Does he blame me for this too? My stomach twists painfully at the thought and I don’t go over and talk to him. I don’t want to know if my best friend hates me.
My eyes hunt through the rest of the families there, bunching them into groups, doing a roll call of the dead by association. Pedro Sánchez Céspedes, Victor’s papi. Ernesto Jimenez Almedo. Luís Molina Vargas. My father. At least four dead, then, from yesterday. My heart is a cramp inside my rib cage, but my eyes stay dry.
When it’s our turn to talk to Padre Julio, I let Mami take the lead, standing beside her quietly like an obedient daughter should. Padre Julio tells her he’s planning a joint funeral Mass for the fallen miners. To lend the families the strength of their community in their time of sorrow, he says. But I know that the real reason is that Padre Julio knows how poor our four families are. This way we can pool our donations for the Mass. Padre Julio is a good man.
When the arrangements are made, we walk to the coffin maker. It is a tiny, clean shop that smells of lumber and varnish, but the air in the room is filled with death anyway. When Mami pulls the roll of bills out of her skirt pocket, she ends up giving most of them to the coffin man. After all, we live on a barren rock far above the tree line. Even the cheapest, plainest box is not cheap when you have to get your trees from far away.
Our last stop is the miners’ graveyard, at the foot of the Mountain That Eats Men. I’ve heard that, down in the valleys, they bury people underground. But up here, the ground is solid rock, so the dead are stacked in concrete sepulchers, one on top of the other. They stretch to the sky with each new disaster, bureau after bureau, where each drawer holds a corpse. If you come to visit your dead, kids with ladders will climb up and polish the plaques for a coin. While Mami negotiates rates with the graveyard man, I think how ironic it is that on this cursed mountain it’s only when the men are alive that we bury them underground. They have to die to be allowed to lie down and stare at the sky.
It’s dusk by the time Mami and I, finally finished, start the long trek up the mountain. Tomorrow will be another terrible day.
Wearily, I put one foot in front of the other and follow my mother’s bent figure up the rocky road.
I should have worn my sneakers.
* * *
That night, I dream. It starts as it did before: with me standing barefoot outside El Rosario, the arched entrance to the mine looming dark in front of me. Beneath my feet, the mountain moves and a wave of air exhales out of the mouth of the mine and over me.
Rock dust on my face.
I lift a hand to wipe it off.
Sticky.
When I pull my hand away, I’m no longer alone. The watery light outlines a body at my feet. My breath hitches. Reaching down, I grab the material of his mining suit and turn him over. A stranger stares up at me sightlessly. I gasp in relief and straighten.
But instead of an empty entryway, the open space before the mine is now lined with the dead: tens of them, packed shoulder to shoulder. I step over the man at my feet and turn one after another, not even remembering who I’m searching for, or why, but gripped nonetheless with the certainty that I must look at each of them.
I turn body after body: some young, some old. Some paler than me, some darker than me, some who are eerily familiar. But none of them are who I seek, and I sob, wondering when I will be done. And I see body after body after body rolling out of the mine entrance, not tens now but hundreds, thousands, all slipping in the cold silt mud, piling in front of the mouth like heaps of mining slag. The mountain vomits them at me, one after another after another. Eight million of them. It is a never-ending cascade of death.
The bodies roll off each other and bump against me. I have to move quickly to avoid being buried by them.
“Your fault,” the dead whisper in eight million shadowy voices. “You should have known better. This is your fault.”
“Stop!” I shout, swimming against the torrent, trying to save myself. “Stop! No more!”
I wake up, a scream trapped in my throat, my breathing irregular and rapid.
Mami is moving through the predawn murk, putting on her best clothes.
Steadying my breathing, I get up and join her.
* * *
True to his word, Don Marcelino shows up at our house a little after dawn. With his help, we lift the cold, stiff thing that used to be my father and load it into the truck bed. Mami, Abuelita, and I pile into the heated cab, to start the slow drive down the mountain. Mami gets in first, angling her knees to make room for the gearshift. Abuelita wedges in next to her. With nowhere else to go, I climb onto Mami’s lap. I’m far too tall for this to really work and I have to bend my neck at an angle, but it’s the only way all four of us will fit in the cab. Don Marcelino gets in on the driver’s side but says nothing. Perched awkwardly, I brace myself against the dashboard for the long, bumpy drive to the coffin shop. But surprisingly, Don Marcelino turns.
“I hope you don’t mind, Doña,” he says gently, “but another one of my students lost a father. I said I would help him as well.”
“Of course,” Mami says.
We pass the school on our left and curve up the road toward El Rosario. I can feel Mami tense beneath me when she sees where we are.
At the edge of the entry lot, Don Marcelino hauls on the wheel, taking the truck up a steep slope to get to the ridge above the mine. Once there, he slowly rolls past a stretch where half a dozen one-room houses have been built against the cliffside out of mud bricks until he gets to a few solitary shacks off on their own, like ours. Don Marcelino stops the truck in front of the third one and gets out. Mami, Abuelita, and I wait in the cab. I realize I can see down into the entry lot of El Rosario. I know who we must be picking up.
