asked Ernesto. "Has he seen a doctor? I know you're a curandera and everything, and I respect that, but there could be something wrong with him."
"He has susto."
"¿Qué?" He took out his notepad.
"Susto," I said, crossing the reeds in my hand to make a grid for the base of the basket. "S-u-s-t-o." Dark over light, light over dark. Some people are cursed with blindness, others with a lame leg or a bad heart. I was given Ernie. "That's when you lose your soul," I said, looking up at his blank, smooth face. It was like staring at the moon, trying to find a man.
"Hola, Mister," he said, huffing as he knelt down to look under my chair. "It's me, Tío Ernesto. Will you come out so I can talk to you?"
Mister did not answer. There was no sound other than the rustle and trill of two blue jays hidden in the blossoms of my apricot tree. I listened carefully; blue jay was my first language. I learned it when I was a baby nestled in Abuela Leonora's willow basket. Hour after hour, while she worked in her garden or walked through the forest picking herbs, I watched for the flash of blue wings through the sunlit slats of willow. In regular conversation, the birds bickered and shrieked and hurled sharp insults. To scare away crows, they called out in the voice of the red-shouldered hawk. Once, I heard them mimic the sound of a weed eater. Sometimes, who knows why, they spoke with a strange tenderness.
Water was my first word — el agua in Spanish; kóh in Apache. Abuela Leonora used the Tiwa word b'ehla, which means our mother the river.
Only English was spoken at the Indian boarding school; the teacher's ruler struck like a snake at the sound of any other language. On Wednesday nights after chapel, Padre Mark let me sit on his knee in the room with oak panels and read to him from a heavy red book with paper as thin as moth wings: The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.
The stories were not as good as the ones Abuela Leonora told, but I loved the spaces between the words, how each one had a different shape, how you could let yourself fall in, and it was never exactly the same the next time you read the passage because you were not the same.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Ghost of Milagro Creek"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Melanie Sumner.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
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