Читать книгу Now Silence - Tori Warner Shepard - Страница 12

Still devastated that Roosevelt would fire on ships carrying POWs, Nicasia awoke at dawn the next morning with a strong hunch that her prayers might have been answered; that God Victoriously Accomplished was hard at work. And she waited impatiently to hear it first hand from the Señora. This time she came with a small stack of empanadas made the traditional way, with lard, flour, suet and raisins. If necessary, she would lie, saying that the lard was just butter. Out of respect for the I AMers who weren’t supposed to eat meat, she tried not to use suet but nobody could get butter.

Voices, animated voices flowed out from Anissa’s front room. Nicasia paused, holding the bowl lightly in her hands as she squinted to see if Anissa had a visitor. She always brought food because Anissa was no cook.

Nicasia hesitated, trying not to breathe, as she listened and heard Anissa talking rapidly. “Á quien?” There was no one there. No one visible, and all she could pick out was Anissa herself clearly in a state of ecstasy or divine madness, one or the other. She was spinning and although it was confusing, Nicasia convinced herself that something astounding had indeed occurred and being good news, it had to be about Melo, so she quietly entered and paused out of respect.

She knew, because Anissa had told her, that saints would appear if you meditate, even the Virgin Mary might come, especially if you used the short cut—spinning. When she spun and grew dizzy, she could see the saints even more clearly. It focused the attention.

Nicasia still hesitated. Anissa was talking to herself and spinning with her arms flailing in a state of total jubilation. She spun with such concentration that she didn’t notice Nicasia’s presence, and she continued singing, exclaiming and spinning, just missing the stick furniture. She had explained it before to Nicasia as “Divine Possession” which was, as she said, a very good thing.

“ Señora? Puedo?” Nicasia didn’t want to disturb her, but it was clear that Anissa was blissful in her trance and was probably receiving messages from an Ascended Master somewhere out of sight. Wonderful news. What if it was something about her Melo, starving, twenty-three years old and still holding on to a thread of life?

“Por favor, dimè?” She pushed the empanadas forward, needing to be informed. It was too important not to.

“Of course, Nicasia, come in! The Purple Flame has come into my life. Our prayer is answered!” Anissa fell backward onto the daybed, clutching at her excited heart and kicking her legs. She was out of control. The news was rapturous enough to seize her with tremors.

Nicasia, filled with joy and desperate to thank St. Germain, did not know how the prayer had been answered. She tried not to seem selfish. “Señora?”

“I can’t believe it! I cannot believe how incredible Saint Germain in His Wisdom and Mercy is.” Anissa said. Then she stopped thrashing her legs and sat up to receive the dish of little pies.

“Thank you.” Her feet tapped a hurried dance. Her attention skirted over the small suet packages, for she still pulsed with electrifying Supernatural Energy.

“Señora, please?”

“Yes, Nicasia. It is astounding.”

“Melo mio?”

“No, Querida Nicasia, I am so sorry. My esposo, Russell Barclay, my rotten drunk husband. I wasn’t even his first wife.”

“He is coming home?” Nicasia had to ask, because Anissa rarely mentioned him. She had always presumed the worst—that mercifully he had not even survived the first day of the Death March. Early death was considered a blessing by Padre Sembrillo because the dead were now at peace, resting in Jesus’ bosom.

“No, not at all. Quite the wonderful and amazing opposite.”

“He died without pain then?”

“Right as rain.”

“I am so sorry,” Nicasia said, moving to embrace the grieving widow. “You didn’t tell me he was a POW.”

“Russell? Oh my god, he wasn’t a POW, he was a goddamned drunk, and he drank alcohol, ate meat and kept a whore. Even the dirty Nips would have turned their backs on him.”

“It is bad to speak of the dead in this way,” the probable widow of a war hero said, the stricken mother of a lost son. She still wore her son Franque’s dog tags that clinked together with her other medals of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Christopher as she held the bowl with the empanadas out, moving them to the table near the wood-burning cook stove.

“It’s okay. Saint Germain flattened him. You remember when I prayed; we prayed together, you and I, just yesterday? I was about to sign his divorce papers, hoping never to see him again in my life when, I can’t believe this, he died just like that!” She snapped her fingers and pinched herself for luck. “I’m giving whatever I get out of him to Edna Ballard for our Saint Germain Foundation in Chicago.”

“You have a big house in Chicago, no?”

“Edna Ballard said to lock it up and walk away. It wasn’t that easy, but that’s what I did.”

Anissa understood that Nicasia could never have done such a thing. She was just the latest in a succession of Garcias since the late 1600s to have been born and still be living in their familial adobe. If she gave it up and walked away, she would have been a lonely exile, walking the riverbanks, weeping like La Llorona the legendary witch, screaming for her lost children. Like her men, she would be ragged skin, an empty form, a draft animal, servant to inhumane masters. Her house with the tomato-colored geraniums in the south window was too important to leave. The heritage of it alone was enough to bring Melo home.

How often had Anissa explained how it happened that Edna Ballard had been called by her Saints to lead the I AM followers from Chicago to live out the war among these fixed, rooted people? Edna Ballard and her husband Guy were the founders of The I AM Presence Movement. They were avatars calling down the Ascended Masters to oversee the unfolding of the coming Golden Age. Anissa, skeptical, leery and educated, had joined them in Chicago because to her mind, at least, they made some sense in a brutal world gone mad with destruction. The Purple Sword was the logical solution to the vicious return of the world war cycle.

She showed her devotion by giving up meat in that city of abattoirs, going on the wagon and refusing Russell sex because he was undeserving. Phyllis was not his first dalliance and in fact, there was a girl-child somewhere, the daughter of someone’s French nanny. Of the three mortifications, abstinence was the most appropriate.

“You did not love your husband, even in the beginning?”

“Of course, I did. I was mad for him in the beginning. I was too young to see that he was a lady’s man, a man who could not keep his pants buttoned, ever.”

“Was he in the army, pues?”

“God no, they wouldn’t even have him, considering what he’d done to his hand. So clumsy he shot off his thumb. An accident years back. I mean, he was Four-F long years before Pearl Harbor happened. And he was devastatingly attractive to women, that was the problem.”

Nicasia let her talk.

“You know how it is with men who drink. It traps them. His day has passed and my bet is that his mistress, a chippie named Phyllis, was about to dump him as well.”

“A chippie?”

“Una puta.”

“Saint Germain let her live?”

“She was not on the motorcycle with him. He died alone. Too bad he didn’t take a Japanese with him in the name of freedom and bloodshed. No, Saint Germain didn’t even rid the world of the whore, Phyllis. We might as well keep this just between us. I don’t want people to think I’m a mean person, even though I am right. Just say that he’s part of the war dead.”

On the following day, the newspaper carried a posed photo of Roosevelt seated at his desk wearing his same toothy smile. Nicasia was outside when she saw Anissa come out and bend down for the paper lying on the wooden planks of her portale. Although it was not in the local New Mexican, the news that Russell L. Barclay had gone to his great reward bounced door-to-door throughout the town. That Anissa’s husband had died was met with disbelief because no one believed that she had ever been married. She was so difficult. And she could not even cook.