Hallie’s truck seemed to lean into the music just the way she did, on those last miles of the paved road corkscrewing up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Swaying along to the old favorite John Denver song turned up full blast, windows wide open to the smell of evergreens, and maybe piñon smoke somewhere. This might well be the part of her trips to Las Trampas—to Reuben and the rest of the family—Hallie loved best. The anticipation, sweet like an unwrapped gift. Like Christmas Eve had been back in childhood. Knowing she had seven whole days ahead of her, she didn’t need to hurry but had driven just a little over the speed limit anyway, most of the way, eager to get to the secluded village and the fifteen acres of an ancient Spanish land grant she considered her true home. The wonderful old farm in the New Mexico community well off the beaten track which was her secret reservoir of happiness, something she prized above all else. Purest magic.
This time was different, though—she felt that as distinctly as she did the nearing autumn in the late September air, the subtle ebbing of the light. Her elation was tinged with momentary apprehension as she came out of the pine trees into the valley of pastures and farmland, glimpsing the river and the village church. She felt almost reluctant as she turned onto the gravel road leading to her treasured Hacienda San Isidro, knowing how much she’d be risking to bring up the matter she’d promised she would while she was there. She was fairly certain there was no way the Gallegos clan would agree to what Joey and Francisco wanted, but she was caught squarely between her dear, adopted family and the man she felt so irreversibly attracted to, and must show her true mettle to if she hoped he might love her back. Terribly torn, she reached the long orchard of apricot and apple trees, the gently sloping pastureland beyond, the little herd of goats for Jorge’s cheeses, the three horses that May refused to let them sell. Feeling a smile start as always, seeing the sprawling farm, she determined that she would do her best to ignore Joey’s earnest bidding for at least a day or two—as long as possible—and just enjoy her time with them.
Pulling up in a swirl of dust, Hallie shrugged her tense shoulders (always storing anxiety) and pulled her two bags from the little Honda truck—one with her oldest clothes and slouchy riding boots, a fleece jacket stuffed in against the cooler nights; the other with some of her apple jam with cardamom and fresh ginger, and two dozen spiced lamb tamales. Small payment for all she’d be given in return. She worked part time as cook and barista for her sister’s bookshop café in Santa Fe, welcoming dogs and teens and indigent poets, and had many devoted customers. She catered opera tailgate parties too in the summer, and liked to share her culinary creations with friends.
She felt the usual sense of homecoming as she approached the two-story adobe house, Territorial style, with corrugated metal roof and two dormers, and on the side a long covered walkway with deep shade and vibrant butterfly chairs.
Before she could get to the door, Pepe and Frasquita came zooming towards her. Dogs of an unpronounceable Aztec breed—Xoloitzcuintli, dog of the gods—one brindle, the other bronze. They’d been lying in the slats of sunlight on the porch, the Xolos’ favorite sport in all the world other than chasing jackrabbits or squirrels.
And after them came May, Reuben and Adela’s youngest granddaughter. Brave, sunny May, who’d had a prosthetic left foot since she was two and viciously attacked by a neighbor’s pit bull. She always wore a turquoise and red jasper ankle bracelet over it, not for concealment but to proudly show off her difference from everybody else.
“Hallie!” she cried excitedly, racing almost as quickly as the dogs, for a big hug.
Adela appeared next, in a homey apron, coming out the screen door from the kitchen, where she’d surely just turned down the burner to simmer under a big kettle of her to-die-for pork & green chile stew.
“Welcome, hija.” Her beaming amber honey face reflected both welcome and love.
Inside, the house had traditional features—thick doorways and windowsills, vigas across the ceilings in the family and dining rooms, a kiva fireplace, a niche or two with Santiago’s hand-carved saints of painted cottonwood—but other unique touches too. A blue-tiled water fountain for the dogs, an aquarium with luminous tropical fish built into one of the inner walls, a burnished copper samovar used especially at Christmas for spicy Aztec drinking chocolate. The 19th century dwelling was special above all, sacred almost, because it held some of her favorite people in the world. People who had helped shape Hallie more than her emotionally absent parents and rebellious brothers ever had. She’d sought refuge and metamorphosis among the extended Gallegos family for much of her life, in Santa Fe then here.
