Hard Red Spring (4 page)

A flaming rock the size of a man's fist hit the side of the police station behind them, leaving a hole in the stucco. Ixna turned away. Mother's mood turned sharply at this close call. She reopened her parasol, pulled Evie under its protection, and walked toward the safety of the church.

“Now do you see?” she yelled over a sudden shout of trumpets. “Now do you see our predicament, trying to conduct reasonable and civilized business in a place like this?”

Two young Indian women, Ixna's age, walked past with very large babies, their heads covered in black sacks. Almost all the Indian babies in town had their heads stuffed in black sacks, always, to protect them from evil spirits. A fact that made the image of her own sister arriving in a sack one day very plausible to Evie. Mother eyed these young mothers as if they had walked across on cue to make her point.

The band had come all the way from Guatemala City. They played “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic” over and over, with no flourish or variation. But with all music, there are rests. Not even the Guatemalan Army could deny that. Even as they denied the ash that rained down, clogging their instruments and forcing some to shake their horns clear, even as one of the trumpeters was knocked in the head with a flying rock and fell down and did not move, they could not deny those beats of silence at the end of each verse. And so everyone stood waiting for it. The director tried to hurry through those rests, waving his arms frantically, as if he himself summoned the rumblings in the distance that seemed, along with Mother, to get angrier with each verse.

A crowd had congregated near the church to watch the performance. The huge limestone cathedral sheltered them from the occasional flying, flaming rocks and blocked much of the ash. Mother pulled Evie up the main steps—past the poor Indians sitting at the bottom, then Ladinos, then the rich Spanish-speaking Guatemalans above them. At the top sat the foreigners, like them, the Germans and French, a few Americans. Mother walked past everyone and into the high, hollow church, where the band's song was transformed into ominous echoes.

Evie had never been inside the cathedral and was disturbed by its decadence. Muddy paintings framed in bright gold, the pictures so muddled and dark that it was not until they got close that Evie could see the scenes: men hanging from trees, a man holding his own severed head.

They sat down to wait and rest in safety. Who knew where Ixna had gone? Indians came and went, lighting candles. Up front, Jesus on his cross looked like the saddest man on earth, with his open eyes rolled up to the sky and his ribs showing. Below him, a line of little girls in sack dresses prayed on their knees. At least thirty girls, all dark, black-haired. A nun paced nearby, watching. Evie had never seen so many little girls in Xela, so many so close to her age.

“Mother.” She tugged at her sleeve. “Who are they?”

“Orphans.”

“What are orphans? Can I play with them?”

“Orphans are children without parents, Evie. You can't play with them.”

“How did they lose their parents? Do parents die?”

“Of course not, Evie. Sometimes they just can't afford to keep their children, so they drop them off here.”

“What are they doing?” It was shocking to Evie that children could lose their parents at all, although it seemed that orphans could only be little girls.

“It seems they've been instructed to pray the volcano away. Or maybe the army.”

~~~~~

The band played for two and a half days without stopping, though the ash had finished by the next day. Father said that they brought in replacements so they could play in shifts. For two days, all through the day and night, Evie could hear those drums all the way up their mountain. She would find herself walking to the beat, chewing, breathing. Even Magellan the bird could not resist the beat. He ignored his food, his water, and any effort on Evie's part to communicate, but he did acknowledge the drums. If Evie sat far enough away and pretended she wasn't watching, he would turn his head almost perpendicular to his body and bob to the rhythm, as if it made perfect sense to him.

She thought often of the orphan girls, too, lined up and praying for two days.

Evie asked Father what all this could be. If it wasn't the volcano, then what was it? He assured her that it was the volcano, that he had climbed the range and seen it himself. It looked like a big mouth smoking a cigar.

“Then why does the paper say it isn't the volcano?” Indeed, the paper had gone from not mentioning the volcano at all to explicitly denying the eruption.

“A hundred years ago, Evie, there weren't newspapers down here. A hundred years ago, no one would deny that volcano erupting. Not even the Spanish. But progress is a funny thing. Newspapers aren't for news, Evie. They never were.”

“What are they for, then?”

“For coloring,” he said, handing over the latest edition.

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” stopped. Evie was on the porch helping Ixna, when the beat that had been regulating their lives for the past two and a half days just stopped. Evie looked up at Ixna—who also looked up, cleared a stray hair from her face, and then went back to her sweeping.

~~~~~

Father stood on the porch in a pose of determined, casual calm, a tense smile fixed on his face as he stared down at the newspaper Judas had brought from Xela. The sun was back, high and red. The days now were stuck in perpetual dawn with the ash lingering in the atmosphere.

Mother, standing next to him, did not smile. Not even a little. Not even in
her exasperated way. Evie saw a new expression on her face, one of despair. The band had worn her down over the past sixty hours. The assault by music, her beloved medium, had unhinged her. Criminals and thieves she could understand, but absurdity proved to be too much. After a particularly scary story from Ixna, Evie had asked Mother the scariest story she'd ever heard.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, she had replied.

Father, on the other hand, remained calm. To him, Guatemalan politics were akin to natural disasters. No use getting upset, you merely endured and recovered. He'd been executing funny dance steps for two and a half days.

They gave the paper to Evie to color in. She could not read the Spanish, but she knew what it said. They'd been talking about it in escalating whispers all morning, the sound of the drums replaced by their quarrel. On the front page, she began to fill in the picture of the President. She'd give him horns. Every time his picture appeared in the paper, which was quite often, Evie colored him a different way to make Father laugh.

That day's newspaper published two decrees from the President. One: that a volcano had indeed erupted in Mexico five days before. A strong wind had blown the ash into Guatemala and aid was being sent to the affected coffee plantations. This decree, printed in Spanish, English, and German, made everyone laugh—Father heartily, Mother nervously. But the second decree had started the fight. The President had instituted a labor draft to provide this aid. Every male Indian in the highlands would be rounded up tomorrow and taken to the Piedmont to save the coffee. Anyone caught ducking the draft would be whipped and forced to work anyway like the others, but in shackles.

“How can we possibly keep this running now,” Mother said, not like a question. Seated at the table, Evie studied her work, trying to come up with something more than horns on the President that would make them both laugh.

“Oh,” Father mused, “there are ways.”

Turning to the second page, Evie found a picture of the Catholic church, which had collapsed hours after they'd been sitting under its protection. What had happened to the orphan girls? Only the steps remained, perfectly intact, leading up to a pile of grainy black-and-white rubble.

“There is no way to run a farm without workers, Robert.”

It had never occurred to Evie that a building could collapse, let alone a church. All this time, she had felt protected somehow, living in their little chapel on the mountain. Now she stared up with fear at the lumpy walls, the pitched ceiling.

“We could sell some things, maybe. It says any Indians indebted to a farmer are exempt. It says here, any Indian five hundred pesos or more in debt. We could loan them money to keep them here.”

Evie began to color in the church ruins with a dark blue pencil. She would have used white, but experience had taught her that she needed bold, dark colors when filling in the newspaper. Anything less would just smear the ink and make everything gray.

“What do we have to sell, Robert?” Mother's tone caused Evie to pause, unable to color well and listen at the same time. “Of course, something of mine.”

“Well, Mattie,” Father joked, feeling her out with his playful blue eyes, “you have such nice things.”

“How convenient for you.” Mother regained her composure just as quickly as she'd lost it, though her cheeks remained two scorched circles.

“I would if I had anything, if I came from rich folks—”

“I have an idea!” Mother clapped. “How about Evie?”

Evie looked up from not drawing.

“She's half yours. We could hire out Evie! Hey, why not? She'd bring in a good price.” Mother's gaze glittered with possibility. “The coffee plantations would take her, for sure. Or one of the new banana farms. You like bananas, Evie.”

Father chuckled with horrifying lightness. “Now, that's an idea.”

Evie dropped her pencil and choked on the sob in her throat. It had been a long time since she'd wanted to work on a banana plantation, didn't they know that? She had learned what it was actually like from Judas, who had worked on the coast for years. Whippings, rotten beans to eat, yellow fever. And the coffee plantations were no better, according to Ixna. Evie stood up from her chair, shaking, with tears in her eyes.

Mother drew her in, embracing her roughly with a little, harried laugh. “We're just joking, sweetie. We're not going to sell you to anyone. How could you think that? You're old enough to know when your father and I are teasing.”

“That's a nice picture, Evie,” Father commented, turning the newspaper back to the front page. The President of Guatemala with horns and gold peso eyes. “You understand the situation here more than anyone I know.”

—

They sent Evie to the kitchen, so they could argue in earnest. There, she tried to feed Magellan. He was not doing well. Evie had yet to convince him
to eat anything. She had tried worms and flies, berries, beetles, and bread. Everything she pushed into the slats of the chicken crate rotted or crawled away.

How do you force food on someone? He must be starving.

No one cares about bread down here
, Mother had begun to mutter to herself a few months ago.

It was true. For two years now, Father tried to sell wheat at market to the Indians, but no one wanted it. He then sent his wheat far away to be ground into flour and then sent back, but still no one was interested. After that, he had Ixna bake breads and cookies, but no one would even try the free samples he offered. They approached his cart, in varying degrees of boldness, to see his blue eyes. Then they walked right on over to the piles of corn on either side. Not one Indian tried the grains, the flour, or the baked goods. Not even the animals would eat bread, Evie realized, watching Magellan defecate on his piece of toast. Not even Ixna, who had once almost starved to death.

From the age of eight until she came to the mountain, Ixna had worked on a coffee plantation, where they paid and fed the workers “per task.” By law, a task was supposed to take a day to complete, but tasks had a way of growing and taking three days. So she worked every day but only received food every three days. The coffee trees, however, were shaded with banana trees. Ixna could not help herself. The overseer caught her, whipped her, and she had to work a year to pay for the “damaged” tree.

It took so long to pay off the tree because Ixna was paid with worn-out pretend money to be cashed in every two weeks for real money. With nowhere to safely keep these slips of paper, she had to tie them to her body beneath her blouse while she worked. During the rainy season, as she worked through heavy rains, the strips of paper disintegrated against her skin and she could not get her work credited against her debt.

So when Mother threatened to sell Evie to a plantation, she had cried, thinking of starvation, bananas hanging over her head that she could not eat. Whips and dogs. She pictured Ixna, eight years old, a brown version of herself.

Considering all this, Ixna had no reason to complain about her work on the mountain, but Evie watched her now, plodding around their kitchen like a slave. How many different ways to cook wheat, to mix wheat, to make it look like something else? Breads, cookies, biscuits, cakes, thick floury pies. Something, anything, to convince the Indians.

Ixna did not like cooking with wheat and certainly did not eat it. She handled flour with visible disgust, moaning at the traces it left on her hands, the clouds it formed with a misplaced breath. She squeezed her eyes and mouth shut, averting her face, not wanting to breathe it in. But she made all of the dishes just how Mother told her, baked them for market knowing they would not be sold. Father's favorite wheat, the one he insisted would save the Indians, hard red spring, was reserved for breads. Beaten, risen, baked, and cooled by Ixna's strong hands, the loaves were fluffy on the inside, with a fortress of crust on the outside. By year's end, Father said, he would convert all his fields to hard red spring. The Indians needed to learn a new crop, for the higher, dryer land. The plantations were expanding, the government giving them all the communal corn-growing fields the Indians had used for centuries. They had a choice: adapt or starve. At the moment, they seemed to be choosing the latter.

“Ixna, why don't you eat our food?”