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By Root 1016 0

had rounded up the townsfolk at gunpoint. They’d kicked the People, shoved them. The church doors were open, and the People trusted Christ, so they went in, thinking they had been offered refuge. The soldiers made strange jokes: “Praise Jesus,” one said. A mother at the far edge of the crowd could not control her screaming child. The little boy jumped and kicked. A soldier shouted, “Silencio!” But the boy would not cease his screaming. The soldier stepped forward and smashed the mother in the face with the butt of his rifle. She fell like dropped laundry, and the boy, suddenly silent, bent to her and poked at her still form.

Don Refugio said, “Captain? May I retrieve that child so he doesn’t get away?”

And he had been waved on, to collect the small victim. Don Refugio took the boy in his arms. He backed through the cactus hedge behind them, a solid wall of twenty-foot-high nopales, silently, never getting a thorn, and there he held the boy and watched as the soldiers slammed the doors and nailed them shut and the people within began crying out as they realized their fate and buckets of burning pitch were flung into the shattered windows and the cries rose to insane shrieks and frantic pounding as the 450 bodies within ignited.

He often told Tomás that Bácum had taught him one lesson: sinners were not the only ones fated to burn.

But mostly, Don Refugio talked to Tomás about hammers and horseshoes.

He came forward. “Muchacho,” he called. “Qué hay aquí?”

Tomás shrugged.

“Nada,” he said.

The maidens stood up, like the horses, hobbled by their neck chains, clinking and shuffling, looking at the ground. Don Refugio saw that each of the young women had filthy bandages on her left arm, matted and stuck to a stump. Jesucristo! He had heard of this. Scalps, ears, noses, hands. These were salted and shipped away in wooden crates, though nobody knew where they went. Some son of a dog in an army office opened a ledger and counted each arm and made a little red check. No doubt his handwriting was beautiful. Don Refugio spit. He cursed.

Tomás scurried after him when he trotted off.

“Go away.”

“Why?”

“Leave me.”

“Why?”

Don Refugio went in his shack and exited, dragging a rickety wooden chair along the ground. He carried a small red can.

“What’s in the can?”

“Go away.”

“What did I do to you, old man?”

“Go away now.”

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I am not mad at you.”

Don Refugio went to a scraggly old cottonwood and set the chair beneath it. Tomás dawdled, wondering what Don Refugio could possibly think he was doing. It was almost time to get to work. This was no time to sit beneath a tree.

“What are you doing?” he called.

“Nothing. Sitting. I’d like a cigar,” he said. “Do you have one?”

“I do.”

Tomás pulled one of the cavalrymen’s cigar butts out of his pocket.

“You shouldn’t steal,” Don Refugio said. “And you shouldn’t smoke. Toss it here.”

Tomás pitched it underhanded. It fell in the dirt, and Don Refugio rose from the chair, bent to it, looked at it, flicked off some dust. He wiped the wet end on his sleeve.

“Yori spit,” he said. He made a monkey face of distaste. Tomás smiled.

Don Refugio pried the cap off the red can and poured the kerosene over his head. He smelled sharply of juniper and fever. He put the cigar in his mouth. Pulled out a wooden match. He stared at Tomás, who was already starting to shout. “You, boy,” he said. “Don’t be like your fathers.” He struck the match and exploded in flame.

The heat knocked Tomás down. He sat up and stared as Don Refugio burned without moving, his hand held up and holding the burned match as it charred. The cottonwood caught on fire, its trunk blackening, the branches over Refugio’s head snapping and sparking. Startled locusts exploded in flame and flew from the tree in a halo of comets.

Tomás stood and screamed. But the roosters were crowing. The chickens and the turkeys and the ducks were making their morning racket. The dogs were barking, the burros were braying. The crows were squabbling. It took the People a long time to hear him. Inside the big house, the patr