She Cries

She Cries
By Aurelio

          The first time I saw the other world, I was dazzled by colors; shafts of sapphire, beams of shimmering white, undulating aqua, hazel and emerald colored bubbles floated to the surface and burst. My mother had her back to me, her body wavering in the seascape, her auburn hair reflecting the sunlight. Silence filled this world, except for sounds of muffled water.

         Large powerful hands grabbed me roughly by the back of my neck, holding me up by the scruff like a cat. Then another hand shot beneath me and lifted me up. My head broke the surface to a cacophony of shouting. My mother's long and strong fingers held me tightly against her chest. But the huge powerful hands ripped me from her grip. My lungs flopped like fish inside my chest.
The hands crushed my chest and I screamed.Searing light scorched my eyes and I slept.

          My uncle Robert loved to tell the story about how he fished me out of the cuvito, and when I heard it for the first time, I was spellbound. His story left me in awe. But as time passed, each time he retold it, others were rapt, but I became less and less so, until finally, the sound of my uncle telling it made me cringe. He always told it in exactly the same way, by first describing the cuvito, a swimming hole fed by a trinity of giant culverts with water from the nearby Rio Grande.

          The center culvert dominated the swimming hole. It was large enough so that if a man stood in it fully outstretched when the ditch was dry, he would reach only halfway up the culvert. In the spring and summer, during irrigation season in the Rio Grande Valley, the ditches were always brimming.

          We lived in Tome, a tiny farming village 30 miles south of Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico. But crossing the county line from Albuquerque might as well have been like crossing a time line. Tome is a remnant of territorial New Mexico, where the descendants of the first 300 heirs of a 16th century Spanish land grant sill live, pray and work. I lived in a modest adobe house with my parents, four younger brothers and my little sister. Next door lived my grandparents and Uncle Robert, the youngest of their five children.

          In those days, in the 1950s, there were no swimming pools where we lived. People used to swim in the irrigation and drainage ditches that branched from the river. People don't swim in the ditches anymore.

         It was a different time then. People cooled off on a hot summer day with a swim at the cuvito. I never see anyone at the cuvito anymore, except for an occasional jogger or horseback rider. No-one swims at the cuvito anymore.

          My Uncle Robert's large powerful hands, the ones that had delivered me from doom, fascinated me as a little boy. He was a pitcher on the Tome semi-pro baseball team. He said it was his hands that gave him the grip for his wicked curve ball and fluttery knuckle ball.

         But though he was old enough to drink and one of the best players on the team, my grandfather didn't allow Uncle Robert to play baseball until he had irrigated the alfalfa fields, fed and watered my grandpa's small herd of cattle and horses, fixed fences, or did whatever else was needed to be done on grandpa's little farm.

         I liked to study Uncle Robert's hands when he slept on the sofa; thick veins cross-crossed the top of his hands and his long and thick fingers had big callused knuckles. They looked like the hands of the giant plaster Christ crucified on the wall in front of the alter at our church, except that there was no blood on his hands.

         "Felipe," Uncle Robert would say. "When I saw you under the water, your mouth pursing like a big catfish, and your eyes big and wide, I though it was too late and that you had drowned. Your poor momma was crying and screaming. I thought she was going crazy."

         Then he'd wink playfully at my mother, who always smiled at me.

          "But then I saw bunches of little bubbles coming out of your mouth. I had to pull you out of your mom's arm, and she's a strong woman, but when I did, I put you down on the ditch bank and I started giving you some CPR I had learned in the Army.

         "When all that dirty ditch water and weeds came flowing out of your mouth and I heard you coughing, I thought to myself, finally, I can think of one good thing that came out of me going to the Army," Uncle Robert said, and everybody would burst out laughing.

         As I grew older, I not only grew tired of the tale, but it began to scare me, not in a startling way, but in a way that gripped my heart and squeezed, turning it to cold hard stone. I became terrified of water. I never went swimming, not even at school. My friends thought it was odd, or perhaps that I was odd, because I didn't join in the fun in the pool on swimming days, I brought a note from my parents explaining to the instructor that I bad a deep-seated fear of water because of a near drowning incident as a small boy.

