by Sandi Ault
“Stay here,” I told Mountain as I got out of the Jeep. I went to the gate and peered through the gap. The bones of what had been a lush summer garden still showed beneath broad swaths of snow. A flagstone walkway to the rustic ramada over the entry had been shoveled and swept. Elegant double doors of hand-carved wood beckoned. I approached them and knocked. The right door swung inward with the first strike of my fist, and it creaked softly on its hinges and yawned into the room. Inside the open central lobby area, a woodstove stood on a wide square of tiles with a small stack of firewood nearby. I called out, “Hello?”
There was no answer.
“Anyone home?”
My voice rang in the air, met only by silence.
I stepped inside and went to the stove to feel the iron top: barely warm. The fire had gone out, but it had been used recently, perhaps early last evening. I returned to the entry door and it gave a creak of complaint as I closed it; in this cold, what little heat remained in the house wouldn’t last long. I moved around the dwelling, taking an inventory of its layout. The east-facing main entry lobby served as a hub, with all the other rooms leading off in the other three directions. To the south a wing of public rooms—a large living room with a tiled fireplace. Beyond that, a long dining table big enough to seat twelve or fourteen people. I noticed that two chairs had been pulled out, as if a couple had recently breakfasted there. In the big kitchen, pots hung from a rack above the stove, and all was clean and neat except for two small dishes and a fork in the copper sink, waiting to be washed.
I thought I heard a noise, as if someone had bumped against a wall. “Hello?” I called, and I heard one of the pots ring with the sound…then the faintest squeak telling me the door had opened. I hurried back to the entry and found the door ajar. I stepped out onto the portal and looked around. No one in sight. I waited, quietly, listening. A cold draft of air swept across the courtyard and stung my cheeks. Must have been the wind, I thought. After a few moments, I stepped back inside and pushed the door closed again, this time making sure the latch caught. I resumed looking around.
To the west of the front entry, a hallway led to the sleeping quarters. First, a pair of small bedrooms, one on either side, each with an adjoining bath. The beds in both rooms were unmade, their sheets and blankets rumpled and pushed to one side. On a nightstand in one of the rooms, an empty beer bottle suggested a lonely nightcap. At the end of the hallway, the master bedroom. I passed through its sitting area, and at the far end, a canopy bed dominated the space, draped overhead with swaths of soft fabric and sheer lace. Adjacent this room was a closet and a large private bath. The master suite, unlike the other two bedrooms, looked as if it had not been used since it was last cleaned and appointed with fresh linens.
The third wing off the entry lobby led directly through double doors into a large office that looked out into the trees, some of which stood so close that their branches touched the roof and made a rasping sound as the wind stirred them across it. Here, a desk sat heaped with papers attended by a well-used office chair with a shawl draped over the back.
Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling on either side. I studied the books: Latin American poetry, twentieth century literature, a sizeable collection of novels by women writers. I noticed a group of books by Videl Quintana, a controversial author who had created a tremendous stir with his purportedly non-fiction anthropological accounts of encounters with an Indian shaman in Central America. Some say he had invented these adventures, but hundreds of thousands had become devout followers of his exploits into primitive religions, animalism, and magic; his books became bestsellers. Adoria Abasolo must have been keenly interested, because she had collected sixteen of his books. I noticed a bit of fluff protruding between two of them. I grasped it between pinched fingers and pulled out a small black feather, likely a fledgling raven’s, downy with a relatively stout quill. I felt it vibrate in my hand. A draft? I shook my head.
Still holding the feather, I stepped close to the desk and glanced across the piles of notes, bills, magazines, notebooks, and more, but I didn’t disturb anything. A book of love poems by Pablo Neruda lay unopened on one corner, several bookmarks protruding from the top of its pages. A computer sat at an angle in front of the chair. I pressed down on the space bar, and the screen came alive. Lines of poetry spread across the white field of a working document:
I am going tonight
And I will become nothing
No trace will exist
Of the me that I am now
But the promise
Of what was meant to be
I pray…
I heard a commotion outside the entry, a rattle of metal and a thump against the exterior wall near the front door. I started to move away from the desk when I heard the door creak as it had when I had first arrived. A woman’s voice called out: “Adoria? It’s me. Is someone here with you?”
6: La Vecina
(the Neighbor)
Before I could get back around the desk and across the room, a woman appeared in the front lobby, looking at me through the open office doors. She demanded, “Who are you?”
“I’m here to see Adoria,” I lied. “And you?”
“I’m a neighbor. I live up there,” she pointed, “off the county road.” The woman studied me with mistrust. She was auburn-haired, olive-skinned, slender, and small—the size of a girl half her age, which was perhaps mid-thirties. She wore jeans, heavy boots, a down jacket and knit cap, and a leather bag which hung crosswise from one shoulder. “Where is Adoria?”
“I don’t know.” This much, at least, was the truth. “I was hoping I’d find her here.”
“That big dog you have in your car scared me when I was walking my bicycle up to the house.”
“Sorry,” I said. “He’s actually fairly friendly.”
