Nothing But Dust

by Sandrine Collette

  So she throws her plate to the little brother and shoots a nasty look at the twins, and merely shouts: “Are you goin’ to leave him alone or what!”

  Liars that they are, like the father who abandoned them long ago, they nod their heads, swearing blind that they’ll leave him alone.

  The day after the father disappeared, Mauro and Joaquin led the grass-fed calves to the pastures in the Monte Alto; Steban fed the lambs, changed the rabbits’ litter, he was unwell that morning, with bags under his eyes as if he’d partied all night long, at the age of four, now what.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the mother had said.

  He’d shaken his head, not answering, scattering the dried grasses through the rabbit hutches, staring vacantly at the grass, and eventually the mother came over for a closer look. But there was nothing. She shook him by the shoulder.

  “Well? Is it because your dad’s gone?”

  His child’s gaze in hers. A questioning, immense. And something else, too, but she hadn’t noticed, didn’t want to know, something that looked like sorrow, and that was no business of hers, and even Steban himself, what did he really know about his father? Was he certain that his absence really deserved sorrow? Should she tell him? She waved her hand in annoyance. He was still staring at her and she was smart enough to know that he wouldn’t let her go until she explained, but that had never been her strong point, words, not for her or her sons, and Steban had to make do with the little she gave him as she held her arm out and pointed toward the road.

  “You see that road? He went that way. To the end, the very end. You can’t see him anymore. He’s not coming back.”

  The boy had looked. And then he turned toward the stable and pointed at the criollos, and his mother felt her heart sink. Then immediately reasoned with herself. Nipped it in the bud. With her black eyes crushing Steban, eyes like a certainty, like a threat.

  “He went on his own. He didn’t take a horse.”

  The older boys got the same explanation. As far as the mother was concerned, the chapter on the father was closed. She had burned any clothes that could no longer be put to use, and a few forgotten items, she’d buried his dinner bowl and metal tumbler behind the house, as a sign of repudiation. She’d erased him down to the last trace, making him disappear from the world, the unworthy man, the reveler, the coward. An absolute blackout in their life.

  Of course the days grew longer, suddenly exhausting when the hay season arrived, then the shearing. But by then the father’d been gone for months, and in the valley everyone knew. A few guys showed up to lend a hand in exchange for a little money—they must have been hard up, for they sure weren’t paid much. Mauro and Joaquin learned to shear the ewes with them. At the age of six they were the men of the house and they played their role conscientiously. In the region, the shepherds respected their efforts in silence. No one repeated what was on everyone’s lips in San León: that the mother wouldn’t last long on her own, and that her land would soon be up for sale.

  That’s because they had no idea of the spite that gnawed away at the old lady, deep in her belly. With a man or without one life was the same, the usual hardship—it was so normal that it no longer hurt. And besides, the mother never got up in the morning complaining about the ferocity of the world, because she’d never known anything else. She didn’t expect anything better. The day the father left she made note of the fact the same way she made note of the cooler temperatures or the sun’s shorter passage across the sky when autumn was coming. Nor did she run to town to inform everyone of her imminent poverty; she had no one to talk to. Would that have brought the father back? It’d surely be better if it didn’t.

  So one day she found herself obliged to take off her apron, saddle up Rufian, and make the journey to San León to buy bags of seed—spring was coming—and a supply of spirits, and to pay her outstanding debts. After her errands she went into the bar and sat down heavily on a chair, ignoring the astonished gazes shot her way, banging her fist on the table to order a Fernet. That was when the rumor got started, and young Trabor went out to tell his brother to go right away for the banker Gomez, who dealt with everyone here, because something was afoot.

  Gomez sat down at the table with her. He snapped his fingers, and Alejo brought him a glass. He drank to her health.

  “What brings you here, little sister?”

  An hour later, the news spread through the entire village. The abandoned mother had ridden away again, holding her belly with one hand and her sacks of supplies with the other, which they’d insisted on giving her. She also promised to send Mauro when her waters broke. But she never sent for anyone, in the end, and the little brother was born in the month of December at two o’clock in the morning, by the grace of God, said the priest, because they all got off lightly. What he didn’t say was that a sad twist of fate would surely have been preferable, because the mother hardly needed a fourth mouth to feed, and more than once she’d worried about the future, with this little brother coming at the worst possible time, smack during birthing season—but in this case, she meant her sheep. However, the damage was done, and the mother had given birth on her own, on her feet. At daybreak the brothers found the newborn baby in his cradle. They asked no questions, went no closer. The mother, somewhat pale, served them dried beef with eggs and a mug of coffee, and assigned the work for the day. She herself rearranged a few things in the house, then after breakfast she went to plant two hundred feet of potatoes, with the little brother bundled on her back.

  In the evening Steban noticed that the newcomer cried a lot, but as usual, he said nothing.

  “Don’t look at him,” scolded the mother when she caught him staring into the baby basket. “You’ll bring him bad luck.”

  And he turned away.

