Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  “What is in that trunk?” she asked, and Juan showed her the two mantillas, the rosaries and the rings. He explained which had belonged to his mother and which to his aunt.

  “So these were your mother’s,” said Otilia, and she tried on the triangle of white lace and the ring. She circled the room in search of a mirror. “What will Pablo do with his?” she said. “Can he find a girl like him?”

  And Juan saw against his will the image of Pablo and a girl like him reeling the whole length of the church from the glass-encased statue of the Virgin to the splintered carved oak doors.

  Otilia felt in her pocket, and took out a radio. A second later a woman’s amplified contralto, accompanied by guitars, erupted into the room.

  “Do I look like a bride?” and with her foot Otilia pushed the street door closed behind her.

  In the sudden dimness Juan and the girl, tangled in each other’s arms, drifted to the nearest cot, which was old Mateo’s, and fell upon it. But Juan had barely got his hand inside Otilia’s blouse when the door burst open and Pablo threw himself across the threshold. Light flooded in, together with the boy’s wordless protestations and his irrational tears.

  • • •

  To mirror Juan’s despair the summer skies clouded over and for three days no single ray of sun touched the bust of Juárez in the square, the wet stone under the village pump, or the church’s tiled dome. On Wednesday night a thin persistent rain began to fall and continued for two days and two more nights. It soaked little by little to the roots of scrub oaks and mountain ferns; the leaves of the nopal cactus, shrunken by drought, began to swell.

  “As long as there isn’t a runoff, we have nothing to worry about,” said the men at the dam on Saturday morning. They looked in the direction of Ibarra over the broad steps they had molded with their shovels as they turned the rising wall of the dam into the profile of a Mayan pyramid. They contemplated an overflow, imagined the pouring down of waste from the mill into the arroyo that bordered Ibarra and on from there into the valley to wither new corn and blacken alfalfa.

  Then one of the men said, “Look. It is over,” and pointed up to a strip of blue between the clouds. An hour later Juan waited in line at the paymaster’s window under a sun that drew steam from the ground. But as he bicycled home there was a bank of clouds piling up behind him in the west.

  At his house he washed himself and then washed Pablo, who by an instinct that kept time always found his way home at the moment of his cousin’s return. Juan was setting two plates on the cobbler’s bench when he heard the first rumble of thunder. He handed Pablo his food and said, “Eat. The noise can’t hurt you.” But through the window the boy could see that fork lightning had begun to drill into the mountain tops.

  Juan stood up. “You stay here,” he said to his cousin. “There’s going to be a cloudburst.” He closed the door hard behind him and ripped off the branch of a mesquite bush to serve as a barricade.

  He had gone only a dozen steps from the house when he stopped and returned to shout through the door. “Pablo,” he called. “I’ll be back again soon.” And into the silence he repeated the word “soon.”

  The downpour began with a great clap of thunder at the same moment that Juan found Otilia in the square. Simultaneously the lights went out and everyone who had been strolling on the walks or resting on the benches crossed the street and crowded under the arcade.

  Juan and Otilia took refuge in a corner. She stood with her back to the café and he faced her, leaning toward her with his palms against the wall. Then he leaned closer in the dark and pressed himself, from his knees to his mouth, against her.

  “Tomorrow at three,” he said at last. “At my house. I will take Pablo to the nuns and say it is an emergency.”

  Then he became aware that a chorus of voices was calling his name. “Juan! Juan! Here is the boy, weeping and soaked to the skin.”

  When they arrived home and Juan lit a candle, he saw that Pablo was not only wet and crying but had fallen on the road and broken a tooth. Blood bubbled in the corner of his mouth. Juan cleaned and dried his cousin, wrapped him in his blanket, and blew out the light.

  Then, before he could close his mind to it, a thought occurred to Juan. Pablo will have an infected mouth, he told himself, and a case of grippe he may not be able to overcome. It is as the doctor said, such children are weaker. It is as the cura said, God is reaching for him.