“Where’s the housekeeper?” She turned and went back toward the woodstove in the entry. “It’s cold in here; she’s let the fire go out. I better get one going.” She squatted, then began scooping ashes out of the firebox and into an ash bucket.
I asked, “Was Adoria supposed to meet you here?”
“I always come on Mondays. Except for last week; I was away for the holidays.”
“Oh,” I shook my head, as if this made all the sense in the world.
She glanced at me, then back at what she was doing. “You never said what you’re doing here.”
“Oh, sorry.” I walked toward her, moving into the entry. “I’m working with an archaeologist with the Santa Fe Public Lands office doing some boundary work. Ms. Abasolo’s land borders the Mountain Mission’s property, and we just wanted to let her know that we will be surveying the fence lines while we’re up here during the next few weeks. We always notify the land owners before we do that, if we can.” I silently congratulated myself for my story.
The neighbor glanced up at me for a moment between shoving logs into the stove. “And did you think you’d find her behind her desk?”
I bit my lip for an instant trying to think what to say. “I knocked on her door and it just swung open. I called out, but no one answered. I felt the top of the woodstove, and I was concerned— like you—that the fire from last night had gone out. No one leaves their house open with no heat in the winter. I began looking around to see if she might have fallen or fainted or something.”
The neighbor stood up and dusted off her hands by brushing them back and forth together. She drew a wooden match from a tin, struck it and lit the wadded paper beneath the pile of firewood. A flare filled the fire box with an orange glow. She watched it until she was satisfied and then tossed the matchstick into the flames.
“You said you always come on Mondays. So Adoria is normally here at this time?”
“Yes, for my lessons.”
“You know, I didn’t introduce myself.” I slipped the feather I was still holding into my jacket pocket and then held out my hand. “My name is Jamaica Wild.”
“I’m Susan Lacy.”
> “So what kind of lessons is Ms. Abasolo giving you?”
“Don’t you know? Adoria won the Nobel Prize for poetry.”
“You’re studying writing with her.”
“Yes. I can’t imagine why she’s not here. Her car isn’t out front, so maybe she just went out for a quick errand and was delayed getting back. She usually has a book of poetry out and ready for me.”
“I saw a book on the desk,” I said, and I went to get it. I came back and held it out to her: “Pablo Neruda.”
“I’ll bet that’s it,” the woman said, taking the book from me. “He’s Chilean. She likes Latin American poetry best. I’ll go ahead and get started, now that I have a fire lit. I’m surprised her housekeeper hasn’t been here and done that already. I’m sure Adoria will be back any minute. Before I start to work, I’ll walk you out. Did you want to leave a card? I’ll make sure she gets it.”
I handed the neighbor my card, and she walked with me onto the portal where she’d parked her bike. She stood watching as I went to my car. As I passed it, I noticed that the bicycle that leaned against the house had expensive, hand-tooled leather panniers on a rack on the back, and they were splattered with dried red mud. It was a nice new hybrid street/mountain bike with hardly any wear on the tires, tricked out with a wide, cushioned leather seat, lights front and back, a horn, and custom pedals. I guessed that Susan Lacy was probably from California, or possibly someplace like Denver, where she could ride mostly on paved streets. No one from northern New Mexico would ride a nice bike like that on these awful mountain roads in winter.
I drove away from Abasolo’s house and onto the gravel road that led to the paved two-lane county throughway. At the intersection of gravel and asphalt, a figure sat on a stump, huddled against the cold—as if waiting for a bus or a promised ride. Mountain stood up in the back of my Jeep, intently focused on the bent-over shape. I pulled over, rolled down the passenger door window, and looked at the slumped contours of a woman in a long dress, her head and shoulders covered with a thick black woolen shawl. “Is someone coming to give you a ride, Auntie?” I asked, using a term commonly used in these parts to show respect for an elder woman.
The mujer slid the shawl back from her face and she grinned at me with a near-toothless mouth and two beady black eyes. “Mirasol,” she said, jumping up and moving toward me as fast as a spry youngster. She leaned down to look in the window. “I was thinking I might have to come remove you out of that bruja’s nest!”
My mouth fell open. “Tecolote!”
She grasped the door handle. “¡Abrir la puerta!”
I unlocked the car door.
7: Friends in Silence
Once Tecolote was seated in the car, she pulled a worn elk hide bag from beneath her shawl and set it on the floor between her feet. She pointed a crooked finger out the windshield. “¡Vamos! Take me over here to los hermanos monjes. One of them needs a cura.”
Esperanza de Tecolote (a name loosely translated to mean Spirit of the Owl) was an old curandera who lived in the high country above a tiny hamlet named Agua Azuela, not far from where I had just found her huddled in the cold. The people from her village and beyond came to her for healing when the powers of modern medicine held by the doctors and nurses at the clinic down in Embudo failed to cure their sickness, wounds, depression, nightmares, or whatever malaise they suffered. She capably splinted broken bones, wrapped and soothed sprains, and made her patients salves, poultices, and teas from the herbs and other wild plants she collected, as well as from the parts of animals and insects she dried and stored in her little one room adobe casita. To cure some clients, she might assign a task—something that must be done to conquer fear or cause a wart to desiccate and drop off, or to entice someone to fall in love, or someone else to leave.
