By the Light of My Father's Smile Read Online Free PDF Page A

church. And many standard hymns—“Onward, Christian Soldiers,” for instance—were translated into their language. This seemed only right, since we were in their territory. But not the song June sang, with its carnal message of unity with creation and no credit to a Creator. I had heard it only once before, the month we’d arrived, ten years ago. It was a chant, really, repetitious and monotonous as all chants are. The tribe had seemed hypnotized by it. Taken someplace deeper than church, where they had to stay riveted on the convoluted ideas, customs, and lives of foreigners in a book, the Bible, that had no particular fascination for them. The song was not written down. How had she learned it? What did it signify? Were the people still chanting this song in secret ceremonies? June obviously knew. And knew as well that I did not know. This was her power, exposed. It was a power, not only over the God we’d come to share with these people, it was a power over me.

Twigs
    I did not know until much later that Susannah was outside our bedroom door while Daddy was punishing me. It must have been as incomprehensible to her as it was to me. I knew I had disobeyed him, but he was after all a minister, or at least putting up a mighty show of being one. He’d even gradually graduated from pastor, wearing a plain tan colored suit on Sundays, to priest, and wore black every day. His profession, as he explained it to me and Susannah, was based on the forgiveness of other people’s sins. In the long white dresses he ordered for me and the Mary Jane shoes, the quaint colorful shawls he purchased from the village weavers, I’m sure he thought me hobbled. But he did not understand my passion for riding horses, or my particular passion for riding Vado, the black stallion that belonged to Manuelito. And so, of course, he did not know where to look when it was clear I had escaped the nest. That from the look of things I had escaped at will, even while the door was locked. That even Susannah, his adoring flunky, had been in cahoots with me, and had lied to him. Oh, Daddy dear, as she sweetly and sickeningly called him, ourMagdalena is sleeping. Oh, Daddy dear, our Magdalena is in the water closet. Oh, Daddy dear, she seems to have fainted from stomach cramps.
    But on that last day I did not sneak. Manuelito and Vado appeared on a rise I could see from my window, and while the family ate lunch, I went out to them. I hitched my long skirt high up on my thighs and Manuelito swung down for me. We were equally brown, equally bold of dark and reckless eye. We’d been twin spirits since the day I arrived with my family so many years ago. And Manuelito had pinched me in the ribs while Daddy led his first froggy-throated prayer, a prayer he’d learned in the car on the way down and obviously didn’t believe, and I’d promptly stepped on his bare foot—in my leather-soled North American shoes—hard.
    It was like that with us. No tears, lots of pain. We did not speak of loving each other. No. That was not our way at all. We instead discovered bird’s nests together, abandoned trails, poisoned wells, vulture feasts, rattlesnake beds, a valley of bluebells early in the spring. All these we shared almost wordlessly. And when we touched each other there was a casual ownership about it, an ownership that claimed just the moment of the actual touching, nothing more. But what this meant was that when Manuelito touched just one curl of my wayward hair—for in Mexico we were not bothered to straighten it—that one seemingly absentminded fingering was felt as something alive, curling, electric, as far down as my toes.
    The place we went to was familiar. In fact, it was our home. We went home. We went to our house. I love to think of it this way even now. It was a shallow cave in the side of the mountains. A rusty shrub obscured our door. But from inside you could see through the shrub, and then