When she came to find him two hours later, he was running a thin trickle over his hands to wash his hands and face in the common bathroom.
“You can come with me to Celedonia’s.” She was carrying a satchel of medical supplies. Her hair was tied back and she had washed the road dust from her face and arms.
She laughed when he complained about the water pressure.
“On Thursdays they fill the municipal pool,” she explained. “There’s no water pressure anywhere in the village.”
He followed her down a path to the river.
In the early evening light, doves were flitting over the valley. The slopes were planted over to corn and to pine copses. The bottom land was planted over to corn and to squash: he could see large striped ayote, a kind of squash, among the stalks.
They followed the path down a hill of cropped grass, through maize stalks that rattled like hollow bone. By the river there was an iron-roofed adobe compound. The light was quickly fading over the hills; the shadows on the path in the maize stalks along the river deepened. The window openings and the doorway in the compound below were dark.
“Maybe she’s not home,” Alana said.
“Celedonia!” she called out.
Three dogs leapt out of the west wall shadows. Alana stooped to raise a stone, and the dogs backed down the path with their haunches lowered.
“The tanned one will try to nip you,” she said.
Frightened and angry, she had a rock in her hand and the satchel ready to swing at them.
The dogs had a cringing wariness in their eyes; one had striped, cat-like markings.
A woman shouted at them from the compound below.
He watched the three lope away, and Alana lowered her arm.
“I hate those dogs,” she said. “Two are okay but they act as decoys for the third.”
“Buenes noches, vengan aqui!”called the voice from below.
They went through a courtyard of beaten, swept earth into an adobe kitchen. The room was dark, except for a flickering glow in the mouth of a stove and in cracks between the stove bricks. The woman who had called to them — Celedonia — moved as a shadow along the shadow of a wall.
Standing just inside the kitchen doorway, he heard two young voices in the darkness call out Alana’s name.
A match flared, and the woman stuck a candle on an angled nail in the adobe wall. She lit another and set it on another nail.
“She says welcome,” Alana said, “and that these are her two daughters.”
The two girls were at Alana’s hair, touching its highlights and smiling. One took up her hand and clasped it in hers.
She had brought them earrings from the city.
Sitting on a wooden bench, each tilted her head to put them on. Candlelight spread over the eldest daughter’s broad cheeks and over the shadows under her eyes. Her hair was tied at the nape, and the candle light glowed on her high, broad forehead, her teeth, the curved skin of her nostrils and lips. As she shifted on the bench, tilting her head to tug at an earlobe, her embroidered blouse gleamed.
Her father came in, carrying a chair made of wooden slabs and pine branches.
“Buenes noches,” he said, smiling.
He placed the chair between the two benches, sat on it, and began to talk with Alana in a quiet voice, sad or apologetic, his hands on his knees. The two daughters went to stand at the stove with their mother who was stirring something in a pot that smelled sweet and bitter.
“A late frost got most of the corn along the river,” she said, “and he’s had to replant. To get by, they’ll have to go to the coast to pick coffee.”
Michael looked at him. He was a little man with a narrow chest and sunken eyes, his arms thin. He was wearing sandals made out of truck tires and his feet and hands were covered with dust. His lips looked dry, parched in the candle light and he would not look at his wife or his daughters.
He went out, shirttails flapping at his jeans, to return from the bedroom across the courtyard with an album that he carried in both hands.
“Our wedding pictures,” Alana translated.
While he sat between the guests, turning the pages to show the photographs, the two daughters returned to drape their arms over Alana’s shoulders, touch her hair, touch their new earrings that flashed when they bent over the album to laugh.
One photo showed the groom’s father in a doorway, his arms full of gifts: sweet rolls and coffee, cigarettes and liquor.
Another showed the groom and his friends bringing mule-loads of firewood to the bride’s family.
“He moved in with Celedonia’s family,” Alana said, “bringing his machete and hoe, and he worked for the family for two years before they were allowed to marry.”
There was a photo of the couple on their wedding day. The mother was no older than her eldest daughter; she looked embarrassed and awkward in her embroidered blouse and woven skirt, her shoulders held high, chin down, eyes wide with anxiety and her hands clasped behind her back. The groom was dressed in striped black and grey slacks, a plain white shirt under a new stetson hat. His arms were held at his sides and his shoes turned out.
The daughters pointed and laughed. Their mother had come up behind them and they drew her down to see, and their eyes gleamed when she smiled.
From the stove she brought them cups of thin gruel that had the sweet odour of squash, and when Alana put down her cup she said, “Time to see him.”
They crossed the courtyard to a low door; before they went in Alana handed him a flashlight from the satchel of medical supplies she’d brought with her.
“I hope you can stomach this,” she said.
Celedonia carried in a lit candle, and a man in a bed turned his head to look at her.
“Quien es este?”
“Un amigo de Alana; no se inquiete.”
“This is Celedonia’s father,” Alana said. “He’s asking who you are. He’s a little afraid of you.”
The father was watching them with glazed, fevered eyes.
