Hard Red Spring (2 page)

“That's all?” Evie had asked.

“What else? That is everything,” Ixna told her.

Evie considered Ixna her one and only friend in Guatemala and did not believe she had ever stolen anything from Mother. Though she was poor, Ixna didn't envy any of them or their things. Because of this, she and Ixna could be friends. When Mother first accused Ixna of stealing her last tin of ivory face powder, Ixna had laughed.

Evie had been bold enough to look in Ixna's basket once and had found pine needles and a red Indian blanket inside.

—

They lived in an old, gutted church on the farm that had been run by a priest years ago. Before this, the mountain had been communal land for the Indians, where anyone could plant or graze or pray. But the government seized it and sold it to the Church. The resident priest then divided the land into small plots that the Indians rented to plant food. But with the regime change twenty years ago, the priest had been thrown out of the country, and the land confiscated by the President, along with all the other “excessive” Catholic landholdings. After that, the government sold the land to a cochineal farmer, who moved in, planted cacti, then failed, or disappeared. Or both. Stories in town conflicted.

The church they lived in was small. Except for the cross on the roof, from the outside no one would even know it was a church. But still, Father had built a porch on the front, where steps used to be, and painted the whitewashed exterior brown, to make it all look less holy. The inside, which had been dark, was then whitewashed for the same effect. It was like the windowless church had been turned inside out.

As the afternoon grew strangely dark, Father was still gone on his ridge climb. As they waited for him, Mother instructed Evie to watch for lava out the one window they had. Father had cut this window to cheer up Mother, but it was almost always used to watch out for disaster: early rains, thieves, wild animals, and now the lava. How would lava come? A sudden lake of fire washing around them, a river cutting through their fields? And more importantly, what would Evie do if she did see lava? Because Judas said once you see it, it's too late to escape.

So many terrible things in the forest: criminals, lava, ghosts, animals.

“What about jaguars? Father left his gun.” Evie's fear amplified, seeing her own worried face in the dark glass.

“But he has Judas with him,” Mother reminded her.

Judas was Father's number one man because he spoke Spanish, English, and Quiché. And because he would sense a jaguar stalking them. Father said Judas's Indian mother had at first named him in Quiché. He had gone by this name for the first few years of his life. But when his mother became a Catholic, the nuns had encouraged her to rename him from the Bible. And they never could dissuade her from her choice.

When Judas did arrive, around dinnertime, Evie had mistaken him at first for lava. His torch bobbing in the distance was everything she had been dreading. A bright, seething eye seeking them out. Paralyzed with fear, she stood at the window and watched the flame appear intermittently, weaving its way leisurely toward the house.

He walked in the front door a few minutes later, holding a much smaller lantern that brightened the whole room and threw his dignified shadow on the wall. Despite his dark skin and flat Indian nose, Judas always wore European pants, shirts, and shoes. Sometimes Father and Evie went into the men's shop in town and selected pants, a shirt, and shiny lace-up shoes for him. Evie had the idea that Father paid Judas in these elaborate outfits.

Seeing Judas alone and in filthy disarray, Mother clutched herself and cried, “Where's Robert?”

“
Saber.
”
Saber
meaning something like,
Who knows?
in Quiché. Only, Judas never said it like a question.

“What? You've no idea? You lost him?”

Judas was immune to any tone of voice, even that of desperation. He shook the ash from his shoes, tapping the points on the floorboards, as Evie's world crashed all around her. Imagining life without Father, no jokes, no songs, no funny stories about important people drinking too much. Then, just as quickly, everything returned to normal.

“Evie, go get a chicken crate! Hurry!” Father's familiar voice, from the far end of the field, brought everyone to the front door. They could not see him at first. He did not have a lantern and blended into the dressed cactus field like he was on a crowded street.

He mounted the front porch, cleared all three steps in a single leap, with a half-full burlap sack bucking and heaving in his hands. Something huge and powerful, with what appeared to be fists, punched at the fabric. Father held it up triumphantly.

The first thing Evie believed upon seeing this was that Father had found her a sister in the woods. Just last year, her parents had announced to her that she would be getting a new brother or sister. How? She had asked just this. How will my sister arrive? Well, Father explained, she or he will come in a burlap sack. Like the ones we use for shipping? Like the ones for coffee? Yes, he had told her, exactly. But she had waited a long time and the bag never came. When she asked again, they seemed disappointed she had remembered the conversation. “We thought you were getting a sister,” Father
explained, “but the mail in Guatemala is terrible. You know we're always having problems. They delivered her to someone else, Evie.”

Then Mother cried.

“Robert, what is it?” Mother asked now, hugging herself, keeping inside the doorway.

“All I saw was red, blue, and green in my torchlight. Just these fabulous bright colors, down low in a bush.”

“But what is it?”

“I thought I was hallucinating. It's the most incredible thing, Mattie. The most beautiful creature. I knew you'd never believe me if I described it to you, so I jumped on it with the bag.”

So, not a baby. A creature. With this, a more terrifying possibility occurred to Evie. A ghost. Father had caught one of the ghosts that lived in the cave. In Guatemala, everyone believed in ghosts. Indians—adults and even respected leaders—came from all over to talk to the ghosts on their mountain. Only, they did not call them ghosts, but ancestors.

“You see something beautiful, an animal, you have no idea what it is, and your first instinct is to jump on it and bag it?” Mother asked, amazed.

“It worked on you.” Father winked, and Mother blushed with pleasure. That was definitely a part of the story Mother had not shared.

“Evie, hold the bag tight over the crate. Hold it tight and don't let go until I say.”

Evie hesitated, then did as her father told her. She imagined a dead Indian ancestor in that bag. A shrunken old mummy man without teeth. It was too late to do anything else. It was in the bag, angry. The only thing to do now was keep this thing prisoner, to make sure it didn't come back for revenge.

Father shook the bag. “Okay, now.”

Evie let go, the top of the crate slammed shut, and everyone stepped back. The thing looked at them and they looked at it and saw that it was not a ghost, or an old man, or a baby, but a bird. Just a regular-sized bird, but with two fantastically long tail feathers, nearly a meter long, crammed into a crate. Now out of the bag, it did not buck and punch, but maintained a calm dignity. How had such a small bird made such a scene, how had it filled the bag like it had?

“What is it?” Mother lifted a lantern, putting a hand on Father. Though she scolded his recklessness, she was often half pleased with the fruits of his bravery.

“I have no idea.” Father panted with excitement. “I think it's lost. Maybe
its home was destroyed by the volcano, maybe he was confused by all the ash.”

The bird's spiked green head gave him the air of alertness, his blue neck the posture of calm. His entire breast, a brilliant jeweled red, pounded with breath, like a large, pumping heart exposed to the air.

“It's gorgeous. What are we going to do with it, Robert?”

“Of course, we're going to keep it.”

~~~~~

The vigil for lava lasted all day and into the next night. Judas paced the porch with Father's gun, while Mother, Father, Evie, and Ixna sat in the parlor, ready to flee a river of fire at a word. No one could sleep. Ixna probably could have, but since she slept in the parlor on her mat under the piano, she couldn't.

It became Father's purpose to find new ways to distract them from the sound of Judas pacing, the vibrations of the earth under them, which proved to be the most disturbing development all day. More frightening than the ash. The stacked china chattered in the kitchen, the stucco walls let out small explosions of dust. The bird, which Father decided to name Magellan, hunkered down and refused to be interesting. For a while, Mother played the piano, which tempted Father to make up songs to go along.

Mother stopped mid-verse, laughing, and pulled the face she reserved only for Father. A face of exasperation and humor, as if she found their troubles both unavoidable and amusing. “If we keep up like this, we won't hear Judas calling.”

“Where's Brazil?” Evie asked. “Is it at the bottom of the sea?”

“Now, that's an idea.” Mother closed the piano. “You haven't even had your lesson today. Robert, show her where Brazil is. We can't have her learning geography from your silly songs.”

Evie fetched her colored pencils and brought them to the table. “This . . .” Father said, making a large shape on a piece of paper, “this is America. And this is Guatemala, and this is South America, and here's Brazil.”

“They grow coffee in Brazil? Like they do here?”

“Yes. This is where coffee is being grown.” He made a few brown dots over Guatemala, a whole lot of dots over Brazil. “And these are where bananas grow.” He painted many little yellow fingers in Honduras, to signify bananas. And a few more on the east coast of Guatemala.

Evie squinted skeptically at the map. “How come if bananas grow in Guatemala, I never see them? I haven't eaten one banana since moving here! You promised—”

“Well, that's a complicated thing, Evie. You see, all the things that make life nice grow under this line.” He took a red pencil, made a line below the United States that went all the way across. “Bananas and tea and sugar and chocolate. Now, below this line, all these things grow. But above this line is where all the money is. See?” He switched pencils, adding Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. “The people in America and Europe love bananas and coffee, so they have to be shipped there.” He made blue lines now. “Americans send money down, and Guatemala sends coffee up.”

“Does anything grow in America that doesn't grow down here? Do Guatemalans ever send money up there for things?”

“Not really, Evie. They don't have money to do that.”

“But you said America sends money down here all the time!”

“It's not that kind of money, darling. Look.” Then he made arrows across all the oceans, showing how all these things move around the world. “The tea is grown in India, and makes it this way by boat to England. And diamonds—” Arrows all over the place, all of them eventually pointing to America and Europe.

“But you grow wheat down here and don't send it up,” Evie said. “Right?”

“That's right, Evie. I am a lonely man. Just me against the world.”

When Mother bent to see the lesson, she pursed her painted lips and said, “That's not where Germany is.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Germany does not border Spain,” she told Father. “I know that much.”

“Have you ever been to Germany?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, I have.”

Then he began reminiscing about the time he'd hopped a train, on his way through Germany, to learn how to brew beer. A story Evie had heard before. He'd had dreams once of starting a brewery in New York. That's what brought him to Mother and snow in the first place. In this retelling, he'd timed his train-leap poorly and was holding on for dear life.

These stories always put Evie on edge, as she wasn't sure they would not end terribly. The fact that her father was at that moment sitting before her, relaying the tale, did nothing to reassure her. Her understanding of death and misfortune had been completely altered since they'd moved to Guatemala, a place where Indians constructed portals to talk to dead ancestors, and those dead ancestors roamed their woods, sabotaging their farm. Death had just become a more powerful stage of life, the boundary between the two so fluid that anyone could pass from one to the other. If her family wasn't careful, they could wake up dead one day and not even know the difference.

Mother's patience for Father's European stories wore thin quickly. She had never been to Europe and blamed Father for not taking her.

“Europe's played out, Robert,” she reminded him, with the phrase he often used on her. “And Evie, sit like a lady. That's enough geography for today. Maybe we should discuss a plan. How are we going to harvest the cochineal this week?”

“We won't,” Father declared, twirling a pencil. “We'll wait until next week.”

“What if it's still ashing next week? We're cutting it close as it is with the rains.”

The rains, which had come early last year, had drowned half of Father's cochineal crop. Judas later told Evie that an old Indian woman had been in the cave, praying for early rains.

“It won't be ashing next week,” he said, with a confidence that put Evie's mind at ease. She did not understand much about her father's cochineal, but she knew that if this year's crop failed, they would be finished. The cochineal was hard work, but it didn't last long. The planting, tending, and harvest only took three months. The rest of the year, Father grew different kinds of wheat. Wheat was what he really cared about, that was his grand experiment, but he had to harvest the cochineal once a year to fund his agricultural endeavors. Once harvested and dried, the bugs were worth more than their weight in coffee.