by Pam Lewis
“She’s my hostess,” Minke said.
Pieps translated again, and Goyo shook his head. “For Goyo, they commit the worst of crimes. Take a look here.” Pieps ran his hand down the mare’s flank. “Saddle sores. The coat is dull. They’re not well fed, and look at Mevrouw. She’s very well fed!”
“She’s mad with grief over her daughter,” Minke said.
Pieps translated for Goyo, who spat in the dirt.
“I can’t stay,” Minke said. “She just wants to know where you are.”
“I’ll bet she does!” Pieps said.
When Minke arrived back, Tessa was allowing the parrot to walk on the table and eat from the food that was laid out. “And?” Tessa asked.
“They’re tending the horses,” Minke said. “They’re quite fine.”
“You look—” Tessa said, studying her. “Are you pregnant?”
Minke had no answer. What a thing to ask!
“Oh, come on. You’re a married woman. Don’t be so modest. Do you get sick? Are you tired?”
She was tired, that was true, and it was a peculiar kind of fatigue that overtook her from time to time, so that she might fall into leaden sleep anywhere. Indeed, she’d almost fallen asleep on the horse the day before, when they were crossing mile after mile at a walk. “A little tired,” she said, taking in the enormity of the new possibility.
“Ach! Poor girl, a baby in this place. I pity you.” Tessa piled a slice of bread with jam, took a bite, and said, crumbs flying, “Make them boil everything. Everything! When your time comes, I’ll come to Comodoro to help you. It’s June.” She counted on her fingers. “I predict the baby will come at the end of the year, summer here. At least that’s a good thing.”
“It can’t be June already.” Tessa had to be mistaken. True, Minke had no sense of passing time. There were no calendars in the hotel. But June?
Tessa’s eyelids lowered, and Minke realized she must have taken more medicine while Minke was out seeing to Pieps and Goyo. “Your husband will be pleased?” Tessa said.
Pregnant.
“I understand Pim inherited Elisabeth’s house.” Tessa’s voice was thick and dreamy.
Minke was utterly shaken by the idea of a baby but loath to show it. “Sander thought it best for him.” The bird pecked at her plate, lurching its neck to swallow. “We won’t be in Comodoro long, either. Like you. We’ll no doubt go back to Amsterdam.”
“I don’t think so,” Tessa whispered.
The woman really was quite impossible. “We plan to return to Enkhuizen for a visit.” There was, of course, no such plan, but Minke felt the need to put up armor against Tessa.
Tessa shook her head.
“What now, Tessa?”
“It was the talk of the ship. You didn’t know, because you were off with my Astrid.” The heavy lids lifted. She still wore her beige nightdress with its matching woolen robe. Her hair hung down her back in a long unkempt red braid. “The conference at The Hague?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about and you know it, so just tell me.”
“Sander imports opium for the manufacture of morphine. You didn’t know this. I can tell from the look on your face. You married a man without knowing what he did.”
“I know about the morphine. Of course I do. Cassian produces it.”
“They both do, but no longer in the Netherlands.” Tessa snapped her fingers dully. “Just like that. Suddenly, it’s illegal to import opium, and anyone connected to it is criminal and their property seized. Sander is no longer welcome in the Netherlands.” She sighed. “I’m personally grateful, of course. Without my morphine, the pain I feel over Astrid would be excruciating.” Tessa slumped back in her chair. “I must become pregnant. I just must or I will lose my mind. It’s so easy for you but not for me.” She pushed herself from the table and stood. “I need to lie down for a bit.”
“Wait, Tessa.” Minke caught the sleeve of her robe.
“That’s all there is,” Tessa said with a disinterested shrug. “I’ve told you everything.” With that, she took her parrot and was gone.
Her mind on fire with this information, Minke walked outside. The sky was ice blue, not a single cloud. She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold. Frozen shallow lakes sparkled in the morning sun. The hills were painted in layers of purple.
