Fireflies

Consuelo’s Odd Marriage

Tiny half-formed apples rotted on the trees the year that Consuelo married the old man. Even they were few and not worth harvesting for there had been no rain. Beans pods shriveled before the fruit within could mature. Corn was ravished by a plague of rats.  No one danced. No one sang. It was a bitter time.

She married an old man with a long beard. She was his third wife, though some people said she was lucky to marry at all. “What kind of harsh luck is this,” she wondered? “And on top of everything else.” But she was not lucky. Luck had nothing to do with it. She certainly was not lucky in the marriage. That is,  until the old man died and that was luck enough.

The man she married was an old Anglo man of Irish descent. He was not so kind although not really as awful as some of the acidic and antique single or widowed men who rode in and out of the canyons and valleys around the village in search of succulent young wives.

Consuelo’s old man came to her bedside soon after word of her blindness had spread beyond the village. News of her misfortune had traveled even deep into the little dry canyon where he had built a diminutive hermit’s cabin from smelly railroad ties and bits of bitter brush and dried bones. He imagined living out the rest of his life there and alone.

Juanita reluctantly admitted him to the house the day he arrived on his dusty mule. She guessed his errand. Indeed, he went straight to Consuelo’s bedside. “My dear girl,” he began. “I am not a young or handsome man, but I will care for you and give you respectability. Marry me and you will be happy again.” That any care or respectability might come from this union was a lie. That he was not young or handsome was a perverse understatement. But, of course, Consuelo could not see him and no one had the heart to tell her the truth.

Consuelo was still listless. Her fractured frame and bruises were healed. But she was still blind and did not wish to be a burden to her mother. Thus she answered the old man, “Of course I will marry you. How kind an offer.”

This old man was not only deluded about his looks and age, but he was also had pretensions.

You can see his pretensions to being someone he was not in their wedding photograph. He is seated and tucked all about as if a lord or congressman. His beard is neatly trimmed but recklessly long like that of an eastern potentate’s. Though it is predominantly white, the beard is darker and grayish around the edges and near the temples. It must have been impossible to keep such a beard clean. It must have been regularly full of bits of food and pine pitch and vermin.

His left hand is tucked, Napoleon style, between the buttons of his waistcoat. Over his collarless white shirt and dark waistcoat, he wears a long black coat, clearly frayed at the wrists. This long coat is ill fitting, especially about the shoulders and the elbows. His pants don’t nearly seem to match the coat. The later is pin-striped and the former not.

The hems on the trousers look rough and are sewn with little care, almost as if merely basted. His shoes or boots are worn and not at all polished. In fact, they appear to be quite dusty as if he had just walked in from his farm and appeared just in time for the picture to be taken.

Yet, he wears his trousers and boots with a certain arrogance.

His lips are tight against his face. These lips are not smiling or frowning, just there, as if drawn onto his face and served no purpose at all. On his head he wears a flat broad-brimmed hat of the kind you might imagine an Amish countryman to wear.

His right leg is crossed over his left and his right hand rests on his right knee. He does not quite address the camera but looks off to somewhere quite distant, a place unconnected to the world in which he lived, to his young wife, and to the moment. It is clear that he believes himself to be a gentleman of means and importance to dress so and assume such a stance.

Consuelo as a youthful woman of about sixteen stands next to him. She is to his left and short and unseeing. It is clear that she is blind. Her eyes are vacant and languid and one seems to be looking off to the right while the other is peering sightlessly and lazily up toward the ceiling.

She is slim and dressed in a dark dress buttoned down the front and draped all around her tiny hips and stomach. The bow around her neck is bigger than her face. Her hair is parted at the middle and drawn back severely to a spot somewhere behind her head.

Her right hand rests lightly on the shoulder of the “old gentleman,” as he enjoyed referring to himself. He was not a gentleman, but an old rounder or knave. He was a horse thief and a gambler. He worked his former wives to death, forcing them to sell his puny crop of apples, apples each had cultivated and harvested, in the streets of far off towns. During the harvest season, he left the  current wife with her baskets of apples in these towns to fend for themselves. He returned, sometimes, several days later.

At home, when they were not working the streets, he forced them to care for all the animals and entertain his card-playing friends deep into the night. He did very little himself to support the household but gamble. And at this he was not successful. His wins, few and far between, were more than cancelled out by his losses.

If there were no money in the house, he sent the current wife out door to door to sharpen knives and scissors and offer to do laundry or read fortunes. If they came back empty handed, he sent the wives out to steal chickens from his neighbors. These he obliged them to sell, squawking and indignant, in a village some distance away so that the chickens would not be recognized. If that didn’t bring in sufficient income, he offered his wives to road crews to act as common roustabouts. This is the man some considered a lucky match for a young blind woman.

It must be said that by the time Consuelo married him, he was still a grim tightwad but not so active in his nefarious pursuits and was often content to sleep at night rather than entertain his chums. At his advanced age, he was rarely interested in chickens or horses or anything else for that matter. He tried once or twice to convince Consuelo to take in sewing or to iron for people or sell tortillas in the plaza. But Consuelo found that if she assented to his requests but did nothing, he forgot all about it by the next day. He couldn’t write, so he did not record his orders to her and all was lost in the fog his mind had become.

In fact, the old gentleman lived only long enough to consummate the marriage. This peculiar occasion happened one autumn night after Consuelo had taken the day’s stiff washing off the clothes line. It was after she had folded sheets and shirts and put them into a chest of drawers. It was after she had served the old gentleman a bowl of noodle soup seasoned beautifully with dill and fennel. It was after the dishes were cleared and remaining bits scraped out the door for their few elderly chickens who managed now and again to provide an egg or two for their meals.

The old man was still in his dark wedding suit and hat for it was soon clear to Consuelo that this wedding suit was actually the only clothing, other than his shirts, that he owned or ever wore.

So still in his suit, the old man took his place upon the bed. “My dear,” he called to her in the kitchen. “Will you not join me tonight. I am so lonely and so cold.” Until this night, she had slept on a small cot in the kitchen and had not been troubled by him. She assented to his request. She lay by him, at first stiffly. He was cold. His hand reached out to her, an icy, bony paw of a thing. She felt a twinge of pity. Amidst the drapes and trousers and watch fobs and buttons and bows he managed, with her complete consent, given out of mild curiosity rather than desire, to conceive the child Rosalie.

It was not too many days later that he died of unknown causes. He died quite suddenly and in his bed (which he had not left since the consummation). In fact, his death was a rather unnoticed affair because it took place on the same day in 1916 that Pancho Villa invaded the United States and raided the little town of Columbus, New Mexico.

Everyone heard about the invasion and were quite excited by the news. Ramona had her old uniform somewhere and began tearing through trunks to find it. You see, Ramona had decided to cross the border and become a soldier in the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Sophia was exceedingly proud of her when she announced her intentions. She came home, one day, dressed as a soldara with bandoliers slung over both of her shoulders. She wore a tidy uniform jacket with brass buttons down the front and on the pockets, jodhpurs, and a bright white pair of spats over her boots

She found the uniform. It had only a few moth holes in it, but otherwise was fine and it still fit over her bosoms and hips. She polished the buttons, darned the holes and was ready to go within a couple of hours. “I must go. He needs me,” She said, speaking of Pancho. She borrowed Paulette, saddled up and rode south as quickly as she could. Paulette, being overweight, was not the fastest of mounts she could have chosen from the horses resident in the village. But she was a faithful old friend. They rode in splendor, south, once again, to the border.

Of course the whole thing was over as quickly as it started. It was, historians said, a factor in the decision of the United States to enter into the war raging in Europe. Something was said at the time about a letter from the Germans to the Mexican government. Whatever, General Pershing himself arrived in southern New Mexico to protect the borders from further incursions and Ramona was right there when the American troops arrived looking for Pancho. There she was, and can be seen in photographs in the archives in Mexico City, right next to Pancho, in support of the revolution as always. She knew nothing about the Germans or the European front and slipped across the border and back home some days after Pershing left.

When she returned to the village, she was greeting with cheers. Her adventure was a cause for food and drink. Ramona, still in uniform, sat in the plaza surrounded by admirers as she sipped lemonade and told stories of the encounter and described Pancho and his soldiers. Everyone loved Pancho. There was not a house that did not have a picture of him hanging on a wall. And everyone loved Ramona for her bravery and daring. Thus it was Ramona’s return and Pancho’s bravery was the talk of the village and everyone forgot about Consuelo’s loss and its circumstances.

The old man’s death was not only quiet but almost, as I said, unnoticed. He was buried high on a hill outside the village, his grave marked by a cross constructed of painted Mountain Ash. It was painted a bright white. His final resting place was near where three large crosses planted by the villagers had stood for many years representing the crosses on Calvary Hill. They were firmly rooted in their bases of stones. They had recently been freshly white washed and gleamed in the sunlight. The old man’s cross was mounded at its base with roses from the church. Other than the cross, there was nothing there to commemorate the old man. His name was inscribed on no stone and in no family album or Bible.

Back in the village now and away from the horrid ranchero of the old gentleman, Consuelo remained distant and quiet. She doubled her domestic efforts, though she did laundry less frequently and ate only to sustain the growing life within her. This little, fragile and wholly unexpected being was all that she attended to aside from her own mind and soul.

Diversions

Lest you have come to believe that the villagers, prone from the founding days to embrace suffering, dwelt only on the tragic elements of their lives, let me assure you that there were occasional joyful diversions. It is hard to believe that anything could have lifted spirits after yet another round of flu and the blinding of the wonderful young Consuelo. Yes, she was permanently blinded when the altar fell on her that day. Yes, she could see if she got really close to something and squinted. And she could make out dark forms moving against bright backgrounds. But for all intents and purposes, she was blind.

Blind as she was, and now a pregnant widow, she was never the playful young woman she had been. She took to exploring (or perhaps creating) her interior life. Yet she, too, did not dwell constantly upon her tragedy. She became a writer.

No one seemed to know just why and how she came to write. She had been moved, after the old man died, back to her mother’s household. And of course she began to sleep in her own astonishing bed again. She slept beneath the limbs and branches and under all the birds and nests. But now she really listened to the leaves rustle as she went to sleep at night. She reached up and touched the leaves when she first awoke. She heard the birds gently chirping throughout the night. She felt the seasons come and go from the comfort of her bed. Sophia still occasionally came and bathed her in lemon balm and rubbed her with sage and saxifrage most mornings now that she was back in her mother’s home. She frequently massaged Consuelo’s limbs and put chamomile compresses on her eyes before she helped her to dress for the day.

Then, Consuelo, supple and scented went haltingly into the plaza and walked about the village smelling the blooming flowers and listening to the sounds of voices and horses and dogs and cats. She still felt love and tenderness for all the world.  In fact, she felt even more love after her accident, for everyone in the village with great hugs and kisses greeted her. They adored her so much. And this new life, these new sensations, must have inspired her to take up pen and paper and record what she learned.

Consuelo’s determination to embrace life was one joy for the villagers. Another were the periodic performances in the plaza. At least once a month a troupe of dancers came up from Chihuahua. The troupe danced merrily for several days. They danced in and around crosses and the twin graves, and around apple trees and large tables laid with generous platters of corn and grapes and sliced apples and large jugs of tea and lemonade. Everyone took time from their chores and chatting to clap and sing and join the dancers while they were in the village.

But this was not enough diversion for people like Juanita and Consuelo and Ramona and the sweet young Epiphany. They could not be satisfied to be mere bystanders. They organized their own entertainments. They rehearsed songs and practiced violins. They had a viola and concertina and learned to play these. They worked on dance routines. All of this practicing and rehearsing was accomplished in the small corral to the rear of the plaza and the houses. This was the corral where Paulette, the horse, lived and was directly behind the house of Juanita. Paulette, of course, having her corral thus honored, joined in and rehearsed a few numbers of her own.

Ramona was the informal leader of the group. She had actually gained some considerable fame on the toy piano. She had a collection of them. One account puts their numbers at thirty-seven. They were of all colors and sizes and shapes except, of course, that they all were of the size to be considered toy. Ramona, as we have said, was a somewhat large young woman. She appeared even larger when seated at a toy piano.

When she was first learning to play, and before Epiphany could walk, she tucked the baby in her bosom, sat on a small red woven cushion placed on the hard dust of the corral, and bent over a piano. She made, with this small instrument, a magnificent sound. Later, by the time Consuelo and her baby joined the group, Epiphany herself would sing with her mother.

Paulette often danced. She demanded that her dress blanket be on her back before performing. It was red and gold with thin black stripes and long fringe that hung down either side of her withers. Someone, often Epiphany as she grew older, braided her tail and her mane. Epiphany sat upon the horse to do this or climbed a railing and reached out to the horse. The horse, loving the braids and the attention, stood still while Epiphany worked, just breathing quietly and occasionally blowing through her nose and lips while the braiding was happening. She loved Epiphany almost as much as she loved Consuelo.

The rehearsals in the corral were quite enough to engage this group and keep them happy and full of good spirit on even their worst days. The participants in these joyful days were mostly women, except for Hermes.

The rehearsals in the corral happened weekly, though sometimes not all of the performers were available. Ramona, for example, was otherwise occupied during the Mexican Revolution. But stories of her escapades were woven into the corral performances upon her return.

If you have not been following along (and who has?) you may enjoy these chapters for themselves or you may wish to go back to the beginning and read forward.

The Patient

The church was no longer simply a place of worship and wonder, but something that had to be approached with a certain wariness. People who had heretofore been merely superstitious and prone to read meaning into every event were now terrified of their own shadows and peered upwards at ceilings and lintels as they passed through doorways. There was no one who was fully at ease.

Consuelo lay in her (now much lengthened to accommodate her several years of growth) walnut bed after her horrible mishap. Its leaves wrapped tenderly around her, but she didn’t heal. Sophia, who ministered to her everyday, declared that she suffered from, in addition to her many wounds, vagotonia, an irritability of the vagus nerve. The symptoms of such were clear to Sophia, who spent days consulting her books. The child sometimes complained quietly of very cold arms and at other times suffered from heat. She was often drenched in sweat no matter what the condition of the ambient air. Sometimes it seemed she had no blood circulating through her fingertips and these then turned a dark blue. Sophia covered these sweet, small hands with woolen mittens and massaged them vigorously.

But there was more.

Most dreadful of all was the fact that Consuelo could not see.

And as a consequence this trauma and the state of her dearest Consuelo, Juanita never had another menstrual period after the day of the accident. It must be said that it was the time in her life that this cessation of flow might be expected, but nevertheless, there are, remember, thought to be no simple coincidence in Solución. This inability on the part of Juanita to never henceforth bear a child seemed to be, to those who heard of it, part of the curse.

Rumors about the whole incident and Consuelo’s condition flew, of course. The stories were, though worrisome, endlessly fascinating to villagers and each teller added details to make their particular tales the more beguiling to listeners. Also there was an unspoken competition among the residents. Each wanted to have been the only one to see this or that or to have heard such and such. Each wanted to be the special friend to whom a particular morsel had been passed on.

Some claimed to have seen a mysterious visitor, all dressed in black and bearing a basket of beans, when they passed by Consuelo’s home that morning. Others said they had seen lightening in the clouds high over the Sangre de Cristos just as Sophia appeared at her window. One said a devil had been seen cavorting on the roof of the church just moments before the loud crash was heard from within.

Villagers reluctantly tore themselves away from their gossip, their books, their snacks, their story telling and their lazing about and took to repairing the church as soon as the dry season was upon them. They made new adobe bricks; they mixed earth with water and pounded and pressed it into molds. They removed molds and set the green bricks out to dry in the sun until they were baked solid. They lifted the bricks, nearly forty pounds each, and slowly rebuilt the back wall and reinforced the roof itself. They mixed mud with straw and kneaded it by hand and filled gaps and covered all the new work. They plastered all over the wall and the roof. They mixed ground gypsum and white washed each wall. They lifted the great altar and replaced and repaired Santos and posts and mirrors. They applied paint where paint had chipped away. They once again, like their forebears centuries ago, gave up their meager savings and purchased and applied gold leaf where gold leaf had been loosened and spoiled in the mud.

But no one could do anything to repair Consuelo. She lay quietly. She never complained. She did not cry out. She didn’t move.

Sophia consulted all of her old journals and wrote to other Eclectics far and wide. She made visits to healers in neighboring villages for advice. She even called Eclectic headquarters in Cincinnati  from the public telephone exchange in the nearby town of Purgatoria.  She tried all the remedies she had learned over the years. She ground mesquite to a powder then placed the powder in a wet cloth and squeezed the liquid onto Consuelo’s eyelids. She rubbed her sweet crumpled body and the still open wounds with a decoction made from snakebroom. She brought all of her wisdom to bear in her efforts to heal Consuelo. Indeed, she stayed up night after night mixing this herb and that. She prayed until she trembled with exhaustion

Consuelo was also prayed over by other women of the village. They donated old dresses so Sophia had fabric with which to make clean poultices and fresh strips with which to bind the cedar splints to her broken arms and legs.

Consuelo was often held Sophia’s arms, her lips gently parted, and given willow and aspen tea to sip. Mugwort tea for energy was dripped slowly between these dry lips.

Still Consuelo was for the most part silent and still. No one was surprised that Sophia seemed not to be able to heal Consuelo. Sophia had no control over what had come upon the Consuelo and she would have no control over what would ultimately happen to her. Consuelo’s trials probably contained some message, yet to be worked out, for all of them.

After a while, even with their public belief in fate, the women, secretly blamed themselves just a little for their neglect of the church. They pooled their resources and hired someone to look after it from now on.

