Across the clearing, Sara saw the old nun still in her chair, sitting in the shade of trees, near a stream, among flowers.
• • •
As soon as the cura arrived, he lifted the carton, cried “Rockets!” and everyone cheered. But to the Evertons the cause of the celebration remained unclear, whether it was the stripping of ranches, mines, and vineyards from the Roman Church, or the subsequent laws that prevented priests from voting or holding passports. Or whether it was simply the place itself, the sudden grass, the improbable oaks, the thin running of water. Two of the men had taken off their shoes and were wading in the spill from the dam.
Aunts and nieces spread out cloths and covered them with mounds of tortillas and kettles of beans. They set down buckets of mole. Padre Ignacio, who regularly demonstrated by example that there was room in religion for many of the other satisfactions, was drinking from a jug. Wine dripped from his chin and stained his red silk vest. The cura of Ibarra abruptly turned away, removed his shoes, and went to the creek to wade.
It was then that Sara glimpsed an orange shirt among the tree trunks. “There’s that boy,” she said to Richard, and pointed to the deepest shadows, where the child sat on the box of rockets behind the nuns. “How did he get here?”
But, for that matter, how did any of us get here, she almost asked, and she looked at the people around her. What eruptions had shaken them loose from earlier patterns of living, lifted them to the fearful brink of choice, only to deposit them at crossroads poorly marked? Except for the merest accident, these five nuns might be designing hats or nursing babies, and all these priests owning drugstores or driving buses. She herself might still be living in a shingled American house with a boxwood hedge in front. Living there with Richard, who came home Mondays through Fridays at six from his company, which manufactured light-duty pumps, and who seemed scarcely to have heard of mines or Mexico. Until the night he came into the kitchen with a box of photographs. All of them had been taken by his grandparents and all were of Ibarra.
Before a week passed, the headframe of the mine, his grandmother in a hammock, his grandfather on a horse, his father at four playing marbles with a Mexican boy his age—these pictures and a dozen more were propped on top of cookbooks, on the spice shelf, along the windowsill, next to the toaster. One morning a few weeks later he filled his coffee cup and Sara’s and said, “I have an idea.”
That accounted, in a way, for their presence this afternoon at the picnic where food was now being spooned onto plates and introductions made.
The cura, wearing shoes again, took them up to each of his friends. “Don Ricardo is restoring Ibarra to prosperity,” he told them. “He is providing a veritable fountain of work.”
So many congratulations followed this remark that no one heard Richard say that he could employ only one hundred and forty men. That the future of the operation depended on the copper market and the price was falling. His wife stood a short distance away while he tried to explain the odds for and against success to men who pumped his hand as if they themselves were miners and newly employed after a layoff. “Risk is involved,” he tried to say.
He stubbornly resisted their faith in him. Listen to them, they may be right, Sara wanted to tell him. You may find new ore. You may have enough time. Shading her eyes with her hand, she estimated the number of priests gathered in the clearing. Twenty, she guessed, and to this figure she added the five nuns. Perhaps if they all prayed at once, she thought, to their God who saves baptized babies, converts, and, for all she knew, bootstrap operations, perhaps an angel or a lesser saint might hear. San Antonio del Pulque might hear.
“The best-known San Antonio,” said the cura, as if she had asked, “is San Antonio de Padua, whose day is celebrated in June.” He paused, perhaps to savor the aroma of chile, garlic, and spices rising from the pots on the ground, or perhaps to watch his aunt, Paulita, approach with two plates.
“Here is your food,” said the cura. “Sandwiches and cooked eggs.”
• • •
With lunch the afternoon fell away from any pattern and into fragments. The serving of food, rather than cementing individuals into a party, separated the picnickers. They isolated themselves in groups of two or three and spoke in broken phrases.
“How do you like your . . .” said the cura, but he went off to refill his plate and left the unfinished sentence suspended in the air over the place where he had just stood.
