He remembered because doña Felicia and he had been there in front of the church. Doña Felicia had heard of the child’s tragedy, and while she did not know the family personally, it was her custom to join with the mourners of her community. And when little Franky, who was really not that little by then, saw the child fly up to the church roof, man! What he wouldn’t have given to know the secret of that trick! To the boy it was a trick, the way all children view the magical, which to them falls within the realm of possibility.

Francisco ignored his tío’s wife in the garden pampering her calabasas, which were sure to win her first prize again at the state fair because no one in the whole state grew calabasas as big and as tasty and rich in color as Loretta’s, and furthermore, without any kind of pesticides. (To say that Loretta and three of her children posed sitting on top of her grand-prize-winning calabasa last year would tell it all. No, it wasn’t true what the envious calabasa contestants said about Loretta’s gardening methods: “She injects them with Miracle-Gro, judge!” “She has a brujo come and do a ritual on her garden, judge! No normal calabasa could get that big!” They were very wrong, these poor excuses for gardeners and farmers, for Loretta’s green thumb secret was as old as agriculture itself but had been forgotten so long that anyone knowing it would have suspected witchery, and that was that Loretta planted and harvested according to the moon’s cycles, not the sun’s. But how Loretta came upon this ancient wisdom is another secret, and yet another story.)

Francisco el Penitente went to his favorite place to work beneath an old cedar, where, while he meditated on the saving of his soul—repeating throughout the day the sign of the cross, the Credo, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Salve Regina, committing to memory the fourteen articles of the faith, and the commandments of God, reciting the list of the mortal and venial sins, the cardinal virtues, the works of mercy, and the powers of the soul and its enemies, namely, the world, the devil who lurked behind each shrub and tree and the treacherous flesh—he soothed himself with the scent of cedar and kept out of the scorching sun.

And yet he remained mortally contemptible. Who had told him that he deserved relief from the sun or to entice his lustful nostrils with the scent of cedar? Ah, ese pobre Franky of such human frailty had a long way to go before he could dare be so vain as to imitate even imperfectly the life of the saint for whom he was named.