Cottonwood Saints

By Gene Guerin

Spanning the twentieth century, Cottonwood Saints chronicles the lives of a New Mexico woman and her son, Michael. Margarita Juana Galvan was born in a lumber camp in 1913 and is brought up like a little princess in her grandparents' hacienda. In contrast, Margarita's adult life is spent in depression-ridden Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Told through Michael, Margarita's story embodies the challenges faced by an intelligent, independent-minded girl maturing in a man's world. Margarita and her family's lives intersect with the prominent events of the century: the influenza pandemic of 1918, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and World War II.

Based on the life of Guerin's mother, Cottonwood Saints connects the lives of the poorest citizens of New Mexico to the local power structure. The story ends after Michael, who became a priest, must leave his order in disgrace, and with the burial of Margarita in 1991.

"Cottonwood Saints is a moving family saga, rich in lore and personality and the marvelous culture of New Mexico. Margarita Juana is a powerful woman, a survivor who perseveres against all odds, determined to hold things together. Her story, about the extreme courage of ordinary people, is sad and true and very inspiring."--John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

"The lyrical voice will draw you in, but it's Margarita Juana's twentieth-century--spanning story that will keep you reading. Cottonwood Saints paints a northern New Mexico on the brink of change its characters both embrace and fear. Cottonwood Saints is quietly lovely, heartbreakingly real."--Lisa Lenard-Cook, author of Dissonance and Coyote Morning

"With poetic descriptions of countryside and towns struggling to be modern, we are taken through the late nineteenth century in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in its growing pains as a railroad town, the hardships of World War II both for those who participated in the Baatan march and those who stayed behind, to the contemporary period. Guerin has exactly captured a period from rural life to contemporary life, with all its disappointments and challenges."--Tey Diana Rebolledo, department of Spanish, University of New Mexico

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9780826337283

Gene Guerin

Born and raised in New Mexico, award-winning author Gene Guerin now lives in Denver.

Book preview

Chapter One

I am Michael Galván.

I am a defrocked priest.

I say this now to get it out of the way. I have no interest in saving this revelation for later melodramatic effect, for this story is neither about religion nor religious crisis, at least not in the usual sense. To attach some exaggerated weight to my clerical failures, and there were many, would serve no purpose except to sidetrack from this narrative.

Just know this. I have an enemy that I love. She is full of promises unkept. Yet, I continue to pursue her, hoping. She is both comforting and cruel. She manipulates. She nurtures. She is New Mexico. She is a land that oftentimes seems more phantasmagoria than place.

Los santos know this place for what she is. That is why these religious images, carved from cottonwood by long-dead artisans, are all so sad—the melancholy Virgin Mother, the fiercely armed St. Michael, the brooding St. Anthony, all coated with gesso and painted in vivid comicbook colors, with lacquer-black hair, large, dark, almond-shaped eyes, pink skin and thin, serious, red lips; the Christ figures with vermilion blood streaming from open sores on knees, elbows, torsos, and thornencrusted heads; and, La Muerte, a skeletal, unpainted crone in raw wood with no adornment save strands of stringy human hair attached to its grinning skull, seated with droll dignity atop a wooden cart drawn by who knows what invisible nightmares.

Perhaps I make too much of this New Mexico.

Only the cottonwood saints know for sure.

1913

On a warm day in June, not one of the cruel days but one that spoke of early summer promise, a female baby was born in a lumber camp wedged into a canyon at the eight-thousand-foot elevation of the Pecos Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. She was born to Leopoldo Zamora and Tamar Pacheco, their first viable offspring after two stillbirths.

Tamar delivered her on a crude, wood-framed bed in a long, narrow one-room house. A previous owner had thrown together the shelter with lumber milled on site from the massive ponderosa pines that blocked out the sun for great stretches up and down the steeply sloping canyon walls.

The shaper of the canyon was a small, unruly stream spawned from snow melt higher up. The river, for that is the designation New Mexicans give to any trickle of moisture that has a current and can sustain vegetation, rushed headlong over boulders and fallen tree carcasses to cut a deep, narrow passage through high banks thickly carpeted with dead pine needles. The water was always cold, always noisy.

The sounds at the birthing were scatter-shot, undisciplined. Outside there was the uneven putt-a-putt of an old gas engine straining to move the wide, flopping canvas belt that turned a large circular blade. There was the screech of the double-pointed saw teeth that bit and churned the seasoned logs into planks. Chipmunks chattered to each other to warn of a high circling hawk.

