by Chelsea Cain
My parents, happy practitioners of free love, didn’t teach me safety, or boundaries. But I am teaching myself these things. Out of love—the real stuff.
Carin Clevidence
Seeing Belize
When they fished the dead man out of the Rio Hondo we were surprised that he was yellow. One of the fishermen from the village saw him floating in the river; by the time they brought him to shore, at the far end of San Antonio where the houses gave way to jungle, most of the village had turned out to look. My mother, the only one with a camera, was asked to photograph the body. My little sister Shelly and I tagged along, but at the edge of the field we hung back, peering out from behind a banana tree. The man was naked. He’d died from machete wounds to the groin, a fact we learned much later. The men from the village carried the body past us on a sheet of canvas. He had been in the river long enough for the water to bleach him yellow. ‘Look at his ears,’ Shelly whispered. His ears were nearly gone, chewed away like his nose and his fingertips by the same fish that nibbled our feet when we played in the shallows.
They buried the yellow man in my uncle’s experimental field. Shelly and I had helped to plant corn there with our cousins, one of us making a hole with a stake, the other following behind and dropping in the kernels. Now the corn was up to our knees. The men dug a hole in an open corner of the field. They lowered the body into it on the canvas sheet. Some of the women crossed themselves. Then the men patted down the soil and marked the grave with a stick. Afterwards everyone milled around and exchanged theories about who the dead man was and what had happened. A drug deal gone bad, people thought. Maybe an escaped convict.
I was seven, Shelly five, when we spent five months in the village of San Antonio, Belize. The year was 1974. My mother had been there before, during the summers that Shelly and I spent with our father. My uncle, her older brother, was doing research on Mayan agriculture and she’d helped construct and plant his experimental raised-field system.
Little is conventional about my mother. Before I was a year old she’d taken me to a march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. By the time I was in second grade and Shelly in kindergarten, we’d stayed in a Canadian commune, an apartment in Greenwich Village, a tree house, a tepee and a white Dodge van named Hippo. My mother thought nothing of taking us out of school to go to Belize for the winter.
What I remember of this time lodged itself in my mind without the help of a journal. At seven I still had trouble writing my last name; it would never have occurred to me then to try to burn a moment into my memory, to catalog events. What I remember is free of logic and of chronology. I remember that my uncle and his family were with us for Christmas, that we decorated a tree branch with red construction paper, that my aunt made donuts. In February, at Carnaval, young men with their faces covered in charcoal and sacking ran through the village throwing stones. In April, Shelly had a birthday party and cracked her pinata open with a stout stick.
San Antonio was a grid of dirt roads lined with small, whitewashed houses. The river, the Rio Hondo, ran along the east side and jungle bordered the rest. My uncle’s field stood at the south end. To walk home from the field, Shelly and I took a path through the jungle, where we sometimes saw leaf-cutter ants, each hefting a scrap of bright green. Out in the sunlit front yards little boys stood in their underpants and waved machetes as tall as they were. Behind the houses women in bright cotton dresses hung laundry out to dry by size, the underthings always farthest from the street. Inside, some of the houses had pages of magazines plastered up for wallpaper. Our friend Ruby lived near the south end of town, in a house with faded turquoise trim and a yard full of red hibiscus.
Up a low hill sat the general store where you could buy bottles of Coke and orange Fanta, cans of sweetened condensed milk, green mosquito coils, girls’ frilled underpants with the days of the week embroidered on the bottom, pigs’ tails cured in brine. Below the store, to the right, was the ferry across the Rio Hondo. It ran on underwater cables and had to be cranked by hand. In the shallows by the ferry dock we trapped minnows in empty liquor bottles baited with raw tortilla.
To the north of the store was the schoolhouse, the largest building in San Antonio. Bats nested under the eaves, and I had seen boys knock them down with broomsticks and beat them to death. Further along, to the left, stood the house of Dona Dominga, who made a candy called coco brut, which she sold from her living room. At the end of her street we had once watched a man process chicle, gum gathered from trees in the jungle. He cooked it outside in a huge pot, stirring it with a wooden paddle. Down a low hill, in the opposite direction, was our house, the last before the river.
