Hard Red Spring (3 page)

But so many things could go wrong. For their first crop, Father had not known to keep his workers from the religious festival in town. They all disappeared, tricked into accepting advances from coffee planters while drunk—an obligation they either had to flee or work off on the plantations on the other side of the volcano. Father could not find enough replacements in time, and two-thirds of the bugs were lost.

Evie's father knew how the world worked and, barring two failed
cochineal harvests, the world generally worked in his favor. He navigated the compelling dramas, like the mudslides, the beheadings, and even this volcano, with a confidence to rival Ixna's. So instead of worrying, Father announced a game with his magnifying glass. He held the glass up. “I can see everything,” he declared, blinking his giant blue eye.

“Can you hold it up and see the volcano with it?”

“No, Evie. It's not for big things you always see, but little things you never see.”

They held the magnifying glass up to Magellan, the bird. Father had named him, but Evie would be responsible for taking care of him. This was the first job given to her at the farm, and she took it very seriously. In addition to freeing his crammed tail feathers so they extended out of the crate, she had placed a dish of water near him, along with some dinner scraps.

“Ixna says she's made out of corn,” Evie said. “She told me last week that all Indians are made out of corn. Can we see if that's true?”

“Corn!” Father declared. “Ixna, is this true?”

From her cross-legged position on the floor, Ixna nodded, determined to be bored despite the incredible drama of the day. She did not have to sit like a lady. In fact, she refused to sit in chairs at all.

“Well, let's see.” Father crossed the room and politely asked for Ixna's hand. She gave it, feigning disinterest, but after a moment she, too, leaned in to see the landscape of her own skin. Her fingerprints, like Father's topographical maps, curved into parallel lines, coming to a point, to a summit, at the tips.

“I sure don't see any corn.” He laughed. “Looks like you're made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.”

Ixna made a face. For a sixteen-year-old, she had a remarkable knack for delivering severe reprimands with the slightest effort, like an old blue-haired matriarch. She seemed to draw pride from being made of corn.

The pacing stopped and Evie heard Judas cock Father's shotgun. Silent, aiming.

“She thinks it's an insult,” Mother said with a laugh, “being made of the same stuff as us.”

~~~~~

The next morning it was still ashing, more heavily than the day before. Large, slow flakes taking their time. Father wanted news from town, so he sent Judas down the mountain road with instructions on who to speak to in Xela, and with money for a newspaper. No lava had appeared, at least not
yet. Maybe it had slipped down the other side of Santa María, to the plantations on the Piedmont. Maybe there'd be none at all. The situation was completely unpredictable. Volcanoes, Judas told Evie, were like jealous women.

Morning looked no different than night, though Father reassured Evie that the sun was still in the sky. Ash in the atmosphere just blocked its light. The ground groaned like a hungry stomach. Their dishes no longer vibrated but clashed and broke. In the yard, the chickens jumped and ran into each other, but Magellan did not move in his crate. He had not eaten the scraps Evie had left for him, and bit her hand when she added more to the pile.

“I think maybe we should let him go. He's not eating.”

“Let him go? But Evie, you've always wanted a pet.” This was true. However, things she always wanted always came at the wrong time in Guatemala, in the wrong way, making her realize she did not want them at all.

“Maybe he eats bugs,” Father said. “After breakfast, go to the woodpile with a lantern and see what you can find.”

When Judas arrived with the newspaper, Father flipped through the entire thing, flipped back, then forward again. “This is incredible,” he said, tossing the paper aside.

Mother took up the paper, glanced through it once, then twice. “Oh!” she cried with an indulgent roll of her murky brown eyes. “The Fasbinders' party was a raving success, did you see? The President's wife showed up in a gown cut for the Queen!” She held up the front page, featuring a photograph of the President and his wife.

Xela's newspaper was not written in English, but Mother could usually cobble together the stories by the names, pictures, and few words of Spanish she knew. Indeed, the front page of that day's paper described a gala held at the Fasbinders' coffee plantation a few days before. They knew it had happened a few days before because Father had been obsessed with obtaining an invitation. Mother, however, could not even imagine herself attending. She had nothing to wear. All the dresses she owned, thanks to Ixna's vigorous washing, were shapeless, faded replicas of their former glory.

“Ask her!” Father had commanded on several occasions. “Ask her for an invitation the next time she comes to tea!”

“Why, Robert? What's the point of going?”

Of course, she knew why. Even Evie knew. He harbored hopes of cornering the President and sharing the details of his grand experiment. The economic future of Guatemala, secured. “Once he realizes the possibilities of a year-round wheat harvest, he might come up with some government funds, Mattie.”

“Everyone is going to talk to the President,” Mother had replied, more than once. “Everyone has a plan for Guatemala. The railroad men, the Boston banana barons, the German bankers. Even Mrs. Fasbinder has a scheme to present to him at the party. What makes you think he cares about feeding Indians?”

“Because starving Indians can't lay train tracks!”

In a high, affected voice, Mother now began reading the Fasbinders' guest list from the paper, names easy to pronounce because they were American. Father held his head in his hands, hopeless, like these influential guests were being introduced and promptly led away from him, one by one.

“Maybe that was what we've been hearing, you think, Robert? We should file a noise complaint. That party has been shaking our whole mountain!”

Father grinned, spreading his fingers to look at Mother.

“And the ash from their cigarettes!” she added with a whoop. “Blowing over here, making a mess!”

It became a happy breakfast, with Mother and Father teasing one another, joking about the newspaper, which failed to make any mention of the volcano.

“Here, Evie, you can color the front page of this one. That's all it's good for.”

So there was no news on the lava. In town, there had just been talk of the ash. Judas said so much of it piled on Xela's rooftops that several had cracked under the weight. With that news, Father climbed up onto the church roof to sweep it clear. “I can see the party from here!” Father called down, hanging his arms over the big cross. “I can see the President with his big cigar! They're all eating bananas, over there! Dancing girls, naked dancing girls, eating bananas!”

“Robert!”

There was no more discussion of the delayed harvest, of the ash, which fell more heavily, Evie noticed, by the hour.

—

The band began playing that afternoon—the drums so loud that they could be heard all the way up at the farm. At first Evie thought that it was the volcano. But this noise felt different. It did not shake the ground. It thumped in Evie's chest like another heart. Mother, standing on the porch, sweeping yet another layer of ash off into the yard, paused, cocked an ear in the direction of the city.

“It's music,” she said to no one in particular, although Evie was the only
one around. Father had left with Judas, gone to climb the ridge again, hoping for a better view. Ixna worked in the kitchen, whitening their good shoes with the useless newspaper.

Evie held her breath and listened, finding the regularity of the beat.

“It's ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'” Mother said, with a peculiar smile on her face. She set the broom against the house and told Evie to run and get her parasol. They were going into town.

They took Ixna with them because they needed a translator. In preparation for the move to Guatemala, Mother had taken six months' instruction in Spanish, only to find that it was useless in most everyday interactions outside the capital. Out here, where the Indians lived, people spoke Ixil, or Quiché, or Mam, or any one of a dozen Indian languages. The only people who spoke Spanish in Xela were the wealthy Guatemalans they did not associate with, the government officials, who preferred to speak English anyway, and other foreigners (mostly German coffee planters), who'd made the same mistake Mother had. Their Spanish, Mother declared, was unintelligible.

Mother held her black mourning parasol like a shield as she walked through the gray flurries of ash. In her other hand, a lantern swayed, revealing frightening glimpses of smoked-out jungle. Today, Evie did not fear the volcano as much as she feared walking to town without Father or Judas. Every foreigner in Guatemala had been warned (by government officials, by the newspaper, by each other) of the dangers awaiting lone white female travelers in the highlands: a familiar refrain from Mother's weekly teas with Mrs. Fasbinder. Men were killed, but the horrors awaiting women were much more unimaginable to Evie, because she had no idea what the words meant.
Taken, molested, disgraced.
All Evie understood was that there were worse things awaiting women on the road than merely being killed.

“They throw girls in the volcano, you know,” Mrs. Fasbinder had said not long ago. “They've done it for centuries.
Virgins
, of course. This country is like a bad adventure novel sold to silly women. You'd think the Spanish never arrived.”

Why were they walking to town alone? What were virgins? Did they die in the volcano? Terrible thoughts, unmentionable questions that Evie could not even gather the breath to ask. Her mother walked so fast down their mountain that Evie could not keep up. She lagged behind with Ixna, who was barefoot and taking her time.

“Ixna, do you think lava's coming to Father's mountain?”

“His mountain?” She clicked her tongue.

“Yes. His mountain. Where we live. Will lava come?”

“Not his mountain.”

“How's that?” Evie asked, kicking the dirt. “My father paid for this land. It belongs to him.”

Ixna did not break her calm stride and passed by Evie, leaving her standing in disbelief. “The mountain never belongs to anyone. We all belong to the mountain.”

“He paid,” Evie insisted, galloping to catch up. How else could someone own something if they didn't pay? “He paid!”

“Who did he pay?”

“The government.”

“Ah, but we paid for it, too. Three times. How many times did your father pay?”

Evie didn't know what to say. Conversations with Ixna usually turned on Evie in this way. So she wasn't much surprised, just hopeful that one day she would understand.

“When he pays four times, it can be his.” Ixna's tiny, flat-topped teeth came over her lip in an angry imitation of a smile. “Then we eat bread. Then all our problems solved.”

There was no view of the city from the mountain, where there should have been a view. Just black clouds, ash falling up, down, sideways, and accumulating on the empty road, and the sound of trumpets and drums in the distance. They walked two miles to Xela. There should have been Indians on the road. Evie imagined them standing, lined up just beyond visibility. They were there, Evie knew they must be there. This road was crowded with shacks so primitive they didn't even have doors and proper walls. These Indians would sneak onto their land to plant food, cut down trees, and worship.

“They have no sense of what ownership means,” Mother often said. “Unless they have a claim. Then they start waving titles at you. Illegible titles for communal land, issued over a hundred years ago by the Spanish Crown! But they wanted independence from Spain and they got it!”

—

The band was still playing by the time they made it to the central park, where half the gas lamps had been blown out and the other half cast a gothic orange light over the busy scene. Visibility had cleared somewhat, because of the protected position of the park plaza. There had been no one on the road, no one to trouble them, and now Evie could see why. Everyone had come here—standing in open doorways or sitting on the wide dingy steps of
the Catholic church—to watch the military band. Evie knew they were from the military by the severe, straight lines they stood in, and their uniforms. At least two hundred of them aimed their instruments at the sky, playing so loudly that Evie couldn't hear what her mother said right next to her. A little farther away, near the market, more soldiers marched, yelling into windows and at the people who passed by. The same phrase over and over.

“What are they saying?” Mother asked Ixna.

Ixna shrugged. “They say there's no volcano erupting.”

“What?”

Evie watched one of the band members shake the ash from his hat and spit on the ground. He held a trombone at his side, then pointed it at some Indians like a gun.

“In Quiché. They say the President decrees that this is not from the volcano.” Evie watched a small flake of ash flutter down and get caught in Ixna's eyelashes. She didn't even blink.

Mother, still holding Evie's hand in her sweaty fist, tightened her grip. “If it's not the volcano, then what the hell is it?”

Rocks fell on the town and littered the street. They burned through the thatched rooftops of Indian shacks and shattered the windows and roof tiles of the government offices and the fancy whitewashed houses. Mother looked around in amazement.

“Europe's all played out, Evie. Aren't you glad we could come to a place with so much promise as this?” She laughed, wiping her eyes clear of something.