Collected Stories, page 13
A horn blatted behind them, and the driver pulled half off the road. A car went by them fast, pouring back a choking, impenetrable fog of dust. The driver stopped philosophically to let it blow away before he started again. “Loco,” he said. “That one has no respect either for his passengers or his engine.”
The American did not answer. He was leaning back in the seat watching the blasted country outside. Occasionally they crept past adobe huts half buried in the ash, their corrals drifted deep, their roofs weighted down, the fields which had once grown corn and beans stretching away on both sides without a track to break their even, slaty gray. He thought of the little animals that had lived in these woods, and whether they had got out before the ash became deep, or had quietly smothered in their holes. A wildcat might make headway through it, perhaps, but not the smaller things, the mice and rabbits and lizards, and it was the small things that one thought of.
“What has become of the people from here?” he asked.
The driver half turned. Some, he said, had gone, many to the United States, being taken away in buses and trains to work as braceros in the fields of Arizona and California.
“Where they may be cheated and abused,” the American said. “What of those who stay?”
“I will show you one,” the driver said. A little further on he pointed to a gray hut under the ash-laden shelter of the pines, a few yards off the road. Peering, the American saw a woman standing in the door, her rebozo wrapped across her face, and back of her the cavelike interior and the gleam of a charcoal fire.
“Some, like that one, will not leave,” the driver said. “The governor’s men have been here and urged them, but they are foolish. It is where they were born; they do not want to leave.”
“But what do they live on? They can’t grow anything here.”
“There are those who cut wood,” the driver said. “Though the trees are dying, they are a thing that can be saved. Others, in San Juan, rent horses and burros for the trip to the boca. That one, she has nothing. She will die.”
The road turned, and the American lost sight of the hut and the still woman in the doorway. Somehow, though the windows were tight shut and the motor and the punished springs filled the car with sound, he had an impression of great silence.
They curved left along a ridge and dropped into a valley, and the volcano was directly ahead of them, not more than two miles away. From its vent monstrous puffs of black smoke mushroomed upward, were whipped ragged by the wind, belched up again. The side of the cone, looking as straight at that distance as if drawn with a ruler, ran down into a curving lava stream that stopped in a broken wall two hundred yards short of the road. The west side of the cone was lost in smoke.
The driver stopped and pointed. Under the lava, he said, was the village of Paricutín. It was not possible to walk across the lava yet, because it had not cooled completely and there were poisonous fumes, but this was a good place to watch from, with the wind the way it was.
“In San Juan it will be dirty,” he said. “One will not be able to see much for the smoke.”
“The horses leave from San Juan?”
“At about this time every afternoon.”
“And there are people in San Juan still?”
“Sí.”
“Vamanos,” the American said. “If we wish we can come back here later.”
He sat forward in the seat, watching the volcano throw up its gobbets of smoke. Through and behind the smoke, like distant flying specks, he could see the rocks and boulders that were thrown up and fell swiftly again.
“This trip by horse,” he said. “What is it like?”
“It is something to be remembered,” the driver said. “One goes up in daylight, but on the return it is very dark, so dark that one cannot see the horse’s ears. And behind, as one comes down this black trail that one knew a year ago as a cornfield, are always this noise and this glare on the sky as if hell were open.” He took his hand off the wheel and raised it over his head. “There is always this feeling of something behind,” he said. “It is like fleeing the end of the world.”
“You could wait for me if I went up?”
“Why not?” the driver said. “It is an experience.”
They passed a corral, a hut, a clutter of sheds, another corral, its gates hanging open under a gray drift. Then the houses closed in suddenly and they were in a street. In the perpetual twilight of this town of San Juan men and women, wrapped to the eyes in rebozos and serapes, their bare feet gray and silent in the ashes, walked along under the overhang of thatch, and children leaned against the walls, only their eyes showing under the sombrero rims, and watched the car pass.
In the plaza three buses and a half-dozen cars were parked. Only when the motor was cut did the American realize that the silence he had been constantly aware of outside had given place to a thin, gritty patter on the roof. The driver gestured upward. “Here it rains cinders,” he said. “It is necessary to keep the head well covered, and something over the mouth and nose.” He tied a bandanna across his face and climbed out. “I shall see about these horses,” he said.
The American waited. On the far side of the plaza a group of Americans, men and women, were already mounting. In odd mismatched clothes, suit trousers and leather jackets and sombreros and bandannas, the women in riding breeches or Levi’s, all of them with their faces muffled, they looked like members of a comic-opera outlaw gang. The driver was having a conference with two Mexicans who were adjusting stirrups for the women. After five minutes he came back.
“It is a pity,” he said. “This crowd which is to go immediately has taken all the horses available.”
“It is not important,” the American said. “Actually I am not so interested in the insides of this volcano.”
He tied his handkerchief across his nose, pulled down his hat, and stepped out into the feathery ash. The air was thick with smoke, and cinders pattered on his hat and shoulders. He slitted his eyes against the gritty rain.