          I never allowed anyone, except the instructor, to see the note.

         Then as I got older, I started having a recurring nightmare. I was walking on a narrow plank spanning a deep wide irrigation ditch, and the plank was far above the ditch, so far up that in the dream I was always just a speck high above the water. When I looked down, the water crashed and roiled, thunderous and angry, rushing headlong into a giant rusty culvert, that seemed to come alive and look back at me with unblinking black eyes and grinning rusty red mouth.

         I would inch my way across the plank until I was within a step or two from the other side. Then, I'd lose my balance and fall, my arms catrtwheeling as I plunged helpless to the stinging mercury brown water smelling of fish and seaweeds.

         Sometimes I woke up, but more often, the dream would go on so that the current grabbed me and pulled me deep into the dark forbidding bowels of the culvert until my feet became entangled in submerged wire, and I drowned. I'd watch from disembodied eyes as iridescent bubbles escaped from my mouth and floated to the surface, my lungs exploding in a swirling waterscape of red.

         Not very long after I had nearly drowned at the cuvito, my mother told me for the first time about a woman she called La Llorona. Even the sound of the woman's name frightened me. It meant wailing woman, my mother told me. I asked her why she was named so. She answered mysteriously that it was because her cry was a wailing, a sound that frightened the biggest strongest man and sent anyone who heard fleeing in panic. She asked me if I had ever heard the sound a jackrabbit makes when in the killing jaws of a wolf or coyote. I nodded yes that I had heard that high pitched squeal of tortured agony.

         La Llorona was the devils' daughter, a sorcerers wife, and more evil than anything I could ever imagine, my mother warned, and she said that if I ever encountered her, it would be me making the sound of the jackrabbit.

          La Llorona lived in the ditches, laying in wait for children, and she drowned and ate the children, who were unlucky enough to disobey their parents admonition not to go alone or to play at the ditch, my mother said.

          Not long after that, my grandmother introduced me to La Llorona. My grandmother, weary of hearing me whimper, opened my bedroom curtain and there the evil woman appeared. I saw her hiding behind two tall willow tress in the yard, illuminated by the ghastly urine yellow glory of a full moon.

         "Mira, mijo," my grandmother said, pointing a long slender finger at the shadows.

          "Can you see her?"

          La Llorona waved spindly arms at me, glared and beckoned to me with beady black hateful eyes, that dared me to go outside. Her misshapen red lips dripped blood red. I yanked the curtains closed and stopped whimpering, burrowing deep under my blankets.

          As I grew older, I heard many stories about the wailing woman. In one, she had killed her own son to drive the boy's father mad after she had found her husband in bed with another woman. In another account, she was a whore who didn't want a baby and so she dropped her newborn infant into the river and drowned him. In yet another tale, she was a young virgin girl afraid that her parents would find out about the baby and so she left the child in blanket on the llano, where it was devoured by coyotes. My mother had made La Lllorona a cannibal of children.

         In the place where I live, the Rio Grande valley stretches from Taos to the lower Rocky Mountains to Las Cruces near the Mexican border. Aspen, pine and pinon-studded mountains reign in the upper valley of the Rio Grande, but when the river reaches Santa Fe, its waters dwindle and lush mountains turn to desert. In the early 1900s, a conservation district formed to carve irrigation ditches out of the desert for farmers, who from their labors created a lush and verdant valley.

         As a senior in high school, after I had just turned 17, I met La Llorona for the first time, as I was irrigating my father's alfalfa fields. In the darkness, I heard the quiet gurgle of the ditch water. I could see our house about a half mile away, ghostly shadows made by my brothers walking past the windows, a single light bulb flickering on the porch.

         Earlier, before the sun went down, I had heard the soothing sounds of doves somewhere in the alfalfa fields, but as the day ended in our village, which had no streetlights, darkness fell like a heavy black shroud.

          As I toiled guiding the irrigation water over the fields, two cats fighting pierced the night air. Crickets kept up a shrill drone, broken by the occasional croak of line frogs.

         The eerie night sounds made my skin crawl, and I thought of La Llorona. I had not thought of her since I was a child, but now she seemed to me to be nearby. I sloshed awkwardly through the muddy water in calf high rubber boots slightly too big for me. I balanced a heavy mud-caked shovel on my shoulder. A canopy of stars winked overhead on a background of dark blue velvet. Crickets droned. Water from the ditch burbled in the dark.

