While she never ventured off the place other than to make the wagon ride across the gritty, shadeless trail to La Villa Real de la Santa Fé to attend mass at San Miguel, Francisca found that she could journey across centuries and converse with people in many languages. She met saints and rogues and angels who reminded her of the brilliant painted reredos at the cathedral. She met harlots in beaverskin and virgins white as the snow-crowned Truchas. She walked beside blessed Bernardo Abeyta and caravaned with whimsical Santo Niño. She was the very penitente carved from orangewood and balsam whom they crucified as El Cristo Negro of Esquípulas. She became the stuff of myth, a question whose answer was another question. Had she not loved being awake and alive, she’d have thought how wonderful it would be to sleep and dream always. As nights glided into days, days into nights, it became harder for her to tell the difference anyway.
Francisca never married, proved herself to be alone among the de Peña children capable of running the ranch after the deaths of her parents. She outlived them all, each of those brothers with their saintly names. Under her aegis, Rancho de Peña continued to thrive. A grand hacienda was built on the rise overlooking the ranchlands, replacing the small adobe fieldhouse beside the river. Every stretch of earth was put to use. Her vines bore the richest fruits, her fields the best produce. No one had finer livestock or better-trained horses. The first guitar in Nambé pueblo was heard under the portal of the new hacienda, strummed by none other than Francisca herself. Dances were held, both secular and sacred, hoedown and corn dance. For a time, her world was a desert utopia.
Then the day arrived, 9 February 1880, when Francisca de Peña left her flesh behind. She was cremated—a sinful annihilation in those times, but enacted on her strict instructions—by the man to whom she’d willed the de Peña holdings, a man for years rumored to be her lover, certainly her dearest friend, and the sole person with whom she shared her bruja’s secret.
Juliar Montoya built Francisca’s bier along the stony shoal of Rio Nambé, near the fieldhouse that fronted her favorite pasture. A snowy morning. Crows cawed overhead. Cottonwoods, some of whose recalcitrant leaves had failed to fall, rattled above as the wind gusted through. Pellets of ice hissed when they struck the fiery coals. Montoya did his work alone, watching over the fire while her legs and arms burned and curled and her beloved face flamed, blackened, collapsed, and her bones pushed forth from the searing skin that once hid her heart but did no more. Having blazed throughout the long dank day, fed with cedar branches and lengths of poplar, the fire finally smoked down to char, and Montoya broadcast with a shovel her glittering ashes in that field her feet had known so well. Blinding benevolent snow soon enough buried Francisca’s remains, and as it continued to fall in thick waves it whitened the terrain, softening everything visible so that the world momentarily forgot itself. Montoya shouldered his shovel and walked back up to the main house. As long as he lived, he would never forget the sweet perfume of that funeral fire.
Journeying on in her vivid dream, Francisca kept mostly to herself. She walked barefoot the dry pebbly bed of Rio Nambé in autumn and smelled the sage that bloomed alongside it in spring. Sometimes, when the moon was new, she lay in bed beside Montoya, wrapping her arms around him after he’d fallen asleep. She admired the way he carried on the work she had begun. Itinerant workers who drifted onto the ranch were treated as confreres. A fair wage was given for a fair day’s work. And Montoya, who deplored peonage—Indian slavery practiced by local friars—took in refugees even as he managed to avoid trouble with militia and traders who passed through on their way between the Taos and Chihuahua markets.
After Nambé reservation was established, the old de Peña ranch, along with others—Ortiz, Garduno, Sena, the precious ditches still bear their names today—became islanded within its borders. Of all the Tewa pueblos, Nambé would prove to be the most peaceful and the poorest. Seasons ascended over the valley and veered away. There were dry years and wet ones. The wind blew, and then came days when the air was so still fans could not push it along. There were sick animals and those it seemed nothing could kill. Violent men ranged at every periphery, and some who were less violent, and a rare few who weren’t. All the while, Nambé watched the mountains abide and monumental clouds wheel above their summits.
