What the Moon Saw (6 page)

Abuelo set down his mug. “Know things,” he repeated proudly. The firelight glinted off his eyes. The green one looked translucent, like some kind of gemstone, and the brown one glistened like melting chocolate. “Your grandmother can see a whole world that the rest of us cannot.”

Abuelita playfully poked his shoulder. “More hot chocolate, Clara?” she asked, standing up.

I nodded, watching both of them. Suddenly, more than anything, I wanted to know what she knew.

“Abuelita,” I said. I was ready to take a deep breath and dive under to get the shining coins.
“Cuénteme.”
Tell me.

She passed me the steaming mug, settled back into her small wooden chair, and began.

Helena

S
UMMER
1934

T
he most beautiful things in life are unexpected, Clara. They tear at the fabric of the everyday world. The world of patting tortillas and fetching water and washing dishes. They show you the deeper world, where you talk with the spirits of trees. Where you see silvery threads connecting a leaf to a star to an earthworm.

I was just a young girl, about eight years old, the night I made my first soul flight. The whole day I’d spent working. Cooking, washing, sweeping, as always. That evening we were drinking hot cinnamon milk around the fire—Uncle José, Aunt Teresa, my cousin María, my grandfather Ta’nu, and me—when we heard something strange. The hoofbeats of a burro, growing louder, closer.

Ta’nu somehow knew. He put down his milk and said, “Ita”—that’s what he called me, Flower—“bring me the
mezcal.
And gather
ruda
and white lilies from the garden.”

He walked out the door. He was a small man, stooped over. A calm man. A man who never rushed, never panicked.

I leaped up and collected some cups, the
mezcal,
and a jug of water.

Uncle José muttered, “All these strangers coming. I’m tired of it.”

Aunt Teresa looked down and said nothing. She hid her eyes whenever Uncle was near. She was a wide, round woman, but she tried to make herself small around Uncle. Small like a mouse hiding in the corner.

“Bring me another cup of hot milk,” Uncle José barked at me, just as I was hurrying out the door with my arms full.

Aunt Teresa whispered in a brave mouse voice, “Child, go help your grandfather. I’ll give José his milk.”

Uncle shot her a dark look.

Before he could say another word, I stepped outside and into the dusk. A man and a woman stood by the burro. They held a child, a little girl, maybe four years old. Her body hung limp, like wet laundry. Ta’nu took the things from my hands. He led the family down the hill, into the curing hut.

I knew what to do. You see, I had been helping Ta’nu heal from the time I could walk. From the time my parents died. I ran around back and picked bunches of
ruda,
breathing in the smell. A sharp, strong smell. Then I gathered an armful of tall, white flowers, still damp from the afternoon rainstorm. I ran back to the hut in the faint light. Mud squished between my toes and splattered my
huipil,
but that didn’t matter.

Inside, on the table covered with statues and pictures of saints, candles were lit. The smell of smoking pine filled the room. On the dirt floor, on a woven mat, lay the girl, barely breathing. Poor thing, she looked like a wilted plant, a plant so close to death.

“My daughter was down at the stream,” the woman said, “playing, while her sisters gathered water.” She spoke slowly, trembling, wrapping her braids around her fingers. Her eyes were swollen from tears. “They said my daughter fell.
Crack,
her head hit a stone. And, still, she hasn’t woken up.”

Ta’nu took the white lilies and
ruda,
dripping with rain. He swept them over the girl’s body. He sang and sang. Waves of words he sang, words that rose and fell. Words that moved up and down with his arms. That wove around us, then up through the cracks in the roof. Over and over, he called to her spirit. He asked it, again and again, to return to her body.

Soon, I knew, he would need the
mezcal.
I opened the bottle. Our
mezcal
was made from cactus juice from a nearby town. How it burned going down your throat, how it made your skin tingle!
Mezcal
has great power to heal, you see, when it’s mixed with herbs. But some people—like Uncle José—gulp
mezcal
down. They drink it because they have a thirst for something else, only they don’t know what their thirst is for. They gulp
mezcal
down until they collapse, dizzy. And oh, how they make their families suffer.