A tall, beak-nosed man, whose black turtleneck sweater fit his muscular torso like a sheath above a wide black leather belt, approached the two Americans. He took Sara’s hand, then Richard’s in his enormous grip and spoke, without introduction, as to old friends.
“We all need holidays like this,” he said, and his restless eyes surveyed the clearing. “The country air makes us wish . . .” Still gazing past them, he suddenly changed the subject. “May I invite you to visit, when you can, my . . .” Here he lapsed silent, as an ivory-skinned girl, light-footed and sinuous as a cat, wound her way past him.
What would we visit? Sara wondered. His chapel, his icon collection, his hybrid rose? She wanted to ask him to mark the route on a map, but the cura had returned with his second helping and was saying, “Muy rico.”
Richard looked at the priest’s food. “Perhaps we might . . . If there is enough—”
“Have you noticed . . .” said the cura, and waved his fork in a circle so that the tines seemed to rake up all the assembled faces, the ones that were mostly Indian and the ones that were mostly Spanish, into a jackstraw heap of flashing eyes and smiling teeth and deposit them at his feet.
Sara took a step backward, away from the faces. She clutched at Richard’s hand just as he lifted it to point to the dam. “In last summer’s thunderstorms . . .” he began. But now came a clatter of hooves behind them and they turned to see Padre Ignacio riding a mule bareback down the slope. Trailed by a landslide of stones and gravel, the cura’s assistant reined in at the edge of the grass, called for wine, and, still mounted, let it overflow from his mouth to his lap and into his shoes. He waved his arm in the direction of the nuns. But the four younger sisters looked down at their own folded hands and Madre Petra had closed her eyes against the sun. Therefore she saw neither Padre Ignacio wave nor the strong restless man in black pull the ivory-skinned girl to him and start dancing. Nor did Madre Petra know that the girl moved as though in her sleep to the rhythm of her partner’s singing, moved first her right foot, then her left, and that she danced, if this was dancing, in one place and with both arms around his neck. The nuns, with their eyes cast down or closed, could not notice that the man’s hands were first on the girl’s shoulders, then her waist, then her hips, pressing her to him through a pleated skirt as thin as gauze.
The nuns neither saw nor heard Padre Ignacio’s summons. But, in any case, his commands were not directed at them. He was waving to the child on the box of rockets.
The boy, clearly reluctant, stood up at last and made his way, step by slow step, past the nuns, around the clusters of people on the grass, in front of the Evertons, and to the mule’s side. Padre Ignacio extended a hand and swung the child up.
Sara saw that soft drinks had stained the orange shirt, and a taco fallen on it, and some sauce. His face, too, was smeared with food. And Sara noticed something else.
From where she stood, the man and boy sat astride the mule in profile, their features silhouetted against a sky bluer than the interior of heaven.
“Look,” Sara said to Richard, “how much alike . . .” and together they noticed that the priest’s long upper lip and knobby brow were duplicated in smaller scale on the boy. Padre Ignacio’s flared inquisitive nose was reproduced on the child, also the unblinking stare. But what seemed bold in the man appeared simply patient in the child, who swayed unsteadily on his perch, clinging to the mule’s stubby mane, while the priest tipped out his wine.
Padre Igna
cio was about to put the jug to the child’s mouth when the cura, who had been standing at some distance, approached the mule and lifted the boy down.
At this the child began to cry without a sound, peering into his own tears, grown blind and dumb in his relief.
“The resemblance,” Sara said to her husband. “They could be father and—”
“Or brothers,” Richard said.
“But there’s more than forty years between them. Even in this country, even in a family of twelve . . .”
Richard told her to be still. The cura had advanced into the middle of the clearing and displaced the dancing couple. He raised his hand for silence.
“It is time,” he said.
Whether it was the words, or the shrinking in of the afternoon, or a gust of air from the north, something at this moment caused Sara to button her sweater to the neck.
The cura spoke to the weeping child. “Come on,” he said. “It is time for the rockets.”