Inside, Tamar forced short pantings and grunts through her clenched teeth and flared nostrils.

Overall, the woman in labor was of a plain sort. Her face was broad. By the bump on its bridge her nose might qualify as Roman except that it lost its classic look as it spread out into thick, pulpy nostrils. Her eyes were brown, running to yellow. Her bones were large and her hands, even at twenty, already showed arthritic swellings at the knuckles from too many days doing laundry in frigid waters. She now used these hands to grip the sides of the bed while she dug her heels, red and raw, into the coarse flannel sheeting.

Tamar’s husband, Leopoldo, was not present at the birth. He had left early that morning with a pair of draft horses in harness to bring in a giant of a tree that he and one of the mill hands had felled and trimmed the previous day.

Even had Leopoldo remained, his wife would not have permitted him in the room with her. Instead, when her water broke, Tamar summoned Don Kiko, the camp cook, to attend her.

Don Kiko’s boast to her when she called for him in her desperation was that he had delivered many calves and foals and had even performed a caesarean on a ewe with a breached lambkin. I sewed up her belly with an umbrella spoke and a piece of string. She bounced right up and began to eat some sweet clover. She was fine, he added quickly to assure Tamar of his competence.

"Ándale, Doña Tamar, ándale, Don Kiko now urged. I can see the top of the head. Many black hairs. Now is the time. Get the business done."

So glazed were Tamar’s eyes that it was impossible to tell whether they were filled with pain, anxiety, or sheer hatred for Don Kiko and all men.

He struggled to gain purchase of the back of the baby’s head. "Otra vez. Try again. There. I have it. Give it to me now."

With one final push, Tamar evacuated her belly. Suddenly Don Kiko’s hands held a confusion of blood, a small amount of greenishbrown, watery feces, clots of mucus, and a solid lump of baby. Quickly he reached for the towel he had draped, for modesty’s sake, over Tamar’s splayed thighs and with the same motion pulled her cotton nightshirt down over her lower torso. He balanced the slimy newborn in one hand and arranged the towel over the other. Then he deftly transferred the tiny bundle of flesh and began to wipe it.

"Una mujercita. And so small. This one may not live."

He glanced at Tamar for some reaction but all he saw were her half-closed bobcat eyes.

Back to the work at hand.

First the umbilical cord, gnarly, opaline, and obscenely thick. Such a fat conduit of nutrients and oxygen for such a small and fragile creature. No matter. In all likelihood they would be ready to bury la pobrecita by the time Leopoldo returned home.

Don Kiko tied off the cord with a short length of cotton twine, snipped it, and set the newborn adrift from its mother.

His mind went on to other things. What were the protocols? Should they wait for Leopoldo in case they had to baptize the baby without the priest? Who should give the name, the father being absent and the mother incapacitated? Who was the family saint? Whose feast was being celebrated on the Church calendar that day? If the child died, who would say the prayers? Would Leopoldo even want to be here for the burial? Would it not be better for him not to see the daughter he would never know?

Don Kiko looked at the baby, now face down in repose on Tamar’s stomach. He sensed, more than saw, a slight movement, a quiver, a spasm. But it was making no sounds. Of course. Unlike calves, foals, and lambs, human infants sometimes needed a reminder that they were now part of this world.

He grasped the baby by her feet, dangled her away from him, and directed a sharp slap to her soft, wrinkled, conical butt cheeks. There was an immediate response, a not-too-loud but quite definite yelp from the vicinity of the small head. He righted the child and looked into her face. The features were screwed up into a tight mask, then the mouth opened, and Don Kiko heard a wail loud as any he had heard from his barnyard progeny.

He held the baby up to the face of the exhausted woman.

"¿No ves, Doña Tamar? Not more than three pounds I would guess. But she wants to live. ¿Quién sabe? It is in God’s hands."

Don Kiko was beside himself with excitement. He had waited for several hours in the shadow of the house, so that he would not have to speak with any of the mill hands. It seemed only proper that the father of the child be the first to hear the news. Finally, when he saw the giant pair of gray horses turn down the bend beyond the house, he rushed up the slope. "Leopoldo, Leopoldo. You have a daughter. Very small and very puny. She may not live, but who knows? I’ve seen stranger things happen. Perhaps we should pray for a miracle. ¿Quién sabe? Who can say what would be better? Doña Tamar is resting but she is fine. She says she will be up for supper."

