Читать книгу The Journal of Antonia Montoya - Rick Collignon - Страница 8

IT RAINED THE DAY LORETTA and José were buried. The sky the day before had gradually become streaked with white, and in the night the wind had stopped and the clouds had become thick and heavy and had banked up against the mountains. At dawn the day of the burial, rain had begun to fall lightly. A gift to his pastures, Flavio had thought. But by mid-morning the clouds had fallen to the base of the hills in shrouds, and the air had become water.

Loretta and José lay in their caskets in the mud at the edges of the two graves that had been dug side by side the previous day, when the earth had been hard and dry. Now the sound of the rain on the wood was so loud that Ramona had trouble making out the words of the priest. He spoke with his head bent, which made it worse, and it seemed to her as if he were mumbling on purpose.

The road leading up the hill to the cemetery was so slick that before leaving the church, they removed Loretta and José from the back of Father Leonardo’s station wagon and placed them in the bed of Flavio’s truck, where the pine boxes slid and bounced into each other on the ride up. One last time, Ramona thought. At the cemetery the footing was so treacherous that when they unloaded José from the back of the pickup, one of the pallbearers slipped and the casket fell on his foot. The man, a Friday-night compadre of José’s of whom Loretta had never approved, remained to help carry both coffins to the edge of each grave and then limped painfully down the hill and got into his car and sat drinking whiskey by himself, watching how the rain fell. The mourners who remained huddled loosely together, not daring to lower the caskets into the holes for fear that the wet wood might slip on the rope, and who knew what would happen then?

Ramona stood in the mud and felt the rain fall upon her bare head and run down the back of her neck. The black dress she wore hung flatly from her hips, the wet fabric pressing against her thighs. Her boots were caked with adobe that had splattered to the hem of her dress. She wrapped her arms around her chest and hunched her shoulders and felt a chill run through her body.

It had been just two days since Ramona’s brother and her brother’s wife had died. Ramona had been washing paintbrushes at her kitchen sink and looking out the small, twisted window at how high the weeds had grown under the cottonwoods when she saw the ambulance pull out quickly from the village office. She wondered who had fallen dead from a bad heart. It wasn’t until an hour later that Flavio’s wife, Martha, called and said, “Your brother, José, is dead, and so is Loretta.”

Since the death of her father, Ramona had made it a practice never to attend funerals. This had been fine when she lived elsewhere, but since her return to Guadalupe, it seemed as if someone were always dying, and if she hadn’t known the deceased, she had known their first cousin or their in-laws or some other relative. The act of ignoring funerals, not to mention marriages, baptisms, and church gatherings, had gradually made people feel as if Ramona Montoya were someone who had moved into their midst from the outside. This was a constant embarrassment to Flavio, who thought it his duty to say good-bye to all of Guadalupe’s dead regardless of how much he disliked them. Once, when Flavio had reprimanded Ramona for not observing community protocol, she had stared at him in stony silence until he left, leaving her alone in the house that had been their grandparents’. He never broached the subject again with his sister, and now a part of him was astonished that she had actually attended the burial of their brother.

Few people had come to the cemetery, and those who had stood about as miserably as Ramona. No one had thought to bring an umbrella. In fact, no one in Guadalupe owned an umbrella. When it rained, you stayed inside. No one was foolish enough to go outside and stand in it.

Father Leonardo finished speaking and laid his hands on the lids of both coffins. He raised his head and smiled and asked if anyone wished to speak. Flavio raised his hand slowly as if he were still in school, and when the priest nodded, he said, “My brother would not want us to catch pneumonia.” After he spoke, Flavio thought that he really didn’t know what his brother would have wanted, and in all honesty, if anyone were foolish enough to stand stupidly in the rain, it possibly would have been José.

