The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  Still, Loud was an hijo de puta, so to owe him a debt was, equally, to wish him eternal damnation. Now the hijo de puta was chattering on, like a parrot, as much to himself as to Celestino, about the threat of water restrictions, the problem of keeping his clients’ lawns green without sprinklers. At least he’d abandoned the slopbucket Spanish. Celestino examined the man’s soft, fiercely tanned face, greasy with sweat, his thinning yellow hair. The devil would have a fine time with this one.

  “You’re mighty silent, hombre,” said Loud as they entered the train station lot. “Jobs go all right?”

  “Yes, everything.”

  “You plant those hydrangeas today?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll need the soaker hose. This fucking weather’s like Vegas.”

  Celestino said nothing. He had set the soaker hose, as instructed. Of course he had. He had fertilized the tomatoes. He had baited the Havahart trap for the woodchuck at Mrs. Bullard’s. (She’d make sure he delivered the animal to the wildlife station; she wouldn’t hear of poisons, death of any kind.) Tomorrow he would climb a tall cherry tree split by lightning, remove the burnt limbs, then bolt the trunk back together, in hopes that the tree could grow around its wound.

  Celestino did whatever Loud asked him to do. More.

  Loud pulled up at the platform. “Okay then, hombre. Tomorrow, six. I’ll make sure Gil is here on time. Damn sure.”

  Celestino might have echoed Loud’s tone, smirked and said, We’ll see, but he simply said, “Yes.” He made sure to smile. The less he said, the less he would have to hear in return. He could always pretend exhaustion, at least at the end of the day. Though Loud knew otherwise, most people Celestino met as he did his work believed that he spoke little English. He liked it that way. For now.

  “You’re a curious fellow, my man,” said Loud as Celestino closed the door.

  Through the open window, he made himself smile. He answered his boss, “Curious, maybe I am. I don’t mind.”

  Loud laughed. “Well, it won’t win you many fans or congregants, as my mother likes to say.” At last he drove off, waving carelessly out his window.

  This much you could give the man: he had a tough hide and an easy temper. He wasn’t sensitive, didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He was rich, and his wife was a beauty, slim as a fisher. He had a swimming pool, big cars, a big house: he aimed for these things and wouldn’t have hidden these desires from anyone.

  Celestino forced himself to return the wave.

  On the train, other passengers kept their distance. He always stank of the day’s sweat, even if he changed his shirt. Not that the train was crowded; he had what Loud called the anticommute. Away from the city early in the morning, evenings headed back in. This, too—his train pass—was a “gift” from his boss, the cost (at a discount) deducted from his pay each week. The people on the trains he took were an unpredictable mix, but he had never once seen another man who looked like he worked all day in the sun and the dirt.

  Celestino was the only worker in Loud’s operation who did not live in one of the houses their boss owned in Packard. He had seen them, once, early on, when Loud insisted he’d get a better deal than in Lothian, the crowded, ugly town where Celestino lived. The rent in Loud’s houses was low, and they were clean enough, but they weren’t much different from dormitories: two men to a room, a few bathrooms shared by many. Celestino’s place—the attic of a rundown house, with a corner kitchen, a toilet, a shower—was frigid in winter, beastly hot all summer. Often, it leaked. But the woman who lived in the rest of the house let him stay there cheap in exchange for doing repairs and for making it clear to the neighborhood punks that a man slept under her roof. Years before, Mrs. Karp had hired an aunt of Celestino’s cousin’s wife to babysit her children, all moved away now, her husband dead. This arrangement, though it meant extra work on top of too much already, allowed Celestino to keep to himself.

  No friends, no temptations, no involvements with other people’s mess-ups, tragedies, injustices, schemes. Celestino had his own: his mother in Antigua; his father only God knew where, probably murdered; his two younger sisters working at the tourist hotel. Like him, working too hard, paid too little—but safe. Celestino tried not to think about their village, what had become of it since the raids.

  The more Celestino lived on his own, the more he felt, and was ashamed of it, that each person stands alone and ought to be responsible for himself alone. Or herself. Except that when it came to women, that’s not how he’d been raised. Why couldn’t he have brothers instead of sisters, young men he could leave to their own designs, trust to care for their mother without his help? He could have stopped sending money to his sisters and never heard a word of complaint, but his dreams would not have let him sleep. He yearned to hear that Marta and Adela had married, found men to shoulder this burden.