He tried to smile reassuringly. The room had the smell of crushed herbs and under it a sickly, sweet smell of flesh that had gone off.
“Turn the light down here,” Alana said.
She had drawn up the blanket to expose the man’s feet, lift a poultice of leaves.
“Jesus,” she said.
One foot was swollen and streaked to the ankle, an open wound oozing fluid. He could see the black stub of bones where toes used to be. He drew away from the smell. In the poultice that she’d removed and laid on the bed he recognized oak leaves.
He held the flashlight while she placed a dressing under the heel then bathed the foot in saline water from an IV bag. Crouching at the bedside, she swabbed between the rotted toes and carefully inserted padding between them. Then she dried the foot and wrapped it in a gauze bandage.
She checked the supply of antibiotics at the bedside, then added some to the vial.
“You have to go to hospital,” she told him.
“No quiero ir.”
“He says he won’t go.
He’s afraid he’ll die in the San Marcos hospital.”
“You’ll die here,” she said. “The antibiotics aren’t working.”
She sat on the bed to place a damp dressing on his forehead, wipe the sweat from his cheeks. His eyes were glazed and still, looking at her.
“Quisiera ver una curandera.”
She shook her head, packing up her supplies. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The two girls were waiting outside in the courtyard.
The mother closed the door behind them.
“Tomorrow when we come back,” Alana said to him, “the dressings will be off and there’ll be an herb poultice on the wound. Useless.
He’s seeing a curandera, a plant healer.”
By then it was dark. The sky was a wide scattering of stars and he could hear the river murmuring beyond the fields. On far hills he could see the dim lights of farms and villages. The night air
smelled of pines and of the kitchen fire.
The two daughters walked them to the compound portal on the hillside. They went by a oleander vine that smelled of rose honey.
She hugged the daughters, saying goodbye to their mother. They stood away from him, shy.
“Where are the dogs?,” he asked.
“They don’t come out in the dark. They’re cowards.”
She took the flashlight to lead the way. “It’s good to be back here.” Her steps were light and their was a cool self-assurance in her voice.
“How do you feel,” she added.
“I feel sick.”
In the dark she laughed, the beam showing rock ledges in the path. “You get used to it.”
“Is he going to lose that foot?”
“Either that or he’s going to die.”
They went into a pine copse. She walked quickly ahead. The path softened underfoot — a carpet of needles and gritty volcanic dust. In starlight the delimbed trunks looked like cobwebs, the living branches high above them.
“He was out at night on a security patrol,” she said, “guarding a mine that the army told them to guard. And he got shot at. He thought he’d make less noise running away barefoot, so he kicked off his sandals. He cut his foot on a sharp stone or something.”
They left the trees, climbed into a cobblestone path to the village.
“When the wound didn’t heal, he went to a curandera, not to me. He’s a diabetic.”
They turned up an alley that led to the main street. She walked down to a lit-up tienda, a young girl at the back counter. On the sidewalk, stacked flats of canned juice and a table strewn with plastic trinkets and cheap padlocks.
“Do you want something?”
He shook his head. He felt light-headed and his stomach was still in knots.
A can of juice in hand, she came out to sit on the curb and drink.
“Your posada is that way,” she said, pointing with the can up the street.
He turned to walk away, through dull, pooled light from a few lamps. He went by green and brown painted doors shut for the night, by an iron stairway that led to a second-storey balcony. At the foot of the stairs a sleeping dog lifted its head to turn its blue eyes on him. He could smell the burning charcoal of cooking fires, and in the hills the single blare of a night bus.
Once again she’d had that cool self-assurance in her voice. As far as he could tell she was the only English speaking person who lived in this village. He felt drawn to the way she seemed to fit in, the way she seemed to be at ease with others. Her Spanish was fluent and she even knew a few words of Mam. Celedonia’s father’s leaving had angered and saddened her, because she knew what he needed.
People liked her here. He had seen that on the bus in from San Marcos. As soon as she had stepped into this familiar street, people had waved, a fruit seller had called out a greeting from where he was spreading melons on a tarp, a young girl had come out of a tienda to hold her hand and chatter about what he couldn’t tell.
When he looked back she was still sitting on the curb in a flood of light from the tienda, the juice can in her hand, staring into the cobblestone street.
Maybe he would stay here with her. The work she was doing was useful and he could help out. Already the dream of the lake was beginning to fade, maybe it wasn’t so important that he go there after all.
6
Bernabe heard Lacey stir when he rapped on the pine door. It was still dark outside. Light flickered in the eaves when she lit a candle to dress.
They walked past a tall hydrangea bush, the flowers of which his wife used in her ceremonies. In the pre-dawn air they could smell epazote and laurel as they went down the hill to the village to wait for the bus. He was carrying in a day pack the school supplies that he’d bought in La Trinitaria: markers and pencils, glue and construction paper, a box of blunt-nosed scissors. In a small pack, Lacey carried thirty wide-ruled exercise books that she said were like the ones from her own primary school days.
“Is there anything else I can carry,” she’d asked, and he’d given her two water bottles for the trip.
