Sra. Donalda Rivera was dead

            I am the story I am the Priest.  I am the God.  I have planted the scared Morning Glories and have waited for the first frost to harvest the seeds.  I have seen other worlds and other times, things you could not even describe, things that whisper to me from the dark and from beyond the veil.  For me, Juan Dominguez Trujillo, stepping up to the pulpit of the Our Lady of Heaven Church of Dona Ana, New Mexico, the truth was that there is no truth.  But I couldn’t tell anyone, here the family in the front row, or the two old men he used as chauffeurs of the dead on such occasions.  They all expected a sermon that would raise the dead to Heaven,that would paint the insides of their eyes for the rest of their lives on earth.  They expected me to keep them alive.  I took another cap of Psilocybin and a 5 mg. Valium as I walked to the Alter.

            Senora Donalda Rivera lived in a green stucco house where she grew melons and tomatoes in the hot Deming summer.  Living out past the city, going south to the City of Rocks State Park, Donalda also had goats eating from the parcel of alfalfa that abutted her land where Farm Road 20B intersected the unnamed road that ran ahead to the dry hills.  Out there was range land, where Red Herefords roamed in the dusty triangle cut by the southern pacific railroad. 

            In the final thirty years of her life, Donalda had maintained the bit of land her mother willed to her.  Before her husband George died, together they farmed eight acres of corn and green chile.  After George died, she sold most of the land to fix the old house, and to drill a new well for water.  Intending to stay, she had the roof fitted with new, galvanized tin, and had all of the windows replaced.  The green stucco flowed over the old adobe like a spring blanket of grass. 

            When Donalda died, the land was deep in drought.  Down past Las Cruces, the Rio Grande wasn’t even running, and all the farmers talked about whether the conservancy district would release any water, at all, from the thinning, dust-startled reservoirs in Central New Mexico.  

            The men who dug Donalda’s grave were having a hard time cutting into the hard red clay lying beneath a foot of dusty, rocky topsoil that was the Garden of Memories Memorial Garden.  Out here, in the valley, what was left of a prehistoric sea held the only water, some thirty miles distant.  And they had not opened the gates to acequias to flood the fields and grow the green chiles and melons that sustained the land and its people.  One of these, Juan “Itchy” Nevarez, thought seriously about how thirsty he’d become in all this weather, through all the digging.  It occurred to him then that he needed help in the worst way, and water wouldn’t really soothe him.

            It was a half-mile walk down the main irrigation canal and across several fields to the small adobe and wood church that had been built in 1923.  I was out in my yard, with a black rubber hose watering my morning glories: blues and purples. Some pink and white blooms. Dying in the late September light.  Many drying seed pods.   I could see that one of the gravediggers had walked across an open field.  It was Itchy Nevarez and he held a small red box that he’d found.  As he walked over I remembered the box.  Brother Ed had buried it some 20 years ago. Back then, Ed found a bundle of letters that Donalda had thrown in the trash: Ed was a bit of a scavenger, but anyway the letters inside were earth shaking.  He was never sure if it was a good or bad find.  At first he thought it to be the work of the devil, so he buried the bundle in an old Swisher Sweets box out past the cemetery where rattlers lived along the road in heavy brush.  I called Itchy over.  He could barely hold the box, which was covered in clay, dirt, and underneath all of that filth, duct tape.  In the distance, I could see that Sr. Rivera’s family was starting to arrive.  There were big rain clouds to the south. 

            Before I say Mass, before I bless the dead and speak of the dead, I take a good look at my self.  At 55, I am withered and thin, having lost my chubby youthfulness to disease. It’s not that I’m not fit for my age—heart and lungs are good, I eat well from the garden and from the local butcher I get the best meat.  Rather, I drift in and out of a crippling neurological syndrome that causes seizures and wastes my muscle tissue.  In ten years Itchy might be burying me.  He’s my cousin and loves me the way we all do here.   But he is tired and old like me, and has forgotten or given up on the Great One God who should rule this pasture but does not, and will never.

