1. The Waterways that Flood
Camp Meeting Creek
Goat Creek
Cypress Creek
Verde Creek
Indian Creek
The Guadalupe
2. The Imperfect Witness
At the greater riverbend, my German ancestor confuses La Llorona for Die Weiße Frau.
She nods shyly, Ja, thinking she does know this woman. At least, she
understands the gestures a mother gives when mourning her children.
Some of the women disagree about the story. They don’t know how it happened —
tragedies happen, they say. and, we’ve all known suffering. My great-grandmother agrees.
She doesn’t speak Spanish or English like the Tejanas, but the language they share is Bible.
She says, “But the man is born unto disaster, as the sparks fly upward.”[1]
For some of the women, my great-grandmother understands, the river spirit did nothing wrong.
“No,” one woman, Sofía, says. “Only the spirit believes so much the lie that it should have been her death in place of the little ones, so she made herself the killer. She did not do that.
She believes this lie that became for her the truth. And the story moves through the hills with the motion of the lie: guilt, regret, shame.
That is how it goes.”
My great-grandmother, catching the scent of the stew with a bit of self-centered jealousy, thinks that the best dishes take the most people to make.
Sofía continues, speaking again of the spirit, “But of course it was not her fault. That was an evil lie from the devil.”
“Not her fault?” the mothers ask.
Another woman says, “Then surely she was not wrong though, to feel the way she did.”
On this, they all agree.
“Who has the piedra y el epazote?” Sofía asks.
“Thyme?” my great-grandmother asks, motioning at the epazote.
“No,” Sofía answers, smiling at my great-grandmother who is called Sara.
“It smells after dust,” Sara says.
“Yes,” Sofía says, smiling with her eyes now, “Not dust.” She corrects Sara’s English. “You want to say earth.”
Then she reminds the others to use powdered comino, not a seed, in the soup.
That evening, Sara adds cumin and jalapeños to her sauerkraut. At nightfall, she places a glass of water beneath her bed, bumping against the pine chest holding her wedding dress, now two years old. The house, as always, is silent. She sleeps full and content. Next morning, she carries her stone to the river.
3. The Funeral Song
By the waters
the waters
we lay down and wept[2]
4. Announcing the Season of Mourning
Mourning is not the cheerful singing of mockingbirds pretending to be safely migrating
Carolina wrens. Not today. This place of broken limestone bluffs where new mercies
flow steady as the coming morning — this place has turned.
If you must, go ahead and hate it for now.
Go ahead, feel what passes through,
even if it’s ugly.
It’s your body. It must remove the threat
during the season of mourning.
You are only human, my friend. So am I.
And, if you must, hurl the wisdom stone into the canyon.
Someone will surely recover it, keep it safe for you until time comes.
If you must, retreat to the mountains for a winter or two. Go and
make your home someplace new and fine and far from here.
We will go to the river, and we will pray. The helpers[3] will do what we must for each other now.
And we will remember you.
5. The Cloud of Divine Witnesses
Beyond the violent sky, weeping angels rise from the
Balcones of the clouds,
the chancel where they cry, lulling the soft lullaby
over the alley of the floods.
Beyond the violent sky, the seven trumpets cry out,
calling for the walls around our poor, aching hearts
to fall all the way down[4] in mourning.
Beyond the violet light, hear the cradle-song angels
hum just so quiet and breath-like to the bright children
we may remember as
never alone in the dark.
6. To Witness the Son: Ignatian Contemplation[5] at the Temptation of the Mount[6]
Sara arrives, watches the tempter march off spitting, loathsome.
Kicking up dust.
“Man shall not live by bread alone,[7]” the Son calls softly after the departing tempter.
In Bavaria as a child, Sara has been taught by Jesuits.
And in waking, she has a habit of imaginative prayer that sometimes leaks into dreams.
Now standing before her, the Son presses the stone into her hands, closes her fingers around the rock, smoothed by millennia of cool, running water.
He says, “Sara, I’ve been keeping the stone for you.”
She takes it, confused.
Below the hill, oil lamp light glows from the windows of the houses. It is early evening. Summer. Not dusk for a few more hours still.
A thyme thicket grows beside the path. He bends down, nods gratefully at the plants, plucks a sprig,
then rubs the leaves between His palms, His arms, His face. Then, He gives her a sprig, too, saying, “Yours.”
