Tres
The day dawned, and already the time of youth was fleeing the house which the three giants of my dreams had built on the hill of juniper tree and yucca and mesquite bush. I felt the sun of the east rise and I heard its light crackle and groan and mix into the songs of the mockingbirds on the hill. I opened my eyes and the rays of light that dazzled through the dusty window of my room washed my face clean.
The sun was good. The men of the llano were men of the sun. The men of the farms along the river were men of the moon. But we were all children of the white sun.
There was a bitter taste in my mouth. I remembered the remedy Ultima had given me after my frightful flight from the river. I looked at my arms and I felt my face. I had received cuts from tree branches before and I knew that the next day the cuts were red with dry blood and that the welts were sore. But last night’s cuts were only thin pink lines on my flesh, and there was no pain. There was a strange power in Ultima’s medicine.
Where was Lupito’s soul? He had killed the sheriff and so he had died with a mortal sin on his soul. He would go to hell. Or would God forgive him and grant him Purgatory, the lonely, hopeless resting place of those who were neither saved nor damned. But God didn’t forgive anyone. Perhaps, like the dream said, the waters of the river had washed his soul away, and perhaps as the water seeped into the earth Lupito’s soul would water the orchards of my uncles, and the bright red apples would….
Or perhaps he was doomed to wander the river bottom forever, a bloody mate to la Llorona… and now when I walked alone along the river I would always have to turn and glance over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of a shadow—Lupito’s soul, or la Llorona, or the presence of the river.
I lay back and watched the silent beams of light radiate in the colorful dust motes I had stirred up. I loved to watch the sunbeams of each new morning enter the room. They made me feel fresh and clean and new. Each morning I seemed to awaken with new experiences and dreams strangely mixed into me. Today it was all the vivid images of what had happened at the bridge last night. I thought of Chávez, angered by the death of his brother, seeking the blood of revenge. I thought of Narciso, standing alone against the dark figures on the bridge. I thought of my father. I wondered if he had fired down on Lupito.
Now the men on the bridge walked the earth with the terrible burden of dark mortal sin on their souls, and hell was the only reward.
I heard my mother’s footsteps in the kitchen. I heard the stove clang and I knew she was kindling last night’s ashes.
“¡Gabriel!” she called. She always called my father first. “Get up. It is Sunday,” then she muttered, “and oh such evil things that walked the earth last night—”
On Sunday morning I always stayed in bed and listened to their argument. They always quarreled on Sunday morning. There were two reasons for this: the first was that my father worked only half a day on Saturdays at the highway and so in the afternoon he drank with his friends at the Longhorn Saloon in town. If he drank too much he came home a bitter man, then he was at war with everyone. He cursed the weak-willed men of the town who did not understand the freedom a man of the llano must have, and he cursed the war for taking his sons away. And if there was very much anger in him he cursed my mother because she was the daughter of farmers, and it was she who kept him shackled to one piece of land.
Then there was the thing about religion. My father was not a strong believer in religion. When he was drunk he called priests “women,” and made fun of the long skirts they wore. I had heard a story told in whispers not meant for my ears that once, long ago, my father’s father had taken a priest from the church and beaten him on the street for preaching against something my grandfather Márez had done. So it was not a good feeling my father had for priests. My mother said the Márez clan was full of freethinkers, which was a blasphemy to her, but my father only laughed.
Then there was the strange, whispered riddle of the first priest who went to El Puerto. The colony had first settled there under a land grant from the Mexican government, and the man who led the colonization was a priest, and he was a Luna. That is why my mother dreamed of me becoming a priest, because there had not been a Luna priest in the family for many years. My mother was a devout Catholic, and so she saw the salvation of the soul rooted in the Holy Mother Church, and she said the world would be saved if the people turned to the earth. A community of farmers ruled over by a priest, she firmly believed, was the true way of life.
Why two people as opposite as my father and my mother had married I do not know. Their blood and their ways had kept them at odds, and yet for all this, we were happy.