The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation (44 page)

Storm-Chaser walked over to the bar and ordered a glass of whiskey. He leaned his elbows on the corner furthest from the men. He smoothed out a slice of onion-thin rice paper and untied his tobacco pouch. He sprinkled the last of his tobacco onto the paper and rolled a cigarette, twisting the ends together. He licked the edge of the paper, sealing it with his spit. He used his old age as an excuse for laziness. There was a time when he would only smoke his ceremonial pipe. Now, he was addicted to the white man’s smoke because it was easy to buy tobacco paper, and he could roll a cigarette anywhere, anytime. He could even roll a cigarette while sitting on his horse. He grudgingly admired the white man’s ingenuity. Like his ancestors before him, the white
man would probably be the death of him. The best recipe the white man had come up with was whiskey.

He lit a match and enflamed the cigarette. He closed the book of matches, rolling it around his fingers. The book was silver, embossed with the color turquoise in the shape of an eagle to look like Indians made it, but his people were not clever enough to put fire in a box this small. Without a doubt, you had to take off your feathers to the white man. Besides inventing many ways to kill a man, this fire-maker book was ingenious.

He always let the match burn out by itself and stared, mesmerized, by a fire so little he could hold it between his fingers. When the fire burned out, then he blew on his singed fingertips.

The first smoke was always the best. Like a man parched for water, he dragged on the cigarette, taking the smoke deep into his lungs. Smoke recycling through his chest, up his throat, and out his whiskey-soaked lips, made him feel on fire.

He sipped on his whiskey so it would last, and Shifty wouldn’t kick him in the ass and throw him from the saloon for taking up space. So long as his money lasted, he was welcome in the white man’s world, and the men paid no attention to the old Indian sipping whiskey.

He cocked his head, his good eye half-closed. His mouth was a crescent moon stretched to his chin. The Hispanos and Gringos always spoke through him. The invisible people, that’s what the Indian peoples were, closeted away on reservations, those neither seen nor heard. But Storm-Chaser, though old and half-blind, could still hear a storm the day before it struck, as it traveled across the land some five hundred miles away. He appeared to be sleeping, with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Know why she killed him?” Whitie Smithson, the Sheriff, said.

The men leaned closer to him.

“Samuel found out she was a slut. She give it to every one of us in this room. Shoot, when I escorted her home after her witch trial, she lifted her skirt for me. We had us a good old time, me and Salia.”

Storm-Chaser scoffed at the men, none of them willing to admit he did not know from personal experience whether Salia was as easy as Whitie claimed. Over the years, she verbally and physically abused every man in the saloon.

Bill Wilson, the brother-in-law of the dead Mrs. Gelford said, “The sheriff’s hit the coal with the point of the axe. I seen the boss the day before she shot him. He was talking to Father Rodriguez. Just supposing the boss was asking the priest for some holy water. Salia wouldn’t have liked having holy water splashed on her.”

“I’ve seen, with me very own eyes, Salia dip her hand into holy water,” Red snorted. “That girl wasn’t afraid of anything, even God Himself. Many times she mocked Him in His own house.”

“Ya nitwit, Wilson,” Whitie said, “Samuel was askin’ the priest for holy water to bathe his balls in, to cure his love for a witch. That’s how we used to do it in Texas, when those Mexican brujas swum across the border to bewitch us with their big, muddy eyes. “

Pacheco had come into the saloon and he rocked on his heels, snapping his suspenders. “The patrón was leaving Salia because he found out her son wasn’t his own flesh and blood.”

“You mean that heir he set so much store in…?”

Red chuckled. “Now, ain’t it better the boss found out the truth? No Christian man should mix his blood with a witch.”

“It’s a blessing that baby burned. Boy probably would have growed up to be a witch,” Wilson said.

“Poor boss was innocent as a newborn babe when it come to witches in these parts, him comin’ from back east and all,” said Red. “How was he supposed to know that if a witch offers you food or drink, lay it aside for three days. If the food turns out to have worms, you know it’s bewitched. That’s how we do it back home in Ireland.”

