Hard Red Spring (34 page)

“If one person gets to choose their shed, then everyone will want to choose.”

Walking back to the church in his robe, Dan said, “A blessing in disguise. It's terrible, but he's right. Everyone here has lost someone, everyone has someone to blame. It's the cycle of revenge that we're here to stop. This is an exercise in forgiveness. I'll rewrite tonight's sermon to address it.”

—

A half hour later, the Indians gathered under the flagpole, doing their best to sing. Mincho's voice carried above them all, enunciating the words for their benefit. He stood, their choirmaster, directing with both arms. The Indians followed with distressed faces, as if the Spanish syllables hurt their mouths.

Standing, shivering in the church doorway, Lenore searched the crowd for the Indian woman with the blue eyes but did not see her. The singing of the Guatemalan national anthem every morning was a mandatory exercise. The woman had to be there. Lenore hated to think it, but all these Indians looked the same. Except this one had blue eyes. All the Maya, however, kept their heads down. She might never be able to pick her out again.

Back in the apartment, Lenore stood over the hot plate, waiting for water to boil to make instant coffee. Outside, the refugee men split up for their duties. The road crew marched to the forest and the Civil Patrol learned how to raise and lower the Guatemalan flag. It went running up with a clean, fast zip, then immediately back down. Up again, then down, like several days passing in a matter of minutes.

She looked down into the water. Fine bubbles had formed on the bottom of the pot. She stared at them expectantly.

“A watched pot never boils,” Dan said, shrugging on his flannel jacket.

While the road crew cut trees all day, the Civil Patrol would keep order in the village. Dan would work with the Civil Patrol, though only ten hours a day, instead of sleeping in shifts like the Mayan men. If anything happened, the village was small enough that she could scream and Dan would hear her. Lenore tried to steel herself against panic as she remembered her dream.
Her first night as a missionary and she dreamt that the ragged, docile female Indians were conspiring to burn her alive in her own church.

“The gang's going,” Dan said. “I got to go.”

Lenore checked the pot. “It's still not boiling, Dan.”

“That's okay. I'll just skip coffee today. Tomorrow we'll start it earlier.”

Lenore nodded, wondering why everyone else—President Ríos Montt, Pat Robertson, Pastor May—had such wonderful, significant dreams, while hers only magnified her fears. For months before they had even left Kentucky, she dreamt only of Guatemala. Terrifying dreams about jungles, giant insects, spiders, and snakes.

—

The first task executed by the Civil Patrol was the orderly distribution of food bags. With their wooden machetes—bestowed on the men so seriously that Lenore thought it a joke at first—the Mayan men guarded the military truck from the crowd of their own women. While these women stood in line, Lenore stood in the shelter of the church, eyeing them. These women, with their strange neon costumes and stone faces, frightened Lenore more than the boy soldiers and their guns.

Lenore had heard much about these peculiar costumes at the conference. A perfect example of the Maya's vanity, such impoverished women spending all their time and money weaving these elaborate outfits. The blouses varied from town to town. An Indian could tell right away where any woman was from by looking at her blouse. But if they wore regular clothes, the lecturer said, tribal divisions would break down and the Maya would begin to feel like Guatemalans. Convincing them to give up their clothes was one of the goals of the Project.

Lenore could think of nothing to do with herself, since the clothing donations from Operation Open Arms had yet to arrive and she had no interpreter. They had no idea there would just be one, and that he would have other duties. Mincho headed the Civil Patrol. And so without any idea how to approach these refugees without him, she spent the day organizing their luggage. Everything they'd decided to do without the night before remained in a pile. The village contained no trash cans, provided no garbage service. She realized this after going to the pit toilets and having nowhere to put the plastic packaging from her new toothbrush.

That evening, Dan and Lenore sat in the dark of their apartment. The lightbulb was so powerful and the room so small that to use it seemed an
invasion of privacy. After a few hours of electric light, they stopped using it altogether, preferring to keep their door cracked open to allow a bit of light in from the adjoining church.

