BOOK ONE
(Lucy)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It took four-wheel drive to scale the rutted roads leading to the ridge called Brisas de Olancho. We pitched and bounced in silence on that unfinished road ascending the hill to the village of her home. James parked as close as he could to the village edge. We would have to walk the final distance. He paused before leaving the truck and looked at me. I said, “We have to give her the chance to keep him.” He didn’t answer.
We met at the front of the truck and he led the way up the dusty road, beyond the pulperia with its carnival of accoutrements—soap, toothpaste, Chiclets and lottery tickets. We passed a withered old woman sitting listlessly behind piles of pineapples and limes. We passed roosters and chickens and pigs and goats, dogs nursing puppies and flies on the dogs. Most of the homes had been built from hand-cut branches with grass and palm leaves for roofing. The “doors” were little more than cloth pulled back to reveal residents inside sitting on three-legged stools stoking fires built on dirt floors in the center of the home. The typical Maya three-stone arrangement served as their stovetop on which they boiled their beans and corn despite the oppressive heat.
Finally we came upon Yamileta’s adobe hovel set off the road amid tall grass and wild palms. Rocks held its rusted tin roof in place and the only window showed a piece of cloth tied back with a string. A metal drum, fully exposed, held the household water supply. They kept it under a make-shift shelter near a basket on the ground. I recognized it as the basket I had helped ease off her head when she sold me the yuca at the airstrip. James pulled open the bamboo fence and let himself in. “Yamileta?” He looked at me and I followed. “Yami?” He called her in a familiar way and I wondered if this is what he had called her in the moment of passion that brought them this child.
Yamileta appeared at the door. She wore polyester that made her bosom bulge and her eyes seemed to drop to her cheeks, as if the sadness she carried was too great for a single pair of eyes. “Did you bring the pensión?” she said.
“That’s not why I came.” James paused. There was no love there, neither from her nor from him. He held my hand. Yami looked at me. “Páse.” She nodded stiffly.
A hot plate on a wood table in the corner, a lawn chair, and a small refrigerator accounted for the sum total of her home furnishing—luxuries for a village such as this, the home that might have been Paco’s. We stood in the dark, the air smelling of sweat and kerosene.
James said, “Yami, where’s your father? I haven’t seen him since Berto died.” He paused. “Your father is Berto’s twin brother, right?” She nodded. Her eyes were as stone. “Yamileta, it wasn’t Berto who died, was it? It was your father.” She didn’t speak.
Berto appeared from behind a doorway. James turned away. “Oh God, Berto.” He pulled off his baseball cap.
“I’m sorry, Señor Fee. Miss Lucy.” He nodded to me.
“Do not speak, Tío.” Yamileta threw him a glaring look.
James shifted, rubbing the back of his neck. He sighed. “Why, Yami?”
Yami. Is that the name she hears in her dreams? Does she dream of the one who took from her the only thing in this life rightfully belonging to a woman, her child? I saw two small girls outside hiding behind barrels. But her first-born son she did not have.
Berto waved a stiff bony hand, shaking his head. “He was drunk. He drank all the time. He fell down.”
James looked at Yami, who responded blankly, “That is when I ended him and decided to tie him up. He felt no pain.”
James stood paralyzed. I stepped forward from behind him. “Why did you dress him to look like Berto?”
“My father only drank. He never worked. He used our wage on drink. We need Tío’s pensión. We are moving to the north. Tío can work. If he is thought to be dead, we receive his pensión. Otherwise, we have no money to move to the north.” She looked at me coldly. “Now you know everything about your lover.”
“What about the timing? You put him there the day of the press conference,” I said.
“It was my surprise for the party.”
“How did you get him through the tunnels? Why go to the trouble of hanging him? Why not simply dump him?”
“Tío carry him in the wheelbarrow.” I threw James a knowing look, remembering the wheelbarrow we saw the morning as we groped out of the tomb. “I don’t throw him in the tomb with the sacred bones because Tío won’t do it. He said we hang him. He said he won’t damage the work of El Doctor. Only for that, my dead father did not lay with the bones of Copán’s great king.”
She looked at James. “What do you want me to say, Mister Fee? My son calls you that, verdad? Mister Fee? Why did I paint blue my father and put him in your tomb?”
James looked at her sadly. “Yes.”
“Blue is the color of the priests in Maya stories, yes? I hear many things while cleaning the rooms of the great archaeologists. The Maya painted human sacrifices blue.”
“Yes, some.”
“My dead father is my prayer. I am asking the gods to pity me.” James didn’t speak. “There is a stench before the great Mister Fee, the man who is the father of my only son.”
I looked at James. His eyes were wetting.
“The sacrifice was for me and for you, Mister Fee, for your crimes against me and against your son.”
James choked on his words. “Will you take the boy with you when you go to the north?”
She did not answer.
He heaved a weary sigh. “He could grow to know you, and to love you.” He curled his cap in both hands. “I will bring him to you if that is what you want.”
That broken sad woman in that moment held our world in her hands, dirty hands she had wiped on an apron when she handed me the yuca. I knew in that moment that I loved that boy. I knew James loved him too. We were bargaining his destiny as if his life was for barter like cacao beans or the feathers of the quetzal. James knew then he did not want to lose the son he had not yet claimed.
Yamileta’s hands tied her dead father’s and then painted him blue and carried him, with Berto, in a wheelbarrow through the tunnels. She would not be Nobody. If no one else knew it, she would know. The blue body would ensure that the boy’s father knew it too. Dear woman, take your son. We’ll pray for him and for you too, that the wounds of our loss would heal your wounds from these failings. We will cry for him. Our hearts will be broken because of the love for a son we discovered too late. But we will find comfort knowing a mother has her son, that you are somebody.
“To him I am not his mother.” Wetness covered James’s face, sweat or tears I did not know. His life poured out of him as it did from my own face, too.
“I won’t fail him,” he said.
“You have already failed him,” she said.
I loved James then more than I had ever loved him. I saw the little boy climbing stacking shelves, his little head bobbing to read his father’s name. Then his world collapsed. I saw that he needed me as much as this boy needed his father. I had looked at my veins with a knife in my hand. I had made calculations. I understood what would drive a woman to paint a dead man blue.