All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

“Do you think consequences are meaningful if we haven’t seen them for ourselves?”

“Did you ever think that maybe we’re doing it wrong? All of us?”

He’d been so terrible that he’d chased a field of sheds out into the road one week and burned down a herd of cattle the next.

Donated by an anonymous benefactor, for all the crooked saints.

but the truth is that we men and women often hate to be rid of the familiar, and sometimes our darkness is the thing we know the best.

Although they were very different, they shared one important trait: They did not try to change other people and rarely judged them unless the other person’s values directly influenced their lives. For Daniel, this meant that he had, before his incident with the painting, hung out with young men whom others found to be of dubious character. For Beatriz, this meant that she had often frustrated Judith by refusing to take sides in moral discussions or

disagreements. This trait also made Daniel and Beatriz good conversation partners. A debate without a goal of philosophical interference can continue

endlessly without drama. One of their earliest radio dish discussions had centered around who could receive a miracle. A pilgrim had just abandoned a fractious stallion at Bicho Raro, and the horse’s famously ill temperament was the topic of every Soria conversation. Beatriz and Daniel, then ten and twe...

whether they, as Sorias, could visit their miracl...

“So that horse will be terrible forever?” Daniel had asked. “I do not think the darkness is about being ‘terrible.’ ” It had taken slightly longer for ten-year-old Beatriz to find the words that she needed. She had still been learning how to live with the hard truth that the most interesting parts of her thoughts usually got left behind when she tried to put them into words. There were often very long pauses as she strove for a perfect translation. “I think the darkness is about shame.”

Beatriz observed it all from her perch, paying less attention to the nature and more attention to the small humans moving below her. She did not particularly enjoy physical labor, but she found it satisfying to watch other people engaged in it. She

is, after all, not the tasks people do but the things they do around

the edges of them that reveal w...

There is a plant that still grows in Colorado today called the tamarisk. It is also called the salt cedar. It is not a native plant. In the 1930s, a dust storm had arrived in the middle of the United States and raged for years. To keep all the states between Colorado and Tennessee from blowing away, farmers had planted millions of tamarisk shrubs to hold the ground down. Once its job was done there, the enterprising tamarisk had packed its bags and moved to the southwestern corner of the United States to stay. In bloom, it is very lovely, with tiny pink flowers made beautiful by their unusual combination of tender color and physical durability. When it is not in bloom, it is an enormous plant of extreme hardiness, so suited to growing in Colorado that when it is present, no other plant can compete with it. Massive, unwieldy roots dig deep into the soil, drinking all the water and using all of the salt, eventually making the only suitable neighbor for tamarisk yet more tamarisk.

desire,

It was just that Marisita was not sure that saints and witches were very different in the end.

George Wyatt was a man of action. George Wyatt had been supposed to die in the womb, as his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck, but he’d decided that death was not for him and had chewed himself free. He’d been born two weeks early, his baby

hands still clutching the ragged stump of his umbilical cord, his baby mouth already full of teeth. He’d been the weakest of his

eight siblings, but he’d begun lifting weights as a toddler and by the time he was fifteen, he could lift all of his siblings at once. His family had been dust-poor and he was meant to be, too, but he’d signed himself up for the army and worked hard. He saved a full colonel from choking on his rations in the field by...

Here was a thing Antonia wanted: to suck honey off a man’s finger. Here was a thing she feared: that she would forget to shout at one of her family members and this family member’s lack of care would lead to her house catching on fire. With a furious exhalation, she rose from her paper roses.

As Pete fetched his bag from the car, Antonia spared a bitter glance at her husband Francisco’s greenhouse. He was visible through the glass. While his wife spent her nights making paper flowers so beautiful they seemed real, Francisco spent his days growing real flowers so beautiful they seemed fake. Although

Here was a thing Francisco wanted: to find a pitch-black bud on one of his roses. Here was a thing he feared: being asked to do anything else.

rule: only room and board for the pilgrims, no other conversation, because you don’t know what will help them. Rule two, if you want a wife or you want a husband, you go outside Bicho Raro. Love is a dangerous thing already, without a pilgrim in it. Rule three, only a saint performs the miracle, and no one else around, because you don’t know when the darkness will bite like that snake you just saw. These are the rules.”

Just a decade before, a scientist named Harry Harlow had studied the science of attachment by performing experiments on monkeys. The poor infant monkeys had been deprived of their real mothers but offered two substitutes: an artificial monkey covered with terry cloth and an artificial monkey made of wire. A terry-cloth mother is not much of a mother at all, but all of the infant monkeys agreed she was better than the wire mother. Harlow had not studied young men from Oklahoma in this experiment, but the results still held true for Pete. Padre and the other strange pilgrims felt like a wire mother to Pete, and the specter of Tony, though only a snarling terry-cloth mother, seemed to at least offer a semblance of comfort.

Pete was eyeballing Tony’s new stature,

¡Vivir con miedo, es cómo vivir a medias!—A life lived in fear is a life half-lived!—but

newly visible darkness just as daunting as invisible darkness—

possibly more so. Despair, that opportunistic companion, slunk in, preventing them from examining themselves to perform the second miracle

top of each other, the darkness appearing only to be almost immediately vanquished by the euphoric pilgrim. It was hard to imagine that now, with Bicho Raro brimming with unhealed pilgrims.

otherworldliness.