They came and went these days, as families did—children and grandchildren living scattered across several states, working in Sipapu, Apache Canyon, Taos, and even Cozumel, and returning whenever they could. Lori, Hallie’s closest friend since junior high, was up in Colorado now, married and expecting a second child. May’s parents were divorced, and just her mother here part of the time.
Everyone resident at the moment showed up for supper at the rustic farmhouse table nearly as long as the dining room, tonight set just for six. Reuben gave Hallie a big bear hug. Reuben, her friend and mentor (think Merlin, Gandalf) since day one of ninth grade, when he had taught her earth science and instilled wonder in her for the world she hadn’t paid particular attention to before: crystals and minerals, and fossils holding ancient lives in them; and even more enchanting, clouds and stars and a visiting comet with its long, seductive tail of light (or dust and gas, vaporized ice and solar wind).
Jorge and Santiago didn’t have a fraction of his bubbling-over energy (still going strong at 68), but they both offered words of welcome and big smiles across the table as they settled down. Jorge had brought some of his marinated goat cheese in from his apartment in the barn, this flavored with fresh sage. He’d been named for George Harrison, met and befriended on a trip to India by his adventurous mother, Ria, Reuben’s indefatigable sister. The musician had been studying with Ravi Shankar, while Ria was on her way to the Taj Mahal from graduate studies in Mexico City, needing to see it for herself and size up the geometric patterns and proportions of its architecture. Like George in his All Things Must Pass period, his namesake wore his hair long, past his shoulders.
Santiago, Reuben’s maternal uncle, was a highly regarded santero. He was working on a group of six saints for a gallery in Taos at the moment, he said. No matter that he was ninety-three, and Reuben and Adela had moved back from Santa Fe to live here all year round to help look after him—though he fought with the family stubbornness against their help, or “interference” as he designated it. Shrugging off the pull of birthplace and family. Hallie was looking forward to spending some time with him during the week. She liked to head out to his studio after an early horseback ride and subsequent breakfast out in the patio—an amiable pattern they’d established over the past years.
But she’d been on her feet all day at the café before making the drive from Santa Fe, so after they’d finished the chile stew and caught up with each others’ news since she’d been there in June, she realized she was bone tired, and after helping with the dishes made her excuses and headed up to bed. It had been enervating too, keeping the niggling worry about her appointed task at bay. Despite her best efforts to just ignore Joey’s insistence for a day or two, she felt like a snake in the grass, a wooden horse thrust brazenly into the inner sanctum of the household, as at Troy.
The bedroom everyone thought of as “Hallie’s room,” the little room upstairs with slanted roof and one of the dormers, was a wonderful hidey-hole with skylight letting in a zillion stars; her own tiled sink the color of bluey-green Fox turquoise; a little antique roll-top desk with Santiago’s version of St. Jerome, or San Geronimo, with his lion (head and mane evoking the Aztec sun stone) and open book (its words illegible); foot-soft woven Zapotec rug; daybed with spindle frame, piled with a down and feather cotton comforter. Comforting now.
But as she might have expected she couldn’t sleep, despite her exhaustion, though she was usually the proverbial log there at the hacienda. She’d chosen The Milagro Beanfield War from the owl-stencilled bookshelf, always liking its magic realism and magically realistic New Mexican characters. Other favorite paperbacks included Bless Me Ultima, with its wonderful healer and spiritual guide; The Ancient Child, with native myths and a budding shaman; and several mysteries by Tony Hillerman, involving Navajo skinwalkers, witchcraft, and chindi, ghosts of the dead. She’d expected to drift off after just a page or two, but instead found herself wider awake, yet unable to concentrate on the story. She knew herself to be an inveterate fretter, even at the best of times.
