Harriet Doerr

by The Tiger in the Grass

  “You mean the potter is still alive?”

  “Yes,” said Lourdes, “but he is in poor health.”

  “Does he know that Luis is with his wife?”

  “The potter can no longer separate what he knows from what he dreams,” said Lourdes.

  Fermín, the watchman, spoke so often of his chest pains and stomachaches and the diminishing number of his days that the Evertons sent him to the doctor in the capital of the state. Fermín returned with a prescription.

  “So now you are taking this medicine?” Sara Everton said.

  “No, I cannot afford it.” Fermín shook his head and his wide-brimmed sombrero.

  “We will be happy to pay for it.”

  “No, señores, I cannot accept further gifts from you.”

  The Evertons had knowledge of others in the village who earned no more than Fermín and were raising five children, building a lean-to for their stove, and feeding a horse and an orphan lamb.

  “But since you have no family, are your expenses actually so great?” Richard asked.

  “Señor, it is true,” Fermin told him, “that I have never had to pay the cost of a wife.”

  A silence fell. The night was cold, and Fermin had wrapped himself to the eyes in two deep-fringed sarapes. Under the pervading light of the full moon, Sara could see the thongs of his sandals and the broken toenails that protruded from them. Fermin’s face was entirely shadowed by the brim of his hat, wide as an oxcart wheel. A truck passed on the road and then a motorcycle.

  “However, I do have a child,” Fermin said, “at least one child and perhaps two more. That is what she says.”

  “Who is she?” Sara asked.

  “The mother,” Fermin told her. “María del Rosario, the mother of my child and the other two that may be mine. Also the mother of seven others, including Ramón, who came here last month to weed. But Ramón is not mine.

  “María has ten children, each of a different father, unless it is correct, as the woman insists, that three of them are mine.”

  Fermin gazed down the road in the direction of Ibarra and went on. “I acknowledge the one child and have consented to pay for her needs.” He sighed, and his long nose seemed to grow longer.

  “Pay for no more than one,” said Richard.

  “Does the little girl look like you?” Sara inquired. “Has she your nose and chin?”

  At this, Fermin looked up and exposed his gentle, raw-boned face to the moonlight. “My nose, señora? My chin?” And together they started to laugh.

  Because Ramón, who came to weed, was fourteen and had never been to school, Sara arranged a meeting with his mother. María del Rosario was a short, cheerful woman, apparently happy with her lot. Although seven of the ten children were old enough for school, none of Sara’s arguments in favor of enrollment prevailed. Maria regarded education as a passing fad of the current administration. In any case, she said, one or two of the older ones must stay with the babies while she was at her work, washing dishes at the café on the plaza.

  “As for the others,” Maria said, “who can tell how and where they spend their time? I sometimes notice them at noon, begging from the grocer and the baker.”

  “Some of the fathers must be helping you,” Sara said.

  Maria shook her head. “Not one.” Then, seeing the señora’s look, she changed this to “Only one.”

  Maria said that she and her family lived, not in an ordinary dwelling, but in a narrow thatch-covered space between two houses. She and the ten children shared one room, behind a front wall of rocks and cardboard.

  “There are ways to prevent pregnancy without interfering with your normal activities,” Sara said. “Have you consulted the doctor at the clinic?” But such a procedure had never occurred to Maria.

  “Surely, when life is so hard, you will not want to bear more children,” the North American woman said.

  “That is something only the Virgin knows,” said Maria.

  Sara looked at her guest. Who am I to attempt to impose common sense on this person? she asked herself. Perhaps I should be like her. She accepts life whole, all of it, as it comes.

  With Luis and Fermin in attendance, the Evertons left Ibarra for occasional vacations with confidence, certain that the house and garden would be secure twenty-four hours a day.

  But on their return one spring evening from a month’s absence, they discovered that Luis was in prison. He had written to Lourdes with messages for them.

