The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (37 page)

Automatically, she followed her
father outside and across the road where the burro remained tied. He spoke
briefly to the man in the repair shop and came out with the harness he had left
earlier. Taking the mysterious package from Bertha, he stuffed both items into
his canvas bag and slung it over the burro’s back, then lifted Bertha astride
it and resumed his own position behind her. She watched the rectangular lump in
the bag, bouncing slightly with each step. It wasn’t until they were nearly
home that she realized she’d forgotten all about the candy.

*
* *

“Goodness, what could this be?”
Theresa said when Ruben set the package on the kitchen table. She peered at the
writing on the top. “It’s from Patricio.”

Consuelo looked up from her
metate
, where she had been busy grinding
corn.

Ruben found a reason to go out to
the small board shack he used for storage of the farm implements. He always
seemed to leave the room when Patricio’s name came up.

Theresa cut the string off the
box with a kitchen knife, then carefully removed the brown paper and folded it
neatly for future use. She lifted the flaps on the cardboard box inside and
pulled out some wadded sheets of newspaper. These, too, she smoothed and
folded. Out came an envelope with her name written on it. Below that, some sort
of rectangular wooden item. She reached in and pulled out a carved box.

It was not much larger than a
cigar box, carved in a quilted pattern with some small, dusty stones mounted in
each X of the pattern. Not exactly
rustico
, but not very finely done either. She lifted the
hinged lid and saw that it was empty.

“Maybe the letter explains,” she
said, running her finger under the gummed flap and withdrawing a single sheet
of white paper.

“Dear
Theresita
. . .” she began reading. “He asks how we are doing,” she said, looking up at
Consuelo, then to Bertha. Her eyes traveled side to side across the lines and
her mouth made little movements.

“Read it,” Consuelo urged.

“He uses some English words I do
not know,” Theresa admitted.

Consuelo scoffed. “After the Army
and now in the big city—he’s forgetting his heritage.”

“It’s mostly in Spanish.” She
began to read aloud.

“My dear sister, please keep this
box and care for it. A buddy—” Her brows knitted in puzzlement over the word.
“A
buddy
in France gave it to me.
Believe it or not, I think that this box saved my life during the war. I do not
know how to explain it any better than that. Now, we no longer have a place for
it in our home but it is dear to me even so.”

Theresa looked up at her
mother-in-law.

“It’s that gringo wife of his,”
Consuelo said. “You remember how she looked at us when they came to New Mexico
after their marriage. The same way she must look at this old box.”

“It’s not very pretty,” Theresa
admitted. “Not the sort of thing most women would choose, especially in the big
city where
rustico
is not the style.”

Consuelo nodded grudgingly and went
back to grinding the corn with a vengeance. “No place for it in their home.
It’s that Deborah, having three children so quickly, who caused that problem. A
wonder they have room for all of them.”

Theresa winced.

“I’m sorry,
hija
,
I didn’t mean—” They never spoke anymore of the difficulties
during Bertha’s delivery, of the fact that Theresa had nearly died. In five
years it had become apparent there would be no more children in this house.

“I don’t know what I will do with
it,” Theresa said, reaching to place the wooden box on an open shelf above the
cookstove
.

“Mamá,
I
can use it.” Bertha’s face glowed with excitement.

“For what?”

“Um ... for my treasures!”

“What
treasures
do you have, little one?”

Bertha registered a moment’s
consternation. She raced out of the kitchen. Two minutes later she had returned
with a feather, deep blue, from a jay.

“This,” she said proudly. “. . .
and I have some ... some other things.”

Theresa looked at her daughter.
“You’ll break it. You heard what Uncle Patricio said in the letter. It is an
important thing to him.”

“I’ll never break it, I promise,
Mamá. It will be my greatest treasure.”

“Where do you get such words—
mayor
tesoro
?
Hija
, you will be
a scholar one day.”

“So, may I have the box?”

Theresa reached to the shelf. “If
you keep it safe in your room where
Abuela
can watch out for its safety as well.”

