Wild Penance

by Sandi Ault

  I walked up Regan’s drive. The Toyota was in the garage. I went to the house and looked in the windows. No sign of life. I peered up the path to the casita. The Land Rover was not there, of course. There were big boot prints in the drifts leading from the rear portal up the slope toward the shrine. I followed them, crunching softly in the snow as I walked.

  I could hear her voice as I approached. She was crying and groaning and singing under her breath, all at the same time. I came up the high side of the rocks and looked down at her back, her head draped in a black lace mantilla, which settled in folds onto her thick sweater. She was wearing some kind of soft pants and the same unlaced boots she always wore around the place. “Regan,” I said, my voice firm.

  She turned around slowly. Before her, on the shrine, lay the rosary I had found by the corral-the one with the crucifix with the name A. Vigil engraved on the back. A dozen or so lit candles in red and green glass jars surrounded the wooden piece and a carved santo-Saint Anthony.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Andy? Yes. He tried to kill me.”

  At this, she broke into a full-throated cry, “Ah-h-h-hhhh! My little Antonio! My baby brother! Look what they’ve done! Look what they’ve done!”

  “Regan, I want you to come with me,” I said. I stepped aside, motioning her toward the path that passed by the rocks. She didn’t move.

  “First they killed my father,” she said, shaking her head, the mantilla edging back off the crown of her head and sliding down her hair. “Now, little Antonio!” She began whining, as a nervous dog might.

  “Your father was Arturo Vigil. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw him crucified, didn’t you? That wasn’t just some daring adventure you and your friend took, like that story you told me.”

  “Yes!” she screamed. “Yes, I saw it happen! I was there! They tried to keep us at a distance. I didn’t know for sure that it was my father, but I found out the next day. They killed him! They killed him, and they killed my mother, too! She died of a broken heart within the year. No one would do anything about it. No one would even investigate it. I tried to talk to everyone, but no one would listen to me-I was a child!” As Regan’s facade-her tightly controlled persona-ruptured, and the terrible truth she had been concealing spilled out, it seemed to be taking her substance with it. Her large, bony frame and lean, sinewy flesh seemed more pronounced, as if she were slowly desiccating, becoming a skeleton. Her face was skull-like, with the thin tissue of her amber skin stretching over a pronounced forehead and jaw. She tore each word off with her teeth. “Then, Antonio decided to get revenge. It made him crazy, you see. It made him crazy! He was just a little boy, but the next year, he put the poison on the whips and two men died. It served them right-they killed our father!” Her voice was hysterical, breaking from low to high pitch, shaking. Her whole body was trembling.

  “They held a council. They agreed to suppress the crime from the authorities, but made Andy go away; that was his punishment. He was supposed to go away and never come back. Our tía abuela in Los Angeles took us both in. We had to live on her charity. When she died, we had no one. We had no home. We had no family. We had nothing.” Her voice had calmed a little now, the poison spilled. Her chest heaved with a deep sigh.

  “I want you to come with me now, Regan,” I said again, and I stepped back to offer her room to move onto the path.

  She looked at me with pleading eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Jamaica. It wasn’t supposed to start all over again. Andy said he was just coming back to buy the icons. He said he could sell them and make a lot of money. It was a way of making them pay-you see? For what they did to him, to us. But once he was here, he said he had to find out where they buried him,” she said, looking back at the shrine. “He said he just wanted to know where our father was buried. I always knew it was here, at this shrine. But Andy said we had to find out for sure, to be absolutely certain it was here. He said the answer would be in La Arca. But that’s not really why he wanted it. Antonio still wanted revenge.”

  Again, Regan looked at me. Her face looked like that of the girl child in the photograph I had brought in my pocket-a face full of horror and bewilderment and helpless vulnerability. Her eyes seemed to be looking to me for the answer to some unspoken question.