            I remember reading a story by the Mexican writer Tomás Rivera.  In that story, a kid waited all night for the devil to show up, and he never did.  This non-appearance ended any semblance of faith or fear the child in the story might have had.  So I shower, shave, shampoo my hair, and then meditate naked on my bedroom floor for 20 minutes.  I near the planet Jupiter.  Then, I dress slowly, smoking a cigarette or two.  Finally, out of the Sacristy I tumble, two 15-year old alter kids looking at me like I’m stoned, which I am. A glass of wine, another Valium, and some good ol’ Psilocybin to cut the tension back a bit. 

            At Mass, we spend some time on the Gospel of John.  I then speak of Donalda’s sacrifices for the church (she was the Rectory secretary for years).  Her brother, Trinidad, speaks, and her nieces all cry in unison.  There are white flowers everywhere. 

            You see, god died for me the minute that Brother Ed brought that box of letters into the house.  Who knows who they’re written to, where the responses came from.  That’s the problem.  He had it in his office for a week and didn’t sleep as he read over 300 letters.  He buried it and died two days later.  At night I would dream that he would speak to me, tell me who would die, when and where; he would show me vistas of other realms beyond the veil, he would speak of disaster and death, of cycles billions of years old.  So of course, I am insane too.  Even during the night, when I drug myself into oblivion.  So I cannot dream. So I cannot hear.

*          *          *

            As Mass wound toward Communion, I could hear Ed calling me.  Itchy had left the box of in my office after he asked if I wanted to take a look afterward.  It sang and sang and sang to me as I prepped for Communion. I suddenly blurted a prayer for Donalda as I handed out Hosts.  One of the Alter girls fainted.

Donalda’s whole family burst into a believable and absolute grief, cries and howls of anguish echoing outside into the parking lot.  There was no silence.  Mass could not go on, but it did.  We shook hands, we read again from Mark and prayed for our Bishops and the Pope. Everyone was in black.  As the casket was carried to the waiting limo, I found myself in my office digging through the letters, reading here and there.  This is what they communicated:  there was no Donalda Rivera and there was no little Rectory or Church or graveyard in the desert. What we lived was a dream of an elderly and forgetful god, mere reflection of a greater reality.  That there were billions of star systems teeming with life.  That demons and gods and people from other places interacted freely on our Earth.  There were only cycles of expansion and retraction, forever and ever.  God was the Cosmos surrounding us.  We were not made in his image but from stardust so that He may see through Us.  Our bodies were mostly empty space and electricity.  Yet, from the window I saw Itchy and Donalda’s son Richie carrying the coffin out.  I saw the sunshine on my flowers and on my tomato garden. I watched a jet plane in the long distance flying toward the city.

            Being the work of the devil.  Being.  The work.  A pile of letters that filled and dulled my brain like an opiate:  crisp, dried out, yellowing somehow hot to the touch. I’d found myself in a garden.  I didn’t want to be there, in a garden where we grew food.  For ourselves.  To feed the poor braceros who came by because they saw we had a church here, a mission.  I walked out of the building.  I’d be riding with the family to The Hatch Valley Memorial Gardens.  I took the box of letters with me, intending to toss it into Donalda’s grave at the end of the day.

*          *          *

            Three months after the funeral, I hadn’t heard from Ed at all.  No voices, no songs, no ultimate tranmissions concerning the fate of humanity.  I gave Mass rarely though, letting the new guy from Africa have a go at it.  The congregation seemed to enjoy his militant evangelism, his sweet voice, they way he carried himself.  I read and slept most of time, dreaming frequently of large cities and older, grander times, filled Cathedrals and small town parishes.  The invitations to dinner.  The glimpses at family life.  The devoted Alter kids who didn’t know what I knew: that god was dead and that faith was some way of getting by, that there was something else, perhaps quite darker, that ruled us.  Or perhaps we were alone in a vastness that grew larger and farther away with every passing second.  Sitting up on the wall to preach to some Braceros one day when I was eating my lunch among the poor at a small soup kitchen, outside with the late summer sun blazing, the desert white and quiet, when I started by talking loudly about the sun, how it fed us all with its rays, lit our hard work, glorified our days and graced our families.  “Don’t you mean God, padre,” one of the workers asked, incensed and confused.  I told him to meet me that night way after the sun went down in the parking lot of the San Albino Basilica in Mesilla. 

