The World in Pancho's Eye - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  Mikey told him his name and the Indian said, "That's a good Indian name, Michael Summers. What tribe?"

  "I'm not Indian," Mikey said.

  "Don't be ashamed of it," the Indian said. "Indians and Mexicans are all we have in New Mexico. You fit in here with us."

  "Okay, I'll admit it to you, I'm Yaqui."

  "Ah ha and you speak Spanish like me."

  "Como que no." Mikey smiled happily and went on in Spanish, "How could I not speak Spanish?"

  Then the conductor said, "All aboard/' and Mikey stood up to leave.

  "How did you know I was Indian?" he asked.

  "Your accent," the Indian said. "You are freckle-faced and green-eyed, but your eyes are slanted, your hair is black as mine, and you have the accent and skin of a Yaqui or Apache. I've met those people at our ceremonials. I also know that you are titiritero, shaman. Tell me you have not been told you are titiritero."

  "That's what a Yaqui headman told me."

  "See, I knew it when you came off the train and looked at me."

  Mikey went back to his seat on the train. He did not think he wanted to be an Indian shaman. He had not minded it in Cabezon's camp, but after he came out of the mountains he was somebody else. Nobody in his family except Paul would like it that an Indian saw kinship with him or that he owned some kind of Indian magic. If he ever said he had Indian blood everybody else in his family would throw in with Maggie and Viv and he would be exiled forever.

  Then, because he was alone and did not have to answer to anybody else, he decided he could enjoy being recognized as an Indian as long as it was kept between he and the Indian and not broadcast to the whites of his family. This trip on the train had become as good an adventure as Maggie said it would be. He figured an adventure should help a person find out who he was.

  Mikey was let off the train at Lamy New Mexico, in the early evening. An old Mexican met him there in a wood-paneled station wagon with La Fonda Hotel painted on the door. Lamy consisted of a station house and platform in the middle of a forest of the squat juniper trees that people in the cow country called cedars. The country was one cedar tree after another all the way to the outskirts of the dark, Mexican town of Santa Fe. Mikey was to find out that nobody in Santa Fe wanted their town or themselves to be called Mexican. Mexican was in fact a dirty word. Santa Fe and its people were first-class "Spanish" and to be called Mexican was an insult.

  The driver did not say a word from the time he left Lamy until he stopped in front of the La Fonda Hotel. Mikey stepped out of the station wagon and asked him in Spanish where he should go from there. The man placed Mikey's bags on the sidewalk, looked down the street, and pointed with his lips at a heavy figure in a black suit who hurried toward them at the military pace of 12o steps per minute.

  The man in black stopped in front of Mikey, gazed into his face, picked up the two suiter suitcase and its mate, executed an about-face, and headed back the way he had come at 12o per. After ten steps, he looked back over his shoulder to make sure Mikey knew he was supposed to follow, tucked his chin to his chest, and disappeared around a corner of the hotel. Mikey picked up Nina's small bag and ran to catch up, fell in behind the man, and hit a high trot to keep up.

  The only light on the street was from luminarios, candles inside paper bags that lined the edges of the roof of the pueblostyle La Fonda building. The rest of the narrow street on the way to Saint Michael's was lined with high adobe tapia walls that were not lighted.

  Mikey began to sweat healthily and enjoy the trot in the warm evening. He switched Nina's valise from one hand to the other as he trotted. The street crossed a creek that was lined with willows and cottonwoods in full leaf. The stream ran fast and gave off a sharp, pure smell of green cottonwood and clean water. The climb from the river to the gates of the school was steep and Mikey felt the labor of his lungs at seven thousand feet. Nogales was almost five thousand feet, but Santa Fe was a headier place in a lot of ways besides the altitude. To him it was entirely old, beautiful wrought-iron and adobe colonial Mexican. A place on the final climb to the school smelled as Mexican as Nogales, Sonora, with its red and green chile, garlic, and broiled meat.