But Beatriz set off without hesitation. If Daniel could face his darkness head-on, she could face one of her parents’ arguments.

that how old you think we are?” Antonia demanded. Judith told Francisco, “This mistreatment won’t do. You must move back into the house. You cannot turn your back on her this way! If you don’t like her moods, you have to know that withholding your presence will only make it worse!” Some may have felt she was being unfair or frivolous. But for newly wed Judith, the party represented something else—a promise that a pure and passionate love was still a pure and passionate love years down the road, despite tragedy and differences in personality. It also represented security. She had remained safe at Bicho Raro all these years only because she had her mother and her father standing guard over her sister and her. But now, if they had separated, anything could happen. Darkness could swallow them all. If there was not going to be a party, she wanted to flee again immediately. She would have fled again immediately, if she did not love her family too much to leave them to their fates. Francisco did not reply. When he did

The intention of every Soria miracle was the same: to heal the mind. Daniel Soria had been telling himself this over and over since the night before. This trial was not a punishment, he reminded himself. This trial was a miracle. But it did not feel like a miracle.

It was so dark. Although he was curved into the small orange circle of light provided by a smoldering fire, everything he looked at appeared dull. He seemed to be having difficulty seeing light the same way he had this time yesterday. It was as if there was a gauzy curtain hung between his eyes and the fire, and two heavier curtains on either side of his vision, threatening to close. It was possible, he thought, that they had already closed a little more since he had left Bicho Raro. He did not know what he would do if he went blind out here in the wild scrub.

He knew the miracles were meant to teach the pilgrims something about themselves. Take Tony, for instance, and his newfound gigantism. Daniel figured Tony was someone famous. He didn’t recognize him personally, but he’d seen many celebrities come through Bicho Raro, and he’d gotten pretty good at noting the posturing and style that marked public figures. So Tony, suffering under the public eye as most celebrities do, had received a miracle that ensured he was under even more constant scrutiny. The miracle’s purpose was then clear: If Tony

could learn to l...

giant, he would once again be able to live as a man. This meant that Daniel’s narr...

teach him something, but he didn’t know what it might be. He had thought that he knew himself pretty well, and yet meaning eluded him. Perhaps this darkness was meant to teach him trust, or humility, or despair. Nothing seemed obvious. Possibly an outsider might have been able to immediately identify the truth of it, just as the meaning of Tony’s darkness was obvious to Daniel. But there was no one else to obs...

outcome, which was that Daniel might discover what the darkness truly meant, and still be unable to overcome it. He recalled a pilgrim from Utah whose miracle had left him with a bulbous red face and a helpless desire to gag whenever he tried to put food in his mouth. The man seemed to understand at once what this darkness stood for, because he became overwhelmed with grief and guilt. Daniel, of course, had been unable to speak to him because of the taboo, ...

had died with the pilgrim. The knowing had not helped him. Perhaps Daniel was meant to learn how difficult miracles were. No. He thought he knew that already. “If there wasn’t a moon out tonight, there is one now,” Diablo Diablo said. “Coming up next we’ve got something to put a smile on that moo...

“Imagine … you have a tormented mind,” Diablo Diablo said, his voice dramatic. “You barter with sadness or you fight with grief or you eat arrogance every morning with your coffee. There are saints in this valley who can heal you. You and every other pilgrim can canter to Bicho Raro to receive a miracle. A miracle, you say? A miracle. This miracle makes the darkness inside you visible in amazing and peculiar ways. Now that you see what has been haunting you, you overthrow it, and then you leave this place free and easy. Don’t believe me? Hey, hey, I don’t make the news, I just report it. There’s only one catch: The saints cannot help you tackle your darkness after you receive the miracle, or they will, ah, they will bring darkness on themselves, a worse darkness than any ordinary man’s. Or woman’s, golly.”

‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ ”

“No, I did not,” Marisita said in her sweet, sad voice. “Nothing except for the owls. I’m sorry. I want to be able to help. But I didn’t see any change at all. It’s hard for me to imagine that he even had any darkness inside him, because he is—he was—you know how he is.”

Daniel spared another drop of water. The tear fell to the dust. A pack rat raced out from the brush to grab it, certain it was a jewel because of its shine in the firelight. Daniel’s sorrow had made it tangible enough to carry, and so the pack rat bore it back to its nest, only to later find that offspring raised on a bed of sadness fail to thrive.

you’re in love with him, the family darkness will come on you, too, if you help him.”

“It’s Time to Cry.”

Daniel opened his eyes. But it was not very much brighter than it had been with them closed.

Being a pilgrim was a hard row to hoe. Nearly every person who came to Bicho Raro believed that the first miracle was the end point of their journey. They had only to make it to the point of receiving it and then their soul would rest easy. Things went pear-shaped for many when they understood it was the first of a two-step process, and as time passed, pilgrims began to fall into two increasingly disparate groups: those who performed the second miracle almost immediately after their first and those who, with every unsuccessful day following the first miracle, became increasingly unlikely to ever perform the second miracle.

This was because Marisita believed in perfection, and held herself to that

standard. If you’re a wise person, you understand immediately that this