Hard Red Spring (11 page)

Evie stood a moment, surveying the situation. Judas lifted the logs one by one, to keep his new cream-colored suit clean. “Father's put me in charge,” she informed him. “And I say you should pick up more at once. You're wasting time doing it that way.”

He ignored her, walking a single piece over and stacking it with the others, then taking the time to dust off his sleeves. Inflamed with her responsibility, with his insolence, she twisted a green branch from a nearby tree and stood a distance away with it. Judas watched her with one eye, like Magellan used to do. From the house, she heard her mother shout.

We will not stay in this situation. You are not going to put your daughter in this situation. You have to fire her.

“Father has put me in charge,” she repeated, with sudden tears stinging her eyes. Fire her? When Judas made no reply, she swatted the ground with the whiplike branch.

She could not hear Father's part of the conversation.

I know why you're so desperate to stay! You don't want to leave her!

Stacking, stacking, one by one. Evie took a courageous step toward Judas and snapped the branch again against the ground. “I said—” In one motion, he was at her side, holding her wrist. With her head down, that's all she saw, his big brown hand. He squeezed until her fingers gave up the switch.

I saw you, Robert. I saw! I saw the way you had her bent over the mule trough! Like an animal!

That was enough. Evie twisted free and ran away from Judas, from her parents' terrifying argument.
Stop
, she said to the big-leafed trees clapping all around.
Please stop
, she said, running into the forest, the only place where she could escape. But as she got farther away, Mother's voice worked up to an octave that could sling harsh words to the far edges of the field. Pots slamming.

Evie could not run away fast enough.

Don't blame her. She is a child. A child!

They were talking about Evie. She did play in the mule trough sometimes. She'd float little boats she made from sticks. She played in the trough like an animal. No manners. And now they wanted to fire her. Could you fire a daughter? Was that how orphans were made? She ran out of earshot, too terrified to hear their plan for her. What had she done wrong? Mother believed she'd told Father where to find the money. Money, as always. All she could think of was money. Evie was too expensive to keep. Like the orphan Tomás.

Evie walked the forest aimlessly, trying to get lost. She took all kinds of trails: animal trails, Indian trails, her father's trails. Sometimes there were no tracks and she realized she'd been following the trail of water run dry.

She tried to get lost because she believed that if she did, maybe they would miss her. They would panic, in a desperate search, and Father would return with Evie limp and breathing shallowly in his arms. Her dress shredded from the forest, from the ghosts clawing at her. She savored her fear, imagining these scenes, her parents' realization that they could not live without her, their promises to never fight again. It did not take long for her to come across the cave. She doubled back, trying to get to unfamiliar territory. But several minutes later, she came to it again, then again. All trails seemed to lead to the cave in some way. And when she came upon it the fourth time, she saw people inside.

She immediately recognized Ixna with her basket. An old man stooped inside with her, an old man who must have been a dead ancestor, summoned from the small hole. In tattered pants and no shirt, a chest sunken in where
his soul would be, he looked exactly like he had just been resurrected from the grave.

They'd started a fire in the cave and the sweet-smelling smoke drifted over to Evie, burning her nostrils. The old man poured sap in the flames and talked to them, while Ixna handed him a bottle, an egg, and one of Father's golden hens. The man drank the entire bottle in two sucking pulls, then rubbed his old-man ghost hands over Ixna's belly. He cracked the egg open and stared at its mess on a rock. Then he grasped the astonished chicken by the neck and spun it around once, like a noisemaker. He looked at Evie, his dead eyes finding her in her hiding place, as he raised one of their silver knives.

She ran home as fast as her girl's legs could take her. Running so fast that her braid sailed behind, catching on the forest. The branches swiped at her clothes, leaves clung to her hair, but she made it out and within sight of the house in less than three minutes.

“Evie!” Father called from one of the wheat fields. “Where did you go? Judas was supposed to be watching you.” But she ran right past him.

