Rise Do Not Be Afraid Read online

  Praise for aaron a. abeyta

  “Original, creative, inclusive, imaginative … abeyta’s craftsmanship and artistry is clear. Pick a line, any line, and you will be swept away by the rhythm and meter and metaphor.”

  —Laura Pritchett, winner of the PEN USA Award and author of Stars Go Blue

  The first novel by master poet, Pushcart nominee, winner of the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, and recipient of the prestigious Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship.

  Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a compelling, intertwined story of a small New Mexico town and its people, the presence of shadowy gods, and the heart of human nature. These fantastical and almost whimsical tales are based in myth and biblical traditions, and the characters are rooted deeply in the past, returning to pass down the truth of their town—Santa Rita, New Mexico. Through the eyes and mouths of abeyta’s characters, we are carried through a private and deeply personal history.

  aaron a. abeyta’s allegorical retelling of his childhood past, woven in with his own beliefs and mythologies, brings an adventurous tone to history. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a lyrical and adamant prayer for redemption and salvation in a time where there is none to be spared.

  * * *

  “Abeyta’s language is tender and prophetic, his characters made of fragrant cedars and holy myth.”

  —Tim Hernandez, author of Skin Tax

  “This reissue of Aaron Abeyta’s masterful gem Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a blessing. A novel that reads like poetry, with sentence after sentence that shimmer and shine like the throat of a hummingbird. Rise, Do Not Be Afraid is a work of art that rises above the mundane category of novel, one that deserves a special place in the world of literature for its beautifully crafted telling, tenderness, and elegance.”

  —Charles Finn, editor High Desert Journal, author of Wild Delicate Seconds and the forthcoming On a Benediction of Wind.

  * * *

  “There is no other voice that conjures the sky and keeps count of stars as human migrations, moving, fading, and bursting anew as abeyta’s.”

  —Juan Felipe Herrera, former United States Poet Laureate.

  Rise, Do Not Be Afraid

  An Allegorical Novel

  aaron a. abeyta

  Rise, Do Not Be Afraid

  Copyright © 2007, 2021 aaron a. abeyta

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-200-1

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-201-8

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-202-5

  * * *

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Cover artwork images by aaron a. abeyta

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  * * *

  Published by

  WordFire Press, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  WordFire Press eBook Edition 2021

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2021

  WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2021

  Printed in the USA

  * * *

  Join our WordFire Press Readers Group for

  sneak previews, updates, new projects, and giveaways.

  Sign up at wordfirepress.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  Laura Pritchett

  Known Only to God

  The Lamp of Your Body

  The Cost of Five Sparrows

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  Dip the Tip of Your Finger in Water and Cool My Tongue

  He Viewed the Town and Wept Over It

  A Reed Being Tossed by the Wind

  We Played the Flute for You but You Did Not Dance

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  This Man of Another Nation

  If Even the Salt Loses Its Strength

  Joy Arises

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  I Came to Start A Fire on the Earth

  Not A Stone Upon Stone

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  Causes for Stumbling Should Come

  Into the Lonely Places

  Let Us Erect Three Tents

  Let Him That Has Ears to Listen

  I Am Not Strong Enough to Dig

  If These Remained Silent the Stones Would Cry Out

  Mark Well How the Lilies Grow

  It Is Toward Evening and the Day Has Already Declined

  O Faithless and Twisted Generation

  One Particle of a Letter

  That Those Stepping in May Behold the Light

  By Endurance On Your Part

  About Seven Miles Distant

  Why Did You Have to Go Looking for Me

  Look! Days Are Coming

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles

  Introduction

  Laura Pritchett

  Rise, Do Not Be Afraid gifts readers with an unusual central character—the town of Santa Rita. She is as changing—and as changeable—as any fictional human character I have tracked in my literary meanderings. She is as vulnerable, as kind, as difficult, as unpredictable, and as complicated. And ultimately, she is as hopeful as any mother as she embraces her inhabitants—the herders, guitar players, lovers, mothers, healers, the wounded.

