The Sky Below (34 page)

I took a deep breath, surveying the land around us, the roads, the roofs, the mountain. The chickens milled around the coop yard, their feathery bodies soft dots of moving color. The new tin roof shone bright as a sword in the day's last light. “It's pretty here,” I said. I squinted at the horizon, trying to see over the mountain and all the way back to New York. See who was in Sarah's old house, in my old apartment. See whether Janos was alone in his, or if someone else was there with him, suitably therapeutized and snug, tripping into the atrium to give the Tweeties a special organic treat. I sighed. My lump ached: phantom old life pain.

“He didn't come here,” said Julia. “Not here.”

“He didn't?”

“No. You did.”

“Why?”

“To meet me. To give me my books.” She smiled. “Have you been reading them?”

“Yes. I read all of them. I'm going to start over tomorrow.”

“Okay. Where do you think he went?” It was a bittersweet moment, as these things always are—one era ending, and another, which seemed limitless, just beginning. I flapped my
wings, proud of my strength in them. Maybe Julia had dreamed them, too.

Julia frowned. “Stranger, don't ask me that.”

A silence fell. Left eye, right eye. Which one was more real? It was a choice you made. If I closed my left eye, the massive church in Ixtlan shifted to the right. If I closed my right eye, the massive church shifted to the left. Unseen, unseeable, was the pendulum arc between the two.

I hesitated, then said, “You know, you're not going to be able to call me that much longer.”

Julia giggled, putting a hand over her mouth. “I know!” she said between her fingers. “Ha!”

 

I remember the day before the naming ceremony. It was dry, hot, and the wind was strong. Whenever the wind stopped blowing, the full force of the sun came down on us like a heavy weight. We were all very chatty in the tree, like kids about to be released from school for summer vacation. We bounced on our branches and ate all the cookies before lunch. It was crowded—a few new pilgrims had turned up at the ex-convento and were learning the ropes.

“Tell,” teased Malcolm X from her perch near the top of the tree. “Come on. You can trust us.”

“No way.” I fingered the piece of paper in my pocket. “It's bad luck.”

Julia clambered up a few branches past me and sat down. “We're not telling.”

I could feel the particularly pointy length of bark that had become so familiar, but also rather dear, poking at the back of my knee. A breeze ruffled my wings, but my balance was unshakable. I tapped Jabalí's shoulder with my foot. “What's Julia's present going to be?”

“Hmmm,” he said noncommittally, as if there wasn't one, but I and everyone else in the tree, except Julia, knew that a
tortoiseshell kitten was pouncing around in Jabalí's room on the second floor, with a red ribbon around her neck. Just that morning, Helena had been feeding her bits of tuna and purring at her.

One of the new people, a Chinese-American poet who talked as fast as an auctioneer, said, “So when is CNN coming?”

“When the time is right,” said Jabalí. “Listen to the wind.”

“Oh,” said the poet, clearly confused. She turned gingerly to rest her back against the trunk of the tree, looking uncomfortable in her unwieldy papier-máché tree-frog hands and feet. Green wasn't a good color for her, either.

I laughed, because explaining the logic of it all was so difficult, and somehow beside the point. Malcolm X playfully winged a twig at my head. That roaring wind, as if it were laughing as well, roared around the tree, rustling the branches and shaking the leaves. Above me, Julia, giggling, stood up on her branch and hopped a hopping dance. I had just opened my mouth to say “Sit down,” but it was too late.

The wind of Ixtlan had already taken her. She was already falling.

I reached out for her as she fell past me, grabbing for her shoulder, her hair, her ankle, as her body twisted in the air, the wind turning her head-first toward the ground, her small feet toward the sky. I cried out, opened my wings, and with a great push I flew down after her. My shoulders opened. My arms extended, fingers stretched, the air lifting my chest, my neck. I kicked my feet like a swimmer, pushed down as hard as I could with both my arms. The wind pushed back, lifted me, held me. I hovered. I pushed down hard again, nearly cracking my elbows, diving down through the air, so close to Julia as she fell that I could feel her breath on my face, see her smile at me, certain that I would catch her.