Too tired from the Civil Patrol to write his first sermon on forgiveness, Dan picked the first prewritten sermon from his Open Arms pastor's manual. The blue-eyed Indian, whoever she was, would have to wait to learn the significance of her suffering. Dan tried to nap on the bed while Lenore did her best with their first dinner. She stood over the hot plate, staring down at the pot of water, willing it to boil.

“A watched pot never boils,” Dan said with a yawn from the pillow.

“It's the same pot, Dan.”

“What?” He sat up.

“That's right. The same pot as this morning. I don't know what to do.” The water maintained its fizzy promise, but the small bubbles had been there all day. She put a finger in, felt the temperature of a bath. “I can't boil water for drinking like this. I used the iodine today, but it tasted awful, like blood. I had to put coffee in to cover the taste. Barely warm coffee.”

“Well, at least we have the iodine. I guess we'll have to use it from now on.”

“But what about the Maya? We don't have enough for them, and they probably can't boil the water, either. How are they supposed to drink?”

“They're used to it. They're from here. They'll be fine with the pump water.”

Giving up, Lenore mixed warm iodine water with the Open Arms corn mix. Then she poured the gravelly batter onto a warmed pan and hoped for a tortilla. After half an hour, it still would not firm up, leaving them with a gritty soup that tasted like mold.

“Fritos and Swiss Cake Rolls for dinner,” Lenore announced. She sliced open their box of emergency junk food supplies, though it shamed her to be doing so. What kind of model village would it be if she did this every day? The whole silent village, she was sure, could hear the plastic packaging crinkle in her hands.

—

The sermon began at eight o'clock that evening. The Maya filed into the church, orderly and silent, requiring minimal direction from the guards. Herded from activity to activity all day, they'd been kept busy to give them a sense of normalcy, but Lenore had no idea what was normal for Indians. The men didn't normally have jobs, the women did not normally have water
pumps and hot plates. Certainly no one had had television. But here they were now, shuffling in from their daily Lesson in Democracy.

Lenore sat on the stage behind Dan, facing their congregation. She watched the Indians, feeling a rush of tenderness and hope for these wayward souls.

Dan held a hand up for quiet, an unnecessary gesture, then signaled to Mincho. In his uniform, Mincho swung his AK-47 behind his hip to allow him to speak closely into the microphone. In the system they'd worked out an hour before, Dan would speak a sentence and then pause for Mincho to translate into Quiché. To make this work, he had to keep to single sentences that were very concise.

“Welcome, my brothers and sisters in Christ,” Dan said. A third, unexpected voice followed. An echo off the mountains from the speakers. Huela, tied up outside, whimpered at the sound of Mincho's voice.

Lenore scanned the congregation, over the weary faces, watching for a flicker of understanding.

“God has brought you all to this village for a healing.

“You do not need to run from the guerrillas anymore.

“You do not need to run from your sins.

“Here, the military has been called upon by God to protect you.

“They have chosen to forgive you for your subversive acts.

“And now you need to forgive those that have hurt you.

“The military has brought you here to be healed.

“Only when there is forgiveness can Guatemala experience peace.

“And true forgiveness only comes through the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Dan tried to slow down, to allow the echo to die off before his next line, but he struggled to tame his momentum. Lenore imagined his words reaching the guerrillas camped in the forest.

“In heaven, there is no poverty, there is no lack of food.

“There is land for everyone. But to get there, to get to heaven, you must give up your gods and accept the one true God.

“In the end, God will punish those who deserve to be punished.

“And you will live rich in heaven.

“Do not dwell on what has happened to you here.

“There is no changing the past.”

Unable to wait for his small church echo, Mincho, and then the larger Spanish echo from the mountains, Dan kept on. Sentences overlapped so
that Dan seemed to be interpreting Mincho. The Maya didn't care. They sat, slumped, as if their bodies and spirits were as threadbare as their clothing. The filth had to have a psychological effect. Nothing to do about it until the clothing donations arrived.

Outside, Huela began to howl and howl in her abandonment, a fifth voice contributing to the confusion.

