On the other hand, the crows who swooped down to rescue an occasional lit cigarette butt Francisco had flung out in the distance and flew up to perch on the telephone wires to smoke were most unwelcomed, since they above all threatened to give his hideout away. Anyone looking up at a row of crows puffing away at cigarette butts would only be inclined to look down to see who was supplying them.

However, on one afternoon Francisco had the unquestionable and fortuitous sign that he was where he should be behind the thorny shrubs, sagehorn, and palo verde, when he witnessed a pair of hummingbirds making their nest just over the ledge above Caridad’s door; and hummingbirds, as everyone knows—unlike those scoundrel hustling crows that have no redeeming value—are an omen of true love.

That evening he went home, that is, to his tío Pedro’s ranch, in ecstasy, and as he mixed ashes into his pork stew, causing Loretta to grit her teeth and his uncle to fix his gaze into his own bowl, so distressed was he over his young penitente brother’s obsession with dulling his sensory perceptions, he recited aloud the Hail Mary. The agitating part being that he didn’t just say “Hail Mary,” but “HAIL Mary, FULL of grace,” like that, like he wanted to break out in a gospel song or something, or like there was a private joke going on there between himself and Whomever, which really annoyed Loretta until she finally slammed the salt shaker down on the table and snapped Francisco el Penitente out of it.

“Where are you off to?” Pedro asked Francisco one evening shortly after that. Francisco had not been out anywhere after sunset since he had moved in. Well, let’s face it, he had moved in. He only had one set of clothes, which were on him, of course: black jeans, black shirt, black belt, black boots, black hat, black coat, black everything in other words, not because he was a poet or trying to be stylish, neither. It was just in his long-ago Andalusian blood. His brother, James, the off-and-on jailbird, had always dressed that way, too. So had Pedro’s father, come to think of it.

And besides his clothes he brought his few books, The Soul’s Journey into God, which he had gotten out of the public library up north in the village of Las Vegas a few months ago and was never going to return, not because he was a thief but because he could not stop reading it over and over, a very fragile copy of Cartilla y doctrina espiritual para la crianza y educatión de los novicios que toman el hábito en la orden de N.P.S. Francisco, which had belonged to his great-grandfather, original founder of his morada, and a copy of Legends and Writings of Saint Clare of Assisi that had belonged to his mother’s sister, Sister Clara of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. His tía, Sister Clara, was still alive but had taken a lifetime vow of silence so he had never kept in touch with her. The only time he had ever seen her was at his mother’s funeral, which was when she had given him the book, just slipped it to him without saying nothing, of course.