The Ghost of Milagro Creek Read online

  “Stick around,” I told Teo. “Raise your son.” But he went back to Los Angeles right after the baby was born. My son was a loser like his father, but I blame myself for letting Mister stay in that trailer with Mercedes and her boyfriends.

  “You gotta have custody,” Ernesto said whenever I tried to take the kid home with me. “Without custody, you go to jail. In jail, you can’t do nothing.” Yeeeeeeee! Since when do I listen to that potato with a badge on?

  I buried Mister on the last day of the waning moon in April 1986. Late that afternoon, Diputado Vigil rolled El Auto into my yard. Siren, flashing blue lights, mirrored sunglasses and holster—the whole show. Everyone in the barrio came outside to watch him try to arrest me. Even the chickens crowded around the fence to see him march his fat little legs up to my porch.

  “In the state of New Mexico,” he declared when he reached the top step, “it is against the law for any person or persons to bury a child alive; it is against the law for any … shit.” He stooped down to get a better look at Mister, who had crawled under the chair where I sat splitting reeds to make a basket. “Ignacia? Did his mother do this?”

  “Mercedes is too lazy to beat a child. It was the boyfriend. Car antenna.”

  “How long ago?’

  “Three days.”

  “Mi Dios.”

  Holding the willow between my fingers, I set my teeth on it just right and bit off three long strips. You weave the dark with the light. Abuela Leonora Cow Horn was Jicarilla Apache, and Jicarilla means basket weaver. She taught me where to find the best willows and how to grind their bark into a tea that works like aspirin. For abrasions like the ones Mister had suffered, I prescribed four cups of willow tea and regular application of my favorite liniment: a salve of honey and cayenne boiled in holy water with the silver coin that my great-great-grandfather took from the pocket of a white man after stabbing him in the heart.

  “Have you called DEFACS?” asked Ernesto. “Has he seen a doctor? I know you’re a curandera and everything, and I respect that, but there could be something wrong with him.”

  “He has susto.”

  “¿Qué?” He took out his notepad.

  “Susto,” I said, crossing the reeds in my hand to make a grid for the base of the basket. “S-u-s-t-o.” Dark over light, light over dark. Some people are cursed with blindness, others with a lame leg or a bad heart. I was given Ernie. “That’s when you lose your soul,” I said, looking up at his blank, smooth face. It was like staring at the moon, trying to find a man.

  “Hola, Mister,” he said, huffing as he knelt down to look under my chair. “It’s me, Tío Ernesto. Will you come out so I can talk to you?”

  Mister did not answer. There was no sound other than the rustle and trill of two blue jays hidden in the blossoms of my apricot tree. I listened carefully; blue jay was my first language. I learned it when I was a baby nestled in Abuela Leonora’s willow basket. Hour after hour, while she worked in her garden or walked through the forest picking herbs, I watched for the flash of blue wings through the sunlit slats of willow. In regular conversation, the birds bickered and shrieked and hurled sharp insults. To scare away crows, they called out in the voice of the red-shouldered hawk. Once, I heard them mimic the sound of a weed eater. Sometimes, who knows why, they spoke with a strange tenderness.

  Water was my first word—el agua in Spanish; kóh in Apache. Abuela Leonora used the Tiwa word b’ehla, which means our mother the river.

  Only English was spoken at the Indian boarding school; the teacher’s ruler struck like a snake at the sound of any other language. On Wednesday nights after chapel, Padre Mark let me sit on his knee in the room with oak panels and read to him from a heavy red book with paper as thin as moth wings: The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

  The stories were not as good as the ones Abuela Leonora told, but I loved the spaces between the words, how each one had a different shape, how you could let yourself fall in, and it was never exactly the same the next time you read the passage because you were not the same.

  Out-out-damn-spot was the word for water.

  That’s what the blue jay said in my apricot tree on the afternoon Ernesto came to arrest me—“Out-out-damn-spot” — and at that moment, for the first time, I entered Mister’s mind.

  At first I felt dizzy, blinking stars away from my eyes the way you do when you walk out of the sunlight into a dark room, but that passed, and I felt no different than I do when I am myself. I wouldn’t have even known the difference if I hadn’t seen the reflection of my face — Mister’s face—in Ernesto’s mirrored sunglasses.

