Read Online What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell - Free Book Online Page B

1800-something. Back then, the Indians they were trying to convert would have been the ones working in the garden; not really voluntarily, but the Altar Society has sort of sidestepped that fact. The Church was really awful to the Indians, it’s a wonder any of the Chumash people around here will even speak to us.
    Felix had on that ratty old bathrobe, and he was kneeling in a pool of sun by a stone bench, setting out lavender starts. He was barefoot and the bald spot in his gray hair looked like a monk’s tonsure. He really did look like he might be a brother in some old monastery.
    “Hey,” I said.
    He sat up on his heels and smiled at me. “Hey, yourself.”
    “If I don’t have those dreams, does it mean you get them?” I asked him. They were so awful. Maybe I could stand them for a while, just to keep him from having them. After all, he’d been taking on my troubles since I was nine.
    “Did you get them again last night?” He looked worried now.
    “No,” I said. “Did you?”
    “No, I dreamed I was riding a camel through this big mountain of whipped cream.”
    I couldn’t tell whether he was lying to make me feel better or not. It sounded like a dream somebody might have.
    “Fish were swimming out of my ears,” he added.
    I had to laugh. And I could tell he wasn’t going to tell me whether it was true or not.
    “Did you pray?” he asked me.
    “Kind of. I thought about God, and how everybody says he’s on their side. He can’t be on both sides.” Unless, of course, he is a dog. Dogs love everybody.
    “That’s why every religion claims that everyone else’s God is really the devil,” Felix said.
    “Why can’t they all be the same God with different names?”
    “Watch out. That’s the kind of thinking that got me un-sainted.”
    “How do you know?” I asked him. “You said you didn’t know why it happened.” Now I was talking like he really was St. Felix.
    “Well, being St. Felix is very specific to Christianity. I mean, the Virgin came and rang the cloister bells for me and all.”
    I suppose he read the same Lives of the Saints in the parish library that I did. At any rate, I wasn’t going to get into a discussion with him about whether he’d actually seen the Virgin Mary.
    But I must have looked skeptical, because he said, “If Juan Diego can see her, I can see her.”
    Juan Diego is the Aztec Indian who supposedly saw the Virgin of Guadalupe and converted all his friends afterward. He maybe didn’t really exist any more than St. Felix of Valois did, although the Pope canonized him. But I couldn’t help it; I said, “What was she like?”
    Felix stared across the herb garden, like he was looking straight through the adobe wall, and said, “This woman had a baby, all wrapped in a shawl, you know?”
    “The Virgin?”
    “No, she shoved the baby at the lieutenant and he took it. Then she ran like a bat outta hell, and the baby exploded. The lieutenant was standing under this tree, you know, and there were scraps of him and the baby hanging off the tree. The tree was all burned black. That was when I saw her. She was just hanging in the air over the tree, in her blue gown, and she looked so sad.”
    “Oh my God.” I sat down on the bench. There was no way I was going to remind him that he’d just said she rang the bells for him in the monastery. It was clear that this was where he’d really seen her. Or seen something .
    “She had on this starry cloak,” he said softly. “And she said, ‘You’re late.’”
    “Felix—”
    “Scared the shit outta me, because I didn’t want to go, you know, not where the lieutenant had gone.” He looked up at me and he was back in the herb garden again, not wherever he’d been a second before.
    “Do you dream about that?” I asked him, scared to get an answer.
    He smiled. “Just about the Virgin. She always has her hands full of roses, that’s how I know it’s her.”
    I hoped he was telling the truth. I did not want to have the