Storm-Chaser seemed to be the only one who spotted a sparkle of silver metal, when the stranger turned to leave the saloon. He had seen a silver star in a circle, pinned inside the man’s coat. The badge had blue writing on it. He was a U.S. Marshal.
Storm-Chaser gently set down his empty glass on the bar. He smiled lopsided. He heard all he needed to know, and snaked his way crookedly around the tubular bar.
Red stuck his leg out, and Storm-Chaser tripped, smashing his nose against the wooden floor.
The other men laughed. Red slapped him on his butt. “Well, bless me soul, Mates, if it ain’t the old Injun, Chief. Drunk as a skunk again, hey, Red Man?”
Storm-Chaser grunted and wobbled from the saloon, down the boardwalk. He wiped his bloody nose on his khaki shirt.
“How, Chief. Cowabunga.”
It seemed everyone in town was speaking to him this morning. He looked a bit startled at the Cigar Store Indian guarding the Apache Kid and Standing Bear Trading Post. It was this colorfully painted, wooden Indian that had spoken to him.
“Hello,” he drunkenly slurred back.
The Cigar Store Indian had a perpetual frown on its wooden face, which was the same shade of brown as his own skin. In fact, the wooden Indian looked a lot like Storm-Chaser, with two deep lines running from the sides of the nose, down to the mouth, and a deeply wrinkled forehead protruding over mournful eyes. The high cheekbones were prominent, and the wide nose hooked, with an arresting bridge connecting the nose to the face. A carved headdress of feathers swept the top of the wooden Indian’s head. Storm-Chaser wore his headdress for religious ceremonies, and now wore a straw hat with a single feather in the band. On the headband of the wooden Indian was carved an eagle, with wings spread wide.
Storm-Chaser grunted. The sign of the eagle was everywhere today.
The Cigar Store Indian winked his black eye at him. Storm-Chaser laughed, patting his old friend on its wooden head.
He walked into the store and bought a pouch of tobacco, and package of cigarette paper. He twirled an Indian-head nickel on the counter for a box of the cigarillos he favored that were as brown as his own fingers. He preferred the aromatic tobacco of cigarillos to cigarettes, but they were a luxury he could seldom afford. “And two suckers,” he said.
“Since when have you developed a sweet tooth, Chief?”
“They are for my grandson. Dark-Shadow.”
He left the trading post, whistling, with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his khaki pants.
57
Marcelina turned her steps towards Bones Creek Cemetery. Among the tumbleweeds and the cacti, gravestones erupted on the horizon, rising up from the black dust. Her heart was heavy because she could not scatter Salia’s ashes on Samuel Stuwart’s grave. A witch can never be buried in consecrated ground.
A majority of the headstones were old, yet were difficult to tell apart from the newly dead, whose tombstones looked just as decrepit, due to the infernal winds trapped between the mountains and the rays of the overbearing sun. The gravestones appeared like pages in a horror novel, an Edgar Allan Poe first edition penned in the last century and petrified to grey stone. Beside the stones were wooden markings, pitched into the earth like stakes and scattered about.
Her thoughts were with the woman whose ashes were in the flour sack bouncing against her shoulder blades. In death, Salia was not a heavy load. Even in life, she moved as if she was weightless. One moment, you were alone. The next moment, she stood beside you.
She set the flour sack on the ground and swore crying came from the sack. Salia’s cries were carried by the wind, across the open plains of the cemetery, to the highest point, to the top of the hill where a freshly dug grave was. Fresh flowers were piled about the grave of Samuel Stuwart.
She hated to cross the graveyard to where the patrón was buried. She would be walking over the graves. Her footsteps would disturb the dead. “Only for you, Salia, would I do this,” she muttered. She crossed herself and heaved the flour sack across her back, forging onward.
The wind seemed to push the gravestones. The headstones groaned, as if the dead were protesting the wind trying to yank them from their graves.
As she approached Samuel Stuwart’s grave, the sobs coming from the flour sack sounded so despondent, the hairs rose on her arms. Dust swirled around his headstone, dancing in tune to the despair.
