The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  Sweet gestured toward the wheelbarrow. “We will take that technology over there,” he said, “and get some more. You can’t make too much at a time or it clumps up and begins to dry in the mixing pit.” He sighed. “You should have called me two years ago. Oh, well.”

  Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. I kept trying to crisp my corners, but they came out blunt, ragged, or cracked. Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. The sun moved inch by inch across the sky.

  One day. Two days. Three days. Julia joined us. Then Jabalí. Then the twins from San Luis Obispo, the Episcopal guys, who acted like lovers. Maybe they were lovers, who knew? Our nursery of dull red bricks grew next to the library. They had to be spread out so they’d dry. In their uneven rows and scattershot groups on the straw, they looked as if they were about to blossom into something else: soldiers, boxers, skyscrapers. We circulated gossip. Sweet produced a few joints from inside his prosthetic leg and we circulated those as well (not to Julia, of course). Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. I got new calluses, in new places on my hands. My elbows ached. My corners still weren’t 90 degrees—70, maybe. Helena was by far the fastest, best adobe brick maker. She patted each loaf out onto the straw with impersonal speed and accuracy, humming. Her bricks were identifiable by their heft and elegance. Once the wall was built, we’d be able to see who had made it by the differences in the bricks, like different, repeated notes.

  Sweet, scooping up adobe, said, “Did you hear what happened at Alma?” Alma was a community like ours about two days’ drive away, over the next mountain. Alma was larger than the ex-convento, and the people were shaggier, goofier; they ran a little circus. Their thing was making electricity out of corn, astrology, and orgies. “Raided,” said Sweet.

  “Jesus,” said Xolotl in his delicate voice. “I was at Alma. Raided?”

  “Because of the bus strike.” Sweet scraped off the excess from his brick. “The Federales said they were harboring union organizers. Then the barn burned.” He raised an adobe-coated eyebrow.

  “Bad days,” said Jabalí. “Did they cleanse the ground?”

  “Oh, you know them,” replied Sweet. “They just panicked. They all ran into the caves up there and took peyote, and four days later they came down and said they were leaving. They’re going to Amsterdam.” He said “Amsterdam” with a certain amount of disdain.

  “Utopians,” said Malcolm X with the same disdain.

  “Aren’t we utopians?” I asked. “I mean, come on. Look at us.”

  Malcolm X, Jabalí, Xolotl, Sweet, Helena, the Episcopal twins, and Julia, who was playing Twister by herself on ripped-out book pages, looked at me. “No,” said Malcolm X firmly. She was covered in adobe. “Utopia is a trap.” She gestured at the field of bricks around us, which had grown to be rather large. “You can make adobe out of just about anything. Any dirt, anywhere. Anyone can do it, with a little patience. We’re not utopians. We’re teachers. We’re trying to be what happens after it all falls apart, if there’s anything left.” The others nodded agreement.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Form, adobe, smack of the trowel, a hard shake, brick on the straw. The sun was hot on my head. Could we do that, adobe brick by adobe brick? Rebuild the world? As our pile of bricks grew, I began to see the shapes of what they might make: a small house, a school, a bench to sit on at the end of the day. The bricks, about as big as shoeboxes, extended in every direction, far outnumbering us. I realized—maybe it was as Malcolm X had said it would be—that I hadn’t thought about making one of my boxes in a long time. I hadn’t saved any found treasure. I hadn’t stolen anything, either, except that feather. It was an odd sensation, not wanting to steal anything, like the idea of never wanting sex again. Though I still did want sex. Though I wanted it with a woman, which was upside down. Was having sex with Malcolm X a form of stealing? Sadly, I had to conclude it really wasn’t. She was all too happy to share. A stray dog ambled by and peed on a few bricks. I felt an overwhelming, embarrassing tenderness for the bricks, huddled in irregular reddish lumps in the field, waiting to be born. Form, smack, shake. My corners approached 80 degrees.

  “Ah,” said Helena, standing up and stretching. “My back.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the ruined library. The big rooster, on what remained of a broken bookshelf, crowed. What was left after it all came apart, after the sky had fallen and the world was upside down? If I was a shade now, what was my job?

