Let Their Spirits Dance

Let Their Spirits Dance by Stella Pope Duarte

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Authors: Stella Pope Duarte
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it alum the day Jesse was born.
    â€œThe flames rose so high I became frightened, and in the center, I saw a warrior with a plumed headdress. Just then, your tata arrived at my house to tell me Jesse had been born!”
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    â€¢ T HE DAY AFTER Jesse was killed, I walked to Don Florencío’s shack, forcing myself to put one foot in front of the other. Don Florencío was sitting outside his adobe shack on his old wooden chair. The sun was setting, Don Florencío was facing east. He had a fire going, burning copal. I knew it was copal because it was aromatic, sweet. The smoke was cleansing the air around him of evil spirits.
    He saw me trudge up to his shack and never said a word. He was smoking his ironwood pipe with the sculpted faces on the stem. My voice was gone. A whine began from deep within my breastbone. I had never heard it before. I moved toward the old man and knelt by his side.I clung to his neck, holding on to him for dear life. Over and over again, I let out the tone of a melody that never varied. The pitch was the same, and it came in great gulps. Again and again it came, and the birds answered me, chirping in the distant cottonwood trees.
    â€œYou cry like our ancestors,” Don Florencío said to me. “They cried with their souls, not their eyes. That is the way to mourn, to mourn with all your heart. They accused us, mija, of sacrificing to the bloodthirsty god of war, our priests who carved out human hearts. A horrible thing to do, not in keeping with the teachings of the true God and his mother Tonantzin that you call La Virgen de Guadalupe. But look, there are men now, greedy for power, like the priests of Huitzilopochtli. They sacrifice our young, your brother and many others to war, war that has no hope of ending—bloodthirsty, ha! And they said we were bloodthirsty! But never mind, Jesse will return, mija, in a new form. Our people have always walked the earth.”
    I thought about Don Florencío’s words when we met Jesse’s coffin at the airport after days and days of waiting. The Army said they had sent his body to the wrong address. Even in that, they betrayed us, treated us less than human. I stared at Jesse’s body through the plastic lid, dressed in Army green. I had no words to say how I felt, only shouts, tones, and pitches I had never heard anyone else make.
    Don Florencío made me a tea from a flower he said was shaped like a heart, yoloxochitl, the yellow flower of the heart that heals tlazotlaliste, the sickness of attachment, the fever of affection. I drank it and the cry inside me went away, and eventually I was able to speak again.
    We buried Jesse next to Tata O’Brien. Later Nana was buried with them, and after her, Annette, Priscilla’s six-month-old baby. Don Florencío died months later in one of the caves that bordered the hills close to his shack. It was right that he died in a cave, that’s where he said we came from, like Christ, birthed in a cave. He was taken off in a body bag like the guys in Vietnam. Since there were no relatives to bury him, the neighbors who knew him pitched in and bargained with Murphy’s Funeral Home for a cheap burial. The Murphys were competing with Phoenix First Funeral Home for all the bodies coming home from Vietnam, and those left here dying of heartache. Because of their greediness, God punished them, and Phoenix First Funeral came out ahead in the end. It all happened because Murphy’s didn’t close Esteban Luna’s head after his motorcycle accident and a pinkish fluid oozed from the crack around the circumference of his skull. After that, nobody wantedto be buried by Murphy’s because they didn’t want to be oozing in their coffins, even if they were dead.
    When Don Florencío died, the Murphys were on a campaign to win back their business. The whole family smiled together at his services. They were like a string of flashing Christmas lights. When one was

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