From her mother-in-law’s studied
indifference, Theresa doubted that this was a guarantee but at least she had
somewhere other than the crowded kitchen to keep the box. If Patricio were ever
to visit again, at least the box would not have the grease residue of fried
tortillas on it.

Bertha held out her hands and
carefully took the box. Holding it gently she set it on the table, opened the
lid and placed the blue feather inside. She left the kitchen and walked slowly
down the hall to the back bedroom.

“She’s a smart girl, our little
Bertita
,” Theresa
murmured. “I wonder how she thinks of these things.”

“One day perhaps I shall teach
her in the ways of the
curandera
,”
said Consuelo. “I will soon need a protégé to take over my work.”

*
* *

Bertha reached under her bed for
the carved box. Her fingers, she realized, had grown long and slender, as had
her legs and arms. Her breasts were emerging and a week ago she had been
shocked to see blood in her panties, almost panicky until
Abuela
explained that it was a natural event. That day, she began
her studies in the ways of the
curandera
and today she was to go along to attend a birth for Donna Salazar who, only a
year ago, had been a bride dancing at her wedding and before that, a shy teen
whom Bertha remembered from the days when they studied together at the one-room
school. Donna in sixth grade had tutored Bertha, grade three, in reading
English and doing mathematics.

Bertha sat on her bed and opened
the carved box, smiling at the little collection of treasures she had
accumulated over the years—a red leaf and a shiny stone and a bird egg, in
addition to the blue jay feather she had quickly picked up the day she talked
her mother into letting her keep the box. Now, she could use the box for far
more important things: her growing collection of dried herbs. She placed the
childhood curiosities on the quilt and studied the box itself.

A shaft of light from the window
hit the very spot on her lap where the box sat and she noticed for the first
time a very faint bit of carving on the inner edge of the lid, perhaps the
letters V-I … But the word, or words, were so faint that she couldn’t make them
out. As she had several times over the years, she wondered about the age of the
box. She ran her fingers over the colored stones that decorated it, realizing
now that they were not nearly as valuable as she had imagined them to be when
she was five years old.

The inside of the box had never
been finely sanded smooth, she could tell, but from use and wear it had
obtained a certain patina. As long as there were not deep grooves it would work
for storage of her herbs. She ran her fingers around the edges of the box’s
interior, checking it.

Suddenly a jolt, like an electric
shock, traveled up her arm. She fell to the floor and the room faded away.

“
Bertita
—
Bertita
!
” Mamá’s voice came down some
far tunnel. “Consuelo—come quickly!”

Abuela
’s voice came to her and Bertha’s eyes struggled to open.

“She was unconscious on the
floor,” her mother was saying.

“Let me see.”

Bertha felt her grandmother’s
gentle touch, the wise old hands cradling her head, subtly feeling for wounds.
She cleared her throat and tried to speak but the words came out scratchily.

“I’m okay. I think I am.” She
rolled to her side and slowly sat up.

Where was the box? She looked
around, afraid it might have crashed to the floor and broken, but it sat beside
her unharmed. Her mother fluttered like a nervous sparrow but
Abuela
looked deeply into her eyes, a
knowing gaze. Something had changed.

Bertha wanted to avert her eyes
but couldn’t. She realized they would probably never speak of this.

“Come, dear one. It’s time to
go.”

It took Bertha a minute to
realize she meant that they were needed at Donna Salazar’s home. It was not
lost upon her that
Abuela
had used a
grown-up endearment. She stood up, willing back a wave of dizziness, and
straightened her skirt.
Abuela
busied
herself gathering her kit and finding the black wool shawl she’d worn in public
since
Abuelo
had died, before Bertha was born.

Papá had already hitched the
donkey to the small wagon for them. He would have offered to drive them in the
farm truck he’d acquired when Bertha was seven—she still remembered the day he
came home so proudly in the used Ford—but the vehicle was perilously low on gas
and there was no money right now to buy any.