At this moment Leopoldo had other things on his mind.

The horses were in a mighty struggle to drag the massive log over one last rise and they were losing ground. Behind them a clean straight trench of dark earth marked the sparse meadow grass where they had passed with such ease. But now the earth was roiled with gouges from hooves and from the log, which had decided to dig in like a stubborn child.

Leopoldo reached up with his forearm to wipe the sweat dripping into his eyes. Not now.

Had he heard anything Don Kiko had told him?

Leopoldo’s eyes were narrowed with the effort it took to keep the giant brace in line. His chin ran brown with tobacco juice from a forgotten wad in his left cheek. His heels dredged the loamy soil and he muttered half syllables unintelligible to any living thing except the horses.

Gravity was beginning to win the battle. The log slid slowly, laterally down the embankment toward an arroyo that ran alongside the rise.

Don Kiko at last appreciated how irrelevant the news of the baby girl was at this moment. She was born. She might live. She could die. And there was nothing these two men and this team of horses could do about it.

Jumping to the high ground above the team, he picked up small rocks and pinecones to throw against the wide flank of the lead, uphill horse.

"¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!"

For a painful instant, the top horse slipped sideways. Its hind hooves scooped out generous clumps of dirt. At last, the animal stiffened its legs and the sliding slowed, then stopped. The downhill horse, smaller and younger, now had time to recover.

Leopoldo clucked and shook the reins and both horses began to pull again as a team. The log lurched, then moved across a small swale. Finally, amid curses and coaxings, they reached level ground and came to a stop.

Sweat ran freely down Leopoldo’s face and neck from underneath his battered felt fedora. He exhaled loudly, unraveled the reins from around his gloved hands and tossed them unto the log. Off came the gloves and out came a dirty blue-patterned rag from his back pocket. He removed the hat and slowly mopped the perspiration from the crown of his head along the back of the neck and over his face, streaking the tobacco juice across one cheek.

Don Kiko lobbed a final pinecone in the general direction of the horses and beamed at his patrón.

"We did it. Gracias a Tatita Dios."

Leopoldo slapped his gloves sharply against the log. What were you thinking? Running up like that? Screaming like a crazy man? I could have lost the horses.

The slap at the log might as well have been across Don Kiko’s face.

But I helped.

Helped what? I didn’t need help until you came with all your yelling!

Don Kiko stood up slowly, and with whatever dignity the slippery slope allowed. Straightened to his full five foot three, he spat out his words.

You have a daughter. She will probably die.

With that he stuck his hands in the rear pockets of his overalls and walked down the incline into the meadow. He fully expected Leopoldo to call him back. If he did, he would pay no mind. Let Leopoldo beg for news of a most difficult birth.

But Leopoldo did not call to him. He was not so much as thinking of Don Kiko. So it had happened. The child had come early. So much for his promise to Tamar to get her to her aunt’s house before her time. A little girl. If she were to die like the other two, let it be now, before he knew her.

He picked up the reins and made a clicking noise with his tongue. The horses lifted their heads from their desultory grazing and pricked their ears. So soon? Never mind. They were ready.

The team leaned forward. Their shoulders stiffened and rippled with effort.

For a moment the horses swayed side to side and strained the harnesses to their snapping point. Slowly they broke the inertia of the log, gained momentum, and moved down the hollow toward the blue smoke of the sawmill and home.

With the help of the men running the saw, Leopoldo turned the log out onto a wooden trestle. He unhitched and unharnessed the horses, watered them, fixed their feed bags around their soft, cottony snouts, and wiped them down with a piece of burlap. Some final pats to their haunches and he started toward the house.

He could see Don Kiko, who stood in wait several feet from the doorway paying ceremonious attention to a fingernail.

Stupid little man.

Leopoldo made to pass him in silence. They had nothing more to say to each other.

Aren’t you even going to wash yourself? With that parting shot, Don Kiko strolled away, now thoroughly involved in his manicure.

Leopoldo stopped and looked at his own hands, rough and scratched, with dirt crammed into cracks and under fingernails. He turned and walked to the side of the house.

The former owner had sunk an open steel drum into the ground nearly up to its flanged lip. This created a small cistern, into which flowed a tiny rivulet from an underwater spring that broke to the surface just above the house. The overflow spilled out the far edge to continue its journey to the river beyond.

