Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

  When I wake up the light in the windows is half gone. I panic for an instant, look at my watch. Five, not a problem. Calm yourself, I think. Alyse told me to come to the big house between six-thirty and seven, and pointed out a footpath down to the narrow river—more a glorified irrigation ditch than a real river, at least up here toward the head of the canyon—across a plank bridge, and up through a rocky corral to their house. On the far side, she’d told me, the landmarks that would guide me to their house were a Depression-era windmill that moaned whenever the wind made it work, and a walled inconspicuous zendo, a stupa, the oldest such Buddhist retreat in the country. Those who erected it thought this valley to be worthy. The birds are still chattering and I’m reminded of a line attributed to Lucy Audubon, the wife of John James: “I have a rival in every bird.” I’ve never understood why I always get such a kick out of that quip of hers—it shouldn’t make me laugh, but never fails.

  As I begin to unpack my few things I realize that there’s not much point—I’ll want to be on the road as soon as tomorrow, go up to the Hill or else Chimayó itself—and then I notice something else, how awkward I feel in my shined black shoes. They look suddenly ridiculous to me, all wrong for the desert. Off they come, as does my gray suit, which is nothing special but seems strangely fraudulent here. Idem, my tie, conservative enough with its narrow bands of maroon and white, but here superfluous. I pull it off and stick it into my bag. Idem, the white shirt. Idem, the thin black socks. Baptismal dishabille, like a good purging of pretensions and disguise, not that they don’t wear suits here, just that I never did. I replace my urban costume with jeans and a sweatshirt and feel more at peace. That accomplished, I search through the cabinets to see if there isn’t some scotch—could use a drink—but find nothing. The refrigerator light doesn’t come on when I open the door, but I can see it is empty save for a plastic bottle half full of water—flat and fluorinated—an earthenware jar of crusty browning mustard, and an unopened box of baking soda. There is a chill in the room now. Time to pull the windows closed, the evening air rising out of the canyon is cold. The birds have quieted down and, of course, what is my response but to miss them.

  Do I reread the letter now or tomorrow? I’ve already read it half a dozen times, but I sense that reading it here on the high desert is going to be different—very different, perhaps—than from the distance of home and city.

  I have gotten used to its look. Cockled white paper in a plain white envelope. Paper heavier and too large for the envelope, folded several times to fit. The letter is written in pencil, as is the address on the outside. Pulling it out of my pocket again I am seized by the prospect that all my sudden attention to it is an act of wretched credulity.

  Being alone, I am able to read it aloud, granted in a kind of whisper, and with the greeting “Dear Brice,” I begin to hear the letter as if it were spoken in his voice, a younger voice than that he must have now, but still distinctly Kip’s. “How does a specter go about making his confession? And where could I possibly start in my apology to you, not to mention the explanation I owe others, you know who they are, who she is. I can’t make what I need to make clear to you in a letter, but I didn’t think it would be fair for me to suddenly show up, the ghost of a lost soldier come alive in his flesh. I couldn’t bring myself to phone. So I got your address, you were as easy to find as I thought you’d be. It takes a kind of strength to go away and another kind of strength to stay. I was right to think you would still be in New York.

  “I won’t go on here like I’m some sort of friend of yours anymore, I know I haven’t been. It hurts to write that out in so many words, but how could it be otherwise. If I’m wrong about this, I’d welcome your friendship but I count on nothing. What is imperative to me is that you believe I have a good reason for writing and that I’m not being cruel.

  “Well, maybe it is cruel, a kind of cruelty you’d never have thought me stupid enough to have brought down on myself.

  “I don’t know much about your life, but there are people in everyone’s lives who would be capable, I’d think, of practical jokes. Whether for fun, or to get you back for something you’d done to them. There must be such people in your life. Who knows? I want to save you time and trouble trying to authenticate this, Brice. There are secrets we have shared that you still must have kept secret. They’re nothing to be proud of but we shouldn’t be ashamed, either. If you have told no one else about Mary Bendel and the infamous visits, for instance, you’ll have your proof that this is no fake. We saw a blue pony once in the sky. You’ll remember that. I still have some charming scars from the peppers game, as you must. After our car accident I called you a traitor. I did because you were.

