The Tomb of Cleofas
Snow dusted mountains like a jagged row of teeth towered over the small adobe houses of the little town of Santa Genoveva.
It was a town nestled in the northern Chihuahuan desert beside white sand dunes and forests of petrified wood.
In the center of Santa Genoveva was a small but elegant church fixed with twin spires so that the whole edifice was shaped like an H.
The church was surrounded by numerous headstones behind an iron gate and a stone wall marking that spot as a churchyard, planted with bodies that had been buried since the mid nineteenth century, bodies mostly being clergy and the families of parishioners, though some gun-slinging outlaws had their unmarked places of rest undisturbed,
until that church, St. Genevieve's, would be razed some decades later.
On that particular day, reckoned by the calendar as November 3rd, 1947, a rather icy wind cut through the little town, a harbinger of
winter's frost already painting the jagged teeth mountains white.
Yucca plants and cacti shook in that wind
as the townsfolk took refuge from the sudden burst of cold, whether outdoors wrapped up in blankets sat on their porches or indoors beside the hearth with a bottle of beer or breast milk.
November third meant that the Octave of Hallowtide was still in force, those eight days when there were not a few families visiting the graves of loved ones,
and priests offering masses for those holy souls in Purgatory on side altars in the church day and night.
Outside St. Genevieve's, a boy looking about seventeen watched the cemetery gates open and close.
He had been waiting and watching the churchyard gates since October 31st, watching those devotees of the holy souls enter the yard and kneel at
headstones, laying flowers, kneading rosaries, thumbing through prayer books.
He dared not enter at first, feeling an invisible hand pull him back.
In all honesty, he was afraid to enter, his desire to go further
only spurred on by an opportunity to meet with one beautiful and devoted girl he had seen pray in the churchyard for three days now.
She wore an all black dress; veiled in a mantilla. Behind her veil he caught a glimpse of her pale pink face and dark eyes.
She entered the gate right on cue as
the bell of St. Genevieve tolled four times.
The boy sighed.
He looked at his tan hands, down to his booted feet, and proceeded up to the gate.
A statue of Michael piercing the devil's back first greeted him, followed by a porcelain image of our Blessed Lord pointing to his fiery, Sacred Heart.
Positioned in the middle of the gate was a gold foil sign that read:
Such as thou art, sometime was I,
Such as I am, such shalt thou be.
The boy stepped forward, though a wind pushed the gate open before he could raise his hands.
He stared about the yard. Within were innumerable wooden crosses and headstones protruding from the desert soil.
He searched for the girl, wanting to know only her name, and why maybe she was so devout in coming to this place day after day.
It puzzled him. He had not thought of himself as terribly religious. He attended mass as a child but coming into his own, trying to make due and become a man, he had settled into a less comfortable life, eating at odd hours,
drinking late into the evening and being ejected from saloons more than a few times.
He took to shooting his pistol at makeshift targets when bored and possibly had used it once or twice aimed at a fleshier target in a drunken argument.
He longed for a steadier lifestyle, but found his options dwindling down to only either lawman or outlaw. Maybe he could be both.
But he remembered the church here, as a boy, his mother taking him to hear the somber and still low mass, and the occasional incense abundant, organ punctuated chanted high mass that lifted his earthly soul to the heavens.
It seemed his wandering all about the desert, wandering from town to town searching for a singular something to bring him into a steady adult life, away from home, landed him right back at the start.
He was lonesome. He wanted company as well. Such was his age, and there were not many young women around town that had caught his eye except for
the pale girl in the black mantilla. Asuncion, he thought. My Asuncion.
In a far corner of the churchyard he spotted someone black clad, wearing a laced mantilla kneeling before a tombstone.
There she is, he thought.
The boy crept forward along all the dead; both the lucky ones with fresh flowers, and those lonely and forgotten by time.
He approached the veiled lady.
In her hands she held a leather bound book, the gold leaf pages written in Latin he could faintly recognize as prayers for the dead:
℣. Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine
℟. Et lux perpetua luceat ei
℣. Requiescat in pace.
℟. Amen.
Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.
Requiescat in pace.
RIP
- that one he knew.
He looked to the headstone, its inscribed name worn away with time; and coughed to signal his presence.
"Ma'am. Good afternoon."
The lady turned.
Looking upon him was the face of an old woman in her nineties, her face round and doll like, her eyes a gray blue.
"Oh...Cleofas..."
"Ma'am...pardon me, I..."
In embarrassment he left the grave before saying again..."Pardon me...please, ma'am...I thought you were someone else."
The Lady continued to look back at him before returning to her book, praying slightly louder than her initial inaudible whisper.
The boy searched around further, though the lady's reaction struck him as odd.
Cleofas, a familiar name, though he was not sure whence he recognized it.
He wasn't even sure of his own name, truth be told.
He then spotted her, the pale girl in black, laying a pink cactus flower before a cruciform headstone.
The girl was a beauty of that unforgiving desert not unlike her cactus flower blossoming among harsh needles, ready to prick an unwitting victim.
Then she knelt, unraveling silvery rosary beads and in silent contemplation prayed there in the churchyard for half an hour.
Perhaps I ought to pray as well, he thought.
He had prayed for the first time in a long time recently, he suddenly remembered.
