Avenue of Mysteries

With his teeth clenched in pain, the effort to translate his sister's defense of the blood-licking dog was beyond Juan Diego, who thrashed his head from side to side in Lupe's lap.

When he could manage to hold his head still, Juan Diego believed he saw some menacing eye contact between the Guadalupe doll on Rivera's dashboard and his fervent sister. Lupe had been named after the Virgin of Guadalupe. Juan Diego was named for the Indian who'd encountered the dark-skinned virgin in 1531. Los ninos de la basura were born to Indians in the New World, but they also had Spanish blood; this made them (in their eyes) the conquistadors' bastard children. Juan Diego and Lupe didn't feel that the Virgin of Guadalupe was necessarily looking out for them.

"You should pray to her, you ungrateful heathen--not punch her!" Rivera now said to the girl. "Pray for your brother--ask for Guadalupe's help!"

Juan Diego had translated Lupe's invective on this religious subject too many times; he clenched his teeth, his lips tightly closed, not uttering a word.

"Guadalupe has been corrupted by the Catholics," Lupe began. "She was our Virgin, but the Catholics stole her; they made her the Virgin Mary's dark-skinned servant. They might as well have called her Mary's slave--maybe Mary's cleaning woman!"

"Blasphemy! Sacrilege! Unbeliever!" Rivera shouted. The dump boss didn't need Juan Diego to translate Lupe's diatribe--he'd heard Lupe sound off about the Guadalupe business before. It was no secret to Rivera that Lupe had a love-hate thing going with Our Lady of Guadalupe. El jefe also knew Lupe disliked Mother Mary. The Virgin Mary was an imposter, in the crazy child's opinion; the Virgin of Guadalupe had been the real deal, but those crafty Jesuits had stolen her for their Catholic ag

enda. In Lupe's opinion, the dark-skinned virgin had been compromised--hence "corrupted." The child believed that Our Lady of Guadalupe had once been miraculous but wasn't anymore.

This time, Lupe's left foot delivered a near-lethal kick to the Guadalupe doll, but the suction-cup base held fast to the dashboard while the doll shimmied and shook herself in a frankly less-than-virginal way.

In order to kick the dashboard doll, Lupe had done little more than arch her lap upward, toward the windshield, but even this much movement caused Juan Diego to scream.

"You see? Now you've hurt your brother!" Rivera cried, but Lupe bent over Juan Diego; she kissed his forehead, her smoke-smelling hair falling to either side of the injured boy's face.

"Remember this," Lupe whispered to Juan Diego. "We are the miracle--you and me. Not them. Just us. We're the miraculous ones," she said.

With his eyes tightly closed, Juan Diego heard the plane roar over them. At the time, he knew only that they were near the airport; he knew nothing about who was on that plane and coming closer. In the dream, of course, he knew everything--the future, too. (Some of it.)

"We're the miraculous ones," Juan Diego whispered. He was asleep--he was still dreaming--though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who's writing in his sleep.

Besides, Cathay Pacific 841 was still hurtling toward Hong Kong--on one side of the plane, the Taiwan Strait, on the other, the South China Sea. But in Juan Diego's dream, he was only fourteen--a passenger, in pain, in Rivera's truck--and all the boy could do was repeat after his clairvoyant sister: "We're the miraculous ones."

Perhaps all the passengers on the plane were asleep, for not even the scarily sophisticated mother and her slightly-less-dangerous-looking daughter had heard him.

* 5 *

Yielding Under No Winds

The American who landed in Oaxaca that morning--to Juan Diego's future, he was the most important passenger on that incoming plane--was a scholastic in training to be a priest. He'd been hired to teach at the Jesuit school and orphanage; Brother Pepe had picked him out of a list of applicants. Father Alfonso and Father Octavio, the two old priests at the Templo de la Compania de Jesus, had expressed their doubts regarding the young American's command of Spanish. Pepe's point was that the scholastic was overqualified; he'd been a whale of a student--surely his Spanish would catch up.

Everyone at the Hogar de los Ninos Perdidos was expecting him. Except for Sister Gloria, the nuns who watched over the orphans at Lost Children had confided to Pepe that they liked the young teacher's photograph. Pepe didn't tell anyone, but he'd found the picture appealing, too. (If it was possible, in a photo, for someone to look zealous--well, this guy did.)