To one side of the drum lay a weathered section of planking. On it sat a rusting coffee can lid that held a cracked piece of yellow lye soap.

Leopoldo knelt on the plank, cupped his hands, and filled his mouth with water. The water was so cold it electrified his teeth. He swirled it gingerly around until he could feel the grit of the mountain and the scum from his tobacco wad wash loosely around his tongue. He spat to the side and took more water, this time to drink. Then he rolled up his sleeves and picked up the plug of soap.

He scrubbed away at his neck, face, and hands and ignored the burning of the oily suds on his skin. When he was done with the lathering he leaned over and plunged his arms up to the elbows into the perfect circle of icy water. He splashed his face several times until he was reasonably sure he was properly rinsed. Finally, he stood and pulled out the blue rag to dry himself.

The milky film he had created on the surface of the water swirled in the drum, then began to wash over the side and into the downhill stream. For a moment he followed the soapy residue as it moved away.

It was time.

Don Kiko was nowhere to be seen. Good.

When he stepped inside from the glaring sunlight, Leopoldo was momentarily blinded. He knew where the bed was so instinctively he moved in that direction. Off to his right, in a corner, he heard the sound of splashing water. He turned and saw Tamar.

She did not sense him.

She stood in a shallow basin. Her nightshirt was hitched up and gathered into a cloth belt to expose her narrow thighs. She poured water from a ceramic pitcher down the insides of her legs and rubbed the skin with her free hand. The strokes were hard, impatient.

Leopoldo took the moment to study his esposa. It was not love that he felt. Perhaps loyalty, even admiration, but certainly not affection. She seemed all right. A little pale and puffy faced but nothing more. She had prevailed, and more, she was up and about.

He looked away before he spoke so that she would not be embarrassed when he made his presence known.

Don Kiko says we have a little girl.

Tamar shot her head upward in surprise then quickly, to conceal her nakedness, jerked closed a blanket draped over a cord that was stretched between two nails.

Leopoldo heard the pitcher replaced on the washstand. Then the water rippled as Tamar stepped out of the basin.

Yes, she said from behind the privacy of the blanket, another daughter.

Well, not strictly speaking, he could argue. They had no other daughters, only two vaguely remembered dead babies.

Leopoldo took it on himself to approach the bed. At first he could see nothing that indicated a living thing. But there, between two pillows, was a small bundle. He reached down and pulled back a loose corner of the swaddling cloth. What he saw was a tiny head plastered with dank, dark hair, the cheeks and forehead dusted with soft, reddish down.

He could tell nothing from what he saw. Did she resemble one of them? Did she even resemble a person he knew or might want to know? He could not tell.

He heard the swish of the blanket rubbing on the cord.

With the basin at arm’s length, the barefoot Tamar padded across the gray planking. Her wet feet left darkish prints where she stepped. At the open door she tossed the water from the basin to one side of the stoop.

Very small, he said.

Back in the room, Tamar set the basin on the washstand and took a towel hanging on a nail. She let herself down heavily on the bed, her back to her husband, and began to dry her ankles and feet. She still had not looked at him.

And you? he asked.

We must take her to Mora. She needs to be baptized.

Leopoldo reached out to touch Tamar’s shoulder but thought better of it. Instead he stooped to replace the flap over the baby’s head. He rested his hand on the covered lump for a moment, then stood straight and walked to the door.

I’ll go load the wagon. You have a name?

Margarita Juana, like the other two.

Margarita Juana. Pray God it brings her better luck than it brought her sisters.

They left the camp before daybreak. The only transport available to them was a high-riding wheeled platform, somewhat resembling a giant buckboard, which Leopoldo used to haul lumber from the mill into town.

He and Don Kiko, mollified by now, had spent the entire night loading the wagon with freshly lumbered planks.

There were two very practical reasons for doing this. The first was monetary. Why take a long and arduous trip down the canyon and into town without some financial return? The other reason had to do with safety and comfort. The wagon was designed to carry heavy loads. Its springs were massive and impossible to flex without several tons of lumber pressing down on them. To ride without a load was courting disaster. One medium-sized bump would be enough to send the wagon bouncing high into the air. Passengers could go flying off their lofty perch onto the hard, unforgiving road or into the boulder-studded river.

The couple did not speak, partly because of the noise from the iron-clad wheels against the hard pan of the road and from the loudly creaking wagon, but mainly because there was not much they knew to say to each other.

