Woman of Light Read online

  Woman of Light is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fajardo-Anstine, Kali, author.

  Title: Woman of light : a novel / by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

  Description: Frist Edition. | New York : One World, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021027959 (print) | LCCN 2021027960 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780525511328 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525511342 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3606.A396 W66 2022 (print) | LCC PS3606.A396

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021027959

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021027960

  Ebook ISBN 9780525511342

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Title page: Map: Colorado and New Mexico Oversize Subject File, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; antique paper: freeimages.com/​Davide Guglielmo

  Cover design and illustration: Tal Goretsky

  ep_prh_6.0_140138097_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Sleepy Prophet and the Child from Nowhere

  Part 1

  Chapter One: Little Light

  Chapter Two: La Divisoria

  Chapter Three: The Greeks

  Chapter Four: The Trouble with Men

  Chapter Five: Night Owl

  Chapter Six: To the Edges

  Chapter Seven: A Getaway Car

  Part 2

  Chapter Eight: The Inner Self

  Chapter Nine: Women Without Men

  Chapter Ten: Heat

  Chapter Eleven: We Should All Be as Happy as Kings

  Chapter Twelve: I Heard You Need a Girl

  Chapter Thirteen: La Llorona

  Chapter Fourteen: The Body Snatchers of Bakersfield, California

  Chapter Fifteen: The Red Streets

  Chapter Sixteen: Three Sisters

  Chapter Seventeen: Words into Words

  Chapter Eighteen: The Love Story of Eleanor Anne

  Chapter Nineteen: Justice Cannot See, but Can She Hear?

  Chapter Twenty: The Dressmaker

  Chapter Twenty-one: Invitation Only

  Chapter Twenty-two: A Game of Cards

  Chapter Twenty-three: A New Vision

  Part 3

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Sharpshooter Simodecea Salazar-Smith

  Chapter Twenty-five: A Life of Her Own

  Chapter Twenty-six: Shelter from the Storm

  Chapter Twenty-seven: A Day Without Work

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Where the World Registers

  Part 4

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Simodecea’s Final Shot

  Chapter Thirty: The Split Sisters

  Chapter Thirty-one: An Animal Named Night

  Chapter Thirty-two: To the Wedding

  Chapter Thirty-three: El Mariachi

  Chapter Thirty-four: Portal

  Chapter Thirty-five: Woman of Light

  Chapter Thirty-six: Diego’s Return

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

  About the Author

  What is past is prologue.

  —statue, National Archives, Washington, D.C., based on William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 2, scene 1

  Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one so that we understand it better.

  —from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander

  FIRST GENERATION (PARDONA PUEBLO)

  Desiderya Lopez, the Sleepy Prophet of Pardona Pueblo

  SECOND GENERATION (PARDONA PUEBLO AND THE LOST TERRITORY)

  Pidre Lopez and his wife, Simodecea Salazar-Smith

  THIRD GENERATION (THE LOST TERRITORY AND DENVER, COLORADO)

  The Split Sisters, Sara and Maria Josefina, the children of Pidre and Simodecea

  FOURTH GENERATION (DENVER, COLORADO)

  Sara’s children, Luz and Diego

  Maria Josie’s son, Bobby Leonor (stillborn)

  FIFTH GENERATION (DENVER, COLORADO)

  —Herein lies

  PROLOGUE

  The Sleepy Prophet and the Child from Nowhere

  The Lost Territory, 1868

  The night Fertudez Marisol Ortiz rode on horseback to the northern pueblo Pardona, a secluded and modest village, the sky was so filled with stars it seemed they hummed. Thinking this good luck, Fertudez didn’t cry as she left her newborn on the banks of an arroyo, turkey down wrapped around his body, a bear claw fastened to his chest.

  “Remember your line,” she whispered, before she mounted her horse and galloped away.

  In Pardona, Land of Early Sky, the elder Desiderya Lopez dreamt of stories in her sleep. The fireplace glowed in her clay home as she whistled snores through dirt walls, her breath dissipating into frozen night. She would have slept soundly until daybreak, but the old woman was pulled awake by the sounds of plodding hooves and chirping crickets, the crackling of burnt cedar, an interruption between dawn and day.

  “Enough is enough,” Desiderya muttered and cursed as she slow-rolled from bed onto her balled feet, the noises maddening as she stood. Her back was permanently bent in a slight L, and her long, woven skirt brushed the floor matted in sheepskin. She wrapped herself in a white shawl, and slid her hands into fox-fur mittens, fingerless to easily handle her tobacco. Her pipe was formed of mica clay, and the sparkling burn illuminated Desiderya’s grooved face as she hobbled toward the door, soon fastening a red handkerchief beneath her broad chin. The warmth of her breath tried to linger inside the home, but Desiderya hacked into a phlegmy cough and wrangled the air back into her lungs. You’re coming with me, she spoke and walked outside.