Chosen to fire them off was a youth whose head drooped to his chest and his hands to his knees. He appeared spent.
The cura addressed him as Cuco. “Light the fuses and step back, Cuco,” he said. “Stay whole today and they will recognize you in the seminary tomorrow.”
The nuns called him Refugio. “The child is following you, Refugio. Take care of him,” they said.
Everyone except the two dancers, who had vanished among the cactus, and Padre Ignacio, still on the mule’s back, gathered in the clearing and faced the hill. With the sun at their backs, they gazed up at the ascending pair. Cuco, as melancholy from the rear as face-to-face, climbed as if the boulder on the summit were a burial site and the box of rockets on his shoulder an infant’s coffin. Behind him the boy crawled as often as he walked, reaching out to weeds and clods of dirt to prevent a fall.
Arrived at the appointed place, Cuco kept his back to his audience while he set down the box and laid out the rockets. After that the celebration had to be delayed until the child, scuffed and breathless, reached the older boy’s side and picked up a rocket.
“Refugio,” called out the nuns in modulated tones.
Cuco pushed the boy away and lit a match. The ensuing blast brought reverberations and a smell of powder from the hillside, shouts of approval from the onlookers, and a rush of beating wings above the oak trees, where a flock of doves, unseen and unheard till now, soared steeply upward and were lost.
“Are you accustomed to rockets?” the cura asked the Evertons, and they nodded, remembering childhood July Fourths, when daytime explosions were merely a noisy prelude to the whispered starbursts of Roman candles after dark.
Without incident, except for a stunning volume of sound, Cuco detonated five rockets.
“How many are there?” Richard asked the cura, and discovered there were ten.
Cuco fired off the sixth, seventh, and eighth. With each explosion the child covered his ears and retreated another step. He had not foreseen so much noise and this burnt smell. He had expected to find a magnificence in it all.
Padre Ignacio began to issue orders. “Give the boy a match,” he shouted. “Let him light one.”
“Refugio,” the nuns protested in their crystalline voices.
Cuco obeyed the higher authority. He beckoned to the child, who shrank back and tried to hide behind a sparse mesquite. Cuco, impatient to finish his job, grasped the child’s hand and pulled. But the boy snatched with his other hand at the objects he passed, twigs, the edges of granite rocks, a cactus branch. Cuco dragged him by force to the scorched boulder, pointed toward the ground, and lit a match. The child shook his head and Cuco lit another.
Now the cura of Ibarra, watching from below, called out. “Refugio,” he called. “Let the child go.”
But Cuco, half deaf by then, failed to hear the priest and held out another match. This time the boy, finally resigned to the harm he knew would follow, accepted it. He lit the fuse and the rocket fired. Its explosion knocked him to the ground, and Cuco, too. From the hillside rose shrieks that would echo there until nightfall.
Four men stumbled up the slope and moments later, in a headlong descent, brought the accident victims down. At the same time, the man in the black sweater came running from the maguey fields and, when he reached the clearing, made it his private clinic. “Stand back and let them breathe. Get all the cold water you can. I need scissors or a knife.” Richard handed him a jackknife and one of the priests found a machete. Later on, Sara would say, “That machete. Why did he bring it? Where did he hide it?” But that was after the picnic.
Two nuns were kneeling by Cuco and the child to cut away cloth from burns. Next to them the girl who had danced tore strips from her skirt to soak in the pots and casseroles spilling over with water from the dam.
Madre Petra rose unsteadily from her chair, took a step forward, and said a prayer. Then she put her arm through Sara’s. “They will recover,” she said, “but scarred. Look at Refugio’s shoulder. Look at the child’s face.” Leaning on Sara, the old nun explained the authority of the man in black. “He was a medical missionary once, in the north, among the Tarahumaras.” The madre took another step and considered the pair on the ground.
“Now God has made them his special charges,” she said.
Padre Ignacio had pushed through the crowd and was standing next to the child. “Qué tal?” he called out in hearty salutation.
The child stared up through wet lashes.
