Harriet Doerr (9 page)

A silence followed. The tree shadow edged out, like a pond spilling, over the parched soil.

Then Trinidad said, “I think you know the state of Michoacan, where I was born and lived all my life, in the village of Libertad, until I came here, to these dry hills, to be with my sister.”

At these words Sara Everton saw the state of Michoacán rise like a mirage from the clods of the field before her. As in the finale of a silent movie, when there appears behind the credits a vision of improbable rewards: a humble cottage almost buried in roses or a wire cage from whose open door two doves soar out of sight—like these illusory heavens, there now floated up before her the image of wet green meadows, red furrows of fertile earth, steep slopes of extinct volcanos serrated from crater to ground with ledges of ripening corn, low white houses almost crushed by their tile roofs. She heard the rush of water in ditches and canals and was not surprised when a lake materialized, drowning the famished plots of land, the baseball field, the cemetery and the naves of the churches. Within an hour there would be rain that would silver the surface of the lake as well as the leaves of the eight olive trees that lined the road.

Sara cast off her trance. “Yes, I know Michoacán,” she said, and asked Trinidad what had happened to her firstborn.

“The distance is so short, señora,” Trinidad said, “just fifty kilometers from Libertad to Obregón. Only one hour by the local train, and it stops often on the way. I traveled alone because my husband was to meet me at the end of the line, in the market town where he had gone the day before to sell a calf. In that short distance, in that single hour, it happened.”

Trinidad sat very still, her hands folded in her lap. “I thought the train would leave late, as usual, so I almost missed it. I had to run the last hundred meters, with the conductor waving from the step and the heads in the open windows leaning out to watch me, to see if the conductor would wait or not. I managed to pull myself up into the vestibule just as the train started to move. You know these trains, señora, only two second-class cars, one freight car, and the engine. I looked in both cars, and the wooden seats, each one intended for three people, seemed to be taken, and many of them by more than three passengers. So I was prepared to stand, no harm done, I thought, being young and strong, when the conductor showed me to the one place that was left, a seat on the aisle.”

Now Trinidad went on without pausing. “Across from me was a family of seven, all eating tacos from the mother’s string bag, except the baby, who was at her breast. In front of me near the window was an old man who fell asleep, and beside him an old woman who became ill from the motion and continuously coughed into her
rebozo.
Directly in front of me was a woman with a boy of three, who stood looking at me over the back of the seat. The woman bought him an orange crush and then another to keep him happy. When he started to whimper she spanked him, and the two orange crushes that had gone in and through him by then burst out below and ran in little streams onto my shoes from the seat where he stood.

“Next to me was a very quiet, very ugly girl. She had pale eyes with no lashes, and a long face. Perhaps she was quiet because she was ugly. She was with a man who sat next to the window. His mouth was twisted by a scar that slanted from his cheekbone to his chin. He was drunk and angry. I think he was trying to make the girl say yes, to admit something, but she only shook her head without speaking. Once he shook her shoulder hard enough to make her teeth rattle, and once he slapped her cheek so hard she cried. Twice the conductor came to warn this man, saying that he would put him off at the next stop if the disturbance continued. Then the man would look out the open window with his lips moving, one hand clenched to his knee and the other in his pocket, and we would have a moment’s peace.

“But he always returned to the argument, angrier than before, until at last, when there were only ten minutes of the trip left, the girl spoke, still not looking at him. ‘Then kill me,’ she said. And when he heard these words, out of his pocket came his hand, holding a knife that looked as if it lived there. He switched it open and stabbed her in the chest, in the neck, in whatever part of her he encountered, while she struggled and screamed, until the conductor came running and, with the help of three young men who were passengers, disarmed this man and took him away, his arms bound to his sides with rope.”

Now Trinidad looked at Sara. “And the plain girl, with her pale eyes wide open and blood pouring from her mouth like coffee from the pot, lay dead with her head on my shoulder and her blood running down to my knees, soaking through my shawl and my apron and my dress and my garments beneath. Soaking through my skin until it reached my unborn child and he swam in her blood.

“So great was my fright, señora, that I could not utter a word and no tears came. Two men carried off the girl, and when we arrived in Obregón a few minutes later, there stood my husband, fixed to the platform, thinking that the people from the train who helped me walk to him were bringing him an expiring wife.

“And so it was that my first son, Florencio, whom we call Lencho, was born five weeks before full term, and we feared he might bear some mark of the shock he and I had suffered. But, señora, he was a perfect baby, unmarked, unscarred. Only later we began to notice that when I dropped the cover of a pan, Lencho did not start and when I called to him by name he did not turn. So after a few months we realized that Lencho was deaf and a little later came to know that he couldn’t talk.

“Then I gave birth to more children, a year and a half apart, and we continued to farm our small plot of land in Libertad. Lencho was very intelligent. He watched our mouths and learned to understand some of the things we said. Of course, he could not go to school with the others. Instead, he helped his father plant corn and
chiles
in the spring, and every morning he took the cow to graze.

“And so nine years passed in that part of Michoacán, which is my
tierra,
my true home. One day my husband’s cousin came, who had not been in Libertad since he left to study at preparatory school and college, and then the university, where he was trained to be a doctor. He looked at Lencho and made him open his mouth.

“Then he told me I must take the boy to a specialist in San Luis Potosi, which is five hundred kilometers north of Libertad. The cousin said to waste no time. So I borrowed the money for the bus fare, promising young chickens and fresh cow’s milk in return. Two days after we arrived in San Luis the specialist operated on Lencho’s throat. The surgery lasted three hours, and afterwards, when Lencho was in his bed again, as white and quiet as a corpse, I thought: They have brought him back to this room to die.