  Known as the Sleepy Prophet, she was an important woman in Pardona. During ceremony, she went into trance, recollecting a thousand years’ worth of visions, but her output was unsteady. Many years later when radios had come into fashion and everyone had a massive box near their altars beneath the vigas, the few who still remembered Pardona recalled Desiderya Lopez and how her spirit antenna was often broken. But, sometimes, many times, it worked just fine.

  Desiderya stood at the arroyo’s uneven banks, smoking her pipe and considering the sloping way blue darkness layered the nearby mountains. The arroyo gurgled beneath slender ice. The Spanish had named the stream Lucero because starlight shimmered over the water’s trickling back, as if the earth had been saddled with sky. The galloping sounds in her dreams had vanished, and the sacred mountains looked upon
Desiderya with what felt like amusement in their grouped trees and rock veins. She squinted and turned over her pipe, removing the mouthpiece with her right hand. She stepped over hardened snow toward a rattling among dormant thistle and chokecherry trees, snagging her left thumb until Desiderya bled darkly about her fingerless mittens.

  “Who’s making that racket?” she called out in Tiwa. When there was no answer, Desiderya tried her various dialects, and finally, after waiting several heartbeats, she turned away from the water and brush and said in Spanish, “Freeze then, baby.”

  Pidre cried. Loud as a drum.

  Desiderya pulled at the thistle and chokecherry branches, their stems flickering like the souls of the newly dead. She gasped at the sight of all the trouble.

  There, an infant with wet gray eyes, a baby boy who reached toward the Sleepy Prophet, his face striped in shrubbery shadows.

  Desiderya grunted as she lifted the baby from the weeds. He was cold, the bear claw around his neck dusted in snow. “We’ll get you warmed up,” she said with a calm urgency, carrying the baby to the water’s edge, his face cradled to her low breasts. She dipped her left hand into the thinly frozen creek and rinsed the dried blood from her fingertips before smearing a droplet onto the baby’s cheek. He did not cry at the coolness—instead he locked eyes with the Sleepy Prophet, his brow furrowed, serious in his demeanor. Desiderya chuckled at his angry baby face. “It will only be a moment,” she explained. “I am looking for a message.” Over the baby’s face, the water reflected the sky, those reddish and winged planets.

  “You were left,” Desiderya said after some time. “Left to be found.”

  The baby surprised her then, gathering his lips and attempting to suckle her spacious chest. The Sleepy Prophet laughed. “Been dry for some time, little one.”

  Dawn now, orange and lavender lines appeared beyond the eastern mountains. The world warmed as Desiderya carried the baby through the desert, her fur slippers cracking through iced snow. She hummed prayers to the baby as she walked, songs about heat, greetings of light, the blessings of the sun and moon. She brought the baby to the center of Pardona, past the adobe homes with their blue doorways to deflect drifting spirits. In the distance a cemetery of wooden crosses was scattered about the hillside, as if the Spanish had once spilled a bucket of Catholicism over the land. At the old mission church in the plaza, a white cross leaned left and the air sounded with the squawking of sparrows and wrens. Desiderya left the pink-hued morning and entered the church, blessing herself and the baby with holy water at the door. As was tradition, beneath the floorboards, four dead priests were buried. Their spirit voices greeted Desiderya as she stepped over the ground above their coffins. They told her in Spanish that they knew of a secret, and the Sleepy Prophet groaned with annoyance before she asked them to go on, spill it.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Can’t,” they said.

  Desiderya stomped the floorboards. She rattled the walls.

  “Ouch,” they said.

  “Out with it,” she said, and stomped once more.

  “Fine,” they said. “The baby has a name. Would you like to know?”

  When the dead priests relented, Desiderya repeated the name, her voice echoing throughout the dirt-walled sanctuary. She looked at the baby, who had scratched a faint purple line into his cheek with his translucent fingernails. Desiderya noted to cut them later. “Pidre,” she said and smiled at the baby. “Like stone.”

  Deeper inside the chapel, several young women were on their hands and knees sweeping the floor with horsetail brushes. Dried rose petals were piled around them, and at the altar was a clay statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, dressed in red silk. The young women were preparing for her Feast Day, and the church smelled of incense and blue sage and the copal traded and carried from 1,400 miles south in Mexico City. They gazed at the Sleepy Prophet as she stepped before them with the baby in her arms.

  “Who is that?” asked a young woman.

  “Pidre,” she said, thumbing the baby’s bear claw.

  “From where?”

