The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (103 page)

I could hear the big buzzards and smell what they ate with such relish. I was still locked up. Human scavengers followed, and I heard the sounds of looting. I did not think anyone would come. But then they came to loot the jail’s guns and ammunition. The scavengers were afraid to open my cell because they saw my legs and wrists were shackled. But I told them the Blessed Virgin of the Indians had just worked me a miracle; I had been saved by the hand of God and they must set me free.

THAT OLD WOMAN! Years after her death, Lecha still could not top her. The story of Yoeme’s deliverance had been carefully inserted among the pages of the old almanac manuscript. Why had Yoeme called the story “Day of Deliverance”? What good was the story of one woman’s unlikely escape from the hangman? Had old Yoeme known or cared that 20 to 40 million perished around the world while she had been saved? Probably not. Lecha could hear the old woman’s voice even now.

“You may as well die fighting the white man,” Yoeme had told them when they were girls. “Because the rain clouds will disappear first; and with them the plants and the animals. When the spirits are angry or hurt, they turn their backs on all of us.”

Of course the white man did not want to believe that. The white man always had to be saved; the white man always got the last available water and food. The white man hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits were already dead and could not be tortured and butchered or shot, the only way the white man knew how to deal with the world. Spirits were immune to the white man’s threats and to his bribes of money and food. The white man only knew one way to control himself or others and that was with brute force.

Against the spirits, the white man was impotent. “You girls will see someday. Look what happened to your grandfather. Those mine shafts into the earth turned against him, and his bones broke to mush.”

How fitting that Yoeme had required the single worst natural disaster in world history to save her. Nothing could change Yoeme’s view of her “deliverance.” She had had “a vision” that told her the influenza had saved many others as well as revolutionists such as herself sentenced to die.

Yoeme had made margin notes after the pages describing her deliverance. Yoeme had believed power resides within certain stories; this power ensures the story to be retold, and with each retelling a slight but permanent shift took place. Yoeme’s story of her deliverance changed forever the odds against all captives; each time a revolutionist escaped death in one century, two revolutionists escaped certain death in the following century even if they had never heard such an escape story. Where such miraculous escape stories are greatly prized and rapidly circulated, miraculous escapes from death gradually increase.

It had been with Yoeme that Lecha had first seen rain clouds in the fat of sheep intestines. As children in Potam, Lecha and Zeta and their cousins had played with the lamb and pretended he was one of their make-believe herd. They stirred mud in tin cans and served it to him on plates of cottonwood leaves. He followed them when they ran. His long, woolly tail wagged while he nursed the black rubber nipple on a pop bottle. Later in the summer his tail was thick with fat and wool; burrs had tangled in his tail wool. Then one Saturday afternoon in August, old Yoeme had brought out her sharpening stone and long, curved butcher knife. She had also brought out the enamel dishpan. Uncle Ringo tied the big lamb’s legs together with rope, but the lamb did not struggle and lay on its side calmly as old Yoeme held a small tin pail under the lamb’s throat. Uncle Ringo pulled the lamb’s head back by the muzzle slit its throat. As its blood pulsed into the pail, the lamb made a weak struggle against the rope on its legs.

In the opened belly of a deer, the old woman told them, was where
she herself had first seen distant skies revealed in membranes of blue and purple, translucent as clouds before a snowstorm. The strands of pure white clouds were pearls of belly fat strung on thick loops of tallow the old woman saved for soap making. She told the girls there were ways the clouds might be summoned with the belly fat of deer or sheep. In the winter, steam off the body cavity summoned up snow mists and fogs around the dry mountain peaks. Old Yoeme had turned the lamb’s stomach inside out, and the bright green grass spilled out for the old dog to eat.

Old Yoeme’s gift to Lecha had been peculiar: Lecha’s gift finds only the dead, never the living. For a long time Lecha had blamed herself; she thought she had only to focus herself more intensely and quickly. By the time Lecha had returned to Potam, Yoeme had been so old and shrunken she had to lie in a child’s hospital crib. Lecha had barely been able to suppress a reflex to gag; she hated the smell of all of them crowded in the old house—cousins and in-laws in every room. It had been that day, long ago, when Lecha had begun to realize she could never be buried anywhere near the graves of other family members. Old Yoeme had seemed well cared for, although they left her alone most of the day. The old woman had recognized Lecha immediately. They had given Yoeme the room off the kitchen, and although Yoeme was as alert and cunning as she had ever been, she had got so old and shrunken up she could no longer walk. Even her bones seemed to have withered up, so all that remained were her small dark eyes still glittering with mischief.

Yoeme had claimed she had lived as long as she had because she was curious. Yoeme laughed loudly and had opened her lips and licked her tongue across yellow pegs of teeth. She still had a taste for life, what could she do for her dear grandchild?

“What if the only ones you find are dead?” Lecha had asked.

“Well, yes,” Yoeme had answered. “That is common enough. What do you want to know?” Yoeme had laughed as if Lecha’s question were a joke.

LECHA’S PLAN had been to take them by surprise. She would hire shovel hands in Hermosillo and get them started before any of the
rest of the family found out what was happening. Word had come from Potam that the big house had caved in; the adobe walls had melted like fresh dung after days of torrential rain. As soon as the message had arrived, Lecha had visualized the cemetery as she had seen it as a child: the ocean below the hill was as bright blue as the sky filled with white clouds blossoming in the spring wind. Hollyhocks that had been cut before dawn were tied to weathered crosses, but hours of the breeze and the sun had left the flowers drooping like the heads of captives tied to the stake. Around Yoeme’s unoccupied grave, the shifting dunes were held back by round, smooth ocean rocks the size of fists. In Lecha’s memory, there were no traces of the other graves of uncles and aunts, not even her mother’s. The blue of the sky swelled into the blue of the Sea of Cortés.

The idea had come to her suddenly, and Lecha had to laugh out loud. She who had spent nearly all of her so-called “professional life” watching coroner’s assistants open shallow graves would now watch as shovel hands dug up a few more.

Who would calculate how fast a family graveyard might fill up? The crowding had been the fault, of course, of their cousins’ breeding like flies. Lecha had endured them for more than sixty years, but she damn sure didn’t have to lie there for eternity with them. The big house at Potam had been sinking into the hill with each rainstorm. The seaward walls were going fastest, but the summer storms drove rain hard out of the southeast. White stucco had buckled and fallen long ago. The adobe bricks exposed had lost their edges and angles. With luck the house would cave in after two rainy, gray weeks in January. Then Uncle Ringo, Cucha, Popa’s husband, and any children remaining could be buried in the ruins of the house. The adobe walls would mound into soft pink clay terraces, and from the center, spidery branches of the lively old bougainvillea would scatter scarlet petals over fallen roof beams. As the years passed, after late-summer cloudbursts, a village child might find a curious shard of china or a shell button, or the tiny bone of a fingertip. Some year a man returning from a wood-hauling trip might see something reflect the late-autumn sun. He would find not the engraved silver bowl he had imagined, but the top of Uncle Ringo’s skull.

Popa would be one of the first they would dig up. Lecha herself would scatter Popa’s bones in the mounds of broken glass, rusted tin cans and rotting dog carcasses at the town dump. Popa had insisted old Yoeme leave the big house to live in Popa’s shack. Popa had wanted the big house of course, and once old Yoeme had been moved into Popa’s
shack, Popa moved herself and family into the big house. A deaf woman from the hills was hired to live in Popa’s shack with old Yoeme. Popa tore out the interior walls of the big house, remodeling, she said, but Lecha knew the old whore had been looking for the almanac notebooks. The walls were redone with pink wallpaper that matched the color of rouge the undertaker used on babies’ cheeks. Lecha knew Popa had not found the notebooks because Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks long before she died. When Popa had confronted Lecha in a great fury, the morning after the funeral, Lecha had only laughed at her and stepped into the taxi waiting outside the big house. Popa’s feebleminded children had followed her like quail chicks as she ran after the taxi screaming, “Thief!”

The family graveyard in Potam had been nearly empty when they were children. Although Lecha had not gone back, not even when Popa was killed, she got reports. Popa’s sister, Cucha, had served her family kidney stew gone bad in the summer heat, and three of the youngest had died, while Cucha lingered paralyzed in a hammock on the long porch that ran the length of the big house. Popa herself had been killed in a train wreck, returning before Christmas from a shopping spree in Nogales on the bullet train. That had left Uncle Ringo in charge of Cucha, her three older children (her husband had gone to find work in California and never returned), and Popa’s epileptic husband and four idiot children. Uncle Ringo had not managed the big house and its inhabitants very well. Popa’s children, though quite large, still stole matches or begged them from American tourists driving past to stare at the two-story adobe mansion on the highest hill in Potam. Uncle Ringo, an albino with watery, pale eyes and poor vision, had failed to notice the four huddled over a small pyre they’d constructed from dry weeds and bits of palm fronds. When the pinheaded boy named Dennis came running, his shirt and hair were on fire. The others with halos of smoke and flame had begun running down the road toward town, afraid of the beatings Uncle Ringo had given them for playing with fire before. The family graveyard had filled up quickly.

Uncle Ringo told everyone he’d done his best, but Uncle Federico had insisted on adopting Cucha’s remaining three—all lovely little girls, the oldest being thirteen. Lecha had laughed when her spy from Potam told her about Uncle Federico’s adoption of the girls. Once Uncle Federico had taken Lecha and Zeta to the train station in Hermosillo. Both Lecha and Zeta already knew what Uncle Federico liked to do when he found them alone in the hall on the third floor of the big house or caught
one of them in the pantry off the downstairs kitchen. His forefingers were as thick and ugly as the Cuban cigars he smoked. Once Lecha had seen a large dog turd in the courtyard that she mistook for a cigar her uncle had lost. He could slide the finger under the elastic of the panty leg with the same smooth motion he used to lift the little girls up into his arms. It happened so quickly he used the next motion to slip it out and smooth down the skirts of their little dresses. As they got older, he took each girl for a ride in his two-ton livestock-hauling truck and bought her a Chinese parasol out of red and gold paper, then explained that it was a delicate matter. “I studied at the seminary for the priesthood, as you know. Thus it is I who is chosen by your mother to look after you young girls. Sister Josefa has had you girls study the catechism, hasn’t she? You know the importance of your purity, your virginity, then. Yes? Well, my little dove, I am only watching out for it, a simple checkup. I am a doctor you know, I understand the human body.”

The forty-mile ride to the train station in Guaymas had not been simple.