14: Andrés

14

ANDRÉS

I LED MY MULEout of San Isidro’s stables that afternoon. The sun slipped from its apex toward the western horizon; the chorus of grasshoppers rose with the heat of the siesta hours.

I cast a look over my shoulder at the walls surrounding the house, at its uneven peaks and dips, the spine of an ancient beast.

The house watched me leave, its stare baldly appraising.

A tender, bone-deep fear drew its fingertip down the back of my neck.

What had happened to San Isidro in my absence? So often I had sought the company of the house as a boy, ducking past the patrón and his family to find a forgotten storeroom where I could lose myself in its ancient gossip. Back then, the house recognized me as one of the few who could hear it and welcomed me whenever I entered. Centuries of memories lingered in its shadowed hallways, so thick they wove the building’s walls a gentle, ageless sentience, one that was distracted and uninterested in the affairs of the living.

But now? This was not the house I had known as a child, its chatter secretive and benign. The earth at the house’s foundation was saturated with sickness, a blight, its black veins leading up the hill to the gate and tangling under it like the roots of a cursed tree.

Such a change could not be immediate. It must predate Doña Beatriz’s arrival. It must have something to do with the apparition of the body in the wall. There was no doubt that the anger that vibrated deep in the bones of the house had something to do with that. It festered like an old, infected wound, open and weeping.

I had to fix it. My loyalty to the house was as complete as that to my family; this hacienda was home. I made my decision the moment I stepped across its threshold: I would purge it of its rot.

But how?

My thoughts immediately fell to the locked box in my chest, following the inevitable pull of the current. Every bit of darkness inside it clawed to be let loose.

Last night, cornered in the green parlor by the rage of the house, I acted in self-defense: I unlocked the box. Driven by fear, I reached into myself and released a trickle of the darkness I kept bottled tightly in there.

And now every time I closed my eyes, I saw glyphs carved on the insides of my eyelids. Every time my thoughts wandered, they were drawn with unholy, inescapable attraction to that locked box.

When I was a youth, Titi heard of witches in the north who had been tortured and jailed, accused of an epidemic of demonic possessions. Those who starved in prison or died of torture-inflicted wounds were most often mestizos like me, mestizos or criollos, for Indios did not fall within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.

“There are some things I cannot protect you from,” she told me sadly.

It was true. I was her heir, always had been, but her blood and her gifts were only half of that which flowed in my veins. The rest was a darkness neither she nor I could name.

So Titi sent me to the seminary, where she believed I could hide in plain sight from conscription and inquisitor alike.

Hide I did. And, as much as I initially doubted Titi’s conviction that I should join the Church, theological instruction became the structure I hadn’t known I craved. It gave me a map with clear markings, explicit indications of correct paths and the wrong, a beginning and an end. Clarity gave me the strength to put my faith in the Christian God—though timidly at first, fearful of being scorned for both my birthright and Titi’s teachings. To my eternal surprise, I found myself accepted. Welcomed, even. Trusted.

So long as the sinful parts of my pocked, split soul were crushed into submission, I was given a place to belong. So long as that part of myself was bound with chains, I had His love.

Even since returning to Apan, I had not touched that part of myself. In order to serve as my grandmother’s heir, I leaned on what she taught me and that alone. I told myself it was because I did not need that darkness. I had what Titi taught me. I had earned the guidance and trust of the Lord through penance and devotion.

Now I knew it was because I was afraid.

I acted in fear last night. I had earned still more fear for my trouble: would I ever again be at peace, without that heavy, aching awareness of the locked box in my breast? But would I be able to cure San Isidro without it? What if I could not?

Hacienda San Isidro—my home—was poisoned. It was hurting. Rot like this would spread beyond the house’s walls, leeching life from the earth, blighting the fields, lacing the homes of the village with affliction. It was a sickness. It must be contained, then eradicated.

My thoughts knelt softly before the locked box.

When I opened it last night, when I set a curl of my own darkness free to protect myself and Beatriz from the malice of the house, she did not flinch from me, nor look at me in revulsion. She did not tell me I should burn, as my father had when he learned of the darkness that his bloodline had manifested in me. Even in the candlelight, I could see her eyes filled with trust.

Something in my chest fluttered pleasantly at the memory.

If I were to crack open the box for only a moment, if I were to release only a sliver of what simmered within . . . If I were to control it so completely it had no choice but to return to the locked chamber in which I kept it, then perhaps I could use it to cure the house.