Matilda: 1916

They hired Matilda, “The Toad,” to be a kind of seneschal. She was someone’s mother’s cousin returned from a trip to the outside world that had lasted several years. They called her “The Toad” because of her numerous, quite evident, warts. She had a warty face and warty hands. Her feet fed warts. Her knobby knees had several warts on each. Her ears were warty. Even her breasts had warts, some large and hairy. Her hair was thin and modestly pulled back and pinned at her neck. Her light brown face featured high and prominent cheek bones. Her dark, wide eyes were set deeply into the dusky hollows under her forehead. She could have been a model for  a dia de los muertos candy skull except that she was dark and far from sweet.

Now, returned from who knows where, she was nearly thirty and without immediate kin or funds. She needed housing and she needed work. So she was hired by the women and given a small room attached to the back of the church to call her own.

The church was also hers in a manner of speaking. She was to care for as if it were her baby, her child, and her most precious possession. She swept and cleaned it every day, polished pews with bees’ wax, dusted pillars with long handled mops, scrubbed floors on hands and knees, and checked the roof each day for signs of cracks or weakness.

Wherever Matilda had journeyed, it seemed to have caused her to take up odd habits indeed. For example, Matilda was a living chapel. All over her apron and her striped cloth coat and full cotton skirt were pictures. All up and down her sleeves and on her breasts were pictures. These small pictures were beautiful, colorful little enameled miniatures encased in hand-hammered tin frames. These were lovely portraits of people, men, women, and children, painted with tiny, delicate brush strokes on copper or ivory (though not a few had been done of chicken-skin and one or two on mere cardboard). These, it turned out, were likenesses of villagers who had died many years ago. Or they were pictures of people with whom Matilda had once been acquainted but who had themselves gone away from the village and not returned. She herself had made these portraits in her years of absence, having trained herself to be a miniaturist  as she traveled here and there and having called upon the memory of those she had known and lost as her subject matter. How astonishing was the beauty of these images in contrast to the lumpy, warty visage they adorned.

On each miniature was a single, carefully calligraphed question: “Donde Están?”. The question, written of course in her own cramped hand, was a plaintive one, indeed. Because, you see, despite Matilda’s service to the church, her faith was weak and this question was not rhetorical but sincerely asked. She wondered everyday while sweeping and while oiling woodwork in the chapel. She wondered while carrying the trash and renewing holy water and scraping candle wax from floor and altar. She wondered to herself: “Where, oh where, did dead ones go?” She wondered if each has a soul. She wondered that if each had a soul, was this soul of substance or of spirit. Most of all, she wondered where the souls went. So she wore her questions on her clothes and hoped, someday, to have answers. Indeed her clothing created a sort of heirophany or manifestation of the sacred for the villagers, not unlike the 16^th century Voronet blue monasteries of Moldavia which, in lively cartoons, told the story of the Last Judgment. The villagers of Solución, like those ancient Romanians, did not respond well to abstract theological questions but were stimulated to excess by pictorial symbolic universe.  Matilda was nothing if not that. Matilda, in her aprons and copper and ivory pictures became a living altar, never quite a part of the profane world, always forcing her queries as she walked about the village.

Matilda was not a likely candidate to carry the burden of this problem of the nature of the soul and an after life. She was in every other way a pious, simple seeming woman. She kept a cross tucked into one hand and kissed it frequently and firmly. A lively portrait of Mary in a blue veil was stitched onto the pocket of her canvas vest. In the pocket she kept a hankie and a bit of celery root or cinnamon to chew on while she worked. She had few failings and no known kin or animals to live with her, though it was rumored that a familiar cat slept under her bed but never showed itself to anyone but Matilda. And though she was in a constant state of consternation, musing, as she was, about the nature of the soul, she dared not speak of it as we shall see.

The villagers considered her to be the answer to the mystery posed by Consuelo’s tragedy. Matilda’s presence in their lives, they believed, finally revealed the meaning and message of the whole event. It is easy, in retrospect, to trace the compelling sequence that will help you to understand why so many of the people of Solución came to accept Matilda as God’s messenger as they did and why Matilda’s aprons and vests presented such a compelling, God sent, damnable challenge to them.

As inhabitants of Solución saw it, if the village had not been plagued for centuries by spirits that frightened them, the women would not have slept in heaps. If the women had not slept in heaps, the women would not have neglected their duties. If the women had not neglected their duties, the adobe on the roof would not have failed. If the adobe had not failed, the rain would not have entered the church. If the rain had not entered, the altar would not have fallen. It certainly would not have fallen during the time that Consuelo was kneeling there praying.

And, the icing on the cake: if Consuelo had not been struck, there would have been nothing to feel guilty about and the women would not have hired Matilda. There would have been, for the villagers, no daily encounter with a walking assault on their already rocky faiths. Thus the question of the nature of the soul and what happens after death would never have been raised. By the logic of the villagers, it was the very spirits who had plagued them all along who were responsible for Consuelo’s blindness and ultimately the questions raised by Matilda’s presence. As the villagers saw it, they deserved Matilda. She had been sent as a consequence of centuries of faithlessness to confront and test them and their beliefs once and for all.

The test had to be met. There was no turning back. Now the women and the men and even small children worried and wondered at their futures in new ways. With no priest to guide them, no answers to Matilda’s questions were forthcoming from any authority. So some people lived inside the boundaries of a fiery fear, as strong as the one the women of generations past had felt but also different. And the advantage of this new fear was that it didn’t require giving up any old ones. No, this new fear was a fear of something they’d never thought to fear before: this fear was for their mortal beings and of a hell that surely awaited them for doubting. The answer many if not most found was simple: they became apostate and embraced a purely secular life. There was no point to anything, they came to believe. It was this condition in which I found most of the villagers when I began my fieldwork.

Though Matilda’s pictures and questions were odd and challenging enough for any reasonable village to endure, there was something even odder about her with which the people had to contend.

When Matilda was spoken to, you see, she repeated in full what ever it was that was said to her. She repeated what she heard, but more loudly than the speaker had spoken. In fact, she repeated others’ utterances very loudly indeed.

Sometimes children came up behind her while she swept or while she rubbed the altar rail. These rascally children whispered nasty things. “All the village is damned to hell and the fuckers who live in it will burn through eternity,” they yelled behind her back. And she, without intention, repeated at the top of her lungs, “All the village is damned to hell and the fuckers who live in it will burn through eternity.” The bad children snickered quietly from their hiding places as Matilda repeated these nasty things, always quite loudly, in the church and before the Holy Mother. It gave them particular pleasure if a villager were coming in just then to pray and heard Matilda’s words. No matter how often they had been told of her affliction, none could stand to hear these kinds of things spoken in the church. And they never could stop the little boys from teasing  Matilda in this way.

Matilda could not, you see, help herself. To her complete dismay, when she was addressed by the children, her lips moved and her voice yelled out: “I am a shit head. We are all shit heads. Oh Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.”

The children laughed and ran out of the church. Matilda would kneel and cross herself. In her mind she knew what she had said and she prayed to be relieved of this burden of odd speech. And yet, though she believed in her heart that these words were not hers, she also wondered if her affliction was sent upon her as a punishment for wondering about things she shouldn’t and for causing doubt among the other village people.

At the end of each day of work, after the torment of the children, she was exhausted. She returned to her little room to eat cold bread and tinned cheese and perhaps a piece of fruit. She fell asleep in tears atop her tiny cot and braided bedspread.

You might see now why her faith was weak and why she prayed incessantly and why she wondered where souls go. You might understand better why she wondered what souls are. She was tormented in the day by children and in the night by her own questions. She lay, sometimes in sheet-soaking fevers, and got up every night to record her visions and her questions and her fears, as many saints before her had done.

January 6, 19….

He appeared to me again riding on a silk blanket and wrapped in a dark cloud. As he passed over my head I could see the wounds and the blood dripping from his palms. He called out to me, “Sister Matilda. Do not fear. Your secrets are safe with me. Tell me lots more. I really enjoy hearing from you.” I thought this a strange thing for the Christ to say, but answered, “Oh Lord, I would tell you more if I was sure I could trust you.” At this, he turned into a frightening thing, a massive black bear with teeth bared and claws snatching at the air. He also had wings, large things like fans. I knew then that I had almost been fooled. It was the very devil asking me for my soul.

Her tired, warty fingers were thoroughly calloused by her nightly writing so that they were hardly able to grasp her grandmother’s ancient ink pen. Yet she wrote, and wrote in a fine hand.

We would have all, I believe, liked this Matilda Toad very much. We would have admired her clean small room and pretty braided bedspread. We would have found her quaint and studied all the pictures on her clothes and wondered at this archive that she kept upon herself. We might have found her seeming religiosity admirable. We might have believed her willingness to question sacredly held beliefs an indication of great courage on her part.

But though we might have admired her, we could not have talked with her. We could have had no dialogue or conversation. You see, she would have simply echoed our own words.

“Good morning, Matilda. Would you care to sit and have some tea?”

“Good morning, Matilda. Would you care to sit and have some tea?”

“No, my dear, you are Matilda. I asked you first.”

“No, my dear, you are Matilda.”

“YOU are Matilda.”

“YOU are Matilda.”

She would look sad and tired. We would be incapable of getting off the merry go round.

Though she would look us in the eye and raise an eyebrow or provide entertaining inflection, the words that would come back would always be our own no matter how hard we tried.

It can be unsettling to hear your own words coming back to you. It can be much more unsettling to hear them come back almost immediately. You would have wondered along with me if Matilda was simply mocking us. It could seem, this repeating, to be mocking. The less secure of us would hear our words as foolish and our vocabulary a reflection of our stupidity. We might learn to speak fewer words or to weigh the need to speak more heavily and perhaps to fall into silence all together. And so it can be said and thought that Matilda had a generally dampening effect on conversation in the village except among those who found it amusing to hear Matilda say things that they themselves found in someway to be taboo.

If we truly wanted to have tea with Matilda, we would simply lead her by the hand to the tea table. We would refrain from asking, “sugar?” because her retort would be, “sugar?” No, we would learn to lift the bowl and pass it under her nose.

But what if Matilda initiated conversation, you might ask. Matilda stuttered so badly when not repeating another’s words that she could not be understood at all. The stutter was born of the fear that the words arranging themselves in her throat, on her tongue, and by the curves and puckers of her lips were not hers at all. She was so unsure of her authority in speech that she kept silent.

So the leaky roof led to the downfall of Sophia, the blindness of the baby, the prominence of Matilda in village consciousness, and a village full of fearful, doubting, mostly silent and largely secular people. This was not a pleasant village. Once again, the watchers thought surely no one would stay under such circumstances. Once again, they were wrong.

Dear Reader, Woe be unto thee if you are attempting to join us at this stage. You will have a dickens of a time working your way back to the beginning and then coming forward. This will be very much like doing archeology. If you want to just enjoy this section, you probably need to know that this is the history of a village collected and transcribed by a plucky old anthropologist named Henrietta. Henrietta is the “I” in the story. She spent many summers in Solución but only dared to collect her work from those summers into a single volume when she was  her dotage.  In fact, she did not publish these stories. Her journals and notes were found in the  drawer of her long abandoned desk.

Sophia’s Work

While the children were small, and while the little family lived together in their house on the plaza, Sophia’s kitchen must have been a place of delight. Its ever well stoked and kindled stove warmed it. The space within it always smelled of hot bread or tortillas, or green tomato pie, or smoked fish, people told me. Its walls were lined with heavy, deep wooden shelves and on the shelves were jars and jars of canned deer and elk meat, pickled salmon, pears and peaches, guava jellies, and apricot preserves. You see, Sophia traded chilies and beans for fruit and meat with people all over the region. She traded with cousins in the northwest. She traded with uncles in the mountains. She traded with aunties who traveled to Panama. Moreover, in her work as midwife and healer, people often paid her with food. Sophia did not ask for or require or in anyway expect to receive payment for her work. She had become a gifted healer and midwife and did what she did out of love and in gratitude for and honor to her gift. But nevertheless, the people whose babies she saved and children she nursed to health gave her what they could. Some never stopped giving.  Some brought her a jar of jam on the anniversary of a birth or a healing. Others brought loads of split firewood or mesquite kindling and left it on her doorstep They called her “sister” or “auntie” or “grandmother,” titles that changed according to the age of the customer and Sophia’s own age. “Here, sister,” a man would say, arriving with a sack of beans, “I’ve brought you a little gift for your help with my arthritis. See how I can bend and stretch?” And he would put the bag down and touch his toes with his fingertips. “Oh, Auntie,” a woman would say as she stepped over the threshold. “Oh, Auntie, here is a fresh bunch of onions from my garden. And look, here is little Sophia already three years old and healthy as a young colt, thanks to you.”

Not all of Sophia’s shelves were stacked with jars. Some of them had books. Sophia had learned her healing craft from her own mother and grandmother and aunties. She knew many “traditional” remedies. But Sophia was a person who enjoyed learning. She studied medicine from many sources and delved into the mysteries and new discoveries of the art when stumped by a symptom or when new epidemics came along. Volumes of reference materials were stacked in bookcases and squeezed tight between jugs of vinegar and sacks of dried corn.

She joined the Eclectic movement, a group of doctors and health practitioners who were interested in all manner of alternative healing methods. She avidly read all the publications and research bulletins that came out of the movement’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. In fact she contributed to the Eclectic movement’s periodic journals when she came up with a new theory or brew.

In truth, her kitchen was not so much a kitchen as a laboratory and in it hung bunches and bunches of drying plants for use in her medicines or poultices. These hung there always seeming to be drying and always ready: scouring-rush for women with menstrual difficulties (although these plants were rarely to be found anywhere in the region and had to be sent from relatives who  lived elsewhere), the rhizomes of licorice fern to ease labor, leaves of dock to stop heavy menstrual flow, several species of lupine for headache, heath leaves for the purification of the blood, bellflower and silvergreen for boils, coltsfoot for sore eyes and swelling reduction, and bracket fungus for deodorant. There were also, hanging or stashed in cupboards, dried freshwater eels and strings of dried clams and smoked baby oysters from family on the northwest coast, and large bunches of oregano, fennel, hops and dill.

The wood burning kitchen stove was quite large and next to it sat an enameled hod filled with neatly cut lengths of piñón pine and a trimly stacked pile of pitchy mountain cedar starter twigs torn from fallen limbs. The stove was pulled well away from the wall and behind it and between it and the wall was room for large metal water well so that water could be heated for baths while Sophia cooked. She kept basins of water on top of the stove, too, to humidify the house or bath Epiphany or Hermes when they were still babies. She sometimes had several pots of teas or infusions cooking or steeping at once. Lovely packages arrived by post from China and Japan and India with blocks of black tea or Ayurvedic soaps or roots of ginseng. These were placed in the hot water on the stove and heady infusions were made of them.

Later I learned, through the wife of a clerk in the office, how the postal workers ooohed and aahed at the stamps on these packages, the tidy but indecipherable return addresses, and the smells that filled their workroom whenever one of them arrived. “Look at this, George. Look, will you, at these stamps. Elephants, I tell you. And an old gentleman with a turban and moustache!” “Smell this, James. What can be in here? It makes me dream of naked nymphs and plump thighs.” Sometimes they had to put the packages outside their little workspace until Sophia came to fetch them lest they fall into deep, dream filled trances from the vapors the boxes emitted. They could hardly wait until the end of the day so that they could go home and tell wives and children (if they were lucky enough to have them) about the billows of visions they received from the packets and about the mysterious stamps that had conveyed the packages hence from hard to imagine places.

Oh, Sophia was a student of the healing arts and known by everyone around. And babies there were who knew they owed their little lives and beings to their Aunt Sophia. They came to name their own babies Sophia and that is why there came to be so many Sophias all about in the hills and valleys and beyond far beyond the village. At first they were numbered, as in Sophia 3 and Sophia 4. But soon that system was impossible to maintain. When someone called for Sophia, ten or twelve little girls ran helter skelter across the plaza and the original appeared at her door with a spoon in hand or a pot on her arm wondering what the fuss was about.

Sophia did more than deliver babies of course. She had taken heroic measures to help the people during influenza epidemic of 1899 as we have seen. She was renown among the villagers and the Indian people who lived nearby for her work during the pandemic of 1918. Yes, Sophia was loved by everyone and was loved because she was reliable in her love and selflessly remained engaged in learning about things that might ever be useful to the peoples’ well being.

Here it was, in this house with the kitchen that produced wonders that Hermes lived when he was a baby and young boy. There he was with his mother, Sophia, and his sister and her baby Epiphany. Here it was that Hermes, the boy in a never really growing body, dressed in a walnut dyed suit and eating peas and gruel and ripe peaches and strawberries in season lived. Here he lived and ate and sat looking all about but mostly straight forward. Here is where the tiny baby Epiphany snuggled and cooed.

The Significance of the Leaky Roof: 1915 A.D

But perhaps I have gone on too long about Sophia and her brood. There is the matter of the leaky church roof and how it came to have significance. This is a story often repeated to me and told in many versions.

But there is information you, reader, will need in order to understand this story. First, it is important to know that flat adobe roofs leak more than pitched tin ones. This particularly disastrous leak about which I will tell you occurred before the church had a tin roof. That new roof that one might have seen in photographs was put on the crumbling old building during the mid nineteen sixties.

No, this leak came in the old days. The pre-tin days. The leak occurred with regularity once it started because once adobe begins to leak it will not patch itself. The leak will get worse. The adobe will become soft.

