Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  “That’s so horrible.”

  Abuela nodded. “It was a terrible time.”

  “Do you ever …” Bettina hesitated, then went on. “At this time of year, do you ever want to go back … to be there for when their spirits return …”

  Abuela touched a hand to Bettina’s cheek. “I go every year,” she said. She moved her hand and laid it between her breasts. “Here. In my heart.”

  “Next year I will burn candles for them,” Bettina said.

  “They would like that,” Abuela told her. “But now, come, chica. We have work to do.”

  They were not alone in their task. Other curanderas walked in the immense acreage of the Panteon Nacional as they did, following a winding path through the graves, pausing wherever a spirit still lingered.

  “Es el hora de ir, mi encantó uno,” they would say. It is time to go, my loved one.

  And they would wait until the spirit understood and drifted away, then move on themselves. It was close to dusk when Abuela and Bettina started back for the gates of the cemetery. As they drew near to Tío Gerardo’s grave once more, Bettina spotted a little black dog with a white patch over his left eye, sitting on the grave. It was looking at them, expectant, tongue lolling.

  “Look,” Bettina said. “What a funny-looking dog, with that patch on his eye.”

  She turned to find Abuela standing still, regarding the dog with an expression Bettina had never seen before, a strange mix of sadness, surprise, and fear. That last emotion woke a shiver up Bettina’s spine. She had never seen her grandmother show fear of anything.

  “What is it, Abuela?” she asked, her voice hushed.

  “His name is Pedrito,” Abuela replied. “He was my dog when I was a little girl.”

  Bettina couldn’t imagine her abuela as a little girl. Then she realized what Abuela had just said. If the dog had been hers when she was a little girl…

  “You mean he looks like your Pedrito,” she said.

  Because that dog on Tío Gerardo’s grave was no spirit animal, no ghost. It was a living, breathing creature, of that she was sure.

  “No,” Abuela said. “It is him. I would know him anywhere. We were inseparable for years. He went away when I was only a little younger than you are now.”

  “Went away. You mean he died?”

  Bettina couldn’t take her gaze from the dog. He reminded her a little of her cadejos, without their outrageous coloring and goat’s feet. But he had their lolling smile and obvious good nature.

  “No, he didn’t die,” Abuela said. “He simply ran off one day and we never saw him again.”

  As if that had been his cue, the dog jumped to his feet. He barked at them, once, twice, a third time, then scampered off through the graves until he was lost to their view.

  “What… what does it mean, Abuela?” Bettina asked. “You seemed almost frightened…”

  Abuela smiled. “Frightened? Of Pedrito? ¡No probable! But seeing him there on Gerardo’s grave certainly startled me.”

  “Papa says we must be careful of dogs,” Bettina said. As she spoke, she could feel los cadejos stir inside her. “That they can open doors into other worlds.”

  “Sí,” Abuela agreed. “But they can close them as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Come, we should join the others. Your mama will be thinking that we have wandered off into the mountains.”

  Bettina let herself be led out of the Panteon Nacional, back to her tío’s house. Once they were outside the cemetery, she kept an eye out for the little black dog with the white patch over his eye, but he didn’t make a reappearance. By the time she did see him again, it was too late to undo the damage he had done.

  SONORAN DESERT, NOVEMBER / DECEMBER

  The next night, Bettina was home in her own bed. Tomorrow was Sunday and she’d promised Mama that she would go with her to early mass, so she hadn’t stayed up as late as she normally did. But it was now close to midnight and she still couldn’t sleep. She wasn’t sure why, since she was tired enough. Perhaps it was having stayed up so late the past few nights in Nogales, or the stirring of los cadejos who sometimes woke an inexplicable restlessness in her. Perhaps it was only the change in the air pressure. The skies had been heavily overcast all day, the air thick with the promise of a thunderstorm that had yet to come. So far it remained on the horizon, lightning flickering above the mountains accompanied by the faint rumble of distant thunder. Occasionally, the clouds above released a scattering of fat raindrops that were quickly absorbed into the ground. So far, that was all.