  The lens reflected our big green eye ringed in a purple bruise; the other one was swollen shut. A red welt across our cheekbone glistened with salve. When Tío Ernesto leaned in close with the smell of cigarettes on his man-breath, our new soul shrank back and curled into a caterpillar ball. “Come on out,” the deputy said. “Nothing is going to hurt you.” We spat.

  Sighing, Ernesto heaved himself onto his feet and lit a cigarette. “Yeeeeeee,” he said softly, touching the silver handcuffs on his belt, and I was myself again, thinking, poor old Crow. When Ernesto was a boy, I called him Crow because he loved shiny things. I combed empty parking lots and abandoned campsites for the glittering trinkets he liked to play with: bright beer caps, new screws, the rare penny.

  “Teo sends me the check every month,” I reminded him. “I’ve been buying for Mister all along—his food and clothes and toys. I’m the one who gets his WIC and signs him up for New Mexico Kids so he can go have well-child visits and go to the dentist. I’m the one who takes him. When he gets too big to sleep with me, I’m going to fix up the room off the kitchen, where Teo used to sleep.” Ernesto heard me, but he had gone into that little cave in his mind where he is safe from the problems of women and children.

  For a long time, leaning against the porch railing, he stared across the dirt yard that still showed the sweep of this morning’s broom, past the neat black furrows of my garden, to the glistening white snowcap of Taos Mountain. I split another reed. Beneath my chair, Mister began to hum a slow, sad song with no beginning and no end. Finally, Ernesto faced us. He dusted his hands across the knees of his pants, cleared his throat, and said, “Looks like you got your beets and onions planted.”

  “Sí,” I said, weaving.

  “Zarita said the frost would get hers.”

  “Tell her to plant on the new moon,” I said. Some people say you cannot plant until you see the Indian woman on the face of the mountain, but they are superstitious. I never plant until the snowcap is gone. I don’t even buy seeds before February second, Candlemas, when I bring my candles to the church to be blessed by Padre Pettit. He refuses to bless seeds, so I carry those in my pocket, and they catch most of the magic. Nature is not so careful. Already my apricot tree was in full flower, wearing a frilly pink and white Easter dress of blooms that would freeze and wither before May.

  “So what do you do for lost souls,” Ernesto asked, trying to be polite.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  “Bendito, bendito, bendito sea Dios,” I sang as I pushed Mister’s stroller down the overgrown wagon path that cut across the mesa to the canyon, “Blessed is God!” The plastic wheels sank into the soft sand and snagged in the tumble-weed, but the boy was in no shape to walk. For most of the morning, we lurched across the rough tabletop—sage, red rock, and blue sky. Some people say that the mesa looks like the moon; I wouldn’t know.

  Mister slept with his hand flung across his chest, fingers curled around the Pepsi bottle. Every hour or so, when I reapplied the salve to his wounds, Mercedes’s yellow face floated up in front of me, and I tasted the bitter bile of hatred.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she said when I carried him out of her trailer that morning. She sucked the last of her cigarette and jammed it into a beer can already stuffed with butts. “I don’t care if you are a witch. You’ll regret this day.” Someone had taped cardboard over the tw
o windows in the room, and in the wavering blue light of the TV, her face swam before my eyes. I could have killed her.

  Outside on the sagging porch, black flies swarmed around a pile of junk: bags of garbage and old clothes, bottles, a broken tricycle. The rope hanging from a dried-up apricot tree looked more like a noose than a swing, and the whole yard stank of rotting meat. Two buzzards dipped their wings above our heads in an effortless circle, and from somewhere behind the house, a cuckoo bird whistled.

  “Brownie,” said Mister, tugging on my arm, and for the first time, I saw the stiff, bloated dog that lay dead beneath the trash heap.

  “This is a bad place,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Good-bye, Brownie,” he called over his shoulder, but his voice had a flat, hollow sound, like the wind that blows through the canyon on starless nights.

  The sun was even with the shoulder of the mountain when we came to the edge of the canyon and looked down the thin, rocky path that snaked into the Rio Grande. Below us, a yellow raft covered with tiny people swirled in the current.