The house we stayed in had been made for the schoolteacher. It became vacant when he built his own just across the street, a modern building with cement block walls and a tin roof. The old house stood on stilts. It had an old-fashioned palm roof that let in the breeze: My mother said it was like sleeping in a tree. On hot days the schoolteacher’s wife would come over to sit on the steps with us and list the disadvantages of a tin roof: hot in the sun, noisy in the rain. Our roof never leaked, even during the rainy season when mud washed through the streets in waves and people ran about with pieces of cardboard held over their heads.
Nearly everyone in San Antonio kept pigs. In the morning we’d see blood on the pigs’ ears where vampire bats had fed during the night; everyone slept with their windows closed. The pigs at our end of the village ran loose during the day, rooting through the garbage and corn husks in the gutters along the street and getting into people’s gardens. At night, and in the heat of the day, they slept under our house, the only one on stilts in that part of the village. We could hear them snuffle and grunt below us. Shelly and I came in one day and found our cousin Cedric lying face down on the floor. He’d found a knothole and was peeing through it. We were thrilled: The path to the outhouse was overgrown and I had seen snakes there and once, I swear, a bumblebee the size of my fist. Why use the outhouse when we could pee through the floor? Our mother put an end to this plan.
The house had two rooms, furnished almost entirely with hammocks. From the start I loved the feeling of being suspended and at the same time held tight. At night we lit the brittle, dark green mosquito coils under our hammocks. You balanced each coil on a little metal stand and lit the outside end with a match. They burned for about eight hours with a strong, unpleasant smoke designed to drive away mosquitoes. In the morning there’d be circles of gray ash on the plank floor. When the floor got dusty we washed it down with water Shelly and I carried from the river in red and blue plastic buckets, proud that we could carry two at a time.
The muddy green Rio Hondo was slow moving, with trees and vines draped over its banks. We bathed in it near our house, where a clearing along the bank led down to the remains of an old dock, slippery with river slime. Shelly and I were the only ones in the village with bathing suits. The boys swam at a dock by the ferry, in shorts, and the girls wore old cotton dresses. Further along the bank, under a huge tree, the girls showed us a deposit of green clay they used on their hair. You scooped out a handful and rubbed it on; it made your hair soft and slick. Around the swimming hole grew ‘sensitive plant,’ a low plant with mimosalike leaves that shrank and wilted when you touched them. A few minutes later it came back to life. I used to sit on the bank, water running off my braids, brushing my fingers over the leaves.
We ate with my mother’s friends, Froylan and Balbina. Balbina had a wide face and dark, glossy hair that she kept short in front and long in the back, so that her face was fringed with curls. She wore flowered dresses over her soft, rounded body. Froylan was lean and wiry. They had three children: Maely, a son, who was a year younger than I was, and two daughters, Teti and Mirna. Their house had two rooms, a dirt floor, a thatched roof and a yard with custard apple trees.
The door that looked into the backyard was always open; chickens and sometimes a pig would wander in to look for food. Just behind the house stood the thatched
cooking shed where Balbina made tortillas, taking a ball of corn dough and patting it, over and over, between two pieces of plastic bag. The corn had a dry, almost chalky smell. Balbina cooked the tortillas on a round sheet of blackened steel set over the fire pit. When the first side was done she flipped the tortilla neatly with her bare fingers.
We ate rice and beans. We ate this for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes there was an egg, sometimes Froylan brought fish from the river. The fish were called bocasgrandes, ‘big mouths,’ and Balbina fried them till they were crisp, and served them with rice and beans. Shelly and I craved anything that wasn’t rice and beans. The general store stocked cans of Campbell’s Alphabet Soup and boxes of corn flakes, and sometimes, as a special treat, our mother bought us some. We ate the corn flakes in handfuls, without milk, and could go through an entire box in half an hour. Shelly also Iiked sweetened condensed miIk, which she drank directly from the can, tipping it up against her nose.
