The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (43 page)

Now Calabazas could look back and laugh. But at the time, the discovery of Sarita and the monsignor had been a terrible shock. It had been on the afternoon old man Brito died. Calabazas had returned early from one of his “business” trips. It had been a Wednesday afternoon. Sarita would be at altar society until six. Liria and Calabazas had time to go off to the back wing of the house if they wanted. Calabazas had been relieved to see that Sarita had gone to wash the priests’ dishes. He had had a lingering urge all morning to take Liria to the back room and push up her skirts.

The advantage of the massive L-shaped adobe house was that the back wing was separated by three-foot adobe walls from the front of the house. The back wing had two entrances, and if someone knocked
at one of the doors, anyone inside the back wing could leave by the door on the other side of the building unseen by the person knocking. Liria kept a jungle of hollyhocks around the brick terrace of the back wing. A number of times Liria had had to hurry out one door and into the tall stands of hollyhocks and cosmos while Calabazas calmly pulled on his pants and picked up his woodworking tools to open the door to Sarita or Old Brito’s nurse. It was understood that Calabazas had possession of the back wing to prepare wooden crates with false bottoms or to clean the rifles and pistols.

But on this afternoon Calabazas had only just pushed himself into Liria, between her thick, smooth thighs, when there was a frantic pounding on the door to the terrace. Calabazas could tell by the light pounding it was the day nurse. He gave Liria two quick parting thrusts before he slid off her and picked up his pants. But Liria leaped up too because the nurse said the old man had fallen. Calabazas followed the nurse to the sitting room where old Brito lay gasping in the middle of the floor. The old man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was open and his lips were making sucking, smacking sounds as if the old man were no longer a creature of air but a strange fish pulled up from the depths. Liria knelt over old Brito.

Her eyes were full of tears, but she was calm when she asked Calabazas to go after Sarita. Liria held her father’s hand and watched his mouth, which frantically sucked at the air while his lungs wheezed and rattled in the bony, heavy chest. The skin on the hand was as soft and smooth as a newborn baby’s, although the dark-brown pigment of the skin had faded in freckles and splotches. The day they had stood at each elbow with the old man at the grave for their mother, Liria and Sarita had known that it would not be long before they lowered their father’s coffin into the ground.

Liria had cried not because the rattles and gasps from the old man’s mouth were becoming less frequent, but because the old man had dictated that Sarita, as the elder, must marry first, and must marry Calabazas. Sarita had not wanted to marry Calabazas. She had not wanted to marry anyone, she told Liria. Liria cried because now the old man was leaving them, but their lives would never be their own. Calabazas had been the old man’s tool, someone to carry out his orders, to guard the land holdings, to keep the keys to the locks. The old man had had that kind of power over the lives of all of them. Something was ruined now the old man was gone. Liria could feel it. The old man had been the only reason Sarita, and not Liria, had Calabazas for her husband.

Old Brito’s entire body jerked once, then went rigid for a moment, then lay still. Liria lay his hand on his chest. A circle of dampness darkened the front of his trousers and spread wider between his legs.

CALABAZAS WAS OUT OF BREATH and his voice sounded too fast and too loud. The women had been working in the pantry off the kitchen area of the priests’ quarters when he had pushed open the door. They were starching and ironing white cassocks and white linen altar cloths. Calabazas recognized them only as the older women, most of them widows, who knelt at the front of the cathedral and took Communion at every Mass. They looked startled, as if caught in an illicit act. Calabazas had to ask twice where Sarita was. The women had looked at each other, and by the expressions on their faces Calabazas felt they required some explanation. He told them that old Brito was dying. One of the women pointed in the direction of the monsignor’s apartment across the big courtyard, hidden behind a row of oleanders thick with white and pink blossoms. Later Calabazas would recall that the ladies of the altar society seemed to turn and hurry away abruptly, but at the time Calabazas had thought it was because they did not want to miss the drama of old Brito’s death.

Calabazas strode across the bricked patio and past the small fountain with white water lilies half closed and clusters of tiny golden carp. Calabazas did not think the monsignor would remain in his apartment during cleaning and dusting. The massive oak carved door was not locked, and Calabazas did not knock or wait, but called out once for Sarita as he pushed open the door. Sarita’s purse and shoes were on the floor next to a long wine leather couch in the room that served as the monsignor’s library and parlor. Bookshelves from the floor to the high, whitewashed ceiling were lined with black-leather-bound volumes. The monsignor’s desk was cluttered with envelopes and letters, and a gold-trimmed, black fountain pen with the cap carelessly left off. The polished wood floors were covered with Persian rugs in deep blues and dark reds, and the luxury of the room reminded Calabazas that parishioners and
priests in the diocese had complained about the monsignor, who was, after all, a Jesuit.

