Sojourn in the Land of the Sun (Revised): The Romance of Tim Doughty

By M Avery

I knew that arming the general populace and their elected leadership with knowledge, verifiable knowledge, would change the game in New Mexico forever.
Now here I was in the present gazing at Teresas rosary. Then abashedly upon the beauty of her body. She was real and it hadnt been a ghost chase. I was having some difficulty in processing the ramifications of finding her by the supernatural means I had used. In fact, I was attempting an inner self-assessment of my spiritual status. I had become a sorcerer to find my lover. Would she be? It was unlikely that she would choose to love a person like myself.

ACTION / SUSPENSE / ADULT HISTORICAL FICTION
For persons interested in shamanism... this book is a must!
Gary Grief, Petroglyph Recorder/Archeologist and former Program Chair, Taos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483647999

M Avery

Born in the Alaskan Territory in 1954, M Avery attended St. John’s College of Santa Fe (1972) on scholarship before graduating from University of New Mexico, 1980. After ranching and farming in Monticello Canyon, Quemado, Clines Corners, and along the San Juan River, Avery continued teaching in public, tribal and college programs. Eventually traveling the width and breadth of the Nuevo Mexico territory, Avery now lives and works in Taos, focusing on spiritual and political encounters between the New Mexican tri-cultural peoples. The author emphasizes the peoples’ unified response to the Nuevo Mexico vastness and our on-going struggle to become one community out of great diversity.

Book preview

SOJOURN

IN THE LAND

OF THE SUN

THE ROMANCE OF TIM DOUGHTY

map.jpeg

M AVERY

Revised

Copyright © 2013 by M Avery.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2013909905

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4836-4798-2

                Ebook         978-1-4836-4799-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. References to persons holding political office are intended to set story in modern day and/or are solely based on public information previously published (public domain) newspapers.

Rev. date: 07/22/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

ZACATECAS

HOUSE OF LOVE

CLEFT ROCK

RAINBOW WAY

PAHO

FORBIDDEN

BATTLE IS WITH THE SEA

TACAQUERIA

JICARILLA

FOSTER’S HOTEL AND BAR

CUMBRES

MONERO

HERMANOS

NIGHTFALL

CASSADOR

LET’S DO SANTA FE

STONE LAKE

LOS BRAZOS Y LOS OJOS

THE FIRE SERPENT

CALLING

SOJOURN

FOSTER’S REVISITED

FINDING THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

THE CAVE OF THE PANTHER GOD

SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS

RETRACING THE MIGRATIONS: ROUTE 66

THUNDERBIRD

THE DRAGON, THE BEAR, AND THE SUN DAGGER

CITY OF ROCKS

IN THE HONEYCOMB

PELATAGO

HOUSE OF LOVE, SEQUEL

THE FALL

HOPI’S WOMAN

SCENE THREE

THE LUMINATI

TECHADO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEDICATED TO THE JICARILLA APACHE

GOD GAVE IT TO ALL THE APACHES, NOT JUST SOME

ALSO TO MARY AND RICHARD

THE LAST AND THE BEST OF THE PIONEERS

AND TO THE MEMORY OF SOPHIE AND JOSEPH

AND TO THOSE SPANISH FAMILIES WHO BIRTHED THE

IDYLLIC ROSE DEL NORTE

DAANZHO

HELLO.

BUENO

IT’S GOOD.

IYANA GONI

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

DIGAME

YOU TELL ME.

K’ ADI

LET’S GO.

LET’S GO HAVE SOME FUN.

PREFACE

T his story may be considered historical fiction. Characters are based on real people living in the 20th century and some on into the 21st. The plot reveals actual events of Joseph’s life. I have worked with Joseph on and off during the last decade. He remains involved in the details of book production at this writing.

