by RLB Hartmann

Prologue

Sonora, 1870.

     Villagers predicted that Luis Panadero would go to Hell for beating his family and scaring them witless with drunken pistolshots that blasted chunks of adobe from their hut.  If Mama or Ramon heard the hoofbeats in time to escape, it meant a night on someone else's petate crowded among the Indios.  If not, they must hide in the root cellar amid rotting potatoes and turnips until morning, when rage would be spent and the pistol empty.

     "Luis wasn't always like this," she told everyone.  "Blame the tequila.  Pray for him."

     Daily, Ramon knelt beside her on the earthen floor of the village church and prayed.  "Precioso Diosito, make my papa stop drinking tequila, so that he will love us."

     Sometimes Panadero stayed away for weeks at a time, yet his harsh voice rang in Ramon's ears like the church bell which announced Mass before dawn.  "Solo un pinche perro! Why did you name him Ramon? Why not Luis? I know why-- No es mijo mio, es bastardo.  Ni Ramon, ni Luis.  He is only Trouble."

     Ramon spent his mornings on the Rio Sangria with friends.  They erected reed forts on the mud flats, played patolli for pebbles, took him to their huts across the river to ride their burros or milk one of the goats to moisten the dry tortillas at noon.  He raced older Indio boys until his chest heaved and sweat ran down his bare skin.  Sometimes he won.

     In the afternoons, lying on his petate and pretending to sleep, he watched Mama as she shelled beans, swept the packed earth floor, bent her head over her rosary to pray.  Often she lifted her eyes to stare at the smoke-stained adobe wall where hung a framed picture of the Virgen de Los Remedios and her ninito, Jesus.  Gold-rich embroidered garments and jeweled crowns, and tiny figures of angels hovering on either side of the haloed brown faces, made him think that Jesucristo was the most fortunate boy in the world.

     "Dios is his father," Mama told him.  "Diosito divino."

     How unfair, to have not only fine clothing instead of coarse cotton, but also a kind and loving papa.  La virgen and Jesusito lived in Heaven, not the barren hills of Sonora.  In Cielo, no one ever rode in drunk on a lathered horse, curses streaming from cruel lips, fists ready to bruise.  Once, a bullet had broken the glass from the framed picture.  Ramon's finger just fit the hole in the forehead above La Virgen's right eye.