by Sandi Ault
“Come here,” Momma Anna said. “Do mine. I need rest.” I reached into the vat and pounded on her beautifully formed globe of dough. I punched as fiercely as I could, and then worked hard to try to turn and press and knead the stuff, but it resisted me. Eventually another elder pushed me aside. “White Girl weak,” she said, and everyone laughed.
At last another auntie found a job for me that I could do. She showed me how to grease the trash cans completely with a thick coating of the shortening. To do this, I had to lay the cans on their sides and crawl in, glopping the stuff on the bottom first, and then working my way back up to the rim in a circular pattern. When I emerged, I had shortening on my forehead, shoulders, and upper arms. The ladies laughed at me. “Silly White Girl,” one said.
The dough was dumped into the trash cans and covered to rise overnight. It was time to wash up the tubs and put them away. “Let White Girl do,” Yohe said.
While the bread makers sipped coffee at the kitchen table, and giggled and talked with one another, I worked at the sink to clean the large tubs. Auntie brought in a big basket of gifts she’d prepared for the couple. She showed them to Lupé, holding up bolts of fabric, pot holders, a skillet, and—saving the best for last—a beautiful Pendleton blanket. All the women made enthusiastic oohs and aahs for every item. Lupé started to cry, and Serena got up from the kitchen table to fetch a box of tissues. The others patted Lupé and made little comforting whimpers along with her.
Momma Anna got up from the table and came to see how I was doing at the sink. I whispered, “Why is Lupé crying?”
“She lose son. He got new parent now, not her son no more. These two children, when marry, choose sponsors, new parent. Lupé not mother to her boy now.” She shook her head with concern, pressing her lips together and making a little sharp sound with her tongue. She filled her coffee cup and went back to the table.
When I finished washing and drying all the big tubs and the other implements from the dough making, the women jumped up with amazing vigor and started carrying the tubs outside. They took the benches out, too, and the remaining flour and other supplies, all moving as spryly as if they’d not done a thing all day.
While the rest of the women busied themselves with loading their trucks and cars, Momma Anna headed behind the house to the edge of the field with a determined look on her face. I followed her and watched her reach into her pocket and unfold a cotton hankie. Her fingers drew up a pinch of the mixture inside—it looked like chile seeds, salt, and something yellow. She circled her head with her clamped fingers, then sprinkled the offering onto the slight nighttime breeze. She looked at me with her lips pinched together tightly. “That for Lupé,” she said. “That kind sadness, she cry over lose her son, that need healing, or we all get sick, wedding go bad.”
She was quiet a moment, then barked at me, “You come three in morning. Don’t be late. You be fire bringer,” she said.
I asked her what this meant but she pressed her lips together tightly.
“Anything I need to bring?” I tried.
“Pull back hair,” she said.
I barely slept that night, and when I arrived at three a.m., I could see fires already burning in the back of the two large hornos that had been built especially to handle the tremendous volume of baking needed for this three-week event. I found Momma Anna among the women, all of them busy chopping off hunks of dough from the full mounds swelling out the tops of the trash cans.
“You’re so la-ate!” Momma Anna whined. She handed me a can of shortening, a giant stack of aluminum pie plates, and a piece of cotton. She made a little circular motion with the cotton, demonstrating how to grease the pans. “Get pan ready,” she said.
“Yah,” another elder joked. “White Girl maybe can do that!” All the women laughed.
As fast as I could grease the pie plates, the women slapped and punched and formed the dough into perfect rounds to put into them. When we had well over two hundred of them lined up on two outdoor picnic tables, Yohe deemed it time to start baking.
She dipped an old, blackened deerskin in a big bucket of water, then fetched a long aspen pole and tied the wet hide onto one end with some sinew that had already been soaked. Yohe used this implement to swab out the ashes and pull live embers left in the hornos out and onto the packed dirt in front of the ovens, removing all the live fire and ash. Then she reached in her pocket and removed a stem of straw. She held this in one horno, and I watched it burst into flame after only a few seconds. Yohe nodded—the temperature was perfect.