  It took me two hours to dig a hole big enough for Mister to stand in with his arms crossed over his chest. His head wobbled with half-sleep as I lifted him out of the stroller and lowered him down, but when the cool dirt touched his bare feet, he jerked awake.

  “Mamá,” he said flatly.

  I began to sing the nursury rhyme “Pin Pon,” which I sang to him when he was a baby. The first verse goes like this:

  Pin Pon is a very handsome boy doll,

  Made out of cardboard.

  He will wash his face

  With water and soap …

  “Pin Pon es un muñeco,” I whispered, holding him firmly with one hand as I scooped dirt around him, “muy guapo de cartón, se lava su carita, con agua y con jabón.”

  Suddenly, he screamed, “Let me out!”

  “Mother Earth is holding you,” I told him. “Tierra de Mamá loves you.”

  “I have to pee,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

  I told him to water the earth. It is all good, I said, the pee-pee and the tears. To the earth, it is like rain. But he wanted to get out, and when I pressed the dirt around his neck, he started to panic.

  “Abuela, my chest hurts. Tierra de Mamá squeezes me.”

  “She holds you close to her heart. Con gusto.”

  When he began to cry, I pressed my cheek against his. “Chis, poor baby.” His tears ran into our mouths as I prayed, “Great Spirit, Great Friend, Mahaya, and Mother Earth, thank you for this day.”

  “Respira,” I told Mister. “Breathe. Don’t stop breathing.”

  I breathed in and out for both of us, slow and deep, again and again. With my hand on his throat, feeling his butterfly pulse, I slowed my own heart rate to calm him.

  When he stopped struggling, I gave him a sip of Pepsi and stuck his Spider-Man umbrella into the dirt, to protect his face from the sun.

  I opened my medicine bag and took out the sacred eagle feather, which I passed over his head as I prayed to the Great Spirit. Then I lit a bundle of sage and waved the smoke over both of us. “The earth is your true mother,” I told Mister. “You are in her lap, and she is wrapping her arms around you. See how strong she is. How warm.” I touched some dust to his wet cheek. “She loves you. Listen to her. Te ama, and I love you too, hija.” Then I told him the story of creation.

  “In the beginning, Black Sky and Earth Woman bore the children who live in the belly of Mother Earth. Some people call the first son Black Hac·ct´cin. Some call him Cristo, and some call him Jesus. These children made toys out of clay: a yellow sun and an orange moon, trees and flowers and coyotes and snakes and women and men. They made the bees and the ants and the things that make up the things too small for us to see. When the sun escaped through a hole to the surface of the earth, the little clay people—the Jicarilla Apache—followed the light. As they came up through the hole, God breathed vida into them.”

  “With the breath of life came knowledge. They understood the talk of plants and animals and the slow dances of the stars. Their feet knew the steps that bring water, and their hands knew the cures for envidia, susto, espanto, and mala suerte. The Jicarilla were made in God’s image.”

  “At first, they followed the circle of the sun and moon and stayed close to God, but then they got busy and forgot him. Gradually, they forgot everything. Only the curanderos remembered, and we remember for everyone. My grandmother Leonora Cow Horn taught me these things. She is your tatarabuela. She was a Tiwa Indian; her ancestors lived inside the walls of Taos Pueblo, but he married an Apache. The Apache hate walls.”

  “Okay,” said Mister, and he closed his eyes.

  Lying belly down beside him, with the sun warming the back of my head, my heart slowed to the beat of the Great Mother’s heart. Do not be afraid, I told myself. Do not hope. After a long time, I began to feel the wiry grass pushing through the cracked earth, and from the top of Taos Mountain, the drip, drip, drip of melting snow. One drop of water clung to the next, on and on, gathering force. Slowly, the bud of Mister’s new soul began to swell against my own, pushing outward with mysterious force. I prayed for it to open.

  All at once, my spirit left my body—a light flickering down a tunnel—and flew down the rock-strewn path of the gorge into the cold dark water below. “Dig!” shouted the guide on the raft. “Dig! Dig! Dig!”

  Then I felt the woosh of a hawk’s wing, and his scream rasped down in my own throat—“Kree-eee-ar!”