At the center of all this passage was Francisca. Her nephews and nieces—Mateo’s children; Santo’s—departed the valley to seek their fortunes elsewhere, the boys having felt slighted by Montoya’s inheritance which they thought might better have been their own, the girls marrying into other families in Yuma and up in Gunnison. They never accused Juliar Montoya of stinginess. He offered them a stake in the land, on the condition that they work together with him and share. None of the nephews was ever seen again, though the girls sometimes sent a letter.
Montoya married a gaunt handsome woman from Oklahoma, had children, and died one year shy of the start of the twentieth century. Francisca was saddened that on his death he didn’t join her in the fieldhouse, but she understood her dream was not his. He was buried in Chimayó, three hours’ walk northeast of Rancho de Peña. Every year following his death, his widow, Emily, made the Good Friday pilgrimage to the santuario there. Even in the last year of her life she dug sacred healing dirt from the posito in the mission, then anointed herself and her children with it in the hope it would cure them of illness that loomed about the valley.
Emily Montoya succumbed in 1918 to the Spanish influenza, the same plague that took all of Montoya’s children but one, a kid named Gil, who had in 1895 been born with a clubfoot but was otherwise healthy, an able rider and hardworking rancher. Gil always fancied horses and kept them on the spread not only for traditional work beneath a rider or before a plow, but for breeding. He married, had two children. The elder, Carl, was his particular pride, but Delfino was well loved, too. Carl and Delfino stayed on the ranch working for their father—though Delf, never very prudent, would in later years move south to Tularosa to homestead some of the most broiling, bony, difficult acres anywhere in the desert West. As these generations went about their routines, Montoya’s land changed little beyond its slow conversion from subsistence ranching of the old days to horse ranching.
Coyote fences were woven and laid up along the boundaries of their property. Paddocks were built. A new barn was erected, bigger than the last, then a newer one was raised after lightning set the other afire. Irrigation ditches were dug and redug, cleaned and re-cleaned. Spillways were rebuilt, sluice gates refitted. The tawny land went white in winter and greened again in spring when big Navajo willows brightened like lime explosions among the leafing elms and box elders. Naked cuestas and hogbacks and spires out toward Chupadero were resculpted with magnificent delicacy by the slow hand of weather.
The visions that followed Francisca in her continuous dream were so richly whole as to make her unaware of time’s presence. One thing she missed, however, was the raw tactility of her former waking life. She never bruised or bled now. Drought didn’t make her thirsty. Winter frost failed to chill her. She walked the fields unable to feel the sharp stalks of corn or bulbs of purple garlic. Raindrops in their hurry to reach the ground passed through her body. Amazed, she would extend her arm and watch the drizzle penetrate her palm as if she were not there at all. How she wished she could feel the holy clay of Chimayó, its grainy coolness. But over time she learned not to wish for more than flight and fragrances and the remembrance of touch.
Doubt is a ghost’s most dangerous adversary. Hoping she was somehow not a ghost had kept her going, but after decades gathered themselves and fell behind the arc of the new century, even Doña Francisca de Peña began to wane. Lately, daybreak exhausted her, and she crouched in shadowy corners of the crumbling fieldhouse, wondering if a dreamer could dream within her dreams other dreams. She began to venture more often into the murky world of doubt, only to return feeling worn down, bereft as some cleric who had lost his calling. She told herself that this unfinished presence, this separating spi
rit that seemed the furtherance of a life led, was probably some fond but spurious dream that one small part of her heart had wished into being, even though it lay as dust on the ground. Could it be that a single speck of her waking or dreaming self had simply refused to die and, as a result, was now caught in a fantasy? That she had misunderstood her death, and all this was a prophecy of a future that hadn’t come to pass?
There really were signs she was wasting away. Sometimes she forgot how to ascend the veiled staircase of air. How to smell or see. Sometimes she had to work to convince herself she was the same woman, animated and full of opinions about everything, just as she always had been when this land was hers, and the name Doña Francisca of Nambé carried a weight of authority and respect throughout the valley and outlying lands.
It wasn’t until this boy saw her, this boy christened Mark but nicknamed Marcos by those who worked on the horse ranch—Rancho Pajarito, they called it now—that she began to believe in herself again. She’d wandered these fields for so long that she hadn’t noticed that no one noticed her after Juliar Montoya cast her ashes here, in the century before the advent of electric power and telephone lines and cellular towers, before cars ferried people in from and out to the highway where the school building had been converted into a shining sad new Indian casino down at the junction of the roads to Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Taos, and Chimayó village.
