Stones for Ibarra

by Harriet Doerr

  “Very few strangers, particularly Norteamericanas, come to Ibarra. This is because the town is too small and remote to appear on any map. But I should tell you that, because of the altitude, our air is thin and clear. Also that, if you wish, you can read the newspaper by the light of the full moon.

  “At the moment of writing, my husband and I are the only North Americans in Ibarra. Before long, I will be the only one. This is because of an incident I expect will occur within the next year or so. Buena suerte, Helga. Good luck.”

  Sara laid the letter and the clipping on the bed beside the shoe box. With the cupboard door still open and nothing yet discarded, she left the room and went outside to sit for half an hour in the sun.

  • • •

  That afternoon neither Luis nor Lourdes closed the gate. The Canadian geologist and his assistant, the Lebanese engineer, drove through it five minutes before the arrival of the watchman and the night. They stood on the porch with their duffel bags and waited to be invited in.

  “Where’s Richard?” said the geologist.

  • • •

  Sara lit candles and sat down to dinner with the two men at nine o’clock. This was after it was all done, the expressions of shock and the apologies, the proposals to travel on tonight, even after she had returned the shoe box to the cómoda in the north bedroom and spread the blankets on the beds.

  “I wrote from Peru,” the geologist said, and Sara remembered the letter on Richard’s desk. “To say we’d come through here,” he continued, “on our way north in May.”

  “Is it May?” said Sara.

  The engineer tasted yesterday’s reheated enchiladas. “Very rich, very delicious,” he said.

  The geologist had brought a rock sample to the table and placed it beside his glass.

  “Did that come from Peru?” Sara asked.

  “No, I found it on the road below your mine.” The road reminded him of something. “This afternoon we missed a turn and came cross-country through El Portal.”

  She said, “Then you saw the child-sized chapel,” and she remembered the filigree cross. “Richard and I came that way once.” The Lebanese engineer lowered his eyes. Sara understood that from now on he would do this every time she spoke Richard’s name. It was the engineer’s way of mourning.

  But as soon as she mentioned Richard, the geologist, as though barriers had fallen, asked who was running the mine.

  When Sara explained that the assistant manager Richard hired six months ago was now the general manager, the geologist said, “We’ll drive up there tomorrow to meet him.” He tapped his piece of copper ore. “I hope there’s more of this underground.”

  “I haven’t been to the mine since Richard died,” Sara said, and the Lebanese looked down.

  The geologist examined her with his astronomer’s eyes.

  • • •

  At breakfast the next morning everything was the same as when these men had stayed here before. The Canadian stood beside Sara in the kitchen while she scrambled eggs and the Lebanese remained in the dining room. With a pencil and paper he divided cables, beams, and drills by age and stress. The only difference was that this time he sat alone at the table.

  “How is your wife?” Sara asked the geologist.

  “She’s the same,” he said. “If she were here, she would eat all these eggs. Also the toast.” He put his hand in his pocket to touch the ore sample. “She tried two diets but they failed.”

  “Do you still live at the lake in the woods?”

  The Canadian nodded. “But I’m away a lot.”

  Sara lifted the pan from the fire. “How far is that lake from here?”

  “About half the circumference of the globe.” The plates were ready and he picked one up. “How about you? I expect you’ll turn this house over to the mine and move away.”

  But Sara was already at the door, asking the engineer if he liked his coffee black. He rose from his chair to nod.

  They left at noon. Sara made sandwiches of meat and chiles for them to take along. She filled their thermos with black coffee.

  The geologist held the same rock he had carried about last night. Again tapped it. “You’ve got a lot of this on the sixth level,” he told her. “The Malagueña’s beginning to show what it’s worth.” When Sara remained unmoved, he tried to convince her.

  “It’s a hell of a sweet operation,” said the geologist.

  Sara looked down at the kitchen table and, without speaking, addressed Richard.

  Listen, she instructed him. Richard, listen. Did you hear that?

  • • •

  On a late afternoon in June, under banked clouds that promised rain, Sara looked up from her spading and found Horacio, youngest of the Acostas, standing silently at her shoulder. He said there was news of Paco and brought out from behind a corner of the house a loose-limbed, reluctant boy of about sixteen who said his name was Esteban.

  “You have heard from Paco.”

  “No,” said Esteban.

  “So you don’t know where he is.”

  Esteban said, “Yes.”

  Sara noticed the boy’s large ears and feet, and the space left in his mouth by a missing tooth.

  “You don’t live in Ibarra,” she said, and again Esteban said, “Yes.”

  Horacio, a round-shaped ten-year-old, intervened. “He is my cousin who lives over the mountain in Jesús Maria. He crossed the border with Paco.”

  “Yes,” said Esteban.

  Sara brought Orange Crush from the kitchen and the three sat together on the porch steps. From behind the western peaks came an occasional roll of thunder.

  “How did you get across?” she asked Esteban, but he had no easy answers to such questions. Words fell from his mouth slowly and one by one.