“In the Bible, there is the story of an evil place. It became so corrupt that God decided it had to be destroyed. A man named Lot was spared, God told him to take his family and flee the city, but to not look back under any circumstance. This is what has happened to you. The mountains have become so corrupt that they are being destroyed. Communism, murder, paganism—all sprung from your corrupt lifestyle. Many have not made it out, but a few have. You. God has chosen you. He wants to give you a chance at a new life. But in order to do that, you must not look back.”

At that moment, Lenore sensed someone's stare, which she sought out. From the audience, the woman with the blue eyes watched her. Lenore, startled, turned away.

“God is sparing you, but He's telling you not to look back. To give up the old life, the old ways, and to start new. Some of you, I know, are not willing to give all that up right away. You think that you can maybe do it slowly, one thing at a time, but I am telling you that's not possible. You are being given one chance, just like Lot and his family. It's hard, I know it's hard. It was hard on Lot, especially his wife, who could not obey. She looked back, my brothers and sisters. Lot's family was fleeing the city and his wife could not let go right away. She looked back at the destruction. She did not run back, she only glanced, and do you know what happened?”

A useless question flung up against such a crowd. No one moved.

“She was turned to salt.”

Mincho translated with wide eyes, evidently hearing this story for the first time himself. He turned to Dan, shocked.

“Really?” he asked. “Like salt I put on food?”

Dan nodded emphatically. “Yes, she turned into a pile of salt and then the wind blew her away.” This last part surprised Lenore. Was that really how Dan interpreted a pillar of salt? A formless pile of grains that blew away, leaving nothing? Lenore always imagined a solid salt rock, like a carved statue of the wife. A beautiful translucent statue people came from miles to admire and fear.

A few of the Indians eyed each other, panicked. Amid the distress and
indifference of the others, Lenore found the woman again. With her head tipped down, only her mouth remained visible. Lenore saw that she was laughing. Some joke cracked her lips in amusement and she laughed, silently, through bared teeth.

—

They celebrated their first sermon by opening two cans of warm Pepsi.

“What did you think?” The empty church reflected off Dan's glasses. Bars of light lay across where his eyes should be.

“I think it was wonderful, Dan, I think it'll only get better. I mean, they've probably never been in a church and heard anyone say anything meaningful before, that applies to their real lives. They're used to burning sacrifices in the woods and caves to ancient animal gods. Who can relate to animals?”

Their church, which had been hot all day, now felt cold. The metal walls seemed to take the mild weather outside and amplify it to the two extremes.

They both sipped, trying to make the Pepsis last. They'd only had room for a twenty-four-pack and knew they'd regret this early indulgence later.

“Do you think,” she asked after a minute, “they really think they'll turn to salt if they look at the mountains? They're everywhere, it's hard not to look at them.”

“You know that's not what I meant, Lenore. It was a lesson.” He blinked, sipped. “I mean, the story is true, but how it applies to them isn't so literal.”

“I know it was, I know that. But do you think they do?” She sucked at the brown soda crescent trapped on the top of the can, flicking her eyes up for a brief, serious look. She had been annoyed Dan didn't run the sermon by her first.

“I don't know.” His mouth made a nervous downward slide. “Do you think they think that? I just meant they can't go back to fighting and worshipping their old gods. Do they understand figures of speech? It was a sermon from the booklet, you'd think they'd know how these Indians think.”

“Maya, Dan.”

“Yes, sorry.”

Lenore remembered the woman. It had to be the same woman from that morning, crying and now laughing. How many blue-eyed Indians could there be? How could anyone laugh at that story? Possibly the woman didn't understand it. About half the congregation seemed not to understand, but they certainly didn't laugh.

“Well, maybe just keep that in mind for when you write your sermons. Just maybe clarify what you mean. I can help, if you read me drafts.”

“You're right,” Dan agreed. “I'm sorry, I forgot to run it by you. I'm forgetting our roles already.” He drained his Pepsi. “All this Old Testament stuff might be too much for them, anyway. They've seen enough destruction down here. I'm going to write all my sermons from the New Testament from now on. What do you think?”