Forests of the Heart (11 page)

“Ah,
chica,”
he said today, his breath frosting in the cold air. He leaned on the hardwood handle of his splitting maul and gave her a very serious look. “If only I had the courage, I’d leave my wife and run away with you.”

Having been to dinner at his apartment on the East Side and seen firsthand how much he loved his wife Maria Elena, Bettina knew he wasn’t being in the least bit serious. She might not have accepted his flirting so lightly if he’d been an Anglo, but he was too much like family for her to even consider taking offense. Instead she paused in her own work.

“Where would we go?” she asked.

“Mexico City.”

“But you have relatives there. They would never accept me. They’d call me ‘
la adúltera?
or worse.”

“Did I say Mexico City? I mean New Mexico. Santa Fe.”

“Doesn’t Maria Elena’s cousin Dolores live there?”

“¿Y bien?
We would not have to visit with her.”

“But still she would gossip about us. We couldn’t go anywhere without people talking.”

“Then California.”

“Too many earthquakes.”

“Costa Rica.”

“Too many monkeys.”

And on it went. For every place he named, she had a reason why it wouldn’t be suitable. When Nuala joined them, they switched to English and new topics, but as usual, Nuala contributed little to the conversation. Bettina wasn’t offended. Last Saturday night’s talk notwithstanding, it was simply Nuala’s way. She wasn’t being unfriendly; she was only being Nuala. Quiet, soft-spoken, but with that spark of
la brujería
smoldering deep in her eyes. Bettina hadn’t exchanged more than a half-dozen words with her since Saturday.

While Salvador continued to split the remaining logs, Nuala and Bettina began to load the sled with split wood for the first of many trips to the woodshed where they would stack it. Despite the cold, the three of them were warm enough from their labor to be wearing only down vests over their shirts. The women made a half dozen trips to the shed before they started stacking the wood. This was the part that Bettina liked best, fitting the split logs together like uneven building blocks to make a stack along the back wall of the shed.

They worked in a companionable silence for a while, raising one stack to the roof of the shed before going on to start the second. Alone with Nuala, Bettina decided to see if she could draw her out again, reclaiming the ease with which conversation had grown up between them last weekend. She meant to find out what Nuala could tell her about the woman that Lisette had called the Recluse. Instead she found herself asking about
los lobos.

“What are
an felsos?”
she said.

Nuala paused with an armload of wood and gave her a look that Bettina couldn’t read.

“Where did you hear that term?” Nuala asked.

Something in her voice made Bettina hesitate.

“I can’t remember,” she said finally. “I just overheard it one day. It might have been a couple of the writers talking.”

She had no idea why she’d lied, why it seemed important to keep secret her conversation with that one
lobo.
She needn’t have tried.

“Or perhaps,” Nuala said, “you heard it from a handsome, dark-haired man you met in the woods behind the house.”

Bettina remembered the curtain in Nuala’s room, how it had moved when she’d returned to the house from her meeting with
el lobo,
as though someone had been watching her from inside. Who else could it have been but Nuala?

“Perhaps,” she admitted.

Nuala sighed. “I forget how young you are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you are young,” Nuala told her, “you are immortal. Nothing can harm you. You see dangers, but know that they can only harm others, not you.”

“I don’t think that way at all.”

Nuala arched an eyebrow. “No? Then why do you spend time in the company of such a creature?”

“He doesn’t seem dangerous.”

“Let me tell you what
an felsos
means. It’s from the old Cornish and translates to ‘the cunning friends.’ And they are indeed cunning, though rarely friends—at least to us. The term is used much in the way that faeries were referred to as ‘the good neighbors.’ Not because they were, but because such a reference was less likely to give offense.”

“I thought you said they were Irish.”

“They are. Irish, Breton, Cornish. The
genii loci
of the ancient
Gaeltacht.
In Ireland my people always referred to them as the Gentry.”

