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Tyranny and Colonialism: 1964–72

Who Belongs Here?

Sarah was nine and a half years old, almost nine and three quarters, as she calculated her age for anyone with the patience to listen to her, when she ran down the hall of Quinta Louisa on the Feast of the Epiphany, January 6, wearing the homemade crown with two quetzal plumes attached to its sides. It was constructed from cutout cardboard and gilded with gold paint whose long drips had dried into permanent globs under the feathers, and Sarah believed it endowed her with magical powers.

“Have much care, Sarita,” Don Martín called from the patio door. “Have much care not to break the feathers.”

“I am going to wear the crown to the . . . party at the church . . . for the three kings.” Sarah couldn’t remember how to say Epiphany in Spanish, even though it was almost the same as in English, Epifanía.”

“You may not take the crown away from the forests. The quetzal belongs in the forests.”

Sarah knew that she would lose the battle if she appealed to her mother and father to overrule Don Martín. Even if he hadn’t seen her, permission to wear the quetzal crown to the church would have been a long shot at best.

“Then you must tell me the story again.”

“You know the words exactly. It is not necessary for me to repeat them.”

“I want to hear you say them.”

“Well, come outside to the patio.”

“No. You come in here.”

Martín laid his machete on the edge of the stone patio and sat down beside it and waited. Sarah carefully took off the crown and placed it on the table behind the English Sheridan sofa that had been shipped from England by her great-grandmother—she knew that Don Martín wouldn’t allow her to wear it outside—then opened the screened door. Sarah had grown almost as tall as Don Martín, but his body and arms and legs were strong and firm under his ginger colored skin. His face was smooth and round, but in the sandals he’d made with leather thongs and soled with treads from old automobile tires his feet were scarred from cuts and bruises.

As he told her the story for the hundredth time, Don Martín’s black eyes twinkled and rolled like a little boy relating a secret.

“Long ages ago when the world was young, before Jesus was born of the blessed Virgin, there was a handsome prince in our land. His skin was golden, and his hair and eyes were as black as the night but glistened with light like the stars and the moon. He loved the forests, the animals and the flowers and the butterflies, but he especially loved the birds. He found the feathers from the tail of the great blue and green quetzal on the forest floor, and his sisters wove them into beautiful robes for him. Then the quetzal had no red breast.” Don Martín paused. It had been a long, wearying day. “He began to trap the quetzals . . .”

“No, no, Don Martín. Tell about the little boys. You’re leaving that part of it out.”

“¡Como no! (As you say!) Those were evil days when men killed each other in war. Their priests came and told them that the king must choose a child, a male child, a beloved son, the most beautiful boy of the tribe and kill him. Every year a little boy had to be killed, so that the warriors would have success in war. The prince did not have to worry about the evil priests or about war while he was young. He played in the forest with his friends, the animals and the birds. He gathered flowers, and he brought the beautiful feathers of the birds and butterflies that had died and put them with his flowers in the temple. The priests laughed at the feathers and flowers and dead butterflies that he stuck in cracks of the temple walls, but he was the prince and just a little boy, and they didn’t scold him. No one ever scolded him, and he grew up thinking that he could do whatever he wanted to do, because he was the prince. He became spoiled and vain, but his heart was good, deep inside. He did no work and walked around in his robe of gleaming green feathers like a proud bird.”

“Would they have killed me if I had lived back then, so they would win the war?”

“Of course not. You are a little girl. They never sacrificed little girls, only little boys.”

“I think Pablo is like the little prince, because nobody ever scolds him or makes him do anything he does not want to do.”

“Maybe. Maybe so. Once the little prince captured five quetzals and put them in a cage; but within a week they had died, for as you know the quetzal cannot live in captivity. He took the feathers from the dead birds and asked his sisters to make him a new robe, more beautiful than any of the others. And then his luck began to change, perhaps because the sacred birds had died and lost their plumes, perhaps because he had grown older and could no longer play in the forest and do as he pleased in the temple with the flowers and feathers and butterflies. He swore that he would never cause anything beautiful to die again. Then his father, the old king, died, and the young prince became the king. He was no longer a boy. Now he was a young man. The time for the great feast of war arrived, and the priests came to the young king and told him that he must choose the most handsome male child in the tribe and cut out his heart and offer it to the gods. He did not believe that the gods who had made the flowers and the butterflies and the birds would want a child’s heart cut out of his body. After the quetzals died he had promised not to kill anything beautiful. He refused to choose a little boy to be sacrificed, but the priests told him that he must do what they commanded.”

Martín paused, as he always did at this point in the story and looked down at Sarah’s expectant, impatient face that reflected how she was annoyed by the delay. “Go on. What happened then?”

“You finish the story today. I am tired. You tell the rest of it. You know it as well as I do.”

“I do not want to. It is not the same as hearing you tell it. Even Daddy is not able to tell it like you do. When he speaks in English, it does not seem real. It seems like it really happened when you talk in Spanish.”

“Very well. The day of the festival arrived. The young king was very unhappy. Somehow he knew that one life must be given for another. It is something people have always understood, but this was a long time before Jesus came to tell people about a loving God. He was very confused and sad. He could not decide whether to obey the priests or to keep his oath never to kill anything beautiful. When the hour for the festival arrived, the young king had been persuaded to choose a boy from the tribe. He chose a child—how old are you now?”

“You know very well that I am almost ten years old, and I am in the fourth grade at the American School.”

“The young king chose a ten year old boy, but they did not have schools then, so he was not in the fourth grade, and the priests brought the boy up to the high altar at the temple. A sword was standing beside the altar with its sharp tip pointing up to the sky. The priests planned to take the sword and cut out the heart of the little boy. He cried and screamed when they pulled him toward the altar. It took three strong men to hold him.”

“Just like Pablo.”

“Then, just as they placed him on top of the altar and were reaching to pick up the sword, the young king rushed forward and threw himself onto its point. It pierced his heart, and the red blood ran out all over the golden skin of his chest, but none of the blood touched the green-feathered robe. Not even a year had passed when people began to see the red breasts on the quetzals. No one was allowed to kill a quetzal or a boy again. Now the quetzals are the sacred birds of the forest that guide people into all truth.”

Martín stood and picked up his machete. Sarah hopped up from the edge of the patio like a bird herself and hugged the peasant laborer around his waist and put her cheek against his naked, sweaty, brown belly. “I love your stories. Thank you, Don Martín. I really do love you.”

A couple of months later when Mary Rutledge asked her daughter what she wanted for her birthday, Sarah said she wanted her bedroom floor strewn with orchids.

“Really, Sarah, how foolish! They’d just wilt in a few hours. Think what a waste it would be!” Mary spoke in her Southern-lady tone of voice. “I’ve never heard of anything so silly and impractical. It’s outrageous!”

But Martín had overheard her; and when Sarah came home from school the afternoon of her birthday, tiny mountain orchids were scattered across the floor of her bedroom. “Mother! The orchids! How beautiful! Where did they come from?”

“Martín gathered them in the forest for you. Who else would humor you with such foolishness!”

“Oh, I should have guessed. I should have known Don Martín would pick them for me if I’d asked him to.” Sarah paused, afraid her mother had misunderstood. “I didn’t ask him to, but he must have overheard me talking to you. He understands us when we speak in English, I think, even though he won’t say a word to us except in Spanish.”

“Martín overhears everything we say in this house. It’s impossible to keep anything private.” Mary Rutledge pursed her mouth as she often did when she was annoyed.

Somehow Sarah knew that Don Martín had gathered the orchids for her as a compensation for refusing to let her wear the quetzal crown to the Epiphany party at the church. She put the orchids in a round fishbowl on her dresser, and they didn’t wilt for almost a week, which went to show how much Don Martín knew about beautiful things that lived in the forest and how little her mother knew.

After Sarah’s birthday George Rutledge told his daughter that she could no longer ask Don Martín to ride piggyback around the house and garden. “It’s too hard for him to carry you, now that you’re a big girl, and you’re too old for that sort of thing.”

Sarah believed that Don Martín would still be glad to give her rides on his back. He seemed to enjoy them as much as she did and laughed even more than she did, but she knew her father’s command was unimpeachable and unwavering. It must be obeyed absolutely.

The next day Martín brought Sarah some little brown melons. “Don Jorge said I must not carry you on my back any more, señorita; but I brought you some fruits from the forest.” The wild melons had no names in dictionaries nor even in the market because they were too sparse and perishable to sell, with tough hard dark skins and soft deep pink insides that made her blush to look at them for reasons she couldn’t explain. They were very, very sweet, so that she needed almost as much lime juice as pink flesh to cut the nectarous honey. Although Don Martín would know the Indian names for them, she’d ceased asking what they were called long ago, because she quickly forgot; and the next time he would bring a different variety with yet another name but just as sweet.

Quinta Louisa was a rather ordinary adobe house with a red tiled roof and beautiful polished tile floors. It was furnished with one or two nice chairs and the English Sheridan settee. The appliances had come from the United States, especially the refrigerator and kitchen range. The rest of the furniture had been handmade from beautiful Nicaraguan wood, like the wooden furniture in humbler Nicaraguan homes. There were two extraordinarily primitive bathrooms with beautiful tiled walls and another toilet and shower with rough concrete walls in the servants’ room next to the kitchen.

Martín and Flora lived in a little house in the village with their three sons, Julio, Guillermo, and Pablo; but sometimes Martín or Flora would spend the night in the room next to the kitchen. They never used the bathrooms in the other part of the house, although Mary Rutledge had told Flora that she was welcome to use them when she was working there, but Flora had looked at her with the gaping incredulity that she often expressed at things Sarah’s mother said.

When Sarah refused to eat anything after being sick, Mary Rutledge’s pleas were unheeded and ignored. “Won’t you take a few sips of soup, dearest? Just a few spoonfuls?”

“I’ll try to eat a little bit if Don Martín will come inside and eat with me.”

Mary called Martín in from the garden and related Sarah’s request.

“No, señora. I am sorry very much, but I cannot do such a thing. It is very improper.”

“You know that you and Flora are welcome to join us for lunch at our table. I do not understand. You are always welcome.”

“No. Never, señora. We will eat at our own table in the kitchen. You do not understand these things. It would be very wrong. A sacrilege.”

Mary Rutledge didn’t know the meaning of Martín’s final word and went to the study to look it up in her Spanish-English dictionary. “Sacrílego. What nonsense!” She spoke so loudly that she thought he could have heard her from the dining room, but he’d already returned to the garden.

Julio and Guillermo were six and two years older than Sarah respectively, but she rarely saw Julio and hardly knew him. He didn’t work on the finca (farm) except during the coffee harvest when he helped to pick the beans. Guillermo often helped his father in the garden, but he was shy and rarely spoke and never played with Sarah. George Rutledge had arranged for the two older sons of Martín and Flora to attend a school in Managua after they graduated from the village school, and he paid for their tuition and school uniforms and books. Pablo was almost seven years younger than Sarah and often followed Martín around the garden. When Sarah turned twelve, she thought of Pablo as a baby always needing attention, even though he was really a little boy of six who came and went as he pleased.

Avocados were George Rutledge’s favorite fruit, and it annoyed him that the trees at Quinta Louisa had done so poorly that only three or four pears a year were harvested from his garden. He told Martín they ought to be able to do something about it.

“I am going to take care of the problem, Don Jorge. You will have plenty of avocados when the rainy season comes again.”

“As if that ignorant peon has the competence and training of a horticulturalist and can improve the yield of temperamental fruit trees,” Sarah heard her father mutter as he entered the house.

Several days later George saw Martín cutting a ring of bark around the trunk of the avocado tree. “What are you up to, my good man?”

Martín uttered some long word that Sarah didn’t recognize. “What was that word you used?”

(“Who else in Nicaragua has an Indian peasant working for him that spouts out ten syllable words like some Cambridge don . . . in Spanish, of course,” George had said as he related the story to his wife that evening.)

George went into the study to look up the definition in the Spanish-English dictionary to be sure he understood it. Circumcidante (Circumcising).

Sarah read the entry on the page where her father had left the dictionary open on his desk, but the words didn’t refer to fruit trees and confused Sarah and made her blush. “Circumcising: cutting circularly a portion of the skin around the male virile organ.”

She heard the patio slam once again as her father went back to the garden.

“Martín, tell me one more time what you are doing to that tree?

“I am circumcising it, señor.”

Martín was cutting a strip of bark around the trunk of the tree. “What are you doing that for?”

(“It really did look like some primitive circumcision ritual,” George told his wife that evening.)

“To change the sex. It is a male. That is why it will not bear any fruit. I am making it into a woman.”

“My good man, circumcision is not the way we go about changing the gender of things.”