So Sander did not own the Frisia. He had not owned the house. It was Elisabeth’s to pass along to Pim, not Sander’s. Sander’s business was all to do with opium. That day in Amsterdam when Minke slapped her face, Griet had said there was plenty more, and now Minke understood. But still, it was medicine. What was wrong with that?
It was the talk of the ship.
She walked farther out onto the plains.
Pregnant.
Could Tessa be correct? How would she know for sure? Where was Mama when she needed her more than anyone? She racked her brain for what she knew about birth. Women at home had children, but the children just seemed to come. And it wasn’t ever discussed. Ever! The women who had babies spent time indoors for months before the baby was born. The confinement, it was called. And they grew very fat. What went on? How did it happen? Worst of all, how did the baby come out? Was it cut from the mother? Whom could she ask? Not Tessa. Minke would be too humiliated to have the woman explain one more thing. How did it all connect, though? The courses, the nausea, the confinement?
She walked farther along, hands protectively over her belly. She was very cold. She stopped walking. She would ask Cassian. Of course! He would explain. He would help her. Oh yes. She clapped her hands and headed back.
A baby.
The idea finally sent a thrill through her. She fairly danced her way to the barn in search of Pieps and Goyo.
“You’re looking very happy,” Pieps said.
“I am many, many things right now,” she said.
They’d built a small fire, and Goyo turned a spit with some meat that still had the skin and hair attached, causing her to look away. Pieps offered her his seat, an upside-down wooden bucket. The fire felt lovely on her hands and feet.
“We leave tomorrow, I think,” she said. “Will that do for you?”
“We can leave now if you want,” Pieps said.
“Tomorrow,” Minke said. “One day early, not two. As it is, I’ll have to make an excuse.” She wanted to see Sander as soon as she could. And she needed to speak to Cassian before she talked to Sander. She’d go directly to his house when they got back and find out what was what.
“Goyo has been speaking to Juana in the kitchen.” Pieps bounced on his heels, warming his hands over the fire. “All Mevrouw does is eat, sleep, and teach the bird to speak. But the bird is deaf.”
Minke smiled. It explained the quiet parrot.
“Have you been into Meneer’s study?” Pieps asked, looking up at her with a devilish grin.
“No one is allowed,” Minke said.
“He keeps shrunken heads.”
“Oh, Pieps, please. Don’t make up stories.”
“It’s done in the Amazon, Goyo told me. They remove the bone and sew the eyes and mouth shut.” Pieps held up his fist. “A head shrinks to this size. Meneer has a collection.”
“That’s grotesque. Why would you want to see such a thing?”
Pieps considered the question. “Because I may never have the chance again, that’s why. Because I’m interested in the customs of the Indians, and because Mevrouw Dietz treats us so badly. It would be fun to disobey her.”
“She’d kill us if she caught us. I can’t.”
“I see,” Pieps said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This from the girl who wanted to see steerage. You came below all by yourself in spite of the danger, just for a look, and now you stand in my way when I want to see? One rule for you and another for me.”
“This is different,” she said. “I didn’t know of the danger. I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed.”
Pieps translate
d everything for Goyo. She could tell by his tone that he was making her sound unreasonable. Goyo tore at a piece of meat with his teeth and jutted his chin like someone considering both sides of an argument.
“If you’d been caught belowdecks, Minke, it would have been far worse. A pretty woman like you. Any woman, actually.”
Pretty? Well, now. He thought she was pretty. Goyo stared, daring her to go, she assumed. He said something. “He agrees with me,” Pieps said. She sighed and gave in. She and Pieps would swap one danger for another. If they were going to do it, though, it would have to be right that minute, while Tessa slept her morphine sleep.
“We take nothing,” Minke said.
Pieps jumped up and offered his hand.
“What of Goyo?” she asked.
“He won’t enter the house of people for whom he has no respect.”
THEY ENTERED BY the door farthest from Tessa’s bedroom and tiptoed to the study door. The lock was large but primitive, and Pieps was able to gain access by jiggling it with a bent horseshoe nail. The room was small as a closet, shuttered and dark, the only light coming from the open door. Pieps swung it wider.
“She’ll see us!” Minke said.