  The trees and buildings on the campus were enormous. Mikey followed the stocky man through an iron gate between brick pillars, through a narrow passageway between tall buildings, and along a veranda to a washroom. Two rows of washbasins with mirrors above them were placed down the center of the room and the walls were lined with steel lockers. The man came to a halt in another room that was lined with larger, wooden lockers. He unlocked locker number thirty, gave Mikey the key, and ordered him to unpack his suitcases and put his clothing inside.

  An enormous man came into the room. He wore a floor-length black robe with a square, starched, white bib under his chin that was split down the middle. A small, black beanie sat on the back of his head. He addressed the stocky man as "Prosper" and spoke to him in French, then turned unsmilingly to Mikey. "I am Brother Benildus. Your name, please, young man." `

  "Michael Paul Summers Sorrells," Mikey said, adding his mother's maiden name, as was the custom in Sonora.

  "Hereafter and until you return to Mexico, you will drop the Sorrells in your name. We won't use it here. Here you are Michael Paul Summers and will be called Summers." Because he was so stout, the man grunted with every word.

  "I'm the principal of this school and this is Saint Michael's College, also called Saint Mike's and SMC." With only a glint in his eye that might have been good humor, he then said, "We are the scourge of the Santa Fe High School Demons and all other lesser and ordinary devils from hell. You will be happy here. We will give you work, study, sports, and play. If you need soap, toothbrush, or a comb, Brother Prosper will give it to you and charge it to your account. You will also give him all your dirty clothes to be laundered. I have been instructed by your parents to give you an allowance of twenty-five cents per week.

  Allowance is handed out every Saturday. Today is Saturday, so here is your quarter."

  Mikey took his quarter.

  "Now, Brother Prosper will give you clean sheets and a pillowcase, take you to your cot in the dormitory, and show you how to make your bed. After that, he'll take you to the refectory and Brother Anect will give you supper. You are to be assigned to the Little Boys. Brother Louis will be your prefect, your immediate superior.

  "Now, go with Brother Prosper. After you are given supper Brother Louis will take you to join the rest of the Little Boys for a visit to the fiesta and the burning of Zozobra."

  Mikey wanted to ask who Zozobra was, but Brother Prosper carried his sheets and pillowcase out the door and Mikey ran after him. Two rows of beds lined the walls in the dormitory Tall windows with spacious sills aired and lighted the place. The windows were set deep inside plastered adobe walls. Mikey's dormitory room of twenty-four beds shared a bathroom with another room of twenty-four beds. A narrow carpet was spread down the center of the room between the two rows of beds.

  Brother Prosper chose a bed in a corner of the room, manhandled a cover over the mattress, flapped the clean sheets on it, tucked them under the mattress, dropped the mattress on the springs, spread two army blankets over the sheets and tucked them under the foot of the mattress, slithered the pillow into its crisp case and dropped it in its place, folded the top of the sheet over the blankets, and headed out the door before all the air had a chance to breathe out of the pillow. He did it all so quickly simply, and effortlessly that Mikey never needed to be told how to make a bed again.

  The dormitory was not only a room. It was a hall with an immense, scrolled ceiling. It smelled of calcimine and clean bedding and was airy and cool. Heavy curtains hung beside every window. The lower halves of the windows were covered with old, scrolled paper. Mikey did not know one bit of the history of the place, but he sensed that it was very old and had been used a long time by persons of dignity.

  Mikey followed Brother Prosper to the dining hall in the basement of another old building an
d there another French Brother named Brother Anect served him a bowl of red chile and beans, a quarter loaf of fresh bread with butter, and two glasses of rich, cold milk. The chile was the best Mikey had ever tasted and so hot it curled the roots of his hair and made his mouth feel raw, but was so delicious that he could not stop until he ate it all. Brother Anect watched Mikey out of the corner of his eye and when he was finished with the chile he served him a large bowl of tapioca pudding and poured canned milk over it, exactly the way Mikey ate it and liked it in cow camp.

  Brother Louis came to get him while he ate his tapioca. Brother Louis was small, quick, and black-haired with a short, sharp little beak and a ruddy face. He was also courteous and friendly. The Brothers treated Mikey the same way cowboys treated him. He might be one of the Little Boys, but he was treated with respect and reserve. Mikey never felt that Brother Prosper was unkind when he used the pace of a French foreign legionnaire and did not look back for casualties in his wake. The man was a teacher and only wanted Mikey to learn to move on down the road and not let walking distance stand in the way of progress.

