by Janet Dawson
Lindsey smiled. “Something smells good.”
“It’s my mushroom clafouti. I hope you like it.” A man and woman descended the stairs between the dining room and parlor, introducing themselves. More guests appeared, from upstairs and the other garden cottage, as the innkeeper added more food to the sideboard: the clafouti, a platter of sausages, and a coffee cake with crumb topping, just out of the oven. The guests filled their plates and sat down to eat breakfast, discussing the plays they’d seen the previous night.
After breakfast, Nina planned to take the backstage tour. Lindsey walked south to Southern Oregon University, where campus buildings scattered the sloping hill west of Siskiyou Boulevard. She located the communications department and Professor Sefton’s office, where the walls were covered with framed photographs in black-and-white, strong images of light and shadow. Lindsey surmised they were taken by the woman who sat behind the desk, her hands moving over a keyboard.
Merle Sefton pushed back her chair and stepped around the desk. She was tall, her blond hair streaked with gray. A network of fine lines vied with the faint dusting of freckles on her face. She had a firm handshake and a southwestern twang in her voice. “Dr. Page, it’s good to meet you. Now that we’ve got the niceties out of the way, call me Merle.”
“And I’m Lindsey. I like your pictures. Especially this one.” She pointed at a photograph showing a corridor in a derelict building, concrete walls crumbled, revealing the iron framework within. The image was eerie and unsettling, with empty doorways and windows lined up along the deserted hallway.
“I took that when I was in the Navy, stationed on Guam,” Merle said. “It’s the old Japanese army hospital on the island of Saipan.”
“I’ve seen some of your work on the Internet. I particularly liked the photo essay about Amelia Earhart’s last flight, with the picture of the little jail surrounded by jungle, and the picture of the waves. That one made me seasick.”
“Me, too,” Merle said with a grin. “I shot that from the deck of a destroyer at the tail end of a typhoon, and I was damned queasy myself. The jail is on Saipan, not far from the military hospital. There’s a persistent rumor in that neck of the woods that Earhart was captured and held in the jail before being executed by the Imperial Japanese Army. Back in the Seventies, there were people still alive on Saipan who claimed to have seen Amelia.”
“No one will ever know for certain the answer to that riddle. That’s what makes it so intriguing.”
“Please, have a seat.” Merle waved at the chair in front of her desk. “Your email said you have questions about what happened at San Blas.”
“I read your story and some of the articles that followed. You took a lot of flak, especially from the Wall Street Journal. But you stood by what you wrote.”
“The Wall Street Journal never met a right-wing despot it didn’t like,” Merle said. “Particularly in El Salvador. I stood by what I wrote because it was the truth. Humberto Aragón ordered that massacre, then tried to cover his tracks. Not as effectively as he would have liked, because I saw what he did.”
“Humberto Aragón was a landowner, not a right-wing despot.”
“In El Salvador it’s the same thing. He was a big ARENA supporter,” Merle said, using the acronym for the conservative Salvadoran political party Alianza Republicana Nacionalista. “So is his family. His daughter Cristina married Francisco Medrano, a party bigwig. Severino Aragón is a congressman now. My exposé led nowhere. It’s enough to make one a cynic.” Merle leaned back in her chair. “What’s your interest in San Blas? I checked you out as well. You’re a historian and you write about the nineteenth-century American West.”
“Cowboys, Indians and outlaws,” Lindsey said. “Usually something a bit more scholarly, like my book about the wives and daughters of frontier army officers. Not all my research involves the nineteenth century, though. My latest book deals with immigrant women from Latin America. I’ve been talking with a woman named Flor from El Salvador. She’s one of the survivors of San Blas.”
Interest sparked in Merle’s eyes. “Really? There were only two. Five if you count the three kids that were snatched. She must be the woman who lost her child. The other woman was much older. I wondered what happened to them.”
“Flor was the younger woman,” Lindsey said. “The older woman died. Flor lives in Oakland. She remarried and has two children.”
“Did she ever find her little boy? There’s an organization in El Salvador working to reunite parents with their missing children.”
