Nothing But Dust

by Sandrine Collette

  He’ll shear the one hundred and two ewes.

  All on his own if he has to.

  On the first day he does six ewes. Next to him lies the pile of wool, an untidy accumulation of scraps. Not once did he manage to peel off the fleece the way Mauro does, in one go, revealing with the last snip of his scissors a second skin in the shape of the sheep. All Rafael got was clumps and scattered handfuls, which he shoves into the bags, pressing down hard so it won’t show.

  Six ewes. All of them hurt. Not badly, benign nicks and cuts, when they move and the shears are already open, hardly serious gashes, drops of blood. Rafael took the vinegar from the kitchen to disinfect the sheep before letting them go. Mauro merely spits on his fingers and wipes the scratches with his thumb, a quick, careless gesture, so sure is he that the animals will heal all on their own; but the little brother is not as sure of himself, and he wants to do things properly. He talks to himself in a low voice, conversing with the mother. He justifies himself when he hurts a sheep, makes excuses when the wool drops off in ridiculous little pieces a couple inches long, apologizes. Once it’s hidden in the fleece of one thousand nine hundred properly shorn sheep, his harvest will be invisible, and he spreads it out, a little bit in each bag. He doesn’t give up. Because he cannot just let these sheep go like that, they would die from the heat by the end of spring, sweating, harboring too many germs and parasites in their tangled curls. And once disease gets in among the ewes, it spreads through the entire herd, as if they were giving it to each other on purpose. Then the wool is no good, and their skin itches and burns, even when you daub them with cob to help the scarring.

  Of course he couldn’t let them go without shearing them first.

  He nods to himself, tries to wedge the creature between his legs; she slips down. And yet she’s doing her best, immobile, resigned, her head turned to the side, she doesn’t look, doesn’t judge. She waits. Nearly there, apologizes the little brother, in a sweat. Between two ewes he runs to the kitchen to keep an eye on the vegetables, adds wood to the brazier. He doesn’t dare go into the mother’s room. He can hear the hammering, Mauro’s swearing. The floorboards cracking under the crowbars, as if the money might be hidden underneath. They threw the mattress out the window after slashing it to pieces with a knife. They must have emptied out the big wardrobe, spilled out the drawers; and the dressing table, the only piece of furniture she really cared for, will have been shattered and taken apart. He’d rather not see. By lunchtime, Mauro is foaming. Steban stands in his shadow, pale and withdrawn.

  “Have you finished?” Rafael asks timidly.

  “It’s not in the bedroom,” rages the tall twin. “We’ll keep going elsewhere. We’re going to search the kitchen.”

  “Oh, no!” protests the little brother. “We have to keep this room intact, we have to live somewhere, after all.”

  Mauro looks at him, nonplussed. Then agrees: “Fine. We’ll search here last. And anyway, this is where we spend most of our time, she’d never put it here.”

  “And what about the barn? There are hundreds of possible hiding places there.”

  They wolf down their bad meal—I hope you’re gonna learn how to make something better, and fast, complains Mauro—and rush out. Rafael listens to the brothers opening doors, their muffled shouts as they divide up the work. He washes the dishes, trying to hear what he can; the wind brings only incomprehensible sounds. Once he’s wiped the table he goes off to do his three ewes.

  In the evening Mauro tells Steban off: for not working fast enough, for not being methodical enough. The proof is that the half-wit doesn’t remember where he’s already searched in the barn, and where he hasn’t; he’s been rummaging with no logic, when he should have been working on a grid and not leaving one spot until he was sure he’d searched the whole area. The older twin is annoyed, he wanted to find the money right away, according to the dream he’d made for himself, and the little brother shakes his head in denial, what did they expect, maybe they both thought the mother had left it right out where they’d be able to see it, so they’d find it right away? He laughs at the thought, she was a clever old lady, and hell, they don’t even know how clever.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  When he sees how angry this makes Mauro, Rafael grovels, like a cat about to get attacked, ears flattened against his head and eyes half-closed as he waits for the blow. But the twin has his mind on other things and he gets up and paces back and forth, kicking the floor.

  “We have to start all over,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll get better organized.”

  “Besides,” murmurs the little brother, almost inaudibly, “there’s nothing left to eat.”

  “Well, we’ll kill one of your hundred and two sheep. That way you’ll have fewer of them to shear.”

  “It would be better if you took one of those I already did today, I think.”

  “What bloody difference does it make, one more or less? What the fuck do we care about a few pounds of wool, with the money that’s waiting for us?”

  “I’d just prefer it that way. That’s all.”

  “Yeah,” says the twin, “but at least if we kill her, she won’t wiggle, and maybe you won’t have as much trouble with your shears. Did you think about that?”

  He bursts out laughing and slaps his hands on his knees, and it is that raucous laughter that Rafael knows only too well, the laughter goes with alcohol and brawling, and yet he was careful to hide the last of the whisky after the mother died; now it’s weariness, waiting, tension. Timidly he murmurs:

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What, you think you’re going to stop me?”

