Forests of the Heart (65 page)

Sancta Maria,

Mater Dei

ora pro nobis peccatoribus

nunc et in bora mortis nostrae

Amen

She spoke the last word aloud and the Glasduine laughed, a harsh booming sound that echoed up and down the canyon. Bettina merely gave the creature a serene smile in response. Beyond fear or anxiety now, she was strong with Ellie’s
brujería
and her faith, bolstered by the support of those gathered here to help her and a host of invisible spirits. She stepped into the Glasduine’s open arms and laid her hands upon its chest, pushed through the tangle of vines and leaves to the bark beneath that served as skin.

The Glasduine’s laughter died, cut off as though severed by a knife.

Their gazes locked, Bettina’s and the Glasduine’s. The healing
brujería
mixed with that of Ellie’s mask and the creature’s own. White light flared, deep inside them and burst out through the pores of their skin like a hundred thousand laser slivers, blinding those that watched. The Glasduine’s
vida en hilodela
was immediately made pure.

But there was a price. Their blood turned to lava, hot and burning. Every nerve end screamed. Wailing filled the air, harsh and keening, both their voices howling their pain. The Glasduine bucked and Ellie lost her grip on Bettina’s shoulders. She went stumbling, blinded and moaning, before she fell into the dirt. But Bettina dug her fingers into the vegetative matter of the Glasduine’s chest and held fast. She repeated another “Hail Mary.” The Glasduine grew again, a sudden spurt that took Bettina’s feet from under her. She kept her grip, hanging from the Glasduine’s chest, forcing herself to ignore the pain, to concentrate on the task that had put her here.

Under the blinding light she could feel the darkness of the creature rising up once more, swelling like a maggot-ridden corpse. She caught the tattered wisps of the
brujería
born in Ellie’s mask, and holding onto them like a handful of threads, she plunged an arrow of her spirit into the morass, searching for some part of Donal that the Glasduine hadn’t already swallowed and taken into itself.

She had to navigate through the flood of the creature’s hatreds and lusts, experience the gruesome deaths of the Gentry, delve deeper and deeper until she felt she could go no further and was ready to give up.

But finally, there it was.

A tiny, warm kernel of Donal’s goodness, hard-shelled like a seed, protecting itself from the awful stew in which it floated.

Bettina focused the arrow of her spirit until it was so small and sharp it could pierce the kernel and enter it. Before the darkness could rush in after her, she connected the tattered threads of the mask’s
burjería
to it, then sealed the opening she’d made and enclosed the whole of it, kernel and connecting threads, in a protective sheath. She waited only long enough to see that the kernel was beginning to swell, then retreated, her stamina spent.

She allowed the Glasduine to expel the arrow of her spirit. It returned to her with a shock, withered and trembling. Loosening the numbed grip of her fingers, she let the Glasduine fling her away. She hit the ground hard, went tumbling over the loose stones and dirt. Her fingers, the palms of her hand were raw, the skin burned away. There was nothing left of the rosary her mother had sent her. She could barely lift her head, but she did. She couldn’t look away.

The Glasduine had fallen to its knees. Illumination still flared from its pores, laser-thin and bright, a thousand blinding lines of white light. It was still howling, but the sound was different. Almost fearful.

Grow, Bettina told the seed she’d found in the Glasduine’s darkness. Be strong.

She said another “Hail Mary.”

She couldn’t bring her hands together—even the movement of air across the raw wounds was agony. With an effort, she managed to dampen the worst of the pain. Her gaze remained locked on the Glasduine.

The shafts of light began to swell, to join. The Glasduine’s upper torso drooped. By the time it had bowed its head, pressing its face into the dirt, all the shafts of light had joined into one tall pillar that rose up from the arch of the creature’s back. Colors swelled up from the bottom of the pillar, the familiar greens and golds of the creature’s
vida en hilodela.
A moment later and the light had swallowed the Glasduine whole.

Bettina and the others couldn’t look away.

Something became visible in that light. They were being given a glimpse, as though through a stained-glass window, of enormous trees, giants that dwarfed the cliffs around them. Impossible behemoths that rose and rose up into the sky.