  • • •

  Rain fell all that night and at noon on Sunday was still blowing in barely transparent curtains between the houses and over the roofs of Ibarra. Juan listened to torrents racing in the drainage ditches outside his walls and, inside, where he and Pablo sat, to a measured dripping from new leaks in the ceiling.

  At one o’clock there was a pounding on the door. Two of the men who worked on the dam stood outside. “Come on,” they said. “There’s an overflow.”

  As Juan left the house to go with them, Pablo tried to follow and had to be pushed back in. Holding the door ajar, Juan reached through and pulled Mateo’s bench against it. Then he slammed the door.

  “Stay here,” he shouted to Pablo, and heard the dark wet hill behind him echo, “here.”

  The three men took a shortcut to the canyon and, with the brims of their straw hats slanted down against the storm, made their way along its bank. Arrived at the dam, they walked out on its slippery surface with their shovels. At the ends where the dam met the canyon walls the tailings lay gray and half congealed a hand’s breadth below the rim. But by the time the men reached the center their feet were covered over by a stream of waste and water that had eaten into the dam and was spilling down the steps of the pyramid behind it. Under a new onslaught of rain the men started to shovel gray sludge.

  By two o’clock the stream had become a tide. “We need help,” said one of the men, and he dropped his shovel and started away. When he was still not back in half an hour, the second man said, “Only God knows what’s delaying him.” And he, too, ran off in the direction of the mine, calling to Juan over his shoulder, “Wait for me here at the side.”

  This man had no sooner disappeared than the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun the night before. In the stillness it left behind, Juan heard all around him the rushing of the runoff through a hundred new channels in the hills.

  He picked up his shovel and, testing each step, walked out on the dam. Standing at the center he pounded a few shovelfuls of thick tailings into the erosion but his work accomplished nothing. He looked up the canyon to see if help was coming and then down the canyon, over Ibarra, to the wide valley that had turned green overnight. It was when he started back to the hillside that he saw Pablo, drenched and barefoot, lurching across the dam.

  “Go back!” shouted Juan. But his cousin continued toward him and even seemed to be singing and dancing as he came. Juan raised his palm in the gesture of “Stop!” but the boy came on, careening from one side of the rim to the other as his feet slid under him. The older cousin called “Go back!” until suddenly Pablo was within his reach and Juan stretched out his hand.

  At this, Pablo lost his balance entirely and toppled into the great pool of tailings behind the dam. A few seconds later his head, plastered gray, and one flailing arm emerged above the surface.

  Juan went to his knees and stretched his hand toward Pablo, but the space between them was too great. Then he remembered his shovel, took it by the blade, and started to extend the handle toward Pablo’s wild, circling arm.

  But at this moment Juan seemed to lose the power to act. For, though the implement was long enough and at first there was time, he allowed three seconds to pass, then five, then seven, while he crouched there and withheld the shovel from Pablo’s grasp. Much can be considered in seven seconds. Perhaps Juan, as he watched the tailings rise to his cousin’s mouth, remembered the doctor’s prophecy. Or he may have observed, through the subsiding clouds above him
, the hand of God.

  In any case, he recovered himself too late, and it was too late when he leaned out to thrust the handle into Pablo’s groping hand. By then the mud had climbed to the boy’s ears and all Juan saw of him were his eyes and this hand. Pablo, impelled by some instinct or a reflex at the moment of dying, took the handle in a grip so tight that even after Juan raised his body, and carried it along the rim of the dam to the hillside, and laid it down, Pablo’s fingers had to be pried from the wood.

  • • •

  Pablo was buried in the stony ground of the cemetery the following morning. After the litany had been recited and the blessing spoken, the cura put his hand on Juan’s shoulder. “Now he is in the company of saints and angels,” said the priest.

  But Juan would speak to no one that day. He remained all afternoon in his house with the door nailed shut. When Otilia called to him from outside, and came back to call again, he made no answer. He lay on his cot and wished he were a boy again, just come to his grandfather’s house to live. Then he wished he were in school and could fight a friend again, and win.

