Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [59]
And speaking of witnesses, she thought, he’s seen all this. Seen it, breathed it. She rolled down the windows and her hair swarmed her head. All those days and nights since she’d left the farmhouse began to feel right suddenly, even righteous. Home for her could surely be here as much as back there. It was reshaping itself into a larger idea than she’d conceived before this moment. She wanted to find him. Said aloud, “I’m here.” As she drove up the final ridge along the western slope of Chimayó valley, then began her descent toward the village, Ariel sensed, spiritedly if wrongly, that she was about to realize this fresh, expectant hope.
The plaza of El Potrero was quiet, empty. El Santuario de Chimayó, humble in the morning sunlight, stood before her looking for all the world like a thing built by creatures from one of her childhood fairybooks, so phantasmagoric were its adobe towers and rounded mud walls. She’d not guessed wrong. This was precisely where she should be right now.
The sudden calm, the peacefulness of the place, brought the gravity of what she faced into focus. Thus assured, Ariel climbed out of her dusty car, with ledger and photograph like bell and candle in hand, and entered the santuario, passing under its modest zaguán and through the walled cemetery courtyard that fronted it. The darkness within the church was cool, dank, and smelled of many thousands of scented candles. Without quite knowing what she was doing, or what it might mean, Ariel tucked a dollar in the painted wooden box just inside the nave, took a votive candle and lit it using the matchbook that was also set there on the little table. Alone, she walked up the central aisle margined by wooden pews as if drawn, like an acolyte, toward the reredos with its painted images of Christ, Mary, the saints. She marveled at the radiant, untutored architecture in gilts and greens, reds and blacks, behind the altar rail. Pigeons cooed, echoing in the rafters, a familiar sound made mysterious by this holy room so far from the city that accompanied their song back east. Halfway down the aisle, she glanced up over her left shoulder and caught sight of where they lived, in a crawl space that gave onto a mullioned window whose glass was broken.
She stood breathing the heavy, drowningly rich scent of burned wax. This was, she thought, ancient air. Her knees buckled beneath the weight of some fine ecstasy.
Still alone in the hushed room, she came to. Finding herself on the hard floor, she realized she’d fainted or gone into some sort of fugue, or dream, or she didn’t know quite what, though the duration of it must have been brief, since everything around her seemed the same as it had been before. Kip’s ledger lay splayed beside her and looked like a fallen bird. Feeling dizzy but also, as on the road, alert beyond alertness, she gathered up the book and the guttering, smoking, but still burning candle and pulled herself onto a rugged wooden pew to collect herself.
Time passed. She climbed again to her feet and walked the rest of the short distance to the altar.
Unbelieving, she knelt at the altar rail and attempted, for a quick instant, a prayer. Mindful as ever she didn’t know how to pray, she asked simply, Help me. To her left was a low portal that led to another chamber. She ducked as she made her way through this passage into the sacristy. She’d never seen anything like it.
Hung with crutches and baby shoes, with rosaries and homemade placards of gratitude, with framed photographs of the sick who’d been healed, the sinful who’d been saved, the young who once were crippled or mute or deaf or blinded but now could walk, speak, hear, behold, this narrow, long room was a documentary shrine to belief. Gaudy, it was nevertheless blessed; brazen, it was subtly enchanted.
On her right was a small anteroom in whose center was a hole carved in the earthen floor,