The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 2

2

For part of May and all of June, Nena had been hearing a hum, a noise that vibrated along the surface of her skin. Nena had been afraid to ask her sisters if they also heard it, knowing she’d be scolded for speaking again about things that no one else heard or saw, like the flickers in the corners of her vision, or the whispers of people long dead. It was 1943, and no one was supposed to talk about sustos and corazonadas anymore. But her sisters definitely saw the ladybugs that followed Nena around. Every time Nena went anywhere, from the kitchen to the bathroom, to the Obregons’ grocery store, to the post office, las mariquitas came with her, a swarm of little red dots clinging onto her clothes, like living embroidery. When the ladybugs came too close to Olga, she brushed them away, saying, “Que bonita!” how pretty , in a high-pitched voice that meant the opposite. Luna squashed as many of them as she could reach.

Ever since their parents had died, Nena and her sisters had lived all together on West Overland Avenue, so close to the Rio Grande that from the street corner they could see Mexico. Olga was four years older than Nena, and Luna three. When Nena was growing up, she watched them, not sure if she would end up more like Olga or more like Luna. One was smart, the other was beautiful. Olga polished her shoes without being told, she kept her pencils sharpened, she didn’t chew her nails. She did her homework long before it was due, and she prayed every night, using the rosary Papá gave her for her first Communion. Olga was awarded a full scholarship to Southern Methodist University, and Nena had been very angry on her sister’s behalf when she wasn’t able to go, there not being enough money to pay for travel or books.

And then there was Luna. When she was six, she took a knife and chopped the heads off a half-dozen chicks. When Mamá asked her what she was doing, Luna said, “I’m playing butcher.” In high school, Luna wanted to be a gangster’s moll, and she dressed the part, wearing skirts that she hemmed very short. She was a cheerleader for Bowie High School, and she was so famously beautiful that young men from other high schools asked her to dances.

Now that Nena was no longer a child, she understood she would never be like either of her sisters, and that was fine with her. In the spring, she’d fallen in love with the movie For Whom the Bell Tolls . Se?or Obregon’s daughter Fina worked at the Palace Theatre ticket booth, and Fina had always said that Nena could come as much as she wanted for free. After her ninth viewing, Fina’s boss said Nena couldn’t come to the theater anymore.

It didn’t matter, because by that time, Nena had memorized all of the dialogue in the movie. She’d never seen anyone as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman, who played Maria, an orphan and a fighter with short-cropped hair and too-big trousers, neither of which stopped her from having a grand romance. But who most fascinated Nena was the character Pilar, a fierce commander of anti-fascist partisans who could ride a horse and shoot a gun better than any of her men. And like Nena, Pilar saw things other people couldn’t.

Pilar was also very ugly, her face and clothes grimy, the opposite of Ingrid Bergman, who glowed. Nena had curly hair, and she thought if she cut it short, she could make it look like Ingrid Bergman’s in the movie, yes, black instead of blond, but with the same kind of fluffy glamour. Nena used Olga’s sewing scissors, carefully snipping, evening out the sides, one and then the other, as she looked in the mirror, cutting and then cutting again until there was hardly anything left.

When Luna saw Nena’s hair, she crossed herself in an exagerada way. “You tonta, don’t you know why Maria’s hair is cut short in the movie?” Luna asked Nena, but of course Nena knew. Pilar tells the hero Robert Jordan that Maria “had the worst time a woman can have, if you know what I mean.” Nena could guess what Pilar meant, what men could do to women.

Using all of her savings, Nena bought herself trousers from The Popular, justifying the purchase by wearing them every day. This drove Olga and Luna crazy, neither of them thinking it proper for a lady to wear pants, even though many women did now that there was a war on.

Anyhow, Nena didn’t care what her sisters said; she was preparing for the trouble to come. There were rumors that the Germans and Japanese would come through Mexico to invade the United States, and when they did, Nena would be ready for them. In the desert, almost every plant protects itself with sharp thorns, and Nena was a child of the desert. She didn’t know how to fire a rifle yet, but she’d learn quick. She already knew she had the courage to do what was necessary. One morning, Olga found a rattlesnake curled up on the back step. She ran out into the street to find a man, and Luna threw her hands up, screaming like she was being murdered. But Nena didn’t waste time; she found a shovel and cut the head off the snake.

