Shaman Winter

  Next to him sat Estevan, an artist who belonged to a group that had done a lot of work preserving the agricultural techniques of the old Nuevo Mexicanos. One could see his piñon and cedar sculptures at his gallery along the Embudo road.

  Others Sonny didn’t know sat at the table.

  “Este es Sonny, el detective de ’Burque,” Gonidas said. “Y su linda—”

  “Amiga,” Sonny said. “Lorenza.”

  They all stood to greet her and to make a place at the round table, la mesa de los pícaros as it was called.

  “Qué haces por aquí?” Estevan asked when the greetings were completed and drinks ordered.

  “Pues, bad news,” Sonny said.

  “Oh, Beto’s girl?”

  “Qué ’stá pasando?” Sonny asked, thinking he should jump in right away and ask what they knew because the sheriff was at a dead end, and both knew the state police dogs would sniff nothing out.

  Besides, the smokey haze of the short day was settling over the Taos valley. It was two days till solstice, and Sonny didn’t have much time left.

  The men around the table shrugged and stiffened slightly. They didn’t appreciate strangers asking questions, but the minute Sonny and Lorenza drove into the Garcias’ place the entire neighborhood knew they had come to help. The gossip had reached the cantina before Sonny and Lorenza entered.

  “Pues, es una desgracia—” Estevan began slowly, but Gonidas took over.

  “Es el pinche Viejo Bent,” he blurted out.

  Sonny sipped his Irish coffee. It helped to clear his sinuses.

  “El Viejo Bent?”

  “Ese sanamagón!” Gonidas continued. “Mira, en 1846, más o menos, el Kearny came to Taos.”

  “Santa Fé,” someone corrected.

  “Okay, he landed at Santa Fé in his boats. La Nina, la Pinta, y la Santa Maria.”

  The others shook their heads, downed their beers, and called for another round. It was going to be a long afternoon if Gonidas got to recite the Viejo Bent history. Gonidas paid no attention, plowing ahead with his story.

  “He told all the Taoseños that he was going to kick their ass if they didn’t behave. ‘I’m putting Governor Bent in charge while I go surfing in California and check out the beach,’ he told our abuelos. ‘Oh, please, Mr. Kearny, we’ll be good boys,’ la plebe said. Un bonche de marijuanos, how could they behave? They went and got together with the indios y colgaron al Governor Bent.”

  Sonny looked at Lorenza, who was listening patiently and sipping her coffee. She seemed to understand this was history told from the point of view of los paisanos.

  “The Taos Pueblo Revolt,” Sonny murmured, hoping the spiked coffee would clear his head. He felt a cold in his bones.

  “The Chicaspatas Revolt,” Gonidas grinned. “La plebe and the indios fought the GIs at La Cañada, El Embudo, at Mora, all over the place. Kicking ass with Kearny. Muy ocupados, como dice el Morgan.”

  “What does it have to do with the kidnapped girl?” Sonny reminded Gonidas.

  “Don’t you see, hermano,” Gonidas leaned forward, “el Viejo Bent was a real bad dude. He wanted to take over the whole enchilada. He wanted to be president. So when la raza and the indios killed him, he cursed the manito in charge. And that was Beto’s great-great-great—uuu—muy great-grandfather. Entiendes. They say when el Viejo Bent was dying, les echó una maldición.”

  “He cursed them.”

  “Simón, cara limón. He told all the chicaspatas, especialmente a Beto’s bisabuelo, he was going to get even. That means you, too, bro.”

  “Me?” Sonny looked puzzled.

  “Sure, you too.”

  “But I’m not related to Alberto—”

  “Oh, yes you are, primo,” Gonidas cut him off. “We’re all primos. You may be a detective and have a college degree y todo ese pedo, but under the skin you’re just a manito. So way, way, way back your familia was probably related to Beto’s familia.”

  Sonny glanced at those sitting around the table. Listen to him, their faces read. Sooner or later he makes sense.

  Damn! Sonny thought. Don Eliseo’s theory on the mark. I am related! In the dream Caridad de Anaya was going to marry Hernán Vaca! How in the hell did Gonidas know?