  Where he came from was beautiful; where he worked now, beautiful too. In summer here, there was something of the jungle in Matlock: its tall, muscular, enfolding trees; the still, humid air held close by the canopy of leaves; the swamps that nurtured flowers and mosquitoes alike. Things grew too well, all the wild greenery eager to choke out the tame. This was how Loud made his biggest money. Landscaping, he called it, this beating back the wilderness from large, luxurious homes.

  Yet the more he learned, the more this work satisfied Celestino, and sometimes—after hours laboring alone—it made him secretly proud. Or not so secretly; he knew Loud had sensed this about him months ago. That was when Loud began sending him to work on the gardens and lawns where the owners needed someone who knew the ways of delicate flowers and elegant trees, places where imagination and cunning (and always a good deal of money) had gone into making a paradise. Many of these people were away from home when Celestino did his work. They left their garages and toolsheds open so that he could help himself to shovels and shears. Loud’s work trucks—the ones that carried teams of men and boys who mowed, pruned, and raked with indifference and speed—carried tools of the trade, but nothing refined or specialized, like the dibbles, cultivators, and strangely shaped hoes at Mrs. Anderson’s place. Mrs. Anderson, a twig of a woman, old and dramatically thin, had introduced dozens of tools to Celestino as if they were her children, slowly repeating their names and functions. Celestino did not report this to Loud, for fear he would see it as “fraternizing with the client.”

  When someone was home, it was almost always a woman. She might bring him cold tea or juice, offer sandwiches, or simply place food and drink on a table beside a pool or under a tree. Loud’s policy was that only he, not the people whose property he tended, gave instructions. He never said so, certainly not, but it was assumed among his workers that to break this rule—to forge any direct relationship with Loud’s customers—might lead to deportation. There was talk everywhere now of immigration raids—not here, perhaps, where the rich were rich enough to be generous, where their complicated jobs were not threatened, but as near as New Hampshire. The mayor of a small town just north of the Massachusetts border had begun to stop cars of brown-skinned men at random. Live Legal or Get a Boot in the Ass: this should be the new slogan on the New Hampshire license plate.

  Silence was more than golden; it was survival. To the white women who made the white sandwiches, all the men in Loud’s crew, like members of an army, were anonymous, changeable one for the next. A few weeks back, as he’d walked up a driveway, Celestino had heard a woman say into her phone, “I have to go. My lawn soldier’s here.”

  These women would smile at him in a furtive, hopeful way, then pantomime eating or drinking. Sometimes he would go along with this absurdity, nodding or even miming back, as if he were not just foreign but deaf and mute as well; but mostly he would assure them that he did speak their language—a little. Enough. He did not invite conversation. He liked the solitude of his work. His father had preached the importance of doing “civilized work, work commanding respect.” Celestino had come to see his work in this way, but his fat
her would not have agreed. In the final year Celestino had watched his father at work, Raul had been patrón to more than a dozen men.

  Celestino had been three or four years old before he understood that their village was different from other villages—but this had not always been true. Only a few years before Celestino was born, life for his father, for their relatives and neighbors, had changed. By a celestial stroke of fate, as Raul saw it—dumb luck, Loud would have said—a band of archaeologists had made their village the base for an excavation. Raul had been twenty, just married to Celestino’s mother, when these men drove into the jungle from Flores. They were white, friendly, talkative. Many spoke Spanish—university Spanish. Raul and some of the other villagers knew a bit of Spanish from working on the logging crews near the Mexican border.

  During his childhood, Celestino heard his father tell the story many times. The men drove brand-new jeeps, pulling trailers from which they would later unload tools, books, and tents that, once stretched on their frames, made the villagers’ houses, however colorful, look small, even squalid. They arrived two days before Buena Noche, the village hung with clay ornaments to celebrate the Nativity, mingled with masks and flowers made of woven palms.