  “Keee-rrrrr!” I answered, jumping to my feet. “Kree-eee-ar!” Then the hawk told me that God cannot move through a heart as twisted as an old root, as hard as a bone. To heal Mister, I must spit out my own poison. I must pray for Mercedes. If Creator had told me, “Bite the head off a live rattlesnake,” I would have said, “Yes!” but for a long time I could not pray for Mercedes. I watched the orange raft swirl down the gorge and disappear; then I looked at Mister’s head sticking out of the sand. I brushed a fly away from his swollen eye and took a deep breath.

  “Great Spirit,” I prayed. “May that bitch and her pimp have peace, prosperity, happiness, and a greater love than she has ever known.” I went on to pray for her mother and father, and her grandparents, and their people. I prayed for her vehicle, that it would run for her, and for food to come to her table. I prayed that she would have short lines at the welfare office and that her drug dealers would not cheat her too much. I prayed that when guilt came upon her with all of hell’s fury, she might find the peace of forgiveness.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun was high in the sky. Afraid to look at Mister, in case his soul had not come back, I watched a red ant crawl from the toe of my shoe to the end of the shovel and along the handle and across the blade. It teetered on the edge before slipping out of sight. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw the red umbrella move.

  “¿Dónde está mi madre?” Mister asked.

  “Your mother is here,” I said, sweeping my arm across the mesa. “We are your mother now.” Then I dug him up.

  • • • • • • • • • • •

  On my porch, Ernesto fished a limp stick of gum from his pocket and held it out for Mister.

  “Come on, take it. Get out from under that chair. It’s me, Tío.”

  Mister hid his face in his hands.

  “I don’t know, Ignacia. I think maybe the kid is messed up.”

  “Leave him alone. He’s healing.”

  “All I’m saying is, maybe you’re not the best person to be his mother. Maybe he needs, you know, a family, with a mom and a dad.”

  “You want me to get a man?”

  “Don’t be crazy, okay? I’m just saying—”

  “I’m forty-six. I’m not too old to raise a child.”

  “Oh Christ, Ignacia. You always do this to me. I’m thinking in a straight line, and you turn me sideways.”

  “You think I can’t be a good mother to this boy because I was not a good mother to my own son, and
I wasn’t a good mother to you.”

  “Well, okay. If you want to put it like that. I’m not blaming you or nothing, but it stands to reason—”

  “When Mamá and Abuela Leonora died, and Papá ran off, who kept you alive? Who hunted your rabbits and found clean water? Who saved you from the mountain lion? Who kept you out of foster homes?”

  “I knew you were gonna get personal with me. I just knew it.” He shook his head as if to free himself of a net. “I came over here because that’s my job. Around eleven o’clock this morning, some rafters saw a woman burying a live child up on the old wagon trail. You are a person of interest in this case.”

  I split another reed while he looked out over the yard. A few neighbors were still milling about—Dolores had been walking her cat up and down the road for half an hour. Through the hole in their coyote fence, I watched Jesús polishing the engine of his Jeep with an old pair of underwear. Across the Milagro Creek Bridge, the rest of the neighbors sat with Ramona on the back porch of her store, Mercado de Milagros, pretending to play Parchesi. The chickens, however, had gone back to scratching.

  “I hope you find who you’re looking for,” I said.

  With a deep sigh, Ernesto picked up his walkie-talkie. “Ten-four, Pop. Can’t locate the whereabouts of the suspected perpetuator. I think everything is okay with the situation. Bueno-bye.” He put his sunglasses on and walked back to El Auto with his head down, lifting his hand behind him.

  3

  Spy Wednesday

  April 11, 2001 (afternoon and evening)

  Family

  Afternoon—

  The women came first. Through the open kitchen window, Mister heard the clatter of their heels as they crossed Milagro Creek on the rickety aluminum bridge joining Abuela’s yard to the Mondragón property. The metal bridge was even shakier than the wooden one it had replaced five years ago. Click-clack, click-clack, went the señoras— their neighbor Ramona Mondragón; Ernesto’s wife, Zarita; and poor Dolores Cisneros—all wearing up-dos from Zarita’s hair salon, Shear Beauty, and carrying flowers and food as if they were coming to a party.