The Maya exchanged skeptical looks. They also were disappointed.
I resigned myself in that moment not to take anymore from this place. It had utterly rejected me; I had to heed the message. The godhead thumped in approval. It too wanted me gone. That was all it ever wanted. If we left perhaps the Maya would have a chance again here.
“Maybe we should just leave,” I said.
Dante spun around and I cringed expecting to see anger on his face, but instead it was something else, something wild and joyful. It was more frightening than disapproval. “Where’s your faith wife of mine…did you plant it all in the ground last night?” He smirked watching my discomfort. “All is not lost. This setback is a lesson. In only a few months these bananas will have risen from the ashes. “This plantation will be vital and strong.”
He threw out his hands and waved them at the broken leaves and branches. “This is an opportunity. What is it the padre says? You have to have breakdown before you have break through? Well this is it.”
He had forgotten us again and was stomping through the fields pulling his feet out at every step with effort as the ooze scrabbled at his ankles. He was outlining his vision, drawing it with his fat fingers in the space in front of him, big smudgy air pictures.
I retreated to the house, and passed the godhead. “It’s not my fault,” I told it. It thrummed defiantly, its smile twisted.
I told Dante I was sick and took to my bed. Every evening he brought me something on a tray to eat and gave me reports on the world beyond my room. This is how I knew that Julián had turned away the men that came to sanctify his miracle. I would have been elated at what this meant for me had Dante seemed concerned or worried, but he behaved as if the act that had led to Julián’s self induced defrocking had not come about as a result of our machinations.
I ventured only once to address the issue. I spoke from behind the silver spoon he was feeding me cow’s foot soup off of. He had brought it hot and steaming from the town where the people were no longer afraid to consume meat again.
“It seems to me,” I started “that if he has left the church… that the soul part of the deal is concluded.”
His eyes narrowed and he retracted the spoon letting the uneaten soup dribble off of it. He brandished it like a weapon, like a baton to emphasize his words. “He seems to be keeping his soul to himself,” he said, “not offering it to you.”
This was entirely too true. I had known ever since the storm that the soul was the important part, the body just chance weakness.
He was holding the soup bowl in both hands, he may have been reading my future in it. “Is it really so bad?” he asked. “What I offer you...that you would rather have a worthless piece of land and a broken priest?”
Yes.
He could hear inside my mind now-or perhaps the godhead shared these secrets with him. Without another comment he upended the bowled and poured the hot soup on my lap. It burned my legs and soaked into my sheets, but I did not move at all. He threw the bowl at the wall where it broke into three pieces, and then stood and silently left the room.
I waited frozen to see if he would come back, but the minutes passed and finally I just rolled over in the mess he had made and went to sleep.
The next morning he did not come with the breakfast tray, even though I smelled food. Alarmed I rose quickly from my bed and tried the door. It was unlocked. Now he had heard me. I deliberated for a minute and decided against incurring his wrath again today. I stepped out.
At the table my place had already been set. He had anticipated me. He served me a large fluffy pancake slathered in syrup as warm and rich as his smile this morning. I took two bites as he watched me and swallowed with difficulty, washing the pancake down my dry throat with a slug of coffee.
He picked up the paper and left me free of his gaze.
“They are going to move the capital,” he said. “To Belmopan. The hurricane just did too much damage to Belize City to rebuild.”
I remembered my visits to the city, the bright painted buildings, the rising bridges, the vibrant women in green parks. I had never been to Belmopan, but then what did any of that have to do with me anyway? The whole world had dwindled down to this place and its minor gods. A hurricane could blow the whole world away and I would still be stuck here under his thumb.
I made some sort of noise to let him know that I was listening.
“The Indians have finished clearing the debris.”
Debris. All my hopes and dreams, all that work and suffering reduced to feed for pigs and cattle.
“They’ll start planting next week, as soon as the ground dries out.”
There had been no rain since the storm, the earth had blown itself out and left behind untainted sheer blue skies. Bright nothingness to expose all the mistakes and vulnerability left behind.
“Oh. I almost forgot.” He put down his paper and took a sip of coffee. “The good Father is leaving town.”
My fork clattered to my plate. I actually could not feel my fingers, my feet, my throat held the food I had been eating in place refusing to let it up or down.
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s too bad. I know how you had your hopes set on him.” His tone was conversational, easy, almost commiserating.
I wanted him to die. I wanted him to melt right there in front of me, eaten up by the acid I felt. First his eyes, and then the top layer of his flesh, then his muscles and fat and bones, until he was a puddle on the tiles my father had laid. I tried to convey this with my expression.
“Oh come on Isabel,” he chided. “Did you really think he could face himself after fucking you in the mud like an animal? You went about things the wrong way. Took the wrong part first. Now the idea of you horrifies him. You lost.” He laid the paper aside and took a bite of his pancake. “At least take it gracefully.”
I would never be warm again. I felt the ice crack and crunch in my veins damming all my feeling where the heat used to be. I started to shiver.
“You should be relieved,” he said. “Pressures off, and I’m still here willing to take care of you and this place…to make a go of it. I’m the only one that has ever offered to do that, and you treat me like shit. You should put your priorities in the right place.”