  I had a question of my own. “Father Ignacio came here, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.” She looked away and began to cry. “I had been cleaning my horse’s hooves,” she said softly. “I noticed there was a car parked down by the bridge. I knew I had another trespasser, so I came up to run him off. He was kneeling right there.” She pointed a long finger at the altar and looked as if she were watching the scene play out before her eyes. “He told me that he saw some sketch of yours or something and knew the shrine was being tended. He brought our father’s rosary.” Regan picked up the rosary and held it up to show me. “When I saw this, I was so furious, I took the farrier’s knife, and I stabbed him!”

  “But why? What did Father Ignacio ever do to you?”

  Regan’s voice trembled. “I thought I had put it all behind me, Jamaica. I thought I had closed the book on all that. But when Andy came back here, it reminded me of it again-of what they did to us, to our father, our mother. And Ignacio Medina, he used to be Andy’s playmate at school when we were children. How could he dare to show his face here at our father’s grave? He was trying to keep Los Penitentes alive! He even became one himself!” She shrieked, “I want them all gone, history!” She waved one arm wildly out to the side, as if to erase their memory. “That is why I was telling you all the terrible things they did. I thought you would tell the truth about them in your book. I thought, ‘Here is someone who will write about the foolishness, the horror, the brutality of their ways. Someone who is not bewitched by their archaic superstitions.’ ”

  “But why did you crucify Father Ignacio?”

  “That was Andy. Antonio went wild. He wanted to get the police to think it was the Penitentes that killed him. He wanted justice for our father!” She started sobbing.

  “So he took the body somewhere and tied it on a cross?” I asked.

  “He didn’t have to take it anywhere,” she said. “This place was the morada where our father was killed. But after Antonio’s…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Crimen colérico?” I said. “His crime of anger?”

  “Yes, soon after that, they closed this morada. They said it was stained by what he had done and couldn’t be made pure again. Most of the Hermanos went to Boscaje. That’s where they took all the icons from here, and they left this place untended, forgotten, like junk they could throw away!” She gnashed her teeth as she spoke. “Andy wanted them to have to leave Boscaje, too, to drive them out of existence. He wanted to destroy La Arca like they destroyed our family.” Her face reddened, and tears began to stream down her face. She looked right into my eyes. “Andy wanted to kill you from the beginning, Jamaica! But I wouldn’t let him. I protected you. He was afraid when you found our father’s rosary, with all your research, that somehow you would find out.”

  “You mean the day I first met him here? The day after you threw Father Ignacio over the bridge?” I asked.

  She didn’t even blink at my mention of the incident at the bridge. She seemed caught up in her own replay of events. “Yes. He was sure you knew something.” The long strand of carved beads dangled back and forth in front of her body like a pendulum. “He even tried to find you after that, to find out what you knew. But when you came here after mass, it was obvious you didn’t know anything or you would have…”

  She stopped talking for a moment and watched the beads swing back and forth. Then she began speaking again, forcing the words through tightly clenched teeth. “But that little thief Suazo! He was making plenty of money on those icons! But then he told us you almost caught him when he was photographing the Boscaje processions. And he said he lost the pictures he took, and maybe you
found them. And then we saw Suazo with you…” She looked at me now, and her eyes looked clear and bright, as if what she were about to say was simple and obvious. “Well, we had to kill him. It never would have ended. You know how Suazo was.” There was a strange, mad certainty in her expression.

  “Regan, I want you to come down the hill with me now.” This time I stepped forward, reaching for her arm.

  “All right, Jamaica, I’ll come.” Her voice was suddenly childlike. “I know it’s over. I’m glad it’s over, I really am. I’ll come. Just let me pay my last respects to my father, would you, dear?”

  I stood for a moment pondering all the possibilities. She wasn’t armed. She couldn’t get far in those floppy boots. I couldn’t see what it would hurt. “Okay.” I stepped back. “I’ll let you have a few minutes. I’ll meet you down at the house.” I turned to walk down the slope.

