Hard Red Spring (38 page)

Dan and Lenore nodded, chewing.

“And when I read it, I saw Guatemala! Like the sisters. Guatemala is like a sister in an unfortunate position who has to make a good match, right? A good match to be successful. We have a choice to make a good match, like with Mr. Darcy. Or a bad match, like with Wickham! He's very sexy, Mr. Wickham. He makes promises. Like the Soviets! Promises that sound nice, but cannot be. We must know better. We must wait for our Mr. Darcy!” He heaved forward with this proclamation. “Right?”

“Mr. Darcy,” Lenore repeated. She had no idea what he was talking about.

“The United States! Rich and moral and stable. It was the most important book of my education.” He turned to Dan. “Do you have the baptism list for me?”

Dan put down his knife to pass over pieces of ripped-out paper from the baptism log. There were just fifty on the list, stamped with Dan's translucent, buttery thumbprint.

“This is all? There are over three hundred Indians in the village now.” He frowned deeply. Everything he said with either a smile or a frown, like a man who'd spent his life communicating with people who didn't speak his language.

“There's a long waiting list,” Dan said. “Lenore has everyone signed up.
We've just been so busy that we've only had one ceremony, for the sick villagers. It takes a while, because everyone has to have their baptism interview beforehand.”

“They can have their interview after,” the General declared. “You must start baptizing tomorrow. The President is concerned about delays.”

Dan hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, that's fine. Hopefully, soon we'll catch up and be able to do it in the right order.”

This pleased the General. “And I understand you have some requests?”

“Yes,” Dan said, licking his lips. He swallowed quickly and abandoned his next bite. “First, we're concerned with housing. It seems we'll run out of sheds soon. The pit toilets, too, won't be enough. And I noticed that some of the women aren't getting enough food. I know the men and women are supposed to work for their families' rations, but what about the older widows? It seems they're getting by mostly on the charity of their neighbors, who can't spare much.”

The General nodded. “Charity is a Christian virtue, yes?” He stared at Dan.

“Well,” Dan said, looking at his plate. “Yes.”

“Good.” The General clapped twice. “You see, they're learning. This is good.”

Lenore opened her mouth, but abruptly closed it.

“Anything else?” the General asked.

“We're curious about plantings. Will the villagers get vegetables?” she asked.

“The Indians are planting wheat.”

“Only wheat? That's a lot of wheat for one village.”

“The wheat is part of the Project. Every model village plants wheat, then it is all put together with the corn mix and to make the rolls.”

“But it's just so much wheat. Maybe you could reserve a small section of the field for vegetables. The corn mix can't be very nutritious—”

“The Indians eat corn,” the General proclaimed with a raised fist. “We give them corn mix. They are corn people. They believe they're made out of corn. Just ask them.”

“Okay.”

“What about interpreters, General?” Dan asked. “We still only have one interpreter. We have at least four Mayan languages in the village and we can only interpret Quiché. When will we get interpreters?” The tone of his voice, to Lenore's surprise, verged on confrontation.

“We are working on that,” the General said, now smiling and frowning at
the same time, a look of sympathetic pain at their troubles. “There are many model villages and not many people who speak English and Indian. Not everyone here,” he added, straightening, “went to Harvard.”

“Are there female interpreters? Can I request a woman, please?” Lenore asked.

“Why?”

“I think the women are afraid of Mincho.” Dan kicked her discreetly, but she kept on. “At the conference they said that a lot of the guerrillas dressed as soldiers and raped them. They're terrified of Mincho because he wears a uniform. I think if I had a female interpreter they'd be more open to the program. Can I request one, please?”

“Sure,” he said, his eyes glinting in polite refusal. “Anything else?”

