During the day, while Shelly, Maely and I copied Don Carmen’s handwriting off the blackboard and Balbina washed laundry and made tortillas, Froylan worked in the cane fields. The price of sugar had shot up and all the young men and some of the old ones had switched from farming corn to cane. They worked land that they carved out of the jungle and leased from the government for a few pennies a hectare. The cut cane went to the sugar refinery in nearby Orange Walk. There are two ways to harvest sugarcane: You can cut it green, or you can burn the field first to scare off the snakes and get rid of the dead leaf. If you burn cane it goes sour quickly, so it needs to be rushed to the refinery before it spoils.
There were few vehicles in San Antonio: a military jeep, Don Roque’s tractor, my uncle’s red Volkswagen. The men who owned cane trucks took lavish care of them. Each truck had a name. My mother painted a singing bird on the door of one called the Troubadour. They came through town loaded with cane and chased by a gang of children. Sugarcane looks like bamboo. The inside is white and fibrous and sweet. We once passed a loaded cane truck parked in frontof the school andShelly grabbed one of the ropes, clambered up to the top and began throwing canes down to the rest of us.
When Froylan came home from cutting burned cane, the sweet smell of it hung on his blackened clothes. He bathed in a washtub in water Balbina heated pan by pan on her outside fire. Then each of the children bathed in fresh water, then Balbina. Everyone changed into clean clothes, Balbina and the two girls into dresses, with fresh ribbons in their neatly braided hair, and Froylan and Maely into white shirts and dark pants. Dressed to the nines, everyone in San Antonio took a stroll. Even the baby girls had gold earrings and ribbons in their hair. We walked down the street toward the school, stopping to nod or talk to friends. Tight clusters of girls in bright dresses giggled past us. In the distance we might hear ‘Tears on my pill-ow, pain in my heart, caused by you,’ sung by the groups of young men who lounged in front of the general store after it had closed, smoking cigarettes while the sunset turned to dusk.
At the small store by the river Senora Bobadia sold cubes of frozen sugar water, colored red, orange, blue and green, called ‘Ideals.’
These came in a clear plastic wrapper which you chewed open to get at the sweetened ice. All the colors tasted exactly the same, a sweet, faintly chemical taste. On the day we got our ears pierced we were allowed two Ideals each. We took them to old Dona Donatila’s house and held them against our ears until the skin went numb. Dona Donatila was a tiny, toothless woman with a tenacious grip. She poked a threaded needle through our ears and tied the thread into loops. Shelly didn’t cry at all. On the way home we ate our softened Ideals, our hands reaching up of their own accord to touch our cold ears. We left the loops of white thread in our ears for two weeks, turning them twice a day. My first real earrings were a tiny pair of straw sandals, painted pink, that my mother bought in Orange Walk.
After my uncle and his family returned to Minnesota for the spring semester, my mother worked in the cane fields. She was the only woman who did, except for the occasional wife or daughter who helped out for an afternoon. My mother got up before dawn and waited by the general store with the other workers for a cane truck to come by. Whoever had rented a truck and needed to get cane in that day would pay to have it cut and loaded. My mother started out cutting cane but eventually switched to loading it. She stood on a board over the back wheel of the truck and passed great bundles over her head. Sometimes, she told me, there’d be ants swarming on the cane. She made maybe six dollars a week. Now, when I ask her why she did it, she shrugs. ‘I wanted to make a little money. I wanted to see what it was like.’
No one had much money in San Antonio. Two families were rich enough to own generators. There was one television, run off one of the generators. It belonged to the Castillo family, and they watched it religiously in spite of the fact that the picture on the screen was barely visible. Froylan and Balbina refused to take anything my mother gave them toward food. One night as they sat around the table in the lamplight, my mother slipped a twenty-dollar bill into Balbina’s hand. They sat and talked, and later the three of them walked down the hill to visit friends. While they walked, Balbina, unaware of what it was, absentmindedly shredded the paper; the scraps dropped from her hand and fell to the ground, leaving a trail like a line of leaf-cutter ants. Twenty dollars was a shocking amount of money and Balbina was scandalized. Later it became a great joke and the mention of it would make all three laugh uproariously.