I passed the bottle to Ta’nu. He used
mezcal
only for cures. He took a mouthful and sprayed it on the girl in great gusts. Gusts like wind in a sudden storm. He called to her spirit, reminding it of the pleasures of life. “Hot cinnamon-chocolate milk,” he said. “Warm hearth fires,” he said. “Music, laughter, your mother’s touch,” he said.

But she did not wake up. There she lay with her braids half undone, a few fine hairs damp against her cheeks. Again and again, Ta’nu blew, but the girl remained still. Still as a tree on a day without a breeze.

Ta’nu brushed a piece of copal incense over her. Onto her wrists he rubbed it. Onto her forehead. Onto her temples. Onto her neck. Then he set it in the clay dish of smoldering pinewood. Clouds of smoke spiraled upward. Sweet smoke. Smoke that whispered a kind of language. If you paid close attention, it told you hidden things.

Up and up the smoke moved, and Ta’nu watched it. He watched it to find out what was wrong with the girl. I understood the smoke too, but he didn’t know that. No one knew that. You see, every time I helped Ta’nu with his ceremonies, I knew what he would say, because I knew what the smoke had said. This time the smoke told us that the girl’s soul was captured. Held prisoner by the spirit of the stream.

A stream spirit! Oh, stream spirits are known for their raw tempers. Up they rise, like whirlwinds. Up they rise, spewing dark water, angry waves, furious white foam. You can never tell when a stream spirit will fly into a rage. When it will lash out for something as simple as a girl stepping onto its favorite rock. So you can see why my heart was pounding fast, why fear was spreading over my skin like cold fingers.

“When your daughter fell,” Ta’nu said to the parents, “her soul left her body for a moment. And in that moment, the spirit of the stream snatched her soul.”

The mother bit her bottom lip, so hard it drew blood. “How can we find it?”

“It will not be easy,” Ta’nu said. “She is very young. Her soul is just weakly attached to her body.” He closed his eyes.

We watched him. We waited and waited.

Finally he announced, “I will find her soul and bring it back.”

Before he even had to ask, I ran up the hill to the kitchen to prepare the sacred tea. The kitchen was empty of people. By this time, Aunt Teresa, Uncle José, and little María had all gone to bed. I stoked the hearth fire, then unhooked a small metal pot from the rafters. Into it I poured water from our heavy clay jug. I rummaged through the sacks of dried chiles and hardened corncobs piled in the corner. There it was, the crate packed with baskets of dried herbs. I laid the herbs I needed by the hearth and waited for the water to boil. Back and forth over the dirt floor I paced. Back and forth, skimming the bamboo walls with impatient fingertips.

Finally, bubbles began to rise in the pot. I dropped in three leaves of
yuku kuaa,
six of
ita tikuva,
ten of
yuku nuxi.
They steeped and I prayed. I prayed for the spirits of the herbs to help the girl, to give Ta’nu a safe soul journey. Then I poured the tea into a clay cup and brought it to Ta’nu. I was careful, very careful, not to spill a single drop.

Now a cloud of panic filled the room. Tears streamed down the mother’s face. The father looked stunned, like a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare. Only his hands were moving, wringing each other out like rags.

“Ita,” Ta’nu said to me. “We must do it now. The girl stopped breathing for a moment. She has started again, but the string that connects her soul to her body is fragile.”

Ta’nu gulped down the cup of tea without letting it cool. It must have scalded his throat, but that didn’t matter to him. His song started again, a song that rode on ripples of a stream. A leaf, floating away. His voice sculpted the night air like hands shaping clay. His voice created another world. A world of giant oceans and shooting stars and mountains. Of tiny hummingbirds, butterfly wings, new buds.

The song faded and his body fell limp against the wall. His journey had begun. Now his soul was traveling through the night, to the stream, to the girl’s spirit. We watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall.

“Is he all right?” the woman asked me.

I nodded. “Soon he’ll be back,” I assured her.

But Ta’nu wasn’t back soon. Time passed. Much more time than it had ever taken him before. The girl’s parents barely moved. Their eyes flickered back and forth between their daughter and Ta’nu. Back and forth, back and forth. Watching and waiting. Once in a while they looked at me with faces full of questions. But what could I tell them? I kept watching Ta’nu’s body closely, making sure his chest rose and fell. Something wasn’t right. This was taking too long.