This particular leak occurred because in those days when it began the women were still occupied with their fantastic dreams and ever-present fears rather than with their duty to keep not only their own homes but also the community in good repair. They spent so much time enjoying being piled into one house together that often large groups of women could be found chatting in great knots not just at bedtime but throughout the day. The conversations seemed endless. How could they find so much to talk about?

It seems from what I was told that not all of these convivial gatherings were necessitated by fear in spite of what the women told the men. Fear became more and more a convenient explanation for their behavior from what I can tell. In fact, it was never clear to me from the stories I heard whether there was much fear at all by around nineteen fifteen, the time when the leak came to have significance for the lives of the villagers. Not that the voices and ghosts didn’t come around, but just that the women were accustomed to and largely unbothered by them. The ghosts were just something that happened to be part of living in Solución. “What can you do? It’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember.” They said to each other. Still, the women gathered and snacked and read and neglected some necessary tasks. Some things in their households and in the village suffered more than others on account of their snacking and lounging.

For example, the women had not gotten round to plastering the church for two or three years. Remember this church was of historical and spiritual importance for the people. This was the church that was associated with the founding priest and his miracles. His image was prominently displayed there. The roses still bloomed fresh there every day.

And, still, priests refused to serve there. So no one was really in charge of care taking it or taking notice of it though the women were by tradition and habit supposed to at least clean and plaster it.  Most people who entered had heads bowed and eyes closed in prayer. So nothing was seen. And now, the women neglected it. They just never got around to even thinking about it, though they did manage to break off their slovenly habits in order to get to mass and serve tea to whatever visiting priest was officiating.

But the plastering, alas, was not accomplished. It should have been done each year. It should have been done by the women. That is how it always had been. What’s more, the men were so preoccupied with amulets and glass eating and trying to care for their own needs given that the women were seldom available to them except in the daylight hours, that it certainly wouldn’t have occurred to them to plaster a roof. Certainly it did not occur to them at mealtime. They had come to associate meals with the one time of day that they might be with their wives or lovers. An embrace before a quick tortilla and beans, a snuggle before a sopapilla, or a violent roll about under a soft   Rio Grande blanket made of the wool of the churro before a chili relleno was all that could be hoped for.

“Hernando, dinner is on,” a woman would call. Hernando, having been nearly unable to contain himself during the previous hour, sprang from his bench as if jerked upward on a string by a giant puppet master. He dashed from his bench on the plaza to his house. “Gabriela, my darling, I love you.” Gabriela, now used to this dinnertime routine, allowed herself to be grabbed and danced into the bedroom. The couple made certain that the door behind them was locked for the sake of the children. There amidst the fluffy, ruffled bed coverings the pair tumbled and rubbed bellies and delighted one another. In a little while, they straightened themselves, pulled hair back into respectable places, opened the bedroom door, and walked out with as much dignity as they could muster. They sat themselves at the table and began to eat their now cold dinners. Curious children and grandmothers hardly looked up when the shyly grinning couple joined them. This was the way of the villagers.

The call to dinner and the smell and look of hot beans became so associated with sex for the men that most had erections throughout their life whenever they saw sacks of dry beans in the local general store or green beans ripening in their gardens. Even later generations of males had trouble when they passed the little sacks of beans in plastic bags at the Furr’s super market in Purgatoria. In fact, sons and grandsons learned from their fathers that beans and sex went hand in hand and they grew up associating legumes with desire. And none of the men ever, ever, after about nineteen hundred, could stomach a hot bean. Cold beans, yes. But something other than eating always had to happen for them, even if by their own hands, when the beans were fresh and hot.

Thus men did not notice that the women were neglecting their duty to the church

So during the fourth year of the women’s complete disregard of responsibility to the church, it rained so hard and the roof was so undone that a great sheet of water ran down over the altarpiece.
The Altar

The church was one of the buildings in the square of buildings that surrounded the plaza. The houses about the plaza and were adjoined one another to make long rows and form this square. There were just a few openings in the square, purposely left here and there for footpaths to the fields and orchards. Around the outside of the square of houses, set back about one hundred yards so that each house had room for a corral and kitchen garden, was an adobe wall. Irrigation ditches surrounded the village and one was dug through the wall, and between the openings to the plaza so as to water the trees and gardens planted within. There was a single lane wide enough for the passage of carts and buggies and wagons. The lane led through the largest notch between houses and ended at the edge of the plaza proper. Much later this lane was widened for the use of automobiles and motorcycles and trucks.

All the houses faced into the plaza and had a view of the founding twin’s grave and the site of the Little priest’s trance, thus the village history was easily kept alive. The original jumble of grave goods had long since disintegrated into a great mound of organic matter. Apple trees had been planted just next to the grave and they did well for many years, producing large quantities of fruit and providing shade for those who sat there most of the day. Juanita’s and Sophia’s original houses faced the plaza and the apple trees.

On the side of the plaza directly opposite from where Juanita raised Consuelo in the walnut sprouting cradle and from where Hermes sat and Ramona lived with Epiphany, was the ancient church. And though it was a humble structure, its altar was grand.

It had four great wooden pillars or posts. They were gently tapered upwards, smooth as a baby’s bottom and cleverly painted and marbled with sullen pinks, quiet reds, and compelling greens by craftsmen whose fathers had seen the grand alabaster and granite and serpentine pillars that held up the domes of the grand cathedrals of Europe or the Haggia Sophia in Istanbul. These much smaller pillars in this humble church had been made to resemble, from a distance, those of the finest churches. They rose the full height of the altar screen and were capped with great finials that resembled peaks of soft ice cream sundaes.

Framed between the pair of left posts was a painted image, touched with gold leaf purchased at great expense by the villagers, of a winged saint bearing a crown of stars. He held a serpent in one hand and wore a cloak covered with great wet tears of heaven. The borders of his cloak were made of mirrors that caught light and reflected strange crooked, unintelligible images back to worshippers. In front of the saint, guarding a path that sloped up toward him, were two mangy orange dogs with large, bared fangs. The allusion to the esoteric and specifically to the mystic Tarot  escaped all but one or two itinerant Roma who stopped in the village once or twice to repair copper pots and sharpen knives.

Between the right two posts was a painting of a winged messenger holding a large sunny orb in one hand and a bloody clock in the other. The hands of the clock were set at midnight. The messenger’s wings were made of overlapping bits of broken glass. Behind the messenger were two burning towers. Look closely, above the image of the towers, and you would see the lion of Mark, the eagle of John, the calf of Luke. These images all proclaimed to the worshippers the mysteries therein to be revealed with proper prayer and attitude. Again, only the Roma really understood the significance of any of this.

In the center of the pairs of posts was a gilded portrait of Christ himself. In his right hand, he held a scepter made of roses and wore a gilded crown as tall as his own Middle Eastern face was long. In his left arm he embraced a tiny version of himself, a simulacrum Christ in every detail. On almost every other available surface of the screen were painted roses. Where they were not, there were saints.

Oh, yes, there was a crucifix painted here and there, but these seemed beside the point. There were so many other miracles recorded on the screen and present in the church that a reminder of a mere resurrection seemed inconsequential or a grand theological afterthought.

On the ceiling just above the altar and the screen was a great painted rainbow flanked by a quarter moon and a bright orange sun. Both orbs bore benign faces. There were brightly painted stars, streaks of lightening on both margins, and wonderful, floating clouds in the dark, bright sky.

Each image on the altar screen and on the ceiling above could be read as surely as one could, if schooled, read a Tarot deck. Here was a representation  of one’s journey through life.

But though these images were barely understood, worshippers  scanned the screen looking for signs as they knelt before the altar to receive communion. They watched to see where the light hit the screen, if on a crown or near a streak of lightening. The altar, in this way, spoke to the people of the village. It told stories and entertained children. It insisted on being noticed and commented upon. In its magnificence it overwhelmed even the magic roses that appeared each day. For most religions, the presence of these flowers would have been miracle enough. But not here in this village.

Before the altar screen was a plain unpainted wooden plank that stood on four sturdy oak legs. On top of that were two hammered and punched tin candlesticks with candles and a bowl of fruit

One fine day, Consuelo, around sixteen years of age, went across the plaza, singing to herself and stepping lightly with a little skip. It was a lovely, sunny day, welcome after a week of rain. The hills were turning green with the fresh moisture and little budlets of promised flowers appeared here and there about the plaza.

As she entered the church, she dipped her fingers in the holy water by the door and anointed her forehead. She curtsied to her Lord and crossed herself. Then she strode down the aisle and placed herself just in front of the altar, crossed herself again, and got onto her knees. Why, you might ask, did Consuelo pray? Her life was so perfect, why would she feel a need for prayer? She prayed for the old lady who had brought her to the village. “Holy Mother,” she began, “Thank you for the life I have by the grace of your holiness and the abundant gifts of God the Father.” She prayed for all the women who feared. “Holy Mother, be with us always in the dark fears of the night. Be with those who do not know thy salvation.” She prayed for the doñas in the canyons. She twisted her beads in her hands and prayed for little Hermes and Epiphany. She prayed with an innocent belief that all would benefit by her prayers and that the world would be a better place on her account. She prayed to be a force for good.

The flat roof of the church had been made with a gradual slope and there were gutters of a sort in each corner of the roof to help guide rain to the ground below. But the joints were weak now and where the leak had first begun, a great crack had opened just over the altarpiece. As Consuelo prayed on this particular day, a sheet of water came from the place where the adobe had weakened all along where the back wall met the back roof. This was not so much a sheet of water that came down but something more aptly described as a waterfall. When the water came rushing down the wall and onto the altar, the altar and all of the many mirrors and glass bits and images came crashing forward. And there, just at the moment, in front of that great golden altar with all its fanciful, magnificent posts and hand carved railings and gold leaf covered santos, there, just at that moment Consuelo, now a young woman full of joy and hope, was praying on her knees.

It is important to realize that nothing in this village was ever believed to happen by chance. There is no such thing as a mere accident. In retrospect, in fact, the neglect that the church had suffered was seen as entrancement by some villagers, more evidence that they were cursed and the target of some bewitchment. The neglect was certainly seen as a “cause” of the great rift that enabled the cascade that made the altar tip forward.

However, not only was the neglect of the church believed to be brought about through entrancement, but that Consuelo was in front of that altar in that little church in the plaza at the moment when the rain poured in and the altar fell was not, they believed, a mere coincidence.

Consuelo was, of course, crushed under the weight of the great altar. No one knew if she would live.

These are just about the best people in the world. I love them dearly. You’ll have to poke around this blog (starting with the masthead) to find the chapters that lead up to these.

Little Hermes

Don’t imagine that this baby in the ever-growing cradle with the Great Pyrenees always near her was the only baby that had been admired in the village in the recent past. There was a boy named Hermes, about thirteen years old at the time of Consuelo’s arrival, who had been of at least equal interest to the people. He was the son of Sophia and lived just a few doors from Juanita and Consuelo.

Hermes had been a serious boy baby. He rarely cried and almost never demanded anything. He seemed always busy with some problem of his own design. He had never had, however, the same spark in his eyes as Consuelo who was living and laughing with Juanita. He attracted people for quite different reasons.

Hermes had a round face and a sharp little nose. Hermes looked much like a poet or maybe a seer or prophet. Yes, he had the far away gaze and seldom blinking eye look of a prophet. “Have you seen Hermes today,” people would say. “He has that look. I’m sure he will have something to say to us soon,” the villagers told each other. And they managed everyday to pass by Sophia’s house on the pretense of some chore or another in order to look at Hermes.

He sometimes played with his toes, even in adolescence, although it seemed more as if he were calculating than strictly playing. He sometimes sucked on licorice offered him or chewed on a crust of bread. Other than that, his appetite for the purely material was modest. He laughed occasionally, but his laugh seemed more ironic than sincerely joyful. He did not, for example, guffaw. His laugh came from a sideways semi-smile.

While he was still quite a young person, he sat in a little painted chair outside his mother’s door among the sweet peas and the hollyhocks. He was always dressed in his christening gown. So as people came round to see him sitting there, the white light of his costume greeted them and he seemed to glow there in his painted chair like a little saint. They sometimes chucked him under his chin and cooed at him and smoothed his thin little hair, all for good luck rather than with much affection. “Good day, Hermes. Make my goiter go away and I’ll bring you a candy,” one said. “Oh, good Hermes,” said an old woman as she stroked his bare right foot, “Please give me some teeth so I can chew my beef steak.” His right foot became smooth and shiny from all the touching and kissing that people did, for they especially thought that touching the foot brought luck. And, yes, the foot stroking brought on those ironic little Hermes laughs.

He was also hung with various religious medallions offered in the hope that he would intercede for them with the God they believed in but believed they had no access to. “Here is an unworthy present,” someone said and hung a tin medal in the shape of an arm around his neck. “Please have a word with Jesus for me and make my arms grow big and strong so I can beat Phillip at arm wrestling,” another pleaded. Hermes’ little chair grew weary with gifts for it was also hung, by villagers, with medallions and with rosaries of various kinds.

People often and sat or kneeled before him. They waited, pointlessly it turned out, for some word, because he was the kind of child that it forever seemed as if some word might be forthcoming. The people were seldom satisfied for Hermes seldom spoke.

Hermes had an ordinary crib and no dogs about, but Hermes was an extraordinary baby and everyone knew and remembered this about him.

The Painted Chair

Have you ever seen a child’s painted chair?  A painted chair has a tiny ladder back and the back slats and the legs are painted with bright reds and yellows and blues. The seat is woven tightly with raffia and palm fibers. The whole chair does not stand more than eight or ten inches from seat to ground so that a little body with short legs can easily sit in it and have feet touching the earth. This is the seat upon which Hermes sat amidst the mauve and yellow hollyhocks. The wonderful thing about Hermes and his chair is that Hermes could sit in this chair well into adulthood because Hermes, you see, never did grow much.

He did become less baby looking. His nose became sharper and some of the roundness of his cheeks fell away so that a jaw line was discernible. As he aged, he did not always wear his christening dress, although sometimes he did. Now that he was thirteen, however, and nearly an adult, his mother had made him a little suit with a collarless jacket and short boxy pants. The entire of the suit was dyed a wonderful dark brown with a dye made from the walnuts of the tree growing out of Juanita’s baby’s cradle.

Hermes preferred to go without shoes because people never stopped rubbing his foot for luck and he never did stop calculating with and on his toes. He counted many things and did household budgets and figured who owed what to whom. Now the people did not come to him only to see if he would bless them or intercede for them. They came with business problems. “Hermes, I’ve sold a pig for twenty dollars but I wonder if I’ve made anything on it. Here are bills I had to pay for feed over the year. It seemed it must have cost me quite a lot to grow that pig.” “Hermes, I need an operation. How many years will it take me to pay the doctor, assuming that I can ever work again?” They carried lists of debts and hopes for income and asked him to help them develop household budgets. They came to him before buying a mule or selling corn. They came to him when they had to build a new house. He listened to their ideas and determined the cubic feet of the new structure and therefore could tell, within a  brick or two, exactly how many adobe blocks would need to be made and dried and how many hours the work to make them would consume. He could figure areas of fields so that wills could be written and land distributed precisely and fairly to beneficiaries. All of this difficult mathematical work he did when asked and with and on his toes and in his head. He loved this work. “All is number,” was about the most profound thing he was ever heard to actually say by way of prophecy.

When he was not calculating, or being prayed to or asked for advice, he simply sat thinking, feeling the warm earth under his toes and between his toes, smelling the calendulas and watching the hollyhocks grow taller and taller while he remained about the same height. He thought and wondered at the gifts he clearly had. The gifts were more important, he knew even  as a small boy, than his size or any other limitation he may have. He was, he knew, simply on earth to do well what he could do well. This he was determined to do.

He had a nice pair of white silk knee socks and some lovely black patent leather buckle strap shoes; these were so glossy he could see his own face in them. Yes, he could wear shoes and did upon occasion. Sometimes, on special days, he put these socks and shoes upon his feet. Then he carefully dressed in his walnut suit, and sat in his little painted chair. On days such as these, he looked quite fine and serious. He was accorded great respect by friends and neighbors for he had saved many villagers from penury. Yes, they knew Hermes’s worth. He received thanks without blinking.

As he became older, his hair was cut below the ears and was thicker than his thin wispy baby hair had been. It was brownish red or chestnut and not unlike the color of his walnut suit.

Hermes’s full grown though still quite small adulthood was achieved long after, or a few years after, anyway, Consuelo, the child of Juanita was no longer really a baby but was already a girl who preferred garments that showed off her small waist. She especially liked a short red velvet jacket her mother had ordered from HK. She wore this jacket with lace leather boots that sported quite long tongues. In this outfit, including the dark brown velvet britches she wore with the jacket and boots, she looked a little like a military hero. It was true that she did seem to fancy epaulets and medals she found in pawn shops, left there by military heroes of unknown wars. She sewed the epaulets upon the shoulders of her jacket and hung the heavy medals around her neck. So, in the abundance of medals about their persons, she and Hermes had something in common.

She was altogether much taller and bigger than was Hermes by the time she was ten and he was twenty-three. By the time she was sixteen, she was a handsome woman, full and strong and ready any minute for a fight with words or pen because you see she talked and wrote incessantly. She loved to speak. She loved to read. She loved to write letters. These she wrote with a fearless coral colored fountain pen. She favored onionskin paper.

Hermes, meanwhile, sat. Hermes looked around, and up and down, and seldom blinked.

