Read Online Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade - Free Book Online
Authors: Kirstin Valdez Quade
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the loft at her family: her mother, her stepfather, and between them, arms flung wide, her little sister. Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them, Monica saw that, too; Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed, Monica would rankle ever more under her sharp eye. But Cordelia wouldn’t know any of this, not yet. Tomorrow, while her family slept below her in the gray dawn light, she would place her cheek back on the pillow and watch them, waiting for them to stir, and she wouldn’t even notice that she was finally warm.
THE FIVE WOUNDS
T HIS YEAR A MADEO P ADILLA IS J ESUS . T HE HERMANOS HAVE been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station. People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel Garcia.
Here it is, just Holy Tuesday, and even those who would rather spend the evening at home watching their satellite TVs are lined up in the alley, leaning in, fingers curled around the chain-link, because they can see that Amadeo is bringing something special to the role.
This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school.
Amadeo builds the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the rest of the hermanos, who have rolled up the cuffs of their pants and now drag the arches of their feet over sharp rocks behind him. The Hermano Mayor—Amadeo’s grand-tío Tíve, who owns the electronics store, and who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son (because, he told Yolanda, Amadeo could use a lesson in sacrifice)—plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise in a whine. A few hermanos swat their backs with disciplinas. Unlike the others, though, Amadeo does not groan, and he is shirtless, his tattooed back broad under the still-hot sun.
Today, he woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight, and this is what people watch: he holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce; the sound strikes sharply off the outside wall of the morada.
Amadeo has broken out in a sweat, and they all take note. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty-three years old, the same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that. Yolanda still cooks for him, pushes one plate across the table at him and another at whatever man she’s got with her.
And now here comes old Manuel Garcia, dragging his bad foot up the alley, his wounded hands curled at his sides.
He must have heard about the show Amadeo is putting on, because when else does he exert himself, except to buy liquor at the Peerless? As he nears the morada, the people part to give him a spot against the chain-link, right there in the middle. Now, instead of watching Amadeo, they watch Manuel. He coughs wetly between strikes of the hammer.
Manuel Garcia is old, but still a legend: in 1962 he begged the hermanos to use nails, and he hasn’t been able to open or close his hands since. It’s true the legend has soured a little, now that he hasn’t been able to work for forty-five years and has been kept alive by the combined generosity of the hermandad, the parish, and the state, and shows no sign of dying. Some people have stopped paying their tithes for this very reason. Some have even gone so far as to say that maybe the man was suicidal, and a death wish is not the same as devotion, even if they look alike.
Regardless, only
THE FIVE WOUNDS
T HIS YEAR A MADEO P ADILLA IS J ESUS . T HE HERMANOS HAVE been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station. People are saying that Amadeo is the best Jesus they’ve had in years, maybe the best since Manuel Garcia.
Here it is, just Holy Tuesday, and even those who would rather spend the evening at home watching their satellite TVs are lined up in the alley, leaning in, fingers curled around the chain-link, because they can see that Amadeo is bringing something special to the role.
This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school.
Amadeo builds the cross out of heavy rough oak instead of pine. He’s barefoot like the rest of the hermanos, who have rolled up the cuffs of their pants and now drag the arches of their feet over sharp rocks behind him. The Hermano Mayor—Amadeo’s grand-tío Tíve, who owns the electronics store, and who surprised them all when he chose his niece’s lazy son (because, he told Yolanda, Amadeo could use a lesson in sacrifice)—plays the pito, and the thin piping notes rise in a whine. A few hermanos swat their backs with disciplinas. Unlike the others, though, Amadeo does not groan, and he is shirtless, his tattooed back broad under the still-hot sun.
Today, he woke with the idea of studding the cross with nails to give it extra weight, and this is what people watch: he holds the hammer with both hands high above his head, brings it down with a crack. The boards bounce; the sound strikes sharply off the outside wall of the morada.
Amadeo has broken out in a sweat, and they all take note. Amadeo sweats, but not usually from work. He sweats when he eats, he sweats when he drinks too much. Thirty-three years old, the same as Our Lord, but Amadeo is not a man with ambition. Even his mother will tell you that. Yolanda still cooks for him, pushes one plate across the table at him and another at whatever man she’s got with her.
And now here comes old Manuel Garcia, dragging his bad foot up the alley, his wounded hands curled at his sides.
He must have heard about the show Amadeo is putting on, because when else does he exert himself, except to buy liquor at the Peerless? As he nears the morada, the people part to give him a spot against the chain-link, right there in the middle. Now, instead of watching Amadeo, they watch Manuel. He coughs wetly between strikes of the hammer.
Manuel Garcia is old, but still a legend: in 1962 he begged the hermanos to use nails, and he hasn’t been able to open or close his hands since. It’s true the legend has soured a little, now that he hasn’t been able to work for forty-five years and has been kept alive by the combined generosity of the hermandad, the parish, and the state, and shows no sign of dying. Some people have stopped paying their tithes for this very reason. Some have even gone so far as to say that maybe the man was suicidal, and a death wish is not the same as devotion, even if they look alike.
Regardless, only
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