How Sister Concepción Burned Down Nuestra Señora de los Luceros through No Fault of Her Own, Which Everyone Agrees

(Las Orejas, New Mexico, 1907)

It was a sharp, cold winter, and the icicles hung off the roof so that to go to the privy was to risk a hole in the head. Sister Concepción, in her forty-year-old nightgown made of seven yards of bridal silk, was lying under the weight of three wool blankets, staring at the moonlight shining through ferns of ice on her one small window, when someone came pounding on the rectory door. Sister Concepción waited, thinking it must be Father Velázquez, finally so drunk he couldn’t manage to turn a knob.

But it wasn’t. As soon as she threw open the latch, the girl pushed herself on Sister Concepción, clutching her wide sleeves, the nightgown’s draperies of silk that billowed from her neck and gathered at her wrists. “Oh Sister, where is Father Velázquez? Oh Sister, save me!” Sobbing, tiresome. The girl’s hands were covered with blood, and there were sure to be bloody smears on her nightgown.

It was one of those Marías. Inéz, Euphalia, Paola. There were three of them in this excuse for a village. This one was the María who kept her curly hair in braids even though she was sixteen, who acted devout and prayed so fervently in the mornings at school. Sister Concepción wasn’t fooled. She knew the type: the downcast gaze, the cheeks unblemished, the threaded fingers. The skin looking soft as silk washed for forty years. The very appearance of purity. All the Hail Marys in the world could not save this girl.

Sister Concepción peeled the girl’s sticky fingers off her arm, and as predicted there were smears of blood on the silk. Her lips tightened, and she glanced up at the icicles: water, hard as stone, hanging like weapons from the flat roof of the mud building that the savages here had the nerve to call a church. She imagined stabbing the girl through the eye with one of those spikes of ice. She said a prayer for humility and forgiveness, and moved into the kitchen, throwing the words over her shoulder like so much spilled salt: “You’re letting in the cold. You might as well come in and close the door behind you.”

The girl followed her in and fell to her knees and wove together her hands. Her thin coat parted and there was the blood on her dress, shocking red, soaking her from thighs to hem. “Forgive me father for I have sinned—” the girl whispered, as if Father Velázquez had already entered the room. “He isn’t here,” snapped Sister Concepción. That blasphemous so-called priest. Father was carousing with the men, including this María’s lover, with all of those sinners who fear a habit. She could fetch Father but he would only run out the back door of that pit of snakes. It wasn’t a dress, saw Sister Concepción. It was a nightgown, cotton sprigged with forget-me-nots. This María shivered in her nightgown. She must have awoken to a pool of blood. Or she’d gone to the privy and began her bleeding there. God willing, it was the latter. Then no one would find the bloody sheets. The thought came unbidden to Sister Concepción, the way unholy thoughts come to us all.

María something. In her years as Sister Concepción, she had come across enough to populate a nunnery, though most of them weren’t close to worthy: Mary Catherine, Mary Grace, Mary Sue, Mary Anne, all the Marys, as if every parent hoped the first name Mary could be put on like a starched wimple. The second name told the truth. It named that bright, inevitable yellow center of sin and lust.

María Inéz. That was her name. One of those arrogant, feckless Luceros. María Inéz, with her curling braids worn long past the age of...