  But by the time night fell he had only one wish. He wished last Saturday back, when he had buttoned his week’s salary in his pocket and, trailing the miners who were leaving their shift, pushed his bicycle out to the road. He had pedaled hard, waved as he passed the others, and with his wheels spinning to a blur coasted down the grade ahead of them all. So it had almost seemed this was a racing bike, and new, and paid for.

  6

  PRAY FOR US, FATHERS

  The Evertons met the cura as soon as they arrived in Ibarra and by the time two years were up had come to expect him to visit them weekly with a message or an invitation, or simply to have an hour’s talk over a glass of rum. After Lourdes had met him at the door and kissed his hand, he would sit in the sala in a high-backed chair with his worn black shoes flat on the floor. Then he would give Sara a lily bulb his aunt had sent and inform Richard of the latest wind damage at the deserted monastery, or invite them to a kermess in the plaza for the benefit of the nuns’ school.

  But the cura was too busy to loiter through the dusk at the Evertons’ window, with its view over Ibarra as far as the mesas that climbed in steps toward the east. One afternoon he said, “In my parish I have six ranchos that lie in six directions. Every day except Sunday I must drive my pickup along wagon tracks and through gullies to offer the sacraments in one or another of them.”

  “The town needs a second priest,” said Richard, and Sara nodded as if both of them had been baptized and confirmed in the Church of Rome.

  “An assistant,” she told the cura.

  The priest stood up to leave. “The bishop has promised me one.” And within a month, as if his words had brought them, the assistants started to come and to go.

  • • •

  The first one came in March, at the end of an unusually mild winter. The Evertons’ plum trees had already flowered and the old ash tree was in leaf.

  Richard and the cura passed on the road between Ibarra and the mine.

  “I will bring my assistant to meet you and your señora next Saturday afternoon,” said the cura. But Richard forgot to tell Sara and she was in the village instead of at her door when the priests arrived.

  Walking up the stony lane that bounded her garden wall, she was startled by a fusillade of gunfire. Shots rang out. She stopped at the gate and watched a series of round white disks sail over the roof, two at a time. Near the stone pool in the patio stood a robed priest pointing a shotgun. Out of twelve attempts the priest hit every target. Fragments of clay pelted on the roof, the path, and into the pool.

  When the firing ceased she advanced.

  “You’re a good shot,” she said to the father.

  “Sports were a former vocation.” And the priest reloaded his weapon from a pocket sagging with shells. He introduced himself. “I am Padre Raúl. Your husband has kindly lent me his gun. He and the señor cura are discharging the targets from an apparatus behind the house.” Without further waste of time he aimed into the sky and shouted “Listo!” to indicate he was ready.

  From behind the house the parish priest and Richard shouted back “Ya!” and two small plates soared in separate arcs over the roof. Ten times Padre Raúl signaled “Listo!” and ten times the other two called “Ya!” until nasturtiums and geraniums and a border of dwarf pomegranates were crusted over with white splinters.

  Padre Raúl, surrounded by the aura of a perfect score, stood in the middle of it all, holding the wood of the gunstock as if it had grown to his hand.

  Sara noticed how tall he was and how lean, and presumed that his habit swathed an elegantly muscular frame. His vocations are reversed, she told herself. If he could discard clerical dress he would probably win the World Soccer Cup for Mexico.

  “What were your other sports?” she asked, and Padre Raúl said, “Soccer. Baseball. Jai alai. But I have not participated in them for a number of years.”

  A week later the new priest appeared again at the house of the North Americans, this time to ask for a contribution toward a basketball court. “To defray the cost of cement,” he explained.

  There was a silence while the Evertons considered the justice of supporting this project which promised enjoyment for its own sake when only yesterday they had refused to make a gift to the campaign for Catholic Action.

