“Jesus prayed,” recites Al Martinez. “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this cup from me.” Amadeo likes Al. He’s a chatty big guy and gets teary when he talks about this or that grandchild. Not long ago, he retired from long-haul driving, and his shoulders are rounded from a career spent leaning over a steering wheel toward a horizon.
The cinderblock walls are painted white, and a few benches face front. The only thing worth looking at is the crucifix. This Christ is not like the Christ in the church: high-gloss complexion, chaste beads of blood where crown meets temple, expression exquisite, prissy, a perfect balance of compassion and suffering and—yes, it’s there—self-pity. No, this Christ on the morada wall is ancient and bloody. There is violence in the very carving: chisel marks gouge belly and thigh, leave fingers and toes stumpy. The contours of the face are rough, ribs sharp. Someone’s real hair hangs limply from the statue’s head.
Each night a different hermano says the Holy Mysteries, and together they intone the responses. This is Amadeo’s favorite part, when all their voices merge in a rumbling low current, the same predictable rise and fall. Tonight, though, with Angel’s arrival, he’s edgy and distracted. Amadeo considers calling her mom to get her, but at the thought of explaining to Marissa about the procession, he rejects the idea. “You can’t take care of your daughter because why?” He can hear her scorn.
He watches the praying men: Tío Tíve, in the diabetic shoes he gets subsidized from the VA, his lips trembling; Frankie Zocal, blue veins pulsing his lids; Shelby Morales, his gray ponytail draped over his shoulder like a girl’s.
“The soldiers clothed him in a purple cloak, and plaiting a crown of thorns, they put it on him,” says Al, clear and low, as if willing himself to hold a blaze of feeling in check.
Nine men is a far cry from the old days, Al explained to Amadeo a few weeks ago as they stepped into the heavy dusk. In earlier generations, membership rolls, even for an hermandad this deep in the mountains, could be in the hundreds. Back in those days, when one priest was shared among many far-flung isolated communities, the hermandads weren’t just centers of worship, but mutual aid societies, political councils, community centers. They buried the dead.
“We got your tío to thank for the hermandad. He really brought it back,” Al Martinez said. “Even when my dad was a kid, the tradition was dying out. There wasn’t nothing left of the old morada. But Tíve bought the gas station, fixed it up, reminded us what we once had. It’s the one good thing to come out of his boy’s passing.”
The morada isn’t much to look at. Outside there’s the dark skeleton of a sign on a pole, the bright plastic panels long gone, and two dead pumps. The plate-glass window has been covered in matte beige house paint left over from a long-ago job. Occasionally strangers will pull in for gas and look around, confused by the trucks parked in front, before heading straight through the village and away.
“Maybe ours isn’t as nice as the moradas in Truchas and Abiquiu and Trampas,” Al Martinez said. “Maybe it doesn’t show up on no postcards. Las Penas doesn’t have one scrap of charm, and I say, good. They can have their sculptors and natural-food stores. Let the tourists go to Taos.”
First the Rosary, then silent individual prayer. It’s meant to last an hour, but you’d be surprised how long that feels, how quickly supplication and penitence and entreaty get old. Within a minute or two, knees are wincing, kneecaps grinding between concrete and bone, and by the time the Rosary is over, the legs have gone numb. Toenails ache, pressed against the floor.
Amadeo thinks of his daughter alone in the house. She could be up to anything: going through his belongings, having friends over. Entertaining boys, even.
Amadeo falters on the Apostles’ Creed. He opens his eyes and looks at Tíve, and sure enough, the old man has him in his disapproving gaze. Amadeo clamps his eyes shut.
“Amen,” intone the hermanos, and the Rosary is over before Amadeo even gets into it.