            From my little house in the Hatch Valley it’s about a forty minute drive to Mesilla, a colonial town with a Spanish Plaza and adobe buildings.  A southern version of Old Town, Albuquerque, or of Taos, way up north.

The San Albino Basilica is a church dedicated to farmers, to the blessing of the dry land and the fertile river valleys of southern New Mexico and West Texas.  As usual, it stands at one end of the plaza, and faces the circular plaza itself, which contains a bandstand and several benches, and some old refurbished cannons from the Mexican War.  There’s a lot of good bars and restaurants in Mesilla; Art Fountain, my godfather, ran one for years.  This worker, David, showed up right after work.  He was an electrician with kids and a wife in Imperial, Califas, and they’d come from Puebla when they themselves were kids.  He wore a sliver cross and before he talked to me, insisted on touring the Basilica, looking into each confessional, sitting in front of the hundreds of burning candles lit for the dead.  Under my feet the Earth turned and neither of us could feel this.  Above us, satellites swung in geosynchronous orbits, transmitting news, telephone calls, secret data, lives.

I suffered dreams of a world gone mad.  I knew it well.  We walked behind the Basilica and I asked David to consider the stars, which were blazing in the 2am night as we smoked cigarettes and drank diet coke.  I lost my self in sorrow, I told him.  I had lost myself in the sky, in a bundle of letters my friend Father Ed had found in Donalda’ s house a long time ago.  I reminded him of my religious training, how I knew that the Buddha himself knew that to attach oneself to the past meant only sadness, and to attach oneself too much to the future meant a life of anxiety.  I told him of my anxiety, my loss of faith.  That I would be so moved by letters written more than 40 years ago scared him, I think.  He shook his head and said, “Father, I beat my dog and my eight year old son when I get too drunk.  I’m fucking a rich gringa in Cruces and I feel like shit about everything.  My wife just leaves me tv dinners in the toaster oven and talks to her fucking comadres all night on the phone, and she smokes like a chimney.  I’m drinking a six pack a day, bro.  What can you or God do about that?”

            After reading each letter, about five a night, after about six months I was exhausted emotionally and mentally.  I had convinced my neurologist to up my Benzos and I’d slowed down on the mushrooms.  I smoked a lot though, and had a card from the state, signed by Dr. Robert herself, that allowed me access to Medical Marijuana.  A long, tall, blond, leather-skinned gringo hippy friend of my brother’s would stop by the Rectory every two weeks, in her nice new blue Range Rover.  We’d do business.  She was from Califas and had a regular route.  It was all legal now.  She loved my green chile and melons.  Some days, David would come by and talk briefly.  We’d all read from John and Luke, but that’s all.  He left back to Imperial the next winter.  Before he left, he told me he’d shared what I told him with Father Mateus, from Angola.  Mateus had just smiled and told David that I was just an old man who lived in my dreams now.  As for the letters, they were the devil’s work, or a best, the writings of a mad woman.  David had insisted though, so he asked me.  “Where did they come from?  Who wrote those letters to Donalda’s mother, and what do you think she wrote back?  Since I had spent years reading and interpreting this one woman’s letters, and her commentaries on said letters, I had a lot to say.

            The green chile stew was excellent that day.  I’d added just enough comino and pepper to it, and the potatoes and pork loin chunks were nice and soft.  The stock was smooth and not greasy.  The chile floated everywhere in the pot.  I reached over to my desk, and produced to David a Swisher Sweet box.  Stuffed with letters and typed pages folded neatly in half, hundreds of them.  And another box that Ed had hidden in the walls of the Rectory office, a box the size of a small suitcase.  I don’t to whom she was writing.  I have no idea wrote her these letters, some with elaborate diagrams, equations, and drawings.  Unbelievable stuff.  A sort of theosophical, metaphysical and technical history of a world just like ours, but not ours.  “You know, I said,” this ain’t go nothing to do with you are.  You’re bitter, and filled with hate.  You hate the white man and his world, his fast food restaurants, his piety, his way of life.  That’s why you’re so fucked up.  And you try to conquer him by fucking his women.  Shit.  I haven’t had pussy since I was 17.  You need to be a man, live in peace, stop drinking, which is a symbol of your hatred and inner anger.  These letters got nothing to do with you, how your beat your son because he’s really your cousin’s son, and the poor dog is just a poor dog that god loves too.”   David handed the letter back to me, a four-pager dated March 28, 1931.  It was number 131 in my catalogue, and dealt with multiple worlds and universes.  It had neat, well-drawn pictures and math I could only partially understand.  Signed, as usual, by “Archie, your Friend.”  A postmark the same on all 592 letters:  a small farm town outside of Chicago, Illinois, Leaf River.   David walked quickly from my office.   I could hear him vomit in the Rectory restroom.  I could hear him howl.  I heard breaking glass and he stormed out, looking at me in a sad, inexplicable wise way I could never duplicate.  In the restroom, he left a loaded .45 and a broken fifth of Jim Beam.  I never saw him or his family again.

