Forests of the Heart

  Viewed from outside, the stitches appeared to spell words, but they were like the voices of ravens heard speaking in the woods. The sounds made by the birds sounded like words, but they weren’t words that could be readily deciphered by untrained ears. They weren’t human words.

  This was one of the ways she focused her brujería. Other times, she called on the help of the spirits and los santos to help her interpret the cause of an unhappiness or illness.

  “There is no one method of healing,” her grandmother had told her once. “Just as la Virgen is not bound by one faith.”

  “One face?” Bettina had asked, confused.

  “That, too,” Abuela said, smiling. “La medicina requires only your respect and that you accept responsibility for all you do when you embark upon its use.”

  “But the herbs. The medicinal plants …”

  “Por eso,” Abuela told her. “Their properties are eternal. But how you use them, that is for you to decide.” She smiled again. “We are not machines, chica. We are each of us different. Sin par. Unique. The measure given to one must be adjusted for another.”

  There was not a day gone by that Bettina didn’t think of and miss her grandmother. Her good company. Her humor. Her wisdom. Sighing, she returned her attention to her sister.

  “You can’t play at the brujería all your life,” Adelita was saying, her voice gentle.

  “It’s not play for me.”

  “Bettina, we grew up together. You’re not a witch.”

  “No, I’m a healer.”

  There was an immense difference between the two, as Abuela had often pointed out. A bruja made dark, hurtful magic. A curandera healed.

  “A healer,” Bettina repeated. “As was our abuela.”

  “Was she?” Adelita asked.

  Bettina could hear the tired smile in Adelita’s voice, but she didn’t share her sister’s amusement.

  “¿Cómo?” she said, her own voice sharper than she intended. “How can you deny it?”

  Adelita sighed. “There is no such thing as magic. Not here, in the world where we live. La brujería is only for stories. For el reino de los sueños. It lives only in dreams and make-believe.”

  “You’ve forgotten everything.”

  “No, I remember the same as you. Only I look at the stories she told us with the eyes of an adult. I know the difference between what is real and what is superstition.”

  Except it hadn’t only been stories, Bettina wanted to say.

  “I loved her, too,” Adelita went on. “It’s just… think about it. The way she took us out into the desert. It was like she was trying to raise us as wild animals. What could Mama have been thinking?”

  “That’s not it at all—”

  “I’ll tell you this. Much as I love our mamá, I wouldn’t let her take Janette out into the desert for hours on end the way she let Abuela take us. In the heat of the day and …how often did we go out in the middle of the night?”

  “You make it sound so wrong.”

  “Cálmate, Bettina. I know we survived. We were children. To us it was simply fun. But think of what could have happened to us—two children out alone in the desert with a crazy old woman.”

  “She was not—”

  “Not in our eyes, no. But if we heard the story from another?”

  “It… would seem strange,” Bettina had to admit. “But what we learned—”

  “We could have learned those stories at her knee, sitting on the front stoop of our parents’ house.”

  “And if they weren’t simply stories?”

  “¡Qué boba eres! What? Cacti spirits and talking animals? The past and future, all mixed up with the present. What did she call it?”

  “La época del mito.”

  “That’s right. Myth time. I named one of my gallery shows after it. Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  It had been a wonderful show. La Gata Verde had been transformed into a dreamscape that was closer to some miraculous otherwhere than it was to the dusty pavement that lay outside the gallery. Paintings, rich with primary colors, depicted los santos and desert spirits and the Virgin as seen by those who’d come to her from a different tradition than that put forth by the papal authority in Rome. There had been Hopi kachinas—the Storyteller, Crow Woman, clowns, deer dancers—and tiny, carved Zuni fetishes. Wall hangings rich with allegorical representations of Indio and Mexican folklore. And Bettina’s favorite: a collection of sculptures by the Bisbee artist, John Early—surreal figures of gray, fired clay, decorated with strips of colored cloth and hung with threaded beads and shells and spiraling braids of copper and silver filament. The sculptures twisted and bent like smoke-people frozen in their dancing, captured in mid-step as they rose up from the fire.

