The DMZ Page 25

  The compulsion was so strong that Julie’s fingers dug into the concrete rim of the planter to keep her where she was. She hadn’t known what reaction to expect upon seeing her old home. Bitterness. Anger. Pain. She’d been prepared for all of those.

  But love?

  That was the emotion ripping her apart.

  I … I loved this place, she thought dazedly. I loved these people. I … I was happy here! How could I have forgotten?

  The sudden release of memories flooded her in a torrent that threatened to sweep away the image of the cool, well-adjusted, highly professional young woman she had constructed so carefully after the emotional turbulence of her teen years.

  She remembered playing in the streets with the other town children, a knot of rags as their ball, two pairs of rocks their goal posts. Floating downriver in a dugout canoe, eyes wide with shivering delight at the toothy grin of the piranha the fishermen pulled in. Sitting at the feet of an I’paa storyteller, spellbound by his tales of hunts and battles. The I’paa in turn squatting around the village green while Dr. Baker told the stories of how the universe began.

  Were the I’paa still in their village downriver, or had they vanished with the coming of the guerrillas?

  In that house over there, she had shrieked with laughter at the antics of her neighbor’s pet monkey. No, she couldn’t have one, her mother had regretfully told her demanding daughter, not with Julie gone so much of the year. And Doña Carmen had assured the downcast little girl that she could consider their pet as her own when she was home. That monkey had been part of the excitement of boarding school vacations, stepping off the plane into her parents’ welcoming arms and the hugs of her village friends, and knowing that for a few joyous weeks at least, her world had been returned to her.

  There was Christmas Day with fireworks and a midnight feast at the church that stood just around the corner, but which was now undoubtedly a burnt-out shell like the customs station. Scampering through the rutted lanes of the town with absolute assurance that she would find a smiling welcome through any doorway into which she cared to poke her curly head.

  And coming home at night to crawl under the voluminous mosquito net that had made her narrow cot her own little fairy tent. Falling to sleep with her father’s deep voice reading a bedtime story, her mother’s soft lullabies….

  How many other memories had she shut away and forgotten in the anger and pain of those last disagreeable visits home and the death and separation that followed?

  Yes, she had been happy.

  Then why? Why after all their sacrifice did You have to take it all away? Why did You have to make it for nothing? You let the guerrillas win! You let them wipe out my parents—my life!—as though they were nothing.

  “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies …”

  The guerrilla leader Enrique Martinez had said something similar in defense of his murderous activities. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

  Yeah, right! And what is that supposed to mean? They fell—they died—and everything they ever did, everything they ever were … where is it now? Gone! Gone just as they are!

  “Señorita? Julia, hija?”

  Her name emerged from the night—with the “h” sound of the Spanish “j”—and for a moment Julie thought that the soft whisper too was a ghost of her past. Then she felt a tentative, hesitant touch on her shoulder. Springing to her feet, she whirled around, her hand to her throat.

  It wasn’t the guerrilla sentry she’d half expected. This was a woman, dressed in the shapeless black dress and head scarf of the older generation of campesino women, and so bent with age or arthritis that her covered head barely topped Julie’s shoulder. The moon was rising over the plaza now, and its soft light illumined small black eyes that were no less sharp for the maze of wrinkles in which they were set. It was the elderly lady Julie had glimpsed earlier this evening, clutching a pig in the back of the pickup, a cooking pot at her feet.

  “Doña … Doña Nina?”

  “Then it is you, Julia!” The old woman threw her arms around Julie in a fierce hug. “We knew you would come back one day … we hoped … all of San Ignacio has been waiting. But why did you wait so long? Why did you not come before?”

  Julie felt as though she had somehow slipped over into a twilight zone. They had hoped for her to come back—these people who had done nothing when her world had come apart, who in their not-doing had driven her away from her birthplace?

  But the old woman was still talking in the same soft, urgent whisper. “You were spotted from the demonstration … the comandante ordered out all of San Ignacio to greet the Americans. You have not changed so much, little one. When I saw you beside the gate, I knew what you would do … that you would come here. And so I left the others and returned here to find you. We know why you have come, and I will take you myself. But first, we must leave this place—so open. There are new dwellers in this town who do not know you and would not hesitate to inform the comandante. Let us go quickly, and then you must go back where it is safe, little daughter.”

  Go where? Julie thought dazedly as she obeyed the old woman’s urgent tug on her arm. How could her father’s elderly parishioner know why she had come when she didn’t even know herself? A few quick steps took them across the plaza into the shadow of the tiled roofs that overhung the closed-up shops, Doña Nina scuttling along in an odd, crablike gait that came from her deformity, but moving so fast Julie was hard-pressed to keep up. By the time they rounded the corner, Julie knew just where they were going.

  She stared with astonishment at the high, plastered wall. Its pale blue color looked gray in the moonlight. The building was half again as tall as its neighbors, its apex an inverted V rather than the more typical flat roof. The front entrance featured a double door, its tall, curved portals standing wide open.

  Julie stepped inside, dazed with shock. “I … I was sure this was all gone. I thought the guerrillas destroyed it. They’ve destroyed so many.”

