Читать книгу Mother Mother - Jessica O'Dwyer - Страница 11

FOUR

SAN ROLANDO, GUATEMALA

SEVENTEEN YEARS EARLIER—JANUARY 1985

Three trucks carried the soldiers up the dark mountain road to San Rolando, a village in Guatemala’s western highlands. They rolled past corn and bean fields, past grazing pastures for goats and sheep, past rows of adobe houses with thatched roofs. The trucks lurched to a stop in the central plaza next to a stand of pine trees beside the whitewashed church. The tailgates clanked open and soldiers jumped out, fingers on the triggers of Galil rifles. The soldiers wore the maroon beret of Guatemala’s elite commandos, the Kaibiles. Their polished black boots were silent on the packed dirt.

They were there for revenge: Two weeks earlier, a band of guerrillas had come down from their camp and ambushed an army convoy. They’d killed twenty-one soldiers and stolen nineteen rifles. Somebody needed to pay.

The commanding officer stood in front of the troops. He was light-skinned and tall, Ladino to the village’s indigenous Maya. “I want every one of these traitors out here. Men in the plaza. Women and children in the church.”

Dogs barked as the units fanned out. Cold mist hung in the air.

A sergeant kicked in the door of the first adobe house. It fell to the floor with a thud. In two steps, the sergeant was beside a small cot covered with a gray woolen blanket. A farmer jumped up, his eyes darting to the doorway, where his machete hung on a nail.

“Where are the rifles?” the sergeant yelled.

The farmer’s voice was quiet, submissive. “Señor,” he said, “we have no rifles.”

The sergeant slapped the farmer’s face. “Where are the rifles?”

The farmer’s eyes shifted to the lumpy form of the gray woolen blanket. “Señor, we have no rifles,” he said again.

“Indio shit.” The sergeant jammed his rifle into the farmer’s stomach, bending him in two. Reaching down, the sergeant pulled off the blanket to reveal the farmer’s wife hunched over a baby, with a small boy and a girl curled up on either side. The sergeant yanked the farmer’s wife’s thick black braid and pulled her to her feet; her white cotton sleeping dress bulged over her pregnant belly. She swaddled the baby into a sling, tying on the bundle. The boy and the girl pulled on clothes.

The sergeant unhooked the farmer’s machete from the nail on the wall. “What’s your name?”

“Juan Jorge Piox Oxlaj.”

“Bring your identity card. We have a list.”

The sergeant herded the family outside. Neighbors from all over the village began walking together down the gulley toward the plaza, their movements stiff and deliberate. Their bare feet scuffed the still-damp dirt. Dawn broke with a pink sky. Squawking chickens, bleating sheep, and bellowing cows added to the cacophony of howling dogs. The sergeant pushed the wife and her children toward the church’s side door and continued with the farmer to the plaza where the men were being gathered.

The commander stood on the church steps with his feet splayed. Mirrored sunglasses shielded his eyes. He lifted a megaphone. “Hear this, you communist sons of whores. Traitors to Guatemala. We have a plan to help you remember the location of the stolen rifles. First, you dig a ditch. Then you will fill it.”

Soldiers who spoke the local language, Ixil, translated the commander’s words for any who didn’t understand. Soldiers were of the villages, too. A boy might be on a bus to town to sell his family’s corn, get stopped at a checkpoint, and find himself enlisted. But once they wore the uniform, the maroon beret, these boys forgot their dark skin, their straight hair, their village roots.

The sergeant shoved the farmer Juan Jorge toward a line of a dozen men tied together by a rope looped around their necks and fastened him to the end of the line. Without a word, the men crammed their shovels into the packed dirt and turned over soil. A large mound grew behind them as sweat glistened on their faces.

Inside the church, the women and children huddled in the wooden pews, holding hands and praying. A soldier fingered a silver candlestick from the altar and slipped it into a sack. Two other soldiers picked up the carved santos of San José and the town’s patron, San Rolando, and punted them like soccer balls. A third man stood at the altar smoking a cigarette, and, when ashes fell onto the sacred white cloth, brushed off the small sparks with his pinkie.

