by Daniel Mason
As she got older, she imagined a vast, shifting place, a light, a rush of noise. The old men who had been there spoke of mansions built on great avenues, elegant ladies who carried parasols with their long white gloves and wrapped themselves in mantillas against the fog. Their sons told of automobile factories and rising skyscrapers. Their grandchildren spoke of a different place, an endless cinder-block city with gangs of angry young men. On the single marketplace television in Prince Leopold, mantis-thin women sipped glasses of bubbles before a shimmering skyline. Until she was five, Isabel thought that in the city the sky and land were somehow reversed, until her brother explained how the lights could stretch forever beneath a blanket of clouds.
Each year, the men debated whether to take the ship for the jungles or the flatbed to the city. They drew up the merits, dangers and possibilities of each: rubber plantations versus auto plants, gold strikes versus the mansions, malaria versus city thieves. As they sewed bags with sisal and shaped roof tiles over their thighs, they spoke of impossible factories. They said, In the city in the south you don’t go hungry. In the city the clinics have doctors, the schools have paper, the stores have food. In the city, families put their maid’s children through school, babies are bigger. In the city, the poor are rich, minimum-wagers are kings. The men don’t cheat on you in the city, they aren’t powerless, they don’t drown themselves in drink, they don’t hit. The women don’t get old before their time. In the city, if you are thirsty there are fountains, I’ve seen them myself, big fountains, with water spraying from horses’ mouths. In the city, they have markets every day, they have rain.
At first the men went, and then some of the women, including their cousin Manuela. When Isabel was eight, an entire family bundled their belongings in a knotted sheet and climbed onto one of the flatbeds they called parrot perches for the metal bars that the passengers clung to on the long trip.
The following year, another family left. They were one of the poorest in Saint Michael, and abandoned a wattle house out in the thorn forest, latching the door with a string and a little stick. On their walks, Isaias took Isabel there, where the wind whistled through the cracks in the walls. Inside, he ran his fingers over the grooves worn into the beams by swaying hammocks. Sometimes they waited out the heat of the day together in the shade of the rooms.
As he spent more and more time in the hills, Isabel often found him in the empty house. Someone took its door away, and the chinks in the wattle widened. Once they surprised a pair of rhea. The birds screeched and hurled themselves about the room in panicked, scratching loops until they leaped through an empty window. For days Isaias imitated them, shoving his fists into his armpits and spinning around the room as Isabel chased behind.
Usually, it was empty. A pair of anthills appeared in the floor, and the carapaces of insects swung in the dusty strands of abandoned spiderwebs. Thin centipedes formed question marks as they dried and curled.
Once she found him there with the fiddle. ‘Maybe I should also go,’ he said, and he played for a long time.
When she was twelve, Isabel began to travel with her aunt and uncle to an uneven hillside overlooking the valley, where they kept a pair of thin zebu cows, grew some manioc, collected wood for charcoal and led the goats to graze. The soil was thick with stones and barren except for thorn scrub and the occasional cereus cactus with sticky white fruit. It was a long afternoon’s walk from town. They spent days there, sleeping in hammocks strung from the low trees. They returned with plastic buckets of milk, kept warm by the heat of the day, sloshing beneath a scrim of yellow fat.
In the evenings, they watched a plume of dust winding its way into the distance until it disappeared.
One day they returned to town to find a white pickup parked in the square. In their home, three men sat with her father. There were two pistols on the table. Her uncle approached warily as a man rose to shake his hand. He wore a bolo tie, its clasp fashioned from the rowel of a spur.
‘This man’s from the city,’ said her father. ‘Says the land out by the zebus is his.’
