The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

But if God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if He is three in one in the Trinity, then God knows nothing of loneliness.

God knows nothing of loneliness, because God has never tasted companionship as mortals do: clinging to one another in darkness so complete and sharp it scrapes flesh from bone, trusting one another even as the Devil’s breath blooms hot on their napes.

Fate had been unkind to me, but sometimes, its pettiness worked in my favor.

“You must be strong,” she said. “We must bear this with dignity.” With dignity. With silence was what she meant.

I sacrificed that dream because survival was more important than being lonely.

To be unpopular with the conservative criollo hacendados, those who clung to their wealth and the monarchy, meant that Rodolfo was sympathetic to the insurgents and independence.

There were no cats on this godforsaken hacienda. Juana had lied. And she had sent me here alone.

Their God is money.

Andrés raised his candle, then moved it down and side to side in the sign of the cross. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus—” I cried out as darkness leaped from the walls, from around the skeleton, from behind us, from before us. The cold sucked shadows toward it with a ferocity that made our candles flicker and jump. Andrés’s candle died.

“This will not please Doña Juana.” The sharpness in Ana Luisa’s voice took me by surprise. “What won’t please her?” I asked. Surely not the mouthwatering pozole. Starved of rest, my mind was slow to follow what Ana Luisa meant. She avoided my eyes as she stirred the cauldron of soup before her. Wood from the fire beneath the stove crackled; the silence between us filled with blue smoke. The heat made a bead of sweat drip down her brow. “That you invited the witch onto her property,” she said at last. Panic threaded through my chest. The witch, she said.

Look at me, she said. Ah, but I had, and therein lay the sin.

Should is an oddly powerful word. Shame and anger have a way of flying to it like coins to lodestone. I had achieved detachment from so many worldly things, but this clung like burrs. It was a snake that sank its fangs so deep they touched bone, spreading its venom through my marrow.

He stood before me, the witch in priest’s clothing, a pocketknife in one hand and a censer in the other.

My God, why do You forsake Your people? Why do You not protect them from the gilded monsters that prowl the earth?

house did not reply. I

Perhaps it was that, despite all he was capable of—rising into the air like an angel riding a cloud of darkness, bringing peace to a room with a prayer and his raspy voice—he, too, admitted he was afraid. He, too, seized my hand in the dark. Needed my shoulder against his until dawn.

When a man makes a promise, he makes it on his honor. When a witch makes a promise, they feel it in their bones. Titi believed words are power: they may lay your destiny in stone or shatter a legacy altogether. Words can damn or bless in equal measure, and are never to be used lightly.

“Then don’t.” I lowered my face to his. “Just be with me now,” I breathed against his lips. “Be.”

All this time, I thought knowing what was right would bring me peace or contentment. Instead, sorrow draped leaden across my shoulders as I watched the empty horizon, every fiber of my being willing the carriage to turn back.