  Sara had to draw him out. “So you met the coyote in Tijuana. At night he took ten of you along the frontier to a place where there was no barbed wire.”

  Esteban nodded. He said the coyote had a man on the other side to lead them through the canyons.

  A drop of rain fell on Sara’s face. “How far did you walk?”

  Nine hours. At the end of nine hours they had met the van that transported them on unnumbered roads from one end of California to the other.

  “So that’s where Paco is.” Sara felt another drop of rain. “What is he doing?”

  “Grapes,” said Esteban. He rose from the steps.

  She watched a scattered shower spot the tiled path. “If the job is over, I expect Paco will be back soon.”

  Esteban, standing with his ears outlined against the portentous sky, shook his head.

  “Then why did you come home?”

  “There were too many days and nights between that place and here.”

  Sara looked after him as he made his awkward exit with Horacio at his heels. They were barely through the gate when the downpour started, beating impartially on the roofs of Ibarra and Jesús María, flooding the hen houses and corrals of both these towns, washing without distinction their gutters and their mosaic chapel domes.

  • • •

  That evening Sara sat at the sala window as long as she could see leaves drip and flower pots overflow. Then, instead of listening to another record in the dark, she went to the north bedroom, lit a lamp, and turned the brass wreath to open the cómoda. She took out the shoe box together with a pile of letters and papers that lay on top of it, an accumulation she had gathered since her March arrival. Depositing it all on the nearest bed, she began to sort.

  She first picked up a fertilizing schedule she had made for Paco. This she set aside for Luis, although she knew his true persuasion lay in the circle of the seasons and the direction of the wind. She pulled out a black-bordered newspaper clipping. It was an announcement of Richard’s death, placed in the Concepción Heraldo by a committee of miners. “With gri
ef,” said the clipping. “In esteem.”

  Here were three prescriptions signed by the hematologist in California. Here a packet of seeds marked phlox. Behind a recipe for oyster stew (use fresh bluepoint oysters) she found a twice-doubled piece of pink paper.

  “What is this?” she said aloud.

  The residual dust of dry leaves lay in its folds. Sara lifted one of the veined, scented skeletons. “Camomile,” she said, and knew it was from Lourdes, knew it was meant to ensure impossible things, long life, a forgiving nature, faith.

  There was too much here to sort in a single night. She began to refill the shoe box. When she found the accumulation was more than it could hold, she went to the closet for another box. She left the room in order, the doors of the cómoda closed, the shelves full.

  • • •

  But she had taken something with her and later on, in the kitchen, she spread it on the table. It was a road map so worn that the creases and the torn edges had been taped. On it an automobile route through the southwest United States and central Mexico had been lined in red, and stopovers circled. At one end of the road, in San Francisco, was Richard’s specialist; at the other the Malagueña mine. The mountains and deserts and plains that the map, without illustration, implied had been climbed and descended and traversed so often that Sara, years later and a thousand miles away, without needing to close her eyes, could see the village with the ocotillo fences, the vine-covered boxcars switched onto sidings for family homes, the grazing land, the settlement without a well, the broken hacienda reflected in a lake. She could put her finger on the map and say, “Here’s a blind curve. Here’s a grade crossing. This is where we saw the Tarahumara Indian running beside the road.”

  She knew the distance, in miles and kilometers, between gas stations and between places to spend the night. All these motels, Sara thought, with their rooms waiting to be brought to life with toothbrushes, the local paper, slippers beside the bed. There had been occurrences in these places that, at the time, seemed scarcely memorable. But from this distance, from the kitchen of the house in Ibarra where she stood alone on a rainy night, they were exposed as remarkable.

  One morning in Durango, while the Evertons were eating breakfast in their hotel, a man rode a horse into the vestibule, dismounted, took out a knife, and chased their waiter from the dining room. Once in Chihuahua Sara heard music long before daybreak and pulled Richard awake and outside to listen to a mariachi band of twelve serenade a pair of shutters that remained latched and bolted from the beginning to the end of an hour’s songs.

  She moved her finger on the map and remembered Assumption Day in Morelia. On that occasion there had been no need for her to wake her husband. The rockets that seemed to explode under their pillows at midnight lifted them simultaneously from sleep onto a balcony. Between the detonations, shouts and cheers racked the night. “It’s like the end of a war,” said Richard. Above the church, spotlights shone on a painted figure of the Virgin attached to an upright pole. In the midst of a succession of blasts, human screams, howls of dogs, police whistles, and a siren, bells began to toll for mass.

  Tracing the marked route, Sara recalled the motel where Richard killed a cockroach, the one where he crushed two scorpions. As she folded the map she foresaw that future sorting might prove difficult, so faint and uncertain was the line that separated the significant from the trivial.

  It occurred to her this evening in Ibarra, with rain at the window and Richard four months dead, that nothing ever happened on either numbered or unnumbered roads that could be classified as unimportant. All of it, observed by dark, observed by day, was extraordinary.

