ABQ / Santa Fe News

New West Book Review

Tragedy and Tradition in Taos: Melanie Sumner’s “Ghost of Milagro Creek”

By Jenny Shank, 10-04-10

The Ghost of Milagro Creek
by Melanie Sumner
Algonquin, 258 pages, $13.95

In the moving and evocative new novel The Ghost of Milagro Creek, Melanie Sumner transports readers into a part of Taos, New Mexico that is well off the tourist path.  The Taos Sumner depicts is rife with violence, teen pregnancy, high school drop-outs, alcoholism, and the aftermath of plain bad decisions, but she renders it without judgment, and with considerable affection in this melancholy story of a love triangle that culminates in a death.

As the book opens, Ignacia Vigil Romero speaks in first-person from beyond the grave on the day of her funeral.  “In the barrio at the edge of town, my neighbors called me abuela, which means grandmother,” she relates, “but behind my back, their tongues snapped like flags in the wind.” Ignacia is a Jicarilla Apache whose use of traditional herbal medicines to cure physical and psychological ailments has earned her a reputation as a witch. 

Ignacia keeps ancient traditions alive, and she’s able to tell the stories of the petroglyphs her ancestors left on the nearby rocks.  (Examples of these designs decorate the beginning of each chapter in the book.) She also takes in the stray kids of the town, which is how Ignacia came to raise her grandson, Mister Romero, whom she rescued from his mother’s abusive boyfriend, and Tomás Mondragón, the son of a local alcoholic, as brothers for a time.  Even after Tomás returns to live with his mother, the boys are so inseparable that people constantly confuse them for each other, although they look nothing alike.

When a new girl named Raquel O’Brien walks into Tomás and Mister’s high school class one day, their doom is sealed.  She’s a redheaded, attractive, flamboyant girl from South Carolina who likes to be called Rocky, and the boys fall instantly, simultaneously in love with her.  She picks the more outgoing Tomás first, leaving quiet, handsome Mister to yearn for her for years.  Although Rocky is a lovable character, and does nothing that any normal teenage girl wouldn’t do, her decisions about bestowing and withholding her affection drive Tomás and Mister to make a shocking pact, resulting in a death in the middle of the novel from which the rest of the plot spirals out.

The story jumps back and forth in time, switching from Ignacia’s first-person recollections, to third-person sections from the perspective of Mister, to confessional essays by the aspiring writer Rocky, to police reports, witness statements, and letters written by various characters connected to the three young people involved in the principle drama. 

One of the most engaging voices is that of Layton Scroggins, a sweat-lodge leader who notes, “It takes some people a week to build a lodge, but a bipolar man can do it in a day if he leaves his pills in the bottle and catches himself on the upswing.” He describes a particular sweat lodge he conducted in which Rocky, Ignacia, Mister, and Tomás participated, as well as “a woman from Santa Fe who called herself Rising Dawn.” Scroggins remarks, “She looked somewhat older to me, more like Early Afternoon.” To the sweat lodge, Ignacia wore a traditional flannel nightgown, while Rising Dawn wore a bikini, resulting in one of the funniest exchanges in the book:

“‘In the Rainbow Tradition,’ said Rise and Shine, ‘We do the sweat sky clad.’
‘Naked?’
‘Nude.’ She looked over Ignacia’s beat-up old nightgown like maybe moths would fly out of it, and then she put on a sharp little smile that went like a claw into my own heart.
‘I’m Apache,’ said Ignacia.  ‘And we do it decent.’
‘Is that right,’ she said.
I knew then that it was going to be one hot sweat.”

The second death in the novel happens chronologically after the first, Ignacia’s death, but in Melanie Sumner’s Taos, time is fluid, and Ignacia foresees all manner of bad luck that will occur after she’s dead. 

In The Ghost of Milagro Creek, Taos is a place where cultures mix and clash, where police officers don’t always follow the letter of the law when they have a personal connection to someone they’re supposed to arrest, where people observe Catholic traditions, but mix in Native American rituals and colorful New Mexican Santos.  In this place where every aspect of life has dual qualities, an ending that seems irredeemably sad can be found, on closer examination, to hold happiness within it.

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