Desert Grace, Part 2 0 comments

By Brian Volck

For all my desire to revisit Mision San Jose de Laguna, I almost passed it by. I arrived at Laguna pueblo much later in the day than I’d planned and nearly missed the turnoff, spying the church’s bell façade only with a chance turn of my head as I drove the wrong way. A few mistaken turns later—I’d come this way before; why was I making so many errors?—I found the right street. No one was out in the heat of the day when I drove up to the church and parked the car.

I approached the wooden main doors, deeply carved with images of the wounded arms of Christ and St. Francis forming an X before the cross, but they were locked.

I checked the church office, but that was obviously closed for the day. It seemed I’d come in vain, that I’d leave only with remembered images from past visits. Almost as an afterthought, though, I tried the small door to the far right.

My hand only touched the doorknob when the door snapped open, revealing a small, dark-haired man who seemed as startled by my presence as I was by his. He said his name was Alfred, and that he was about to close up the church. Was there anything I needed?

I told him why I’d come and asked for a few minutes to see the church again. With a trace of reluctance, he agreed, waiting at the rear of the nave while I walked forward in the half-light and knelt in a pew. I tried to take in all I’d come for, slowly washing my eyes over the familiar and the partly forgotten, planning to savor them later and at leisure in the gallery of my memory.

I mouthed a short prayer of thanks, then stood up. Alfred was still in back, watching me. “Where are you from?” he asked.

I told him of my years on the Navajo reservation and my work with the Hopi, distantly related to the Laguna by ancestry and tradition. I explained how time on the reservation taught me and my wife important lessons, and how we returned East so our children could see their grandparents more than once or twice a year, so they could sit at their feet and hear old family stories often enough to remember them.

Whether this was what made the difference, or if Alfred had been planning it all along, he smiled, and said, “I’m an artist. I grew up here in Laguna. Let me show you around.”

We walked toward the altar. He pointed to details in the reredo, the whirling flowers along the antipedium. On the wall to our left hung a seventeenth century image of San Jose painted in soft colors on animal hide. Alfred showed me holes in the hide, presumably from the arrows that felled the animal three centuries ago. The lower end of the painting is stained, which he told me was from the many pueblo ceremonies in which the painting was carried in procession to the nearby lake and dipped in the water. I had no way of verifying his story, but he spoke with a persuasive combination of familiarity and reverence.

Turning toward the statue of Kateri, he began telling me about his mother, a single parent for whom Alfred’s every word conveyed love and respect. “ There are a lot of single mothers around here. She was an incredible example to me. She knew she was going to die, and she started telling me more and more about Kateri. My mother was getting me ready, you know. My mother and Kateri: they’re both very special to me.”

He reached up into the carved pulpit and pulled out a small cloth bag.

“Ah,” I though to myself, “here’s where he tries to sell me something.”

But it wasn’t so.

Inside the bag were two wooden flutes. “I’d like to play you a song I wrote for my mother, “he said, gesturing for me to take a seat in the first pew. I sat, entranced by the melody, the company, the place, the moment. With his flute, Alfred looked like a man at prayer, and his song was certainly that for me. Notes curved, repeated, floating like lines of plainchant in the semi-darkness of the church. I had come to San Jose before for gifts of beauty, but the graces in this occasion were unprecedented.

When he finished—I have no idea how long it was—he played another prayer-song on the second flute. Afterwards, I was speechless, but assumed, like any Anglo, that the moment demanded words. “How do you say ‘thank you, in your language?” I asked. Alfred offered a brief lesson in Keresan, after which I thanked him profusely in two languages.

We spoke awhile longer. He gave me his address and I bought a small tile he’d painted by hand, which he seemed almost reluctant to part with. Then he told me he needed to go. The same was true for me. After a few parting words and some advice on where to find a decent lunch in Laguna pueblo, he headed home, while I walked to the car.

New Mexico bills itself as the land of enchantment. For me, it has long been a land of unexpected encounters, of grace neither sought nor imagined. Alfred was the latest and among the richest of many.

I try not to dwell too much on what might have happened had my day been planned differently, had I arrived five minutes later or earlier in the day, when there may well have been other visitors occupying Alfred’s attention. My scientific training militates against counterfactuals, and Aslan himself warns Lucy, “no one is ever told what would have happened.” It’s gift, all gift, as is everything on this planet.

Remind me, next time you see me, to be grateful.