To soothe her contrition at being set to upset her good-hearted friends, Hallie needed reassurance from the universe. So she got dressed again and slipped downstairs, then headed out the mud room door past the herb garden (smelling blissful) and the chapel (which she’d ignore for now), up to the magical Tower of Riddles to commune with the planets and stars, the vastness of the mountain dark. The adobe tower, an observatory and a place of riddling the skies, drew her like iron filings to a horseshoe magnet—like the one she’d bought with her allowance as a child. Her fascination with science had started then, and was heightened a hundredfold in middle school when Reuben—Mr. Gallegos still—had brought the class here to Las Trampas on a special overnight field trip, and let them look through the big telescope he had installed in the tower. (Initially intended as a belltower for the small chapel just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by Ria had somehow been lost in transit and never replaced.) And after Hallie had made friends with one of Reuben’s daughters, Lori, a class ahead of hers, she’d been invited back over the years, and was grateful to have become almost one of the family.
When she’d asked Reuben to explain about the riddles in the tower’s name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he’d looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he’d been taken with. (Neruda’s love of the natural world matching his own).
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
She’d looked them up for herself later, in California for college then not returning to New Mexico at all, after some harsh words from and to her difficult parents. Aching at her estrangement, and most of all missing visits to the hacienda, she found the next lines in the poem called “Poetry” perfectly capturing how she had felt back home, back in her element.
And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.
“Drunk with the great starry void”—that was so absolutely her, and Hallie felt the giddiness now, here, this night in September in her thirty-fourth year, verging on love, with other fathomless riddles and mysteries unsettling her. What could she say, in the next days, to keep all facets of her tiny, heart-sore being in harmony, preferably of the Celestial kind?
She stood there at the brink, yearning upwards while not able to stop herself from glancing down towards the small adobe church which held the bones of Reuben’s mother and father, and Santiago’s unmarried daughter, the rustic sanctuary like a keepsake box of memory and respect. It was kept locked now, since just after the funeral for Joaquín, Beatriz, and Luz five years ago—their car hit by a drunk driver on the Labor Day weekend on the highway back from Taos.
As she looked down, away from the waning corn moon (she’d learned the traditional names, loving the poetry in them), she was aware of something odd. She’d swear she was seeing a strange shimmer of light around the time- and weather-worn chapel—like drifting fog during those California years, or swelling tides cresting midair, except that this was far inland, and altogether dry, and the September air without a trace of clouds or coming storms. Nothing, then, she could explain. Something ghostly, uneasy, unsettling.
Imagination, Hallie told herself. No more than a manifestation of her troubled conscience, focused around that significant structure. She rubbed her eyes, knowing that tiredness did strange things to her vision, too. Time to go back to the house and make a serious effort to sleep.
She made her way carefully down the stairs of yellow pine from the telescope chamber (which also held binoculars for wild birds, and an antique astrolabe), considering the little chapel in its clearing warily as she started downhill. It seemed to have returned to its inert solidity there in the star-filled night.
But suddenly out of the blue, out of the Aztec-chocolate-dark, something whizzed past her head, barely missing, and crashed beside her on the flagstone path. At that a frenzied uproar came from the dogs in the nearby barn where they stayed with Jorge at night, shattering the darkness further. Hallie jumped, and startled once again as Adela called out sharply from the house, standing in a long flannel nightgown at the door.
“Oh, not again,” the older woman said tightly, strangely.
“It’s me,” Hallie said with a note of curiosity, thinking she’d maybe been mistaken for somebody else.
“What have you seen?” Adela sounded wary.
The guest explained, showing her the jagged piece of tile which she’d picked up off the flagstones. One of the Talavera tiles which decorated the facade of the tower rising above the church. Lizards (pine green and navy) alternating with golondrinas, stylized swallows (navy and white). This had been one of the lizards.