In a time of increasing struggle to keep religious freedom, even in America, Joseph’s story cuts to the chase. Formerly untold details of spiritual warfare emerge as the characters strive with oppressors and recount spiritual training, revealing the explosive intersection of Native American, Catholic, New Age, and Illuminati systems in the Old Nuevo Mexico territory.

Joseph, a Norteño elder whose Spanish ancestors settled the upper regions of New Spain, imparts a life-time of experience and wisdom to an Anglo upstart who has aggravated Native Americans by asking politically incorrect questions, at the wrong time in the wrong place, in order to further his own career. Tim and his wife Teresa are also based on real persons living in the Southwest. They overcame their torment by following Joseph’s instructions and now have four children.

Those who need authentication need only visit Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde to view the pictograph. The surprising meaning of this ancient, incised map of the Land of the Sun confirmed Joseph’s stories about his Native American initiation.

Many thanks to the community, our gracious and faithful Española Valley, and its outlying villages on the high road to Taos, the newcomers on the Hill in Lost Los Alamos, also those special sisters in Taos, and all my Native American counterparts fighting for sovereignty against the odds.

M Avery

July 7, 2013

Chapter 1

ZACATECAS

That was in 1969… here. Here in the United States.

A ridiculous pursuit of insane premonition…

I nstructions placed the missing persons in a small radius. Possibly in one of the outlying weaving villages, I thought as we entered the citified village of Oaxaca. It was a little after one o’clock, and the bustling town was baptized by rays of liquid sunlight. Once the beginning and the end of the main street, an open air market had grown the town. Although electricity was available now, Oaxaca had not seen other improvements in conjunction with the times. That gave its attraction a curious and forbidden magnetism. Exponential increases in tourist trading had mushroomed both the size and risk of attending the indigenous market place.

Jésus was driving in a stop and go pattern that fit my gloomy outlook. I was tired and cranky; lips chapped, scoured with dust from three days travel. Yet now began the real work of finding the unknown woman. If she existed. Yes, I’d taken enough cash to stay four nights should we need to. Everything from the bank—leaving just enough to make it to the next payday—and I was on a knife’s edge with the boss.

We had stopped in Zacatecas to see Jésus’ grandfather. Jésus had been given two names of Native curanderas. Names of curanderas who might (after twenty or more years) still be living in the area. The idea that we could locate Teresa and her little brother seemed highly unlikely as we faced the reality of thousands teeming and overflowing the small town.

Abuelo’s information had narrowed our search to this area. Despite his belief that only two curanderas could have received her, both supposedly still living in the Oaxaca region, almost any educated person would call my determination a ridiculous pursuit of insane premonition based solely upon esoteric readings of superstitious, emotional experiences founded on… Certainly not on any trustworthy principle. Founded, of course, on more superstition.

Jésus’ stories of exorcisms in the remote mountains made it most likely that she had been brought here, if she had remained under the control of a Navajo shaman. So I had insisted on entering the world of Mexican Black Magic for the love of a woman. Unfortunately for me and perhaps for this very good friend, I could not let go. My own deliverance back in year 2000 functioned as the precedence in this case. Adding to my mental anguish, a brusque jackass of an auto salesman was shouting through our radio, reaching us all the way from Mexico City in perfect clarity, keeping time with the post noontime traffic jamming, and accompanying my doubled frustration.

We’d pushed on since about five o’clock in the morning to get here. I searched the entangled crowds wondering if I had been fooled into using up scant finances on a ghost chase. Yet I didn’t have the remaining presence of mind to click the radio off. Aromas from open air restaurants assaulted our empty stomachs. Even the burrito stands gleamed temptingly from odd corners.

Jésus negotiated his old territory and deftly inserted us in an off plaza hotel, just as the patrón de automobile was finishing his spiel.