With a look of terror and skepticism tailored by reverence in his squinting eyes, Carl’s son, Marcos, confirmed for her the prospect that she was there, a figure, a shape, a vision in someone else’s mind, not just the spectral issue of her own weird genius. The question was, how could she express the gratitude she felt without frightening off her only witness?
A quiver of excitement stirred the air around her. Marcos, then thirteen, reminded her of her father, Trinidad: strong, rangy, carven-faced, shy yet with a stubborn cast in those midnight-blue eyes. Like her father, he bore a scar on his left forearm. Even as the boy was shocked to see her floating above the field, he wore the same determined frown of Francisca’s father.
Marcos’s mind was racing, What the hell?
Reaching out toward him, head tipped, she gestured, beckoning him to understand that she was the same deliberately tenacious woman as ever, possessed of the same hardness as the earth beneath them. She tried to tell him that though time had worn her down a little, and that she’d been roughened by its voluptuous desolation, she was—she was, she existed. How else could she extend her arm and open her fingers like this?
Marcos stared.
Heavy wind rolled slow over the desert past Tesuque, down what used to be Kit Carson Highway, past Cities of Gold casino whose name chides Coronado even as its gamblers pantomime his weakness, up the reservation road past Pojoaque cemetery where a fresh grave was decorated with pink plastic carnations and a wooden crucifix painted white. It meandered, this wind, along those same lands where Old World conquerors came, brutal Don Juan de Oñate in 1605, Don Diego de Vargas who retook the pueblos after the Indian rebellion at the end of the seventeenth century, alongside hundreds of other souls whose names were also scratched into Inscription Rock but who are now known only as icons, as words, letters, flourishes of the nearly forgotten. It meandered where explorers had worked their way into these domains and, circling as wind and humans and history will do, it blew over barrancas and came down into this valley and rushed right through her. The cottonwood leaves rustled on their numb winter limbs. This was the end of February 1981, the evening when Marcos first saw Francisca. She’d lost her sense of smell but keenly remembered the perfume of greasewood, of piñon smoke and grayblue juniper berries crushed between her fingers, the smell of rainripe droppings left by animals domestic and savage. She knew she couldn’t touch the amber bark of the cottonwoods that smelled like vanilla on hot summer days, but drew in breath—air breathing air—and ran her hand over the trunk of the great tree if only to show him she could, prove to him she was more than some desert draft.
She tried to speak, a wispy gracías, but intuited by the way his jaw tightened and his cheekbones knobbed out, and his mouth twisted into a scowl of confusion, that he couldn’t hear her. Or didn’t understand. Stubborn as ever, Francisca tried to tell him stories about all the freedoms she enjoyed. Told him that, being lighter than pollen, she could balance herself on the anther of a desert hollyhock. And on the tip of her finger, at that. Told him how she could swim up the heartwood center trunk of any of these trees, counting its rings as she went, then pass the rest of the night listening to an embryo’s heart beat in a hawk egg high in its branches, without ever disturbing the nesting mother.
The kid didn’t move.—Christ on a crutch, he said.
She tried to tell him that on starless nights she’d retraced the same steps she’d taken over the many years, along the portal hung with liver-red ristras, past the room he now occupied, on whose wooden door sprays of myrtle were nailed to ward off spirits—a talisman that had no effect on her one way or the other.
Hadn’t he noticed her before? the vapor breathed.
No answer.
Yes, she continued, drifting closer, flowing like sketchy mist off dry ice. She’d been here all along.
Marcos shook his head, closed his eyes and opened them looking away from the apparition. Clapping the fresh-fallen snow off the sleeves of his canvas barn jacket, he smacked his lips in disgust, hiked up the long rise to the house, ridiculing himself for being just plain out of his fricking gourd.
He thought no more about it the rest of that winter and on through the spring. There was work to do and he didn’t need this crazy bullshit cramping his style. Besides, if he said anything his father would laugh him right off the ranch.