We walked to school with Maely after breakfast, barefoot but with neatly combed hair. Kindergarten, first and second grades met in a whitewashed room with the same teacher, round Don Carmen. The day began with the ringing of the huge bell in the school yard. We found our places at the low wooden desks, then stood together to recite the Lord’s Prayer. If not for my time in Belize I would never have learned it, and although my Spanish faded, it has stuck firmly in my mind, the words inseparable from the singsong in which we all intoned them. After the Lord’s Prayer we belted out the national anthem: ‘Oh Land of the Gods by the Carib Sea, our tran-quil haven of dem-o-cra-cy!’
English is the official language of Belize, and though everyone speaks Spanish or Mayan at home, school is taught in English. It is an English ever so slightly unfamiliar; ‘Don’t vex me now,’ Don Carmen said when a student misbehaved. Or he might ask one of us to ‘fetch’ the chalk. At home on Long Island I’d struggled hopelessly over phonetics worksheets; in Don Carmen’s class, because of my English, I was the star pupil. It was in Belize that I finally learned to read.
The texts were Dick and Jane primers, yellow and cracked. In San Antonio, Dick and Jane read like fantasy. Spot, their pet, bore no resemblance to the lean, mangy dogs with narrow faces who fought and copulated in the dusty streets. And it was impossible to believe that Dick and Jane had ever had head lice, or used old newsprint for toilet paper, or been struck with a ruler. Don Carmen’s corporal punishment, if the class grew noisy, consisted of going around the room with a ruler, making us stand and slapping each of us on the palm; the slap was called a ‘cookie.’ This was a joke by San Antonio standards, where fathers used belts to discipline their children. But I was so scared the first time I held out my palm that when I sat down I missed the chair, landed hard on the concrete floor and began to cry.
The village ran on sugarcane. At five in the morning when the cane trucks rattled down the hill and turned onto the road near our house, Shelly and I would wake in the dark to see their headlights slide along the walls. During the day, while Shelly, Maely and I copied Don Carmen’s handwriting off the blackboard and Balbina washed laundry and made tortillas, Froylan worked in the cane fields. The price of sugar had shot up and all the young men and some of the old ones had switched from farming corn to cane. They worked land that they carved out of the jungle and leased from the government for a few pennies a hectare. The cut cane went to the sugar refinery in nearby Orange Walk. There are two ways to harvest sugarcane: You can cut it green, or you can burn the field first to scare off the snakes and get rid of the dead leaf. If you burn cane it goes sour quickly, so it needs to be rushed to the refinery before it spoils.
There were few vehicles in San Antonio: a military jeep, Don Roque’s tractor, my uncle’s red Volkswagen. The men who owned cane trucks took lavish care of them. Each truck had a name. My mother painted a singing bird on the door of one called the Troubadour. They came through town loaded with cane and chased by a gang of children. Sugarcane looks like bamboo. The inside is white and fibrous and sweet. We once passed a loaded cane truck parked in frontof the school andShelly grabbed one of the ropes, clambered up to the top and began throwing canes down to the rest of us.
When Froylan came home from cutting burned cane, the sweet smell of it hung on his blackened clothes. He bathed in a washtub in water Balbina heated pan by pan on her outside fire. Then each of the children bathed in fresh water, then Balbina. Everyone changed into clean clothes, Balbina and the two girls into dresses, with fresh ribbons in their neatly braided hair, and Froylan and Maely into white shirts and dark pants. Dressed to the nines, everyone in San Antonio took a stroll. Even the baby girls had gold earrings and ribbons in their hair. We walked down the street toward the school, stopping to nod or talk to friends. Tight clusters of girls in bright dresses giggled past us. In the distance we might hear ‘Tears on my pill-ow, pain in my heart, caused by you,’ sung by the groups of young men who lounged in front of the general store after it had closed, smoking cigarettes while the sunset turned to dusk.
At the small store by the river Senora Bobadia sold cubes of frozen sugar water, colored red, orange, blue and green, called ‘Ideals.’
