by Hazel Woods
Shutting the lid of the basket, she closes her eyes and wishes for the day’s end. But then, as soon as her eyes are closed, she opens them, wishing, instead, for the day to seize right here. To arrest itself and go no further. Let the sun remain just where it is, blazing hot, the other side of the earth in an eternal night. Then surely, her life, too, could be suspended, frozen without moving forward. She would not have to move forward into whatever drudgery is waiting for her. Any day now she might receive the expected proposal from Mr. Teagan (would he, really?), along with a telegram from Harold apprising her father of the particulars: the inevitable moment in which this trio of men will tell her they’ve arranged her future.
Just as she has decided to halt the day just where it is, she hears a loud noise from Berto and Teresa’s house up the hill. Leaving the cats and her embroidery basket, Hensley steps off the brick patio. She listens intently. But it is quiet again. The only noise is a lizard or rodent rustling in the dried leaves against the wall. She ventures several steps farther. Suddenly there is a voice, hardly audible, muttering. As Hensley climbs the hill, the sound gets fainter, as though she is walking away from its source. She stops and turns, looking down at the little brick patio where the cats still sleep. A sudden breeze lifts the hair from her neck and bangs the screen door against its frame. The cats look up from their naps simultaneously, startled. Hensley’s embroidery basket falls from its place on the crate, spilling the floss onto the bricks in a colorful mess. A cloud of dust circles Hennie’s face and stings her eyes. She shuts them, the darkness disorienting and dizzying. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stops.
She opens her eyes and the day looks just as it did moments ago. Still, the muttering has ceased, and she feels a stinging sense of lost possibility. As though the desert has spoken to her and she has not understood its meaning. Looking for reassurance, Hensley continues on her way up to Teresa and Berto’s house, hoping for a visit with Teresa.
As she approaches, she sees that the screen door is propped open with a heavy ceramic crock. There are several empty glass jars on either side of the door, like ornaments.
“Teresa,” she calls, a few feet away from the door. “Are you home?”
There is no reply. Instead, Hennie hears a scraping, as though someone is pushing a broom across the floor. She peeks her head inside. Her eyes, accustomed to the bright day, are blinded for a moment and she cannot see a thing.
A man’s voice comes at her from somewhere deep inside. “Who are you?”
Hennie jumps. She turns around and faces the open door, her hand on its hinges. “From down the hill. The superintendent’s daughter. Hensley Dench. Please excuse me. I was looking for . . . someone.”
“For my sister?”
“Um, I thought I heard something.”
“She’s not here. Probably working.”
“She’s my friend,” Hensley says, hoping that he’ll understand she is not there to snoop, that their secret is still safe. “Are you okay? I mean, is there anything you need?”
The scraping begins again. Hensley turns around, her eyes now adjusted to the dark room. There is a small cot in the far corner and a figure in it, holding on to a long wooden pole.
“Teresa doesn’t have any friends,” he says, with effort.
“Let me help you,” Hensley says, walking across the room and bending down to retrieve the small leather-bound book that the pole is aiming for. “Here,” she says, standing over the cot. “Is this what you need?”
His face is nearly identical to Teresa’s, except for the dark but meager whiskers that color his cheeks. He drops the pole on the ground beside him and takes the book from her hand.
For a moment, it seems he will not acknowledge her assistance. Then he brings the book to his face, breathing in its scent.
“Thank you. I’ve been working on that for an hour.”
“Oh, what a chore.” Hensley looks around the rest of the room. In the kitchen, grease from an uneaten breakfast plate wafts across the room.
“How are you feeling?” Hensley asks, looking back at his face.
He closes his eyes. “Half-dead.”
Hensley stares at his gaunt face. His hands have fallen to his chest again and his fingers are wrapped around the book with hardly any life.
“Shall I call for the doctor? I’m sure he would come if it’s urgent.” Hensley is confronted with the odor of urine nearby and as soon as her eyes see the metal jug beside his bed, she wishes she hadn’t.