“In a week you will be spinning tops,” said Padre Ignacio. The boy closed his eyes.
In this first dusk the clearing seemed less spacious than before, less green and flowered. It was turning itself back to what it was, a ragged plot of weeds between scrub oaks and a ditch.
Cuco and the boy were carried off on stretchers made of coats and limbs of trees. Sara imagined the procession filing through the magueys and sliding down the trail at San Antonio del Pulque, attracting no attention from the inhabitants. An observer would think boys were burned with dynamite every day and borne lurching down the path each evening.
The cura sought out the Americans. “This was not the happiest of our picnics,” he told them. “But it was not the unhappiest. Five years ago a priest was shot by a radical on the bridge at Los Ricos and once one of the padres had a heart attack here, in this quiet place, on a day much like this one, full of sun and fellowship.”
As the Evertons shook hands with the guests that were left, each man asked to visit the mine.
“By all means,” said Richard. “But make it soon.”
Sara, without speaking, looked at the ground, at the charred boulder on the hill, and at the sky. Out of the fading blue wash above her reeled a cloud. It was the doves, dropping on fixed wings into the oaks.
• • •
Along the dim path straggled the last of the picnickers. Sara walked in front of Richard without a word until they reached the houses of San Antonio del Pulque.
“They’ve never heard of time,” she said. For the men in the nine doorways were leaning, reclining, and examining their situation in identical attitudes as before.
When the Evertons came to the road, they saw that only their car and the cura’s truck were still there. In the back of the pickup Madre Petra was already stationed in her chair, surrounded by her four sisters. In the cab, next to Paulita, a picnic guest, turned priest again and wearing a clerical collar, sat in Padre Ignacio’s place. It appeared that the assistant priest of Ibarra had been left to find his own way home.
The Evertons started the return trip ahead of the cura. They looked for an armed revolutionary on the bridge and for scraps of bunting in Los Ricos. But the road was as empty as the countryside. The guava processors had left the iron shed.
“Did I imagine them?” Sara asked.
“Not this time,” said Richard. “And there’s that cat.” He pointed to the derelict pump.
/> Under it crouched the silver-eyed, bobtailed animal, clawing feathers from a thrashing sparrow.
• • •
A kilometer or two beyond Los Ricos, at the moment the evening turned dark enough for headlights, Sara looked at her husband and offered to drive.
To her surprise he stopped the car and changed places. In less than a minute he was asleep with his head nodding toward her until it touched her shoulder and was lifted with a jerk. “Turn up your lights,” he said at these moments. Or, “Keep to the center of the road when you can to avoid cattle at the sides.” Then he was asleep again.
She went on in silence although she had things to say. “Am I going too fast?” she might have asked. “What time is it? How far have we come? Are we almost there?”
It was while she was driving in the middle of a lane edged with reeds that a horn sounded twice behind her. She pulled to the right, Richard woke, and the cura’s pickup passed them.
In the beam of the raised headlights the nuns could be seen meditating in the back of the truck. The Evertons watched the cura negotiate a bend, saw the pickup careen, Madre Petra’s chair topple, four pairs of arms extend to set it straight.
Sara simultaneously reached for her husband, as if otherwise he might slide from the seat, through the door, into the night, and under the wheels.
When they rounded the curve and came up behind the truck, Madre Petra was once more upright in her chair. Her hands were clasped and her head was bowed. She may have been asleep. Or concerned with the soul of Padre Ignacio and the recovery of the boys.
But nothing is sure. Perhaps she was simply praying to be alive for next year’s picnic, and the one after, and even the one after that.
15
THE BAPTISTS
From the beginning it had been known in Ibarra that the Evertons belonged to no church, neither to the true church nor to any of the others. But in the years since then the townspeople had become accustomed to the sight of the American couple walking along the steep brink of dams, on the narrow-gauge trestle across the arroyo, or in front of the bus when it was already in motion, as if they had faith, particularly Catholic faith.
Stones for Ibarra Page 17