A Far Country (2 page)

Growing up, she played all day in the dusty plaza before the whitewashed houses and the church. There was an empty fountain built during optimistic times, and a statue that had
long lost all its features to the wind and dust storms. There was no running water in Saint Michael. Some said the statue was the governor, and others said it was a great bandit. The old men said that it had been salvaged from the road to the coast. At Carnival, it wore a hat.

When she was old enough, she attended a one-room schoolhouse at the edge of town. There were twenty or forty children, depending on the season. In the evenings, she walked home alone, or her brother went to fetch her.

They lived in a small house on the plaza. Four hammocks hung in one of the rooms. In the second was a worn sofa, where a visitor slept if there wasn’t space to string another hammock. The walls stopped short of the underbelly of the roof. Flower-print sheets hung in the doorways. Spots of light twinkled in the chinks between the roof tiles and speckled her arms. There was a little wooden table with an altar for the Virgin and a half-dozen photos perched at uneven intervals on the walls. Above the couch someone had written, in charcoal,
ROBERT S
. +
MARIA
. It was surrounded by a heart, and had been there for as long as she could remember. She didn’t know who they were. Outside, the door was chalk-marked “7” by a census taker. Then the “7” had been crossed out and rewritten “4.”

On the other side of the sofa was a kitchen. There was a small raised hearth with an iron trivet and an earthen jar for water. They kept the provisions in a wooden cabinet to hide them from the flies. The table was surrounded by four stools, which her father had carpentered himself. If visitors came and there weren’t enough plates, the children waited and watched until the meal was finished before taking their places at the table.

The back door opened into the thorn scrub, where a path zigzagged through the brush and didn’t stop until the mountains. Drying clothes flapped on the branches. Goatskin chaps with hair on the outside hung on the wall, but they were brittle and hadn’t been worn since a murrain killed most of the cattle. Outside in the center of the main square was a single telephone, installed by the family of the state phone company when one of its sons was running for governor. The token collector never came, so someone pried open the collection box. From then on, calls were free: the line engaged, the coin dropped out into the caller’s hand. A single token sat atop the phone.

In the four hammocks slept Isabel, her brother, her mother and her father, in that order toward the door. They slept so close that they bumped one another when they moved.

Her mother tended the house and a small garden of manioc. A spring ran near Saint Michael, and when the earth wasn’t so dry that it took all the water before it reached the surface, she tended a mango tree and a copse of banana trees as well. She had studied at a Marist school on the road to the coast and could read, but Isabel’s father didn’t know the letters. During the season, he cut sugarcane in the fields that grew along the distant stretches of the spring. Isabel would remember him from this time as a quiet unshaven man who rose long before dawn to eat cornmeal and leftover scraps of salted beef, refried until the strands of gristle curled up like pieces of thread.

Watching him, she learned that the natural state of a person is silence, that speaking only stirs up problems where there weren’t problems before.

Her father had sunburned skin and pale green eyes. Her mother’s skin was dark, and when she wore her oldest skirts, Isabel could lose her on the road at night.

When it wasn’t cane season, her father found work with the construction companies, grading roads or laying pipe, at times going as far as the coast for projects in the state capital. In the cluster of houses about the square also lived her mother’s mother and father, her mother’s sister, the children of her mother’s sister, her grandmother’s sister and her children and grandchildren, and dozens of other cousins by blood and by marriage.

On the thresholds of the houses they tossed clay marbles and played jacks with goat knuckles, serrying them in little legions. When they grew tired of the knuckles, they played with the shadows of the knuckles, crouching creatures that unfurled themselves as the sun went down. At dusk, they abandoned them and swarmed the square like a wasps’ nest disturbed.

Once, she had three brothers and a sister. The oldest was a young man by the time she was born, with a good job on a bus line. Her sister married a man she met in the drought camps at age fifteen, and returned with him to his home. Since then, she had come to Saint Michael once, with a baby.