“Forever trees,” Bettina heard her wolf whisper. “In the long ago.”

By that she knew they were looking in on the First World, the source from which the Glasduine had been drawn. She drank in the sight, leaning closer when she saw a woman walking under those trees.

Bettina wasn’t sure who the others saw—she sensed that each of them recognized her in their own way—but she saw a dusky madonna, modestly clad in blue and white robes, and knew it was Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin as first seen in a vision by Juan Diego at the chief shrine of Tonantzín on Tepeyac Hill, centuries ago. Those trees were far from Cuautlalpan in Mexico, but
La Novia del Desierto’s
presence felt as natural in that ancient forest as it did in the Sonoran.

The woman lifted her head and looked their way. She smiled and Bettina’s heart grew glad in a way it hadn’t since her
abuela
had followed the clown dog into the storm. Then the vision was gone.

But the marvels continued.

The pillar of light dwindled until it pooled around the fallen body of the Glasduine. Bettina held her breath, watching the liquid light pulse. Then something moved in the center of the pool. For a moment Bettina thought it was the salmon from the pool behind Kellygnow, but then a saguaro rose up, swallowing the body of the creature as it grew.

By the time it stopped growing, it towered fifty feet into the desert sky, two tons of cactus, enormous by any standards, though dwarfed in Bettina’s mind by her brief glimpse of the incredible heights of the forever trees.

The giant stood there for a long moment, gleaming in the sunlight, gleaming with its own inner light. Then one of its arms dropped off. Another. And it fell apart as quickly as it had grown, the green waxy skin browning, rotting. In no time at all the only thing that remained were the saguaro’s ribs, the lower halves still standing tall, their upper halves drooping like the spokes of an umbrella. Caught in the middle, with ribs thrusting up from its chest, was a small body.

Donal, Bettina realized at the same time as Miki ran forward. Miki wept, trying to break off the saguaro ribs. Hunter joined her, pulled her away.

“Let me try,” he said.

He lowered her to the ground and with
el lobo’s
help began the grisly task of breaking the brittle ribs so that they could free Donal’s body. Miki remained where Hunter had left her, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Bettina glanced at Ellie. The sculptor’s eyes were wet with her own tears when she turned to Bettina.

“What… what happened?” she asked.

“Neither Donal nor the creature lived a good life,” Bettina said. “So the shape would not hold for them. There is an old
Indios
saying. If you live a good life, you come back as saguaro; you become one of the aunts and uncles. Live a bad life, and you come back as a human.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “You chose well for your mask.”

“Yeah, like I knew what I was doing.”

Bettina shrugged. “Your heart and your hands … your
brujería
knew.”

Ellie slowly stood up.

“So … we won, I guess.”

Bettina nodded.

“So why do I feel like shit?”

“Because we are just people,” Aunt Nancy said, joining them. “Because the world isn’t black and white and it cuts us so deeply when those we love— those we think are good people—do bad things. It’s hard to celebrate a victory that has come about through the death of one we loved.”

Ellie gave a slow nod. “I still can’t believe Donal had it in him.”

“There was goodness, too,” Bettina said. “In the end, that’s what saved us.”

“It just seems like such a senseless waste.”

“Sí”

“Let me see your hands,” Aunt Nancy said to Bettina.

Ellie went pale at the sight of them.

“Oh, my god,” she said. “Your hands …”

“They will heal.”

“I have a small jar of bunchberry/cattail paste in my pack,” Aunt Nancy said. “Let me get it.”

“Thank you.”

“Can’t you, you know, heal it with magic?” Ellie asked.

“I have been working on it,” Bettina told her, “but such healing never works as well on yourself. Mostly I’m concentrating on dampening the pain and retaining my hands’ mobility.”

Aunt Nancy returned and with a touch as gentle as the brush of a butterfly wing, she applied a thinned mixture of the paste to Bettina’s hands. The bunchberry immediately cooled the burns, penetrating deep under them to relieve the pain. The cattail helped to numb the worst of it.

“There’s always a price,” Aunt Nancy said.

Bettina nodded. She thought of
los cadejos.
They hadn’t even named theirs yet.