It was before going out to the Santa Genoveva saloon on one October 31st, the bells ringing for Hallowmas vespers; he entered St. Genevieve's and listened to the Gregorian chant of the priest clad in violet and silver trimmed vestments and the cantor in his plain white choir dress:
℣. Dómine, exáudi oratiónem meam.
℟. Et clamor meus ad te véniat.
Orémus.
Omnípotens sempitérne Deus, qui nos ómnium Sanctórum tuórum mérita sub una tribuísti celebritáte venerári: quǽsumus; ut desiderátam nobis tuæ propitiatiónis abundántiam, multiplicátis intercessóribus, largiáris.
Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum, Fílium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum.
℟. Amen.
Their prayers moved him to tears.
He sought out the priest for absolution and penance and then headed back to his hotel, reconsidering spending the night at the saloon.
But in the middle of the street, halfway home, he was met with the pistol of an old comrade.
"Sorry, Cleofas. Don Montserrat sent me. Don't hate me."
Cleofas turned, half-smiling.
"No, Anselm...I put myself in this mess...I don't hate you. Not at all."
That was three days ago, three days now since he had visited the cemetery- so he remembered.
But where was she.
His lady? His Asuncion? He had been with her intimately he also recalled, but why had he forgotten so much?
He grew frustrated and groaned, kicking the sand.
The church bell tolled five.
The young lady rose from the grave, pacing slowly along the crosses and headstones.
A brilliant reddish hue was beginning to glare on the mountains.
The wind rushed, colder now than since winter's end.
That Autumn was a short one.
Soon would be Advent, Christmas, and the festive jollity that the yuletide entailed.
The young lady wrapped her black shawl around her thin bony arms.
Cleofas eyed her from behind a statue of St. Michael, though it seemed she was still oblivious of his presence.
"That's...not her. Not Asuncion," said Cleofas.
The young girl stepped next to the old woman.
"Grandma?" she said.
The old woman rose to her feet folding her book.
"Did you pray for Grandpa?" asked the old woman.
"Of course."
"Good...good...You know...something happened here...just now."
"What, Grandma?"
"Nothing, let's go to Vespers..."
"What happened?"
"Well...You wouldn't believe me if I told you, but...I think he came to visit me. Grandpa. A fantasma."
"Grandma! You're joking..."
"No...really. I felt him...he spoke to me...He was awfully polite though, which made me doubt if it was really him for a second..."
"Let's get to Vespers, Grandma. Besides, Grandpa couldn't be a ghost wandering the churchyard, could he? I mean I though ghosts are just supposed to be apparitions of the damned, right? If we're praying for him, then he ought to be inside Purgatory..."
"Purgatory might not necessarily be something he is physically inside... in his state of Purgatory, this could be his way of saying he knows we're looking out for him..."
"He could also be in Heaven though, right?"
"Perhaps...those in Purgatory are on their way to heaven."
"What did he say to you?"
"He came and asked me for pardon. I forgave him long ago though-you know he was in a gang. Died in a shootout in town too. Seventy years ago now by my reckoning."
"I didn't know that..."
"No need to bring up old gossip...but there was some good in him. He sometimes attended mass with me. Attended vespers the night he died, in fact... He wanted to do the right thing, I believe...So it's reasonable to continue to pray for him. Not all hope is lost for that old scoundrel. Handsome scoundrel, but I digress..."
The two women entered St. Genevieve's as the drone of chanted vespers called out the evening hour.
Cleofas felt a hand on his shoulder.
He looked upon the statue of St. Michael.
"Time to go," spoke the angel.
"Time...for what?? Go where?"
The angel pointed to the tombstone of his faded inscription; the pink flowers placed by Asuncion blowing in the wind. Picking up a flower, the angel pointed with it to the church.
"We're going to visit our Blessed Lord...unless you don't want to leave this place now, of course."
"I do! I do, honest!"
The Angel handed Cleofas the flower.
"Cleofas, as your family has prayed diligently for you, you will do the same for them, won't you?"
The cantor's chanted vespers filled the stillness of the churchyard.
"Of course!...but...might I just listen a while...I really enjoy this sort of music."
The angel took him by the hand.
"Let's step inside the chapel a bit then," he said to Cleofas.
Cleofas smiled.
The sun having set behind the mountains, a flurry of snow began to drift across town. Leaving St. Genevieve's after vespers, Asuncion and her granddaughter bundled up close, arm in arm and hustled back to their home down main street for a warm supper. As they reached their little adobe home, Asuncion blinked, rubbing her eyes. Before her stood that young man Cleofas, and a tall creature with wings of fire, a pink flower between his fingers.
"What was that, Grandma?"
"Oh, nothing, Genevieve."
Genevieve looked back down the street, seeing the dark outline of two men, who for a moment she believed to be that 'nothing'; but with another icy gust, the outline of the men disappeared.
As the ladies entered the front door of their adobe home, Asuncion spoke low again, her breath visible in the cold air:
"May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace... Amen."
"Amen," said Genevieve. From the kitchen window she watched that early November snow quietly drift across the sleepy town, watched the freezing white shroud settle on the spires of St. Genevieve and her churchyard, covering the pink cactus flower held in the fingers of the statue of the angel keeping watch over all his holy souls.
The End