          My boots made sucking sounds as I walked through the mud. I had made a date of couple of days ago with Darlene, a girl in my class I really wanted to get to know. But I had to call her to cancel after my dad told me I had to irrigate. Irrigation was on a rotating schedule managed by a ditch rider, who rode up and down the ditch making decisions about allocating the water. If he called at 2 a.m. in the morning, one had to go, or risk not having access to the water for another month.

         I begged Dad to let me go on the date. I told him my little brother had agreed to irrigate for me so I could go. My dad didn't believe in anyone doing someone else's work, and especially for a reason so self-serving and feeble as going on a date.

          When he said no the first time, its stayed no. So I irrigated. The ditch was 10 feet deep and deeper in some spots, where the water swirled near the dam the conservancy district had constructed. The dam was made of a concrete frame with two metal rods that supported 2-by-6 flat boards that one could slide down the metal frame.

          It made a crude and effective dam. On the bank, I turned a metal wheel that released the water from the ditch into a culvert that delivered it under the ditch road to an earthen channel that we had dug along the eastern of edge of our alfalfa fields. The water cascaded out of the main ditch like a South American waterfall, pushing its way onto the parched ground like a schoolyard bully getting first in line. But then the water was swallowed up. The water crawled, slipping into crevices and cracks, forcing spiders, grasshoppers and other bugs into frenzied flight.

          Darlene was in my thoughts as I leaned on my shovel, most of the hard work done herding the water and repairing breaches in the mud channel. Then splashing in the darkness startled me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I realized someone was running at me full bore through the water-covered field. The splashing was frantic and threatening. I strained me eyes to try to see, but the moonless sky shrouded the night.

          The splashing started again, closer, and then it stopped. I rested the shovel on my shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to swat at whatever charged form the darkness. Water gurgled. A train whistle called in the distance.

         Crickets and bullfrogs split the quiet and goosebumps scurried like tiny spiders on my skin;. The splashing began again and an owl screeched. I bolted, dropping the shovel. My feet slogged though the mud, but one boot sank deep and stuck. I was knocked down like a roped calf.

          My head hit a rock and I tasted blood as my nose sank below the four inches of water spreading inexorably over the field.

         I awoke to the sound of water. A woman was looking down at me. She wore a blue gown of satin that billowed gracefully over the soft white swells of her breasts, and her hair was golden, silky and it cascaded over her shoulders. But it was her eyes that transfixed me, blue like a robin's egg, and sorrowful. Her lips were rose-colored and full, ripe and curved in the middle of her mouth bewitchingly.

         "Are you alright?" she asked.

          "Yes," I replied, dazed as I fingered a growing welt on the side of my head. I tried to speak, but instead choked out steams of water as I sat up in the mud.

          "That's the splashing you heard," the woman said, pointing to a huge catfish spraying fantails of water as it tried futilely to find deeper water.

         "You could have drowned," she said.

          "Yes." I wondered if I was dreaming.

         "Who are you?" I asked, rubbing the welt on my head.

          "My name is Cristina," she said. "But you may know me as La Llorona. I don't like that name, but it's what people have called me for a very long time, and so I suppose that is also my name."

         I was enchanted. I had imagined for so long that the evil woman my mother had warned me about would be cruelly ugly, but instead, she was bewitchingly beautiful.

         "I thought you would be fat and ugly," I said, wishing I hadn't said something so stupid.

         Her face was graced by a beatific innocence and wonderful smile, yet it was sad and despairing, like her eyes.

         "I was beautiful once," she said. "Now, I'm just lost." The woman cradled her face in her hands and wept silently.

         But why are you crying?" I asked.

         "Surely, you've heard about me and the terrible sins I've committed. Mothers and fathers forever have retold the curse of La Llorona to their children," she said.

         "Well, yes, my mother told me you drowned and ate your children," I said, again wishing I could retrieve my words.

         She smiled again, guessing perhaps by my expression what I had wished. I felt better because I had at least distracted her from her mournful weeping.