The second time Marcos caught sight of her was on a warm June night, the year after that first encounter. New moon, ebony sky, stars arrayed like pulverized crystal on black velvet. Stillness but for the genial hubbub of scuttling stone in the riverbed. The horses slept standing in their stalls. His father had asked him to check on a mare who was late to foal. Striding briskly down the cindered aisle of the wide barn, he heard nesting birds shuffling in the eaves. The mare stood in her fullness, not yet ready to drop. Nothing to do but wait, he knew. Sliding the stall door shut, he set out to kill some time by tramping over to Conchas Park to spy on the vatos, the lowriders from Chimayó who hung out half a mile east of Rancho Pajarito.
He walked up the pebbly road that paralleled the riverbank, listening to the voices in the water with the drowsy sense that if he were fluent in their language he might be able to understand what they uttered. His feet knew the path as he loped along, dropping his head now and again to duck some low-slung branches of scraggly riverside trees. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, he looked over at the austere creek whose pocked face dully sparkled. His jeans were loose, clenched by a rawhide belt with a worn silver buckle. His T-shirt was black.
This was his favorite dangerous game. He knew that if they caught him snooping, they would try to chase him down and beat him up. The rumor was some guy from Las Trampas who’d come down to the valley on a lark had gotten himself knifed for trying to join their party uninvited. Marcos had no rational right to be watching the vatos, but that was why he found them such an irresistible spectacle.
Not that they did much. Built a driftwood bonfire in their forsaken park and drank cervezas, maybe blew some horse, bragged and prattled in Spanglish. Their women—mallbang coifs teased up above their foreheads like turkey fans—sat in their sleek finned cars listening to the radio while they knocked some back, snorted and smoked, drifting through the slow ritual of a weekend bender. For his part, Marcos hid in undergrowth on the shadowy shore opposite and gazed and eavesdropped. Had the night been starless he would have shimmied out over Rio Nambé on a fallen tree trunk to sit astraddle and smoke a butt, concealing the tangerine fire in the bowl of his hand. He could while away hours here and often did.
So it was nothing unusual for him to be ambling back home late a
long this stark stretch of road, as he was doing on the night Marcos again glimpsed the figure in the field. Intending to check on the mare once more before going to bed, he unlatched the aluminum gates which gave a slight clatter. Glancing across the corral to the right, down at the far margin of the meadow, he saw it—or, her—an insinuation of whiteness in the window of the deserted adobe.
His shoulder quaked. He winced and the quietest cry came out of him, a muffled yelp. Whiteness first, then a kind of blue, he saw, a pallid bluish white like watered-down skim milk, indistinct, at first stationary. After several incalculable moments the light moved more quickly than he might have thought possible. How he knew the figure was a woman he would not be able to say. She glided over the ground as a skein of light illuminated from within, a demure storm cloud, away from then back toward the ruined fieldhouse. Marcos stared breathless, seized less by fear than a kind of wishful skepticism, a hope that what was happening here wasn’t in fact happening. Without turning her head—for she did now have features, deep gray eyes, purling plaited hair, a magisterial, even haughty mouth, and on her face a look of abstracted curiosity—she again shifted direction to confront him, began deliberately to cross the pasture toward the oval-mouthed boy. She was as close as his trembling, outstretched palms when he stumbled back against the rattling metal paddock gate and her light frayed, faded, and vanished.
As before, Marcos told no one. After a month of walking down to that lower pasture at the same time every night to find himself saying ridiculous, insipid things like,—I’m here, or,—You can come out now, he himself began to question what he had twice seen. Even though Francisca de Peña was there, moving slowly around him, hovering before him, passing through him, she failed to make her presence known.
That mare, named Dolores, foaled finally, and her filly grew and foaled as well in the ensuing years. Having graduated from Los Alamos High, Marcos worked full-time now at the ranch. He broke new tenant horses in the day and in the evening drove to Tesuque for beer and spiced fries with friends. His bedroom wall was covered with blue and red ribbons, proving his rise through the competitive ranks as a horseman. Although a boy no more, he was unable, however, to erase from his thoughts the apparition in the field.
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