“Evie, it's time for lunch,” was all Mother said when Evie burst into the house with a strangled sob. “Ixna left your plate in the kitchen.”

~~~~~

Over the next two days, workers began to materialize on the farm. Indian men Evie had never seen before. Some solitary figures walking up the road, others arriving out of the trees, holding blankets. Eleven men in all, skinny and universally filthy. They grinned black gums at Evie from a distance. They slept in the woods on their Indian blankets, and Evie could hear them laughing and talking in the night. Sometimes they sang.

No one went into the woods now. Judas carried Father's pistol all day and Father lugged his shotgun between the house and the cooking shed. Evie was not allowed outside, not even on the porch, and had to stay inside with Mother.

“But why?”

“Just because I need you here, to help in the house.”

“Where's Ixna?”

“We had to fire her.”

“Why?”

“She was too expensive to keep. Plus, she stole.”

Evie never believed all her mother's suspicions of Ixna until now. Clearly,
Ixna did go to the cave to command the ghosts, had stolen Mother's face powder and mirror and knife. What could she want from the old-man ghost? At least she was gone now. Too expensive to keep. With that, remembering their fight, Evie became determined to prove her own worth around the house.

Though she insisted she needed Evie's help, Mother never came up with any chores for her to do, so she made them up herself. She dusted the furniture and rinsed pans all morning, while Mother did nothing. She no longer played the piano, hadn't played it since the day of Mrs. Fasbinder's visit. But she had started doing her hair again, and wearing her corsets and lily-of-the-valley perfume. She even changed into her best dress, a silky navy blue dress that Ixna had ruined last year and that Evie hadn't seen since. The hole she'd beaten into the armpit wasn't even on a seam, so could not be easily fixed. But now Mother's solution seemed to be a stiff right arm, pinned perpetually to her side, so that the hole never showed. All day she opened doors, applied lipstick, and even used a fork with her unskilled left hand, while her right arm remained at her side.

Looking so nice with nowhere to go and with nothing to do, every five minutes Mother paced to the window, searching for calamity. She moved carefully yet constantly around the house, like she was trying not to wake some giant beast sleeping beneath them. The snake.

“Why are you afraid of these new workers, Mother?”

“Afraid?” She sat down for the first time that day. “I'm not afraid, Evie. What makes you say that?” She sat straight, her back not touching the chair.

“I don't know.”

“Well, I'm certainly not afraid. If anything, I'm just very excited that your father's plan is working. In a week, we'll have enough money to go back to New York and see your grandmother. I guess I'm just excited to go back.”

“But where did Father get the money to pay them?”

“That's a good question, Evie. I couldn't put it better myself.”

Evie moved to the window and watched as Judas marched the new workers on a tour of the cactus field, their line drooping and wavering like a leisurely snake.

“Mother, what's it like being drunk?”

That was the last Evie saw of them, because Mother shot up from her chair and covered the window with her shawl, with her fumbling left arm. Casting them in near-darkness. “You know, Evie, I just realized we have completely neglected your education this week. What would you like me to teach you today?”

“I want to know what it's like being drunk.”

Mother lit two lanterns. “Evie, that's no subject for a lady!”

“But it's in Father's song! And I know a drunk person when I see one. They move like this.” Evie swayed and staggered in an imitation of the Indians on the side of the road, in the central park, at the market, just outside their window. “Why?”

“Your Guatemalan education hasn't suffered this week, I see.” Mother breathed deeply and searched her mind for a moment. “They move like that because being drunk is like dancing to music only you can hear.”

This confused Evie, since it seemed that today everyone on the mountain—the new workers, Father, Judas—was dancing to a tune everyone could hear but her. “But if two people are drunk together, are they hearing the same music?”

“No.”

“How do you know? Have you ever been drunk?”

“Of course not! Now, Evie, this conversation is over. We will move on to geography. I saw the map you drew the other day for Tomás. You got it all wrong. Don't you want to see the route we'll be taking home?”

