Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Earlier this morning I went down the street to La Paloma to look at their chimeneas to use in back of the house for those times I can’t get Chuy to build a campfire. There I found these little wooden dogs. They reminded me of the stories you used to tell me about the children of a volcano that you said had come to live inside your chest—do you remember? What was it that you called them?

I hope you will accept them as a small apology for my impatience with la brujería. I will try harder in the future.

Chuy and Janette send their love—the painting is hers. ¿Está bonito, no está el? I swear I don’t push her, but I can’t keep her away from my art supplies and she’s fascinated with the prints Suzanna runs off her lithography press. Perhaps she will be an artist, too.

Mama asked me to include a little something from her, I have no idea what it is.

Call me soon. Te echo de menos, hermanita.

love Adelita

Bettina smiled as she set the letter aside. That was Adelita, her writing, as always, a mix of stiff phrases and casual conversation. She was never as comfortable putting words on paper as she was putting images. Bettina pulled the box closer. Funny that she would dream of los cadejos on the same day that this package came. She hadn’t even thought of them in years.

Unfolding the tissue paper, the first thing she saw was Janette’s painting: a small watercolor of a lizard, poking its head up through a cluster of Mexican poppies. Although the subjects were accurately rendered, Janette had been more liberal in her color choices. The flowers of the poppies were the brilliant gold-yellow they should be, but their stems and leaves ran a gamut of light pink through to rich purples. The lizard was a dark, deep blue with yellow markings, the ground a lighter blue, while what could be seen of the sky was an almost iridescent rose color, as though it had been formed from an endless cloud of fairy dusters. In the bottom right-hand corner Janette had carefully printed out her name in neat block letters.

The whole thing reminded Bettina of a desert sunset. Homesickness thickened in her throat and made her chest feel too tight. It wasn’t so much the desert she was missing as Janette’s growing up, day by day, so far away from where Bettina was making her home. Living here, Bettina was missing it all.

“That’s lovely,” Nuala said, coming over to the table to look at the painting.

“My niece painted it for me.”

“She seems to have as much talent as her mother.”

Bettina nodded. With the painting removed from the top of the package, she could see a small bundled piece of cotton cloth that had been tied closed with a piece of twine. She picked it up. Through the cloth she could feel what seemed to be beads. A necklace, perhaps, she thought, but undoing the knot in the twine, she folded the corners of the cloth back to find a rosary.

This could only be from Mama.

While her first thought was that it was yet another attempt of Mama to play on her guilt, when Bettina studied the rosary more closely, she realized it was anything but. The beads were made from various sacred beans and seeds that had been collected in the desert, the crucifix carved from dried cholla spines. Combined they evoked two potent brujeríos: that of the Virgin, and that of the desert. This was something Abuela might have given her, or Papa. To have it come from her mother felt… confusing, she supposed.

Looking up, she found Nuala’s gaze riveted upon the rosary as well. The older woman reached out a hand, fingers brushing the air above the threaded beans and seeds.

“This is very powerful,” she said.

“It’s from my mother.”

“She is a wise woman.”

For a moment Bettina thought how incongruous the idea was. Of all of them, Mama would have the least to do with Abuela’s medicines and brujería, or Papa’s Indios mysteries. But then she considered how Mama had kept them all together, fed and clothed them, tended to their bodies and their spirits.

“Sí,” she said, nodding slowly. She closed her hand around the rosary and felt it grow warm between her palm and fingers, felt it tingle against her skin the way the air did before a thunderstorm. “In her own way, she is very wise.”

She carefully stowed the rosary in the pocket of her vest and returned to the package, taking out Adelita’s gift. Nuala chuckled as Bettina set the small wooden dog carvings on the table by her coffee mug. There were five in all, Mexican folk art dogs painted in a rainbow palette of pinks, blues, lime greens, and bright yellows. Two stood on their hind legs, one seemed to be trying to sniff its own genitals, the remaining two were posed like coyotes made for the turistas, snouts pointing at the sky.

Truly los cadejos, Bettina thought.

“What fun,” Nuala said. “Your niece could have painted them.”

Bettina smiled. The freedom of color was similar, though the carvings were much more garish, almost fluorescent.

“They were born in a volcano,” she said.

Nuala gave her a puzzled look.

Bettina smiled. “Once upon a time,” she said, laying the palm of her hand between her breasts, “they lived inside me.”

The good humor left Nuala’s features.

“Think of this,” she said. “What do you call a wolf that pretends to be your friend?”

Bettina shrugged. “No lo se —I don’t know.”

“A dog.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Bettina said.

But she remembered something her father had told her once, about dogs and wolves.

A dog is never simply what we think we see. He keeps us safe from the wolf and coyote, but deep in his heart, he is a wolf, a coyote. He is the one that…

“They walk between the worlds,” Bettina said.

Nuala nodded. “And between is an ancient and potent piece of magic. It always has been, in all its shapes and guises. From the bridge that spans the gorge, or connects one side of the river with the other, to that moment that lies between waking and sleeping. From the gray mystery that lies at the junction of night and day to those twilight places where mingle and meet all the languages and cultures of the world, all the stories and landscapes and arts.”

Bettina nodded, the memory of her father’s voice growing stronger in her mind.

All dogs are spirits. They carry potent brujería so we must always be careful in our dealings with them.

“And in those places,” Nuala said, “you will always find him waiting: the dog, the wolf, the fox, the coyote. In some guise or other. And no matter what he promises you, death is the secret he keeps hidden in his eyes. In the end, there is always death, and it isn’t his.”

Bettina shivered. But her father had spoken of that as well.

Remember, they bring the little deaths, too: sleep, dreams, change, the step from this world into la epoca del mito. You don’t need to be afraid of them, but you should respect them.

Bettina touched one of the colorful carvings that she’d placed on the table before her.

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said.

“No,” Nuala told her. “The innocent never are.”

Bettina frowned, but Nuala was already turning away, back to the counter where she had been chopping vegetables for a stew. Gathering up the carvings, Bettina returned the colorful dogs to their box, along with Janette’s painting and her sister’s letter. She stood up from the table, the box in one hand, her coffee in the other.

“What?” Nuala asked, the steady rhythm of her chopping falling silent for a moment, speaking now as though their earlier conversation had been about nothing more profound than the weather. “Won’t you have some breakfast?”