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By Root 1545 0

a pretty long performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays—he counted more people onstage than in the audience—they kissed in the parking lot, then kissed again the next night and the next. Mary telephoned her mother to let her know she was still in Denver and all was well. She couldn’t bear to hear the tearful pleas that she come home and so hung up, feeling for all the world like some thankless monster, but promising herself never to call again. Marcos’s parents slowly became surrogates, flesh-and-blood variations on her imagined ideal of what parents might be in a perfect Mary world. Carl’s gruff taciturnity. Sarah’s ease with anyone and everything. Even the dogs sleeping on the portal, the doves in their cages, the horses in their pastures, seemed faultless. Rancho Pajarito carried all the weight of what home might have meant, had fate launched a kinder stork on the day of her birth.

And Marcos, the Marcos of this third encounter with Francisca de Peña, took Franny on a midnight ramble along Rio Nambé to show her a thing he used to do when he was a kid. Hand in hand they walked toward Conchas to see if the vatos were partying. That they weren’t didn’t bother her. She liked to be here with him. To feel her life being lived near his.

—Oh well, he said. —Probably isn’t the kind of thing I should be admitting I used to do, anyhow. Not what somebody from Princeton would understand.

—I’m sure it was fun back then.

—Lonely rural kind of fun.

Under heavy starlight, not talking further, straying back to the house along the bank path, their thoughts wandering, they came to the horse gate, and Marcos opened it as he’d opened it a thousand times already in his life, by rote, his thoughts concentrated on the palm of his hand warmed by hers. Gate metal scraped against the earth and the chain clanged. The flume behind them was running high and the moon was just the finest sliver of white where it sat on the saddle ridge near Capulin. The aluminum latch chimed its colloquial hollow note into the cool night. Mary sensed a sudden change in Marcos and asked what was wrong. He was staring into the lower meadow.

Francisca de Peña had drifted into the field where she lay curled like a magpie nest made of long and waning sparks, or some soiled halo unevenly afloat. This light awakened and uncoiled to disclose itself and thus became more a woman than that spherical luster very near to where Marcos and Franny stood. Francisca arose to what complete luminosity and elevation were left her and spoke her own name. She uttered de Peña, herself calling out to herselves.

Marcos and Franny stood silent.

She spoke other names—saying, as her mother had so often said, Esparaván—and moved slowly closer. Moved slowly because she found that, at least by her impression, she had no other choice than to thread herself ponderous through the Nambé air. Esparaván? Gavilán?

Marcos asked Franny, —Are you seeing this?

She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

Francisca neared them and could almost taste their fear.

—Franny? Do you see this?

Together they stood as Francisca hesitated midfield. She gazed at that whisper of moon, and she admired her familiar mountains and this oddly familiar boy. And as Marcos and his unknown girl saw her fully forming, unfurling like a chrysanthemum of mist, looking much as she had when she was as alive as anyone who ever walked these lands—she who presented herself to them as a kind of soft photographic negative, clearly and with all the dignity of life—Francisca de Peña heard Franny finally say to Marcos, —Yes. Yes, I do.

Part II

Critical Mass

Chimayó, New York, Gallup, Tularosa

to Nambé

1944–1996

HERE SAT A MAN whose worn leather jacket was the same shade as his drawn, haggard face. Holding a midnight-blue cap in spidery hands, he shifted his frail frame against a ditchside weeping willow whose budding leaves whispered on their swaying fronds. His wide-set eyes were jaundiced yet full of life. His dusty shoes might have been mistaken for stones had they not been attached to his long legs. It was Good Friday,