“She has a lead,” Lindsey said. “I’d already planned this trip to Ashland, then I found out you teach here. I’d like to know more about San Blas, beyond what appeared in the article you wrote. Your impressions, your opinions.”
“Would you like to see the photographs I took?” Merle asked. “They’re at home. I warn you, they require a strong stomach.”
Merle lived in a one-story frame house near the campus. A big orange tabby cat greeted them at the door. “That’s Rascal. He guards the house when he’s not sleeping twenty-three hours a day.” She led the way through the kitchen to a den, where a sliding glass door led to the small backyard. “I’ll make coffee. I got the habit in the Navy, so I’ve got to have my brew. French roast, the darker the better.”
Rascal jumped onto the arm of a recliner and offered his head to be scratched. Lindsey obliged, glancing at a plaque holding a brass bell and an inscription to JOCM M. A. SEFTON. “What does the A stand for? And what’s the significance of the bell?”
Merle started the coffee brewing. “The A is for Alice, my grandmother’s name. As for Merle, my mother was a big Merle Oberon fan. She saw Wuthering Heights every night for a week when it first opened. It was her all-time favorite movie. If I’d been a boy, she’d have named me Heathcliff.” She ran her index finger over the bell’s polished brass. “A ship’s bell is a standard gift given to people leaving a duty station or retiring from the Navy. I got this one when I retired as a master chief petty officer, the highest enlisted rank. My specialty was journalism. That’s what the JOCM stands for. When I retired, I’d been in the Navy twenty-five years. I joined up in ’sixty-three, after Kennedy was assassinated.”
“I was fourteen, in the ninth grade,” Lindsey said, remembering that awful Friday.
“I was nineteen. Joining the Navy was what I could do for my country. It was also a good way to get an education. The University of Oklahoma has an excellent journalism school but my family didn’t have any money for college and my grades weren’t good enough for a scholarship. I enlisted, went to boot camp, and the Navy sent me to school. I worked in Navy public affairs offices, writing and editing stories for base publications, writing press releases, taking pictures. Got to be pretty good with a camera, and in the darkroom. The Navy had a school for photojournalists, a year-long course at Syracuse University in New York. When I left Guam I went there, then I did a tour of duty at All Hands, the Navy magazine, in Washington D.C.”
“How did you wind up in the middle of a war in El Salvador?”
“I was only forty-four when I retired,” Merle said. “Young enough for another career. There were lots of things I wanted to do. I hooked up with a small independent news service. They sent me to El Salvador, told me to connect with a rebel group and find out what was going on down there.” She glanced at a silver-framed photograph of an older man. “Joe didn’t want me to go. He tried to talk me out of it. He said it would be dangerous. Maybe I was trying to prove I was as tough as he was. His name was Joe Redfern and he was a hell of a writer.”
“He was,” Lindsey said. “I’ve read his books. He died recently, didn’t he?”
“Yes. I miss him. We were together more than twenty-five years. He was almost that much older than I was. A different generation. Coffee’s ready.”
They settled into chairs in the den. “So off I went to El Salvador. In April of ’eighty-nine I was in Chalatenango department, up north in Los Árboles, a town in the mounta
ins near the Honduran border. The town was rebel territory. By then I’d had my share of encounters with the army and civilian authorities. In fact, that weekend I had an unpleasant run-in with an army colonel outside the city of Santa Ana. The guy threatened to pull my credentials and boot me out of the country. Which is what happened two days later. I was already on somebody’s list.”
“Before that, you went to San Blas,” Lindsey said.
Merle nodded. “Twice. The first time was the day after the killings, the second time the following day. That first morning the sun was just coming up. It was quiet as death.”
19
Chalatenango Department, El Salvador, April 1989
It was quiet, much too quiet.
The sun had just risen. The campesinos who lived in San Blas should have been up as well. It was time for the men to rise from their beds and go to work. The women would have awakened long before their men, lighting cooking fires and stirring pots. There should be children, shouting and laughing as children did when they played.