Tamar held a cardboard shoebox on her lap. She had warmed a bucket of bran and spread the seed husks to about a three-inch depth in the bottom of the box. Over this she placed several plies of flannel and into this warm nest she transferred the infant. Thus insulated and secure, the baby lay quiet.

Stopping only occasionally to rest and to feed and water the horses, it took them until midmorning the next day to reach Mora. Tamar’s milk was slow in coming but, conveniently, the baby did not have much of an appetite.

Their specific destination was the hacienda of Tamar’s Uncle Delfino and Aunt Adela Arellanes. They were blessed with all manner of riches: land, livestock, and a general mercantile store. But the greatest treasure of all had eluded them. They had no children. Custom thus dictated that they take in a child from their extended family. Tamar had been their surrogate daughter since birth. Tamar’s mother, Adela’s younger sister, was rich in children but little else.

When Tía Adela heard the rumbling and creaking of the lumber cart coming up the narrow lane to their large, territorial-style house she was not surprised. She had been expecting them for several weeks. It had been decided on an earlier visit that Tamar would deliver her baby there, under the ministrations of Nasha, the indentured Indian servant. She walked out to the courtyard and waited. Look at them—like two gypsies, wagon and all.

She had never fully embraced the marriage between Tamar and Leopoldo but usually managed to keep her counsel to herself. Leopoldo, to give him his due, was a hard worker and handsome to boot. He had the reddish blond hair and blue eyes that marked him as someone with European breeding in a land where the blood lines between Spanish and Indian had long been blurred in converging streams of dark and light. Also, to be frank, and Adela prided herself on her honesty, Tamar, despite a generous dowry, had not attracted much male attention, being plain and with a tendency to surliness.

Leopoldo said that he hailed from California. He came to Mora, as he put it to Don Delfino, to look for opportunities.

Tamar was instantly smitten. She was unaware of, or chose to ignore, what everyone in Mora was saying behind her back: She has money and the Californian needs money.

After their marriage, Leopoldo invested some of Tamar’s dowry in a saloon. Unfortunately, his clientele consisted in the main of those who had already run up hefty tabs at the other drinking establishments along Mora’s single commercial street.

This is one pump you can’t prime, Delfino warned him.

The enterprise failed within eight months.

Next there was the flourmill. It burned to the ground a month after he opened it. It was widely believed, but never proven, that a rival mill owner was responsible.

With the little that was left of the dowry, Leopoldo purchased the timber rights to a stand of ponderosa pine. With the lease came a gas run-saw and the one-room long house where he and Tamar lived.

The wagon squealed to a stop and Adela stepped forward. She could see from the look in Tamar’s eyes that it was too late for hot water, clean linen, and Nasha’s attentions.

Standing on tiptoes, she received the shoebox from Tamar’s hands.

Tamar immediately began to whine. I couldn’t help it. She was early.

Leopoldo had by now climbed down from his side and was around to help his wife from her seat. Tamar came down slowly at first, then all in a rush, falling from weakness and fatigue into her husband’s arms.

Adela tilted her head back and spoke to the heavens. "Nasha, ¿Dónde estás? Come out here now!"

The Indian, who had been standing in the shadows of the open doorway, trotted out into the courtyard, her head down, her hands tucked inside the bodice of a large calico apron, her feet bare. Nasha owned one pair of shoes, which she diligently stored beginning in the first week of May, not to be resurrected until the first week of November.

"Sí, sí, estoy aquí, madrecita."

Help Tamar! Don’t you see what’s happened? She’s already had the baby. To Tamar, Can you walk? To Nasha, Put her to bed. Then fix her some tea and broth.

With each order Nasha nodded. "Sí, sí, Tía Adela. Right now. Sí, sí."

Aunt Adela then addressed the issue of the shoebox.

Is this the best you could do for a coffin? Couldn’t you even spare a little of your precious lumber for a poor innocent who should have been born here in our house instead of in a mountain shack?

But, Leopoldo stammered, she’s alive.

Adela pulled the blanket back and thrust a finger in the baby’s mouth. There was a weak sucking response. "¡Por Dios Santo! She does live."

The procession quickly made its way into the cool of the house and through to the large kitchen in back. Adela laid the box on the table and pulled up the small infant, covers, flannel bedding, and all. Grains of bran cascaded onto the checkered red-and-white oilcloth that covered the table.

We must get her to the church at once to baptize her.

That’s why we came, Tamar said.