They had lost the youngest brother to cholera in the camps. Isabel remembered him only from a photograph taken by an aid worker: a small boy who stood apart from the family, as if he were already getting ready to leave. She thought of this when she heard an old woman say that children who die young know it before anyone else; they behave differently, as if they have already been back and forth to the place they are going. But she always had known what would happen to him, long before she heard the old woman speak.

People said that she and her middle brother Isaias were
close because they had grown up alone together, but she knew that it began even earlier, before that first retreat. There were very few photos of her family from that time. No one in Saint Michael had a camera. The photos were taken either by a cousin who lived in the state capital or by itinerant photographers, who appeared, like the color green, in the years of rain. They lined up families against the white wall of the church and returned with the prints months later, led house to house by a crowd of children.

In the photos, Isaias and Isabel were always together: a smiling child proudly carrying a baby; a boy dangling a beribboned child upside down during the winter festivals; a young man squashing his nose against a little girl’s cheek as she stood on a chair in a borrowed flower girl’s dress; the pair of them at night, at the edge of the cobbled square, Isaias with a smile and Isabel wide-eyed, her lips half parted in surprise, her hand raised slightly in the air, as if blindly reaching for him the moment the flash went off. Even in a formal family photograph taken before the first drought, while everyone was solemn, staring at the camera, she was looking at Isaias, a gaze that she recognized in the old women before the statues of the saints. And Isaias, age nine then, looking back.

Once, after a summer carrying crates at the market in Prince Leopold, he treated her to a photograph at a traveling fair. They stood on stools and stuck their heads through holes in a wooden board. There was a painted dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, a suit, a steamship and the words
GONE TO ’FRISCO
. It was the first time she’d heard of the sea. In the photograph, her yellow-tinged curls poked out of the hole and fell alongside the black mane of the painted woman. Isaias looked earnest, his jaw set and his lips pinched defiantly. They looked eerily similar, with the same skin, the same color hair,
the same light blue eyes that ran through her family like a jagged vein through a stone. Behind the set, he held his back straight and his hands on his hips.

They said that he took after his grandfather Boniface, a thin man who wore a watch on each wrist, donned a stained white suit despite the heat, and spent the market days pining for the return of the New State with two other eccentrics and a set of dominos. Boniface played fiddle, and in his youth he had made a name for himself. At a time when schooling was a whim of the large plantation owners who hired them for seasonal labor, he taught himself to read and knew which plants to take for problems of the liver and which to take for problems of the nerves. He knew how to remove a rotten tooth with the tip of a knife and what to give for a snakebite. He was also very handsome, and the town whispered that he was grandfather to many more of the dusty children than was publicly acknowledged. He wore three wedding bands, one for each wife he had survived. From him Isaias learned to play fiddle, and to smile in a way that made girls cover their teeth and trace their bare toes through the sand.

Isaias was born in the public hospital in the nearest city of Prince Leopold. Isabel was born in Saint Michael itself, twenty minutes after her mother’s water broke as she crossed the cane fields. It should have been the other way, her mother said, the pensive child born in the yellowed hospital walls, the impetuous little boy clawing his way out into the cane. But they showed their true selves within hours, the boy protesting wildly against the prodding hands of the hospital nurses, the girl uttering a single, startled cry before settling quietly into the arms of her mother, who rose and continued the walk home.

Her mother would often say: Even then, anyone could see
the difference. At that time when babies won’t stop watching your face, that boy stared straight past. Not Isabel—she looked you in the eye and knew what you were thinking, but the boy’s eyes were moving the moment he could keep them open.

From an early age, Isaias went alone to walk in the hills. When Isabel was old enough to keep up, he took her with him, on excursions in the high heat or at dawn, dragging her grumbling from the house to see the birds before they hid from the sun. He found her wild cactus fruit and polished the dust from it with his shirt. He made her practice the names of plants. He thrust his hands into the thorns to grab beetles, into the hot mud to scoop up toads, into the cacti to pull out vivid pink flowers that he held for her, as she squinted with one eye and then the other through a scratched watch-repairman’s lens he bought at the weekly fair in Prince Leopold. He found fossil fish for her in the eroded sandstone and showed her rock etchings of men and animals. He broke off long leathery pods from the mimosas and rattled them as they walked.

