Shaman Winter (17 page)

The explosion of a cannon filled the dream, and young Hernán Vaca disappeared in the blinding light.

Another line of Sonny's ancestors were not to consummate their marriage, another ancestral line was cut off.

Sonny stared into the smoke of the battle. The adobe huts of Santa Fé were burning. The fields of corn were burning. An era had come to an end.

The smoke cleared, and Sonny saw Popé standing with the war captains. Governor Otermin lay wounded; two arrows had pierced his face. It was time to abandon Santa Fé.

Eleven days after Popé marched on the capital, the exodus from Santa Fé had begun.

We will kill them when they are out in the open, Popé said.

No, the oldest war captain replied. The bloodletting is done. Let the Españoles leave our land. Let them take their Cristo and his mother with them to their own place, that land across the sea. There let them pray to their Cristo and santos, and to the Lady Divine, who appeared to them and told them the end of their rule was coming. We will remain in our pueblos and honor our kachinas. We are not warriors who like the smell of blood. We are farmers. Let us return to our ways.

Sonny watched as the long line of Españoles, Mexicanos, and some natives, Indians who sided with the Spaniards, straggled down the Río Grande, carrying with them the same yellow silk banner Juan de Oñate had brought with him when he entered New Mexico.

On either side of the river the Pueblo Indians camped and watched the sorry exit of the homeless refugees.

Very well, we will let them pass, Popé said. The battle was won, but even as he watched the pitiful column march south, a vision appeared.

They saw it in the smoke of the burning villa.

Look! one of their medicine men cried. The Spaniards will return. In the wisps of smoke they saw the return of the Españoles.

They had found no gold, no rich mines of silver, only the hard life in the valleys of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. But they would return.

The land will call them, the medicine man said. Already they had raised their sons and daughters on the land, even on to the third generation.

Those who saw the vision recognized its truth.

Let us celebrate, Popé said. Destroy the churches; burn all their holy items as they burned ours. Kill the cows and horses, for they do not belong to our way. Bury the knives and pots made of iron. Burn the sacred books they keep in their churches.

Everything that belonged to the Españoles would be destroyed.

But not forever. The Españoles and the Mexicanos had buried their parents and grandparents in the earth of La Nueva México, and so the blood of the land would call them, the spirit of the land would call them to return.

The people who farmed had learned the ways of the pueblos had also learned the language, the food, and they shared in the dances and ceremonies. Many moved easily from Spanish village to Indian pueblo, some intermarried. A fusion of blood, of memory, of dream. That memory would draw the Españoles back.

Down the Camino Real, Governor Otermin's bedraggled and frightened exodus came to rest near Sandia Pueblo, a few leagues from the scattered farms that would someday be known as la Villa de Alburquerque.

Why did this happen? Otermin asked an old man they found in the pueblo, one who remained friendly to the Spaniards.

Because you dishonored the way of our ancestors. Because you tried to take away our faith, the old man answered.

It is said that Otermin wept at those words. Others say he only grew more bitter, that he had not learned a lesson.

But Sonny's concern was with Caridad. What had become of the girl, the young woman he knew was one of his grandmothers?

P
ART
II

S
OLSTICE
T
IME

8

Sonny jolted awake, bathed in sweat. The night's fever had passed, but he felt sore and weak. The sense of helplessness he had experienced in the dream permeated every muscle.

He sniffed the air. Even the smell of gunpowder seemed to linger in the room.

“Nothing! There was nothing I could do!” he groaned, awakening Chica, who peered from under the blankets. “Raven took her and I just stood there! So much for being master of my dreams!”

He felt anger, then he breathed deep to let it subside. The New Mexico families were connected. You dug into one family tree and found the roots spreading. His parents often talked of the parentela, the relatives whose roots went back in time and spread across the state. One of the Anayas of la Merced de Atrisco in Alburquerque had married into the Bacas of Taos. Distant relatives. Very distant, but relatives. Familia. Was Caridad the daughter of the Cristóbal Anaya mentioned in Fray Angelico's book?

Congestion filled his sinuses, and Sonny reached for a tissue from the box that lay on his bedside table.