“Only a fallen tile.” If it had come from the chapel instead, she could have made a point of mentioning what bad shape the structure was in.
Adela’s look was odd in the low exterior light, and Hallie added soothingly, “I’m sorry I was out, and disturbed you—I couldn’t sleep.”
“That’s fine, hija. But maybe better come inside.”
“What’s the matter?” Hallie asked. Her friend was distinctly on edge.
After a long silence, Adela said “It’s Beatriz, we think.” She moved back into the unlighted family room, keeping her voice carefully low.
Beatriz, Reuben’s mother, the much-lauded family matriarch, lying entombed in the chapel. What in the world—?
“We had a priest from La Mesilla—no, in truth, a curandero—here to consult and advise what can be done about the bad spirit. A poltergeist, or duende—which has been troubling the hacienda for some time. Especially, it seems, the little church. One arm of the stone cross broke off some weeks ago, thankfully while we were all at supper. Then days later we found St. Rita toppled from her niche beside the door, without explanation. There’ve been all kinds of disruptive actions, loud noises, physical disturbances—which the curandero tells us are due to the presence of a spirit in emotional turmoil, wanting attention. Like an unruly child or adolescent. Beatriz wouldn’t make contact with him, but we’re sure the troubled one is her.”
An unsettled spirit—sensing the disruption Joey and Francisco were pushing for, and Hallie had been bidden to propose? The lizard tile sent flying in protest, to catch her attention—or something worse? She felt goosebumps rising. Lizards as spirit animals were associated with adaptability and transformation, she remembered, which was maybe way too relevant.
“Did this curandero have any idea what the source of her upset might be?” Hallie asked cautiously, dreading Adela’s answer.
“She’s always insisted on having her own way,” Adela said ruefully. “And the chapel’s been especially important to her. When it was built, it served as a prayer room for family worship and private contemplation, but Beatriz appropriated it for her own use. The old Madonna in the shallow niche outside the door was ousted by the St. Rita Santiago carved at her request, and my mother-in-law spent hours every day inside burning sandalwood incense and sage smudge sticks. Reading, writing, praying . . .”
Hallie was feeling more reprehensible with every word.
“Since her death mi marido has scrupulously preserved his mother’s sanctuary. Her última morada—final resting place. Keeping everybody out, as she had done for years. Leaving flowers outside the chapel door, lighting candles on the doorstep on her name day and other holy days. Being respectful of her memory, always. But not that long ago, a couple of people stopped by from Taos. Part of the group that’s been restoring churches all over New Mexico, wanting to visit our chapel. To look inside, intrude on those resting quietly there.”
She almost gasped. Someone had been here already? She hadn’t known. Not Joey’s group, from Santa Fe, but there was at least one other Francisco had mentioned.
“Of course you can imagine Reuben told them ‘Go away!’ in his sternest headmaster’s voice, you know?”
She could hear it clearly, directed at her. If the trouble had started at the first mention of having the chapel disturbed, because Beatriz couldn’t bear the thought of being moved, or inconvenienced in any way, how could Hallie possibly suggest letting others intrude? She’d draw his wrath as well as the unrestful matriarch’s.
“But now you need to sleep, querida,” Adela was urging. “You’ve had a scare tonight, and I’m sorry to have gone on so long about family matters.”
***
Reuben caught Hallie in the kitchen first thing the next day, before she’d finished the big mug of Costa Rican coffee she’d dripped through a filter cone before heading out to the horse paddock. He was getting ready to take apples and preserves and Adela’s cinnamon apple fritters to the farmers’ market. The trees in their orchard were Muscat de Dieppe, originally from Normandy, and the family also made cider and a potent apple brandy like French Calvados.
“Adela tells me you almost got walloped by a tile falling from the tower. I’m grateful it didn’t hit you.”
She realized that this was a perfect opportunity to say what she had to, since it would only get harder as the week went on. She took a deep, steadying breath.
