Wild Penance

shoulder.

It was just a kiss. Nothing more. But when our lips met, I felt a current of euphoria move through me and my mind became a void through which only pleasure passed, everything else forgotten except for those lips, his hand, his chest and shoulder, his arm, the smell of him, the warmth of his skin, the taste of his lips. One kiss.

I gently pulled away. “We shouldn’t be doing this now,” I said.

He sat up straight and then quickly got to his feet. “Maybe not now,” he said. “But we should definitely be doing this.” He took a long look at me, his eyes brimming with excitement. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

After Kerry left camp, I got up and stroked Redhead’s face and gave her a cold piece of carrot that was in my coat pocket. I picked up my rifle and took it back to my seat by the fire.

26

The Bruja

The next morning, before I went home, I drove to Agua Azuela. I hoped Regan could help me figure out what the Penitentes had to do with all the other strange events that had been occurring. But, once again, Regan was not at home. When I got to her house, I saw that her Toyota was not in the garage, so I backed down the drive, turned around, and drove back across the bridge over the rio. At the intersection between the bridge and the road, I stopped to check for traffic. Ahead and to the left of me, several cars were parked in the wide dirt turnout in front of the ancient church. Regan’s Toyota was among them. The local villagers were probably conducting their lay services in place of mass. I pulled my Jeep across the road and drove to the back of the lot near the arroyo, thinking I might snooze in my car until the service was over and then see if I could talk with Regan. But as I started to settle back in my seat, I remembered the old woman who had approached me in the churchyard after mass, insisting I come for tea.

“Why not?” I said aloud. I would go visit her and have a cup of tea while I waited for my friend.

The old woman’s strange instructions proved to be precise. After I rounded the boulder with the hand on it, I climbed up the goat path on the south slope of the mountain, and above me a few hundred yards I could see a brush arbor and an adobe casita. As she had predicted, the crone who had demanded an audience two days ago after mass was waiting for me on the portal. We had not set a date, nor had I agreed even to come, but nonetheless, she seemed to be expecting me. She waved a dish towel in her hand, motioning for me to approach. The path was steep and the morning sun was just rising over the other side of the canyon. Frost on the sage scrub sparkled like thousands of stars.

“Come! Come! I made you tea,” she said, again waving the dish towel as I stepped onto the portal. She trundled through the doorway of the adobe, and I followed. The opening was small and I had to stoop to enter her one-room dwelling. A table, crudely made from a slab of wood, with deep scars and four crooked limbs for legs stood in the center of the room, and two similar slab-and-stick chairs were placed on opposite sides of it. There was no other furniture.

In one corner, a large, deep nicho was carved into the adobe, and this housed at least a dozen santos, before which at least as many votive candles were lit. Braids of dried sweetgrass, fat cigar- shaped smudge sticks, ancient-looking green glass jars of herbs and twigs, and several dried skink pelts, which the natives used to store a baby’s umbilical cord after birth, lined an inset shelf in the earthen wall.

A shepherd’s bed grew out of the long wall, over the fireplace. These old-fashioned sleeping berths were found in many old rural adobes: a massive fireplace, used for both cooking and heating the home, was built with an adobe slab over the top, and a bed was made on this slab to keep the occupant warm at night. The bedding looked to be crude cotton bags of straw, but there was a thick, woven wool blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rumpled bags. There were no pillows or sheets.

Flanking the fireplace on the low adobe hearth stood cast-iron pots, pottery cups and bowls, and an olla-a pottery water jar-filled with water, to which a waxed dipper gourd had been tied on a thin hemp rope circling the jar’s neck. In the fireplace itself, a metal grate supported a small pot of simmering liquid, and a huge cast-iron teakettle hung from a hook, emitting contrails of steam.

“Sit! Sit! I made you tea,” she squeaked. Again I was reminded of bats when I heard her shrill, high-pitched voice. Her plain sackcloth dress and worn, curled-up-at-the-toes men’s wing tips without laces were the same as the day I had first seen her at the church.

“How did you know I was coming?” I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down so that I faced the fireplace, where she was ladling liquid from the simmer pot into a cup.

“What is your name?” she asked as she brought the cup to the table.

“My name is Jamaica Wild. But how did you know I was coming?” I could smell a lovely lemon fragrance from the tea as she pushed the cup across the table and directly under my face.

“It is not important. You are here. That is what is important. Drink! Drink! It is hot now, but it will not be if you talk until your tongue is tired.” She turned back to the hearth and poured dark liquid from the teakettle into a second cup.

“What is your name?” I asked.

She turned and looked at me with a mischievous grin that made her look as if she were just a child, an effect considerably contrary to the deeply lined face, bushy white brows, and fewer teeth present than missing. She turned her chin up and her ear down, so that her face lay sideways on the hump that extended from her neck to her shoulder on one side. She ambled over to the table with her own cup and sat down. “My name is Esperanza,” she said, “but the people over here call me Tecolote.”

I took a drink of the lemony tea. It had a slightly bitter taste but was not unpleasant. “This is good tea. What kind is it?”

“Hush! Do not insult me! Do I ask you what you serve when I come for a little meal with you? This is what you need, that’s what kind it is. If I told everyone what I was giving them, they would not need a curandera at all, and I would be out of business. Now drink!”

“So you are a curandera? I guess I should have known. I’m not sick, though. I don’t need-”

She stood up with astonishing speed, given her twisted frame, and the chair made a loud scraping noise across the adobe floor. “You don’t think you need help? What about la carreta de la muerte? I have seen you on it!”

“The cart of death?”

“You do not see that the Black Spirit hovers behind you? You stuck your bare bottom out for men to look at and the Black Thing almost devoured you! And you don’t think you need help!” She slapped one twisted hand on the tabletop and shook her head back and forth in disbelief. “You better drink up, little Mirasol. You better drink up while you can.” She stared at me, then pointed a bony finger at the cup and raised it up as if to will it to my lips.

I picked up the cup. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. How did you know about-”

“You are always wagging your tongue, asking foolish questions, while your taza sits waiting for you to empty it.”

I drank from the cup. It tasted good now, the bitterness having the effect of cleansing my palate. The warm liquid felt good in my stomach.

She watched me intently, her face moving up and down each time I lifted the cup to my lips, drank, and then set it back on the table. Her eyes were two black pin lights. “Lucky for you there is a bruja like me, and also an angel to help you. You are going to need a lot of help, Mirasol. You are not finished with the thing that tries to devour you!”

I felt drowsy, very tranquil, and slightly drunk. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything you are saying. What is ‘mirasol’?”

“The flower with yellow petals that grows so tall, as tall as a man, with all the seed for the birds in the center. The flower that grows where you grew.”

“Sunflower? Sunflower? How did you know-”

“No more of your questions!” she snapped. “This is not a social visit here. I did not tell you to come in order to ask me foolish things, Mirasol. I told you to come because you need help!”