Trinity Fields (7 page)

Kip groaned; Fernando Martinez, who was still sitting against the dirt wall, was breathing through his mouth, making a rasping, scraping snore; and as I searched with my hands for my head I heard myself give out a moan that came up slowly from the depths of my first hangover. The keys were still far away, at least relative to where we'd slept in the bowels of the santuario, but I recognized, without having to think, what those keys meant.

—Kip, I whispered into his ear, which was right next to my mouth, as he'd fallen asleep with his head on my chest, —Kip? and I gave him whatever kind of shove I could manage, —Kip, wake up, man. His head was so heavy on me. I pushed myself up to my elbows, breathed quietly as I could, —Kip? once more, and moaned again from pain that flared in my temples.

I found I barely had the strength to hold myself up. A door, the great carved front door of the church, closed hard far down at the end of the main chamber and made a faraway clattering, like some great wooden wave crashing on a frail, jerry-built wooden shore, and both Kip and Martinez came wide awake. In the sallow ray that gave through the small window, the only source of light in this little cell, I could see Martinez blink, mechanically at first, three four five times, then stall with an open-eyed look of pure fear.

Wakeful, dreamily maybe, but conscious in an acid-blinded sort of way, I found my focus rise from my fingers, my head, my Kip, to Fernando Martinez's glare. The minutiae one takes in at a moment such as that! How I zeroed in on not just the red-flushed rims of his eyes but the damp lashes that unfolded, curling up and down and away from them—and then as quickly as the moment came it passed and the pace of things stepped up. Whatever middling state in which I'd lolled between the lofty and futile adventures of the night gone by and those to come was over in a flash. Turning point; and the world was about to tumble down around our ears.

The three of us began on hands and knees to crawl toward the doorway all at once. There was still the chance of making an escape if we could get out the side door of the sacristy and into the car before whoever was opening the church to worshippers caught us. Kip let out a yelp and the wildness of the yelp was that of a ferret caught in a bear trap, baleful and wretched, and he gave it full throat as he twisted back on himself to see he'd caught his foot and wrenched his ankle in the posito. If it weren't so pitiful, we'd have broken out laughing, but there was no time to laugh. Kip kept yowling and cursing now, and Martinez and I—responsive to our own fears—shrieked and our feet and arms churned. It was as if we were a single seething and sightless monster, like poor Caliban in Robert Oppenheimer's and my own favorite drama. Things went black and blank until a man's voice rose to challenge us in Spanish from down at the end of the nave, and when I heard—with ears that didn't seem to belong to me—just how distant that voice was, I knew if we ran hard we might evade, or at least postpone, being caught.

It was Fernando Martinez who showed a modicum of common sense. Kip and I would have been helpless, by ourselves, in the situation, and Martinez probably intuited it. Coming to, suddenly—or at least so it seemed to me—he clambered to his feet, hissed, —Shut up! then whispered what we were to do—I remember his face going very stiff—and we did what he said, no questions asked, no further ado. We bolted straight through the door by the altar that led into the nave, where we more or less faced, in the morning dark, our dilemma.

An old man. Like the church, he seemed out of a storybook, yet quite unlike the church, he was surely a spent thing. A spindle is what comes to mind as I think back, or a dying summer bee dusted by the first frost, a husk, a helpless wisp. He was, pathetically insofar as we could barely hear him over the music of his keys on the thick ring in his right hand, cursing at what we assumed was the top of his lungs, cursing us down and up, paying out a wheezy string of epithets in what might have been three languages, a little Tewa, some Spanish, some English. It was clear he was more terrified than we, and we knew, in the way boys like the commonest nasty predators can, we knew how to capitalize on terror. Martinez made his move first; and Kip and I followed suit. As we rushed toward this poor viejito whistling and windmilling our ungainly arms, I felt sorry for him, the caretaker, or custodian, or could he have been the priest? Seeing him there before me in what this shadowy light unveiled as a dismal suit, dark blue or a gray-blue, short at the cuffs and buttoned at the belly, the white of his shirt revealed in an inverted V above the waistband, there with his bola tie—turquoise lump set in dull silver was it? and no, I'd decided, he couldn't be the priest—half done up, there in his old body, and seeing him fix in slow shock on we who were bearing down on him, I realized he posed no threat whatever. So when Martinez, or maybe Kip—by accident, I assumed—brushed him with a flailing elbow as they ran by, not hard but enough to make him stagger, I caught the man in my arms and steadied him, felt just how tough he was, smelled the coffee, the old tobacco, and what must have been antiquity on his breath, and felt quick sympathy toward him until he recovered his balance and thundered, —
Váyanse, hijos del demonio!
loud, louder than I could have imagined possible, and cried, —
Lárgansen, desgradiados
, get out of here, you disgraceful boys even as he sprang forward and swiped me across the face with his keys.

