Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

  This was how it worked.

  Insofar as you didn’t exist, the duty was far superior to what he had been doing before. Moreover, there was something about the people here—they were, for want of a more specific word, good. The Hmong had been displaced from mountain to mountain for centuries, the Chinese had herded them south, the Vietnamese had pushed them west, they were reduced to vagabondage, and wherever they would settle they knew they would be able to remain there for the briefest period of time before someone strong would come to ward them off. Kip felt kinship with them. He embraced their plight as best he could. They were outsiders, too, and he determined he would stand by them as long as he could.

  Last night, while walking back to the old Cadillac, hands in my pockets, my nose was sated with the powerful scent of mothballs. I borrowed from my mother one of my father’s old jackets. The chill in the air caught me by surprise, a sharp mountain night breeze. Rather than feeling uncomfortable in his clothing, a kind of congenial rapture spread through me. The fit is a little tight, the sleeves short, but I was grateful to wear it not just because of the physical warmth it provided, but because of the fatherly smell that lives on in its fabric.

  The smell reminds me of his patience when I used to ask him a question about the bomb when our family would take a Sunday drive up into the mountains to see the first spring flowers or the last of the fall colors. His answers were patient because my question did not accuse him of anything. I was just old enough to know about what he had helped to accomplish, but had not yet reached that moment when a child begins to separate himself from his parents and to see that his perceptions may, for a thousand reasons, differ from theirs.

  I remember how I asked, —Did it look like that cloud? pointing out the window at some formation that is not uncommon here but which elsewhere would appear to be a miracle.

  —No, my father said.

  A week later, or a month, I asked, —Did it look like that cloud there?

  —No, not really, son.

  A month later, or a year, —Did it look like that cloud?

  He hesitated. I sat up straight, wherever I was, in the back seat of the car, on a hiking trail.

  —That one?

  —Yeah, did it look like that one there?

  He said then, quietly, —Maybe just a little like that one, yes.

  —Like that one there, I verified, my mouth ajar as I memorized the massive white cloud with blue-gray shadows.

  —It must have been something, all right, Dad, I said.

  Silence followed.

  —It was something to see, he said, finally.

  When I might have looked at him I didn’t. I looked up only.

  Another time I asked my father, —Did you ever stop to think how weird it is we live on this lava-flow mesa that was made by a big old explosion when this volcano blew up and that you made a blowup just like it?

  He said, —I did.

  I waited.

  He said, —But you’ve got it wrong, Brice. The explosion of Jemez volcano made the Trinity blast look like nothing.

  I believed him at the time because he was my father and what he told me was to be believed, but I was at the turning point and soon enough everything that was accomplished in the labs would be, by my sights, against the laws of nature and man. As it happens, he was correct about the Jemez eruption being greater than Alamogordo. They found ash from the volcano all the way over in Kansas. Man had not yet bested nature, but a rivalry between them had commenced.

  For all that, I loved my father, do still. My fingers feel for buttons along the front of the jacket, but they are gone. Knowing my father as I did, I search the side pockets for the missing buttons and there they are, a decade later, waiting to be sewed back on. If I have to do it myself with my ten thumbs, I think, I will make sure they are back on by the time I leave for New York.

  The coffee had cut its way through the gin. Good thick black coffee. Mom keeps as furnished a house now as she did when we were children, her pantry stocked with just enough of what is needed to live quietly, in comfort. Her grace has abided by her, it seems to me, and her quirks may spin like curious weights tied to the ends of the threads of a mobile, but the center does not change—she, as a whole, remains in balance. Queer balance, but balance.

  I have promised to come back tonight. I was surprised a little that she didn’t take me up on my offer to drive her to Chimayó for Good Friday services, but it is possible she could tell that I was hoping, in fact, she’d decline the invitation. On the other hand, she well may not have needed any hints from me in order to decline. She had her own theories about Chimayó.

  “I don’t believe in dirt, Brice,” she’d said. “I went down there once some years back and saw where they piled it, over by the latrines, and that was enough for me.”