  “Pues,” he wrote. “Well, mi amíga Lulu. After you have read this letter, please explain the true circumstances of my arrest to the señor and señora. As you know, from time to time I have grown a few marijuana plants between the nopal cactus behind my house. Only rarely did I profit from this marijuana, which I sold now and then in the form of cigarettes costing five pesos each. Twice I had been warned about this negotiation by agents of the federal government who entered my neighbor’s corral and looked over the wall. Each time they confiscated the plants. But I decided to try one more time and soon had my finest crop. I was rolling a few cigarettes one evening when the federales came back and burst into my house without permission. ‘Luis Fuentes Castillo,’ they said, ‘you are under arrest.’ They drove me directly to the state capital, and the judge sentenced me to be locked up for five years. Please tell all this to the patrón and the patrona so they will understand why I was not at the gate when they returned. I send to them and to you salutations from my new home, the penitentiary.”

  So Richard called for the second time on the state prosecutor, as he had in the case of Basilio Garcia, who shot his brother in the back, and again made clear to the attorney the true character and natural innocence of the criminal the government had apprehended. And for the second time the prosecutor agreed to reduce the sentence from five to two years, followed by three on probation.

  “Luis is a good man,” Fermin said one night, “but he does not recognize those laws he believes to be unjust or impossible to enforce.”

  A light shone above the door of a small concrete-block structure recently built near the gate.

  “How do you like your new house?” Richard asked. “And the cot inside? And the asbestos roof to cover you from thunderstorms?”

  “I enter that house only to sweep it,” said Fermín. “As for the cot, my grandfather was a Yaqui Indian, and with his blood in my veins I cannot sleep comfortably on anything higher than the ground.”

  After a pause, Sara spoke. “There are a million stars tonight,” she said.

  “The heavens are paved with them, señora,” said Fermin.

  The North Americans hired a youth of sixteen to take the place of Luis in the garden and were amazed at the sudden flowering of roses, the new lushness of ferns, and the increased dimensions of the woodpile.

  When Luis was released from the penitentiary, Richard found him an outside job at the mine, sweeping around the offices and outbuildings.

  Prison had returned Luis to Ibarra a thinner man, with fewer teeth and as much gray in his hair as black. But it was apparent from his eyes that abuse and privation had in no way altered his high opinion of life.

  Luis’s new work allowed him to converse with the miners as they signed in and signed out. He often rested his broom in a doorway and stared across the arroyo, pondering the news they had given him.

  One day he initiated a thorough cleanup of the weedy lot behind the storeroom. He first cleared away the brush, then made two piles of what was left. In one he placed objects that would be useful to him—Coca—Cola bottles with refunds due, cardboard boxes and wooden crates in fair condition, a bent saw, and a dozen straight nails. He collected into another heap all the rest—torn paper, splintered boards, oily rags. When the rubbish was gathered together, Luis tossed in a lighted match. A dynamite cap exploded. The detonation knocked him back and dropped him, clothes half torn off, six meters away.

  Fermín visited his friend in the hospital.

  “From now on Luis will be deaf on one sid
e,” Fermin said. “And he can never open his right hand, or close it either. But he will walk and see. He has been granted two separate miracles.”

  Later on, when Sara Everton returned to Ibarra alone after her husband’s death, she visited Fermin at the gate every evening. First they discussed his health, then the weather, the Mexican economy, and the stars.

  “There it is,” she said, pointing to the east, “the constellation we call Orion in English.”

  “The four kings and the three Marys,” said Fermín.

  One night he said, “When you were gone, I had to chase away two boys who were stealing the carved ram’s head from the porch. I needed only to say, ‘Thieves, you are here at your peril,’ and they dropped what they carried and fled, not showing their faces.”

  “Oh, dear,” Sara said.

  “So I must ask you to buy me a gun,” said Fermin. “A treinta y ocho especial like the one I sold the mayor of Ibarra when the señor, your husband, would not allow me to patrol these premises armed. Now you are alone in the house and I am alone outside. With this thirty-eight special I could frighten any malas personas who intrude.”