Perhaps it could work.

The mule tossed his head; then, rolling the bit against his teeth in gentle annoyance, he lowered his head and rubbed his forelock against my shoulder. Walk on, that said, ornery and impatient—the sooner we began walking again, the sooner he could be rid of bridle and bit and me alike, and rest in the shade.

I obeyed, still lost in thought. My gentle prying with the villagers about the house had mostly been fruitless. They were far more intent on telling me all that had happened to them in my absence, the sicknesses they had suffered. Unfortunately, there was much to discuss. Cholera, from infected drinking water. A rash of measles killing children one spring. Then typhus struck the village. My heart contracted hearing the damage my absence had wrought. Typhus! I shook my head mournfully as the mule and I walked toward the western road. Even at thirteen, I could have rid the village of typhus-spreading parasites with an hour of work.

But I had been banished.

The only mercy was that the plague had taken Doña María Catalina with it.

Paloma had told me how quickly the disease seemed to strike the house. One day, Doña Catalina was her usual barbed self, energetically quarreling about finances with Juana over dinner. The next, the patrón’s wife was confined to her room; Ana Luisa said she was too ill to move or be seen. For three weeks she remained in her room in convalescence, only tended by Ana Luisa. Then she abruptly died. Paloma watched her quiet funeral from a distant perch on the graveyard wall: she waited, hands clenched in anticipation, until the casket that held the hateful woman was firmly covered with earth.

And even after Doña Catalina’s death, I remained banished from the land my family lived on. For two years, I lived in Apan alone, a stalk hacked away from the heart of the maguey, anger and resentment toward the Solórzanos weeping from my wound. Rumors of Rodolfo’s remarriage and return to San Isidro with a new bride had licked through the town weeks before they actually set foot on its dust; when they finally appeared in the church, they were like salt flung on an unhealed wound. I scarcely spared the new wife a glance. Whatever fate she had sealed for herself by marrying that monster was no concern of mine, I told myself.

Until she made it my concern.

It was because Paloma was present that I lingered after Mass the day Beatriz sought Padre Guillermo’s blessing for the house. Juana and Ana Luisa had forbidden Paloma from coming to town to seek me out; I had not seen her in two years and was desperate to speak with her.

The first words Paloma spoke to me were a desperate hiss. “Doña Juana is hiding something. Mamá too. Something terrible.” There was a wildness in her eyes that stopped my heart: that was the feral fear of hunted things. “La señora is going to ask priests to bless the house, but it needs so much more than that. You must come help.”

She was in danger. I knew then I would fight to return to San Isidro, banishment or no. I had let her be harmed in that house once before. I would not allow it to happen again.

At that moment, I looked up and met the new Doña Solórzano’s eyes.

She had dark hair, was small but proud shouldered. Her maguey green eyes were a shock of color against the black lace of her mantilla. These met my gaze and held it fast: she measured me with a frankness that snatched my spirit from my body and set it on the scales of justice.

A thought unspooled in my quiet mind, unbidden, swift and certain as the click of a lock: this one is different.

She was. She asked me to come to San Isidro. She opened the gates of the hacienda and ended my banishment.

The sensation of San Isidro’s earth beneath my feet after years away was intoxicating . . . until I grew close enough to sense the sickness and rage that putrefied its very air. When Doña Beatriz Solórzano begged me for help, I knew I would not turn her away. Any chance to remain at Hacienda San Isidro and protect Paloma from the poison that seeped through the house was one to be seized. But the desperation in Beatriz’s voice unlocked a compassion in me I thought my anger at the Solórzanos had buried for eternity.

She was alone. No one—not husband, friend, or family—stood by her side as she faced the jaws of that cavernous, sickened house.

Tending to lost souls is our vocation, Titi often said.

That was what I was doing when I covered Beatriz’s sleeping body with a blanket in the green parlor last night, my touch featherlight even as it lingered a breath too long. A lost soul sought aid, and I gave it. That was what I was doing. That was who I was, that was the responsibility I inherited from Titi and the Cross I chose to take upon my shoulders.

Then why hadn’t I yet sought penance for my moments of failure?