He opens his eyes. “No. This is not urgent. This is ordinary; it’s how I feel every day that I can think clearly. Teresa has put the pistol far out of my reach. Even out of the pole’s reach. But, really, what’s the difference?”
Nobody has ever spoken to her so bluntly. Certainly not a stranger. She thinks of Mr. Reid’s letters. The pistol that accompanies him everywhere. The bullets that no doubt search for him, day after day. The death that surrounds him, that he struggles mightily against.
“The difference is everything,” she says, her heart racing. “It is absolutely everything.”
“For you, maybe. Not for me. This cot is a coffin, only the corpse is uncooperative.”
Looking at his pallor, the way his fingers hover around the book, the fatigue behind his eyes, Hensley worries he is sicker than anyone knows.
“What has happened to you? Have you become a ghost?” he suddenly asks.
Hensley furrows her brow. “Whatever are you talking about?”
“Are all my hallucinations caused by this fever? I swear I saw my mother. Right here, in this room.”
Hensley shakes her head, her face blank.
“Do you know my mother?” he asks, confused.
“No, I’m sorry. I never knew her.”
“Do you know how she died?”
“Your mother?” As she wonders how in the world he would expect her to know this, she is struck by an image. In a city she’s never seen before, a woman runs through an outdoor market. She is being chased by something ferocious, but it is out of sight. Hensley hears the growling in her ears. Her heart races with the anxiety of the hunted. And then a blast of warmth radiates from her belly to the tips of her fingers. She folds her arms across her chest. “No. I have no idea.”
Berto looks away from her, to the wall beside his cot. He begins to speak, slowly describing their history. Hensley strains to hear all of his words. He tells her that his mother, like so many, had been widowed by the revolution. They lived on a large cattle and rum plantation that covered a hundred acres outside Mexico City. His father was the foreman. It was a good job. He was tired every night. Berto and Teresa had a carefree childhood. They drank fresh milk every day, often straight from the teat, caught grasshoppers, relishing the way their legs pushed hard against their closed hands, tried to pull fish from the stream that ran behind their quarters, and never wanted for a hot meal. Their mother was a midwife and had delivered all the babies on the ranch. She knew rhymes and songs and how to treat a sour stomach or a broken bone. The parish priest taught them and the other children how to read. A nun spoke to them in English.
When Madero was shot, most of the laborers left. Things were changing. Resentment grew. Everybody was somebody’s enemy.
Berto continues to stare at the wall, his voice weakening. Hensley leans over him, bound to his words.
During the upheaval, the jefe left the hacienda and went to California. Took his valet, his mistress, and a truck full of rum. His wife was left behind with the crystal and the gold chandeliers and an empty set of servants’ beds. She asked Berto’s father to stay. For protection. She paid him in silver goblets. One a day. Berto’s mother objected. She wanted to leave.
When the mob came, there were seventeen goblets. One in every pot, two in their father’s worn-out boots, three in their mother’s medical bag, six pushed into the bottom of their parents’ mattress, and o
ne under each of their blankets. At night, as he and Teresa closed their eyes and listened to their mother humming the fragments of a lullaby, they each tucked a goblet under one arm like a stiff, cold doll.
Berto’s face becomes still, as though perhaps he has fallen asleep. His eyes are closed. But then, he continues, his voice barely a whisper.
His father met the men—some of whom who had walked the fields at his side just months before, supplying branding irons and dirty jokes until sunset—at the door of the plantation’s hacienda. His mother took him and Teresa to the barn and covered them in hay. They stayed there all night, holding their goblets tight. The donkeys were braying and stomping, the straw scratched their bare arms and legs, and the smell of animal manure was everywhere. His mother shivered between them, barely able to control her panic.