  She is also real. The town of Santa Rita rests in a small valley at the end of a dirt road with canyon cliffs on both sides and a river meandering through. The town is mostly abandoned—likely there are no residents who live there full-time anymore—but abeyta has been there, both literally and in his imagination, conjuring up the hustle and bustle of human hearts and endeavors. When he decided to write this novel, he returned to this place he’d explored as a child, and was offered the keys to the literal locks that keep the town sequestered. His mind unlocked the rest to create the story we find here.

  This novel, which mostly takes place between 1955–57, is set in the general area of the Colorado-New Mexico border—specifically the landscape between Tres Piedras, New Mexico, and Antonito, Colorado. This is land abeyta knows better than most in America could hope to know a place, outside of First Peoples, of course. His family first came to the area in 1844—when they were pushed out by the Utes—and returned in about 1846. Abeyta is, incredibly, the seventh of nine generations. This family called this land home long before it was broken into the United States, into states, into counties, into towns, and this is something that Santa Rita knows, and abeyta knows, and which the reader comes to understand. And it is a complicated place—in the bosque, in this landscape, the people are, as abeyta writes, “made of Spain and oceans, Mexico and pyramids, mountains with cold blue lakes, of adobe and memory, of words, of acequias and rivers and rain, of bone and prayer, and of memory.”

  It is also an area abeyta and his family have cared for. Indeed, while he is celebrated for his poetry, abeyta also currently serves as mayor of Antonito. He does this not because of political ambitions—indeed, I believe politics was the farthest thing from what he want
ed—but his town needed a mayor, and he therefore became a true public servant. With his wife, Michele, he started a school for the area’s youth that focuses on justice, because their town needed a school, and he thereby became a schoolteacher as well as a professor. Which is only to say: He is a man who received much from this place, and who gives back even more.

  So, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio, or Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittridge, or my own attempt to capture the spirit of a town in my novel The Blue Hour, we find that episodic narratives blend together to tell a complete story of a community. But make no mistake—this is not a “regional” novel (a term which incites great fury in me)—it is about war, faith, living off the land, living off the heart. It is about birth and hunger. It is about family stories and family sagas. It is about the difficulty in finding honest and complete communication—a theme close to my own heart and writing—and about the romantic hope that we might someday succeed.

  Indeed, this last theme—the potential power of communication—is one that becomes salient, and within that larger idea lies the novel’s beating heart—poetry. There are two ways in which poetry infuses this work—first, in the poetic writing itself, in the attention to language; and second, in the direct and indirect homage to previous poets.

  To speak to the first impulse: abeyta’s craftsmanship and artistry is clear. Pick a line, any line, and you will be swept away by the rhythm and meter and metaphor. As one random example, this: “abuelita scoops out with a tin cup, always the same cup, always the same tin cup balanced in her hand, not really measured but weighed by the soft, thin fingers of her hands holding the tin cup, balanced really between the farmer’s grain, the earth’s rain, the acequias.” It’s the sort of line that becomes rhythmically engrained in the mind, or at least my mind, and it’s for this reason that I’ve nominated abeyta to be poet laureate for the state of Colorado on several occasions—I believe he is absolutely one of our great contemporary (and yet not widely known) poets. He’s quietly won the Colorado Book award and the American Book Award and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship. His publications are many, but more importantly, these works are original, creative, inclusive, imaginative. I teach his work regularly because it is great poetry.

  He is also a poet of the people. He once told me, “most people forget poetry because poetry forgets most people.” There’s truth to this. The best poems, in my opinion, are not the ones in love with themselves, or offer some exercise in intellectual prowess, but rather they are in love with humanity. These are the poems that cannot be ignored. They are poems that stab the heart. Like his poetry, this novel does not forget the people.

