Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  So it was merely to share news that late one morning the parish priest stopped Sara Everton as she walked past the village church. The cura stood bareheaded in full sun, his crucifix and the metal rims of his glasses reflecting light.

  He began with the formalities. “Your husband is well,” he said, “and the mine prospering.” Pronounced with clerical authority, his intended questions became statements requiring no response, neither the truth nor the lies.

  The priest came to the point.

  “A Baptist minister is coming to Ibarra,” he said.

  “What for?” said Sara.

  “To visit his relatives.”

  “Are the relatives Baptists?”

  “No. They are Catholics, as he himself once was.” The cura looked past the bust of Juárez in the plaza, over the cantina and the convent and the slack flag on the presidencia, and beyond them all to the circle of hills seared to their zinc and copper veins by the hot winds of Mexican spring. Then he lifted his gaze and it seemed to Sara that he was hoping for a sign, one that would be visible to her as well. She, too, often looked up, but only to follow a pair of black butterflies, or a sparrow and a hawk.

  “Do I know the relatives?” she asked.

  “They are Inocencia Casillas, the Baptist’s aunt, and her two nephews, the Baptist’s cousins.”

  In her mind Sara placed Inocencia against a series of familiar backgrounds, among the crowded market stalls in the city of Concepción, under the portico of the cathedral, in the narrow doorways of Ibarra.

  “With three nephews, why does she beg?”

  “To her, begging means more than a plate of stew or a pair of shoes. It is her profession.” The cura started to walk away, then turned with a reminder. “She begged from you, señora, even when her son, Blas, was employed at the Malagueña by your husband.” He paused halfway up the church steps. “Inocencia is ill,” he said. “This morning I gave her last rites.”

  Sara remembered the beggar’s pinned and knotted garments, her quick eyes, her bird-claw hand. She deserved a luxury before dying, a sack of sugar or a goose-down quilt, a long red coat. But it was already too late.

  A small whirlwind from nowhere carried dust across the cobbles, lifted Sara’s light hair, blew grit into her eyes, and reached the top step at the same time as the cura.

  “The Baptist wants to see his aunt before she dies,” he said. “He will arrive tonight, bringing with him his wife and daughter. From El Crucero, Chihuahua, on the United States border.”

  “Perhaps he became a Baptist when he married one,” said Sara.

  “No, she was a Catholic.” The priest regarded Sara as though, even after their long acquaintance, he still believed she might put her thoughts in order and explain apostasy. She noticed this look, interpreted it correctly, and started to move on.

  But the cura spoke again. “It is probable,” he said, “that the three Baptists will walk up to your house to call on you and your husband.”

  “Why?” said Sara.

  The priest, without answering, glanced at the clock in the tower and moved toward the church. From its entrance he addressed her once more.

  “Next Sunday is the day of our Señor of Tepozán,” he said. “If you will look from your house at noon, you and don Ricardo will see the procession on its way to the monastery. Eight men will carry Christ’s statue on their shoulders.”

  Sara had already seen this figure, paler than flesh and larger than life, sealed in its transparent coffin in a windowless cubicle off the west transept. Through the glass the body had a greenish cast as if, once life had bled away, neither faith, nor revelation, nor an artist’s skill could restore its natural colors. It reposed, stabbed and nailed on a purple cloth, and stared into the twilight of day and the black of night that followed.

  “We will be at our gate to watch you pass,” said Sara, and the cura entered the church.

  • • •

  “Do you remember Inocencia, the beggar?” Richard said at dinner that evening. “She has died. Of old age, according to the miners.”

  Or of snuff and pipe tobacco, thought his wife. Or of carrying a bucket of well water for half a mile on her head, morning, noon, and night since the day she learned to walk.

  “How old was she?” Sara asked. “Was she ninety?” From the age of ninety, which many people attain, she subtracted Richard’s age of forty-six. According to Inocencia’s longevity, half his life should lie ahead instead of the doctor’s predicted and now shrunken span. Sara looked at her husband’s dark head, bent over a mango he was slicing from the seed. He showed no remorse for the cruel thing he’d done, to allow himself an illness that had no cure. Her anger passed, giving way to fear. Fear, for the time being, passed.

  “Inocencia probably never knew how old she was,” said Richard. “But she was at the mine last payday, begging from the three o’clock shift.”

  Sara stared through the window and saw, instead of the darkness outside, the gnarled old woman toiling up the steep ascent from the plaza to the Malagueña gate.

  “And her son killed only three months ago,” said Sara, recalling the exhibition of bravado presented in January by Blas Casillas, a mature man. On that occasion he rode his bicycle from the mine to the town with failing brakes, catapulted headfirst into the stone façade of the presidencia, and was dead before the mayor could get up from his desk.

  There are more violent ends in this village than in a provincial capital, thought Sara. Scarcely a week passes without a broken head, a severed leg, a fatal burn. Or is it only that everything shows in Ibarra, is on display like the buttons and spools of a notions shop?

  Richard took two pills from his pocket and swallowed them with wine.

  “You forgot them at noon,” said Sara, and felt a momentary sinking, as if a strand of the rope to which she clung had begun to fray. It was too insubstantial to hold her, this rope, woven as it was out of a doctor’s life-or-death pills and her own unreasonable expectations. She could feel it sag.

  Richard glanced at her, rose from his chair, pulled her up to him, and kissed her on the wrist, on the throat, and, without stopping, on the mouth. In this way he closed the door on her foreboding.

  “You’re a mind reader,” said Sara.

  “I’ve had chances to practice.” He turned as he left the room. “Blas Casillas was a good miner. He was more at home working through an ore body than he was on his own doorstep.” Then he unnecessarily reminded Sara, “You shopped with me in Loreto for his coffin.”

  • • •

  On that day winter was resurrected and the Evertons awakened to a light that lay like ashes on the landscape, draining off the green from the jasmine and the red from the patio tiles. Icicles as long as pennants hung from burst pipes outside the bathroom and the kitchen. No water ran in the house that day, and, outside in the courtyard, the earthen jar, so wide and high it could have hidden a bandit from a soldier, was sealed with three inches of ice.

  The Americans had been drinking coffee in front of the dining-room fire when Remedios Acosta, a Casillas neighbor, tapped on the window.

  “Blas is dead,” said Remedios the moment she was inside. When the Evertons nodded, she went on, “I have come on behalf of Inocencia. About the coffin.” She surveyed the room, noticing the windows, which might better have been boarded up for privacy, and the hearth piled with logs thick enough to barbecue a goat.

  “The mine will cover all costs,” said Richard.

  “The coffin will fit in your car,” said Remedios, and, when the Evertons agreed the station wagon would hold it, the affair was settled. As they opened the front door for the visitor to leave, the air from outside struck across their faces like a blow.

  “This is the coldest day I have ever known,” said Sara, forgetting all the others.

  “Even so, it is best to buy the coffin immediately,” said Remedi
os.

  The Evertons, their wheels caught in the frozen ruts of the road, had covered half the distance to Loreto when they reached a decision. They would buy one of the cheaper boxes for the dead man and give Inocencia the difference in money.

  “It’s what Blas would want,” said Richard, and Sara nodded. Behind them lay an extended space where they had lowered the back seat to make room for the coffin.

  But in Loreto at the unlit, narrow shop with FUNERALES ORTEGA painted over the door, the proprietor argued that this was not what Blas would want.

  When Richard pointed to a plain gray box, Ortega said, “That one is not suitable,” and moved along his stacked display, mentioning woods, metals, fabrics, and hinges.

  “I must insist,” Richard said at last, and Ortega, still protesting, helped him load the gray coffin into the car.

  On the way back to Ibarra between stiff roadside weeds, the station wagon, weighed down by the box, barely cleared the crown of the road and occasionally scraped it.