Bettina frowned.
Genii loci
she understood. It was Latin; a
genius loci
was the guardian spirit or presiding deity of a place. But…

“Gaeltacht?”
she asked.

“It’s what we called the Irish-speaking districts back home,” Nuala explained. “But I think of it as any home of the Gael—wherever the Celtic people gather and speak the old language, remember the old ways. Each of these places had a spirit, sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. More often they were neither good nor evil, they simply were—the third branch of the Celtic trinity, if you will.”

“So these wolves that come to our yard,” Bettina tried.
“En otro palabras
—in other words. They are evil?”

Nuala shook her head. “Not as you’re using the word. Long ago, they followed the Irish emigrants to the New World, but this land already had its own guardian spirits. So there was no place for them. But here they remain all the same. They are homeless, unbound, and they neither feel nor think the way we do. When the Gentry gather in a pack they can be like a wild hunt, ravening and hungry for blood, but even on an individual basis, they’re not to be trusted.”

“Why not?”

Nuala shrugged. “Mostly, I think, because they are jealous of us—the way the dead are jealous of the living. We have what they can’t have—we fit in, we have a relationship with our environment. We have homes. Most of us are comfortable in our own skins. They want this way we live. Some try to slip into our lives, pretending to be our friends, our family, our lovers, but never able to succeed because of their feral nature and their otherness. Some are only dangerous when we intrude into their lives, reminding them of what they can’t have. Others actively seek us out as prey, tearing us open to see where we have hidden our souls.

“All are dangerous.”

Bettina shivered. She remembered the sting of potential danger hanging in the air when she had walked with her wolf through
la época del mito,
but she was sure he meant her no harm. They had been alone. There were many things he could have done, or tried, but the worst he had done was speak in riddles.

Nuala laughed without humor.

“I can see it in your eyes,” she said. “As I said earlier, youth considers itself immortal. You hear what I tell you. You understand the danger. But you are unable to conceive of it touching you.”

“No,” Bettina told her. “It’s not that at all.
For lo menos
…”

But Nuala wasn’t listening to her. She turned her back and carried her armload of wood into the shed.

“You will see,” she said over her shoulder. “In time, you will see. If you live so long.”

Bettina started to follow, to argue further, then shook her head. She wasn’t sure what the age difference was between Nuala and herself, but it was obviously enough for Nuala to consider her no more than a child, inexperienced and naïve. And just as obviously, Nuala was one of those adults who grouped young adults, teenagers, and children together in her mind and considered all of them to be deficient in common sense. Bettina had learned long ago that there was no use arguing with such a point of view. One could only carry on.

The housekeeper’s attitude towards
el lobo
and his
compadres
irritated Bettina as well. Granted, she didn’t entirely trust the wolf herself, but suspicion was not conviction. And when she considered how an outsider might view her father and the uncles from his side of the family, she was willing to give
los lobos
the benefit of the doubt. For now. She would be cautious, but then she was always cautious, Nuala’s comments to the contrary.

She understood how
la época del mito
could be considered dangerous—it was mostly unknown territory, after all, no matter how often one crossed its borders. But she wasn’t afraid of the unknown. She wasn’t afraid of death, either. She didn’t welcome its approach, she would struggle against it, but in her experience, those who feared death were those who believed it to be an ending instead of what it was: a change. A journey into the unknown much the same as the time one spent in
la época del mito.
The difference was, one did not normally return from the fields of death.

There were people who might disagree and point to ghosts as their proof, but ghosts were not spirits straying from
la tierra de los muertos.
They were those who had yet to move on from this world.

Eh,
bueno.
She would not let Nuala’s prejudices sour the day. The crisp, cold air, so different from that of the dry Sonoran Desert she’d called home, filled her with a heady sense of well-being. It was all still so new to her. The winter, lying thick and deep all around them. The snowy fields. The wind and the cold. The locals could complain, but it made the blood sing in her veins and she refused to lose the feeling of being so alive.

