The Last Karankawas(18)
Perhaps Roland, ever the fearful Roman Catholic, should have had Latin on his headstone. His looks nothing like this one, though that was not her decision. Once they learned the prognosis, he insisted Ofelia go with him so they could pick one out together. But he ended up choosing it himself. The end came quickly, and now he rests beneath a granite headstone in a corner of the pretty Catholic cemetery behind St. Luke’s, in a section of east Brownsville about a mile from the house where she and he spent forty-four years, just off Boca Chica Boulevard. He is four hundred miles away, alone. And she is here.
When Roland died, their son Oscar decided his widowed mother shouldn’t be down in the Valley anymore. You’ll come to Galveston and live with us, Oscar said. Mama. No arguments. Let us take care of you.
She resisted for months. In the Valley, she had her church, her weekly games of Rummikub and Chalupa, her monthly bingo mixers. Pachangas, quincea?eras, barbecues. A community built on decades of stories lying thick, seventy-two years’ worth of threads passing from one person to another, then back to her in a pattern they could recognize. But her son and daughter-in-law had insisted, and on their last visit to the Valley, Hector smiled so sweetly at her. He was what did it. Ofelia de los Santos loves her grandson. He is a big, strong boy; at twenty-one, he already reminds her so much of her own father, un buen hombre. And he introduced her to Magdalena Castillo, the grandmother of his classmate. Ofelia’s first new friend in years, her only friend on Galveston. You’ll like Mrs. Castillo, she can be a crazy viejita, but she’s nice, his only description.
Now she and Magdalena meet for breakfast once a week, walking together to the taqueria a few blocks away. Ofelia likes the crazy viejita with the long, gray-streaked dark hair that makes her look like a fortune-teller. She orders her sausage-and-egg tacos a la mexicana and her coffee black, like Ofelia, and though Magdalena has only ever known Galveston, she understands roots, patterns of threads, and stories. In her eagle-sharp black eyes, Ofelia sees an understanding and respect for el otro mundo—the unseen senses people have long feared, denied, burned women for.
Her friend and her grandson are the only things Ofelia loves about this island.
“I like this one,” Beeb is saying, and Ofelia looks again at Father Byrne’s marker. “So pretty, the cross.”
“Yes,” Ofelia agrees. She crosses herself and murmurs a quick Apostles’ Creed in Spanish. It is still habit, despite all these years without the craft. Her mother used to say demons could withstand much, but not the Creed. A healer’s first tools are her hands and her tongue. Ofelia de los Santos had been Ofelia Vaca then, watching her mother trace a cross on her own forehead, her lips, her breasts, mimicking. Yo creo en Dios, Padre todopoderoso, creador del Cielo y de la Tierra. Say it, mija.
Beside her, Beeb crosses herself, mumbles a prayer under her breath. Many Filipinos were Catholics, too, Ofelia remembers, deciding she likes the woman a bit better.
“Rest in peace, amen,” Beeb finishes in a loud voice. She squints at Christophorus Eduardus Byrne. “Do you know him?”
Ofelia shakes her head.
“That’s nice. So the spirit moved you to pray? Or I should say the spirits moved you!” Beeb laughs. “That’s what Xander says. Oh, of course you don’t know Xander yet, but you will. He’s just up ahead.” Beeb steers her around a chunk of sidewalk jutting up from the ground. “Xander founded the whole Society! Xander is the Galveston Ghost Whisperer. You’ve heard of him, yes?”
She recognizes the name, but only because of the Society website. Hector found it for her. He laughed as he pulled it up on his computer, but when he saw the seriousness of her face, he quieted. Something like this could be pretty cool, Abuelita. The Spiritualistic and Supernatural Society? They could learn a lot from you, he said. I know how strong you are now.
Ofelia de los Santos stared at the picture of the Society’s founder: Xander Reeves, the Galveston Ghost Whisperer. He of the long, bleached hair, white as a sunbeam, and the pitch-black sunglasses. He looked the way Ofelia imagined young serial killers looked—high boots, dark clothes, a black trench coat lapping at his ankles.
Xander Reeves appeared nothing like the ghost speakers Ofelia once knew, two tías and her grandfather among them. The Vacas were average people; they had white hair that puffed around their faces like bolls of cotton. Even their trances were sensible, lacking drama. They simply stopped what they were doing—stirring a bowl of cereal, turning the radio dial, opening a door—as their eyes rolled back in their heads. They did not shake when Ofelia Vaca or the others led them to a chair, flinching at the cold air seeping from their skin. Their arms would come up above their heads as if pulled by the sky, or as if they reached for other invisible hands.
This Xander had his hands on his hips, chin lifted at an arrogant angle. Ofelia de los Santos doubted spirits reached down to him from anywhere.
“Xander is a medium,” Beeb explains as they walk. “He’s lived on the island all his life, so he knows the best places to find spirits. This cemetery is full of Civil War soldiers—did you know that? It was the first cemetery when the city was founded. Many of the people who died during the big hurricane, they’re buried here. The ones they could find, you know.” She clucks her tongue in sympathy, and Ofelia finds herself doing the same. “Xander says there were so many dead they built funeral pyres on the beaches and burned them all day and all night for weeks. We have meetings there sometimes, where the pyres were, on Stewart Beach—over there by Fish Village. That’s where I live.”