  “Don’t take one who still has her wool.”

  “And what if I feel like it?”

  Mauro stands up to his full height, aware of how he intimidates the two of them, Steban and the little brother, and he pounds his chest. Show me who’s gonna tell me otherwise! He bounds away from the table with a laugh, brandishing his knife, running toward the pens while the little brother cries out in protest, and Steban restrains him by his sleeve. D-don’t, he’s g-gone c-c-crazy.

  In the light of the oil lamp, sniffling with anger, he shears the dead ewe, she is lying on his lap, and the blood runs onto his trousers and his pants and his shoes, but he doesn’t stop, by the time he finishes cutting the wool the brothers are already asleep, and he stuffs the sacks. In the silence of the night he sweeps the stable and the stained floor, feeling strangely lonely next to the creature, her eyes are wide open, staring at the roof beams above them, and the lamp causes fleeting shadows to dance over the walls.

  STEBAN

  For his second day in Mauro’s wake, Steban moves the stores of hay in the barn, lifting up the fodder and examining the ground attentively. All morning they’ve been picking things up and putting them back, digging and scraping, finding worn boards that they toss to one side, and the older brother’s furious complaints make him tremble every time, and curse the mother to whom he addresses his prayers, if only she could hear him. Make her agree to help them at last. But probably she doesn’t really want to, because all their searching is futile, they ferret through sheaves and cough with the dust and in the evening they leave the barn like exhausted miners, their faces black, their bodies stiff, and by the time they sit down at the table where the little brother serves them meat and vegetables, fatigue has triumphed over anger; shadows yawn beneath their eyes and they leave half their food on their plate.

  And Steban is really beginning to wonder whether, all things considered, it wouldn’t be better if the mother were still there, because life here with Mauro is turning sour, he loses his temper and jabs with his pitchfork, mindless of the fact that the half-wit is right there behind him, that would be too much, if he ends up crippling him, then there would be only two of them, the older brother tearing the house to bits and the little brother stubbornly shearing his sheep, and no one
to tell them what is right and what is wrong, to put things back in order, for sure Steban’s not the one who’s going to do it. Mauro’s fury upsets Steban, and he keeps as far away as possible in his corner of the barn, far from the pitchfork but also from the waves of hatred emanating from his older brother, leaving a chill down his spine. He is terrified by his older brother’s power: what if he loses his mind for good, if they fall victim to his rage Steban doesn’t rate the little brother’s chances of survival very high, or his own for that matter; the little brother especially, Mauro has always despised him, an immediate, gut aversion, as if Rafael couldn’t be his brother, given the fact that the father was already gone, and maybe that suspicion is at the origin of everything, the older brother’s ignorance, his inability or unwillingness to count nine months, all he saw was the arrival of this squalling little baby, and his mother, exhausted.

  If only he could find the words that would calm Mauro down. He’d have time enough to try, there with him in the barn. The irony of it is he can only open his mouth to stammer a few syllables, he’s learned to spit out what’s important and nothing more, and sometimes when he’s alone he practices, but to no avail. Not a single whole sentence wants to come out of his constricted throat, and yet it’s not the fault of his throat, he knows that, neither his throat nor his vocal cords nor his teeth, just his damned head which never got over the terrible fright of that night with the father, so terrible he’s never told anyone about it—but then, who would he tell?

  So, night before last, when they found the mother dead, he felt a very distant relief, a sort of rush in his guts, of tension finally being released, for the first time she could do no harm, never again would there be any danger of her taking him away too in the middle of the night, going home with the horse’s coat stained with blood, just a little there on his flank, where Steban’s legs would have been dangling. It is a huge comfort to realize this, and to know for certain that she’s buried in the ground and will never come out, after those hours of terror, yes, right to the end he thought he could see a tiny spark of life in her inert body, right up to the moment they left the orchard he thought the mother might rise up all of a sudden, call out, bang on the lid of the coffin. And everything would have been lost, they would have dug her out again and the fear would have started all over again. Whereas now.

  But Mauro’s violence is beyond anything he expected, and he wrings his hands in silence while the older brother, coming away empty-handed yet again, bangs the walls of the barn and screams, “Where is it? Where is it?”

  All the twin’s strength has gone into destruction, and the building is in ruins—the hay scattered everywhere, boards torn away, stores tossed to the ground. A vision of devastation, in which Steban is participating only out of cowardice, to escape a beating, but he’s used to it, his entire life has been a long apprenticeship of transparency and domination, down to the very name the older brother has given him: the half-wit, which offers him a certain peace and to which he submits without protest, so now he leaves the barn behind.

  The building looks as if a storm had swept through it, and they would just leave it like that, a monumental waste, were it not for the little brother.

