The Woodcarver's Secret (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (39 page)

She sensed movement and offered a
hand as her mother got to her feet at the graveside.

“Come,
Mamá
, we can go home and I’ll make you a nice lunch.”

“There are beans. I cooked beans
yesterday.”

It was all she did anymore—cook
traditional dishes as if there were still four people in the house. Bertha
often took the extra food to her patients, but they scarcely had the money to
feed the county. This was another subject for discussion.

“
Mamá
,” she said as she ladled beans from the steaming pot to their
plates. “We have to talk about money.”

She looked at the hunched form of
her mother—barely fifty years old and already her spine was curving. Arthritis,
too, was taking a toll and Theresa could hardly lift a cooking pot, much less
hoe a garden or drive the tractor.

“Neither of us can do the work of
the farm now. Without a crop to sell, we cannot feed ourselves. I think we
should sell the land.”

Theresa stared at her food. No
words. But a tear plopped onto the paper napkin that Bertha had tucked into the
neck of her dress.

“This land came to my family
thirteen generations ago. My grandfather told me the stories, made me promise
to keep it always.”

“I know, Mamá, I know.” Bertha
let the silence grow. “I will make sure that we keep the house.”

“Is that it? Is that the best I
can hope for?”

Bertha’s voice came out barely a
whisper. “Yes. I think it is.”

With an eighth grade education,
Bertha had already been turned away for most of the jobs in Taos. She accepted
work cleaning houses but it was not a rich town; no one hired a full-time maid.
Besides, her real love was healing. But the administrator at the hospital had
laughed to her face when Bertha inquired about nursing work. “Get a nursing
degree,” the man had said as he shut the door firmly after her.

Two women alone. They would
starve before Bertha found a husband, even if there was such a man who could
immediately step in and keep their farm land productive, keep producing crops
when the focus on growing things seemed to have switched to big farms owned by
corporations in the fertile plains of the nation, not the tiny places of a few
dozen acres where the growing season was so short and the land so arid that it
was nearly impossible to bring in a crop before winter killed it.

The man who wanted to buy the
land had told her these things, and although it made her angry she recognized
the truth in his words.

Ten thousand dollars. He’d held a
check out in front of her. It was more than city people made in two or three
years, he’d said, more than the people of Taos County averaged in ten years.
She could support herself and her mother for a long time if she invested the
money properly.

He went on about earning interest
at the bank and some other things, but Bertha understood little about those
ways and cared even less. On the day she slit open the last sack of beans in
the cupboard, she decided to call him. He offered an extra three thousand if
she would include the tractor. She bargained long enough to make him exclude
the house and a city-sized lot around it from the sale. When he handed over the
check she turned away.

Tears flowed freely once she was
outside the bank where she had signed papers and exchanged the paper check for
cash. The 1932 Ford truck refused to start, even though she tried the various
tricks
Papá
had shown her. She was
about to abandon the stupid thing and walk home when a young couple stopped,
sensing her problem.

“Let me tow it for you,” the man
offered, and before she knew it Bertha was at the car lot making a deal to
trade the old truck for a used sedan and some of her newly acquired cash.

She took a deep breath on the way
to the house. This sort of thing will have to stop, she told herself. The cash
had to last them a very long time. When she arrived at home, driving the new
car, it was heartening to see the way Theresa’s expression brightened, and
Bertha told her mother to get in—they would take a drive just for the fun of
it.

Since the war, gasoline was
plentiful and cheap; they deserved a little enjoyment from life. They drove out
to the Taos Pueblo, which Theresa remembered from her childhood. Bertha had
never been there. By evening, when they arrived back at their small adobe
house, Bertha could tell that
Mamá
was tired. They snacked on tortillas and went to bed shortly after dark.

The next day Bertha was awakened
by a ferocious roaring sound. Two bulldozers and a grader scraped at the land,
ripping out the sage and tearing through the small, secret places where her
medicinal herbs grew. She raced outside and shook her fist at the driver of one
of the huge machines but he only shrugged and said this is what the boss had
ordered. She went back into the house, where she rummaged through the things in
the bedroom closet that her mother had never sorted, coming up with
Papá’s
shotgun and a box of shells for
it.

She screamed at the drivers of
the big equipment but no one paid attention until she fired a shot into the
air. All three machines stopped; the men stared at her.

“Crazy old witch!” one of them
shouted as they ran for their pickup truck and drove away.

An hour later, they were back
with the man who had given her the check and the county sheriff.

“Sorry, ma’am,” said the sheriff.
“This all looks legal. He bought your land and now he wants to build on it.”

He informed her that she could
keep the shotgun as long as it stayed inside the house. If she brought it out
again he would have to take it away.

Within a week, their acres of
beautiful land had been flattened smooth, the raw dirt looking pitiful without
vegetation. Wooden stakes with bright ribbons tied on them appeared in patterns
that marked off squares. Signs went up along the road. Foundations were dug,
walls of cinderblock went up. By Christmas, two dozen little houses had
sprouted up and their quiet lane had cars traveling up and down it all day.

Bertha noticed that these were
young families—husbands who had been to the war, come home to marry, and babies
were starting to come. She talked to two of the women who were obviously
pregnant, offering her services as midwife. Both of them looked at her as if
she were looney, before informing her that they would have their babies the
real way, in the hospital with a doctor at hand.

She trudged back into the house
and called Donna Salazar, the friend she had known all those years ago in
school, mother of the baby whose life Bertha and
abuela
had saved. Donna had been suffering a chest cold and Bertha
offered to bring by more of her special salve.

“It’s changing too fast for me,
and I am not an old woman,” Donna complained once she had greeted Bertha and
offered coffee. “Even my own Gracie—she’s going to a doctor at the clinic now.”