Que bueno dia! No credito? Nada dinero? No hay casa grande? No problema! Esta dia todas las dreams come true! Viven aqui an el dia de mercedad! We will forgive your past history; come buy from us! Ciudad Mexico, Ciudad Mexico… el numero…

Jésus cut the motor terminating the raucous salesman. His pitch was over but still reverberated through my head. We were hustled under cover by porters too eager to please Americanos. Led by these desperados to an immense, sun drenched room, I was reminded what elegance my pennies could purchase in this country of great poverty. I threw myself bodily on one of the brilliantly attired twin beds grateful to be de-cramped from the Dodge’s tight interior.

When Jésus volunteered to go for food, I stepped into the roomy baño to wash away a three-day layer of gritty road travel. My taut muscles relaxed. Hand-laid tiles of every conceivable color in the shower rotated beneath my bare feet. As I focused on the luxury of the beading water replenishing my body and the kaleidoscope of color beneath, memories flooded in mixing with the cascading gurgle of water running down and away through the cast iron grate. Joseph was there, in color, as big as life itself, warning me again.

Stay out of this realm, Tim. Don’t give into the torment! It is beso del muerto; it is the kiss of death if you do.

His better half, Sophie, was agreeing sweetly, Escuchen, mi’jo… She was sitting fragile yet iron with age beside her dying spouse’s side. Her attempts to control the grieving had begun to spill over. Tears glistened on her cheeks attesting to the agony of parting from him, of allowing him to go from her.

Listen to the man, my conscience echoed, translating Sophie’s Spanish pleas. My elderly mentor, Joseph, was talking at the stubborn white man again, yet again. So many discussions concerning this very challenge! That stubborn gringo, that would be me. And why, if Joseph himself had used this realm and studied this way, why had he forbidden me to follow his own tracks—and this mandate from his hospital deathbed? It made little sense to me that he had spent the last years of his life teaching me everything except what I would actually need to know here in Mexico to survive.

I was trapped now, and I was also on my own reconnaissance. I had insisted on entering the world of Mexican Black Magic for the love of a woman. Perhaps my tombstone would read foolish instead of stubborn for ignoring Joseph’s explicit warning.

+ + + +

I was offended when he said Christianity was a bloody religion, in reference to the sacrament you know—drinking of wine. The Lord specifically did this to unbind the people from the bloody sacrifice of many animals. If that intellectual pendanto had ever, ever seen the rituals that I have—the disemboweling of sheep and goats, beheading of chickens and then what they do with this—the arrangement of entrails, burning and chanting and drinking of actual blood—his observation about Christianity would have been much different. I have seen the blood offered to the God disappear into thin air in broad daylight. And at that point all my curiosity disappeared also. Joseph raised his eyebrows.

When was that?

That was in 1969… here. Here in the United States. We were at a Pueblo feast down in the Española Valley, end of the day. Revival of Mexican magic.

What happened next?

The hombre was healed. Later on… maybe five years later, the same man committed suicide.

So what were you doing there? Were you offering Christian prayers to help out? Or were you apprenticing? What were you actually doing there—Joseph?

I hadn’t meant for my voice to get that accusative intonation, but it came out that way. He took it in stride: apparently fielding a part of my personality he’d never seen before. I could see his amusement with the severity of my tone playing about the corner of his lips and the temptation show a personal offense was there in his eyes, but immediately softened. His intent to teach me something instead surfaced, and so palpable I almost caught my breath with expectation.

They were my drinking buddies, Tim. They asked me to come see something. Sobered me up muy pronto, if you get it.

So did it attack you?

Sure it did.

So what did you do then?

Laughing, Joseph rejoined, No more partying for me!

Come on, I want to know what you did when the demon affected you.

Has anyone ever told you you lighten up a little? Tanto fuerza estado.

Come on Joseph, quit holding out on me.

I did nothing, hermano, nothing. There wasn’t anything I could do. That’s the consequences of participating in something like that. And I wasn’t about to go to the priest and have me and Sophie marked as ‘afflicted ones, pobrecito’ to the rest of the community. I liked living here—I wanted to stay home, right here in my own village—to become estranged and have both myself and my wife outcast was not in my plans. So, basically, I’ve been ignoring it for the last thirty years, and that’s a just punishment.