Her uncle slowly made his way to her father’s side. ‘We’ve had that land for as far back as my great-grandparents,’ he said. ‘And probably before.’ ‘You mean you’ve worked the land,’ said the man. ‘No,’ said her uncle, ‘I mean the land’s ours.’ ‘Then you’ve got papers, of course,’ said the man, smiling. ‘Not now.’ ‘Not now. What’s that mean, citizen?’ ‘Means just that. Means once we did, but not now, with all the going and the coming because of the droughts.’ ‘That’s the problem,’ said the man. ‘Because I’ve got papers.’ He pushed a stained sheet forward. Her uncle picked it up. He massaged a long keloid that ran from his eye to his ear, a scar from a bottle slash, twice infected, poorly repaired. ‘Says right there that the land’s mine,’ said the man. ‘Right there at the bottom is the date my family bought it.’ Isabel took a step closer. The paper looked old and brittle. Her uncle threw it back onto the table. ‘You’re cricketing,’ he said, angry now. He clenched his jaw. ‘It isn’t yours.’
The man rose. ‘I came here to tell you, not to ask, citizen. You can leave on foot, or your people can carry your body out in a hammock.’ He turned angrily, and the other men put the guns into their belts and followed him out.
The man came back, three times, and each time he spoke to a different family. Each time he brought his henchmen. They didn’t clap their hands outside the houses, as was the custom, but banged on the doors with the butts of their pistols. He carried the same faded papers, and he said things like ‘I will let you work it if you give me half, You should thank me, Most landowners are not so generous.’ Word came that he worked for even a bigger man, a general of the Federal Army, who lived in the capital and controlled great swaths of the state.
In town, the men searched old chests and the backs of closets. They shouted at their wives to find the records, although everyone knew there were no records to be found. ‘The man’s papers are fake,’ her uncle told them. ‘Fake’s only fake if people think they’re fake,’ said others. ‘They look real.’ ‘That’s a lie,’ said her uncle. ‘Fake’s fake, I know their tricks, I’m not believing some piece of paper just because he left it in a box with a pair of crickets to piss and shit on it and make it look old.’
On their walks, Isaias was silent. Once Isabel asked, ‘What’s going to happen?’ He answered quickly, ‘We’re still here, aren’t we? Do you think this is the first time this has happened? Do you think it’s the first time someone has tried to scare us away?’ The words sounded rehearsed, as if he was repeating something someone else had said.
A week later, two dogs were found at the edge of the town, their heads shattered, sticky and covered with flies. At night, the men ate silently, and the women uneasily eyed the sacks of beans. In the weekend markets, they heard similar stories from other towns. They began to see the three men everywhere, driving into towns with pistols in their belts to pay visits to families who refused to sign the old sheets they couldn’t read. She watched the old people circle them cautiously, an arm’s reach away.
Later that month, on a small farm on the outskirts of Prince Leopold, someone strung up more dogs in the thorn and cut off the udders of a milk cow. They gouged out the eyes of a herd of goats and left them to tangle themselves in the scrub, hissing at the birds that made swooping dives at sockets clotted with blood. The goatherd was tied to a post and left in the sun, muttering through blistered lips. On the old road to the coast, a man who stayed on his land was found outside his little house with a stick stuck in his throat and the crotch of his pants brittle with blood.
In some towns, they heard, there were those who resisted, gathering at the entrances of their lands with sharpened hoes before squadrons of the Military Police. Late at night, in Saint Michael, Isabel’s uncles and father sat around the table alone. From behind the sheet in the doorway, she heard the clicking of guns as they were cleaned and loaded. The sound brought a soft cry from her mother. She has seen this be
fore, Isabel thought. When she couldn’t sleep, she looked over to her brother and watched him staring up at the specks of sky.
At the crossroads, offerings appeared, scattered corn and half-empty bottles of cane wine.
They waited for the priest. When he didn’t come, they opened the church. In the gray shadows, Isabel stood by her mother in a row of women with bowed, kerchiefed heads. An old aunt put a worn prayer card of Saint Michael to her eyes and began to wail. The others fell to their knees, pressed callused hands together, whispered, Protect us, Saint Michael Archangel, warrior who thrust the devil into hell, Defend us in our battle against our enemies, Crush Satan beneath your feet so that he may no longer hold us captive, Spare us, Saint Michael, Have mercy on us in the hour of our trial, Assist us in the dangerous struggle we are about to endure. Out of the corner of her eye Isabel watched their lips moving. She felt herself part of a long line of daughters. She knew her mother had once kneeled where she was kneeling and her grandmother where her mother was kneeling, shifting through the pews as each daughter came in and took her mother’s place.
‘You aren’t praying,’ said her mother, and Isabel pressed the base of her thumbs to the top of her head. She imagined Saint Michael smelling of dust and feathers, diving toward the earth with his wings tucked behind him. She saw him perched on the church tower, preening his feathers and waiting. She imagined him with talons, scratching on the roof tiles above her, red dust filtering down; she heard the crackling uncrinkling of his feathers as he folded and unfolded them; she saw him pacing the plaza and letting the children stroke his wings, sharpening his spear on the stones and tucking his head into his down at night. She watched him waiting for the cars, and when the cars came, unfurling into a great bird and, with a single clap of his wings, tearing up plumes of gravel, overturning the pickups, unpeeling the roads and hurtling the henchmen into the white forest, their pistols fluttering harmlessly down.
They locked up the church again when they left. They waited through the long days and watched the shadow of the statue sweep the square and stretch up the walls like the silhouette of a stranger.
Isabel’s uncle continued to go out to the land, although her aunt stayed home. At night Isabel could hear them shouting at each other in their house across the square. He became silent and sullen, and at the weekly fair, he bought a scapular and an invocation against bullets. He sat in the square and with his thumb broke the spines from a spray of thorn. Her father told him, ‘Be careful, or we’ll find you with a mouth full of ants.’
Then, in a bar in Prince Leopold, a drunk whispered that he was already marked. The men in the family began to escort him everywhere. When it was Isaias’s turn, he brought a sharpened cane scythe, choked up on the handle and let it sway cautiously as they walked off down the road. Her mother waited nervously by the door, but to Isabel, it was inconceivable that Isaias might be hurt. ‘He knows strong prayers,’ she said, to comfort her mother.
A week later, her uncle didn’t come home. His wife wailed and rolled on the ground, tearing at her hair until the women came and sat on her and rubbed her chest with herbs and holy water. When they found his body out on the road, his mouth was open and his tongue was stuffed into the pocket of his shirt. The men went and carried him back in a hammock. As the women fell over him, Isabel turned away, frantic, to look for Isaias. He wasn’t home or at the fountain. The schoolhouse, where sometimes he went to read the few books, was empty. At last she found him, alone on a trail above town. His eyes were red and his lips trembled when he tried to speak. Finally, he said, ‘Don’t cry. There is enough crying already.’
She went back down the hill to her house and curled into the cool cup of her hammock. Twice she heard her uncle speak to her, and she whispered him away. She squeezed her fists, pinched her eyes tight and felt the fabric beneath her face grow wet and warm.
They completed a novena of mourning.
When the nine days were over, she began to hear different words in Saint Michael. They no longer spoke of the droughts, but of false papers and boxes of crickets. I will be run off my land by cricket piss, they said, and no one laughed. Their conversations dried, as tinder dries and becomes ready to burn.
She was awakened by her parents’ arguing. ‘What do you want me to do?’ her father said again and again. ‘I have no choice—they have taken away my choices.’ At the weekly market in Prince Leopold, she joined the crowd around the canteen television. Images played of massive settlements made of black plastic tents, clashes between landless men and the police. One day, a young mother stared from the screen with such defiance that Isabel turned to look behind her in the square.
The days passed, but the henchmen didn’t return. Slowly the men put their guns away. Someone said there were bigger fights over better land elsewhere. ‘I never thought I would thank God for worthless land,’ said her father, smiling for the first time in months. That summer the men still found work in the cane fields. When the foreman offered them the same pay as the year before, one of her cousins shouted, ‘But prices have doubled!’ ‘I think there are many men who would be happy for your job if you don’t want to work,’ said the foreman.
In November, a family who lived near the highway locked the door to their house and boarded a parrot perch to the south, and two weeks later another followed. The older people cursed them as cowards. They asked, ‘Who will do the work if all the children have gone away?’