I first met Esperanza several years ago when she approached me in the yard of the ancient church near her home and insisted I come to her place for tea. When I visited her, as requested, she warned me that I was being pursued by a dark element she called Lo Negro, or the black thing, and she gave me a concoction that led to an unforgettable hallucinogenic experience. At that meeting and a later one, she helped me to solve the mystery of a friend’s murder, and to evade being harmed myself. As a result of that, and another subsequent life-or-death experience where Tecolote’s advice saved me, I had learned to respect the old crone and to listen when she spoke, whether or not what she was saying made sense to me in the moment.
I drove down the county road several miles, and then turned onto the dirt track that led to the monastery. We passed under an enormous log archway with a sign that read:
Mountain Mission Monastery
Mass Sundays 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.
Vespers daily at 5 p.m.
Confession Third Saturdays 4—7 p.m. (holidays excepted)
Visitors at other times by Appointment Only
The road was deeply rutted, and bordered on one side by a crumbling edge that rimmed a precipice of sheer rock dropping straight down into a narrow ravine. I had to concentrate to keep the Jeep from straying from rut to rut and too close to the edge. Tecolote turned in her seat and stared at Mountain, then reached an arm back and patted his head and neck. The wolf seemed to regard Esperanza as I did—with affection and a dose of caution.
It took almost a half-hour to drive that four-mile-long road. As we went, Tecolote chattered about how cold the nights were growing and how much time she had to spend gathering kindling and firewood every week to keep her house warm. At one point, she asked me to stop, and when I did, she got out and walked back a few yards and picked up what looked like a raven feather. She held it up to show me and smiled, then hiked up her dress and squatted down to pee. I got Mountain out of the back of the Jeep and let him romp a little as I looked over the side of the cliff at what might await a car that slid off the track. I was grateful we had come when the road was somewhat dry. When Tecolote was done with her comfort break, she returned and rummaged through her leather bag. She pulled out a length of dried tendon, perhaps from a deer, brandished it above her head and called, “Montaña,” and the wolf ran toward her. She held it out, the wolf jumped in the back, and she gave the treat to him and patted his head. Mountain dropped down with his prize between his front paws onto his pile of blankets in the back, and Tecolote settled again into the passenger seat, carefully straddling the hide pouch on the floor between her feet. I got behind the wheel and resumed driving, wondering to myself why Tecolote carried a dried tendon in her “medical” bag unless she somehow knew she was going to meet Mountain today.
Like most of the adobe churches built by the Spaniards who settled here in the late Middle Ages, the monastery was enclosed within an adobe wall. Beyond a pair of thick, time-worn wooden gates in the front of the wall, a buttressed building stood two stories tall with a bell tower rising from the roof. Another vehicle huddled in the dirt lot, an old wood-sided Grand Wagoneer, encased halfway up the sides in dried mud.
We walked through the half-open gate and down the gravel walk. At the main entrance, Tecolote grasped the leather pull on the bell and tugged hard. The loud clang echoed in the covered recess. The door opened, and a robed friar recognized my companion and smiled. “Doña Esperanza, thank you so much for coming. Your patient awaits you.” He gestured with his arm for us to come in. “I’m Brother Tobias,” he said to me.
“Hi. I’m Jamaica.”
“Are you her assistant?”
“No, I just drove the car. She’s the healer.”
“Well, thank you for bringing la curandera to us. One of the brothers has a persistent cough. She always has just the thing.” We moved into a dark hallway, where the only light came from two dimly glowing sconces high on the wall. “I will escort our physician to her patient. Would you like to wait in our library?”
“That would be lovely, thank you. But first, could I take some water to my wolf? He’s in the car.”
“I’ll have a novice bring you tea and some water for your ani
mal. The young man is observing silence, just to let you know.”
In the library, a comfy reading area in the center of the room was surrounded by high walls shelved and filled with books. Long study tables were piled with books, as were the end tables on either side of the couches. I wandered over to the shelves and browsed titles on psychology, self-help, gardening, cooking, philosophy, and religion. I heard a shuffle, and looked up to see a young man standing in the doorway with a tray. I didn’t know if I should greet him verbally, so I simply smiled and nodded my head. He set a pitcher of water, a pottery mug, and a small teapot on the coffee table and left the room. I took the pitcher and went out to the car to give Mountain a drink.
The wolf was standing in the cargo area of the Jeep, looking around, probably wondering where I was. I gave him a drink. “I’ll be right back,” I assured him. I said it again and saw him visibly relax. I had used this phrase, Pavlovian style, to painstakingly train him to stay alone for short periods of time, despite his intense abandonment anxiety. I began with just five minute increments and gradually increased the duration, always rewarding him with a treat after a successful practice. It hadn’t always gone smoothly. He chewed through a lot of my stuff initially, but Mountain finally got to the point where he would wait contentedly for up to two hours if he was someplace where he felt safe. As I was closing the hatch to go back inside, I noticed that the mud-encrusted Grand Wagoneer had left the parking lot.