“It is for avocado trees, señor.”

George told Mary at dinner that the tree would be dead within the month but he might as well let Martín have his way. “You can’t tell these bull-headed campesinos (peasants) anything. They’ll just walk off and start sulking and do no work at all. You might as well let them have their way in little things and save your arguments for urgent matters. The tree is perfectly useless anyway if it bears less than a half-dozen pears every year.”

To George’s surprise the avocado tree didn’t die. It produced more buds that season than it had borne in all the previous seasons added together, and there were even more pears the following season; but the next season after that, the year that Sarah turned thirteen, the tree put out almost no buds again.

“Martín has some crank theory about virgins. Perfectly ridiculous. These fool peasants are obsessed with superstitions about virgins. I don’t believe a word of it. He told me an avocado tree won’t bear fruit if a virgin climbs on its limbs after she begins to menstruate.”

“Father! Really!” Sarah got up and threw her napkin on the table without inserting it into its ring, as she’d been trained to do, and ran to her room and slammed the door.

“You really shouldn’t talk so freely around Sarah now that she’s becoming a young woman, George. She’s easily embarrassed.” Mary’s eyes twinkled, and she wrinkled up her lips. “But you might pay more attention to Martín’s folk remedies. Remember how the tree began to bear fruit after it was circumcised a couple of years ago.”

George forbade Sarah from ever climbing in the avocado tree again. He told her that she was too old for such behavior, just as he’d told her when she was ten that she was too old to ride on Don Martín’s back.

The next season the trees produced even more fruit, and the next year they showed more buds than George had ever seen on a tree, with the promise of a prodigious crop of pears until Pablo’s outrageous behavior ruined them. From the time that he was still in diapers there had never has been a child at Quinta Louisa who could make mischief like Pablo.

Pablo’s troublemaking was partly Mary’s fault. She hadn’t objected to having Julio and Guillermo in the house before Sarah was born or even to having them play with Sarah as older boys when she was little, but she’d refused to have another baby under foot when Pablo was a toddler. He’d seemed always to be at the patio door or yelling in the garden, and Flora would have to run out to care for him.

Pablo was eight years old when Mary saw him high in the avocado tree, breaking off pears and tossing them to the ground. She rushed into the garden. “You get down from there right now and stop picking the avocados.” For a moment he looked at her, and then he began pulling off all the pears with frenzied flings, even the green ones and those hardly out of the bud. “Stop it! You hear me, stop it right now, you wretched boy!” Mary ran under the tree and began shaking the trunk, although she herself was shaking more violently than the tree, while Pablo was scurrying around above her, pelting her with green avocados, giggling and bouncing them off her head and shoulders like some evil monkey. She screamed until everyone appeared in the garden—Sarah, Flora, Guillermo, and various other workers. Finally George heard her yelling hysterically even from where he was drying coffee beans in the sorting shed. (Martín was in Costa Rica taking the training course to run the new coffee-processing factory that George Rutledge planned to build.) One of the workers helped George get the rebellious little imp down out of the tree.

“Why did you do such an awful thing to my avocados, you horrible, wicked boy?” Mary’s voice was raspy after her screaming and from her lingering anger.

The plump, brown little brat put his hands on his hips and looked Mary straight in the eye. “My Papá planted the tree, and my Papá waters the tree, and my Papá gathers the fruit, so why do you call them your avocados?”

George emitted one of his single puff-pops of laughter in spite of himself at the boy’s audacious courage and spirit. No one else would dare talk to his wife like that.

“What are you laughing at, George Rutledge? You’re the one who’s crazy about avocados. I’m just trying to protect them for you, since you think they’re the most delicious food that ever was.”

Flora assured Mary that she would buy avocados for them at the market and replace every piece of fruit that Pablo had destroyed.

Mary was still trembling and breathless, near hysteria. She turned red-faced and bent over in an inelegant squat that must have been inherited from some long-dead North Carolina mountain ancestor. “I do not want avocados from the market. These were mine, and they belong to no one else, and that wretched boy destroyed them, and I do not want him ever in my sight again.”

“Mary, Mary, now let’s keep things in perspective.”

“Get that child out of my garden, and do not ever allow him to come inside the garden wall again unless you stay with him. Not ever!”

The following day Sarah saw her father sitting on the bench in the middle of the garden after he’d gathered the limes that the family used to marinate meat and flavor their drinks. She slipped out of the house without her mother seeing her leave.

“Daddy, why was Mother so mean to Pablo yesterday? We can always buy avocados at the market, and Doña Flora offered to replace them.”

As her father rubbed his chin Sarah recognized the gesture that often accompanied his reluctance to respond to her questions. “Well, Susi, you have to understand something about your mother. She is the most generous person in the world to those who are less fortunate. For too generous for her own good sometimes, I fear. But when someone takes something away from her that she thinks they have no right to, something that belongs to her and is important to her . . . well, you saw how she acted yesterday.”

“But why is Mother like that? She doesn’t act that way all the time.”

“Most assuredly not. She’s usually the most kind and generous . . .” George Rutledge rubbed his chin again. “I don’t know. Perhaps it goes back to her early life on the farm in North Carolina. After the tenants all left for better jobs, and the Lloyds had to give up growing row crops and convert to timber and cattle; and people started taking advantage of them, encroaching on their land and filching things . . . I don’t know. It may go back to some of that.”

“It’s too bad. Pablo’s not really so awful, not for a little boy his age.”

“I know. And your mother does a great deal to help Don Martín and Doña Flora and their sons. I think it would be best not to mention any of our conversation to your mother. Don’t you agree?”

“I understand, Daddy, and I promise never to climb in the avocado tree again either. I wouldn’t want Mother to yell at me the way she screamed at Pablo.”

“That would never happen, Susi. Not ever. But let’s keep this as a secret just between the two of us.”

George Rutledge took pride in telling whoever would listen to him that his tree bore more avocados than any others in the region after Martín circumcised it. Following her father’s strict orders Sarah never climbed the avocado tree again, and except for the season when she entered her teens and a year later when Pablo broke off the buds of fruit, Quinta Louisa never lacked for avocados. George could never determine which had caused the larger dearth of fruit, Sarah’s climbing on the limbs as a teenager or Pablo’s vandalism. As a rational man he wondered if Pablo hadn’t surreptitiously destroyed the buds on the tree the same year that Sarah had climbed it as a menstruating virgin.

About a week after Pablo’s escapade in the avocado tree Martín came home from Costa Rica for a visit and told George that he wanted to quit the apprenticeship for running the coffee-processing factory.

“Now look here. You must not let that business between Doña Mary and Pablo bother you. You know how riled up she gets over little things from time to time. It will all blow over and be forgotten in another week or so.”

“I miss my family, Don Jorge. I do not like living in the city.”

“It’s only for a few months. You’re much too intelligent to spend the rest of your days as a servant or a common laborer picking coffee. I want to give you a better chance in life. You deserve it. Besides, a smart fellow like you can be extremely helpful to us in running the factory, if I decide to build it.”

“I just want to come back to the campo (countryside) and live in the mountains where I know the trees and the flowers. Please don’t send me away again. Let me stay here with my wife and children in the village. I’ll die in the city. I’ll grieve myself to death. I belong here.”

George had been unable to persuade Martín to return to Costa Rica, and he never left the campo again for more than a couple of days at a time.

When Pablo was sick the month after he’d been banned from the garden, Flora had to care for him; and Martín spent several days doing Flora’s cleaning chores inside the Rutledges’ house, where he found the broken shells from wild birds’ eggs in Sarah’s room.

“Did you take eggs from the nests of the birds in the forest?”

“No, Don Martín. I just found the broken shells on the ground. They must have fallen out of the nest.”

Don Martín swiped his index finger inside the shell and held the sticky albumen close to her nose. His eyes squinted, and Sarah was terrified.

“I am sorry.” She wept and tried to swallow her sobs so that her parents wouldn’t overhear her.

“They are the quetzal’s eggs. Destroying the quetzal’s eggs is a great sin against Nature, and lying is a great sin against God. You must go into the forest with me and do your penance.”

When Mary Rutledge saw Martín leading Sarah toward the forest, she asked her husband what was going on; and George made the mistake of telling her what he’d overheard. Mary saw Sarah’s tear-stained face and horror-strickened eyes when she returned with Martín.

“You have no business punishing my child, Martín. It is no concern of yours, and you must not do it again.” Mary spoke calmly, rationally, without any expression of emotion in her voice or on her face, but Martín’s black eyes glittered like lightning reflected on obsidian. His jaw was clenched.

“You can send me away if you want to, Doña María, but as long as I have responsibility for your finca and your family and your forest and your daughter, I have to do what is right.”

“Now Martín, I did not mean to imply that you were wrong, but I think parents ought to be in charge of punishing a child. I am sure Sarah deserved to be reprimanded. Please just inform us when she needs to be corrected, and tell us what you propose.”

“She can tell you what I did. That is up to her, not up to me. Then if you want me to leave the finca, I will go; but I have to do what is right with the children in my forest, just as you must do what is right with them in your house and garden when they steal the fruit.”

Sarah told her mother that Don Martín had rubbed a bitter herb over her mouth to remind her how ugly lying was, and Mary laughed and said that she could remember how her grandmother from Virginia had washed her mouth out with homemade soap for lying. Several months later Sarah told her father what had really happened, how Don Martín had rubbed the ordure of wild birds over her lips.

Every Sunday morning the Rutledges traveled up toward Managua on the Pan American highway for the English-speaking Anglican service at the little stone church that Sarah’s great-grandfather and other British expatriates had built. St. Francis Church appeared like a chapel on a meadow in Kent with its narrow lancet windows that provided little ventilation in the stifling tropical heat. A new missionary priest had arrived from somewhere in the mid-West, and Sarah had overheard her father muttering to her mother. “I wonder if he’ll fit in or be as much a disaster as the last one,” (who had fled back to the United States in less than six months.)

“What’s his name, George?”

“Father Richard Sims, I believe. I should have driven out to welcome him this week I suppose, but . . .”

“We’ll just have to wait and see. Give him a chance. Maybe it will turn out better this time.”

Even though Father Sims was younger and taller than Sarah’s father, he was somewhat stooped and very thin so that he appeared to be shorter. He seemed distracted by the insects flying around the church. His eyes glanced back and forth from one of the lizards crawling up the wall to a moth flitting around the chancel. The small congregation of forty-odd people was almost equally divided between North American and British expatriates and English-speaking Nicaraguans of Caribbean ancestry from the East Coast of the country. When a dark costeño (resident of the East Coast of Nicaragua) stood up to read the Old Testament lesson, Sarah began giggling.

George smiled and glanced at Sarah whose tittering laughter was almost out of control, but her mother was not amused and had no sympathy for such misbehavior, especially in church.

“Stop that, Sarah, or I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life when we get home.”

Sarah bit her lip and pinched her thigh, but she couldn’t stop. “I can’t help it, Mother.”

“You must stop.” Mary gave Sarah a stare that could have frozen even the sweltering inside of St. Francis Church. The reader paused and looked at them and frowned—an unusual expression on his usually broad smiling face.

After the service Mary Rutledge was shaking Sarah by her shoulders and screaming at her in a whisper, as only her mother could do. “Making fun of people who are different from us is the worst thing a person can do. I will not have you looking down your nose and laughing at the Negroes.”

“I wasn’t doing that, Mother. I wasn’t making fun of him. I just got tickled at how he talked, and I couldn’t quit.”

During the coffee hour after the service on the brick patio beside the church Father Sims found Sarah standing by herself close to the wall in the shade. Only a few younger costeño children worshipped with their parents at St. Francis, and none of them was Sarah’s age.

“I find the British-Caribbean accents a little amusing, too, although quite charming. A reading from Isaiah . . . .” He poorly imitated the flat monotone and long “I” of the reader. “Do you know Taylor? He’s quite a nice chap.”

“Not really. The costeños usually hurry off before the coffee hour to catch their bus downtown. I guess they’re staying late today to welcome you.”

“Are there any activities for young people here at St. Francis? A youth group or Sunday School?”

“No. There aren’t any children except for me.”

“Well, we’ll have to remedy that. You stay there. I have something for you to take home.” Father Sims scurried with his cassock flapping against his legs across the parking lot toward the small vicarage where he lived. He brought out a hand of bananas to offer Sarah in order to placate her and perhaps bribe her to behave better in church. Perhaps he’d heard during his first week of cultural orientation that bananas didn’t grow well at higher elevations, and he had several heavily laden trees at the back of the vicarage garden.

“No thank you. I really don’t like bananas at all.”

