The Widower's Tale (6 page)

Countless times I had wondered, as I did on that pink, hazy, tropically warm evening just over a year ago, how Poppy would have handled this daughter differently; if she would have steered Clover to steadier ground--yet not as often as I had wondered what I might have done (or not done) on another, equally sultry summer night to alter whatever simple chain of events had led to Poppy's drowning in the pond.

2

Hombre!"
Tom Loud leaned across the front seat and opened the passenger door.
"Muchos apologias."

Celestino climbed into the cab and nodded at Loud. "Thanks."

"Gil must be a little sunstruck today." Loud tapped his large bronze forehead. As he pulled into the road, he glanced at the purple mailbox and laughed, a grunt. "Elves and Fairies come to roost at Old Man Darling's place. How perfect or what." He cocked his eyebrows at Celestino, as if the two men could share in this vision of justice, whatever it was.

Celestino did not know whether he disliked Loud more because he exploited people or because he, Celestino, was obliged to be grateful that the man had noticed his particular talents and raised him above the other guys in status and pay. This "special treatment" made Celestino more of an outsider than he had already been. Gilberto had not forgotten Celestino because of the sun; he had ditched him, knowingly left him to roast by the side of the road. The Brazilians--and even the Quiche
chapines
, the ones who spoke fluent Spanish--had known he was different from the start. Sometimes he was certain they could sense that he'd had a big advantage and he'd blown it. When Loud had sent him out to work by himself in the spring, he'd been relieved.

Still, Loud was an
hijo de puta
, so to owe him a debt was, equally, to wish him eternal damnation. Now the
hijo de puta
was chattering on, like a parrot, as much to himself as to Celestino, about the threat of water restrictions, the problem of keeping his clients' lawns green without sprinklers. At least he'd abandoned the slopbucket Spanish. Celestino examined the man's soft, fiercely tanned face, greasy with sweat, his thinning yellow hair. The devil would have a fine time with this one.

"You're mighty silent,
hombre,"
said Loud as they entered the train station lot. "Jobs go all right?"

"Yes, everything."

"You plant those hydrangeas today?"

"Yes."

"They'll need the soaker hose. This fucking weather's like Vegas."

Celestino said nothing. He had set the soaker hose, as instructed. Of course he had. He had fertilized the tomatoes. He had baited the Havahart trap for the woodchuck at Mrs. Bullard's. (She'd make sure he delivered the animal to the wildlife station; she wouldn't hear of poisons, death of any kind.) Tomorrow he would climb a tall cherry tree split by lightning, remove the burnt limbs, then bolt the trunk back together, in hopes that the tree could grow around its wound.

Celestino did whatever Loud asked him to do. More.

Loud pulled up at the platform. "Okay then,
hombre
. Tomorrow, six. I'll make sure Gil is here on time. Damn sure."

Celestino might have echoed Loud's tone, smirked and said,
We'll see
, but he simply said, "Yes." He made sure to smile. The less he said, the less he would have to hear in return. He could always pretend exhaustion, at least at the end of the day. Though Loud knew otherwise, most people Celestino met as he did his work believed that he spoke little English. He liked it that way. For now.

"You're a curious fellow, my man," said Loud as Celestino closed the door.

Through the open window, he made himself smile. He answered his boss, "Curious, maybe I am. I don't mind."

Loud laughed. "Well, it won't win you many fans or congregants, as my mother likes to say." At last he drove off, waving carelessly out his window.

This much you could give the man: he had a tough hide and an easy temper. He wasn't sensitive, didn't care what anyone thought of him. He was rich, and his wife was a beauty, slim as a fisher. He had a swimming pool, big cars, a big house: he aimed for these things and wouldn't have hidden these desires from anyone.

Celestino forced himself to return the wave.