  “The purpose of the basketball court is to provide healthy pleasure for the youth of Ibarra,” said Padre Raúl, as if he could read their minds. And he went on to say that the court would be built in the open space in front of the nuns’ school near the well, now full of rubble, that had once been fed by a spring.

  Three months later the court was completed. The inauguration ceremonies took place on a glittering Sunday afternoon in June under a sky of blue so intense that what could be seen of man and all his works appeared to blanch beneath it. School benches had been set up at each side of the court. On the east sat the visiting team and its supporters. On the west the local team and a crowd of townspeople overflowed the seats and formed in ranks behind. The visiting players wore matching sweaters and regulation shoes. The members of the Ibarra team had on the familiar pants and shirts they were seen in every day. Two wore the stiff black shoes that were usually saved for mass.

  “This isn’t going to be fair,” Sara said to her husband. “The others are bigger and have brought a coach.”

  “We have Padre Raúl,” said Richard.

  The cura and his assistant stood in their cassocks under one of the new baskets. The backboard was red and had COCA-COLA inscribed across it in white letters. Throughout the conference between the two priests Padre Raúl kept the basketball in motion between his hand and the cement paving, thus reproducing the ominous beat of a war drum.

  Then the cura welcomed the guests and offered thanks to God for his bounty, to the Evertons for the cement, to the Coca-Cola Company for the baskets and backboards, and to El Mundo Deportivo of Concepción, the store that had given the ball and might soon become the donor of uniforms.

  “Now Padre Raúl of the parish of Ibarra will bless this court,” said the cura, and started to withdraw.

  But no one had thought to bring holy water, not the cura, nor his assistant, nor the sacristan, and the cobalt afternoon was slipping away.

  “We will have a symbolic blessing,” said the cura, and the spectators clapped.

  Padre Raúl stood in the center of the court with the basketball tucked under his left arm. Raising his right, he drew down great handfuls of air so pure that, unlike water, it could not be seen or heard. This air he sprinkled in the four corners of the court and along its boundaries.

  After this the cura rose from his seat to announce that the visitors’ coach would act as referee during the first half of the game and Padre Raúl during the second. Then he said a brief prayer and crossed himself, as did all the players an
d both referees.

  The teams took their places, the whistle blew, the sky remained the color of azurite in raw copper ore, and the audience on one side exulted and cheered while the audience on the other lapsed quiet. At the half the visitors led 18 to 9.

  “Our team should have been allowed a handicap,” said Sara.

  But Richard was hopeful. “Padre Raúl may have a few ideas,” he said.

  The second half of the game was less monotonous than the first. The assistant priest was everywhere. “Out of bounds!” he kept calling. “Violation! Foul!”

  His whistle blew so often and with such authority that arguments went unheard. Six times the visitors’ coach advanced to appeal decisions, but the towering presence of Padre Raúl, vested in the garments and the prestige of the church, one powerful hand fingering his crucifix, the other incessantly drumming the ball to the ground—all these things served to stifle protest. The two small boys in black hard-soled shoes completed nine free throws between them.

  To the accompaniment of shrill and constant whistling the sun sank to the west, the radiant air turned cold, all traces of blue evaporated from the sky, and evening came on. By the time the game ended, the shadow of the spire on the nuns’ chapel stretched across the court and the old dry well and all the empty space beyond. The cura announced that Ibarra had won 33 to 28 and shook hands with the visitors’ coach.

  The crowd dispersed in all directions, toward the main square, the bus, the kitchens of their houses. But the Americans stayed on in the dusk, and lingered not far from the benches. They seemed to be waiting for the first star, or for moonrise, or perhaps to congratulate the assistant priest, who stood in the center of the court with his hands at his sides and his eyes fixed on nothing.

  The church bells had begun to ring for vespers by the time Padre Raúl picked up the ball. He bounced it down hard and on its third rebound lobbed it over his shoulder into the basket behind. It dropped through without touching the rim. The net shivered.