The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation (12 page)

“Now?”

“Here. On the church grounds.”

She handed the doll back to Salia. “I can’t. You do it.”

“No. It is your duty to bury your stepfather. You must show respect or his ghost will haunt you,” she said, slapping the doll in her hand.

“Ay! My stomach hurts. My head pounds. See how my hands tremble. Sweat drips from my pores,” she screeched, dropping the little corpse. In death, he looked even more like her miniature stepfather. A light glowed from a window above, illuminating the shadow of a wooden cross hanging in the church. God was watching, yet, she fell to her knees, digging a hole in the dirt with her hands. She dropped the doll in the hole, covering it with dirt. She lay hunched by the tiny grave, sobbing.

Salia stomped on the dirt so the burial spot would blend in against the church wall, damp from showers the night before.

“I must pray for my soul and yours,” Marcelina said.

They snuck into the church through a side door and tiptoed like two church mice to a bench.

Marcelina suffered on her knees while Salia kicked the back of the pew.

Marcelina folded her hands in prayer and bowed her head, but her show was mainly to impress Salia

Ay! She got off her sore knees and shuffled towards the statue of Saint Mary to confront her. “What of my stepfather? Why did you not stop my foolishness? You know what a practical joker I am,” she mumbled.

The Mother of Jesus looked at her as if ten Hail Marys would absolve her of the sin of murder, and to add sufficient show of anguish, Marcelina struck her chest ten times, just as Mama did.

Through all her dramatics, Salia stood there with her mouth twisted at the feet of the statue. She reached into her pocket, took out some nail enamel, and painted Mary’s toenails red.

“What are you doing? It’s blasphemous!”

“So many people look at her feet, I just thought it would be a nice gesture,” she said innocently.

Mama opened the church door and called out, “Marcelina?”

Salia darted behind the statue.

Mama raised her hands to heaven at her missing daughter’s dirty white dress, the reddish-brown mud looking like blood stains.

Mama placed her coat around her shoulders. It was January and bitter cold.

“Everything’s going to be alright now, Mama. I can pass for sixteen so I can work at the Lamb Hotel as a maid. Diego can work at the mines as a helper. You are a good cook; perhaps the No Pity Café will hire you.”

“Don’t worry so. Your papa will recover and go back to work,” Mama said, patting her hand.

“He’s not my papa! He’s dead!” she yelled, uncaring that her words might arouse suspicion, but for his funeral, she wore black, like a dutiful daughter in mourning.

At his wake, all her favorite scents from the back table wafted over to her. Mama said she had the nose of a hog. She swooned from the odor of garlic simmering in salsa, onions sizzling in jalapenos, freshly cut tomatoes, ground beef sprinkled with pepper, corn fresh from the husk and aged cheese smelling like sweaty feet.

While the faithful recited the rosary with closed eyes and beat their chests with their fists, she inched to the back, unseen, until Diego stared at her as if she was doomed to hell.

She tapped her lips with her middle finger, but he was too dumb to realize she was throwing him a dirty finger. When he turned back around,
she shuffled to the food table. She snuck taco number one under her blouse and then taco number two in the waistband of her skirt.

Mama pinched her by the neck. “Before we close the coffin, you must say good-bye to your papa.”

“No. No.”

“Yes. Yes. Go Marcelina.”

And with one shove, Mama hurled her toward her crime.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and looked into the coffin.
His death is not my fault
, she thought, because she did not break the statue of St. Jude that was kept at his bedside.
When a statue of a saint breaks, someone in the family will die
. Creencias, or superstitions, always come true.
St. Jude killed him, not I
.

Or someone else did
, she thought, examining the guilt-ridden faces of Mama and Diego, who had both hovered around his sick bed with every ample opportunity to hold the statue high above their heads and hurl it to the floor.

Her stepfather’s face was ashen grey in color, just like the doll had been. His head was propped up by two sticks on the sides of his neck. His mouth was frozen open, as though he still struggled for every breath. A gold coin covered each of his eyes.

To buy his way into hell. He wants to take me with him. Two coins. One for me. One for him
, she thought.
Mustn’t let him. Mustn’t happen. I’ll be good. I promise. Never again. I’ll make up for it. He was a bad man anyway
.

He wore the suit he always wore to funerals, except for one difference.

There. On his suit. Reddish-brown mud.

“Caution. Careful. Don’t get caught,” she mumbled, dipping her fingers into his coffin, wiping away the tell-tale sign of the mud clod.

She rubbed so hard, she disturbed the dead.

His ice cold hand grabbed her wrist, the hairy fingers smelling of fish.

She mewed, pulling at her wrist, turning her face from his foul corpse breath, mixed with the stink of whiskey and cigarillo smoke snaking from his nose.

His chest moved up and down.

She could feel his breath in her ear.

His swollen tongue licked her neck.

The snake in his pants moved.

Marcelina screamed.

“Oh, how she loved her papa,” Mama told Pacheco.

The Penitentes had to pry her frozen fingers from the coffin.

The men carried the coffin from the house.

Mama grabbed her hand, dragging her out the door.

Outside, the witches waited. Felicita lifted Salia’s chin, forcing her to look in the coffin. Whereas, Marcelina screamed when she looked at her stepfather, Salia had the detached look of a surgeon examining her handiwork. All the mourners, except Marcelina, looked at the ground, paying their respect to her stepfather, who had been one of the Penitentes Brothers of Light. Salia reached into the coffin, snatching the gold coins, shoving them in her pocket.

She’s stolen from a dead man
, Marcelina thought with horror.
He will rise from the grave and come back for his coins. Even her brujería will not save Salia
.

Felicita did not seem worried over her daughter’s thievery. She simply watched with an amused face as they nailed the lid shut on the pine coffin.