He brought his fiddle. In the shade of a buckthorn, she sat on a bumpy stone and listened to him play. The fiddle had a threnodial cry, as if one could play the sound of creaking floorboards or an animal’s wail. On the way back, he told her how he would become famous. It was one of the few times he laughed, and his laughter spread until it shook his whole body. Isabel lived for these moments. She lost herself to imagining his successes and boasted of them to everyone.

When he was older, he borrowed books from a traveling notary. He read to her. Her favorite story was of the Princess of China, whose hair was described as long black sails.

Once, as she ran dusty and barefoot through the house in a pair of underpants, her grandfather Boniface grabbed her arm.

‘Where’s your conspirator?’ he asked. She was four and the word was big and unfamiliar. He brushed dust from her cheek. ‘What is it, little mouse? They don’t teach you anything in school?’

‘Conspirator in what?’ asked her mother, cutting a sliver off a rope of tobacco. ‘I don’t think I understand, either.’

‘What’s not to understand? The boy makes crazy plans and she believes them. He thinks he is a king, and she thinks this is the center of the world.’ He waved a hand. ‘Yes?’

Isabel sneezed and didn’t have an answer. She already knew there were certain questions adults asked children only for the sake of other adults. ‘Wipe your nose,’ said her mother, laughing, ‘and if you see your conspirator, tell him the goats chewed down the clothesline.’ Boniface loosed her arm and she sprang off running into the brush.

At Saint John’s festival, her mother freckled her face with dabs of dark mud. At Carnival she was an angel, then an Indian, then an angel again. Most boys borrowed lipstick and put on their sisters’ dresses. Each year Isaias wore the same oversize coat of ribbons and colored buttons. He brought his fiddle to play along at the edge of the band, where he flirted with the girls who came down from the villages. Isabel trimmed her hair with tinsel, shouted, ‘It’s Carnival!’ and whirled, glinting, as he played.

When Isaias was thirteen and she was six, her father said it was time for him to leave school and join the men in the sugarcane fields.

He went on longer walks, alone. At night, she heard him arguing. ‘Let me go to the coast,’ he said. ‘And what are you going to do there?’ her father asked. ‘Play fiddle.’ ‘And be a beggar your entire life?’ ‘Not a beggar. In the cities you can make a living in music.’ ‘That’s a lie.’ ‘It isn’t a lie, I promise. I can play in the markets, or in a band. There are many ways.’

In the morning, she awoke to Isaias climbing out of his hammock. She rose quietly and stood behind the sheet that hung in the doorway. She watched his hunched back as he ate in silence.

He worked for the next three years cutting cane with the older men. He walked the half hour to the fields in the darkness and returned to sleep in the early evening. To protect against the sharp leaves, he wore patched leather shoes and three shirts, ash-stained, stiff with dried sweat, buttoned to his neck to keep out the spiders. He wrapped his ankles and torn elbows with rags. Fragments of cane fiber specked his clothes and hair. In the cane fields the men were joined by others brought in by flatbeds. At lunch they sat in the clearings and ate from dented tins.

Once he cut his hand. The foreman made the driver wait until the end of the day to take him to a clinic. Isabel came along. There they learned the nurse had gone home, and so they slept on a wooden bench until she came back in the morning. The nurse poked at the wound worriedly and stitched it with wide, looping bites. The next night Isaias began to shiver. By the morning, the wound had swollen at the stitches like an overstuffed sausage, and when he made a fist, one of the threads tore through the flesh. He spent the next week at a little hospital in Prince Leopold.

He asked for Isabel to stay with him. In the next bed was an
old woman whose breath rattled like the withered pods they twisted off the trees. Cockroaches fell off the walls under their own weight. Since Isaias was so thin, there was space in the bed, and the nurses let Isabel sleep there. Outside a window, they could see a pair of thrushes dash along a stretch of hot earth. They argued about whether a bird’s feathers were warm or cold. ‘Warm from the sun, cold from the wind,’ said Isaias, and this question occupied Isabel for a long time.