         "I've heard so many stories, but I admit that I've never heard that I ate my children," she said. "People must think I'm very evil. I don't blame them, I suppose, because what I did was evil."

         Then her face clouded again. She sat on the ditch bank, gathering her gown about her. I noticed it didn't get muddy. Her dress and body stayed miraculously clean and soft, fragrant like flowers.

         "I was the wife of Tome Dominguez," she began "He was a very wealthy and powerful patron who settled here before the Pueblo Indians revolted, in the 1600s. He brought me to this place from Spain as a young girl; not even 18 and I married him, as was the custom for a young girl then. At first, I loved this beautiful valley. I loved my husband; he treated me like a princess.

         "We had the most glorious hacienda, here, by the sunny side of El Cerro de Tome. Every week, we had fine parties and glorious balls. The territorial governor and his wife, and his mistress would come, along with all the people of the line village. The music the mariachis played was festive, and laughter and singing floated through the rooms of the hacienda like a Christmas song.

         Cristina stood up and pressed her palms together, holding them close to her cheek as she closed her eyes and swirled and bowed and danced on the ditch bank to music only she could hear. And then she stopped.

         "My husband waited until a year after we were married to tell me that he expected me to have a child, that he wanted an heir. And after the first child was a girl, I was expected to have another. I cried and I sobbed and I pleaded with him, begging him to wait, to give me more time to enjoy my own youth. I was still just a girl myself; but Don Domingo wasn't amused," she said.

         Cristina gazed longingly at the velvet canopy of stars overhead. A coyote barked. I felt a shiver course down my spine, though I was still enraptured with the lady's beauty, and engrossed with her story.

         "By the first warming days of April of the next year, a little baby girl was suckling at my breast, and by the summer of the next year, a little boy was born. And just as I had feared, there were no more galas, no more parties, the governor never came to visit anymore. Don Dominguez was happy, but I was not. My children, Santiago and Angelica, were beautiful and they loved me and my husband and they loved life.

         "Santiago had curly brown hair and his eyes were big and shaped like almonds, and his big sister had long silken black hair and she too had brown eyes that yearned for life and love. They loved to play and sing, and they never knew of my own sadness; what do children know of sadness?"

         "In my heart, I resented the children, though they were innocent and so loving of me and Don Dominguez. But I didn't understand. I came to believe they were the reason there were no more parties, no more dancing on the patio under the giant cottonwood trees. I believed it was the children who had robbed me of my happiness. I began to hate them. I am so ashamed, but I detested them, truly. It was evil to think as I did, I know that now."

          I stood by helplessly as Cristina began to sob again. She stopped and fixed her lonely and tortured gaze on me, and though her eyes were rimmed with tears, they shone through the veil of her sadness like distant stars.

         "I took them to the ditch one day when Don Dominguez was away in town. The children were laughing and singing. They believed we were going for a walk. They were singing a song their father had taught them. It was a simple folk song with simple lyrics and they loved to sing it.

         "Santiago thought I was playing when I tied his sister's hands and rolled her into the ditch. I can still see Angelica's eyes, trusting, wide and questioning, and then panic-stricken when she realized what I was doing, and then she fell into the water. And Santiago, he was laughing. He was too young to realize what was happening. He held out his own little hands and laughed as he asked me to tie his hands too, like his sister's.

         Cristina walked away a few paces and disappeared in the darkness, but I could hear her softly sobbing once again. She returned and sat on the wooden bridge that spanned the ditch and now her gown fluttered softly in the breeze. Her tears glinted like diamonds on her cheeks. I sat next to her.

         "When we found them, their little bodies were swollen and blue. I tried to tell Don Dominguez and all of the villagers that it was an accident and that the children had wandered away from me and that they had fallen into the ditch.

          But I did not expect that their bodies would be found. Their hands were still tied. And instead of feeling free and no longer burdened with children, I only felt dead, as I feel now, and as I feel every day.

