Wild Penance (31 page)

There was almost no traffic on the roads of Taos on the morning of Good Friday. Snow covered the tops of buildings and cars and turned shrubs into white balls of soft cotton. The trees were heavy and silent in their thick, white coats and stood like sentient pillars, supporting the close ceiling of clouds. It was as if the whole world had fallen asleep under a blanket of white and lay there still as a child.

Kerry and I had retrieved La Arca from the lockbox at the ranger station. I held it to me and looked around before we went inside his apartment. There was not another soul in sight.

I set the bundle on the table, and Kerry helped me off with my coat. My face hurt from being roasted by fire, then frostbitten in the blizzard. A swollen knot inside my mouth just beneath my lower lip throbbed painfully. And my throat was bruised where Andy had shoved the rifle barrel against my jawbone. I was dehydrated, my lips were cracked from chapping, my back ached from pushing Manny across the morada. My whole body hurt.

“I’ll make us some coffee,” Kerry said, dropping my coat on his bed.

I waited for it slumped in a chair, my emotions dulled by deluge. While the coffee brewed, he brought me a glass of water. As I sipped, I looked around the room again at the photographs he had made. “These are so beautiful,” I said and took another drink of water.

“You like my work, then?”

I tried to smile.
Ouch.
“You know I do.”

“Your mouth hurts?”

I nodded.

He picked up a dish towel, walked to the door, and opened it. He stepped outside, disappeared for a moment, then came back in, wiped his feet, and came over to me. He gently lifted my chin.

“Ow! Don’t touch under there!”

“Which hurts more? Your mouth or your chin?”

“My mouth. No, my chin. I don’t know . . .”

He put the cloth, packed with a handful of snow, against my mouth. It hurt. Then it felt better. “Here, take this. I’ll go get our coffee.”

I drank in the calm, the quiet. After we had made our way down the treacherous Forest Service road from the conflagration and carnage, Kerry and I had spent the night at the ranger station giving statements and filling out paperwork. The blizzard had delayed everything, and a snowplow was supposed to make its way up the mountain today to create access so officials could even get to the Forest Service road. It might be another day or two before the bodies could be carried out. “Poor Manny,” I said. “Poor Redhead.” I began to cry.

“Yeah.” He brought steaming coffee, set it on the table, examined my swollen, tear-streaked face. “Poor Jamaica.”

I tried to smile. “Do you have any sage?”

“You mean for smudging?”

“Yes, you know—a smudge stick, anything.”

“I have some local, from the pueblo.” He went to his dresser and brought a fat thread-bound sage bundle to me. “I’ll get some matches.”

We smudged La Arca, the room, ourselves. Then we sat down together at the table and I began to untie the horsehair rope. I told Kerry the story that Theresa Mendoza had told me, and also what I had learned from my trip to the Taos library.

“Am I allowed to see it?” he asked, respectfully.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t see it. They display it in the church on Easter Sunday in Truchas. But I would rather you didn’t touch it.”

“I won’t. I understand.”

When the mecates were undone, I stopped to compose myself. Just as Theresa Mendoza had done, I closed my eyes and drew within. I said a silent prayer to anyone who might be listening that I would be guided to do whatever was best. Then I drew back the embroidered cloth.

Kerry inhaled deeply, his chest rising, his eyes like moons. “It’s beautiful! Wait! Let me get my camera!” He moved to get up.

I shot out my hand to stop him. “No, don’t.”

“But . . . for your book? Wouldn’t you like a picture of it for your book? You said it’s all right for people to see it.”

“No. I don’t want a picture of it. Then people will come in droves to see it, maybe even try to steal it. I don’t want you to photograph it.”

“Okay.” He sat back in his chair. “Now what?”

“Now you go take a shower or something. Let me know before you plan to come back into this room.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, saluting as he got up.

 

La Arca unfolded her secrets to me that morning in the cool, gray light of Kerry’s apartment. The smoke from the sage we had burned floated in a heavy haze in the soft hues of a snowy dawn. The sound of Kerry’s shower was like a distant, constant drumroll accompanying this ceremony honoring the victory of Passionate Faith over Evil.