A breeze snaked through the maguey, carrying the voices of the few tlachiqueros who paced the rows of the fields while their fellows took siesta. I worried my lip distractedly as I walked. Last night, I had revealed my true nature to Beatriz. She swore she would tell no one, but the fact remained that outside of Titi’s people and the villagers of the haciendas, she was the only person with whom I had spoken so frankly. Was it sleeplessness that loosened my tongue? Was it the way Beatriz listened, her head lilting gently to the side?

Or was it a graver failing? A very human failing, one that drew my eye to her more often than not?

A failing that left me following the bend of Beatriz’s waist as she set the tray of pozole on the table beside the capilla, tracing the line of her back up to her neck, to the curls that brushed against her skin, to the curve of her throat?

Look at me, she said.

Ah, but I had, and therein lay the sin.

I realized in a sharp flash, the white blow of sun in the desert, that as much as I loathed him, I envied what Rodolfo had.

I should have banished the thought immediately. Sought forgiveness and punishment for it in the same breath. I should have stepped away to collect myself, to regain the cool, controlled detachment I had fought so hard to earn. The hard-won aloofness from worldly desires that I so liked about myself.

I coveted the patrón’s wife. The map my training gave me was clear on this matter: repent.

So why did I continue to turn the sin over in my mind, examining it like an old coin, instead of casting it as far from my heart as I could? Was it because there were graver matters at hand? Or was it because—God forbid—a stubborn part of me did not yet want to be forgiven?

A shadow crossed my path. I lifted my chin sharply, tightening my grip on the mule’s reins.

Directly before me stood Juana Solórzano. Her feet were planted firmly in the dirt of the road; she looked at me with a bland, almost bored sort of aggression.

“Villalobos.” Her voice raked over my skin like a hair shirt. No one addressed me by my surname but her. It was a constant reminder that my father had once served hers, that my family still served her, and that no matter how tall I grew, how far I traveled, how much I studied, how high I rose, she would always look down her nose at me. “You’re not supposed to be on my property.”

Juana’s enforcement of Doña Catalina’s banishment even after her death surprised me. Angered me. Perhaps I should have overcome that. Perhaps I should have been able to forgive her with time.

Shouldis an oddly powerful word. Shame and anger have a way of flying to it like coins to lodestone. I had achieved detachment from so many worldly things, but this clung like burrs. It was a snake that sank its fangs so deep they touched bone, spreading its venom through my marrow.

“Buenas tardes, doña.” I reached up with my left hand and tipped my hat to her. Let her read every ounce of quiet insubordination I poured into the movement. Let her know that I could hold grudges just as long as she. “I came at the invitation of Doña Solórzano.” The living one, I added silently. “And I’ll return in a few days at her invitation as well.”

I clicked my tongue to the mule and led it forward and off the road slightly, so as to carve a path around where Juana stood.

She told me I was imagining it. Beatriz’s voice echoed in my mind as I remembered the hollowed-out, exhausted fear evident in the slump of her posture when we spoke in the sacristy storeroom. But she told me she was afraid of the house. She and Ana Luisa both.

I believed Beatriz’s conclusion was sound. I had known Juana—if from a distance—for most of my life, and I knew her to be sharp-eyed. Attentive. If she avoided the house as much as Beatriz said, then she knew something was wrong with it.

What else did she know?

Juana’s face was shaded by a sweat-stained hat, but it was still evident that she narrowed her eyes at me as I passed.

She would not help us.

I mounted the mule and bid Juana farewell without looking back. “Buenas tardes, doña.”

I received no reply. When I cast a glance over my shoulder, she was gone, vanished among the rows of maguey, silent as an apparition.

Was there a chance she would go to Padre Vicente about my presence here? Perhaps, but perhaps not—Padre Vicente disapproved of her way of living, how she refused to marry and rarely came to Mass. How her lack of simpering whenever she did cross paths with the priest set the man on edge. In a way, I respected how she grated on Vicente’s nerves. She did not give a damn what anyone thought of her, as dangerous as that was for a woman of her station.

But what if she mentioned my presence to Rodolfo? Would he be angry that Beatriz had disobeyed him and sought my help?

This thought sent a bone-deep chill through me.

I knew what that monster was capable of.

But it was still unclear to me what danger Rodolfo posed Beatriz. As cruel as he was to servants, he had not raised a hand against Doña Catalina in life.

From my mind’s eye, the skeleton in the wall grinned back at me, naked and mocking in the flickering light of the candle.

Or had he?