The Many Roads to Reward

I watched it all from my spot on the bench beneath the cedar-pole awning of la Hacienda Gustamos over the course of one solitary month. During those thirty days, for lack of anything better to do, I whittled their likenesses from chunks of manzanita wood as I watched them work; the super-hard, desert-dried ironwood forcing me to make frequent pauses for blade resharpening, but by the time their construction project was completed so was mine, as I had carved out rather lifelike 3D figures of them all… boy, girl, and burro.

The pair rode double into Ciudad Juarez with the boy behind, their bouncing synchronized astride the swayed back of an overloaded, yet quick-stepping burro, the burro‘s pace appearing suited to the pair’s dispositions. A bulging towsack tied to it’s rump increased the burro’s already considerable load. The day was warm in Ciudad Juarez, as always, the sky clear, as usual. The burro came to an abrupt standstill on the banks of the city’s thinly flowing river, whether reined in or thirsty I could not say. The pair climbed down from it’s back there, hefting their bundle down into the soft mud along the river’s bank as the ass splayed out it‘s legs giraffe-like and drank of the warm, muddy water. The young man opened the sack and spread tools from it out across the ground while his even younger and smaller companion, without the slightest pause to rest, immediately began picking up driftwood along the river’s bank, passing over the water-logged ones so as to get only the straightest and stoutest sticks. Once satisfied that she’d found sufficient wood to make sturdy stakes she stepped off a large rectangle, bending at exactly measured corners to carefully poke, one-by-one, the gathered sticks as far into the packed-sand earth as she was able. Having chosen a mallet from the tools laid across the ground, El Niño followed her from stick-to-stick, holding each one upright with his free hand as he drove it deeper into the parched sand with his hammer until there was a clearly defined, staked out foundation. The pair proved tireless in their endeavors; she shaping bricks from the mud and grass along the river’s banks and laying them in the sun to dry, he cutting manzanite wood into timbers before shaping the timbers into workable widths using ax and adze, as warranted. When enough timbers were shaped the pair drug two of them so that their thicker ends touched either stake on the western side of the foundation she had marked off, allowing their narrower, upper ends to stretch out along the ground towards the setting sun. Next he chose a hand drill from amongst the laid out tools. Using it, the boy attached cross braces at both the timbers’ midway points and their far ends with carefully whittled, wooden pegs driven into the holes he had drilled. He then removed the stakes La Niña had marked the foundation corners with before digging deep, narrow post holes from the spots where the stakes had been exhumed. Finally, El Niño tied a rope to the center of the furthest cross brace, looped the other end around the burrow’s saddle pommel, and then, with the girl leading the burrow eastward, I bore witness as the framework slowly lifted. Like feet into shoes the bottom ends of the timbers slid almost magically into his pre-dug holes as the constructed contraption arched heavenward, so that I nearly applauded their work from my shaded bench until thankfully realizing in time that it was too warm for such effort, and slunk back against the cool, shadowed wall of la Hacienda Gustamos. When the whole apparatus was nearly upright the girl halted the donkey in place while the boy hung a string from it to check for plumb. She led the ass backward and forward by it’s halter until the boy was satisfied enough with the framework’s placement that he was comfortable quickly-but-carefully backfilling around what now were the perfectly plumbed and squared skeleton-leg posts and joists of a rather large wall. Over the next several days I drank warm tequila, ate cold tamales, whittled, and watched as three more walls were lifted and attached in much the same manner, all of it done with plenty of energy, yet also with such efficiency and planning that hardly a modicum of perspiration exerted from the trio, the donkey a strange, yet seemingly equal partner to the pair.

During the next week peaked rafters were mitered and placed, scaffolds were constructed, mortar was mixed from limestone, chalk and slag, and bricks were laid, while from inside la Hacienda Gustomas la senorita brought out cervesas for breakfast, or tequila for supper, either drink designed to wash down the plentiful tamales she handed to me along with. She was a kind woman, la senorita, so I made love to her sometimes, when I was able. Yes, she might have been exceedingly ugly to the eye, but there is more than one way for a woman to be beautiful, and I did believe her beautiful, nearly as beautiful as were the babes a-building alongside yonder river bank.

Next, mortar was smoothed into the chinks of the laid pole roof, with earth pitched over to insulate. A door was added to the front with steps leading to it and glassless windows with wooden shutters placed along the building’s north and south sides, presumably for light. The plank floor the pair crafted was the only one of it’s kind in all of Ciudad Juarez, the other buildings having dirt floors, or flagstone, and was raised from the ground to negate the infrequent flooding of the river. Finally, a manzanita cross decorated the front crown, identifying the structure as being God’s holy dwelling.

And then the pair saddled the burro and went. Why? Where to? Whether or not they ever prayed at the alter they built? Who can say? Without a word to anyone the pair and their donkey finished their building and went.

For a year I gazed with wonder at the wondrous work the pair and their burro left behind them. I often picked my own carved figurines up from where they lived on the bench beside me, asking questions of them that it was not in a piece of wood to answer, but there was no other to ask. During that year the morning cerveza’s, and the afternoon tequila’s, and the tamale diets took their tolls on an already sickly body, so that when he arrived and moved into the church for shelter it was with difficulty that after two days of consternation I could finally pick up my figurines and make my way over to the church for my first time visiting it, and up the solidly built wooden stairs to meet him, and to ask why he had chosen here to stop, and to tell him that the church belonged to others, and to ask him to leave it perfect, just as the lovelies who built it had left it, por favor? I laid my figurines on the alter for him to see and I knelt, beseeching him to go yon, and back to the dessert from which he’d come, that this house was built by loving hands for another… for their Lord and Savior.

”And is he not also yours?”

I gulped and swallowed, never having believed before, but their work had inspired. It had produced a longing in me for more, and for better. I longed to be like “them” in their sodality, and in their artistry, and in their inspiration.

“I hope that he could be.”

She found me there on the river’s bank, La señorita de la Hacienda Gustamos. She did not cry, but fished my figurines out of the mud instead, dunking them one-by-one under the river’s heavy current. Seeing their beauty and sensing their worth la señorita washed them in the water, saving the tiny burro with it’s sack for last, and finally her knees where she’d knelt in the mud, neverminding her bare feet as they squished back to dry land. She’d made a pocket in the folds of her apron with which to carry her newly gained treasures and using it she headed away from her casa, and towards la cantina where hungry, if not godly, men awaited. Sometimes hunger was sufficient for her needs. The statuettes would bring enough to buy cornmeal, beer, and tequila for the next lost soul who might follow the smell of hot tamales to her door, and this man would perhaps allow her to feel both some outer and inner sanctum in this, the harshest of lives.

And thusly, unseen and unknown by the world; through hallucinations, kindnesses and miracles, are those lost somehow saved.

Amen

(I started this awhile back for some challenge or another and lost interest, as I often do. All of the religion writes sparked by @EstherFlowers1’s recent “Challenge” made me decide to resurrect it. The story idea came after visiting the staircase in “The Loretta Chapel.” The story was intended to be, after a comment I believe from @JulienSorel, a practice exercise in building longer sentence structure into my writes, thus the many run-ons which I hope you did not detect, as that was my goal, or at least that you did not mind ;). I don’t think it is completely terrible, after a little polishing.)