She fell to her knees at the headstone and said a hurried prayer for the patrón, because it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than to enter heaven.
“As for you, my friend,” she said, shaking the flour sack, “May God save your soul.”
“And mine,” she whispered, looking at a grave in the corner. She blew on her hands to warm them and wrapped her poncho tighter. She made her way to her stepfather’s grave. With chattering teeth, she opened her cracked lips and spit. Stone-faced, she watched her saliva soak into his name. Flavio Baca was born a fool on April 1st. Mama lay to his right and to his left was Papa’s headstone. For all eternity, Señor Baca was sandwiched between her parents.
She knelt before Papa’s tombstone and made the sign of the cross. She then placed a hand on Mama’s stone and squeezed. “I am carrying your grandson,” she whispered to their graves. “Pray for me. I have repented, yet Tezcatlipoca pursues me after all these years. Pray for me that this time, I have a healthy child. The deaths of my other babies are unfair because I atoned.”
“I tell you, I have reformed,” she yelled and spit on her stepfather’s grave.
She turned her back on the cemetery, but not from death. She still hugged Salia’s ashes tightly to her chest. Salia had been her blood sister in the truest sense of the word, for they shared the blood of Flavio Baca that spilled from his body and onto the hands of two teenage girls.
One of those girls was now dead, burned to death for her sins.
The other girl, well, she repented.
58
Ever since their friendship ended, Marcelina rarely saw Salia. As the years went by, if she wanted to see Salia, she would have to pay, like everyone else who stood in line at the entrance to the Engine House Melodrama Theatre and Opera. She now delivered Salia’s ashes for one final, grand performance.
Outside, the theatre was not much to look at, simply a tin building with a blue sign. Ah, but the magic conjured inside whenever Salia took to the stage.
Salia was white.
Salia was black.
She was all the colors of the rainbow.
In essence, she was a chameleon, possessing the power to become whoever or whatever she wished, all with the help of a magic lodestone, a piedra imán, watered and fed by Salia.
Marcelina wished now she had seen Salia sing in one of the great operas, or one of the lesser operas she made great by her performance. Juan once suggested they spend an afternoon at the theatre, but she remembered the effect Salia had on her husband. Just think how the men must have worshipped her on stage, their eyes mesmerized by her beauty.
A sign hung lopsided on the theatre door. Closed Until Further Notice!
There was only one way she would be able to enter the theatre. She hurled a rock through a window and very carefully cleaned out the remaining glass by punching it with another rock. She leaned over the opening and dropped the flour sack on the floor, then lifted her leg over the window sill and climbed in.
She walked down the aisle between the rows of seats. The patrón had ordered the white velvet chairs, just for Salia.
Facing the chairs was a semi-circular stage with elaborately carved wood and the words Engine House Melodrama Theatre and Opera painted in white, the same color of the Roman columns holding the dropped ceiling of the stage. Draped, purple, velvet folds of material, with tassels of gold, hung from the stage ceiling, cascading into pools of royal velvet. Flood lights ran around the stage, along with an alley, so an engineer could control the lighting. A silk screen hung in the back drop.
The silk screen still possessed an
embossed image of Salia as the gypsy Carmen, her last performance at the theatre.
Marcelina waddled up the stage steps, her shoes sounding like hollow logs under the blade of an axe, the theatre designed to broadcast every word said by the actors.
She stood in the center of the stage, rocking her hips, and heard the applause. Never, in her wildest dreams, could she imagine what it must be like to be loved by so many, a great singer, admired by all.
She went to take her bow, and stopped in mid-air, her eyes rolling to the flour sack. The lights went out. The applause flickered. Never, in her wildest nightmares, could she imagine what it must be like to be hated so much by so many. She did not envy Salia as much, after all.
She took a white wafer from her skirt pocket and held it up to the light. “I bless this host in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said, then dropped the wafer into the sack. She pounded the sack with her shoe, grounding the wafer to dust. She shook the bag to mix the holy wafer dust with Salia’s ashes.
