Sandi Ault - Wild Penance

I aimed my Jeep toward the home of a friend of mine. Regan Daniels lived right on the rio in a beautiful adobe with a wall of south-facing windows. I left my Jeep at the bottom of her drive and walked up the hill to a corral-style gate. Her silver Toyota was in the open-front garage there. Neatly stacked cords of firewood stretched from the corral to the house, and an old nag stood catatonic in a patch of brush beyond a fence. I walked up a path to the kitchen entrance, grabbed the leather loop on the bottom of the old iron bell that hung beside the door, and gave it a hard shake. The sharp clanging pierced the quiet day. I shuffled my feet, looked in through the sidelight at the elegant terra-cotta tile on Regan’s cocina floor, the intricate carving on her handmade cabinets. No answer. I walked around the house and looked farther up the path toward the barn. Its doors were closed. Still higher up, beyond the barn, at the casita Regan rented to bed-and-breakfast guests, I saw a mud-covered green Land Rover with California plates. I knocked loudly on the French doors at the back of Regan’s house. No answer still. I could see the cool, dark living room within. No one in sight.

Knowing Regan was a little hard of hearing, I wanted to open a door and call to her, but somehow I knew that would not be well received. I sensed that she hoped no one would notice this infirmity. In her youth, Regan had been a dancer and even performed her way around the world doing USO tours. She had done a smattering of bit parts on television and ended up a long career as a dancer in summer stock musicals. She had retired here because she was born and raised in northern New Mexico, and she appeared to have plenty of money, from what I could see. Her beautiful home was by far the largest and most distinctive in the old part of Agua Azuela, and perhaps even among most of the newer homes in the surrounding mountains. She had told me that her house overlooking the rio was once a morada, where the Penitentes held rituals in the old days.

This was, in fact, how I came to meet Regan. Her land abutted BLM acreage, and I had occasion to patrol this area once last fall when I discovered a nearly abandoned old Penitente cemetery, or campo santo , as they are called-which means “field of saints.” The graves were scattered along a flat shelf of open ground about a hundred yards below the canyon rim, just above Regan’s land. The view of this unique landform was blocked from below by boulders and stands of scrub piñon and juniper.

When I first happened onto the cemetery, I recognized Penitente features in the headstones and other markers. And one of the graves had an exceptional marker: a massive, weathered wooden cross, crude and simple, its base piled with great stones. The upright stand of the cross had split; shards had broken away in such a way that it was partly hollowed out just above the base. Above the transverse beam, a relief of glyphs had been carved in the surface of the wood, but these had eroded so much that they were impossible to make out. A stipe-such as that on which the crucified’s feet would either rest or to which they would be nailed-was affixed to the cross; however, it had gone askew and was positioned almost vertically. In the center of this cross, a broken crucifix, the large ceremonial kind-perhaps ten inches in height, ornately cast in metal and with trefoil ends-had been screwed to the cross, the two pieces at angles to emphasize the break between them. On a flat stone in front of the rood, a small bunch of wildflowers, recently placed and barely wilted, marked the shrine.

I took a small notebook from my pocket and made a quick sketch and a few written comments, jotting a note to come back and do a more detailed drawing later. I was studying the shrine, thinking how lucky I was to have found it, when I heard a deep, husky voice calling, “Hey! You there!” I stood up and looked around. Coming up the slope from below was a tall, lean, white-haired woman, obviously quite agile. She was wearing a long oatmeal cotton sweater. Her khaki pants were tucked haphazardly into big, sloppy work boots caked with dried mud, which looked as if they had been hastily pulled on and not tied. The tongues of these monsters flapped against her pant legs when she walked. I waited, and as she came near, I could see her tan, deeply lined face and dark eyes, which were looking at me the way a raven might regard a hawk who had just invaded her nest.

“You’re not supposed to be on this land.”

“I’m with the BLM, ma’am.” I opened my badge holder and showed her my RPA shield. “I’m a resource protection agent.” I pulled my folded quad-the detailed map of the terrain for that quadrant-out of my back pocket and held it up. “I’m pretty sure this old cemetery is on BLM land. We can look for the survey marker, and I’ll show you, if you’d like.”

“Oh.” She began shaking her head up and down as if in agreement. “Yes, I think you’re right, don’t bother. This campo santo used to belong to the village, not to anyone in particular. That was before the BLM came in here. But things have changed. Nobody looks after it now. I own the land below here. I try to keep trespassers off my land, you see. Not too many people know about this place, but if I see anyone up here, I try to run them off. You never know what someone will do.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to be able to keep everyone from coming up here, no matter what you do. There’s a shrine up here, and it’s being tended.”

“Oh, that? Yes, you’re probably right.” She had a deep, contralto voice, a smoker’s voice, but age had given it a tremor more characteristic of a tightly wound tenor. She extended her hand. She must have been nearly six feet tall. Even though she was standing below me on the slope, our eyes were at the same level. “I’m Regan Daniels. I guess I’m sort of territorial about this place. I’ve never seen you here before-are you new with the BLM?”

I shook her hand, noting her pleasantly firm grip. “No, ma’am, I’m not. But this is my first time in this section. My name is Jamaica Wild.”

“Jamaica Wild. My, that’s a pretty name. Unusual, isn’t it?” She turned her head to one side and peered intently at me out of one eye, like a crow. She had strong features-high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, a long, elegant nose, and a full mouth-the kind of face a model could take to the bank while young. I could still see that youthful beauty behind all the decorations that maturity had bestowed. “Will you be assigned here permanently?”

“I don’t believe so, Ms. Daniels. I usually work the high country, mostly range-riding the fence lines in remote areas. But when the weather starts to get cold, I do other assignments. I’m just familiarizing myself with the BLM land in this area right now.”

“Oh, I see.” Her questions answered, she looked now as if she were in a hurry to end the conversation. She made as if to leave, then stopped and looked back at me. “Would you like to come down to the house? I was just about to make some tea.”

In Regan’s cocina, she brewed some poleo, a native wild mint that grows near water. I wandered through the large, open rooms of her beautiful house, through the dining room and the enormous living room, looking at all the pictures on the walls-many of them featuring a young Regan with well-known television stars and even a former president, once a movie star himself. Others were of Regan in front of the world’s landmarks. The glazed tile floor in the living room was a deep, lustrous blue. Three modern, oversized, white leather sofas seemed to float like barges on this vast expanse of glistening ultramarine, with artfully tossed fur throws and big woven pillows riding on them like passengers. The coffee table in the middle was a horizontal slice through the trunk of a giant cedar-pink, white, and deep red-that had been glazed with a heavy coat of polyurethane. On this table rested a stack of large art books. The sun streamed in the windows, and the exquisite antique porcelain and cast-iron woodstove threw off a pleasant warmth. I tried one of the plush barges and sank deeply into the cushions. I felt like I was being cradled in a soft deerskin glove.