Wild Penance

38

Before coming home to my cabin, after the paramedics had dressed my wound, I delivered La Arca to Tecolote for safe return to the Penitentes. Once I had seen the old cuaderno and the other treasures inside the ark, I realized that I didn’t need to preserve the fading history of the Penitentes-they had done so themselves, reverently, but privately. And some things were meant to remain private, even held in secret. Esperanza smiled with approval when I placed my book inside the box, its deerskin cover looking strangely new by comparison with the other treasures, in spite of all that my book had been through. I felt a small pang of sadness as I took my hand away.

Oddly enough, I had more difficulty returning the photograph I had put in my pocket before going to see Regan than I did giving La Arca my book. I studied the snapshot carefully before giving it back, something drawing me to look at it again and again. In faded black and white, it had captured Regan as a youth, dressed in black, clutching the hand of a small boy, their faces wide with horror as they watched five men in the distance struggle to raise the cross on which their father hung. The image troubled me in the way that something does when I’m about to receive an important life lesson. I told Tecolote as much, but she only smiled and nodded her head.

It was certain from what Regan had told me, and from the evidence in the shed at the Suazo place, that Santiago Suazo had been stealing icons for Andy Vincent. Investigators at the scene uncovered Santiago Suazo’s body, along with the nag Regan had put down, in the pit grave dug by her unsuspecting neighbors. And they found the bullet-scarred white Ford Ranger and an old beat-up cargo van locked in Regan’s barn, both registered to Regan and bearing New Mexico plates. I had to assume that Andy was almost certainly the one who had tried to wipe me out at Bennie’s, too, but hit Nora instead.

The next day, I was nursing the wound in my shoulder and the confusion in my mind by sitting in my big chair in my cabin with a cup of tea, trying to figure out how to occupy myself for the next month while I was on medical leave. I was surprised when I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the drive. Eyeing the nightstand where I had placed my revolver, I moved to the window to look out. I saw a pale green Forest Service truck pulling up to the house. Kerry Reed got out, then spent some time easing a big, flat parcel wrapped in brown paper out from behind the seat.

I opened the door and waited for him.

“How’s your shoulder?” he said.

“It hurts, but it’s getting better.”

He stepped inside with the parcel. “I brought you something.”

While he took off his hat and coat, I set the package on the table and opened it. It was a photograph of Redhead, grazing in a meadow behind the stables at the ranger station, her red and white coat gleaming in the high mountain sunlight, a backdrop of kelly green forest and turquoise sky behind her. There was a small inscription in the corner:

TO JAMAICA, MY FAVORITE WILD WOMAN-ALL MY LOVE, KERRY

Tears filled my eyes as I looked at it. “This is beautiful,” I said, kissing him. “Thank you.”

“I have some good news, too.” He grinned. “I’m moving to your neighborhood. I just got my new assignment. I’ll be bunking from now on at the ranger housing in Tres Piedras.”

Before sunrise on Easter morning, I sat on a rock outcropping outside my cabin, wrapped in a blanket. I held the Old One, the smooth stone that had been with me these past twelve days. I had never thought of it before, but right then it occurred to me that the stone had come to me on the same day that I witnessed the body of Father Ignacio, tied to a cross, falling from the bridge. And then I thought about Regan and her painful life of grief over the death of her father. I remembered the image in the photo. She had been just a child, just a child when it all started.

And then I thought of my own father, now gone.

Suddenly I understood the lesson of forgiveness the Old One held for me. I stood and cast off my blanket. I spoke aloud. “Daddy, please forgive me for not being there when you were injured. I was just a child, being a child, having a little fun after school.”

I waited quietly, as if my father might answer me from beyond the grave, but the woods surrounding my cabin were silent. And I did not feel any relief from what I had just done. I opened my hand and looked at the stone. Then I did as Momma Anna had demonstrated-I closed my fingers around the Old One and placed it against my chest. I drew in a big breath and waited. The sun’s face peeked over the top of the mountains in the distance and golden light began to flood across the sky. I let out the breath and felt a release of anxiety and tension, a lifting of emotional pain that had been with me so long I had forgotten I was carrying it. I had finally forgiven myself. I had finally forgiven myself! I said out loud, “I was just a child!”

But despite my having learned such an important lesson from the Old One, it was my friend Bennie who brought the most change into my life that Easter Sunday. In the afternoon, I traveled to the Wildlife Center in Española, where Bennie and a wildlife ranger had arranged for me to temporarily adopt a wolf cub in dire need of saving. The cub’s mother had been shot by a rancher outside of Yellow-stone, and after several unsuccessful attempts to get another pack to adopt the pup, the little one had been taken in, starving, by the rehab center. Hopes for an unmothered cub were not high. Since I was on leave for a month and could be with the babe constantly, I was a temporary stopgap until they could find a sanctuary that would take the wolf in.

“Come on, kiddo,” Bennie said. “I’ll show you how to bottle-feed this guy, so that you two will bond.” She gave me instructions and left me sitting cross-legged on the floor, alone in a room with my new companion.

A whimpering ball of yellow and brown fur with short legs and a distended belly soon waddled up and took a seat out of my reach. His eyes were yellow gold, and his face was marked with a distinct brown and black mask and tufted ears-one of which failed to stand up. He couldn’t have been much over six weeks old. He studied me warily, drool dripping from his lips, the hunger making him bold. He edged toward me. I didn’t move. Finally, unable to control his desire to feed, he came forward and took the nipple extending from the bottle I held in my hand. He rolled onto his side, pushing gently at my leg with his paws, a look of ecstasy on his little wolf face. I looked down at my new living companion, careful not to threaten him with too direct a stare. Two yellow eyes looked back at me-wild eyes, a kindred spirit. He looked up at me like an infant does his mother-with adoration.

A half hour later, Bennie came into the room as I nuzzled the little ball of fur tucked sleeping in my arms like a baby, where I held him after he’d had his fill. “He’s so cute,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s cute now, kiddo,” Bennie said, “but he’ll weigh around a hundred, maybe as much as a hundred thirty pounds when he’s grown, and he won’t look cute to anyone then. Right now, you are our answer to whether he lives or dies, but it gets harder every day he grows toward maturity to find him a permanent place that will take him in. A lone wolf is not sought after, and I don’t want him to have to go to a zoo. We’ll just have to keep trying. In the meantime, you two look like you’re developing a good bond. What do you want to call him?”

“Mountain,” I said. “I’ll call him Mountain.”

Later, I drove home with the little ball of fur tucked inside a sling next to me so that he could feel my warmth as he snoozed in his little cocoon. I made up a silly little song and sang it as I drove, a soothing little lullaby for my new companion, and for me: