Forests of the Heart (26 page)

“But—”

“Sleep now,
chica.
We will speak of this again in the morning. Tonight you need your rest.”

Bettina thought it would be impossible to sleep, but when she laid her head down once more, weariness rose up like a swell of dark clouds.

“Ahorita,”
she heard a small
cadejo
voice whisper deep in her mind, just before she fell asleep.
“Tenemos una casa.”

Now we have a home …

Bettina woke in the hours before dawn, uncertain as to what had roused her. From where she lay she could see Ban still sleeping. He lay with his hands folded on his lower chest, face to the stars. Somewhere in the distance, one of his namesakes yipped at the moonless sky, joined moments later by a
com-padre
on another hill. Abuela had left her place under the saguaro and her blanket was still folded beside her pack, but that didn’t surprise Bettina. Her grandmother often wandered abroad at night—in the desert, in
la época del mito,
wherever
los pequeños misterios
took her. Bettina would have been more surprised to see Abuela sleeping on her blanket as one would expect from a normal person. She was half-convinced that her grandmother never slept.

It was while she was turning onto her other side that she realized what had woken her. First she smelled the cigarette smoke. Sitting up, she looked around to see the tall, lean shape of her father sitting on his haunches a half-dozen feet from where she lay.

“Papa?” she said, whispering so as not to disturb Ban.

“I am here,
chiquita.”

He stubbed out his cigarette on a stone and stowed it away in his pocket before coming closer. When he sat down beside her, Bettina snuggled against him. He smelled as he always did, of cigarettes and feathers, of the dry desert after a rain.

“I came as quick as I could,” he told her. “I would have woken you, but you were sleeping so peacefully.” He cupped her chin in his hand and looked into her face. “You are unharmed?”

“Sí, Papa. But I was frightened at first.”

“How was it your
abuela
allowed you to travel so far on your own?”

“It was an accident,” Bettina said, and then she told him how it had happened, who she had met on the other side.

Her father had always been a good listener. Bettina had often watched him with other people, saw how he focused all his attention on them when they spoke. She knew he wasn’t the sort to wish he was somewhere else, or be thinking of what he would say when the other speaker was done the way she sometimes found herself doing—especially with some of Adelita’s friends. Anyone in her father’s company had his complete and undivided attention which, she’d also noticed, many found to be unnerving.

But she didn’t. She held close to this rare moment of intimacy with him. It wasn’t that he neglected them, but that he was an anachronism and his life moved to a different current from that which pulled his family. Though he remained close to them, he could not live as they did, always walking on cement and carpets. He needed the earth underfoot. He needed to hunt for his food in the desert, instead of in a store; to go into the wild places where his
Indio
blood called him. He had never been in a car. He had never used a telephone. He saw no reason to change a way of life that had already endured for thousands of years.

“You don’t own a home,” he would say. “You only visit in it for a while.” Though of course Mama, raising a family, disagreed.

“These new tribes that have come to this land,” he would say, “they have no understanding of the desert, the mountains, the wild places and the spirits living in it. They have their politics, but we have the rituals. They have religion, but we live
with
the spirits. They live in a world without harmony, without mystery.”

Bettina had often wondered what had brought them together, her
Indio
father and her mostly Mexican mother. Her
abuela,
her mother’s mother, seemed closer kin to her father than Mama did. But this was not something she would ever ask either of them. And they seemed content in their own way, only arguing when it seemed the girls grew too wild. Then Papa would walk off into the desert for longer than usual and Abuela would make his arguments for him. Since her grandmother had come to live with them, her father spent more and more time with his
peyoteros
in the desert.

“Papa,” Bettina said when she finished relating her tale. “I think they’re still inside me.
Los cadejos.
I can feel them … shifting sometimes, against my bones. Or I hear a faint echo of their voices in my head.”

He regarded her for a long moment, dark gaze seeming to look under her skin, into her spirit, before he gave her a slow nod.

“I don’t think they mean you harm,” he said.
“Pero,
if you are worried, you must ask your
abuela
to take you to the shrine of the
inocente.
Do you know the place I mean?”

Bettina nodded. It was north of where they lived, along the river, a crude shrine built from old adobe bricks with only the vague memory of an image in their center. On every ledge and protruding space of the shrine stood the stubs of burned-down candles, a lava flow of wax drippings that almost covered the bricks in places. A man had killed his son in this place, the story went, killed him for simply talking to his beautiful second wife, not recognizing his victim as his own son until it was too late. That innocent ghost was said to be able to chase away unwanted spirits, to take care of those who had been wronged as he was.

“Go there,” Bettina’s father told her. “Light a candle for the
inocente
and pray.”

“I will, Papa.”

He ruffled her hair. “I have heard of these
cadejos,
you know. When I lived in Sonora, the elders still had stories of them. There were two:
la cadejo
bianco y la cadejo negro.
Like yours, they both had the feet of goats instead of paws, but their eyes were like fire, burning like the deep hearts of the volcanoes that birthed them.
La cadejo bianco,
it was said, was the good one, the one who helped people, while
la cadejo negro
made people lost.”

“Truly?” Bettina asked.

“
Verdaderos.
In those days, many people would say they had seen them, and one of the elders once told me that
la cadejo negro
was the good one really.”

“And they said only that? There was only a white and a black one in those stories?”

Her father shrugged. “You know how stories are now—there is no one way to tell them anymore. This had already begun before I came to Sonora.” He smiled, teeth flashing in the dark. “I have never heard of your brightly colored volcano dogs. But there are so many things we have never heard of, you and I, and yet they are true, eh?”

Bettina nodded.

“Still there have always been stories of
los perros misteriosos
among our people. A dog is never simply what we think we see. He keeps us safe from the wolf and coyote, but deep in
su corazón
he
is a
wolf, a coyote. He is the one that can walk between the worlds, who leads us in the end to Mictlan.”