When Nuala returned for another load, Bettina acted as though the conversation the housekeeper had walked away from had never occurred. Instead, she chatted happily about the windswept lawn and the snow piled deep in drifts, Chantal’s offer to take her cross-country skiing and did Nuala think it would snow again tonight? Nuala gave her a considering look, eyes dark with
la brujería,
then shrugged, her gaze turning mild once more. As they continued to work, their differences fell silent between them, if not forgotten.

Later, Nuala went inside to begin dinner for the residents of Kellygnow. Salvador and Bettina finished stacking the rest of the wood, Salvador teasing her the whole time. He no longer wished to run away with her himself; instead, now he was trying to decide which of his nephews she should marry. Bettina laughed and shook her head at every suggestion he made. She followed him around to the side of the house where his old pickup truck was parked.

“Vamos a mi casa,”
Salvador said. “You can eat with us. You know Maria Elena—she always makes too much.”

Bettina was tempted, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to impose.”

“Impose? How can you impose? You are like family.”

Bettina had no plans, except to read for a while, perhaps go for a walk later. Then she remembered how walking on the grounds had turned out for her last Saturday night. She was in no hurry for a repeat visit with
el lobo.

“Entonces, gracias,”
she said. “But only if you’ll stop at the market on the way so I can bring something.”

“What can you buy that Maria Elena hasn’t already made?”

Bettina shrugged. “A salad. Some fruit for desert.”

“Bueno.
Only don’t buy too much.” Salvador patted his stomach, which was as flat as patio tile, and probably as hard. “I can’t afford to put on any extra weight.”

Bettina nodded solemnly. “I see what you mean.”

Salvador gave her a shocked look. He put his hands on his stomach, and stood straighter than he normally did, if that was even possible.

“¿Cómo?”
he asked. “What do you see?”

“Nada,”
she assured him. “Do I have time for a quick shower?”

When Salvador dropped her off at the house later that night, Bettina walked around back to the kitchen door, carrying the leftovers that Maria Elena had sent home with her. In one plastic margarine container was a leftover
chile relleno
and some refried beans. A smaller container held a serving of
albóndigas
—Maria Elena’s famous meatball soup. She wanted to put them in the fridge on her way to her room and it was quicker to simply go around the house, coming in by way of the kitchen, than to navigate her way through the warren of halls from the front door.

The sky was clear and riddled with stars. Snow crunched underfoot and the wind blew cold air up under her parka, making her shiver. She paused by the door. With her breath frosting in the air, she looked to the woods, wondering if any of
los lobos
were nearby. She could sense neither man nor spirit. Studying the shadows between the trees, her gaze was drawn to the light that spilled from the windows of the Recluse’s cottage, called to it as surely as the moths that fluttered against the screens in summer were drawn to the windows by the interior lights. Now that she had seen its inhabitant, it was impossible to ignore the witchy flavor her presence lent the building.

She should ask the woman if she had a brother, Bettina thought. A brother who was a priest.

Though what was more likely was that it had been the Recluse herself that Bettina had seen by the salmon pool. The Recluse, dressed as a priest. Or perhaps she’d only been wearing a collarless white shirt that had seemed like a priest’s garb in the dark.

Pero,
Bettina decided. The priest’s identity wasn’t the real question at the moment. She was more curious about what the priest had been doing in
la época del mito
in the first place, and why hadn’t
el lobo
been able to see him. Or rather, why he’d pretended he hadn’t seen him.

She turned back to the kitchen door.

It wasn’t something she was ready to pursue at this time of night. It probably wasn’t even any of her business, but it nagged at her all the same, the way mysteries always did. Because there was something in the way the priest had looked at her that night—if only in passing—before his gaze continued down to the pool where that enormous salmon lay sleeping… the creature that
el lobo
had called
an bradán.

Perhaps she should have asked Nuala what
an bradán
meant, while the housekeeper had been willing to talk this afternoon.

Bettina shook her head. Oh, yes.
Bueno idea.
And receive yet another lecture.
No gracias.