Hard Red Spring (5 page)

Ixna's forehead rippled in annoyance as she kneaded dough for dumplings. Her fingertips left marks on little balls she twisted away, dented and smiling like little faces. “Our ancestors did not have bread.” The water on the fire had begun to boil, the pot rattling like something trapped inside. “So why should we?”

“Because progress is good. My grandparents didn't have telegraphs, but now we do, and we're happy.”

“Your family is happy?”

“
Goddammit, Mattie!” Father shouted from the porch.

The little faces were lined up, ready for the pot, but Ixna did not put them in right away. She turned to a different batch of rising dough and began punching it down, punching hard, as if defending herself from attack. She asked her question again.

“You think wheat will make Indians happy like your parents are happy?”

Evie ignored the question and pinched a corner of the dough, rolled it into a pill, and squeezed her hand into Magellan's crate to offer it. He swiped down, bit her knuckle with a small, vicious twist.

Hard red spring, at least, had not yet won over Ixna, or Magellan. How could anyone resist it? In addition to being tasty, it was beautiful out in the fields. When the stalks rose, they came up looking like fire.

“Father's very smart,” Evie said, sucking the blood from her injured finger.

“Not so smart if he makes the snake angry. It was very ignorant to make him angry.” As Ixna spoke, she took the lid off the boiling pot to check the water.

“What snake?” Evie knew she should not ask, but if she did not know she would only imagine the worst. Yet another enemy added to their life on the mountain.

“The big snake in the volcano.” Ixna took a heap of dough and rolled it briskly with the flat of her hands, making a long tube, a snake. “He punishes bad people.”

Ixna never tried to shield Evie from the horrible truths of the adult world, and because of this she was sometimes her best source of information. As long as she made sense, which she rarely did. “How has Father been bad?”

“Bad is not asking permission of the mountain, not giving thanks. Bad is going against the ancestors. Breaking their traditions.” She cut the snake of dough into small pieces and pinched the ends. More dumplings.

“What traditions?”

“Traditions of dressing and praying and eating.”

“Like eating bread? Does eating bread make the snake angry?”

“Yes.” Ixna took the dumplings and dropped them in the pot one by one. “But what makes him most angry is when someone tries to own this mountain.” Ixna dropped the last one in and watched the blanched bodies tumble, fighting for surface space.

Evie watched Ixna watching the dumplings, taming their foam with a spoon. They came out one by one, their little pale faces wrinkly, cooked, hardened into worry.

Evie found Mother in the parlor, alone. In this new red light, she looked beautiful. Until about a year ago, she had been shaped by corsets and padding, her skin dusted porcelain with powder. One by one, these artifices had dropped away. The corset was the first to go, being impractical with the work, the uphill walks, and Father's claim not to notice a difference. She began to wear her hair straight and loose. With the disappearance of her last tin of face powder, she suddenly developed freckles across her nose, which made her look girlish. Only her lipstick remained, and this Mother applied obsessively,
to keep the wolves from the door
, Father had once said. Another terrifying joke Evie did not understand.

Mother was writing a letter.

“Who are you writing to?” Evie asked.

“Just writing a letter home.”

Mother composed all their letters to New York. These letters, which Mother read aloud before mailing, usually detailed the most trivial things. Things like: “Evie was chased by a rooster today,” “The Indians stare at me
when I wear pants.” On the day they woke up to ash raining down on their heads, she wrote home: “I ripped my last pair of good stockings today. Will never be able to replace them.”

“Is there something you want to say to Grandma?”

Evie did not remember her grandmother, but would never say so. “Are we staying, then?”

“Yes.” Mother tried on a smile, fresh and pink. “Your father has a plan.”

Evie understood this plan right away. Like every other plan he'd had on the mountain: Mother would write Grandmother for more money. She'd sent more money when they bought the bugs in January, when Father advanced the Indians their pay last year. When the police chief arrested their worker Raffie for startling a white woman and made Father buy him back in time for the second harvest, which ended up drowned in the early rains anyway.