         "The people of the village despised me. My husband, who had so loved and cherished me, now called me a viperous and murderous witch. He locked me in my upstairs room, overlooking the garden, and told me to wait for the arrival of the circuit judge who came once a month to the territory. The sheriff had advised him to do that so I wouldn't be put in jail, where I was likely to be raped and killed. But each morning, from my tender prison, I could hear Don Dominguez sobbing, as he stood in the empty room of his children. He was a proud and strong man, and it pained me to hear him sobbing when he thought all were asleep. I felt despair in my heart I did not know could exist.

         "On the day before the judge was scheduled to arrive, I took a razor that I had hidden in my room and I carefully and deliberately slit both my wrists first, and then I quickly applied the sharp razor to my throat and pulled the blade firmly from one ear to the other. I lay back in my tub of steaming hot water and I watched, as the soapy water became red with my blood. It felt as if I was in a dream as my life flowed into the water.

         "But my suffering didn't end, as I had hoped and prayed that it would when I stole my own life. When I arrived at the gates of heaven, an old man with white hair and long white hair with wise and gentle eyes told me that I could not enter. I sensed a great sadness in him when he told me that my penance for eternity would be to haunt the ditches, contemplating my sins.

         "And so now, each morning when the sun rises, my children are by my side and alive and happy again, singing their song, as we are walking to the ditch," she said, breaking into long convulsing sobs. My own eyes rimmed with tears as my heart broke.

         The next day when I told my friends of my encounter with La Llorona, they laughed and teased me, and they tried to smell my breath. I never told anyone from that day on about having met the beautiful lady in blue.


         Meanwhile, farms began to disappear in Tome as more and more people discovered the hidden enclave just south of Albuquerque. The village still had five and 10-acre farms sprinkled along both sides of the river. Most people grew small patches of alfalfa and had cows; the ricos had horses too. A cottonwood tree lined square protected the church like an ancient vestment; the same church my parents and their parents, and their parents before them, had been baptized and married in, and which, I was told had been vigorously defended against the raiding Pueblo Indians during the Great Revolt.

         But now, the old village was being swallowed up by huge subdivisions that resembled those in Albuquerque, the big modern city to the north. New homes with newcomers from all parts of the state and country sprouted on the llano, the vast desert plains where the villagers had for generations grazed their cattle and cut their firewood, from the pine, juniper and pinon-studded foothills of the Manzano Mountains.

         After I graduated from high school, I went to college in Albuquerque, where I bumped into Darlene, the girl with whom I had been forced to break a date years before because I had to irrigate. When I told her about the lady in blue, over a burrito at the Frontier Restaurant across from the campus, she was so engrossed that we met again for dinner. By the end of the semester, to the delighted surprise of my family, we were engaged and then married.

         Within a year, we had a beautiful little girl, whom we named Saramia. I especially liked the song Sara by Fleetwood Mac, and so I added the Spanish word mia, which meant my own. Samaria, besides my wife, was my love and my life. Saramia, or Mia as I called her for short, had bright probing brown eyes and curly light brown hair that my wife combed in ringlets and tied with blue and yellow ribbons.

         After my wife and I graduated from college, she got a job as a social worker in Belen and I started working as a public relations officer for the Santa Fe Railway. My parents gave us a small plot of land as was the custom among families who could afford it, and we settled into a happy and contented life.

         Saramia loved to frolic in the field behind our home , the same one I had irrigated years before when I had met the Lady. Now it was overgrown with weeds and Chinese elm trees, many of them diseased. I started the job of clearing the land, planting fruit trees and a small garden of Chile, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.

         Saramia called the field her Enchanted Garden. She had just entered the fifth grade and had read the book. She loved to play hide and seek in the garden.

         My father still grew alfalfa, and so he had a stack of alfalfa bales where Samaria and I looked for eggs from the chickens my mother kept. Near the haystacks under ancient cottonwood tress was an old adobe garage, with mud bricks that had slots between them. They made ideal hiding spots and over the years, my family hid treasures in them, like old plastic combs, keys to nothing, nails and screws and sometimes even rusted coins that could be rubbed back to brightness.

         Saramia and I often went treasure hunting, and we always found something because I made sure to restock the treasures when Mia wasn't watching. Swallows built nests in the vigas, large beams made of pine logs supporting the roof of the garage. Even if we were inside, the swallows swooped in and perched in their tiny mud huts and fed worms and other insects to their squabbling chicks. Mia loved to watch the swallows.Saramia called my father Tata and my mother Grammy and she brought nothing but happiness into their lives too.