You go to bed right now. Nasha, what did I tell you?

Nasha, always busy, had been brushing the bran from the table into her cupped hand. She dropped the grain into the box and took Tamar by the arm.

"Venga, mi angelita. Nasha will make you feel better."

They entered the bedroom and Nasha shut the door.

Adela looked at the child in her arms and then at the father. You had to wait, didn’t you?

Leopoldo was now slumped into a straight-backed chair by the stove. He had closed his eyes and his head was already rolling back.

Adela prodded his boot with her foot.

Sleep later. Have some coffee. It’s hot. I’ll send for Delfino. We will be the godparents. Do you have a name?

Margarita Juana. Tamar chose it.

"¿Otra? She’s stubborn enough, that wife of yours."

So the baby was baptized Margarita Juana, ending the string of misfortunes that had accrued to the name. For, unlike her predecessors, she survived. And, in fact, she ended up surviving them all.

It was a turn of good fortune that redounded to me since, in due time, she was to be my mother.

Chapter Two

1913–1917

By the time my mother, Margarita Juana, was a week old, her throne was secure in the household of Delfino and Adela Arellanes. And Nasha, the Indian, was her adoring handmaid.

A gentle conspiracy soon sprang up between the dueña and the bondservant. A lumber camp was no place for an infant, especially a girl. Especially Margarita. Tamar’s milk, or rather the lack of it, gave them their edge.

That which had been a mere trickle to begin with soured and stopped entirely within two days of Margarita’s birth. This gave rise to a steady parade of wet nurses through the Arellanes kitchen and into Nasha’s bedroom where the crib had been set up.

There had been five wet nurses in all. The ever-vigilant Nasha dismissed three of them for cause, at least as defined by her. One was not very clean. Another had the evil eye about her. A third already had too many sucklings up and down the valley clamoring for her tits. A fourth came once, took fright at Nasha’s impertinence, and never returned.

For a month after Margarita’s delivery, Tamar was too debilitated to return to the hardships of the wilderness. However, she was a strong and healthy twenty-year-old who was soon up, taking solid nourishment, and making herself a general nuisance around the house of her foster parents.

She tried to revert to a girlhood when Adela refused her nothing and Nasha was there to see to her every need. Her aunt and the Indian, however, no longer shared this conceit and told her through both words and actions that she had permanently and irrevocably ceded her role as reigning deity of the house to her own infant daughter.

And lest there be any discussion on the matter, Nasha made it plain that Margarita was hers.

From the moment Adela carried the baby into her house in the shoebox bassinet, Nasha had taken over her care. Whenever Tamar made some effort to practice her sluggish maternal instincts, Nasha was at her shoulder scolding and correcting her.

Don’t hold her like that.

Don’t gather the diaper like that, it will surely rub her and cause a rash.

Leave her alone. I just put her down for a nap.

And so began the separation of mother from child. Even had Tamar wanted, she could not bond with Margarita, so isolated did Nasha keep her from the baby. Finally, she stopped trying altogether and gave the exclusive care of Margarita over to the Indian. After that, and then only with continual prodding from Adela, Tamar would hold her daughter for a few minutes every evening after the dishes had been washed and put away. Nasha hovered as always and Tamar would, as soon as decency permitted, resign the delicate bundle to the nanny and go to bed.

The only one who did not know about Tamar’s recovery was her husband.

Every two weeks, when Leopoldo came down from the mountains with a load of lumber, he would dutifully stop at the Arellaneses’ to check on the progress of his wife and child.

His arrival on the ponderous wagon was unmistakable. Now empty of its load, its deafening clatter warned Tamar that he was on his way long before he made the turn up the lane to the house. This gave her ample time to take to her bed, often fully clothed and coifed. She would pull the heavy comforter over her head to speak to him in muffled tones from a script that grew stale through many repetitions.

Make sure the door is closed. I cannot bear the light. The outer door too. I cannot bear the drafts.

They are closed, Tamar.

Did you bring a load down?

Yes.

Did they try to cheat you again?

I watched them unload.

I need some money. The baby needs food and clothes.

Leopoldo had just been with the baby and understood full well that it lacked for nothing. But he never argued. Instead he would pull a small bundle of paper currency from the bib pocket of his blue coveralls and peel off a few bills.

Is this enough?

Whatever you can manage for your wife and child. Put it on the corner of the bed.

