Ghost of Milagro Creek story of healing

Ignacia Romero, the curandera for a tightly-knit barrio community in Taos, N.M., has taken her last breath. Yet she is far from finished in telling her story and her spirit hovers over her own coffin, eying the rosary the priest has draped over her hands. She remembers that rosary and has a thing or two to say about it:

“[It was] the one given to me when I was 13 by the missionaries at the Indian boarding school in Santa Fe. There I learned to speak English and pray like a white-eyes. Every night, when my empty belly began to growl, I knelt on the cold floor and asked Jesus and Mary to burn the school to the ground.”

Half Jicarilla Apache, half Tiwa, Ignacia is the flinty, sharp-eyed narrator in Melanie Sumner’s finely crafted “Ghost of Milagro Creek,” a novel about what happens when you surrender your customs, language and beliefs to adapt to a society that might never accept you no matter what you do.

As the book opens, Ignacia's grandson, Mister, and his best friend, Tomas, are poised to carry out the suicidal pact they made as boys. For Mister, 19, his grief over the loss of his abuela gives him the excuse he's wanted. With two guns he stole from his great uncle -- and both boys believing in the eternal hellfire the church promises suicides, leaving them planning to shoot each other at the same instant -- Mister alerts Tomas that he's ready.

When the plan goes awry, Mister heads into the desertand looks for a way to finish himself off, only to come back in contact with the same spirits that saved him years ago.

The first time Mister nearly lost what Ignacia called his susto, or soul, was after a brutal beating at the hands of one of his mother's boyfriends. He was only four and the cure was almost worse than the cause. "It took me two hours to dig a hole big enough for Mister to stand in with his arms crossed over his chest," Ignacia recalled. "His head wobbled with half-sleep as I lifted him out of the stroller and lowered him down, but when the cool dirt touched his feet, he jerked awake."

At first he screams, but the creation myths Ignacia tells the child lull him back to sleep, and her spirit moves into his body to help him heal. When he wakes, asking for his mother, she points to the mesa. “’Your mother is here," the spirit said. "We are your mother now."

After Mister recovers, the Great Spirit gives him a twin, Tomas, to help him find his way through life. The two became inseparable. They even love the same girl, the redheaded, exotic Raquel O’Brien from South Carolina. But Tomas, with no abuela to remove him from his abusive mother’s custody, is irreparably damaged.

When she was a child, terrible things happened to Ignacia, too. At the missionary school, the nuns smacked her in the mouth with a ruler for speaking her own language, and a priest made a habit of sexually abusing her while they read Shakespeare together. “You cannot heal unless you have been wounded,” Ignacia said. Without “the gift of pain,” she would not have had the power to save Mister’s soul. But once she’s gone, will she take it with her?

Sumner uses alternating voices in Ignacia, Raquel, various police reports and witness testimony to create this layered look at two sets of beliefs, Christian and Indian, that have become irreversibly entangled, like the twins, Mister and Romero. “Ghost” shimmers with the light and landscape of New Mexico, and sparkles with the uniquely bleak, dark humor that has allowed generations of Native Americans to survive the worst kind of well-intentioned ethnocide by the U.S. government. The multifaceted narrative moves forward and backward in time until a picture emerges -- one strand at a time, much like the basket-weaving Ignacia's tribe is known -- of a small community whose broken world might finally have a chance at healing, if they can reclaim their once powerful medicine, hidden in plain sight.

Sumner currently lives in Rome and teaches creative writing at Kennesaw State University.

Fiction