“That was the church,” Nazario Robles told Merle Sefton as they stood near a log pile on the slope overlooking San Blas. “The store. The house closest to the dam, my mother lived there, with my sister and her husband.” He fired up a cigarette and exhaled curses with the smoke.
The earthen dam was above the village, forming a pond from the water running down the mountain valley. Below the dam the creek diminished to a trickle and hugged the far edge of the clearing where the village lay, near a dirt road winding over a hill.
The nearest house was barely more than a hut. An iron cooking pot lay near the door. Merle and Nazario entered the house. She saw pallets and blankets on bare ground, clothes hanging from pegs, a few dishes lined up on a shelf. Merle reached for a flat pasteboard wallet containing a color snapshot showing a man, a woman and a little boy, dressed in what were probably their best clothes. The man in the picture, barely into his twenties, was solemn-faced, but the woman, a teenager, smiled shyly. She held the little boy in the curve of her arms, a sturdy child perhaps a year old, with black hair and black eyes, a round face and a wide smile.
Merle held up the photograph. “Did you know them?”
Nazario’s mouth tightened. He tucked the picture inside his shirt. “They were friends.”
Merle raised her camera and snapped off a few shots. Outside she took more photos of the house. Near the iron pot she saw a scrap of cloth, blue-gray, a shiny metal button attached by a thread. As she reached for it, something moved in the nearby trees. Merle straightened, every nerve alert. Nazario tensed and swung his rifle in the direction of the sound. Then he relaxed. “It’s Beatriz.”
“Clear for now,” Beatriz called.
“How far to the coffee processing plant?” Merle asked.
“Over that hill, about one kilometer.” Nazario pointed at the road on the other side of San Blas. “From the plant to the house where the landowner lives, maybe five kilometers. That’s why I sent Beatriz to check, to see if there’s activity at the plant. We may not have much time.” He turned his back on the abandoned house and led the way downhill.
A few days earlier Merle was sleeping in a comfortable bed at the Camino Real hotel in San Salvador, where her news service, like many others, was based. In the capital she’d made contact with Nazario, who invited her to Los Árboles, a town in the Sierra Madre mountains, the northern part of Chalatenango department. She drove her rented car north out of San Salvador, heading for the Cinturón de Oro, the golden belt of rich agricultural land, through Santa Ana department, with its graceful city of the same name. North of Santa Ana she had a run-in with that flaming asshole of an army colonel who didn’t like reporters eschewing the ruling party’s line and trying to get the rebels’ side of the story. He threatened to toss her out of El Salvador before finally letting her go. She fumed about it. When she was stopped at a roadblock north of Texistepeque, she wondered if the colonel had made good on his threat. The soldiers took their time examining her news service credentials and her passport. She held her tongue, reminding herself that Joe had warned her not to come to El Salvador.
You don’t know what it’s like, Joe had said. You were peacetime Navy. You’ve never been in a war, or a war zone. Joe knew what he was talking about. He’d been on battlefields from Guadalcanal to Vietnam.
She figured Joe would have kept his mouth shut instead of trading sharp words with that brass hat, with good reason. The colonel she’d tangled with earlier that afternoon was fairly high in the food chain, in a position to do exactly what he’d threatened. How the hell could she write the story if she wasn’t here? Come to think of it, getting the boot would be mild compared with what could happen—and had—in this country. She could wind up dead out here in the boonies, a bullet in her head, courtesy of some death squad, or these soldiers.
She arrived in Los Árboles late Sunday, had dinner, and planned to get some shut-eye. But Nazario found her as she walked back to the threadbare hotel, telling her she must go with him to a village called San Blas on the other side of the mountain. There had been reports of weapons fire, and black smoke smudged the sky, visible for miles.
They left at four o’clock Monday morning, in a battered Toyota pickup that had somehow migrated from a Japanese assembly line to a war zone in El Salvador. She and Nazario rode in the pickup bed, while Beatriz shared the cab with the driver, who now waited for them on the ridge above, high enough to see if anyone was approaching and give a warning signal.