Luna worked as a waitress at the officers’ club at Fort Bliss, and Olga operated the switchboard at the Hotel Cortéz, a tall building overlooking San Jacinto Plaza, where the alligators lived in their pond. Luna’s and Olga’s husbands were away at war, Olga’s in Europe and Luna’s, Beto, in the South Pacific. Nena stayed home and took care of the babies, Olga’s daughter and Luna’s son, both nine months old, biding her time until the Germans attacked.

She sang to the babies, played with them, jiggled them on her hips, one on each side. She washed diapers and did the household laundry, keeping pots of water boiling on the stove. She cooked all the meals except breakfast, she swept and mopped the floors, she dusted, and she tended to the chickens. But even though she was up at five and worked all day, the house never stayed tidy, the laundry never got completely done, and the babies were rarely clean, full, or happy at the same time.

One day, the babies fussed all morning, refusing to nap all afternoon, and then they had a competition to see who could cry louder and harder, far into the evening. By the time Olga got home, Nena felt like she’d been awake for three days straight, her skin greasy, her eyes dried out by the heat of the summer.

“Why do you insist on always leaving the dirty water in the laundry basin?” Olga asked. “Always” was a terrible word to use, and it wasn’t even accurate. Nena only sometimes forgot to dump out the water. She knew better than to speak these thoughts out loud.

Late that night, Luna flung open the front door, kicking off her shoes in the corner and singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She danced through the house, the sour scent of beer trailing after her as she picked up a sleeping Chuy from his crib. He woke up crying. This woke up Olga’s daughter, Valentina, and then both babies cried and cried and cried some more. It took forever to put them down again.

Please , Nena prayed when she was finally able to go to bed. Please end this war and bring back the men. Please let me have something of my own.

When she was alive, Nena’s mamá often told the girls that they could be whatever they wanted, except maids. But what was Nena other than a muchacha—a servant girl, nanny, and cook for her sisters? Nena couldn’t stand the long days anymore, she couldn’t take the humming noise or the ladybugs flying in their swarm, buzzing with messages that she couldn’t understand, but that they seemed bent on delivering anyway. Help me , she prayed.

Nena was twelve the first time she had a serious vision, when they were still living in the old house. For Nena’s whole life, her papá was only able to speak in a raspy whisper, his lungs so tattered from being gassed in France during the First World War that he couldn’t work with his brothers at the family trucking company.

Nena’s mamá worked as a cook in a restaurant. She didn’t make enough money to support the family with that job, so on Sundays she sold pozole in the little park across from the church. During the week, the Montoya girls made the soup, soaking the hominy in lye to better slip the skins off the kernels, wringing the chickens’ necks and plucking them, making the broth, and then on Sundays, Nena and her sisters helped their mamá carry the heavy pot wrapped in blankets, along with sawhorses and planks to form a table.

The soup was hot and spicy, warm in the winter, and in the summer, it felt nice to eat something even hotter than the air. All afternoon on Sundays, Nena ran back and forth to their house, cleaning the clay bowls and bringing back refills of the condiments—the chopped-up onion, the chiles, the cilantro. People milled about in their Sunday finest, talking and gossiping and flirting. In the middle of the park, a pack of dogs nibbled at their fleas, scratching themselves. There were always lines to buy the soup. When someone couldn’t afford a bowl, Nena’s mamá gave it away for free.

Weekday mornings, Nena’s mamá helped her papá out of his bed, letting him lean on her as they slowly made their way through the house and onto the little piece of concrete that he called his patio, a corner of the small, dusty yard. When he was having a strong day, he pulled Nena up onto his lap and told her stories from his childhood in New Mexico.

The family house had been built low and close to the ground, adobe covered with stucco, four rooms with a woodstove, clay tiles on both floor and roof. The house was dark in the morning where it sat on the western side of the Tularosa Mountains, high on a mesa for protection from the Apaches when the place was first built. By the time he was born, only the house, the corral, and a patch of garden remained of the many acres that had been granted to the family in the eighteenth century. Centuries before this, the family had been at the side of the explorer O?ate when he claimed the land north of the Rio Grande for King Philip II of Spain, in what Nena’s papá called La Toma, The Taking.

“Who did they take the land from?” Nena once asked, and her papá had laughed, explaining, “From your cousins the Indios, of course.”