The look he must have seen on my face was some way equal to the unexpected swat he had given me. We each reeled backward a step, and locked eyes. We stood, a couple of generations removed from one another and descended down lines of thoroughly different blood and values, and gawked like two soldiers of opposing camps come unawares on one of the enemy, with arms drawn perhaps, but maybe not in the mood for any trouble after the day of heroics and warring, who try to back away, thinking, So these are the people we work so hard to do away with.

We stood, stared. I must have reached out to him, extended my hand, gave him a stolid smile.

Then that daydream soon was gone and Kip yelled, —Hurry up, come on, Brice, and I blinked and may actually have thought to give the old fellow an embrace before I regained my senses and dashed, my cheek on fire, toward the door at the end of the sanctuary.

The sun was so bright the light seemed stiff. We burst from the darkness into the hard white morning heat of the plaza, at a dead run. The reedy words of the old custodian receded as we piled, helter-skelter, Kip limping, into the car.

—Go, man, Martinez shouted, but Kip couldn't find the keys. Aside from a crumpled roll of dollar bills covered with a pale patina of the sacred dirt, his pockets were empty. He searched the floor of the car, and the seat. —
Picale, andale, ir'ya vacas!
cried Martinez.

Would that we had clung to the righteousness of our endeavor, is all I can think now, as I remember this scene from my youth; the vain panic, the demoralized and dishonorable flight from a helpless specter of a man. My cheek still has on it a patch of white, this tough welt, which I will always regard as an emblem of the series of bad if heartfelt decisions that were made on the morning following our idealistic—and after its own fashion successful—pilgrimage. While Kip and Martinez argued, and while the old fellow climbed the gentle hill from the zaguan to the top of the plaza, I lamented. Looked up at the hills that ascended above the irrigated flat fields of the valley, rose in parallel and curved mounds to converge, higher and higher, into the low mountain of Tsi Mayoh, and wanted—again, like a child—to bolt, flee my mates, leave behind my mess. I wondered how far away I could get on foot before they caught up. Remembered I had taken a piece of chicken from the refrigerator, a leftover from dinner the night before, wrapped it up in paper, and now I tapped my hands on my pants pockets.

Sometimes the mind can run in so many directions at once. I suppose I had thought ahead to the projected night before me, down in the valley, pictured myself under the heavy stars, hungry and far from the comforts of home. The chicken wing was gone. Must have lost it in the desert where some cayedog got himself a pretty easy morsel. I could picture my mother and sister sitting there at the table last night, talking of this and that, and remembered how I'd eaten second helpings and, bashful, asked for thirds against this secret prospect of famishment.

But then Martinez laughed and pointed, —The keys, man, there they are, let's go, and sure enough they were still in the ignition where Kip had left them. My mouth was as parched as the soil that covered my lips and cheeks.

—Go away, I shouted at the old caretaker, who was almost upon us, —go away, saying it as much for his sake as ours. Kip got the Plymouth started and slammed the column stick into gear just as he came hobbling to the side of the car, waving those church keys in the air, whooping and sputtering, the mongrel dogs—black, brown, white with spots, all nondescript but for their fat wet swinging tongues—running in close circles around him.

