A. MUIA
The Good Confession Santa Gertrudis La Magna Baja California 1842 In the uneasy morning light, Barros the gravedigger of Santa Gertrudis pushed his hand-hearse from the abandoned mission to the campo santo. He walked slowly, stopping to wipe his brow. He put a hand under his heart and felt it stutter, and he paused a moment before going on. The cemetery was overfilled, bursting with the remains of the Cochimí—the aged and overtasked, the infant and near-infant, the robust and brokenhearted and accidented and diseased and wasted. The born—legítimo, natural, adulterino, bastardo; and the baptized— standard and provisional, privadamente, in articulo mortis, in periculo mortis. A few markers of stone leaned into one another. Men of stature lay in repose under flat table tombs. Mounds of bones congregated beneath. The forsaken campo santo was soundless in the wind. Barros smoothed the half-hearted furrows where coyotes had been digging. A vulture wheeled above. He went to the corner of the campo santo and with a spade he worked into the earth, loosening the soil and inserting his fingers. Sifting the ground, he pulled up bones to make more room, for the long-dead priest had said everyone must have a consecrated burial at least once. The bones disarticulated in his hands. He blew detritus from their fissures and placed them in the hand-hearse. A mist lay across his brow. He sat back on trembling shanks and the vulture alighted on the half wall, watching with a red-rimmed eye. Barros did not know whether it favored the bones or him. Raleigh Review | 73