“Some pay in coin more dear than others,” she said.

She looked at the slope of Miki’s back as she continued to weep, silent now. Then past her to where Hunter and her wolf were freeing Donal’s body.

“My sympathies lie with the living,” Aunt Nancy said. “And the innocent.”

“You’re tougher than I am,” Bettina told her.

Aunt Nancy shook her head. “No, I’m just older. I’ve seen that much more of the hurt we do to each other.”

It took them over an hour to free Donal’s body from the wreckage of the dead saguaro. Without
el l
obo’s exceptional strength, it would have taken them much longer, for the saguaro ribs that pierced the body were resilient and hard to break. It was a grisly, unhappy task, but they finally pulled the body free and were able to lay it out on the flat stone where Ellie had worked on the mask. Hunter fetched more water and Miki carefully washed Donal’s face and hands. Her tears were gone, but Bettina could see that the heartbreak remained.

Later, they sat in a half-circle around the body, all except for Tommy, who was propped up against another stone close at hand, cushioned on a thin mattress of dried grasses that Ellie and Hunter had gathered lower down in the canyon. He had to lay on his side because of the long furrows the Glasduine had torn across his back. Bettina had worked on them again, ignoring her own pain when she had to lay her hands directly onto the wounds. All that remained now of the furrows were thick, red welts that were still very tender. While Tommy tried to remain alert and follow their conversations, he kept drifting in and out of consciousness. But at least when he closed his eyes now, it was because he was sleeping.

Aunt Nancy lit a smudgestick and set it on the stone by Donal’s head.

“I always thought I was the strong one,” Miki said after a moment, rocking back on her heels.

She reached out and brushed the hair back from Donal’s brow. When she sat back again, Ellie put her arm around her shoulders.

“But I see now,” Miki went on, “that a lot of that was Donal looking out for me that let me be strong. For so many years, he kept all the bad things in the world at bay.”

“He wasn’t an evil person,” Bettina said. “Misguided, yes, but—”

“Oh, please,” Miki told her. “He was a bloody, self-centered bastard. Look at what he did. We could all be dead.” Her voice went quieter. “But he was still my brother.”

“What he did was wrong,” Bettina agreed, “but in the end, he allowed us to banish the creature.”

Miki shook her head. “I don’t know that it makes up for it. I always knew he was bitter, but I never knew he was carrying such venom around inside him.”

“None of us did,” Ellie said.

“But we should have. We should have paid more attention to all those tirades of his. We should have gotten him help.”

Ellie shook her head. “Even if we’d known, he wouldn’t have let us.”

“But we still could have tried.”

Ellie sighed. “You’re right. We should have tried.”

“I don’t excuse your brother,” Aunt Nancy said after they’d all fallen silent, “but consider this. If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters.”

“But it’s not something we’d do on purpose,” Miki said.

“I doubt he meant for it to turn out as it did,” Aunt Nancy told her.

Later still,
el lobo
carried the body up to a small cave he’d found set high above the water line for when the floods came. The trail leading up to it was better suited for goats, but except for Tommy, they all made the trek up. They sealed the opening with boulders and rocks, everyone pitching in. When they were done, Ellie took a sharp rock and scratched a picture on the face of the stone above the cave. It looked like a rough cartoon of a donkey or a horse to Bettina.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s Eeyore,” Ellie said, her eyes welling with tears.

“What’s an ee-yore?”

Miki began to cry again when Ellie explained.

Bettina wasn’t strong enough to attempt to guide them all out by the direct route she and her wolf had taken to get here, and no one was up to the long trek it would take otherwise, so they made a rough camp out of the canyon, higher up on the west side.
El lobo
carried Tommy up while Ellie, Hunter, and Miki scavenged wood to fuel their fire. They came back with lengths of mesquite and ironwood and they soon had a small fire to hold back the night. For food they had to share a few biscuits and some beef jerky that Aunt Nancy pulled out of her seemingly bottomless backpack, along with a packet of tea.

“It’s the first thing you learn when you go into the bush,” she said. “You never go without provisions.”

She also had a small tin cup in there which they all shared for the tea.