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“Felon, fiend, and fighter, but still a son of God,” he would’ve vowed. He would’ve kissed the medallion he wore around his neck and winked at the sky, if it’d been anyone’s funeral but his.
They put him in the earth with the saint around his neck, the coin lying flat upon his chest. And their band was down to three.
Four months more, they rode together—when Roberto fell from his horse as they fled a bank they’d freshly robbed. His head split open on a rock. His horse kept running.
Juan Miguel stopped. Eduardo paused, and then kept riding.
Juan Miguel gathered up his brother’s brains and bones and hefted him onto his own horse, then rode with him to the small canyon where the men always regrouped when they were scattered by chance. Eduardo was not there, and he never did return.
Roberto lived another two days, his skull leaking through the narrow cot he rested upon, his blood puddling on the floor beneath it. He finally stopped breathing, his eyes still open and staring at the beams across the ceiling.
Later that night, Juan Miguel tried to bury Roberto beside Luiz, but a nun saw him creeping through the churchyard and raised the alarm. She did not raise it loudly. She only summoned the priest who served the small parish at the edge of the city.
The priest was a lean, young man with a serious face and sorrowful eyes, and he caught up to Juan Miguel because the gunslinger would not part with his brother’s body—wrapped in a sheet, and growing stiff. It weighed him down, and he’d trudged only halfway back to his horse when the young priest stopped him with a word.
“Esperar.”
Exhausted, crippled with grief, and alone in all the world…Juan Miguel hesitated. He shifted his grip on his brother, and he faced the priest with surrender. He had nothing left to fight with.
“Wait,” the priest said again. “I will get a shovel. I will help you dig.”
When it was done, and when there was a mound of dirt and a makeshift cross above Roberto’s mortal remains, the priest said his prayers and Juan Miguel stayed silent.
“Have you anything left?” the priest asked. “Anyone?”
/> He shook his head, but could not unclench his throat to speak.
A small lantern spit and fizzled from its perch atop a nearby stone. By its light, the priest looked down at his guest’s forearm—and he saw the large crucifix which had been so badly applied there. “Do you believe in anything?” he asked. “Anyone?”
Juan Miguel did not know, so he did not speak. He did not move his head.
“There’s another way. I think you should consider it.”
“It’s too late for that,” he whispered.
“Better late, than never.”
But not there, so close to the city where the four bandits had made their names.
***
In time, with patience, and with far greater trust than Juan Miguel deserved by his own admission…the young priest made arrangements elsewhere. There was a new chapel, much closer to Texas—but much farther from the capital—in a place called El Huizache. It was a place to start over, a new life bought with a promise: never again.
Juan Miguel Quintero Rios did not make his promise to the priest. He promised higher than that, as high as he could reach: Alone at night, he knelt before the icon of Mary, lit his candles, crossed himself, and he vowed, “Never again. I will never touch the guns again.”
He kept them all the same, wrapped in his brother’s shirt. Everything a reminder, everything a debt to be paid. Too heavy to carry, too important to leave behind.
The gleam of the handsome six-shooters never dulled, and their delicate whorled designs never grew faint from repeated handling; and when the newly reborn “Juan Rios” arrived to shepherd the men and women of El Huizache, he put the guns inside the altar—atop the relic box.
Within that box rested a tooth and a bone that might have come from a knuckle. Regardless of its precise origin, both pieces had once belonged to a saint named “Macarius” according to the note the new padre was given.
He debated the wisdom of stashing the guns with the relic.
On the one hand, it felt like sacrilege—those guns had threatened, harmed, and even murdered. On the other, they were holy after a fashion. Every day that passed, every hour, every second he left them where they were and did not draw them, did not turn them in his hands, did not run his fingers over the inlaid handles or the rich designs…they were his promise to the Mother.
He chose to believe that She understood.
***