Father Leonardo nodded and said, “Es verdad, Flavio.” He stretched out his arms and blessed the small gathering one last time and then turned and walked away quickly. Ramona followed the line of people, and after a few steps, she took a moment to glance over her shoulder at where the coffins sat. She felt her body turn to ice. She felt as if her heart had stopped and there was no more breath in her body. Loretta was sitting up in her casket, her blouse wet and molded to her breasts. Her head was cocked a little bit, and she was running her fingers through her hair, threading out the rain.

“It is not a very good day to be buried, Ramona,” she said. “In the mud. I hate the mud. How your brother would track it through the house like he was blind. Always making a mess.” Loretta shook her head, and Ramona could see drops of water fly from her black hair.

“Loretta,” Ramona said.

“Ramona,” Loretta said, “I have something to ask of you.”

“Loretta,” Ramona said again, although she wasn’t sure she spoke aloud.

Loretta dropped her hands down to where her lap would be. She leaned her body toward Ramona. “Ramona,” she said, “I want you to take little José. I don’t want him to be with my family. And I don’t want him to be with Flavio and Martha. I want you to take him, Ramona. Do this for me.”

“Loretta,” Ramona said again, “You shouldn’t be talking to me.”

Loretta smiled, and Ramona could see her youth. “What should I be doing, Ramona?”

Behind Ramona, Flavio had climbed into his truck. He rubbed his hands together, thinking no one should feel this cold in August. He looked out the windshield at his sister. She was turned away from him so that all he could see was the back of her body. He could see her head move slightly every so often, and he wondered what she was doing still standing in the rain. He turned the key in the ignition and flipped on the heater switch. He wished Ramona would hurry so he could get home and drink a cup of coffee and smoke some cigarettes.

Ramona did not know what to say to Loretta. She could hear the engine of Flavio’s truck turn and then start. She thought that this conversation with her sister-in-law had gone on long enough. “I must go,” she said.

“Promise me,” Loretta said, still with a smile.

“I’m not a young woman,” Ramona said. The ice that had gripped her body had receded, but now she could feel the dampness of her clothes against her skin, a warm feeling in her head like a fever. Even the thought of a seven-year-old boy made her feel like there was no blood in her body.

Loretta waved her hand gently at her and shook her head. “I don’t want to sit in the rain forever, Ramona.” And when Ramona didn’t answer, Loretta said, “Thank you.” She lay back down in her casket, letting her body fall softly.

“Loretta,” Ramona whispered.

Loretta raised her head above the edge of the pine box. “Yes, Ramona.”

“I don’t understand any of this.”

Loretta made a slight shrugging motion. “How could you, Ramona?” she said. “You will get sick standing in the rain.”

Ramona and Flavio drove from the cemetery in silence, not speaking even when the truck slid out of the ruts going down the steep hill and Flavio had to take his foot off the brake and pray the vehicle would pull back. When they made it safely to the highway, Flavio breathed a sigh of relief and glanced at his sister. Ramona was staring out her side window, watching the rain run like a small creek down the side of the road. Flavio looked back out the windshield. He wondered how he could have a sister so different from himself. Between them, even “good morning” seemed difficult. He thought of his brother and Loretta and then of how he would have to go to their trailer soon and board up the windows and shut off the gas and empty the refrigerator before things began to spoil. The idea of cleaning out the food from his brother’s house made Flavio feel sadder than he had at the news of their deaths.

Ramona leaned against the door on her side of the truck with her cheek pressed against the damp glass. She stared blankly out the window and felt the heater splay hot air on her knees. She sat there feeling tired and empty and old.

Ramona remembered when her mother had died of a strange illness that had caused her arms and legs to go numb, a numbness that spread rapidly to her heart. Ramona had stood in the Guadalupe graveyard and looked at her grieving father and her brother Flavio, who was eleven with the mind of a tree, and at her baby brother, José, who although three years old could only walk backward. Ramona, at nineteen, could suddenly see the rest of her life. That night she packed a small suitcase, and the following morning, she left town on the bus that stopped every day at Felix’s Café. Thirteen years later, after the death of her grandfather, Ramona had returned to Guadalupe on what she could swear was the same bus.