“This . . .” Mother said, making a large shape on a fresh piece of paper, “this is America. And this is where we are, and this is Europe.” She'd refused to add to Father's world map, preferring to start a new one herself.

Sitting down, she found she could draw with her right hand, while keeping her elbow at her side. She spent a long time on Europe, telling Evie about France and England and the trip she'd take her on one day. The Mediterranean, the Alps.

“But where's Guatemala?”

“Guatemala is here,” she said, making a lonely shape at the bottom of the map, not connected to anything. Not like Tomás's, not like Father's. And this is how we will get home.” She made blue arrows to retrace their dismal journey three years ago: up the Pacific coast, across Mexico, then through the Caribbean, then train tracks up to New York. Then more arrows, leading to Europe. “And then we'll go to Italy and see the ancient capital of Rome, and all the art and beautiful things there. Maybe in France we'll find you the green coat you want. Just green, don't you agree?”

“Is France where the Frenchman in Xela comes from?”

“Yes, Evie. That's very smart of you.”

“And where do Guatemalans like Mr. Ubico come from?”

“They came from Spain.” She pointed to one of the shapes, one that
looked like a fist. “A long time ago. Hundreds of years ago.” This did not surprise Evie, that Ubico was hundreds of years old. It seemed to explain his power, his ability to replace God, as Father said. So much to learn from this map, though she knew not to ask about Ladinos. Mother would insist it wasn't even a real word, though it seemed Ubico had finally been convinced it was. “And what about the coffee planters? Mrs. Fasbinder and all them?”

“They're German, mostly. Mrs. Fasbinder's parents came from Germany”—she traced the route—“to America. Then Mrs. Fasbinder moved from America to Guatemala.”

“And where do Indians come from?”

“Why . . .” Mother seemed surprised at the question. “Indians are from Guatemala, of course. They've never gone anywhere.”

“And what about Mestizos, like Tomás? Where do they come from?”

Mother put a hand over her mouth and blushed, averting her eyes. “Oh, Evie . . .”

“Mestizos come from Mestizoland!”

They spun around to see Father standing in the front door. His sleeves were rolled up and his arms were stained red with cochineal up to his elbows.

“Robert!” Mother shrank down in her seat. “Shouldn't you be out there?
Watching
things?”

“I missed my girls. Anyway, Judas has them under control.” He walked over to look at the map and studied it over Mother's shoulder. Annoyed, for some reason, for being so startled, she moved away from them both. But her perfume remained.

“Where's Mestizoland?” Evie asked.

“Right here,” he declared, pointing smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. An island! Tomás was from an island! Evie marked it with a pencil.

“Well,” Mother huffed from the other side of the room. “Maybe you should be teaching geography, Robert, since I've been living in ignorance my whole life. Since I've never been to Mestizoland.” She crossed her arms. Obviously Mestizoland was another country she wished Father had taken her to, but hadn't.

“Not ignorance, Mattie,” he mumbled sadly. His blue eyes glittered in the lantern light like melting ice. “Innocence. Sweet, beautiful, divine innocence. A state we should all live in.”

“Where's Innocence? That's a state?”

“Yes, it is. Right here.” He pointed to a spot below New York. Evie
marked it. “Though I've never been there. They wouldn't let me in, I'm so terrible.”

Mother laughed unwillingly, wiping her eyes. “You've been drinking that stuff, too, Robert? It's not even noon.”

But time didn't seem to matter anymore in the house. With their one window covered and the lanterns lit in the middle of the day, it was like the ash had come back, stranding them all in a grimy, unchanging light.

“It's made of eggs and spices and, I don't know. It's great stuff. Have a drink with me.” Father turned from the map and brought a bottle out from the waistband of his pants. “Let's celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” Mother tightened her grip on herself as he stepped near her.

“Our new workers. Our third harvest!”

“You call a bunch of drunk, wanted Indians workers?”

“What's wanted?” Evie asked.

“Oh yes, she already knows what drunk is, Robert.” She explained to Evie, “Wanted means that your Father wanted them very badly. So much so, that he'll probably be wanted himself, which means we'll all be wanting to leave very soon.”