Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

There was not a day gone by that Bettina didn’t think of and miss her grandmother. Her good company. Her humor. Her wisdom. Sighing, she returned her attention to her sister.

“You can’t play at the brujería all your life,” Adelita was saying, her voice gentle.

“It’s not play for me.”

“Bettina, we grew up together. You’re not a witch.”

“No, I’m a healer.”

There was an immense difference between the two, as Abuela had often pointed out. A bruja made dark, hurtful magic. A curandera healed.

“A healer,” Bettina repeated. “As was our abuela.”

“Was she?” Adelita asked.

Bettina could hear the tired smile in Adelita’s voice, but she didn’t share her sister’s amusement.

“¿Cómo?” she said, her own voice sharper than she intended. “How can you deny it?”

Adelita sighed. “There is no such thing as magic. Not here, in the world where we live. La brujería is only for stories. Por el reino de los suenos. It lives only in dreams and make-believe,”

“You’ve forgotten everything.”

“No, I remember the same as you. Only I look at the stories she told us with the eyes of an adult. I know the difference between what is real and what is superstition.”

Except it hadn’t only been stories, Bettina wanted to say.

“I loved her, too,” Adelita went on. “It’s just… think about it. The way she took us out into the desert. It was like she was trying to raise us as wild animals. What could Mama have been thinking?”

“That’s not it at all—”

“I’ll tell you this. Much as I love our mama, I wouldn’t let her take Janette out into the desert for hours on end the way she let Abuela take us. In the heat of the day and… how often did we go out in the middle of the night?”

“You make it sound so wrong.”

“Cálmate, Bettina. I know we survived. We were children. To us it was simply fun. But think of what could have happened to us—two children out alone in the desert with a crazy old woman.”

“She was not—”

“Not in our eyes, no. But if we heard the story from another?”

“It… would seem strange,” Bettina had to admit. “But what we learned—”

“We could have learned those stories at her knee, sitting on the front stoop of our parents’ house.”

“And if they weren’t simply stories?”

“¡Qu boba eres! What? Cacti spirits and talking animals? The past and future, all mixed up with the present. What did she call it?”

“La epoca del mito.”

“That’s right. Myth time. I named one of my gallery shows after it. Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

It had been a wonderful show. La Gata Verde had been transformed into a dreamscape that was closer to some miraculous otherwhere than it was to the dusty pavement that lay outside the gallery. Paintings, rich with primary colors, depicted los santos and desert spirits and the Virgin as seen by those who’d come to her from a different tradition than that put forth by the papal authority in Rome. There had been Hopi kachinas—the Storyteller, Crow Woman, clowns, deer dancers—and tiny, carved Zuni fetishes. Wall hangings rich with allegorical representations of Indio and Mexican folklore. And Bet-tina’s favorite: a collection of sculptures by the Bisbee artist, John Early—surreal figures of gray, fired clay, decorated with strips of colored cloth and hung with threaded beads and shells and spiraling braids of copper and silver filament. The sculptures twisted and bent like smoke-people frozen in their dancing, captured in mid-step as they rose up from the fire.

She had stood in the center of the gallery the night before the opening of the show and turned slowly around, drinking it all in, pulse drumming in time to the resonance that arose from the art that surrounded her. For one who didn’t believe, Adelita had still somehow managed to gather together a show that truly seemed to represent their grandmother’s description of a moment stolen from la epoca del mito.

“Not everything in the world relates to art,” Bettina said now into the phone.

“No. But perhaps it should. Art is what sets us apart from the animals.”

Bettina couldn’t continue the conversation. At times like this, it was as though they spoke two different languages, where the same word in one meant something else entirely in the other.

“It’s late,” she said. “I should go.”

“Perdona,Bettina. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

She wasn’t angry, Bettina thought. She was sad. But she knew her sister wouldn’t understand that either.

“I know,” she said. “Give my love to Chuy and Janette.”

“Si. Vaya con Dios.”

And if He will not have me? Bettina thought. For when all was said and done, God was a man, and she had never fared well in the world of men. It was easier to live in la epoca del mito of her abuela. In myth time, all were equal. People, animals, plants, the earth itself. As all times were equal and existed simultaneously.

“Qu te vaya bien,” she said. Take care.

She cradled the receiver and finally chose the small shape of a dog from the milagros scattered across the tabletop. El lobo was a kind of a dog, she thought. Perhaps she was making this fetish for herself. She should sew her own name inside, instead of Marty Gibson’s, the man who had asked her to make it for him. Ah, but would it draw los lobos to her, or keep them away? And which did she truly want?

Getting up from the table, she crossed the kitchen and opened the door to look outside. Her breath frosted in the air where the men had been barefoot. January was a week old and the ground was frozen. It had snowed again this week, after a curious Christmas thaw that had left the ground almost bare in many places. The wind had blown most of the snow off the lawn where the men had gathered, pushing it up in drifts against the trees and the buildings scattered among them: cottages and a gazebo, each now boasting a white skirt. She could sense a cold front moving in from the north, bringing with it the bitter temperatures that would leave fingers and face numb after only a few minutes of exposure. Yet some of the men had been in short sleeves, broadcloth suit jackets slung over their shoulders, all of them walking barefoot on the frozen lawn.

Poreso….

She didn’t think they were men at all.

“Your friends are gone.”

“Ellos no son mis amigos,” she said, then realized that speaking for so long with Adelita on the phone had left her still using Spanish. “They aren’t my friends,” she repeated. “I don’t know who, or even what they are.”

“Perhaps they are ghosts.”

“Perhaps,” Bettina agreed, though she didn’t think so. They were too complicated to be described by so straightforward a term.

She gazed out into the night a moment longer, then finally closed the door on the deepening cold and turned to face the woman who had joined her in the kitchen.

If los lobos were an elusive, abstracted mystery, then Nuala Fahey was one much closer to home, though no more comprehensible. She was a riddling presence in the house, her mild manner at odds with the potent brujería Bettina could sense in the woman’s blood. This was an old, deep spirit, not some simple ama del laves, yet in the nine months that Bettina had been living in the house, Nuala appeared to busy herself with no more than her housekeeping duties. Cleaning, cooking, the light gardening that Salvador left for her. The rooms were always dusted and swept, the linens and bedding fresh and sweet-smelling. Meals appeared when they should, with enough for all who cared to partake of them. The flower gardens and lawns were well-tended, the vegetable patch producing long after the first frost.