All of this progress was looked upon with mixed emotions by the Monkey River inhabitants, very few of which were employed by the company due to Dante’s preference for mixed race hiring to keep fraternizing to a minimum. The infirmary was usually full of men that had beaten or cut each other up, particularly after the weekend’s paycheck, when the frequent tight lipped and battered female victims of rape would be treated as well. Keep’ em drunk and keep ‘em fed, was Dante’s’ motto And let ‘em go to hell as long as they get their work done. He made sure they could buy their liquor on credit since most of their wages went to the company store for outlandishly priced goods. Everyone on the plantation owed the company. I was not alone.
Dante had hired a few of the Monkey River men and women just to keep a balance. They tolerated the workers from other towns even less than each other, so there was very little chance of any organized resistance. At any rate the company was careful to meet all of their needs adequately enough to delude them. It was only over time that the long lists of credits and the sporadic paychecks would begin to eat at the people and squeeze them together into a formation of protest. And it was easy to find reasons to let people go. It was the modus operandi of the big plantations to bleed them dry and then send them walking.
On the day the first shipment from the expanded plantation was due to go out the townspeople had gathered on the new docks to watch the cargo ships come in. The new wood was splintery and hot. I stood among the people as they shifted and complained and shielded their eyes from the sun-spangled water. A big gray behemoth, the Sibyl, slid over the distant horizon and got close enough that we could see her flags, the American stars and stripes and under that the royal blue of the British Honduran, its fifty olive leaves undulating in the snap and crack of the sea breeze.
The ship continued to close the distance and stopped just within deep waters. The barges then made their ponderous way toward the sea, bearing their loads of bananas, which would be hoisted aboard and hurried to distant shores quickly enough that they would not spoil.
Because everyone was diverted by the ship they did not notice the body until it came bumping up against the pilings of the docks. My first crazy thought was that it was the fat bartender, but it turned out to be a manatee, her eyes a glazed blue, her whiskery jaw stiff. Several men used nets and hooks to drag her to shore and hauled her onto the beach.
She was full and round and defenseless, the epitome of motherhood, her body a ponderous Venus figure, her face gentle. I had occasionally seen them rolling in the bay, but never up close. The people were puzzled by her death, there was not a mark on her but her face was frozen in a grimace of agony.
Someone called out from the docks; there were two more, both in similar shape except for a few fishy nibbles out of their flippers. They were laid in a row on the sand and studied, but no explanation was forthcoming. The people were quiet and filled with foreboding. Whatever had killed these gentle creatures must lie just beyond the bay.
The barges had been emptied and the Sibyl was moving out with a few triumphant trumpety blasts, but no one was watching anymore. We were transfixed by death, by mystery and ill omens.
The next morning the red tide could be seen on the horizon, a wave of overactive plant life blooming unnaturally, leaching an overabundance of toxins and choking the water. A bloody scrim on the sea.
The fish began to die and the fishermen stood on the shore and swore and shook their heads. For a few days the people caught shellfish and ate them, but these made them very sick and several of the elderly died. Without fish their livelihood and main source of protein was gone.
The tide filled the bay and darkened the waters a rusty brown the color of dried blood, the dead marine life necklaced the beach when the tide came in and began to stink. The rotting fish brought flies and vermin. The people were afraid to go near the water, and irrationally avoided their river as well. They grew filthy and hungry. The smell drifted even to our house on balmy nights, the stench of a fishmonger’s trash barrel.
“They are catching frogs and eating them now,” Julián told us over dinner.
“The tide will pass,” Dante said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Yes, but it will leave uncertainty and fear in its wake.”
“It will pass,” Dante repeated. But the tide held on longer than usual, until the people thought the bay had died and could not be resurrected. They grew thinner with frogs and worry, and their hair grew matted and dull with filth.
“We have to do something,” I told Dante.
In response, he hired who he could get in the town, and promised to feed them the goat and beef he had brought in by train to the plantation, if they would sell some of the land and help clear it for bananas. The town council met and conceded. They did not know what else to do.
I was infuriated at this knife in the back approach. “How could you?” I demanded.
“No one else would help them. I am doing them a favor and in return I get something as well, where’s the harm in that?”
After they began clearing the land he paid them daily, and told them if they wanted to eat they would have to come to the commissary and get it. The plantation filled with the hungry locals, who snuck their leftovers home to their children. I watched them file in and out every evening at six, a long straggly ant trail of silhouettes against the sunset. Most of the men stayed later than the women, drinking the whiskey on credit and contributing to the weekend body count.
The Maya faired well enough on their beans, and tortillas, and forest pig. They did not need the fish or the goat and beef. They stayed tucked away quiet and plodding on their scrap of land.
The nameless housekeeper was the first to die. I found her in the morning lying in the kitchen, her body still soft and warm. She lay in a pool of bloody vomit, her fingers curved into claws. In the shanties I could hear screaming. Virtually everyone was sick and twenty died the first day. The Monkey River people that survived did not return. The next day forty died before noon. Each time a body fell someone rang the lunch bell in the empacadora to mark their passing. It clanged with death all afternoon.