As her mother approached them, Mary Rutledge overheard Sarah and shot her a withering look. In the parking lot, Mary read Sarah another diatribe. “You must always accept gifts graciously, Sarah. Refusing people’s gifts is almost like rejecting them personally. Just say, thank you, and smile and be pleasant and gracious. It’s almost as bad to spurn people’s freely offered, friendly gift as it is to make fun of them. I really don’t know what’s gotten into you today. I’ve tried to teach you to be polite and lady-like. Surely you understand that people’s feelings are the most important . . . .”

“That little priest will soon learn to take off his cassock before the coffee hour, or he’ll burn up.” Sarah knew that her father was attempting to change the subject and alter her mother’s focus.

“He’ll learn, George. It’s quite an adjustment for him, I’m sure.”

“We should invite him to Quinta Louisa for a meal, Mary. Maybe Beatriz and Armando could join us for a little dinner party.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, dear. I’m glad you’re going to give him a chance.”

Even though Armando and Beatriz Chulteco were Nicaraguans from old aristocratic families that belonged to the Conservative Party, they had both attended college in the United States; and most of their close friends were North American and British expatriates. Beatriz’s mother had been the closest friend of Sarah’s grandmother, and Armando’s grandfather had befriended Sarah’s great-grandfather when he’d first arrived from England. Mary Rutledge often referred to Beatriz as her closest Nicaraguan friend; and when she was being honest with herself, she admitted that Beatriz was her closest friend in the world.

Whenever she talked, Beatriz raised her arms and jangled her multiple bracelets and flicked her long, tapered fingers with manicured nails that testified that she had never washed a dish or pushed a mop in her life. “Come sit by me, Sarita.” Armando and Beatriz Chulteco did not have children, and Sarah was more than a goddaughter, more than a niece could have been to them, especially to Beatriz. “How do you like the new padrecito (little priest)?”

“He’s nice. A little gawky maybe. Sort of like a scarecrow in his cassock.”

“Wicked girl!” Beatriz hugged Sarah tightly against her. “We’ll have to get him started on the right foot.”

Even before dinner was announced, with Sarah still sitting beside her, Beatriz had beckoned Father Sims and begun instructing him about how he must employ a housekeeper in addition to the part-time gardener that cleaned the church and lived in the little house behind the parking lot in order to guard the church.

“I’m afraid I can’t afford servants on a missionary’s salary.”

“Oh, Padre! A live-in maid costs only a hundred córdobas a week—that’s just fourteen American dollars. Surely you can afford that!”

“Really? But I’m not sure I need . . .”

“Of course you do. You can’t buy ready-to-eat food at the supermarket down here. Someone has to cook for you, and you can’t leave your house unattended. Ladrones, sneak thieves, will carry off everything. They’re not violent. They won’t hurt you. You are perfectly safe from harm in Nicaragua. Do not let me scare you, but they will get inside while you’re gone and strip everything bare.”

“Perhaps I should consider it.”

“I will take care of everything for you. I will line up some girls for you to interview. Do you speak Spanish well enough, or would you prefer a costeña that speaks English?”

“I can get by in Spanish. I don’t think it would be appropriate to have a costeña, so many of them are members of my parish and even the Moravians all have family members in the parish.”

“¡Como no! (As you say!) I always think of the Episcopal vicar as just the chaplain for my North American and British friends, but you have to care for them, too.” Doña Beatriz began speaking in her giddy, silly little-girl voice and tugging at her dangling gold earring.

“Mrs. Rutledge says you know the American and British community better than anyone else in Managua. How can I meet them and invite them to church? I’m especially anxious to get something started for the children.”

“!Claro que sí! (To be sure!), Armando and I are Catholics, of course; but I’d be delighted to help you. What did you have in mind for the children?”

“A Sunday School for the younger ones. Some kind of youth group for the older young people.”

“I’ll get you their addresses so you can drop them a note. I’d suggest setting up a meeting one afternoon at the American School when the parents pick up their children. They all go to the American School, of course.”

“Even the Nicaraguan children?”

“Claro que sí (To be sure), all those of a certain class, but most of them are Catholic.”

“Would that make it impossible for them to be involved in a youth group, even a social sort of thing?”

“Oh no. That might be quite feasible, if it wasn’t too religious.”

“And then there would be the young people from St. Francis. The costeños as you call them.”

“Now that might be a bit more difficult. They’re from a quite different social class, you know.”

George Rutledge approached them. “Am I interrupting?”

“Of course not, George. Do join us.”

”I need Beatriz’s advice and counsel.” George scowled at Sarah in a teasing way.

“She’s been very helpful to me, Mr. Rutledge.”

“Please call me George. Shoo, Sarah, I have something to ask Doña Beatriz in private.”

Sarah scurried away but stayed close enough to overhear her father’s conversation. As an only child often left alone in the company of adults, she’d developed the skill of acute hearing for eavesdropping.

“Sarah’s been feeling a little isolated and lonely lately. I was thinking of organizing something . . . a party or some such . . . for some of the children her age.”

“That fits right in with what the padre and I were discussing. We might kill two birds with one stone, as you North Americans say. Don’t you think so, Padre?”

Father Sims nodded in agreement.

“You know Halloween is coming up. I realize it’s not a Nicaraguan custom; but I remember how thrilling it was for me when I first went away to boarding school in the States. I’d never experienced anything like it. Do you think we could have a costume party for the children here at Quinta Louisa? Would you be willing to help Mary organize something like that?”

Beatriz clapped her hands and shook her head so violently in her excitement that her bracelets and earrings jangled together in a tinkling chorus. “Of course! ¡Ciertamente! (Certainly!) It will be great fun!”

“Perhaps you could help get some costumes for Martín and Flora’s boys and some of the other children from the village and some of the costeño children from the church.”

“¡Dios mío! (My God!) George, that’s just what I was trying to explain to Reverendo Sims. That just won’t work. You can’t treat your workers as equals. Even Mary knows people of different classes can’t socialize together. You should know better. You’ve lived here all your life. Sometimes I think Mary knows more about handling servants than you do. Bless her heart! I love her better than ripe sugarcane with that North Carolina drawl.” Beatriz’s voice had once again risen in pitch to a little girl timbre.

The logistics proved too difficult for transporting the costeño children who attended St. Francis from the central city to Quinta Louisa, but George Rutledge insisted that Martín and Flora’s boys and the children from the village should come to the Halloween party. Beatriz Chulteco would have nothing to do with their costumes. Mary Rutledge had to find something for Flora’s boys to wear and searched for scraps of cloth for costumes that Martín could take to the village for the coffee workers’ children, but Beatriz provided all the decorations and many of the refreshments for the party.

The Chultecos came for an early supper before the party at Quinta Louisa. Some of Sarah’s classmates came at dusk, but it was dark when the workers’ children arrived in masks carrying torches. As the villagers entered the garden in their frightening costumes with painted faces and masked eyes, she clung to her father and was not in the least delighted with the pleasant feeling of squeamish awe that he had told her he had enjoyed as a boy during his first experience of Halloween.

One of the boys from Sarah’s class came over to comfort her. His name was Carlos Vargas Allen. His mother was a North American friend of her mother, although his father was Nicaraguan. Carlos was shy and smaller than the other boys in her class, and she’d rarely paid any attention to him. He patted her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Sarah. I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” For the first time Sarah noticed his soft, gentle voice; and even through her tears she saw his beautiful black eyes sparkling in the darkness.

After everyone left that night, Sarah came whimpering and sobbing to her father’s bed; and he clasped her and held her tightly in his arms for almost an hour despite Mary’s protests in the twin bed beside them. He told her that she was safe and secure and that no phantoms of the night would ever be able to hurt her.

The weekend before Sarah’s fourteenth birthday her mother asked her how she would like to celebrate. Sarah was aware that her father still blamed himself for the Halloween fiasco and that her mother continued to be preoccupied about her lack of social ties and friendships with her peers; and Sarah intended to take full advantage of their guilt.

“I’d like to go down to the Eskimo on Saturday night.”

“Saturday is impossible, as you know very well. I’ll talk with your father about Sunday evening when there are fewer rowdy people on the streets.” Since George Rutledge’s parents were killed in an automobile accident on the steep mountain road coming back from Managua, he’d resisted driving into the city at night, especially on the weekend, unless it was an emergency.

When Sarah and Mary allied in a united front to persuade George, he protested as usual. “You know we don’t go into the city at night. Besides with the elections coming up, a political rally is scheduled in the central plaza.”

As his wife and daughter persisted and his feelings of guilt about the Halloween fiasco were recalled, he relented. “I’ll call someone at the American Embassy and see if they think there’s any problem because of the rally.” George’s friend at the American Embassy told him that no inflammatory demonstrations were anticipated and that in fact a large dinner party with many American guests was planned that night at the Gran Hotel. George had forgotten that he and Mary had been invited and had declined to accept the invitation to the dinner party, but he did agree finally to honor Sarah’s birthday request.

A few years earlier the Eskimo ice cream parlor had been built within sight of the National Cathedral but away from the Central Plaza where the Conservative Party was scheduled to hold a rally opposing Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s candidacy for President of the republic. The plate glass windows and plastic covered seats and chrome-plated metal strips around the counter and stools and table edges seemed even grander and more elegant than the pictures of such places in the United States that Sarah had seen in magazines. The North American and British teenagers, who were several years older than Sarah, came here for a soda or sundae after their dates at the movies. Chic Nicaraguan boys, especially those who attended the American School, also brought their dates to the Eskimo.

Sarah didn’t have a boyfriend, and no boy had ever tried to sit beside her even when a large group went together to a movie on a Saturday afternoon. She hoped that some teenagers might be at the Eskimo on that Sunday night, January 22, 1967, although they would have been more likely to be encountered on a Saturday night. At least she could fantasize about someday having a date and being accepted by the “cool kids” and luxuriate in her imagination at the only place in Nicaragua that felt like a part of the youth culture of the United States. (Even though her father often told her, when she babbled rhapsodically about the Eskimo, that the American Embassy and the ambassador’s residence were actual properties of the United States, they certainly felt to Sarah more like any other big Nicaraguan office building and mansion.)

George Rutledge finally found a parking space on the street and hired an urchin to guard the car with a payment made more for extortion than for security. They began walking toward the Eskimo when they heard the noise. Firecrackers and backfires from old buses and trucks could be heard in the night several times every hour in Managua, but careful practice had taught George to distinguish their sounds from gunfire.

Sarah felt her father grasp her upper arm so tightly that it hurt and saw him reach his other hand toward her mother. “Back to the car, as fast as you can walk!”

George might have chosen any of a dozen routes out of the city; but habit took him on his customary route to the South Highway through narrow lanes with high curbs and extraordinarily high sidewalks, hardly wide enough for a single person to balance against the tiny wooden structures. The houses in the old neighborhoods were constructed from wood rather than from the concrete and stucco used for houses built later in the city. The walls and shutters were unpainted; but from the bright green or yellow or blue or red doors, now all open, soft light splashed into the street.

There were no street lamps, and the middle of the road was dark; but people crowded onto the narrow sidewalks and spilled off into the edge of the street, laughing, singing, drinking, and shouting. Women and girls in tight dresses and high heels stood alone or in pairs, never more than three together. Occasionally one of the bright doors would bang shut with a squeal and a high-pitched laugh. It was a prostitutes’ district. Even young teenagers like Sarah felt a giddy amusement and delight knowing that it was the putas’ (prostitutes’) neighborhood without their parents’ awareness of their comprehension of such things. Riding down the middle of the street, she imagined being involved in the bawdy joy and lascivious pleasure, as if she were standing on the sidewalk with the revelers.

“I’m sorry, Susi (her father’s baby name for her), we’ll make it up to you. Maybe we can take some of your friends to dinner at Los Ranchos next week.”

“That’s all right, Daddy. You tried. I shouldn’t have insisted so much.”

Suddenly they heard shots and saw people run from doorway to doorway. The merry voices became shrill with fear and then muted into whines and cries as the doors closed and the crowds thinned and darkness transformed the street into a black tunnel of terror. Only the headlights of the old Austin picked out a few cringing figures, no longer dancing, now staggering into some opening before it was locked against them. A woman ran across the street in front of them carrying a young child in her arms with another young child who held her hand. The older child couldn’t keep up with her, and she dragged him by the arm. Then he fell. She paused for only a moment and bent down and tried to lift the fallen child, but she could not manage both children, and she ran into one of the last open doorways abandoning the injured child in the street. They could see now it was a little boy. George swerved to avoid running over the small body and then accelerated.

“George! Stop!”

“We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll shoot us!”

“Stop!” Mary was screaming and opening the door of the car as if she intended to jump out while it still sped along. “We have to see about the child.”

