I WROTE THE LETTER with Cleo in my lap, mewing and burrowing close to me. When I finished, I folded the parchment carefully, put Cleo in my apron pocket, and went to Mrs. Lacey’s room. She was sleeping peacefully.
I tied the bag of asafetida around her neck.
Next I stopped in the kitchen, where they had set up Elena’s cradle so that she was always in front of someone’s eyes. She was sleeping. She looked like a baby doll, lying there in her linen gown and little bonnet. I felt a surge of love for her, for her helplessness. The other girls hadn’t paid her any mind, busy as they were with their own personal concerns. But I often picked her up. Tomorrow, Ramona said, I might help bathe her.
I had always wanted a little sister. All of my classmates in Independence had sisters and brothers. I had none. And being an only child was smothering. I had often felt that everything I did either made my parents’ happiness or broke it forever.
I leaned over the cradle and kissed Elena, then I went to the barn to seek out José.
I CAME UPON HIM mending his sandals. He sat on a bale of hay. He looked up and smiled at me. “How are you faring?” he asked.
“I was hoping to convince you to stay,” I said.
He sighed and gestured that I should sit. “I am not wanted. Knowledge of that is worse even than accepting charity.”
“I want you to stay. As for charity, you don’t have to take all the money for the staircase, then. You can take some off for this week of food and lodging.”
“If only all accounts could be settled so easily,” he said.
“Will you stay, then?”
He looked at me. “There is a lot of bad feeling in this place. It is like an undercurrent in the sea. It pulls one under.”
“I know.” I fished the letter to my father out of my apron pocket. “Here. I’ve written this to my father. I want you to read it.”
He read the letter, taking his time about it, stroking his beard, nodding. And while he read it I looked about the barn and thought how unlikely all this was. Three months ago I’d been in Independence with my mother and father, with a trip to Santa Fe only talk around the table. Now I sat in a barn in Santa Fe, awaiting approval from a carpenter—a stranger—about a letter to my father, who was in the land called Texas, having left me. I was surrounded by Catholics. My mother was dead. I’d just tied a bag of stinking asafetida around the neck of a comatose woman so she could go to her Methodist heaven. In my pocket was a blind kitten, rendered so by girls who were waiting for a visit from a saint.
“It is a good letter,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“It bodes good feeling.”
Just then Cleo meowed and stuck her head out of my pocket. José looked startled at first, then smiled and cupped his hands. I put her into them. “She’s blind,” I said.
“Born that way?”
“No.” Hesitantly I told him what had happened.
His eyes took on depths that seemed to hold all the sadness in the world, not only for the cruelty that had been done to Cleo but to all, man and beast. He stroked Cleo gently. “I thought this was a holy place,” he said.
“It is, oh, it is!” I said in a rush of need to suddenly defend the school and convent. “The nuns have taken in Elena, the baby. And they will raise her. The Bishop is such a good man! In all my life I have known no better.”
He nodded, holding the kitten up in his hands before his face. He gazed at her, and Cleo, poor little thing, did her best to gaze back.
“Sister Roberta said she might see again someday. What do you think?”
“She might,” he said, handing Cleo back to me. “You must love her and care for her well.”
“Oh, I will,” I promised.
“Now what will you do if your father asks you to come and live with him?” he asked me, picking up a sandal again to work on it.
“Likely I’ll go,” I said.
“You will?”
“Yes. I’ll take Cleo and Ben and . . . and—” I looked around me in the barn, wanting to include more, wanting to say more, wanting to let him know that we weren’t all what he thought around here. Oh, some were. And I was. For I was lying to his face.
“I’ll take Elena. Yes, I’ve been thinking on it. I’ll ask Mother Magdalena if I can take baby Elena and give her a home.”
He smiled. “You would do all that for me, Lizzy? Just to get me to wait around a week and take food and lodging for nothing?”
I cuddled Cleo close to me. “I always wanted a little sister,” I said. But I could not look him full in the face.
“Then I will stay, Lizzy. I will stay the week.”
I gasped. “You will?”
“Yes. But you must not feel that you must give the baby a home just for me. That would be something that the heart should be sure of.”
“I’m sure.” I stood up, clutching Cleo. I felt strange of a sudden. The idea of going to live with my father in Texas and taking Elena had never been in my mind until this moment, until I’d sat down in the carpenter’s presence. And now I felt the idea growing inside me, falling into place and beating with regularity. Like a new heart.
“You should have boots,” I told José, “like all the other men around here have. Not sandals.”
“They have always served my needs,” he said.
“You will tell the Bishop, then, that you are staying? Even though you can’t go about hammering this week?”
“I will tell him,” he promised.
I started to move away, then stopped. “May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“I know you aren’t a religious man. I mean, I never see you praying in the church.”
“There are other places to pray,” he said. “And even other ways to worship.”
“Yes, well, the nuns baptized Mrs. Lacey Catholic before she went into her coma. And she didn’t want to be baptized Catholic. She’s Methodist, only had no paper to prove her baptism. She knew they would do this and asked me if I would put a bag of asafetida around her neck if they did. Does asafetida void baptism?”
“I have never heard such,” he said.
“Then the Catholic baptism will stand?”
“I would think so, yes.”
“But what if she is already baptized Methodist? How will God take her? As Methodist or Catholic?”
He paused for a moment in his sewing of the sandal and gazed to a middle distance somewhere behind me. “I think it doesn’t matter to God,” he said finally. “I think He loves us all the same, Lizzy.”
“Would He not take her to heaven because she wanted to void the Catholic baptism?”
He recommenced his sewing. “He is not a punishing God, Lizzy. That is the mistake most people make, thinking He sits with an account book and a big fist, waiting to punish us. He is not a wrathful God but a loving God who made each of us and loved us since we were in our mother’s womb. This is only the opinion of a poor, badly educated man, of course, but I think He wants us to enjoy the world as He has given it to us. Else why would He have given us so many beautiful things? Like your kitten, for instance? Or baby Elena?”
Cleo was purring in my arms. I nodded, thanking him. Around me in the barn the animals chomped on their food and a kind of peace descended upon me that made me know everything was going to be all right.
“If Saint Joseph doesn’t come, you will finish the staircase for Christmas, won’t you?” I asked.
“I will, Lizzy. If Saint Joseph doesn’t come.”
“They think he’s coming,” I confided. “Did you ever hear anything so silly?”
He shook his head no and smiled and went right on sewing his sandal.
ELINORA DID NOT COME to our room that night. She spent the night in the penance chamber. I supposed that she would hate me now more than ever. Strange though it was, I had to keep looking at Cleo and reminding myself of what she had done, to be pleased.