  She had stood in the center of the gallery the night before the opening of the show and turned slowly around, drinking it all in, pulse drumming in time to the resonance that arose from the art that surrounded her. For one who didn’t believe, Adelita had still somehow managed to gather together a show that truly seemed to represent their grandmother’s description of a moment stolen from la época del mito.

  “Not everything in the world relates to art,” Bettina said now into the phone.

  “No. But perhaps it should. Art is what sets us apart from the animals.”

  Bettina couldn’t continue the conversation. At times like this, it was as though they spoke two different languages, where the same word in one meant something else entirely in the other.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I should go.”

  “Perdona, Bettina. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  She wasn’t angry, Bettina thought. She was sad. But she knew her sister wouldn’t understand that either.

  “I know,” she said. “Give my love to Chuy and Janette.”

  “Sí. Vaya con Dios.”

  And if He will not have me? Bettina thought. For when all was said and done, God was a man, and she had never fared well in the world of men. It was easier to live in la época del mito of her abuela. In myth time, all were equal. People, animals, plants, the earth itself. As all times were equal and existed simultaneously.

  “Qué te vaya bien,” she said. Take care.

  She cradled the receiver and finally chose the small shape of a dog from the milagros scattered across the tabletop. El lobo was a kind of a dog, she thought. Perhaps she was making this fetish for herself. She should sew her own name inside, instead of Marty Gibson’s, the man who had asked her to make it for him. Ah, but would it draw los lobos to her, or keep them away? And which did she truly want?

  Getting up from the table, she crossed the kitchen and opened the door to look outside. Her breath frosted in the air where the men had been barefoot. January was a week old and the ground was frozen. It had snowed again this week, after a curious Christmas thaw that had left the ground almost bare in many places. The wind had blown most of the snow off the lawn where the men had gathered, pushing it up in drifts against the trees and the buildings scattered among them: cottages and a gazebo, each now boasting a white skirt. She could sense a cold front moving in from the north, bringing with it the bitter temperatures that would leave fingers and face numb after only a few minutes of exposure. Yet some of the men had been in short sleeves, broadcloth suit jackets slung over their shoulders, all of them walking barefoot on the frozen lawn.

  Por eso….

  She didn’t think they were men at all.

  “Your friends are gone.”

  “Ellos no son mis amigos,” she said, then realized that speaking for so long with Adelita on the phone had left her still using Spanish. “They aren’t my friends,” she repeated. “I don’t know who, or even what they are.”

  “Perhaps they are ghosts.”

  “Perhaps,” Bettina agreed, though she didn’t think so. They were too complicated to be described by so straightforward a term.

  She gazed out into the night a moment longer, then finally closed the do
or on the deepening cold and turned to face the woman who had joined her in the kitchen.

  If los lobos were an elusive, abstracted mystery, then Nuala Fahey was one much closer to home, though no more comprehendible. She was a riddling presence in the house, her mild manner at odds with the potent brujería Bettina could sense in the woman’s blood. This was an old, deep spirit, not some simple ama de llaves, yet in the nine months that Bettina had been living in the house, Nuala appeared to busy herself with no more than her housekeeping duties. Cleaning, cooking, the light gardening that Salvador left for her. The rooms were always dusted and swept, the linens and bedding fresh and sweet-smelling. Meals appeared when they should, with enough for all who cared to partake of them. The flower gardens and lawns were well-tended, the vegetable patch producing long after the first frost.

  She was somewhere in her mid-forties, a tall, handsome woman with striking green eyes and a flame of red hair only vaguely tamed into a loose bun at the back of her head. While her wardrobe consisted entirely of men’s clothes—pleated trousers and dress shirts, tweed vests and casual sports jackets—there was nothing mannish about her figure or her demeanor. Yet neither was she as passive as she might seem. True, her step was light, her voice soft and low. She might listen more than she spoke, and rarely initiate a conversation as she had this evening, but there was still that undercurrent of brujería that lay like smoldering coals behind her eyes. La brujería, and an impression that while the world might not always fully engage her, something in it certainly amused her.

