Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya Read Free Book Online

been a Luna priest in the family for many years. My mother was a devout Catholic, and so she saw the salvation of the soul rooted in the Holy Mother Church, and she said the world would be saved if the people turned to the earth. A community of farmers ruled over by a priest, she firmly believed, was the true way of life.
    Why two people as opposite as my father and my mother had married I do not know. Their blood and their ways had kept them at odds, and yet for all this, we were happy.
    “Deborah!” she called. “Get up. Get Theresa cleaned and dressed! Ay, what a night it has been—” I heard her murmur prayers.
    “Ay Dios,” I heard my father groan as he walked into the kitchen.
    The sun coming over the hill, the sounds of my father and mother in the kitchen, Ultima’s shuffle in her room as she burned incense for the new day, my sisters rushing past my door, all this was as it had always been and it was good.
    “¡Antonio!” my mother called just when I knew she would and I jumped out of bed. But today I was awakening with a new knowledge.
    “There will be no breakfast this morning,” my mother said as we gathered around her, “today we will all go to communion. Men walk the world as animals, and we must pray that they see God’s light.” And to my sisters she said, “Today you will offer up half of your communion for your brothers, that God bring them home safely, and half—for what happened last night.”
    “What happened last night?” Deborah asked. She was like that. I shivered and wondered if she had heard me last night and if she would tell on me.
    “Never mind!” my mother said curtly, “just pray for the dearly departed souls—”
    Deborah agreed, but I knew that at church she would inquire and find out about the killing of the sheriff and Lupito. It was strange that she should have to ask others when I, who had been there and seen everything, stood next to her. Even now I could hardly believe that I had been there. Had it been a dream? Or had it been a dream within a dream, the kind that I often had and which seemed so real?
    I felt a soft hand on my head and turned and saw Ultima. She looked down at me and that clear, bright power in her eyes held me spellbound.
    “How do you feel this morning, my Antonio?” she asked and all I could do was nod my head.
    “Buenos días le de Dios, Grande,” my mother greeted her. So did my father who was drinking coffee at the big chair he kept by the stove.
    “Antonio, mind your manners,” my mother urged me. I had not greeted Ultima properly.
    “Ay, María Luna,” Ultima interrupted, “you leave Antonio alone, please. Last night was hard for many men,” she said mysteriously and went to the stove where my father poured her some coffee. My father and Ultima were the only people I ever knew that did not mind breaking their fast before communion.
    “The men, yes,” my mother acknowledged, “but my Tony is only a boy, a baby yet.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and held me.
    “Ah, but boys grow to be men,” Ultima said as she sipped the black, scalding coffee.
    “Ay, how true,” my mother said and clutched me tightly, “and what a sin it is for a boy to grow into a man—”
    It was a sin to grow up and be a man.
    “It is no sin,” my father spoke up, “only a fact of life.”
    “Ay, but life destroys the pureness God gives—”
    “It does not destroy,” my father was becoming irritated at having to go to church and listen to a sermon too, “it builds up. Everything he sees and does makes him a man—”
    I saw Lupito murdered. I saw the men—
    “Ay,” my mother cried, “if only he could become a priest. That would save him! He would be always with God. Oh, Gabriel,” she beamed with joy, “just think the honor it would bring our family to have a priest—Perhaps today we should talk to Father Byrnes about it—”
    “Be sensible!” my father stood up. “The boy has not even been through his catechism. And it is not