Joseph turned to me. My father warned me; I could have listened. And now I am warning you. Be aware; it’s real, don’t go near it. You’ve had enough experience in this now for a lifetime. Steer clear, listen to your conscience, see it coming, and get out before you are pulled in too deep to back up. That’s the miry clay, Tim.

Joseph died a few days before his ninetieth birthday. He was right. I certainly did have enough experience to stay in politics and out of black witchcraft for the rest of my born days. Most likely I would rue chasing a phantom woman in the other realm. This chase might even be the death of me in itself.

It was hard to tell which God was compelling me here, to the interior of Mexico, to search out a ghost story that I could never sell. To any magazine I knew anyway… as productive copy. What kind of a career switch was that? On the other hand there was nothing happening on the political front and I was tired of Old West living in Cerrillos, New Mexico.

So was I here due to being bored? No. My friend Jésus’ determination had made the journey possible; Jésus and I were now physically within range of the answer. Joseph’s drinking buddies—I didn’t think so. I needed some real answers. Not something from a book or somebody else’s experience. Answers he had left for me to find out; yet I knew that his warning had been sincere. It wasn’t Joseph who was baiting me. I was hoping that my gravestone would not read foolish instead. Something like, O probrecito, given the best instructions from the greatest man of his day, here lies Tim Doughty, pendéjo.

+ + + +

Jésus’ first answer had been Hell, no. But, I’d persevered.

Mirate, Tim, he said as I matched his stride during our ascent to the small chapel in the Cumbres foothills. Even if it is true and she is in this type of a predicament, what makes you think that you are God’s chosen to go and help her? You’ve been warned never, never to get involved in black sorcery again. You are too susceptible to spells yourself and would probably suffer unto death in it. Have you forgotten that the church devoted itself for six months of around the clock prayer to free you from the grip of an Apache shaman? There are others that need our help desperately. What do we need to do? Go on a wild goose chase with you? I think you need to stick with your job at the New Mexican and not respond to this call, Tim. I think it’s a trick. Ignore it.

At that point he stopped to rest by shimmying to the top of a large boulder off the trail. I climbed up beside him, dusting the sandstone grit from my jeans. We sat in silence.

In a while, he condescended to speak. "When I was almost nineteen years old I saw a group of women in the church bringing a girl of fourteen to the priest. She was disheveled, her clothing torn, and out of control. Several had placed their hands around her wrists and her mother had secured her by the waist to haul her before the father there in Zacatecas, for prayer, for especially anointing with sacred oil, for prayers in Latin specifically written to disentangle the ingenuous sinner from contemplated intercourse with the devil. Certamente, unsanctified sexual relations that may lead to slavery to Satan! Now this normally is done privately by the priest away from the eyes of the congregation, all of whom may not be saved or may not be of a sympathetic heart toward the suffering family. Pero, she suddenly became enraged during her passage through and wrestled with the escorting parties, breaking free of even the elderly priest who attempted to hold her outstretched hands long enough that the women could subdue the outburst. So they were about her in a circle attempting to calm her with concerned prayers and admonitions. I was beside a pillar; I had lit a candle for my auntie who had entered childbirth that morning, for the safe passage of a cousin into this world, and they did not know that I was watching: there was too much going on.

"Suddenly her mother began wailing uncontrollably, and for good reason. As we watched, ring marks from a set of teeth appeared on her daughter’s neck and along her bare arms as she cried out in pain and her eyes widened with insanity that an invisible attacker was on her. A strong elderly woman grasped both her arms to her sides from behind and the priest rushed in with Holy Water to cast it from the daughter. It took some minutes for the wailing and screaming and struggle to subside. The marks were still visible as they accompanied her through the hallway to the chamber. There they were to apply the Holy Oil and the Priest to make specific prayer for her life and salvation.

