In a shady hollow next to the parking lot of a West Chicago True Value Hardware, pineapples dangle from the trees and women in stretch pants bless themselves. At five o’clock on a recent Sunday evening dozens of people mill around the clearing. Many have come because they believe the Virgin of Guadalupe has appeared here, in the bark of the ash trees. They’ve also come because a mariachi band is supposed to perform at six.
Some shapes in the trees do resemble the traditional icon of Guadalupe, a robed figure surrounded by concentric ovals. Once your eye can discern one Virgin, however, it’s possible to see similar forms in any tree with highly textured bark. Based on the number of people gathered this Sunday, the hollow is either home to a miraculous forest of Virgins or the object of an overpowering expression of wishful thinking.
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“No, that’s not for me,” Larry says. “I think I would freak out.”
The night before he’d been up late, painting his van until three in the morning. He’d overslept, and felt something pulling him toward the hardware store. When he got to the parking lot, he went to the clearing and began scooping peat and bark out of a knot in one of the trees. There was a strange aroma to the bark, and as he continued digging, up to his elbows in the knothole, he felt a current of electricity run through his arm.
Aurora resident Jose Aguirre, 39, has been coming regularly and staying late every night. He didn’t know Cuaya before, but they are now close friends. Both of them, he says, have been touched by God. Aguirre, dressed entirely in white “because God told me to,” tells the story of how he rose briefly into heaven while at a church retreat this spring. When he returned, he began healing people through massage. He smacks his lips as he talks, savoring his words. Jesus came to him “like a heart attack,” he says, in a voice low and hushed and smooth as oil. He believes that the Virgin has visited Cuaya in the same way. The Virgin of Guadalupe has come to West Chicago because the people needed a miracle, he says.
