'Padre Delgado'
"You seem, to have confuse' me wi' my brother. Will you, stan' down, so I may doctor to these men?
My bullets, were rubber, but I thin' some tha' flew, were not."
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"Aren't you a little [i]FAT, to be a mendicant?"[/i]
Arnando Avilar Del Aquila De Jesus y Ramones was always a stout child. It didn't hurt, in the family stonemason business, to be a third slower, if you could shift a hundredweight of stone or bricks. And 'Nando, he could. Hard work kept 'Nando and his brother strong, if not trim. That didn't bother 'Nando, who would sing with gusto while they worked, wordless melodies, perhaps off-key, learned from ‘pequitos’ only he had seen. It was the singing that brought Arnando to the attention of the priest, and the priest that brought Arnando to the Book. The apocryphal, even, forbidden gospel of Saint Teresa of the Stones somehow freed something in Arnando, and the child knew, he was to be a great healer, and to found a church of healing, an hospital, though the young boy did yet know such a word. And young boys, do not always remember, fleeting visions, nor pequitos.
As a young man, Arnando, having forgotten visions and pequitos, but remembering his desire to heal, lied about his age, and enlisted to aid a military field hospital. First, perhaps, as a muleskinner, soon enough, an attendant, an assistant, a surgeon. In the chaos of war, when the hospital was overrun, ‘Nando Delgado’ stood his post, and his ground, tending to any wounded brought to him, demanding that all wounded be brought to him, if he would care for any. Enemy officers, perhaps indisposed to such egality, found it hard to argue with the big youth, flitting from table to table, seemingly two places at once. It was, after all, the chaos of war.
But chaos and war pass, and law, and order, and bureaucracy come again to reign over peace. And where a Protestant might have been decorated, where even an Irishman might have been forgiven, a Mestizo might find himself on charges, of aid and comfort, to the enemy. A hanging offense. And a cause for flight, if one could, as one might could, when word reaches a brother, and a gang reaches a prison cell.
The bandit life was not for ‘Nandito Bandito’, as his brother would teasingly call him. But the poor people among which the bandits would shelter, they seemed to need, what Nando could do for them. And he did what he could. And he found, he could do more. Much more. Perhaps, too much.
”They say, my brother, it is unnatural. They say, you are of the Devil. That no bandit, no soldier, not even trained by Yankee doctors… heals with a touch.” Nando had to go. A bag of plundered gold, Nando’s share, was his brother’s gift. Alone, in the hills, among the stones, Nando buried it. It would be, he swore, the church of his vision. Someday.
The next day, Nando was captured, by the army, from which he had escaped. As if, they knew, where to find him. Alone in his cell, Nando wondered, would they hang him, for treason? Burn him, for deviltry? Or stone him, like Saint Teresa, for hearing things, for knowing things? He was sure, they would do, one of those. And they would have.
If it had not been for a man named Conroy...