More than half of the employees loaded onto the buses that ran supplies back and forth between the plantation and the various towns, and returned to wherever they came from, leaving even their paychecks behind.
The remaining men were sent to spray the crops in the morning. As they were filling the sprayers one of the tins of insecticide burst and showered the men. Their skin erupted in blisters and red welts.
By the third day all the shacks were empty, the plantation was a ghost town.
Earlier the men had lined up requesting pay for the work they had done. Dante’s skin was as pale as sea foam his eyes shot red and swollen with impotent rage. He told them they would not get any money unless they stayed and worked. They left without. They did not want to die. Each one, as he passed the godhead, crossed himself and shuddered.
Julián came and found us in the house with handkerchiefs over our mouths and noses, medieval apothecaries trying not to catch the Black Death.
“Those won’t do you any good,” he told us when we tried to offer him one. “Several of the children in the village have died. They all ate the meat their mothers brought home from the commissary.”
Dante dragged us to the boat where he radioed the supplier and was told that the meat had been bad. It had sickened people up and down the line of farms, but none had died any where else.
Dante gunned the engine on the car and careened off on his own in a boiling cloud of dust. By nightfall he returned. He ranted and raved swinging his arms and stomping through the house, upending tables and breaking lamps while I cringed in the corner hoping to be forgotten. He had tried to hire men from the other plantations, but none would come no matter what he offered. They knew a curse when they saw one. “Stupid fucking natives. Why didn’t they all die?” He gave the sofa a kick and it slid, bumping across the tiles close to where I sat on the floor. “That’s okay… I made sure that su
pplier will be out of business by tomorrow morning. Hard to sell meat when your whole company’s burned to the ground. When you are fucking meat yourself!” Horrified I hoped he was drunk, that he did not know what he was saying, that he would not realize that I had heard. He picked up a picture and was about to hurtle it against the wall when he glanced down at it. It was a picture of my father and it reminded him that I existed. “Oh Isabel.” His voice rumbled low and gentle, an idling engine. “Come out come out wherever you are.”
I wasn’t hidden, I was only asking for trouble if I tried to avoid him. Blood will out.
I stood on shaky legs and quivered in the shadows where a fallen lamp canted at angle threw a harsh circle of light up onto the ceiling, a false sun.
He took small steps toward me, little bites of the floor. “What do you think wife of mine? Do you have any suggestions?’
I shook my head.
“But someday all of this will be yours.” He made a grand gesture encompassing the jumbled household and presumably the abandoned plague stricken plantation beyond the black windows. “You sold your soul for this.” He was right up against me now pressing me back into the wall fitting his convex body into the hollows of mine. “You married me for Christ’s sake.”
I reached up and felt the little cross around my neck.
“Ah yes.” His eyes were hooded, engorged and purple. “That’s a thought. You even agreed to defile a priest for this. You think I’m the ruthless one. You have used and swindled everyone in your life to get what you want…and now I am being punished for your transgressions. “
I shook my head again, emphatically.
He said, “This is your fault. You and your whoring and your fucking godhead turned the natives against us.”
I could not stop shaking my head, as though I had lost something vital to control myself, to hold myself together.
His teeth pressed together. He raised his hand and deliberately, and hit the sides of my face with his fist three times, controlled staccato thunks, like pistons-one side then the other-and then the first again. I was trapped between him and the wall. He hit me just hard enough to leave bruises, to break the inside of my mouth against my teeth and fill my mouth with blood. He held his hand back and surveyed his dirty work, seemed satisfied. It was more gratifying than locking me in a room. He could see me suffer. He stepped back leaving me plastered to the wall and wallowed through the debris, kicking it to the sides. He went out the door, but I did not hear the car start.
I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror, tenderly probed the puffy weals on my cheeks and rinsed my mouth out. Outside I heard the diesel roar of construction equipment. The lights cut through the curtains and striped my walls as he passed back and forth scourging the land of the shacks and shanties, flattening the commissary and the infirmary and the school under the dozers tread’s.
Inside I tried to repair the damage to my face and my house. I retrieved my father’s picture and placed it beside my bed next to my mother’s.
They were close together but separated forever by their frames, their tiny territories, their photographic seclusion. I locked my door and lay awake as Dante roared thought the night destroying everything he had built, all the reasons for my sacrifice. Deconstructing.
Chapter Sixteen
STORM BREWING
I was woken by the smell of bacon and eggs, and for one sleepy moment I thought I was still a girl. I could feel the soft worn nubby chenille blanket with the cabbage roses. I would open my eyes and see the little pom-poms dangling from my lampshade, my doll collection on the shelf on the far wall with their speculative glassy eyes, the sun streaming through the white organza curtains. I would burrow under my blankets until my mother would come to get me for breakfast. She would snake her long fingered hand under the blanket and tickle my chin until I capitulated and threw back the covers. I would slip my feet into the yellow terry cloth slippers while she tightly belted my robe, like I might fall out of it. That was the way she tucked me in at night too, securing the sheet under my chin like a bunting. I waited until she had left the door cracked and disappeared down the hall to tug them down and kick my feet free. I did not want to be trapped, even by good intentions.
