A quiet descends on us as if this is a sign.
And then Doug is coming towards us, his face radiant as he looks at Yo, who smiles radiantly back at him. “Luke says to gather everyone together,” he says.
I give her a pat on the butt as I’ve done many times before over lesser things. I’m nine years older than she, so sometimes I’m mom as well as best friend. Though soon this, too, will end. And don’t think I’m not feeling wistful knowing that I’ll be relinquishing my place as Yo García’s best friend.
Shouts rise up from the far northeast corner of the field. Just as everyone was beginning to gather together under the hickory trees for the start of the ceremony, some argument seems to have erupted.
He wonders if he should go down and referee or stay here and religify (a phrase he heard a black preacher use on NPR about a month ago, a phrase he wishes he could use without sounding as if he were caricaturing the man’s black English), stay here and religify the wedding site by laying one stone on another stone, creating at the very least a makeshift altar in this unhallowed grove. But the shouts grow in intensity. Maybe his mere presence will calm whatever hot tempers have flared or frayed nerves have snapped in this unseasonably hot weather. But surely, Yolanda’s tropical-island family—for he assumes the problem has arisen among her guests—surely they are used to conducting themselves civilly in much hotter weathers.
The aunts are the first to rise from their folding chairs. Thick-fleshed and antique as they seemed, they are amazingly nimble on their black patent-leather heels. They move swiftly over the pasture to join the growing crowd of guests forming a ring around whoever it is fighting.
He looks around for Doug to ask how they should proceed, but the groom is absent. So, as a matter of fact, is the bride. The therapy group, which had been conducting a kind of impromptu session, seated on the hay bales Doug’s parents laid out for chairs, rises up as if at a signal, and walks across the field en masse. Midway, at the sound of a female scream, the group breaks into a run. He cannot help noticing how middle-aged women run, their bodies like heavy bundles they are afraid might drop and the contents spill or break.
Only the old men, Yo’s father and a retired professor of something, are left conversing on their fold-out chairs by the spent lilacs. “I always say to my children from Dante,” the father is saying, “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men. . . .’” He recites in halting English.
“I believe that’s Shakespeare, Mister García—”
“It is Dante,” the father insists. “I know how to say it in German, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese.” He renders the quote in two of the four languages before the shouts interfere with the multilingual recitation. “Let us check the tide,” the father nods to the professor, and the two men sigh as they, too, rise to their feet. They walk down the field, arm in arm.
He follows a few feet behind them, his white robe clinging to his trousers—there isn’t even the whisper of a breeze. The shouts have diminished, and now he can make out Doug’s voice saying, “Calm down, we’re making it worse. Now will everybody please stand back.”
As if Moses himself had spoken, there is a parting in the sea of cotton and seersucker and bright silks. And that is when he sees what has happened. A young ewe with two lambs bawling beside her has gotten her head stuck in the wire fence that separates the two fields. She must have tried to climb through to greener pastures, and then, at the approach of some of the guests, pulled back only to lock herself in the electric wires. On the dirty white scruff of wool around her neck there is a necklace of blood. Every time she bolts, she gets another electric shock.
Doug tests the wires, but jerks his hands off. “Someone go turn off the battery! Down there, at the northeast end of the field,” Doug instructs. As everyone turns a circle trying to figure out which way is north, Dexter, the balloon guy, dashes off, the tail of his tie-dye shirt lifting as he hurries down the hill.
He cannot help thinking of those deer he has caught with his headlights on late-night mountain roads that lift their tail signaling danger before they disappear.
“What should I do?” Dexter shouts up, and Doug shouts down, “Just turn it off!”
Doug taps the wire, then grabs hold of two strands. “Okay, everyone, stand back!” But his first yank is unsuccessful. The ewe lets out a pitiful wail that sounds almost human.
“Is she okay, Dad, is she?” Corey has been the only one not to obey her dad’s orders and back off. She kneels by the sheep, holding the wooly head in her hands as if to keep the ewe from strangling herself.
“That a girl, Corey,” Doug says, “just hold her firm.”
The old aunts in their elegant black dresses commiserate over the fate of the poor animal. One of them turns to the darker-skinned woman beside her and asks in accented English, “Are we to have it for the barbecue?”
He would like to say, this is the sheep that the Lord has sent to gather us together on this hillside. This is the promise made to the sons and daughters of Abraham.
Suddenly with a second yank, Doug pulls the wires apart and the ewe leaps forward into the field. Close behind, through the gaping hole follow the two bleating lambs. The aunts stampede to one side afraid that the animals will bite. One of the glamorous Dominican cousins whose name he cannot recollect crouches behind the returned Dexter, who is hamming it up, arms out, as if keeping monsters from causing a damsel damage.
And now, it is the children who are out of control. For how can they contain their delight at seeing their own frisky selves mirrored in these gamboling lambs? They chase after them down the length of the field, crying out for them to stop. It takes a good ten minutes before parents have rounded them up. The exhausted ewe catches her breath at the bottom of the field where the wood-line starts.
“She’ll find her way home,” Doug reassures everyone.