Serena fetched a long paddle and headed for the door of one of the hornos. She laid the peel flat and the women began bringing the pans of bread dough, lining them up six at a time on the blade of it, and while Serena shoved these into the hornos, the dough brigade shuffled back and forth from the picnic table to the paddle with more pans. They loaded the peel again and again. We managed to fit over 125 pans in each oven.
Frank lifted large, flat chunks of sandstone into place, using them as doors to close up the hornos. There was a tiny glimmer of green light along the edge of the horizon, against a deep indigo sky full of stars. It would be dawn within the next hour or so.
The women hurried back inside to take the bits of remaining dough and shape them into cookies, making intricate ropes and forming them into flat panels that looked like Celtic knot-work, each cookie as large as a man’s hand. They sprinkled these with colored sugar, taking great care to create as beautiful a masterpiece each time as they could.
Momma Anna had me fry sausage and scramble two dozen eggs while the artisans prepared their work. When the women had designed several hundred cookies, they came in the kitchen and got breakfast and ate it hurriedly from foam plates, slurping more coffee as they ate.
They rose from the table at some unheard signal and filed outside. It was time to remove the loaves of bread.
After the stones were rolled back from the openings, Yohe manned the paddle and started removing the loaves from the hornos. The women put padded oven mitts on their hands and began scuttling back and forth from the ovens to the picnic tables. Golden brown domes of bread, their smell warm and yeasty and delicious, lined up like soldiers in long, even rows. I noticed that there was none of the usual chatter, that the women were working in silence. I used a dish towel to maneuver the hot pie plates and keep the rows straight. When all the bread was out of the ovens, the cookies were put in just as the loaves had been. A few women also brought out loaves of store-bought sliced white bread and threw the pieces randomly onto the hot stones on the floor of the hornos. The doors were left slightly ajar for this last round of baking. Lupé went into the house and came back with a small cast-iron skillet. Inside, I saw the green tips of cedar. She struck a wooden kitchen match against the bottom of the pan and when the flame was ready, she put it to the cedar and held it there until the smudge began to make smoke. The women lined up along either side of the two tables, and Lupé passed by each one of them fanning the smoke onto them and onto the loaves of bread. The aunties and grandmas gathered the smoke into the palms of their hands and used it to wash their hair, their faces, their upper bodies. They turned their eyes skyward. Then they helped to fan the smoke across the rose-scented bread.
When my turn came, I inhaled the sharp, clean smell of the burning cedar and washed myself in it. I saw the sun peek over the shoulder of Sacred Mountain and make a starburst of shooting rays into the gray dawn sky.
While the other women carried the cooling loaves into the house, I saw Momma Anna walk behind the hornos, into the shadows. I followed her, and as before, she removed her hankie, circled her head with pinched fingers, and sprinkled her potion into the air.
“Is that for Lupé again?” I asked.
She said nothing.
“Is she still sad?” I tried.
She turned to me and gave a rare, tender smile. She blinked both eyes. “That for you. You got no family. Only that wolf.”
Later, as I washed the pie pans from t
he bake and the women shoved the cooled loaves by the dozens into plastic bags and then into the trash cans to transport to that evening’s feast and giveaway, I said to Momma Anna, “Boy, this baking is a lot of work!”
She looked at me and snorted. “This one easy. We not make prune pies this time. Most time, we do prune pies right after cookies.”
8
Bone Man
After my encounter with Gilbert Valdez at the gas station in Cascada Azul, I headed toward Taos. On the way back to the highway, I saw a hitchhiker waiting with his dog beside the road, a common sight. The BLM encouraged a Good Samaritan practice. I pulled over on the shoulder, leaving plenty of room between me and the hitcher so I’d have time to prepare. I unlocked my glove box and took out my Browning high-power automatic. I unsnapped the holster, but left the gun in it, then reached across my body and clipped it onto my belt over my left hip, away from the passenger seat, but making sure I could get to it if I needed it. I reached into the backseat and skewed my rifle on the floor, wedging the butt end under my seat so it would be hard to dislodge quickly.