Babies first, that was the order. Two soldiers patrolled through the aisles. The wife of Juan Jorge pushed her baby deeper into the sling. A soldier pointed straight at her. The boy and the girl grabbed her arms. “Mamá,” they whimpered.

“Shut up!” the soldier commanded. He aimed his rifle at the girl’s face and jerked his head toward a corner where the young girls and teenagers were corralled. Next, he swung his weapon at the boy and gestured toward a circle of boys in another corner. The separation process continued until the pews were emptied. A soldier led Juan Jorge’s wife and her baby out the church’s side door.

The wife squinted against the morning sun, eyes straining past the soldiers and trucks toward the pine trees. Two dozen men now stood roped together next to their shovels, faces and clothing flecked with dirt. The ditch they dug was finished: fifteen feet long, four feet wide, and eight deep.

The rest of the mothers with babies filed out of the church behind the wife, and one, whose infant had been baptized on Sunday, lifted her blouse to let him nurse.

The commander strode down the church steps, fingers flicking over a pistol holstered on his right hip. A young boy in uniform carried the megaphone. The commander waited while the soldiers gathered the mothers with babies into a group. The newly baptized infant sucked on his mother’s breast.

“Now you will see the fate of people who betray our great country,” the commander said. “We kill their seed.”

He nodded at a soldier who then reached over to the nursing infant and pulled him from his mother’s breast. A strangled gasp rose from the throats of the captive parents. The soldier carried the infant to a pine tree, and with one swift motion, swung him against the rough trunk. The infant’s soft skull cracked open, seeping a mass of clear fluid. The soldier tossed the body into the trench.

The infant’s father surged forward, dragging the other men to the ground. With one shot, the commander dispatched the infant’s father. The wailing mothers torqued their bodies toward the gunshot. The soldier loosened the noose around the dead man’s neck and kicked the corpse until it also fell into the ditch.

The infant’s mother collapsed to her knees, weeping. The commander walked in a circle around her. “You smell too bad for me to take you,” the commander said. “I’ll wait for your daughter to be brought from the church. Fresh and sweet.” As the infant’s mother lifted her hands to cover her ears, the commander aimed his pistol at her sternum and pulled the trigger.

Juan Jorge’s wife’s legs felt weak. Her baby would be murdered and she would die, too. She closed her eyes and murmured the words of the Ave Maria, asking the Blessed Mother to spare her boy and her girl. She begged the Virgin, “Let my children live.” She clutched more tightly to her baby in the sling.

The commander holstered his pistol and adjusted his sunglasses. Licking his bottom lip, he said, “You traitors killed twenty-one of my boys. I want to see you suffer.”

He gave a signal and the sergeant who had taken Juan Jorge’s machete walked in front of the line of mothers and their babies, brandishing the knife. The mothers stared at the ground. The sergeant with the machete stopped in front of the wife.

“Give me the baby,” he said. Tears ran down the wife’s face as she fumbled to untie the knot at her neck that secured the sling. The sergeant waited. One second, two seconds. He wrenched the full sling off her body, throwing it onto the hard-packed dirt.

The farmer’s wife shrieked. In a second, the sergeant raised the machete shoulder-height and with one strike, sliced across her neck. Her body crumpled, twitching on top of sling and baby. The air filled with moans of the mothers, the babies, and the captive men. Using shovels, soldiers pushed the bodies into the ditch.

The commander lifted the megaphone to his mouth. “Any of you bastards remember where those rifles are now? Because it’s not over until you do.”

He lifted his free hand as though tipping a bottle. “We found their stash of guaro liquor. You soldiers got work to do first. Finish the women and let the Indios bury them. The men eliminate each other with machetes. You get to watch.”

Later, when night came, the soldiers set fire to the thatched roofs of the adobe houses. They burned the plots of corn and beans and torched the town hall.

They searched every hiding place in the village and found no stolen rifles.

Two days later, three brave men from the nearby hamlet of San Lorenzo Chal walked over local trails to investigate. In the trench by the church, they discovered a pile of the dead, and as they offered prayers, heard a faint cry. They burrowed through the pile, and at the bottom, found a bloodied sling with a baby wrapped inside, skin puckered from dehydration and left eye swollen and bruised.

But the baby was alive.