  I had just begun picking my way over some snow-covered rocks when I felt the movement behind me. I whirled around to see Regan poised in midair like a hawk about to light on its prey. My eye caught the glimmer of a slender sliver of silver, and then I recognized the farrier’s blade she held raised in one hand as she made to plunge it into my back. The crucifix dangled from her other hand, the wooden beads swinging wildly. I lunged to the side to avoid her stab, and she wobbled briefly, then regained her balance and raised the knife again. This time, I caught her arm on the way down and felt the knife blade rip the shoulder of my coat as it went past. We struggled. Regan’s face was molded into tight ropes of corded flesh and muscle, so that it seemed a drape of skin had been pulled over her skull when wet and then dried into hard ridges. She was surprisingly strong, and her stance above me gave me a disadvantage. Her knife arm began to tremble violently, but I was losing my grip and my balance. The thick cotton strands of her sweater were all I could hold on to, and I dug my fingers into the woven spaces. The fibers began to stretch, I was still tottering, off balance, and then a hole opened up in the sleeve of her garment and Regan’s powerful shaking arm flew up, free of my grip. She curved her weapon down again toward me just as her hand reached the top of its flight.

  I felt myself falling, so I grabbed for her, seizing her sweater with both hands-this time about the chest-and I pulled her over with me, on top of me, as I fell back and down the slope. In a kind of terrifying slow-motion pas de deux, we tumbled over and over, first me above Regan, then her above me, her mouth open in a perfect oval of surprise, the knife still clutched firmly in her hand, the tight cords in her neck giving way to slack skin and her expression moving from madness and anger to shock and fear. All this as we tumbled, still wrestling, my hands moving from her sweater to the ground to her arms above me to the ground again, my chest crashing into hers, then hers into mine, the two of us like a lopsided wheel bumping and collapsing down the incline, when finally we slid into a shallow level place and Regan was on top of me scrambling to gain her balance and strike again with the knife. I scrambled, too, and, failing to wiggle free as she sat on my hips, I could only roll to the side as the knife came down. “Regan, stop! Why are you doing this?”

  She didn’t answer but drew back again, her weight still pinning me to the ground. My head was out over the edge, unsupported-and my neck strained to keep it from falling back. I reached for Regan’s arms but gravity gave her the advantage and the knife came down again, this time catching the top of my shoulder as it plunged into the ground beneath my left ear. I felt a searing pang shoot through my trapezius and up the side of my neck. Regan’s weight was full on me, and I shoved against her as she drew the knife back again and struggled upright. A stab of pain went down my left arm and I felt it weaken, felt the muscle tearing and the warm, wet blood pooling under my upper back. Once again, she raised the knife, but this time she pushed my right shoulder down with her free hand, to prevent me from rolling out of the blade’s path. Her face was a white mask with hollow eyes-nothing human, nothing of Regan there.

  As the gleam of silver began to arc toward me, I could see in my peripheral vision the wooden beads from the rosary that she held against my right shoulder, and the carved form of the crucified body on the cross in the snow beside my neck. I closed my eyes for an instant, then opened them and did what I had to do.

  I felt a rush of grief as I thrust my hand into the pocket of my jacket and pulled the trigger. I heard the bullet make a dull, wet connection just a split second after the muffled blast, felt a spray of moisture hit my face. In the center of Regan’s forehead, where a smudge of ashes had marked her just weeks before, a dark circle marked where the bullet had entered. On her face, a frozen look of disbelief. And then, lifeless as a rag doll, in what seemed like slow motion, she toppled forward and rolled past me down the hill, the tongues of her boots flapping at the snow as she went.

  I turned over, my shoulder throbbing, and raised myself up. I looked at the pocket of my coat, singed with smoke and eaten through by the shot. I looked down the hill. At the bottom of the slope, Kerry and Jerry Padilla were already rushing toward me, their guns at the ready.

  38

  The Wolf

  Before coming home to my cabin, after the paramedics had dressed my wound, I delivered La Arca to Tecolote for safe return to the Penitentes. Once I had seen the old cuaderno and the other treasures inside the ark, I realized that I didn’t need to preserve the fading history of the Penitentes-they had done so themselves, reverently, but privately. And some things were meant to remain private, even held in secret. Esperanza smiled with approval when I placed my book inside the box, its deerskin cover looking strangely new by comparison with the other treasures, in spite of all that my book had been through. I felt a small pang of sadness as I took my hand away.