Epiphany

Hermes had a niece named Epiphany. I came to know her very well when she was an older, grown up woman of about fifty and as big around as Kate Smith but on a bigger frame, maybe about five foot seven. She had lots of bright red hair cascading down her back when I knew her. It was just beginning to grey but that made her look even more exotic than she had in youth people told me. That hair of hers was so extravagant even at fifty that it reached nearly to her waist. Some days she wound it all around a giant sausage shaped form that she called a rat. It was a thing that she’d made of her own hair, saved from the many brushings she gave it. Some days she just let it tumble around her as she swept and baked and walked about the plaza delivering Sophia’s medicines and gifts to neighbors and friends.

I was renting a room from her and her mother Ramona and her grandmother Sophia. In fact, Epiphany and Ramona as well as Sophia told me many of the stories of the village and its history. They were, what we anthropologists call, “primary informants.” It was because of these stories that I came to hear about Epiphany’s early years.

When Epiphany was born she fit into the palm of her mother’s right hand. I say right hand because her mother, Ramona, had a left hand substantially bigger than her right. It was something you noticed about her right away. Everyone knew that it would make a difference in imagining the size of the infant Epiphany if you said right hand rather than left hand in describing her. So everyone said that the newborn had fit into the palm of her mother’s right hand.

Epiphany was only twelve years younger than Ramona’s brother, Hermes, her uncle. Of course, Ramona herself was only about fifteen when Epiphany was born. She had been pregnant without benefit of marriage. Babies were so scarce, as I have mentioned, that people cared little about husbands and celebrated Ramona’s condition. In truth, everyone in the village watched her like a hawk lest some ill befall her during the pregnancy. Though they knew Sophia would tend her well, they sent baskets of freshly baked bread, pies, and steaming bean pots to the house just to be on the safe side.

And then out popped this minuscule baby. Everyone said of Ramona that, “She did not eat enough.” “The baby is small because the mother starved herself while carrying the poor thing.” However, Ramona’s appetite when I observed her was substantial. She was significantly larger than Epiphany when I first came to live with them and apparently had always been a “big girl.” I would guess she weighed well over two hundred pounds and was a muscular five feet nine or ten. And besides, Sophia, her mother and Epiphany’s grandmother, was always one to urge food upon a person, pregnant or not. I presumed she had always done this with her “kids” as she called everyone in the village more than ten years younger than herself.

Though in her mid-eighties when I first knew her, Sophia was constantly cooking and pressing food on me and everyone else who entered the house. No one could leave without eating for she said it would “bring shame” to her if we didn’t oblige. “It is my honor, my gift to you,” she’d say. “I may as well die if I can’t feed you,” she’d say and cast her eyes to the floor. So, of course we’d pretend hunger for her sake. “Oh, yes, please. I could eat a horse.” She’d fill a plate, the visitor would force the food down, and then, faster than one could protest, second helpings were served. “Come now, you’re too thin. You must have some bulk to prepare you for times of stress and disease,” she advised. This she did know something about to be sure.

When I was doing my field work, I always ate meals with the Sophia and Epiphany and Ramona. Hermes came for nearly every meal as well, unless he was busy working with Consuelo. If that were the case, he took his meals with her.

I always ate far more than I needed. And in addition, I was forced to consume several plates of this or that if left alone with Sophia during the day. My interviews with her on tape are constantly interrupted. “How about some nice pumpkin cookies? We’ve been talking far too long,” a scratchy voice calls out to me across the years. Or, “Just let me finish icing these shortbreads and we’ll have some tea and a little snack.” I remember, listening to  the recordings all these years later,  how helpless I was to refuse. I gained fifteen pounds that first summer.

Sophia, though in her eighties, was still a strong woman in the late nineteen forties, but a short one. She was maybe only five one or two. She told me that she had been considerably taller in her youth. “Ah, you should have seen me in my twenties. I was a tall, beautiful girl. Serious, though. Always serious,” she said. She was not only short when I met her, but slightly stooped. She walked with a pronounced rock in her slow gait, as if she had injured her right hip or had a stiff joint there. Nevertheless, she still carried firewood and worked with medicinal herbs and was present for most village births as an advisor. But times had changed. The people in the village who had become Methodists wouldn’t call upon her. “Ignorance,” she said. “Nothing for it.” And one of the Baptist ministers in Purgatoria who had attracted some of the village people to his congregation, had fumed against the use of “witchcraft” in the treatment of illness, saying from the pulpit that old women who used plants and unguents of various kinds should be avoided. “They are of the devil, these old curanderas. Shake the dust from your feet. Fear for your soul,” he ranted.

In the years after I was in the village, Sophia cooked in her own wing of the house. It was the biggest room in the house by far.  She had her own stove, much smaller than the old one in her original home on the plaza, and kept most of her plants and books in that room along with a small iron frame bed and all of the family photographs. She stayed there in her private area most of the day. Except, of course, at meal times or when she was cooking for the family. Then she was in the large front room which also served as the main kitchen and dining room.

Sophia, if she hadn’t cooked the meal, nevertheless directed its serving and consumption and provided running critique. “More beans on that plate,” she’d screech at whomever was serving. “The tortillas are undercooked and pasty,” she’d say between the remaining teeth in her mouth as she fingered the warm flat breads. Bits of boiled corn and dribbles of bean juice escaped between those same few teeth when she talked. Her chin was forever shining with the grease of the food while we dined. “Eat, eat, Epiphany,” she’d grumble while pinching the middle-aged woman’s upper arm, “You’ll never grow at this rate.” “Ramona, you are starving yourself. For what! Not a man, surely.” and she herself would pick up a large wooden ladle and scoop another tremendous helping of corn chowder into her daughter’s bowl.” Thus both women, the daughter and granddaughter of Sophia, ate and had always, apparently, eaten, like ranch hands or boxers after a ten mile run or loggers after a morning of felling cedars.

So food or lack thereof while still in the womb did not explain Epiphany’s size when she was born.

It would rather seem that this was simply a smallish family tending genetically toward smallness and sharp noses and such. These traits were certainly present in Hermes as well Epiphany.

Ramona, however, was, as I said, “a big girl” and woman and had been all her life. At the time of Epiphany’s birth, the women of the household told me, she had breasts big enough to accommodate the baby Epiphany to sleep down in between them while she worked hoeing chilies and beans and peppers. Granted a baby the size of the palm of a hand did not require much in the way of accommodation.

Ramona, when Epiphany was young, worked in the fields of a large nearby commercial farm in order to support the family: Sophia, Hermes, Epiphany and herself. Sophia always prepared Ramona and Epiphany for the day of hard labor.

The baby was wrapped in an oversized, fresh handkerchief and given a large, sloppy, helping of wheat gruel laced with molasses then tucked into Ramona’s bosom each morning before she left the house. Sophia packed a large lunch for Ramona, usually something that contained meat, a bowl of beans and one of corn pudding, a jar of tea, and a slice or two of buttered bread. These she placed in a wicker basket along with a piece of fruit and a small covered dish of extra gruel often mixed with ground nut paste, bee pollen and honey, for the baby.

Accommodating Epiphany was so effortless that it was easy for Ramona and everyone else to forget that there was a baby there at all. That people forgot about Epiphany was aided by the fact that while Ramona was pregnant, her tummy was quite small or, in truth, hard to see. She never really looked pregnant. So that while everyone knew intellectually about the pregnancy and brought food and other gifts for the mother to be, they forgot all about it when she was just walking about or playing or working outside.

Of course they all knew when the baby was born, though it took very little time, an hour of labor at the most, and caused Ramona almost no discomfort. She was out in the field working again within a few hours of the delivery. Even so, the villagers celebrated wildly that same night with fireworks and songs and a big dance in the plaza. Then they all sort of forgot the birth as well. There simply were no memorable tales of suffering to be told and it was these that always captured the imagination of the villagers.

Indeed, the baby was so small, the pregnancy so comfortable, and the birth so easy that many people who worked the fields with Ramona were quite surprised when she pulled the baby out occasionally to nurse her or at lunch time to feed her some solid food. Each time the baby came up from the bosom, whomever was about and witnessing was once against astonished. “Good God,” someone would cry out. “What is that?” And then, embarrassed, he or she would see it was a baby and remember. Indeed, almost nobody remembered from day to day that the baby was there all the while between Ramona’s breasts sleeping and humming to herself while Ramona hoed. Even Ramona was sometimes surprised to find her when she occasionally plunged into her own cleavage to find a kerchief with which to mop her sweaty brow. Yet there was Epiphany and up she came with the kerchief, smiling and tiny, pale and shining, like a pearl popping out of an oyster.

The baby in this way became accustomed to being a surprise and to being something of great value, for when people actually recognized her for what she was, they rushed to Ramona’s side to pet and praise the infant. “Oh, you sweet thing. How much you’ve grown since yesterday,” a woman would say. “Oh, you darling dumpling. Are you not simply smothered by your mother’s sweat and heaves?” The men took off their straw hats, all stained around the crown and band from years of service in the hot fields, pushed their hair back from their brows with their rough, calloused hands, and shyly touched her tiny feet and held her small hands. Their dark, furrowed faces beamed and their work worn, sad eyes filled with tears. The women wiped the sweat from their sunburned faces and leaned into her to kiss her tiny nose. They crossed themselves and prayed for her health, that she would be fecund, and that she would be delivered from the hard lives all women seemed destined to have. They led Ramona and the baby to the bank of the irrigation ditch and bid them stay near them at lunchtime as they munched and lounged beneath the nearest cottonwood tree.

The baby came to love the attention. The baby in this way also became accustomed to the movement and rhythm of her mother’s body and the rhythm of her work and the sound of her efforts in the fields. She also became accustomed to heat and sweat and did not mind these. In fact, she came to think of heat and sweat as necessary elements of love and safety.

At night when it was time to sleep all in a heap (as many of the women continued to do even when Juanita ceased doing so and everything seemed as if it might be all right), Ramona found a quiet place for Epiphany in a drawer lined with a goose down quilt and fitted with a soft white duck feather pillow in the corner of the room. The drawer was at the base of a wonderful and ancient birthing bed carved and painted blue, with four posted corners and a heavy painted roof. The sides and ends were tiled with large panels and the walls on the two sides where the bed fit against the wall were painted with images of pear and plum trees bearing large ripe fruits. The occasion for its intended use had never come, for it was a bed that had belonged to the twin who, of course, died without issue.

The women piled themselves on mattresses and pillows with their sunflower seeds and novels and propped their heads up and crooked their knees and read and snacked together. All the while Epiphany dawdled in her drawer and played with her toes, though not with the perspicacity of Hermes, and sucked her little fingers. Epiphany came in this way to enjoy a drawer and to love the sound of pages turning and the scent of lilac and of lotions. She came to love the crackle of a brush in hair. She came to love the sounds and smells the women made together. Unlike Consuelo who could not wait to be in her own home through the night, Epiphany secretly hoped that these wonderful communal nights would never end.

While Epiphany was young, Sophia, of course continued to contribute to the household though Ramona was the main wage earner. Sophia liked to make a pie sometimes. She liked to walk the plaza and engage the languid dogs and listless cats together in some games. She related and interpreted dreams and cared for sick and aging people in the village and brought soup to them. She was mightily loved for all her caring. This she did until the day she died. It was very well for this small family to have money from Ramona’s labors, but it was the grace and beauty from Sophia’s way of being in the world that made their lives special. All together this was good life.

Their household, the original one, on the plaza, not the one in which they lived when I first knew them, was just a few doors away from Juanita’s home. Sophia still talked about this house in great detail in the late nineteen forties and helped me make written plans and drawings of its interior so that I could understand what a typical plaza household was like before all the “modern” changes had been made. She had some photographs of the interior, taken on special holiday occasions. And the house was still occupied by Hermes. So I was taken there many times and Sophia sometimes made me sit for a cup of tea there while she described the house as it had been when she was a young woman. It really hadn’t changed much.

The plaster on the adobe outside and in was still white and smooth, maintained lovingly by Hermes. The table and the shelves and all the chairs were made of cleanest mountain pine and brightly polished. The vigas were black with age and in the corner was a small fireplace, dome shaped like the orno, the beehive oven outside in which Sophia used to bake her bread. Their fireplace, too, was plastered white.

Around the walls were hung images of Sophia’s ancestors, solemn looking women dressed in black lace and dreary looking mustachioed men in floppy bow ties, and somber jackets. Some of the photographs were hand tinted so that the people in them had cheeks and lips that glowed an odd pink that made them look like the painted dead in coffins. Their skin in the pictures matched the color of dried tangerines. The frames were all ornate, deeply sculpted and gold leafed, though chipped or tarnished in places.

Here and there in the walls were niches, deeply cut and painted at their borders with a deep Marian blue. They held within them a variety of representations of the Virgin herself, each more pale and mournful looking than the last, each draped with painted plaster and bereft in appearance. Bereft and sorrowful, perhaps, because the joy of her life was absent from her in all of these statues. Beyond her various sight lines he hung on a carved cedar crucifix. But she would have grimaced had she seen him and she was spared, at least, this. He was, in the foot-high sculpture, extravagantly skeletonized and fixed to his cross at a grotesque angle. His face was contorted in agony. Nothing about this image could give comfort to anyone. The image of the son adorned a wooden door that led to a bedroom, now Hermes’, and over the door was a dusty, dried piece of palm from some distant past Palm Sunday. Hermes wasn’t sure, but thought it might have been something Sophia put there the year he took his first communion.

In one corner of that bedroom, seldom used, was an iron bedstead covered with a luxurious quilt made of the shreds and tatters of Sophia’s grandmothers’ and great grandmothers’ dresses. Sophia had given the quilt to Hermes when she went to live in the new house. She brought it out into the light one day to show it to me. The stitches that made the fabric one were tiny and even. The seams were tough and flawless.

A large wooden candelabra hung over the big kitchen table. It hung from a dark iron chain and had fixed on it four large beeswax candles. These candles, when lit, made a honey colored flickering light and fine moving shadows on the walls and on the floor and under chairs.

I was there many evenings talking with Hermes. He still preferred the candlelight of his childhood. When he lit the candles on the candelabra, standing tiptoe on a kitchen chair, their soft glow gave the room the feeling of an ancient catacomb and the sensibility of a wondrous living thing. I could imagine the place when it was inhabited by Sophia, Ramona, and the young Epiphany. I could imagine them moving around on the clean earthen floors, their bodies casting long dark shapes. The place must have seemed to have been inhabited by a covey of wizened nuns.

There was little in the place to detract from the impression I had of going back in time. Hermes had hung a few more recent framed photographs and some snap shots of Epiphany at different stages of her life were tucked into some of the old frames. Other than those pictures, what I saw was probably pretty much how things had looked since the early nineteen hundreds

The cradle is quite magic. In these two chapters we learn how the cradle was constructed and what it is able to do.

The Cradle is Planned

The baby could probably have played with the intriguing Elsie for the rest of the day but Juanita decided it was time to get on with the reason for her visit. Juanita placed the baby’s wrapper on the picnic blanket and Elsie was instructed to put Consuelo on the wrapper.

Juanita bound the babe who found the swaddling to her liking. She immediately became the docile sweet child she would ever be.

Elsie meanwhile organized her things around herself again, and made some notes. She rolled another cigarette. HK laughed out loud and wove another line or two of yellow. All the sheep moved slowly toward the north and then sauntered around and nearer the house. They took turns gazing with their large, mild, sheep eyes in the direction of the child, pulling grass with their big, blunt teeth, and murmuring things among themselves. The dog who watched the sheep, momentarily startled by the chaos on the picnic blanket, had now relaxed and was watching the sheep again while she whistled through her nose at gnats. She snapped at bees and butterflies that came too near. She trusted that order had been restored and all was back in balance.

Juanita told HK that the babe needed a cradle and the conversation began.  HK knew immediately which wood would be best. Very quickly, HK’s mind went to work. HK designed a wonderful one made of scrub oak and black walnut. He saw it clearly. He always saw a finished thing in his head before he commenced a project. When he planned blankets, every stitch was there inside his head. He only had to follow his own complete and careful plan. This day, he saw the carved rockers. He knew their shape and size. He knew the angles of each cut he must make. He saw the curves he’d plane. He saw the grain of the wood and how it would enhance the look of the cradle. He saw how delicate the finials must be to frame the cradle and how Consuelo would be there embraced by the whole.  He saw himself carving and fitting and pegging and gluing. He saw each joint fitting tightly. He saw the wood sanded to a perfect sheen. He knew Consuelo would not suffer one splinter in her delicate skin. He saw himself finishing the wood of the cradle with goose grease. This grease he knew would cause the cradle to move silently back and forth on its rockers and give Consuelo dreams of flight. He saw that the rockers would be removable and that the cradle could become a bed and grow as Consuelo grew. He saw the bed resting sturdily as if on mountain lion legs. He saw the bed standing on strong feet with a firm backboard.

He saw all this then stood up and walked toward the ramada. “All right. Let’s go,” he said. “I know what I need.” He found a large basket hanging from the shelter’s roof by a leather thong. He strapped it over one shoulder. He picked up a belt that lay near one of the saddles on the corral fence. He cinched it around his waist. It had a knife holster threaded onto it and in the holster was a bone-handled knife. “Come along, then,” he called to the others. “Quietly.” Juanita carried Consuelo who was sucking a perfect peach that Juanita pressed gently to her lips. Elsie followed. The heat of the sun was good upon their shoulders and their heads. They walked a mile, perhaps two, toward a stream and a grove of dense chaparral forest populated by oak and walnut.

The dogs stayed behind sleeping in the cool ramada. Tumbleweeds rolled all around them, propelled by the gentle afternoon breeze. They did not notice.

HK cut bits from the pygmy walnut and oak. He cut just a limb here and there from this tree or that. He never cut enough to kill or harm the tree. He tied the wood into a bundle, and then placed it deep into his basket. What wouldn’t fit into the basket, he strapped over his back. It was nothing to him for his shoulders were broad and his back was exceptionally strong. He was a big person, a big man, though his manners and gestures were gentle like a woman’s.