  “It is hard to tell the bad persons from the friends,” Sara objected. “And you have your machete. According to Luis, you are faster with it than all the young men of Ibarra.”

  “Fast to pull it, yes,” said Fermin. “But any man in town who is not a cripple can outrun me.”

  Sara inquired about Luis, who was working a part-time job as watchman at the San Gerónimo mine. Near it he had constructed a low hut, or kennel, out of gunnysacks and newspapers. Into this he crawled when there was frost or hail.

  The next morning Sara invited Luis to be at the gate on Sundays, holidays, and Fermin’s nights off. Luis not only accepted but was willing to sleep on the watchman’s cot.

  When she took leave of Fermín at the end of her stay, he said, “Señora, consider this. The front wall is of stone and very high, but the adobe walls at each side of the garden are worn away almost to the ground in places. A child, a goat, or even a pig might enter here, to say nothing of that low element of grown men you regard as friends. In view of this, I must ask you again to buy me a gun.”

  “No one will harm this house,” she said, without explaining that in medieval times, though warlords and traitors and the king of hell himself besieged a citadel, it still held fast when a man known to be beyond reproach stood sentry at the gate.

  6

  Saint’s Day

  The sun is scarcely up and coral still streaks the sky over El Nopal when three top-heavy carnival trucks lurch into the village square. They come to a stop outside the cantina, which is not yet open for business. Directly across the plaza, the sexton is standing on the church steps with a broom.

  Now here come a boy and girl, running, but not to early mass. They want to watch the roustabouts unload the carnival. Before the day is over, they will ride the carousel, or so they believe.

  These barefoot children are Paco Ortiz and Gloria Valdés, cousins and lifelong friends. Paco is eight and looks too thin and too old for his age. There is an anxious line between his eyes. Gloria is taller, three years older, and has a dancer’s grace and a dancer’s flower stem neck, as well as the beginning of full lips and breasts. She is Paco’s mother, sister, and unrecognized bride.

  Paco’s dog, a mongrel bitch, runs after him. Though she is fully grown, she appears to be half-size, her coat matted on her low frame and tangled in a fringe over her glistening eyes. When she was small, Paco named her La Loba, after the female wolf he believed she would eventually resemble.

  In the village, the children and the animal are referred to as “the three.” “The three are in the arroyo,” people say, or “The three are at the well.”

  Now they wait for the carnival men to set up the rides. The children sit quietly on a bench, while La Loba tracks the gutter right and left in her perpetual search for food. She makes sudden forays on short, shaggy legs to a blackened banana skin or to a scattered heap of corn husks.

  More than an hour has passed, and the carousel horses are still roped in the vans, when a long shadow falls across the children from behind. It is Máximo Ortiz, who lays his good hand on his niece’s shoulder and his maimed hand on the shoulder of his son. Both turn their heads to look up at him. They see that he is sober. Máximo is known to be the strongest man in El Nopal. Unless he is drunk, he can outreach, outhit, and outrun any man in the village. But since his bad luck, he is not always sober. No sooner did his wife die, bearing the scars he had inflicted to her grave, than an accident at the limestone quarry where he worked tore off two fingers and the thumb of his right hand.

  Now, to remove this hand from his shoulder, Paco stands. “There are the horses. Come on,” he says to Gloria, and he practices a whistle he has just learned to summon La Loba.

  Máximo watches them approach the trucks, watches La Loba following them, and thinks: I should have killed her two years ago with the rest of the litter. And remembering the annoyances that have plagued his life, along with the great injustices, he allows rage to possess him, lets it burn hot and blind and pure, until at last he strikes the back of the bench and bloodies his good hand.

  Paco and Gloria, at the front of a small crowd that is gathering, see that two men have emerged from each cab, pulling away torn sheets of canvas and revealing to the spectators their toppling cargo. They bring four swan boats that will rise and dip not far above the ground, a Ferris wheel, and a carousel. The disassembled frame and the cars of the Ferris wheel fill one truck. In another, the imperial necks of swans are being separated from machinery. The third is apparently entirely filled with the prancing legs of horses. Somewhere among them a golden hoof flashes.