I half closed the fan of my wings to plunge ahead of her. I
reached. She grabbed at one of my wings, smile fading, eyes squinched shut. I almost got her elbow, but she was falling too fast for me, and she hit the ground with a terrible sound. A wind gust carried me up again. I had to fight my way down, pressing my shoulder blades tightly together to make my wings flat and still. I hit the ground hard. Kneeling next to her, I knew that she was dead. Her head was tilted at an unnatural angle in the dirt, and her eyes were open, sightless. The polyester moth wings, light as a kite, were broken underneath her. There was a mosquito bite on her small knee, and at the sight of it I began to cry helplessly. I closed her eyes. I brushed a strand of hair off her forehead.

The tree was making a great noise. “Call 911!” I heard the fast-talking poet say. I couldn't look up. I couldn't bear to see Jabalí's face in his monkey mask as he climbed down from the tree, branch by branch by branch.

 

We gathered sticks. Young and old, large and small, we wandered through the forest by the river. The adults looked for sticks at least five feet long; the children gathered kindling. Javier, the dark-eyed boy who had chased Julia in her Communion veil, ran back and forth like a sheepdog, urging the other kids forward and tossing the useless twigs out of their hands. I walked with Jabalí, who was pushing a wheelbarrow already filled with long sticks. Overnight, all the air had gone out of him. He'd taken everything out of his hair and tied it into a shapeless gray knot. He wore jeans and a faded green'T-shirt and he looked old. The wheelbarrow squeaked as it bumped along over the rough earth. Otherwise, it was completely quiet except for the sounds of our footsteps, the crack of a stick now and then as it was broken in half.

Bending down and standing up again, I gathered my share. You had to learn to look at the ground in a certain way, scanning for good ones. A really good one was two inches in
diameter, not much more, free of fungus, relatively unbuggy. You stripped the leaves before tossing it in the wheelbarrow; leaves don't burn well, as Caroline had taught me long ago. Malcolm X kept glancing back. I raised my hand to say it was okay, I had the old man with me.

Ahead of us, everyone from the ex-convento, along with a fair number of people from the one-road town, dotted the forest, and they looked like a crowd of people anywhere: in a bus station, at a movie, at a highway rest stop. They roamed forward, bending down here and there. The local butcher had a wheelbarrow. So did Xolotl. And Helena, walking beside her two tall sons in their soccer jerseys. The fast-talking poet had one. Slowly, the wheelbarrows filled with sticks. When they landed on the pile they made a clacking sound.

Jabalí stopped walking, the wheelbarrow handles in his hands. The squeak stilled. He looked confused. I took the handles from him. “Come on,” I said, pushing the wheelbarrow forward. “Come with me.”

 

I remember Julia. That isn't her real name, of course.

 

We took the sticks we had gathered to a clearing, a flat piece of ground upriver. We set the wheelbarrows down. There were perhaps a dozen old piles of ash in the clearing, each one ever so slightly different from the others: a bit taller, or a bit more scattered, or more dense. Tiny pieces of metal gleamed from some of the piles; in one, the thumb of a mitten was visible; in another, what looked like the corner of a photograph. Otherwise, the piles of ash concealed what lay inside. They were mounds, and on top of each mound was a rock.

How furious he must have been with Marie, I thought, not to build her a house like one of these, but to burn her in her own bed. He didn't look furious now; in fact, he had no expression at all. The face beneath his face seemed to have washed
away. Once all the sticks were unloaded from the wheelbarrows, a small group huddled around them, talking softly. The kids waded in the river. Malcolm X took out a pocket knife and cut forks into four green, fairly thick branches, cracking the forks open with her hands and cutting the stem of each branch down until it was about a foot tall. Measuring out a rectangular area with her foot, she stuck a forked stick into each of the four corners of the rectangle, plunging it deep into the sandy riverbank. Another group followed with sticks, and I followed them, taking the sticks they gave back and handing them others. Before too long, they had built a narrow platform by weaving the sticks together. The kids rushed back from the river to shove twigs and dry leaves under the platform, filling the space beneath it. The kids weren't crying, but they weren't laughing and talking in their usual way. They were quiet, but sometimes they pushed and jostled irritably, getting in each other's way, as if it mattered who put which leaf where.

