“This one is hungry,” she said quietly, motioning toward the baby. “See how distended the belly is? And the arms and legs are pitiful.” She spoke rapidly in Spanish to a young woman who then spoke softly in Aymara to the impassive mother. The woman nodded and began wrapping the infant in a long white rag. Jeanne brought out two boxes of dried milk and explained carefully to the mother how she was to prepare it each day. She looked directly into the woman’s face, but the woman kept her eyes lowered, nodding her head as if she understood. She then wrapped the baby tightly in her shawl and shuffled off, clutching the boxes in her hand.
“She’s nursing the baby, but thinks she may be pregnant again. Her milk is drying up, she says. The baby cries all the time, and her husband is not patient.”
Jeanne looked at Father Jack. He was moving restlessly around the room, picking up things and then putting them down.
“She’ll probably be pregnant again in another month,” Jeanne added.
The pastor avoided her pointed look. “Well, I’m off,” he said. “I’m on my own for the next two weeks as Tom has gone out to the campo. He’ll make the rounds of baptisms, weddings, Masses, and probably some funerals. He left this morning at dawn.”
Kate felt a small drop in her heart, as if someone had deflated a balloon. She tried to convince herself it was the altitude.
C
hapter Four
After their first meeting on the trip from La Paz to Juliaca, Kate hadn’t seen Father Tom for most of December except on the days when he celebrated early Mass in the freezing church. She’d spent those first weeks trying to learn how to teach the children of the Altiplano, frustrated by being removed from them by not one but two languages.
So it was a considerable relief from teaching when Sister Jeanne Marie asked her to go along on a sick call a week after she arrived. Alejandro picked them up in the jeep, and they sped across the plains under billowing clouds, the sunlight sharp and unrelenting in their eyes. The mountains gleamed purple in the distance, receding endlessly from them, luring them on. Kate shut her eyes; later she opened them on golden fields with llama and alpaca grazing in the stubble. Dust swirled around them. From nowhere a cluster of huts appeared and a dog came running out to greet them, barking furiously. Kate stayed outside with the children while Jeanne Marie went into the dark hut with Alejandro to see the sick old man, Hernán. Kate could hear him coughing, and when the two emerged from the hut, Jeanne Marie’s white apron was spotted with blood.
“Tuberculosis,” she said. “There isn’t much I can do except make him comfortable.”
As they drove off, Kate looked back. The family stood still in the dying day, silhouetted against red clouds. All around them stretched vast plains. She watched until their figures merged with the plains and disappeared.
That night after supper, Kate and Jeanne Marie had talked about their day while they cleaned up the kitchen. Jeanne complained wearily, “I get so tired sometimes of rushing off to see someone when it’s too late.” She was bent over the sink with her sleeves rolled back, scrubbing the iron frying pan with desperate vigor. “Three years ago there was an outbreak of diphtheria. Whole families were wiped out. I had plenty of vaccine in the clinic, but we couldn’t persuade the people to get the shots.” Polishing the faucets, she continued. “Many people in the sierra prefer to go to their own curanderos.”
“Yes, but at least what you’re doing is concrete, real. I’m not sure that my classes are doing anything. Heck, half the time I’m not sure that Elva is really translating what I say. She goes on and on, and I just have to hope that she’s not making up her own catechism lesson.” Kate leaned against the counter, admiring the thoroughness of her companion as she scrubbed the sink with soap.
“Listen,” Jeanne Marie insisted, “you teachers are teaching them to read. If the Aymara people become literate, they can solve their own problems.”
“Tell me about the coca leaves, Jeanne. Today I watched a group of men in the market. They sat in a circle and passed around what looked like a lime, squeezing the juice over the leaves.”
Jeanne laughed. “Well, what you saw is the equivalent of the men back home who go down to the corner tavern for a couple of beers after a hard day in the factory. Or at least that’s what men did in Newark where I grew up.”
Kate had known that Jeanne was from somewhere in the East, and now she could place the accent, her clipped speech. “Okay, but why the lime juice?”
“They wad the coca leaves up in a ball after they’ve sprinkled them with the juice, and then they chew it. Slowly the drug gets released from the leaves and suppresses hunger.” She sighed as she took off her apron.
Once a month the whole team met in the priests’ house to discuss their work and evaluate what they were doing. Kate found herself looking forward to her first meeting, getting a glimpse into the priests’ house. She’d wondered at her excitement on the day of the meeting. It had been the week before Christmas, a clear day that ended in numbing cold. She and the other nuns arrived at the rectory at five o’clock as the mountain dusk fell quickly. Señora Montoya and Alejandro were waiting on the porch and greeted them as they came up the steps.
Before they could ring the bell,
