By PATRICK CABELLO HANSEL
Where is the best place to jump between centuries? Or perhaps, the better question is: when is the best place to jump between centuries? For while travelling through space seems pretty straightforward, it often isn’t. Roadblocks and detours abound. Travelling through time, with the idea that you can bend time to your advantage, is both impossible and widely practiced, sometimes successfully.
Thank you to Dave and Mary Ellen for their suggestions of the liminal spaces where time travel of the unusual sort can occur! For those of you who doubt its existence, hang in there. You’ve followed the previous 23 and ½ chapters, which are in the past. You’ve wondered where our blessed family is going, which is in the future. So right now, in the present, suspend disbelief and follow along with me. I may not know where I am going, but I trust the trip will be fine.
This is a ghost story, after all. In the first novella “Searching,” Matthew Kelly Hidalgo appeared as a possible ancestor of both Luz and Angel. I say “possible” because it was never clear if Matthew died in infancy, was murdered as a child, was kidnapped and became a Mexican folk hero, or if he exists in some form today. That’s the nature of ghosts. Angel and Luz have been following his trail for years, and now have landed back in the time where he roamed the swale, the piece of land we call East Phillips.
Imagine there is no light rail, no Greenway, no Little Earth or even the cemetery. There is a railroad track that runs a block north of Lake Street. There are trees and a few houses. There is a swale, by definition, low and wet. Where would you go to get a perspective on your surroundings? Higher ground.
So Angel and Luz, with little Angel in tow, followed the tracks until they began to bend at what is now 28th and Hiawatha. Near the Roof Depot and its clarion water tower. In the mid-19th century, the swale began to rise to the north and west there. Our little family were pulled in that direction until they came to rest on a little rise, what is now East Phillips Park.
“Where are we, papi?” little Angel asked.
“More like ‘when are we’”? Luz replied.
“I think we should be near abuelo’s church,” Angel said. “But where is Santo Rosario? It should be just south of here.”
Luz turned his head toward a gaping hole in the ground. Angel let out a gasp.
“Is that where Holy Rosary used to be?” he said.
“No, mi amor,” Luz said. “That’s where Holy Rosary will be. I think we’re back to when it was just being built.”
“What are we going to do?” Angel asked her, as he hugged her closely. “How do we get back to find Lupe?”
“I wish there was a light to show us the way,” Luz said.
Then, as if from a place and a time that transcends all time and place, little Angel’s voice broke their reverie.
“Mami! Papi! “Mira a la luna!”
And there it was, the rising full moon, bigger than they’d ever seen, rising in the east. It was the same full moon, just a few blocks over, that Agnes saw. A few blocks over, and 120 years later. There she stood, holding little Lupe, looking at, and for, the same light.
To be continued…