The monsignor stepped out of the bedroom while Calabazas was facing the writing desk, and when Calabazas turned, he had expected Sarita, not the monsignor. The surprise left Calabazas speechless. The monsignor had closed the bedroom door behind him. Calabazas realized the long, dark-red robe the monsignor was wearing was not a cleric’s robe but a bathrobe, and the monsignor’s hair needed combing. Calabazas apologized for entering without knocking and explained there was an emergency at home and Sarita was needed at once. But the monsignor seemed preoccupied with something other than Calabazas’s words. The monsignor watched intently as if he were examining each word as it came out of Calabazas’s mouth. Calabazas could see the small kitchen through the doorway behind the monsignor. The sink and round glass-top table were spotless. The monsignor had still not spoken. Calabazas did not think he looked angry for the intrusion, but Calabazas mumbled an apology and turned to leave because he was not familiar with the ways of priests. But before Calabazas reached the door, he heard the bedroom door behind him open. Even after he saw the expression on Sarita’s face, Calabazas still had difficulty understanding what had happened. It was as if a part of his brain was tossing bits and pieces of information at him but he could not hold them together. They kept scattering—skittering away before Calabazas could form any coherent idea. The monsignor’s messed hair. The monsignor’s bathrobe. The monsignor’s silence. Sarita’s stricken expression. Sarita’s emerging from the bedroom. Then suddenly it was all there. At that moment Calabazas had not laughed. He had barely been able to swallow. But years later, when he thought of himself as the cocky young stud, so certain he knew the score on everything and on everyone, Calabazas had to laugh. He could imagine himself standing in the monsignor’s study, Persian rugs on the polished wood floor, the white-headed monsignor in his bathrobe with Sarita at his side. Calabazas liked to laugh now when he remembered his absurd pride, his absolute belief in himself and in his little world. Later Calabazas thought he and the monsignor might have stood paralyzed, staring at each other indefinitely, if Sarita had not pushed past both of them and run out the door. Calabazas followed her. The monsignor did not move.

The monsignor sang a High Requiem Mass for old man Brito. The vaulted ceiling high above the altar enveloped all of them in the monsignor’s baritone, and Calabazas realized how Sarita as a Catholic
schoolgirl had been attracted to him. They had never talked about that day. Sarita continued with all her ladies’ altar society activities. Calabazas had never gone to Mass or confession anyway. Calabazas would get occasional glimpses of the monsignor driving one of the new Cadillacs donated each year to the diocese by wealthy car dealers. The last time Calabazas had seen the monsignor, walking near the cathedral, the purple-edged cassock had been hanging loosely and Calabazas realized Sarita’s old lover was sick. When the monsignor died, the newspaper gave his age as sixty-four. Sarita had moved on to radical young priests smuggling political refugees across the border, so the death of the monsignor did not sadden her.

LECHA REACHED UNDER the pile of pillows beside her and found the wooden ammunition box with the notebooks and fragments of the old manuscript. Her medication left her feeling as thin as an air current a hawk might ride. She sank back on her pillows with her eyes closed and thought how easily she could imagine the gliding and soaring of the red-tailed hawks that often flew near the ranch house. What she needed was her late-afternoon injection so she could be up and around and doing something. She called for Seese although she was perfectly able to get herself moving. It felt nicer when someone else did it. Seese had made friends with the New Mexico Indian Ferro had hired. The gardener. The handyman. The hired man. She called for Seese again and tried to see the face of the little travel clock on the bureau, but its face was turned away from her. No matter.

The injection got everything under way. She was up and out of the pale blue satin nightgown and into her white garden caftan. Shoes were not important. She seized the wooden ammunition box full of notebooks and the loose squares of the old manuscript; the strange parchment got drier and more curled each season until someday the old almanac would reveal nothing more to an interpreter. She headed for the chaise lounge
on the patio. Lecha had never been able to get old Yoeme to say much about the old notebooks, except all of the material transcribed into the notebooks had been on thin sheets of membrane, perhaps primitive parchment the Europeans taught the native Americans to make. Yoeme had told them the skins had been stretched and pressed out of horse stomachs, and the little half-moon marks were places the stomach worms had chewed.

•   •   •

“A number of the pages were lost, you know,” Yoeme had intoned, with her eyes half-closed so she could recall the details clearly. “On the long journey from the South. The fugitives who carried the manuscript suffered great hardships. They were the last of their kind. They knew that after them there would no longer be human beings who had seen what they saw. A dispute erupted among those few survivors of the Butcher.”

They argued whether they should send the strongest to make a run for it, or whether they should give up and all simply die together. Because they were the very last of their tribe, strong cases were made for their dying together and allowing the almanac to die with them. After all, the almanac was what told them who they were and where they had come from in the stories. Since their kind would no longer be, they argued the manuscript should rightly die with them. Finally, the stubborn voices prevailed, and three young girls and a small boy were chosen to carry the almanac North. The pages were divided four ways. This way, if only one of the children reached safety far in the North, at least one part of the book would be safe. The people knew if even part of their almanac survived, they as a people would return someday.

Flight to the North had begun after the occupation by the invaders. The people in the South had heard about the tribes far, far to the North from the traders who spent their lives walking north and south along trade routes. Traders carried parrots and orchids north and returned with turquoise and white buckskins. That had been the final argument: somewhere in the North there might be a few survivors of their tribe who had been given refuge by the strange people of the high, arid mountains.

According to the story, the four children left at night with pages of the almanac sewn into their ragged garments. The eldest girl carried a flint knife. The young boy was given a torn blanket. They were told their only hope was to avoid the slave catchers on horseback with dogs. They must find people in the villages who were not afraid to associate
with fugitives. They were carefully instructed before they set out. They were told the “book” they carried was the “book” of all the days of their people. These days and years were all alive, and all these days would return again. The “book” had to be preserved at all costs.