  18

  BRING STONES

  On a February day in the following year a stranger was delivered by Chuy’s red taxi to Sara Everton’s door. When the ice-cream vendor, a few miners, and the goatherd noticed this person passing them on the road, they knew with their instinct for endings that he had come to arrange for the removal of the North American woman’s furniture, to count the tables and lamps and pictures and carry them across the border. By ten o’clock that morning the stranger, a lean, shrewd-eyed man who wore a brown felt hat indoors and out, was noting on a pad of paper the contents of the white adobe house.

  Sara watched this man fill a page and start another. “Not everything in the house is to go,” she told him. As he reached the bottom of the second page, she asked, “How did you get here so quickly from Michoacán?” She had not expected him before the middle of the day, or even late afternoon, if he missed connections. Seeing him point to a tall brass candlestick and the statue of Saint Peter, she wanted to say, wait. There has been a misunderstanding. It was never my intention to leave Ibarra.

  The man, who introduced himself simply as Dionisio, owned a transportation company of one van and two employees, and only wished to arrive at an agreement with this señora Everton.

  “I left Morelia on the midnight bus,” he said, “and traveled while you slept.”

  Sara continued to inspect him. He believes I sleep through the night. And although his business is to help, I believe he is here to tear my world apart.

  Together they moved slowly from room to room, pausing often, like visitors at an archeological museum. In the sala, Dionisio halted his circling. “A mirror like that one in the elaborate frame is hard to pack,” he said.

  Staring into the oval glass, wreathed around with brass flowers and vines, Sara scarcely recognized her face. This is how the mover sees me, a thin woman who should comb her hair more carefully, get more rest, learn to focus her attention.

  “Señora,” he said. “What about the kitchen table and the carved pine cómoda?” He looked into the glass for an answer.

  “Are your men careful packers,” she asked, “and your van reliable?”

  Dionisio said his enterprise was of the highest confidence. Then he asked about Richard’s desk and the bed with the altar-screen headboard.

  “Those things are to go,” she said into the mirror where she and the proprietor of Transportes Dionisio seemed permanently framed side by side, bound together by metal tendrils and metal buds.

  Facing her own image, she watched her mouth move in speech. “How much will all this cost?”

  Addressing the woman in the glass, Dionisio mentioned a sum. After she nodded, his hatted reflection announced that he would return with his van in six days. She nodded again. He kissed her hand.

  • • •

  At four o’clock that afternoon Padre Juanito, the new cura’s new assistant, found Sara in front of her rock garden, uprooting and replanting succulents. He stood, dark-skinned as his Indian forebears and gallant as his Spanish ones, between her and the sun.

  “There will be a memorial mass for your husband,” he said.

  Padre Juanito, recently ordained, had brought a new clerical style to Ibarra. Today he wore green pants and a scarlet shirt. “Five nights from now at vespers,” he went on. “The señor cura is out of town and I will preside.”

  He is like a macaw among ravens, Sara thought. She was accustomed to priests who wore habits in Ibarra. The others had walked the village on their rounds, driven the pickup to the ranchos, exhorted, absolved, and perhaps wept, all while wearing their black cassocks.

  “You hesitate because you are not a Catholic,” said the young priest.

  “No, not that.” But his words reminded her that the purpose of this mass, and of the one that had preceded it, was to lessen Richard’s travail in purgatory. Sara tried to imagine her husband in that place, and failed.

  • • •

  The six days until Dionisio returned rushed by and at the end of each one everything still remained to be done. Sara wrote instructions for Paco, who had come back to Ibarra after half a year in the California vineyards. Nitrogen, phosphorus, manure, she wrote. She bought two brooms and a hose for Luis. She left a note for Lourdes under the stove polish. I
t was the manager of the Malagueña mine who would enjoy the results of her lists when he moved into the house the day after her departure. It was he who would walk through the mulched and weeded garden, notice the greaseless oven.

  Sara continued to remake flower beds, a February habit she was unable to break. She pulled apart violet clumps and, deluded by custom, seemed to expect to witness their blooming.

  • • •

  One afternoon Sara found a white religious habit among the sheets in the laundry basket.

  “What is this?” she said to Lourdes.

  “Padre Juanito’s habit.”

  “Why is it in our laundry?”

  “Because your sink is more ample than his and your iron has steam.”

  Sara allowed the garment to fall back into the basket.

  • • •

  All morning, on the day of the mass, Sara packed books and records. Surrounded by boxes, she looked up from the floor at the sea-green blown-glass lamp, at the mirror entwined in brass, at the Virgin of Mercy observing her with a confounded expression from a painting on the wall.

  Through the window she noticed a green haze of new leaves in the ash tree. “Watch for the cenzontle bird in the fresno,” she would tell the mine manager. “It’s earth-colored and sings a backward scale.”

  In the afternoon Sara walked to the school where the nuns once taught. Crossing the hall that still echoed children’s voices, she pushed open the warped door of the sala. In this room she had sat once a week for most of a year to learn Spanish from Madre Petra. Now she stood among leaves drifting in from the patio and listened. The nun’s ghost addressed her.