It is unknown to this day if she had engaged in a sexual ceremony or was placed under such a heavy trance that she could be physically marked by a fallen angel. Since this had appeared among witnesses she was not blamed nor outcast from the community, but she was never asked in marriage and in later life entered a convent to serve the Lord."

I have seen this with my own eyes. Why do you want to deliberately reenter that world and take on the depth of Mexican sorcery?

My answer that noonday encompassed the better part of a week’s events. I had taken a second journey to the Hopi healer I had seen five years before for deliverance. In the end God must have spoken to Jésus, for even after I had explained what I had heard and seen, he was still adamantly refusing to participate. When our journey was over his thick black hair turned pure white, but he survived; and, I was there too, still standing, to see him transformed that way at the age of thirty-seven after he returned out of hell and back to the States from Mexico.

Now for our story: a story of a spirit, the whirlwind it brought, and how it twisted us all together—the whole bunch of us. And when we wrenched free, how we all landed. This is how we survived its religious torture. A religious spirit, that’s what it is. In case you are wondering why I stated is; not was: I state this for a reason and that reason has nothing to do with semantics or theatrics. You do realize that they cannot be killed, right?

Chapter 2

HOUSE OF LOVE

For he had given me that essential assistance,

taking me in during my long illness…

Heads will roll.

I t had been almost four years since I had lived with Sophie and Joseph. The days had rolled by like a Kansas landscape: flattened, churning miles that slid into the monthly planner. I was settled into Santa Fe during those years in a studio apartment that never saw a soul but myself; bobbing along the tide of New Mexico’s central government issues. Still no sign of the woman of La Fonda: the one who had made her presence known in a vision during the Legislative Session. A woman running, running barefoot over a pine-needled, carpeted mountainside.

Native, but not native. A free and natural woman, running barefoot over rocky ground up in Colorado.

For that reason my time in Santa Fe was filled with suspense, a suspense that greeted me in the opening of every door. She felt near; certainly I would find her at any moment. Then at last the romantic setting of Santa Fe faded along with my expectations that simply dead-ended. Casting about in the variety of singles’ bars, I noticed the same edginess of other men who appeared to eddy about pathetically in a sea of hungry females. It was a crass, aggressive mating dance. Couples, half-inebriated, engaged in an expensive cycle of dinners and entertainment in the nightclubs dotting the City and were seemingly oblivious to an ever-increasing rate of exchange of sexual partners.

At last came an evening when I folded up the soiled Santa Fe scene and tossed it away—and sought solitude benumbing to my new friends. Their waves of calls were spaced farther and farther apart; they lingered, and then gently eased out of my life. Ennui bitterly toasted everything I touched. Stars didn’t shine. Women were no longer pretty. In fact, the people around me seemed somehow piggish in appearance, and I became supra aware of my own fleshiness.

Buying a new vehicle might cure this, I thought; but once the papers were signed the glossy excitement evaporated coincident with the terminal flash of the salesman’s eyes. A flash, nothing more… and he had seemed so into bringing joy and happiness into my bleak single’s existence. So then: I had given up my old jeep for a black Dodge half-ton embellished by an exorbitant payment. A glint then in the salesman’s eyes appearing just as the chain snapped around my torso. The last signature in ink and full insurance initialed as well. Until paid off. A five-year pay off.

Not long after that, I took residence in a trailer out of town. The Dodge’s heater worked that last week in December. Merry Christmas. I liked the new truck; they had waived the Christmas payment. I double, tripled, secured my agreement with the New Mexican. I had thirty hours per week and no benefits, and I really, really liked driving my new truck around town because I really couldn’t go anywhere else. And as I cogitated on the narrowness of my budget, I came across the memory of the happiness I’d forgotten I was pursuing. This happiness had little to do with money.