  Sonny nodded. “Yeah, I’m related.”

  “Pues, hay ’sta! So watch out for ese pinche Bent, he can get you, too. Póngate la cruz,” he said, and made the sign of the cross over Sonny, as if to ward off Bent’s curse. The curse that had hung in the air since 1846. “Now that will be twenty-five cents.” He laughed and held out his hand.

  Sonny smiled and gave Gonidas a high five.

  “Thank you, father.”

  “Padre de cinco,” he answered, and the others chuckled.

  Sonny knew once a curse was laid there’d be no rest until it was lifted. Meanwhile, the ghost of Governor Bent haunted the roads and alleys of Taos, creating problems for the families of those who killed him long ago.

  “Mira,” Gonidas said. “Alberto García’s grandparents were the Nuñezes, el viejito Escolástico, and the grandmother doña Eulalia, who came from the familia Marquez in Rio Seco, de mi compadre Alonso, and from the Aguilar family from Hondo, el difunto Escribano Velarde, and they came from the Archuletas, de allá de Tecolote, de los Sanchez, who married a woman from Taos Pueblo, la Tonita, way back to the Seguras y Salas, de Pecos y de Taos, way back in 1846.…”

  He went on and on, naming families, their villages, and how they were related, and who had married who, and who had killed who, and who slept around, and the family feuds and jealousies, la envidia, and the quarrels of one small town against another, until he laid out the history of Río Arriba, connecting all the families.

  Sonny had just browsed through Sabino’s Map, and that’s what the author had done for Chimayó. Naming the families until all the relationships came out.

  But Gonidas didn’t need to write it in a book, the history was in his head, even tying the bloodlines down to Río Abajo, southern New Mexico, extending la familia of Nuevo Mexicanos down to the Bacas from Socorro County, Sonny’s father’s family, and the Jaramillos from La Joya, his mother’s family, and when he was done, he had proved they were all related.

  “We’re all primos,” he finished. “Everybody has the same raices.” He laughed. “Como dice la Biblia, they beget y beget. And every thirty years, el ’spíritu del Viejo Bent viene a chingarlos. Especially en Halloweenie.”

  “I guess.” Sonny could only nod, dumbfounded by the man who seemed to know the genealogy of the entire state.

  So, since 1846 the ancestors of those paisanos who had murdered Governor Bent, Gonidas said, “even if you were just driving the getaway car,” had been blaming the ghost of the vengeful governor when they lost a cow or a sheep, or someone cut their pasture fences, or wells went dry, or husbands beat their wives, or kids took up smoking dope, or the death of a loved son occurred in a foreign battlefield.

  It made sense. As much sense as any other explanation. The taking of the northern Mexican territories by the U.S. Army in 1846 was a violent affair. Manifest Destiny at its worst. The powerful forces swept across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, expanding the rule from Washington, securing a southern route to the California coast and all the lands, mines, and resources thereof.

  Lorenza touched Sonny’s arm. It was time to go. He looked pale and tired, and he was sneezing into the bar napkin. Enough history for one day.

  “Gracias,” Sonny said weakly, putting some money on the table to cover their drinks.

  “Take it easy, greasy.” Gonidas grinned.

  “Tómala suave,” the others said.

  They withdrew, and the plática around the table went on as if they had never been there. In the smokey bar the exchange of ideas, idle talk, philosophy, and the constant re-creating and reanalyzing of history would go on. The oral tradition exposed truth as a knife exposes the heart seeds of a watermelon when it’s cleanly sliced.

  Some of the plebe would get up
to go home to cut firewood, home to eat, to milk cows, and as they drove, their eyes would keep darting to the side of the road, the ditches, the forest if they drove up toward Questa, searching for Beto’s daughter.

  Others just off from work would drop in for a beer and take their places at the round, well-worn table, the table of the pícaros, each lending his insight to the continuing story.

  Sonny stopped at the bathroom. His legs were weak when he stood, his body trembled from the effort. He felt old, tired. He needed sleep; he needed something. He washed his face in cold water, splashing it on roughly to revive himself.