  Such processions of cars had been seen before—they carried the tourists who came to see the fallen temples—yet always they passed through. Rarely did they stop. Amid the nervous curiosity surrounding these strangers who did stop, Raul joked that the Three Kings and their courtiers had arrived a bit early this year. This was before General Lucas, before the government raids reached their part of the country; by then, the sound of approaching vehicles inspired only fear.

  As they were to learn, Dr. Lartigue had already spoken to authorities in Flores. A state official stood by his side when he called a meeting in the square, as soon as the last stall in the market had closed for the day. Standing on a poultry crate, he described the archaeological dig that was about to begin, a magnificent project that would grow for years and years. Raul loved to tell how the white man who spoke city Spanish held up a smooth stone face that he claimed was the face of a god. It had been discovered not far from the village, he said, and if there were more treasures to be found, they would go to nearby museums, would draw more tourists from distant countries who wanted to learn about the traditions and the artistic genius of the villagers’ ancestors.

  Then he told them how they, the villagers, could make a good living working for the archaeologists, how there would be many jobs. They could earn enough money to support their families through the seasons when the archaeologists would go back to their universities and teach their students about their discoveries. They would also pay a few men to protect the project while it lay waiting for their return.

  Unlike Celestino, Raul was never shy. Before the end of that first season, he was directing a small crew (mostly cousins and friends), wielding machetes and shovels according to the archaeologists’ directions. Some of these men had worked before as loggers; they said this work was safer and kinder: better pay, shorter hours, many breaks.

  Dr. Lartigue liked Raul. It wasn’t just that other men listened to him, or that he spoke Spanish and could read well enough. “I made him know he could trust me, and he could,” Raul would say when he told the story.

  Celestino was born in 1981, during the fourth season of the dig. By this time, Dr. Lartigue had made sure that the village had a good teacher for the children, a man from the city. There was electricity for everyone, more reliable plumbing. There were jeeps left behind when the archaeologists returned to the States. Celestino and his sisters learned Spanish, lived comfortably, and they would accompany their mother, who cooked for the Americans, into Flores when she shopped for provisions.

  After the day’s work was over, Dr. Lartigue often invited Raul and a few others to his tent. He wanted to hear what he called “local tales”; in exchange, he gave lessons in English and archaeology. He showed them large books of photographs—the pyramids and temples of Mexico, Honduras, and their own part of the world, El Petén. They learned how to mark off excavation pits with stakes and string, how to use measuring tools, how to tell fragments of pots and statues and buildings from ordinary stones. Dr. Lartigue explained how projects like this one attracted thieves, how it was important to be careful when strangers showed up. He kept a gun in a locked box under his cot.

  Dr. Lartigue’s wife was one of a few women who came along with the foreign men, though she would come for only a few weeks. She would help Celestino’s mother and aunt do the shopping and cooking. Sometimes his family shared their noon meal with the archaeologists; once he was in school, Celestino could translate from his mother’s tongue to Señora Lartigue’s Spanish. By the time he was old enough to sit still, Celestino was welcome in Dr. Lartigue’s tent along with his father.

  “You will learn English, too,” Raul told his son, “and you will do this work, too. We are lucky. We work with men who use their minds. Men who use reason as a muscle.” He had squeezed his thick arm to demonstrate.

  Celestino took for granted the dependable cycle of work, just like the changing of seasons for those who grew coffee or mangoes. Five months of orderly, well-paid work were followed by seven months when the project slept. During the rains, there were occasional visitors, often in the company of Dr. Lartigue or a government official, but mostly the village returned to a slightly modernized version of its former simple self. Raul and a few other men patrolled the site. A locked shed held the most valuable tools, the maps, books, and other papers sealed in plastic tubs. Celestino was too young to understand that the excavation gave their village invisible protection from the war, from the military raids that had stretched by now far into the mountains and jungles.

  He joined the excavation crew when he was twelve. But Dr. Lartigue had other ideas for Celestino, ideas beyond the slashing and digging, the sifting of the clay they dried in wide trays, in the sunlit clearings. The year Celestino turned fifteen, Dr. Lartigue told Raul about an exchange program for Spanish-speaking natives (“indigenous peoples”) that would permit his son to go to the United States for four months and attend an American school. An immersion program, Dr. Lartigue called it. One of the schools that sponsored the program was near his house; Celestino could live with Dr. and Señora Lartigue and their two children. “My daughter is just a year younger than you are,” he said to Celestino. “She’ll show you the lay of the land. She knows her way around, ma fille.” He’d laughed. “Perhaps too well.”

