Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  “What? Why?”

  “He told me to tell you that he hopes you’re feeling better really soon and that he’s looking forward to seeing you in class again.” Suvi blew theatrical kisses. “He’s pining for you, Ana.”

  “That’s stupid. He didn’t say that last bit.”

  “You’ll never know, will you?” She zipped up her bag. “So, I was going to ask you last time, before you got all sick and weird on us…”

  Ana watched Suvi look around the room, and didn’t have to try very hard to imagine how it seemed to her.

  “Yes?”

  “Your mother. How’s the search going?”

  Ana shrugged into her pillow. “It’s not. Not for the last week. Not even very much before that.”

  I don’t even know if I want to find her. I had a chance, at the police station—

  “You tried Google?”

  Ana nodded.

  “What about chat rooms? You know, like asking real people?”

  “I don’t know how you do that.”

  “First, you have to find a chat room. Like, if you were looking for a Star Wars geek, maybe you’d try a sci-fi chat room. Or, I don’t know, one for aspiring poets if you knew she wrote poetry. People know people. This city is a lot smaller than you’d think.”

  Sunday night at the library is a quiet time. Not so much at the front desk—people often come in at the last minute to return books before the week starts—but further back, at the work stations and in the children’s section and between the stacks.

  Ana told her father she had to look something up for school the next day. She said she would be an hour at the most.

  She went to the computer farthest from the others and typed in “chat room.” Those had been Suvi’s words. It would need narrowing, though. “Canada,” she typed. And then, “Mennonite.”

  This was OK. She wasn’t involving anyone else by doing an Internet search—not the police, not the people at the Women’s Center. Ana could remain anonymous. If someone came back to her with information, she could take her time deciding what to do with it.

  The first result to appear was something called MennoCanTalk. These would all be liberal Mennonites—ones who used computers and drove cars and let their kids wear jeans to school—so how likely could it be that one of them would have any Old Colony contacts? She clicked the link to a home page that listed a handful of active discussions and scanned the topics. Best Bible camps? Divorce and the divided house. Prayer requests. Anyone heard from Fran in Kelowna?

  Those were just the ones that people had commented on most recently. In the upper corner there was a search box.

  “Colony Felicidad,” she typed. 0 results, said the pop-up.

  “Helena.” 0 results.

  “Bolivia.” Two threads: one discussing a rape case that had been in the news the year before, the other asking about mission work.

  What did she know about her?

  “Berliner doughnuts.” One thread: Does anyone have a good recipe for plum butter?

  “Lennon Sisters.” She clicked on the sole result. Favorite oldies? asked someone with a cartoon cat as his avatar.

  My grandkids have just discovered the McGuire Sisters, he’d written. “Sugartime” and “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight”—nice clean lyrics. I told my daughter to put them on to Patti Page. Any other suggestions for family sing-alongs?

  Halfway down the page, something caught Ana’s eye: a two-sentence reply from someone who called herself Perdita.

  Show them the Lennon Sisters on YouTube. We watched Lawrence Welk reruns as kids and I always wanted to be Janet.

  Ana clicked on the avatar: a gray square that the poster, Perdita, hadn’t bothered to customize.

  About:

  Lapsed Menno

  Threads I’m On:

  Favorite oldies?

  MennoCan Book Club

  First Light Congregation, Toronto—experiences?

  Colony Felicidad

  Cayua means “the ones from the forest.” The Bolivian Guaraní used it to describe those indigenous people who the early Jesuits failed to convert. Nowadays it means anyone who fails to integrate.

  In the days when the Guaraní were hunted by slave dealers, they could either hide in the jungle and take their chances with their bows and arrows against the slave dealers’ guns, or they could join the Jesuit missions. Then the slave traders started to target the missions too: on any given Sunday, when everyone gathered for Mass, it was easy to capture many Guaraní at once. For this reason, some Guaraní returned to the forest to be cayua. Perhaps that’s why they don’t find it strange that the Mennonites in Colony Felicidad also prefer to exist out of time and place.

  Agustín was the Guaraní driver who used to take shipments to Santa Cruz when we had more cheese than we could sell in the local town. His pickup was twice the size of one of our wagons and he called it his third baby. Twice a week he would park at the end of the long driveway that connected the campo to the main road and wait for one of the boys to arrive with a wagon rattling with milk cans. Once a week he came for the oranges and avocados that grew in our orchards. If the boy was late with the wagon, Agustín would toot the horn and the little kids would fight over who got to commandeer one of Papa’s horses down the driveway to greet him.

  Sometimes he gave little presents to the children: carvings, usually, because he was good with a knife and as a driver he spent a lot of time waiting around. It might be a slingshot for one of the boys, or a rattle if there was a new baby. Once he carved a figure of a man who was a priest looking one way, and a devil looking the other.