  The Brothers were kind to him because they figured he was probably homesick, so in respect for his feelings, they used an impersonal tone. What he liked most was the way they looked him in the eye to see how he was holding up while they gave him orders and made sure he had everything he needed. A kid in Mikey's position might bawl when he saw that a grown-up was trying to look after him, and he could bawl for being deprived. Anything could make a kid bawl when he was seven hundred miles away from his fathers, mothers, horses, dirt, dogs, cows, and trees. Cowboys and vaqueros knew how to treat Mikey when it looked like he was about to cry. His uncles and the cowpunchers he knew looked him in the eye and used that same impersonal tone when they suspected his feelings were hurt. They would not direct one word at his feelings, but watched to see if they could help him keep from clouding up and blubbering. If he did emote because he could not help it, they looked away but kept on talking about some prospect at hand. They talked about something impersonal to help him get past the emotion that bothered him and bothered them. That way they kept the everyday world going so it would be there when Mikey recovered from the crisis.

  Brother Anect did not say a word to him, but he kept a kindly eye on him. As long as Mikey knew Brother Anect he never heard him speak to a student. He was in charge of the Brothers' refectory. He also received visitors in the chapel of San Miguel and told them its history. The church was the oldest in the United States and he told visitors about the priests and Brothers who were buried under the altar, martyrs who had been killed in an Indian mutiny against the missions. He showed visitors the arrow holes in the walls and a spear hole in one of the paintings. He showed them the beams that had been charred but survived after most of the church was burned. His deep voice with its thick French accent droned and droned. His drone was famous among the boys of Saint Michael's and probably unforgettable to the tourists.

  Mikey found out about Brother Anect's drone the next day. Nina had made him promise that he would say a prayer of thanksgiving as soon as he arrived at school, if he did not perish on the train. He forgot to say the prayer at early Mass, so he went back to the chapel at midmorning. While he prayed, tourists rang the bell and were admitted through the front door by Brother Anect. The people went silent when they entered the cool hush of the chapel. Brother Anect turned on the lights over the altar. To Mikey, that altar looked like a place prepared for worship by savages. Smudges of the blood that was spilled in the mutiny were still there. The same savages who had killed the priests and Brothers and burned the chapel had repainted and readorned it. The natives who had worshipped savagely at the altar had also savagely killed and burned there, and then fixed it up again because they never lost their faith in Christ or the saints, only postponed it a little to settle a grievance. A lot of blood was on that altar, real blood from the martyrs and probably their slayers and painted blood that welled from deep wounds in the hands, feet, hearts, and brows of the figures of Christ, His Blessed Mother, and the saints.

  That chapel became the house of Mikey's secret best friends. He never talked to the Brothers when his heart was heavy, but he knew good spirits in that chapel listened to him. His friends the saints had seen hundreds of years of every kind of trouble. That first evening, Brother Louis led Mikey out of the basement dining room and up to the second-floor study hall of the Little Boys. Twenty boys Mikey's age stood by their desks reciting evening prayer as he walked in. After the prayer Brother Louis introduced him to the boys and told them to get ready to go to the fiesta and the burning of Zozobra.

  Mikey shook hands with a gang of thugs that were just like he and Billy Shane. Not one seemed unhappy to be away from home. Several were from families in Mexico that sent their boys to Saint Michael's to learn English. The first boy Mikey met was Manuel Enriquez. Manuel could not speak a word of English, but he walked up to Mikey and started talking to him in Spanish as though he knew Mikey would understand him. "¿De dónde eres tú? Where are you from?" Manuel asked.

  "Nogales," Mikey said. "And you?"

  "Chihuahua."

  "What's your name?"

  "Manuel Enriquez, and you?"

  "Miguel Pablo Veranos."

  "Stay with me. My brothers are in the Big Boys and they'll take us out for steak."

