there is no resurrection

but there is change

On the red butte is a circle of stones; in the circle, a man. He sits crosslegged, facing my viewing screen. His eyes are closed.

And then they open. He stares directly at me. I try to pull away but cannot.

The man extends his hand, turns it so the palm faces me. In the center of the palm is a viewing screen in the distinct shape of Sinz Butte. The moment I look, I’m windtunneled into it. Images pummel me like stones:

Bodies on the earth, dust, blood, flies, buzzards perching, a massacre. 
A throat slit, red on a blue uniform. 
A kiva destroyed, men hung from wood posts, a stern priest in black, a child’s slow sobs. 
A prairie dog killed then sewn back together. 
War screams. Horses. Gunshots. Curses. Brujería. 
A rape, closeup on the woman’s face, the horror. Another rape and another and again, but this time closeup on the man’s face, far worse. 
Coal smoke. Coke fields. The high mournful song of the gas wells. 
A man turning into a raven and back into a man. 
A fire spreading, smoke curling upward and cloaking Sinz Butte like a magician’s trick.

And then the smoke clears and the screen settles into a single scene:

A Jesuit priest in long black robes stands near the base of Sinz Butte with a circle of Pueblo men and women cross-legged before him. He’s explaining the Apostle’s Creed, using his hands and simple nouns. He struggles when he gets to the part about the christ coming back to life.

Al tercer día resucitó de entre los muertos. On the third day he rose again from among the dead.

The Pueblo watch him blankly as he gesticulates. There’s a canteen of water and the priest pours some into a wooden bowl, smiling ingratiatingly. He indicates to one of the Pueblo men that he should catch a fly. The man does so easily and gives it in cupped hands to the priest.

The priest submerges the fly in the bowl’s water and then sets it on the orange dust of the ground. It lays still. The Pueblo lean forward, curious. The priest sprinkles a bit of dust on the fly and it revives for a moment, twitching.

The priest is elated that his trick worked. He says, Resucitó! La resurrección! and points to the fly. He looks at the faces of the Pueblo and does not see the fly quietly die in the dust beside him.

Resurrección! he repeats, and a Pueblo man says, Ibimuhuegite! I hear the words and their meanings simultaneously:

Resurrection! says the priest.

The fly just died! says the Pueblo man.

The priest clasps his hands in delight and nods, carefully repeating the word. Ibimuhuegite! He congratulates the Pueblo man on the translation, using his Christian name. He continues with the explanation of the creed. The Pueblo listen more intently now, curious to know this prayer about killing flies.

The viewing screen gets smaller and smaller and suddenly it’s the palm of the man on Sinz Butte again. His eyes are laughing but his face is lined and serious.

And then he’s a buzzard flying and I’m following, back through time.

There’s a mule dead in the orange dust. Nearby is a small camp of men. The buzzard lands on the mule. It eats for a while, picking with precision at the bones, and then, sated, pushes off from the corpse and spirals upward. It flies to Los Montes Callados, to a high crag of rock.

There’s a cave with two young buzzards. They have white-grey fluff and black heads. The buzzard lands and preens the young for a moment before regurgitating meat on the rock. The young squeak and eat greedily. The buzzard turns and looks at the land below. The whispering river, the sagebrush desert, the silent mountains, the parched red butte. The buzzard’s vision focuses on Sinz Butte and suddenly I’m there again with the man in the stone circle.

His lips don’t move, but his mind says to me, There is no resurrection, but there is change.

.

From Cricket’s Almanac, a novel about the strange little town of Skelling, NM.

If you’d like to spend more time in Skelling, please visit: origin stories, one day the mule died, the rite of possession, season of the whore, scales fell from my eyes, to be a lowlife, bee mine: