The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind (21 page)

Fear had poisoned everyone she knew. It was killing the people of Tres Montes in one way or another. It had left them with no prayers of their own for God, no faith in themselves to face the unknown. No way to be consoled or offer respite to anyone else.

The cooking fire, where Blanca had boiled water, was still smoldering when Sonia reached it. She dropped Rafael’s soiled clothes into it and watched the flames lick high into the air.

Then her eyes fell on her shawl. It lay exactly where Felix had dropped it near the doorway. Sonia began to reach for it, deciding on the spot to turn the wretched thing to ash, too. But when she stooped, something surprised her inside the nearby bushes. A pair of eyes was watching her from between the branches.

She took a step closer to get a better look.

It was Luz, a girl who’d once burned with fever, but had recovered as Sonia prayed for her.

“I’m hiding like a panther,” the girl said. She made her hands into claws and growled.

“Oh. You’re a very good panther, then.”

Luz edged out, grinning wide as she wrapped herself around Sonia’s legs. The warmth of her little body was instantly calming. Sonia thought of the copper charm that stood for Luz on her shawl. Time had already given it the desirable tinge of verdigris. Would time be as generous to the real girl in a place like Tres Montes? What would it offer?

Sonia ruffled her hair.

“Go on, now, before your mother finds you,” she said. “We shouldn’t both be in trouble.”

In a flash, Luz’s bare feet were slapping against the packed dirt.

By nightfall, when her parents at last dozed in their chairs, Sonia stared out into the dusk, trying to not to think about sleep. She was too afraid to close her eyes and lose Rafael, who looked smaller and more fragile with each passing hour.

Instead, she listened to the night sounds. For all its grandeur, there was no music like this in the capital. Nor did the breeze circle the treetops in the same way. She took in deep breaths, until a rustle in the room made her turn.

Abuela had slipped into a corner, looking at Rafael with pity.

“Don’t take him yet,” Sonia said. “Please.”

Abuela sighed and made Sonia’s eyelids heavy. Good memories blew through the room. Learning to swim in the river, roasting chicken legs on the fire, searching for lizards after rains, running the cliffs, even the Saturday-morning arguments at market. The images took shape before Sonia’s sleepy eyes and floated away to Felix and Blanca, until soon their slack lips curled into smiles.

Sonia reached for Rafael’s hand. It was ice. She lay down beside him and whispered in his ear.

She murmured stories about the capital, pretending she could still see the mischief in his eyes. She promised him the largest truck that money could buy and apologized for every moment she had ever secretly envied him. His breaths grew shallow, and a strong odor of sulfur filtered through his bandages. She tried not to notice the red streaks of infection running the length of his wounded arm.

It was nearly dawn by the time Tía Neli, Pancho, and Mongo arrived with the doctor, a tired-looking man who’d been battling spotted fever in the countryside. Mongo’s horse had a glazed look; its ears were limp from the long trip. The group rushed up the path and stopped when they saw her.

Sonia was in the yard alone, staring at the embers that still glowed in the fire pit. Bits of Rafael’s charred belt were smoldering. For a moment, no one spoke.

“We’ve brought the doctor,” Pancho said.

She turned to him slowly.

“Abuela came,” she replied.

Tía Neli covered her mouth and raced inside with the others, the screen door banging behind her. Sonia didn’t follow. She stared at the last of the fire once again.

Rafael was gone.

T
HERE WERE NO
songs or processions. No long wails of neighbors coiling into the sky, only Señora Clara tucking mint leaves gently inside Rafael’s cheeks as she prepared him in his father’s best coat.

The next day he was buried quietly in a spot not far from Abuela and Luis, where Sonia said he could look out over the train whenever he liked.

“He didn’t deserve that fate,” Pancho whispered to Mongo, who had dug a grave through the moss and rocky earth while Pancho watched hopelessly, his arm still useless from his untimely exit from the train. That pain, however, was nothing compared to watching Sonia’s private despair.

The barkeep wiped the sweat from his head and loaded the last shovel onto his horse. He shook his head and clapped his young friend on the back.

“Don’t waste your time on such thoughts, Pancho. Fate meets the lucky and unlucky every day. There’s no use thinking it’s any other way.”

They finished packing in silence.

“Where will you go now?” Pancho asked him when he mounted at last. Conchita Fo had disappeared for parts unknown, according to Armando. La Jalada was deserted.

Mongo shrugged. “Who knows? Wherever the wind takes me, I suppose. But don’t worry. I’ll send word when I get settled; then you can write me more of your stories.” He hit his forehead with his hand. “Oh. I almost forgot.”

He fished in his pocket and drew out the remaining money that the
milagros
had fetched in the capital. “Give it back to her. Her people will need it from the looks of things.”

Pancho pocketed the money for safekeeping and watched his friend disappear into the trees. Then he joined Sonia near the fig tree. She and Tía Neli sat away from her parents. The space between them reminded Pancho of a chasm between mountains, but this one seemed to have no bridge. No one was speaking.

He tossed a small sack of wildflower seeds on the ground.

“For planting,” he said. Next year, when the ground was flat and hard again, he thought it would be a comfort to see their color, the bees dawdling heavily in the blooms.

Sonia stared, and Pancho instantly knew what she was thinking. Next year she would still be here without Rafael. By then she might start to forget the sound of her brother’s voice.

