Soulful Collection Tells Stories of New Mexico Pilgrims

Lisa Sandlin ’73 takes New Mexico’s claim to be the State of Enchantment quite seriously. Although she teaches at Wayne State College in Nebraska, she has summered in New Mexico since 1974, so it’s no surprise that, in her third collection of short stories, In the River Province (Southern Methodist University Press, 2004), the roads of her adopted state are filled with pilgrims.

Many of these pilgrims are en route to a sanctuary at Chimayo, a New World Lourdes, where the crippled and damaged are cured. The pilgrims’ wounds might be physical—abandoned crutches line the church’s walls. But they also are emotional and spiritual, as in the case of Andy C’de Vaca, who makes the traditional Good Friday pilgrimage to request that the thorn of unrequited love finally be removed—after decades—from his broken heart.

In the River Province by Lisa Sandlin.

C’de Vaca (his name is a variant of Cabeza de Vaca, which is one of the nuggets of information that makes the book feel so deeply grounded in New Mexican reality) makes his pilgrimage in the story “I Loved You Then, I Love You Still,” but the reader doesn’t learn if he’s finally able to forget the high-school love who broke his heart. That’s because Sandlin is more interested in the process of pilgrimage than in its results. Readers follow Andy through several phases of his life: high-school romantic, Vietnam medic, honest cop, and disillusioned cabinetmaker, but Sandlin finishes the story with Andy still marching toward Chimayo. Although Andy wants to make his pilgrimage in solitary peace, a pair of sisters attach themselves to him despite his efforts to avoid them. Now, walking beside them, Andy savors the “perspective that those other days visited by loneliness and regret are the illusion, that this day is the real day.”

Sandlin often plays with time—characters who have a starring role in one story pop up again in another, deepening the sense of connection between the characters and the New Mexican landscape they inhabit. Andy C’de Vaca gets two stories, and while, in a sense, he feels like the book’s protagonist, he doesn’t ask for very much out of life and simply plows ahead, doing his duty and always on the lookout for grace.

The collection begins with “’Orita on the Road to Chimayo,” a graceful but complex piece of storytelling that follows a multiethnic group of pilgrims on the Good Friday pilgrimage. Sandlin shifts the point of view skillfully between the Anglo Catherine, the New Mexican Benny, and Verdiano, a young man from Mexico who is going to Chimayo to ask for good luck in his upcoming marriage. After Verdiano is struck by a car and lies dying beside the road, a crowd gathers around him, including Benny and Catherine. Sandlin’s painstaking account of Verdiano’s death and its effect on his fellow pilgrims is both moving and bracing. Later, in the whimsical “The Career of Saint Librada,” we return to the death scene as an unlikely folk saint is supernaturally recruited to carry a message to the dying man’s fiancée in Ciudad Juarez.

Sandlin closes the collection with a masterpiece that snaps the rest of the collection into focus. “The Saint of Bilocation” is a highly researched account of the Inquisition’s investigation into the miraculous career of Sor Maria de Agreda, a 17th-century Spanish nun who apparently was granted the ability to appear in two places at once—Spain and “the River Province,” as New Mexico was originally known to the Spanish. She reportedly was able to zip back and forth between the convent and the New World to aid in the conversion of the Native Americans. Fray Antonio, a missionary who for eight years labored in the River Province, is brought in to examine her testimony and pass his own judgment as to its accuracy. Knowing how the Inquisition disposes of heretics, Fray Antonio realizes Sor Maria’s life hangs in the balance of his report. Pious man that he is, Fray Antonio is afraid to believe. His struggle to accept the majestically inexplicable forms a coda for Sandlin’s entire collection, and Sor Maria’s straightforward acceptance of heavenly magic gives In the River Province its beautiful soul.

—David Theis