In the Time of Butterflies (26 page)

Like I said, it must have been the Lord’s tongue in my mouth because back then, I was running scared. Not for myself but for those I loved. My sisters—Minerva, Mate—I was sick sometimes with fear for them, but they lived at a distance now, so I hid the sun with a finger and chose not to see the light all around me. Pedrito didn’t worry me. I knew he would always have one hand in the soil and the other somewhere on me. He wouldn’t wander far into trouble if I wasn’t along. But my son, my first born!

I had tried to shelter him, Lord knows. To no avail. He was always tagging along behind his Tío Manolo and his new Tio Leandro, men of the world who had gone to the university and who impressed him more than his country father. Any chance he got, he was off to the capital “to see Tía Mate and the baby Jacqueline,” or to Monte Cristi “to visit Tia Minerva and Minou and the new baby Manolito.” Yes, a whole new crop of Mirabals was coming up. That was another possible explanation for my pregnancy—suggestion. After all, whenever we were together for a while under the same roof, our cycles became as synchronized as our watches.

I knew my boy. He wanted to be a man outside the bedroom where he had already proven himself. That widow woman could have started a school in there, the way I understood it. But I didn’t resent her, no. She delivered my son gently into manhood from his boyhood, something a mother cannot possibly do. , And so I thought of a way for Nelson to be in the capital, under supervision so he wouldn’t be running wild with women or his rebel uncles. I talked to Padre de Jesus López, our new priest, who promised to talk to Padre Fabré about letting Nelson enroll in Santo Tomás de Aquino in the capital. It was a seminary, but there was no obligation to the priesthood.

At first Nelson didn’t want to go to a school of pre-priest sissies. But a couple of weeks before the start of classes during the heavy plantings in the yucca field, he had a change of heart. Better to abstain from the gardens of delectable delights than to be stuck planting them, dawn to dusk.

Besides, his weekends would be his own to spend at his aunt Maria Teresa and his uncle Leandro’s house.

Besides, some of those pre-priests were no sissies at all. They talked about pudenda and.
cunnilingus
as if they were speaking of the body and blood of Christ. How do I know? Nelson came home once and asked me what the words meant, assuming they were liturgical. Young people don’t bother with their Latin these days.

Next step was to convince his father, and that was the hardest of all. Pedrito didn’t see why we should be spending money sending Nelson to a boarding school in the capital. “His best school is right here beside me learning about his
patrimonio.”

I didn’t have the heart to suggest that our son might not want to be a farmer like his father. Recently, Nelson had begun talking to me about going to the university. “It’s just for a year, Papi,” I pleaded. “It’ll be a good finish to his education.”

“Besides,” I added, “right now, the seminary is the best place for him.” It was true. Johnny Abbes and his SIM were dragging young men off the streets, and farms, and from offices, like Herod the boy babies in all of Judea. The church, refusing as it did to get involved in temporal matters, remained the only sanctuary.

Pedrito folded his arms and walked off into his cacao fields. I could see him pacing among the trees. That’s where he always went to think, the way I have to get down on my knees to know my own mind. He came back, put his big hands on either side of the door frame his great-grandfather had built over a hundred years ago, and he nodded. “He can go.” And then with a gesture indicating the green fields over his shoulders that his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father had farmed before him, he added, “If the land can’t keep him, I can’t make him stay.”

So with the help of good Padre de Jesus, Nelson entered Santo Tomás de Aquino last September. Out of harm’s way, I thought.

And for a while, you might have said that he was as I was—safe in God’s love.

I’ll tell you when I panicked. Around Easter my Nelson began to talk about how he would join the liberators once the rumored invasion from Cuba hit our shores.

I sat him down and reminded him what the church fathers were teaching us. God in his wisdom would take care of things. “Promise me you’ll stay out of trouble!” I was on my knees before him. I could not bear the thought of losing my son.
“Por Dios,”
I pleaded.

“Ay,
Mamá, don’t worry!” he said, looking down at me, embarrassed. But he gave me a lukewarm promise he’d stay out of trouble.

I did worry all the time. I went to Padre de Jesús for advice. He was straight out of seminary and brimming with new ideas. He would have a young way of explaining things I could bring home to my son.

“Padre,” I said, kissing the crucifix he offered me, “I feel lost. I don’t know what the Lord requires of us in these hard times.” I dared not get too critical. We all knew there were priests around who would report you to the SIM if you spoke against the regime.

Still, I hadn’t given up on the church as Minerva and Maria Teresa had. Ever since I’d had my vision of the Virgencita, I knew spirit was imminent, and that the churches were just glass houses, or way stations on our road through this rocky life. But His house was a mansion as big as the sky, and all you had to do was pelt His window with a pebble-cry, Open up! Help me, God! and He would let you inside.

Padre de Jesus did not intone vague pronouncements and send me home with a pat on the head. Not at all. He stood and I could see the travail of his spirit in how he took off his glasses and kept polishing them as if they’d never come clean. “Patria, my child,” he said, which made me smile for he couldn’t have been but five, six years older than my Nelson. “We must wait. We must pray.” He faced me. “I, too, am lost so that I can’t show you the way.”

I was shaking like when a breeze blows through the sacristy and the votive candles flicker. This priest’s frankness had touched me more than a decree. We knelt there in that hot little rectory, and we prayed to the Virgencita. She had clung to Jesus until He told her straight out,
Mamá, I have to be about My Father’s business.
And she had to let him go, but it broke her heart because, though He was God, He was still her boy.

I got braver like a crab going sideways. I inched towards courage the best way I could, helping out with the little things.

I knew they were up to something big, Minerva and Manolo and Leandro. I wasn’t sure about Maria Teresa, caught up as she was with her new baby Jacqueline. But those others, I could feel it in the tension and silence that would come over them when I walked in on one of their conversations. I didn’t ask questions. I suppose I was afraid of what I would find out.

But then Minerva came to me with her six-month-old Manolito and asked me to keep him. “Keep him?” I, who treasured my children more than my own life, couldn’t believe my sister would leave her son for anything. “Where are you going?” I asked, alarmed.

That tense silence came upon her, and then haltingly, as if wanting to be sure with each step that she was not saying more than she had to, she said, “I’m going to be on the road a lot. And I’ll be coming down here for some meetings every week.”

“But Minerva, your own child—” I began and then I saw it did hurt her to make this sacrifice she was convinced she needed to make. So I added, “I’d love to take care of my little godson here!” Manolito smiled and came readily to my arms. How delicious to hold him like my own baby five months ahead of time. That’s when I told Minerva I was pregnant with a boy.

She was so glad for me. So glad! Then she got curious. “Since when are you a fortune teller to know it’s a son?”

I shrugged. But I gave her the best reason I could. “I’ve got a name all picked out for a boy.”

“What are you going to name him?”

I knew then I had brought it up as a way of letting her know I was with her—if only in spirit. “Raúl Emesto,” I said, watching her face.

She looked at me a long moment, and very simply, she said, “I know you want to stay out of trouble, and I respect that.”

“If there should come a time—” I said.

“There will,” she said.

Minerva and Manolo began coming down every week to Ojo de Agua from Monte Cristi, almost from one end of the island to the other. Now, whenever they were stopped at the interrogation stations, they had a good excuse for being on the road. They were visiting their sickly son at Patria González’s house in Conuco. Monte Cristi was too hot, desert really, and their doctor had prescribed healthier air for the little boy.

Every time they came, Leandro drove up from the capital, and this curly-headed man Nino and his pretty wife Dulce came over from San Francisco. They met up with Cuca and Fafa and one named Marien—though sometimes they called each other different, make-believe names.

They needed a place to meet, and so I offered them our land. There was a clearing between the cacao and the
plátano
groves. Pedrito had put some cane chairs and hammocks under a thatched roof, a place for workers to rest or take a siesta during the hot part of the day. Minerva and her group would sit out there for hours, talking. Once or twice when it was raining, I’d invite them to come into the house, but they’d refuse, knowing it was just politeness on my part. And I was thankful to them for sparing me. If the SIM came, Pedrito and I could always swear we knew nothing about these meetings.

It was a problem when Nelson was home from school. He’d go out there, eager to take part in whatever his uncles were plotting. In deference to me, I’m sure, they kept him at a distance. Not in any way that could hurt his young man’s pride, but in a comradely way. They’d send him for some more ice or
cigarrillos
or please Nelson, hombre, couldn’t he take the car down to Jimmy’s and see what was up with that radiator since they had to make it back to the capital this very night. Once, they sent the poor boy all the way to Santiago to pick up batteries for the short wave.

When he came back from delivering them, I asked him, “What’s going on out there, Nelson?” I knew, but I wanted to hear what he knew.

“Nothing, Mamá,” he said.

Then the secret he was keeping became more than he could contain. When it was almost June, he finally confided in me. “They’re expecting it this coming month,” he whispered. “The invasion, yes!” he added when he saw the excited look on my face.

But you know why that look was there? I’ll tell you. My Nelson would be in school in the capital until the very end of June, out of harm’s way. He had to study hard if he expected to graduate in time to attend the university in the fall. We had our own little plot cooked up to present to his father—the day before university classes started.