One night, a pack of dogs dug their way into the chicken coop, devouring all the chickens. In an instant, there were no eggs for the family to eat, no meat or bones to make the broth for the pozole, and no extra money to make up the rent shortfall.

At the end of the month, Se?or Echeverria, the landlord, came by the house, as he did every month, to collect rent. Nena’s mamá explained that she would have it for him soon. Se?or Echeverria grunted at the kitchen table, dunking his pan dulce in the chocolate Nena’s mamá had made for him, squishing the pastry in his mouth with ugly slurping sounds. When he was done, he wiped his hands on his pants instead of on the napkin that had been placed in front of him.

He got up fast, pushing his chair away, backing Nena’s mamá up against the counter, pressing his body then his lips against hers. Her hands flew up to his chest to shove him away, but he was too big, his belly pinning her. He pulled open the front of her dress, the buttons flying off, tapping on the floor. He reached into her dress with one hand, touching her breasts, using his other hand to muffle the sound of her yelling. Nena’s papá was in the bedroom, too weak to help even if he heard the commotion. Nena knew she was the only one who could come to her mamá’s aid. The big knife for butchering the chickens was right there in the drawer. She would pull it out and stab Se?or Echeverria in the space between his ribs.

Before Nena could reach the drawer, a buzzing started in her ears, the room wobbled, and then she found herself on a crowded street. Nena was inside Se?or Echeverria’s chest, and something was wrong, broken, and then she was at a funeral mass. When Nena’s mind returned to the kitchen, she was splayed out on the floor, her head in her mamá’s lap. Se?or Echeverria was staring down at them.

Nena sat up, meeting his hard eyes. “You have three weeks to live,” she told him.

Her vision would prove to be correct, but it wouldn’t do Nena or the rest of the Montoya family any good. Se?or Echeverria evicted them before he died, and in the years after that, Nena made things even worse by using her ability to try to fix their situation.

Help me , Nena prayed in her hot little room. Please let me be something other than what I am now. Please, God, let me be brave and have adventures.

The three sisters shared one fan, and it was Luna’s night to use it. Nena had set a bowl of tap water next to her cot so that she could dunk a washcloth in the water and lay it across her forehead, but the washcloth grew hot so fast it was hardly worth the effort. Nena kicked the sheet off herself and spread her legs, hanging one off the side of the cot, pulling her nightgown up and flapping the hem to make a breeze.

Moonlight shined into her room. The hum buzzed in Nena’s ears, louder than ever now, in an awful harmony with the noise of the cicadas outside. She watched the hands of the clock, the second hand tick ticking, every moment bringing her closer to the morning, when she would once again wake and rise to work like a dog. At four o’clock, she heard a baby start to fuss, making a sharp cry, whimpering, and then going quiet. Nena touched her damp forehead, pushing back her limp hair. She worried about the long workday ahead, not the first she had tackled with as little sleep.

“Elena,” a woman whispered.

No one called her by her name. Everyone called her Nena, baby.

Another whisper. “Elena Eduviges Montoya.”

Nena got out of bed and opened the door to the backyard. No breeze greeted her, only hot, dry, dead air. The cicadas crawled thick on the ground under the bright moonlight.

“Elena.”

Nena looked around the yard. She couldn’t see anyone, but the voice was so clear, the person calling her had to be very close. Maybe on the other side of the pecan tree. The cicadas crunched under Nena’s bare feet. She rested her hands on the tree’s trunk, feeling the smooth bark under her fingers.

“Elena,” she heard again, closer this time.

Nena turned to see a woman approaching. The lady wore a dark dress, black under the light of the moon. On her head was a tall peineta, covered by a black lace mantilla that fell over her face. The fabric of her dress hissed as the lady moved. The closer she came, the louder the cicadas buzzed. The frogs in the irrigation ditch cruá cruáed, and the owls uu uued.

The woman stopped in front of Nena and lifted her veil. She had a long, oval face, and pale skin, dark eyes, her eyebrows plucked into two high, thin arcs. Lace creeped up from the top of her dress, covering her neck. A cameo held the collar closed at her throat. A black rebozo hugged her shoulders, and even in this heat, she was shivering, pulling the shawl around herself.

“Your name is Elena Eduviges Montoya?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve come to bring you home.”

“This is where I live,” Nena said, waving at the little house behind her.