  “We should have come by wooden-wheeled cart,” said Richard.

  “Pulled by white mules,” said Sara.

  “A matched pair,” he said.

  And to herself she added, Wearing black plumes.

  From out of the crowd who filled Inocencia’s door two men came forward to help carry the coffin of Blas Casillas. But when they saw it, these two brought up four other men and together they pondered at the back of the car. From within Inocencia’s house issued a scent of incense and an echo of prayer.

  Finally one man said, “It is gray.”

  “It is a woman’s color,” said another. Then they all said, as if they had rehearsed it, “It is a woman’s or a pauper’s coffin.”

  When Richard explained his proposed cash present to Inocencia, the six men made no reply and in silence leaned against the car to let time pass.

  “Is it possible to ask Inocencia herself?” said Sara.

  “She is in grief.”

  In Loreto one hour later, the proprietor of Funerales Ortega without comment exchanged the gray box for a finer one at eight times the cost. “The mother of the deceased will be happy with your choice,” he said. “It is the same model selected by the families for the owner of the cine, the assistant stationmaster, and the tax collector.”

  Now old Inocencia, the beggar, was dead.

  “Must we shop again in Loreto for a coffin?” Sara asked her husband the day after she heard the news.

  “Not this time,” he said. “Inocencia died rich, the second richest woman in Ibarra. Next only to Chayo Durán.” And Sara conjured up a picture of Chayo’s mesón, where visiting engineers and government clerks sometimes boarded by the week without fuss or feathers, hot water, or an inside toilet.

  Sara began to revise her previous image of the beggar. As though she had witnessed it herself she now saw Inocencia in the National Bank at the state capital. She observed the old woman’s bent and ragged form at the teller’s window and watched her unknot her rebozo, allowing pesos, centavos, tostones, and quintos to scatter over the counter. These coins rolled across the floor as far as the manager’s desk, where they toppled on their sides to expose the faces of patriots.

  “It was all found this morning,” said Richard. “Kettles and tureens of coins, a mattress stuffed with paper bills.”

  How soft the beggar must have slept, thought Sara, and asked, “Who discovered the fortune?”

  “Two nephews,” said Richard.

  “And they divided it.”

  “No. The cura came along and took it away in a flour sack for later distribution.”

  “These nephews,” said Sara. “What do they do?”

  “One is the sacristan of the church and the other is the chairman of Acción Católica.”

  “So they’ll get the money.”

  “There’s a third nephew,” said Richard, “a Baptist minister from the state of Chihuahua. He’ll arrive in Ibarra tomorrow.”

  “I know,” said Sara. “Bringing his wife and daughter.” And she saw the shades of the Baptists advance up the driveway without touching the ground and settle, wraithlike, into three porch chairs.

  On the following Sunday morning the Baptists came, unaware that Sundays were the only days the Americans had to themselves without the cook, the gardener, and the water carrier, without interference and encounters. The Baptists could not know that Richard and Sara were awakened from sleep at daybreak by the singing of an uncommon bird outside their bedroom window, or that at nine o’clock they were still in this bed that had part of a choir screen for a headboard. Or that for these hours they had lain so close it seemed doubtful that custom of any kind, opening curtains, getting dressed, eating breakfast, could pull them apart and deposit them, naked, on opposite sides of the bed to feel for their slippers on the splintered pine floor.

  During this time they spoke occasionally.

  “That bird is singing the scale of C major backward,” Sara remarked. “C, B, A, G, F.”

  “It’s a cenzontle,” he told her.

  Half an hour later he said, “The whole thing’s settled.” And when she asked, “What?” Richard said, “The two Catholic nephews will inherit Inocencia’s money. The cura has eliminated the Baptist on grounds of neglect. He hasn’t visited Ibarra for fifteen years.”

  Sara raised herself on one elbow to look at her husband’s face. “Did the other two help her?”