It was Joseph who had initiated the burning of my graduate school loan with me the previous spring. I had driven up through Chama to see him after publishing a successful run of articles covering the City Different’s political dysfunctualities. We’d had a splendid time analyzing State government long distance over the phone together, and I’d made the trip to thank him. When I mentioned to him that my Journalism degree was paid off now, and that the small revenues from our book had made this possible, he insisted that we burn the loan papers in his old wood stove to celebrate. By doing so, we would toast my eventual destiny as a homeowner.

Joseph knew how I had been derailed and what it had taken for me to get back up for he had given me that essential assistance, taking me in during my long illness. He had paved my way with Norteño hospitality that I will never cease to admire. This part of the story I will share with you in just a bit. On that particular day, the loan closure papers were sitting there in the glove box of my jeep. So I went outside, under the lowing pines, triumphant, to retrieve them.

It’s not a mortgage—but it’ll pay for one, he said and handed me a Budweiser researched out of his fridge. Sophie congratulated me quietly with her contented smile and left us chatting at the wood stove more than likely to continue for hours, possibly until the next mealtime, as had been our habit.

The first whistlings of the narrow gauge were heard in the distance. In response both of us fell silent. When I look back upon my last visit with the old Hispanic, I reflect I suppose I should have known. They both seemed slowed by their age; their household was actually functioning like a hand-wound clock releasing its worn out spring. I could hear merriment and good times like the toning of a clear bell all through their adobe home.

Sophie was preparing lunch in the kitchen—a kitchen flooded with light—but she was longer at it this time than in days past. I, too, was in denial that life would end and that this beloved house would become suddenly still: their love eddying out into the sea of remembrances along with the clarity of their faithful run together through life. I remembered thinking surely it won’t be very long before Joseph passes on and will Sophie then live with her daughter in Bernalillo? I wondered briefly; but I knew Joseph had competently prepared for his wife’s last years in advance. As it was, she quietly departed in her sleep less than five months after his death.

love%20birds.jpg

But there we were at the wood stove like old times. The loan was all consumed by flames with the exception of the signature page, reserved in case. The clever strategist raised his eyebrows as he returned it to me, in case, and I tucked it away carefully adhering the velcro on my inside jacket pocket. Joseph had closed his eyes and I was watching him waiting for more wisdom, perhaps another story he’d want to share. His bushy eyebrows had finally also bleached out now matching his white head, but Joseph was no Santa Claus. His shrewd comments had carried me into Santa Fe politics successfully. He stirred.

Heads will roll.

Heads will roll, he breathed deeply now, saying it again for emphasis, and as I leaned forward to attend, he unlatched the wood stove door. He poked the simmering coals within the blackness causing the fire to sing.

Surely it will finally come… racial strife in the capital city. All the white kids shuttled into private schools and the Mexican kids huddled together in the public system. Mmm. Gnarled hands came to rest on the arms of the ancient stuffed chair.

I didn’t reply. I’d been reciting statistics to him that had revealed the trend to dumb down instructional standards. Ten years of it already and a crisis in petty crime stalked the City Different. It was now at critical levels and beginning to tarnish the city’s magnetic draw as a cultural hub. Eventually the economy would suffer, and all would be pulled into the conflict.

Crime was presently being gallantly rebuffed by tenacious but underpaid Hispanic law enforcement who were not remunerated any differently for their bilingual mediation skills. These officers were for the most part Norteños, raised to respect the law and to value peaceful society, to protect and to serve, with generations of understanding concerning the inflow of Mexican migration. Many of them Catholic: imbued with a spiritual sense of mercy and forgiveness and human understanding. They were cut from the purple cloth of Oñate, of which you will hear much more as we go along. That morning Joseph’s luminous dark eyes pondered, and I simply waited. His eyebrows knit together.

We moved back into Española. Gas was cheaper then. I knew he was speaking of his Norteño people. There are few of us willing to hold it back any longer.