“No wonder you Irish had the great famine,” a few men said, laughing.

Red ignored their taunting.

“Hell, the witch probably did it to him to death.” Whitie made an obscene gesture and they all laughed.

“Think it’s possible the boss really fathered the boy? I mean she was his wife and all.”

Drew Goodson walked into the saloon. “Say what you’re really thinking, Shifty, what’s been on the mind of every one of us since last night. Was the baby who died in that fire really Sam’s son and heir to all of Madrid?”

Shifty looked around the faces in the saloon. “Don’t even whisper that accusation. Even with the boss dead, I’m betting his arm still reaches across the state.”

“I’ve another theory about Salia’s baby,” Whitie said.

The men looked at the sheriff and swallowed.

“Maybe that fat tub of lard, Little Maria, was right about a kidnappin’. Remember that boy belonging to that rich De Vargas family, just out of his mother’s womb, disappeared six months ago in Santa Fe?”

“That’s ridiculous. Everyone remembers Salia waddling around town with her big belly, about to deliver,” said Shifty.

“Perhaps, her witch baby died so she stole the De Vargas boy,” Red said in a dry voice.

“Or, maybe she pretended to be pregnant to get Samuel to marry her. Oldest trap in the book,” Whitie said.

The men nodded their heads. Many of them had shot gun weddings.

“You mean, we may have burned an innocent baby?” Red lifted his glass of whiskey and chugged the fiery liquid. He burped.

“It doesn’t matter because Sam’s got himself some nephew who’ll inherit,” Drew said.

“What about the new owner? Is he against unionizing?” Red said.

“We’re betting on the fact he’ll be content to receive a monthly check and leave the operations to us.”

“Here. Here,” Red said, raising his glass.

The men clinked their glasses together.

One of the men cleared his throat and had joined the tale late. He was covered in dust, like he just rode into town. He was a stranger in these parts. None of the men were cautious about who they spread their gossip to. If they shared what they knew with a stranger, perhaps he would share what he knew. “I hear,” said the man, “That Salia Esperanza was looking for the company doctor the day Samuel Stuwart died.”

“Now, why in the world would a witch require the need of a doctor for a stomach ache?” asked Whitie.

“Something to do with a gunshot wound in the belly,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“Yeah, well quit spreading lies, Mister! Witnesses saw Salia with Samuel’s blood all over her. She gave him a stomach ache, alright—a knife in the gut,” Drew snapped.

Storm-Chaser seemed to be the only one who spotted a sparkle of silver metal, when the stranger turned to leave the saloon. He had seen a silver star in a circle, pinned inside the man’s coat. The badge had blue writing on it. He was a U.S. Marshal.

Storm-Chaser gently set down his empty glass on the bar. He smiled lopsided. He heard all he needed to know, and snaked his way crookedly around the tubular bar.

Red stuck his leg out, and Storm-Chaser tripped, smashing his nose against the wooden floor.

The other men laughed. Red slapped him on his butt. “Well, bless me soul, Mates, if it ain’t the old Injun, Chief. Drunk as a skunk again, hey, Red Man?”

Storm-Chaser grunted and wobbled from the saloon, down the boardwalk. He wiped his bloody nose on his khaki shirt.

“How, Chief. Cowabunga.”

It seemed everyone in town was speaking to him this morning. He looked a bit startled at the Cigar Store Indian guarding the Apache Kid and Standing Bear Trading Post. It was this colorfully painted, wooden Indian that had spoken to him.

“Hello,” he drunkenly slurred back.

The Cigar Store Indian had a perpetual frown on its wooden face, which was the same shade of brown as his own skin. In fact, the wooden Indian looked a lot like Storm-Chaser, with two deep lines running from the sides of the nose, down to the mouth, and a deeply wrinkled forehead protruding over mournful eyes. The high cheekbones were prominent, and the wide nose hooked, with an arresting bridge connecting the nose to the face. A carved headdress of feathers swept the top of the wooden Indian’s head. Storm-Chaser wore his headdress for religious ceremonies, and now wore a straw hat with a single feather in the band. On the headband of the wooden Indian was carved an eagle, with wings spread wide.