The woodsy, earthy scent, like
der Forst of her childhood, fills the air.
She breathes in through her mouth, closes her eyes while searching her mind, recites flatly:
“In the bloody sweat of thy face thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground,
for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, und unto dust thou shalt return.[8]”
“I know that one, too,” He says, smiling. “For you, time here now.” Then, “Like me. Wash.” And He demonstrates.
She follows His example.
“Come,” He says. “Come, let’s go back down this hill.
Turn away
from the dim lights of mankind that
keep you awake
stealing your rest.
And
fix your eyes solidly
on Me.[9]
Now, would you like to hear a story about my kingdom?”
By faith, Sara receives.
7. The Builders
In the future, sirens warn families.
By faith, Noah builds.
Endnotes
[1] Job 5:7. In the German (Luther)1545 Bible, the literal (Linguee) English translation of the first half of the verse is, “But the man becomes to disaster born…” In the King James Version (BibleGateway), the verse reads, “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” Quoted text is a blend of the first half of the Luther 1545 literal English translation with the last half of the KJV(21c) Bible.
[2] Adapted creatively by the author from the opening of Psalm 137:1 (BibleGateway). Passage memorized/internalized by the author.
[3] The idea of “look for the helpers” in times of community tragedy and disaster, such as catastrophic flooding, comes from advice Nancy Rogers’s gave to her son, Fred Rogers, which he writes about in his book, Mister Rogers Talks with Parents (1983).
[4] Joshua 6:20. (BibleGateway) The chapter, beginning with verse twenty, describes the taking of Jericho by Jacob and Caleb, which brought down its walls after a seven-day campaign.
[5] Ignatian Contemplation (Tippett) in conversation with Jesuit Priest James Martin. Martin direct quote from transcript online: “Ignatian contemplation, or Ignatius calls it “composition of place.” And it’s using your imagination to place yourself within a scripture scene and to see what comes up by way of emotions or feelings or desires.”
[6] The Temptation on the Mount: Gospel story in which Christ is tempted for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. During this time, Satan offers Christ power over all the kingdoms of man on Earth in exchange for essentially his fealty, but in the form of the symbol of bread. Christ is hungry because he’s been fasting. When offered food, Christ refuses, saying that people can’t live on food alone; they also need wisdom. The author has the story memorized.
[7] Matthew 4:4 (Christ quoting an Old Testament verse saying ‘It is written’) (BibleGateway). When offered food, Christ responds accordingly. The author’s mother had a devotional journal called “Not By Bread Alone” on her nightstand for many years.
[8] Quoted text is a creative blend of the literal (Luther) translation of Genesis 3:19, specifically the use of the adjective-noun “bloody sweat,” which stands in for the German Schweiße, meaning “sweat, blood, perspiration.” The rest of the text follows the KJV (21) (BibleGateway) translation, with the exception of the German word “und,” which the author creatively added. Additionally, the author consulted Google Gemini AI (Google, n.d.) during a first pass at the German Biblical translation.
[9] These lines: “Turn away from the dim lights of mankind that keep you awake stealing your rest. And fix your eyes solidly on Me” are inspired by lyrics to Lemmel’s hymn (Lemmel, 1922) “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus,” which the author has memorized. (The hymn itself is based on text from Hebrews 12 KJV.) Note: the philosophical idea of the importance of setting one’s eyes solidly comes from an idea discussed in Book6 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. (Knausgaard, 2018). He calls this idea “fasten one’s gaze.” In Knausgaard’s novel, the idea comes from a priest’s eulogy at the narrator’s father’s funeral. It is a message the priest is desperate to deliver to mourners, and he repeats it many times. Knausgaard makes the point that the priest does not declare “on what,” and we are to assume: “fasten one’s gaze” onto what has value, on our own values, on community values, on love, on what is worthy of attention (which for Knausgaard is his daily writing practice). For Christians, Jesus means all of these things, including the pursuit of meaningful work.
[10] From Chapter 11 of Hebrews. The chapter is a list of all the many people throughout the Bible who relied on faith, trusting G-d for a safe outcome during troubling times, or, for example, in the case of Sarah, who trusted G-d for the desire of her heart.
