A Far Country (8 page)

In the evenings, when she came home with the goats, she looked for a letter from Isaias and asked her mother for any news. But the mail came rarely; the postman waited for letters to collect for many days before he made rounds to the remoter settlements. There were weeks in Saint Michael without mail.

She tried writing to him. She took paper from the schoolhouse and wrote slowly, making her capital letters big so they filled the lines. She spelled out the words on her lips. She wrote,
Isaias you should come home It is much better here than the city You make Money yes but Here is better Many people left There are places to farm I can help I know how to take care of everything now
. She crumpled it. She wrote,
Isaias I am very lonely Why If you were here I wouldn’t be so lonely
. She crumpled it. She wrote,
Isaias Mother and Father say you should come back Why did you go away You can’t
She didn’t know how to spell
abandon
, and she stopped.

Again she crumpled it. They were a little girl’s words; she felt stupid. She had used up the paper, so she returned to the schoolhouse. As she walked, she asked herself why it was so difficult to explain. Why can’t I just say it, that without you there is nothing here, suddenly we are poor and there is nothing, suddenly it is empty but it was never empty before. She found brown wrapping paper and used it to trace a school calendar, going over and over the numbers until the graphite broke.

Like the last time he left, she began to spend more time alone. She found that the solitude of the white forest rendered her invisible, that in the empty place that remained, her imagination flourished: Isaias returned, the rain came, the white forest flowered, the gray smothering heat lifted off Saint Michael and the backlands. She had always daydreamed, but now the dreams consumed her; there were hours she walked without knowing where she was.

As soon as she awoke, she would take the goats into the hills. The rest of her days withered until all that remained were her imagined hours with her brother. She told him about the road, the forest burning, the migrations. When she told him about the construction worker, she asked him to accompany her through town and to the road crew so that everyone would see she wasn’t alone. She fantasized about Isaias hitting the worker so hard that his teeth rattled like a fistful of pebbles.

He left her at the edge of the trail. She wondered, Does he know? Is he really with me on these walks, Is part of him here, somehow do my questions find their way to him, through some strange thread, some web, some hidden channel to the south? Or are they my own questions and my own answers? Is it him or is it my memory of him? She wondered, Does everyone
feel this? Or is it different, is it like hunting for him in the cane, like that strange and impossible game?

In town, the other girls talked about upcoming festivals and the men they met in the marketplace. They crowded around an old beauty magazine that one of them had brought from the coast. Isabel avoided them. She worked harder, grating the manioc furiously, deliberately filling the buckets to the brim when she carried them up from the river. Once, as they washed the dishes, her mother said, ‘Things will be better, Isa,’ and when Isabel tried to speak she felt her throat thick and heavy. She turned her face to the gray water and hid in the arbor of her hair.

In the little hand mirror, her cheeks were gaunt. She wore through a sandal and resoled it with goatskin. The pencil tickled as her mother traced the outline of her foot. When the phone rang, she ran to it, but it was always for someone else. Once, she returned from a walk to the news that Isaias had called. She called him back, but the line rang and no one answered.

When the parrot perches passed through town, she stood in the crowd that gathered to bid goodbye. The men lingered, discussing the road and weather. The children clambered over the tires and the passengers stared out through the slatted rails. When they finally left, and the wind took away the last of the ridged tread marks, she imagined her brother waiting in an identical square at the end of the long descent.

In the valley, the road crew moved on, and the plumes of dust disappeared into the backlands. A week later, another crew came, with different machines. They laid hot black tar
over the broken path. These men were different, humorless. They drank heavily at night and shot at the thrushes and snakes. They drove into Saint Michael and sat in the canteen until they were very drunk, and then veered away into the night.

With the new roads came more trucks, dragging huge containers toward the big cities of the interior. The children went down to the verge. They kicked the flattened carcasses of the bull toads across the asphalt or played soccer with a sack stuffed with rags. They lay in the road to listen for the vibration of the trucks, and then lined up like a little gallery of race spectators to watch them pass. They set out cacti and cheered as the tires pulped them. They gonged stones off the container siding.