  After a while she got up and sat by the window, looking out at the darkness that lay beyond the spill of their yard light. As she watched, another splatter of rain ran across the yard, spitting up dust as it hit the ground and was then swallowed by the thirsty dirt. The grumbling thunder sounded closer.

  She was about to return to her bed when she saw movement at that place where the darkness of the desert came up to meet the farthest spread of the yard light’s illumination. She leaned closer, expecting to see a coyote, hunting cats, perhaps, or a scavenging javelina. But it was the dog who stepped into the light and sat down in the dust. The little black dog with the white patch over his eye that she’d last seen by Tío Gerardo’s grave. He was ignoring the raindrops, all of his attention focused on their house.

  Bien, she thought. This time I will have a closer look at you.

  But before she could dress and leave her room, her abuela came walking around the side of the house. The dog waited for her as she approached him, his head cocked to one side, pink tongue hanging from the side of his mouth.

  Bettina sat still. An uncomfortable feeling of guilt rose in her, as though she’d planned to sit here and spy on her grandmother, but she couldn’t turn away now. The dog bounced to his feet as Abuela drew near to him, then bounded away into the darkness. Abuela appeared to hesitate for a moment, then followed him out into the desert.

  Where was she going, following that dog? It seemed so strange, especially remembering that unfamiliar trace of fear in Abuela’s features when they’d first come upon the little dog in the Panteon Nacional.

  At her window, Bettina pressed closer to the glass. It was no use. Beyond the range of the yard light, the darkness was simply too profound. The glass fogged a little from her breath. Suddenly lightning flashed close by, illuminating the yard and the desert beyond. She had a glimpse of tall saguaro, clusters of prickly pear and cholla, her abuela’s back, some distance from the house now, then the light was gone. She jumped as a thunderclap boomed directly overhead, pulse quickening.

  The rain followed almost immediately, great sheets of it that came down so hard that even the backyard was no longer visible. It was as she finally turned from the window that the sensation came to her, as abruptly as the flick of a light switch. One moment she was aware of her abuela’s presence in the world, the connection that stretched between them, a thousand colored threads of experience and memory all twisted together into the braid that was their relationship. Then it was gone. Cut clean and sudden as though it had never existed. Abuela was no longer in the world. No longer in la época del mito. No longer in anyplace that Bettina knew.

  The loss tore a hole in her heart that she could not imagine filling again, a bottomless shaft that seemed to put a lie to everything that was good—kindness, hope, love—leaving only an unfamiliar despair.

  She couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night, hoping she was wrong, knowing she was not. All she could do was sit at the window and stare out into the rain, searching, waiting for the familiar connection to her grandmother to return. But it never did.

  The next day, no one could help her. Papa had gone off into the desert with his peyoteros as soon as the family had returned from Nogales and everyone else appeared to have an enchantment clinging to them, an onion-skin layer of false memories, thin but impenetrable, that left her frustrated and confused. When she asked after Abuela, Mamá and Adelita looked surprised,
spoke of the trip she’d been planning, how she wouldn’t be returning for some time. They spoke as though this was old news, as though Abuela had left on this trip a long time ago.

  Abuela’s friends were no help either. In town, in the desert, in la época del mito, the enchantment held true. She hitched a ride out to the Manuels with Juan Vicandi, one of Adelita’s older friends who owned a car, but Loleta and Ban seemed as surprised by her questions and offered no new answers to them. The gossips in the market, who could easily devote an hour to someone’s change of hair color, were remarkably incurious. In the desert she spent hours tracking down prickly-spined cholla spirits and the calm, slow-speaking saguaro aunts and uncles, she spoke to jackrabbits and phainopepla and Coyote Woman, and learned no more. Deep in la época del mito, she found Tadai one afternoon, sunning himself on a flat red rock, and he told the same tale.