In December, on Saint Lucy’s Day, they set out six chips of salt at night. In the morning, four had dissolved: it would rain by February.
Now when her family gathered, they spoke only of the city in the south, as if the calm had cut a path for the rumors to pour in. Everyone had a story. In Isabel’s mind it ceased to be a place; it was the static in the background of the radio programs, the flickering on the television screen, a press of crowds, a screech of tires, a chorus of hawkers’ shouts. On the news, a reporter stood before a bus station, where families dragged bags over concrete floors. He spoke of numbers, first tens and then hundreds of thousands, numbers she didn’t understand. In her imagination, the television’s forest of great glittering towers shattered and fell about the city. In their shadow grew a tangle of planked slums and brick escarpments, a city of cement and broken cement. It was a heaven and a terrible place, an emptiness, a tomb, a place to beg alms, a whorehouse, a street child’s playground, a floodland, a stink. Shimmering at the end of the great descent of her imagination.
One night Isaias shook her awake. ‘Come,’ he whispered, and she swiveled her legs from the hammock and followed him.
Outside, the square was empty and blue. He said, ‘Isa, I’m going. There’s a perch leaving for the city early tomorrow from Prince Leopold. If I leave now I can catch it.’
Sleep still clung to her. She stared at him mutely. ‘I am going to go mad here, Isa. I am going to die if I stay.’
She was quiet. He said, ‘Isa, you understand. I can’t take it.’
‘Those men aren’t coming back. Things will be better—’ she said, but he shook his head. ‘That’s not it. If I thought they were coming back I’d stay. But I’ll spend my life here. I’ll die in the cane if I don’t leave. At least I’ll have a chance.’ ‘At what?’ ‘You know: a chance. I’ll play music, I’ll perform, I’ll get a good job, I’ll send money. You don’t know the stories I’ve heard. I’m going to send you letters, and color photographs. I’ll make wishes for you at the cathedral.
‘Isa …’ He paused. ‘Are you all right?’
She nodded slowly and looked into the square. She wished something would happen: that a dog would pass by or someone would start yelling somewhere, or the sun would come up and break the moment into day. She felt her lips tighten. She looked down at her feet.
‘Isa, I’m not abandoning you.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’
‘But it’s what you’re thinking. If you’re thinking something, you should say it.’ He watched her face for her reaction. ‘When you’r
e older, you’ll get it. You’ll see. You’ll understand that a person can’t just wait and let things happen to him.’
She traced a flagstone with her heel.
‘Isa—listen. What do you want? A brother who’s just a cane cutter? Another broken-back?’
She saw then that he had shaved, and his hair was combed. He wore his best shirt. The fiddle rested against the wall.
‘Where are you going to stay?’ she asked.
‘With Manuela. She has a new man, you know, but he works at sea. There’ll be room for me.’ ‘When are you coming back?’ ‘Soon.’ ‘What’s soon?’ ‘Months, just months.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell Mother, then?’ ‘Because she won’t let me, Father won’t let me. They think a person can cut cane forever. I’ll tell them when I get there. When I have my first job and they can’t say no.’ He laughed. She said, ‘But you promise you’re coming back?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Say you promise, Isaias.’ ‘You’ll be okay here,’ he said. ‘I’ll write letters to you. It will be like you’re there with me.’ ‘Say you promise, Isaias. Say: “I promise, Isabel.” ’ ‘I already said I did. Now you are acting like a child.’
She looked away and bit her nails. Her hand was trembling, and she put it down. ‘I promise,’ he said. He kissed both her cheeks, her forehead. ‘Tell everyone not to be mad.’ He laughed and poked her. ‘Come on, look up … Imagine your brother, like on the radio: Isaias, the King.’ Her cheeks were hot; she wouldn’t smile.
Two weeks later, the phone rang again in the empty plaza. This time her father retrieved it. He white-knuckled the receiver. ‘Where did you get the money to pay for the trip?’ he shouted. ‘How long is it going to take you to make that much? Doing what? I don’t care what a man once told you, those kinds of things are not for people like you.’