Flavio pulled off the highway just past Felix’s Café and turned onto a gravel road that followed the creek as it wound through the valley. He drove past his fields and saw how green the alfalfa had become with just the morning rain. He hoped it would rain forever, or at least until it was time for him to cut the fields one last time before autumn. After a mile or so, he turned off the road onto his drive, long and narrow and thickly lined with apple trees.

The house had been their father’s, and it was where Flavio and Ramona and José Sr. had spent their childhood. Their father had built it with his own hands early in his marriage. After his death, Flavio had waited a brief time and then moved into the house, giving his brother a great deal of the furniture and a beige cast-iron cookstove that at this moment was rusting in the rain behind José’s trailer. To Ramona, he had given their mother’s wedding ring and the chickens and turkeys that had lived in a shed behind the house.

After the death of their mother and after Ramona’s departure from Guadalupe, their father, who had always liked the taste of whiskey, began drinking in earnest. Blessed with a strong body and a mind that stayed calm even on windy days, he was able to consume vast amounts of alcohol and still hold his job at the copper mine. Flavio remembered his father during those years in much the way that one remembers a wall. Five years after Ramona returned to Guadalupe, their father dropped dead in Tito’s bar one afternoon while reaching into his pocket for change. The medical examiner in Las Sombras told Ramona and Flavio and José Sr. that their father’s heart had shrunk to the size of a large marble and was the color of old snow. The burial of her father eight years ago was the last funeral Ramona had attended, and at least, Ramona thought, her father had had the decency not to sit up in his coffin and converse with her.

The wake for Loretta and José was being held at the home of Loretta’s parents, so the only vehicles in Flavio’s drive were his wife’s car and, beside it, Ramona’s pickup. Flavio pulled in next to the truck and parked. He shut off the engine and sat listening to the sound of the rain on the cab. He hoped that the tar he had spread around the base of his stovepipe last spring was keeping out the water. He looked over at Ramona and cleared his throat. When Ramona looked back at him, Flavio could suddenly see that his sister was aging. Lines like feathers branched away from her eyes, and there may have been more gray than black in her hair. Her eyes were red with a darkness below them, and Flavio was reminded of his mother when she would lie ill in bed and hold her arms out to him. She would say softly, “Mi hijo, come here to me.” Flavio suddenly felt sad again, and when Ramona spoke, the sound of her voice startled him.

“Flavio,” she said.

“Yes,” Flavio said too loudly.

“Is little José here, or is he at his abuela’s?”

“José is in the house,” Flavio said. “We’re to go over to Loretta’s family.”

Ramona grunted. She pushed the truck door open, climbed out of the cab, and with long strides walked to the house. Flavio sat in the pickup for a moment watching his sister, and then he got out and trudged after her through the mud.

Flavio’s wife, Martha, was in her kitchen wrapping the tortillas she had made in a warm towel. She had begun cooking the moment she received news of Loretta and José’s death. On the counter about her were platters of enchiladas in a sauce of thick red chile. Stacks of pork tamales that she had wrapped in cornhusks. Posole and menudo and chicharrónes. There was a bowl the size of a basin full to the brim with salsa with so much cilantro in it that it was the first thing Ramona smelled when she entered the house. José was standing at the side of the sink, cutting garlic that Martha would sprinkle over the enchiladas, when Ramona walked into the kitchen.

“Hello Martha,” Ramona said. “Hello José.”