  It was not that Abuela had never existed, only that she had gone away, had been gone for some time now, and no one was worried or even curious. It wasn’t until Papa finally returned she was told another tale. She walked out into the desert with him the evening he came home, comforted by his presence, the smell of his cigarettes, the clasp of his hand around her own. They sat on a rock above a dry wash as she finished her story. From where they sat they could look down on the winding path the wash had taken, the bed still damp from the recent rains. They could hear quail murmuring under the palo verde and mesquite, and the breeze brought them a brief, pungent scent of javelina, here, then gone. In the west, the sunset cast a sliver of orange and pink across the lightly clouded sky.

  “Este perrito,” he said when she was done. “She said it was her pet when she was a child?”

  Bettina nodded. “He was with her for years until he ran away.”

  Papa grew sorrowful. “Era el payaso perro de los dioses viejos,” he said. It was the clown dog of the old gods.

  Bettina grew cold. She shook her head, refusing to believe. It couldn’t be. But she remembered the stories both Abuela and Papa had told her about la Maravilla, how it returned for its master or mistress to show them the way to Mictlan, the land of the dead. Tears welled in her eyes. How had she not connected the stories with the arrival of her abuela’s childhood pet and her subsequent disappearance?

  “But… but why?” she said. “Abuela wasn’t sick or … or anything …”

  She couldn’t continue.

  Papa laid his arm around her shoulders. “There comes a time when each and every one of us must journey on. I know this is no comfort to you now, chiquita, but it is the way of things.”

  Bettina buried her face in his shoulder. For a long time, all she could do was sob. Papa held her close, stroking her hair. He murmured comforting words, but he might as well have been speaking Chinese, for all she could understand or take consolation from them. Finally she was able to sit up. She blew her nose on a crumpled tissue Papa pulled from his pocket and gave to her. Red-eyed, she stared out across the darkening desert. In the distance a coyote yipped and she knew a moment’s dark anger for it and all its canine clan.

  “If she … if she is dead,” she finally said, “where is her body? Why does everyone act as if she’s only gone away on a trip somewhere?”

  Papa rolled a cigarette and lit it before answering. The smoke he exhaled soon disappeared in the dark air.

  “Su abuela,” he said. “Dorotea Muñoz. She was never like other people. You know this. She traveled to other places, spoke to those that the rest of the world can only imagine. We know this to be true, for you and I, we walk in those same worlds. We know the spirits firsthand.”

  He glanced at Bettina and she nodded.

  “This is a wonderful thing to be able to do,” he went on, “but it can be dangerous as well. The spirits are, how do you say …inconstante.”

  “Fickle.”

  “Sí. Muy fickle. And easy to offend. Approach them with respect and they will mostly treat you well. But interfere in their business and they have no patience with you. Their anger is as legendary as their kindness.”

  “What did she do to make them angry?”

  Papa shrugged. “You know your abuela. She was never one to allow an injustice to go unchallenged and among the spirits—as it is with us—life is not always fair. What she did… this is not something she would speak of, any more than she would speak of her life before marrying your grandfather.”

  “She told me about it yesterday.”

  Papa nodded, as though that explained something. “What I do know,” he continued, “is that she aligned herself with one spirit which set her at odds with another.” He took a final puff from his cigarette and ground it out on the stone they sat upon, pocketing the butt. “It is best not to interfere in the business of spirits—your abuela told you that?”

  “It is a lesson she learned with more difficulty.”

  They sat for a time in silence, watching the last of the light leak from the western sky.

  “So for that,” Bettina said finally. “They just took her away?”

  “That,” Papa replied. “It is such a small word and can hold so much. Who can tell what enemies she made by interfering in their business? What bargain she struck that she might come safely away once more? Caras vemos, coazónes no sabemos.”

  Bettina sighed. It was true. One could only guess at what another was thinking or feeling. It was impossible to know.

  “I miss her,” she said.

  Papa put his arm around her again. “Sí,” he told her. “I know you do.”

  “Is there nothing we can do to help her?”

  He shook his head. “We must abide by her decision. She went of her own choice? No one forced her?”

  “She only followed the little dog, out into the storm.”

