Sandi Ault - Wild Penance

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Andy? Yes. He tried to kill me.”

At this, she broke into a full-throated cry, “Ah-h-h-hhhh! My little Antonio! My baby brother! Look what they’ve done! Look what they’ve done!”

“Regan, I want you to come with me,” I said. I stepped aside, motioning her toward the path that passed by the rocks. She didn’t move.

“First they killed my father,” she said, shaking her head, the mantilla edging back off the crown of her head and sliding down her hair. “Now, little Antonio!” She began whining, as a nervous dog might.

“Your father was Arturo Vigil. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him crucified, didn’t you? That wasn’t just some daring adventure you and your friend took, like that story you told me.”

“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes, I saw it happen! I was there! They tried to keep us at a distance. I didn’t know for sure that it was my father, but I found out the next day. They killed him! They killed him, and they killed my mother, too! She died of a broken heart within the year. No one would do anything about it. No one would even investigate it. I tried to talk to everyone, but no one would listen to me-I was a child!” As Regan’s facade-her tightly controlled persona-ruptured, and the terrible truth she had been concealing spilled out, it seemed to be taking her substance with it. Her large, bony frame and lean, sinewy flesh seemed more pronounced, as if she were slowly desiccating, becoming a skeleton. Her face was skull-like, with the thin tissue of her amber skin stretching over a pronounced forehead and jaw. She tore each word off with her teeth. “Then, Antonio decided to get revenge. It made him crazy, you see. It made him crazy! He was just a little boy, but the next year, he put the poison on the whips and two men died. It served them right-they killed our father!” Her voice was hysterical, breaking from low to high pitch, shaking. Her whole body was trembling.

“They held a council. They agreed to suppress the crime from the authorities, but made Andy go away; that was his punishment. He was supposed to go away and never come back. Our tía abuela in Los Angeles took us both in. We had to live on her charity. When she died, we had no one. We had no home. We had no family. We had nothing.” Her voice had calmed a little now, the poison spilled. Her chest heaved with a deep sigh.

“I want you to come with me now, Regan,” I said again, and I stepped back to offer her room to move onto the path.

She looked at me with pleading eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Jamaica. It wasn’t supposed to start all over again. Andy said he was just coming back to buy the icons. He said he could sell them and make a lot of money. It was a way of making them pay-you see? For what they did to him, to us. But once he was here, he said he had to find out where they buried him,” she said, looking back at the shrine. “He said he just wanted to know where our father was buried. I always knew it was here, at this shrine. But Andy said we had to find out for sure, to be absolutely certain it was here. He said the answer would be in La Arca. But that’s not really why he wanted it. Antonio still wanted revenge.”

Again, Regan looked at me. Her face looked like that of the girl child in the photograph I had brought in my pocket-a face full of horror and bewilderment and helpless vulnerability. Her eyes seemed to be looking to me for the answer to some unspoken question.

I had a question of my own. “Father Ignacio came here, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” She looked away and began to cry. “I had been cleaning my horse’s hooves,” she said softly. “I noticed there was a car parked down by the bridge. I knew I had another trespasser, so I came up to run him off. He was kneeling right there.” She pointed a long finger at the altar and looked as if she were watching the scene play out before her eyes. “He told me that he saw some sketch of yours or something and knew the shrine was being tended. He brought our father’s rosary.” Regan picked up the rosary and held it up to show me. “When I saw this, I was so furious, I took the farrier’s knife, and I stabbed him!”

“But why? What did Father Ignacio ever do to you?”

Regan’s voice trembled. “I thought I had put it all behind me, Jamaica. I thought I had closed the book on all that. But when Andy came back here, it reminded me of it again-of what they did to us, to our father, our mother. And Ignacio Medina, he used to be Andy’s playmate at school when we were children. How could he dare to show his face here at our father’s grave? He was trying to keep Los Penitentes alive! He even became one himself!” She shrieked, “I want them all gone, history!” She waved one arm wildly out to the side, as if to erase their memory. “That is why I was telling you all the terrible things they did. I thought you would tell the truth about them in your book. I thought, ‘Here is someone who will write about the foolishness, the horror, the brutality of their ways. Someone who is not bewitched by their archaic superstitions.’ ”

“But why did you crucify Father Ignacio?”

“That was Andy. Antonio went wild. He wanted to get the police to think it was the Penitentes that killed him. He wanted justice for our father!” She started sobbing.

“So he took the body somewhere and tied it on a cross?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to take it anywhere,” she said. “This place was the morada where our father was killed. But after Antonio’s…” Her voice trailed off.

“Crimen colérico?” I said. “His crime of anger?”

“Yes, soon after that, they closed this morada. They said it was stained by what he had done and couldn’t be made pure again. Most of the Hermanos went to Boscaje. That’s where they took all the icons from here, and they left this place untended, forgotten, like junk they could throw away!” She gnashed her teeth as she spoke. “Andy wanted them to have to leave Boscaje, too, to drive them out of existence. He wanted to destroy La Arca like they destroyed our family.” Her face reddened, and tears began to stream down her face. She looked right into my eyes. “Andy wanted to kill you from the beginning, Jamaica! But I wouldn’t let him. I protected you. He was afraid when you found our father’s rosary, with all your research, that somehow you would find out.”

“You mean the day I first met him here? The day after you threw Father Ignacio over the bridge?” I asked.

She didn’t even blink at my mention of the incident at the bridge. She seemed caught up in her own replay of events. “Yes. He was sure you knew something.” The long strand of carved beads dangled back and forth in front of her body like a pendulum. “He even tried to find you after that, to find out what you knew. But when you came here after mass, it was obvious you didn’t know anything or you would have…”

She stopped talking for a moment and watched the beads swing back and forth. Then she began speaking again, forcing the words through tightly clenched teeth. “But that little thief Suazo! He was making plenty of money on those icons! But then he told us you almost caught him when he was photographing the Boscaje processions. And he said he lost the pictures he took, and maybe you found them. And then we saw Suazo with you…” She looked at me now, and her eyes looked clear and bright, as if what she were about to say was simple and obvious. “Well, we had to kill him. It never would have ended. You know how Suazo was.” There was a strange, mad certainty in her expression.

“Regan, I want you to come down the hill with me now.” This time I stepped forward, reaching for her arm.

“All right, Jamaica, I’ll come.” Her voice was suddenly childlike. “I know it’s over. I’m glad it’s over, I really am. I’ll come. Just let me pay my last respects to my father, would you, dear?”