She descended the stairs. She knew it would be the last time. She lifted the lid of the trunk and picked up the corncob doll worn from its years of strange, obsessive, misplaced love.
Jerry
I am stepping through a window of memory, my own memory…. When I stopped speaking, the words dropped away one by one, dropped away against a great wall of meaninglessness. Yes, one by one they dropped away and then there was silence. I did not have to hear my mother, not only her words unspeakable, although she spoke them, but her footsteps as she walked away, cradling her favorite doll. She had left the others for me. But still she walked away. No hesitancy, although she appeared to amble. That was her way—ambling. It was noon when Mother left me, and time seemed to stop. The sun congealed in a colorless sky. It was like a big yellow squawk and then there was silence. “Bye” was the first word I swallowed into that long silence. It simply froze on my lips as I watched my mom walk down the path to the road. I watched her until she grew into a dot, but oddly enough I felt as if I was the one who was vanishing into nothingness. There was this vast emptiness and it simply swallowed me into its silence. And that was all. My mother was gone.
So now I’ve told you about my mother and how the skirt, the stupid long skirt swirled around her ankles as she stood in the path and waved good-bye….
Jerry set the corncob doll down. She felt a wind on her shoulder. It startled her. How could there be a draft down here in the cellar? And then she heard the creak of the stairs.
“Aunt Constanza?”
“Yes, dear, I’m coming down. It’s time…it’s time…it’s time I looked in the trunk.”
She came over to where Jerry knelt and folded her long legs until her knees looked pointy through the thin fabric of her skirt. Her hand darted out to a piece of paper Jerry had never even noticed that had stuck to the inside wall of the trunk. “That must be a page from Jeraldine’s diary there, you know, my sister, your great-grandmother.” Carefully she peeled off the paper. It was unreadable except for a few words.
“Her handwriting is just like yours, Aunt Constanza.”
“Yes, but it’s hers. Not mine. She was crazy as a bedbug. I told you that already. But smart. Smart as a whip. She had a sweet husband, part Navajo, part Tewa, too; that’s how we’re related to Margaret Santangel. They ran a gift shop up by the Santuario at Las Trampas. Good business, especially during Holy Week. Lot of people make pilgrimages there. They believe that the earth is tierita bendit, as they say—sacred earth, you know. Lot of Indians, including Margaret Santangel, believe in its healing powers. She gets her nephew to go over and dig it up.”
“What does it heal?” Jerry asked.
“Oh.” A dark light did a jig in Constanza’s eyes. “I think it’s just an old superstition.”
A smile played across Jerry’s face. “You do?”
Constanza shrugged her shoulders and looked up. “Who knows. Let’s go up now.”
They stood outside in the cook yard. Lacy clouds raced overhead and puffs of tumbleweed chased across the dry scrubland until fetching up on the chamisa. The breeze carried the scent of sagebrush, and Jerry and Constanza felt the warmth of the early sun of the new day on their faces. They heard a car coming down the road and saw a cloud of red dust rising.
“Oh Lord. Here comes Sister Evangelina.” Constanza sighed.
Two minutes later Sister Evangelina pulled into the drive. She leaned out the window. “You don’t look ready for church.”
“We’re not,” Constanza replied.
“Well, get ready, dear; we’ll be late. Easter Sunday after all.”
“So it is,” Constanza replied.
Sister Evangelina leaned farther out the window and peered hard at Constanza. “Constanza, what’s going on with you?”
“Not much.”
“Well, come on then.”
“We’re not going, Sister Evangelina.” Jerry looked at her aunt. Was she really saying this? “Jerusalem and I are staying here.”
Sister Evangelina looked completely confused. She started up the car. Then there was the sound of grinding gears and the car stopped. She leaned out the window again. “What did you just call your niece?”
“Jerusalem. I called her Jerusalem.”
Epilogue
THE NAVAJOS BELIEVE that when the world was created, the people traveled through four worlds before climbing a reed from the bottom of the lake known as Changing Waters to this present world. They say that First Man and First Woman came with their first two children, who were called Changing Twins, and that they, First Man and First Woman, fashioned a mountain with their own hands from the earth, and they filled it with plants and animals. On the peak they placed a black bowl with two blackbird eggs in it. They held down the peak with a rainbow. One twin took some clay from a riverbed and made it into a bowl. The other twin found reeds growing and shaped them into a water basket. They picked up stones from the ground, and with these they chiseled axes, knives, spear points, and hammers.
