Hard Red Spring (8 page)

“Oh, I see, Mr. Crowder.” He said their name real slow, and then he repeated it. “Crowder, I see what you are saying.”

“Not really,” Father stammered. “I didn't mean—”

“Do not worry. Americans are always saying things they don't mean. That's what makes your country so great. Freedom of speech. But I will give
you advice,” Mr. Ubico mused, lightly touching his gun, just to confirm its presence against his body. “If you are in Guatemala, American laws don't matter. Americans think the laws are here—they think
I am here—
only for the Indians. But I am your
jefe
, too.”

Father nodded, and Ubico grabbed his huge, limp hand and shook it many times. At this point, Father noticed that Evie was not outside with him. Their eyes met and he gave her such a peculiar, stunned look that she thought she had done something wrong. She was in trouble, suddenly, she had no idea why, but she tried to move quickly to join him, to fix her mistake. But Mr. Ubico stepped between them and fished into his pocket. “For the little wheat girl,” he said, pressing an already-sticky mint into her palm. She had no choice but to accept it, and no choice but to pass under his other arm, which now ceremoniously held the door open for her.

~~~~~

Guatemala was not at all how her parents had told Evie it would be. When they first proposed the idea, they painted pictures in her mind of perpetual spring. Ocean and beaches, year-round mild temperatures, flowers. Father brought home a pamphlet to show them.
Guatemala: The Land of Eternal Spring
. Cheap land, fertile soil, a vast, mobilized, and cheap workforce. A rainy season as predictable as the phases of the moon. The government pamphlet did not show volcanoes or Indians, but white-tiled mansions and flowering vines, pictures that inspired Mother to abandon her campaign for Europe and get behind the plan. In the Land of Eternal Spring, a spring wheat could provide an eternal crop.

In marrying Father, Mother had come down in the world, but she had married for love, she insisted to everyone. And that could not be bought for anything. Love had cost her, however. She had grown up with servants, a summer house in the country, and even a motorcar with a crank. With Father, she had none of these things.

According to Father's initial arguments for the plan, in Guatemala they would be rich, they could own land. In Guatemala, they would have servants. They would be richer than almost anyone but the plantation owners. These were not things they would be able to afford in Europe, he always reminded Mother.

For years, Mother had harbored dreams of moving to Europe. Only distance, she came to believe, would give her marriage dignity in the eyes of her family. In New York, her relatives pursed their lips at Father's accent, his grand plans, which he would outline to anyone, whether or not they asked.
Their humble apartment was a scandal to her mother, who was convinced Father had married Mother only for her inheritance. For all this, Europe seemed to be the answer, the gloss her life needed. But since Europe was played out, according to Father, and since they could afford a nicer life in Guatemala, she finally agreed to the plan.

After arriving, however, it soon became clear that being richer than people who could not even afford shoes was not much of an accomplishment. Nevertheless, Mother kept up appearances. In letters home to her mother, she insisted that she finally had it all: love and money. This proclamation became increasingly harder to make over the years as she periodically had to write a different kind of letter home, asking for money.

The things that had convinced Mother to come were not the same things that had convinced Evie. Evie loved bananas. Once Father informed her that they would be living where bananas grew, she no longer cared about leaving her friends, her school. She'd only had one banana in her life, but the pleasure had been vivid enough to stay with her for years. It was winter in New York and her mother had returned home with two bright yellow bananas. They fit in her hands like two door handles.

“I was walking by the pier and they were being brought off a boat! I paid a dollar each. Can you imagine, a tropical fruit making it to us in the middle of winter?”

The most important thing about bananas was knowing how to eat one properly. On two dessert dishes, Mother laid out the naked fruit and cut them up into small circles. “You must always eat them with a fork,” she cautioned. “Like a lady. I didn't know that at first. I made that mistake a few years ago. I bought a banana from the docks and peeled and ate it right there, in front of all the longshoremen! Just ate it with my hands. Can you imagine! I had no idea!”

Evie could imagine it perfectly, but could not imagine what was wrong with eating a banana with your hands.

Sweet, mild, and soft, her first banana felt like ice cream, if ice cream could be warm without melting. She loved the color, the shape. She loved the fact that her mother would pay a whole dollar for just one.

“You can eat all the bananas you want!” Father had promised Evie. “We will even make the journey there on one of the banana boats. What do you think of that?”

This was what she thought: Huge yellow boats shaped like bananas. Curved and fierce as Viking ships. She became nauseous with joy and
expectation, barely able to finish out the year at school. She told adults, her teachers, her friends, that she wanted to work on a banana plantation when she grew up. Her favorite color became yellow.

But the incomplete Guatemalan railroad made it entirely impossible to arrive on the Caribbean coast. Father even researched an alternate way of traversing the railroad gap, but the sixty-mile stretch connecting the east coast to the rest of the country was impassable. Swamps, malaria, yellow fever. Evie imagined people turned yellow, turned into bananas.

Instead, they were forced to take the exhausting route they did. On coffee boats.

But more disappointing than all this, Evie soon learned that bananas were even harder to come by in their part of Guatemala than in New York. Again, the incomplete railroad ruined everything. Nothing could make it across from the Caribbean coast, so it all went up to the United States. More and more bananas were making it up. Mother now read letters from New York in which vendors sold cooked bananas in the streets, their discarded peels becoming a public nuisance. Banana editorials and recipes and cartoons in the newspapers Grandmother sent. There were so many bananas in New York now, whole bunches for sale at the grocer's, and they had left just in time to miss out on it.

But even with these disappointments, Father remained committed. On their first night on the mountain, he struck a pose in the open church door and stared up at the wide net of stars cast over their existence.

“This is all ours, Mattie, can you believe?”

“Oh yes,” she reassured him. “I believe it.”

“We are the richest people on earth.”

Mother closed her eyes, took Father's hand.

“Everyone,” he continued, “everyone we know back home has plumbing and electricity and couches. But who in New York can say they own a mountain? Who in the world can say they own a mountain?”

