Wild Sorrow (18 page)

“You are having a nice day with that boy of yours,” Esperanza said as we worked.

“Yes. I am having a very nice day with Kerry. And with Mountain. You know, Kerry loves the land so much. Today, when he showed me some of his favorite places, I realized that his love for the earth is as deep as mine.”

“You are like
los indios
in that way, Mirasol.”

I smiled. “I am like the Indians in a lot of ways, I think.”

“
Sí,
but you know there is something about this place over here. The peoples are very different, one from the other. When the Spanish came here, you know,
los indios
already lived here. They were happy here, and they believed that they belonged to this land. On the other hand,
los conquistadores,
they wanted to conquer this place, they believed that the land belonged to them. Maybe it has changed a little now, but that was the difference then, you see, and that is what has caused all the trouble for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“But you,” she said as she crushed the softened chiles against the side of the bowl with a wooden spoon, their dark red flesh dissolving into the hot water, “you do not believe that the land belongs to you. You believe that you belong to the land.” She poured the chile paste into the beans and stirred the mixture.

I gave a small smile. Tecolote knew me well, better than I would have thought.

“Those boys are coming in now,” she said.

Seconds later, I heard Kerry's boots on the wood planks of the
portal
, and Mountain ran in the door, waving his tail with excitement.

Tecolote fished a bone from the beans and set it in a tin pie plate to cool. She cooed to Mountain about it, speaking to him in Spanish, and the wolf sat at attention, fixed on her every word, a long strand of drool dripping from a corner of his mouth. When the bone had stopped steaming, she held it up above the wolf's head, pointed to her eyes with two fingers, and held his gaze. Tecolote waved the two fingers and said an incantation over the bone: “This gives you the strength to run, but you must not run until it is time.”

As she handed the bone to the wolf, I muttered, “My thoughts, exactly.”

Esperanza hobbled to the hearth and used a large gourd ladle to scoop the beans into bowls.
“Un grito a tiempo saca un cimarrón del monte.”

“What?” I asked.

She put a bowl of beans in front of me. “It is an old saying over here.”

“But what does it mean?”

She turned back to the hearth. “A shout in time, it gets the stray animal out of the woods.”

I gave a soft snort. “Not always.”

Kerry winked at me and grinned. He grabbed a large round log from the firewood on the porch and brought it in to use as a stool, since there were only two chairs.

We ate the beans from pottery bowls and rolled the tortillas and dipped them into the soupy chile sauce that surrounded the legumes. It was a delicious, simple meal.

“I want to ask you about a Spanish word I heard,” I said to Esperanza. “Can you tell me what a ‘monito' is?”

The old bruja held her big spoon in her fist like a small child might. She stopped midpoint between bowl and mouth, and sauce dripped from the spoon as she hesitated long enough to answer my question. “Monito—it is a little doll.” She shoved the spoonful of beans into her mouth and began macerating them with a delighted smile.

I remembered the box that had been riding shotgun in my Jeep. “Oh, that reminds me,” I said. “I tried to deliver the doll in the box that you gave me to Sister Florinda at the pueblo, but she would not accept it. She asked me if it was a joke.”

Tecolote shrugged. She made a loud slurping noise as she sipped the chile sauce from her spoon.

“I'll bring it back to you,” I said. “I don't have it with me today because it's in my Jeep and we came in Kerry's truck. But I'll bring it next time I come.”

The old bruja stopped eating and thought for a moment, her spoon poised in midair. Then, she held it up and waved it to give emphasis to what she said next: “Instead, Mirasol, I think you should find a child who would like a doll for La Navidad.”

Kerry reached for another tortilla from the sackcloth bundle. “This is delicious,” he said. “We've been out in the fresh air all day, and I didn't realize I was so hungry until now. Thank you for the meal.”

“De nada,”
the old bruja said, grinning. “It will give you
la fuerza
for the afternoon.”