“If you would like me to show you around—” the driver said.
“It is not necessary,” the American said. He went poking off up a street that opened on the plaza, his nose filled with the odor that he realized he had been smelling for some time, a sour, acrid, vinegarish odor like fresh-sawn oak. He saw many people, shrouded and silent, but they did not break the stillness in which the falling cinders whispered dryly. Even the handkerchief-muffled calls of the Americans riding off toward the crater, and the tooting of the bus horns in farewell, came through the air as through a thick pillow, and he did not hear his own footsteps in the dust.
Once, as he walked past a doorway into which a trail led through the deep ash, the accumulated ashes on a roof let go and avalanched behind him. He turned to see the last runnels trickling from the thatch, and two little Indian girls, each with a small baby hung over her back in the looped rebozo, came out of the doorway and waded experimentally in the knee-deep powder.
The end of the street trailed off into ashen fields, and for a moment the American stood in the unnatural gray dusk looking across toward the cone of Paricutín under its lowering cloud of smoke. At intervals of about a minute there was a grumble like far-off blasting, but because of the smoke which blew directly over the town he could not see the rocks flying up. The cinders were an insistent, sibilant rain on his head and shoulders, and his mouth was bitter with the vinegarish taste.
It was not a place he liked. The village of Paricutín, on the other side, had been buried completely under the lava. That was death both definite and sudden. But this slow death that fell like light rain, this gradual smothering that drooped the pines and covered the holes of the little animals and mounded the roofs and choked the streets, this dying village through which ghosts went in silence, was something else. It was a thing Mexicans had always known, in one form or another, else there would not be in so many of their paintings the figure of the robed skeleton, the walking Death. They were patient under it, they accepted it—but the American did not like to remember how alive the eyes of the Indian girls had been as they waded through the ashes with their little sisters on their backs.
On the way back to the plaza he met a pig that wandered in from a side street. The pig looked at him, wrinkling its snout. Its bristly back was floured with gray ash, and its eyes were red. It grunted softly, querulously, and put its snout to the ground, rooted without hope in the foot-deep powder, walked a few steps with its nose plowing the dry and unprofitable dust.
The American left it and went back to the car. In a moment the driver came from the bus where he had been gossiping. “Let’s go,” the American said. “Perhaps where we stopped first it is clearer.”
They went back through the choked streets, leaving the silent Indians who moved softly as shadows through the dead town and the hog which rooted without hope in the ashes, and pulled off the road in deep ash at the end of the valley. For a few minutes they sat, talking desultorily in polite Spanish and watching the irregular spouting of the cone, opening the windows so that they could hear the ominous low grumble and the faint clatter of falling rocks. The cone was blue-black now, and the lava bed across the foreground was a somber, smoking cliff. It was a landscape without shadows, submerged in gray twilight.
“I have conceived a great hatred for this thing,” the American said finally. “It is a thing I have always known and always hated. It is something which kills.”
“Truly,” the driver said. “I have felt it, as those who are in the war must feel the war.”
“Yes,” the American said.
“You have friends in the war?”
“Sons,” the American said. “One is now a prisoner in Germany.”
“Ai,” the driver said, with sympathy. He hesitated a minute, as if hunting for the correct thing to say to one whose sons were captives of the enemy. “You hear from him?” he said. “How does he endure his captivity?”
“How does one endure anything?” the American said. “I suppose he hates it and endures it, that is all.” He looked out the window, raised his shoulders. “I have heard once only,” he said for politeness’ sake.
They looked across the gray waste that had once been a milpa, toward the smoking front of the lava bed. The light had changed. It was darker, more threatening, like the last ominous moments before a thunderstorm. The west was almost as black as night, but across the field spread a steely dusk that rendered every object sharp-edged and distinct. The American raised his head and looked at the ceiling of the car. The stealthy, light fingering had begun there.
“You see?” he said. “That is what I mean. It is something which follows. It is like a doom.”
The driver made a deprecating gesture. “The wind has shifted,” he said.
“It always shifts,” the American said.
He stepped out of the car and stood shin-deep in the gray death, listening to the stealthy whisper and the silence that lay over and under and around. The crater rumbled far off, and boulders fell back with a distant clatter, but the silence still hung like something tangible over the valley.
As he watched, the heavy dusk lightened, and he looked up. By a freak of wind the smoke had been blown high, and though no sign of the setting sun came through the obscured west, a pale, pinkish wash of light came through under the cloud and let an unearthly illumination over the field of ash and the smoking cliff of lava.
Into that lurid dusk an Indian in white pajamas, with a bundle of wood on his back and an axe across his shoulder, came out of the pines at the upper edge of the lava and walked along the clifflike front. Little puffs of dust rose from under his feet. After him, fifteen yards behind, came another, and after him another.