~~~~~

Father said nothing on the ride home from Ubico's office—no jokes, no lessons, no songs. When Evie told him that the meeting had lasted for much longer than two minutes, he snorted some phlegm from his throat and spit off the side of the cart. Not knowing what else to do, Evie put Ubico's candy in her mouth. It tasted like it had been in his pocket for years, with old pennies. She turned and spit, too.

At home, after unhitching Tiny, Father stretched and tested his big joints, and smiled tensely at nothing. He went to check on the Indian workers, with the reins still looped around his hand. Evie followed, hoping to glean something, anything, that would explain what had just happened in Xela. Father, she realized, hadn't just been speechless or tongue-tied. By the very end of the meeting, he'd been afraid.

On the ride home she'd come to that conclusion, and then another: It wasn't just seeing her father afraid that frightened her. Despite the smiles, handshakes and apologies, she saw the source. Ubico had said their last name like he was chewing it.

Now she hoped for any word from Father that would convince her otherwise. But he didn't seem to be thinking of Ubico anymore. He remained focused on the harvest. “Why aren't these nets finished already?” he demanded, stepping into the group of Indian workers.

Judas explained that they had finished them; however, the holes in the netting Mani had bought were too large, so that the bugs might fall through. Judas didn't notice at first because he had been stocking the wood.

“Mani, why the hell would you buy this?” Father inspected the old netting, torn in long pieces on the ground. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

Mani's smudged, flat face tilted more intently to his work; he understood his name and Father's tone and nothing else. Everyone just kept working.

“Judas, translate!”

Judas pursed his lips and said nothing.

“Why is it that not one goddamned thing can go right here? Judas, translate!”

Father began to pace the supply shed, kicking at the discarded swaths of net and flailing his arms, Tiny's reins. No one looked up from their work.

“Oh, now I see how dedicated you all are. Translate!”

Judas mumbled something in what Evie guessed was Quiché, which only seemed to infuriate her father more. He kicked the box at Judas's feet. “That's not what I said!” Father yelled, though he understood no Quiché at all. “What did you tell them, Judas?”

