Page 58 of The Hacienda

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I thought I knew his temper like I knew the weather. With a flood of pulque would come predictable storms, slamming doors, raised voices. With enough patience, I could skirt the worst of it; I learned to melt into the walls as if I were one of the voices myself. But if my own temper thinned, or if I snapped back at him, I courted danger. When I tried to snatch the papers back from him, I expected to be shouted at, shoved, or struck for my trouble.

Instead, my father shrank away from me.

“They burn people like you, you know. You, Inés... they shouldburnyou.” His eyes popped from his skull with fear, bloodshot but for the bright white above and below his irises. “Send you to Hell where you belong.” Sharp as a darting animal, he reached for a wooden cross on the wall, yanked it off, and flung it at me. I ducked. It struck the wall behind me with a dull thud and fell to the floor, cloven in two.“Go to Hell.”

I left for San Isidro that night. I never saw him again.

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Word came from town that he packed his belongings and left Apan. Some said he meant to go north, to Sonora or Alta California. Others said he spat on the earth and swore he would return to Spain.

It was not long after that Titi insisted I go to Guadalajara. That I fulfill my mother’s dying wish by becoming a priest.

“You must,” she said as she bid me goodbye. “This is what is right.”

I was far less firm in my conviction. I was afraid of insurgents and Spaniards on the road, of bandits, of the Inquisition circling me like Daniel in the den of lions. What wisdom was there sending a damned soul straight into the Church’s jaws, when I ought to be hiding from them?

The fear in my father’s eyes as he shrank away from me had seared me like a brand. Its mark would never heal over, never scar.

They should burn you.

“How can you know this is right?” I said, fear cracking my voice.“How?”

“Ay, Cuervito.” She patted my hands. The touch of her gnarled hands was soft, but her dark eyes were steely in their confidence. “You will learn to feel it. When the time comes, you will know what is right.”

Years had passed, and that time had not come.

I balled my hands into fists, the winter wind cold on my face, my knees pressing into the damp dirt of her graveside.

How could one simplyknow?

In Guadalajara, I endured homily after homily on faith and belief. On placing my fate in the hands of the unknown. In my splintered self, God was one thing. God was invisible and unknowable, but I learned to have faith that He was there, even if I doubted He paid as much attention to the smudge of earth that was Apan as He did other places.

But in Titi’s teachings, I learned that some thingscouldbe known. I always heard the voices, no matter where I was. Now that I had returned to Apan, I felt the movement of weather; I knew when thunder would open the heavens over the valley. I knew when the riverbeds would flood with the spectral presence of the Weeper and how to placate her. I knew when the wildflowers would blossom, when horses would foal. I felt the presence of spirits in the mountains, how they shifted even in their deep slumber.

So why didn’t Iknowwhether or not I should help Paloma and Mariana?

I thought of Mariana in the firelight, flinching away from my every movement like a wounded dove, a frail shadow. I knew she hurt. It was written across her spirit clear as ink. I knew Paloma’s fierceness. Her conviction.

I knew when I looked at the small congregation that morning at Massthat my grandmother’s absence was a wound. The people of San Isidro—the people who were my home—were in pain without her.