“Madre Inocenta sent me to escort you to the convent.”

“Who?”

“Our abbess. The head of the aquelarre.”

A coven? But this woman had also said that this Madre Inocenta was the head of a convent. Which was it? One word had to do with God, the other word brought with it the darkness Nena knew and feared, a darkness she couldn’t seem to escape. Rushing blood throbbed in her ears, the noise that usually signaled the arrival of a vision, except that the vision seemed to be not in Nena’s head, but in her yard. Nena had always hoped that there were other people like her in the world, others who heard the hum, who understood the language of the ladybugs. She’d prayed for help. For all she knew, this help may have arrived in the form of this lady.

“How can nuns be brujas?”

“Tcht. Brujas. That’s not a word we use. We are servants of God.”

Now this was starting to sound heretical. Nena crossed herself. Was this woman La Llorona, the spirit who stole children away in the night? In the stories, La Llorona dressed in white, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t disguise herself, or that this costumed woman didn’t wish Nena harm. She shivered in fear.

“Why would Madre Inocenta want me?” Nena asked.

“If you’re like us, your visions will grow stronger. You won’t just faint, you’ll have fits, episodes that last for days. No doctor or priest will be able to alleviate your suffering. It’s lucky for you that we found you. With our help, you can learn to control La Vista instead of allowing it to destroy you.”

Nena’s eyes fixed on the beadwork on the woman’s dress, black and glittering in the pale light of the rising sun.

“Why aren’t you dressed like a nun?” Nena asked, suspicious.

“We are a cloistered sisterhood. To leave the convent, I had to dress like a lady of the world.”

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“You may call me Sister Benedicta de la Cruz.”

Nena bowed, she wasn’t sure why, although this was a rather grand name and seemed to suit this lady.

“Well, what are you waiting for, child? Come with me to the river,” Sister Benedicta said. It was an order, not a request. She did not dare defy the sister. And did she even want to?

Nena considered going into the house to get some shoes, to put on her trousers, but she might wake up her sisters, who would then scold Nena and prevent her from seeing what this woman wished to show her. The river was so close, Nena reasoned. She would be home long before anyone noticed she was gone.

The neighborhood was at its quietest, the time of night when the lights were out even at the big brick Mansion House, where the prostitutes lived and worked. She noticed then that all the streetlights were out. How strange.

Nena followed Sister Benedicta through the yard, and where there should have been a fence, there wasn’t anything but sandy soil and the plants of the desert. The sun was rising, the strengthening dawn light painting halos around the peaks of the mountains, the air cold. In the summer, temperatures dropped overnight, but it never grew this frigid. Odder still, Nena saw that all around her now was desert, the humps of creosote bushes and sotol stretching all the way to the Franklin Mountains. The houses and stores and cars of El Paso had disappeared. The railroad, the smelter, Fort Bliss, were all gone, the fences and border checkpoints gone. No barbed wire, just scrubby bushes and stands of cottonwood between plots of farmland, dug with little canals. The land now felt endless, open in a way Nena had never experienced before.

Nena’s curiosity kept her on the razor edge of fear. But she was a soldier at heart, and she knew how to be brave. When they reached the river, Nena encountered another surprise. The Rio Grande ran fast and full and loud. Nena had never seen the river like this before, and she should have been afraid, but the roar of the river soothed her. Whatever force existed that could bring water down from New Mexico so fast was something to be respected. Nena had asked for something to take her away from her life, and now it had.

She shivered in her nightgown, hugging her arms around herself. She really should have taken the time to change into proper clothes. Her nightgown was ruined, dark with grime. Olga and Luna would be so angry at her. They’d already used up their ration books for work clothes and baby dresses.

“We can’t have you going into town dressed like that. If anyone sees you, they’ll take you for a puta. Here,” Sister Benedicta said as she unwrapped the black rebozo from her shoulders and handed it to Nena. “Pull it over your head and hide your face.”

Nena wrapped the shawl tight, and they stood on the riverbank, watching a man on a ferry pole himself across the wide, rushing river toward them. While they waited, Nena had the sudden disappointing thought that she was dreaming, though she had never had such a vivid dream. There was no other way to explain what was happening. Usually thinking while dreaming made Nena wake up, but nothing happened, and Nena stayed in this strange place, awake.