  “What do you mean that was enough for you? I don’t get it.”

  “The hole with the sacred dirt? I thought you were a pundit on this topic. The hole is supposed to refill itself, Brice. That’s the miracle of Chimayó, that the posito is self-replenishing. When I saw the mound of yellow dirt next to the toilets I went into the church and got some soil from the hole. I saw they matched and that was it. To think they store it right next to an outhouse.”

  In the old days, I would have interpreted her skepticism about Chimayó as a barb for me, an innuendo meant to repay me for the ordeal I put her through way back when. I didn’t say a word, though. She’s allowed. And besides, I admire the distortions that can come about over the course of the years—that is, how we can come to believe whatever we need to believe in order to survive. What a luscious irony that I, the sometime atheist, would believe to this day that Chimayó remains a sacred place whether or not they bring in a little extra earth to help the miracle along, while she, the believer, is able to endorse things infinitely more far-fetched than what is proposed down at the little adobe church, but scoffs at the healing powers the soil is famed for far and wide. For me, the archbishop and church elders could excavate their sacred soil straight out of the latrine and I would still have the firm faith that there is something special and healing about it. And yet, I can look at the colorful carving of Christ on the cross above the altar at Chimayó and see nothing more than a folk artist’s rendering of a man who defied the establishment and met with very harsh punishment for his dissension. That a religion would arise in his wake, a religion with the magnitude of impact Christianity has had over the centuries—that seems the miracle to me. But still, I don’t know—I waver.

  I waver because whenever I approach the valley an ineffably compelling joy comes over me.

  The feeble heater in the car cranked up all the way. The wind whistling at the windows. A draft of cool air seeping in around my feet and calves. The old bucket humming along the road under the stars. On the road down to the desert, past San Ildefonso pueblo, across the flats toward Pojoaque—Po-Su-Way-Gay, if I remember right, which means the watering-drinking-place where three rivers come together. Toward Nambé and the badlands beyond, not sober but not drunk either, me at the wheel and this time all alone. No Kip, no Martinez, just me and my sensation of profound unreality coupled with crystal clarity. I turn the radio on. Crank the big knob over and run through a series of crackling stations until I happened upon the old Hank Snow song, “Keep On Movin’.”

  Along the way, even at that late hour, I saw one ghostly figure and then another, walking along the shoulder of the highway, serious pilgrims who have set out early to be there for first light and Communion at the santuario. I slowed down, didn’t want to hit anybody. Coyote fences and grand cottonwoods that looked like giant puppeteers along Rio Nambé. Many more settlements, houses and trailers, side roads disappearing into the dark, than there were years ago. Horses behind barbed-wire fences caught in the headlamps. And then the settlement of Nambé fell behind and once more the open desert. Sandstone formations stood out there in the blackness, shaped like bishops and circus bears, and while I couldn’t clearly see them as prese
nces—see them rather as negative statuary blocking out the stars—I knew their color and in some cases knew what it was like to climb them. I came to the place in the road where you bear left to go down to the valley of Chimayó. Long gentle curves as the asphalt clefts the wilderness. Way off in the distance, over my shoulder to the south, the amber lights of Española shined as I descended into the town with the same ease as if I did this every night of my life. I parked by the old cattle guard and walked down to the church.

  The plaza was almost the same as when I was fifteen. There seem to be more walls and fences than before. The church was open—it would remain open to pilgrims all night long, but I didn’t go inside. I walked instead its perimeter, the collar of my father’s jacket turned up around my neck against the dewy cold, and tried to connect this man who is me to that boy named Brice who no longer exists. Stars sharp, the moon low to the west. The trees are taller, and the two biggest cottonwoods out front by the gate were gone. These wooden picnic tables were new, and what appeared to be concrete benches down in the outdoor chapel behind the church I didn’t remember. The town was less quiet for the hour than I thought it would be. The church-run concession was open, selling coffee and hot chocolate. It would be much livelier with throngs of penitentes later in the day, they say as many as twenty-five or even thirty thousand people this year, walking across the April scratchland. Back in the fifties no more than a hundred pilgrims congregated here, some of them having walked great distances, maybe carrying a heavy homemade cross in honor of their Savior all the way. Before that, back before the turn of the century, you might have seen zealous members of the Penitente Brotherhood, come to dramatize the fourth station—El Encuentro—when Christ meets his mother—and to enact a Procesión de Sangre de Cristo complete with Christ’s three falls, his flogging, the ministrations of Veronica and Simon the Cyrenian, culminating in an actual Crucifixión (rope was used rather than spikes, but the effect must have been devastating to these true believers). The flagellants and extremists may be gone, but the desire to walk some miles across the desert as a way of sharing with Jesus the tribulations of the Via Crucis remains. All night, all day, they come, in wheelchairs and pushing baby strollers, some hobbling behind canes, others on crutches, some barefoot with sackcloth robe, some wearing Nikes and gaudy Day-Glo sweatsuits. Military fatigues are donned by quite a few, and there are those in solemn groups with their MIA/POW flags aloft, black background with white lettering, THEY STILL WAIT, their own warrior cross. Low-rider chariots with rap music blasting, silent horseback riders. By the end of the day some will be somber, others festive. Many will fast and pray and, having touched the sacred soil, walk back home. For others the tailgate parties will begin, with tamales and fresh burritos and posole, with thick lemonade and lukewarm beer.

  The moon last night, past full but still heavy with light, was setting over the long measure of hill, sinking into the scrawny bush up there when I heard a pigeon coo in the eaves. The forsythia bushes at the back of the santuario yielded a delicate, sweet scent in the dewy air. I couldn’t see the hands on my watch, but it must have been about three-thirty or four. Contentment welled within. Whereas most people were in their beds asleep, there were a few owls who understood the pleasure of darkness. We were alive, terribly and completely alive. I am not always an owl but for this one night I was among them, just like I was that once when Kip and I slept in the depths of the church here.

  The creek trickles pleasantly, carving away at the pale loam. There is the heavy smell of burnt leaves, or scorched soil, which hangs in the air—as I suspected, the fields have lately been burned to clear the ground for the new shoots of meadow grass to grow. I remember that smell—indeed, I remember everything in this place—with much more ease than I might have expected.

  It is far too late to get a room at the Rancho de Chimayó, and too early to wander and wait for sunrise, so I decide to get a little sleep in the rear seat of the car. The chill filters down through the starry night and edges under my skin. It hurts, in a way, and is also exhilarating. My back aches—a tart, sharp flame—my punishment for having jumped over my mother’s fence. I rub it as best I can and think, Pathetic, Brice, you rickety corpse. Then I think of calling Jessica. There must be a pay phone somewhere. But what would I say?

  I cradle my head in my arms and try to find a position in which my back doesn’t throb. My eyes are open and out the window I see a shower of shooting stars, watching them trace quickly their way down the heavens one after another over a period of several minutes. Soon the shower is over and I huddle under my jacket, wondering will I ever get any sleep at all, wondering whether I’d have been wiser to have stayed at Bonnie Jean’s house or my mother’s, like they asked, and for once have been accommodating and sociable. Despite the pain, however, and the knowledge that I’d have been a better son and sibling for having remained on the Hill, I know that being here is somehow right, for the best. Like my mother herself used to say, —I’ll sleep when I’m dead, tonight I dance. I’m not dancing, but there is to this a kind of dance. You’re not that old yet, I tell myself. Lay some claim still to what youth is left in you.

  Dawn lights the valley. A neighborhood rooster crows once and then twice and then falls silent. Some dogs are barking. I must have slept a little. I look up and see the faces of five or six children in the windows of the car, their dark eyes looking me over, their hands and noses pressed against the glass, peering in as if I were some strange saint enclosed in a casket. For an instant I am overwhelmed by the thought that I might be home in New York, dreaming a dream of having come to New Mexico to meet my childhood friend once more—but then I begin to come to and remember. They don’t move, those kids. And they don’t smile.