“Reuben . . . I wonder if it might be a good thing . . . something you maybe ought to think about, given the cross, the saint, and other things falling . . . and how run-down the structure is . . . to get the chapel fixed up by professionals, before somebody does get hurt?” He was frowning, but she went on, stumbling. “Some friends of mine, some guys I’m working with part-time . . . I hadn’t told you yet . . . would love to get it on a list of other village churches they’re restoring all over northern New Mexico. They’d be happy to talk to you, see what you think.”
She got no further with her friend; she saw his resistance hardening in real time even as she tried to show her earnest sympathy and readiness to concede and conciliate and not betray the fond regard she felt for all of them. She didn’t have a chance, his set face and clenched jaw told her. No way was he going to let any outsider intrude in family things. Not even her, she understood with heavy heart, knowing she’d just become one of those outsiders seen as a threat to hearth and home, and in particular to the last resting place of its redoubtable matriarch, mother of Reuben and his five siblings. No matter that she didn’t rest, unquiet Beatriz—seemed to have no intention of resting, though she had been not-of-this-world for several years now.
Hallie had gulped her coffee without noticing, and shakily rinsed out the empty cup to set on the drainboard. Reuben’s expression had turned grim, greatly displeased, his aura a dark red, so she murmured apologies and fled before he could explode at her as she had seen him do once with an especially disruptive student in his junior class. She felt awful, and wished she’d held her tongue. She knew the others would be angry at her meddling too, though Adela would probably conspicuously hold her tongue, and go about her work with that exaggerated emphasis which served to (almost) hide her true feelings, and Jorge would just tune her out, his eyes not friendly any more. She’d surely forfeited her welcome, as she’d been afraid she would.
After an hour’s quiet ride on Nubarrón, the pinto gelding with the markings of a desert thundercloud, Hallie scrambled eggs with fresh oregano from Jorge’s herb garden, eggs fresh from the Orpington hens. Not hungry but making herself eat. Reuben had left with the apples, and Adela gone off to Taos as planned for weekly shopping and lunch with her two sisters, dropping May off at a friend’s in Chamisal.
Still shaken from her failed attempt to talk to Reuben about Joey’s interest in the little rundown church, the disgraced guest went out to the big studio where Santiago worked carving his saints, between the barn and the casitawhere May’s mother, Cristina, lived when she wasn’t down in Bernalillo with her new boyfriend, a package delivery driver for UPS. A thicket of chokecherries screened the studio, turning the light snow-white in spring and wonderfully rosy in summer, the fruit used for syrup and against various ailments. And on the terracotta tile doorstep stood the old San Isidro, patron of farmers and this particular farm, which Santiago had carved long ago with broad-brimmed hat and staff and a pair of sloe-eyed oxen with upswept horns beside him, studying every comer. He’d carved another for Jorge with goats instead of the traditional oxen, to keep where he made his cheese.
Hallie loved to watch the old santero in his holy place, grinding and mulling the natural pigments with which he painted his carved saints. Yellow ochre, burnt sienna, malachite and azurite, mica red clay. He created saints for every need, and not just the popular ones—St. Francis with his birds or San Pasqual with his long wooden spoon. Smelling of pine shavings. Seeing the possibilities in everything. Not judging her.
Or not yet, anyway. He hadn’t talked to anyone that morning, she supposed, so didn’t know what had transpired in the night, or over her morning coffee. Sad and needing to talk, she told him all about how torn she’d felt, being part of the restoration project (though she was just taking care of office and computer stuff for them), wanting to help preserve essential New Mexico history, sharing Joey’s passion for that and badly wanting him part of her life—but at the same time knowing how determined Reuben was to keep the chapel sacrosanct. And since last night, knowing how Beatriz Gallegos de Silva herself felt about that—the intense energy she’d seen emanating from where the matriarch’s bones lay. Simmering, seething, miasmic. Petulance, she might say now, remembering the teenager or child the curandero had mentioned.
