“Conjugate the radical-changing reflexive verb, to recollect.”
“Me acuerdo,” Sara said out loud, and stopped. In the courtyard two cows grazed under a peach tree. Hens had discovered an open classroom door and were roosting on the first-grade desks.
• • •
On Sara’s return to the house, her glance fell on a pile of stones at the edge of the road opposite her gate. Stopping to count them, she found there were eleven gathered into an orderly heap in the dust. Children playing, she supposed, building pyramids. But she recalled the cement cross set at a curve of the mountain road above the Malagueña hoist. Around it were dozens of stones like these.
“What is that cross on the road beyond the mine?” she had once asked Paco.
“The cross marks the place where a fatal accident occurred,” he told her.
“Is someone buried there?”
“No, the victim of the accident is in the panteón. The cross is only to remind passersby of what happened.”
“Why are those stones piled around it?”
“When people pass and remember, they bring stones.”
Today, twenty-four hours before her spoons and sofas would be taken off in Dionisio’s van, she stood in front of her gate and considered the heap across the road. When Luis, pushing a wheelbarrow, came up behind her, she said, “I suppose children have been collecting these stones.”
“God knows,” said Luis.
“Or someone is trying to mark this place for a bus stop.”
“God knows,” said Luis.
• • •
That evening Sara attended the memorial mass. She sat at the front of the church with Lourdes and copied what her cook did. In unison the two women rose, knelt, and resumed their seats side by side. Simultaneously the congregation behind them knelt and rose, with the sound of air moving in summer trees.
Padre Juanito appeared to have grown even younger since Sara saw him last. He looked no more than twenty as he spoke of Richard, whom he knew only by hearsay that was already turning to legend. “Don Ricardo Everton,” said the priest, “has left footprints in this soil that neither rain nor wind can sweep away.”
Cast under a blue spell by the fresh paint on the walls of the nave, Sara saw these footprints tracking the ruts of the road from the house to the plaza, from the house to the mine. She tried to place Richard in these tracks and bring him back to Ibarra in time to prevent the arrival of Dionisio’s truck and the probable tears of Lourdes.
Padre Juanito was nearing the end of his remarks. “Nationality and language do not separate friends,” he said. He paused for a length of time, then, fearless, stated his conclusion.
“It makes no difference what a man believes,” he clearly said, “if he is a good person.”
Sara stared in astonishment at the assistant priest as he stood before the altar in his freshly laundered white habit. The moment she heard his words, she foresaw his future and knew with terrible certainty that, as soon as the cura returned, Padre Juanito would be transferred. To a smaller parish, in a wilder landscape, without Americans.
• • •
Dionisio and his crew arrived at seven o’clock in the morning and maneuvered the truck through the wooden gates with less than an inch of clearance on each side. When the van was stationed behind the house, the proprietor entered the sala, kissed Sara’s hand, and introduced the driver.
“Where is your other employee?” she asked.
“He is ill. He ate bad pork at a sidewalk barbecue.” Dionisio took out his list. “Therefore we must depend on your men to help us.”
Paco and Luis were called in from the garden and all day lifted chests, benches, and rugs. During this time the sick man lay with his head against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree and sipped Coca-Cola.
Dionisio spent much of the afternoon on the porch, spooning sugar into the coffee Sara brought him. He sat in the leather chair that had the finest view of Ibarra and checked the hands of his watch against the items left on his list.
“Three hours more,” he said. Then, “An hour and a half.” And finally, “Only thirty minutes.” Now his eyes were doubly shaded, by his hat and the coming on of dark.
The sun had set when he returned from an inspection and announced departure. Sara walked out to the truck. She waved to the driver and nodded to the man, still half poisoned, who slumped beside him on the seat.
Dionisio, neglecting to kiss her hand, was climbing to the cab when she spoke to him for the last time. “The gates are two hundred years old,” she said. “For them to be harmed is beyond my endurance.”
Moments later she stood with Paco and Luis at the unharmed gates and watched the van sway as it climbed the grade. Long after it was out of sight she heard its motor laboring in low gear.
• • •
Across the road the outline of the stones dissolved into the gathering night. Sara believed more had accumulated since yesterday.
“This pile of stones is getting bigger,” she said to Paco and Luis, but they were already turning toward the village.
They glanced over their shoulders in the other direction. One of them said, “From here the house looks the same.” And the other, “As if the movers had never come.”
Looking up the driveway, Sara saw that Lourdes had lit the remaining lamps and that, indeed, the exterior of the house revealed no evidence of the inner pillage.
Through the gates she watched trees lose their green and the tile pattern of the driveway disappear. As she stood next to the heap of stones a miner passed her on his bicycle, then two others coasted by. She raised her hand and the riders waved back. But her intention had been to stop them.
Stop, she wanted to call out. Stop for a minute. Look through these gates and see the lighted house. An accident has happened here. Remember the place. Bring stones.
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Stones for Ibarra Page 22