“
Gracias,
Pancho,” Tía Neli said. “We’ll plant them before we go.”

But the hours went by, and they walked home in gloom. No one had mustered the will to plant the seeds.

The next day, when Pancho arrived at the grave to spread the seeds himself, he found that Sonia was already there. She was sitting at the very edge of the outcrop, watching the hawks in the canyon. Her shawl lay beside her. She’d removed every charm from the fabric and piled them at the foot of the fig tree. Clearly, it had taken her hours of work. Her fingertips were bloody from the pricks. Her clothes were damp with dew.

He sat down and put his arm around her shoulders. From here they could see the river and the tracks, even the roof of Irina Gomez’s dilapidated schoolhouse and the shade tree where they’d shared so many stories.

“One day it will feel a little better,” he said, thinking of long ago when he had become an orphan.

Sonia picked up her shawl and rubbed her fingers along the fabric.

“I need to trouble you with another favor,” she said.

“Of course, anything. What is it?”

“Bring my parents here. Will you do that for me?”

“What should I tell them?”

Sonia sighed. She’d been asking herself that same question all night.

“Just bring them.”

Sonia was waiting when Pancho returned with her parents and Tía Neli. She was standing at the edge of the outcrop with her bare shawl on her shoulders. Tía Neli, still in her apron, gave her a worried look. Felix and Blanca stood watching her in awkward silence.

“Is your plan to finish us off by scaring us to death, Sonia?” Tía Neli asked. “Come away from there.”

But Sonia did not move.

“There are other more important things that need to be finished off,” Sonia said. “Things that should have been stopped long ago.”

She held out the remains of Abuela’s gauzy shawl, light as a whisper without any of the charms. When she opened her hands, it was snatched by the wind and carried far up into the drafts of the canyon. Blanca and Felix watched, speechless, as it sailed out of view.

Finally, Sonia came to their side.

“I would have saved him if I could have,” she said. “But I’m no more a savior than anyone else, Papi. I wish I could be what you hope for. All I am is Sonia.”

Felix cast down his eyes.

“God does the right thing by crooked paths,” he repeated. “This
is
the just punishment for sin.”

He caught her by the elbow as she started to walk off. His grip was still firm. “The sins here have been mine all along,
hija.
”

Sonia looked into his face. Felix’s lips were trembling.

“Look at what I’ve done with my bull-headedness. I asked a young man to give up hope for a future. I made a girl carry the burdens I was too weak to carry myself. For all I’ve done, there is no forgiveness. I’m cursed. All I can do is beg you to have pity on me, Sonia.”

Sonia buried her face in his shoulder. Soon Felix drew his wife and daughter closer.

“We can make things right again. Your brother wanted a future, one that he chose for himself. He knew he deserved one, and so do you. I don’t want him to have died for nothing.”

Blanca took his hand and kissed it. She ran her hands along Sonia’s hair.

“I knew she wouldn’t come back the same,” Blanca said. “But I never imagined she would come back so strong.”

“If you will permit me . . .”

Sonia lifted her head to find that Pancho had joined them. He offered his elbow and walked her parents to the fig tree, where Tía Neli was already waiting. A single
milagro
was hanging from a strip of cloth on the lowest branch. It was the charm Rafael had given Sonia. . . . A silver eye for wisdom and clarity.

“Pancho and I think this silly tree has always looked too bare.” She surveyed the canopy with misty eyes. “I can’t stand the sight of it another minute.”

Pancho held out the next charm on a strip of Tía Neli’s torn apron. He pressed the copper heart into Sonia’s hand and cast a cautious glance at Felix, who was looking on.

“Put this one on next,” he whispered.

The Ocampos worked together, their feet firmly on the mountain that had seen them born, but their sights high enough to see new possibilities. As the day wore on, news spread from one yard to the next and one by one, the people of Tres Montes gathered to watch them work. By dusk, the limbs of the fig tree glittered with what had once been the prayers of a whole mountain. The
milagros
moved in the breeze and reflected even the dimmest of evening light. Everyone stared in awe at the power and beauty of their own hopes and fears laid bare.

That night the music of charms in the wind guided them home.

Y
EARS LATER
, S
ONIA
used the money that hadn’t been able to save her brother to build a new school for the village. Sometimes she would stand at the door and listen to the music of the Prayer Tree outside. Each year her students added their own hopes and dreams to the branches for all to see. Sharing them, she told the students, was the first step toward helping their dreams come true. This, she thought, was the best way to honor Rafael.

Indeed, mentioning a hope out loud was how Sonia would realize her own dream, although she didn’t know it at the time. How could she have guessed that a chat over shaved ice with a chauffeur would lead to this? But it was true. Oscar never forgot Sonia or her bright, intelligent eyes. A few years later, when he died a content old man, a letter arrived for Sonia from the capital.
Teach,
his note said. Inside was the money for her studies. Somehow, he managed to return every penny she had earned during her time in the capital — and then some.

As for Pancho, in time he earned fame for his poems and mountain tales, telling them with the same joy, whether to kindhearted thieves or to men of honor. As Sonia had predicted, he’d become Francisco Muñoz, a favorite of the president and his wife, both of whom tirelessly requested the tale of the Girl Who Could Silence the Wind.