you need to do is get your letters from the store house. Your answer’s right there, Melo old buddy.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right.”
“Shit”
Santa Fe, New Mexico, February, 1944
Anissa always knew what Nicasia, her next door neighbor, was wearing that day. In her black dresses, she was fixed and unchanging. Her hair was pinned in a bun—never let to stream down. She was a slight, modestly dressed mother of a fallen soldier as well as the wife of his missing-in-action father. And she was the mother of a Bataan Death March survivor, dressing exactly like the other bereft women in their aspects of mourning and she had, with them, grown sorrowfully prayerful. Their numbers were large in such a small town and they had a faceless similarity, one to the other.
Anissa, though, appreciated Nicasia’s great sparks of watchful kindness and her grace. Nicasia listened to everything she said with a sharp purpose, trying to comprehend new facts, always ready to step in to soften tragedy when it arose. Her eldest son, Franque Garcia, had been killed at the outset of the Bataan Death March, and the telegram assured her that he’d died a hero’s death. She’d been informed that Faustino was missing she had not received the black-starred telegram. That small detail opened a shaft of possibility, she dreamt that the Faustino Garcia rumored dead was another soldier with the same name. Nothing, no mail had been received from the American soldiers after their surrender to the Japanese in April of 1942. After that, dark and empty silence.
Nicasia prayed and fasted for the end of the war when her remaining son was shipped home alive. She cherished her youngest son Melicio Garcia’s life over her husband’s and more than her own. Two years before when the shattering news arrived of the surrender, LaBelle, his novia, the woman who he’d promised to marry, moved in with her to wait out the war. He was their last hope; only he could make the world reasonable and whole. LaBelle said Melo was her destiny; for his mother, Melo, gave her life purpose.
“I can’t stand this war any longer,” Anissa had shrieked the day before when Nicasia ritually appeared at her doorway, tamales in hand. She threw down the New Mexican, the only local newspaper. “Death, casualties and that damned Roosevelt again.”
Nicasia could but nod. Each day she came, hoping to hear that the War was almost over, the news to feed her beating heart. There never was a war that did not end sometime.
Every day, the war. All day, they ate and breathed the war and its blaring talk. The American public received waves of unreliable information. Overstatement was the norm. No one had the facts, and if anyone knew the truth, it was “rephrased” for the greater American morale. Roosevelt warned against exaggeration, repeating again that the war would be long and difficult but reinforcing the government’s constant censorship by holding back such facts as the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942, and the penal conditions of our POWs surrendered to the Japanese.
All real news leaked out from unauthorized sources. And it was often a year late. The American Red Cross tried to keep up with the deaths of their hitos, tios, maridos, abuelos and amigos but the Japanese Red Cross refused to cooperate. When reported, the names of the war dead (culled from the town’s 900 conscripted soldiers) were proclaimed to be heroic deaths, but were in fact useless wastage from starvation and jungle disease, not war doings. Their lives were lost through wanton neglect, some of which was the result of governmental deceit. Their sacrifice brought no one closer to freedom or the coming Golden Age.
Anissa had read the last entirely credible report aloud to Nicasia stating that the Empire itself was starving and out of gas and oil so, as a last resort, the Japanese were shipping the POWs from the Philippines to work as slaves in the coalmines of the Japan’s home islands in a last ditch effort to eke out fuel for the desperate war.
Anissa continued to read aloud saying that those men who were still alive and fit for work had been crammed into the holds of the Hell Ships headed north in zigzag paths fleeing the US Naval bombers above water line, and the American submarine torpedoes below. Both the Japanese and their prisoners were targets on the same boat, starving and fleeing fire from the US. The New Mexican quoted escaped American prisoners saying the conditions on board these ships were far worse than the Bataan Death March, even more disgusting.
War was chaos; confusion and lies on all sides. But these new reports of packing the POWs, shoulder to shoulder without food and water into the holds of the Emperor’s remaining rust-buckets rang true.
And the part about being helplessly attacked by the Americans even truer.
Now, her neighbor stood quietly dressed in her worn black dress with another plate of tamales in hand. Only her neighbor Anissa seemed to be able to sort the facts out of the long paragraphs, so Nicasia arrived bearing some gift in exchange for Anissa’s close readings of the printed news.
“God damned Roosevelt!” Anissa had summarized the day before.
So the war raged on and heartbroken widows stood helpless to do anything but pray. Rocks and talismans were traded, dirt was blessed. Rumors of stronger saints and more powerful Deities spread, and women crowded shrines. Powerless, they begged for help. The more contemptible the enemy, the more extreme were the prayers and offerings.
Yet there was hope. It came from an occult national movement called The I AM Presence that Anissa subscribed to, a religious group claiming to have direct revelations about the unfolding of a promised Golden Age. Edna Ballard, the founder of the I AM Movement and herself an Ascended Master, moved her printing press and offices of the million person strong Movement to Santa Fe during the war in order to further the I AM belief in the Divine Presence of God’s consuming Violet Flame. Anissa, properly outraged by the Nazi Evil, joined the Movement in Chicago and followed Edna’s move to proselytize, vowing to practice chastity. Next to the power of God Himself, Anissa and the movement believed in Jesus Christ and their wondrous Ascended Master Saint Germain, whose promises to end Evil itself were irresistible.
Even Nicasia trusted Saint Germain to guard and keep their small town safe. It was an I AM fact that death was powerless in La Villa Real de Santa Fé de San Francisco de Assis because of Saint Germain’s protection and His Purple Sword.
But His Protection only extended to the city limits. Good things like piñon fires and roasted goat were stored for those who stayed safe inside La Villa Real de la Santa Fe. Because of Saint Germain, Anissa had repeated over and over, everyone in Santa Fe woke each morning unharmed, and she preached that under His Dominion no child in the town had yet contracted whooping cough or chicken pox.
“But what about the Japs?” Nicasia had asked timidly. There were actual Japanese in town, internees who were forcibly held in the town’s Alien Enemy Internment Camp for national security. In a hasty move immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, all Japanese were rounded up and held in internment camps, their rights removed. The 2,000 men behind the guard towers off of West Alameda Street were protected too by the same magic spell that protected the original Spanish families. It was said that none of them took sick—but two died of old age. Or remorse, which was allowable.
“They should have committed hara-kiri out of guilt for their Emperor’s sins,” Anissa agreed. She would have supplied them her shotgun, if it had been in her possession.
Even though the Santa Feans were protected from physical disaster, the 20,000 souls who lived there suffered deep anguish. One in every four households had been stricken with war losses, their sons and relatives dead, wounded and imprisoned. So their families grieved and prayed to any saint who would listen.
Anissa urged everyone to invoke the strongest power, The Great I AM Power. “Saint Germain will bring His Pillar of Violet Singing Flame to heal your sorrows.” She then pointed out that all Catholic Novenas, Masses and Good Friday Penances had been useless to end the unjust war; the war America had been dragged into through evil and lies. What had the Christian Catholic God done that could match the protection from the Violet Ray?
“Saint