The three strung out across the field, walking as silently in the rosy, metallic light as dream figures. The ones behind did not try to close the gap and walk companionably with the one ahead; the one ahead did not wait for them. They walked in single file, fifteen yards apart, each with his burden of wood on his back, and the little puffs of dust rose under their feet and the punched-hole tracks lengthened behind them across the field.
The American watched them, feeling the silence that weighed on these little figures more heavily than the loads upon their backs, and as he watched he heard the man ahead whistle a brief snatch of tune, drop it, start something else. He went whistling, a ghost in a dead land, toward some hut half buried in ash where a charcoal fire would be burning, and his wife would have ready for him tortillas and beans, with cinders in them, perhaps, like everything else, but still tortillas and beans that would fill a man’s belly against the work that must be done tomorrow.
The American watched the three until they were out of sight around the shoulder of the hill. When he climbed into the car and motioned for the driver to start back he was not thinking of the steady smothering fall of the cinders or the death that lay over the streets and cornfields of San Juan. He was thinking of the eyes of the little Indian girls, which were so very alive above the muffling rebozos.
“It is a strange thing,” he said. “This whistling.”
The driver, reaching to turn the ignition key, shrugged, and smiled. “Why not?” he said. “The mouth is not made merely to spit with or curse with. At times it may be used for whistling, or even for kissing, verdad?”
Two Rivers
His father’s voice awakened him. Stretching his back, arching against the mattress, he looked over at his parents’ end of the sleeping porch. His mother was up too, though he could tell from the flatness of the light outside that it was still early. He lay on his back quietly, letting complete wakefulness come on, watching a spider that dangled on a golden, shining thread from the rolled canvas of the blinds. The spider came down in tiny jerks, his legs wriggling, then went up again in the beam of sun. From the other room the father’s voice rose loud and cheerful:
Oh I’d give every man in the army a quarter
If they’d all take a shot at my mother-in-law.
The boy slid his legs out of bed and yanked the nightshirt over his head. He didn’t want his father’s face poking around the door, saying, “I plough deep while sluggards sleep!” He didn’t want to be joked with. Yesterday was too sore a spot in his mind. He had been avoiding his father ever since the morning before, and he was not yet ready to accept any joking or attempts to make up. Nobody had a right hitting a person for nothing, and you bet they weren’t going to be friends. Let him whistle and sing out there, pretending nothing was the matter. The whole business yesterday was the matter, the Ford that wouldn’t start was the matter, the whole lost Fourth of July was the matter, the missed parade, the missed fireworks, the missed ball game in Chinook were the matter. The cuff on the ear his father had given him when he got so mad at the Ford he had to have something to hit was the matter.
In the other room, as he pulled on his overalls, the bacon was snapping in the pan, and he smelled its good morning smell. His father whistled, sang:
In the town of O’Geary lived Paddy O’Flannagan,
Battered away till he hadn’t a pound,
His father he died and he made him a man again,
Left him a farm of tin acres o’ ground. …
The boy pulled the overall straps over his shoulders and went into the main room. His father stopped singing and looked at him. “Hello, Cheerful,” he said. “You look like you’d bit into a wormy apple.”
The boy mumbled something and went outside to wash at the bench. It wasn’t any fun waking up today. You kept thinking about yesterday, and how much fun it had been waking up then, when you were going to do something special and exciting, drive fifty miles to Chinook and spend the whole day just having fun. Now there wasn’t anything but the same old thing to do you did every day. Run the trap line, put out some poison for the gophers, read the Sears, Roebuck catalogue.
At breakfast he was glum, and his father joked with him. Even his mother smiled, as if she had forgotten already how much wrong had been done the day before. “You look as if you’d been sent for and couldn’t come,” she said. “Cheer up.”
“I don’t want to cheer up.”
They just smiled at each other, and he hated them both.
After breakfast his father said, “You help your ma with the dishes, now. See how useful you can make yourself around here.”
Unwillingly, wanting to get out of the house and away from them, he got the towel and swabbed off the plates. He was rubbing a glass when he heard the Ford sputter and race and roar and then calm down into a steady mutter. His mouth opened, and he looked at his mother. Her eyes were crinkled up with smiling.
“It goes!” he said.
“Sure it goes.” She pulled both his ears, rocking his head. “Know what we’re going to do?”
“What?”
“We’re going to the mountains anyway. Not to Chinook—there wouldn’t be anything doing today. But to the mountains, for a picnic. Pa got the car going yesterday afternoon, when you were down in the field, so we decided to go today. If you want to, of course.”
“Yay!” he said. “Shall I dress up?”
“Put on your shoes, you’d better. We might climb a mountain.”
The boy was out into the porch in three steps. With one shoe on and the other in his hand he hopped to the door. “When?” he said.
“Soon as you can get ready.”
He was trying to run and tie his shoelaces at the same time as he went out of the house. There in the Ford, smoking his pipe, with one leg over the door and his weight on the back of his neck, his father sat. “What detained you?” he said. “I’ve been waiting a half-hour. You must not want to go very bad.”