HK characteristically moved without speaking and without wasting motion. He was in character on this day. His gestures were perfect to the task. At the base of each tree from which he cut a limb, he placed a hand rolled cigarette. Elsie watched him closely and wrote in her notebook.

They walked for several hours together, HK studying the trees, the others watching him. Eventually the dogs, fresh from sleep, found them and walked silently with them all. They moved along the dry stream beds and watched cloud shadows on the earth. They saw the rain high in the mountains to the east and to the west. It was late in the afternoon now and this was the time of year when the rain comes in the mountains and the sheep look up longing for a journey there to where the grass is green. The watchers slept for once. They were happy with HK and did not interfere ever with his work.

The Cradle is Installed

Weeks later, a small boy ran to Juanita’s house with a message. “The cradle had been completed,” he panted. “You can come now with me. You will see.” Juanita stopped shelling peas and saddled up Paulette. Consuelo, of course, was secured against her breast by a scarf woven of brilliant scarlets and magentas. They rode off again to see HK. The dogs were told to stay behind this time. They pouted but obeyed.

HK was standing outside his door with a broad smile. The cradle was exquisite. “It is very special,” he said as he strapped the cradle to Paulette’s lavish hind end. “It is something that will last the baby all of her life.” Juanita pulled a worn leather wallet from deep within Paulette’s saddle bag. “No money, sister,” he said. “We are family. May the family grow and blossom. May the cradle sustain and nourish this wonderful child.” He bent to the baby and kissed her chubby, cheeks now tawny from the summer sun and her adventures in flower gardens and on the occasional horseback sojourns into the desert.

Juanita wondered at HK’s choice of words. A cradle, she reckoned, might give peaceful sleep. But how would it nourish?

There was great excitement when Juanita and the baby and Paulette and the dogs returned to the village. Everyone knew where they had been and why. As Paulette high stepped into the plaza, crowds of their women neighbors dressed in fine, white cotton dresses embroidered with red and indigo thread and with purple and yellow ribbons streaming from their hair, cheered for horse, cradle, baby and their happy friend, Juanita. The Pyrenees leaped from the place where they had been sleeping and streaked, like pale, furred, whirlwinds, in great circles around the perimeter of the village. The men who sat on the plaza took off their dark hats, scratched their necks and rubbed their scalps, buttoned their vests, tucked in their shirttails and stood saluting the arrival. Someone brought out a guitar and began to play a quick little tune so that everyone could dance around the grave of the village founder. Sophia and her children, Ramona and her baby, and Hermes, brought a bouquet of flowers and presented it with great flourish to mother and child. Someone brought out a plate of sliced apples; another produced a basket of warm tamales.

Everyone knew what a superb craftsman HK was. Still, this cradle, they thought, far surpassed his earlier work. First, people remarked on how the dark wood was all finely grained and polished until each surface was as reflective as a mirror. Then they examined the structure of the cradle itself. It was only about four feet in length, but it had tall posts on each corner and was pegged and notched and fitted with clips and joints so that the posts could be fitted under the cradle in place of the lengthwise rockers when the child grew and thus extend the whole into a stable bed. The finials were removable so they could be fitted to the rockers that would become the posts when the child was older. They were carved with delicate images of deer and bear and wolf and eagle. The carving was so fine that each hoof and talon was completely realistic and even the pupil of each eye and the lashes that shaded them could be seen. The posts themselves were carved in bas-relief with images of stars and moons and howling coyotes and frantic summer geese in flight.

After allowing villagers to examine and celebrate the cradle, Juanita placed it in her house. And she placed Consuelo in the cradle. She knew that the cradle could be made to grow as the baby grew, and that was well and good. But something strange happened. The cradle grew in other ways.

Juanita noticed something odd within a week of the time that the cradle was installed in her house. She was leaning over to kiss the baby’s cheek and caress one of the baby’s hands. “Good morning, little heartbeat,” she said. “Good morning sweet pea blossom,” she said.” She kissed each finger on each hand. “Good morning tiny lunch grabbers,” she cooed. The fingers of the baby intrigued her more than any other part. She held one little hand in hers and traced each fine line in the palm with her fingertip. As she leaned a little higher to kiss the baby’s head, something tickled her forehead. It was a fresh, succulent tickle. “Ooohhhh,” she half laughed. “What can that be touching me so sweetly?” She rolled her eyes up as her lips touched Consuelo’s soft hair. She saw something dark dangling just above her forehead, though she was too close to whatever it was to focus properly. She backed off a bit. It was a tendril of a plant, something living and leafing. She stood up then and looked from another angle. “Oh my love, something is growing here!” “Yes, yes, this is some kind of sprout or vine,” she thought. It was about five inches long. She followed the stem of it with her fingers and found that it had come right out of a carved post to the left of the baby’s head. It was a lovely little vine, but what was it doing here, she wondered. This sprout, as it turned out, was an oracular sprout and its vegetable self announced a deep green promise of things to come.

What happened, and it was, of course, considered miraculous, was that the lovely smooth walnut wood that made up the head and footboard of the cradle began to turn green with stubbles of growth. Day by day the cradle produced a flurry of healthy shoots. They started as small things and grew slowly. Juanita tied them to the cradle posts so that they would not grow over the baby. After they were supported in this way, the sprouts grew tall. They covered the top edges of the foot and headboard then grew all up and along the posts. They grew and grew, beautiful, luscious, lean sprouts. Sprouts with just the hint of juicy leaf buds. Sprouts that seemed to seduce each other and engage in complex dances. Sprouts that did not care if they seemed frivolous or altogether unnecessary.

Juanita took to watering the head and footboard and all around each post every morning when she sprinkled and swept the packed earth floors and fed the baby. She found the baby and the cradle and these mysterious plants so amusing that she dressed in increasingly more colorful aprons over red and magenta as well as yellow smocks. She made and wore lacey collars now and spoke to the sprouts and the baby as she moved around the house doing her chores. “Good morning sproutlets. Be well today. Thrive. Good morning sweet baby. Rest well in your lovely verdant bed.”

The sprouts seemed to enjoy the attention almost as much as did the baby. And so the sprouts grew into limbs or small trunks. Consuelo enjoyed the feel of the leaves against her face and the smell of the occasional blossom. She touched them gently with her petite hands. Soon, in only a few weeks, she was surrounded by waving leaves that quivered in the breezes of her own rocking. Before long, birds found the limbs and trunks, saw them through the window, and flew through the open shutters near where Consuelo slept. First it was just one or two young warblers. Then an oriole found the party. Then two. Then a few sparrows. Soon whole flocks came through the doors and windows. Juanita was pleased but had to dodge and duck as the birds flew about the house. She had also, of course, to cover all her things because the birds could no longer distinguish inside from outside for the plants had thrived and become a quartet of trees.

The Pyrenees, always looking for diversions and amusements in their day, entered the house as well. They loved the singing of the birds and of Juanita and pressed up against the cradle from the bottom and the top. They pressed with enough strength and springiness to make the cradle rock more vigorously than Consuelo could do all by herself. The dogs even took to singing with the birds. They all, each living creature, loved Consuelo mightily.

The sprouts and limbs became imposing trees and grew right up to the ceiling of Juanita’s house. They made great right and left angles when necessary and pushed their way through windows to the light outdoors.

In a few months, around June, Juanita, from across the room, saw something new on one of the trees. “Eh? What’s this,” she said. She put down her watering can and took off the brilliant indigo apron she was wearing that day. She hung it carefully on a hook near the kitchen stove. She tidied her hair before her mirror and cleared her throat. She wondered to herself, “What more can be happening here?” Her heart began to race and even to skip a beat. She could feel a kind of pressure in her throat. Quietly, carefully, with all her feelings clinging close to her breast, she crept over to the left front tree. She put a hand out and touched a small green fruit. It was firm and cool. Each subsequent day she crept toward it and looked at it carefully. Yes, it was growing. And there were more of these diminutive fruits. Many more. One day, perhaps it was in the month of September, the green skin of the first fruit cracked and then the next day, split, creating a deep, great fissure. The pale flesh beneath the green and inside the crevasse turned a rich brown. Then, within another day, the outer flesh dropped away altogether and, “plop,” a perfect walnut fell at her feet.

The fruit had formed and grown all over the branches of the now mighty trees, and one by one each cracked and split and dropped walnuts onto Juanita’s floor. There were walnuts everywhere to eat. Juanita made walnut tortillas and walnut soup and walnut gruel and walnut paste for Christmas cakes. There were so many walnuts that all the villagers came to the house to help harvest them. They put walnuts in their salads and ate them for snacks. Weavers came out of the mountains and took the green husks away for dye.

The baby grew and grew and never needed any thing more than that wondrous cradle HK had made for her. Life was so delightful then and filled with happiness and hope. At night the Great Pyrenees slept between and under branches and Consuelo cooed and Juanita no longer wanted for anything in her life.

I love this part of the story. Mainly because I love New Mexico. I put on my Lynch Hat Works (Lubbock Texas) pinch front hat and some turquoise  to get into the mood for this rewrite.

A Beautiful Moment: 1900

Well, enough of the digression. Back to our story. The one about Juanita and the dogs and the baby. You remember?

Juanita eased the mare toward the small house. She approached from the east and drew the horse up short near the doorway. “Easy girl,” she said and slid from Paulette’s back until her bare feet just touched the ground. She was so gentle in this movement, so serene and smooth, that Consuelo did not wake even for a moment. The Pyrenees came dashing over a hill and down a gentle slope just a little ways behind her. They came close and pressed against Juanita’s legs and skirts and looked into her eyes and up toward the place where the baby lay sleeping at her breast.

“Quiet now, everybody,” she said. “The baby is resting still.” The Pyrenees, respectful always of Consuelo and on the whole obedient to Juanita, began to sniff the ground. From just beyond the house, a curious, third, alert dog standing near a clump of unshorn sheep looked up. It was her job, that vigilant dog, to tend the flock. She was always ready to take action if she perceived a threat to her charges. And so, though she inspected the newcomers from a distance, she remained wary and did not leave her post. There were sporadic “baas” from the slightly troubled assembly of bovidae.

The Pyrenees put their noses into the air and caught the scent of the other four footed ones. But they did not move toward the sheep. The sheep dog’s shoulders relaxed a bit. The Pyrenees haughtily lifted legs and peed around the sages and the stands of grasses near the door of the house. The sheep dog was not distracted by this arrogant move. She stood her ground. A large grey cat stretched blankly from a window box that sprouted hardy petunias. She looked at horse and dogs and woman and stretched again. She made a soft sound like singing or a creaking limb against a house. She settled back into the box, a red petunia just under her pink and black nose.

The house was round, or nearly round it had so many planes and angles. It approached a circle but was not one. It had a low roof, a slumped, cone-shaped roof that could almost be called a dome.

A little smoke came from an opening in the center of the roof and a rough beige blanket trimmed with deer hooves hung at the single doorway through which one entered the house. The house was plastered with adobe and bits of straw showed through the mud bricks here and there. At edges of windows and doors, parts of posts, the wooden framework of the structure, stuck out like bleached, skinless bones. The house smelled of ash and pinion and earth.

The sheep, still a bit anxious about Paulette and the dogs, and eyeing them between toothy tears at grasses, hung close together. The sheep dog, more careful with his charges since the arrival of the strangers, collected them and drove them quietly, slowly a bit further from the house as they continued to graze.

Just near the house was a small corral made of peeled posts. In the corral were six beautifully marked horses. One was so black as nearly to be blue, and one was almost a twin to Paulette. Another was a pinto, brown and white and lively as he ripped at mangers full of hay and grass. Two other horses raced around the perimeter of the corral and nipped at each others’ back hooves. One was a dusty white. Over the railings hung tangles of bridles, shiny, tooled saddles, and brightly patterned saddle blankets.

There was a sheltered area, a ramada, near the house. It was a shaded place made of more peeled post vigas criss-crossed with barkless saplings and some brush. Over the crossbeams of the shelter’s roof were draped bundles of grasses, weeds, and herbs. On the ground below the drying herbs were tin wash tubs and large clay jars of dye. The vats of dye, perhaps ten or twelve held liquids the color of blue, red, yellow, green, and mahogany. There were several vats of the deepest walnut brown dye. Deep inside the tubs and jars, and submerged within the liquid dyes, were yards of yarn spun from the sheep’s wool, twisted and twirled in great swimming colors like a snag of eels in a rainbow sea.

The air smelled wet and fresh beside the house and near and under the shelter. There was a scent of lemon balm and China tea. There was a hint of vanilla bean and mustard plant.

Juanita, now on her feet and taking in all the smells and sights, lead Paulette to a corral post and tied her there. “That’s a good girl,” she said and pulled an apple from somewhere in her gown with which to feed the horse. Paulette took it gratefully. Juanita left her there but took the baby into her arms. She saw the dogs were happy exploring the cat and the petunias. She walked slowly round the house circling to the south and then the west. She held Consuelo close to her so that the baby would not feel any missteps as she walked on this unfamiliar earth. She found HK at the north.

HK[1] and Elsie were arranged on a beautiful, large, red and black blanket upon which sat a sizable wicker picnic basket and a thermos of tea. Between Elsie and HK were a plate of finger sandwiches and a bowl of thinly sliced oranges. In a rattan container was a bottle of some fine wine. Perhaps it was champagne. The pair was sitting artfully, one across from the other, lounging on the blanket, and chatting merrily. Elsie was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with a bandana tied around the crown. HK was adorned with silver and turquoise and wore a shirt of the deepest blue open to the heart. A red woven band was tight around his forehead and circled to the back of his head. It did not hang loose there but was tied firmly at the base of his neck below a thick, black, elaborate bun of hair.

As the two talked, their lips were moist and showed the whiteness of perfect teeth. Their lips and teeth caught the sunlight sometimes so that their words came as if from tiny luminous vessels. There was something in this scene that took Juanita’s breath away.

“Tell me just once more,” Elsie was saying, “What do you use to make that brightest blue color in the wool?” She used the end of a pencil to point to, but not touch, a place on the rug he was weaving. HK’s body was turned slightly to the side so that his right shoulder faced Elsie. His loom was just in front of him. “You see the variations in the blue?” he fluttered his hand over the area. “You see how it gives a mottled effect?” He spoke softly to her and then took up his weaving again, easily, skillfully, deliberately and with most graceful movements of his fingers and wrists. Elsie’s notebook was in her lap. As he spoke, she picked up the book and wrote. “I like the variegation. I think it adds interest to my pattern,” he told the anthropologist. The two of them were so absorbed with one another and their work and their pretty posturing that they had not heeded, or perhaps even heard, the arrival of the horse Paulette and her gentle companions. Neither had they noticed the arrival of the Pyrenees. They had not noticed the cautious movement of the sheep dog nor of the sheep themselves. Even so, they were not surprised to see Juanita appear from behind the house. Though they saw her, they both continued their posturing and their work. Juanita stood a respectful distance.

HK and Elsie had been both smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, but HK had put his out as he began weaving again after taking some food. Just now, his hands did not stop moving and tossing shuttles from left to right and back again between the rows of yarn stretched taut on his loom. Elsie’s notebook was half-filled with notes from her observations so far that day. And just now, her pencil moved quickly on a page.

“I want to tell you a story now,” HK said without a pause in his work. “I want to tell you the story of the first women and the men and what happened when they had a big fight with each other and tried living apart, on opposite sides of a river.” He told her that story and then added some tales about the origin of pottery and mica chips and stars and prairie hens. Her pencil could not move fast enough and she asked him sometimes to stop speaking just for a moment until she caught up.

Consuelo slept on and missed the whole scene. Juanita still stood quietly, leaning against the house in the shade, and watched and listened while the stories unfolded. She was fascinated by HK and always had been. But this woman who was sitting on the big blanket writing so energetically was new. She found her just as fascinating. She had never seen a woman smoke, for example. She watched the woman suspend her note taking momentarily to roll and light a fresh cigarette. She watched as the smoke drifted out of her mouth. She watched the smoke as it was drawn up into her well-formed nostrils. She wondered who this woman was.

Yet, as always, she was fascinated by how HK’s hands moved on the loom and the magical way in which a delicate pattern emerged from the bits and pieces of colored yarn. She looked back at the woman

They were equally beautiful, these two, and knew they were. Juanita came closer and approached the blanket. She knelt down and sat there on it in one graceful movement. The baby, wrapped tight against Juanita, sighed a deep sigh that made the earth below her tremble. All was well that day and for a moment it seemed again that everything might be all right.

Bad Dogs

It cannot be said, I am sorry to report, that the Pyrenees were the most disciplined of dogs. They did respect the sheep and sheepdog, yes. They did that. They were loyal, almost to a fault, to Juanita. Generally, they stayed close to her legs and pressed in, leaning, from either side so that it was sometimes hard for her to walk. When she did walk, the three bodies moved as one with a peculiar, halting gait. This was true on almost all occasions when they were together.  When the dogs were not leaning against Juanita’s legs, they were often leaning against the legs of Paulette. This being close always seemed to settle the dogs into a kind of stupor. Thus they seemed to be quite unexcitable and reliably calm creatures.

However, gentle and restrained though they generally were, this day taxed the will and ability of the dogs to behave properly. It had had been full of adventure. The dogs had been quite stimulated by the journey. The pair had been running for many miles through the mountains. They had been nipping at snakes with their big, pink mouths and following gopher scent with their big black noses and bravely, though carefully, lifting legs on dozens of cacti. The potential hazards of this is surely apparent.

