Y qué clase de lugar es éste? the boy said.
Lugares donde el fierro ya está en la tierra, the old man said. Lugares donde ha quemado el fuego.
Y cómo se encuentra?
The old man said that it was not a question of finding such a place but rather of knowing it when it presented itself. He said that it was at such places that God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at such pains to create.
Y por eso soy hereje, he said. Por eso y nada más.
It was dark in the room. He thanked the old man again but the old man did not answer or if he did he didnt hear him. He turned and went out.
The woman was leaning against the kitchen door. She was silhouetted against the yellow light and he could see her figure through the thin dress she wore. She did not seem troubled that the old man lay alone in the dark at the rear of the house. She asked the boy if the old man had told him how to catch the wolf and he said that he had not.
She touched her temple. He dont remember so good sometimes, she said. He is old.
Yes mam.
No one comes to see him. That’s too bad, hey?
Yes mam.
Not even the priest. He came one time maybe two but he dont come no more.
How come?
She shrugged. People say he is brujo. You know what is brujo?
Yes mam.
They say he is brujo. They say God has abandoned this man. He has the sin of Satanis. The sin of orgullo. You know what is orgullo?
Yes mam.
He thinks he knows better than the priest. He thinks he knows better than God.
He told me he didnt know nothin.
Ha, she said. Ha. You believe that? You see this old man? You know what a terrible thing it is to die without God? To be the one that God has cast aside? Think it over.
Yes mam. I got to go.
He touched the brim of his hat and stepped past her to the door and walked out into the evening dark. The lights of the town strewn across the prairie lay in that blue vale like a jeweled serpent incandescing in the evening cool. When he looked back at the house she was standing in the doorway.
Thank you mam, he said.
He is nothing to me, she called. No hay parentesco. You know what is parentesco?
Yes mam.
There is no parentesco. He was do of the dead wife of my dead husband. What is that? You see? And yet I have him here. Who else would take this man? You see? No one cares.
Yes mam.
Think it over.
He unlooped the bridlereins from the post and untied them.
All right, he said. I will.
It could happen to you.
Yes mam.
He mounted up and turned the horse and raised one hand. The mountains to the south stood blackly against a violet sky. The snow on the north slopes so pale. Like spaces left for messages.
La fe, she called. La fe es toda.
He turned the horse out along the rutted track and rode on. When he looked back she was still standing in the open door. Standing in the cold. He looked back one last time and the door was still open but she was not there and he thought perhaps the old man had called her. But then he thought probably that old man didnt call anybody.
TWO DAYS LATER riding down the Cloverdale road he turned off for no reason at all and rode out to where the vaqueros had nooned and sat his horse looking down at the dead black fire. Something had been digging in the ashes.
He dismounted and got a stick and poked through the fire. He mounted up again and walked the horse about the perimeter of the encampment. There was no reason to think that the scavenger had been anything other than a coyote but he rode anyway. He rode slowly and turned the horse nicely. Like a show rider at a judging. On his second circling a little farther from the fire he stopped. In the windshadow of a rock where the sand had drifted lay the perfect print of her forefoot.
He dismounted and knelt holding the reins behind his back and he blew at the loose dirt in the track and pushed at the delicate edges of the track with his thumb. Then he mounted up and went back out to the road and home.
The following day when he ran the traps that he’d reset with the new scent they were pulled out and sprung as before. He set them again and made two blind sets but his heart was not in it. When he rode down through the pass at noon and looked out over the Cloverdale Valley the first thing he saw was the thin spire of smoke in the distance from the vaqueros’ cookfire.
He sat the horse a long time. He put his hand on the cantle and looked back toward the pass and he looked out over the valley again. Then he turned and rode back up the mountain.
By the time he’d pulled the traps and packed them in the basket and ridden down into the valley and crossed the road it was early evening. Once more he checked the sun by the width of his hand on the horizon. He had little more than an hour of daylight.
He dismounted at the fire and took the trowel from the packbasket and squatted and began to clear a space among the ashes and charcoal and fresh bones. At the heart of the fire there were live coals yet and he raked them aside to cool and dug a hole in the ground beneath the fire and then got a trap from the basket. He didnt even bother to put on the deerskin gloves.