  That evening after dinner, as the singing and drinking were getting started and the Episcopal twins were hooking up their electric violins, I wandered over to the library in a restless mood. I stepped over the busted, rusted chicken fence. Like the adobe bricks, many of the chickens were sleeping, contented balls of feathers in their straw nests. Others scratched at the mix of feed and scraps on the floor. Two pecked a third, who squawked and flapped up awkwardly to roost on an encyclopedia that was listing from missing pages. In the indigo sky, stars were beginning to appear. The chicken smell was acrid, and the half-open space was warm from their presence. I still didn’t know how we were ever going to make a roof for the library, and once we did make it, how were we supposed to hoist it up? Some kind of crane made out of palapa with an adobe engine? Cast a spell and sing it up, floating through the air on its own?

  I stubbed my toe on a large volume. Kneeling down, I saw that it was called Música Sacra por Todos los Días, and that there were the remains of what had once been brightly colored notes on the cover. Inside, smiling children in hair ribbons (girls) and caps (boys) romped with lambs and sat in a circle around a snow-white Jesus in equally snowy robes at the tops of scores of hymns in Spanish that I didn’t know even in English. The pages were stained, but the book was intact. Underneath that book, face-down and nearly buried in the dirt, was a little one, hand-bound with strong red string, called Ma Vida. Embossed on the front was a gold cross; inside, tiny elegant handwriting in Spanish covered the pages. One page had a line drawing of a heart with rays of light coming out of it. Another had a crown of thorns, looking almost whimsical, unattached to any divine head, floating spikily on the page. The paper was near crumbling and several hunks of pages were missing, but this book, I knew, was truly treasure. It was worth something. Not far from Ma Vida was a book called Historia de las Américas, coated in chicken shit and a little swollen, but otherwise complete. I put all three books under my arm.

  The light was fading fast. I rushed to pick up unruined, or only semiruined, books, the way you rush to pick up pretty shells on the beach as the tide is coming in. I was a nuisance to the chickens who were still awake, pushing them aside to grab large books, small books, slender books, thick books—any book that had most of its pages and at least one of its covers. I stacked them in a neat pile on the other side of one of the ruined walls. I could hear the stray dogs barking, but what could they want with books except maybe to pee on them? Dogs eat chickens, not pages. I clambered over the busted fence, trotted back to the kitchen, and got one of the clunky flashlights, circa 1981. I returned to the library and by the beam of the flashlight rescued book after book, thinking This is stupid, but unable to stop myself. What if Ma Vida had been written by the little nun with the unfortunate nose whose bed I now slept in? How could I let her book rot away like that, disrespected and unnoticed?

  Some of the books were too far gone; I left those to the chickens. But some were half alive. And some were remarkably fit. The stacks against the outside wall grew so high that by the time first light arrived I didn’t have to lean over anymore to add to the pile. I dug around in the corners, even checked under the chickens’ nests (lots of complaints), until I was satisfied that I’d reclaimed every possible volume. I looked and looked for an edition of Ovid, but there was none. His shape-shifting gods were pagan, forbidden. Adding a bo
ok on what seemed to be advanced mathematics to the last stack, I was very pleased with my work. I sat down and closed my eyes, thrilled by the sweetness of the last traces of night air on my face, the library that I’d saved at my back. It smelled musty, also a bit like loam. I felt quite clearly that I understood something, but before I could articulate what it was, I must have fallen asleep.

  “Stranger.”

  I opened my eyes. Early morning. An ache in my neck, the musty books behind me. Scent of coffee. Julia, squatting next to me, drinking from a tin cup. Chickens everywhere, scratching around by the adobe bricks. “Oh, no.”

  “They were bored. They told me they wanted to go out.” Julia offered me the cup. “Wake up.” Funny, wild, happy shapes in green felt-tip marker covered her hands and forearms. She threw a stone at one of the chickens and laughed as it squawked and ran away. “Ai, gordito,” she called after it.