“Modern conveniences,”
Abuela
said, at her side. “
Pah
! The truck has no gas and the radio brings only bad
news.”

Bertha couldn’t disagree—no jobs
in the cities, no money in anyone’s hands. She helped her grandmother up to the
wagon and climbed onto the seat beside her, taking the reins. More often than
not, when
Abuela
cured someone of a
deadly illness she came home with a chicken or a sack of potatoes rather than
cash. At least they were eating.

At Donna and Arnoldo Salazar’s
house, the labor was well underway, judging by the high-pitched shrieks they
could hear as soon as they opened the kitchen door. Arnoldo sat at the table
with a cup of coffee in front of him, his hair standing out at wild angles and
a look of anguish on his face. Clearly, he wished he could be somewhere else
and didn’t have a clue what to do. He pointed toward the bedroom. A female
neighbor came out, carrying a damp rag, saying she wanted to refresh it with
cool water.

Consuelo took charge and led
Bertha into the room where the sixteen-year-old mother-to-be writhed on the
bed.

“Open my kit,”
Abuela
said to Bertha. “Find the
lavender and the
malvas
, then go to
the kitchen. Brew the lavender tea and boil the
malvas
.”

The old woman turned away from
Bertha and began speaking soothing words to her patient, coaching her to
breathe rhythmically and helping her to a more comfortable position. Bertha put
the malvas leaves into a small pan with fresh water and turned on the gas
burner. Boiled, the liquid would make a soothing wash for the new mother after
the birth. Meanwhile, she brewed a light tea from the lavender and carried a
cup of it into the birthing room.

She held it out to her
grandmother but at that moment Donna’s face contorted with another contraction.

“She’s farther along than I
imagined she would be,” Consuelo said, indicating that Bertha should set the
cup on a dresser that had a picture of the Virgin hanging above it. “The child
will come—”

A scream ripped the air.

Bertha watched as
Abuela
gently stroked the swollen belly,
a feeling—half awe and half terror—coming over her. She forced herself to
concentrate on her grandmother’s actions rather than imagine herself in the
position of her friend, going through this agony.

“It’s coming very soon now,”
Consuelo said, her voice low and soothing. “You will feel an urge to push.”

Bertha stood to the side, unable
to watch what was happening under Donna’s messy nightgown. Instead, she looked
at her grandmother’s face. The calm and benevolent expression shifted
imperceptibly.

“What is it?” She mouthed the
words rather than saying them aloud.

Abuela
gave a short jerk of her head and Bertha moved into place.
Between Donna’s legs a dark blob of a head showed, with a spongy, greenish band
around it.

“I need to get this cord away,”
Abuela
whispered. “Take the baby as it
comes out.”

Was it a real baby? Bertha was
horrified at the blue-gray color of its face. She stretched out her arms and
Abuela
, in nearly one move, pulled the
baby free, placed it in Bertha’s hands, and began working on the ropey cord.
Bertha didn’t see exactly what her grandmother did—she couldn’t take her eyes
off the warm, sticky little form she was holding. She was vaguely aware of the
cord coming away and then she simply hugged the tiny infant to her chest,
heedless of the mess to her own clothing. She felt a peculiar energy travel
through her arms and hands, flooding through to the little bundle she held. In
short moments, the baby began to squirm, then to whimper. When Bertha looked
again, its face had turned a vivid pink.

“That’s good!” Consuelo’s face
lit up, her grave consternation gone.

From the bed, Donna lay back
against her pillow, panting and trying to ask what was happening.

Consuelo turned to her patient.
“You have a beautiful baby girl.”

Bertha moved automatically,
washing the baby, handing it over to its mother, following
Abuela’s
directions. She barely remembered leaving the Salazar house,
driving the wagon home or eating the enchiladas Mamá prepared for dinner.

In their bedroom that night,
Abuela
spoke quietly in the dark. “You
have a gift,
Bertita
,
an ability I have never seen before, even in my apprentice years with my
mentor. That baby would not have lived but you made it so. I do not know how
you did it, but do not relinquish that gift.”