“This house is becoming lost,” he said softly, his words not much more than air. After a few seconds, he walked across the room to the sink. He turned on the tap and was relieved to find that the pump in the well still worked. He let it run until the water ran clear and then he drank deeply from the faucet, washed out a glass, and filled it again for Felix.
Felix was sitting on the sofa in the front room. Other than the dirt and scratches on his hands and face and his torn clothing, he looked just as if he were sitting as usual by himself in the corner of Felix’s Café. His hands, trembling slightly, rested in his lap. His shoulders were hunched and he stared forward with his head drooping. Flavio sat beside him and held the water to Felix’s lips as the old man took a few sips.
“This has been some morning, Felix,” Flavio said and leaned back against the couch. “To see you walking out of the mountains.” He shook his head and settled a little deeper into the sofa. “I don’t know what I thought.”
Across the room was a painting of the same alfalfa field Flavio had been trying to irrigate for the past twelve days. But in this painting the field was full, the alfalfa green, the blossoms a rich purple. Two men and a small boy stood in the distance with shovels where Flavio knew the ditch lay. Beside it hung a painting of the old village office, which still stood not far from Ramona’s house—a crumbling adobe with cracked windows and a bellied roof that sat in a field of dry weeds and twisted, rusted-out vehicles.
“My sister,” Flavio said, “painted these paintings. You remember Ramona, Felix? She would paint like there was nothing else to do—even as a young girl, when we were children. And every painting was a painting of this village.” Felix’s head had begun to shake slightly, and again Flavio wondered how this man who could barely sit up had come wandering out of the hills.
“I don’t know why she did this either, Felix,” Flavio said and looked back at the painting of the alfalfa field. For a brief second, he almost knew who the two men and the small boy were, but then, like a breath, the memory left. “It’s true, though,” he went on. “She painted the church and the cemetery and old twisted juniper trees and even once I remember she painted a painting of mud. A whole road of mud she painted and not even one flower or a blade of grass.”
For the most part, Flavio thought that what his sister chose to put on canvas was foolish. One painting after another of a tired village that not only had seen better days, but was a place Flavio saw only with familiarity. But at other times, if he stared at her paintings longer than he should, he could almost hear the creaking of vigas or smell the thick odor of dirt on the blade of a shovel.
Moving his eyes across the rest of the paintings on the far wall, Flavio thought that this house was too full of his sister, as if she had just walked off one day and forgotten to return. He grunted softly and lowered his eyes. It was then that he saw the seven santos standing like shadows in the corner beside the door.
Flavio had first seen the santos thirty-five years before. They had appeared in this house as if from nowhere, and seeing them now standing in the corner made him suddenly feel as if they were the only remaining members of his family. Unfortunately, of all the family that had passed through his life, these were not relatives he had ever been fond of. They were too old and too coarse and seemed to hold secrets that Flavio knew in his heart he hadn’t the slightest inclination to hear.
“I’d forgotten they were here,” he said. He turned his head to look at Felix, whose eyes were now closed, beads of saliva at each corner of his mouth. “Don’t look at them, Felix, if they bother you. They are only things Ramona used to have.”
Flavio had walked into Ramona’s house one day and found her washing dishes in the kitchen. It was not long after the death of their brother and not long after their brother’s son, Little José, had come to live with her. Behind his sister, crowded together on the small table, were the carved figures, one of which had been merely touched with a knife. All stood with their hands at their breasts, and they stared straight ahead without a smile. One was older than the others, the wood split with age, the paint on her gown and on her face cracked and peeling. Flavio had suddenly felt awkward, as if he had interrupted a conversation between people he did not know.
He had stopped just inside the kitchen, and eventually he had scraped his feet nervously on the floor. When his sister turned to look at him, he had waved his arm and said, “What are those things, Ramona?”
“They are santos, Flavio,” Ramona said and turned back to her dishes.
“I know what they are. What are they doing here?”
“They’re not doing anything here, Flavio,” Ramona said. “I found them and brought them into the house.”
“You found them?” He looked at the figures again. He thought that they resembled small children who had grown far too old. “They were lost?”
“No, Flavio,” Ramona had said, and in her voice had been the same tone he remembered hearing often as a child. “I found them in the crawl space above the ceiling.”
Flavio walked over to the table. On the one that was only partially carved, he could see fresh markings on the wood. At her feet were curled splinters as thin as paper. “This one’s just been carved,” he said.
“Yes,” Ramona said. “That one is Little José’s. He works on it a little each day.”
“José is making a santo?” Flavio said. Then he reached out and touched the oldest of them, and a chip of paint flaked off and fell to the surface of the table. Where the paint had been, the wood was smooth and black. He looked up at the vigas overhead.
“How did they come to be in the ceiling?”
Ramona wiped her hands on her pants and turned to face her brother. For a moment she said nothing, and then she smiled. “I don’t know, Flavio. I only know that they were there for a long time.”
It occurred to Flavio that through all the years he had been in this house, just above his head had stood these seven Ladies, cloaked in cobwebs. He looked back at them and wondered what they had been doing up there all that time. Then he realized that this, too, might be something that he would rather not know.
“What made you look up there?” he asked.
Again Ramona paused before speaking. “To see,” she said finally, “what was behind the door grandfather had nailed shut.”
Flavio turned to her. She was leaning back against the sink, her arms folded beneath her breasts, a slight smile still on her mouth. Flavio thought that though his sister was answering his questions, she was saying nothing.
“What are you going to do with them, Ramona?”
Ramona closed her eyes and shook her head gently. “I don’t know, Flavio,” she said. “I only know that I’ll keep them here.”
The santos stayed with Ramona, usually out of Flavio’s sight, until she died. And after that they had remained in the house by themselves. How they had come to be in the space above the ceiling or why Ramona had thought to look there was something Flavio and his sister never talked about. Flavio had almost come to think that the seven Ladies had stopped for coffee one morning and chose, for their own reasons, never to leave.
Flavio could feel that Felix’s weight had shifted against him and that the old man’s breathing had slowed. There wasn’t a sound in his sister’s house, and he thought that if he didn’t get up soon, he would fall asleep and all of this day would be lost.
“We should go, Felix,” he said. “To find your son who is probably worried sick.” Through the open door he could see the cottonwood trees where his truck was parked and, beyond that, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that sat still and dusty in the heat.
“How can it be so hot?” Flavio said to no one. “I can never remember it like this.” Then Flavio