“Is he going to bribe someone?”

Mother paused, her pen point pressed into the paper, and glared at Evie. “Where did you learn that word?”

“From Judas,” she lied. Because Judas wouldn't care or blame her if Mother scolded him for it. He understood survival on the mountain more than anyone. Evie certainly could not say that she'd learned it from Mother's teas with Mrs. Fasbinder.

“Well, you surely are getting a Guatemalan education,” she observed crisply. “But no, we won't use Grandmother's money for bribes. We pay people to
work
, Evie. Bribes are for cheats and criminals. Your father's not that kind of man.” She turned back to the letter, writing in a burst. “I did not marry that kind of man.”

“How come the President says the volcano didn't erupt? Did it erupt?”

“Of course it did, Evie. You saw for yourself, didn't you?”

“Yes. But why does he say it didn't?”

“Sometimes, Evie, the truth can be very expensive.”

After finishing her letter, Mother began to play the piano. She played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Evie had never heard her play before. She stabbed at the keys with fierce fingers, making many mistakes, trying to reach Father in the fields. Evie knew that by suggesting they sell “some things,” he really meant the piano. It was the only thing they owned in Guatemala that was worth anything, outside of the mountain itself. Father didn't have nice things and Mother had left all her jewelry in New York, for fear of tempting thieves.

This piano was like a part of the family. When they left for Guatemala, it
accompanied them on every leg of the journey. First shipped by rail across the U.S. to New Orleans. From there, it came on the coffee steamboat with them from New Orleans to the port of Coatzacoalcos in southern Mexico. Then it was loaded onto a car on the Tehuantepec Railroad, hauled across Mexico, to a Pacific port, where men rolled it onto another coffee steamer bound for Champerico, Guatemala. From Champerico, the piano took up a whole compartment in another railroad car to Retalhuleu. Then it was pulled by a team of horses to Xela, where Father unloaded it at the base of the mountain and pushed it onto a wooden cart, to which he attached Tiny, the skeptical mule he'd just bought.

“If you think getting here has been a trial for us,” Father had said, sweating and swearing at Tiny, who refused to complete the last mile of their monthlong journey, “just imagine how the coffee planters feel. Whoever solves the shipping problem in Guatemala will be a rich man.”

On several occasions, Mrs. Fasbinder had offered increasing sums of money for the piano, but each rising price offended Mother more than the last offer. And though Evie knew she had just been making a point, her mother's suggestion that they sell Evie rather than the piano was not as much of a surprise as one would think. And Father's hint about selling it in the first place made her realize how bad their situation must be.

“Will all our workers be drafted away, even Judas?” Evie asked over “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Somewhere else, somewhere civilized, with her eyes closed, Mother tapped a foot to keep time on the old floorboards. “I don't know, Evie. I hope so. No. No, I don't.”

“If he goes, will he die?”

“No, Evie. He'll come back, don't worry. This isn't the railroad draft. A lot of Indians get drafted to the coffee plantations and come back.”

“But Judas isn't Indian. He's a Ladino, he told me. Maybe they won't take him.”

“Ha!” Mother cried over her own song. “Ladino isn't even a real word, Evie. He may spend every peso he makes trying to become white, but according to the government, he'll always be Indian. And for Indians, the government has the last word down here.”

~~~~~

Evie watched the labor drafts the next day from an overlook near the road. The sun that day had risen red and progressed to a yellow-orange bright
enough for her to see the larger details below, where Xela's central park seethed with thousands of Indians. Bold black lines of policemen then corralled the crowd into smaller groups. The mass halved, then quartered, on and on until they fit into the wagons.

Every male Indian in the area between the ages of twelve and fifty who was not majorly indebted to any farmer was required to go. But since most Indians didn't even know how old they were, the police ignored claims that someone was too young or too old. Indians rarely made it past fifty, anyway, so no one could argue about being too old. If they looked like they could harvest coffee, then off they went. Judas told Evie that his nephew, nine years old, had been taken away and probably wouldn't be back for months.

Father's plan for his Indian workers, however, succeeded. On the faith that Mother's letter home would work, he borrowed from the bank in Xela and registered their debts at the government office to exempt them from the draft. By the time Evie came back from the overlook, they were gathering wood for the cooking shed, repairing the brushes and nets.