  Because Steban knows that after supper the little brother will come and pick up the hay and stack it all again neatly, he’ll drive in a few nails to put the boards back in place, he’ll pick up the overturned churns and sweep the floor. He won’t leave the barn until it’s back the way it should be, a strange sprite repairing the damage his older brother has wrought, and never mind if Mauro smashes it all up again tomorrow, he’ll do it again, he’ll spend his life at it if he has to. Steban cannot understand what motivates the little brother to mend and restore so tirelessly, he’s vaguely fascinated by this determined struggle to keep the estancia going, and the way he said, at supper:

  “I did twelve ewes today.”

  “So what,” said Mauro, “you want a medal?”

  “And I only hurt five of them.”

  The twin gives his nasty laugh. “That’s still five too many. And your potatoes are still raw inside.”

  Rafael lowers his head.

  “It’s better than yesterday.”

  “It’s still disgusting.”

  “Didn’t stop you eating.”

  “Go on provoking me, you’ll see.”

  “And you didn’t turn your nose up at the chops, did you.”

  “You really are out to annoy me.”

  “I’m just saying, it might not be great, how I cook, but in the end you don’t seem to mind.”

  “Like I have a choice, for fuck’s sake!”

  This time Rafael doesn’t respond, and Steban begins to breathe more easily inside, slowly, feeling the specter of the quarrel move away, and it’s strange how as he observes the pair of them—the older brother getting more and more worked up, and the little brother snappy, digging his teeth in where he can—Steban feels sure that something is about to overflow, when neither one will back down, both convinced they are right, just a simple little thing, for sure, some petty little quarrel. Something will trigger it. Of course, since it’s him, the half-wit, who is having these thoughts, no one would pay him any attention if he actually spoke his mind, and yet he perceives things that others overlook without understanding, stubborn impressions, vibrations in the air, when he puts it like that it seems ridiculous, but he’s used to being taken for a fool, he keeps quiet, he observes. The rising tension. The disappointment that is poisoning Mauro, and the little brother running all over the place trying to do everything and forget nothing, neither the ewes nor the horses nor the dogs nor the hens, nor the vegetable garden, nor the house that the older brothers will soon be attacking, since the money must be there, they should know she wouldn’t hide it in the barn, they’d already searched there once before. Steban, to be honest, doesn’t even know why he too is hunting for the bag, because he knows full well that if they find it he won’t get a thing. He wouldn’t know what to do with the money, he would use it unwisely, or so Mauro would say when he confiscates his share. So what’s the point, he searches half-heartedly, more a question of moving furniture and items around than impatiently going through them, he doesn’t think, doesn’t even wonder where the mother might have hidden the money, he just waves his arms around so Mauro won’t suspect him of giving up, as they turn the loft in the barn upside down, already sure that the treasure isn’t there.

  On the third day he has to bandage Rafael: the shears, too big, are giving him blisters on his thumb and middle finger. The little brother had rolled a scrap of cloth around his hand to protect it, but it keeps sliding off and he has to put it back whenever it falls, and spends most of his time struggling with his rag-bound fingers.

  Summer ends and departs and they do not really notice, one morning they go out and for the first time they shiver. Steban looks up and realizes the birds have gone, abandoning their nests and refuges, and the twisted branches of the coihues. That morning he recalls that since the change of moon the sun has been less kind and the wind hasn’t dropped, blowing a chill air day and night, obliging them to turn up their collars and keep the fire going all the time. The brazier went out so they seek shelter by the stove in the house, and Rafael says, smugly: I told you we’d have to keep the kitchen tidy, otherwise where would we go now?

  For the first time Mauro is consumed with doubt: they’ve been searching for the treasure for six days now, and they’ve ended up going through their own bedrooms, you never know, could the mother have been that devious, to hide the money right under their noses, sneaking in soundlessly as they slept, laughing to herself about her despicable scheme. They tore up the floorboards, ripped out the walls. Apart from the kitchen, the house looks as if a tornado had barreled through it, a home ravaged by an insane fury. When he walks through it at night to go back to his bedroom, Steban gazes in silence at the ax-gutted walls, how they open a prospect all the way to the
end of the corridor. Boards have been piled here and there, studded with upturned nails, and Mauro punctured his foot on one of them the night before. The little brother looked after him the way he does the ewes, using vinegar, tearing up one of the mother’s old shirts for a makeshift bandage.

  “I’ll have to mix some plants so it won’t get infected,” he said.

  The twin grimaced.

  “Yeah, same plants you used for the old man you tried to save?”

  The little brother shrugs. Have it your way.

  He too seems to have given up. He no longer repairs the older brother’s destruction, but Steban sees him piling up the cracked boards, pulling out the twisted nails, and he knows he’s being patient, it is just a question of time, eventually Mauro will have to admit defeat. In the meantime Rafael is getting better and better at shearing, he comes home in the evening as proud as a peacock and he tells them about his day, in spite of the twin’s sarcastic remarks, either he’s decided he doesn’t care, or else he doesn’t hear him through all his own chatter and babble, he’s so absorbed by the progress he’s made, by his sheep, truth is it doesn’t matter if Mauro despises him, and the dogs sit behind him, their ears pricking forward when they hear their names.