Yes, this had been a fine, challenging day for dogs accustomed to lying or standing about near the horse Paulette or their beloved Juanita. The dogs seldom had such an outing as this.

What is more, the dogs found out early in the journey that the sometimes forgetful and self-absorbed Juanita had not managed to remember to pack snacks for them, though she had brought sweet apricots, a peach, and tortilla bits for Consuelo.

The dogs played about near the cat for some time, trying to arouse it to some kind of action. Soon they were satisfied that the cat was one of the lethargic, unruffable types and hence unmoved by them. Thus they were disappointed. Moreover, they were hungry. Their stomachs began to growl so loudly that each was astonished and puzzled. They looked out toward the sheep dog, then each peered at each other suspiciously, each thinking perhaps he had offended the other in someway.

In search of food or action, they went over to the corral and looked the various horses up and down. The horses ignored the dogs. No, they thought, this would not do for fun. Then they  came around from the front of the house and made towards the place where they knew they would find Juanita. They came still with their compelling memories of snakes and awareness of hunger. They stood for a moment beside Juanita. But then they saw the sandwiches on the blanket. Dogs sometimes lose themselves. Dogs sometimes allow the baser instincts to get the better of them. These dogs on this day did behave abominably.

The dogs forgot all ideas of formal introductions and permissions. They pounced upon the picnic and the scene that I’ve described for you was instantly in chaos with dogs and sandwiches and teas and shuttles all flying here and there. “Yeouwwww,” Elsie screamed laughing. “Stop, No, Bad,” Juanita yelled hopelessly. She tried to grab the fur on their backs in order to restrain them. She actually jumped on the back of one and wrestled with him for a moment. He rolled onto his back, feet kicking at the air. But still, his long tongue was able to snag another sandwich. “Grab the bottle,” Elsie said. “Don’t let the wine get on the blanket.” “Your notebook,” HK said between chuckles. “The dogs will spoil it.”

But the dogs were not interested in the wine or the notebook. It was the sandwiches that they prized. Furthermore, the dogs did neither slowly chew nor savor the finger sandwiches, but simply swallowed whole. They seemed, moreover, to laugh together at their naughtiness, showing their big white, grinning teeth and long pink tongues. It was as if all their restraint gave way that day.

Their tails wagged vigorously, slapping hard at the face of Elsie who clutched the wine bottle and her notebooks against her breasts laughing. “Who are you? Who are you? Who has sent you to make our day so grand?” she said to the animals from between clenched teeth that still firmly gripped the cigarette she had been smoking. She expected nothing more from dogs than this and she loved surprises.

The weaver had not moved from where he sat, but he had taken the precaution of retrieving some yarn he planned to use from near the spot on the blanket where the dogs were clumsily grabbing at the food. The dogs looked up at him then, one with the crust of a sandwich dangling from his mouth. HK looked back at them. A half smile moved onto his lips. He spoke a word or two, but these words were soft, just barely audible.

We must imagine what this word or two might have been because no one who was there recorded this utterance. Juanita didn’t hear it. Even Elsie, whose notes I have studied carefully, seems to have lost herself at this moment and wrote nothing about it afterwards. She was, as I said, laughing and maybe her pencil had fallen to the ground and she could not write even when quite recovered because her notebook had closed and she had lost her place in it.

Whatever he said, the dogs apparently heard it. They moved away from the blanket and toward the shade of the little ramada where the dye vats were kept. As they crept there, they feigned shame, all the while casting occasional, sidelong self-satisfied looks at one another.

They stretched out and were quickly sound asleep.

Elsie set about examining her notebook, checking for any spills or tears.  She was a good anthropologist and knew that notes came first. There were always more sandwiches, but notes had to be preserved above all.

Juanita was, of course, embarrassed. “Juanita,” HK said. “Come here, sit with us, and don’t let those silly dogs disturb you.” “Juanita?” Elsie said, not having been introduced. She took the cigarette from her mouth and crushed the lighted end between her thumb and forefinger then tossed it into a little tin can by her side. “Juanita. I’m Elsie. Come on. How about a glass of wine. Come on.” Elsie felt shy, but joined them then. “Here,” Elsie said. “Don’t think about it again.” Then she spotted the baby. She put her own glass down along with her notebook and pencils and tobacco. “May I hold her?”

Juanita, you will remember, had gotten up that morning with the idea of doing something about Consuelo’s lack of things and her desire to sleep in her own home. What Juanita had in mind to do was have a cradle built. She dreamed that she would fill this cradle with exquisite blankets and lace covered pillows. She dreamed that she would give this child what she needed.

HK was not only the best weaver in the world. He also made finely woven clothing to order. He collected herbs and knew about them. But most of all, given Juanita’s interests, HK worked wood. He was known as the finest wood worker in the territory. He was known for the beautiful bedsteads he had carved from ponderosa, the lovely tables he’d made from large single slabs of burl, and the fine picture frames he’d fashioned from dry chollo.

Juanita sat comfortably sipping her wine while Elsie played with Consuelo who was now awake and waving her arms about and grinning up at the lovely, unknown face of the woman who held her. Juanita, calmer now, recalled her mission to herself. Everything was again quiet. The blanket was cool for they had set the loom and the picnic to the north of the house. The shade had fallen there most all of the day. So everyone was cool and happy to be in the company of one another.

Elsie, carrying Consuelo and talking sweetly to her all the time, went into the house for a moment and returned with cakes and another thermos of tea. A few sandwiches had escaped the attention of the dogs, and were still quite suitable for human consumption. Juanita began to eat. The bad dogs remained lying respectfully a little ways from humans. They seemed almost to be sweet dogs now, pressed against each other in the shade and sleeping quite soundly. Meanwhile, Consuelo made gentle sounds of breathing and giggling, liking very much to be in Elsie’s care.

The saga continues. The revised manuscript is now 163 pages long. I’m about half finished with the rewrite. The goal is to get this ready to send out in the next couple of months so I can get on with Aristotle’s Lantern. I’d like to have that in some shape to take to Wallowa/Fishtrap next summer.

The Anthropologist as Hero Part III

I don’t think I mentioned that I was “adopted” by one of the Solución families. Yes, I was officially adopted into the village. I was lucky. Not every anthropologist is adopted by her people. Being adopted by the people you have studied is a sign of acceptance. This simple, generous act on the part of my friends certainly would lend credence to any work I eventually published. I would be known as an “expert” for the area if I let the adoption be known.

The adoption by families in Solución was a sign that people did care for me, not just tolerate me. Each year, when I returned to visit or work, large tables were placed in the plaza with iced tea at one end and lemonade at the other. A great feast of chicken and enchiladas and beans and rice was always held in my honor. I always had shawls placed around my shoulders by women as old as I. Of course, they, like me, were mere youngsters when I did my first field work.

On the occasion of what I thought might be my last visit, the year I officially retired from the university and thought I might not be back in the field, there were heaps of food…even more than usual. Official speeches were made about me and gifts were given all around. Crisp new dollar bills were given to the children and piles of antique linens were distributed. Oh, it was a jolly afternoon that stretched long into the night. I still wear my many shawls, you see. I have several with me. They are always a comfort when the sun sets and the winds start up again out here in this beautiful canyon. I used to need them in the house, but Mildred’s propane heater keeps us toasty now. I only need the shawls when I go out walking, looking at the night sky, listening to the night hawks whistling and diving at their prey, and feeling the cooling sand near the creek beneath my feet. Mildred likes to see me in my shawls and scarves and long skirts walking under the moon. She likes me to wear soft, flowing things on this old body. She is not the flowing type herself.

The shawls comfort me when I go out to be alone. When you are working hard to invent things or paint or sculpt or write you must have time alone. If you don’t already know this, please believe me that it is true. Even living here now with Mildred, I must have time alone. I go off into the hills or go down with my papers to the arroyo and sit under the shade of tree to write. Others, no matter how close to you or how much they love you simply don’t understand this need to be alone. They are forever waiting for you to “finish,” something that may never happen when you are engaged in your work. Work, real work, does not have a beginning, middle and end. It is synonymous with your life. Others, unless they also have this kind of work, don’t get it. They are constantly lurking, fidgeting, calling one to meals that you don’t want or need. They desire, frequently, to tell you the outcome of a baseball game or surprise you with flowers. Well, you see what I mean. It makes for tiresome, unsatisfying relationships for everyone concerned. I know this from personal experience. You simply want to get out of it at any cost.

You see, the work of the mind, the work of the imagination, takes time. It must be nourished. Long, lonely walks are good. Dark nights under the stars are good. Hours in the bed in the confusion of a cold and fever are helpful. One cannot simply be walking about chatting and suffering every kind of interruption and distraction that comes along if one is to do one’s life’s work. One can, and often does, take time to do laundry or vacuum the floors. But even these chores must be done alone because the real work is always being churned about in one’s mind.

It is even harder to do this work of thinking, and imagining, and writing when you are part of a traditional culture. In such a culture, people have clear and deeply held beliefs about what you ought to be doing with your time. It is a fact, too, that in a traditional culture, one is surrounded constantly by people who wish to chat. That is why vision quests were invented. It was not so much that people wanted to gain power from their fasts and isolated times on mountain tops. They simply wanted to have time on their own to THINK. For most of one’s life, a person raised in a traditional culture just never hears his or her own original ideas. Nothing of much interest occurs to one if one is forever in conversation. Disagree with me if you like. But conversation simply drains me and others with whom I’ve discussed this issue. It is also clear to me that if one lives in a traditional culture that one has no opportunity to develop one’s own thoughts about what it is to be successful or what one might ever want to do with one’s life. It must be said, however, that more often than not, the chatting one hears is in one’s own head. Truly mature person have the knack of turning chatting into actual, useful introspection and thoughts.

The shawls are a comfort when I walk around the deserted ruins of Solución, too. The landscape is so bleak. There is nothing now to hold the heat at night as the old adobe bricks did. It is as if the great fire gathered all heat to itself and when it flamed out, it left nothing but a monstrous, unlivable chill on the land.

Elsie is Introduced: 1894-1900

Remember, Juanita was on a journey with horse, dogs, and baby. She had a mission. Remember? Surely you do. The dogs and the horse knew and took her directly to where she wished to go without needing to be told. Juanita was going to the house of HK. He would, she hoped, be willing to make a cradle for the baby Consuelo. She did not know that HK had a visitor. HK was one of many Indians in those days who had an anthropologist watching him day and night and asking him many questions all the while. I must tell you something about this anthropologist before Juanita meets her because she was an unusual woman.

Elsie was one who found time and maturity to be introspective and thereby to think for herself. She had come to the southwest to work long before I arrived. She was, as I said, an anthropologist. She became an anthropologist because she fell in love with a photograph.

She was not, of course, born an anthropologist. Elsie had been told all her life that she should become a wife and mother. She had been bred for these jobs in New York City where her own mother and father were rich, powerful, and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Moreover, Elsie had been surrounded by chatting.

Elsie’s mother and father were not only chatters but were, you might say, demanding. They demanded much of Elsie in the way of conventionality. This is something I know quite a bit about.

Elsie’s mother wore long fur coats and her father dressed in tails and top hats. Elsie was expected to dress in gowns and accompany them everywhere. “Come darling, hurry along now. Don’t dawdle. Pick up your feet. Don’t stomp. It’s common. Hold your head high. There’s a dear.” Everywhere was the theater and the opera and fancy dinner parties.

Elsie was sent to all the finest boarding schools in the northeast and summered in on the eastern seacoasts, often pluckily sailing about far from shore with this or that young fellow. She was taught how to pack picnic baskets with lovely roast ducks and chocolate cakes. She was taught how to make delightfully decorative ribbon sandwiches and perfect lemonade. She was taught to dress in gauzy mauve or lemon gowns and smile constantly in order to seem to be amused by everything and everyone. Scowling was explicitly disallowed. “Let’s see a big smile now. Don’t frown dear, your face will be frozen like that. You’ll get wrinkles.” Wrinkles were to be avoided as was anything else that might, her mother thought, make one unattractive. “Get out of that sun dear. Your hat. Where is your hat? This will never do.”

She learned to accept the lighting of her cigarette in such a way as to pull young men closer to her and bind them to her, thus causing them to believe that she was in love with them. Her mother approved of smoking because it was associated with the performance of seduction of men of wealth.

She held the cigarette to her barely parted lips. She held it lightly between the fingers of her right hand. She bent her head just so slightly and looked first at the end of the cigarette and then, without moving her head, up into the eyes of the man with the lighter. Then she looked down again and then up into his eyes again as the flame sizzled the tip. She inhaled deeply then, through pouty lips, expelled the smoke slowly, raising her eyes to his. The trick was to hold his gaze for several seconds. Then she could do with him what she pleased.

All this lighting of cigarettes was considered quite an art among women of her class and age and Elsie was the best. So the men followed her about with lighters and European stick matches and watched her constantly for the least sign that she might want a cigarette lit. Some offered her cigarettes from slim, highly polished gold cases they carried in the breast pockets of their jackets.

Men who did not and had not ever smoked now carried these cigarette cases about on the chance that they might encounter Elsie. They looked for lighters in expensive jewelry stores. They found some gold ones and some jeweled ones and ones that promised not to fail. They found some that promised a flame upon a gentle flick. To flick and produce no fire was not at all impressive. And these young men wished to impress.

When Elsie prepared for an evening out, she pulled her light brown hair into a tangled unconstructed bun atop her head and wore her dresses low below her shoulders. Elsie had wonderful shoulders and beautiful full breasts. Her neck was slender and her nose was perfectly tilted.

When Elsie went out, she dined on salmon paté and smoked oysters. She drank champagne and danced divinely having spent hours of her youth in dancing classes wearing cotton gloves and suffering boys with rooster hair and frozen feet. As much as she hated these classes, as with everything else, she was a quick study and never forgot anything once learned. She hated this life, but she was good at it. Her rebellion did not come until somewhat later. In the meantime, she enjoyed being very good at what was expected.

Her mother spoke to her of household management. “Now darling. Husbands cannot be bothered with the day-to-day problems of running a house. Husbands,” she said, “must never hear of your problems with staff. You are to order groceries, supervise cooks and maids, solve the problems of plumbing or any other domestic crises. Never ever let on that there are any problems in the home. The home is a sanctuary for the man.” Elsie was encouraged to take notes. She did write in a little book when her mother instructed her. However, she wrote nothing of what her mother was telling her. “Pay all the bills,” her mother said. “Look for a book on the history of the Oregon Trail,” Elsie wrote. “Design menus, organize parties, issue invitations,” her mother said. “Visit the Museum of Natural History and take a ride in Central Park this week,” Elsie wrote. “Pay the gardeners. Ask your husband if he’d like to have his gentlemen friends over for an entertainment,” her mother said. “See if you can get out of your bedroom window and out into the street without being detected,” Elsie wrote.

Elsie was, she was told, never to complain or ask for more money or talk at all of any problems when the husband returned from the office. She yawned. The exterior world, she was told, would be the husband’s domain. He was to go off to his bank or law office and do whatever. He would, she was told, come home exhausted from his day of clubs and cigars and luncheons. He would be quite taxed by having gazed now and then at columns of numbers in his office. He would need, of course, complete rest, a good meal, and sweet, considerate conversation that required no thought. In her notebook, Elsie drew a picture of a fat man with large moustaches and mutton chops slumped in a chair behind a table scattered with turkey carcasses and empty bottle.

As you may have gathered, Elsie thought, from the time she could think at all and in whatever infrequent few minutes alone she had to think, that all of this was boring. She thought being a wife the most insufferable kind of future she could imagine. In spite of objections from her parents, one day she announced, “I have enrolled at Columbia University.” “For what purpose?” her father asked. “I’ll not have a daughter of mine becoming a common teacher,” her mother exclaimed. Indeed, Elsie had no particular goal or course of study in mind. However, she ignored the objections and questions of her parents, started her classes and soon discovered interests.

Discovering interests can be a frightening thing. It can set you apart from peers. It can damage your identity or, at the very least, poke holes in it. At the very most, discovering interests can bring your whole being  into question. Discovering interests is a dangerous thing. Your vocabulary may come to include words that are off-putting to friends and family. For example, Elsie came to discuss topics such as justice and equality at the dinner table. Elsie wondered aloud about sexual behaviors of all sorts.

Discovering interests might lead you to begin to light your own cigarettes as Elsie did.

During one of her after class visits to the Museum of Natural History, she saw a new display. There was a large placard at the front of the oversized glass case. On it, she read about a weaver woman-man who made blankets bigger than the average New York storefront. Behind the placard, hanging from the very ceiling, was one of these grand blankets. In another case, she saw pictures of the weaver, a lovely face, a dark and lovely face, looking squarely at her from an ornate golden frame. She saw his loom, or rather a replica of it, installed in yet another case. She yearned to meet this man-woman and see him work. She wanted to watch his hands on the loom. She wanted to hear his story. For the first time in her life, she wanted to offer someone else a cigarette.

She forgot about the young men with the cigarette cases and instead gazed at replicas of ancient human skulls and shelves of baskets from the West and great Southwest. And she decided that she would be an anthropologist for she understood that it was anthropologists who were privileged to study such things for their entire lives.

Elsie found out who taught such things as anthropology at Columbia and went the following Monday after classes to find the new lecturer, Franz Boas.