We built a very small house around the platform. It was about four and a half feet tall, two layers thick, and it was composed of sticks pushed as close together as possible to make the walls. The roof was a mix of old newspaper and dry palapa, held down with fist-sized stones. The house wouldn't have held up to so much as a rainstorm, but then again it didn't have to. I felt a tightening in my chest.

Jabalí walked all the way around the house, and then he nodded. Malcolm X glanced at the house and nodded as well.

We walked in a long, straggling line back up to the dining hall. A few of the local women were waiting for us. There was cold soup, bread, and water on the long dining table. We ate in silence. After dinner, we all walked into the main church with them and sat in the pews. The local women sang. I watched the candles burn.

 

Two days passed. Julia lay in the stone library that had once been an ice house, because it still stayed cool there, set far back
in shade. For the moment, it didn't just look like a catacomb; it was one. During those two days, we fasted and meditated. Jabalí gathered Julia's things. I lay on my bed. Even now, the nodule on the inside of my left thigh didn't hurt. I wished it would. Malcolm X and I sat together in the courtyard. My wings hung on their hooks, empty. The space between them was enormous. On the second night, I pulled my old laundry bag out from under the bed. It smelled like East Seventh Street. I emptied it onto the bedspread and counted the money.

 

I dreamed about Julia. I still do. It is always the same dream: she is coming down to meet me at the gate with the blue flowers twined around it. Her feet are bare, but her hair is neatly twisted in little braids all over her head, each one banded with a small white bow. She is holding the burned clay figure of the man in her hand, and she is smiling.

 

I remember the fire. We carried her down to the riverbank in the middle of the night. The timing wasn't ritual, it was practical: the authorities in the area were willing to look the other way if we had these ceremonies at night, when someone might see a fire from the road, but no tourists would be walking by the river. In three days, Jabalí had shrunk and hardened, like a scar. Xolotl had shorn his hair, leaving an inch of gray stubble. He was exceptionally clean, having scrubbed himself from head to toe. It made my heart ache to look at him. He carried one corner of the shape wrapped in a white sheet; Malcolm X, Javier, and I carried the other three. Javier held his corner tightly with one hand; in his other hand he held a bell. Everyone else walked behind, carrying long, slender lit candles.

When we reached the flat place by the river, we set her down in her house. Gently, Jabalí unfolded the white sheet just to her shoulders. Her young face was regal in repose, like the face of Nefertiti. One by one, people came forward. Helena brought her a tattered doll. Xolotl set a watercolor of the cave near her
small hand. In the watercolor, the cave was verdant, with a homey glow inside. Malcolm X brought eggshells and salt. Jabalí ranged many things around his daughter: her dresses and skirts, a book she had liked, the objects he had cut from his hair, driftwood, a picture of a jumping horse from a magazine. The kids from town, arrayed in suits and dresses with scrubbed faces and smooth hair, brought little notes that they had written and rolled into scrolls, carefully tapping each scroll into the interstices of her bier. One little girl whispered something in Julia's perfect, still ear. I came forward. I put the scrap of paper with my name on it near the subtle white shape of her hand. Underneath her, with the dry leaves and the scrolls from the children, I stuffed all the money, working it into the kindling. And very far back, nearly at the edge of the house, deep in a nest of leaves and paper, I tucked my father's radio. At her feet I put one of the books from the library, a lavishly illustrated one about the universe. I stepped back to join the others.

Xolotl and Jabalí came forward with coffee cans half full of gasoline, and they doused the little stick house with it, sparely and precisely. Javier, who was crying, rang the bell. We each came forward and touched our candles to the house. Of all the things I was asked to do there, carrying that candle two feet and touching it to the stick was by far the most arduous. I didn't think I would survive it. Soon the blaze was unimaginably hot, it smelled, and we had to move far away from it. We clustered by the river. Julia changed from what she had been to something else that rose into the air.

 

No one went back to the tree. If it hadn't been sacred before, it was now. It remained bare, unpeopled. The fast-talking poet and her friends put on their big backpacks and left, stuffing the donation box with money as they went. All the tree-folk costumes went flat, tangled up in a heap in the storeroom: beaks
and frog legs and the squirrel tail and my wings, resting folded in the corner.