Hot Night in the City

and ripen, or to communicate her indignation to the villagers who had begun to gather along the road to watch the fun, for her neighbor was already picking at a moot branch on the far side of the tree. Grunting to her feet and slapping the mud from the back of her skirt, Widow Etcheverrigaray returned to the fray determined to punish this outrage. Crying out every vilification that years of rivalry had stored up in their fertile imaginations, they clawed at apples and ripped them from the branch, all the while decorating one another's reputations with those biologically explicit calumnies for which the Basque language might have been specifically designed, were it not universally known that it was invented in heaven for use by the angels. There was a moment when, as each of them reached for the same apple, their hands touched, and each cried out and recoiled as though defiled by the contact. Still fuming over the way Madame Utuburu had underhandedly released the branch, Widow Etcheverrigaray decided to repay the insult in kind. She set all her weight against the branch, bending it back to her side so that when Madame Utuburu reached out for the fruit, she could let it go, and it would snap back and give—

—the branch broke, and the widow found herself sitting once again in her leek bed, the hoots and jeers of the spectators flushing her cheeks with rage and embarrassment. She sat there snarling descriptions of Madame Utuburu's character, ancestry, practices, and aspirations, while that thoroughly slandered woman, finding her last basket still not filled and the branch bearing the remaining apples broken off and lying out of reach in her neighbor's garden, lifted her palms to heaven and called upon God to witness this plunder! This larceny! This piracy! And she hastily crossed herself and begged Mother Mary to put her hands over the ears of the baby Jesus, that He might not be offended by the obscenities gushing from the foul mouth of this scurrilous, vulgar, low-born Etcheverrigaray!

Which description impelled the widow to make a gesture.

Which gesture obliged Madame Utuburu to throw a lump of mud.

Which assault forced half a dozen villagers to rush up from the road to prevent bodily damage from spoiling the innocent pleasure of their entertainment.

In the final accounting of the Battle of the Apple Tree, it was the Widow Etcheverrigaray who was able— just—to fill her baskets from the last of the apples, while Madame Utuburu had to bargain long and hard before the tight-fisted Licquois baker accepted her scantier baskets with much sighing and many martyred groans and predictions that his children would die in the poorhouse. But many villagers judged Madame Utuburu the victor for, after all, it wasn't she who had twice had her broad bottom dumped into her leeks.

For the next few weeks, every time the women in the marketplace asked about the battle (which they did with wide-eyed innocence and cooing tones of compassion), Madame Utuburu threatened to bring legal action against the vicious vandal who had damaged her tree! And Widow Etcheverrigaray made public her suspicions concerning what her neighbor had offered the baker to make up for her missing apples; although, in the widow's opinion, that commodity had been worth little enough when it was young and fresh and would now be accepted by the baker only if he were attempting to shorten his time in purgatory by mortifying his flesh.

During the next year, they fought out their rivalry on the battlefield of their gardens, each working from dawn to dark to produce vegetables that were the pride of the village and the despair of other gardeners. The work in the open air kept their bodies strong and flexible, and the praise of passersby kept their spirits alive, particularly if this praise could be interpreted as a slighting comparison to the other woman's crop.

Then, one cold, wet, autumn day, Zabala-One-Leg died. Not of anything in particular; he simply ran out of life, as all of us eventually must. Zabala had no family, but he was of the village, so we all went to his burial and stood in the rain while the priest took the opportunity to promise us that death was the inevitable portion of each and every one of us, so we had better start preparing for it, and particularly certain people he could name, but he wouldn't mar this solemn occasion with accusations... however just! Everybody left the cemetery, the women to home and work, the men to the cafe/bar of our mayor to have a little glass in memory of Zabala. ...Perhaps two.

Only Madame Utuburu and Widow Etcheverrigaray remained in the churchyard, standing in the rain on opposite sides of the scar of fresh earth, their eyes lowered to the rosaries they held between work-gnarled fingers. For an hour they stood there. Two hours. Although their shawls became sodden with rain, and they had to clench their teeth to keep them from chattering, neither was willing to be the first to leave, for to do so would be to relinquish the role of chief mourner and admit that the other had the most reason for grief.

