The Witch Narratives: Reincarnation (41 page)

Salia’s small face looked out from the window, like she didn’t care what happened to her now that the patrón was dead.

Part Six

I Promise I Shall Return

One child dies.
Another is reborn.
So, it has been since the tipi-moon.
Rejoice, oh native Son.
The shadow of the eagle has returned
.

52

May 26, 1934

A
thirsty traveler rode along the Turquoise Trail. The shaman, Storm-Chaser, huddled beneath a woolen blanket covering his shoulders. He squinted his good eye at the houses of Madrid, looming like sand dunes of flesh-colored adobe under the glow of a full moon. The old man spit. He did not care for the Hispanos or Gringos and considered all of them white people. They called him Chief with a sneering manner and treated him like the town drunk. He did sometimes beg the citizens for spare change so he could buy another bottle to take back with him to the reservation, but they had no compassion for a thirsty man. Many a time Shifty, the bartender at the Mine Shaft Saloon, would shake him. “You’ve had enough, Chief. Go back to the reservation and your family.”

The truth was he didn’t come into Madrid that often. When he did, it was to get drunk and buy tobacco. Being a medicine man, right now he could use a little medicine himself. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was mighty thirsty. He was in need of something strong to wipe the trail dust from his lips.

He rocked on a soft-pad, Apache saddle stuffed with buffalo hair and grass. The saddle was adorned with rainbow-colored beads, clacking in rhythm to the hoofs of his pinto horse. The leather was soft from years of his rump rubbing against the saddle.

On his saddle was painted the figure of a black bear, his supernatural helper. The bear stood in a circle of hailstones and lightning, the mark of the Thunder Spirit.

His face was hardened by 73 years of living, chafing against his skin, until he looked like petrified wood. He had been blind in one eye for 23 years. Half his blood was of the Mescalero Apache tribe which branched out east of the Rio Grande, and the other half flowing through his veins, was Santo Domingo Pueblo Indian.

He pulled at the reins and rested his hands on the pummel of his saddle. Instead of moccasins, his feet were encased in worn, high top tennis shoes known as the Converse All Stars, a shoe made for basketball. He had never seen a basketball game, but his wife, Spider-Woman, ordered the shoes from a mail-order catalogue. The world he was born into in the year 1861 often clashed with the modern world of 1934, where the horns of jalopies startled his horse.

He swung his tennis shoes and clucked his tongue.
Now what are those stupid villagers up to
, he thought, shaking his head at the mob gathered at the bottom of Witch Hill, rising dark and threatening, to the east of Madrid. Even he avoided Witch Hill, where among the yuccas and the mesquite bushes was a den of rattle snakes.

The moon teetered at the top of Witch Hill, like it was about to roll down and smash the villagers gathered there. A howling coyote sat at the top, outlined by the full moon.

“I’m gonna kill that damn coyote,” a voice shouted from the mob.

A rifle fired, and there were more shots from other armed men.

The coyote merely sat at the top of the hill. Undisturbed. Unmoving. Unafraid. Unimpressed.

Storm-Chaser touched the patch over his eye, his old wound aching. A witch took his eye from him. He preferred to stay clear of witches. One never knew if a witch might suddenly take a disliking to you, even when you didn’t interfere in his or her malice. Nor was it ever a good idea to befriend a witch because witches were easily turned, out of jealousy or whatever crazy reason took their fancy.

To take a witch as your lover was insanity. He grunted at this thought, remembering Felicita Esperanza.

Even so, Storm-Chaser turned his horse in the direction of Witch Hill and all the commotion going on, wanting to see what these fat-headed people were up to. That is, if he could ever get his horse to move. The animal never liked Witch Hill. Storm-Chaser usually left Madrid, lying slumped over his horse with his breath blowing in the horse’s nostrils, making his horse a bit woozy. Even though the horse was tipsy, it never went by Witch Hill but took Storm-Chaser home the long way, even though the horse was anxious to get home.

Storm-Chaser now pulled at the reins made of rope with a lark’s-head knot tied in the middle. The knot pulled at the horse’s bottom jaw, but his horse refused to budge.

He tugged harder on the reins.

The horse reared.

He smacked the horse on its nose, and the horse rolled its eyes at him, and then lumbered towards Witch Hill.

As he rode nearer, he could smell smoke and see the flames engulfing the house.

“Burn, Witch! Burn!” came the chanting.

“Can you smell the odor of roasted flesh?” a masked man said.

“You mean roasted witch,” laughed a man in the crowd. Storm-Chaser recognized his voice. It was Red Flannahan, one of the miners.

Only one person in the mob seemed upset, Marcelina Martinez, the hairdresser, who always smelled of perfumes and soaps. She was the only person in town who ever smiled at Storm-Chaser. “Have you all gone loco? There’s an innocent babe in there,” she yelled.

One young boy picked up a rock and threw it at the window.

“No, Johnny,” his mother scolded him.

“No one breaks the windows, else the witch might turn into an owl and flee,” Pacheco Sandoval ordered.

The crowd dropped their rocks, stones hitting the ground like hail.

The priest didn’t care how Salia was killed. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus chapter 22, verse 18.” The cold voice of the village priest, Padre Rodriguez, roared in a booming voice, “Out, Witch. You must die!” He threw holy water on the house which sizzled against the heated walls.

The crowd gasped. From inside the house, a snake pounded against the window.