  Like many peasants, he chewed coca leaves as a habit—one cheek bulging with a ball of screwed-up leaves that he drew from a woven pouch worn around his neck. Every now and then he’d take a pinch of lejia powder from a sack kept in his back pocket and add it to the wad in his mouth. One of the boys told me that this ash powder was what made the leaves work, in the same way that adding baking soda to vinegar is what makes it fizz. People in Bolivia chew coca like people in other parts of the world drink coffee, and Agustín loved it more than anyone.

  There was only one time that I got to speak to him, because Klaas Epp’s father saw a group of us girls gathered around Agustín’s pickup in our flowery dresses and straw hats with the dark ribbons and he made quite a scene at the community meeting that night. Normally we wouldn’t have stopped to speak to a man who wasn’t a relative, but we had been walking back from the dairy when Agustín pulled up alongside us and said he’d drive us the rest of the way home. There wasn’t anything improper about it, but I suppose Klaas Epp’s father wasn’t to know that. It was me, Susanna, her sister Maria and their little sister Eva.

  Agustín was telling us about pombéro, the forest spirits. He talked to us in broken English because our English was better than his German, and our Spanish was non-existent. From what we could gather, the most feared pombéro was the hideously ugly Yasi Yateré, whose feet faced backward and who kidnapped children by trapping them in climbing vines. Parents would leave honey for him in parts of the forest known to be dangerous—for instance, where the river was deepest and the undercurrent strong. Then there was Cuarahú-Yara, who whistled like a bird to lure young boys out on egg-stealing missions.

  “You tell your brothers to stay out of the jungle or Cuarahú-Yara will get them,” he said, before hooking a finger around the wad of coca leaves and shifting it to his other cheek.

  “What about us?” asked Maria. “Or is he only interested in little boys?”

  You could tell by the way she said it that she meant Agustín to hear the question differently. I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was as if Susanna and Eva and I weren’t there anymore. Agustín’s face crinkled into a grin, but before he could reply, Klaas Epp’s father had appeared at the end of the drive, shouting at us to get home.

  He must have had a pretty serious talk with the Guaraní driver after that, because from then on Agustín hardly dared look a
t us girls, let alone start up a conversation or offer us a lift in his pickup. Never again did he venture onto our driveway; he’d always stop on the main road and the boy with the wagon would have to haul the milk tanks or the oranges and avocados or the cheese and tortillas right up to the top of the slope before Agustín would jump out of the driver’s seat to help with the loading.

  He was back to being cayua, as were we. And the forest, now that we knew it to be populated by spirits plotting our destruction, was more unknowable than ever.

  The long driveway that linked Colony Felicidad to the main road—the one where Agustín never dared to drive his pickup after that time with Maria and the talk about the forest pombéro—was just one of several wide, dusty roads that crisscrossed Mennonite land in our corner of the country. Every now and then you would see a small airplane buzzing low in the sky, shaving the tops of the trees as it hummed over the forest before disappearing we knew not where. The nearest airport was Santa Cruz.

  Later, we learned that the planes were using our quiet community roads to land and refuel. Sometimes a truck with a Paraguayan licence plate would drive through too, although in neither case did we ever talk to these people responsible for what technically could be called trespassing. No one seemed to question it or make much effort to come up with any explanation. Maybe it was just that most of us didn’t think that way. We were taught to work hard and mind our own business, and that’s mostly what we did.

  It’s hard to mind your own business when a plane crashes barely a mile from where you live, though. It’s hard not to feel the impact that sends a row of straw hats leaping from the coat hook by the door, brushing the ground below with a dry whisper, and not glance around the schoolroom to find everyone else looking just as startled. It’s hard not to let out a yelp of surprise when every slate covered in carefully chalked German letters hits the floor with an echoing clatter. It’s hard not to notice the tiles cracking under your feet from the aftershock or the uneven glass panes rattling in the window frames and everyone holding on to the long, white school desks as if, no matter what happens, those desks will be the last thing on earth to move.

  Some of the boys rushed outside to see what had happened, but our teacher barricaded the doorway with his arms to prevent us girls from following. We watched the boys lope away from us through the pampas grass, their lean bodies crooked with haste, as a twist of smoke drifted over the distant tree line.

  When school ended at lunchtime, we heard how a wheel appeared to have got stuck in a ditch as the plane attempted to land, tripping it into a cartwheel. Diedrich Pankratz said he saw a truck driving away from the wreckage with two people in the back. There was no one in the plane, which by some miracle had not burst into flames.

  We kids trailed the police team that came to investigate at first light the next morning, while the sky was pink and the grass still weeping. It was one of those rare times when it helped to be considered a child: the adults thought we were too young to see anything we weren’t supposed to, or at least too young to understand it if we did. We hovered in clusters, the boys venturing nearer the forest, the girls loitering around a bandy tree trunk fifty yards back. It was a hot, still day, and the little ones soon took off their headscarves to flap at the cloying air. We saw the police emerge from the trees and register us, a flock of blond-braided girls, bare-legged, holding up fluttering cotton squares as though we were waving good-bye to lovers at a train station.

  “They took the bit of the plane that records its route,” said Bernhard Hamm, breathless in his determination to be the first one to report back. “The box bit.”