            I’m growing Morning Glories this year.  I told you that, right?  Well I do slip a bit on all those Benzos and the wacky tabacky.  Mostly stopped cigarettes, but yeah, you can tell I’m losing fat and muscle, even though I eat like a teenager.  I can still play ball for about 20 minutes, though, and the kids appreciate that.  Still have a great outside shot.  Dogs, all loveable, come and go in my life.  Mateus has taken over most of the Litergical duties.  I still do confessions, and I still work with the poor two days a week now, cooking in the kitchen at Our Lady of Hope Soup Kitchen, in the student neighborhood by the Agricultural college, some 20 miles away.  I love the drive through the desert and the long view of the deep stars when I return to the desert Rectory late at night.  I stop and take a small exit before the Hatch cutoff that leads me into nowhere, in the middle of the dark, where the coyotes, their prey, the narcos and traffickers haunt the landscape.  Still, I am drawn to the silent stars where there is no light, no cities to confuse the darkness, no human breath for miles.  Sometimes I see a cow standing asleep on BLM land, and I drive my old car out on a dirt road to where there are long salt flats under the Sierra Oscuro.  I lie in the sand and watch the Milky Way, I gaze and meditate.  I think of Donalda’s mother, what Donalda knew, what I now know.  I think about how I walked from her grave, wiping my hands of dirt, looking at nothing in particular. 

            I am the story I am the Priest.  I am the God.  I have planted the scared Morning Glories and have waited for the first frost to harvest the seeds.  I have seen other worlds and other times, things you could not even describe, things that whisper to me from the dark and from beyond the veil.  For me, Juan Dominguez Trujillo, stepping up to the pulpit of the Our Lady of Heaven Church of Dona Ana, New Mexico, the truth was that there is no truth.  But I couldn’t tell anyone, here the family in the front row, or the two old men he used as chauffeurs of the dead on such occasions.  They all expected a sermon that would raise the dead to Heaven,that would paint the insides of their eyes for the rest of their lives on earth.  They expected me to keep them alive.  I took another cap of Psilocybin and a 5 mg. Valium as I walked to the Alter.

            Senora Donalda Rivera lived in a green stucco house where she grew melons and tomatoes in the hot Deming summer.  Living out past the city, going south to the City of Rocks State Park, Donalda also had goats eating from the parcel of alfalfa that abutted her land where Farm Road 20B intersected the unnamed road that ran ahead to the dry hills.  Out there was range land, where Red Herefords roamed in the dusty triangle cut by the southern pacific railroad. 

            In the final thirty years of her life, Donalda had maintained the bit of land her mother willed to her.  Before her husband George died, together they farmed eight acres of corn and green chile.  After George died, she sold most of the land to fix the old house, and to drill a new well for water.  Intending to stay, she had the roof fitted with new, galvanized tin, and had all of the windows replaced.  The green stucco flowed over the old adobe like a spring blanket of grass. 

            When Donalda died, the land was deep in drought.  Down past Las Cruces, the Rio Grande wasn’t even running, and all the farmers talked about whether the conservancy district would release any water, at all, from the thinning, dust-startled reservoirs in Central New Mexico.  

            The men who dug Donalda’s grave were having a hard time cutting into the hard red clay lying beneath a foot of dusty, rocky topsoil that was the Garden of Memories Memorial Garden.  Out here, in the valley, what was left of a prehistoric sea held the only water, some thirty miles distant.  And they had not opened the gates to acequias to flood the fields and grow the green chiles and melons that sustained the land and its people.  One of these, Juan “Itchy” Nevarez, thought seriously about how thirsty he’d become in all this weather, through all the digging.  It occurred to him then that he needed help in the worst way, and water wouldn’t really soothe him.