“Oh, Dad, can we get one, can we get one of those lambs?” Corey pleads.
The weariness on Doug’s face, which he has noted on and off all afternoon, lifts like the balloons that still hover above the windless field. “If you live here, Corey, you can have a whole farm of them next door.” Doug cocks his head at his daughter, then despite her disgusted shrug, he grabs hold of her and kisses the top of her head. “Give us a smile, lambkins.”
If they were at St. John’s, now would be the moment he nods to the usher to ring the second bell. Instead he lifts his robed arms in a gesture he realizes, too late, is theatrically biblical. “Friends and family,” he says, “we have a ceremony to perform.”
“Right oh,” one of the elegant uncles says, throwing his arm around Doug.
He leads them up the hillside toward the deserted hickory grove, aunts and cousins, his own parishoners, the therapy group, the sisters, the two old men, Doug’s parents—his flock now, each and every one of them.
— But no, wait. Up on top of the hill, someone is standing by the folding chairs and hay bales, an angel in a silver tunic sent to the poor shepherds to say, “Do not be afraid. Sing a joyful song to the Lord. You are all His people.”
But then the angel comes forward a few steps, and the word becomes flesh, Yolanda García!
As he watches her gazing down at them advancing up the hillside, he has an uneasy feeling that she might bolt like the ewe into the thicket on the other side of the road. He closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them, she is still there, lifting her hand in welcome as if she has been waiting all her life for them to gather together here.
The night watchman
setting
The notice arrived in the hands of the dwarf boy who came up on a mule to José’s fields on a day so hot José had taken the late morning as well as the afternoon off. “What does it say?” José asked, unfolding the sheet he had already carefully removed from the envelope after washing his hands.
The boy shrugged. “Don Felipe said it was bad news, that is all I know.”
“Coño, muchacho,” he warned, swinging at the boy. But it was the mayor
Felipe who deserved a cuff for sending a boy like this up into the mountains, bringing bad luck to the yucca plants.
José unfolded the notice again and narrowed his eyes, concentrating. Somehow it seemed that if he looked at the paper intently enough, the meaning would communicate itself to him. But all he saw were the neat, furrow-like rows of print, and an insignia on top with the flag. This would have to be a government notice.
His mujer came to the hut’s entrance and peered out, squinting.
“I have to go down to the village,” he spoke calmly. Xiomara was carrying his seventh and it would not do to get her agitated and end up with a monstrosity like this dwarf for a child. Not that José wanted or needed another mouth with seven other children, including Xiomara’s nephew, and her mother and father to feed.
He called out to his oldest to saddle the mule. At first, the boy did not move from where he lay under the ceiba tree, numbed by the heat. But as soon as José made the motion of standing, the boy was on his feet and running away to the field behind the hut where the mule had been let to graze.
Down in the village the bad day got worse. Felipe explained that the notice had gone out to all campesinos on the south side of the mountain who were squatting on government lands: the fields were to be flooded when the dam being built north of here was completed. Inhabitants must be evacuated by the end of the year.
“What is a man to do?” José asked in his quiet voice. When he was younger, some of the men in the village had called him pajaro for talking in a woman’s voice. But he had suspected it was more than his voice that bothered them. José could turn any woman’s head, a fact he had known since he was a boy of twelve and Doña Teolinda had asked him to undo the hook on her brassiere and then do the work of the brassiere himself. “I have ten mouths to feed. We cannot live on nada.”
“There might be an opening for the postman job if Guerrero doesn’t get any better. But . . .” Felipe looked straight at José as if trying to decide something about him. Perhaps he was still not sure whether José had come down the mountain for added news or because he could not read the letter at all. “But the postman job would require knowing your letters.”
“Is there other work?” José said by way of an answer.
“I hear talk”—Felipe shrugged as if not responsible for the rumor he had heard—“that a relation of Don Mundín’s has come to the house again this summer. She might need a gardener, a night watchman.”
“I need work for longer than the summer—” José began.
“I understand,” Felipe nodded. “But you talk to her, you get a job, and maybe she is satisfied and talks to Don Mundín and they take you down to the capital to work on their gardens there.”
The prospect sent a jolt of excitement through José even in the midst of the bad news he had just received. Coming down the mountain it had entered his mind again, the possibility of getting his papers and going to work in the States. The old people on the northside farm, the Silvestres, had two grown sons, both of whom had made it to Miami in rowboats, without papers, and gone on to work in factorías and restaurantes, marrying portorriqueñas and getting their papers. Every month, they sent home money, so that the old people had a small generator that ran a television, a radio, even a cookstove like the rich people down the mountain.
“Go talk with this woman,” Felipe urged. “Tell her your predicament. You know how women are.”
Yes, José agreed, though it had been a long time since he had known a woman besides Xiomara. The slave life he led didn’t allow him the time or the money for such distractions. Looking down at his callused hands—the dirt packed under the nails, the battered thumb he had smashed in the cane grinder years back—it was hard to imagine them doing anything else besides working the soil his grandfather and father had worked before him. What other talents did they have? Briefly, he recalled his young hands, softer, cleaner, still untried, working Doña Teolinda’s pale breasts. “Yes,” she kept saying as he touched where she told him, “yes, that’s just right.”