Sister Benedicta handed the ferryman a coin, and he took them across, helping them up the muddy bank on the other side. Walking up a dirt road, they arrived at a pueblito, its narrow streets dotted with brown adobes. Some streets had cobblestones, but they were buried in layers of horse caca, broken shards of clay, the ends of carrots, and rotten onions. The stench of sewage hit Nena like someone had thrown a bag of it at her. She wrapped her rebozo tighter around her mouth and nose.

They had left in the night, but Nena saw that this town was now opening its eyes to the day. Servants bustled through the streets, carrying bread from the bakery, vegetables from the market. Nena followed Benedicta past the huts of the poor. These dwellings, made of woven sticks with thatched roofs, were even more humble than the house they lived in after Nena lost her family’s money at the horse races.

Sister Benedicta walked fast, her head high, her veil pulled down over her face. She didn’t seem bothered that her dress was sweeping up the dirt and everything else. The hem was caked with mud and straw and hair, like it had been sweeping the earth forever. An unwashed odor wafted off Sister Benedicta, a mix of mustiness and woodsmoke and old wool, manure, and worse. A horse and buggy pulled past them. There were no cars anywhere, no bicycles.

“Where are we?” Nena asked.

“El Paso del Norte.”

“When are we? I mean what’s the year?” Nena asked.

“The year of our Lord 1792,” Sister Benedicta said. “Why are you asking such foolish things?”

“I’m sorry, Sister,” Nena said, at a loss for words. She pinched herself, but she still did not wake up. 1792. If that was true, Nena was in New Spain, not modern Mexico. Nena knew now that she had done something impossible—she was no longer in her time, but deep in the past. Sister Benedicta was from this other time, and she hadn’t yet noticed that Nena had come from the future. When had Nena made the jump? When she’d walked to the pecan tree? Nena suspected that if she’d turned around for a last look, her house would have been gone like the rest of her El Paso.

Nena and Sister Benedicta passed the whitewashed adobe church, Nuestra Guadalupe del Paso, the same church Nena recognized from the Juárez of her own time. They crossed the square, with an outdoor market on one side and a row of little stores on the other. At the far edge of the square, they turned onto a narrow street with high adobe walls, and wooden gates shaded by graceful cottonwood trees.

A man on horseback approached, the horse glossy, so black it was almost blue. The man wore a linen shirt with a brown suede jacket, tight pants with gold buttons, a red sash around his waist. He had a thick mustache and dark eyes. Sister Benedicta stiffened, adjusting her veil to conceal her face. She pulled Nena to the side of the road and against a wall. Nena looked up at the man, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He raised his whip, clicking with his tongue, and the big horse danced and snorted, trotting into the distance.

“Who was that?” Nena asked.

“Don Emiliano. My brother. He would have been confounded to discover me outside the convent.”

At the end of the street, Sister Benedicta pulled on a rope hanging from a wall, clanging a bell. A huge wooden door swung open. A small, dark older woman in a simple homespun dress and a long braid bowed to Sister Benedicta. Nena followed Sister Benedicta into a room cut in two by a grate that reached to the ceiling. Sister Benedicta swept through the turnstile in the grate, whirling around on the other side to glare with impatience at Nena, who held back.

In Nena’s El Paso, there was no one to talk to about a world only she saw and heard and smelled. Sister Benedicta had promised that Nena could learn how to keep from fainting when her visions came to her. And if it was possible to so easily jump one direction in time, then it should be just as simple to jump back. Nena would return home soon enough. Olga and Luna could take care of their own babies for one day. Maybe they ought to see what it was like without Nena around. Maybe then her sisters would appreciate her more when she returned. Nena pushed through the turnstile.

Nena and Sister Benedicta walked down a short, dark hallway and entered a courtyard of hard-packed dirt. To their right was a vegetable garden, empty but for a few bolted cabbages, their stalks long and spindly. To the left stood a small building with a smoking chimney and a chicken coop. In the wall across the yard was a door. Walking through it, Nena was greeted by the chants of the nuns in a chapel. She detected the odor of tallow candles, which had made greasy streaks on the wall. At the end of the passage, Sister Benedicta unlocked a door with a key from a big iron ring she kept under her dress.

“Stay here,” she said, guiding Nena by the shoulder into a small room. Sister Benedicta turned around, left the room, and closed the door behind herself. Nena heard the cell door lock.