It was then that I noticed a regrettably familiar face approaching in the rearview mirror on the passenger side. “Oh, Jesus,” I whispered harshly to myself, “it’s Bone Man!”
Under an enormous knit cap and a swirling tangle of greasy dreadlocks, a cheesy smile lit up a leathery face smeared with dirt. “Wow, Jamaica, I thought that was you. Dude, what happened to your Jeep?” He folded down the seat back in order to throw his duffel bag behind it, then started when he saw my rifle. He threw up his hands in a mock gesture of being held up. “Whoa! Peace, man! Don’t you know it’s dangerous to live by all that hardware? I’m almost afraid to get next to it, dude. Bad karma.”
“Okay by me,” I said, and put my Jeep back in gear. “Get your stuff out, then.”
“No, wait, okay, I was just kidding,” he said. “Is it all right if Bob Marley sits in the backseat?” He urged his golden retriever in the back without waiting for me to answer.
Once inside, he fastened himself in with the seat belt, and I noticed a terrible stench. “God, Bone Man, don’t you ever wash?” I waved my hand in front of my face, then leaned toward the opening where my door once was to breathe air that wasn’t fouled.
He grinned at me, his teeth edged with detritus around the gums. His army-surplus fatigues were stained and torn. “They charge six bucks for a shower at the Northtown gym. Maybe if you could help me out with a little change?”
I blew out a breath, hoping not to have to take one in again soon. “Where you headed?” I asked, eager to drop him off anywhere I could.
“Bob Marley and I were up visiting friends at the pueblo,” he said, reaching behind him to fondle the panting retriever. “We don’t have to be anywhere in particular now. We’re just hangin’. Where are you going?”
“You were at the pueblo? It’s closed now; it’s Quiet Time. Besides, they don’t allow you to bring your dog in. They don’t even allow pedestrians.”
He shrugged uncomfortably and started picking at his front teeth with a grit-packed thumbnail. “I got a buddy who meets me down at the gas station by the casino. We go in the back way, in his truck.” Then, looking at his dog in the backseat, he said, “Hey, is it all right if Bob Marley chews on that Kong toy?”
“No! That’s Mountain’s. He’ll know if someone else has been gnawing on it. Wolves are very territorial about their stuff. It’s going to be bad enough when he smells your dog in my Jeep.”
“Okay, okay. Give me that, Marley.” Bone Man reached in back and grabbed the big black rubber cone. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Give it to me.” I snatched it out of his hand and laid the toy in my lap.
“Sorry, dude.”
I pulled onto the highway and headed back toward Taos. “Why don’t I let you and Bob Marley off at the gym and you grab a shower, okay?”
“Cool,” he said. “And if you could spare us some—”
“I’ll see what I’ve got,” I said, cutting him off.
And then he began to perform the ritual that had earned him his name. He reached under his shirt and pulled out a long necklace made of chicken thigh bones strung tightly against one another—there were literally hundreds of them on one long strand. He closed his eyes and began running his fingers up and down the bones, playing them like piano keys. “I feel a vibration of danger here, Jamaica. I feel an animal coming for you. A big animal…”
I pulled into the gravel lot in front of the Northtown gym. “Save it!” I snapped, as my tires slid against the crushed stone and the Jeep jerked to a rocking halt. “I’m not interested, Bone Man.”
He looked offended, but he hurried out of his seat belt. “But you said you’d help me with some spare change…”
I reached in my pocket and found a wad of several dollar bills. “I’m not giving you a ride again if you don’t do something about that smell,” I warned as I tendered the cash.
He nodded his head in gratitude. “Okay, Jamaica. Thanks.” He opened the door of the Jeep and began extracting his dog, his things. Then he leaned down and looked in at me. “I really did see a big animal,” he said. “It was coming after you. Maybe it was trying to get you but it got your Jeep.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Brilliant deduction there, Bone Man. You really hit it right on this time.”
“No, I mean, there’s something coming for you, Jamaica. It’s out there.”
“Okay, Bone Man,” I said. “I gotta go.”
