2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Cleaning Saints
by Ann Hunkins
My grandmother kept three things in her refrigerator:
coffee yoghurt, chicken legs two weeks old, a gallon jug of white wine.
She kept a cast-iron skillet of lard on the stove,
fried the chicken legs in the same stuff every time.
At fifty-five, she drove her red Mustang to Santa Fe,
the same one she used to back out into traffic
at the bottom of Garcia Street without looking.
Neighbors remember her.
She took her white wine through a straw,
smoked long brown cigarettes in her sleep.
She’d sew coins and tiny chicken bones onto vests she patched together
out of scraps from her old dress shop, and wear them to formal dinners.
She flung down under-cooked French fries on restaurant tables,
told waiters and social workers to go to hell.
Once or twice she wrote me a card in shaky letters:
“Don’t waste time wondering who likes you and who doesn’t.”
Or: “I wish I could tell you things will get better.”
She wasn’t religious, but she cleaned saints
at the Folk Art Museum up the hill,
swabbing layers of smoke or maybe oil
from someone’s palm or cheek off slick painted
panels using Q-tips, slowly revealing the surprised
faces of San Francisco de Asís, San Raphael Arcángel.
I don’t know how the saints got so dirty,
trapped inside their flat wood worlds.
At night, they watched with dry eyes as she burnt holes
24 Santa Fe Literary Review