However his father tried to reason with the men, it failed. They nailed him to the door and left him there while they ran past, filling their burlap sacks with every shiny thing in the place. The doña hid in a secret passage between the pantry and the dining room. When she emerged and saw the walls stripped of their gold-framed portraits, the tables turned over, the couches’ upholstery ripped and gutted, the hooks in the kitchen missing all their shiny copper pots, human feces on the marble-top dining table, and the silk rugs on fire, she ran out of the house—perhaps she never even noticed their father, sacrificed, hanging on her front door.
At this point, Hensley’s knees quiver and buckle. She folds herself onto the floor beside Berto’s cot. He turns to face her. “He lived three days.”
Hensley puts a hand to her mouth. Dear Lord, she begins, but there is nothing else. Nothing. The silence gathers around them and presses hard on her head and chest. Dear Lord, she tries again, but fails to continue. Berto’s breathing has turned rhythmic. Hensley examines his face closely. At one corner of his mouth, spittle gathers and leaks gently onto his cheek. His eyebrows are perfect black dash marks in the middle of a sentence. She does not dare wake him, but Hensley cannot help but wonder about his mother. The image of the chase has faded, but Hensley can still hear the terrified heartbeat, as if it were her own.
With great effort, she stands and moves quietly to the kitchen. As she begins to tidy up, a jar falls from the counter and shatters. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, turning toward Berto, but he is still, quiet.
She wraps her hand around the broom that is leaning against the wall and begins to collect the scattered pieces of glass into a pile. Mixed in with the shards of glass, there are several unmistakable flecks of gold. Picking through the pile with her fingers, she tries to segregate one from the other, but it is an impossible and bloody task. Her index finger suffers a small but painful gash. She sucks on it, drawing the blood into her mouth. Pulling a mixing bowl from the shelf, she sweeps everything into it, both glass and gold. It is a beautiful and dangerous combination of ingredients. She imagines cracking an egg and pouring some milk on top and scooping golden glass fritters onto the cast iron. It reminds her of a fairy tale—a helpless young girl concocting a deadly breakfast for a slothful and oppressive king with shrunken teeth. But killing the king will not liberate the young girl. She is doomed.
Hensley gives the bowl a shake, just to hear its noise, then sets it on the counter, embarrassed by her clumsiness.
Hensley wraps her finger in her apron. Crossing the floor again, she stands above Berto, wondering if she should do something for him. Wet a rag for his brow or brew some tea. Instead, she shoos away the flies that are gathering, landing and levitating with the alacrity of eager suitors. The book is still in his hands—or, rather, beneath his hands—since they no longer have any intention in them. Hensley tries to read the spine, but its gold letters are faded and in another language, presumably Spanish.
Letting the apron fall away, Hensley checks her finger. It has stopped bleeding.
There must be something she can do. As the sun rises higher, the air coming through the open windows is no longer cool. With the heat, the metal jug by the bed is becoming ever more pungent. The flies are drawn to it, some so spellbound that they now float, lifeless, on the surface.
Using her apron as a makeshift glove, Hensley grabs the handle and hefts it outside. Walking a few paces away from the house, she squats, turns her head into her shoulder, and holds the pail as far away from her body as she can. In a single motion, she dumps it and it pools into a momentary puddle before soaking into the ground. The slightly furry black flies are all that remain. Hensley takes a deep breath.
The cats have abandoned the sun, choosing instead a patch of shaded dirt somewhere out of sight. Her embroidery basket, weeping its colorful contents, is now the lone inhabitant of the patio. Beyond her house, she can see the post office and the bar. Farther still, the dirt road leading through the hills to the mine is visible. The rhythmic clomping of horses’ hooves echoes up from Main Street.
The jug is heavy in her hand and she walks carefully, avoiding prickly pears and goatheads along the way back to the front of the house.
She pushes on the door and it opens into the room, again confronting her with its darkness. “Hello?” she says, slightly afraid that Berto may have slipped away. Instead, as her eyes adjust, the room is just as she pictured it moments ago. Berto is alone, asleep in the bed, his hands still swaddling the book, his chest visibly moving beneath it. She replaces the empty jug beside the bed.