These came in a clear plastic wrapper which you chewed open to get at the sweetened ice. All the colors tasted exactly the same, a sweet, faintly chemical taste. On the day we got our ears pierced we were allowed two Ideals each. We took them to old Dona Donatila’s house and held them against our ears until the skin went numb. Dona Donatila was a tiny, toothless woman with a tenacious grip. She poked a threaded needle through our ears and tied the thread into loops. Shelly didn’t cry at all. On the way home we ate our softened Ideals, our hands reaching up of their own accord to touch our cold ears. We left the loops of white thread in our ears for two weeks, turning them twice a day. My first real earrings were a tiny pair of straw sandals, painted pink, that my mother bought in Orange Walk.
After my uncle and his family returned to Minnesota for the spring semester, my mother worked in the cane fields. She was the only woman who did, except for the occasional wife or daughter who helped out for an afternoon. My mother got up before dawn and waited by the general store with the other workers for a cane truck to come by. Whoever had rented a truck and needed to get cane in that day would pay to have it cut and loaded. My mother started out cutting cane but eventually switched to loading it. She stood on a board over the back wheel of the truck and passed great bundles over her head. Sometimes, she told me, there’d be ants swarming on the cane. She made maybe six dollars a week. Now, when I ask her why she did it, she shrugs. ‘I wanted to make a little money. I wanted to see what it was like.’
No one had much money in San Antonio. Two families were rich enough to own generators. There was one television, run off one of the generators. It belonged to the Castillo family, and they watched it religiously in spite of the fact that the picture on the screen was barely visible. Froylan and Balbina refused to take anything my mother gave them toward food. One night as they sat around the table in the lamplight, my mother slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Balbina’s hand. They sat and talked, and later the three of them walked down the hill to visit friends. While they walked, Balbina, unaware of what it was, absentmindedly shredded the paper; the scraps dropped from her hand and fell to the ground, leaving a trail like a line of leaf-cutter ants. Twenty dollars was a shocking amount of money and Balbina was scandalized. Later it became a great joke and the mention of it would make all three laugh uproariously.
We went to Orange Walk with Balbina a few weeks before Easter. Balbina was there to buy Easter dresses for Mirna and Teti, and we followed her into shops packed tight with children’s white dresses, bolts of red velvet, display cases overflowing with lace and ribbons. Balbina wore her leather shoes with the raised heels. She bartered fervently in her soft Spanish. Shelly and I had never had new clothes for Easter before, but our mother let us pick out matching dresses with short, tightly pleated skirts and lace on the bodices. In another store we got new earrings, g
old hoops with three gold beads. Later, the gold paint wore away and the beads turned the milky white of sugar candy that’s been sucked on.
Outside, the sun was very bright. Along the sides of the wide, dirty street people hawked tamales and shaved ice from colored carts. My mother bought an orange, cut in half and sprinkled with salt. On one corner an old woman without teeth sat by a pile of oranges, which she peeled on a dented, treadle-worked machine. A stake skewered the orange and a blade peeled it concentrically; the bright rind snaked to the ground.
That evening we went to a circus. Around us crowded women with children on their hips and men who smelled of cane smoke. Two clowns came out from behind the striped curtain with an antique camera, and a trained donkey answered questions from the audience by pawing the ground with his hoof. A woman in a short skirt twirled eleven hula hoops at once, on different parts of her body.
The finale began with a small box in the center of the makeshift stage. The lights dimmed and the audience grew quiet. Then a spotlight shone on a human hand, rising out of the box. It was a small hand, pinkish brown. Another hand followed, then a head, and then a whole girl appeared, swelling out of the glass box like an expanding sponge. She wore a blue leotard and her hair was pulled back in a tight braid tied with a blue ribbon. She stood without smiling, then made a low bow that became a somersault and then a series of rippling rolls. Next she stretched on her stomach on the spangled cloth and slowly lifted her feet and legs, until she was curled in a circle, holding her ankles with her hands and staring out between her legs into the crowd. Shifting the weight to her feet, she rolled herself upright, still with that blank look, and turned her back to us. There was a rose I hadn’t noticed before at her heels.