  Bettina had been trying to make sense of the housekeeper ever since they’d met, but she was no more successful now, nine months on, than she’d been the first day Nuala opened the front door and welcomed her into Kellygnow, the old house at the top of the hill that was now her home. Kellygnow she learned after she moved in, meant “the nut wood” in some Gaelic language—though no one seemed quite sure which one. But there were certainly nut trees on the hill. Oak, hazel, chestnut.

  There were many things Bettina hadn’t been expecting about this place Adelita had found for her to stay. The mystery of Nuala was only one of them. Kellygnow was much bigger than she’d been prepared for, an enormous rambling structure with dozens of bedrooms, studios, and odd little room-sized nooks, as well as a half-dozen cottages in the woods out back. The property was larger, too—especially for this part of the city—taking up almost forty acres of prime real estate. With the neighboring properties ranging in the mil-lion-dollar-and-up range, Bettina couldn’t imagine what the house and its grounds were worth. Its neighbors were all owned by stockbrokers and investors, bankers and the CEOs of multinational corporations, celebrities and the nouveau riche—a far cry from the bohemian types Bettina shared her lodgings with.

  For Kellygnow was a writers’ and artists’ colony, founded in the early 1900s by Sarah Hanson, a descendant of the original owner. She had been a respected artist and essayist in her time, a rarity at the turn of the century, but was now better remembered for the haven she had created for her fellow artists and writers.

  The colony was the oldest property in the area, standing alone at the top of Handfast Road with a view that would do the Newford Tourist Board’s pamphlets proud. There was a tower, four stories high in the northwest corner of the house. From the upper windows of one side you could look down on the city: Ferryside, the river, Foxville, Crowsea, downtown, the canal, the East Side. At night, the various neighborhoods blended into an Indio traders’ market, the lights spread out like the sparkling trinkets on a hundred blankets. From another window you could see, first the estates that made up the Beaches; below them, rows of tasteful condos blending into the hillside; beyond them, the lakefront properties; and then finally the lake itself, shimmering in the starlight, ice rimming the shore in thick, playful displays of abstract whimsy. Far in the distance the ice thinned out, ending in open water.

  The view behind the house was blocked by trees. Hazels and chestnuts. Tamaracks and cedar, birch and pine. Most impressive were the huge towering oaks that, she learned later, were thought to be part of the original growth forest that had once laid claim to all the land in an unbroken sweep from the Kickaha Mountains down to the shores of the lake. These few giants had been spared the axes of homesteaders and lumbermen alike by the property’s original owner, Virgil Hanson, whose home had been one of the cottages that still stood out back. It was, Bettina had been told, the oldest building in Newford, a small stone croft topping the wooded hill long before the first Dutch settlers had begun to build along the shores of the river below.

  Adelita had never lived in Kellygnow, but before moving back home to Tubac and opening her gallery, she had studied fine art at Butler University and some of her crowd had been residents. It would be the prefect place for Bettina, she said. Let her handle it. She would make a few calls. Everything would be arranged.

  “I’m not an artist or a writer,” Bettina had said.

  “No, but you’re an excellent model and in that house, one good model would be more welcome than a dozen of the world’s best artists. Créeme. Trust me. Only don’t tell Mama or she’ll have both our heads.”

  No, Bettina had thought. Mama would definitely not approve. Mama was already upset enough that Bettina was moving. If she were to know that her youngest daughter expected to make her living by being paid to sit for artists, often in the nude, she would be horrified.