Berto groans quietly in his sleep. Hensley wrings a damp towel out and carefully places it across his brow. Beneath its weight, he shifts slightly, falling deeper into some faraway place.
Hensley lifts a chair from the kitchen and sets it beside his bed. She closes her eyes and tries to place Mr. Reid beside her, in his own chair, in civilian clothes. Maybe even in a jacket she’s tailored for him out of the beautiful gray flannel that she’s coveted so often at the fabric depot on West Forty-fourth. She urges him to sit, cross his long legs, fold his hands in his lap, gaze at her in the dimness and smile. Or sigh. Or rub his eyes. Or request a story. The unfolding of a drama. Or the revelation of a secret. She realizes that despite the distance, he is her closest friend. It is he with whom she longs to be.
Reaching for the towel on Berto’s forehead, she finds herself suddenly terrified. What if it were Mr. Reid instead of Berto here in the bed, with his hands splayed across the leather volume? The thought startles her out of her chair and she walks the floor, her mind racing. What if he is gravely injured overseas? With some other young woman tending to him just as she tends to Berto? Will she even know? She and her father are no relation to Mr. Reid. He might vanish and the only trace she’ll ever have of him is his letters.
“You must not,” she says aloud, desperate to be heard. “You must live.” Returning to her place beside Berto, all of their lives conflated into one, Hensley reaches out, places her own pale hand on his arm, and leans close to his face. “Do not die,” she whispers. “Please. You must survive.”
Beneath her hand, his arm twitches violently and Hensley recoils.
Her tears betray some deep sorrow that feels familiar yet distant. She rewets the towel and places it with care upon his forehead. “I will stay right here,” she says, collecting herself, drying her cheeks with her sleeve. Berto’s book falls at her feet. Looking down, she picks it up and then returns her gaze to the bed. Berto sleeps on.
She opens the book. Its weight on her lap is reassuring. On the inside of the front cover is a list of names and dates. A family tree. Written in different hands, with different ink, this is their history, beginning in 1820. Hensley places a timid finger on the only two names she knows, Humberto and Teresa, born on the very same day, 1899. Then she places her finger on their father’s name and his birth date. She closes her eyes, imagining that baby, the chubby cheeks and feathery hair. Then, at the end, his hands roughened, bloodied, torn, useless. What monsters we become, she thinks.
The book must be a hundred years old, for th
ere are nearly a half dozen generations. Perfectly written names and dates, so carefully placed on this sacred page. How small we are, Hensley thinks, tracing the names of long-gone men and women. And then, thinking of the telegrams crossing the country, the imminent wedding gifts and baby blankets, how very large. She speaks their names as best she can, invoking history.
She turns the page. The words are in Spanish, but contrary to what she expected, it is not a Bible. It looks like a novel, with beautifully inked chapter titles. She tries to sound out some of the words, searching to hear what comforts Berto, but just then his eyes open suddenly. Frantically, he reaches out. Hensley places the book into his hands and he relaxes. Her own heart is racing, the sound of it deafening her.
“So thirsty,” Berto says, his voice still thick with sleep.
“Of course.” Hensley stands, walking across the floor without any feeling in her legs. She fills a jar with water and returns to the chair beside the bed. She notices that the pillow behind Berto’s head is dark with sweat. “I think your fever has broken,” she says.
Helping him to lean up on one elbow, Hensley guides the jar to his lips. He gulps noisily. Hensley smiles.
As he restores himself on the pillow, she says, “Better?”
He nods. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You don’t need to stay. Every day is like this. I am a predictable show. Nothing very interesting here.”
Hensley can’t help but laugh. “Utterly boring.”
Berto furrows his brow. “Do I talk in my sleep?”
Hensley doesn’t answer his question. Instead, hoping for distraction, gesturing to his book, she asks, “Would you like to sit up so you can read?”