Once, a little boy arced a stone into the air before a hurtling truck. It seemed to hang momentarily in space before the windshield disintegrated into a rain of glass. Ahead, the truck stopped, the children scattered into the thicket. A door creaked open and the driver walked back down the road. He stared into the scrub. A wind picked up, stirring the shards of glass. Suddenly he seemed afraid. He drove away. The children rushed the road, laughing, hurling stones.

Two weeks later a roadblock appeared. A pair of troops from the Military Police paced in the heat, stopped cars and banged their rifle butts against the sun-hot trunks. The children joked that they were hunting the little boy, but their parents were somber. The children were prohibited from leaving town. An officer came to ask questions. He sweated heavily and wiped his brow with his forearm. They were looking for highwaymen: someone, he said, was rolling boulders into the road and pistol-whipping drivers out of their cars. He watched everyone carefully as he spoke.

A week later he returned with reinforcements. They arrested two men. When they released them a month later, one had a clouded, useless eye and the other woke at night screaming. Then one day the men disappeared into the thorn. Later, on a back road outside town, Isabel came across an empty red car. There were no license plates. The window was smashed, and a thrush ate spilled bits of manioc flour from the floor mats. A snake stirred in the shade of the fender. She told her father.

‘Don’t tell anyone you saw that,’ he said. ‘And if the police come again and ask, keep your mouth shut about what you saw.’

Down in the valley, the cane began to grow again, but word came that they would be hiring fewer men this year because of a new reaper that could drive straight over the piles and scoop the stalks into its belly.

At home, her father paced the house and drank. One night, as Isabel tried to sleep, she heard him whisper to her mother in the other room, ‘Send Isa.’

‘And be alone?’ her mother answered.

‘We are going to be alone if she stays here. Look how thin she is. There’s not much of her left.’

‘Don’t say things like that.’

‘There is barely enough food for you and me. She could work in the city.’

‘She’s fourteen. Think before you say those kind of things. She knows nothing about the city. She knows nothing about the world. You worked in the capital. The city is even bigger. Can you imagine her there, the way she is, quiet and watching all the time?’

Her father interrupted, his voice angry: ‘Then what do you want? For her to stay here and keep disappearing into the thorn? Fourteen’s old. Girls are married when they’re fourteen. Maybe she’ll meet a man in the city. She’s pretty when she’s not so thin. But now she’s just getting strange. Since—’

‘Since Isaias left,’ said her mother. ‘I know. Don’t think I don’t see it.’

‘But you think things are going to be better.’

‘That’s not what I am saying.’

‘It’s what I’m hearing.’ Her father’s voice broke. ‘You think it’s going to get better. If not, you better think about what you’re saying, because it’s what I’m hearing.’

There was a long silence, then her mother’s voice began again, trembling. ‘I can’t. I can’t do this. Who’s going to take care of us later? I had four children, and now there is just her.’

‘Just her? They’re not dead. Isaias isn’t dead. You are talking about him as if he’s dead.’

‘No, I’m not. You know I’m not. But he’s not here, either. You think children come home from the city? How many children have you seen come home from the city? What if the perch turns over? What happens then? What happens if she gets sick?’

‘Her body’s closed. She knows which prayers to say. She’s never said anything since that day she saw the spirit out in the forest. It isn’t the same in the cities.’

‘I’m not worried about a spirit, I’m worried about real people.’

‘She isn’t weak. She knows the backlands as well as I do. She’s smart.’

‘She’s smart like an animal’s smart. Like an animal knows what’s near and senses things before they come. I don’t know
what good that does in the city. She can barely write—you’ve seen her try.’

‘I—’ began her father, and then he cursed. Her mother muttered something else, and then her father said, ‘Of course I don’t want that. What father wants that?’ and then they both were silent for a long time. Isabel strained to listen. She thought she heard her mother crying. Then pacing, then the clatter of bottles.

‘Put that away,’ said her mother.

Without warning, she heard a pot slam against the wall. ‘You think I want this?’ he shouted. ‘You think I asked for this?’ ‘Shh, don’t scream, I didn’t say—’ The pot clattered across the room. ‘Don’t you understand? They’ve got my face against the ground.’

