What came ye out in the wilderness to see?...

The church at San Salomón is small and remote—as is the village itself—and would be unworthy of its designation except for the figure of la Vírgen on its altar. Legend has it that She was carried two hundred miles on the back of the priest who was tied to Her and forced out into the wilderness after his church was burned by rampaging regulators from the Lincoln County Wars on their way south fleeing Pat Garret, or the army either one. The skeptical say that Salomon had not even been a priest, and that he’d carved the Figure himself. The faithful say that the outlaws forced el pádre Salomón up the Guadalúpe Mountains at gunpoint after tying a wooden cross made of two rope-bound aspen logs to his back; and that on his descent down the southern slope of the Guadalupes, the cross transformed itself into the Virgin. The rope was the same one now coiled seven times around the waist of the cassock that She wears. Salomon, naked except for leather sandals and a loin cloth, built the altar and the room that houses Her out of adobe bricks that he molded himself by hand and around which succeeding generations of the folks that came to pray to Her from the surrounding farms and ranches built the church. Salomon appointed himself chief caretaker and pastor, and performed his version of the mass until he died at a very advanced age, but not before he had selected his successor.

Salomón García, named for and baptized by the padre himself, was a pious boy, so much so that he would cover his own head the way his mother did when they entered the church. He was seven when old Salomon died. The villagers started calling him Sally and that was how he became known. It was a happy time for everybody. The village never grew much, but it got along. Sally was taking care of the church without his mother’s help by the time that he was ten years old. A priest would come from El Paso twice a year and marry those that needed it, baptize the new children, and perform confirmations and communions and what-not. The Church itself never did make a decision about the miracle at San Salomon. Sally left for the seminary when he turned eighteen.

He returned four years later in white collar and black robe, a fully ordained priest. But the church came and took him, and gave him a different assignment. A year later, he returned to San Salomon drunk and in mufti. The church keeps secrets from the people that some men can’t bear; it never bothers itself with learning much about men except the best ways to make them heel.

That day, Sally spent maybe an hour inside the church before he came out, and put a chain with a padlock on the front doors and left San Salomon on the road leading west. His mother spent half the day on her knees in front of the locked church praying, before she made her decision to follow her son. She did not think that he would survive without her.

But she never caught up to him. One day, two years later, she abruptly began the trek back home. It took the woman, alternately known as la lloróna, la lechúza, la brúja, la hija del diablo, la curandéra—and sometimes just Crazy Maggie—three years to take the long way around from Seattle to San Salomon. They say she cured a young boy of seizures in Fresno, and a little girl of paralysis in Thermal, and restored the sight of an old man in Tucson. They also said that she turned a man into a pig in Las Cruces. She was rumored to have answered, “It requires magic to do that?” It had been a learning experience for her, too.

Because Sally woke up in Denver one day to a vision of a man saying, “Go home and take care of my mother.” Sally asked, “Who is your mother?” and the man said, “Who is yours?” Sally’s attempts to temper his own soul into a more perfectable clay had left him sick and torn. Some say that he enlisted and fought in the war. By now he could hardly remember whether he was seeking forgiveness or revenge, or understanding.

But now he made what he intuited to be a beeline to San Salomon, and it was a hard enough task, but nothing as formidable as the Guadalupes Mountains, at the foot of which the same man appeared to him in a dream and said, “Take this cross. It will help you climb over. I would give you a bigger one if I thought you could carry it.”

On Sunday morning, In San Salomon, Sally turned onto the street leading to the church, and for all he knew Maggie might have been kneeling in the dirt since the day five years before, he had turned for one last look and seen her there.

Maggie had gotten home at dawn that Sunday and gone straight to the church where she had knelt down in the dirt to pray. A man helped her up and said, “Go inside.” The doors were open.

Maggie said, “Who takes care of the church now?”

The man said, “Your son has never let anyone else but him take care of it, Doña María. He is coming up the hill now to say the mass, the way he has done every Sunday since you’ve been gone.”

Noe.