  “Seems he’s mixed blood,” said Desiderya. “Maybe Spanish. Probably not French. I’d say from his blanket he comes from the southern villages.”

  “Who abandons their own?” another young woman asked with disdain.

  Desiderya thought of why babies are sometimes left. She saw images in her mind that she’d rather not see, felt profound hunger, witnessed a village perched high on a hill, horses slaughtered for food, a church crumbling back into the earth from which it was built. The Sleepy Prophet studied Pidre then. He gazed upon her face with recognition. His spirit felt complementary, an old friend, a grandson she had fished from the weeds.

  “We cannot know the depths of another’s sacrifice,” Desiderya said, easing the baby into the young woman’s arms. “For now, find him a breast. One that works.”

  * * *

  —

  As a child, Pidre was a great hunter with a stern expression over his cloudy eyes. Often haughty, he was disciplined by the men of Pardona with a grass lash. He giggled his way through beatings, a spirit, the people said, that couldn’t be tempered. When the other boys threw stones at his back or smacked his ankles with broken cornstalks and called him names like Snow Blood and Sky Eyes, he didn’t meet them with violence. And over time they relented, for Pidre had the gift of storytelling and a strong ability to tell jokes. Once, as the women prepared meals for All Souls’ Day, Pidre, a runt of a boy with spidery arms and twig legs, hid beneath fat loaves of horno bread. He lay on the table covered in dozens of steaming loaves, inhaling the yeasty scent until the other boys entered the kitchen for their afternoon snack. At that moment, he raised his arms as if climbing from a shallow grave. The women screamed and beat the bread flat with their brooms and handkerchiefs. Later when Desiderya heard about what Pidre had done, she told him it would have been much funnier if he’d been naked. “Like a real demon.”

  Within eleven years, Desiderya Lopez lay dying of old age on the sheepskin rugs in her clay home. The earthen smell of her bedroom had been replaced with the stale stench of sickness, a body soon to erode. On her altar, she had placed dried apricots and biscuits for the journey. The air sounded with music, a distant lullaby prayer. Pidre rested his face in the nook between her neck and shoulder, her silver hair plaited around her distinguished face. He kissed her sectioned braids. He listened to her shallow breaths, the sounds of her spirit slipping away.

  “You’re only little now,” said the Sleepy Prophet, “but I saw you as a man.”

  Between tears, Pidre asked, “What am I like, Grandma? Who do you see?”

  “You live near a large village on the other side of the Lost Territory, along a river, surrounded by their mines.”

  “Mines?”

  “Their gutting,” she said. “You’ll have a fierce wife and daughters. Do not be vengeful people.”

  “Grandma,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, my baby. You will.”

  “I miss you,” Pidre cried. “I already feel it. I am missing you now.”

  “But I am still here,” Desiderya closed her eyes and winced at a pain that seemed lodged within her heart. “Pidre,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “You gave me such joy,” she wheezed into the ghost of a laugh. “You are my grandson, and you are my friend. Thank you for coming into my life.”

  She let out her final exhale, her breath circling the room. At that, Desiderya Lopez, the Sleepy Prophet of Pardona Pueblo, moved from the temperature of the living into the temperature of the dead.

  * * *

  —

  As Pidre grew up, he was well liked and respected among his people. Mexicano, French Canadian, and American traders often traveled through Pardona, bringing their weapons and furs, metal trinkets and fancy candies. Pidre had an eye for these things, a
nd an ear for languages. He bartered with the traders and stored their impressive items beneath his sheepskin. In exchange for small tasks, Pidre would dole out candies to the children of Pardona. At seventeen, he announced to the elders that he was interested in leaving the Land of Early Sky. He was a businessman, well suited for the white world. There were many objections among the elders, who had so graciously taken in the child from nowhere. “We are your people now.”

  Pidre said, “I know where I come from, but I’d like to see the other side, too. The Sleepy Prophet predicted it.”

  After much deliberation, the elders agreed that it was time and sent the boy off with many beautiful pots, furs, and handcrafts to trade for the white man’s money in town. There were several nights of dancing, the clowns came out in their black and white paint, the women gave offerings of Winter and Summer food, and the men presented their advice: “Be wary of their currency, for it is marked with blood.” Pidre said he understood and embraced his elders with gratitude.

  On the morning he left, Pidre headed north from Pardona, steadily walking a dirt path lined with sapphire mountains and the winding stream of Rio Lucero. He carried a kidney-colored satchel given to him by the Sleepy Prophet, worn straps knocking against his hip. The sky was endless and overcast in simmering clouds, and the pungent sagebrush reached for Pidre every step of the way. He felt small against the vastness of world until he felt struck, somewhere deep inside his heart, with the enormity of his Grandma Desiderya’s invisible air.