Within, La Arca was lined with old black velvet, crinkled and shiny with age. Antique photos showed above the lip of a velvet pocket in the lid. Some of these were quite large and made from old silver or copper plates. As I removed them, I read the dates the photographers had etched right on the plates in scrawling white handwriting: 1895, 1898, 1902. There were also several stacks of small zigzag-edged photos that had been made sometime later than the larger ones, their corners just peeking out above the pocket top. I pulled them from their nests and placed them in three piles on the table.

In the body of La Arca, a small, ancient-looking brown book rested on top. I picked it up carefully and examined it. It was a cuaderno—a compact book written entirely by hand, including the words to the alabados—the hymns, written text of the teachings of the brotherhood, their prayers, chants, plays, sayings, rules. I thumbed through the yellowed, brittle pages, examining the elegant handwriting, the hand-sewn binding of woven cloth. It was written entirely in Spanish. I looked through page after page. I found the expression Father Ignacio had quoted at our meeting in Santa Fe, heard his melodious accented voice in my mind:
¡Ayuda a otros y Dios te ayudará! Help others and God will help you. It is an old Penitente saying.

This cuaderno reminded me of my own handwritten, hand-drawn book. Cuadernos like the one I was holding were the means by which Los Penitentes had conveyed their culture and faith from generation to generation. Many Hispanos learned to read and write using their cuadernos. The old books were so rare now that only one was known to exist from before the turn of the century—because when they became worn, new ones were made and the old ones destroyed. This was probably a priceless artifact. But I put the book beside the photographs. It was not what I was looking for.

La Arca held seven rosaries made with hand-carved wooden beads; each one had an ornate crucifix. And there was one large, silver cross with three transoms, the shortest one nearest the top, each of the next two successively longer. At the crux of the second transom was a large ruby. I set these things on the table also.

Beneath that lay a sheaf of yellowed papers. I handled them carefully. Several of them were folded and sealed with wax, and they were so old and brittle that tiny bits of them chipped off the edges and fell into the box as I moved them. They would have snapped apart if anyone tried to open them.

One item interested me, though, and I took great pains not to damage it. It was a small, handwritten ledger, its cover crudely hand-stitched from plain tan cloth, with only a few sheets of thick yellow paper inside. It appeared to be a kind of log, with over a hundred Hispanic names, each one with a year following. A few of them had the word
muerto
written after the year.

More papers, all in Spanish, many of which looked to be official documents that bore an impressed seal, sworn to in both elegant and crude handwriting, some witnessed with simple
X
marks, others with flamboyant signatures. A name among the signatures on one document caught my eye:
A. Vigil
.
Where had I seen that name?
There were hundreds of Vigils in northern New Mexico. I could have seen it on an election billboard or a mailbox, anything. Still, it haunted me. I looked through more of the pages. There it was again:
Antonio Vigil
. This time, it was not a signature, but a document that contained the name over and over again—something about
crimen colérico
—an angry crime. And another name,
Arturo Vigil
.

I heard the bathroom door open and Kerry’s voice called to me: “I’m just letting the steam out. Find anything important?”

“Still looking. I wish I knew more Spanish.” I shook my head. I could smell Kerry’s shampoo, hear him brushing his teeth. I carefully set all the papers on the table.

At the bottom of the box, I found what I was searching for. It was wrapped in a piece of crimson silk. I carefully unfolded the cloth and regarded the precious treasure within. In large, ornate black script, the title read,
El Instituto Religioso de la Santa Hermandad
. There were exquisite, block-cut, embellished letters at the beginning of each paragraph, and the printing on the yellow-gold parchment pages was antiquated and irregular. A hand-colored illustration of a man on his knees whipping himself bore the title
Imitación de Cristo
.
The tract by Padre Martínez! It does exist! Here it is!
I scanned it, handling it with the utmost delicacy, shaking my head back and forth in disbelief. Then I carefully returned the priceless prize to its protective silk wrapping and set it on the table.

La Arca was now empty. I closed the lid and stood up. Then I gently turned the box over. On the bottom, carved into the wooden base, was the signature of its maker and the date it was made:
Pedro Antonio Fresquíz—1831
.