  The ghost of Governor Bent, he thought. El Viejo Bent. Perhaps Raven had inhabited the governor’s spirit to do his evil. Raven using the ghosts of history to enter the dream and destroy it. With the murder of the governor the full force of the American army came down on the paisanos, and enmity was strewn in the path of future relations. The split would be we versus them: we the Mexicanos and our way of life threatened by them the Americanos. In the middle were the once-great Indian pueblos of the Río Grande, which had seen the arrival of both great tides of immigrants onto their land. They cast a pox on both houses.

  “How do you feel?” Lorenza asked when Sonny reappeared.

  “The death of Governor Bent was a battle against an occupying force,” he replied, glancing at the table of los pícaros. “There would be others. The battle at Embudo, and Vicente Silva and las Gorras Blancas in Las Vegas, a resistance movement that turned in on itself, and Reies López Tijerina’s 1966 raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse …” He paused. “But for all practical purposes, the time of the gringo had come.”

  “Yes.” She noted his pallid color and the dark around his eyes and knew it was time to get him home.

  “Well,” she said, guiding him outside and into the van, “there’s more than one way to make a revolution.” She started the engine to get the heater going.

  Yeah, Sonny thought, as long as the memory was kept alive the way of the ancestors, los antepasados, would be known, and the lessons learned would serve as guideposts for the future. Most important, the people would know that Raven worked in many ways.

  “Raven is everywhere.”

  Lorenza nodded.

  “And he has many names.”

  “Wherever the dream is destroyed, you find his prints.”

  Footprints. Paiz had said the same thing.

  They sped out of Taos, south, along the Río Grande Gorge while behind them spectacular clouds formed over the mountains, bringing snow to the peaks while Taos bathed in the slanting rays of mellow afternoon light, sun-showers that glowed on the sage. A magical setting. The light was biblical, spreading across the chamisa plain and infusing the foothills of the mountains, touching the clouds with burnt orange and soft mauves.

  “You cold?” Lorenza asked.

  “A little.” He covered himself with the serape and snuggled back into his chair. He was tired. “I’m okay. I’ll just read awhile. How about you?”

  “I’m okay,” Lorenza said. “You rest.”

  “Gracias,” he whispered, knowing he was in good hands, and thankful for it. Lorenza had been patient throughout the trip, a source of strength.

  He opened a book and put the notepad in front of him. “The History of New Mexico,” he wrote. “June 1846, Colonel Stephen W. Kearny began his march against New Mexico.”

  But the fatigue and the rocking of the van made the pencil slip from his fingers. He closed his eyes and planned the dream he would enter. You prepare the stage, don Eliseo had told him.

  Prepare the setting of the dream, like a play or the movies.

  Thinking this, Sonny faced the door of intense light, shading his eyes. This is about Kearny, he thought. I can compose the dream. Let me go to the Las Vegas, New Mexico, plaza on that day that changed history. He walked through the door and looked around.

  A very hot mid-August day enveloped the foothills east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and in the little hamlet of Las Vegas the people were busy making preparations to resist the Army of the West. Col. Stephen W. Kearny had left Fort Bent, the Alamo of the Nuevo Mexicanos, in southeastern Colorado and was marching on New Mexico.

  Reconnaissance parties, the best and bravest young men from Taos and Las Vegas, had been sent to the eastern plain to keep track of Kearny’s slow march. Kearny’s two divisions were mostly volunteers, a green and ragtail army. With it Kearny planned to march all the way to California and wrest away México’s northern territory. New Mexico stood in the way, but only momentarily. The gringo entrepreneurs who already had a foothold in the Santa Fé Trail trade had bought out Governor Armijo.

  In Las Vegas the wedding of Epifana Aragón to Lisandro Jaramillo had been interrupted by the preparations for war. Near noontime the last scout came riding into town, urging his pony at breakneck speed to bring the news that Kearny was in sight.

  Epifana Aragón, a lovely young woman of sixteen, stepped out of her parents’ home into the excitement on the plaza.

  The gringos are coming! The gringos are coming! the young scout shouted as he rode around the plaza, like a Paul Revere of another time and place. It was Epifana’s fiancé, Lisandro.

  Lisandro! she called, and he pulled his horse to a smart stop in front of her and dismounted.