At the church of San Cirilio, the witches waited outside, standing over the exact spot where her stepfather’s pseudo remains were buried. Felicita smiled at Marcelina, and she stared back defiantly.

She plopped down in the church pew, and Pacheco watched her, no longer looking at her with sympathy but with curiosity.

She acted brave but her intestines danced La Cucaracha, a Mexican Revolution song. She muttered the lyrics, “The cockroach, the cockroach, can’t walk anymore, because it doesn’t have, because it’s lacking, marijuana to smoke.” Even the funny song could not take her mind off the image of her stepfather’s doll buried by the side of the church.

She dropped to her knees, bowing her head, not because she had become so religious. She preferred to look at the dirt floor than at Pacheco’s piercing eyes. At this moment, she felt more fear of him than of Felicita. The witch was a known antagonist, Pacheco and his Penitentes were more mysterious.

Ay, caramba, the knees again! What is it with the Catholic Church and kneeling? Get on with it, Padre Ass. My stepfather doesn’t deserve a high mass
, she thought.

Beside her, Diego stared at the statues of saints with rapture.

She pulled at her collar, popping open a button. The walls suffocated her. It was the fault of the Saints hanging on the walls with their arms reaching out to grab her and taking all the oxygen on purpose.

She was only able to breathe freely outside the church, in the open air.

Along the way to the cemetery, violinists played a sad Spanish song of loss. Everyone cried except for the witches, Marcelina, and Diego.

When they lowered the coffin into the ground, Felicita patted Salia on the shoulder and winked at Marcelina. Just like when her tío died, she raised her fingers to her lips and blew Marcelina a kiss.

Her lips somersaulted through the air and smacked her face. She wiped her cheek. Blood again. Only this time she was certain it was her stepfather’s blood dripping from her fingers.

Felicita grabbed Salia by her arms and hugged her. She rocked her daughter back and forth with joy.

She had the nagging feeling that she repaid her debt to Felicita for turning her stepfather into a woman. Storm-Chaser had been wrong. It had never been her that Felicita wanted. With a sinking feeling she had the suspicion that with her stepfather’s murder, she helped Salia graduate to the third degree of brujería, the black arts, which include death.

And what of you
, the voice whispered.
Why do you feel so disappointed it wasn’t you Felicita wanted after all?

Part Two

Salia

Family ties are thick as mud
.

11

A
procession of Penitentes climbed the path up the hill to their morada, their holy shack hidden by trees. At the head walked a man, clothed in a loincloth. Ribs stuck out of his chest, his fasting stomach sucking into his spine. A crown, woven from a sticker bush, was shoved into his head, trickles of blood dribbling down his cheeks. He dragged a human-sized crucifix, slung over his shoulder, his muscles straining, but none of the Brotherhood of the Penitente Order, marching behind their mock-Christ, offered to help. Two guards, their arms crossed in front of their chests, kept an eye out for the sheriff. The men never thought to look up at the trees for spies. Marcelina and Salia had a bird’s eye view from the branch of a tree. They passed a bottle of stolen whiskey back and forth, and did as Marcelina’s nana used to say, “To give the bottle a kiss”.

The Penitentes were all barefoot, their feet bloodied by pebbles and stickers, their white baggy pants blowing about their ankles. Black caps covered their heads. Their faces were hid behind scary, hand-painted masks depicted to look like various Catholic saints. Their masks reflected suffering. Horrors. Affliction. Anguish. Grief.

Mouths were painted open in a perpetual black scream. The men wailed a dark, high-pitched tune, accompanied by the eerie slapping of leaves of amole weeds across their bare backs, raw and oozing blood. With each lash of the whip, blood splattered their white pants, bubbling a red trail leading up to the morada. The motto of the Penitente Order was: to find oneness with the Almighty, you must experience the passion of Christ’s suffering.

The Order originated in Spain, three centuries before and imported to New Mexico by Franciscan friars accompanying the conquistadors. Even the conqueror, Don Juan de Oñate, on Good Friday, 1598, stood among the friars dressed up in their Easter outfits—hair shirts with a sash of cactus thorns encircling their waists. The friars chanted, as Oñate lashed his bare back. His soldiers followed their leader and whipped themselves, until the camp ran crimson with their blood.

The red Ortiz Mountains didn’t turn red from the blood of the Penitentes, Good Friday, 1928—it was the descending sun reflecting its shine upon the land.

The Penitentes cried out, as once more their whips lashed down upon their backs.

At the rear of the sufferers a flute player whistled from a homemade reed flute. One man blew into a bottle. Another banged some tin cans together. The last musician rattled chains.

The most eerie Penitente was unmasked. He was the Roman soldier, and the only whip he lashed was his horse’s rump, encouraging it to climb the hill. Pacheco. As always, his lady love road in the bed of the wagon, wearing a black lace doily on her skull. Agnes represented the death awaiting all sinners.

The mock-Christ bore the sins of all, quite a heavy load. He fell on the hill beneath the life-size cross.

One of his brethren helped him to his feet and hefted the cross to his shoulder, dragging it behind him in the dust.

The man, who helped him, beat himself with his whip, crying out.

A bruise purpled the mock-Christ’s chin, proving he was all too human. He lugged the cross up the hill, falling now and then; only to be helped to his feet until finally, a mountain of a man carried the cross for him the rest of the way.

One by one, the men marched towards the back of the morada. One step more and each man, in turn, seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

No miracle had taken place. The Penitentes did not vanish into thin air. Their disappearance was a calculated illusion.

They laid the cross on the ground and the mock-Christ lay on the wood with his arms spread and his ankles crossed. Pacheco hammered his feet and hands to the wooden cross. The mock-Christ screamed in agony, the nail going through bone, poking muscle and scattering tissue. The Penitentes whipped themselves harder to commune with his suffering.