“La fuerza?”
he said. “What's that?”

“Strength,” I said. “Right?”

“
Sí.
You will be glad for a little extra energy today,” Esperanza said, giving a mostly toothless smile.

As we left Tecolote's cottage, we stepped off the
portal
into brilliant sunlight and a relatively warm, beautiful New Mexico winter afternoon. We started down the goat path, waving our good-byes.

“Mirasol,” she called to me, waving me back.

I came back up the path.

“It is better that we do not speak about this in
la casita.
You do not have a monito in your possession, do you?”

“No.”

“Good, that is very good. I did not see it around you, but I wanted to be sure. Many times, over here, when the people are saying ‘monito,' they are speaking of a witch doll.”

The Shower

Back at my cabin, I hooked Mountain to his chain, and I choked back tears as I did so, trying hard not to show weakness.

Kerry tried to console me. “Maybe he'll learn something from this. Maybe he'll learn that if he runs off, he's going to be restrained.”

I looked at the wolf, who dropped to the ground and refused to meet my eyes. “I think he is learning to long for his freedom even more. And to hate me for depriving him of it.” I had been trying to control it, but the worry and sadness welled up in me, and I began to sob. I knelt on the ground and lifted Mountain's muzzle, but he looked away and struggled to free his chin from my grip.

Kerry and I built a campfire near my makeshift shower at the edge of the woods. I brought a large pot and a grate to place over the fire for heating water to add to the sun-warmed water in the shower bags. I put Mountain on his long lead and bridle and we took him with us to La Petaca to get buckets full of water for the big cauldron. The wolf scampered along exploring in the woods, wandering in and out among the low limbs and brush so that I had to repeatedly disentangle him.

“What did the power company say about why you don't have electricity?” Kerry asked as we returned to the stream for our second round of water.

“They never made it out here. I called several times, but the only time I ever got a real person on the phone was this morning, and he told me they had sent a guy out yesterday but he couldn't tell which place was mine. I'm supposed to place a big sign up at the end of my drive where it meets the road.”

“And the FBI didn't find any connection between your call to the power company and the guy who phoned you about the elk?”

“Apparently their sheets are all clean as a whistle at the power company. They just can't deliver electricity.”

“But it does seem odd. You don't know of anyone else who has that cell phone number, anyone who might have given it to anyone else?”

“It's posted on a list on a bulletin board at the BLM. I never paid any attention to that list before, but it's possible someone might have given it out, if asked.”

He shook his head. “I don't get it. Whoever it was knows who you are, they know where you work, and they know what you do. I'm worried about that.”

“Yeah,” I said, stopping to work the lead out from around one of Mountain's front legs, which had gotten lassoed in it. “Me, too.”

 

While the water heated, Kerry helped me make a sign for the power company and secure it with a bungee cord to the fencepost at the corner by my drive. Later, when the cauldron had come to a boil, we added steaming water to top off the sun-warmed reservoirs in the black shower bags. We raised them up—one in each of two tall ponderosa pines—via a rope over a tree limb used as a come-along. With Mountain secured by his heavy chain to a nearby tree, we undressed in the pink-gold glow of the last of the day's sunshine and stepped onto the river stones I had placed on the ground for a shower floor and into the sheltering arms of the pine branches. We opened the valve on one of the bags and I felt the top of my head tingle, sending a telegraphic message of comfort down my spine. The luxurious sensation of warmth fanned across my back and shoulders, soothing the scrapes and bruises, radiating a delicious sense of heat over my arms and chest which spread to my lower torso and then my legs as the water flowed over my skin.

I turned my face up into the spray and felt the rain of wet warmth on my cheeks. I smelled the sharp, spicy sap of the pines, the ancient musk exuding from the moist stones, the earthy scent of damp grass and ground, and the incense of Kerry's skin, redolent with clean sweat, maleness, and his own aromatic signature. As our hands found one another's shoulders, a flood of red light unfurled from the orb of fire on the horizon, rippling along the contours of the land, burnishing everything with the beautiful crimson blush of the surrendering sun.