Bettina shivered at the mention of the land of the dead. It could seem too close on a night so dark, with her father telling his spooky stories.

Her father smiled at her reaction. He lowered his voice dramatically “Only the dog may go into the underworld and return. He leads us there, but he can also lead us into the other worlds, just as your
cadejos.
He is descended from the clown dog of the old gods, as you know, fickle and unpredictable.”

Bettina remembered that story from another night of storytelling.

“La Maravilla,”
she said.

“Sí.
When he comes for us, we know we have no choice. We must follow where he leads.”

“Now I’m scared,” Bettina said. “Did
los cadejos
come to take me back to Mictlan?”

“No, no,
chiquita.
But all dogs are spirits. They carry potent
brujería,
so we must always be careful in our dealings with them. Death is the gift we offer to the world in thanks for the life it has given to us, but no one should seek it out.”

“All dogs?”

Her father shrugged. “You will know them when you see them,
los perros misteriosos.
And remember, they bring the little deaths, too: sleep, dreams, change, the step from this world into
la época del mito.
You don’t need to be afraid of them, but you should respect them.”

“I will try, Papa.”

“And go to the shrine with your
abuela.
If she can’t take you, I will.”

Bettina nodded, then stifled a yawn, tired once more.

“I must go,” her father said. “Do you want to come home with me?”

They were so different, her
mama
and
papa.
Mama would never even ask such a question. But she loved them both, he for his mystery, she for the home she made in their house, in their kitchen, in her heart.

“No, Papa,” she said. For then he would have to forsake his hawk’s flight to walk her home. “Thank you for coming.”

“You are my blood,
chiquita.
How could I do less?”

He kissed her on the brow, then stood. So tall, Bettina thought. He and all her
Indio
uncles. She heard him strike a match, light his cigarette.

“I love you, Papa,” she said.

“Te amo también,”
he told her, but she was already asleep. “I will look in on you in the morning.”

There were hawks in the sky when Bettina woke the next morning, a half-dozen of them, dark against the dawn clouds.
Brujo
spirits, riding the high thermals.

“Tu papá y sus peyoteros,”
Abuela said. “You called to him as you did to me—when you were in
la época del mito.”

Bettina nodded, remembering—that and something else.

“He was here last night,” she said.
“Mi papa.”

Abuela nodded. “I was out walking among the uncles and aunts and saw him on my return, hawk wings lifting him into the early dawn.”

“He told me to ask you to take me to the shrine of the
inocente.”

“Because of
los cadejos.”

Bettina nodded.

“It is a good thought.” Abuela paused for a moment. “But I have been thinking, too. Had they meant you harm, they would not have brought you back to us as they did. I believe they are your
medicina
guides.

“But Papá said—”

“We will go to the shrine and burn a candle,” Abuela assured her. “If they mean you ill, the spirit of the
inocente
will drive them from you. But if they are your friends, the spirit will know and he will leave them untouched.”

When they returned home that evening, Bettina went to evening mass with her mother. She wanted to talk to Mama about her experience in I’itoi’s cave, how Papa had come to her, crossing the Tucsons and the desert on his hawk wings, but it was a conversation she couldn’t even begin. So she sat beside her mother, listening to the priest with her hands folded on her lap, and went up to the rail for communion. Afterwards, she waited with her mother by the confession booth, but when her turn came, she could no more speak to the priest about it than she could to her mother.

Was that a sin? she wondered as she confessed to arguing with her sister and a half dozen other small transgressions. Would God understand?

She wasn’t sure that he would, but she knew the Virgin did. Throughout the service Bettina’s gaze had been drawn, as it invariably was, to the Virgin’s statue with its blue and white robes, her serene presence. The Virgin had lived in a desert, too. Surely she had been aware of the small
misteriosos,
before the miracle birth of her Son.

Later she did tell Adelita.

“I saw Papa today,” she said as they lolled on a bench they had made in the backyard by placing a found board on matching stacks of adobe bricks. “Out in the desert.”

There were no flowers in their small garden—only herbs and vegetables and the cacti that had been there before their house had been built. Neither Mamá nor Abuela understood the concept of watering plants that one could not eat. It was one of the few things on which they agreed.

“He and
nuestros tíos,”
she added.

“They aren’t really our uncles,” Adelita said.

“I know that. But I like them all the same.”

Adelita said nothing. She scuffed at the dirt with her toe, a little put out because Mama wouldn’t let her go off with her friends this evening.

“They were in their hawk shapes,” Bettina said.

That made Adelita laugh. “You can be such a little child.”

“I am not.”

“Then why do you still believe in
los cuentos de hadas?”

“It’s not a fairy tale.”

Adelita gave a practiced adult shrug.

“You weren’t always this way,” Bettina said.

“No,” her sister agreed. “But I grew up. One day you will, too.”

“I will never grow up if growing up means no longer seeing the truth.”

“Then they will lock you away with all the other
locos.”

Early Monday morning, when the dawn was still pinking the sky and long before Bettina had to be at school, Abuela walked with her along the river-bank to the shrine of the
inocente.
They walked quietly but still startled up coveys of Gambel’s quail and doves. When a roadrunner crossed the path ahead of them, Bettina stopped, her pulse quickening.

“It is only what it seems,” her
abuela
told her. “A bird, nothing more.”

Bettina gave a little nervous laugh.

“I knew that,” she said.

Her grandmother said nothing.

The riverbed they walked along was mostly a dry wash now, damp in places from the spring rains, the only water puddled in the bed’s lowest depressions. Mesquite and palo verde grew along the river’s banks, sometimes hanging over the path where they walked. On the other side of the path patches of Mexican poppies the color of marigolds and purple blue lupines clustered around cholla skeletons.