George stopped and put the car into reverse. Even before he had stopped again, Mary had leapt from the already opened door and was running toward the fallen child in the street. George followed his wife immediately out of the car, and Sarah slipped out behind her parents and saw a wound and bloodstains on the little boy’s shoulder and realized he had been struck by one of the bullets. He was small, only three or four years old, with a dirty, flat, sweet Indian face. Sarah could smell the big chocolate stains around his mouth and thought of the chocolate soda she had been prevented from ordering at the Eskimo. She began to cry.

“Sarah, get back in the car. Right now!”

Sarah obeyed her father, but from the car window she looked down at the little boy in the street. He was wearing a ragged shirt but new shorts. He was barefooted. Sarah’s mother put her head down close to his face and chest. “He’s breathing, but he’s unconscious, maybe he fainted or is in shock.” His eyes were closed, but little bubbles of saliva gurgled out of the corner of his mouth. Blood ran down his right arm. His right hand twitched. Sarah could hear gunshots still striking and ricocheting in the distance.

George knelt beside his wife. He was shaking. “¿Tu madre? ¿Dónde está? ¡Vámanos con prisa!” (Your mother? Where is she? Let’s leave quickly!) He mumbled, almost whined incoherently. Mary appeared calm, almost clinical, without feelings, without fear. She looked around for the mother of the child, who had disappeared in the darkness; but there was no one on the street to tell them which door she had entered.

“George, you carry him to the car.” Sarah’s father didn’t respond, so her mother picked the child up herself. He was heavy for her. He was bleeding badly, and blood had soaked through Mary’s sweater and blouse and moistened her shoulder. “Can you drive?” George nodded and followed his wife blindly, almost staggering, as the older child had followed the mother across the street. “George, can you drive? Answer me.”

“Sí.” They got into the car, where the motor had been left running. Mary took off her scarf and tied it tightly around the child’s shoulder and cuddled his head on her bosom. George seemed to be heading down his usual route toward the South Highway.

“No, George. To the hospital.”

“El Retiro?”

“No, Baptist. The Baptist Hospital, George. Hospital Bautista.” He still seemed to be driving toward the site of the public hospital, El Retiro. “No, no, George. The Baptist Hospital.” He didn’t seem to respond to English. “El Hospital Bautista, Jorge. A la Clínica Bautista.”

When they reached the hospital, George carried the child inside; and Sarah followed them without receiving any protests or instructions from her parents. Mary knew some of the missionary nurses and communicated the situation to them immediately. Even though the child had lost a large amount of blood, the wound didn’t seem to be critical, and Mary’s scarf had stanched the flow of blood to some extent. A Nicaraguan doctor thought that the little boy would survive and recover. Mary told him that they would return soon to see about the child and promised to cover all his expenses. They would try to locate his mother tomorrow, if the shooting and violence had ceased in the besieged barrio (neighborhood).

“Let’s go home now, George.” He was silent. His terror had passed. Now he was silent out of shame. He was pulling at his fingers, popping the joints.

Sarah had never seen her father behave in such a frightened way before, and it terrified her more than the gunfire.

Mary turned toward George on the long, silent drive to Quinta Louisa. Once she reached out to him but withdrew her hand just inches before her fingertips touched his arm. “It’s all right, dear. It’s all right. Everything will be fine.” The whispered words were intended as much for Sarah as for her father, but Sarah didn’t believe anything would ever be all right again, and nothing would ever be fine for her in Nicaragua again.

Sarah’s mother tucked her into bed late that night, but for the first time in her life Sarah’s father didn’t come to give her a goodnight kiss; and his absence frightened her even more than seeing the wounds of the injured child, more than the bloodstains on the street and on her mother’s blouse, more than the words of her mother and the silence of her father in the car on the way home to Quinta Louisa.

Because Armando and Beatriz Chulteco lived in the center of Managua, in one of the old homes just off Roosevelt Avenue, Sarah’s parents invited them to spend several days at Quinta Louisa until order was restored in the city. Although a few shots were fired back and forth on Monday, the Nicaraguan army had established complete control by Tuesday morning; but with stores still shuttered and tensions high, Mary and George believed their friends would probably be safer and would certainly be calmer on the finca (farm) with them.

The newspapers reported fewer than twenty people killed, but family members of coffee workers from the village counted almost sixty friends and acquaintances known to be slain, and the count must surely have been even higher. Sarah sat with rapt attention listening to her parents and the Chultecos narrate the facts and rumors about what had happened.

Both political parties customarily rounded up campesinos (peasants) from the rural villages during the election campaigns and brought them into the city on big trucks and offered them a drink and a sweet. The outing was a rare and coveted celebration for the peasant laborers, who paid little attention to which political party was sponsoring the rally.

Now at the peak of the cotton harvest, trailers of raw cotton packed outlying streets on the weekend, waiting to be the first in line to be drawn into the gins on Monday morning. Underneath the cotton, rifles had been hidden; and communist guerrillas from Colombia retrieved the guns and stationed snipers on the roofs of some of the taller buildings along Roosevelt Avenue. They set cars on fire along some of the side streets. The snipers then fired into the crowd of campesinos from both directions, so that they were trapped in panic on the central street.

Some of the leaders of the Conservative Party were arrested and jailed, although Armando swore that they had played no part in the riot and had no knowledge of the plot by a few Nicaraguan communist sympathizers and foreign terrorists to destabilize the country. Some Conservative Party leaders had rushed into the Gran Hotel and held the guests hostage at the dinner party to which the Rutledges had been invited but had declined to attend. The hostages were confined until the opposition political officials were assured that they would not be executed by the Somoza regime. Anastazio Somoza, the younger brother of the former President and now a candidate for the Presidency himself, was the Chief of the Nicaraguan army. He surrounded the hotel with tanks whose cannons were trained on the entrances.

“He would have blown the building down in a quick moment if his older brother had not been more level headed.” Sarah looked at Don Armando with wide eyes and a gaping mouth.

“Really?”

“Sin duda (without doubt), Sarita. Most certainly.”

“Tachito is an evil man.” Everyone called Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Tachito or little Tacho. His father, the first dictator of the Somoza regime, was called Tacho, which was a word for a large kettle used for boiling cane to make sugar, although no one knew how the General got that nickname.

“One of my friends at school told me he had his soldiers throw some men who were saying bad things about him into the Masaya volcano.”

“Sush! Do not say such things out loud, Sarita.” Doña Beatriz held her long thin fingers with their four bejeweled rings across her lips. “You must not say such things except to friends you trust absolutamente (absolutely). Who knows what the servants may hear and repeat, or some of the coffee pickers that may be communists . . . ?” Doña Beatriz’s eyes were wide with fear. “Especially for you as a foreigner.”

“We’ve been here for four generations, Beatriz. This is our country, too.” Armando’s and Beatriz’s faces reflected the fear that was present on Sarah’s father’s face in the barrio on Sunday night, but now George Rutledge looked calm, even brave. “We belong here.”

“Don’t be too sure who belongs here. If there’s a revolution, I’m not sure even Beatriz and I would belong. At least you have to give the Somozas credit for maintaining order for four decades.” Now Don Armando looked more sad than frightened to Sarah.

“This is all very tedious, and you’re scaring Sarah. We’ve never had any trouble here on the finca. The people who work for us, the people in the village, would protect us from any danger. They always have. They always will. They love us, and we love them.” Mary Rutledge stood and smoothed her skirts to show her objection to their conversation.

“Nevertheless, my dear, we walk a narrow line. Armando is right. We are foreigners, even after four generations. This is the only country Sarah has ever known, the only one I’ve ever called home for that matter. But we must be careful never to take sides . . . or undue risks.” Sarah’s father now looked as sad and serious as Don Armando.

“Sometimes risks are necessary. Now let’s have some tea and talk about something more pleasant.” Mary wiped her palms across her skirt again. “Come help me with the biscuits, Sarah.” Mary Rutledge had learned to refer to cookies as biscuits, just as George’s English grandmother Louisa had insisted that they should be called. After all, Quinta Louisa was named for her, and her spirit still pervaded the finca.

Eventually the Papal Nuncio negotiated an agreement between the leaders of the Conservative Party in the Gran Hotel and the Somozas. Some of the foreign visitors who had been staying in the Gran Hotel were taken to the homes of the expatriates and their friends in Managua until they could arrange flights out of the country. Armando and Beatriz Chulteco returned to their home and welcomed a German businessman as their guest. After his two terrifying nights as a hostage in the hotel he was sleeping soundly in the Chultecos’ guest room, when Beatriz’s perverse Siamese cat pounced onto his stomach in the middle of the night. His anguished scream was imitated as the story was told over and over at dinner parties over the next several months while Nicaragua settled back into its normal life, or what appeared on the surface to be normal.

The first order of business for the Rutledges after they were able to drive back into the city was searching for the mother of the injured boy. Remarkably the telephones had never stopped working during the tense days while the Guardia (National Guard) restored order in the city. (Telephones were controlled by the military; and permission to have one in a private home required proving that it contributed to military security, which in practice simply involved making one of the many customary bribes that foreigners as well as wealthy national citizens paid to a bureaucrat.) Mary had called the Baptist Hospital every day to check on the condition of the child and to give assurances that the hospital would be paid for his care and room accommodation.

Mary, or occasionally George, when she had an appointment, always drove Sarah to the American School each morning and picked her up each afternoon. It required more than two hours out of every day, but the only alternatives were a boarding school in the United States, like George had attended, or one in England, like the one where his father had been sent. Mary believed that long drives each day were worth her time and effort so that Sarah could remain with them at Quinta Louisa for as long as possible.

On the first day that the American School reopened, however, George planned to drive Sarah to and from school. Mary wanted to return with him to pick Sarah up in the afternoon and try to find the injured child’s mother in the barrio. George wanted to bring Sarah home and then return alone to search for the mother by himself, but Mary insisted on accompanying him when he picked Sarah up. Then George wanted to bring Sarah home and return to the city with Mary, if she insisted on going with him.

“That’s foolish, George. We don’t need to make two separate trips into the city. Sarah can go with us after we pick her up.”

“Well, how’s this? We can go early and make our inquiries before school is dismissed.”

“We can’t predict how long it may take us to locate the child’s mother in the barrio. It might take a few minutes. It might take hours. Besides it will be a good experience for Sarah.”

As usual in such differences of opinion, Mary’s plan prevailed, although Sarah was aware from the sour, pained expression on her father’s face that he didn’t believe it would be a good experience for her at all.

Barrio Arbolito was a rather notorious neighborhood. Directions in Managua were given from old landmarks—two blocks north and a block and a half west from where the little tree used to be—where the little tree used to be also gave the name to the barrio, Arbolito, little tree. The little tree had disappeared years ago, but the name stuck.

The doors of most buildings were closed against the afternoon light and heat. All of the old downtown neighborhoods would be closed and shuttered when the sun was brightest and the dust and smoke from traffic heaviest; but the confinement was even more pronounced in Barrio Arbolito than in other poor neighborhoods, because prostitution was the principal business. Those who work at night must sleep in the daytime. Poverty and squalor were also more evident in the daytime than they had seemed on Sunday night, even in the midst of the gunfire; but the memory of the child in the street and the sounds of the gunshots still echoed in Sarah’s memory, like bullets ricocheting in her mind.

George Rutledge approached an older boy sitting on a doorstep. “Young man, we are looking for the mother of the little boy who was shot Sunday night. We are the people who took him to the hospital.” It was harder to find anyone in a prostitutes’ district, because people living there were trained not to give out information.

“I don’t know who she is.”

George looked at him with a stern, unbelieving stare. He probably knew. Perhaps he could be intimidated into supplying information. He would not be coaxed. Children here were too hardened by the time they were ten or twelve for gentle persuasion. If all else failed, he could probably be bribed. “You know, of course, that a little boy was shot here last Sunday.” George used the firm, almost angry voice of interrogation.

“Yes, señor.”

“Do you know which house he lived in?” George took some change out of his pocket and began rattling it in the cup of his left hand.

“I do not know where they lived.”

“Maybe you can take us to talk with someone who would know something.” George held us fifty centavos between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The boy didn’t extend his hand. He waited for the money to be offered first, the ritual etiquette from a pubescent son of a whore, without a shirt, whose hands were black with layers of dirt and whose face was streaked with brown grit and stains. A younger boy appeared from inside the house and stood with them, as if he belonged to the party. “Is this a friend of yours?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Can I guard your car?” The younger boy hadn’t heard the questions about the wounded child.

“Here’s fifty centavos for you, too. I’ll give you another córdoba if the car’s all right when we return and a córdoba for your big brother if he takes us where we can get some good information.” The younger boy also waited for George to hand him the coin. Even though they would have stolen everything from the car if it had been left unlocked and unwatched, they wouldn’t violate the code of proper behavior, not with a gringo patrician.