Kerry drew me to him, holding me against his chest. Our skin seemed somehow more naked for being wet. “I could stay like this forever,” he said. “This is so perfect, this moment. Right now.”

“Except for Mountain,” I said into his shoulder.

He pulled back slightly. “What did you say?”

“Except for Mountain. This is perfect for us. But he's over there on a chain. He's not free.”

Kerry raised his hand and held the back of my head as he looked into my eyes. His skin glowed bronze with sunset light and the tiny streams of water on his chest glimmered. “We'll make it up to him, babe. He's safe. That's what matters. Now, come here.” His hand gently traced a trickle of water along my spine all the way to the round curve of my bottom.

Solstice

It was cold and dark when we set out for Tanoah Pueblo the next morning, Kerry in his truck, and Mountain in my Jeep with me. We had been invited to come prepare for the solstice rituals and then participate in the festivities. At the pueblo, Kerry took Mountain along when he and a few of the men went to gather up wood from the foothills of Sacred Mountain. Here in the pueblo, there was to be no using machinery, digging, chopping of wood, or excessive moving about during this time of “staying still” or Quiet Time, as it was more commonly known. Kerry, a non-Indian and thus immune from these restrictions, would bring the previously stacked, cut, and dried wood back from the store-piles in the foothills by the truckload, and under the direction of the men from the pueblo—and with their help—pile it in great mounds, dotting the large dirt plaza in the center of the walled village of the pueblo. This firewood would be used for the solstice ceremonies, and to build huge bonfires on Christmas Eve for the procession.

Momma Anna had instructed me to meet her outside the church after the first morning mass, but I was early. I stood outside the low adobe churchyard wall, wrapped in a blanket my medicine teacher had given me. I waited in the cold, listening to the sound of water flowing under the ice that nearly covered the small río that ran through the center of the village. Big tissue-paper flakes of snow began to float down from the dark sky.

I heard a hinge creak, and a Tanoah man emerged from a nearby doorway, wrapped in a blanket. He stepped out onto the hard-packed earth in front of his home, holding one hand high to offer cedar to the coming sunrise. As his soft moccasins marched in place, he closed his eyes and gestured with the offering to the seven directions—first to the east and the rising sun, then to the south, the west, the north, the earth below, the sky above, and to the “Within,” holding his pinch of cedar to his heart. As he completed this ritual by sprinkling the cedar tips over the ground, he opened his eyes and saw me. He walked in my direction, but stopped a few yards away from me. We studied one another for a moment, and I recognized Sevenguns just as he discerned that it was me. “It is cold,” he said. “You want some coffee?”

“That sounds good,” I answered, emphatically. Once again, the morning had reminded me of how painfully stiff and sore I still felt from the beating I'd taken in the avalanche two days ago. The cold seemed to exacerbate the experience. “I think I have a while to wait before the early mass is over.”

“You could go on in there,” he said, pointing at the church. “Might get some Jesus.”

“No, that's okay.” I grinned. “I was told to wait outside, so that's what I'll do.”

“You come to my house.” He waved an arm for me to follow him. “I leave the door open, you are just like outside. Only I got coffee and a good fire over there.”

 

Sevenguns spooned instant coffee into two mugs, then poured boiling water from a blue-speckled, enamelware coffeepot into them. “A man and a woman from the FBI come here,” he said, handing me one of the mugs. “They ask me, ask all the old ones here did we go to that school.”

I stared into my coffee, trying hard to be patient as I waited to see if more details would be forthcoming—and trying even harder not to ask any questions.

“They ask one thing, then another thing, then they leave me and do not come back. They can already see that I am too old and feeble to be the one who kill that woman out there.”

“I'm sure they ruled you out for other reasons. You don't seem that old or feeble to me.”