A few minutes later, Don Marcelino backs out of the house, again supporting the head and shoulders of a corpse. The body comes out, horizontal, and then, carrying the feet, is Victor. His face is scrubbed and his hair is gelled aggressively into place. His dress clothes are clean, if a little too small. Though he’s pale, his hands don’t shake as he wedges what’s left of his father into the truck bed beside what’s left of mine.
I think about how awful it has been to have Papi’s corpse in the house, even with Mami and Abuelita there with me. I can only imagine how Victor has managed these past two nights alone. Victor comes around and opens the passenger door, only then noticing us.
“I . . . I’ll sit in the back,” he says.
I imagine us, snug in the cab, while Victor sits alone with the corpses and can’t bear the thought.
“No!” I say, before I even really think it through. “We can all fit . . .”
I trail off because it’s obvious we all can’t.
“It’s okay,” Victor says, and turns away from the door.
“Wait!” I scoot over Mami and Abuelita’s laps and slide to the ground. “I’ll sit with you.”
The last thing I want to do is sit in the wind-whipped truck bed with our dead fathers, but I can’t leave Victor to face that alone.
“Okay,” he says, and we climb in together.
We crowd up near the cab to be able to hold on to the edge of the window. It also mostly blocks the dust kicked up by the tires. The rattling and cold make it so that we don’t say anything. The corpses jostle with every bump. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.
A warm hand grips my fingers. I look over. Victor won’t meet my eyes, but he gives my fingers a small squeeze. Together, we stare at our joined fingers all the way down the mountain.
* * *
Only an hour later—a third of the time it would have taken us to walk to the city from El Rosario—we arrive at the coffin shop. I hop out of the truck bed, grateful the trip is over.
There are four plain pine boxes on the sidewalk in front of the shop. Victor and Don Marcelino put the contents of our truck into two of them and the coffin m
an comes out and nails them shut, then helps lift one of them into the truck.
“I’ll drop the Águilars at the church,” Don Marcelino says to Victor before he gets back in, “then I’ll come back for you and your father.”
Victor nods, his face very stiff.
I climb onto Mami’s lap and we drive away.
* * *
Even on a normal Sunday, I have trouble finding God in this echoing stone space. Today, a Wednesday and my father’s funeral, I find it even harder. My eyes keep wandering around the church, checking the faces again and again. Pretty much everybody I know has made it to the shared service. There are some people from the city, like Don Marcelino, but mostly it’s mining families. My gaze roves over them. There are the families missing a mother: Susana, with her papi and her little brother; César, stiff and uncomfortable in a suit, his little daughter Belén beside him in crooked braids and a too-small dark dress. Then there are the families missing a father: mine now among them. When I see the families that still have both parents, I think: Which will they lose first? Because, even though the miners call it the Mountain That Eats Men, it doesn’t just eat the men. It eats their wives with grief; it eats their children with poverty. I look at Victor, standing alone, his spine rigid. And as soon as the men die, the mountain starts chewing on their sons.
Mami pokes me gently in the side, and I face the front again and mumble along with the responses.
After Mass, I stand outside the church with Mami as people offering sympathy pool and eddy around us. I find I’m having trouble remembering who we’ve talked to. It feels like every time I blink, a new person is standing there. I blink again and it’s César and Belén.
“Have you found Daniel?” I blurt out.
Abuelita tsks at me for being rude, but César answers me politely.
“Not yet. But I promise you, Doña Montaño,” he says, holding Mami’s hands in both of his, “and you, Ana, that I will do everything I can to find the boy or, at the very least, return you his body so you can properly mourn. I’m so sorry for your family’s losses. As supervisor, I feel personally responsible. Please, if there’s anything I can do . . .”
I stare at César’s hands, unable to look at his face. I can’t help but notice that his knuckles are raw from scrubbing, but that he wasn’t able to fully get the dirt out of them either.
“Thank you for your kindness,” says Mami, “but when the Tío decides to take a man, there is nothing anyone can do about it. Please don’t blame yourself.”
César doesn’t contradict her. No miner would ever speak against the power of the devil of the mines, even standing on the steps of a church.
“Such a disaster,” Abuelita murmurs. “Five dead and seven injured.”
“You’ve counted wrong,” I hear myself say. I’m surprised that my voice is clear and calm. Inside I’m boiling.
“Your grandmother is right, Ana,” César says softly. “There are twelve slots I need to fill on that shift.”
“You’ve both counted wrong.” I can hear the steel creeping into my voice. Belén’s eyes are wide at my tone. She always seems to catch me at my worst.
“Ana!” Mami snaps. “Don’t be rude to Don César.”
I close my mouth and stare angrily at my feet and stop listening to them.
Because they’re wrong, wrong, wrong.
There are four dead.
Seven injured.
One missing.
* * *
When we get to the house that night, I collapse on my mat, feeling drained. Mami sits heavily on her bed, mechanically unbraiding her hair. Abuelita stands in the corner, staring into space. I watch Mami, too tired to move. Her fingers flex and weave. Her smooth black hair falls to her waist in waves, threaded with silver like the mountain.