‘Who’s they?’ Her mother sounded as though she were speaking to a child.

‘They
. The people against us. The situation.’ He said the word slowly. ‘The whole situation that’s against us.’

Again there was silence.

‘And if she doesn’t want to go?’ asked her mother, at last.

‘She’ll go. She’s wanted to go since her brother left.’

They moved outside and Isabel caught only phrases. She welcomed the sudden calm.

More days passed. Her father’s drinking bled into the daytime. Twice, he shattered stools in anger. He paced the house and collapsed into tears. Her mother hid the plates, cups and saints so he wouldn’t break them.

One night in late May, he came home with his face swollen and bruised. ‘Who did this to you?’ said her mother. When
she brought him water, he hit it away. Isabel undressed him. His clothes smelled of cane liquor. She rocked him and wiped grease and little specks of food from the ruddy stubble of his beard. When he fell asleep in his hammock, her mother took her outside.

For a long time they were quiet together. ‘We can’t do this much longer,’ said her mother.

She looked old and very tired. ‘I spoke to Manuela,’ she said. ‘She has her own house. She says it would be hard for you to get work in a factory, but she has a baby. She has been paying a woman to watch it during the week. You could take care of it until you found some kind of work. There’s a perch next week.’

‘And Isaias is there.’

‘Yes, Isabel,’ said her mother. ‘Yes, he is there. But he’s working, too, remember. Don’t expect so much from him. It’s hard if someone expects too much of you.’

Isabel telephoned the city. A man answered. She could hear loud music playing in the background. ‘This is Isabel, Manuela’s cousin. I want to speak to my brother.’

‘I’ll get him,’ said the man.

She hung up the receiver and looked out at the empty square. Many of the houses were shuttered. A pair of children played, but the plaza was otherwise empty. She called again. ‘Hello?’ Music blasting, a loud bass sound. ‘It’s Isabel.’ ‘Couldn’t find your brother, love. Haven’t seen him for a couple of days, actually.’

‘He must be working on the coast,’ she said.

At meals they said little. In a canvas bag, among her clothes, she packed her long knife, its blade narrowed from sharpening. Her mother said that in the city there was nothing
to cut. ‘Not cactus?’ asked Isabel. Her mother shook her head. Isabel left the knife.

Later, she walked to the edge of the thorn, broke off a smooth gray piece and placed it carefully into her bag.

As the days passed and her departure grew closer, she began to suffer attacks of vertigo. She wished her mother would change her mind. Then, later, when rumors came that the price of the trip had risen, she worried she wouldn’t go at all. The rumor was false. Again, vertigo seized her. She began to worry that someone would ask,
But do you want to go?
and she wouldn’t have an answer.

Finally, she kissed her aunts and uncles and cousins and, last, her father. ‘Be good,’ he said only, but looked away when she tried to meet his eyes. She walked with her mother to Prince Leopold, to the bus station where the flatbeds passed. She had walked the road many times, but it was different now, as if the light were somehow clearer. The thorn forest turned to fields, to dusty roads, to tin shacks, to chipped whitewash and pantiled rooftops, to walls painted with advertisements and names of political candidates. The day was very hot.

At last they reached the station. The ground was a hard burnt soil, and the station was ringed with pensions for those who missed their buses. At the snack bar, a pair of flies flitted over a sagging cake.

They sat on a concrete bench near the ticket offices and watched idling buses discharge passengers in the spray of diesel. The bus lines were called
Progress
, the
Princess of the Farmlands
and
Good Hope
, but Isabel knew they were all too expensive. Her mother stared at the station clock. The air was heavy with the heat and exhaust. A boy climbed out of a
concrete trench, where he had been toiling at the undercarriage of a car.

It grew hotter. A group of old men set out chairs and lifted their shirts above their bellies. A middle-aged woman fanned a child and slumped forward, her face damp and drawn. A filthy cat wandered along the edge of the station where the sun met the shade, changed its mind and settled in a patch of weeds.