  Epifana! He gathered her in his arms.

  You’re safe! she cried.

  Epifana’s father appeared at her side.

  You’re a brave man, son, he said to Lisandro.

  Of all the young men in Las Vegas, none was braver than Lisandro, none a better horseman or more respectful to the elders. He was a shining example. Because of his family’s wealth he could have excused himself from the preparations for war; instead, he had volunteered to scout.

  I will go into the very heart of the enemy camp if I have to, he had vowed in front of the council of elders who were organizing the resistance.

  Epifana’s heart glowed with love at the bravery of her beloved.

  They will be here soon, don Jose, Lisandro reported smartly, saluting his soon-to-be father-in-law and the other men gathered in the plaza.

  A solemn don Jóse turned and mounted the small stage in the middle of the plaza. He spoke slowly, thoughtfully.

  As you know, Governor Armijo has retreated to El Paso. The rumors from Santa Fé are mixed. Some say he sold out to Santiago Magoffin, and Santa Fé is now helpless to resist the invaders.

  But we’re not, brave Lisandro shouted, holding up his buffalo rifle. Other young men around him cheered and also waved their pistols and rifles. Some only waved pitchforks or sticks, for as herders and farmers, they had only these weapons.

  Let the Yankees come, one shouted, and we’ll give them a taste of lead!

  Go home, Yankees! another young man shouted, and the crowd took up the refrain. Go home, Yankees!

  They come to ruin our way of life! Why can’t they stay where they belong! a farmer shouted.

  We should build a fence to keep them out, his vecino added.

  For years the mountain men and traders from the United States had worked their way into the land of the northern Río Grande, and the people reluctantly accepted the intrusion. New goods appeared, farm implements, better rifles, iron pots for the kitchen, steel axes, all useful instruments in the daily life of the paisanos. But still the people feared being overrun by the Americanos, and now that war had been declared against México, their fears were about to be realized.

  The shouts for war grew, and only don José could quiet down the young men who were ready to take on the Army of the West.

  As you know, he said, the American colonel brings two divisions. Thousands of infantry. He has artillery, and we do not. Kearny has a thousand mules carrying their ammunition and supplies. And what do we have to meet such a force?

  The men looked at their weapons. A few wore pistols, and some carried the buffalo rifles that they used to hunt the bison in the eastern plains in the fall, but compared to the army descri
bed by the scouts, they would be like wheat before the scythe.

  What can we do? one of the elders asked.

  We must protect our families, our homes, another said. For many years now we have seen the Yankees come to our land. They speak a different language. They refuse to learn Spanish. Soon they will want us all to speak only English. And … they are Protestants.

  A gasp went up from the women, who crossed their foreheads and muttered a prayer at the mention of the word.

  So we must fight! the young Lisandro cried out, and again the young men cheered him.

  Don José raised his arms. Wait! Sometimes the better part of valor is to listen and to learn, he said. Let us listen to the Americano colonel. Let us see what terms he offers. To resist will mean our young men will die. I do not want to be responsible for so many deaths, for the burning of our fields and homes, nor for the widows left in the wake of war.

  The older men around him nodded. Perhaps the Americanos would be kind and show mercy. Don José was correct, the inhabitants of Las Vegas just didn’t have the men or armaments to resist. Many would die if they opposed the huge army that even now was at their door. There would be carnage on the grasslands of the land they loved so well.

  Don José put his arm around his daughter. If I want peace and time to grow into old age, he said, some will say it is because I am a coward. I am not! If you vote to fight, then I will march alongside you. But you know, and I know, that our armed resistance is useless. We will die. Who will care for my family when I am dead? Who will teach my grandchildren the ways of our ancestors? It is for my family that I vote for peace with the Americanos. We must trust that this occupation of our land will be short-lived and that finding no gold, they will move on to California.

  Or go back where they came from! a man shouted, and the crowd applauded.

  The older men agreed, but the hot tempers of the young men were not so easily cooled.

  If we don’t resist now, they will take our land! Lisandro insisted.

  Listen to my father, mi amor, Epifana whispered to Lisandro. He wants what is best for us.