“We need the light.”
“Quickly,” she said.
The desk was barely visible at first. Pieps took up a paper spike on which bits of paper were impaled. He took them to the door to see. “IOUs,” he said. “People seem to owe Dietz a great deal of money.” He paused. “There!”
She barely made them out, small brown misshapen objects in a row on a shelf. Pieps took one, held it for a moment, passed it to her, and before she knew it, she had her hand around a thick mass of hair. She took it to the door, the better to see. The skin was dark and as hard as leather. Long strings hung from the corners of the eyes and mouth where they had been sewn shut, a thought that reminded her, with a shiver, of Astrid sewn into her shroud. How had it happened to this man, a life snuffed out and then kept on a shelf for the pleasure of that boor Dietz?
How could she help but think of her own baby, tiny and delicately forming, its bones still soft, its hair not yet begun? She practically threw the thing back to Pieps. “It’s bad luck.” She should not have exposed herself, exposed the baby, to this. “Let’s go. This is a terrible place.”
“Wait.” Pieps had a box and opened it with the same horseshoe nail he’d used on the door. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Take a look at this.” He held up a bundle of thousand-guilder notes. “There are boxes more in here. Lots more.”
“We have to leave. Right now.” The longer she stayed in that evil room, the more harm would befall her baby, she was sure of it.
She peered up and down the hall. Nothing. Pieps locked the door behind them, and they hurried through the parlor and into the courtyard. He was grinning and dancing around. “We’ve seen shrunken heads, Minke. Aren’t you glad you did that?”
She might be sick. “No.”
“What is it?”
“I feel awful.”
“You’re green.”
“I’m going to faint.”
Pieps caught her in his arms before she could fall. She came to immediately and took a deep reviving breath.
“Well, well, well.” Tessa waddled from the house toward them, her face pink with rage, shaking a finger. “I take you in. I feed you and your men. I confide in you, and this is how you repay me? You enter my husband’s study when I specifically told you not to. I heard you. I saw you. And with him, no less! And now kissing him!” She shook with anger. “You’re nothing but a little Dutch whore.”
Minke pulled herself away from Pieps. “I was not kissing him!”
“Leave. And take off my Astrid’s clothing. You’ll wear your own, whether they’ve dried or not.”
Back in her room, Minke struggled with her clothing, her whole body burning with the shame of entering the study and then being accused of kissing Pieps. When she was dressed, she knocked on Tessa’s door. “Mevrouw,” she said, cracking the door. Tessa lay in bed stroking the parrot. “I apologize very deeply, Mevrouw. It was wrong of me to betray your hospitality.” She stared down at the floor. “But I was not kissing Pieps. I would never do such a thing. I was holding on to him. I felt unwell.” Still, shame made her bones ache.
Without even looking at her, Tessa held out a sealed envelope. “Deliver this to my husband in Comodoro.”
TO FORD THE river, they rode an extra half hour upstream, where the water was only as high as the horses’ knees, so they wouldn’t be soaked for the long ride home. Minke sat folded over, head down against the wind and hands under her arms for warmth. Pieps cantered forward to ride beside her. “I’m to blame,” he said.
“We both acted badly.”
In her pocket, the letter for Meneer burned. No doubt it would tell him of her infamy, and he would take great pleasure in telling Sander. With stiff fingers, she removed the letter, limp from being pressed against her damp clothes. The words had leached through the envelope. The flap had come loose. She could find out exactly what Tessa had said. She could throw it away.
But she would do neither. As Mama would say, the truth was always best. And if Sander didn’t believe her? Then she would just throw herself into the sea and drown.
They’d ridden two hours when dark clouds rolled down from the west, blackening the air. Goyo’s horse swung its silver rump this way and that, anticipating the first crack of lightning, which, when it came, illuminated the whole landscape ahead, just as Elisabeth had said. The rain pelted down. Crash after crash of lightning electrified the sky, with no shelter to be seen. Without a word, Goyo galloped into the storm. Pieps circled around her. “Give your horse her head! She’ll follow him.” Minke let the reins go slack, and the horse set off at a canter after Goyo. She hung on tightly to the pommel, head down, eyes raised only enough to watch the streaming ground directly ahead.