Storm-Chaser used the distraction to sneak to the back of the house. He dismounted and stood, bowlegged, beside his horse. In the moonlight he resembled a child, his head barely reaching the middle of his horse’s rump. He was dressed in his town clothes of baggy, rolled up khaki pants and a wrinkled white shirt, which was his way of trying to fit in. He wore a beaded belt, however, of blue, red, yellow, white and black. Rows of beaded necklaces hung around his neck and a beaded bracelet hugged his wrist. A silver turquoise
ring on his baby finger glowed in the moonlight. The color turquoise brought luck and guarded against evil, which was why his people used the color abundantly in their squash necklaces, and the arm and leg bracelets they wore. The colorful beads on his belt were dominated by the color turquoise splashed about the black leather.

Storm-Chaser reached for his saddle and removed his war club, which consisted of a stone head and wooden handle. The stone and handle were sewn together with sinew and covered with buckskin. The club could crack a head in two. He wasn’t about to lose his other eye. He would fight the witch, if need be, to the death.

He raised his arms in victory. “It is a good night to die!”

53

S
torm-Chaser approached the back door, expecting some resistance. With his war club he could break the lock. Before his fingers even touched the door knob, the door swung open, as if he was expected. No one had opened the door to bid him entrance. Unafraid, he entered the house, shielding his nose with a hanky.

The witch, Salia, writhed on the floor like a burning snake. Her dress and hair were on fire but she did not cry.

He removed the blanket from around his shoulders and hurried towards her.

She shook her head, pointing at the crib in the far corner where the house was not on fire. A window was open next to the baby and the wind keeping the crib free of smoke.

Odd, Storm-Chaser recalled the wind had been blowing in the opposite direction and fiercely. The wind then should be causing the fire to consume the crib, instead of protecting the child like it was.

There was a crash at the front window. “Look,” someone exclaimed from outside. “A snake is slithering through the hole made with the rock by little Johnny.”

“Shoot that snake before it gets completely out of the hole in the window and escapes,” someone yelled from outside.

BAM!

There was the sound of a gunshot from outside the house. Inside the house, Salia jerked, as though she was struck by a bullet.

“The snake is dead,” the crowd yelled.

Storm-Chaser sucked in his breath. Even in death and half-burned, Salia was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“We got to make sure the baby’s dead,” a voice said from outside.

He spun to the front door and breathed a sigh of relief that it was locked.

There was a humming noise coming from Salia, and he turned back to her. A spirit rose from her burning body. Storm-Chaser could see right
through her ghost to the front door, which was being battered. She beseeched him, her thoughts filling his head, as if in a dream.
I could not save myself, but you can rescue my child. The child must be protected. Help me! I know you, old Man
.
You knew my mother
.

He touched his missing eye. How could he ever forget Felicita? She was an old wound. She had taken his eye and stolen his heart. Like the Gringos say, love is blind.

Save my child
, the spirit pleaded.
Save him!

Her pleas grew more frenzied, like a whirlwind twirling inside his head, as the front door began to give under the mob’s pressure.

“I will save the baby, though he is the grandson of Felicita, my arch enemy, my old love,” he told the ghost.

Beside her charring corpse was a black book entitled,
Shroud of Veils
. The title shimmered in red, glowing letters which seemed on fire, even though the flames had not touched the book in which Felicita’s and La India’s magic was buried. The
Veils
were like billowing clouds of supernatural power.

Storm-Chaser reached for it and the
Shroud of Veils
went up in flames.

The baby sat in the crib, looking very calm. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. The boy was about six months old and stared at him with the strangest expression in his big, blue-grey eyes. A mop of thick, jet black hair brushed his forehead.

“Forget the front door,” a man yelled from outside. “The witch may still be alive. She’ll kill you, if you enter her house. Burn the back.”

Footsteps walked around the wrap-around porch.

Like a spark, exploding into a blazing fire, Salia came back to life.

She opened the front door and rushed out into the crowd, screaming. She was engulfed in flames.

“Forget the back door,” someone yelled. “There she is!”

The crowd scattered, screaming with fear. The men who had been headed for the back of the house ran, with the burning witch chasing them.

It was now safe for Storm-Chaser to escape from the back with the child cradled in his arms.

He very carefully climbed aboard his horse.

The horse reared its head, its nostrils flaring. The horse stamped its hoofs, anxious to flee. The horse’s eyes had a fearful look from the smell of
smoke, but the horse did not bolt until Storm-Chaser and the baby were safely on its back.

Storm-Chaser looked behind him.

Salia had turned into a ball of fire, her singed, coppery-red hair fluttering about the flames.

Sparks of fire jumped this way and that.

Suddenly, one spark lifted slowly into the air, then flashed across the sky like a shooting star, headed east.

54

N
o one saw them as Storm-Chaser and the baby headed towards the Santo Domingo Reservation. The horse did not have to be guided. Many a night the horse led the drunken old man back to the pueblo.

When he realized he wasn’t being followed, his adrenaline slowed, and Storm-Chaser felt thirsty again. He cursed the villagers for burning Salia and disrupting his plans.

No sound came from the child nestled in his arms.

Storm-Chaser rode slowly to his three-room apartment on ground level at the pueblo, which was an adobe construction of medieval-like apartment buildings with no electricity, plumbing, or coal lamps. Kerosene was used instead.

There was an open fire still going outside his apartment, a beacon lit by his wives for him whenever he went to Madrid. He dismounted. “Spider-Woman,” he called in a hoarse voice. “Little-Dove.”

He pulled a gun tucked in the front of his pants and fired the barrel in the air.

Where are those worthless women
, he thought.
They must be visiting my daughter
.

He lay the boy down by the fire and entered the apartment. He came back with a cradleboard and put the baby in it. The cradleboard had a soft skin pouch on a wooden frame with laces running down the center and a hood to keep the cold out. The cradle was warm and could be carried on one’s back.