She stood facing his office for a few moments, composing herself, and knocked at his door. “Come in,” he called out in a thick German accent. She opened the door, twisting the brass knob slowly and pushing the door an inch at a time. He was seated behind a large oak desk, bent over a letter he was writing to his wife, still in Germany:

November 4 1899

“My dear sweet wife,

I must write to you this afternoon so that my letter will go with the mail at eleven tomorrow. If only I could be with you tomorrow and greet you and kiss you and my Bubbichen. Dear, I haven’t heard from you for so long that I’m feeling quite bad again. How is our Bubbichen doing? He won’t recognize me again, I fear! ……………”

On his desk was a table top miniature of his lovely wife herself. Stuck into one leather corner of his heavily stained desk blotter was a small photograph of a baby in a handsome christening dress. He looked from one image to the other between the sentences that he wrote.

Elsewhere, on wooden bookcases and shelves that reached to the ceiling, were hundreds of bound manuscripts, maps in large rolls stacked like firewood, and complex Kwakiutl transformation masks. Bear and Raven stared out at Elsie through dark, ellipsoid eyes. Elsie stared too, but her eyes were fixed on Dr. Boas.

He was a slender, intense man with a dramatically high forehead due to hair loss, a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, and a relatively bushy moustache. He wore a suit made of worsted wool, for money was scarce and most of what he had he sent back to his family, and a tie neatly knotted around his high stiffly starched collar.

“Sit please,” he said without looking up. His ink pen moved quietly across the page before him.

She moved carefully into a golden oak pressed back chair placed directly across the desk from him. She continued to take stock of the office while he finished his work.

“There.” He looked up. “I needed only to finish the thought. And for you? What might I do then?”

“Professor,” Elsie said. “I wish to become an anthropologist.”

“Ah, yes. Of course you do.”

“Professor. What should I do? What should I read.”

“Very simple. Let me give you a few suggestions. When you have read these, come back and we will see. Edward Tyler of course. And Darwin. You’ve read Darwin, yes? Morgan, Powell. Comte, Engels, Marx. You must be prepared to engage in the significant intellectual debates of our time. We will see then. We will see.”

The books were not really about Indians on the whole. She was puzzled, but buried herself in these dense volumes.

She returned in a few weeks. She had done her homework well. The professor was delighted. “And now leibling,” he said. “The work begins.” He began to tutor her nearly daily. After just a few weeks with him, Elsie’s identity was thoroughly poked. She had more and more time to think. She had time to imagine. I think Boas must have been quite intriguing at the time. I heard much about him and had classes with some teachers who were close to him. But he had died before I enrolled. I worked with Mead and Benedict, but they were respectful of Boas and so I didn’t hear any stories about him directly from them. These stars of the field were off working for the United States government and fighting tyranny when I was getting started. Mead was an outspoken member of the Committee of National Morale, a group of academics that were dedicated to furthering the war effort among Americans. She was also lecturing here and there and somehow involved with Eleanor Roosevelt and a group called the Committee on Food Habits. So I didn’t see much of her except for the occasional lecture. I was admitted to a field seminar with Benedict after my first summer in the Southwest. Ruth was writing The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, was working for the Office of War Information and doing little teaching.

So the first months of my education as an anthropologist were quite different from those experienced by Elsie. I was stuck in courses taught largely by pale, boring WWII draft dodgers with little experience in the field. I was thoroughly bored with kinship charts and courses on pig raising, land tenure, and conflict resolution among the Turkana by the end of that first year.

Elsie, however, was inspired by Boas himself and by her romantic notions of the American Southwest. “I must dress like an anthropologist,” she thought to herself. “You are far too conventional,” some of her Bohemian classmates told her. Elsie  agreed and retrieved a pair of Indian jodhpurs from her closet. These were a bit worn from riding lessons she had taken and the gallops she’d had in the park over the past few years. But they were still serviceable and still fit her trim little body. Elsie acquired a mail order catalogue from a major Midwestern distributor. From the catalogue, she ordered a leather jacket and deep brown, felted Western hat with concho band. Egged on by some young students with whom she lunched, she visited a novelty clothing store in midtown Manhattan. There she found some high-heeled, tooled leather boots, and a rainbow striped Seminole vest made in Florida.

When all the bits and pieces of her new identity were assembled, she dressed herself in them, strode down the stairs of her parents’ immense home, and sat clumsily at the dinner table. “Good God,” her mother moaned. “What is the meaning of this?” her father asked, but continued to carve the roast.

She began to appear around the city looking like, her mother thought, a wild thing. Her mother insisted, of course, that all this nonsense stop. “My dear, this will not do. You must cease this foolish behavior or you’ll never find a husband.” Her mother stamped her little feet, her lovely and elaborate coiffure waggling with each insistent step. Elsie ignored her.

In fact, Elsie became even more daring. Her own hair came down from the confines of the bun and fell around her neck and shoulders. It gleamed and moved like seaweed in a swift river as she walked the several blocks to her classrooms carrying a load of anthropology books. She took her lunch now not with the other young ladies of her mother’s circle but while staring at cases of stone projectile points and carved Kwakiutl canoes in the Museum of Natural History. Dr. Boas had procured that canoe and most of the other items in the collection that stirred her heart.

Her mother locked herself in her room during this period of Elsie’s life. Her mother cried and did not answer calls and did not ever come downstairs. “I cannot face it,” she cried from deep inside her silk comforter. She became a sort of Bertha Mason, Bronte’s classic mad woman in the attic. She liked and even cultivated the image, Jane Eyre being one of her favorite books. Of course she did not go out into the streets or attend parties or arrange dinners. In fact her poor household management became a subject of gossip. But she ignored such talk if she happened to hear of it. Elsie’s naughtiness was, she secretly felt, a kind of godsend. Her meals were sent up. She ordered flowers and chocolate for herself. She read novels.

The husband, Elsie’s father, was now forced to work out of the home during the day and give orders to domestic staff by night. The universe he’d always known was in shambles. All of this, he declared, was “entirely improper.” The marriage was terribly strained.

Elsie did not care. “I don’t care,” she said, tossing her unbound head. She came into the house with new purpose. She stomped about on the gleaming wood floors in her boots. She ignored the father’s pleas that she should leave off these new behaviors. “My darling daughter. Your mother is distressed and the servants are overwrought. At the very least, you might learn to walk like a lady in those boots instead of a, well, a farmhand.” The household staff grimly scrubbed and polished the floors each day. The butler stoically swept up the trails of sand and dust that gathered in the carpets and the rugs each place Elsie stepped.

Elsie ate nothing now but rich dark pot roasts and boiled potatoes. She drank pots of dark coffee. She ate and planned for nothing but her trip to the West where she would go for field work with Dr. Boas’ guidance and blessing. It was her goal, of course, to meet the weaver she had seen in the photograph.

Elsie read her anthropology books as well as maps and guidebooks. She read books on Navajo language and social structure. She saw her teacher everyday now and thought of patterns of culture and kinship and poetry. She thought no more of coming-out cotillions. Elsie, instead, wore bandanas and rolled her own.

You might wonder if I ever met Elsie. Elsie had retired from teaching full time during the time I was in Moa Nui. She turned seventy during my post-doc work in New York. There was a huge party held in her honor and I was there when she gave a lengthy, colorful after dinner talk about her life in the Southwest and her relationship with HK. HK himself was the surprise guest and sat there at the speakers’ table next to her tossing in jokes and bawdy details as she spoke. She was an elegant woman with a tanned face and full pink lips. She had piles and piles of thick white hair, piercing blue eyes, and was covered with enough pawn jewelry to decorate a whole village. HK dressed as he always had, in deeply cut velvet shirts, broad red headbands, and turquoise. His face was deeply rutted, but his eyes were clear and his hair was still black and gleaming.

I was told many stories about her from others who had known her at the party and from some of my teachers. Ruth had been one of her students and told tales about her occasionally when I had the chance class with her. All I heard at Columbia corroborated what I heard about her from the villagers, that she was a handsome, fierce, demanding woman who loved HK in a peculiar sort of way. She was loath to be away from him for even a day. So this is the Elsie who was HK’s visitor when Juanita decided to ride out to his house.

All previous chapters are available in either previous posts or by clicking a link on the masthead. This novel, begun and largely finished in the early 2000s, is being rewritten and serialized prior to submitting for publication.

Consuelo Arrives 1899

One morning, Juanita, now a widow for some years, and bereft of both the child who was the light of her life as well as the sweet young husband who adored her, lay wrapped in the dreams of early morning wakefulness. Her world had collapsed around her and for years, she thought of them night and day. In the middle of the simplest tasks, she would suddenly find a numbness creeping over her mind and body. There seemed to be not point to anything. The days crawled by during those first years without the sounds of the child’s voice and with no meal to prepare for anyone but herself. She was eager for the evening and for the time when she could join the other women and crawl into the cocoon of her grief. You see, after the death of her husband and child (with whom she always passed the night, even if the other women left their own husbands at home), she had gone back to sleeping with the piles of women in the twin sister’s ancient house. Yes, the women still slept in piles, no longer out of fear or necessity but out of custom and pleasure at the card games and gossip they shared deep into the night.

There, nested between kin and friends and in her layers of blankets, she could cushion herself against thought and take refuge in her dark dreams.

On this morning, she heard an energetic flicker pounding his tough little beak against the tin roof above her head of the women’s room. That must have been what awakened her, she thought. The flicker’s business moved her to rise from her comfortable bed, and plot her passage around and through the others who were still sleeping. She was, surprisingly for her, eager to start her own day. The bleak dreams of the night had mounted their steeds and fled with the break of day and the light was beginning to show through the dense curtains at the windows

Juanita was a beautiful woman. She was in her prime at age thirty=four. She was a loose-limbed woman with lavish breasts who moved like a sleek jungle cat and bore a sly smile. She had abundant thick dark brown hair with streaks of red here and there and just a bit of grey beginning near her temples. She was a woman who had found a strange peace with herself and her losses in spite of her loneliness and grim days.  She had even grown capable of taking the occasional delight in the lives of others. There was nothing bitter or stingy about her. And this hard won beauty of spirit was reflected in her lovely chestnut eyes, soft lips, and in the luxurious way in which she moved around the village.

Juanita was well awake now. She moved quietly, rolling and crawling, over the still sleeping body of the woman with whom she shared her bed. She managed not to touch or wake her. She pulled an ankle length cotton smock that was hanging from the bedpost over her amply skirted, tight bodiced, white dirndl, the dirndl in which she slept. The smock was a brilliant yellow. She pushed the sleeves up to her elbows and gathered the skirt in her hands so that it would not brush the floor. Juanita found a path to the back door, sleekly lifting a foot here and there, winding her way over and around the women who were arranged in heaps on feather beds around the floor. She closed the door behind her gently and walked with almost exaggerated grace (a grace of which she was entirely unaware )to her own house. There was a large, bright, tin pitcher on the stoop behind her back door. She left it there so it was handy for the flower watering. She picked it up and filled it at the irrigation ditch that ran near the back of her house then hoisted it heavily to her right shoulder. She walked  around to the front of the house, toward the plaza, with the weighty vessel causing her to walk slowly and with some effort.  She turned toward the front door of her own house and began to douse a lovely stand of purple columbine and golden calendula that grew around the doorstep. It was unusual, some said, that Juanita and only a few others in the village could grow flowers so easily. Juanita had flowers that no one else could grow at all.

The flowers grew all around the little stool where she often sat facing the plaza. To the right of her door, hanging on the wall, was a large tin washtub. She kept it well scrubbed and so clean that on this morning it caught the early sun light. To the left of the little stool, nearly hidden by the flowers, a dainty black and white cat slept. This was the lovely scene: Juanita, her pitcher and tub gleaming, her flowers abundant, a little cat breathing at her feet. She drew the attention of many villagers to her generous beauty as she sang to dispel the sorrow she felt.  Sometimes now, as her losses occasionally were forgotten for a moment, she sat and dreamed upon her doorstep and sang.  She sat there nearly everyday with pitcher and tub and tiny cat and sang. As memories of the husband and child  faded one blink at a time, she daydreamed about carnivals and the holy processions in Oaxaca she’d heard about. She dreamed about ice cream and other sweets. Juanita had become a dreamer and her voice sometimes had the effect of awakening other villagers to the possibilities of life.

On this day, when she had finished watering and commenced to sing from her perch, a small woman walked into the village and across the patch of green that surrounded all the crosses and the graves and jumbled grave goods. She walked, picking her way on tiptoe, towards Juanita. She had, it was quite clear, a petite baby in her arms. The baby was wrapped tightly and secured from below and over and around the shoulder of the woman with a finely woven pony blanket. The blanket might have been an important one. Juanita could tell from its designs that it was probably Apache. It had zig-zag lines and fringes and a yellow band on either end. It was worn almost through from where a rider had sat on it and bounced and jangled silver spurs across Sonoran sunsets, perhaps avoiding the buffalo soldiers, she thought, perhaps leading his people across the Mexican border to safety. She wondered how the baby had come to be wrapped in such a blanket and how this nimble-footed woman had come by such a baby.

The woman was, perhaps, a bit under five feet tall. She wore thick glass lenses over her eyes. The lenses were set in large horn rimmed frames. She had a black scarf wrapped over and around her head and secured below her jaw. Her dress and apron and knitted shawl were all black. Her chin was pocked and prominent. Her lips were pursed and lined from sucking far too many sorrows or licking the salt of her own tears. Lines were carved deeply from the corners of her eyes and nose traced the contours of her muffin cheeks. The odd effect was that she looked tired and jolly all at once.

The baby slept with a palpable sweetness within the blanket’s folds and creases. It looked pink and whole and fairly pretty. There was a curl of hair, so light as to be translucent, just framing its sweet eyes. The eyes were dreamy. They were peaceful, waiting eyes with eyelashes meant for spaniel dogs or cows; these were eyelashes certainly not meant for humans. Juanita’s heart seemed to turn about in her chest when she saw these eyes.

The woman, then more certainly, came deliberately but slowly towards Juanita. The babe slept. The woman walked, steadily, evenly, with the little sleeping bundle. Juanita saw the woman’s ring; it was gold, a simple band upon a finger on her left hand. She saw the feet shod in heavy black oxfords. She saw the knitted dark stockings through which no bit of flesh could be seen. She saw the woman’s hands were red with eczema. The disease was peeling and tearing at the flesh at least up to the wrist. Juanita could not see beyond the wrists for her dress and shawls prevented further inspection.

Juanita, living all alone, though sleeping in a pile with other women in the night, felt especially generous that day. She called out and invited the woman to sit. She fetched a mahogany chair from the house. It was one her grandmother had purchased many decades ago from a wandering woodworker.

The chair was highly polished and elegant, for the grandmother had aspirations that included haughty ideas of what one should sit upon and where. The grandmother still remembered stories of Spain and the entrada and the forming of the first bricks of the village and the first idea of where to put the gardens and the bean fields. And of course, she knew many stories about the twins and the little priest.

But most importantly to her, the grandmother still remembered vaguely that she was from a royal lineage. At least she fancied that she remembered this. No one could distract her from this memory or even contradict it. Her memories were from such a distant past that no one could prove or disprove her fixation or beliefs.

And so this chair was hers upon which she sat stiffly in bits of old brocade and yards of lace, with smears of boot black on her eye lids for drama, and cherry juice upon her cheeks for color.

Her hair was piled high upon her head from its coal black youth until it was as white as walls, or school paste, or Lutheran missionary hands. In her surprising hair she placed a carved tortoise comb. The comb held scarves and veils that fluttered when she walked or moved her head.

On her chair and in her veils she sat enthroned and silent. She sat just inside the house by the door, staring out. One day her ordinary sternness seemed preternaturally stiff. She was indeed quite dead, as stiff in death as life, yet surely lifeless. No one knew how long she’d been dead, because she seldom spoke or breathed or ate and so it could have been a week or more.

This very grandmother’s very chair was the one that Juanita fetched for the small woman. The woman sat lumpily on all her garments and such and held the tiny baby even closer to her. She sat patiently as Juanita related the story of the chair that I have just recounted. Juanita, alone so much of the day, often bored guests with long digressions and unnecessary details of her life. The little woman listened graciously.

Juanita offered her a bowl of last year’s piñóns. She brought her a wooden mug of guava juice. There were no glasses left in the house, you see, due to the activities of Julio, the mad man, who had chewed them all to bits. She brought a plate of dates stuffed with walnut meat.

They sat together, the woman, the baby, and Juanita, in the shade of creeping mimosa and an apple tree planted by an uncle. They listened to the water wearily fingering its way along the irrigation ditch. It was a fine day to sit. There was no talking. There was no talking wanted or needed. It was such a fine day and these fine moments they shared in that shade eating and drinking. The little stool was happy and the mahogany chair felt proud again.

It was such a good time that when the little woman left, the baby, of course, as you might have already imagined, stayed behind and lived with Juanita. She was named Consuelo after Juanita’s grandmother.

The baby slept within the warm comfort of the pile of women by night and much later, by day, learned to make corn bread and caramel cream and entertain the village with her puppet shows. Rarely did the women shout, “No, no, no,” after the coming of the baby. They were entertained and ecstatically in love.

The day the baby came was such a fine gentle day that it could, might have changed the destiny of the village. It seemed to have done so for just a little while. People seemed almost blessed for a time.

It truly was a day that might have stopped the tourists coming all those years later. It was the kind of day that might have stopped the rains and winds and kept the watchers busy somewhere else. Oh yes, this was a day to celebrate. A baby with no pedigree, all innocence, from nowhere any one had been. Oh, yes. This, the villagers thought, this peace and wonder was how it was all meant to be.