At the library, I had learned about the santero from Las Truchas, probably the first native-born santero in Nuevo Mexico. As Father Ignacio had promised, this man—the one from the legend Theresa Mendoza had told me—and the sacred tract by Padre Antonio José Martínez, who was the first New Mexico Penitente to become a priest, had come together at last. Padre Martínez had virtually risked his life to defend Los Hermanos against the decrees the Church issued condemning the brotherhood when he printed this sacred document. This tract was his opus, and that source of power Father Ignacio had mentioned that someone had been trying to steal from Los Penitentes. It was their credo. And this sacred ark was probably the last work of art Pedro Antonio Fresquíz had made before he died. Its value alone—without the tract by Padre Martínez—was inestimable. Only a few pieces of his work remained in existence, and their distinctive style was prized by collectors of religious iconography the world over.

I rotated La Arca back to an upright position and studied the beautiful, passionate carving, the deep, stainlike colors of the cedar wood’s variegations on the lid of this portable shrine. I began to replace the contents, one by one—beginning with the Martínez tract in its silk cover. Then the aging documents and the cloth binder with its ledger of names. Then the silver cross with the ruby, and the carved-bead rosaries with their crucifixes. And the priceless cuaderno.

I turned then to the piles of photographs. I had seen photos like these in some of the books I had looked to for research into the brotherhood. Sadly, most of them were overexposed, not very clear, taken from a distance—showing Penitente rituals and processions. And even a few of crucifixions.

The figures in the older pictures seemed unreal. The stark light of New Mexico’s midday sun shone on the harsh faces of rocks, making the black-clad figures in coats appear to be shadows, and the black-hooded, white-trousered Penitentes hard to make out against the strata and the bare ground.

The newer photographs, those with the rickrack edges, were clearer. There were several of the ritual reunion of Christ with his mother. There was a series showing the stations of the cross. Many of processions. And eight pictures in sequence of the same crucifixion. They looked like they were hastily shot, the frames not well composed, some of them askew. They were taken from a considerable distance—probably in secret, from behind a rock—and then seized later. A few onlookers, also dressed in black, appeared in several of this series, tiny and hard to make out. I scanned these. Then I saw the face.

It was a face I had seen in countless photographs, a face that, surprisingly, had remained very similar over the years.

I quickly began to unpack La Arca again. I removed the cuaderno—and the rosaries and silver cross—looking for what was beneath them. There! I picked up the cloth-bound ledger and scanned the most recent dates. I found what I was looking for:
Arturo Vigil, 1954—muerto
.

“Kerry, get ready, okay? I have to go.” I carefully restored to La Arca all her treasures. All but one.

The Shrine

I asked Kerry and Jerry Padilla to wait at the bottom of the drive. “Promise me you’ll wait here for my signal.”

“I don’t feel right about it, Jamaica,” Padilla said. “How do I know you’ll be safe?”

I pulled my Sig Sauer pistol from its holster. I held it up to the deputy and raised my eyebrows at him. Then I tucked the pistol into one big pocket of my jacket, the photo into another. I patted my gun pocket. “I don’t think I’ll need this, but just to reassure you . . .”

I walked up Regan’s drive. The Toyota was in the garage. I went to the house and looked in the windows. No sign of life. I peered up the path to the casita. The Land Rover was not there, of course. There were big boot prints in the drifts leading from the rear
portal
up the slope toward the shrine. I followed them, crunching softly in the snow as I walked.

I could hear her voice as I approached. She was crying and groaning and singing under her breath, all at the same time. I came up the high side of the rocks and looked down at her back, her head draped in a black lace mantilla, which settled in folds onto her thick sweater. She was wearing some kind of soft pants and the same unlaced boots she always wore around the place. “Regan,” I said, my voice firm.

She turned around slowly. Before her, on the shrine, lay the rosary I had found by the corral—the one with the crucifix with the name
A. Vigil
engraved on the back. A dozen or so lit candles in red and green glass jars surrounded the wooden piece and a carved santo—Saint Anthony.