  “I think these few details from the days we knew one another should be sufficient to legitimate my request. Or that is, make legit that it is me making the request and not somebody else.

  “Time is no luxury for me. I need to meet you. I will assume that you will know where. It is the place where we became adults together. It would be understandable that you might not want to open things up after all these years, but for me there isn’t much choice in the matter, not if I’m to complete something I started a long time ago. I need to entrust you with a story and there is someone I hope you will pass it along to. I need you to be my friend just one time more.

  “Don’t be a traitor twice, Brice. Even the walls of Jericho fell, and believe me or not but my purpose here is to make sure some walls don’t. I will meet you there in a week, you know where and I think you know when, pilgrim. Please come, please listen.

  “As ever, Kip.”

  As ever, Kip, indeed, as forever and always—you’re too much as ever Kip. Shock, fear, relief, unhappiness, confusion, a sense of betrayal, a rending I could almost hear across the tenuous fabric of my contentment; then—and all this occurs within the briefest time—these sensations are drowned under a single wave of hope that the letter is a hoax, precisely because it goes so far out of its way to proclaim itself the truth. Why does it try so hard? I think, and for another instant I say to myself, Brice, you’re a fool, you’re here on a fool’s errand, and even if it is Kip who’s written this, Jessica was right, it may be a grave mistake to give his airs any credence. “Don’t be a traitor twice”? I mean, come on. The audacity of it takes my breath away, the nerve of the man. I stuff the letter back in its envelope and find myself studying the stamp, an image of a wood duck, stern, even fierce, with his green and brown feathers and piercing red eye. The postmark, Los Alamos. Where else? Put the letter back in my pocket and pace the narrow kitchen. A story to entrust and someone to pass it along to, more mystery than I like—is this a story I’m going to want to hear? As I pace I notice a framed photograph hanging over the glass-front cabinet. In the image are a couple of gold prospectors, old-timers with big ears and shabby hats, one of them caught in the act of blowing away dirt and scratching gently in his pan to see if there is gold, while the other looks down over the shoulder of his crouching friend. It is an old black-and-white glossy but has the feel of some daguerreotype, and in white ink someone has written in the corner of the still Russell Lee, Pinos Altos, May 1940. Smile at the convergences. They emanate youth.

  They want for there to be gold in the wide-brimmed beat-up pan. In their way they seem to be gentlemen. The days of the gold rush long past and yet look at them, they haven’t given up one whit of hope that their future will turn up in the bottom of a pan.

  No, it’s not a hoax, the letter. It is Kip. And I think, Yes, I have to be here. Yes, I have to know what story he wants me to know.

  The sky has evolved into a mute deep blue, huge and high. The evening star is faint but visible. I make my way down the hill toward the river. It sounds like a thousand chattering children. I slip a couple of times during the descent and set rocks running. Soon I cross the river on a rickety plank and begin to climb toward the silhouette of the windmill above me, knowing better than to think that it’s a giant in need of a proper lancing.

/>   —Part of your salvation is you were never meant to play Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Jessica said once, a long time ago.

  —And what part am I supposed to play? I asked.

  —You’re both Don Quixote, as far as I can see.

  —I’ll take that as a compliment.

  —Do with it as you like.

  Both Quixote. Maybe so, maybe not, but there was a time when we knew we would never die. We might get sick. We might get hurt. But we knew we would get well and our wounds would heal. If we were sad, a new day would bring us happiness. If we had lost hope, the desert dawn would restore our faith. We knew that those who betrayed us, if we were betrayed, would suffer, just as we would suffer if we were the authors of some treacherous act. Sure, there would be suffering, but it would come to an end. We knew it, we just knew it. Sickness would end, pain would end, the blues would come to an end, guilt and betrayal would be forgotten, we would forgive, we would be forgiven.