Paulette, Consuelo, and Juanita have an Adventure

The baby. Juanita’s baby, Consuelo. That baby was so exceptional, people said, that she seemed to be talking even when she was around six months of age. She made sounds that might have been, some thought, connected, meaningful, and quite sensible. And she was beautiful, as beautiful and smooth and ivory-skinned as a baby in those popular painted miniatures that one could find in the finest homes in those days. The baby had a full head of curly hair within about four months of her arrival in the village. The hair had, in those months, gradually darkened to stunning ebony. And her eyes were as big around as walnuts. Her eyelashes were thick and curly and her little eyebrows were so perfectly shaped they could have been drawn on. She smiled most of the time and that she made everyone around her smile. She was a dear, plump, warm baby.

Consuelo, however, had no things when she first came to be with Juanita. She had, for example, no clothes or bedding and no diapers. The woman who brought the baby to the village said she would send a few items, but these did not ever arrive. In fact, the woman was never seen or heard from again. Juanita made some inquiries for she realized she’d like to know more about the circumstances of Consuelo’s first few weeks of life. But though she contacted various churches and agencies in the region, she could not find a trace of the woman.

Juanita had, of course, had a baby once before. But she had burned all of the things that belonged to the first child, along with here husband’s things, while she was in mourning. She wished that she had kept some of her child’s handmade sweaters and caps and knitted booties and soft woven blankets.

Now, this was long before the time that women went to Furrs’ or Target or Walmart stores and could choose diapers for specific sized baby bottoms. This was a time before babies were encouraged by television ads to potty train themselves with elastic panties. Babies and their parents in these long ago days were not urged to buy gendered garments or really anything at all. But nevertheless, babies did need some things and the things they needed had to be, if you lived in places such as Solución, ordered from far away department stores or made by yourself or someone close to you. So, since this baby had no things, Juanita had to begin sewing and knitting and tatting and embroidering and getting the word out that Consuelo would appreciate this and that. Her plea was heard. All of Juanita’s friends got busy with needles and scissors and began arriving almost daily with a donation. “Here dear little baby is a nice blue jumper for you,” one said. “How about a nice stack of clean, bleached flour bag diapers! I’ve hemmed them all with a very fine stitch and washed them until they are soft as goose down.” “Good morning Juanita, my dear. Could Consuelo use some bed things? I had a little time and made her a crib sized blue quilt with matching pillow cases.” And so slowly, Consuelo had  things.

The lack of things of her own was not Consuelo’s only immediate problem. Consuelo grew cranky and tired of sleeping in a heap with so many people every night. Consuelo, though just a baby, was bent on having a real home and some stability in her life. She knew, if no one else did, that the first couple of weeks after her birth had been disconcerting. Malleable as these experiences had made her, she was ready to settle in for the long haul. Thus, this daily habit Juanita had of picking up a packed bag and shuffling the two of them across the plaza to bed down with a bunch of fluttering females was just not the ticket.

She grew, quite early in her life with Juanita, to dread the coming of dusk. Dusk always meant to Consuelo that Juanita would set to selecting books and snacks and a nightgown to take to the common bedroom. The baby, cheerful at all other hours of the day, took to crying loudly as the sun set.

Juanita was not stupid. She understood very well what Consuelo wanted. So one morning she got up and went back to her house, sprinkled her floor with water, and swept her doorway free of cobwebs. She deadheaded her calendulas then wrapped Consuelo tightly in a gay posy-covered scarf and bound her to her breast.

She walked with Consuelo to the corral. “Come now, lovely Paulette. We will have a little trip today.” She called sweetly to the beautiful appaloosa, a grand horse who stood at the manger having a morning feed. She was a leopard spotted gray with deep blue rump markings. The mare came expectantly, her great lips pulled back across her enormous teeth in an almost smile. The mare loved to be ridden, loved spending time with Juanita, and most of all had come to love the baby. She always nuzzled the tot when she could get near enough to do so. Juanita entered the corral. Paulette pricked her ears and performed a lively dance when she saw Juanita take the bridle from the rails and walk toward her.

Paulette was always followed about by Juanita’s two Great Pyrenees. These dogs were as big as bear cubs and were the most loyal of companion pups. They each had blonde fur as soft as milkweed pods.

The mare came to stand near Juanita and the dogs alerted now to the possibility of an adventure, rose from their sleeping place under the shade of a walnut near the corral. They squeezed under a bottom rail and came quickly to the place where Paulette stood still, receiving her saddle. The dogs wagged, saliva dripping happily from their tongues, and pressed Juanita’s calves. They looked up and into her in the eyes, mouths pulled into a big-toothed grin. The mare put her head on Juanita’s shoulder and looked down into her face. The animals sensed a mission as well as an adventure and became excited with Juanita’s own excitement. The mare, the dogs, and the woman were all excessively animated because they were going to do something today. They liked doing something other than lying or sitting in the shade and, in the case of the beasts, snapping at flies. Consuelo, on the other hand, was inert in her scarf swaddling. She was, after all, a baby. Her mind, however, was quite active. She would be patient with the others.

Juanita put a saddle blanket on Paulette, lifted herself to the mare’s back, and looped one end of a rope halter around her right wrist. They all, woman, baby, mare, and dogs, rode, walked and trotted off into the morning mountains.

They rode against sandstone cliffs and near smoke-blackened caves, ancient dwelling places, where, unknown to Juanita, many watchers noted her passing. They paused at a rock called Kneeling Nun and lit candles for success. They rode through a valley where wild horses ran. They stopped occasionally and drank from cold, lip-numbing streams of water. They passed tasseled cottonwoods, stands of walnut trees, bunched slender willows, and pygmy junipers. They rode and walked and trotted until they saw a humble house beside a neat corral.

What follows are the next two chapters of my serialized novel,  The Romance of the Village of Solución. Check out the masthead for the beginning….and then posts below for subsequent chapters. This novel was begun about a decade ago. It is being rewritten bit by bit and then will be submitted for publication.

Juanita Finds a Husband: 1887

Juanita was adored by her family and all the other women and men of the village. She grew steadily and with little drama. Her playmates included a precocious child named Sophia. Sophia was favored with more of Juanita’s attention than the other attractive but less gifted playmates who courted her.

There was something special in that friendship, something that made their time together sparkle like a bonfire or a lightening strike or sun hitting a half buried bit of glass in the desert. It was clear that the two had a future together.

Juanita, in spite of her interest in Sophia’s wild imagination of their possible futures, had no particular aspirations except to someday be a mother. Every woman in Solución shared that dream. No one knew if she would be thus blessed. All prayed and did what they could to be worthy of that blessing themselves. Their prayers were met with limited success.

When Juanita met a dreamy young musician from the next village down the road, she convinced herself that she was in love in order to get on with her life and the possibility of a fulfilling her primary ambition. The young man, well educated for the period and place, was more than willing to set up a household with Juanita and began to save money from his labors at an office in the nearby town with this end in mind. Juanita’s parents promised to give her a small house adjoining the central plaza in the village. Thus, as their whispered talks together became serious and their chaste visits more frequent, they made plans for a life together knowing  that they did not want for much in order to begin a family life.

Though this was not a grand romance, Juanita had pleasant feelings for this young man. He was a good fellow with a head of curly, dark hair and a chin that commanded respect. Prominent chins were much valued in Juanita’s family. He had a full, dark, neatly trimmed moustache that he maintained with daily effort. He dressed modestly and properly in a well-pressed suit coat and dark trousers. He always wore a dazzling white shirt, one of three that his mother bleached and starched and ironed after each wearing. The shirt itself had a collar with prominent  “wings,” removable to ease his mother’s efforts.

Around his neck was a silk Windsor tie. The ties he chose from a catalogue were woven with a colorful pattern that gave forth a quite jaunty look to his otherwise somber appearance.

The young man respected himself and respected Juanita. He treated her with the dignity she deserved. Though she required no proof of his comradeship and faith in her, she appreciated and carefully catalogued the wonderful letters he sent to her during his absence. Some of these survived into recent times. I copied those that I was permitted to see and found a few of these in one of my old journals yesterday. One particularly is worth quoting in order to demonstrate the young man’s sweetness:

“My dearest Juanita,

I cannot refrain from writing you a few lines to-day, though we parted so recently. My thoughts are constantly with you, and your pleasant face and sweet smile seem even now to be before my mind’s eye. I do not know that it is much satisfaction to you to be so often reminded of my love and devotion, but it is a pleasure to me to speak my thoughts on the subject and perhaps you will think me selfish in this respect…..”

And so on.

Juanita, who had many admirers, refused the attentions of other gentlemen once she and her young lover made a commitment to one another.  She went nowhere with a man unless he was an uncle or cousin or her own father. Uncle Joachim, somewhat chastened by old age and attempting to change the reputation held of him by his kin as death approached, was often a chaperon.

One day the young man asked if she were ready to name the day. She declared happily that she was and planning for the occasion of the wedding commenced. Every woman who had taken part Juanita’s birth was now called upon to assist in preparation of linens, food, and the decoration of the plaza where the reception fiesta would be held. The church was whitewashed and all the woodwork inside polished.

Someone made arrangements for a padre to come to officiate. He was promised that no one would be offended if he did not care to stay over night in the village.

Trees and bushes in the plaza were trimmed and pruned. The twin graves were covered with new plants and flowers so that they would be in bloom on the day of the wedding. Desert mallow, marigold, and poppy were planted all around the borders of the plaza and fine, smooth stones were brought from the arroyo to make a new pathway from the church to an arbor that the young groom himself made of ponderosa cut and carried from the mountains.

The women who helped birth Juanita also helped to put together a marriage outfit for the young bride. She was given all new clothing and linens, and her house was scrubbed and provided with furniture and silverware and dishes.

On the morning of the wedding, Juanita was dressed in white with a beaded veil and carried a wreath of orange blossoms. The gown she wore was constructed from a beautiful antique lace. It had a high collar that emphasized her slender, shapely neck. The sleeves were puffy and long and studded with elaborate white silk rosettes. The waist of the gown was fitted and ribbed so that nothing of Juanita’s body was left to the imagination.

The groom wore a black morning coat with a swallow tail and, underneath, a deeply cut white vest, and a white shirt with a tall, heavily starched white collar. His white bow tie was made of silk ribbon.

Juanita’s sole bridesmaid, Sophia, was also dressed in white and adorned with orange blossoms. They were all handsome and happy that day.

Forty-seven pairs of eyes, and numerous others belonging to distant friends and non-related relatives, wept as the vows were spoken. Forty-seven pairs of eyes closed and prayed silently that this couple would be blessed with off-spring. Juanita’s mother fainted dead away with hope and joy as vows were exchanged. Juanita’s father’s smile was so broad and proud it looked as if his dark face might crack. This old gentleman, it must be said, had played no role in Juanita’s life up until the wedding day. In fact, he had never married Juanita’s mother. Still he came to witness his only child’s big day and he fairly burst with the pride of it all.

The wary priest, it must be said, did not linger after his duties were performed. His pony was quickly repacked with gold embroidered vestments, crosses, and vials of holy water and he was off at a gallop long before sunset, indeed, not long past high noon.

Juanita’s father hired a band from Juarez to play in the plaza. He paid to have a group of dancers come with them as well. He had an ox killed and roasted in a pit. He donated twenty of his older chickens to be stewed and roasted. He bought two large bags of white flour and one of corn meal to be used in the preparation of the feast. He was trying, some said, to make up for his life long neglect of this lovely daughter of his.

The women of the village cut and sliced and mixed and ground and shucked and peeled and floured and fried and wrapped and stuffed for three days before the wedding day. In consequence, after the ceremony, there was much dancing and singing and and eating. Uncle Joachim, relieved of the burden of chaperonship, drank to excess and curled up near the twin graves where he slept for several hours in the late afternoon sun and well into the night while others sang, ate and danced. Men of the village who remained sober gave speeches to each other as well as to the groom. Most of what they said does not bear repeating. The groom was embarrassed and disgusted but maintained his silence for the sake of Juanita. The women, lovely and sly in the mantillas and frilly gowns, brightened about their cheeks upon hearing the suggestions for a happy marriage the men made in their speeches. They looked at each other, feigned shock and surprise as they were supposed to do, and turned their eyes to the ground. But they were not unfamiliar with the bragging of the men. They knew that in reality the men had very little else but imagination when it came to fulfilling nuptial duties. They knew that the men were never subtle or romantic in their approaches to them. They knew that marriages would never last if not for the confining nets of custom and tradition and their lack of choice. The women remembered, anew, why they were relieved to have the excuse of their fear of ghosts in order to sleep in great heaps together.

Never mind. Nothing could spoil the joy of this day. There was hope for a future that might be brighter.

In a few hours, in the late afternoon, the couple went into the house and changed into riding clothes. Juanita emerged in boots and pants that nearly matched those into which her young groom had changed. Their horses were ready and, with a well laden pack horse which Sophia had decorated with garlands of roses, they rode off into the mountains for a week of honeymooning under the stars. It was during this adventure that Juanita, indeed, conceived a child.

Death is a frequent visitor: 1889

Life seemed to follow an appropriate course during the next two years. The baby was born to great celebration. The husband was a good one. Juanita enjoyed her household duties. Uncle Joachim died. Sophia married and bore two children, Ramona and Armando, always called Hermes. Sophia was considered especially fortunate after the birth of two children. Many believed that she must have some strong medicines or potions and they wondered about her. Her reputation as a fecund woman with, perhaps, some secret knowledge that might increase one’s capacity for conceiving spread to villages far beyond Solución.

Sophia, still the one of the pair of friends who was imaginative, was not content with having simply a fine reputation for fertility. She was not content to simply raise children, clean a house, and split kindling. If people thought she had strong medicine, why not capitalize on it, she decided. Thus she began her long career as midwife, herbalist, and healer.

Then came an invisible, devastating stranger. This was the flu epidemic of eighteen-eighty-nine. Many in the village were stricken first with respiratory problems, then with problems of the nervous system, and finally by gastrointestinal distress. Juanita’s mother and father were among the first to go. So many were dying, there were, finally, no coffins available. Village handy men found scraps of lumber here and there and dismantled a few sheds. They nailed together makeshift boxes as well as they could. Women found bits of woven cloth and blankets with which to line them. Juanita’s mother and father were laid out, wrapped in clean white sheeting, grieved over, and put into the earth in a shared pine container. Juanita herself cut and sprinkled sweet sage over the bodies before the box was closed.

When the flu struck, Sophia took it upon herself to study the disease. Sophia administered to all who fell ill. She tried all the newest treatments for which she could find reference. Some suggested efficacy in combating the disease. Potassium bromides had been used with some good effect the literature she had on hand said. Opium was, of course, indicated for the extreme agitation that often accompanied the affliction.

She made gelsemium from the dried rhizome and root of the yellow jasmine, a plant she ordered from herbalists she tracked down after reading about the epidemic in city newspapers. Ads and claims for cures were common in those days, and Sophia tried them all. The alkaloids present in the bark of the yellow jasmine root is probably the active ingredient and would have some effect she reasoned. She gave the gelsemium doses to most of those in the village who had been stricken.

Truth be told, she tried everything she heard or read about. She stuffed asifidity pouches with camphor and hung these around the necks of all the village children. She rubbed chests with a mixture of lard and turpentine and placed a few drops of the turpentine on sugar cubes to make the medicine more palatable to the youngsters. She boiled down onions into a thick, sweet syrup and brought bottles of this to each household to be used as a tonic.

She drew the line at using a remedy, recommended by some, that was made of dried sheep dung.

Her services were called upon all during the seemingly endless scourge. She cared for everyone and could be found ministering to the old and the young day and night. None did she care for with more hope and fervor than Juanita’s spouse and child.

The young husband was the first of the two to show symptoms. For a day or so he complained of a severe headache. He became confused and agitated. Sophia got him into a bed and urged him to rest and drink water boiled with bits of cherry bark. This calmed him for a few moments, but he soon tossed blankets off and threw further mugs of the proffered brew against the wall. During the next hours, he sometimes jumped up and paced up and down the floor of the little house then screamed out the window at things and people no one else could see. He mistook the few trees on the plaza for men and the sparse bushes and tumbleweeds for women. Sophia could see by his behavior and pallor that his temperature had risen dramatically by evening when she returned from making the rounds to care for others in the village. He complained of a chill. He struggled mightily that night against the grips of a powerful seizure.

While Sophia did her best with the husband, Juanita tried to comfort the child, barely two years old. He had developed a fever during the day and lay listless in her arms in the far corner of the room. The course of his illness was quite different from that of his father. He became nauseous and vomited repeatedly during the night. His pulse slowed and his body became rigid in his mother’s arms. He lapsed into a coma around midnight.

Try as both women did, both husband and child died within the week. They were two of the more than thirty villagers who were prematurely taken that year.

Sophia was with Juanita when her husband died. They had been up for several nights with man and child, holding hands with each other and with the beloved ones. There had been no tears, not yet. But, later, yes. When the suffering young man breathed his last, the women fetched a small tin tub of warm water with soap and slowly undressed him. They began to bathe his body, the life and vigor drained away from it. They stood each on one side and leaned against the bed gently bathing his skin to prepare him for his burial clothes, so recently his wedding clothes. Juanita put her hand under his back to lift him slightly for the bath. It was when she felt the warmth still in his back that she began to cry. There was pooled all that was left of his vital spirit.

Juanita’s husband and the child were laid to rest together, he in his black morning coat and the little one in a small suit with a large lacey collar that Juanita’s mother had made for him on his last birthday. A photographer was called to make a picture of them before they were wrapped tightly in cotton muslin and an antique blanket with a beautiful pattern of indigo stars. Then they were placed in a box made of boards from Juanita’s mother’s chicken house and carried to the sacred ground high up on the hill, near the three crosses.

Most all of the village doors, including Juanita’s, were draped

in black crepe.