On the train, other passengers kept their distance. He always stank of the day's sweat, even if he changed his shirt. Not that the train was crowded; he had what Loud called the anticommute. Away from the city early in the morning, evenings headed back in. This, too--his train pass--was a "gift" from his boss, the cost (at a discount) deducted from his pay each week. The people on the trains he took were an unpredictable mix, but he had never once seen another man who looked like he worked all day in the sun and the dirt.

Celestino was the only worker in Loud's operation who did not live in one of the houses their boss owned in Packard. He had seen them, once, early on, when Loud insisted he'd get a better deal than in Lothian, the crowded, ugly town where Celestino lived. The rent in Loud's houses was low, and they were clean enough, but they weren't much different from dormitories: two men to a room, a few bathrooms shared by many. Celestino's place--the attic of a rundown house, with a corner kitchen, a toilet, a shower--was frigid in winter, beastly hot all summer. Often, it leaked. But the woman who lived in the rest of the house let him stay there cheap in exchange for doing repairs and for making it clear to the neighborhood punks that a man slept under her roof. Years before, Mrs. Karp had hired an aunt of Celestino's cousin's wife to babysit her children, all moved away now, her husband dead. This arrangement, though it meant extra work on top of too much already, allowed Celestino to keep to himself.

No friends, no temptations, no involvements with other people's mess-ups, tragedies, injustices, schemes. Celestino had his own: his mother in Antigua; his father only God knew where, probably murdered; his two younger sisters working at the tourist hotel. Like him, working too hard, paid too little--but safe. Celestino tried not to think about their village, what had become of it since the raids.

The more Celestino lived on his own, the more he felt, and was ashamed of it, that each person stands alone and ought to be responsible for himself alone. Or herself. Except that when it came to women, that's not how he'd been raised. Why couldn't he have brothers instead of sisters, young men he could leave to their own designs, trust to care for their mother without his help? He could have stopped sending money to his sisters and never heard a word of complaint, but his dreams would not have let him sleep. He yearned to hear that Marta and Adela had married, found men to shoulder this burden.

Where he came from was beautiful; where he worked now, beautiful too. In summer here, there was something of the jungle in Matlock: its tall, muscular, enfolding trees; the still, humid air held close by the canopy of leaves; the swamps that nurtured flowers and mosquitoes alike. Things grew too well, all the wild greenery eager to choke out the tame. This was how Loud made his biggest money.
Landscaping
, he called it, this beating back the wilderness from large, luxurious homes.

Yet the more he learned, the more this work satisfied Celestino, and sometimes--after hours laboring alone--it made him secretly proud. Or not so secretly; he knew Loud had sensed this about him months ago. That was when Loud began sending him to work on the gardens and lawns where the owners needed someone who knew the ways of delicate flowers and elegant trees, places where imagination and cunning (and always a good deal of money) had gone into making a paradise. Many of these people were away from home when Celestino did his work. They left their garages and toolsheds open so that he could help himself to shovels and shears. Loud's work trucks--the ones that carried teams of men and boys who mowed, pruned, and raked with indifference and speed--carried tools of the trade, but nothing refined or specialized, like the dibbles, cultivators, and strangely shaped hoes at Mrs. Anderson's place. Mrs. Anderson, a twig of a woman, old and dramatically thin, had introduced dozens of tools to Celestino as if they were her children, slowly repeating their names and functions. Celestino did not report this to Loud, for fear he would see it as "fraternizing with the client."

When someone was home, it was almost always a woman. She might bring him cold tea or juice, offer sandwiches, or simply place food and drink on a table beside a pool or under a tree. Loud's policy was that only he, not the people whose property he tended, gave instructions. He never said so, certainly not, but it was assumed among his workers that to break this rule--to forge any direct relationship with Loud's customers--might lead to deportation. There was talk everywhere now of immigration raids--not here, perhaps, where the rich were rich enough to be generous, where their complicated jobs were not threatened, but as near as New Hampshire. The mayor of a small town just north of the Massachusetts border had begun to stop cars of brown-skinned men at random.
Live Legal or Get a Boot in the Ass:
this should be the new slogan on the New Hampshire license plate.