  “Of course not. The sacristan is paid in sacks of rice and bottles of cooking oil, and the chairman of Acción Católica has nine children.” With his left hand Richard pulled his wife’s head down to his.

  “There’s that bird again,” she managed to say.

  • • •

  The three Baptists could not have suspected, when they pushed open one side of the heavy wooden gate, that the Evertons had closed it last night for the sake of privacy. Or that they would discover the American couple still at breakfast when they arrived, still drinking coffee on their porch with their feet up on a pair of carved stones.

  “It is eleven o’clock by my watch,” said the Baptist minister, who during the next hour spoke only Spanish in spite of his years on the border. He was a short, square man, tightly buttoned into a suit that was warm for May. Introducing himself, his wife, and young daughter as the Peraltas, he went on to describe his Chihuahua mission which, although short of funds, had already separated two hundred souls from idolatry and the kissing of rings and brought them to the floating off of sin by immersion.

  “Have some coffee,” said Richard, and Sara brought cups.

  Then she said, “We regret the death of your aunt, Inocencia, especially so soon after the accident that killed your cousin Blas.”

  “God save them,” said the Reverend Peralta, and fell silent.

  “You are admiring these stones,” said Sara, and touched them with her sandaled foot. “They are pediments of columns discovered in the rubble behind the church and were given us by the cura of Ibarra.”

  During the pause that followed, the child looked down at her hands clutched in the lap of her somber twill skirt. The preacher’s wife, short, robust, and wearing half-mourning for Inocencia, stared beyond the village that lay below them, in the direction of the tilting headframe of the idle Gloriosa mine.

  Richard’s glance followed hers. “Perhaps you would like to visit the Malagueña mine,” he said. “We have it back in operation. Of course ladies are not allowed underground. They are considered to bring bad luck. If an accident occurred after a woman entered a tunnel it would be blamed on her.”

  “God reveals his will in mysterious ways,” said the Reverend Peralta.

  “That reminds me of a most unusual bird,” said Sara. “Do you know the cenzontle?”

  The Baptists, startled, put down their cups on a leather table. “May we see your house?” said the minister, and he rose as
if appointed guide and led them all into the sala. Once there, the visitors sat side by side on a sofa that faced the adjoining bedroom and the tangle of sheets. Sara pulled together the sliding doors.

  “Sunday is the time for Protestants to worship together,” said the Reverend Peralta, and he suddenly stood and took a Bible from the pocket of his brown serge suit. His wife and daughter also rose and all three bowed their heads.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” said the minister, and the Evertons, still seated, listened to the Twenty-third Psalm being recited in their living room with the same stupefaction they would have felt if Karl Marx, returned to earth, had come here to stand under the blown-glass lamp and recite his Manifesto.

  “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” intoned the reverend, and the words, converted in the Evertons’ minds to English, reached them through layers of half-forgotten childhood practice and long adult disuse.

  This can’t be happening, Sara told herself. Not to us, not in this room. He is committing an act of trespass if he is trying to save our souls. Or is that what he’s after? she wanted to ask her husband. For an instant her eyes met the Baptist’s serene, acquisitive glance. Wishing she could induce an interval of deafness, Sara looked past the minister and through the long windows to the ash tree, among whose branches the cenzontle hid.

  Richard, too, gazed through the windows and examined the dry hills beyond the garden wall for outcroppings of ore that might have extruded overnight.

  The Reverend Peralta saw that their attention had strayed and addressed them separately. “Señor,” he said. “Señora,” and waited until their eyes turned reluctantly toward his. “My daughter will sing.” When the girl continued to sit rigid in her place, he spoke her name. “Rebeca,” he said, and when still she made no move to rise he spoke her name again and put his hand under her elbow to bring her to her feet.

  Rebeca, pushed from behind, advanced two steps into the room. Her sorrowful young face was framed against the ochers and crimsons of a weathered painting on the wall behind her, a representation of the Virgin of Mercy presiding over purgatory.