Free Trinity Fields by Bradford Morrow

leftover from dinner the night before, wrapped it up in paper, and now I tapped my hands on my pants pockets.
    Sometimes the mind can run in so many directions at once. I suppose I had thought ahead to the projected night before me, down in the valley, pictured myself under the heavy stars, hungry and far from the comforts of home. The chicken wing was gone. Must have lost it in the desert where some cayedog got himself a pretty easy morsel. I could picture my mother and sister sitting there at the table last night, talking of this and that, and remembered how I’d eaten second helpings and, bashful, asked for thirds against this secret prospect of famishment.
    But then Martinez laughed and pointed, —The keys, man, there they are, let’s go, and sure enough they were still in the ignition where Kip had left them. My mouth was as parched as the soil that covered my lips and cheeks.
    â€”Go away, I shouted at the old caretaker, who was almost upon us, —go away, saying it as much for his sake as ours. Kip got the Plymouth started and slammed the column stick into gear just as he came hobbling to the side of the car, waving those church keys in the air, whooping and sputtering, the mongrel dogs—black, brown, white with spots, all nondescript but for their fat wet swinging tongues—running in close circles around him.
    Our tires spun, kicked up pebbles. Our heads heaved forward, came to right. The moronic dogs stopped and, with the miraculous singularity of vision a pack can display, turned their attention from the viejito to us in the car, then one, then another of them bared fangs, and in an instant bounded straight in our direction. Kip, not having seen any of this, fumbled with the stick, hit the gas and suddenly backed up again, slammed into something, pumped the brake, pushed the shift stick to drive. The engine coughed and we lurched out forward as a painful howling rose from under the chrome bumper. I turned and saw that one of the mongrels, crackling with energy, powered itself in a furious scuffle with the earth, its hind end reddened and paralyzed, its head and forelegs churning as it pulled itself in a semicircle, and lunged across the powdery ground snapping in the direction of the car. The old man had sat himself down on the plaza. He watched the injured dog as it ran in arcs, fell, jumped up again, described a half-moon on the dust much the way we used to make snow angels on our backs after a fresh winter flurry, and collapsed once more. The other hounds were right alongside us. Martinez stood in the back seat. To him this was a marvelous circus, I guess. He threw the whiskey bottle at the closest dog, a black and muscular blur, and caught it square in the chops. Beyond the dogs, the bottle, the old man, I saw the santuario receding from view, glazed as it were by the scrim of dustlight. The stout twin spires seemed peaceful and eternal there in the delicate, protecting hands of the cottonwoods, and I knew with the same certainty one knows something in a particularly vivid dream that despite ourselves we had accomplished what we’d come to do, that while our simple-hearted wishes might be beyond the interests of fate to grant, our motives had not been construed as other than good and kind and compassionate. We could eat all the sacred dirt on earth, but still those who loved to make war would make war. My crooked halo whitened—could Kip, could Martinez see?—into the sincerest burning beam for that one small moment, then dimmed away.
    Thinking back on it, I’ve come to adore El Santuario de Chimayó more and more over the years, despite my distance and the fact I’m not a religious man, don’t attend church, don’t intend to attend church in the future. Chimayó is more than a church, has to it a spiritual richness beyond what any religion offers. Sturdy and luminous, it is a holy yet secular place, secular as in saecular, saecularis , worldly and pagan,