  Oddly enough, I had more difficulty returning the photograph I had put in my pocket before going to see Regan than I did giving La Arca my book. I studied the snapshot carefully before giving it back, something drawing me to look at it again and again. In faded black and white, it had captured Regan as a youth, dressed in black, clutching the hand of a small boy, their faces wide with horror as they watched five men in the distance struggle to raise the cross on which their father hung. The image troubled me in the way that something does when I’m about to receive an important life lesson. I told Tecolote as much, but she only smiled and nodded her head.

  It was certain from what Regan had told me, and from the evidence in the shed at the Suazo place, that Santiago Suazo had been stealing icons for Andy Vincent. Investigators at the scene uncovered Santiago Suazo’s body, along with the nag Regan had put down, in the pit grave dug by her unsuspecting neighbors. And they found the bullet-scarred white Ford Ranger and an old beat-up cargo van locked in Regan’s barn, both registered to Regan and bearing New Mexico plates. I had to assume that Andy was almost certainly the one who had tried to wipe me out at Bennie’s, too, but hit Nora instead.

  The next day, I was nursing the wound in my shoulder and the confusion in my mind by sitting in my big chair in my cabin with a cup of tea, trying to figure out how to occupy myself for the next month while I was on medical leave. I was surprised when I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the drive. Eyeing the nightstand where I had placed my revolver, I moved to the window to look out. I saw a pale green Forest Service truck pulling up to the house. Kerry Reed got out, then spent some time easing a big, flat parcel wrapped in brown paper out from behind the seat.

  I opened the door and waited for him.

  “How’s your shoulder?” he said.

  “It hurts, but it’s getting better.”

  He stepped inside with the parcel. “I brought you something.”

  While he took off his hat and coat, I set the package on the table and opened it. It was a photograph of Redhead, grazing in a meadow behind the stables at the ranger station, her red and white coat gleaming in the high mountain sunlight, a backdrop of kelly green forest and turquoise sky behind her. There was a small inscription in the corner:

  TO JAMAICA, MY FAVORITE WILD WOMA
N-ALL MY LOVE, KERRY

  Tears filled my eyes as I looked at it. “This is beautiful,” I said, kissing him. “Thank you.”

  “I have some good news, too.” He grinned. “I’m moving to your neighborhood. I just got my new assignment. I’ll be bunking from now on at the ranger housing in Tres Piedras.”

  Before sunrise on Easter morning, I sat on a rock outcropping outside my cabin, wrapped in a blanket. I held the Old One, the smooth stone that had been with me these past twelve days. I had never thought of it before, but right then it occurred to me that the stone had come to me on the same day that I witnessed the body of Father Ignacio, tied to a cross, falling from the bridge. And then I thought about Regan and her painful life of grief over the death of her father. I remembered the image in the photo. She had been just a child, just a child when it all started.

  And then I thought of my own father, now gone.

  Suddenly I understood the lesson of forgiveness the Old One held for me. I stood and cast off my blanket. I spoke aloud. “Daddy, please forgive me for not being there when you were injured. I was just a child, being a child, having a little fun after school.”

  I waited quietly, as if my father might answer me from beyond the grave, but the woods surrounding my cabin were silent. And I did not feel any relief from what I had just done. I opened my hand and looked at the stone. Then I did as Momma Anna had demonstrated-I closed my fingers around the Old One and placed it against my chest. I drew in a big breath and waited. The sun’s face peeked over the top of the mountains in the distance and golden light began to flood across the sky. I let out the breath and felt a release of anxiety and tension, a lifting of emotional pain that had been with me so long I had forgotten I was carrying it. I had finally forgiven myself. I had finally forgiven myself! I said out loud, “I was just a child!”