  And we knew we would never pass away. We knew, being kids, that daddy death would look and look but he’d never find the likes of Kip and me.

  It really was quite a friendship, wasn’t it, I think. With everything ahead of us and little by way of qualms.

  I am up the hill. There is the zendo and there is the house.

  What am I going to say when they ask what’s brought me back to New Mexico? I managed to avoid answering that question all afternoon. Secrets inevitably create the need for more secrets, and before you know it the secrets become lies, no more stable than a house of cards in a playful breeze. But as I walk toward their home I realize I should have a story in place to explain my presence. It will have to do with Holy Week and Chimayó. That’s becoming big now, and maybe I’ve decided to come out and see it one last time before the tourism and its shams and flimflam artists take over? Have one last look at it while there is still some semblance of what it was like in the quiet old days of our youth when the Lourdes of America was unknown to any but a few dozen locals, some anthropologists, the true faithful. In fact, I am looking forward to seeing my sacred site anew. Maybe this once, the world will display itself as immutable. That would be a precious relief, might be enough to get me to light a votive candle and say a prayer, or contemplate some saint or another in one of the antique bultos. So my secret can be hidden behind the sleight of a venial fib after all.

  The light is on over the door. Moths circle it. The door is unlocked. I open it and say, “I’m here.”

  Chiming, echoed tones, like timbres that start as tastes in the mouth then work their way somehow into the ear. The chiming came from keys. It wasn’t a dream but somehow I must have wanted it to be a dream, or wanted it to remain inside the fitful dream I was already having rather than graduate into something far less interior and circumscribed. The keys—brass tongues licking brass rings—clanged against one another, far away from where we lay in a heap.

  I came to first. The sun was aloft.

  We stank.

  If my mother were there to behold us in our dirty glory she’d have said, —You boys stink to high heaven. My mother would do that, mix her schoolmarm side—which expressed itself in complete sentences, as well made as if with mortise and tenon—with her down-home side. She was forever calling Kip “antsy”—which at the time I misconstrued as “auntsie” because my aunt Ariel was reputed to be consumed by restlessness, as consumed as Kip I imagined, and I had not as yet learned about ants in one’s pants, or had not in any event connected those ants to the state of being antsy.

  Beam of light on my fingers, white with dried mud. Furrows at the joints of my fingers a matter of curiosity, something I’d not observed before, made me fathom that a baby’s hands have the quality of antiquity to them, the creases and puckers in the flesh reminiscent of the timeworn. Silly aching child staring at his mitts. My throat was sore.

  —Stink to high heaven, that was one of her favorite phrases and another concept I’m afraid I couldn’t understand, or else just misunderstood, since wasn’t heaven supposed to smell good?

  Kip groaned; Fernando Martinez, who was still sitting against the dirt wall, was breathing through his mouth, making a rasping, scraping snore; and as I searched with my hands for my head I heard myself give out a moan that came up slowly from the depths of my first hangover. The keys were still far away, at least relative to where we’d slept in the bowels of the santuario, but I recognized, without having to think, what those keys meant.

  —Kip, I whispered into his ear, which was right next to my mouth, as he’d fallen asleep with his head on my chest, —Kip? and I gave him whatever kind of shove I could manage, —Kip, wake up, man. His head was so heavy on me. I pushed myself up to my elbows, breathed quietly as I could, —Kip? once more, and moaned again from pain that flared in my temples.

  I found I barely had the strength to hold myself up. A door, the great carved front door of the church, closed hard far down at the end of the main chamber and made a faraway clattering, like some great wooden wave crashing on a frail, jerry-built wooden shore, and both Kip and Martinez came wide awake. In the sallow ray that gave through the small window, the only source of light in this little cell, I could see Martinez blink, mechanically at first, three four five times, then stall with an open-eyed look of pure fear.