After a time, lights appeared in the distance, and the horses broke into a gallop after Goyo, rain beating at their faces, until they reached a small, low building. It was made of mud and held together by rushes. Goyo signaled to them to stay on their horses while he went inside. He came out again, gestured toward the door, and spoke to Pieps.
“He says we are welcome to enter while he takes the horses to shelter,” Pieps said.
The doorway was even lower than the one at Tessa’s, and Minke had to stoop to enter. Inside was a single room with eight or nine people warming themselves by a fire. A girl of about Minke’s age regarded her with solemn interest. The girl had skin as white as Minke’s and hair as black as Goyo’s. An old woman, leather-skinned and smoking a spit-slick cigar, stood over a pot on the fire. Boiling meat; Minke knew the smell by now. A man with an immense black beard that spread across the width of his chest was the center of attention. He paused when they entered, nodded, and resumed telling a story in a voice so loud it was almost a shout.
Minke and Pieps settled down against the wall and listened. Pieps said it seemed to be about an armadillo outwitting a fox, and they both laughed. Goyo came in after seeing to the horses and sat beside them, and Minke had the delicious feeling of being safe between her friends while thrilling to her own situation—that she was pregnant—and her baby, still in the very early days of his life, was actually here, in this estancia, with such surprising people. She had never felt such joy and such contentment at once.
They slept where they were, and in the morning Goyo awakened them for a hasty breakfast of boiled meat and rice boiled in milk. There was a great commotion outside; a dozen or so horses were fully saddled, splendid in their silver tack, including heavy bell-shaped silver stirrups. The bearded man—his name was El Moreno, the dark one—took the lead.
“They’re showing off for you,” Pieps said with a wink.
The showing-off became dangerous. The men rode much too fast and shouted at one another. At first the shouts seemed only spirited, but then a hint of anger crept in. El Moreno spotted a guanaco—a beast that resembl
ed a llama—at a distance and took off after it, swinging his boleadoro, three leather-bound stones on a long tether. He swung it round and round over his head, then let it fly, and the thing sailed through the air, wrapped like a whip around the legs of the animal, and brought it down. One of the other gauchos dropped from his horse, cut the animal’s tendons with a half-moon-shaped knife, and the fight began in earnest.
“What’s happening?” she asked Pieps. Even her horse had laid its ears flat back.
“El Moreno should have been the one to cut its leg.” Everything happened quickly in a language she didn’t know. A circle formed. El Moreno dismounted, wrapped his filthy poncho around his left arm, and held it up as a shield against the man who’d cut the guanaco.
“Come on,” Pieps said. “We’re leaving.”
“Can’t we watch?” She was beyond fascinated.
Pieps had her horse by the reins and was leading her quickly away.
She kept looking back. “What about Goyo?”
“He’s the one who said we must go.”
“We don’t know the way.”
“In this country it’s not so difficult.” He pointed. “We go that way. Toward the sea.”
“Will someone be killed?”
“Yes.”
“Over a guanaco?”
“Over an insult.”
They rode on. The weather was fine and clear after the storm. She thought about the gauchos, that at that very moment one of the men she’d seen had had his throat slit. “Is that where they are when they’re not in Comodoro?”
“Some of them,” Pieps said. “There are thousands more. They move about with their horses and cattle.”
“But those people live in that estancia.”
“They’ll move on. Others will live there. There’s little sense of ownership among the gauchos. Property ownership, I mean. Plenty of other ownership, as you just saw.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Goyo. I’m as interested as you are. It is said that once a man has proved his prowess by killing his enemy, he is left in peace.”
AT COMODORO, PIEPS offered to come with her to Cassian’s, but she said no, she’d face Dietz alone. She tied up her horse next to Dietz’s. Cassian appeared from one of the outbuildings, wearing black rubber gloves up to his elbows. He beamed when he saw her. “You’re back early!”