The older boy led them in the direction of the local pulpería, a small, one room shack where candy and bottle drinks and tortillas and cakes and cigarettes were sold. It would be the obvious place to take them, the obvious place for them to begin making their inquiries even with his help. George wrinkled his chin at Mary and Sarah.

“You do not get any more money unless we receive some good information.” George then turned to Mary and Sarah. “Are you sure you want to come? It would be better for you to wait in the car.”

“We’re coming with you. Here, take my hand, Sarah.”

They passed the pulpería and turned down an alley between the tightly clustered houses on the street. Sarah saw a family living under a plastic and tarpaper tent inside the corner of a crumbling building with only two walls left. Such a degraded hovel was not allowed in sight of the street; it must be hidden from the slightly more respectable poor dwellings. The boy stopped at a door even rougher and cruder than the others, made from unpainted boards that were uneven at the bottom with cracks between them.

“Open up. Open the door, old woman. These North Americans gave me a córdoba to lead them to someone who could tell them about the boy who was shot on Sunday night.”

The old woman who appeared at the door might have been eighty or ninety or two hundred years old. She possessed an ancient frame rarely seen in Nicaragua. The thick muscular body that made the age of poor women indistinguishable from forty to seventy years of age had shriveled. The thin, leathery, solemn face had crumpled into a thousand creases. The small hard hands and feet once like crude tools had twisted and contorted. The black hair had turned to a hoary mass of white that few women with predominantly Indian features ever lived to display. She leaned with both hands on a stick and wore two ragged sweaters and a shawl, even though the temperature was close to a hundred degrees. Her hut was like a dark, dank cave. The dirt floor at the back was rutted. The ground in the front had been leveled, and tiles had been laid over the bare earth, but they had not been grouted together. A tijera (canvas cot) was folded against the wall. Crude benches and stools were scattered among various jars and pans and pots and glasses, some turned over, many lying randomly on the bare earthen floor at the rear. There was no window, not even a hole covered by a shutter. The stench that came through the open doorway was sickening; and Sarah felt and tasted the darkness, a damp forbidding darkness.

“Bueños dias, señora. I am Señor George Rutledge. We took a little boy to the hospital when he was shot on Sunday night.”

“What do you want, gringo devils? We don’t have any money to pay you and give the hospital. I don’t know anything about all that trouble.”

“We don’t want any money, señora.” Mary’s voice was soft and gentle unlike her husband’s stern tone. Sarah thought that her father wouldn’t have spoken so gruffly if he hadn’t been embarrassed by exposing her to this seedy neighborhood. “Please, señora, we’re looking for the mother of the little boy who was shot, so that we can tell her that he’s getting well.”

“His puta (prostitute) mother lives at the back of the barrio by the field where we throw our garbage, since she moved from Casa Fuqui.” Another reference point for directions was Casa Fuqui, the whorehouse used by the U.S. Marines that had occupied the country during the 1920s and 1930s until they’d put Anastasio Somoza García into power. Casa Fuqui itself, like the little tree, had also disappeared long ago; but the stories about the U. S. Marine occupation were frequently revived and retold, especially by the secret, subversive groups that wanted to overthrow the Somoza regime. “The boy will show you, if you give him another córdoba. He is my grandson.”

The boy led them to a house that was even shabbier than the old woman’s hovel, with a dirt floor and another rough, unpainted door and a thatched roof, also without windows. A pit for cooking, like a primitive barbeque grill, was dug outside in the yard. A toddler hugged the leg of the woman who opened the door. The little girl was also filthy, like the other children Sarah had seen in Barrio Arbolito. Her mother was a light-skinned woman with Spanish rather than Indian features. Her blouse and wrap-around skirt were dirty and ill fitting. The space lacked any walls and was divided into places for eating and sleeping by a blanket hanging from a rafter and a woven reed mat. The house smelled sour with the same odor of the old woman’s house.

The Rutledges introduced themselves to the woman presumed to be the injured child’s mother. Mary asked her to tell them her name. ¿Como se llama? (How do you call yourself?)

“Me llamo Blanca. (I call myself Blanca: my name is Blanca).”

“The little boy who was shot is your son?”

“Yes, señor. Do you know if he is alive? I was told some norteamericanos (North Americans) took him away.”

“Our family drove him to the Baptist Hospital. He is recovering well.” Mary’s tone continued gently and consolingly.

“How old is he?” Now George also spoke to the mother more softly.

“He has four years.” Clinging to her was the little girl that she had carried in her arms the night of the attempted coup who seemed to be about two or three years old.

“What is his name?”

“He is César.”

“Did you know that he had been taken to the Baptist Hospital?”

“Yes, señora, I knew that someone had taken him to the hospital.”

“But you haven’t been to visit him?”

“I thought that someone would bring him home if he did not die. I was afraid they would make me pay money at the hospital if I went to see him.”

“We are paying for his care. Would you like for us to take you to the hospital now to see him?”

“I cannot leave his little sister, señora. Will you bring him back to me when they make him well?”

“I don’t think . . .”

George was interrupted by Mary who also responded to him in English before replying to Blanca in Spanish. “Never mind, George. Of course we will. We will go to the hospital right now and see how he is recovering.”

“Mary, it’s late. It’ll be dark by the time we get home.”

“There’s time, George. We must do what we can to help these poor people.”

When they inquired at Baptist Hospital, they learned that the little boy was ready to be discharged. By the time they finished the paperwork and paid his bills it was growing dark even in the city; and by the time they left César with his mother the night was totally black without any streetlights to guide them on the primitive roads through Barrio Arbolito.

“We must do something about that little boy, George. We can’t leave him in that condition.”

“You can’t take care of every poor urchin in Nicaragua, Mary. It’s impossible.”

”I can take care of those that God drops into our lives, like little César.”

“Mary . . . Mary.” George’s voice was exhausted. He knew better than to argue. He knew that he had already lost another battle. “Are you all right, Sarah?”

“I’m fine, Daddy. Thank you for letting me come with you. I’m going to do everything I can to take care of poor people in our country when I grow up.”

“It’s not our country, sweetheart. We’re just guests here in Nicaragua. We try to take care of the people entrusted to us, like those in the village that work on the coffee finca for us, and Don Martín and Doña Flora and their boys; but we can’t take care of everyone. It’s not our responsibility.”

Sarah knew that her father’s words were actually directed to her mother through her, to whom he was ostensibly speaking.

As they drove through the gate at Quinta Louisa the headlights of the old Austin illuminated Martín wringing his hands as he paced on the front veranda.

Sarah had not even stepped out of the car before Martín began upbraiding her parents as if they were children and he were their parent. “What do you mean coming home so late? I thought you had suffered an accident on the highway, and evil people had done terrible things to you as they did to your parents.”

Sarah didn’t know what terrible things evil people had done to her grandparents, although she knew they had died in an automobile accident when her father was still in college; but she was too weary to ask what Don Martín had been talking about. She was too tired even to study her homework, a task she almost never neglected as a dedicated, conscientious student. Immediately after supper she dropped into bed and instantly fell asleep, but she dreamed about the poor people and shabby houses in Barrio Arbolito and then had a nightmare about evil people dragging her out of the car and beating her on the side of the Pan-American Highway.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon three weeks after Easter when Sarah overheard her father speaking on the telephone. What drew her attention was the tone of his voice, not quite panicked or alarmed, but disturbed. She soon realized that he was talking with Don Armando. She wondered if Don Armando or Doña Beatriz were ill—she knew they hadn’t died or her father would have been more greatly distressed.

As soon as he hung up the receiver, she asked, “What is it, Daddy? What’s the matter? Are Don Armando and Doña Beatriz all right?”

“They’re fine, Susi. Luis Somoza died. A heart attack. It was very sudden.”

“I thought we didn’t like the Somozas.”

“You can’t paint everyone with the same brush, Susi. Luis was a good man. When he was President, he pushed through legislation to prevent him from succeeding himself and any member of his family from following him immediately. Only a dictator can end a dictatorship without bloodshed. He did many good things.”

Mary Rutledge had entered the room during George’s lecture to Sarah. “So Luis is dead. We’ll miss him. He was an honest man, a good leaven for the country; but I wonder if he didn’t undo all his progressive efforts by supporting Tachito’s candidacy for President. He won’t even be there to see him inaugurated in a few weeks.”

“And he won’t be there to rein him in over the weeks and months and years to come. If Luis hadn’t stopped him, Tachito would have leveled the Gran Hotel and killed everyone inside during the coup. God help us!” George scowled and bit his lower lip as he often did when he was upset.

“Will we be all right, Daddy? Will Tachito hurt us?”

“Of course not, Susi. None of this affects Quinta Louisa very much. No one pays much attention to us up here on the ridge. Our lives will go on as usual, but God help Nicaragua!”

Mary Rutledge left abruptly for a trip to North Carolina. She usually made her plans weeks, even months in advance. She hadn’t been feeling quite herself, she told Sarah and George; and she wanted to have a medical check-up by the doctors at Duke University Hospital. When she returned, she looked gaunt and pale, but she told her daughter and husband that she was just a little anemic and had been given a tonic to build her up.

Mary also brought a collie puppy from North Carolina for Sarah, who hadn’t mentioned wanting to have a dog or even thought of asking for a dog. Sarah suspected the puppy was another response to her mother’s concern about what she perceived to be Sarah’s loneliness and isolation. The puppy was cute and fun to play with for a few minutes; but Sarah never had much interest in pets. If she’d chosen any pet, it would have been a bird; but she actually preferred to watch the wild birds that flew into the garden or see them with Don Martín in the forest rather than to put one of the local macaws or green parrots into a cage as many Nicaraguan families did.

Even though Guillermo was in the second year of study for his bachillerato (a diploma somewhat more advanced than a high school graduate’s in the United States), he took the bus from the city every afternoon to the village, ostensibly to help his parents, Martín and Flora, with their chores, but partly to care for the collie puppy, Laddie, and to play with him in the garden at Quinta Louisa.

Pablo still attended the local village school supported by the Nicaraguan government for education only through primary years. Julio didn’t visit Quinta Louisa often. He wrote long, obsequious thank-you letters to George and Mary Rutledge expressing how grateful he was that they were paying for his education, but he seemed ashamed of being the son of servants and even ashamed of Martín and Flora themselves, although he meticulously observed filial duty toward his parents.

Mary had effectively banned Pablo from the garden as an incorrigible child, but Guillermo enjoyed helping tend the flowers and fruit trees with his father, and after Laddie arrived Guillermo was present almost every afternoon.

Sarah conversed with Guillermo more during the first weeks of Laddie’s residence than they’d ever talked before. She felt that she was obliged to spend some time with him, because he was caring for what was supposed to be her dog. Guillermo told her that he was fascinated by the dog with long silky hair and white and tan markings. Sarah could understand how exotic he might appear in comparison to the yellowish-brown, short-haired, bony, mangy curs that cowered on every street corner in Managua, just as the macaws and parrots fascinated their North American visitors and even Sarah herself compared to the drabber wild birds in the United States. As Laddie grew, he chased Guillermo around the garden. They wrestled in the grass as if Guillermo were a little boy Pablo’s age, and Sarah found herself talking to Guillermo more because she really enjoyed his company than out of obligatory appreciation for his care for her dog.

“What are you going to do when you finish at the colegio (secondary school), Guillermo? Are you going to the university like Julio? I’m sure Daddy would still pay your fees.”

“I am not smart like Julio. He wants to be a big businessman. I like to make things. I would rather live here in the village than in the city.”

“Just like your parents, Don Martín and Doña Flora.”

“I would like to go to the technical institute. Do you think Don Jorge would pay fees for me there?”

“I think so. I will ask him. He would probably like it if you could keep the machines at the processing plant running. Those are the only times I have ever heard Daddy curse—when they break down.”

“You know he sent Papá to Costa Rica to learn about machinery . . .”

“. . . and he begged Daddy to let him come back and work in the garden because he couldn’t stand that dark place that smelled bad with all those loud noises that hurt his ears.”

They both laughed.

When Sarah asked her father about Guillermo’s plans, he said that he was sorry Guillermo didn’t want to attend the university if he was able to meet the qualifications.

“A university education would give him many more opportunities in life. I’d like to do as much as I can to prepare him to help his people.”

Mary arched her eyebrows. “He’s a typical middle child. Such a sweet boy. Not like his brothers, that snobbish Julio or that imp Pablo, the little terror. Let him find his own level, George. Besides he’d be such a help to you if he could manage the machinery in the plant.”

