Home > All the Crooked Saints(9)

All the Crooked Saints(9)
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

The telescope was a parabolic radio telescope, sixty feet wide and about eighty feet tall, a scooped dish of metal rods pointed hopefully at the sky. Its skeletal shadow moved around its base like a giant sundial. With the cooperation of some of the more tax-savvy Sorias, the telescope had been constructed during the fifties—ostensibly to monitor the weather but practically to spy on the Russians—and had been decommissioned after only one use. The head engineer on the project would not report on what his team had picked up with the tracker, only that everyone else would sleep better at night having not seen it. Later, everyone on the team quietly moved to colder climates in distant countries.

Beatriz now used it as a place to think. Sometimes she climbed the ladder forty feet into the air and observed Bicho Raro from the metal mesh platform. And sometimes she removed her shoes and climbed past even that, feet pressed into metal bars and legs hooked over supports on the back side of the dish, sometimes dangling, sometimes clinging, until she managed to heave herself over the rim of the dish and into it. Then she would lie inside the metallic nest of the dish and stare up at the sky, imagining herself—her mind, that is, the important part of herself—being projected as far up into the sky as she could see. She would hold her thoughts up there for hours at a time, breathing them back into the altitude if they started to drift down, and then, finally, she would turn those distant thoughts back down to Bicho Raro and consider her home from that great height instead. Things came into better perspective, she felt, when viewed from one thousand feet.

Sometimes, Daniel would join her, the only other person Beatriz had found so far who she could share her sanctuary with. Although they were very different, they shared one important trait: They did not try to change other people and rarely judged them unless the other person’s values directly influenced their lives. For Daniel, this meant that he had, before his incident with the painting, hung out with young men whom others found to be of dubious character. For Beatriz, this meant that she had often frustrated Judith by refusing to take sides in moral discussions or disagreements.

This trait also made Daniel and Beatriz good conversation partners. A debate without a goal of philosophical interference can continue endlessly without drama. One of their earliest radio dish discussions had centered around who could receive a miracle. A pilgrim had just abandoned a fractious stallion at Bicho Raro, and the horse’s famously ill temperament was the topic of every Soria conversation. Beatriz and Daniel, then ten and twelve, had looked down into the pasture from that great height and speculated upon whether they, as Sorias, could visit their miracle upon an animal.

Daniel argued that a horse’s lack of humanity presented an insurmountable problem for the second miracle. Even if the Saint could manifest its darkness, surely the horse lacked the moral certainty to come to an understanding of how to banish it. The second miracle would never occur, and the horse would therefore live out its days plagued by the same darkness that had previously lived inside it, now made worse by being given concrete form.

Beatriz agreed that the horse’s lack of humanity was indeed the obstacle, but she believed that the Saint wouldn’t be able to perform even the first miracle. Humanity, she maintained, was necessary for darkness to exist. Without an understanding of the concept of darkness, morality, or other existential subjects, the unpleasantness inside the individual could not be darkness but rather simply nature, and thus could not be cured with a miracle, or perhaps at all.

“So that horse will be terrible forever?” Daniel had asked.

“I do not think the darkness is about being ‘terrible.’ ” It had taken slightly longer for ten-year-old Beatriz to find the words that she needed. She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words. There were often very long pauses as she strove for a perfect translation. “I think the darkness is about shame.”

Daniel had contemplated the pilgrims he had already seen in his twelve years. “I think you’re right.”

“We were nearly in agreement in the beginning,” Beatriz had added, in order to be a gracious winner.

Daniel had grinned. “Nearly.”

On the day after Tony’s miracle, Beatriz was alone as she climbed to the platform above the layer of dark dust. Then, as the sun slowly began to warm her cold blood into movement, she watched her home come to life. She could see most of it from her perch, as Bicho Raro occupied a fairly small footprint. There was a dusty, bare parking area at its heart. Buildings gathered around this like hands around a fire. Only a dozen or so were still standing: three houses, three barns, her father Francisco’s greenhouse, her aunt Rosa’s camper, three sheds, the Shrine. The dirt drive led through these, past a cistern, and then out to Highway 160, the only paved road for miles. Both the drive and the highway were barely better than the surrounding scrub, which one could drive through, too, if your vehicle was eager. One might even end up doing it even with an uneager vehicle if the night was thick enough, because there was not a lot of difference between the cracked asphalt and the dusty expanse it cut through. It was easy to lose your way without headlights (which is true of a lot of life).

Surrounding all of this was the high desert that Pete had fallen in love with, and that had fallen in love with him. It was broken only by scurfy tamarisk and sage and near-invisible twists of barbed wire until it got to the mountains.

Beatriz observed it all from her perch, paying less attention to the nature and more attention to the small humans moving below her. She did not particularly enjoy physical labor, but she found it satisfying to watch other people engaged in it. She liked to watch the things they did that were unnecessary. It is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around the edges of them that reveal who they are.

For instance, from the dish’s platform, she could see her second cousin Luis repairing some barbed wire that the cows had run through during the last big thunderstorm. He was cutting out some sections and restretching others. Every so often, however, he would move his fingers in the air and she would know that he was practicing his guitar in his mind. She could also see Nana working in the tomatoes behind her house. She was on her ancient hands and knees, weeding, but twice Beatriz saw her sit back on her rump and place a raw, fresh tomato in her mouth to savor. Beatriz also saw her aunt Rosa (Joaquin’s mother) carrying peppers and the baby Lidia back to her home for cooking—the peppers, not the baby. Rosa’s steps were slowed by pausing to sing and plant kisses into the top of Lidia’s head; Beatriz knew from experience that this ratio increased throughout the course of the day until no work got done and only kisses were given.

A tremolo cry pulled Beatriz’s attention from the ground to the sky just above her. Squinting against the brightness, she discovered that several owls had gathered on the rim above her head, their talons making familiar scratching sounds against the metal. The group was made up of multiple species: two barn owls, a barred owl, and a small owl of a kind Beatriz had not seen before. Most people, in fact, had not seen this kind of owl before, as it was the rare buff-fronted owl, a native of distant Peru. Because of how surely the miracles appealed to owls, Beatriz, like all the Sorias, was used to their presence, although, unlike most of the other Sorias, she had spent many long hours wondering if the owls’ attraction to miracles was beneficial or harmful. There was, after all, a large difference between the way flowers drew hummingbirds and the way artificial light compelled moths.

A banded feather drifted down. Beatriz snatched for it, but the action of snatching displaced both air and feather, and it continued its slow descent to the ground below.

“Why are you still here?” she whistled in her invented language.

The owls didn’t startle at her voice. Instead, they continued to stare at her in their wide-open way. The buff-fronted owl that had come so far turned its head on one side to better study her. She was not sure that they were the same owls from the night before after all, though if that was true, she wasn’t sure what they were being attracted to.

“No darkness here,” she whistled. “No miracles, anyway.”

Their gazes continued to be so purposeful that she looked back to the ground to see if another pilgrim had arrived without her knowing. But the only person she saw was Michael, Rosa’s husband, thrusting a shovel into a patch of dirt. For as long as Beatriz had known him, he had done nothing but work or sleep. To understand Michael, you only had to understand the project at hand, which in this case was the log lodge Beatriz had mentioned the night before. Currently, the lodge was only four pieces of wood sunk into the ground. It was merely the promise of a building, and had grown no further not because of Michael’s unwillingness to do the work but rather because it was a point of contention, questioned at every stage. Judith was not the only one who argued that it didn’t need to be built.

   
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