  With the father gone, the mother closed the house to visitors. It was not like they’d ever had a lot of visits, and now there were even fewer. From time to time an uncle, particularly in the beginning, to show that they looked after their kin. More often, a buyer for cattle or wool, or a breeder who wanted to negotiate access for his beasts to graze on the mother’s lands—she earned a few more pennies that way, renting out her meager pastureland. But most of the time the days passed and no one but she or her sons ever crossed the threshold. Even when they ordered her to put the boys in school she didn’t budge. They weren’t about to come out and get them with a rifle in their hand, now, were they.

  So, for the first time in years, she had peace. Even if it was at the cost of backbreaking labor: she accepted it.

  When she’d married the father and come to live on the estancia, she knew that her husband’s old man lived there, too. What she didn’t know was that he’d last so long. In San León everyone had assured her that the old geezer wasn’t long for this world, given the quantity of alcohol he consumed. Drunk from morning to night—as soon as she arrived she could see that it was true. But as for his allotted time, that was another matter altogether. The twins were born three years later, and the old man was still tippling to his heart’s content. Then Steban, two years after that, on whom the old man spilled a glass of whiskey, stumbling as he went to view the newborn swaddled in his crib. He drank up half of all their income. Sometimes the mother said something to the father, and they had it out. The next day she had a bruise on her cheek, a swollen eye, and nothing had changed. Worse than that: the father had begun drinking, too. Sprawled across the table he filled one glass after the other, telling incoherent stories to the old man’s approval. They lured each other into tales only they could understand, in their drunkard’s dialect, and the brothers looked at them askance, fascinated and vaguely disapproving, until eventually the mother took the bottle away, shouting that that was enough. Some evenings there were fights, because the men clung to their glasses, and they bellowed insults the boys did not understand.

  “Go to bed!” roared the mother, and they ran straight to their rooms
, and for a long time they listened to the shouts and insults coming down the corridor, the sounds of bodies clashing, thumping.

  So when at last the old man died, the night the twins celebrated their fifth birthday, the mother felt the relief spread all the way through her, to the marrow of her bones. A sort of evil, radiant joy, which could have set her dancing had the fear of being seen by the father not prevented her. She’d found the vile old man lying stiff on the floor next to the woodstove, with an injury to his temple. A nasty fall, which he wouldn’t have had if he hadn’t drunk so much, she told the father, who was weeping his eyes out. That same night she’d let her husband back into her bed, to console him.

  But the evil was there now and her man, on his own now, went on drinking for the both of them. He would put a glass down in front of him and pour as if the old man still had his ass glued to the other chair. And in fact it seemed to the mother as if the old man must be laughing all the way from the hell he’d surely landed in, that swine of a man who’d almost ruined them and was still hard at his devil’s work. When she wiped down the table in the evening, using vinegar to remove the smell of alcohol encrusted in the wood, she ruminated, champing at the bit. She’d waited eight years for the old man to croak; but if she had to put up with a drunk of a husband for the rest of her life, she wouldn’t make it. He was working less and less, searching for the bottles she hid with the obstinacy of a hunting dog on the trail of some wounded game. Mauro and Joaquin often found him at the edge of a pasture, vomiting bile and brandy. He’d jabbed a horse, trying to shoe it, leaving it incapacitated for two weeks. He screamed at the mother every day. And things weren’t getting better.

  And yet that night when the mother had struck the first blow, regardless of all the spite she’d accumulated and the urgency that had gone into it, she did not think the father would die of it.

  She’d found him in the barn, collapsed in the hay, an oil lamp at his feet. In his right hand was the bottle of spirits, nearly empty. She’d screamed, because of the alcohol and because of the flame, she’d frightened him gesticulating like that, was how he put it to her afterwards: that was why he had knocked over the fuse. In a few seconds, the fire had caught in the fodder, a terrifying vision, the smoke running all along the bales and its warm breath already upon them. The mother rushed over to pick up an old blanket and tossed it on the burning hay to smother the flames, slapping over and over at the fire that escaped to the left, to the right, burning the skin on her wrists and arms. When she collapsed next to the father, in shock, but with the building safe, he grunted in a thick voice that when she’d burst into the barn he thought she was a she-devil. And he added, “You just never bloody leave me alone.”

  That was when she began to hit him.

  Maybe it had been smoldering for years, this rage that flared up all on its own, without her thinking about it, this fury suddenly taking hold of her, enough to make you wonder if that was all she’d been waiting for, and the father whimpering there beneath her, the man with nothing to say, just silent, and she hit him again and again. And maybe it was the blow she gave him in the end when she kicked him in the throat with the tip of her boot, the rage at seeing her life destroyed, her sheep and cattle sold for bottles of hooch year after year: she only stopped when he was no longer moving.

  No longer moving, ever.

