And just as la Fe’s fate was not to marry Tom, the convenience store manager, but her very own cousin—whom she first met that arid day of her little sister’s funeral, a boy who kept pinching her little arms black and blue while she clung defenseless next to her grieving mother and who remained vivid in her memory—as far as Fe was concerned, Caridad’s heart’s fate was sealed, too. No matter how much la Caridad—strange and stoic and even holier-than-thou as she had become—refused to admit it.

8

What Appears to Be a Deviation of Our Story but Wherein, with Some Patience, the Reader Will Discover That There Is Always More Than the Eye Can See to Any Account

The sorrowful telling of Francisco’s demise takes as its point of departure an adventure (or what was seen by some people as a warning) that started in a small town far away, not scattered with tumbleweed but skirted by seaweed, known as Santa Cruz.

Now, neither the woman nor her companion in this account was Caridad’s Woman-on-the-wall in Chimayo, but with some patience (a virtue no one could ever have too much of) a few people actually made the connection in the end, like in one of those connect-the-dots games. It seems that these two Californian women would be thought of somehow as being responsible for Francisco’s end since who had asked them to come here in the first place? But this all depends on who is telling the story, and as far as anybody has been able to put it all together, it begins something like this:

Helena and Maria, although both born in Los Angeles, had met each other at a grass-roots organizers’ conference in Oakland. But their real friendship did not blossom until later, after each had done quite a bit of living and learning from that living. Finally, they came together and made their home, with their three cats, Artemis, Athena, and Xochitl, in a rented two-bedroom nestled in the redwoods just outside ese village called Santa Cruz. There they lived productive and peaceful lives, Maria as a tarot reader and social worker and Helena as an independent landscaper.

They had gone on that way being more or less happy until the summer when they decided to explore the land of Maria’s ancestors. Helena and Maria were the adventurous types so their plan was to make it a road trip, camping along the way, until they reached the ruins of the Anasazi, the mysterious ancient ancestors of the Zuñi and Hopi peoples, that they had both read about.