         One day, we were walking in the field, near the ditch, when she asked why we never walked at the ditch. My tone of voice frightened her.

         "You must never go to the ditch!" I shouted. I knelt and squeezed her arms so tightly that she whimpered. I relaxed my grip but I sternly warned her to never go to the ditch alone.

         "The ditch is a place where little children like you can fall in and drown.

         "If you go to the ditch, La Llorona will get you," I said, feeling a twinge of guilt at falling into my parents'trap of controlling children by scaring them. But I felt it was necessary.

         "Who's La Llorona?" Mia asked.

         "She'a mean and ugly witch who eats children, and if you go to the ditch, you will meet her and she will drown you and she will eat you,"I said, but I again felt regret and guilt at having to tell her such a lie.

          Saramia paused to look toward the ditch, and I was afraid that all I had done was to pique her curiosity, but then she seemed to forget all about it. She ran through my dad's alfalfa, shouting to me playfully that I couldn't catch her and, of course, I couldn't.

         One hot summer day, Darlene asked me to watch Mia while she went to help her friends make cakes and cookies for the upcoming Fourth of July fiesta carnival at the Tome Catholic Church. I asked her to bring me some frosting and she responded by giving me a kiss that tasted like vanilla frosting.

          Mia was playing on her swing set next to the garden. Darlene waved goodbye as she drove away. I put on my work gloves and started to weed the garden. I worked for about an hour when the sun settled overhead and I took a break to get some iced tea. When I came out of the house, I had two glasses, one for me and for one for Mia. She came running and sat on my lap as I lay back on the sweet, fragrant grass under a young maple tree I had planted a few years ago. Mia settled into my lap as I leaned back against the tree trunk. She smelled like blossoms from the garden. I hugged her and she giggled.

         "I love you, Daddy," she said.

         I was so touched by her show of affection that I was moved to squeeze her and hold her tightly.

         "I love you too, Tonta," I replied.

         She frowned at my term of endearment, which I had stopped using as soon as she realized it meant "little dummy."

         I meant it only in the most loving and kindest way, and perhaps as a fun reference to her always asking questions about anything and everything.

         My wife didn't like it either, and she didn't accept my explanation that Mia didn't understand what I it meant.

         Now Mia was old enough to understand. I suspected she had learned the meaning from her mother.

         "I'm not a tonta, Daddy," she said crossly.

          I knew I was in trouble because she had on the same expression and tone of voice her mother had when I was in trouble with her. She even crossed her arms and glared at me sternly, exactly as her mother did.

         "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. When did you learn to speak Spanish anyway?" I asked.

         "Daddy, just don't call me that anymore, okay? My friends might hear you" she said.

         "Okay, I'll try to remember not to embarrass you. What should I call you then, pajarito?" I asked playfully.

         "I'm not a birdie either," she said. But then she burst out laughing when she saw my surprised expression at her knowledge of Spanish.

          We hugged and I lifted her off her feet and swung her in a wide circle. She squealed and her peals of laughter filled the air. It was a sound that filled me with joy.

         "Come and play with me, Daddy."

         "No mija, I'm so tired. I think I'll just sit here and read the newspaper.

         "You go and play, and I'll watch you."

         I stretched out in the grass under the shade of the maple tree. She squealed happily as our dog, which I had defiantly named Tonto, jumped and bounded alongside her as she went to play in her enchanted garden. I watcher her for a few moments before I settled back to read my newspaper. My eyelids fluttered, but I shook my head and took another drink of my tea. Saramia was playing.

         When I opened my eyes, it seemed like just a few seconds had passed. But my face was red and it stung from the sun. Bees were swarming angrily around my iced tea, which was now just warm sugary water. I sat up and looked at my watch, drowsily realizing that I had been asleep for nearly two hours. I felt a twinge of panic when I called Saramia but she didn't reply.

         Panic surged up my throat when I couldn't see her.

         I ran inside the house, slamming door after door and nearly breaking them as I flitted through every room like a trapped hummingbird. I ran outside and banged the door again, this time smashing the glass with the force. I saw something in the distance, a tiny windbreaker stuck in some weeds near the ditch.