I arranged my face into some semblance of life. Deep down I knew that he was right in a way. I had done the wrong thing. Julián was leaving because of me. “Thank you,” I said to him. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
But what I really thought was Die. Die. Die. I might have meant it for him or both of us. I wasn’t sure. I got up slowly and pushed in my chair. I carried my plate and cup to the sink and rinsed them thoroughly, placing them on the drain board. I squeezed out the sponge, took it to the table, and wiped up the sticky syrup splashes and the grains of sugar and the crumbs. After Dante finished I took his plate as well and rinsed it and set it aside. I took his cup and rinsed it out, filled it with hot water to warm the inside, and then gave him fresh coffee. I went into the bathroom and took a shower for the second time, carefully soaping and washing each hollow and curve with firm strokes of the washcloth, between my toes, even behind my ears. I washed my hair two times and rinsed it until it squeaked.
I dried off and powdered myself with a mother’s tenderness: my bottom, my armpits, under my breasts. I padded to my room and dressed in clean underwear and clothes. Pastel skirts and blouses that I had bought for trips to the city. I pulled on my pumps. I added pink lipstick that tasted like candy on my bare lips, and brushed my hair and tied it up in a chignon.
I clicked across the tile wishing I had my mother’s perfume to further hide myself in, but I had never been given to those extravagances. In the cupboard I found a bottle of vanilla, a trick from my grandmother’s youth, and dabbed it behind my ears and in my elbows and my wrists. I remembered baking chocolate chip cookies and tasting it once. I was surprised that something that smelled so warm and sweet could taste so bitter.
Dante was on the veranda smoki
ng a cigar and watching the Maya haul away the last of the rotted banana plants. He took in my appearance with surprise and suspicion, his eyes widening before he dropped the doors shut again. Without a word, I reached into his pocket and took out the keys to the car. I walked down the stairs, careful in my heels, having forgotten how to wear them. Dante did not say anything. Did not move to stop me.
I had to take off my shoes to drive. It was cool and comfortable in the car, insulated. I went straight to Julián’s, crushing several small clumps of flowers on the way with my errant driving.
The storm had left trees down and the carcasses of plants strewn around. The road was runneled and pocked from flood water. It had dried into hills and valleys and I jounced my way up Julián’s drive.
I put my shoes back on carefully, and picked my way through the welted path to the stairs. I knocked three times firmly, but no one answered. Methodically I checked each window. The furniture was in place, but the things on the wall were missing. The sculptures in his bedroom, the books and extra pairs of glasses and dishes on the sink were not there. It was a ruin.
He was gone.
I carefully backed out of the yard, drove the half mile to town. The new preacher, a missionary, was inside the hall. He stood with his back to the door staring up at the papist grotesquery of Christ on the cross. It was carved of wood, each nail emphasized and underscored by the grimace on His face, the scarlet painted blood running down His ankles and wrists. I saw how lurid and ridiculous it must be through the Protestant’s eyes. Why had they not sent a priest? Were they short on staff? Maybe they thought that something so foreign would not usurp the prodigal son if he chose to return.
“Good morning,” I called out.
The missionary spun, startled, but looked pleasantly surprised when he saw me. “Good morning to you.”
“I’m Isabel Cordova,” I held up my hand.
He shook it loosely and limply. “You and your husband have the banana plantation on the hill.”
I nodded, “It was my father’s.”
“I hear it got hit pretty hard by the storm.”
He was definitely American, probably Midwestern I guessed by the way his nose swallowed his words. “I’m Gerald Alton. My congregation calls me Pastor Jerry.”
I glanced up at the carving of Christ and back to his pale freckled arms and cheeks. “Why you?”
I suppose that was rude but it made him smile. “That is the big question in my calling.” he said. “I wanted to be here. I’ve always wanted to see this part of the world. Everyone always goes to Africa, but my wife and I...her name is Carol…we thought this might be a gentler place….better for the children.”
I smiled back. Tacked it in place to look appropriate, to match the lipstick and the hairdo.
“Also I agreed to give communion. I said I would just swallow mine quickly.” He chuckled. I could see why they had allowed him to go. Sometimes naiveté is comforting.
“Will you stay if Ju…if Father Julián doesn’t come back?”
“They have assured me I’m temporary. They don’t want me to forget that I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing here. I’m Baptist. They’ll probably have an exorcism after I leave. They want Father Julián to come back…everyone wants a miracle worker in their parish.”
“Where did he go? Do you know?” I tried to appear only partially interested, just a concerned parishioner, not a woman whose next breath depended on some of his answers.
“I’ve already told you too much,” he said with good natured chagrin. “So I might as well keep going. I think holding back is the same as lying don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Did you know him well?”
I nodded again. Kept nodding until I caught myself.
“They said he was taking a sabbatical, but he came to me before he left. Told me that God had told him to go...that he wasn’t welcome here. He intimated that this whole town had fallen on hard times ,and I gathered he felt in some ways that he was responsible. I’ve known men to do that in my profession.” He sat on the pew nearest us and rubbed his ankle. “Football injury.” he said absently. “Sometimes a man of God goes through what Dante Alighieri called a dark night of the soul.” He caught my pained expression and considered my face. “Sometimes we have to go all the way through hell to get out the other side.”