They shook their heads over it.
Bertha wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and looked at her slender
fingers, with
abuela’s
thin gold
wedding band on her right hand. She didn’t feel like an old woman, either, but
Donna was right. Things were definitely changing.

*
* *

 
Bertha pulled the carved box from the drawer
in her dresser. The wood warmed her gnarled hands and she flexed her fingers.
In the adjacent drawer were her bottles and bags of herbs, meticulously
gathered and prepared each season, just as
Abuela
had taught her more than fifty years ago. She plucked out the bottle of
inmortal
, the
antelope horns root used for respiratory and heart conditions. But she
suspected
Mamá
would also need
cota
for her kidneys and persistent stomach
ailments. In her nineties now, Theresa was nearing the end.

Once, that thought would have
brought inconsolable sadness to Bertha but she had seen much death in her time.
She carried the herbs to the kitchen and began preparing the Navajo Tea from
the
cota
,
thinking back to that first time she had attended a patient with
Abuela
, the time she saved the tiny infant.
Baby Gracie Salazar had grown to adulthood, become a grandmother, died in a
traffic accident on her way to Albuquerque to fly in an airplane to California
and take the grandchildren to a place called Disneyland. Too many things had
changed.

She poured the tea and carried a
cup of it to
Mamá’s
bedroom, setting
it on the bedside table so she could lean over and help her mother to sit up.
Stuffing pillows behind the crooked back, Bertha thought of the many old
people—most of her patients these days—who were about the only ones in the
county who believed in the traditional
curandera
ways. She had attended so many of them, and she knew the signs of impending
death.
Mamá
was in her final weeks;
there was really no way around it. Bertha tamped down the terrible feeling that
rose in her chest. Relief. Caring for strangers was one thing; living the
caregiver role day in and day out for years—it had worn her down.

In the living room, the telephone
rang. Bertha started to ignore it, then realized it was surely another
patient—only her patients ever called the house and it was the only reason for
getting the telephone at all. Perhaps this one she could actually help. She set
the teacup down and told Theresa to rest until she came back.

“My father is calling for you,” said
the voice on the line. Bertha recognized it as Sarah Williams, a woman in her
fifties who had shown an interest in studying the ways of the
curandera
. “I’ve given him the
altamisa
for his
fever, but he thinks you can do more. At this point, I welcome anything you
want to try. He’s driving me crazy.”

Bertha smiled and reassured Sarah
that she would come soon.

“Mamá, I’m going to ask Tina
Ortiz to come over and stay with you a few minutes,” she said, when she’d
gotten Theresa re-settled under her quilts.

“Who is that? Patricio can stay
here with me. I’d rather have him.”

“
Mamá,
you know Tina. She lives next door. She’s been here many
times. Uncle Patricio is too far away.” She’d given up repeating that Patricio
had died more than twenty years ago, still in Chicago, having only visited New
Mexico a handful of times after he left.

Bertha went to her own room and
gathered her kit, placing some loose herbs into the carved box, carrying an
assortment of bottles in the bag that she normally took on every house call.
When she looked in on her mother, the old woman was sleeping soundly.

The sedan she had bought in 1950,
right after the death of her father, sat in the driveway—well-maintained and
rust-free in the high desert climate. She placed her medical kit on the back
seat and walked to the house next door. Tall elm trees shaded the front yard,
where the Ortiz family was one of the few who had moved into the new
development and stayed. Most of the other homes had changed hands several
times; Bertha didn’t understand this new way people had of moving all the time
for no particular reason. Her knock at the door brought no response. Tina must
be shopping. Bertha left a note explaining that she should be home within a
couple of hours. Theresa could not get out of bed on her own, would not even
attempt it, but she might need to be assisted to the bathroom. Thankfully, Tina
didn’t mind such duties.

Bertha hurried back to the car
and drove to the Williams home, where she gathered her kit and greeted Sarah at
the door.

“How is he doing?” Bertha asked.

“The fever is down. The
altamisa
really
helped, but he still has pain in that leg.”

“Don’t talk about me—I’m sitting
right here!”

Bertha walked in, to find Monty Williams
stretched out in a recliner chair in the living room. Close to her own age, he
hadn’t fared as well health-wise. He’d let a head cold go untreated until he
had a high fever, which Bertha and Sarah had been treating successfully.
Today’s complaint was apparently about his right leg, which was sliced with
scars from old war wounds and now gave him pain every time a new weather front
moved through.

Bertha set her kit on a nearby
table and asked if she could see his leg. “You have a couple of new lesions
here,” she told him. “Did you run out of the goldweed ointment I made for you?”

But Monty Williams’s attention
was not on Bertha. He was staring at the carved box.

“Where did you get that?” he
asked.

“I’ve had it since 1925. I was a
child when my uncle gave it to me.” It was the most explanation Bertha had ever
given as to the box’s origin.

“I saw one just like it once,” he
said, his eyes taking on a faraway look. “Germany. Early forty-two. They sent
me to Bernkastel, a little town on the Mosel River. A Nazi soldier had that
box. I picked up enough German to know that he was telling his buddy the thing
belonged to Hitler himself.”

Bertha felt a chill creep up her
arms.

“Course, it couldn’t have been
that
box,” he said with a nod toward the
coffee table, “not if you’ve had it since the twenties. Aw, who knows? There
are probably hundreds of ’em out there, way they mass-produce stuff these
days.”

Bertha went through the motions
of grinding more goldweed leaves and mixing them with a little olive oil in a vial,
leaving the ointment with Sarah for treatment of her father’s skin condition.
But her mind was on the box and what he’d said.

There were not hundreds of them
out there, of that she felt sure. But even knowing there were two, she had to
wonder. Did the other one hold the same kind of power as this one?

*
* *