He’d always told me never to touch him, never to wake him during a soul travel. It was too dangerous, he’d said. A touch could break the thread from his body to his soul. But he’d never told me what to do if he didn’t come back.

Time passed. A dog barked in the distance. Silence again. Then another sound. A wilder sound pierced the night. The cry of a jaguar.

Soon the roosters would crow. Loud noises like a rooster’s crow could also break the string. Ta’nu had to come back soon. Why was he taking so long?

His chest stopped moving. He lay still, perfectly still.

The woman turned to me. Her mouth hung open in alarm.

I closed my eyes. I willed Ta’nu to take another breath.
Breathe…breathe…breathe…
On a tiny current of air I entered his lungs. I entered his lungs and urged them to rise.

My eyes opened and his chest rose. He was breathing again. Breathing, but faintly. Very faintly.

“Wait here,” I told the girl’s parents.

I ran to the kitchen. Some tea remained at the bottom of the pot, a half cup’s worth. That should be enough for me. I was half the size of Ta’nu. I ran back to the hut. My feet slapped the mud. I kept one hand over the cup to keep it from splashing. Back in the hut, I sat down, took a deep breath, and drank the cold tea. Oh, it was bitter. So bitter, I almost spit it right out.

I sang, the same way Ta’nu did. I asked the spirits and saints and God for help. The rhythm carried me, the rhythm of my voice. A voice that spiraled upward with the copal smoke. My tongue and lips felt numb, yet I heard words coming out of my mouth. Words that I couldn’t feel myself forming. Behind my eyelids I saw swirls of light. Pulsing whirlwinds I saw. Whirlwinds pulsing with cricket sounds, with my heartbeat, with the light drumming of rain.

Then I was outside, in the night. But I felt no earth under my feet. I hovered above, at the treetops. Everything glowed. Only a crescent of moon showed that night, but the leaves and branches glimmered, silver. And everything pulsed with life. The trees whispered to me, the corn murmured. Even the stones were breathing. Over the treetops I moved. Below, I saw threads, like spiders’ webs, connecting everything.

Walking, it would have taken hours to reach the girl’s village, but my flight lasted only minutes. Soon I reached the shiny curving stream that marked the outskirts of the village. I floated above the woods at the water’s edge, then made my way downstream. There they were, Ta’nu and the girl! On top of a cluster of stones in the middle of the river. Two wispy figures, glowing faintly. So faintly I’d almost missed them. Their soul strings seemed to be knotted together and pinned down with rocks.

But just behind them was something else. Oh, it was something so cold! Something that chilled my bones. Something that made me want to fly home as fast as I could. The spirit of the stream. He hadn’t seen me yet, but I saw his eyes. Eyes that formed dark whirlpools, sucking me in, threatening to drown me.

I hovered, hidden in the leaves, helpless. If I tried to untangle their strings, the spirit of the stream might capture me, too. I looked around for a sign of Ta’nu’s spirit animal, a deer with eight white spots. No deer to be seen. Perhaps the spirit of the stream had pulled the deer under its frothing waves. Ta’nu and his deer spirit had been rescuing souls all their lives. So what could I, a little girl, do?

There I lingered, at the edge of the woods, hoping the spirit of the stream wouldn’t notice me. Then, below me, a noise. A rustle in the underbrush.

It was the shiny form of a jaguar! His spots shimmered like tiny moons, and he stood so close underneath me I could nearly touch his powerful shoulders. He looked up. Moonlight glinted in his eyes. Then, in one swift motion, he loped over to the stream and lapped at it with his tongue.

The stream spirit froze. The black pools of his eyes filled with fear. He backed away, downstream.

I watched the jaguar. Water dripped from his jaws. He looked straight at the stream spirit, opened his mouth, and let out a cry. A cry that ripped through the night like lightning.

In a flash, the spirit of the stream disappeared underwater.

Now was my chance. I descended from the leaves. Little by little I moved toward Ta’nu. His eyes held terror. Terror was something I’d never seen there before.

I looked at the girl. Her spirit body was thin and trembling. First I loosened the knots at Ta’nu’s wrists. All the time I felt the eyes of the jaguar behind me. And I realized something. I realized he was not stalking me. No, he was guarding me, protecting me.