This he did. Sometimes, before he left, he added a bill to the little pile. Sometimes he took back a coin or two if he felt unreasonably put upon.

"¿Te sientes mejor? Tía Adela tells me you are feeling better."

Some days, yes …

Tamar let the sentence trail off. For every good day there had to be a bad day, and if he did not know that, she had no words nor the patience to explain it to him.

When will you be strong enough to travel?

I will not leave my baby. She needs me.

This was a complete fabrication. The baby had not needed her from almost that first moment when Don Kiko severed the cord between them.

Besides, Tamar lied from under the covers, I am still not right. I am not eating well. I sleep very little. And the baby fusses all the time.

The scene played itself out for four months. Then one day Leopoldo left the wagon at the blacksmith’s for some repairs. It was a pleasant morning and his muscles were stiff from the long trip down the canyon. A leisurely two-mile stroll to the Arellanes house was just the thing to help him stretch out. He knocked at the kitchen door and entered without being asked.

There sat Tamar at the table. She wore a white cotton cloth around her neck to cover her bodice. Her chin glistened with grease as she gnawed on a savory rib from a roasted kid goat. The plate in front of her looked like a mastodon burial ground, piled high with bones stripped clean of their meat. Her mouth went slack at the unheralded sight of her husband.

Leopoldo pulled out a chair opposite her at the table and sat down.

"Qué bueno. You’re feeling stronger."

Tamar yanked the cloth from her neck and dropped it over the accusing heap of bones.

I was a little hungry this morning.

Good.

Adela and Nasha’s only reaction to Tamar’s sudden return to health was a rolling of their eyes. But they were positively glowing in their enthusiasm when Leopoldo announced that Tamar would be returning to the camp the next morning. Adela loved her foster daughter but had grown tired of her idleness and lack of purpose. Besides, for better or worse, a woman’s place was by her husband. Nasha had her own agenda and it was currently sleeping like a little angel in her bedroom.

Every day, in the quiet of the afternoon, after the wet nurse had left, Nasha went into her room and retrieved from underneath the baby’s mattress a beaded leather purse with a drawstring. Its contents, more precious to her than the rarest of gemstones, was the roasted bran that had provided Margarita with a warm and protecting nest on her journey down the mountain.

Careful as an apothecary, Nasha measured out a tiny amount of the grain into a small saucepan of boiling water. Once the watery gruel was cooked, she strained it through a piece of muslin into a whisper-light china cup. Behind the closed door to her room, she folded Margarita into her arms and sat on the bed. Then she took a piece of clean linen, dipped a corner into the bran water, and put it to the baby’s mouth.

As Margarita contentedly sucked on the soggy rag, Nasha rocked back and forth and softly crooned lullabies in Spanish and in Tiwa, the barely remembered tongue of her infancy.

"Hati pam’one, Precious little blossom,

Tcakwil ‘a’eye, Come to me.

‘Amaxutcetci, Let me hold you."

It would take about an hour for Margarita to finish the contents of the cup and Nasha received more than one thump on the back from Adela’s broom for neglecting her regular duties. But Nasha did not stop the feedings, not until that magical bran that gave Margarita her life force was completely used up, and was now part of her forever.

There was no question but that when Tamar and Leopoldo left, Margarita would stay behind. Leopoldo could see no purpose at all for a female infant in a lumber camp. Tamar was past caring one way or another. All agreed that the baby would thrive best if left in Mora. Adela welcomed the distraction of a new life in the house. And, as for Nasha, she had already decided to curse with baleful purpose anyone who attempted to take Margarita from her.

The infant offered no opinion but it was clear that she preferred Nasha’s strong, wiry arms and warm bosom.

Nasha came from the Indian pueblo of Picurís, which lay across the mountains to the west about thirty-five miles from Mora. When Nasha was five years old her father gave her to Doña Prisca Pacheco, Adela’s mother, part of a settlement over some missing sheep.

A group of Picurís shepherds were summering their flocks on grazing land that abutted Doña Prisca’s vast holdings. One day a fold of twenty-five sheep on nearby pastureland simply vanished. The shepherds swore that they knew nothing about it. But, in a gesture of goodwill, they offered Doña Prisca a fine ram and ewe, which, they told her, would eventually bring many more sheep than the paltry twenty-five she was missing. They would also, again for goodwill’s sake, give her a young girl, the fifth daughter of one of the shepherds, to be of whatever service the grand lady should require.

Doña Prisca was shrewd and knew that this