Before Laddie was even a year old, he developed a taste for the neighbors’ chickens. George scolded him and beat him with a rolled-up newspaper and even whipped him with his leash until he made sounds that Guillermo couldn’t stand to hear and ran with his hands over his ears to the village. Don Martín tied a dead chicken around his neck for days until he pawed at his head and scraped against the wall and rolled on his back like a rabid creature, but none of their efforts discouraged him from chasing the neighbors’ chickens.

“We must do something about that dog, Mary. We can’t put it off any longer.”

“Those shiftless people ought to keep their chickens penned up. We’re responsible for keeping our dog off their property, but they’re responsible for keeping their chickens off the road in front of our house. When those chickens wander all over our yard and garden, I can’t help what my dog does to them.”

George Rutledge looked woefully at his wife. “You don’t know how much a chicken means to a poor campesino, Mary. It has an enormous value in their scale of things.”

Mary Rutledge was not moved. “Don’t be absurd, George. A chicken is nothing compared to a beautiful purebred collie. Besides, if those campesinos think so much of their chickens, they should keep them penned up.”

“I’m sorry, my dear. I shall have to see that Laddie’s taken away. I’m especially sorry for Guillermo’s sake.”

Sarah was sad about Laddie, but she never asked her father what he’d done when he took the dog away. She felt even worse for Guillermo than she did about Laddie. She and Guillermo never spoke about what happened to Laddie or even mentioned him to each other again, but they continued to talk together often in the garden and on the back patio.

“Mother, I think Guillermo has become one of my best friends.”

“I do wish you’d try to make more friends at school, Sarah. We are very fond of Martín’s family, but they are different from people like us. Of course, Guillermo’s my favorite of Martín and Flora’s children, but you belong to two different worlds.”

Sarah’s mother continued to treat Guillermo with a mixture of affectionate admiration and condescension, not altogether differently from how she had treated the purebred collie, Laddie. When Sarah told her father how her mother had talked about Guillermo, he said that his wife acted toward people in Nicaragua as she’d been taught to behave in North Carolina and that Sarah should understand that her mother might never really understand the way people related to each other in Central America.

Ever since the Rutledges had visited Barrio Arbolito searching for the mother of the little boy that had been shot, Mary Rutledge had been campaigning to provide better housing for the coffee workers that lived in the village and especially better quarters for the temporary seasonal workers that came from other regions of the country to gather the coffee beans during the harvest. Last season many of them had fallen ill with flu-like symptoms.

Mary had stayed at the harvesters’ camp from dawn until dusk for days that stretched into weeks, and George believed that she had become overly involved and obsessed with their problems. After the epidemic had long since passed, she continued to nag him about erecting what he considered to be elaborate houses to shelter the pickers at harvest time.

“They’re little better than chicken coops, George. We’ve got to provide something more adequate.”

“My dear Mary, they’re only needed for a few weeks every year, and the combination of weather and illness last year happens only once a century or so. I know they’re cramped and uncomfortable, but they do all right for the few weeks of harvest time under ordinary circumstances.”

“I think they’re sorely lacking in the minimal standards of basic hygiene and sanitation.”

Sarah was always concerned when her parents argued, as if it threatened the security of her world, although their voices were usually quiet and calm with her father’s British reserve and her mother’s Southern gentility.

“I think you’re more concerned about appearances than you are with the basic standard of life for poor Nicaraguans. You’ve been in a tizzy ever since your sister-in-law came down here and began ranting about having never seen such dreadful poverty as there is on our finca. I know the shelters for the harvesters don’t look very attractive, but I’ve told you a thousand times that my resources are limited and the resources of this country are limited, and we have to take care of critical health problems and year-round living conditions first. We can’t be distracted by appearances.”

“I’m not talking about appearances, George Rutledge. I’m talking about contaminated water and a lack of available necessities that very nearly brought on a plague at our finca last year.”

“Haven’t I done more to alleviate poor people’s problems than any coffee planter in Nicaragua?” He sniffed, as he often did when he felt he was being unfairly criticized. “This is not our country, Mary. We do what we can to help our own, our workers in the village; but we can’t change this country.”

“Your family has been here for three generations. Sarah is a fourth generation Nicaraguan, George.”

“She’s not a Nicaraguan. She’s an American of British ancestry. You’re being more sentimental than practical. What do you know about contaminated water and conditions that cause a plague? What do you even know about how poor Nicaraguans really live? You’ve always had everything you needed and most of what you wanted in life.”

“I’m a woman, and I have the feelings of a woman, and I see the poor women of this country spending half their lives carrying wood and water. I see them on the road, barefooted and ragged, with a stack of wood on their heads or a pot of filthy water on top of a rolled-up rag to balance it and protect their skulls. You’re not a woman. You wouldn’t understand what it means to gather wood and carry water ten hours a day, day in and day out.”

George left the room and made no reply to his wife, but that very afternoon he sat down at his desk and began to work out the plan that would bring potable water to the village and extend the pipes to the harvesters’ camp, where he decided to erect new, larger shelters. The new shelters would be simple and rude, certainly not what his wife had envisioned; but they would be safer and drier during storms than the old ones and larger and more adequate for the families that stayed there for the harvest.

Sarah didn’t usually notice how her parents looked or felt; but after her mother returned from North Carolina, Sarah couldn’t avoid seeing her mother’s pallor and loss of weight when her clothes seemed to droop from her shoulders as if they were hanging from wires in the closet.

“Mother, are you all right? Are you feeling bad?”

“I’m fine, dear. I’m just a little run-down. They gave me some tonic to build me up.”

Soon Sarah’s concerns about her mother were displaced by anxiety about her own situation. At fourteen her focus was most often on her social standing in her peer group, and her preoccupation was not alleviated by her mother’s concern. Even when Mary Rutledge didn’t pepper Sarah with seemingly benign questions about with whom she ate lunch, what the girls in her class were talking about, whether any boys had spoken to her, Sarah was aware of her mother’s unspoken fretting. Sarah was at least half a head taller than the boys in her class and a full head taller than most of the girls. Both mother and daughter chased each other in circles of unspoken worry as the date for the end of the school year dance approached.

Finally, Mary broke the silence. “Are you going to the school dance, Sarah?”

“No one has asked me.”

“Surely there’s a boy from your set who would escort you as a friend. You don’t have to be sweethearts.”

“Carlos Vargas is my only friend.”

“He’s a lovely boy. I play bridge with his mother at the Gran Hotel every Wednesday. Nancy is rather shy and doesn’t talk much, but she’s very nice.”

“They say his father is a revolutionary, a member of the FSLN.” (Frente Sandinista Liberación National)

“Oh, I hardly think so, dear. If that were true, he surely wouldn’t be married to an American. I could whisper a word in her ear.”

“Mother! Don’t you dare!”

“I’ll be discreet. Carlos would never even know I’ve spoken to her.”

“I don’t want to go to the dance with him. I want to go with a boy like me, an American or English boy. Isn’t that what you said you wanted me to do, mother, make friends with people like us?”

“He’s half American, dear; and he goes to your school and even attends the church youth group sometimes, doesn’t he?”

“What’s this all about?” George Rutledge came through the patio door from the garden mopping his brow.

“Mother’s trying to fix me up with a Nicaraguan boy for the school dance, but it’s crazy. I want to go with someone like us or not go at all.”

“Nicaraguans are more like us than you may think, Susi. Someday you’ll understand that.”

“Oh, Father! Really!” Sarah rushed from the room. Only when she was very upset did she call George Rutledge Father rather than Daddy.

Mary did discreetly mention Sarah’s lack of a date to Nancy Vargas. Carlos did ask Sarah to go with him to the dance, and Sarah accepted with great trepidation. Nancy Vargas confided to Mary that Carlos had wanted to ask Sarah but had been afraid she would refuse him and even laugh at him. Sarah was self-conscious dancing with Carlos, who was even shorter than most of the other boys in their class, but they had found it easy to talk with one another. Carlos made her laugh. She felt almost happy with him; and when the other boys left their dates and moved off together to the back of the gymnasium, Carlos stayed by her side.

Sarah was sitting cross-legged on her bed studying the assignment for her history class when her mother called her from the hall and asked her to join her parents in the parlor. They almost never gathered as a family in the parlor unless they were entertaining guests. They often lingered around the dining table after supper and discussed the day’s events and later would move to the back patio where the soft velvet blackness of the tropical night caressed them while they talked about things far removed from Nicaragua in time and space. Sarah wondered if she were in trouble, if she’d unknowingly broken some parental rule; but when she saw her father’s anguished face, she knew that something was terribly wrong. Her mother’s face rarely revealed anything. Mary Rutledge appeared most placid and serene when she was most troubled or frustrated unless she was angry; but as Sarah saw her father glance back and forth at her mother, she knew that the problem concerned her mother.

“Sarah, we have something very serious to discuss with you.” Mary Rutledge’s voice, which sometimes betrayed her true emotions, was as calm and tranquil as her face.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Oh no, dearest. Your father and I have decided that you need to know something about me.”

Sarah wondered in her first panicked thought whether her mother might want to divorce her father and return to North Carolina to live; and she immediately resolved to stay and live with her father in Nicaragua if that should prove to be true.

“What is it? Please tell me.”

“You remember that I made a rather sudden trip to North Carolina a few months ago.”

Her mother’s impulsive trip to North Carolina had puzzled Sarah. As she recalled its out-of-character nature from her mother’s meticulously planned routine, Sarah felt certain that her mother was leaving her father. Sarah nodded. “Un-huh.” She wished her face could conceal her emotions as easily as her mother’s did.

“I went to see some doctors. I went to Duke, because they’re the best. The doctors here suspected something was wrong, but they didn’t realize I had cancer. It’s very bad.” Mary Rutledge’s tranquil face suddenly shattered like a rare crystal vase filled with water that has fallen to the floor and broken into scores of pieces.

“Mary.”

“Mother!”

George and Sarah moved simultaneously to each side of Mary’s chair and held her in their arms between them. George’s face also flooded with tears, but Sarah was too stunned to cry. Then Mary dabbed her face with one of the handkerchiefs she always kept under her belt or in a pocket of her dress; and her face was restored to its perfect serenity, as if time were reversed and a broken vase came back together in unblemished wholeness.

“Now, my dears, sit back down. We have a lot to talk about.” George and Sarah obeyed Mary, as they always did. “I was given some medicine that helps with the pain. I may have to return to Duke for a further palliative regime, but I’m not going to have chemo or radiation. Your father and I have discussed this.”

“Mary, there’s still time . . .”

Mary Rutledge held up her hand. “There may not be that much time, my dear. The cancer is very advanced. We’ll review the situation as we go along and make whatever adjustments . . . seem appropriate. But, yes, dearest George, there is still time; and I want to spend it here with the two people I love most in all the world, in the home I love, and with other people . . . whom I care about very deeply.”

Now Sarah’s tears began to flow at last, too; and she and her father rushed back to the arms of Mary’s chair and cuddled her like an infant, as if they were her parents, not her husband and her child. This time Mary indulged them and didn’t push them away for a much longer time but finally patted them gently back in the direction of their chairs.

“There’s one more thing. I’ve made your father promise to fix up the workers’ houses in the village. You know how it’s bothered me, and I want to move the family of the little boy who was shot up to the village and give his mother a job in the factory. Your father and I have agreed to all this. I hope you’ll help him, Sarah, even if you have to give up certain things for yourself to pay for it.”

“Of course, Mother.”

“You know I’ll carry out your intentions to the fullest . . . but . . .” George hesitated like a little boy who knew he shouldn’t mention such things but couldn’t help himself. “. . . when the time comes, do you want your final resting place to be in your family’s plot in Burlington? Do you think they’d allow me to be . . .” He could not say the word buried “. . . with you there, too? You’d need to discuss it with them before . . .”

“No, my dear. I want to be buried here in Nicaragua. Here on the finca, out on the cliff, beyond the garden, on the other side of the forest. This is my home. This is the place I love. I think it’s ridiculous to be taken back to the States like your parents or to England like your grandparents. Don’t you think this is the place we belong, George, after all these years?”

“I do, Mary. I do indeed with all my heart. Thank you.”

“Please stop talking about all this! I don’t want to hear any more about all these things right now. Please! Please! Please!”

“Of course, Susi.” Sarah’s father reached out his arms to her, but she ran to her mother.

“Come here.”

Sarah curled up in her mother’s lap like a child that had grown as large as the parent but needed to be a baby again. Mary stroked Sarah’s hair, and Mary’s face was as peaceful and even as joyful as if they had just shared some wonderfully blissful experience together.