I reached up and touched my face, felt the swelling there, its growth overnight. My jaw was sore when I wiggled it, but no teeth were loose. I unlocked the door and tiptoed out toward the bathroom.
“Good you’re awake,” Dante called. “I’ve made you breakfast.”
I slunk back toward the kitchen and slid into my chair as unobtrusively as possible.
He got up humming and poured me a cup of coffee. “This is a good day,” he said.
I sipped my coffee and it scalded the broken places in my mouth. Somehow, even that was comforting, everything that reminded me that I was alive felt good.
“Things are going to be better now,” he announced leaning against the counter. “Did you know that thirty percent of our bananas were scrapped because of bruising and blemishes? We increased our yield fifty percent, but because of those shiftless bastards I hired we only had a twenty percent increase in salable goods. That’s not very productive is it?”
I sat as still as I could trying to figure out the answer he was looking for. He didn’t actually require my answer anyhow.
“No it’s not,” he affirmed. “And then there was the added expense of all that housing and feeding them, and the teachers.”
I did not remind him that they bought their own food at inflated prices, that the housing consisted of shacks made of scrap wood and tin that he had not even hired teachers because the women that he employed did not have any children.
“I have invited Father Julián over here to discuss business this morning. I think I have an arrangement that will suit everyone.”
I held my coffee in my mouth, focused on the sting. I was afraid of his plans.
Dante was sliding the eggs and bacon onto three separate plates when Julián appeared, looking disconcerted and a bit suspicious.
“Well good morning padre, perfect timing I was just telling Isabel I have an idea. Do you take your coffee with cream or sugar?”
“Black please.”
“Naturally. Don’t know why I even asked.” Dante slid Julián’s plate across the table to him so that it landed perfectly centered a couple inches from the edge of the table, with the uncanny expertise of a bartender sending a mug down the bowling alley of the bar top. He did the same with mine, and then settled his own plate in front of him and began to eat. We listened to his smacking gulps a few moments before picking up our own forks. No one had anything to say, so we ate in silence until Dante finished and scrubbed his face with the napkin.
He swallowed the rest of his coffee and belched. “Excuse me.” He did not look any worse for wear after his long destructive night. I reached up and felt my injured face and his eyes followed the gesture vacantly. I was glad that Julián could not see. Dante smiled reading my thoughts. “So padre can I offer you some more coffee?”
“No thank you.”
“Then let’s get down to business.”
Julián pushed his half eaten plate away and turned his attention to his host.
“You are certainly aware of the problems we’ve been having.”
“The whole district is aware of them señor.”
Dante chuckled. “Well that appears to be the case. Superstitious bastards won’t come back to work and so my hands are tied. I’m at a disadvantage.”
Julián just listened.
“I had a lot of time to think last night, and I realized I was too hasty in my expansion and not choosy enough in my hiring. I chose the most expensive route and it ended up costing us.”
Was us me and him, or the company, or all of us in general?
“Pride goeth before the fall,” Julián said.
Dante ignored him. “I didn’t mean to alienate the local people with my practices. And then of course Isabel hasn’t been much help, her behavior lately has be
en, let’s just say… questionable...and it has made the workers nervous.”
I felt Julián resist looking at me. “I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard anything, she’s caused quite a stir.”
My eyes were impaled by his. I did not know his direction, if his intention was to expose me, shame me, break any bonds that might have lingered between Julián and me. “Well never mind. As it stands we have three hundred acres of land and no employees on the horizon.”
Julián saw where Dante was headed. I could tell by his posture, the way he sat up straighter focused like a beam of light. I had still not figured it out myself.
Dante on the other hand, relaxed; he leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his belly. “I can see you’re beginning to understand. You’re a shrewd and intelligent man.”
Julián allowed a small cold smile. “You need the Maya.”
Dante picked his teeth and continued to watch him.
“So what are you prepared to offer them in exchange for their labor, if they even agree to it? Will you deed them their land back?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to do that. The company has its policies, and unfortunately I’m just a middle man really. I can’t ask favors. But Isabel and I are prepared to allow them the use rights of fifty acres to expand their milpas. They can have the land leading to the temple if they wish, or some other portion if it better suits their needs.”
I had been watching the volley of their conversation back and forth and was unnerved by this development. I wanted to warn Julián that Dante was up to something. I was hoping he already knew that well enough. The pain in my jaw reminded me to keep my mouth shut.
Julián was shaking his head. “They do not want to be serfs, they want their land, and as you said, your hands are tied. If they don’t help you this plantation will die, it will not recover.”
Dante asked, “Would you do that to Isabel?”
Julián’s eyebrows tightened. “The Maya do not care about Isabel.”
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