~~~~~

Two days after the draft, it was light enough out to venture into the woods again. Judas stood on the front porch that morning, taking instructions from Mother.

“Clear it all out,” she told him. “Whatever you find. On our walk to Xela, I saw those shacks right on the property line.” She had started using the Indian name for the town (pronounced
SHAY-la
) months ago. The Spanish name, Quetzaltenango, was just too much of a mouthful, too tiring—eventually even for her.

They had not wanted this much land, but the government insisted Father take it all, for a very low price. All or nothing. Then they gave him instructions on how to keep Indians away: hanging a specific dead animal from a tree, sabotaging altars with dreadful omens, shooting trespassers, but Mother preferred fire. It was dramatic yet unconfrontational, and she could see the plumes of smoke, the proof, from the porch.

Judas relaced and retied his shoes before setting off with a lantern in his hand and his machete strapped to his hip. Evie followed with a basket of rolls. Behind them, the piano began, per Father's request. He'd requested a long song, the longest Mother could find, to keep him company while he worked.

“Judas, are you an Indian or a Ladino?” Evie asked, tagging behind.

“I am Ladino,” he announced, annoyed. “Do I look lazy and drunk? I work for my food, I buy my clothes.”

“But your parents were Indians? And you used to be Indian?”

“Yes, but that's before. Now I speak Spanish, English, some German. Now I am Ladino.” He held the lantern out as if lighting their way through the forest, though the sun shone bright enough now that it wasn't needed. In his other hand, he held one of Ixna's rolls, which he ripped with his teeth.

“But you're on the draft list. Have you told the
jefe
that you're Ladino?”

“I am working on that,” he assured her, chewing. For a man missing many teeth, the crust was difficult to crack, and his entire face contorted with the effort. But still, Judas ate wheat with pleasure, unlike every Indian in town.

“What about Ixna?” Evie asked. “She works. She can speak Spanish and English. Is she Ladino?”

Judas held a finger up, shook his head. “But her clothes are Indian,” he said with his mouth full. “Women cannot change to Ladino. If all men change to Ladino, then Indians have money and dignity. If all women change to Ladino, there are no more Indians. There is nothing left.”

Father's forest looked burned. The ash would remain, sticking to everything, until the first rainy season shower. Animal tracks preceded them, and human tracks, too. Evie could tell Judas's tracks from his shoes, pointed at the tips, whereas Father's boots left wide, blunt prints. The largest in the forest. There were so many tracks, tracks of bare feet, Indian feet. Deer, jaguars, and lizards, and the sideways slide of snakes. They could still hear the piano clearly, running through a refrain. Mother's playing not only entertained Father while he worked, Evie drew courage from it when she ventured into the forest.

They ran into Father and Ixna, who was holding her red blanket to her chest. Both coming from another trail, laughing. Father held on to Ixna's tied belt, allowing himself to be towed along the path. They did not see Evie and Judas right away.

“Father!” Evie called. “Are you playing a game?”

They both spun around. “We are!” Father answered, waving. “Blindman's bluff! Though don't tell your mother, you know she doesn't like games so much when we're supposed to be working.”

“I know.”

The piano suddenly stopped. Birds, insects, unseeable things crawling in the brush. Evie shivered with fright. Father turned Ixna around by the
shoulders and pushed her down one of the paths. In a moment, she was gone. In another, Father was gone, too, down a different path.

The music began again. The pause lasted just long enough that Evie knew what had happened. A breeze from the window had blown the sheet music across the room.

“I can never get Ixna to play games with me,” Evie told Judas. “Not even I Spy.” All Evie's games on the mountain were solitary, dreary endeavors at imitating her parents. Planting pebbles, pecking at the piano. “But it seems she likes blindman's bluff. You think she'd play that with
me
?”