At the big house he explained to Sergio, the short, muscled caretaker whose mouth was rich with gold fillings, why he was here. His farm was being repossessed the first of the year, and he would need a job by then. But if he could find work now, he could manage this last harvest at the farm what with three big enough sons—
“It is not up to me.” Sergio held up a hand to stop his flood of reasons.
“Is there a need?” José asked in his small voice that always pacified men like Sergio or Felipe. It made them feel, José understood, that their self-importance was being recognized. “Perhaps there is something I can do?”
Sergio shrugged. He did not know of anything that needed doing. José could see that the caretaker was looking him over as if he, José, were a lower class of human being. He had not changed from his work clothes, and the shoes he had brought for show were still in the paper bag he carried with a cold plátano-con-queso-frito wrapped in a plantain leaf in case hunger caught him on the road. Sergio seemed to have forgotten, along with the Sandovals and Montenegros, the Lopezes and Varelas, that they themselves had come down to town from dirt-poor farms up in those mountains.
A handsome woman appeared at the back door, a bunch of keys in her hand. José had passed her several times in town, and like most women she had gazed upon him admiringly. Now she nodded a warm saludo.
“My wife, she is in charge of the house,” Sergio said by way of introduction. “And my sister does the cooking. Porfirio, her husband, he helps me with the gardens. So, you see, everything is taken care of.” Sergio lifted his hands helplessly. He turned to his wife and explained the situation in a way that was already concluded: José wanted a job, but there was no job to be had.
“He should talk to the lady,” the woman said when her husband had finished.
“And bother her when she has just arrived?” Sergio said with temper in his voice.
They were speaking of him as if he were not there, so José walked off a little ways in deference to them. As he stood waiting, he lifted his eyes to the largeness of the house. Up on a second-story balcony a lady was looking down on their gathering. Her face was painted up so that she looked like someone on the television the old people had showed him, a face watched by many people. “¿Qué hay?” she called down. But it was not for him, José, to say what was up.
“Can we help you with something, doña?” Sergio called up. His face had changed—instead of the harshness of someone in charge, it was now full of concern and smiles.
“No, nothing.” The lady pointed. “But him, what does he want?”
Sergio waved in dismissal. Nothing for her to worry about. “I will take care of it.”
“I want a job,” José called up, this was his chance. “I have ten mouths to feed.” Though his was a quiet voice, the lady heard every word of it, for the next thing he knew, she was saying, “I’ll be right down.”
And down she came, a noodle-thin lady. Poorly fed you might guess, but she looked bright and frisky like someone with a full stomach and more of what she liked stored in a locked closet. She was looking him over, but not like Sergio’s wife or the other women in town, not with the interest of a woman looking at a man, but as if she were taking his picture with her eyes.
“What can you do?” she asked him.
Without meaning to, his eyes strayed to her small breasts. Surely she had not given suck to a child, as small and high as they were for a woman who looked to be in her ripe years. When he caught himself looking in the wrong place, he glanced down. He could feel her own eyes, following his gaze to his bare feet. And maybe that more than anything is what won her heart—for when he said he could do anything at all she wanted, she said, “We’ll find something for you to do, right, Sergio?”
“You’re the one who knows,” Sergio conceded.
That very night José began his job as the night watchman at the big house, eating the plátano Xiomara had packed for him as well as a plate of arroz con habi
chuelas Sergio’s wife María left him for his late supper. The next morning he appeared at his hut, his eyes heavy with sleep, but his heart light with the good news that a lady at the big house had hired him. He was to be paid more money in a week than he had earned in a month farming this maldita tierra.
It was the first time José had cursed the land his father and his grandfather before him had farmed. Xiomara made the sign of the cross, and then placed her hands on the roundness of her belly to ward off the evil eye.
From the first, the lady intrigued José. She was supposed to be Don Mundín’s relation, but what that relation was, no one was sure. It was said she came summers to work in privacy, but no one had seen what private thing it was she was doing except sitting at a table upstairs looking at the mountains.
Soon José knew her full story, for the staff was only too eager to inform him. They had known her since she first started coming eight summers ago. She was so easy and kind that María, who had left the house after her son had drowned in the pool out back, would return to work whenever the lady came down. Recently, she had married a husband, un americano, but it was well known that they were not good at satisfying their women. There was the added proof that she would not be having any children—or so she had told María, who told Sergio, who had the habit of sitting with the watchman and reporting the day’s happenings before going home at night. Now that the lady had shown a liking for José, Sergio’s attitude towards the hick farmer had changed significantly.
“You will not guess why she cannot have children?”
“She is too old,” José guessed, although he had assessed that she had six or seven years before the change would come over her.
Sergio shook his head importantly, his eyes closing with the pleasure of knowing the answer. “The husband had himself fixed years back de propísito.” On purpose.
“No, no, no.” The two men shook their heads in disbelief.