It’s the same old thing you know, he started up again. The kitchen in the home—the school in the city. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before; he pursed his lips together tightly. Quietly, he rose from his chair. It appeared to resist his going, clinging—the grayed fabric bunching around his cotton twills—but he went on anyway, slowly reaching, and I watched what was a long, long pass of his hand. I became aware that age had finally curtailed his amazing energies. He poked about into a cherry colored, prefabricated bookcase I’d never paid much attention to before: his personal library filled with well-worn, used books and papers tossed about. Then he came out with a small, neglected looking wooden box.

The women teach them; then we send them off to war… Yet… Mira, Tim. Those wars were always somewhere far away. We were always clever enough to avoid it in our own backyard. Until today. Now we are tired. Here you go.

Joseph handed me a relic.

It was an ebony carving. Four chips of turquoise flowered in the very center of the tiny black cross. It came into my hand lightly.

Acoma, he stated, referencing the southernmost Pueblo of our state. Years ago he had taken me clear to the top of this warrior’s mesa.

I could only nod. I couldn’t speak. He was gifting me with some unknown, unseen honor; the appreciation that welled up in my chest overwhelmed me. What was this? My spirit was still and expectant.

Mira, my friend. We gave our Faith; they returned it in Beauty. That is the secret of our land. This is the long fight for peace in New Mexico. M’entiendes… should it be destroyed by a simple racial strife? It was as if my ears had opened. He had emphasized simple. A simple racial strife. How could racism be simple? Now I listened with my whole being. Who is this man? My friend… no, he was more than that. This moment was so like the moment my own father had blessed me ten years ago, passing on his wisdom and hope and faith to me in his prayer for my life. Somehow, for some reason, I was receiving a double blessing. The double portion was coming through Joseph.

Our leaders exhibit their brave articulation without a single shred of common sense, he stated, apparently already reconciled to this fact. I pray to God that it is not too late, that we will stand firm as one people throughout the generations.

I nodded again.

Coffee? Sophie? The home resounded affectionately, sweetly. The sweet waters of their aged love. Ud. comer? Old, he was getting old. Joseph had forgotten he’d asked me the same thing just an hour ago. Y un otra hora despues… It was so very hard to leave their presence that time.

So Joseph had been a father to me. I chaffed under his expectations—that I should reveal the underbelly of the beast—a greedy, life-absorbing corruption that clutched the tiny State of New Mexico at the borderland of tyranny. But whatever he passed to me that day had certainly driven me on. As the Western drought deepened, I convinced my editor to run a series of Sunday articles on water rights, and I was following up on an obscure reference to a legal case in Zimmermann Library on campus in the state’s only large city, Albuquerque. Notes explaining the development of the litigation extant circa 1930, guiding water allocations until the 1985 re-issuance. Maybe a flaw… some way to understand the current insanity of continued development in Santa Fe without the essential aquifer reserves. Now the builders were warring over a disappearing aquifer and there was much talk of the deals cut behind doors and in attorney’s offices for Santa Fe Council approval. Kickbacks.

It was Thursday. And it began again: incessant pounding and buzzing like a hive of angry bees enveloped me, and I was propelled into the other realm with a vengeance. God knew how long it would take to get out this time, my agonized soul silently breathed through the halls of my mind and the body of a renewed affliction from hell.

Let me see Joseph’s cross. Jésus had crossed his arms and was staring at me.

It’s at the house, I explained. I took it off three days later, after another episode in Santa Fe.

‘Where did you put it?"

It’s inside my computer console. Why? Do you think it’s cursed?

Not that simple. But it may present a challenge to a sorcerer.

No one has ever seen it. I wore it under my shirt.

Reason? Jésus had cocked his head rather accusingly.

I felt it should be kept private. After all, Joseph didn’t wear it, although he treasured it. Maybe it’s…

More of a girl thing? Jésus snapped at me, baiting me.