  Manuel's brothers Carlos and Ignacio were in the eleventh grade. They had been at SMC four years and were varsity athletes. They took Mikey in when Manuel introduced him and they called him Becerro, or CaIf. Carlos and Ignacio fed their little brother a steak, but Mikey was too full of chile to eat with them.

  The Enriquez brothers were formal and reserved, as Mikey knew people of Chihuahua to be. Manuel was even more serious than his big brothers. He seldom smiled and he never giggled. The older brothers joked with him all the time to get him to laugh, with little success. Manuel reminded Mikey of Billy Shane. Billy had been serious and no giggler. Manuel combed his hair straight back without parting it as Billy had done.

  Zozobra was a giant made of tinder, the biggest and most fearsome figure of a man Mikey had ever seen. He was the symbol of evil to the faithful Indians of the City of the Holy Faith, so they set him afire and burned him down to have done with him for another year. He sent sparks high into the clear darkness and the heat of the burning effigy was welcome when the night turned cool.

  Mikey entered into the Saint Michael's routine that night when he and his companions knelt by their beds to recite prayers in unison. Sunday morning everybody was allowed to sleep until seven, then they awakened to the prefect's whistle and got up to dress and wash for eight o'clock Mass. At eight thirty everybody went to the dormitory and made their beds. Sunday breakfast was always cold cereal, bacon and eggs, and a sweet roll. Recreation time began after breakfast and the boys did as they pleased until noon. Dinner at noon. At 1 PM the Little Boys formed up with Brother Louis and filed downtown. On Saturdays they went to the Paris Theater for a double feature that consisted of one cowboy movie, one detective movie, an episode of an action serial, and a cartoon. On Sundays they went to a feature motion picture, a newsreel, a cartoon, and a short subject at the Lensic Theater. The Little Boys sat in a group with Brother Louis during the movie and marched home with him like chicks after a mother hen when they came out.

  The Big Boys were allowed to walk to the movies on their own, take dates, hang out at the soda fountains, and do as they pleased until 5 PM. The movie theaters were the terrain of Saint Michael's and Loretto on weekend afternoons and the Santa Fe public school boys and girls entertained themselves elsewhere. The rivalry between the parochial schools and the public schools was so strong that the public school kids stayed away from the theaters on weekend afternoons and went in the evenings. That fact about territory never occurred to Mikey because he was obliged to stay close to Brother Louis outside the walls of Saint Michael's. The boarders fell back into their routine on Sunday evening with Benediction in the chapel and study hall a
fter supper.

  On school days Mikey was up at six, washed and at Mass at six thirty, breakfast at seven thirty, and classroom formation outside the main building at eight thirty. Every session of study hall, formation, class, and activity was preceded and ended by prayer. Classes ended at three thirty and the boys who did not go to practice in team sports could do anything they wanted until five when athletes and nonathletes were called to study hall for an hour. Benediction in the chapel was at six, supper at six thirty, recreation until study hall at eight, and bed at nine.

  That was the schedule of an ordinary day without extracurricular business. Extracurricular business was football, basketball, boxing, softball, track, tennis, hiking, handball, archery, band, drama, the writing and makeup of the yearbook and monthly San Miguel News, choir, altar boy service, and anything else that might occur to the Brothers that kept boys busy. The boys involuntarily abstained from the Saturday and Sunday movies during the forty days of Lent. They made the sacrifice because they were confined to the campus except to take group hikes. They could make the voluntary sacrifice to abstain from candy if they wished, but on Saturdays they hiked back and forth to the mountains until their tongues hung out. Lenten sacrifice was relaxed on Sundays, so they studied, read, played games, and listened to the radio.

  Mikey did not think of his fathers, mothers, horses, dirt, dogs, cows, and trees for at least one month after he started school at Saint Michael's. After that he remembered them only fleetingly. He did not miss them because he did not have one minute for them. He still only applied himself to his studies enough to pass. He loved all activities outside the classroom. He was not one to lounge with the other kids in the recreation room with its Ping-Pong and pool tables, punching bags, card games, Monopoly checkers, chess, and weights.