LIE DOWN IN ME

Etched in sandstone, and as bare as the landscape where it is set, this short novel of the cabrero (goatherd) who marries a Yaqui Indian girl, attracted by the suppurating wound below her breast which will kill her. She dies in the canyon where they have lived and in a gruelling trajectory he carries her body down and back to his native village--a sick rabbit he is forced to eat poisons him, a bandit shoots him. Once home the priest refuses to bury her but the still pursuing bandit, interested in the body on a litter which will give him a cover as he evades the police, forces the cabrero to make the rude journey back again to its desolate end. . . . Mournful to be sure in its effluvia of blood and tears, but perhaps for some effective in a minor fashion as a South American primitive.