Their thick, black skirts became too heavy with damp to stir in the wind that began to drive the rain diagonally across the grave, but still neither would leave the field in the possession of one for whom that handsome rogue of a Zabala had never cared a snap of his fingers. To do so would be an insult to his memory. ...To say nothing of his taste!

In the end, the priest came trotting out from his house beside the church, sleepy-eyed and grumbling about being torn from his meditation by a couple of stubborn old women. He stood at the head of the grave, the wind tugging at his big black umbrella, and angrily ordered them to come away with him. At once! As it is rash to disobey the messenger of God, especially when one is standing so conveniently in a graveyard, they allowed him to shepherd them home, but only after each had made a brief attempt to lag slightly behind. They walked home, one on each side of the priest, each with one shoulder protected by the umbrella while the other shoulder was drenched by rain running from its rim. Without a word, they left the priest at the bottom of their gardens and trudged up their paths, each to her own house.

The next morning dawned with that cold, brittle sunlight that signals the end of autumn, and Madame Utuburu knew it would soon be time to harvest the apples, which had been plentiful this year, but small and not as sweet as usual. (Is not God's even-handed justice everywhere revealed?) As she worked putting up jars of piperade, she glanced from time to time out her kitchen window to see if that greedy Etcheverrigaray was already stripping the tree. But the widow did not leave her house all day, and Madame Utuburu wondered what sort of game the old hag was playing. Oh-h, wait a minute! Was she pretending to be too stricken with grief to attend to garden chores? Was this her sly way of implying that she had the greatest reason to mourn young Zabala, who had never cared a fig for her? What an underhanded trick!

After mass the next morning, the priest asked Madame Utuburu why her neighbor had not attended service, and she replied that she was sure she didn't know. Perhaps she had given up going to mass, realizing that although God's mercy is infinite, it might not be infinite enough to save certain people who are forever parading their pretended grief! The same kind of people who always go about carrying thick books written by spindly legged sons who are so feeble they couldn't throw a pelote against a fronton! No, not if the child Jesus Himself begged him for a game! The priest shook his head and sighed, sorry he had asked.

That afternoon Madame Utuburu looked up from mulching her garden against the coming winter to see the priest plodding dutifully up the widow's path. He was inside no more than two minutes before he came out, a leaden frown on his brow. When Madame Utuburu called over the wall, asking what old Etcheverrigaray was playing at, the priest picked his way across to her, holding his skirts up so as not to muddy them. 'Your neighbor has been summoned to judgment,' he said in that ripe tremolo one associates with calls for funds to reroof the church.

Madame Utuburu could not believe it! That healthy old horse of an Etcheverrigaray? She who was strong enough to rip a branch off another person's apple tree? It couldn't be!

'No doubt her bone marrow caught a fever from standing in the rain at poor Zabala's burial,' the priest said. 'I found her sitting in her kitchen, her feet in a bucket of water that had gone cold.'

The priest went off to make the usual arrangements, and soon four women of the village came down the road wearing hastily-put-on black dresses; their heads bowed, their palms pressed together before them, their tread slow, but each radiating a tremor of restrained excitement at being part of the great events of Life and Death. They turned into the Widow Etcheverrigaray's to wash, dress, and lay out the body, first opening the bedroom window to let her soul fly up to heaven. Then the First Mourner—who merited this privileged title because, as the oldest of the watchers, she was probably 'next in line', though this was never mentioned aloud—went out back to announce the death to the chickens, so they wouldn't stop laying. In other parts of the Basque country, the custom is to go to the Departed One's beehives and whisper that their keeper has died, so that sudden grief will not cause the bees to swarm and abandon their hives. No one in our village keeps bees, so we tell the chickens instead, and it must work, because none of them have every swarmed and abandoned their roosts.

Back in Widow's Etcheverrigaray's kitchen the mourners sat gossiping in felted voices, thrilling one another with pious reminders that any one of them might be called unexpectedly to God, so they had better be ready with clean souls. ...And clean underwear.