That decided it for me. I crouched beside him and put my hand in his. He put his other hand on top of mine, and I remembered my father suddenly, realized that love comes in many unrecognized forms. “Pastor Jerry, I wonder if you might do me a favor?”
He met my eyes and waited for me to speak.
“I want you to hear my confession.”
Before he was murdered Pastor Alton was invited to our house for dinner.
I came home from a shopping trip in town. I dreaded these trips, I walked the aisles, condemned, avoiding eyes and glances, hoping that I would see no one I knew. No one I would have to acknowledge or speak to. When they stopped me they were always polite, but their eyes strafed me with unspoken curiosity and unrestrained blame. Losing Julián was also my fault they had concluded. At least in that they were correct, and the guilt bent my neck even further until I was almost walking hunched over.
I came back from these trips frazzled and loose-limbed with exhaustion. Dante made me go. He said that if I wanted to eat I would have to do the shopping, that he would not be my housemaid.
“I’m afraid,” I told him. Which was ridiculous only in comparison to my fear of him.
“Of them?” he scoffed. What do you care what other people think?” He shook his head, condescending and superior in every way. “They’re only natives…too stupid to do anything but blame someone else for the bad things that happen. If the Europeans hadn’t come they’d still be standing around in the jungle, a bunch of naked niggers and injuns blaming a flock of birds for a bad cold.”
He always had the answers.
I came in the door with the strings of my net shopping bags digging into my wrists. I always carried more than I should. I did not want to make two trips past the godhead. I had stopped to wait for fresh bread, and as was my habit, I kept a place last in line. I was later than usual.
When I set the bags down and blew my hair out of my eyes, I discovered that there were people standing in my kitchen. Pastor Jerry, and a small woman with a kind but simian face, and four children as pale and round and clean as scrubbed pine bed knobs. Carol, Jerry’s wife, barely came up to my chest and her monkey face was emphasized by small articulate long fingered hands and a jaunty little walk. I expected her to crawl up on my shoulder and doff her hat, but her handshake was warm and firm and feminine.
“Hello Isabel,” she said in the tone you use with an old friend. “It is so good to meet you.”
We put the groceries away together under the watchful and uncommunicative eyes of her children, while Dante fixed steaks.
Carol talked on, in the soothing uninflected purr of a cat, about the wonders of the jungle, and getting her new house ready, and about the people she had left behind. I felt myself relaxing into her conversation, growing warm and limber. By the time we sat down to dinner I was certain she was the key to Pastor Jerry’s success.
Dante and the pastor had done the man dance around sports, politics, and the local weather, and had come to roost on the topic of his strange sojourn into the Catholic church.
So far the pastor has not spoken to me though he had smiled at me several times, his eyes giving nothing away.
“I have friends in the Catholic church,” he explained. “All brothers in Christ you know,” he winked. “They knew I wanted to come here, and well, they couldn’t find anyone else right off the bat. Most of the priests didn’t want to step into a parish where the resident priest had not only been a favorite and a local but then became something of a saint.”
Dante’s smile stretched so wide I thought it might snap like a rubber band.
His shark bite grin even made Pastor Jerry falter
for a moment and he remembered himself, remembered what he actually knew. “Well…” he finished weakly. “I’m just a bird of different feather is all.”
“But Jerry has an idea,” Carol interrupted laying her hand on Dante’s arm lightly and quickly and pulling it back. “When your Father comes back we want to start another church. One of our own. Just to offer another opinion say, if any one wants it. Not to compete. Certainly not, the only competition in the world of God should be between good and evil. But just in case there are other needs to met.”
“Pillow talk,” Pastor said, and then looked embarrassed and flushed for having mentioned something as lewd as a pillow. “It would have to be in harmony with the established congregation. I would want to have the approval of the Catholic Diocese first.”
“There aren’t many toes here to step on,” Dante said.
“Well that’s why it’s even more important,” answered the pastor. “One small step might smash all the toes.” he sipped at his water in dainty swallows trying too hard to be civil and relaxed.
“Well I think there’s room for many different forms of God’s message myself,” Carol asserted. “These steaks are delicious, is the beef local?”
By the time they left I felt almost normal, even though as the evening went on Pastor Jerry became more restless and less talkative. The more reclusive he became the harder Dante worked to pry him back out of his shell. But the pastor knew his adversary, and knew how to keep quiet when he had to. Carol filled in the spaces as Pastor Jerry dwindled. The children never spoke at all, just ate their meal without making a mess, and then lay their forks on the sides of their empty plate, and folded their hands in their laps. I suspected that Carol would have to wind them again in the morning to set them going.
Their lowered voices carried to the veranda as they walked to their car.
“What was the matter with you tonight?” Carol asked her voice just slightly tinged with irritation.
He reached over and took her arm in his. “I’m just tired is all sweetheart. Just getting used to this jungle air.”
Godhead Page 21