  I sat up. The coffee was weak and sweet. “You shouldn’t have let them out,” I managed. “We’re going to have to find them all and put them back in.”

  She settled herself next to me and leaned against my shoulder. Had her legs, in just the time I’d been here, gotten longer? Was her face more defined? Her heavy eyebrows were almost comical, Groucho-like, and, ai, those teeth. She would never be pretty. She would have a different kind of power. I didn’t see any auras around the girl, of indigo or any other hue, but Jabalí was right that Julia had a certain quality that was rare in a child. Sorrow, perhaps. I don’t know if it was simply the wry cast of her features or something deeper, but even in her liveliest, most knock-kneed moments, she seemed tuned to a pitch children shouldn’t be able to hear. She pinched my elbow. “What are you doing out here, Stranger? Coyotes going to get you and eat you.”

  I gestured at the books. “I found all these. Aren’t they amazing?”

  She craned her neck. “You gonna sell’em?”

  I looked down at Julia, with green marker all over her arms, the scab on her knee, her unbraided hair, finishing the coffee in the tin cup. “No,” I said, “I’m going to make them into a library.”

  She giggled, wiggling her toes in the dirt. “A library! Why? For the chickens?”

  “No,” I said. “For you.”

  She turned around again to look at the books. “My books?” she said, knitting her heavy eyebrows together. “Okay. My books.” She took one down from the stack and began turning its pages. It was a medical textbook, with illustrations of livers and gallbladders. Julia peered closely at the illustrations, tapped them with a finger, tried to see what was under the spine. Had anyone taught her to read? She seemed to be palpating the book.

  We sat there together in silence as Julia examined it, leaning against the others, watching the chickens wander through the field of adobe bricks in the morning light. After a while, the adobe crew arrived. Sweet took his leg off and leaned it against the wheelbarrow. Helena brought a paper bag of fresh tortillas, a thermos of coffee and another of hot milk. Xolotl did a sun salutation. Julia did it with him, adding improvisatory movements of her own. We took our places by the adobe pit, reached in, and began our workday. I thought my father would be proud of me if he could see me now, covered in dust and building with my strong, calloused hands.

  The library is still there, as far as I know, occupying the small, cool stone building, like a catacomb with its low roof, that had at one time been the ice house, then a fallout shelter, then a shed. I like to think that my little nun had sneaked in there on a hot day, chipped off a piece of ice with a nail, and ran the ice illegally inside her collar, took off her wimple and put the ice against the back of her shorn neck, lifted her heavy skirt and held what was left of the bit of ice, already melting, against the back of a knee. I like to think that that was where she began composing Ma Vida in her mind, away from the chores and gossip and entanglements of the other nuns, who were always so busy.

  Who will ever know about me? she might have thought, and then felt guilty. A workaday nun like herself, in an unimpressive convent in these unimpressive mountains. The town was no more than a few filthy, patched prospectors’ tents then. She would have known that it was terribly arrogant, and possibly a sin, to imagine that her life was of any consequence, but she could write, couldn’t she, of how she had come to devote her life to Jesus. How she had seen him in a bucket of water and he had transformed her from a poor, ignorant girl into a teacher, a warrior, a bride. She could draw the sacred images she saw in her mind before falling asleep at night.

  The little nun would never have, couldn’t have, imagined anyone like me, or that I would be the one to find her book so many years later, nearly lost on the floor of a chicken coop. Or maybe she had. In that, the little nun might have been ahead of me, trusting as she did that her book, like her soul, would be found and saved in a world to come that she couldn’t have imagined, either. And that I, the unimaginable man from that unimaginable world, would salvage the book of her life, Ma Vida, from the convent’s destroyed library; that I would cut, plane, and sand what was left of the busted bookshelves, and then anchor them, with considerable trouble and two smashed fingers, into the old stone walls of the ice house; that I would set Ma Vida in alphabetical order among its loftier, waterlogged fellows, covered in chicken shit, that had once explained how the sun went around the earth and how homunculi lived inside each drop of sperm. The little nun couldn’t have imagined a girl such as Julia, hesitating in the doorway in her torn Communion veil/tablecloth. Or maybe the little nun never existed, because Julia didn’t say anything about sensing such a person; she didn’t say much at all, gazing around, one end of the veil clutched in her fist. Or maybe the little nun did exist, and she wasn’t surprised to see me blow out the lantern and close the door as the dinner bell rang, just the way she had done, heading down the dirt path with Julia to join the others.