  By ten o‘clock the crowd has filled the street, but the carnival men are in no hurry. Not a ticket can be sold until after a special twelve o’clock mass to honor the Virgin of Help, the patron saint of this town. To celebrate this mass, the bishop himself is coming from the cathedral in the state capital, seventy-five miles away. And by the time he arrives in his black Buick, which will be dusty from traveling roads not always good, the three palsied motors that operate the rides will already have been set up in the street across from the café and poolroom. Spliced cables will extend out of sight to power lines.

  Máximo is not among the spectators. He is on a bench in the middle of the plaza, nursing his throbbing hand. He sees Gloria leave the crowd and start across the square in the direction of her house, where she has left her mother to do all the work alone. She starts to run.

  “Stop,” says her uncle. “Sit.”

  She hesitates. He takes her arm and pulls her down beside him. He does not release her hand, which is the color of copper, but holds it on his lap.

  “How old are you now?” he says, and she says, “Eleven.”

  People are passing on their way to find good seats in church. They nod good morning.

  “I have to go,” says Gloria, and Máximo presses her hand before slowly releasing it.

  During the next half hour he first watches the arrival of the bishop, then investigates to see if, by chance, the cantina has opened early. He sees Paco standing so close to the carnival trucks that a roustabout has to tell him to stand back. La Loba is at the boy’s feet.

  Máximo is back on a bench at twelve o’clock when his sister, Catalina, with Gloria combed and sandaled behind her, hurries past him. For an hour music and prayer and the bishop’s voice raised in sermon overflow from the nave of the church into the square, empty now except for Máximo and a few beggars. But by the time mass is over and Catalina and Gloria emerge from the church, Paco is sitting at his father’s side, and Máximo holds a large Pepsi in each hand.

  He lifts the bottles. “Refreshments for the children,” he says.

  Catalina, a widow who takes in boarders, examines her brother and sees he has a bloodshot eye, a three-day beard, and a bruise on his lip. She notices his freshly scraped hand and says to herself, Another
fight.

  Aloud she says, “For a man who lost his wife and his job in one year, you are generous,” adding, “and the corn, ripe for the harvest, rotted in last summer’s rain.”

  Máximo holds up his two-fingered hand. “Until a month ago, I was paid for disability.”

  As she turns away, Catalina says, “You have recovered enough to take light jobs, but instead you loiter all day in the square, a place for children to amuse themselves.”

  When she is out of sight, Gloria and Paco sit, one on each side of Máximo, and drink their Pepsis without a word. Máximo’s left hand lies on the back of the bench behind his son, and his two-fingered right hand rests on his niece’s slender thigh. Gloria is one of God’s loveliest creations and still incomplete. Her skin is still a child’s, her bones have still to grow. Máximo’s hand has discovered that.

  When the bottles are empty, Paco is sent to return them to the grocer. But three minutes later he is back. “Come on,” he says to Gloria. “They have unloaded the horses. I think there is one that is gold.”

  Máximo has not removed his hand from Gloria’s leg. He is staring at the two dark braids that have fallen forward on her pink sweater. He sees that his niece has been growing so fast that three pearl buttons have been pulled off. Gloria is looking up at him.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Choose the horse you will ride tonight.” He watches her move with head high through the crowd. She is barefoot again.

  It is already two in the afternoon, and the horses still lie on their sides on the floor of the carousel. Even in this position they are rearing, plunging, and opening their blood-red mouths to bare the bit between their fierce ivory teeth.

  “Here it is,” says Paco.

  He is looking at a charger as black as night, its mane whipped back by a savage gale, its bulging eyes fixed on glory. Its reins and saddle are gem-studded, and its four golden hoofs strike hard at the air. Now the men who are setting the horses in place pierce each one with a golden pole.