Since when do I have Kleenex next to my bed? he wondered. He looked at the bedspread. A patterned blue comforter, not the old serape he had bought in the Juárez mercado a year ago. He smelled the clean, crinkly sheets. They had felt so good to get into last night, but he had been too tired to notice much more. He looked at the window, where white lace curtains glowed in the light of the morning sun.

Lace curtains he hadn't noticed before. Rita's work, he smiled.

“Gracias, amor,” he murmured, and pushed his feet over the side of the bed. Chica crawled out from under the covers, wagging her tail and looking up at him with loving eyes. Seal-pup eyes. Sometimes they reminded him of deer eyes, the brown eyes of a doe he had seen while hunting with Cruz Trujillo high on the Taos Mountains. Other times her eyes were human, so perceptive, understanding, and searching.

“Buenos días, Chica.” He rubbed her ears, the scruff of her neck. “Go do your thing.”

Chica leaped off the bed and disappeared. Moments later Sonny heard her barking outside. In a few minutes she would be back, ready for breakfast.

Groaning, Sonny tested his legs. Yes, the thigh muscles tensed, the strength was there, it was just something in the brain that was still jumbled, not giving the exact commands to the legs. His calves were weak, his toes cold. The cold dip in Frijoles Creek had been a shock to his system, but maybe for the best.

“It's only a matter of time,” he said, trying to psych himself up. “Stronger than yesterday.”

He looked at the phone. It was going to ring. He shivered with dread.

Reaching out, he touched the bowl, felt its pulse again. There was no bowl in last night's nightmare, only the carnage of the rebellion.

But he had ordered the dream, the time and place. He just didn't have the power to be the main actor. Raven could come and go as he pleased in Sonny's nightmares.

“But I have the bowl.”

Maybe the bowl didn't mean anything to Raven. He was after the women, not the bowl. Maybe the bowl had been returned to him by Owl Woman.

“Who knows.” He shook off the lethargy he felt.

Taking hold of the wheelchair handles he cautiously raised himself. His trembling legs held and he walked slowly to the bathroom, pushing the chair in front of him and testing each footstep for sign of weakness. He didn't want to fall.

He used the toilet, took a shower, and dressed. After his shower Sonny thought of shaving. His beard had grown thick during the past two months. Dark. He had asked Rita not to shave it when she volunteered to shave him. It made him look older. He felt older. With the beard he looked like the men in the dreams. Andres Vaca and Hernán Vaca both sported dark beards.

Because the Catholic Church and the Spanish civil authorities kept such meticulous records, he would be able to trace his genealogy. But his Indian grandmothers remained nameless, in many cases unknown. The Church had baptized them and given them Spanish names, Christian names. Their Indian names were erased, as if in erasing the name of the heathen, the Church could make them over in a new image.

The names of the grandmothers were missing, but their blood simmered there beneath the surface. Their native beauty could not be erased. It was there in the color of the people, in Sonny's brown skin. It was in the beauty he saw in Rita and Lorenza. Dark eyes, flashing smiles, the high cheekbones. It was there in the memory.

“If I keep my Spanish beard,” he said to Chica, “I'll be a Spanish soldier, just like Andres and Hernán.”

Hell, he didn't want to be a Spanish soldier. He just wanted to be who he was, or like he used to be, a freewheeling thirty-one-year-old Chicano from the North Valley. He did enough private investigating to pay his rent, take Rita dancing, help some people. Like his greatgrandfather Elfego Baca, el Bisabuelo, had helped people. He had shot it out with badass Texas cowboys to show them they couldn't push around the poor farmers from the Socorro Valley.

No, he wasn't Spanish, he was Nuevo Mexicano, a mestizo from the earth and blood of the Hispano homeland, which was also the Pueblo Indian homeland. He was a coyote. The history of the northern Río Grande valley had been washed by many currents, and each flood deposited its sediment in the earth of La Nueva México. The earth held the memory no one could deny. All expeditions to the Río Grande had left their imprint. Now new immigrants were filling the valley, Californians fleeing urban living, New Yorkers with their city accents, from everywhere they came seeking the sun and a slower pace of life.

