by Shay Lopez

The last time I drove to Taos from Durango, I looked eastward from the flats of juniper and piñon up toward the Brazos Box, out over the village of Tierra Amarilla. The view brought one of my favorite books to mind. The closely packed homes in crusty disrepair, the obligatory church steeple at the center of town, a sparse herd of sheep inside a sagging wire fence reminded me of Corazon Sagrado in Red Sky at Morning.  Shortly after this trip, I recommended and loaned a copy of the book to a friend, who returned it to me a couple days later with a smile, a slight shake of her head and only one word, “Fantastic.”  

 

Red Sky at Morning, Richard Bradford’s charming coming of age story, opens in Mobile, Alabama. Josh Arnold, our 17-year-old narrator, and his parents pile their plates with Tennessee smoked ham and a sticky sauce made from the pride of Atlanta – Coca-Cola. “Put them together and you’ve got secrets from a Southern Kitchen,” muses this snide teen. This meal is a last supper of sorts as Josh’s father Frank, owner of a Mobile shipyard and recently commissioned commander in the Navy, will soon be headed to war. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, and with the looming threat of attack on Mobile’s shipyards, Josh and his mother are moving to the northern New Mexico town of Corazon Sagrado.  

One of the most time-tested and proven formulas of fiction resides in the “stranger comes to town” premise. Josh isn’t exactly a stranger; his parents bought a summer home in Corazon Sagrado when he was four, he spent many a childhood summer in the town, but as a teen opted to stay in Mobile during the warm months. “There was nothing for me in Sagrado. It was two thousand miles from saltwater and the movies were always two years old.” But for Josh and his mother, Ann, northern New Mexico becomes their home. Ham with Coca-Cola sauce is to be replaced by fresh tortillas and posole with green chilies; saltwater with sage and sandstone. I am a native of the West, so my drive to Taos that day was not all that extraordinary, but looking up to the magnificent granite promontory over the Brazos, I could imagine how this place might seem a different planet to a lowlander or Gulf Coaster.   

 

Through the eyes of Josh, we’re quickly introduced to the eccentricities of this village, from the scent of its piñon smoke cook-fires to the dusty back alleys between its adobe houses. We meet the town drunk at a local festival; Josh gets his first bout of chile farts after eating from a taco stand; we get the crime report from Chamaco, the sheriff; and we also meet the students of Helen de Crispin High School, where it becomes clear on the first day of school that outsiders are treated with some reserve. Amadeo and Excilda Montoya, the caretakers of the Arnold’s property, welcome Josh and his mother graciously, “Bienvenidos” spelled out in gravel on their doorstep. However, Maximiliano Lopez, (perhaps a distant cousin of mine) whom other students refer to as Chango (monkey), greets Josh the first time they meet, “I am goeen to bahss jour ass.”

 

I remember when Red Sky at Morning first came onto my radar as a teenager. One of my father’s best childhood friends was visiting from New Mexico and gifted the novel to my dad. My dad, who loves a good book but isn’t what I would call a “reader” spent the next afternoon in a window seat of our family room with his face buried in the pages and more than a few times burst out in laughter. It’s the dead-on description of place, spot-on dialogue between quirky characters, and the clever commentary of our smart young narrator that Richard Bradford really nailed.  

 

Josh ingratiates himself with Marcia Davidson, daughter of the Episcopal minister, and Steenie Steenopolous, son of the area’s obstetrician, who spells out the dynamics of Sagrado for Josh. “We only recognize three kinds of people in Sagrado – Anglos, Indians, and Natives. Keep your categories straight and you’ll make out all right.” But even Marcia and Steenie put Josh through a battery of their own tests for the outsider including a hilarious romp through the town dump and a game of “gallina” (chicken) which has them attempting to touch a rotting horse carcass swarmed with flies and stench. A far cry for Josh from sailing cat-boats on Mobile Bay.

 

This coming of age really takes hold when Josh is forced to walk home from school alone one afternoon and encounters Chango and a scarred, long-armed cohort nicknamed Tarzan. Chasing Josh through alleys and down side roads, Tarzan wields a knife, and when Josh realizes this, he panics, ducks into a hidden driveway behind a pile of piñon logs and eludes his pursuers. But as he catches his breath he is astonished to see that not only he is surrounded by a yard full of stone carvings, but through the window before him he is looking upon the seated figure of a nude woman. Talk about a twist of fate! And then a voice catches him off guard. “Are you a lover of art, or just a dirty little boy?” Enter bald, thickly-mustached sculptor Romeo Bonino.

 

Romeo is a friend of Josh’s dad, and soon takes on an avuncular role in the young man’s life. Through discussions of art, the female form, and the pleasures of drinking fine wine (which Josh feels justified in stealing from his dad’s cellar) Romeo rounds out the varied cast of characters who populate not only this unique community but this important year in Josh’s life. And as Josh falls under the spell of this place, learning of its beauty and charms, we see his mother, Ann, begin to fall under the spell of sherry (also from Mr. Arnold’s cellar). She never can quite reconcile her aristocratic southern sensibilities and afternoon bridge games with a place where people slaughter their own livestock and live in houses made of mud. Amadeo and Excilda Montoya, caretakers, suffer the brunt of Ann’s caustic criticisms of this place, but Josh, though spurned as the outsider by classmates, learns to love their way of life, and we begin to see how ethnic and geographic prejudices can run on a two way track.

 

At its core, Red Sky at Morning is a serious novel, dealing with the tensions of strangers in a strange land, conflicts between ethnicities, a boy becoming a man in the absence of his father, an outsider finding home. But above all, the conversations of Sagrado’s characters, Hispanic and Anglo alike, are so accurately rendered, and the voice of our narrator is so sharp, wisecracking, and full of wit that what we have is a fun, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable read you’ll be sorry has ended when it does.