We went to Orange Walk with Balbina a few weeks before Easter. Balbina was there to buy Easter dresses for Mirna and Teti, and we followed her into shops packed tight with children’s white dresses, bolts of red velvet, display cases overflowing with lace and ribbons. Balbina wore her leather shoes with the raised heels. She bartered fervently in her soft Spanish. Shelly and I had never had new clothes for Easter before, but our mother let us pick out matching dresses with short, tightly pleated skirts and lace on the bodices. In another store we got new earrings, gold hoops with three gold beads. Later, the gold paint wore away and the beads turned the milky white of sugar candy that’s been sucked on.
Outside, the sun was very bright. Along the sides of the wide, dirty street people hawked tamales and shaved ice from colored carts. My mother bought an orange, cut in half and sprinkled with salt. On one corner an old woman without teeth sat by a pile of oranges, which she peeled on a dented, treadle-worked machine. A stake skewered the orange and a blade peeled it concentrically; the bright rind snaked to the ground.
That evening we went to a circus. Around us crowded women with children on their hips and men who smelled of cane smoke. Two clowns came out from behind the striped curtain with an antique camera, and a trained donkey answered questions from the audience by pawing the ground with his hoof. A woman in a short skirt twirled eleven hula hoops at once, on different parts of her body.
The finale began with a small box in the center of the makeshift stage. The lights dimmed and the audience grew quiet. Then a spotlight shone on a human hand, rising out of the box. It was a small hand, pinkish brown. Another hand followed, then a head, and then a whole girl appeared, swelling out of the glass box like an expanding sponge. She wore a blue leotard and her hair was pulled back in a tight braid tied with a blue ribbon. She stood without smiling, then made a low bow that became a somersault and then a series of rippling rolls. Next she stretched on her stomach on the spangled cloth and slowly lifted her feet and legs, until she was curled in a circle, holding her ankles with her hands and staring out between her legs into the crowd. Shifting the weight to her feet, she rolled herself upright, still with that blank look, and turned her back to us. There was a rose I hadn’t noticed before at her heels.
She tilted her head back and began to bend, until she was staring at us upside down. I remember the way her black braid slithered down her blue leotard and down her legs and finally hit the floor. And I remember seeing her teeth appear, bright and unexpected, to bite the stem of the rose.
On Palm Sunday Shelly and I wore our new dresses to watch the procession of the Virgin around the village. The women wore flowered hats; the men’s white shirts shone in the sun. Shelly and I followed the crowd to church. The church was at the other end of the village, a long, whitewashed building with a wooden roof. Palm fronds and flowers lined the path to the door. Inside, the church was hushed and cool, lit by the high windows and the candles on the floor where Jesus Christ lay, nailed to the cross. His wooden body was gruesomely pale, except where blood darkened his wounds. Shelly and I waited in the doorway, holding hands. We watched Balbina, and then we approached together and placed our sweaty coins in the collection tray, and bent to kiss his cold feet.
My mother had been working in the cane fields for about a month when she turned yellow. This was just after the dead man turned up in the Rio Hondo; people teased her, saying he must have been a relative. Her arms were yellow, her legs, her belly, her face, even the whites of her eyes. She crawled into her hammock and stayed there. Shelly and I brought her bottles of fresh water. Balbina placed steaming bowls of chicken broth into our hands and we carried them carefully down the hill to our house. ‘It’s hepatitis,’ our mother told us. But though neither Shelly nor I said a word, we were thinking the same thing: She had turned the color of the only dead person we’d ever seen.
Eventually, my grandmother in New York found out that my mother was sick. There were no telephones in San Antonio and no real way to reach someone in an emergency. My grandmother got on a plane, flew to Miami, changed to another plane. She flew into Belize back when the landing strip for an international flight was a