            It was a half-mile walk down the main irrigation canal and across several fields to the small adobe and wood church that had been built in 1923.  I was out in my yard, with a black rubber hose watering my morning glories: blues and purples. Some pink and white blooms. Dying in the late September light.  Many drying seed pods.   I could see that one of the gravediggers had walked across an open field.  It was Itchy Nevarez and he held a small red box that he’d found.  As he walked over I remembered the box.  Brother Ed had buried it some 20 years ago. Back then, Ed found a bundle of letters that Donalda had thrown in the trash: Ed was a bit of a scavenger, but anyway the letters inside were earth shaking.  He was never sure if it was a good or bad find.  At first he thought it to be the work of the devil, so he buried the bundle in an old Swisher Sweets box out past the cemetery where rattlers lived along the road in heavy brush.  I called Itchy over.  He could barely hold the box, which was covered in clay, dirt, and underneath all of that filth, duct tape.  In the distance, I could see that Sr. Rivera’s family was starting to arrive.  There were big rain clouds to the south. 

            Before I say Mass, before I bless the dead and speak of the dead, I take a good look at my self.  At 55, I am withered and thin, having lost my chubby youthfulness to disease. It’s not that I’m not fit for my age—heart and lungs are good, I eat well from the garden and from the local butcher I get the best meat.  Rather, I drift in and out of a crippling neurological syndrome that causes seizures and wastes my muscle tissue.  In ten years Itchy might be burying me.  He’s my cousin and loves me the way we all do here.   But he is tired and old like me, and has forgotten or given up on the Great One God who should rule this pasture but does not, and will never.

            I remember reading a story by the Mexican writer Tomás Rivera.  In that story, a kid waited all night for the devil to show up, and he never did.  This non-appearance ended any semblance of faith or fear the child in the story might have had.  So I shower, shave, shampoo my hair, and then meditate naked on my bedroom floor for 20 minutes.  I near the planet Jupiter.  Then, I dress slowly, smoking a cigarette or two.  Finally, out of the Sacristy I tumble, two 15-year old alter kids looking at me like I’m stoned, which I am. A glass of wine, another Valium, and some good ol’ Psilocybin to cut the tension back a bit. 

            At Mass, we spend some time on the Gospel of John.  I then speak of Donalda’s sacrifices for the church (she was the Rectory secretary for years).  Her brother, Trinidad, speaks, and her nieces all cry in unison.  There are white flowers everywhere. 

            You see, god died for me the minute that Brother Ed brought that box of letters into the house.  Who knows who they’re written to, where the responses came from.  That’s the problem.  He had it in his office for a week and didn’t sleep as he read over 300 letters.  He buried it and died two days later.  At night I would dream that he would speak to me, tell me who would die, when and where; he would show me vistas of other realms beyond the veil, he would speak of disaster and death, of cycles billions of years old.  So of course, I am insane too.  Even during the night, when I drug myself into oblivion.  So I cannot dream. So I cannot hear.

*          *          *

            As Mass wound toward Communion, I could hear Ed calling me.  Itchy had left the box of in my office after he asked if I wanted to take a look afterward.  It sang and sang and sang to me as I prepped for Communion. I suddenly blurted a prayer for Donalda as I handed out Hosts.  One of the Alter girls fainted.

Donalda’s whole family burst into a believable and absolute grief, cries and howls of anguish echoing outside into the parking lot.  There was no silence.  Mass could not go on, but it did.  We shook hands, we read again from Mark and prayed for our Bishops and the Pope. Everyone was in black.  As the casket was carried to the waiting limo, I found myself in my office digging through the letters, reading here and there.  This is what they communicated:  there was no Donalda Rivera and there was no little Rectory or Church or graveyard in the desert. What we lived was a dream of an elderly and forgetful god, mere reflection of a greater reality.  That there were billions of star systems teeming with life.  That demons and gods and people from other places interacted freely on our Earth.  There were only cycles of expansion and retraction, forever and ever.  God was the Cosmos surrounding us.  We were not made in his image but from stardust so that He may see through Us.  Our bodies were mostly empty space and electricity.  Yet, from the window I saw Itchy and Donalda’s son Richie carrying the coffin out.  I saw the sunshine on my flowers and on my tomato garden. I watched a jet plane in the long distance flying toward the city.