  Bettina had thought to only stay in the house for as long as it took her to find an apartment in the city. She was given one of the nooks to make her own—a small space under a staircase that opened up into a hidden room twice the size of her bedroom at home. There was a recessed window looking out on the backyard, overhung with ivy on the outside and with just room enough for her to sit on its sill if she pulled her knees up to her chin. There was also a single brass bed with shiny, knobbed posts and a cedar chest at its foot that lent the room a resonant scent. A small pine armoire. A worn, black leather reading chair with a tall glass-shaded lamp beside it, both “borrowed” from the library at some point, she was sure, since they matched its furnishings. And wonder of wonders, a piece of John Early’s work: a gray, fired-clay sculpture of the Virgin wearing a quizzical smile, blue-robed and decorated with a halo of porcupine quills cunningly worked into the clay and painted gold. In front of the statue, that first day, she found a half-burned candle—someone had been using the statue as the centerpiece for their own small chapel of the Immaculata, she’d thought at first. Or perhaps they had simply enjoyed candlelight as much as she did.

  Either way, she felt welcomed and blessed.

  The one week turned into a month. Adelita had been right. The artists were delighted to have her in residence, constantly vying for her time in their studios. They were good company, as were the writers who only emerged from their quarters at odd times for meals or a sudden need to hear a human voice. And if their intentions were sometimes less than honorable—women as well as men—they were quick to respect her wishes and put the incident behind them.

  The one month stretched into three, four. She needed no money for either rent or board, and had barely touched the savings she’d brought with her. Most mornings she sat for one or another of the artists, sometimes for a group of them. Her afternoons and evenings were usually her own. At first she explored the city, but when the weather turned colder, she cocooned in the house, reading, listening to music in one or another of the communal living rooms, often spending time in the company of the gardener Salvador and helping him prepare the property for winter.

  And she began to trade her fetishes and charms. First to some of those living in the house, then to customers the residents introduced her to. As her abuela had taught her, she set no fee, asked for no recompense, but they all gave her something anyway. Mostly money, but sometimes books they thought she would like, or small pieces of original art—sketches, drawings, color studies—which she preferred the most. Her walls were now decorated with her growing hoard of art while a stack of
books rose thigh-high from the floor beside her chair.

  The few months grew into a half year, and now the house felt like a home. She was no closer to discovering what had drawn her to this city, what it was that whispered in her bones from the hills to the north, but it didn’t seem as immediate a concern as it had when she’d first stepped off the plane, her small suitcase in one hand, her knapsack on her back with its herbs, tinctures, and the raw materials with which she made her fetishes. The need to know was no longer so important. Or perhaps she was growing more patient—a concept that would have greatly amused her abuela. She could wait for the mystery to come to her.

  As she knew it would. Her visions of what was to come weren’t always clear, especially when they related to her, but of this she was sure. She had seen it. Not the details, not when or exactly where, or even what face the mystery would present to her. But she knew it would come. Until then, every day was merely another step in the journey she had undertaken when she first began to learn the ways of the spirit world at the knee of her abuela, only now the days took her down a road she no longer recognized, where the braid of her Indio and Mexican past became tangled with threads of cultures far less familiar.

  But she was accepting of it all, for la época del mito had always been a confusing place for her. When she was in myth time, she was often too easily distracted by all the possibilities: that what had been might really be what was to come, that what was to come might be what already was. Mostly she had difficulty with the true face of a thing. She mixed up its spirit with its physical presence. Its true essence with the mask it might be wearing. Its history with its future. It didn’t help that Newford was like the desert, a place readily familiar with spirits and ghosts and strange shifts in what things seemed to be. Where many places only held a quiet whisper of the otherwhere, here thousands of voices murmured against one another and sometimes it was hard to make out one from the other.

  The house at the top of Handfast Road where she now lived was a particularly potent locale. Kellygnow and its surrounding wild acres appeared to be a crossroads between time zones and spirit zones, something that had seemed charming and pleasantly mysterious until los lobos began to squat in its backyard, smoking their cigarettes and watching, watching. Now she couldn’t help but wonder if their arrival spelled the end of her welcome here.