  Raul could not believe their good fortune. He had dreams that Celestino would beat a new path on which his sisters would follow. What a life they could have—all of them—if Celestino went away with Dr. Lartigue.

  As Celestino’s train made its way toward Boston, it would pass one or two trains on the outbound track. They were filled, you could tell as they hurtled by, with people dressed for office jobs. Some of these people were hurtling toward the gardens he’d spent his day watering, weeding, and cajoling into bloom. Would the man in the huge white house, the farmhouse that no longer sat on a farm, notice that his peach trees had been trimmed today, the rotten fruit discarded? Would Mrs. Connaughton’s husband see that the sunflowers had been straightened, secured to wooden stakes? Celestino had never met these men; he could only imagine their existence.

  Was he praised? Hardly ever. But that wasn’t what he aimed for. What he aimed for was a life of not working for Tom Loud or anyone like him. Yet it became increasingly clear that Loud, or someone like him, would have to be the one to help Celestino break free. He would have to have a sponsor; he would have to become valued, indispensable. Perhaps this was the humiliation God would exact from Celestino; it was only fair. That he would have to become like a loyal, skilled hunting dog to the hijo de puta.

  He would have to be nicer to Loud; he must make himself do this. My stubborn one, his mother called him. Also my quiet one. Stubborn and quiet: these were not qualities that married well if you wished to find favor. They were qualities you ha
d to mold: quiet into listening and learning, stubborn into work.

  Celestino was more frugal than Loud’s other workers (“your compadres,” Loud called them when he spoke of them to Celestino). He did not have a cell phone. He did not gamble on cards or buy lottery tickets. He’d found free clothes, decent clothes, left in bags behind a church on the block where he lived. He often wrapped and saved for later the sandwiches he was given by the women whose gardens he tended; once in a while, Mrs. Karp gave him a dish of leftover chicken or lasagne. If she traveled to visit one of her children, she told him to take food from her refrigerator, to keep it from spoiling. He drank one beer, or none, each night. Every so often, he went to Mass.

  He sent half the money he saved to Marta and Adela, who lived with their mother. Because of pain in her back, Mamá could no longer work at the hotel. She could not lift the thick mattresses on the fancy beds or carry stacks of linens, bath towels the size of blankets, down the endless halls (once the halls of a monastery). She could not walk all day on the hard stone floors that the tourists found so charming. She could not bend to clean a bathroom tub—or get up again once she had. From what his sisters had told him, during the phone calls he made every few months, Mamá sat in their apartment and watched soap operas all day long—while claiming that her Spanish was too poor for any job not requiring exertion. Sometimes she made weavings that Marta and Adela took to the hotel shop, where tourists bought them to lay across their dining tables in London or Miami Beach.

  When Celestino thought of Dr. Lartigue, he felt rage as often as pity. It was not right to be angry at someone for dying, especially dying too young, but this was how he felt when he was awakened at night by the teenage boys who played ugly music in the street or cruised noisily back and forth on their skateboards. He would lie awake and imagine his way through Dr. Lartigue’s house in Cambridge: its winding stairs with the beautifully carved railings, the silver kitchen with its long green table where Señora Lartigue arranged every meal so artfully, fancy or plain (every meal delicious, served with wine or juice she had squeezed from fresh fruit). Dr. Lartigue’s study, filled with so many books that they overflowed the shelves and stood in stacks as tall as a school-age boy; stone sculptures, frayed textiles, paintings of pyramids and tattooed gods that leaned against the towers of books. The porch surrounded by Japanese maples. Celestino’s room on the third floor the first time he stayed there: a small room, like a bird’s nest. Later on, the larger room on the second floor, the room left behind by Etienne, Dr. Lartigue’s son. Isabelle’s room, next to Etienne’s, her white bedspread with the blue-flowered squares. Isabelle’s voice. Isabelle’s eyes and hands and feet, everything between.