         My heart lurched as I started walking briskly and then I broke into a dead run. I yanked up the windbreaker but there was nothing. I shouted out her name and no reply.

          I ran up the embankment and then down the ditch road. The murky churning brown water of the ditch seemed to mock me. The sound of the water was deafening. As I ran, my mind raced, what should I do? Call the sheriff? The rescue squad? What? I kept running. There was no sign of her anywhere.

         The water beckoned, until finally, I was at the cuvito, the same watering hole where I had nearly drowned as a small child. I had not been back for years but it hadn't changed at all. It looked just like it did in my nightmares. Giant weeds and trash were carried along by the current into the huge center culvert, which seemed to be grinning at me, it's red rusty maw opened wide and bloody. Dark eyes seemed to be looking at me from deep inside the pipe. I ran around the confluence of culverts, and noticed the water level was noticeably rising, but still I saw no sign of Saramia. Of course, the water was rising.

         When the Conservancy District released river water from the Isleta Pueblo dam, the ditches became swollen and the water threatened to breach the banks, but somehow, it never did because the farmers, at the same time, released pressure by irrigating their fields. Even so, the huge culverts were under water most of the time in the spring and summer.

         A hawk screeched overhead. It dove and impaled a struggling swallow. My eyes scanned the ditch banks and locked on a piece of blue cloth stuck to a jagged edge of the silver metal on the top of the culvert. I moved closer and my heart beat against my chest like a trapped animal. It was a piece of Saramia's blue shirt, the one I had helped her select and put on this morning.

         I heard a faint sound and I froze. I heard it again; it was a tiny voice coming from deep inside a can. I strained to hear, but I heard only the crash of water. Then the cry again.

         "Daddy, I'm in here, Daddy."

          "Mia!" I shouted in answer.

         Her voice sounded so weak. The water thundered angrily. The water level had climbed to within a foot of the top of the culvert. Cold blind fear gripped me with paralyzing numbness.

         I looked desperately on both sides of the ditch but there was no-one to help. A horse nickered curiously in a field nearby, and trotted closer to the fence to investigate. My mind was chaotic, blood pounding against my temples and against my eyes. I considered running back to call the sheriff' s office or the rescue department, but I knew there wasn't time.

          The water kept rising. I heard my little girl scream again. I couldn't move. My vision blurred, and I fought against passing out. My legs were rubbery; they felt disconnected from my body. I stumbled into the water, but I stopped when I felt the cold slithery water.

         Mia screamed, but I could not move. I was paralyzed. Out of a swirling haze, a vision in a blue gown appeared. The Lady locked her robin'e s blue eyes on mine. I could see her lips moving fervently.

         "Felipe! Felipe!"
         "No, dejame!, leave me alone!" I cried.

         "Felipe, listen to me. Your little girl will drown unless you go into the cuvito and get her out. You must go in and get her out!"

         "NO! I can't swim! I' ll drown! Both of us will drown! I must go back and call the sheriff, don't you see? I must call the sheriff! He'll get her out!"

         "Felipe," she said with quiet urgency. "There is no time. If you go back now, your little girl will die."

         "No! You must go in after her, Cristina, you can get her, please, please, help me!"

         "Felipe, I know you're afraid. But I cannot save her. You are her father. You must go in!

         Saramia screamed again. I howled, the horse at the fence breaking into a gallop. Saramia called me again; she sounded so tired, defeated.

          I forced myself to walk into the dirty, churning brown water, despite the terror in my heart. I swam awkwardly, emulating the dog paddle technique I'd seen dogs use. I reached the edge of the culvert, keeping up the steady paddling and kicking my legs back and forth. I peered from the side into the dark tunnel. It was the entrance to hell.

          A monster of mud and water had me in its clutches. It tugged at me, trying to pull me into the cuvito, a concrete and metal mortuary slab. Then Saramia came into my view. She floated 40 feet inside the culvert. She was barely visible in the dark inside the bowels of the culvert. Something had to be holding her up; her face was upturned, though just inches from the top of the culvert.