Mary Rutledge lived less than three months after Sarah learned about her mother’s cancer. Mary didn’t appear to be in significant pain, although with her calm, stoic demeanor it was difficult to discern her true physical suffering. Although Sarah had usually preferred her father’s company in the past, during those months she enjoyed talking and sharing drives in the car and baking bread and cakes and sewing clothes with her mother, as if they were meeting as new friends for the first time. They often laughed together. Sarah accompanied her mother to the village several times every week to survey plans for improving the workers’ houses. They often stopped to visit with Blanca, the mother of the little boy who had been shot.

George Rutledge worked in the garden with Martín for longer hours than he’d ever done before. He never sat with Sarah on the back patio after supper while Mary and Flora put away the food and tidied the kitchen as they’d often done in the past, as if his pain were greater than his wife’s and it was too much to inflict on Sarah.

Mary Rutledge died on a Wednesday afternoon while Sarah was at school, as if she’d planned the moment of her demise to spare Sarah the agony of her final hours. Sarah couldn’t remember who the people were from the hoards that came to Quinta Louisa and to the funeral at St. Francis Episcopal Church and couldn’t recall what they’d said to her. She did remember Doña Beatriz Chulteco and Carlos Vargas Allen’s mother because they didn’t try to talk to her and say things that would make her feel better. They hugged her in just the right way and released her at just the right time. Father Richard Sims was the only person she could remember talking to her. Even though she couldn’t recall his exact words, she remembered that he’d made her feel, if not better, at least somewhat less terrible. Later she felt comforted as she remembered his gawky appearance and jerky movements when he’d spoken to her.

It was late in the afternoon following the funeral when they lowered Mary Rutledge’s coffin into the hole at the top of the cliff. Martín had arranged for the grave to be dug, and he and some of the workers used ropes to let the coffin down slowly. Sarah thought how remarkably level they kept it with a rhythm that almost seemed like a stately dance. She could see far out across the mountains. The parrots chattered more noisily than usual. She watched a scarlet macaw fly into the trees at the edge of the forest. She wondered if she would ever see a quetzal. Then she thought that someday her father would be buried here beside her mother, and a long time from now she would also be lowered into the earth at the top of the cliff.

Along with the construction on the workers’ houses in the village George Rutledge had a small house built at the back of the garden, so that Martín and Flora would be closer in order to care for Sarah. Pablo lived with them. Guillermo visited several times a week. Julio now worked in Costa Rica and came to Nicaragua only every other month or so. Flora did everything physically for Sarah that her mother had done—preparing her food and fussing at her for not eating properly, arguing about what clothes she should wear to school, waking her up in the mornings and reminding her to go to bed at night, asking her if she’d finished her homework—but Sarah never felt that Flora was like a mother to her in even the slightest way. When Sarah saw Flora embracing Pablo and laughing and talking with him, she remembered what it had been like to have a mother, especially during the last months of Mary Rutledge’s life; and she felt a great weight of sadness enveloping her and had to walk into the forest so that the parrots and other birds would drown out the pulsing beats of her thoughts.

Father Richard Sims steadfastly pursued his plan for organizing a youth group. He had followed Beatriz Chulteco’s suggestion of meeting with the parents of teenagers at the American School in the afternoons after classes were dismissed. A few enthusiastic parents came the first week and fewer returned the second and third weeks, but by the fourth week they realized his intentions were serious, and they brought other parents. After two months of meeting with the teenagers and their parents Father Richard began a Sunday afternoon gathering at St. Francis Church. Only Sarah and a younger girl, not yet a teenager, and a much older boy came. By the second week only the two girls arrived, and by the third week only Sarah appeared. None of the costeño children who attended St. Francis Church for worship on Sunday mornings remained for the youth group, even though Father Richard offered to give them lunch. For a couple of weeks the next month Father Richard tried a weeknight gathering, but only Sarah came, and George told him that it would not be possible for him to drive Sarah regularly from the finca on a weeknight evening.

Then Father Richard gave up his dream of bringing the poorer Nicaraguan children together with expatriate teenagers and relinquished his illusion of having a gathering at St. Francis Church. He began meeting at the American School on Wednesday afternoons with whoever showed up. The half-dozen or so teenagers that came the first month—Sarah was the only consistent member—grew to a group of twelve or fifteen the second month and by the third month reached an average of twenty-five to thirty regular participants that met faithfully every week.

It was neither scintillating discussions nor exciting outings that attracted the students but rather Father Richard’s dogged consistency and dedication to the group, the same qualities that drew Sarah into regular conversations with him after her mother’s death. Unlike other people who gave pat answers and slick euphemisms and polite advice to Sarah, Father Richard’s embarrassed silences and incoherent mutterings and gawky movements seemed to break open Sarah’s own inchoate thoughts and stifled emotions.

Father Richard and Sarah usually met at the American School on Thursday afternoons after classes were dismissed. Sarah knew that the afternoon, like the youth group meeting on Wednesday, took her father away for a longer time from the finca and the construction of the new coffee-processing factory that would grind and package the coffee for export as well as wash and dry the beans like the old plant had done. She felt badly about asking him to stay late on two afternoons a week and for creating difficulty for him, but he never complained. When she mentioned her concern about imposing on his time, he told her that it was all right. “Your happiness and well-being are my major concerns, Susi. What’s the point of the rest of it if I don’t take care of you?”

At the school Father Richard always wore a clerical collar without a coat. Sarah once teased him and asked if he wore his collar to bed. Father Richard blushed deeply and raised his arms in his familiar scarecrow pose and smiled but didn’t reply.

“Do you, uh, think about your mother very often, Sarah?”

His patient silence drew her out, a silence without anxiety, without frustration. The question elicited a string of memories that Sarah related for almost half an hour. She stopped talking only because she was sobbing too greatly to form words.

On another day he asked, “Do you, uh . . . visit your mother’s grave very often, Sarah?”

Sarah began to talk again in an endless stream of words but not about her mother’s grave nor about her feelings related to her mother but rather about listening to the parrots and other birds that she saw in the forest on her way to the cliff and sometimes seeing the squirrel monkeys and iguanas in the trees and how Don Martín had promised her that one day she would encounter the quetzal that she’d never seen. She wondered why she found it easier to talk with Father Richard than with anyone else, even than with her father.

There were only five Episcopal teenagers in the youth group—Sarah and the son and daughter of a British consular officer, who attended only sporadically, and the younger girl and older boy who had come to the very first meeting. The other members of the youth group were the children of American Embassy personnel and children of American business representatives as well as an odd selection of children of evangelical missionaries and children whose parents were Nicaraguans married to foreigners, two Germans, and a few Nicaraguans from wealthy families who sought to emulate gringos. Most of them were Protestants with a few nominal Roman Catholics. The strict Roman Catholic families refused to allow their children to participate.

Sarah was attracted to the muscular German boy and the tall, blonde English boy and hoped that one of them would notice her. Although both of them were almost painfully polite to her, neither of them ever paid any real attention to her. She had no close girl friends. A Nicaraguan girl named Carmen made her laugh and was easy to chat with, but Carmen applied such heavy make-up and wore such tight dresses that Sarah alternately admired and feared her, simultaneously repulsed by her and envious of her. Sarah’s only real friend was Carlos Vargas, the boy who had escorted her to the dance at the end of the previous school year before her mother had died.

“If only he wasn’t so short,” she told herself. Carlos looked more like his Nicaraguan father than his North American mother. His dark face and arms glowed with luminous Indian gold just below the surface, but his shiny black hair, through which he obsessively ran his long thin fingers every few minutes, was curly, not straight like an Indian’s locks. Sarah wondered if somewhere back in his ancestry he had a drop of black, a gota de negro, as the Nicaraguans said, that made the passions smolder and flame.

On one of the youth group outings to the beach at Pocho Mil, Carlos Vargas rode with Sarah in her father’s car along with Carmen and the young English girl whose parents had requested that she ride with George Rutledge. Carmen’s vulgar chatter seemed to be inhibited in the presence of Sarah’s father and the younger English girl. Even Carlos, who was usually easy to talk with, and Sarah herself were self-conscious in the company of her father and Carmen. They drove all the way to the beach in almost complete silence.

After a short swim the girls all sat and lay on towels and sunned themselves while the boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth on the black volcanic sand closer to the edge of the sea. The larger boys bumped against Carlos and knocked him down again and again. Sarah could see the bruises and scrapes on his elbow and a cut running with blood over one knee. She wanted to rush down and tell them to stop picking on Carlos, but she knew her words would bring him more embarrassed pain than his scruffs. She glanced up at Father Richard, but he seemed oblivious or perhaps only helpless to know what to do. Her father walked down behind her from the crude palm covered cabaña where the adult chaperone drivers were seeking shade.

“That Carlos Vargas Allen is a brave lad.” Sarah was aware that her father was teasing her about her reluctance to allow Carlos to escort her to the school dance.

“I know that, Daddy. I know very well what you’re referring to. You don’t have to shame me. He’s become a real friend, but just a friend.”

“He’s more a man than any of them down there.”

“I know that, too. You don’t have to tell me that either, but can’t you do something to stop them picking on him?”

“I’m afraid not, Susi. Things have to run their course.”

Then a thunderstorm blew up suddenly without warning. The adults ran from the cabaña to take shelter in their automobiles, and the teenagers ran to occupy the place of their chaperones in the cabaña. (People unfamiliar with the tropics don’t realize how quickly the temperature can fall from blazing heat to chilling cold, as felt by those whose blood is thin.) Sarah and Carlos found themselves huddled together under a big beach towel apart from the others.

“I thought you played better than anybody else. You wouldn’t take any of their crap, not from anyone.”

Carlos laughed. His voice was deep, especially when he laughed, not like the girlish giggles of some of the other boys. “Watch your language, gringa. You’re just prejudiced because you like me.”

“I do like you, Carlos, very much, but . . .”

“But not as your boyfriend . . . .”

“Just as a friend,” they said together and both laughed again.

“I wish you could . . . Sarah, there’s something I have to tell you. Something very serious.”

“Oh, no! He’s going to tell me he loves me, and it will ruin our friendship,” she thought. “What Carlos?”

“You better start calling me Charles. I have to get used to it. My father is sending me to a military school in the States to finish high school. He thinks I need the discipline, and I believe he’s scared of something happening to me because of all he’s messed up in.”

“Carlos! Charles.” Sarah laughed, but her laughter wasn’t like her laughter before. Now it covered her pain and her sadness. “I can’t get used to that . . . Charles.”

“I know. Me neither.”

“Will we ever see each other again?”

“I’ll be back for vacations, and I’ll come home for good when I finish school. Will you still be here then?”

“Maybe. I might be away at college.”

“Yeah. Me, too. But I mean, are you coming back here to live in Nicaragua?”

Sarah paused. She wanted to be honest, but she wasn’t certain. “Sure, I suppose. Are you?”

“Of course. This is where I belong. I’m a Nicaraguan.”

“You’re half gringo. Your mother is a North American. She was Nancy Allen from Florida before she married your father. That’s why you’re Carlos Vargas Allen.”

“But neither of your parents is Nicaraguan. You’re not half anything, unless you’re half North American and half British. You’d have to choose to be a Nica.”

“I think I’ll choose Nica. I don’t like being a gringa very much.”

“Good. Then we’ll live here together until we’re very old.” Carlos grinned.

“I don’t want you to go away. I’ll miss you so, so much.”

“I know. I don’t want to go away either. I’ll miss you, too, Sarah, more than anything else.”

“Carlos! You’ll always be Carlos to me.”

“I . . .” Carlos never finished his sentence, and they moved closer and hugged each other more tightly under the beach towel. Sarah wondered if maybe she liked Carlos as more than a friend. She wanted to cry, but neither of them cried as they listened to each other’s deep breaths and sighs. They didn’t speak again at the beach, and the sun came back out, and Father Richard walked around the cabaña and told them to pack up their belongings to head back to the church. They rode home in her father’s car sitting side by side on the back seat without ever saying another word to one another.

Although he lived with his parents in the little house that George Rutledge had built for Martín’s family across the garden from Quinta Louisa, Pablo rarely came into the yard. Perhaps he’d internalized Mary Rutledge’s warning to stay out of her garden and feared being haunted by her ghost if he disobeyed her prohibition from beyond the grave. Sarah thought it was more likely that he was too lazy to toil in the dirt with his father and probably also wanted to disassociate himself from peasant labors like his older brother Julio had, at least in his own mind. Flora had always babied him, and she doted on him even more ardently after her two older sons left home. Pablo had nicer clothes than Julio or Guillermo had ever worn as boys. Martín acquiesced to Flora’s indulgences, and Sarah suspected that her father gave them extra money for Pablo partly as an inducement to make them contented in the little house behind the garden away from their friends in the village.

