Drought

by Ronald Fraser

  Huddled on the track she was weeping, a tangle of wet hair over her face. He knelt beside her. ‘What happened, what happened?’ he asked pointlessly.

  ‘Mother!’ she sobbed. ‘Mother!’

  ‘Where is she? Tell me.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Was she in the house?’

  All he heard were her sobs; she didn’t reply. He got up and ran on. Soon he was wading through water up to his knees, his thighs, then his chest. He reached the shattered cottage and struggled to find a way in, for the roof had collapsed on top of the doorway. At last he pushed his way in through a broken wall and saw the devastation. The wall, which had taken the main brunt, had collapsed and the shattered remains of chairs, beds, cooking utensils, floated in the water; the tintype of the blonde hung incongruously from a twisted rafter.

  ‘Señora!’ he shouted. ‘Señora!’

  For a moment he thought of diving below the surface to look for her; but the water was like liquid earth and he could see nothing. He pushed his way out through the ruptured wall.

  ‘Señora!’ The shout echoed emptily over the water, over the uprooted trees. Near the house, one of the cows was belly-up in the water and a bit farther off the calf floated entwined in the branches of an almond. Only the carob was still standing, he observed, and that was when he saw her, crumpled like a black rag doll, in the bottom branches. Christ! He waded across, believing that she was still alive, but when he got close he saw by her contorted face that she was dead. She looked as though she were shouting with anger and one arm was pointing with fingers outstretched.

  Hesitantly, he put a hand out; she was the first dead person he had touched. Gathering up courage he lifted her down by the armpits, surprised at how little she weighed. Then he slung her over his shoulder and waded towards the rising land from which he’d come. He was unsure whether he ought to be moving her because almost certainly he was infringing some law governing corpses, but he thought he would argue that one out later. Now and again her body seemed to twitch and, scared, he wanted to drop her; but he knew he had committed himself to getting her out and tried to ignore these frightening spasms. She was dead after all, he reassured himself.

  When he reached the place where he had left Ana, she was no longer there. He walked on. It was still raining torrentially. If there was no one in the gap in the hills he’d leave the corpse there and walk back to the village to inform the Guardia Civil.

  In the gap, however, he found a group of men sheltering under the giant boulder. He laid the body down gently before them. He didn’t see that Ana was crouched among them; but she saw him and the burden he was carrying, and she rushed at him screaming. Before he knew what was happening she hit him across the face several times, and it was only the intervention of one of the men that ended her assault.

  ‘Assassin!’ she shouted, slumping on the ground.

  ‘He’s not to blame,’ said the man, whom John recognized as Culebra. ‘It’s the other. I foresaw this happening. That wall was never safe.’

  ‘My mother, God rest her soul, knew that,’ Ana cried. ‘Didn’t she get the building stopped! Miguel told her the wall wouldn’t hold.’

  John looked at her, at the men. He knew, they all could have known, that but for the dead woman’s determination to stop the building, the dam’s inner retaining wall could have been finished before the rains came. The top part of the dam had burst only because the stone wall remained unprotected by concrete.

  ‘We knew early this morning it was going to burst,’ said Culebra, ‘because we saw the wall bulging. We warned everyone. Only she wouldn’t leave.’

  ‘But why?’ John expostulated. ‘She was the one who said it was dangerous.’

  ‘The dam and the señorita had taken her son’s life, let them take hers, that’s what she said. Ana begged her on her knees to leave, and only just escaped herself. But she wouldn’t come. From up here we saw her walking round and round the house, then she started to make for the dam, shouting words we couldn’t make out. It was then that it burst and she disappeared under the water. I think she went mad, what with Miguel, and having to leave the farm.’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘Yes, now that there isn’t a man to work the land. The señorita came down last week to tell her.’

  ‘I see,’ replied John. ‘Well, there’s her body. I’m leaving it with you. I’ll inform the Guardia Civil when I get to the village. You’ll have to take care of the rest.’ He wiped away the sweat on his face and started the climb back to the village.

  That evening the total exhaustion returned and he collapsed, shivering with cold. Dolores wrapped him in blankets she warmed by the stove and brought him steaming cups of broth. His head lost its moorings and for a time he was delirious. Dolores feared pneumonia and called in the doctor who, to her relief, could find nothing wrong. By noon the next day he was better; and when in the afternoon he heard the church bell tolling he got up, despite Dolores’s protestations, and went out.

  The heavy rain had turned to a drizzle and the cloud had lifted from the top of the village. On the threshing floor, as he expected, a number of men were gathered waiting. From there, the damage done by the dam’s flood waters was hidden by the hills; but the rain’s work was visible everywhere else in terrace walls that had collapsed, in uprooted trees and boulders strewn over the countryside. The land had been scoured by the rain. It was the heaviest rainfall in living memory, he overheard one of the men say.

  ‘Ay! It’ll be months before the land is fit to sow,’ said another.

  ‘Months! It’ll be a year before El Mayorazgo and Casa Colorada can be ploughed. Tío Bigote was lucky to have sold.’

  ‘It’s the Englishman’s problem now,’ said the first.

  ‘He went away just in time, perhaps he won’t want to be coming back,’ laughed a young man.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. He’ll only have paid the ten per cent deposit. He might rather lose it than pay for land that’s destroyed,’ replied another.

  ‘And El Mayorazgo? The señorita needn’t have thrown them out, eh?’

  ‘Ay! First Miguel, then his mother. Who’d sharecrop for her?’ said the first.

  ‘There’s plenty would. But the land is lost now. Miguel always said the wall wouldn’t hold.’

  ‘Poor man! It’s a good thing he didn’t live to see this.’

  John was expecting these comments. But the earlier phrases had left him bewildered. ‘Did you say Tío Bigote was selling his farm?’

  ‘What’s left of it now, that’s right, to your compatriot, they say.’

  ‘But!’ Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Tío Bigote on the far side of the threshing floor. He went across and stood next to him. After a decent interval, he asked the old man politely if what he had heard were true.

  ‘Look here, señor, fifty-five years I’ve worked the land and now I can retire, thanks to a foreigner. And what do I see? The land it took my father seven years to pay off, making charcoal, threshing, borrowing from the señorita’s father – the land is gone, ruined.’

  ‘But it is not your land any more, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, that is correct. But who tilled and fertilized that land? Who dug the terraces? Who planted the trees and built the house? The land is more than a piece of paper, more than money …’

  ‘Yes.’

  The time had come, John thought, to put the question at last. The old man’s lined face seemed to tighten suddenly. ‘Miguel? Eh, he mentioned it once. But he wasn’t serious about it, couldn’t be.’ There was a long pause as he looked at the hills where a car could be seen climbing the road. It was coming too fast to be the taxi. A foreigner’s car, defying the rain, almost certainly. Then the old man turned: ‘With the dam it was worth more than anyone here could pay. Miguel knew that, it was why he didn’t insist. And now thanks to the dam, that land is a ruin.’

  There was a stir among the men as they moved to the edge of the threshing floor. John looked down: the pine hill,
the rushing watercourse, the familiar, rain-washed track. And then, far below through the gap in the hills, Miguel’s mother’s coffin appeared.