“But when he woke up an hour later he turned his head toward a step or a voice. He started making sounds, and in the next weeks and months the sounds became words.”

Trinidad looked at the American woman. “Now I have told you how the Virgin protected Lencho,” she said.

Sara nodded. She said, “Yes.”

Trinidad, standing to leave in the gathering dusk, told Sara how soon after Lencho’s cure the whole family traveled across two states of Mexico to thank the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos, who is responsible for miracles of this sort. From the bus station they crossed to the church, where they waited for two hours in the courtyard, on their knees among the kneeling crowd, until it was their turn to enter. When they finally reached the altar, Trinidad lit a candle for Lencho to place among the hundreds already lighted there, and each child had a flower to add to the others that lay in heaps and sheaves at the Virgin’s feet.

“She might have walked away on flowers, señora,” said Trinidad.

By the time she went off with the empty egg basket, the shadow of the ash tree had climbed the eastern wall. Its branches scarcely stirred. The birds that inhabited it might already have settled in for the night.

Sara lingered there, staring across the darkening valley to the hills lying in full sun beyond. She closed her eyes and listened. For a few seconds no door slammed, no dog barked, no child called. It was so still she could hear the turn of a leaf, the fold of a wing.

The train from the border was two hours late, and when it finally rolled into the station, no one left the sleeping car.

“They missed it in Juárez,” said Richard Everton.

“Or were left behind after one of the stops,” said his wife, Sara. “In Palacios, or El Alamo, or Santa Luz. Maybe Steve wanted to take pictures.” But her concern began to sound in her voice. “As for Kate,” she went on, “Kate’s lived in so many time zones that she’s stopped needing clocks. She’s like the people here,” Sara said. “She tells time by the sun and the stars.”

And once more the Evertons walked the length of the train, from the locomotive to the rear car, making their way through crowds of laden passengers, boarding and unboarding the day coaches.

Richard was questioning the conductor when Sara called, “There’s Kate,” and waved to her friend, a reluctant, red-haired woman who clung to a furled umbrella and hesitated at the top of the train’s rear steps as if the platform were thirty feet below and in flames.

Sara had time to say to Richard, “Something’s wrong,” before she lifted her face to Kate and asked, “Where’s Steve?” For Kate had apparently come by herself to spend a week in Ibarra.

The Evertons stood with the porter below the vestibule, and all three raised an arm to bring Kate to them before she could suffer a change of heart and simply travel on.

At last she spoke. “I’m alone,” she said, and stepped down.

The Evertons led their guest away from the station, saying nothing to each other and only “No” to the vendors of bananas and tacos, baskets and lace. Except that Kate, approached by a ragged child crusted with dust, bought his entire stock of candy-coated gum and paid for it in dollars.

While Richard lifted Kate’s suitcases into the car, she stood motionless, her umbrella planted against the ground like a divining rod.

Richard took it from her. “There won’t be rain for three months. Not until June,” he said.

Sara, looking in the direction of the platform, said, “Here comes Inocencia.”

An old woman, wrapped in a number of shawls and bent as a gnarled branch, approached them in a patchwork of skirts that swept the dirt and stirred up discarded trash.

Ancient of days, Sara thought, and of winds and frosts and cobblestones. “Inocencia begs in Ibarra,” she explained to Kate, “and here in Concepción, when she can get a ride.”

On the way back to Ibarra, Kate sat with Richard in front, and Sara behind with Inocencia. I would like to call her Chencha, as the
cura
does, thought Sara. It is less formal. But there was something in the old woman’s blackbird eyes, something about her slippered feet set parallel on the floor, that discouraged intimacy.

They turned north from the station toward the mountains and in ten minutes were on a narrow road winding around hillsides and through gullies.

“How was the train?” Sara asked. “Did the fan work? Was there ice?”

As though she had not heard, Kate made no response. She has traveled so much that details like these are immaterial to her, Sara supposed.

Neither of the Evertons asked about Steve. Once Richard pointed to three silos clustered in the corner of a field like white wigwams and once to a vineyard covered with the green mist of breaking leaves. “Revisions in the landscape since you saw it last,” he said.

From the back seat Sara watched Kate nod.

After that Richard said nothing at all and Sara spoke once. Reminded when they passed the chapel of a crumbling hacienda, she said, “Next Wednesday is the Day of the Priests. We are invited to a program.” This information produced no answer.

Not until they turned west at a pond where cows grazed in the muddy bottom, not until the car started to climb toward the hills, did Kate utter a word. Then she said, “We are separated.” Not “Steve and I.” Simply “We.” As if she were pronouncing separation to be a universal condition, a state in which every man and woman slept and woke. Sara looked at the back of Richard’s head, as if for reassurance.

As they neared the summit of the mountain grade, Kate spoke again. “Steve decided at the border not to come. There was no way to let you know in time.” She appeared to be talking to herself. “He says living with me is like serving a sentence.” She might have been addressing the burro asleep on its feet in the road ahead of them.

But they blame themselves, Sara thought, in sight of each other, for the death of the child. Since the day of the accident, guilt has taken up quarters with them. And blame just outside the door, rattling the knob.

Divide the blame, Sara wanted to tell her friend, who sat mute and stiff in the seat ahead. Blame the precocious two-year-old and his suddenly longer reach. Blame the box beside the door, the latch that didn’t stick. Blame your quiet street and the one car on it. Blame the mother of five who drove it and who wept at the time and is probably weeping still. Blame her.