Sometimes I feel like those First People. I feel as if I have climbed up through worlds, through windows in time. I have traveled to the edges of vast distances where borders are blurry and voices are muted. Through some mystery, through my silence, perhaps, I blew life into these people. They became animate. Their blood coursed, and as it did it coursed through me and I learned our secret. And here is a truth: In our secret selves we can grow old while we are still young; we can cross borders that no one else can see. We can hear voices that have long been silent. And that is what, I think, I have done.
Do you know how some people can see shapes in the clouds? Well, I see them in the shadows. The shadows cast by the clouds on the mountains or on the desert. The shadows become different when they are cast this way. They tell different stories. A cloud like a flying rabbit becomes a hooded figure in a shadow story, or perhaps an angel with wings.
Our family has the blood of many different peoples in its veins—Hispanics, both Jews and Catholics, and Indians, Aztec and Navajo and those of the pueblos. However, because of our long blood secret, I do not think that we come from the earth like the First People of the Navajo, nor from Adam’s rib as the Bible says. I think we come from the shadowlands.
Descendants of Grazia Ribeiro
Descendants of Grazia Ribeiro
Descendants of Grazia Ribeiro
Author’s Note
I FIRST BECAME INTERESTED in doing a novel about the Spanish Inquisition almost sixteen years ago when I read an article in the New York Times about the secret Jews of New Mexico and the Southwest. They were called crypto Jews. The ancestors of the secret Jews began coming to America as Conversos after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. It was not long before the Inquisition followed them to Mexico and they were forced to practice their religion covertly. After generations of spiritual subterfuge and repression, these Jews entirely forgot that they were Jews; indeed, they had become practicing Catholics, yet clung almost unwittingly to certain customs such as lighting candles on Friday night, not eating pork, and never mixing meat and dairy products.
In New Mexico these crypto Jews began to intermarry over generations with other people of Spanish descent and the Indian populations as well. The story in the New York Times focused on a few of these people who were beginning to rediscover their heritage.
The Nazi holocaust took the lives of six million Jews within a period of a few years. In comparison, the number of lives, more than three hundred thousand, taken during the Spanish Inquisition was much smaller, but the most astonishing thing to me was the unimaginable stretch of time over which the Inquisition endured. The brutality that began with the burning of the Jewish quarter in Seville in 1391 persisted until 1826, when the last victim of the Inquisition died in Valencia, Spain. That an organized program for deadly persecution spanned nearly five hundred years is astounding. The madness that sustained such an endeavor is staggering to contemplate.
I knew that if I was to tell this story, I would have to tel
l the whole story—the centuries upon centuries saturated by blood. This story could not be told as a day in the life of the Inquisition, nor could it be the story of simply one family within one generation. The crushing weight of time would have to be as significant as any character. It took me ten years of thinking to figure out how I could try to encompass this dimension of time within a single book.
I do not think I would have ever attempted this book without the encouragement of my late editor, Meredith Charpentier. Patiently, quietly she waited and waited for me to begin the book. An editor cannot give a writer a voice, but a really great editor can quiet down a writer like myself and help her listen to the authentic voices in her own head. Meredith helped me listen for the voices that make up Blood Secret.
She died shortly after I completed the last draft of the book, and it is to her memory that I dedicate Blood Secret. She was my navigator through the shoals of this unbelievable history.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2004
For Further Reading
Gerber, Jane S. The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Marks, M. L. Jews Among the Indians. Chicago: Benison Books, 1992.
Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. New York: Random House, 1995.
Rochlin, Harriet and Fred. Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Roth, Cecil. The Spanish Inquisition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1937, 1964, 1996.
Sachar, Howard M. Farewell España. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Tobias, Henry J. A History of the Jews in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990, 1992.
About the Author
Kathryn Lasky is a versatile talent who has created picture books such as PORKENSTEIN and THE LIBRARIAN WHO MEASURED THE EARTH, historical novels THE BONE WARS, BEYOND THE BURNING TIME, and A VOICE OF HER OWN, and a number of novels in the bestselling Dear America and Royal Diaries series. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
You can visit her online at www.kathrynlasky.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Getty Images/The Hulton Archive
Copyright
BLOOD SECRET. Copyright © 2004 by Kathryn Lasky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196281-3
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Rim Rock, Colorado
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Author’s Note
For Further Reading
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Blood Secret Page 17