In the village, they went to sit on plastic stools around a charcoal brazier; Maria Telles was stirring canisters of milk, hot chocolate, coffee and mosh. She was wearing a woolen toque and a woolen sweater. A faded pink apron was tied over her skirt, with patch pockets that she put money in from the sale of her drinks and buns.
He bought the girl a cup of milky hot chocolate and a sweet bun.
“It’s a long walk,” he explained to her.
Across the street dogs were nosing among trestle tables under a tin roof. Up against a wall at the crossroads, two or three drunks were sprawled asleep. Up the street, three unlit, empty buses parked in a row.
“Our bus is coming from another village,” he said, sipping from a cup.
“Es usted maestra tambien?” the coffee seller asked.
“She asked if you, too, are a teacher,” he translated.
Lacey shook her head, smiled.
“Quiera usted trabajar para mi?”
“She says you can work for her in her commador.”
Again she shook her head.
He could tell she felt she had to hurry if she was going to do any good. But how do you hurry when you don’t know where you’re going?
He emptied his cup, stood to go: he’d heard their bus cresting the hill.
Lacey stood to follow, kicking over the cup that she’d placed at her feet. The coffee seller laughed, stooping to pick up the plastic cup where it clattered on the cobblestones. She floated both in a tub of rinse water that reflected the pearly shimmer of an early morning sky and the dull glimmer of the one street lamp at the crossroads.
While the bus was climbing gravel switchbacks out of the village, she asked about his life in Vancouver.
“It’s a common story,” he said. “But maybe it will help you to understand our life here.”
He said that in his last year of schooling, in a time of serious financial problems, he left with a friend to work in Vancouver.
A contact from his village had found him a room in a house on East Pender Street and a job washing dishes at Felicia’s, starting at four and working long past midnight, plate after plate dipped through the soapy water that soon turned grimy and grey, the gleaming cutlery swirled around in handfuls and put to dry in the racks, his hands liking the warmth of the water that spread down his arms into his chest and belly and the simple work, no need to talk, calmed him and the easy stacks of dishes and cups gleaming clean, made him feel he had a place there, just concentrate on what he had to do, listening to the cooks’ and waitresses’ banter, trying to understand what they were laughing or angry about.
What astonished him was the walk home after work though streets that had a strange, buzzing glitter in them that went on and on, way into the hills, past the lit-up storefronts with barred windows, the stacked cardboard and bags of garbage, a machine that swept the streets, prowling with its whirling brushes.
Once he returned in the morning to find his room stripped. The thorough thief had taken everything — even sheets and hand soap — and he burst out laughing.
You’ve even stolen the mildew he remembered saying out loud, and he went to buy a clasp that he screwed into the door sash, padlocked the door when he was away. The landlord had said it was too expensive to change the locks, people moving in and out all the time.
Sometimes he walked till dawn in the alleys, to see what people were growing in their back yards: apple trees he saw and sweet corn in the summer, pea vines; he even recognized the dark little flowers of scarlet runner beans that grew on stretched twine.
All the dark windows and people sleeping behind them.
Once he could see into a lit-up kitchen where a man was pulling on his boots to go to work by a woman at a table in her nightgown, smoking and drinking tea.
He knew then that their peaceful life would never be his.
“Now I teach in Tzib
aj,” he said smiling,“for forty dollars a month.”
“What can I do in your school?”
“I’m teaching the grade sixes English. You can help.”
“I’ve never taught anything before.”
“Tell them about where you’re from,” he said. “Tell them about your life. If they feel connected to you, they’ll learn something they need, some little thing that you may not even know.”
As the bus climbed higher, dawn seeped into the eastern hills, and the higher they climbed the more the highlands spread out before them, a patchwork of cornfields, pine forests and valleys, one long river that wound to the horizon. Stones rattled against the floor panels.
Her eyes, bright and clear, showed an eagerness that settled her and she began to look more carefully at what she saw.
He talked of nights on Commercial Street, sitting in the Napoli café with his friends, sometimes playing a little music, Jose Leal the guitarist, Maximo Rios the violinist and Julio Soto who played the chirima, a strange, breathy instrument that reminded him of the costumbre. They talked of politics back home, of who was the new prayer sayer, for instance, and the news of the ongoing battle between the Catholic priest Father David and the costumbre, how the priest was collecting money to build a hospital for the community though there was no accounting of where the money actually went and of how your family had to donate twenty days labour to the construction of the hospital or they would not be admitted to the sacraments.
“That’s how it’s always been in our country,” he laughed, “you are forced to volunteer your labour while your children go hungry.”
On Sunday afternoons they played soccer on the 8th Avenue field, sometimes organized into a game with the Honduran La Bicolor and the barbecues afterwards under a Persian ironwood tree, the babies on spread blankets under the leaves because some had settled in Canada and married there.
“Were you married then?”
“No. I married when I returned. I had big dreams. Move to the city, maybe go back to school to become a lawyer or an architect. All that takes time and money. Now we live with my mother.”
The Orchard Keepers Page 22