“I told them to keep working. What is the point?” Judas asked evenly, using Mother's phrase. “What is the point of wasting time with argument? We have less than three days.”

Evie had never seen her father so angry before. A blue vein stood out over his temple like a worm, like his brain was infested with bright blue worms.
She wanted to leave, but became afraid to move and draw his fury. He kicked at the burlap sacks, the dust on the floor.

Father was pacing and kicking and then he kicked Mani, who shot up from the stool, dropping his net to the floor. “Get back to work!” Father cried. He unlooped the reins from his hand with a quick twirl and struck him across the cheek.

The whole mountain became very still.

“The point is that it's always something. Either Mani gets the wrong netting, or Raffie gets arrested, or you all get drunk and take advances from a coffee planter that I have to repay, or your cousin prays for an early rain to drown my crop! I'm helping you! I am helping your pathetic people, can you not understand that?”

They all blinked at him, not understanding a word, except for Judas, who placed a hand in one of the nets, testing its strength with twisting fingers. Mani's dark skin showed no mark from the lashing, but his hands were balled into fists.

“No one's sleeping, no one's eating, no one's taking a goddamned piss until these nets are finished, the wood is stocked, and you are all on your way down
my
mountain and on your way to the Piedmont. I am going to get two years' worth of work out of you in two days. I paid you, and you are going to earn it! And Judas, if you don't translate that, I'm going to break your goddamned back!”

Evie held her breath. She felt it, was sure she felt the snake stirring beneath them, angry. But no, it was Mother, stepping across the rickety floor.

“Robert.” She entered, wiping her hands on a towel, putting them all to shame. Everyone looked down, including Father. But her attention shifted to Evie. “Evie, how did you manage to get your nice dress dirty already? Ixna just washed it!”

Evie stared down at herself, unable to come up with an answer.

“How did your meeting with Ubico go?” Mother had put words to Evie's own question. In the beginning, the meeting seemed normal enough, just tense. Like Mother's teas with Mrs. Fasbinder. But then she was sure the end had gone terribly wrong. But now Father seemed to have other worries, like the nets. Maybe she didn't need to fear Ubico, yet another worry added to their life on the mountain. So she awaited the answer with as much hope as her mother.

“He said he'll talk to some people. He really wants to help.”

The matter-of-factness, the ease with which her father lied shocked Evie.
She knew Mr. Ubico had never said those words and she now felt more than ever the ground beneath her slipping, as surely as she'd felt the volcano moving beneath them just ten days ago.

“Well, that's good news, I guess. You didn't mention Boston, did you?”

“Of course not, Mattie. I'm not an idiot.”

~~~~~

By the time Mrs. Fasbinder arrived for her weekly tea with Mother the next afternoon, Father and the workers were uncovering the prickly pear fields for the harvest. All their clothes and hats and sheets lay in a sooty pile on the porch, a pile that their guest had to step over to get into the house. Usually well dressed for these teas, Evie and Mother wore their everyday clothes. They made up for it, however, by putting on their best white shoes. Evie was always grateful for an opportunity to wear hers.

The wife of a German American coffee planter, Mrs. Fasbinder lived on the other side of the volcano. She was generously proportioned with a pug face, sweaty but sweet-smelling, as if the perpetual gloss on her sallow skin wasn't perspiration at all, but perfume. In Mother's letters home, she always spoke of her dear friend Mrs. Fasbinder, which baffled Evie, since Mother didn't seem to like Mrs. Fasbinder at all. But she was their only visitor. The only reason to use the tea set and to wear nice clothes.

The Fasbinders had no children, but that day Mrs. Fasbinder arrived with a little Indian boy of five, wearing button breeches and a white blouse from one of the nice shops in town. His name was Tomás Raúl Mancha Egardo, Mrs. Fasbinder said, but they were thinking of changing it.

“I doubt that's even his real name. The nuns just make up these ridiculously long names for these orphans, to make them sound convincingly Hispanic. But they're almost all Indian. And this one is definitely, at least, half.”