Silence was more than golden; it was survival. To the white women who made the white sandwiches, all the men in Loud's crew, like members of an army, were anonymous, changeable one for the next. A few weeks back, as he'd walked up a driveway, Celestino had heard a woman say into her phone, "I have to go. My lawn soldier's here."

These women would smile at him in a furtive, hopeful way, then pantomime eating or drinking. Sometimes he would go along with this absurdity, nodding or even miming back, as if he were not just foreign but deaf and mute as well; but mostly he would assure them that he did speak their language--a little. Enough. He did not invite conversation. He liked the solitude of his work. His father had preached the importance of doing "civilized work, work commanding respect." Celestino had come to see his work in this way, but his father would not have agreed. In the final year Celestino had watched his father at work, Raul had been
patron
to more than a dozen men.

Celestino had been three or four years old before he understood that their village was different from other villages--but this had not always been true. Only a few years before Celestino was born, life for his father, for their relatives and neighbors, had changed. By a celestial stroke of fate, as Raul saw it--dumb luck, Loud would have said--a band of archaeologists had made their village the base for an excavation. Raul had been twenty, just married to Celestino's mother, when these men drove into the jungle from Flores. They were white, friendly, talkative. Many spoke Spanish--university Spanish. Raul and some of the other villagers knew a bit of Spanish from working on the logging crews near the Mexican border.

During his childhood, Celestino heard his father tell the story many times. The men drove brand-new jeeps, pulling trailers from which they would later unload tools, books, and tents that, once stretched on their frames, made the villagers' houses, however colorful, look small, even squalid. They arrived two days before Buena Noche, the village hung with clay ornaments to celebrate the Nativity, mingled with masks and flowers made of woven palms.

Such processions of cars had been seen before--they carried the tourists who came to see the fallen temples--yet always they passed through. Rarely did they stop. Amid the nervous curiosity surrounding these strangers who did stop, Raul joked that the Three Kings and their courtiers had arrived a bit early this year. This was before General Lucas, before the government raids reached their part of the country; by then, the sound of approaching vehicles inspired only fear.

As they were to learn, Dr. Lartigue had already spoken to authorities in Flores. A state official stood by his side when he called a meeting in the square, as soon as the last stall in the market had closed for the day. Standing on a poultry crate, he described the archaeological dig that was about to begin, a magnificent project that would grow for years and years. Raul loved to tell how the white man who spoke city Spanish held up a smooth stone face that he claimed was the face of a god. It had been discovered not far from the village, he said, and if there were more treasures to be found, they would go to nearby museums, would draw more tourists from distant countries who wanted to learn about the traditions and the artistic genius of the villagers' ancestors.

Then he told them how they, the villagers, could make a good living working for the archaeologists, how there would be many jobs. They could earn enough money to support their families through the seasons when the archaeologists would go back to their universities and teach their students about their discoveries. They would also pay a few men to protect the project while it lay waiting for their return.

Unlike Celestino, Raul was never shy. Before the end of that first season, he was directing a small crew (mostly cousins and friends), wielding machetes and shovels according to the archaeologists' directions. Some of these men had worked before as loggers; they said this work was safer and kinder: better pay, shorter hours, many breaks.

Dr. Lartigue liked Raul. It wasn't just that other men listened to him, or that he spoke Spanish and could read well enough. "I made him know he could trust me, and he could," Raul would say when he told the story.

Celestino was born in 1981, during the fourth season of the dig. By this time, Dr. Lartigue had made sure that the village had a good teacher for the children, a man from the city. There was electricity for everyone, more reliable plumbing. There were jeeps left behind when the archaeologists returned to the States. Celestino and his sisters learned Spanish, lived comfortably, and they would accompany their mother, who cooked for the Americans, into Flores when she shopped for provisions.