We are lost, Cristóbal would think, stumbling behind his companions, in a land that cares nothing for us. When they would stop for the night, he would sit huddled close to the fire and voice his fears to Hipolito and Francisco.
“You cannot get lost,” Hipolito would say, “where no one has been.”
“That is what lost is,” Cristóbal would answer.
“To find our way back, we need only to return the way we came.” Cristóbal would shake his head and look into the fire. “We have been walking in circles for days. To go back the way we’ve come would only bring us here.”
Hipolito would lean toward Cristóbal and place his hand on his shoulder. “With luck,” he would say, “tomorrow will be the end of our journey. You must have faith, my friend.”
But whatever faith Cristóbal once had was now gone. He didn’t know what he was doing in the middle of a vast wilderness, especially with two men who spoke to him as if he were a child and who shared none of his fears. Worse, he could barely remember what had prompted him to leave the safety of Las Sombras in the first place. All he truly wanted was to be in his small house surrounded by his eight daughters who loved him dearly and his wife whom he had known all his life and who cared for his children and was never out of sorts. How could a man, he thought, who had so much, give it away for something that couldn’t be found?
Each morning, the three men would wake in the cold, their blankets stiff with a thick layer of frost, and again, as he had the night before, Cristóbal would begin to complain. Francisco would look at him is disgust, as if there were little difference between his burro who refused to rise without being beaten and Cristóbal, who sat hunched and motionless by the fire, his blanket wrapped tightly around his shoulders. Hipolito would begin to talk as if Cristóbal had forgotten his past and what had happened in it.
“They were killing the priests,” Hipolito would say. “That is why we left, my friend.”
And each morning, his head bowed, Cristóbal would stare at the smoldering fire and answer the same. “There are too many priests.”
Francisco would grunt and shake his head and feed small sticks into the coals. “They were shot with arrows, like animals,” he said. “Then they were beaten with rocks and their clothes were stripped from their bodies and thrown in trees. How could you have forgotten all this, Cristóbal?”
“It is the fault of the priests. If they would leave the Indians to themselves, none of this would have happened, and we would be home in Las Sombras where we belong.”
“The priests will never leave the Indians alone,” Hipolito would say softly to Cristóbal, and although Hipolito knew that what Cristóbal had said was true, this was the closest he or his cousin would ever come to speaking out against the church.
The village of Las Sombras was at the end of a long trail that wound and twisted and sometimes disappeared altogether south, far into Mexico and beyond. The village sat, with its small, mud plaza and scattered ranchitos, just a few miles west of a large Indian pueblo. Even though they were so near each other, other than chance encounters while gathering wood and the sporadic trading of meat or cloth or seed, there was seldom any contact between the two. It was as if each village had somehow come to believe that the other did not exist, and that if it did, it was in everyone’s best interest to ignore that fact. And Cristóbal was right, whenever problems did arise, it always seemed to stem from the doings of the priests.
“As soon as a new priest arrives,” Cristóbal would go on, “does he stay in our church where he belongs? No. He takes a large cross and his rosary beads out to the Indians and upsets them.” Cristóbal would raise his eyes and look at Hipolito. “Do the Indians come into Las Sombras and force our children to dress in the masks of animals and dance in their dances? Do they make us sit down and tell us stories about their gods? If they did, we, too, would throw rocks at them.”
“It is more than just the priests and the Indians,” Hipolito would say. “You know that.”
“No, I don’t know that any longer.”
“Why must we talk about the same thing each morning?” Francisco would ask. “And in the evening, we have it again.” Then he would walk away and stand looking off into the distance at nothing.
Hipolito and Francisco had known Cristóbal nearly all their lives. The walls of their houses were built against and grew out of each other’s and their children, who were numerous and close in age, lived as if all shared the same family. Of the three men, Cristóbal was always the most outspoken, especially when it came to the village. Hipolito and Francisco often agreed with his complaints, but it was one thing to hear his words within the village and another to hear them in a place where each step took them farther from home. Cristóbal’s words not only were a plea for them to abandon their search, but also made Hipolito and Francisco feel as if their reasons for leaving Las Sombras in the first place were only a trick they had played on themselves.
“It was you, Cristóbal, who first mentioned leaving the village,” Francisco would say over his shoulder, and Hipolito could hear the anger in his voice. “Besides, do you not remember the winter two years ago?”
Following a summer of drought where the corn was empty in its husks and the alfalfa grew coarse and stunted, that winter had brought snow and cold and disease to Las Sombras all at once. Snow began to fall in late October, and it continued for months, until the houses sat buried to their roofs and everything outside the village became just a memory. When it wasn’t snowing, a cold came to the valley so intense that tree limbs cracked with ice and the chimneys could not draw air.
Soon after the first snowstorm, villagers, especially the old and the very young, began to fall ill with a sickness that dulled their minds, took the strength from their bodies, and finally brought on a fever that rose so high they would forget how to breathe. Those who died, among them Francisco’s young son Pablito and his daughter Sophia, were wrapped in thin cloth and carried to the plaza. There, one of the priests would crouch stiffly against the wind, say a brief prayer, and then cross himself before hurrying back to his room beside the church.
The dead were placed together on the ground beneath a large cottonwood, and there they remained under so many feet of snow until late in the spring when the earth was no longer like stone. Livestock not brought into shelter froze standing in the fields, and those that didn’t were butchered for food. Seed stored for the following season was ground between rocks and boiled in melted snow and fed to children.
When the weather finally broke in mid-April, the hollow-eyed people of the village straggled out from their homes and found only mud and slush and the dead, stacked on the plaza like cords of wood.
The following summer, Cristóbal began to complain bitterly and incessantly about life in Las Sombras. While Cristóbal had always complained about one thing or another, Hipolito and Francisco knew that he had no real intention of ever leaving Las Sombras. But what he said made the thought of remaining in the village unbearable.
They would listen to Cristóbal and agree with him that there were other places in this country where they could choose the best land for themselves—where there was enough pasture and game that a winter such as the one that had just passed would not be so crippling, and where they could have just one priest who would stay with them and not cause trouble by foolishly bothering the Indians. Hipolito and Francisco would take what they heard from Cristóbal back to their families. Almost without realizing it, they began to plan to leave Las Sombras for a place that would be their own.
After the murder of the three priests, rumors began to spread that the pueblo and other pueblos in the south were threatening to unite. When they did, they would rise up as one and drive the Spanish and their God that could not mind his own business from the entire territory. Although these rumors had occasionally surfaced in the past, it was what finally prompted Hipolito and Francisco to leave. By then, there was no doubt in their minds that Cristóbal would go with them.
Five days after the priests were buried, the three men left Las Sombras before dawn. The night before, Cristóbal