         I took a deep breath and I plunged into the depths of the cuvito. The current grabbed me with unimaginable force and sucked me deep inside. I used my hands to move along the bottom of the pipe, and I used my legs to launch up to catch a breath of air. Then the water grabbed me and I was tumbling inside the tube. Something grabbed my ankle. It hurt. I couldn't move. I struggled, but my ankle was stuck. I used my hands searching blindly, until my hands came upon the bloated carcass of a dead cow stuck on barbed wire at the bottom of the culvert.

         Its lime colored putrid eyes were staring at me. I screamed, loosing a stream of bubbles underwater. My ankle did not give. I struggled, but then I relaxed. Bubbles escaped from my lungs. A strange soothing calm had spread over my body. The water was warm. I felt drowsy, as if I could sleep a long time. It was heavenly. Peace filled me. I watched the bubbles float past my eyes, shafts of sapphire, shades of emerald, blue and aqua colors dancing before my eyes. It was dazzling.

         A vision in blue burst from the murky brown water. She swirled her small hands insistently in front of my face.

         "Felipe! You must not sleep! Your baby needs you! She is so young, it is a tragedy for children to die so young. Felipe!"

         Her expression of intense hope and love caused me to shake my head, once, and then again, and the water was cold again, it was crashing, deafening. I shook my head violently, and knives sliced into my lungs. I dove and fumbled at my ankle; somehow I summoned enough strength to lift the heavy carcass. It moved. My ankle slipped free, leaving behind my shoe. I broke the surface choking, my lungs stung from the knives. I siphoned slivers of air. The current dragged me violently until I bumped roughly into Mia. Her eyes opened startled, and full of pain, but then she saw me, and her face brightened.

         "Daddy, my legs hurt, something's hurting me, Daddy."

         I captured a breath and dove, praying it wasn't another dead cow. But it was wire, strands and strands of baling wire tangled around her legs, holding her up like the wire pedestal of a ceramic doll. I pushed my legs against the bottom of the culvert and rose to the surface, the top of the culvert just inches away.

         "Mia! Help me, baby. You're stuck in some wire! Help me! It's going to hurt, but you must shake your legs back and forth as hard as you can!

         She nodded weakly. The water thundered. Her beautiful brown eyes shone through her tears. I took a breath and dove. My tortured muscles protested, and my lungs screamed. I loosened the wires and Saramia shook her bloodied legs.

         Suddenly, she was free. I cradled her head under one arm and pushed toward the light at the end of the pipe. The water cruelly tried to pull us back under, but I kicked and struggled. I held Saramia tightly as the water bashed us against the sides of the culvert. We emerged from the tunnel and a blinding yellow light forced my eyes closed, and I felt myself begin to float.

         The water, which just seconds before had been a murderous monster, had transformed into benevolent savior, and was now carrying us gently to the side of the water hole where my feet came into contact with the ground. I stumbled toward the shore, still holding Saramia tightly.

         I laid her on the muddy bank and I lay next to her, exhausted and spent. Mia gagged and I sat her up and helped her to breathe. After she was breathing easily, we both lay back down on the muddy bank. My muscles and my lungs burned. In the sky, the lady in blue was rising, floating, waving at me, swirling toward the sun.

          Her eyes locked with mine and I felt an immense joy and love between us. I struggled to my feet.

         "Wait! Wait, Cristina!"

         I could see that her penance had been lifted. She held her two small children, one in each arm, and she kissed them, one at a time, as they were all lifted by an unseen force toward the sun.

         "Cristina, Wait!" She was gone.

         "Daddy, who are you talking to?" Mia asked, as she reached out with her tiny arms to hug me tightly around my neck. Her curly brown hair was matted with mud.

         "Was it the lady in the blue dress?"

         I looked incredulously at her.

         "You saw her?"

         "Yes, Daddy. She said you were coming. She said you would save me. I was crying and she said to be brave because my daddy was coming, and you did come, Daddy. I'm sorry I went to the ditch, Daddy. Who was that lady, Daddy? Do you know her? She was so nice, and she's so pretty.

         "Oh, mija mia,"I said squeezing her tightly against me.

         "She is so nice, and she is so pretty, and she loves her children so much, just as much as I love you."