Woman of Light (2)
Desiderya stomped the floorboards. She rattled the walls.
“Ouch,” they said.
“Out with it,” she said, and stomped once more.
“Fine,” they said. “The baby has a name. Would you like to know?”
When the dead priests relented, Desiderya repeated the name, her voice echoing throughout the dirt-walled sanctuary. She looked at the baby, who had scratched a faint purple line into his cheek with his translucent fingernails. Desiderya noted to cut them later. “Pidre,” she said and smiled at the baby. “Like stone.”
Deeper inside the chapel, several young women were on their hands and knees sweeping the floor with horsetail brushes. Dried rose petals were piled around them, and at the altar was a clay statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, dressed in red silk. The young women were preparing for her Feast Day, and the church smelled of incense and blue sage and the copal traded and carried from 1,400 miles south in Mexico City. They gazed at the Sleepy Prophet as she stepped before them with the baby in her arms.
“Who is that?” asked a young woman.
“Pidre,” she said, thumbing the baby’s bear claw.
“From where?”
“Seems he’s mixed blood,” said Desiderya. “Maybe Spanish. Probably not French. I’d say from his blanket he comes from the southern villages.”
“Who abandons their own?” another young woman asked with disdain.
Desiderya thought of why babies are sometimes left. She saw images in her mind that she’d rather not see, felt profound hunger, witnessed a village perched high on a hill, horses slaughtered for food, a church crumbling back into the earth from which it was built. The Sleepy Prophet studied Pidre then. He gazed upon her face with recognition. His spirit felt complementary, an old friend, a grandson she had fished from the weeds.
“We cannot know the depths of another’s sacrifice,” Desiderya said, easing the baby into the young woman’s arms. “For now, find him a breast. One that works.”
* * *
—
As a child, Pidre was a great hunter with a stern expression over his cloudy eyes. Often haughty, he was disciplined by the men of Pardona with a grass lash. He giggled his way through beatings, a spirit, the people said, that couldn’t be tempered. When the other boys threw stones at his back or smacked his ankles with broken cornstalks and called him names like Snow Blood and Sky Eyes, he didn’t meet them with violence. And over time they relented, for Pidre had the gift of storytelling and a strong ability to tell jokes. Once, as the women prepared meals for All Souls’ Day, Pidre, a runt of a boy with spidery arms and twig legs, hid beneath fat loaves of horno bread. He lay on the table covered in dozens of steaming loaves, inhaling the yeasty scent until the other boys entered the kitchen for their afternoon snack. At that moment, he raised his arms as if climbing from a shallow grave. The women screamed and beat the bread flat with their brooms and handkerchiefs. Later when Desiderya heard about what Pidre had done, she told him it would have been much funnier if he’d been naked. “Like a real demon.”
Within eleven years, Desiderya Lopez lay dying of old age on the sheepskin rugs in her clay home. The earthen smell of her bedroom had been replaced with the stale stench of sickness, a body soon to erode. On her altar, she had placed dried apricots and biscuits for the journey. The air sounded with music, a distant lullaby prayer. Pidre rested his face in the nook between her neck and shoulder, her silver hair plaited around her distinguished face. He kissed her sectioned braids. He listened to her shallow breaths, the sounds of her spirit slipping away.
“You’re only little now,” said the Sleepy Prophet, “but I saw you as a man.”
Between tears, Pidre asked, “What am I like, Grandma? Who do you see?”
“You live near a large village on the other side of the Lost Territory, along a river, surrounded by their mines.”
“Mines?”
“Their gutting,” she said. “You’ll have a fierce wife and daughters. Do not be vengeful people.”
“Grandma,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, my baby. You will.”
“I miss you,” Pidre cried. “I already feel it. I am missing you now.”
“But I am still here,” Desiderya closed her eyes and winced at a pain that seemed lodged within her heart. “Pidre,” she said.
“Yes?”
“You gave me such joy,” she wheezed into the ghost of a laugh. “You are my grandson, and you are my friend. Thank you for coming into my life.”
She let out her final exhale, her breath circling the room. At that, Desiderya Lopez, the Sleepy Prophet of Pardona Pueblo, moved from the temperature of the living into the temperature of the dead.
* * *
—
As Pidre grew up, he was well liked and respected among his people. Mexicano, French Canadian, and American traders often traveled through Pardona, bringing their weapons and furs, metal trinkets and fancy candies. Pidre had an eye for these things, and an ear for languages. He bartered with the traders and stored their impressive items beneath his sheepskin. In exchange for small tasks, Pidre would dole out candies to the children of Pardona. At seventeen, he announced to the elders that he was interested in leaving the Land of Early Sky. He was a businessman, well suited for the white world. There were many objections among the elders, who had so graciously taken in the child from nowhere. “We are your people now.”