“SO WHERE _ IT GO?” she yelled, grabbing by his Pendleton collar with her scarred hands that good-for-nothing former foreman that all the girls there thought was so cute (but not nearly as cute as he thought he was) and who at that moment to Fe only had the face of a grim reaper with a goatee. “WHERE DID __ GO, PENDE, SON-__-A- …” She screamed again, “IF NOT IN__ME?”

And that’s when Fe, looking around suddenly, noticed it all for the first time and let go of the guy, who was just looking sorry at her, but who could say if he really was? The whole plant had been completely remodeled in the short time since she had been let go, down to the replaced sheetrock. And all the stations, not just the foreman’s, which used to be open to everybody and everything, were partitioned off. Nobody and nothing able to know what was going on around them no more. And everybody, meanwhile, was working in silence as usual.

12

Of the Hideous Crime of Francisco el Penitente, and His Pathetic Calls Heard Throughout the Countryside as His Body Dangled from a Piñon like a Crow-Picked Pear; and the End of Caridad and Her Beloved Emerald, Which We Nevertheless Will Refrain from Calling Tragic

“I don’t get it,” Loretta sighed, shaking her head and walking out of the kitchen. Francisco el Penitente, or Franky as she had always called him, did not look up from his breakfast of blue corn atole and a side dish of huevos and posole. She was not objecting to the food, which she had prepared herself. It was good and what her husband, Franky’s uncle, had had that morning. No, it was that Loretta caught Franky doing something real strange to his food that made her walk out.

Well, face it, she said to herself, putting on her gardening gloves and going out to do some work on the vegetable garden, Franky always was kind of strange; but mixing up ashes from the fireplace into his food was a new one for the record. That was too much. Still, she knew darn well what he was up to. But what could she say? She had married into that family over a quarter of a century before and knew well enough that it would do no good to laugh nor cry about what she saw the men in her husband’s family do in the name of God.

Francisco finished eating his tasteless ashen breakfast and went out to start on a bulto of San Isidro commissioned by a nearby rancher. He was the patron saint of farmers, and to not revere him could bring a farmer the worst punishment of all: bad neighbors. A farmer could survive droughts and bad crops, but not an ill-willed neighbor.