  Wakeful, dreamily maybe, but conscious in an acid-blinded sort of way, I found my focus rise from my fingers, my head, my Kip, to Fernando Martinez’s glare. The minutiae one takes in at a moment such as that! How I zeroed in on not just the red-flushed rims of his eyes but the damp lashes that unfolded, curling up and down and away from them—and then as quickly as the moment came it passed and the pace of things stepped up. Whatever middling state in which I’d lolled between the lofty and futile adventures of the night gone by and those to come was over in a flash. Turning point; and the world was about to tumble down around our ears.

  The three of us began on hands and knees to crawl toward the doorway all at once. There was still the chance of making an escape if we could get out the side door of the sacristy and into the car before whoever was opening the church to worshippers caught us. Kip let out a yelp and the wildness of the yelp was that of a ferret caught in a bear trap, baleful and wretched, and he gave it full throat as he twisted back on himself to see he’d caught his foot and wrenched his ankle in the posito. If it weren’t so pitiful, we’d have broken out laughing, but there was no time to laugh. Kip kept yowling and cursing now, and Martinez and I—responsive to our own fears—shrieked and our feet and arms churned. It was as if we were a single seething and sightless monster, like poor Caliban in Robert Oppenheimer’s and my own favorite drama. Things went black and blank until a man’s voice rose to challenge us in Spanish from down at the end of the nave, and when I heard—with ears that didn’t seem to belong to me—just how distant that voice was, I knew if we ran hard we might evade, or at least postpone, being caught.

  It was Fernando Martinez who showed a modicum of common sense. Kip and I would have been helpless, by ourselves, in the situation, and Martinez probably intuited it. Coming to, suddenly—or at least so it seemed to me—he clambered to his feet, hissed, —Shut up! then whispered what we were to do—I remember his face going very stiff—and we did what he said, no questions asked, no further ado. We bolted straight through the door by the altar that led into the nave, where we more or less faced, in the morning dark, our dilemma.

  An old man. Like the church, he seemed out of a storybook, yet quite unlike the church, he was surely a spent thing. A spindle is what comes to mind as I think back, or a dying summer bee dusted by the first frost, a husk, a helpless wisp. He was, pathetically insofar as we could barely hear him over the music of his keys on the thick ring in his right hand, cursing at what we assumed was the top of his lungs, cursing us down and up, paying out a wheezy string of epithets in what might have been three languages, a little Tewa, some Spanish, some English. It was clear he was more terrified than we, and we knew, in the way boys like the commonest nasty
predators can, we knew how to capitalize on terror. Martinez made his move first; and Kip and I followed suit. As we rushed toward this poor viejito whistling and windmilling our ungainly arms, I felt sorry for him, the caretaker, or custodian, or could he have been the priest? Seeing him there before me in what this shadowy light unveiled as a dismal suit, dark blue or a gray-blue, short at the cuffs and buttoned at the belly, the white of his shirt revealed in an inverted V above the waistband, there with his bola tie—turquoise lump set in dull silver was it? and no, I’d decided, he couldn’t be the priest—half done up, there in his old body, and seeing him fix in slow shock on we who were bearing down on him, I realized he posed no threat whatever. So when Martinez, or maybe Kip—by accident, I assumed—brushed him with a flailing elbow as they ran by, not hard but enough to make him stagger, I caught the man in my arms and steadied him, felt just how tough he was, smelled the coffee, the old tobacco, and what must have been antiquity on his breath, and felt quick sympathy toward him until he recovered his balance and thundered, —Váyanse, hijos del demonio! loud, louder than I could have imagined possible, and cried, —Lárgansen, desgradiados, get out of here, you disgraceful boys even as he sprang forward and swiped me across the face with his keys.

  The look he must have seen on my face was some way equal to the unexpected swat he had given me. We each reeled backward a step, and locked eyes. We stood, a couple of generations removed from one another and descended down lines of thoroughly different blood and values, and gawked like two soldiers of opposing camps come unawares on one of the enemy, with arms drawn perhaps, but maybe not in the mood for any trouble after the day of heroics and warring, who try to back away, thinking, So these are the people we work so hard to do away with.