  I run my hand over my forehead, and when I sit up in the back seat they take off kicking up dust as they go. I have an urge to yell out at them, but what would I say and why yell? The sun is not yet dry and baking, but it will be. My shoulder and neck ache now as well as my back. I cough, and notice how every sound I make inside the shell of this old car is amplified, so that my breathing, my moaning and swallowing, my shifting about in here to find a comfortable position, is deafening.

  Brice, you old dolt, I think. Vaulting your mama’s fence like you were ten years old, sleeping in the back of a car like some vagabond or runaway. Viernes Santo, Good Friday, man—penance for the apostate. Your pains are not inappropriate.

  Everything seems possible in the morning. The day is before you and you have done nothing as yet to foul your lines, you’ve uttered nothing regrettable, you’ve heard nothing you’d rather not have heard. Your senses are coming to focus but are not so sharp as to allow the world without to enter you, pollute your personal environment, convert you into the man you become during the course of the day. I feel indescribable peace alone, awake, in the morning. Sleep has intervened, however subtly, and I’m born new, no matter that the sun has come up to show me for the wearied assayer that I am. The photograph of the two prospectors.

  Día de la Cruz, my Spanish comes back to me. I step out of the car and draw myself up slowly to height. Pilgrims are everywhere. Smoke reaches up past the shadows, rising from where bread and chilies will be baked to offer the visitors today, some of them the very walkers I passed along the road under the stars. They made it, and will be among the first to enter the church, as they’d hoped, to receive the Communion wafer and the wine —Tomad y corned todos de él, porque esto es mi cuerpo . . . tomad y bebed todos de él, porque este es el cáliz de mi sangre—as strange a rite as exists, to enact the cannibalization of their Messiah, and afterward be granted the privilege of entry to the small room where the sacred healing dirt is available to each repentant believer. Several women and a man stand before the open wooden gates of the courtyard of the church. The very first of the processioners to arrive.

  I begin to wonder, as I have off and on for the past few days, what Kip will look like after all these years, what he will sound like. My stomach grumbles, perhaps respo
nding to all these lariats of smoke rising from ovens in the village. I decide to get coffee and something to eat. I pat my trouser pockets for the keys to the car, find them, and begin to lock the doors. Then I think better of it. Why worry about such matters. I have nothing worth thieving, anyway. Moreover I believe, perhaps naively, that even if I did, there’s no one who would want to steal from me. Not here, not this morning.

  The strangest letter my mother ever wrote me, back when I was in college, when Kip and Jess and I lived together, opened with the words, “Let me tell you a story. It is a kind of parable. The parable of the cowbird and the hermit crab.”

  I resented the letter at the time, but later I learned to prize it for its impossible fusing of directness and obliquity. This is what she wrote.

  “There is a species of bird known as the crown-headed cowbird that thrives in the eastern part of the United States, and this bird has developed a most eccentric way of perpetuating itself. Unlike most birds, the cowbird builds no nest in the spring. Instead, it lays its eggs in nests of other birds, and depends on others to hatch and raise its young. The cowbird is neither fastidious about habitat—deciduous woods or conifer, farmland or suburban garden, its preferences are broad—nor particular about who will wind up parenting its young. A yellow warbler will do just as well as a vireo, a spotted thrush as well as a song sparrow. The cowbird lays her egg at dawn. Sometimes she has removed an egg from the nest of the poor host bird the day before, sometimes she throws out the host’s own egg the day after. A few birds, the robin and catbird for instance, won’t tolerate her frightful and parasitic conduct. Either they’ll abandon the nest, or build themselves a new floor of twigs and leaves right over the cowbird egg. Or else they’ll simply throw the unwelcome eggs out. But these ladies are the exception. Most of the victims fail to fight back, and rather than incubating, hatching, and feeding their own young, they wind up raising a brood of orphaned cowbirds.