Marcelina waved her arms and danced around the stage, scattering Salia’s ashes. Peach dust covered the stage like talcum powder. “My Friend, you will haunt this theatre. It will serve them right,” she sang. “What a joke on Madrid. The villagers will expect you to haunt Witch Hill, but only Felicita and La India can be found there, rocking in their chairs.”
She ripped the flour sack in two and dusted the chairs in the front row, making sure she left all of Salia.
She made her way to the door.
She heard laughter, like the tinkling of ice against crystal. “Already, my friend, you haunt this theatre. It has begun.”
The theatre masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung at the exit. The mouth of the white mask, Comedy, was laughing, red and white ribbons flowing down the sides.
The mouth of the black mask, Tragedy, was turned down. A tear dripped from his eye hole and black ribbons.
Beneath the masks was a sign with a quotation written by the gringo playwright, William Shakespeare. The sign read: All the World’s a Stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.
Like the Comedy and Tragedy masks, Salia’s life seemed to end in tragedy, but perhaps, she had the last laugh. Marcelina closed the theatre door and smiled at the darkening sky. Tears dampened her cheeks when she thought of Salia trapped inside the burning house. Sparks of fire jumped this way and that. Part of the roof crashed in. But, then suddenly last night, when it all seemed over, Salia had run from the burning house and flashed into a fireball.
“With magic, all things are possible. One can even travel by the spark of a flame and race across the sky like a shooting star,” Salia once told her.
Felicita taught Salia how to fly, and her preferred mode of transportation had always been as a fireball, witch lights the villagers call these fireballs.
Last night when it all seemed over, one spark lifted slowly upward from the ball of fire, and then flashed across the sky like a shooting star headed east, towards Europe and the theatres awaiting any great opera singer.
Yes, there in the sky, I see it. Salia’s star.
All the World is a Stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.
Salia had one hell of an exit to rival any great opera singer.
59
On the walk home Marcelina hugged the child in her womb and thought about the visions of the night before. La Llorona had taken all her babies. If she dug up their graves, she knew what she would find.
I can give you what you want, Tezcatlipoca had hissed at her in her dream. And the vision came to her of a healthy baby in her arms. Juan Junior. Her son. The one who would live.
For years she prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, Patron Saint of Pregnant Women, only to miscarry or have all her babies stillborn. After her twenty-day old son died in his cradle, she busted the statue of St. Anthony of Padua.
This Juan Junior might survive, if only…
In a daze, she found herself back at the bottom of Witch Hill. She held a hand to her forehead and swayed at the picket fence. How did I get here? Why did my feet lead me here, as if pulled by an invisible force?
You know why, the voice whispered. She had not heard his voice in years.
Last night, she wanted a second chance, to be fourteen years old again. Before that ever happened. To be given another chance.
Well, this was her second chance. Forget the nonsense of a spark. Salia, her rival, was dead. Marcelina had the house all to herself.
This time, she walked through the front door.
She slowly climbed the stairs to the third floor, her heart beating in anticipation. Her eyes had a glazed look. She hadn’t felt this rush since her wedding night, this desire, this agonizing throb, as if her heart beat in her secret place. The excitement of the forbidden.
She entered the room at the end of the hallway.
The black curtains parted, as if expecting her upon the stage. A melodrama awaited her, and she was the star.
The idol of Tezcatlipoca was untouched by fire, waiting patiently, all these years.
Well, she had waited too long. She had lusted. She had envied.
“Maybe, the piedra imán has a mind of its own, and chooses who it wants to belong to,” Two-Face had told Jefe earlier, after they couldn’t find the magic stone.
Me, Marcelina thought. The piedra imán chooses me. I shall take good care of the precious lodestone. Feed it three times a day. Water it. Mother it. The shape-shifting stone will make me thin and beautiful.
She imagined herself tall and slender with shapely legs, dressed in a shimmering flapper dress and dancing the Charleston on a table surrounded by men. While she danced, she munched on a fried chicken thigh.