  “The police?”

  “No, the passengers who went off in the truck. They took it with them. And the log book too. The police are angry as bulls.”

  The plane had a Paraguayan registration, but no cargo. The police thought it must have been landing to collect a shipment from the waiting truck. When the plane crashed, the driver must have taken the pilot and passengers away along with whatever it was they’d come to collect.

  “A shipment of what?” I asked.

  Of course, I had to be the stupid one. And as usual, it was Maria who seemed to draw out my stupidity.

  “Coca, dumdum,” she said.

  By now both her father and Klaas Epp’s dad had come out to meet the police. Gerhard Buhler waved his daughter over.

  “Take the little ones inside,” he told Maria. He tipped a nod in my direction, and for an instant I sensed that he was going to tell me to come with them to stand by the police car. But he didn’t. That wouldn’t have made sense.

  Toronto

  Hi.

  Ana’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.

  I hope you don’t mind, but I think you might know me.

  She stared at the avatar’s gray silhouette, the pixels in the name Perdita blurring on the fuzzy screen.

  My name’s Ana. It changed when I left Bolivia. I think you might be Helena. Or Lena. Or maybe something else, but if those names mean anything to you that won’t matter.

  She unscrewed her water bottle and gulped deeply. An older woman sitting at the computer opposite frowned over her spectacles at her before resuming her own search. Ana replaced the bottle cap and hesitated.

  Papa and I are here, in Toronto.

  If you want, you can write to me at ananeli@mymail.​com

  If you’re not who I think you are, I’m sorry for bothering you and hope you will delete this.

  A

  P.S. Justina told me about the Lawrence Welk thing. I still have your note and your pearl necklace.

  They went to the Baptist church because it was closest. The service was unlike anything Ana had experienced before: guitars and drums and clapping and swaying and laughter in the middle of the sermon. It felt like a party.

  When they emerged onto the street, her father said, “Don’t worry, we will find another church. There are churches here for people like us. I’m sure of it.”

  As they walked, a woman emerged from a house a few doors down, carrying a small dog under one arm. She was fussing over one of its paws and had to push the front gate open with her hip. Ana’s father held it for her and she smiled.

  “Thanks,” she said. “He hates these boots, but his paws get filthy in the park. His nails were a mess the last time we went to the doggy spa. Mortifying, right?”

  The dog stared up at Ana and her father with doleful eyes. Each of its paws had been squeezed into what looked like a pink rubber balloon. The harness it wore was dotted with a daisy print.

  “Have a good day,” said Ana’s father, and closed the gate for the lady as she coaxed the little dog down the sidewalk.

  “I’ve seen ones like that before,” he said to Ana in a low voice, once they had turned the corner. “They’re everywhere here. They treat their pets like people. What good is a little dog like that to anyone? It doesn’t chase rats or herd anything useful. It wouldn’t frighten a child, let alone a burglar—and besides, their owners have expensive security systems.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t have children,” said Ana. Her father grunted.

  “You never wore boots like that,” he said. “What is a spa, anyway?”

  Colony Felicidad

  A few weeks before we left, I lay in bed early one morning listening to the sound of wild dogs crying at the fading moon. I was thinking of the chickens locked up in their shed and wondering if they connected the dogs’ howls with their own hair-breadth mortality. The chickens were safe, but only because they were locked up. Eventually, some of them would get eaten by the people who kept them from the dogs. It wasn’t much of a life.

  I was half asleep when something landed with a thud on the roof right about my head. The walls shuddered as I jolted upright. There was a dragging sound that crossed the room, then another thud on the ground outside.

  I would have gone to the window, but I was too frightened of what I might see. I thought of the jungle pombéro, of Yasi Yateré with the backward feet and swi
rling vine traps, and I pulled the blanket up to my ears.

  Another thump, louder this time. Something landing from a height. Then a faster drag, screeching down the shingled roof.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  This was the longest silence yet. Whatever it was on the roof, it was staying put this time. I stared up at the ceiling until my eyes went funny—until I could almost believe that I was seeing through the plaster—and then I edged myself out of bed and crept toward the window.

  Footsteps, then, retreating from the other side of the house, and a single person, certainly no more than that. I leaned out of the window and craned my neck. I could see nothing on the roof. For a second, I was distracted by the beauty of the dawn sky—so many colors!—and it was because of that that something struck my cheek as I hung out of the window. Something warm and wet. I touched my cheek, and I saw that my fingers were stained. The early light wasn’t bright enough see what color, but I didn’t need any light to be quite certain.

  My fingers might have been dipped in strawberry jam. But of course it wasn’t jam that now ran in a slow, thick trickle down the side of our house.

  Frank Reimer came banging at our door a few minutes later to say there were vultures circling our house. His sister had spotted them on her way to milk the cows, flying low with their enormous wings spread out wide as sawhorses.

  When he and Papa and a few of the other men ran at them with waving arms, the creatures flapped and fussed, refusing to be frightened away. That was when Frank realized there must be something drawing them to the roof.