  “Then we have no choice but to respect her choice.”

  “And mourn.”

  He nodded. “And mourn. But surely, chiquita, with all you have seen and done, you know that departing this life is but the beginning of a new journey.”

  “But not for us. Not for those who are left behind.”

  “It seems very final now,” he agreed. “Now you must mourn. Light a candle for her and pray for her soul.”

  It was with great effort that Bettina didn’t begin to weep again. She was afraid that if she did this time, she might never stop.

  “What—what will we tell the others?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Nothing. Whether the enchantment is one she left behind, or that of the spirits, who are we to interfere with it?”

  “But why are we untouched by it?”

  “You were closer to her than any other,” he said. “Some things not even enchantment can take away.”

  “And you?” she asked.

  Papa shrugged. “I am not easily enchanted, by man or spirit.”

  Who are you truly? Bettina wanted to ask him. Or perhaps the question should be, what are you? Man, hawk, desert spirit. Curandero, shaman, peyotero. Which, or all? But in the end, she realized, it didn’t really matter. He was her papa and that was enough.

  She leaned closer to him, wishing it was as easy to call Abuela back from where the little dog had led her as it was to be comforted by her papá’s embrace.

  But she could not spend her life attached to Papa like some Siamese twin. They had each their separate lives. Being able to share the loss of her abuela with him helped some, but her sadness remained a gaping hole that nothing seemed to fill. When he went back into the desert, this time to stay, though she did not know that until much later, she tried to carry on with her own life. A life without Abuela who was gone now forever, but who would never be forgotten. She lit a candle in church and another at the shrine of the inocente. She skipped school every day and walked out in the desert, repeating Abuela’s lessons to herself so that she wouldn’t forget them. One day she packed some clothes and went to stay with Rupert and Loleta Manuel, to complete her education in herbal and desert lore.

  Mama would not, could not understand, wh
y she needed to do this. They argued until finally Bettina simply had to walk away. It was months before they spoke again, for Mama had a formidable way with silence, wielding it like a weapon.

  Life with the Manuels was different from how it was at home. Loleta treated her as an adult, spoke to her as an equal, but Bettina also had to shoulder far more responsibility than she did living with her own family. Often it was she alone who set the meals on the table for Loleta and Rupert and what guests they might have visiting that day. She gathered wood for the fire, shared the cleaning, the washing, the preparing of ointments and amuletos, learned when to ask assistance of los santos and when of the spirits, when to massage an ill, when to treat it with medicine.

  But she had freedom, too. Early mornings, afternoons, and sometimes late at night, she walked in the desert surrounding the Manuels’ home.

  One day Ban came over for dinner and she was surprised to discover that she was no longer interested in whether he viewed her as a woman or a girl. The realization made her feel both relieved and sad. She helped clean up after dinner and sat with the family for a little while before finally making some excuse and escaping out into the night. She wore a sweater against the coolness and went up into the hills, winding through the scrub and cacti until she came to a favorite sitting spot on the stone lip of an arroyo. Far below, mesquites, willows, and cottonwoods clustered along the length of a dry wash. Closer, a few handbreadths from where her feet dangled, petroglyphs had been cut into the gray-brown stone. I’itoi’s spiral. What looked like hand prints. Stylized lizards and frogs. Small patch patterns such as could be seen on pottery. Wiggly lines that might be winding rivers or snakes.

  It was amazing, Bettina thought every time she saw these ancient markings, that they could last so long. That made her wonder if the occasional spray-painted graffiti she stumbled across would also be here for the next thousand years. She had to smile. Who was to say that the petroglyphs weren’t the ancient people’s graffiti?

  She heard Ban approaching long before he reached her, sensed his brujería moving through the scrub. She nodded to him when he sat down on the stone beside her. He hung his long legs over the edge beside hers, toes pointing at the wash below. Somewhere close by she heard an owl hoot. Moments later, they heard the sound of its wings as it passed by overhead, so close that Bettina felt she could have lifted her hand and brushed its wings with her fingers.