They drove on secondary roads, away from the main highway over the mountains, at times without lights. The army wasn’t the only danger. Many of the powerful landowners had private armies, paramilitaries. Nazario was impatient, in a hurry to get to San Blas as early as possible. Otherwise it would be too late, he’d said. Too late for what he didn’t say, but Merle figured he was worried that whoever was responsible for that plume of smoke was planning to cover up the reason for the fire.
They arrived at first light. But it was already too late for the people who’d lived in San Blas. The church was a blackened ruin, smoke rising from the ashes. The stench of char and decay rode the wind.
Merle heard a steady buzz, and realized that the sound came from swarms of flies covering the bodies.
Oh, Lord. This is going to be bad.
She’d seen pictures through the years, grim photographs of horrors, everything from Nanking to the Warsaw Ghetto, from Auschwitz to My Lai. But pictures, powerful as they were, could never compare with the reality. Now she was the one taking the pictures that would shock the people who viewed them.
Merle gagged, glad she’d had nothing to eat this morning. The stench overwhelmed her. The corpses had been lying here since yesterday afternoon. She took a bandanna from her pocket and tied it over her nose and mouth. It didn’t help.
Merle switched on the portable tape recorder hanging by a cord around her neck, then raised her camera and started shooting pictures. She spoke into the recorder, describing the location of the shots, noting landmarks. She reached the end of the film and put a fresh roll in her camera.
Nazario stared at the church ruins. “I came here yesterday to see my mother. Then I went to meet my compadres at another camp. We heard gunfire. From a distance we saw the smoke. I knew all the people who lived here were dead.” He swore again, castigating himself for visiting his mother, bringing this fate down on her and the village.
“You’re not to blame,” Beatriz said. “You’ve visited your mother only a few times. If Humberto knew about you, it was already too late.”
“Who’s Humberto?” Merle asked.
“Aragón. He owns this finca,” Beatriz said. “His son Severino is in the army.”
“So who did this? The army? Or the Aragóns?”
“Could be either one,” Nazario said. “The army’s been though here. But the Aragóns have their own private army patrolling the finca.”
Merle steeled herself to the carnage around her and took more pict
ures, driven by the need to document the results of this frenzied orgy of violence. Then they heard three short bleats from the pickup’s horn, the driver warning them. They hurried up the slope. Merle looked back and saw Jeeps coming over the hump of the road that led to the coffee processing plant, with a bulldozer in the rear. She raised her camera and squeezed off a few more shots.
Merle longed to wash away the stench of San Blas. She wrote most of the story in her head on the way back to Los Árboles, where she stood under a stream of tepid water in her hotel bathroom, scrubbing away the dust and stink but not the memory of what she’d seen. She toweled herself dry, put on her robe, and sat at her portable typewriter, fingers pounding the keys as words poured from her brain to the paper. She put the story and the film rolls into an envelope and hid them in her bag.
Her stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten since the previous day. It was nearly three. No wonder she felt like hell, with no food and very little sleep on top of what she’d seen that morning. She dressed, shouldered the camera bag she always carried, and went downstairs to the café across the street from the hotel. She ordered a cold beer and worked her way through several pupusas and a bowl of curtido.
Nazario and Beatriz caught up with her as she left the café, telling her that two women from San Blas were here in Los Árboles. Merle checked the batteries in her tape recorder, counted the films in the bag and the shots remaining on the roll in the camera. Nazario drove to a house near the sawmill, where two survivors sat near the front door. Dried blood stained their clothes. Nazario sighed. Merle guessed he’d hoped one of the women would be his mother or sister, but neither was. He smoothed sorrow from his face and replaced it with anger. He held out the photograph they’d found in San Blas. Merle realized the younger woman was the mother in the snapshot.
Tears streamed from the woman’s ravaged eyes. She took the picture, sobbing onto the older woman’s shoulder. Merle fought back tears and pointed her camera, trying to look unobtrusive, though the people gathered nearby stared at the tall blond American woman.