A Far Country (4 page)

Isabel was nine. She spent the mornings watching the children. Slowly, she learned that if a child was colicky, she only had to carry him on her hip and soon he would quiet. It was normal, she thought, but the other women said she was different. Once, as she hushed a baby, she caught her mother staring. She asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ but her mother said, ‘Nothing,’ and stroked her hair.

In the afternoon, she went to school. She noticed that on his rare free days her brother took longer walks in the hills, always
with the fiddle. She heard it wailing from their house, from the street, from the tangle of brush that led down into the valley. If it cracked, he shimmed it with chips from dry branches. He composed his own music or played traditional backlands folk songs and songs from the coast.

On Friday evenings, he walked ten miles to Prince Leopold, where a group of old men formed the Remembering the Past Regional Band, with an accordion, tambourine, triangle and drum. Sometimes there was a man playing clarinet, with a register key fashioned from cut tin. They played long into the night. For the first few warm evenings, nearly the entire neighborhood gathered to watch them play. Over time, they went back to their radio sets and their rocking chairs, until only a few remained: Isabel and a simple man who laughed at his own secret joke; the wife of the triangle player; a pair of mangy dogs who stirred the dust and chewed at the flaking pads of their paws.

Once, toward the end of winter, Isabel saw a little boy wandering on the dusty road above town. He was covered with long glass-like hair, and he chirped when she approached him. A week later, she fell sick. She shook with a fever, calling out, dreaming of people with strange faces taking her into the ground. Her mother made a poultice of leaves to press against her chest. Isaias came home in the evenings and lay next to her in her hammock. The fever broke.

A week later, she saw the boy again. Again, she became ill, and dreamed of running on the surface of a river, leaping on rocks made of faces that bobbed and sank beneath her feet.

Her mother took her to Prince Leopold, and then on a second
truck to a small town farther out in the thorn scrub. There, they waited outside the house of a man who was said to move easily between worlds. There was a long line of trembling old men and women with screaming children. At last, they walked into a dark room, and her mother unfolded a crumpled wad of bills from a knot in her skirt.

The man was heavy and unshaven. Isabel thought he would have incenses or cowrie shells to cast, but he sat alone on a chair with a missing back. On a table behind him were scattered cloves of garlic, a dead bird tied to a little wheel, brown bottles with rolled newspaper stoppers and a cut-metal pipe with punched eyes, pointed ears and thin wire arms. Bunches of herbs hung from nails hammered haphazardly about the room. A calendar read
AUTOBODY PRINCE LEOPOLD
. He called her ‘Isabel’ without asking for her name, and told her everything she had seen.

To her mother, he said, ‘Her body isn’t closed.’ Her mother nodded. The man recited an invocation. It was a strong prayer and would protect her now. ‘But you will have to watch after her,’ he said, and prescribed a special prayer to Saint George.

On the trip back her mother told her how there were certain people for whom there was less of a barrier between this world and the other one. Who needed prayers to close their bodies and protect them. These people could become healers or poets or could hear the word of God. They could see and smell and feel what others couldn’t. But they were vulnerable to everything: they were haunted by spirits that others couldn’t see, felt others’ sufferings, fell ill more easily and often. Prayers could close a body, although some people didn’t wish for their body to be closed: they risked the hauntings in exchange for their awareness. If a healer closed your body, you
could no longer know which plants cured and which were poison. Anyone’s body could be torn open, by too much sadness or too much suffering. It was why, with the death of someone close, the world seems different, the light changes, we can see and understand what we never saw before. ‘Once,’ said her mother, ‘when my sister died, I became sick, and saw a headless mule outside our house. In my dreams, a woman in white told me that our dogs would get distemper and the next year they did. They said I cried for two weeks, but I don’t remember crying at all.’

There were those, like the healer, for whom no barriers existed, for whom there were no limits of knowledge or suffering. ‘That isn’t you,’ said her mother. ‘In you, the walls are there, they are just thinner. My grandmother was like you. Even when she stopped seeing spirits, still her body wasn’t closed. She could read people. She knew cures and could calm children. Then, when the drought came, she began to see more clearly: she knew how to find water, and whether rain was coming. Some said she was lucky for it. But it wasn’t easy; she felt the sadness of others, too. She was like that her entire life.’

She paused. ‘Except when my grandfather was sick: then she was blind. Everyone knew he was dying, but she didn’t believe it. With him, it was like her vision was blurred.’

Later, she added, as if from nowhere, ‘Being blessed and lucky aren’t the same.’

In Prince Leopold, they stopped at a little store that sold incense and icons. Rows of saint icons lined the shelves. Handwritten labels curled from the bottles. Isabel read them slowly. There was
Find Employment Soap, Soap Bring-Him-to-Me, Spell-Breaker Soap, I-Dominate-My-Woman Shampoo, Shampoo
Beauty, Shampoo Goodbye-Evil-Eye
. At home her mother washed her in a bitter solution that stung her eyes. They set a laminated card of Saint George on a shelf next to a rosary and a photo of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Tears in Blackwater.

Isaias watched Isabel from a distance. ‘Why are you staring?’ she asked. ‘I’m not.’ ‘You are.’ ‘It’s like performing miracles,’ he said. ‘Like magic.’

‘Not magic at all,’ snapped her mother. ‘Just seeing.’

He asked Isabel, ‘Does it scare you?’

‘No,’ she answered, not certain if this was true. She thought, Does it scare you to see farther, to hear better? ‘I’m not seeing anything that isn’t already there,’ she said.

Her grandfather Boniface considered the diagnosis silently. They repeated the prayer for three Fridays.