            Being the work of the devil.  Being.  The work.  A pile of letters that filled and dulled my brain like an opiate:  crisp, dried out, yellowing somehow hot to the touch. I’d found myself in a garden.  I didn’t want to be there, in a garden where we grew food.  For ourselves.  To feed the poor braceros who came by because they saw we had a church here, a mission.  I walked out of the building.  I’d be riding with the family to The Hatch Valley Memorial Gardens.  I took the box of letters with me, intending to toss it into Donalda’s grave at the end of the day.

*          *          *

            Three months after the funeral, I hadn’t heard from Ed at all.  No voices, no songs, no ultimate tranmissions concerning the fate of humanity.  I gave Mass rarely though, letting the new guy from Africa have a go at it.  The congregation seemed to enjoy his militant evangelism, his sweet voice, they way he carried himself.  I read and slept most of time, dreaming frequently of large cities and older, grander times, filled Cathedrals and small town parishes.  The invitations to dinner.  The glimpses at family life.  The devoted Alter kids who didn’t know what I knew: that god was dead and that faith was some way of getting by, that there was something else, perhaps quite darker, that ruled us.  Or perhaps we were alone in a vastness that grew larger and farther away with every passing second.  Sitting up on the wall to preach to some Braceros one day when I was eating my lunch among the poor at a small soup kitchen, outside with the late summer sun blazing, the desert white and quiet, when I started by talking loudly about the sun, how it fed us all with its rays, lit our hard work, glorified our days and graced our families.  “Don’t you mean God, padre,” one of the workers asked, incensed and confused.  I told him to meet me that night way after the sun went down in the parking lot of the San Albino Basilica in Mesilla. 

            From my little house in the Hatch Valley it’s about a forty minute drive to Mesilla, a colonial town with a Spanish Plaza and adobe buildings.  A southern version of Old Town, Albuquerque, or of Taos, way up north.

The San Albino Basilica is a church dedicated to farmers, to the blessing of the dry land and the fertile river valleys of southern New Mexico and West Texas.  As usual, it stands at one end of the plaza, and faces the circular plaza itself, which contains a bandstand and several benches, and some old refurbished cannons from the Mexican War.  There’s a lot of good bars and restaurants in Mesilla; Art Fountain, my godfather, ran one for years.  This worker, David, showed up right after work.  He was an electrician with kids and a wife in Imperial, Califas, and they’d come from Puebla when they themselves were kids.  He wore a sliver cross and before he talked to me, insisted on touring the Basilica, looking into each confessional, sitting in front of the hundreds of burning candles lit for the dead.  Under my feet the Earth turned and neither of us could feel this.  Above us, satellites swung in geosynchronous orbits, transmitting news, telephone calls, secret data, lives.

I suffered dreams of a world gone mad.  I knew it well.  We walked behind the Basilica and I asked David to consider the stars, which were blazing in the 2am night as we smoked cigarettes and drank diet coke.  I lost my self in sorrow, I told him.  I had lost myself in the sky, in a bundle of letters my friend Father Ed had found in Donalda’ s house a long time ago.  I reminded him of my religious training, how I knew that the Buddha himself knew that to attach oneself to the past meant only sadness, and to attach oneself too much to the future meant a life of anxiety.  I told him of my anxiety, my loss of faith.  That I would be so moved by letters written more than 40 years ago scared him, I think.  He shook his head and said, “Father, I beat my dog and my eight year old son when I get too drunk.  I’m fucking a rich gringa in Cruces and I feel like shit about everything.  My wife just leaves me tv dinners in the toaster oven and talks to her fucking comadres all night on the phone, and she smokes like a chimney.  I’m drinking a six pack a day, bro.  What can you or God do about that?”

