Child of the Holy Ghost

by Robert Laxalt

"You're our mother and this is your country," I shouted at her, anything to stop her pain. "We don't care about that Middle Ages nonsense over there." But "over there" in his mother's natal Basque village, Pete finds himself stepping back into a medieval morality, into the rigid and unrelenting code of his ancestors, older and stronger than reason. Denied by his own blood kin, cold anger forges his determination to pierce the silence of the villagers and learn the. Circumstances of his mother's birth. One by one the ghosts rise up. Jeanne, beautiful and headstrong, who carried her head too high and invited a disaster she would defiantly embrace. Garat, her father, solid and unyielding as the stone of his ancestral house. Maitia, the golden child who would be Pete's mother, born to the hellish accompaniment of rough music that was the village's supreme censure for her mother's violation of the moral code. On the day of her First. Communion, Maitia's cold baptism into the realm of shame