She climbed the steps of the altar. The legs of the panther skin, draped across the idol, parted, opening its secrets to her.
Of course, she thought. Salia would have hid the piedra imán with Tezcatlipoca guarding its power.
She searched around the skin, finding only a black rose. She cocked her head at the idol. Such kind eyes, she thought. Why hadn’t I noticed before how he looks at me with such love? Juan never looks at me so lovingly.
It was inevitable. She always wanted this. She lusted after this, ever since she was a child.
She writhed on the floor, rubbing her backside against the dirt. It felt good to give into temptation. She didn’t even care that a cockroach crawled up her leg, or a spider traveled up her arm.
Welcome home, Marcelina, the voice whispered. Welcome home, my prodigal child.
She lay there with a black rose stuck in her palm and La Llorona bending over her.
Sneak peek at
The Witch Narratives,
Resurrection
Part One
Lust For Power
For what does man live but to gain power in the world?
1
May 26, 1934
The Santo Domingo Reservation, New Mexico
It was near the stroke of midnight. The witching hour. The time of day when chaos rules, along with the children of Tezcatlipoca, the Patron of Sorcery, Witchcraft and Magic. There is but one way a Native American can gain power in the white man’s world and that is through the way of the Shaman or to embrace Tezcatlipoca. A witch’s ascendancy cannot be measured in dollars like a white man’s authority.
Tonight, Jefe’s sleep was disturbed by a future filled with omens. A foreboding drained of yearnings. A destiny emptied amidst danger. A forthcoming exhausted for lust. In his dream, Jefe deflowered twelve virgins. Each virgin held a torch burning from passion. After he had his way with the last virgin, an eagle swooped from the sky, grabbed his shoulders with its claws, and carried him away. Jefe was a badass witch but never felt as helpless before, flying through the air with his legs dangling useless, the eagle’s prey.
Jefe now kicked his legs against the mattress. His body was drenched in sweat, his breathing labored. His heart beat pai
nfully.
He opened his good right eye, being half-blind in his left eye. Something was wrong. His temple pounded like his brain was about to explode. Jefe had not felt such fear since his grandmother, the witch known as La India, carved up his face with her knife.
He jerked to a sitting position, alert to every danger. His dream had to be significant. His nightmare reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think clearly in this room that stunk so much of women. He could still smell the juices of the virgins he deflowered in his dream. He was choking on vagina. He was born cursed by women, for women and of women. From his grandmother, to Felicita his stepmother. And Salia, his half-sister. From his wife. His mistress. His daughters. Women would surely be the death of him.
A man was often damned by the women who surrounded him. Look at him. Married to a shell of a woman whose nerves shook so loudly, he couldn’t resist the urge to rattle her often. It was a trick of nature she was Storm-Chaser’s daughter. Weeping-Woman was proof of the shaman’s weak blood.
His grown daughter, Two-Face, still snored on the mattress beside him. His wife, Weeping-Woman, slept at the foot of the mattress like a faithful dog. The babe Anjelica, born of his dead mistress, slept in her cradleboard.
He had to get out of this room before he killed them all.
He yanked his buckskin pants over his hips and on bare feet left the hogan. A cloud of dust from the dirt floor evaporated from beneath the door blanket as it flapped behind him.
He could still feel the eagle’s claws cutting into him. His back was sticky with blood and felt like his skin was slashed to ribbons. He grabbed the hogan wall for support. Like his hunchbacked body, his hogan was odd shaped and sorry-looking, not a log house like that of some Puebloans. His hogan was made of sod and leaned crookedly, as if the relentless wind shoved it, banishing them to the far ends of Santo Domingo, but no one, not even his father-in-law, his enemy, the powerful shaman Storm-Chaser could have chased Jefe away. His banishment was self-imposed, though welcomed with relief. The people dwelling at Santo Domingo slept more soundly because he was no longer their neighbor. He was expelled as a member, shunned behind his back, respected face-to-face, and sucked up to out of necessity. It was because of Jefe that the people felt cursed.
The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation Page 32