Our tires spun, kicked up pebbles. Our heads heaved forward, came to right. The moronic dogs stopped and, with the miraculous singularity of vision a pack can display, turned their attention from the viejito to us in the car, then one, then another of them bared fangs, and in an instant bounded straight in our direction. Kip, not having seen any of this, fumbled with the stick, hit the gas and suddenly backed up again, slammed into something, pumped the brake, pushed the shift stick to drive. The engine coughed and we lurched out forward as a painful howling rose from under the chrome bumper. I turned and saw that one of the mongrels, crackling with energy, powered itself in a furious scuffle with the earth, its hind end reddened and paralyzed, its head and forelegs churning as it pulled itself in a semicircle, and lunged across the powdery ground snapping in the direction of the car. The old man had sat himself down on the plaza. He watched the injured dog as it ran in arcs, fell, jumped up again, described a half-moon on the dust much the way we used to make snow angels on our backs after a fresh winter flurry, and collapsed once more. The other hounds were right alongside us. Martinez stood in the back seat. To him this was a marvelous circus, I guess. He threw the whiskey bottle at the closest dog, a black and muscular blur, and caught it square in the chops. Beyond the dogs, the bottle, the old man, I saw the santuario receding from view, glazed as it were by the scrim of dustlight. The stout twin spires seemed peaceful and eternal there in the delicate, protecting hands of the cottonwoods, and I knew with the same certainty one knows something in a particularly vivid dream that despite ourselves we had accomplished what we'd come to do, that while our simple-hearted wishes might be beyond the interests of fate to grant, our motives had not been construed as other than good and kind and compassionate. We could eat all the sacred dirt on earth, but still those who loved to make war would make war. My crooked halo whitened—could Kip, could Martinez see?—into the sincerest burning beam for that one small moment, then dimmed away.

Thinking back on it, I've come to adore El Santuario de Chimayó more and more over the years, despite my distance and the fact I'm not a religious man, don't attend church, don't
intend
to attend church in the future. Chimayó is more than a church, has to it a spiritual richness beyond what any religion offers. Sturdy and luminous, it is a holy yet secular place, secular as in saecular,
saecularis
, worldly and pagan, made of earth, of dust and water. Open to all, it shuns not the least among us. What else can a sinner say? Chimayó proposes, in its simplicity, that all churches should be made of hand-hewn timber and hand-plied mud, since wood and adobe sustain the spirit better than the finest marble or firmest granite. The Europeans can keep their pallid fortresses, with rose windows and spires to take your breath away, with golden doors to baptisteries and campaniles touching the lower stratosphere. The believers who, in the early part of the last century, fashioned Chimayó from the barest elements around them, knew that trees rise from wet earth, and that wood and mud are old biological friends. More than this seems an excess, and somehow faithless. If man is made of clay, why not his houses of worship? It remains as extraordinary to me today as it was then that not an hour's distance from this valley was the Hill where a fire was built that could burn not just wood but earth as well.

—Shut up, man, I turned toward Martinez. How could he find all this so funny? He hooted something in dialect at the old man, pumped a defiant middle finger into the morning breeze. I hadn't noticed, the night before, that he had his own brand. A scar ran from a point just below his eye down his smooth brown cheek to the edge of his jaw. It was thick as a worm and dull pink. He turned, offered me a smile—or rather, an inverted frown. His teeth were gap-spaced but there was a delicacy to him. Who was this guy? I turned around and sat back. And, of course, who were we?

Martinez laughed some more.

—
Cállete la boca,
Kip told him.

Martinez responded, —
Cállete 'l hocico
yourself, then pulled himself together, got serious all of a sudden, and said, —So what is next, my friends?

—What do you mean what's next? What's next is you're gone, is what's next.

—I think I'll stay along for a little while yet.

—You're crackers, boy.

—Kip?

—What.

—Maybe we better go back home now.

—No way, he said, and took a hard right turn, started driving faster, through what there was of this small village, past some broken-down wooden stalls and houses, toward fields with shade trees here and there and cattle with yokes of lashed sticks grazing in the mild calm of their simple world. I stayed quiet, was grateful that Fernando Martinez decided to be quiet. The determination in Kip's face made me ponder what we were going to do, where we were to go now.

We had no plan. What fragment of an agenda we did have in place the night before had been fulfilled, more or less. Kip and I each had a lode of tierra bendita in our bellies, as proposed, but beyond Chimayó, Kip and I had failed to scheme. There wasn't time to discuss it, and so having passed the Capilla del Santo Niño, surged beneath the trees that lined the narrow dirt lane, having sped down the main road, a road that would lead us not back toward Los Alamos, but rather toward Truchas and Taos, we found ourselves farther away from home and deeper into trouble. I glanced over at Kip again and saw him wince when he weighed down on the pedal with his hurt foot. I breathed in deep the pristine air off Tsi Mayoh, off the alluvial soil of El Potrero, off the Rio Quemado and Santa Cruz, and thought that I ought to have some say about what we were doing, but then figured, Leave it alone, after all what does it matter now that we're pure, now that we've eaten from the well of earth, there's nothing anybody can do to hurt us.