“Mami?”
“Mmm?”
“What will we do now?”
Her fingers still.
“I don’t know, Ana,” she says finally. “But we’ll find a way. We’ll be all right.”
The empty words make me think of something Abuelita says: Promises set for a banquet, but rarely fill the plates.
“How much money do we have left?” I ask, thinking about the roll in her skirt pocket.
She closes her eyes briefly.
“None. We’ll need to work extra hard to pay off the burial. I still owe the cemetery some money.”
“How much?” I ask. When I was little, I used to complain when Mami couldn’t buy me the things I wanted. I’m sorry, mi hija, she would always say. I have to buy the things we need before I buy the things we want. Living isn’t free. Now that I’m older, I know that living isn’t free. Apparently dying isn’t free either.
“Never mind,” she says, her fingers moving again, double-time. “With a little hard work and a little luck, we’ll be fine.”
There’s that word again. Fine. I’m learning not to trust fine.
I chew my lower lip, thinking. Hard work doesn’t help you as a palliri. It’s one of the things I hate most about the work: there’s no way to do it better. You bash two rocks together and you either get lucky and find enough mineral in it to sell, or you don’t. There’s no smarter way to pick rocks; no faster way to get through them. The only way to have a better chance of finding the needle is to have more people searching through the haystack. I remember Don Marcelino’s sad face yesterday when I said I wasn’t staying at school. This isn’t forever, I tell myself, and I make up my mind.
“I’ll come to work with you and Abuelita tomorrow.”
“What? No,” Mami’s response is automatic. “You need to go to school.”
“With three of us working as palliris we’ll be able to sort more. If we find some good ore, we’ll be okay again, and then I’ll go back to school.”
“I don’t like the idea of you missing any more school. I know your papi never had much good to say about it, but I still think an education could get you a better life.”
“The older kids skip school all the time for work. It’s not like dancing around and counting to ten in French are going to do me much good on this mountain anyway.” I swallow against the burn in my throat and force the words out. “The price of mineral is high right now. School is for little kids.”
Mami sighs.
“Just until we pay off your father’s funeral,” she finally agrees.
10
Mami shakes me awake before the sun rises. The day is cold and cheerless. When I fill the pot from the water barrel to make tea, Mami shakes her head.
“We need to get started,” she says. “Just bring some coca leaves. We’ll chew them as we work.” She smiles to take the sting out of her words. “The sooner we pay off your father’s funeral, the sooner we can get you back to school.”
Mami, Abuelita, and I walk to a new slag heap, a little farther from home. This heap is by one of the active mines and Mami hopes it might have better metal than the one next to our house. All day long, carts loaded with crumbled rock will come out of the mouth of the mine and pour out their contents. Someone will sort the mineral-laden rocks from the ones that don’t seem worth it. They will take the good ones to the mining cooperative, which will extract the metal and pay the miners. The trash they will throw down the hill.
The trash is for us.
I hunch beside Mami and reach for a rock. Breaking it open on the ground in front of me, I scan the inside for traces of minerals we can sell: something too small for the miners to bother using the machines to sort. Instead, we do it by hand. I peer carefully at the chunks.
Nothing. Just like the search for Daniel.
I throw the worthless halves over the cliff and reach for another. I smash the rocks against each other, again and again, thinking back to my conversation with Victor when he helped fix the air compressor and wishing I could do something that actually made a difference. Instead,
I’m stuck here, bashing leftover rocks against each other hour after hour after hour.
Ten hours later, when it’s too dark to see the colors striping the stones anymore, we stop. My fingers are sore, my nails are ripped, my mind is numbed by the repetition, and my heart is aching from having clocked another day without my brother.
“That was good work you did today, Ana,” Mami says with a smile. “Thank you for your help.”
I try to smile for her, but I’m not sure I manage it.
“Shh,” she says, softly brushing a strand of hair off my chapped face. “Tomorrow will be better, you’ll see.”
But tomorrow won’t be better. Because I know that, for all our work today, we weren’t lucky enough. The little pile of rocks we’ll bring to the smelter tomorrow has only the tiniest hints of metal in it. It’s probably not even enough to buy dinner for a day, let alone repay the cost of Papi’s burial. Which means that tomorrow will not be any better than today. Tomorrow I will have to skip school again to work as a palliri.
I want to scream. Cry. Tear down this entire worthless mountain with my bleeding fingers and cast it into hell where it belongs.
But I don’t say anything out loud.
Instead I follow Mami and Abuelita to our house through the gathering dark. When I look over my shoulder, in the direction of the El Rosario mine, I’m surprised to see someone wearing a miner’s suit walking toward our house. For a split second I want to believe it could be Daniel, but even from this distance I can see that it’s a large man, not a scrawny eleven-year-old boy.
“Who’s that?” I blurt.
Mami squints at the road and Abuelita crosses herself as if she’s seen a ghost. We all hurry into the house. We don’t know who it is and there’s no reason to take chances. He could be drunk or armed. Now that there’s only the three of us and no man in the house, Mami stacks rocks in front of the closed door at night.
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