She didn’t see the little boy again. At night, her dreams were quiet dreams about her family and the white forest, dry and empty recapitulations of the day. She no longer heard snakes moving close to her on the trail. In the market, it was easier to pass the beggars without feeling their sadness. She could still calm children, but it took longer now. Somehow the old drought songs weren’t as lonely anymore, and she knew that if she tried, it would be harder to find Isaias in the cane.

T
he burning season came.

In the fields, the men set fire to the cane. The long blades flared, blue and yellow, the nestled leaves fanning like pages of a burning book until only the sweet core remained.

At night, Isabel could hear the crackling of the fires. Sometimes she went to the edge of the road and watched the men herd the flames over the hills. At sunset, the smoke turned the horizon as red as a rooster’s crest. She joined the other children as they ran down the long road to the burns, where they felt their faces prickle in the heat and squinted at the silhouettes of the cutters moving gracefully against the fires.

The harvest began as soon as the long, sharp leaves crumbled to cinders. The workers came home with their nostrils black, their eyelids dark with ash like kohl. Spiderweb tattoos laced the wounds on their hands and striped the chapped crevices of their lips.

The days were long. She saw little of her brother. She waited for him to resume their walks in the final moments of
light. But each day he said he was too tired, and so she stopped asking. At night, his coughing kept her awake. She found black stains in the handkerchiefs she washed in the stream. In his absence, her world narrowed and quieted.

When the season was over, the men collected their final wages from the foreman. The canteen ran a swift business. Some of her uncles visited a house in the city, and at home their wives cursed them. Once, her father went along, and in the morning, Isabel woke to her mother shouting, her voice hoarse from crying.

It was about this time that Isaias disappeared.

At first they thought that he had gone to a cousin’s in Prince Leopold. Later, they found the fiddle was also missing. Her parents were furious, but Isabel imagined him playing in faraway plazas, before massive crowds. It was two weeks before the telephone in the square began to ring. She heard a girl’s voice answering and then footsteps toward her door.

She cupped the receiver as if she were whispering into his ear. ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘In the capital,’ he answered. ‘Tell everyone I’m fine, I joined a band that plays in the market.’ She whispered, ‘They’re going to
kill
you. Father curses you and Mother cries all the time. You should’ve called.’ ‘I couldn’t, I didn’t have the money to call, but now I do.’

She wanted to ask, Why didn’t you tell me? ‘What’s it like there?’ she whispered.

‘There aren’t words for it, Isa, it’s so beautiful, I will tell you everything when I come home.’ ‘When’s that?’ ‘Soon, before the cane season starts, I promise. You’ll be happy I went. You’ll understand.’

She could see her mother lingering at the door to their house. Isabel asked, ‘Do you want to talk to anyone else?’ ‘No,’ Isaias said, and she could see him standing at a pay phone by the sea. On the shore, a white bird cocked its head inquisitively, a group of men struggled with the thin filaments of a net. The wind was wet and smelled of salt. ‘Just tell them I’ll be home soon. I’ll explain everything then.’

On the wall of the schoolhouse were multiplication tables, an alphabet and a map of the state. The state capital was only two hand widths away from
S. MICHAEL
and the dashes that showed the river that sometimes ran. Both had been inked in; there was nothing else but blank space. The capital had a star and printed letters that stretched into the sea. Now Isabel daydreamed of going there, imagining a place filled with fiddlers, markets, automobiles. In the evenings, she took the goats to graze and visited the places Isaias used to take her. She made a collection of pods and oddly shaped stones.

Sometimes, when her parents were fighting, she said that the land near the house was too dry for grazing, and she walked the goats a day into the scrub.

It was easier, alone in the white forest. There was no shouting and she could imagine her brother was with her. She brought manioc flour, found cactus fruit to eat, foraged bromeliads for the water in their hearts. The nights were cold; she slept on beds of dried leaves. She could hear goatsuckers screeching and the pods of the bean trees exploding as they cooled and coiled. Twice she saw a will-o’-the-wisp catch fire near the watering holes, but she had seen them many times with Isaias and so she wasn’t afraid. In abandoned plots she found dried pieces of corn and beans, which she collected to bring home to plant. She slept curled up with the animals and awoke with their dry dust on her lips and in her ears.

Once, one of the goats stirred up a fer-de-lance. She stood still and watched it hiss, and then she killed it by striking a rock against its head. The goat smelled the snake on her hands and bolted. She found him tangled in the thorn, braying, his eyes wide and ears tucked back. She unwrapped him from the thorn, and again he tried to run. This time she grabbed his ears, twisted his neck until he fell to his pasterns and wrestled him to the ground. She could feel his heart pound beneath her knee. His eyes were wide, flecked with mucus and dust, his neck lined with little bulbs of swollen ticks. She stared at him, feeling his warm breath on her face. She waited until his heart slowed and she let him stand.

Another day, she heard her name whispered. She gathered the goats and walked four hours home. When she arrived, Isaias was coming up the road from the dirt highway. It was two months since he had left. She walked the last length of the road with him, as if she had been with him all along. At their home, she entered at his side to see her mother turning, wiping her hands in her skirt, her father rising from his hammock.

Isaias leaned the fiddle case against the wall and without saying anything put a short stack of bills on the table. Her father counted them. ‘This isn’t much,’ he said, but he put them in his pocket. ‘Planting starts soon.’ He turned to let Isaias pass.

That night, when Isabel asked him about the capital, Isaias said he had joined a band performing for tourists at a seaside hotel. He said a man told him he had a true talent. Isaias’s eyes twinkled.
You will go far
were the words the man had used, and the next day, Isabel repeated them to the other children.

Over time, he told her about nights in plazas lit by long strings of bare bulbs, dances that went on until dawn. He
described tips falling so fast that they rang in the plastic bowl like a shaking tambourine. He had a girlfriend there, a beautiful girl with long black hair, and Isabel imagined her to be like the Princess of China.