  In the middle of the night she harnessed Rufian and slung the father’s body over the saddle—he was heavy, she had to start over four times before she got him to stay up there where she could lash him on properly. She led him out to the swamp, the only one anywhere around, at the foot of the little chain of mountains, where the will-o’-the-wisps dance, where no one dares to go. The mother knew that was all nonsense, and she knew of no better spot to get rid of the body. Because it didn’t take her long to think it through: she didn’t want to go to prison or lose the estancia, or even the sons whom she’d now have to raise on her own, including the one who was on the way, who’d stopped her bleeding two months ago now. A free woman, that was what she was—she’d never been more free, and the thought of getting herself locked up at this very moment when the horizon was at last opening to her seemed an unacceptable injustice. She spent the early hours of the night working out her plan. She would say that the father suddenly vanished, on impulse, that he’d abandoned her and her sons, and everyone would acknowledge the fact with a pat on the shoulder to encourage her, because no one would disbelieve her. He’d been up to no good for so long. Some neighbors would try to console her by assuring her he’d be back, he wasn’t such a bad fellow; she’d burst into tears, sure she’d never see him again, and in San León people would whisper that the father was a real bastard for leaving a woman who needed him so badly.

  Yes, that was how it would all go, without any suspicion, without a hitch. Once she felt calm, the mother led Rufian to the middle of the swampland, trying not to think of what might be clinging to her legs, and for all that she was lifting her knees high as she walked. There was something terrifying about the swamps at night. The quagmire could hide all sorts of creatures, all sorts of traps; the moonlight mingled the territory of sky and water, gray and wan, obscured by the tree branches that were too thin and too dense, and once when the mother looked behind her to make sure the father was properly attached to the horse, the path she had come on had vanished. She would find her way: she was born here. But it made a strange impression, as if the swamp were slowly closing over her, waiting for her to unload her burden in order to snatch her and swallow her in turn. One wrong step and she’d sink in and not be able to get out again. Yet the horse was walking by her side: she had infinite faith in his instinct. She moved closer to him, and with every step the father’s legs swung against her hip.

  As she slid the body into the muddy sands, she spread wide his arms and legs so he’d be as flat as possible, already half hidden by the rushes. She exerted a slight pressure with the tip of her foot, the better to push him into the welcoming silt. And like a sentry who refuses to be budged, she’d planted herself further back on a patch of solid ground, regularly testing the earth with her foot to make sure it would not give way, pulling the horse forward with her. She wanted to be sure. In a low voice she rehearsed the words she would be saying in the days to come: He’s gone, he just left us, just like that, the kids and me, all alone, yes, he left, I don’t know where he went, he didn’t say. No, I don’t think we’ll see him again.

  After an hour had gone by, in the stagnant air of the swamp, the father’s body was entirely buried beneath the thick grasses, and the mother knew that no one would ever find him, because the insects and foul beasts that hid in the water would get to him soon enough.

  RAFAEL

  The little brother comes tearing around the bend in the road, lying close against his chestnut’s mane, urging him to gallop faster. In one hand he’s holding the reins. In the other, a hat. Behind him, his three brothers are snapping leather straps on their horses’ flanks, yelling, but he knows it’s to no avail: none of them can catch Halley. He almost lets slip a cry of wild joy—last year when he laughed too hard with his mouth wide open he swallowed a fly, and there are evenings when he can still feel the nauseating sensation of the insect’s legs tickling his tongue at the back of his throat. He half turns in the saddle to look back and senses more than sees Joaquin’s face, distorted with rage; he hears Mauro’s hollering. Steban is right behind him, following the others in silence, the mute and passive accomplice of the wars waged among the brothers. So Rafael sits up, imperceptibly, slowing his chestnut, the horse balks and shakes his head to protest, spewing drops of foam. Rafael whispers, laying a hand on his shoulder:

  “Easy, easy . . . ”

  Rafael laughs at the tension in the reins, the horse’s anger as he refuses to calm down, thrusting his forelegs forward, gathering in his powerful hindquarters. Behind them, the pounding of hooves takes only a few seconds to come closer. Like every time, a wave of fear
goes through the little brother, immediately replaced by the excitement of the chase. He waves the hat, arm outstretched, and lets out a cry, and he can hear Joaquin’s roar of anger, You fucking asshole! and his criollo panting as it reaches Halley’s stride, biting his rump. For a hundred yards or more the two horses gallop side by side, ears flattened, lips pulled back from their teeth: only the bit is keeping them from gnashing each other in the cheek. Rafael leans to the right to avoid his chestnut’s furious thrusts of the neck, and he can see the reins wet with sweat, and the horse’s white nose, almost pink at the corner of his mouth, where there is a gleam of steel. He drives him on, clicking his tongue, Come on, come on, is nearly unseated by the horse trying to rear to get away from the hand restraining him, rolling his eyes, intoxicated, exasperated. The little brother gives a sudden tug on the reins and laughs, then some slack, feels giddy with the way Halley propels himself forward now, muscles tense between the boy’s thighs as if they were about to explode. Rafael feels the wind in his hair, in his eyes as they narrow against the dazzling sunlight. The wild gallop, and yet he is hardly shaken for all that; both of them are flying, like woodpeckers low to the ground about to soar skyward with a single flap of their wings. Until Mauro shoots them down with his rifle. For no good reason. For a laugh. They don’t even eat them.