Santiago, silent but open the same way his hands lay open on his lap, cupped upwards, when they were at rest, let her pour her heart out to him. When she’d shared her full distress, he brought from a table against the wall the St. Rita of Cascia he’d carved for Beatriz when she’d asked it of him—a little damaged in her recent fall, and in need of some TLC.
“Patroness of bad marriages, was what my sister had in mind. But Rita’s also good for wounds, impossible causes. So she might well help you, today.” He put the wooden figure into Hallie’s hands, its heft already comforting, the pine smelling fresh-cut, filled with benevolence.
“I can’t deny the chapel’s ruinous. I see no point in leaving it as is, no matter how my nephew feels. It was once an inspiring place for prayer.”
He told her he had learned to skirt the little clearing on the slope below the Tower of Riddles where “la malhumorada” brewed her spite. Where, as he put it, disapproval threw its sour poison up and out like one of those spiky halos Our Mother of Sorrows is typically portrayed with.
“They called the curandero in, but had no need—I could have told them what is going on.”
He told her with genial amusement that Beatriz had been willful “since day one, since her difficult birth,” so no surprise she was being headstrong again. He told her that she’d fallen head over heels for a young man in her earliest teens, but had been forced by her family to marry Joaquín Gallegos instead.
“All of her life she carried in secret a flame for the one she wasn’t allowed to have. Diego Barela; I liked him too. She let that slip to me one New Year’s Eve when she was in one of her crazy moods, writing her wishes for the coming year and sweeping out the negativity as we were taught, but at the same time throwing caution to the wind as she raged against God.”
Hallie listened, imagining the feverish sorrow. Feeling St. Rita’s power in her hands. Mesmerized by the color of the powdered azurite in Santiago’s mortar. Azurite was said to offer spiritual connection, emotional balance, healing—exactly what was needed now.
“It is my firm belief that my sister is raising Cain at all hours because she’s miserable at being stuck for all Eternity here in that prison cell, next to the husband she never wanted and never loved. She cherished the chapel in life because she’d decreed it her sanctuary, where he couldn’t come, where she might sit and envision another face; but now she’s with him there without release.”
Bad marriages, he’d said St. Rita was intended for. And theirs had evidently been bad indeed. It said a lot that Beatriz was so thoroughly in charge of everyone’s behavior, even now, while Joaquín, buttoned-up and featureless, Hallie had thought, hard-working but without distinction, seemed all but forgotten.
“Her fancied paramour was buried in a church just west of here, not far from the P’osi Pueblo Ruin . . .”
She remembered that church among the restoration projects already completed. And Santiago continued,
“But his body was moved when they restored the church; moved outdoors, under the mountain sky—and Beatriz is certainly aware of that. She was a know-it-all even in life,” he smiled, amused again. “I’m sure she’ll stop her tantrums and leave us in peace if we’ll just free her from the chapel she’s been sealed up in. With all her turbulent heart she longs to join Diego Barela. She’s got her sights set on el más allá. The great beyond . . . just up the road a bit.”
The renovations would be her salvation, then.
“Yes, I think you misunderstood her message to you, chica. With that tile she hurled your way she was saying ‘Get me out!’ in no uncertain terms. Knowing also, I think, that you are on her side.”
Hallie felt rueful still, but much relieved to hear what Santiago thought of the disgruntled acts.
“And if you’re still ready to help give her her freedom . . . I’ll be glad to tell my nephew and the others what I know, and tell him I’m convinced it’s for the best to give Beatriz her own way.” The perceptive big brother chuckled softly and added “As ever.”
She felt her heart lift, lighten, at the old santero‘s words, and was certain she heard a cackle of exultant laughter through the doorway of the studio, off towards the little church.
Christie Cochrell loves the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, now living on the northern California coast, she’s traveled widely all her life. Her work’s been published by The Saturday Evening Post, Tin House, Grande Dame Literary, and many others.