He pressed the flats of his palms together and held them to his greasy forehead in a prayerful salute.
I shifted into reverse, dug into the gravel, and spun my Jeep around, then pointed the nose toward the highway again and paused, waiting for oncoming traffic to pass.
But Bone Man wasn’t done with me. While I sat watching for an opening in the traffic, he suddenly appeared beside my face, his breath like a feedlot on a warm day. “I guess it’s probably a good thing you have those firearms after all, Jamaica,” he said. “The bones tell me you’re going to need all the protection you can get.” He held up the chicken-bone necklace and rattled it at me, as if to verify the fact.
9
Tecolote
In the hills above the tiny village of Agua Azuela lived an old bruja named Esperanza. The villagers, mostly Hispanos, called her Tecolote, which meant Owl. They half-feared her, half-revered her, and most of them sought her out as a curandera, or healer, in spite of the fact that they also thought she was a sorceress or witch of some sort.
The bruja and I had a short but intense history together. The previous spring, Tecolote had approached me in a churchyard—a complete stranger, without benefit of introduction—and demanded I visit her at home. A week later, following the directions she had given me, I climbed the mountain to find her waiting for me, even though I’d never let her know I would come. That first visit, she made me a potion that gave me an unforgettable hallucinatory experience. We had several subsequent and equally peculiar meetings. I’d been writing then about Los Penitentes, an ancient and secretive brotherhood that still practiced ritual flagellation and—some said—crucifixion in the remote high mountain villages of northern New Mexico. A priest I’d consulted in my research had been found dead, his lifeless body roped to a cross. Esperanza seemed tied somehow to the enigma through her associations and her clairvoyant visions, which were shrouded in mystic symbolism. She offered me cryptic clues, then appeared—and disappeared—in public places as I followed those clues. She tendered disconcerting advice that seemed irrelevant, but—when followed—ultimately led me to solve the mystery involving the murder of my friend the priest. That episode left me with an inestimable respect for the mysterious powers of Esperanza de Tecolote.
As I approached her remote casita now, again without notice, she was waiting expectantly on the portal as she had been the first time. “Mirasol,” she called, waving me forward, “come in. I made tea.” Mirasol was the word for sunflower, a nic
kname she had given me. This time, I didn’t even bother to ask her how she knew I was coming. “Montaña.” She waved to the wolf. He ran to her. “¿Cómo está? Ven aquí,” she continued as she ambled inside, the wolf right behind her.
I stooped down to pass through the low doorway of the tiny adobe home and entered her spartan living space. As always, candles were lit in the nicho before the carved santos, and the low adobe hearth was covered with pottery jars and iron pots. The teakettle hissed over the fire, above which was the slab of adobe that was Tecolote’s bed—what the locals called a shepherd’s bed. The only furniture in the one-room house was the cottonwood plank and stick table and two chairs.
Tecolote held a meaty bone up before Mountain, whispering to him in Spanish as he watched her and drooled. She raised one hand and pointed with two fingers at her eyes. The wolf followed this gesture and looked at her submissively. The wildlife ranger who’d placed Mountain with me for adoption had instructed me never to stare directly at the pup because wolves saw this as a threat. But Mountain never seemed threatened by Tecolote. Rather, he seemed to sense that she was in charge. The bruja handed the bone to the wolf and he took it delicately from her and curled up on the adobe floor.
Then Tecolote turned to the hearth and busied herself with teacups. The large hump at the base of her neck caused her frame to twist to one side and the shoulders to slope downward at an angle from one side to the other so that she seemed always about to tip over. She was short and lean and brown, and her thick calves were knotted with hard muscle. She always wore a plain sackcloth dress, a shawl, and unlaced, brown, curled-up-at-the-toes men’s wingtip shoes. Her thin white hair was pulled tightly back at the nape of the neck.
She toddled toward the table with my cup and set it down, giving me a mostly toothless smile. Her few teeth, like her long, gnarled fingernails, were stained brown. “I’m glad that good boy recognized me,” she said. “You better hold on to that one, Mirasol.”