Dan turned his list over in his hand, skimming down and deeming vitamins, milk, better hot plates, bandages, soap, antiseptic, and antibiotics unworthy of mentioning. He also failed to mention that they suspected that the well was what was giving everyone diarrhea and filling the pit toilets too quickly. Dan refolded the list and said, “I was hoping to talk to you about your road project. I'm a foreman, you know. I've paved highways on government contracts. I've cut fire roads for the Forest Service. I can help you map the best way to cut up this jungle.”

They talked about roads for quite some time: grades, soil, gravel, defoliants. The General brought out a topographical map of the area.

“Excuse me, General,” Lenore interrupted. “Excuse me. I wonder if you got my note about the sewing class. I have no idea if these notes make it to you. We give them to the soldiers and they just disappear. We never hear—” She checked herself. “I just think it could be a very important part of the program, too. Did you get my note?”

“Oh yes, I'm sorry. I get so many notes.” The General leaned back to stare at the ceiling, to page through these notes mentally. “A sewing class to make their own clothes? But they have the donation clothes.”

“Yes, but those clothes aren't very nice, General.”

“Please, call me Gilberto.”

“Gilberto. I think that taking pride in their work and learning a new skill will give them more incentive to give up their costumes. Which is a goal of the Project.” She found herself repeating exactly what she'd written in the note. “And I know another goal of the Project is to convince them to participate in the economy. Sewing is a valuable skill, I think something they can work at later once the war is over.”

He nodded, fingering the edge of his cherry-stained desk, thinking. He turned a hard profile, like a face stamped on a coin.

“And I fear the women are idle,” she said before she could stop herself. This was not something she'd mentioned in the note. “They don't have enough to do.” What was she saying? Even Dan turned, shocked.
What?
he mouthed to her.

The General's eyes squared, at something he suspected all along. “Okay, this sewing class seems like a good idea, but it is not a recommended activity on the list. If you can prove its worth, maybe I will put it on the list.”

“Thank you, Gilberto.”

“If you can get the women to wear these clothes, I will have all the model villages doing the same. It has been a problem,” he said. “None of the women in any of the villages are wearing the donation clothes. If this works, it would be a great contribution to the Project.”

—

They sat in their room after, feeling ill from all the food. Lenore regretted the meal, knowing that it had stretched her stomach to an unreasonable size. The next few days, she'd be hungrier than ever.

“I don't think I'm going to get a female interpreter,” she said, noticing a line of ants swarming a drop of corn mix on the floor. Ants everywhere. She knew she'd never get rid of them. She also knew Dan didn't think having a female interpreter was necessary.

“Next time,” he said, “we should prioritize better. I think maybe we complained too much. We didn't mention one positive thing.”

“We didn't mention any of the problems, Dan. Not medicine or water treatment. We talked about roads.”

“Lenore, I could see how upset you were, but I just saw that list of problems and it occurred to me that we don't have those things because we don't have roads yet. Everything was airlifted here, even the trucks at the base.” Dan gave up on his sermon and moved to the bed, curling up in defeat. “I'm sorry, I meant to mention those things, but I just became so focused on the solution that I never mentioned the problems.”

Lenore, surprised by this turn, began to comfort him. “I'm sure he's already aware of all the problems, Dan. I'm sure he's working as hard as he can on them.” She paused. Outside, they heard shoveling. They'd come back from the meeting to find soldiers digging more toilets. “I got the sewing class. And he wants us to hold a baptism tomorrow. That's something, he is aware of priorities.”

The girl Cruzita would be in the first group, which pleased Lenore. But
then she remembered Emelda, further down on the list. The woman did not seem convinced by anything Dan preached. Why would she volunteer to be baptized? And how could these two possibly be related? A sweet, dark-eyed angel and a bright-eyed, cackling heathen.

“I don't know how I feel about baptizing them before their interviews,” Dan said. “They need to understand the significance of the ceremony.”

“Do you think . . .” she tried, “do you think some of these Indians could be using baptism for something bad?”

“What do you mean? How could baptism ever be bad?” He sat up on the bed, showing that he had been crying.