            After reading each letter, about five a night, after about six months I was exhausted emotionally and mentally.  I had convinced my neurologist to up my Benzos and I’d slowed down on the mushrooms.  I smoked a lot though, and had a card from the state, signed by Dr. Robert herself, that allowed me access to Medical Marijuana.  A long, tall, blond, leather-skinned gringo hippy friend of my brother’s would stop by the Rectory every two weeks, in her nice new blue Range Rover.  We’d do business.  She was from Califas and had a regular route.  It was all legal now.  She loved my green chile and melons.  Some days, David would come by and talk briefly.  We’d all read from John and Luke, but that’s all.  He left back to Imperial the next winter.  Before he left, he told me he’d shared what I told him with Father Mateus, from Angola.  Mateus had just smiled and told David that I was just an old man who lived in my dreams now.  As for the letters, they were the devil’s work, or a best, the writings of a mad woman.  David had insisted though, so he asked me.  “Where did they come from?  Who wrote those letters to Donalda’s mother, and what do you think she wrote back?  Since I had spent years reading and interpreting this one woman’s letters, and her commentaries on said letters, I had a lot to say.

            The green chile stew was excellent that day.  I’d added just enough comino and pepper to it, and the potatoes and pork loin chunks were nice and soft.  The stock was smooth and not greasy.  The chile floated everywhere in the pot.  I reached over to my desk, and produced to David a Swisher Sweet box.  Stuffed with letters and typed pages folded neatly in half, hundreds of them.  And another box that Ed had hidden in the walls of the Rectory office, a box the size of a small suitcase.  I don’t to whom she was writing.  I have no idea wrote her these letters, some with elaborate diagrams, equations, and drawings.  Unbelievable stuff.  A sort of theosophical, metaphysical and technical history of a world just like ours, but not ours.  “You know, I said,” this ain’t go nothing to do with you are.  You’re bitter, and filled with hate.  You hate the white man and his world, his fast food restaurants, his piety, his way of life.  That’s why you’re so fucked up.  And you try to conquer him by fucking his women.  Shit.  I haven’t had pussy since I was 17.  You need to be a man, live in peace, stop drinking, which is a symbol of your hatred and inner anger.  These letters got nothing to do with you, how your beat your son because he’s really your cousin’s son, and the poor dog is just a poor dog that god loves too.”   David handed the letter back to me, a four-pager dated March 28, 1931.  It was number 131 in my catalogue, and dealt with multiple worlds and universes.  It had neat, well-drawn pictures and math I could only partially understand.  Signed, as usual, by “Archie, your Friend.”  A postmark the same on all 592 letters:  a small farm town outside of Chicago, Illinois, Leaf River.   David walked quickly from my office.   I could hear him vomit in the Rectory restroom.  I could hear him howl.  I heard breaking glass and he stormed out, looking at me in a sad, inexplicable wise way I could never duplicate.  In the restroom, he left a loaded .45 and a broken fifth of Jim Beam.  I never saw him or his family again.

            I’m growing Morning Glories this year.  I told you that, right?  Well I do slip a bit on all those Benzos and the wacky tabacky.  Mostly stopped cigarettes, but yeah, you can tell I’m losing fat and muscle, even though I eat like a teenager.  I can still play ball for about 20 minutes, though, and the kids appreciate that.  Still have a great outside shot.  Dogs, all loveable, come and go in my life.  Mateus has taken over most of the Litergical duties.  I still do confessions, and I still work with the poor two days a week now, cooking in the kitchen at Our Lady of Hope Soup Kitchen, in the student neighborhood by the Agricultural college, some 20 miles away.  I love the drive through the desert and the long view of the deep stars when I return to the desert Rectory late at night.  I stop and take a small exit before the Hatch cutoff that leads me into nowhere, in the middle of the dark, where the coyotes, their prey, the narcos and traffickers haunt the landscape.  Still, I am drawn to the silent stars where there is no light, no cities to confuse the darkness, no human breath for miles.  Sometimes I see a cow standing asleep on BLM land, and I drive my old car out on a dirt road to where there are long salt flats under the Sierra Oscuro.  I lie in the sand and watch the Milky Way, I gaze and meditate.  I think of Donalda’s mother, what Donalda knew, what I now know.  I think about how I walked from her grave, wiping my hands of dirt, looking at nothing in particular.