  The roof of the chicken coop, née convent library, was a sheet of corrugated tin, and after we built the walls, we all attached it in less than a day, with the help of the rest of Helena’s family and sixteen borrowed ladders. The chickens flowed into their spot and settled themselves in the shade. Sweet put his leg back on for the last time, buckled it, and tootled away, the adobe globe spinning on the roof of the adobemobile.

  I remember the muddy sweat in my eyes, the smell of the dirt, the worn, pocked surface of the long dining table that had grown silky from use, the murmur of talk at dinner, the scratch of chicken feet on what was left of the chicken coop’s stone floor, the half inch that the new, splintery latrine door never fully closed. You had to hold the edge of it with one finger as you squatted in the dark. I remember the lesion, like a strange fungus, that welled up around the lump on my thigh, silvering it. I remember the night my nightmares stopped and the week without dreams that ensued. For seven days straight, I felt empty and full at the same time, like the roaring wind of Ixtlan. Then I dreamed my name.

  At dinner one night, Jabalí announced that Julia had dreamed that CNN was coming in a few days. The next morning, I slipped the wings back on. They were light and pliable, as if I’d never taken them off, as if they’d actually grown from my shoulders in the time that I’d been at the ex-convento. They seemed that natural. With a subtle movement, I flapped one. It felt spectacular.

  Jabalí adjusted the straps for me, smiling. “These are yours now,” he said. “You’ve earned them.” Close though he was to me, nearly chest to chest, I couldn’t smell him at all. There were a few new pieces in his hair: a bit of painted bark, a fork with bent tines. Julia playfully pulled at a wing tip. I twitched the wing from her grasp.

  “You look tall,” she observed, coming around to stand in front of me.

  “I am tall.”

  “Not so much,” she said. “But now you look it. Let’s go.” She hopped around impatiently in her little moth wings.

  Jabalí stood back, pleased. “Good. Pájaro.”

  We all hiked out to the sacred tree. When we climbed up, my branch was empty and strong, but now I was able
to balance effortlessly. The wings provided ballast, and though we all sat there for the rest of the day, my legs didn’t get tired the way they had before. I wasn’t bored, either. From my perch, I could see our humble church, the road that led to the very small town, the mountain road, Ixtlan, and the steeple of the massive church there, inside of which, I knew, was Jesus in a wig and gold lamé hot pants. The local priest, a middle-aged man with a mustache and a confiding way of speaking, was walking slowly down the road toward our church. He was gesturing as he walked, like a man rehearsing a sermon. His hands waved.

  “Jabalí.” I pointed with my chin.

  Jabalí opened his eyes. “Hola, Padre!” he called out in a booming voice through his monkey mask, raising his arm and rattling a branch.

  The priest on the road glanced up, around. His hat fell off.

  Jabalí laughed. “Probably thinks it’s the voice of God.” He cupped a hand to his ear. “Can you speak up, please?”

  Everyone in the tree laughed, lightly shaking the branches. “Ah, we keep his collection box full,” said Jabalí. “That’s what he cares about.”

  On the branch above me, Julia, in pink trousers and a yellow dress with ruffles, sang a song in Spanish. We all got dozy in the afternoon, so we swapped jokes, stories, gossip, cures, and unusual events. Alien sightings. Malcolm X told a funny story about seeing the Northern Lights when she’d been doing hallucinatory breathwork for three days. Toward sunset, when everyone had been quiet for an hour or so, listening to the wind, Julia stood up on her branch, grasping the one above her.

  “I know my name,” she announced, her toes gripping the branch at her feet, just above my head. I looked up. Her long brownish-blackish hair flew out behind her; her expression was grave.