Martha was a small, round woman who was at a loss as to what to say to nearly everyone. She knew she was this way because of her mother, who was also small and round, but who had been born mute and so never said anything to anyone. Martha had adored her sister-in-law, Loretta, for the simple reason that Loretta could talk and talk without any need of a response. When the two of them were together, Martha spoke only to prod Loretta into another long monologue, and then she would go on with what she was doing and listen to her sister-in-law as if the words Loretta spoke were woven with poetry. With Ramona, it was different. Ramona seldom spoke, and the silences that fell between them made Martha constantly uncomfortable in Ramona’s presence. Oddly enough, Ramona had always admired Martha and often wondered how her brother had come to marry a wife who cooked so well and kept the house neat and was never angry. When Martha saw Ramona enter the kitchen, she prayed that her husband would come soon.

“It rained,” Martha said, laying more tortillas on a towel.

“Yes,” Ramona said. “The mud was everywhere.” José had stopped what he was doing and was staring at her. Ramona could see Loretta’s wide eyes in his face and the darkness of his skin that had come from the Montoyas. “José,” she said softly, reaching out to touch his shoulder, “please go get your coat.” When he had left the room, she turned to Martha.

“Loretta spoke with me once, and she told me that if anything ever happened to her and my brother, I was to take little José.”

Martha turned to Ramona and felt that her mouth had opened. She closed it and tried to smile. She heard the front door open and the sound of her husband’s boots coming toward the kitchen.

Flavio walked through the living room and came a few steps into the kitchen. “Flavio,” Martha said, “Ramona is here.”

“Of course Ramona is here,” he said. “She came with me.” He felt awkward and irritable. He wished his sister would leave so he could feel comfortable in his own house. “Are you ready to go?” he asked his wife. “Yes,” Martha said, “in a moment,” and she went to the stove and took two towels from the oven that she had placed there to warm. She went back to the counter and draped the towels over the three stacks of tortillas.

“José,” Flavio yelled. “Get your coat. It is almost time to go.”

“Are his things here?” Ramona asked her sister-in-law.

Martha realized there were two different conversations going on among three people about the same thing. She thought, not for the first time, how fortunate her mother was merely to listen good-naturedly and not be placed in such positions.

“There’s a bag in the living room,” Martha said to Ramona. “Everything else is still in the trailer.”

Ramona turned her head toward Flavio. “Maybe tomorrow you can bring the rest of his things.”

Flavio had no idea what his sister was talking about. It wasn’t until the front door closed a few minutes later that his wife told him Ramona had taken little José.

Neither Ramona nor José said a word as Ramona drove back to her house. José watched the rain and thought of the time when he was very little and had been outside his house during a lightning storm. His father had burst from the trailer and had grabbed him roughly around the waist and carried him inside. When his father put him down, he hit José hard on the butt and, with his face twisted in anger and fear, told his son to never again be outside during a lightning storm. There was evil in it. It would mess around all day up high, but when you weren’t looking—and here his father had slashed his hand through the air between them—it would strike as quickly as the snakes at the river and boil the blood in your body. José’s father had stood there breathing hard, and then he took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it. He let the smoke out of his lungs slowly and then reached down and touched his son’s arm. “Let’s me and you have a soda, José,” he had said. “We can watch the storm from inside.”

When Ramona turned off the dirt road onto the highway, José began to cry silently. Ramona looked at him out of the corner of her eye and thought that this had been a foolish idea. She should turn the truck around and return José to Flavio and Martha, who would care for him properly. Maybe it was true that Loretta had come back from the grave to ask a favor of Ramona, but it wasn’t necessarily true that just because Loretta was dead, she knew any better.

Ramona drove through town and took the road behind the village office and pulled up to the front of her house. She shut off the engine and looked at her nephew. She would feed José some lunch, and then she would see. José looked over at her, and Ramona reached out her hand and brushed lightly at his hair.

“Let’s go inside, José,” she said. “We’ll have some lunch and drink something warm.”

The two of them climbed out of the truck. A slight breeze blew, and the water from the cottonwoods fell on them in large fat drops. Before they reached the house, the front door swung open and Ramona’s grandfather, Epolito Montoya, who had been dead for thirteen years, stood in the doorway. “Why are you out in the rain?” he said.