No Amount of Evidence Can Make Me Believe

You have to start the water early if you want your clothes dry by dark. Say sunup, maybe 6:30, when the water you siphoned off the roof the night before is frozen halfway down the tub. You pile mesquite branches into the 50-gallon drum marked "Union Carbide Not For Re-Use", stuff in a balled copy of the Partido Comunista de Bavispe broadside, which has very flammable ink, and drop in a match. Not too soon, because you are cold. Very cold. Your house is a shack of corrugated steel, without heat, and your bed is a wool blanket on a tarp on the floor. There is ice on the steel wall where you breathed all night trying to stay on the warm spot you made. So when the flames catch and the bark ignites and the thick diesel smoke of the mesquite starts straight up to the medium-blue sky, you lean in its path and begin to thaw. In a few minutes you stop shaking and you can feel your face soften, and the ice begins to separate from the tub. You stay there, almost immobile, until the ice is half gone and steam grays the smoke. Then you get your dust-red shirts and shiny pants and secret underwear and pile them into the tub, stirring with a stick until they're under. Water explodes when it sloshes onto the barrelhead. And now you are warm.



You move out of the jacal and into the sun, which now angles into the courtyard. The chickens are out and looking for crumbs. The sun comes over the wall through broken bottles, and the rim of the wall's shadow is toothed with green and brown, eating away the frost inch by inch, quickly now. Several other plumes of black and white rise over the houses, and you hear Spanish and Tarahumara, and you smell coffee.



The senora's house has a blanket for a back door, and she pushes it aside to come out with two mugs of canela. She is already made up, but her hair is still in curlers and she is in her nightgown, over which she has draped two threadbare cardigans.



"Good morning."

"Good morning. Did you sleep well?"

She winces as she hands you the tea. "My back is not so good in this cold." She always starts her day with tea and a complaint, though she is by nature sunny and agreeable. You sip your tea, remembering how you mistrusted its redness when you first came here, sure it contained food colorings long-since banned in the States. Now you like it, though she's added too much sugar.

"I had a dream about you." She has dreams, and is known with some suspicion and much reverence as something of a bruja. You don't want to encourage her, but you can't say nothing.

"Tell me."

"Well, OK, but maybe this is not what you want to hear on laundry day. Maybe you want a break from God and all this Spanish you must be tired of."

"No, it's OK. You dreamt, then, of God?" This is how you say it in Spanish. I was long since comfortable with these Baroque constructions, no longer American, really. Converted to grand gestures, gentlemanly suavity, chivalrous deference, and eloquent solicitousness.

"Yes. Of course. I dreamt that you brought me a book, very fine, of gold, with the finest engravings in a mysterious script. You told me to read it, and I was very moved by your trust in leaving it here in my poor house. I read the book for three days and nights, not stopping except to light the lamp when it was dark, and put it out when it was light. At the end of the book, a great curandero wrote that I should ask God if it was true, so I went to the church and did many rezas and then asked Baby Jesus and the Sacred Heart and Mother of God if the book was true. They told me to ask you, that you would speak for them. So I am disturbing your laundry day to ask you if it is true, this book of gold."

My heart was beating so hard I couldn't take a deep breath. My hands were shaking. I felt something like fire start inside me and my heart surged. "Yes, sister. It is true. All of it. Every word."

She smiled, hugely, her teeth and gums the color of cinnamon. "I knew it!" she said. It was such a beautiful book, and I knew it was true!" Then she told me she would have eggs ready in a minute and went inside.



I stirred my clothes some more, and began to fish them out of the now boiling water and onto the concrete washboard. I soaped the collars and did a rather cursory job of it as my hands began to chill. Then I lifted the tub off the drum and rinsed everything, and refilled the tub for my companion, who would wake up soon to wash his own clothes.