Sonny turned his chair to the window. Pushing the curtains aside, he looked out. La Paz Lane, that narrow dirt road in the North Valley where he lived, was quiet and peaceful. Last night's storm had passed, leaving behind it only a glaze of snow and cold. Enough to blow away the smog that settled into the valley this time of the year. The air inversion trapped car pollution, dust from the dirt roads, and the smoke from chimneys under a blanket of cold air. The occasional weather fronts that swept across the valley pushed the smog out of the valley and dropped a coating of snow on the Sandias.

Probably six inches of new snow on the crest, Sonny thought. Enough to get the skiers excited. By midday the temperature would rise into the forties in the valley.

Across the street sat don Eliseo's old adobe home, a house built by the old man's ancestors. The family had been in the area for generations, since before the founding of Alburquerque in 1706.

The old man lived alone; his wife had died years before Sonny moved into the village of Ranchitos two years ago. Don Eliseo's sons were too busy to show up very often, and the old man had become like a father to Sonny—no, not only a father, a mentor. The old man's stories helped Sonny connect with his roots, and his philosophy of life revealed the spiritual nature of the people.

There he was now, ambling out of his front door toward his cornfield. Every morning don Eliseo greeted the sun, bowed his head in prayer and asked a blessing for life. He raised his arms and offered the light in the four sacred directions, offering his prayers to the world. Then he stripped off his shirt and bathed his face, arms, and chest with the cold water of his well.

The sun that rose over the southern edge of the Sandias was the sun of the winter solstice. Don Eliseo would pray that the light of the sun not be drowned in the western shore on the last day of its cycle, December twenty-first. He prayed for people. He prayed for peace and clarity.

In the middle of the sere and frozen stalks of corn, don Eliseo raised his arms to the sun and welcomed the new day. It was twenty degrees outside, freezing, and still don Eliseo was there to greet the sun.

“Lord,” Sonny whispered, “if he can pray in the cold, I can surely pray in here.” He closed his eyes and raised his arms in the sunlight that poured in through the window.

“Bless all of life,” he intoned softly. “Lords and Ladies of the Morning Light, fill me with clarity. Help me find Owl Woman and the missing girls, Consuelo and Caridad—”

He stopped himself and opened his eyes. Caridad? She was only a dream; she wasn't missing. But she would be reported missing today, Sonny frowned. If Raven was acting both in the dream and in waking life, the girls he had taken in the dreams corresponded to girls he took in real life. Any minute now the phone would ring and someone would report a missing girl.

“Damn!” he swore.

Beside him Chica sat up on her hind legs and motioned with her front paws.

“Yes, time to eat,” Sonny agreed. He turned to his bed, and retrieving the bowl from the nightstand, he carried it on his lap to the kitchen, where he placed it on the table. Then he started the coffee and filled Chica's bowl.

Raven wanted the Zia medallion and revenge. That summer during their struggle at the rain-swollen arroyo, Raven had fallen in, and the current smashed him against rocks. Now Raven was not the handsome Anthony Pájaro anymore. One side of his face was a swath of scar tissue. The horrible scars became his mask.

Sonny poured himself the first cup of strong coffee and sipped, welcoming the caffeine charge.

Rita had left him a breakfast in the fridge to be warmed when he awakened. And a note.

Amor, it's 2
AM
and you were sleeping soundly. Lorenza says there is nothing more we can do, and she
really
insists I get some rest. She's sending me home. Warm the bowl of menudo con posole in the microwave. Warm the tortillas in the toaster. Te amo con todo mi corazón. Rita.

“Mi corazón,” Sonny repeated. My love, she shouldn't have stayed up that late. She had her restaurant to run. He could kick himself. His actions affected others, and he didn't like it. He didn't want Rita hurt.

He knew she hadn't been feeling well. Not her old energetic self. He asked her how she felt, but she pretended nothing was the matter. “A cold, that's all,” she said.

He thought of her as he warmed the posole and menudo. He liked his menudo with diced onions, oregano, and spiced with red chile. She had left all the fixings, ready for him to use. He popped the homemade tortillas in the toaster. The simmering menudo and the toasted aroma of the tortillas quickly filled the kitchen.