Part One

"You can't buy bullets with food stamps."

— Nick Rael

Amarante Córdova had had thirteen children. That is, he and his wife, Elizabeth — known as Betita — had had thirteen children, who either still were or had been Nadia, Jorge, Pólito, María Ana, Berta, Roberto, Billy, Nazario, Gabriel, Ricardo, Sally, Patsy, and Cipriano. Betita, who had never been sick a day in her life, died in 1963, on November 22, on the same day as President Kennedy, but not from a bullet in the head. She had been outside chopping wood during a lovely serene snowstorm when suddenly she set down the ax and began to walk along the Milagro–García spur out onto the mesa. In recalling her death later Amarante would always tell his listeners, "You cannot imagine how beautiful it was that afternoon. The snow falling was as serene as the white feathers of a swan. When the ravens sailed through it they made no sound. You looked up and the big black birds were floating through the snowflakes like faint shadows of our forefathers, the first people who settled in the valley. The tall sagebrush was a lavender-green color because there had been a lot of rain in the autumn, and that was the only color on the otherwise black and white mesa, the pale lavender-green of the sage on which snow had settled. You remember, of course, that Betita's hair was as white as the snow, and she was wearing a black dress and a black woolen shawl that Sally, our daughter who was married to the plumber from Doña Luz, knitted for her on a birthday long ago."

Slowly, taking her time, Betita walked across the mesa to the rim of the gorge. "And there she stood on the edge looking down," Amarante said. "For a long time she was poised there like a wish afraid to be uttered. The walls of the gorge created a faded yellow glow to the flakes falling eight hundred feet down to the icy green river below. Ravens were in the air, circling, their wings whispering no louder than the snow falling. It was very peaceful. I was at the house, I never saw her leave. But when she didn't come in with the wood after a while, I saddled up that lame plow horse we used to have called Buster, and went after her, following her tracks in the snow. Just as I left the road to enter the chamisal an owl dropped out of the darkening sky, landing on a cedar post not ten yards away. An owl is a sure sign from the dead, you know, and it was right then I knew she had disappeared into the gorge. When I arrived at the rim an enormous raven was standing where she had last stood, and when he saw me he spread his wings, which were wider than my outstretched arms, and floated up like a good-bye kiss from my wife into the lazy storm. Next day we opened the church, only the second time that year it was used, not to say prayers for Betita, but to burn candles and shed our tears for the President who had died in Dallas. But I lit my candles for Betita, and nobody noticed. Three months later her body was discovered on the bank of the river two miles below Chamisaville."

The Córdova sons and daughters had scattered, as the saying goes, to the four winds. Or actually, only to the three winds, eastward being anathema to the children of Milagro, whose Mississippi was the Midnight Mountains, that chain running north and south barely a mile or two from all their backyards.

Nadia, a waitress most of her life, first in Doña Luz, then Chamisaville, wound up in the Capital City barrio, dying violently (and recently) at the age of sixty-one in a lover's quarrel. Jorge emigrated to Australia where he tended sheep, same as at home. Pólito, who spent his life wandering around, getting married three or four times and taking care of sheep in Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, had died young of the flu. María Ana wanted to be a dancer, took the train to San Francisco, and after years of strenuous work, heartbreak, and small roles in the city ballet company, she hurt her back and wound up teaching in an Arthur Murray studio. Berta married an Anglo who raised lemons in California, and, curiously, they never had any children. Roberto, Billy, and Nazario became farm workers, mechanics, truck drivers, dishwashers, and short-order cooks in and around Los Angeles; they all raised large families, and although between them they'd had nine sons in Vietnam, only one of Billy's kids, Rosario, had been killed. Gabriel, who miraculously metamorphosed into a run-of-the-mill featherweight boxer in the army, turned pro after his discharge, was known as the Milagro Mauler during his short and undistinguished prime, and died in a plane crash in Venezuela. Ricardo had stayed on as a rancher in Milagro, although he spent half his life in the lettuce, sugar beet, or potato fields of southern Colorado, or else with the big sheep outfits up in Wyoming and Montana. Two of his sons, Elisardo and Juan, had died in Vietnam; another boy was stationed in Germany. Sally married a plumber in Doña Luz and had eleven kids herself, one of whom became a successful pop singer in Mexico City, but never sent any money home, not even after the plumber died when a black widow bit him while he was creeping around somebody's musty crawl space on a job. Patsy, the most beautiful and the sharpest in school, ran West to join a circus, became an Avon lady instead, and died with her husband and all their children except Peter (who was in a Japanese hospital at the time recovering from wounds received in Vietnam) in a head-on car crash in Petaluma. And little Cipriano, the baby of the family, born in 1925, who went farther than everyone else in his education, and, in fact, had just obtained a full scholarship to Harvard when he was drafted, was vivisected by a German machine gun during the first eighteen seconds of the Normandy D-day landings.

All his life Amarante had lived in the shadow of his own death. When he was two days old he caught pneumonia, they gave him up for dead, somehow he recovered. During his childhood he was always sick, he couldn't work like other boys his age. He had rheumatic fever, chicken pox, pneumonia three or four more times, started coughing blood when he was six, was anemic, drowsy all the time, constantly sniffling, weak and miserable, and — everybody thought — dying. At eight he had his tonsils out; at ten, his appendix burst. At twelve he was bitten by a rattlesnake, went into a coma, survived. Then a horse kicked him, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He contracted tuberculosis. He hacked and stumbled around, hollow-eyed, gaunt and sniffling, and folks crossed themselves, murmuring Hail Marys whenever he staggered into view. At twenty, when he was already an alcoholic, scarlet fever almost laid him in the grave; at twenty-three, malaria looked like it would do the job. Then came several years of amoebic dysentery. After that he was constipated for seventeen months. At thirty, a lung collapsed; at thirty-four, shortly after he became the first sheriff of Milagro, that old devil pneumonia returned for another whack at it, slowed his pulse to almost nothing, but like a classical and very pretty but fainthearted boxer, couldn't deliver the knockout punch. During the old man's forties a number of contending diseases dropped by Amarante's body for a shot at the title. The clap came and went, had a return bout, was counted out. The measles appeared, as did the mumps, but they did not even last a full round. For old time's sake pneumonia made a token...