“I mean, do you think some of them don't believe? They're just going through the motions for some deceptive purpose?”

“It's possible,” Dan said with a nod, “that some guerrillas have infiltrated the village, like the General said, that they're going through with it to blend in and fool us. Do you have someone in mind? Have you noticed anyone suspicious? The General wants us to report anyone who's suspicious.”

“No.” She was not willing to turn anyone in yet. “Everything's just been so easy. I never expected it to be this easy, saving all these people.”

Dan quickly fell asleep from all the food. Lenore watched him, fighting the desire to crawl into bed herself. But she needed to write the church for sewing supplies. If she missed one thing, she'd have to wait, probably weeks, for another shipment. So she sat at the table and began to make her list. Scissors, needles, strong thread. The supplies began to sound like weapons, and Lenore wondered if this was a good idea, after all.

When she finished the note, she stood in the doorway of the church, watching the soldiers work. She counted the holes. Five new pit toilets, but they couldn't extend the sanitation building much more, as the only direction they could dig brought it closer to the water pump.

~~~~~

The next evening, Lenore strolled the paths, thinking. Some women nodded hello when she passed, while children trailed wordlessly behind, hoping for some church candy.

“I don't have any candy,” she told them in English. “You have to come to church to get candy.” Lenore showed her empty hands, but they kept following, the boys in clothes she recognized from the donation pile. They were healthier, no doubt, than when they had arrived. Somehow, the corn mix was more and better than what they had been surviving on in the mountains.

Making a turn, she discovered the Civil Patrol blocking her way. She'd walked in on one of their exercises: practicing a roadblock. From a small distance, Lenore could see Dan wielding his wooden machete, hacking the air at a soldier's command.

She'd never tell Dan, but these drills often looked absurd to her. Like a bunch of boys playing war. Lenore understood the need for a police force to maintain order, but she believed that brandishing those swords gave the wrong idea. Instead of making the villagers feel secure, she noticed that the exercises frightened anyone passing by. Now the patrol fell awkwardly into different formations, like a junior high marching band. Their fake weapons raised, lowered, slicing and stabbing, they marched in place. Lenore chose the long way, to avoid them altogether.

She found Emelda in her shed, alone, holding her daily roll of bread. Just standing and staring, as if it reminded her of something. When Lenore stepped in, she assessed the situation quickly. Still the stacked newspapers, and the clippings pasted to the wall. Her hot plate turned on, a red eye seething in the dark. A hardened ball of sap smoldered on the silver surface, slowly expiring in a thin trickle of upward smoke, making the air medicinal.

“I want to talk about getting you a job in the village,” Lenore said.

Emelda did not respond. She considered her roll, scratched at it with a fingernail.

“I know that as a widow you don't have anyone to help earn your rations for you. And with new people coming in, it will just get harder to get food. They haven't been delivering more.” Nothing, no reply, not even a glance. “And I need you, I need an interpreter. I can't do my job the way things are now.”

The woman tossed the roll up and caught it, replied in an Indian language.

“I know you speak English!” Lenore snapped, then composed herself. “You spoke English to me before.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“I was not well that day.” Emelda shook her head and squatted low on her heels. “I have many problems, but I'm not a widow. I don't have a husband. Never did.”

“Why do you want to be baptized?” Lenore asked.

“I don't want to be baptized. I need to be baptized.”

“Why do you
need
to be baptized?”

“You,” she said, laughing miserably through her charred teeth, “are not a good missionary.”

“I've seen you during the sermons. You shouldn't mock the Lord. I'm sure you have a boatload of sins on your record, but that is the worst of them.”

“I do have sins.” Emelda bounced the roll in her hand as if it had significant weight. She bounced it, then cocked her arm back and threw it out the door.

There were two things going on now, but Lenore needed to remain focused. She would scold her later for wasting food. “Well, that's the first step to earning a baptism. What are they?”

“I traded the blood of my people for land and money.”