Pablo was even given a boom box that he carried on his shoulder, and he played music so loudly inside his house that it could be heard all the way inside Quinta Louisa. George Rutledge, who found it difficult to reprimand Martín or Flora or any of his workers or his daughter, marched across the garden on at least a half-dozen occasions to tell Pablo to “turn that damned thing down.” Three times that Sarah could remember, Pablo had come up to Quinta Louisa to speak with his mother as he played the boom box on his shoulder and wiggled his hips toward Sarah in a way that made her blush, even though he was only an eleven-year-old boy.

Occasionally Pablo would help his father carry baskets of fruit and vegetables from the garden at Quinta Louisa to their house across the garden with pouty lips and squinted eyes after a threat from Martín. Although Julio came up dutifully from Costa Rica every month or two to visit his parents, Guillermo came every week and spent the day working with Martín in the garden. Late in the afternoon Sarah saw him sitting shirtless on the bench in the middle of the garden, mopping his brow with a bandana, and she walked down to talk with him.

“Doña Sarah!” Guillermo reached for his shirt and tried to cover his chest as if he were embarrassed out of modesty. His torso and arms, like Martín’s, seemed to be molded from brown clay without any definition of the muscles on the surface of his skin, so that his vibrant strength was concealed, also like his father’s.

“Do not doña me, Guillermo. I thought we were friends, equals.”

“Friends, sí . . .” He smiled at her shyly and said with his eyes, “but not equals, never equals.”

Sarah thought that Guillermo was a typical middle child and recalled her mother’s analysis. Julio was the first-born successful son. Pablo was the pampered baby. Guillermo was the reliable, loyal, affectionate middle child, always trying to please and gain favor without calling any undue attention to himself.

“When Daddy and Don Martín are no longer able to manage . . .” Sarah looked away to conceal the tears forming in her eyes. “. . . who is going to help them manage?” Despite trying to control her voice, it cracked. When Sarah looked back at Guillermo, she saw him also wiping his face again with his bandana, this time not to dry sweat but the tears that echoed Sarah’s. “Of course Daddy was grooming Julio after he had no son to take over.” Sarah looked back and smiled at Guillermo who mirrored her smile discreetly. “But we know that is never going to happen.” They both began to laugh.

“You know I am going to be here and am going to do what I can.”

“Will you, Guillermo? Will you really? If I am . . . if I am left here alone will you help me?”

“Of course. You know so. Of course so.”

“You are more like a brother to me than . . . well, than anyone else; and if that doesn’t make us equals . . . Shit! ¡Caramba! I don’t know what would . . .”

“Watch your mouth!” Suddenly Guillermo looked stern and paternal and sounded almost like his father, like Don Martín, when he reprimanded her.

During Mary Rutledge’s terminal illness and after her death George had relinquished his custom of sitting on the back patio with Sarah after supper, as he had abandoned several other rituals that he’d shared with his wife and daughter during Mary’s final illness before she died. Sarah assiduously maintained the familiar traditions, almost obsessively, as if not observing them every day would cause her to forget her mother. Gradually George’s pain brought on by remembering and Sarah’s fear of forgetting abated as they lived through the first stages of their fresh grief; and they came together again, adapting old practices and inventing new ways to be together.

The fronds of the tall palm trees that lined the perimeter of the garden looked almost black in the moonlight, and the gentle breeze rustled them with quiet, soothing sounds that allowed George and Sarah to sit quietly together in silence or to talk to each other comfortably, without any repressed feelings of guilt.

“Daddy, are you going to send Pablo to school like you did Julio and Guillermo?”

“I don’t think so, Susi. He’s a poor student. I don’t know whether he doesn’t have the intellectual ability or just won’t apply himself. In any case I’m not inclined to waste my money for no good reason.”

“I think that’s a mistake.”

“Why?”

“If you did it for the others, you should do it for him. You ought to treat them all alike.”

“I might pay for him to go to a technical school, but not the colegio.”

“You really should consider doing the same for him as for Julio and Guillermo. You let Guillermo go to the advanced technical institute after he finished the colegio.”

“The primary technical school is good enough for Pablo. He wouldn’t achieve anything attending the colegio. He’s not my son. If they were my children, I’d try to treat them equally; but I have no obligation to help him. The money I spend on their education is as much for the country as for them personally—to provide needed skills and future leadership.”

Sarah sighed. “He is something of a rebel.”

“Something! With those ridiculous clothes, that attitude, his infernal loud music . . .”

Sarah reached over and clasped her father’s hand. It would have been a familiar gesture if he had reached for her hand; it was as if they were reversing roles of parent and child. “Pablo has lots of spirit. He may do something remarkable one day.”

“Maybe so. Maybe so. But not on my shilling.”

In late October just after the peak of the rainy season Sarah and her father were sitting together on the back veranda when she noticed a red glow in the sky to the northeast.

“What’s happening, Daddy? It surely can’t be a forest fire with everything so wet from the rains.”

“I don’t know. It’s rather peculiar. Maybe it’s some strange meteorological phenomenon.”

The following day at school Sarah learned that the volcano Cerro Negro was erupting. Later she heard that several villages near León had to be evacuated; and as the winds blew over León, ashes piled up in layers over houses and automobiles in the city.

On several evenings some of Sarah’s friends drove toward León to see the fiery boulders and lava hurled into the night sky, and Sarah pleaded with her father to let her ride along with them. George Rutledge adamantly refused to allow his daughter to put herself into such danger.

Finally one night her father agreed to drive her closer to the eruption himself, but only as far as he deemed an appropriately safe distance. He didn’t trust the judgment of teenagers’ daring recklessness.

“It should be a good experience for you to see such an event of Nature. You may never be able to see anything like it again.”

When Martín heard about their plans, he went around the entire afternoon wringing his hands and muttering, “Take care. Be very careful. You must not go too close to the vomit of the gods.”

George Rutledge stopped the car several kilometers farther away from Cerro Negro than what his careful inquiries over several days had informed him was a safe distance and even farther away from it than Sarah’s friends had driven; but Sarah still shuddered when each explosion rumbled, causing the old Austin to vibrate. She thought that the fire in the sky was the most beautiful and most terrible thing she’d ever seen.

On the drive home her father was silent and seemed morose. Just before they left the main highway to take the steep, winding road to Quinta Louisa, George Rutledge began speaking in a soft monotone, as if he’d forgotten that she was sitting beside him and was musing alone to himself.

“This is a violent land. I wonder whether it will be destroyed by Nature or by its people when their anger is unleashed.”

“Daddy?”

“Oh, Susi!” Her father turned toward her as if he’d been suddenly reminded that she was with him in the car. “I’m so sorry. I was just thinking out loud.”

“That’s all right. Thanks for taking me tonight.” Sarah started to say something else and ask her father why he was sad. She thought that he’d descended into a moment of anguished mourning for her mother, as he often seemed to do briefly before he recovered his usual placid, positive demeanor; but this time he didn’t emerge from his dismal funk.

Sarah wanted to say something more to him, but she didn’t know what to say. She looked over at him and smiled; but he glanced away out the side window of the car turning away from her, as if he were afraid of her seeing something in him that he’d divined from the fire of Cerro Negro.

Sarah continued her private conversations with Father Richard Sims almost every week and continued participating every week in the youth group that he led, but it didn’t seem the same after Carlos Vargas left. She’d hoped to see Carlos during his school’s summer vacation and at Christmas, but his family had almost always visited his mother’s family in Florida for Christmas, and they continued to do so after Carlos was in the military school. His mother spent more and more time in the United States, especially during his summer vacation, as if she were trying to keep him away from Nicaragua. Some of Sarah’s Nicaraguan classmates whispered that Carlos’s father was more and more involved with the Sandinistas. Perhaps Carlos’s mother wanted to shield him from danger or from humiliation if his father was imprisoned by Tachito or suffered an even worse fate. As Sarah advanced through her final years of high school she thought of Carlos, like her mother, as someone cherished in memory and affection that she would never see again.

One evening near the end of her senior year Sarah and George Rutledge were sitting side by side on the back patio as they usually did after supper, looking at the garden beneath the blazing stars after the moon had set. Sarah had been accepted at Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina, where her mother had gone to school and close to some members of her mother’s family. She wasn’t sure whether her anxiety was induced more by her fear of living in what was to her a foreign land or her concern about leaving her father alone here in Nicaragua.

“Do you think I’ll like it up there, Daddy? Do you think I’ll fit in?”

“Of course you will. Your mother reveled in her college years at Elon. That’s where we met, you know.” Sarah knew very well. She’d heard the story recounted many times, but she didn’t speak because she knew her father wanted to tell her again; and even if she had objected, he would have gone on narrating his memories.

“I was asked to speak at a forum about Central America at Elon. I’d just graduated from Duke, and Mary was a senior. From the first time I saw her, I knew she was the woman I wanted to marry.

Then George Rutledge continued with a long monologue about things Sarah had never heard before, perhaps things her father had never said aloud before. “I was so worried about how Mary would fit in down here, like you’re worrying about fitting in up there in North Carolina, I suppose. But she was at home from the moment she got here. Not that she ever went native. Mary was always a North Carolina belle, as Beatriz Chulteco so often reminds us, to the day she . . . left us. She always saw people down here as a reflection of North Carolina castes and classes, blacks and whites, cotton mill workers and old Southern families. But still, she was different from my mother and my grandmother. Mother never really left North Carolina. She was sort of a perpetual visitor in Nicaragua, and my grandmother . . . well, Louisa was a whole other story. She tried to make everything she touched in Nicaragua British, from the furniture to the servants to the coffee finca workers, even to the garden. You’ve heard how she tried to plant an English rose garden.”

“I’ve heard Don Martín laugh about it.” Sarah chuckled at the story, especially the way Martín told it.

“Yes, just ask Martín about la Dueña Louisa. He was just a little boy, but he never forgot . . . Mary was different. Mary felt a kinship with this country, with the people, with the finca, with the birds, damn it all, even with the volcanoes. That’s why she wanted to be buried here, I suppose. She belonged . . .” George’s voice broke, and he sobbed.

“Daddy, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, of course. You know, of all the things I’ve done in my life, what I’m most proud of is what we did in the village for the workers . . . the potable water, the electricity, the renovation of their houses, even moving Blanca’s family here. That was all Mary. That was her idea. Her passion. I only wish she could have lived to see it completed.”

“I’m very proud of both of you. You know that.”

“I know, Susi. I’ll miss you very much, but I want you to have a wonderful time in college, as I did, as your mother did.”

“I will, Daddy; and I’ll miss you very much, too. You know that.”

“I hope you’ll come back someday . . . to live; but if you find your place in North Carolina or somewhere else in the States or somewhere else entirely, that’s all right. You have to find your place where life takes you.”

“Of course I’m coming back to Nicaragua. This is my home. This is where I belong.”

Flora died in the middle of the night from a fever, perhaps typhoid, and Martín came to the front door of Quinta Louisa tapping softly and then speaking apologetically for waking them so late at night to tell them that his wife had passed away and asking helplessly like a little boy what he should do. Martín had always known what to do and told them what must be done at such times and so George Rutledge was flummoxed at first by his queries. George and Sarah had both noticed at odd moments over the past several days that Flora didn’t seem to be feeling well, but they were so preoccupied with their own concerns that they were distracted from inquiring seriously about her health; and Martín and Flora had not wanted to burden the father and daughter for whom they worked with their problems and pain.

The next day Martín had asked George Rutledge if he could bury his wife atop the cliff beyond the forest close to Mary Rutledge’s grave, rather than in the village cemetery beside the little church.

“Of course. Of course you can, my good man. Where we will all be together someday.” It was one of the few times that Sarah had seen her father weep openly in Don Martín’s presence, and she wished that he would reach out and embrace Don Martín, but they never touched, not even their hands.

On the third day they buried Flora at the top of the cliff. The workers from the finca carried her casket though the forest, just as they had carried Mary Rutledge’s casket; and all the people from the village followed them. Father Richard Sims helped them with the service at the grave. They couldn’t find a Roman Catholic priest who was willing to come up from Managua for a campsina’s funeral. George said the Catholic priests couldn’t be blamed; it was estimated that there was only one Roman Catholic priest for every ten thousand of the faithful in Nicaragua. The people from the village and Martín and Guillermo and Julio and his wife and children seemed touched and grateful for Father Richard’s words and prayers in broken Spanish; but Pablo ran screaming back through the forest before the service was finished.

“Mamí! Mamí! Do not let that foreign devil priest take you away!”

For the first time in her life Sarah felt a loving tenderness for Pablo and wanted to take him in her arms and comfort him like a little brother, but she remained standing beside the grave as if some force beyond her control anchored her there while the women from the village chased after Pablo through the forest.