Father Alfonso and Father Octavio had sent Brother Pepe to meet the new missionary's plane. From the photograph on the American teacher's dossier, Brother Pepe had been anticipating a bigger, more mature-looking man. It was not only that Edward Bonshaw had recently lost a lot of weight; the young American, who was not yet thirty, hadn't bought any new clothes since his weight loss. His clothes were huge on him, even clownish, which gave the deeply serious-looking scholastic an aura of childish haphazardness. Edward Bonshaw resembled the youngest kid in a big family--the one who wore the hand-me-downs discarded or outgrown by his older, larger siblings and cousins. The short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt hung below his elbows; the untucked shirt (a parrots-in-palm-trees theme) drooped to his knees. Upon exiting the plane, young Bonshaw tripped on the cuffs of his sagging trousers.

As usual, the plane, upon landing, had struck one or more of the chickens that chaotically overran the runway. The reddish-brown feathers flew upward in the seemingly random funnels of wind; where the two chains of the Sierra Madre converge, it can be windy. But Edward Bonshaw did not notice that a chicken (or chickens) had been killed; he reacted to the feathers and the wind as if they were a warm greeting, expressly for him.

"Edward?" Brother Pepe started to say, but a chicken feather stuck to his lower lip and made him spit. He simultaneously thought that the young American looked insubstantial, out of place, and unprepared, but Pepe remembered his own insecurity at that age, and his heart went out to young Bonshaw--as if the new missionary were one of the orphans at Lost Children.

The three-year service in preparation for the priesthood was called regency; thereafter, Edward Bonshaw would pursue theological studies for another three years. Ordination followed theology, Pepe was reminding himself as he assessed the young scholastic, who was attempting to wave the chicken feathers away. And after his ordination, Edward Bonshaw then faced a fourth year of theological study--not to mention that the poor guy had already completed a Ph.D. in English literature! (No wonder he's lost some weight, Brother Pepe considered.)

But Pepe had underestimated the zealous young man, who seemed to be making an unnatural effort to look like a conquering hero in a spiral cloud of chicken feathers. Indeed, Brother Pepe didn't know that Edward Bonshaw's ancestors had been a formidable bunch, even by Jesuitical standards.

The Bonshaws had come from the Dumfries area of Scotland, near the English border. Edward's great-grandfather Andrew had immigrated to the Canadian Maritimes. Edward's grandfather Duncan had immigrated to the United States--albeit cautiously. (As Duncan Bonshaw had been fond of saying, "Only to Maine, not to the rest of the United States.") Edward's father, Graham, had moved farther west--no farther west than Iowa, in fact. Edward Bonshaw was born in Iowa City; until he came to Mexico, he'd never left the Midwest.

As for how the Bonshaws became Catholics, only God and the great-grandfather knew. Like many Scots, Andrew Bonshaw had a Protestant upbringing; he'd sailed from Glasgow a Protestant, but when he disembarked in Halifax, Andrew Bonshaw was closely tied to Rome--he came ashore a Catholic.

A conversion, if not a miracle of a near-death kind, must have occurred onboard that ship; something miraculous had to have happened during the transatlantic crossing, but--even as an old man--Andrew never spoke of it. He took the miracle to his grave. All Andrew ever said about the voyage was that a nun had taught him how to play mah-jongg. Something must have happened during one of their games.

Edward Bonshaw was suspicious of most miracles; however, he was preternaturally interested in the miraculous. Yet Edward had not once questioned his Catholicism--nor even his great-grandfather's unexplained conversion. Naturally, all the Bonshaws had learned to play mah-jongg.

"It seems there is often a contradiction that can't be, or simply isn't, explained in the lives of the most ardent believers," Juan Diego had written in his India novel, A Story Set in Motion by the Virgin Mary. Though that novel was about a fictional missionary, perhaps Juan Diego had specific qualities of Edward Bonshaw in mind.

"Edward?" Brother Pepe asked again--only slightly less tentatively than before. "Eduardo?" Pepe then tried. (Pepe lacked confidence in his English; he wondered if he'd mispronounced "Edward" in some way.)