  His homage to certain writers adds to this celebration of poetry. One does not need to have studied poetry to enjoy the novel, but for those who have, you’ll find that the poetic references are like little nuggets of gold, unexpected and delightful—readers will come across bits of Blake, Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and Merton, to name a few, though it is Rilke who is front-and-center. Indeed, reading this novel makes me think of this passage in Rilke’s essay, “For the Sake of a Single Poem”:

  For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and knows the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.… You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

  I believe in abeyta’s rare hours. I believe in the music—the guitar, piano, flute, violin, whistling, voice that play in this novel. I believe in the Spanish; I believe in the language. I believe in the myth—keep an eye out for Hermes, Apollo, Dionysus, and Ares—and I believe the three ghosts who narrate. I believe in the bearing witness of that which we have lost, or are on the cusp of losing. As abeyta writes of the communidad: “Santa Rita died, but there are pieces of her still with the people. We hold our old selves close to us at times, live in the memory of what youth was and only remember those times that were beautiful and those that were tragic. One by one, the in between memories fade, and we are left with the parts of us that can save us. That is how Santa Rita is kept, in small pieces that can save us.”

  These small pieces, I believe, are a direct reference to abeyta’s nod to the oral tradition of storytelling. Abeyta jumps in time and space and point of view—and, importantly, most stories are told from at least three different perspectives. In this way, he offers us a sense that the story is alive, changeable, dependent on perspective. I have seen this tension before in abeyta’s work—this sense that if he puts word to a page, he somehow detracts from the oral tradition. The solution, it seems, is to keep it alive as possible, with different angles and versions.

  In that way, the town is saved, and thus ultimately, this becomes a hopeful novel. Hopeful about love and about human endeavor. As abeyta writes: “Santa Rita would disappear slowly and only a few would understand its loss. Santa Rita would die, but there are pieces of her with its people … Only a few would understand how the loss eventually equals the healing.”

  I once visited abeyta on his family’s ranch in this area. We went on a drive to see this land and the nearby river and stopped at a cemetery with graves dating back to the 1800s. We were leaning against his truck, talking, looking out over the stones and scrub. While we were chatting, he quietly started getting old Gatorade bottles from the back of his truck which had been refilled with water—he was a football coach at the time—and he started watering all the scraggly bushes and plants. To me, it looked like these plants had no future, or, at the very least, a very difficult one. And yet, he just started watering—an act of folly, perhaps, but certainly of hope and of care. It occurs to me that these circles of water around bushes and sagebrush are just like his poems and this novel. Without much ado or ego, he simply offers sustenance.

  —Laura Pritchett

  Source: Rainer Maria Rilke, “For the Sake of a Single Poem,” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

  Known Only to God

  Of the three, two are named, and one is known only to God. Of the three, he dreamt one alive, and that one image pulled him over and over toward its embodiment and therefore lives. Two, the named, are buried together beneath a cedar tree on land his abuelito bought from a woman named Lara. Like two of the three that he never imagined or knew, he also did not know Lara, but he used to play in her hollowed-out house, drop dark round stones into her unused well and wait for the sound of the stone’s heart to beat as it entered the water.

  Lara’s house was built south of the mesa that looms over his boyhood home. During the winter there are parts of the earth beneath that mesa that never feel the sun. Lara’s house is just beyond the winter reach of the mesa’s shadow. The cedar tree where the two are buried is not. All of the earth below the mesa is covered with and full of stones, cold round river stones smoothed gray with shades of black and red, left there by an ancient river. The river still exists, further down from the mesa it flows less violently, thinner, greener, less than a quarter mile from where it left its memory, its round and water pocked children of stone. Despite the rocks, people were always digging. Men mostly, with their shovels, talaches, and fierros, have put up homes, dug wells, buried children, left rou
nded ditches as proof of their work.

  The cedar tree sits between two ditches, one large and stony as its old mother, the other shallow and clay formed. During the winter the tree does not feel the sun. He dug one grave, a January grave in the frozen earth between those two acequias. For all his life in that cañon, it will be the only lasting proof of his ever living or working there, that shallow cedar-shaded grave between two ditches where two of the three are buried and are with him now helping tell this story. Whatever voice you hear, it may be theirs, the abandoned well’s, the mostly forgotten adobe home’s, the winter shadow’s, the ancient river’s or the voices of two acequias; whatever voice you hear you must know that it is also God’s.

  He chose that tree because it is near his mother and father’s house. It is near the field where he once played. He thought the memory of young voices playing off the walls of the mesa would be like bells from a far away church, the kind you hear randomly and distantly but recognize nonetheless, so too are the voices and joyful screams of youth against cliffs of hardened clay and always green arms of cedar.