Storm-Chaser grunted. The sign of the eagle was everywhere today.

The Cigar Store Indian winked his black eye at him. Storm-Chaser laughed, patting his old friend on its wooden head.

He walked into the store and bought a pouch of tobacco, and package of cigarette paper. He twirled an Indian-head nickel on the counter for a box of the cigarillos he favored that were as brown as his own fingers. He preferred the aromatic tobacco of cigarillos to cigarettes, but they were a luxury he could seldom afford. “And two suckers,” he said.

“Since when have you developed a sweet tooth, Chief?”

“They are for my grandson. Dark-Shadow.”

He left the trading post, whistling, with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his khaki pants.

57

M
arcelina turned her steps towards Bones Creek Cemetery. Among the tumbleweeds and the cacti, gravestones erupted on the horizon, rising up from the black dust. Her heart was heavy because she could not scatter Salia’s ashes on Samuel Stuwart’s grave. A witch can never be buried in consecrated ground.

A majority of the headstones were old, yet were difficult to tell apart from the newly dead, whose tombstones looked just as decrepit, due to the infernal winds trapped between the mountains and the rays of the overbearing sun. The gravestones appeared like pages in a horror novel, an Edgar Allan Poe first edition penned in the last century and petrified to grey stone. Beside the stones were wooden markings, pitched into the earth like stakes and scattered about.

Her thoughts were with the woman whose ashes were in the flour sack bouncing against her shoulder blades. In death, Salia was not a heavy load. Even in life, she moved as if she was weightless. One moment, you were alone. The next moment, she stood beside you.

She set the flour sack on the ground and swore crying came from the sack. Salia’s cries were carried by the wind, across the open plains of the cemetery, to the highest point, to the top of the hill where a freshly dug grave was. Fresh flowers were piled about the grave of Samuel Stuwart.

She hated to cross the graveyard to where the patrón was buried. She would be walking over the graves. Her footsteps would disturb the dead. “Only for you, Salia, would I do this,” she muttered. She crossed herself and heaved the flour sack across her back, forging onward.

The wind seemed to push the gravestones. The headstones groaned, as if the dead were protesting the wind trying to yank them from their graves.

As she approached Samuel Stuwart’s grave, the sobs coming from the flour sack sounded so despondent, the hairs rose on her arms. Dust swirled around his headstone, dancing in tune to the despair.

She fell to her knees at the headstone and said a hurried prayer for the patrón, because it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than to enter heaven.

“As for you, my friend,” she said, shaking the flour sack, “May God save your soul.”

“And mine,” she whispered, looking at a grave in the corner. She blew on her hands to warm them and wrapped her poncho tighter. She made her way to her stepfather’s grave. With chattering teeth, she opened her cracked lips and spit. Stone-faced, she watched her saliva soak into his name. Flavio Baca was born a fool on April 1st. Mama lay to his right and to his left was Papa’s headstone. For all eternity, Señor Baca was sandwiched between her parents.

She knelt before Papa’s tombstone and made the sign of the cross. She then placed a hand on Mama’s stone and squeezed. “I am carrying your grandson,” she whispered to their graves. “Pray for me. I have repented, yet Tezcatlipoca pursues me after all these years. Pray for me that this time, I have a healthy child. The deaths of my other babies are unfair because I atoned.”

“I tell you, I have reformed,” she yelled and spit on her stepfather’s grave.

She turned her back on the cemetery, but not from death. She still hugged Salia’s ashes tightly to her chest. Salia had been her blood sister in the truest sense of the word, for they shared the blood of Flavio Baca that spilled from his body and onto the hands of two teenage girls.

One of those girls was now dead, burned to death for her sins.

The other girl, well, she repented.

58

E
ver since their friendship ended, Marcelina rarely saw Salia. As the years went by, if she wanted to see Salia, she would have to pay, like everyone else who stood in line at the entrance to the Engine House Melodrama Theatre and Opera. She now delivered Salia’s ashes for one final, grand performance.