No. It’s definitely masculine in appearance, I rebuffed his scorn, showing patience with his probing, angry attitude. He had reason to be offended. But it’s ancient. I didn’t want to explain it.

Jésus sighed as if allowing my childish ways, and he made his reason for his anger crystal clear. Jésus felt that I had reverted to spiritual ignorance by keeping an object that compromised spiritual purity. But obviously you think it has something to do with being called back in.

Yes, but I’m unwilling to part with it. I’ll just keep it separate from my person; at least that’s what Hopi directs. I resumed walking and Jésus caught up with me. The midday summer heat was pleasant in the mountains. A breeze cooled the light perspiration. We had been afoot for a half hour and were approaching the shrine.

So I see. You went to a Hopi healer before approaching the Church. I was silent. Judgment didn’t suit my friend. It wasn’t his thing at all. Patiently, I waited as he reflected on the information I had given him. Gradually, his perplexity lifted, and he asked while we continued the last of the path, Tell me again from the beginning, from the hive of bees, exactly what you experienced before you removed Joseph’s cross…

Chapter 3

CLEFT ROCK

It was as if lightning had struck, clefting the rock.

Was there a motive?

I heard it too clearly: a short but terrible scream, after the closing of a doo r. A slamming door, a scream, and the tormenting buzzing lifted. I was out of the channel, but perplexed enough to suspend my actions momentarily . Why had this been brought to my attention? Very rarely was I visited anymore. The presences would lift almost as suddenly as they came, and it had become apparent to me over the last few years that the native shaman had established a no fly zone around me, although apparently there were those who would find my identity a curiosity and dally around me. The repercussions were swift.

Now it had been at least eight months since Joseph’s death and the heaviness of mourning had passed. During that period I had experienced some psychic phenomena and the recurrence of sharp, almost explosive lights of the fabled third eye. It was as if someone was attempting entrance into the inner recesses of my personal vision, but I would not take the bait.

Joseph had given me specific instructions at his death, the accumulated wisdom of his life span, and that of his father and especially his mother, and their community. He had given me insight into the spiritual realities of cursings carried on between the indigenous communities dating back to massacres, raids, retaliation between the earlier populations, on both sides. He made the need to remain pure and not be drawn into battling between shaman priests very clear to me. He pointed out that hippies who had come to the New Mexico territory expecting to create utopia had sadly become puppets to such forces during the seventies, many progressing on to their own destruction, and pulling entire communities into a morass of spiritual and political conflict resulting in violence.

Many Spanish people had attempted to aid the seeking, floundering Anglo newcomers with true concern for their well-being only to find that the Hispanic community was targeted more and more by anglicized whites painting them as vain-glorious conquerors who had enslaved and destroyed Natives. Whites were publicly, everywhere, denouncing Norteños for what they considered to be historical crimes, focusing blame on the remnant of Norteños who could trace their ancestry to Oñate’s original band of Spanish settlers. Current politics and sharply judgmental retro-active historical accountings were rank with accusation against Joseph’s People, and when I had entered the environs in 1999 a soured scourging of the Spanish villages was well under way.

My work dealt daily with confrontation politics. It was hard to keep up with the shiftiness of political bosses attempting to out-spin Santa Fe wealth. The presence of ambitious Anglo businessmen driving the Santa Fe development, with absolutely no concern for the lack of water, was derailing the old, once stable constitutional decrees. There was talk of overturning the constitutional guidelines in response to the tremendous pressure of wealthy, international whites who desired to spend only a season or two in Santa Fe each year.

Thursday morning, after catching the news before heading to work, I had seen the drought listings flashed to the screen. The aquifer had fallen to 31% of normal in this sixth year of drought. Legislation concerning real estate and water rights had been too massive for committees to digest. Unfortunately, the State had lost a longtime engineer who had been replaced by a very poor choice due (in Joseph’s opinion) to the ignorance of an Anglo governor. Chaos