  A dim glow sprang up in the darkness. Doña Nina handed Julie a cheap wax candle and turned to tug shut the heavy doors before lighting another for herself. “It is the largest gathering place in San Ignacio except the cathedral. It would have been foolishness to burn it down. And so we informed the guerrillas. There are no more services held here, but the comandante uses it when he wishes to speak to the people of the town.”

  Shielding her candle against the breeze of her movement, Julie walked slowly down the aisle of the church Dr. Richard Baker had built for the people of San Ignacio. The benches were rough wood and backless. The walls were plaster over cinder block, painted the same pale blue as the outside. High above the pale circle of candlelight, the ceiling was galvanized aluminum stretched across rafters made from the stripped-clean trunks of hardwood saplings.

  The platform at the end of the aisle was of the same smooth concrete as the floor. The wooden lectern her father had built to hold his sermon notes still stood forlornly in the center. Here her father had preached to a faithful but small congregation, the majority of the town’s inhabitants preferring to accept the aid of Dr. Richard and Elizabeth Baker without the inconvenience of worshiping their God.

  Julie had reached the platform before she realized that she and Doña Nina weren’t alone in the church sanctuary. Faces peered through an open door beside the dais. Julie knew where it led. The courtyard where in good weather she and her mother had taught the children while Dr. Baker taught the adults indoors.

  Julie lifted her candle, the dim light bringing into sharp relief the faces in the doorway. The nearest was a tall, powerfully built woman with the chocolate skin and broad features of a strongly African-Indian mix. Her face brought back uncertain memories of a dusty patio where Julie had learned to wrap pork tamales for the steaming kettle, and a small, vociferous monkey she had cried over when she left.

  “Tía Carmen?”

  A swift movement brought warm, plump arms around her. Then the others
surrounded her, hugging, touching, patting her as though to judge if she were real, their low murmurs excited, even joyous. “Julia, hija. Qué bella! You are looking so well! So beautiful!”

  Half a dozen villagers pressed in on her—all vaguely recognizable, if older and more careworn than her memories. It took a moment to process that there were no men among them nor even the younger girls with whom Julie had once played. These were the older women of her father’s congregation, the tías or honorary “aunts” who had played their role in the proper upbringing of the little foreigner who had made their village her home.

  Then Doña Nina was upon them, urging them toward the side door. “Come, friends, we have no time for this,” she whispered authoritatively. “She cannot stay long—it is dangerous. Let us show her what she has come to see.”

  The wind blew out the candles as soon as they stepped into the open courtyard. But the moon and stars were bright, and Julie stepped confidently away from the cinder-block wall of the church sanctuary. Branches waved like dark arms above her, and the tangy scent of lemon and orange was sharp in her nostrils. She knew where she was. Under this citrus grove she had once gathered the youngest toddlers for Bible stories and songs. But why had she been brought here now?

  The hiss of a match being struck and the acrid whoosh of fuel catching fire banished the darkness. The baker’s wife—what was her name?—held up the lantern she had just lit, its bright light sufficiently discreet behind the high walls of the church courtyard. Stooping beneath the branches of the citrus grove, she hurried forward. The other women surrounded Julie, guiding her onward with soft murmurs and urgent hands. Julie followed the bobbing light of the lantern, the feeling of being in a twilight zone growing stronger.

  The church courtyard was far larger than the sanctuary itself, a good-sized piece of property where her father had hoped someday to build Sunday school classrooms and even a school. Beyond the citrus trees was another open bare area where the church youth had kicked around a soccer ball. Finally they reached a pair of enormous mango trees through whose huge overhanging branches Julie could see the back wall of the lot. Bewildered and impatient, she halted.

  Then—even before the baker’s wife set the lantern on the ground—she saw it. A mound, too even to be natural. The women held back as Julie walked forward, slowly, hesitantly. At the far end of the mound, almost hidden by the drooping branches of the mangos, she noticed an upright, curved shape.

  A tombstone.

  This was a grave.

  The baker’s wife adjusted the Coleman lamp so that its soft gleam fell directly on the stone, bringing its chiseled inscription into sharp relief. Two names, one above the other.

  Dr. Ricardo Baker.

  Sra. Elizabet Dorsey de Baker.

  Whatever Julie had imagined, it hadn’t been this, and the impact of it cast her to her knees. “I never knew …” she managed to say dazedly. “I thought … I had no idea.”

  “The guerrillas would not allow us in to see them,” her former neighbor Doña Carmen said quietly. “They kept all houses with the cholera quarantined to keep the disease from spreading. But afterward—we brought them here. We thought you had heard. We sent a letter with the Red Cross team and wondered that we did not hear. Perhaps the comandante took it from them as he took so much else. Things have been—difficult in these years.”

  Julie reached out to touch the cold, smooth face of the tombstone. Other words were inscribed below the names. In the pale beam of the Coleman lamp she saw, not the usual QEPD, the Spanish acronym for Que En Paz Descanza, “May You Rest in Peace,” but other letters and numbers. MT. 10:39. JN. 12:24. They were Scripture references, she realized, and translated them mentally into the Bible passages she had memorized as a child.

  Matthew 10:39. “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

  John 12:24. “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

  That verse again! Julie’s hand dropped to the mound. It was covered with grass, a thick, lush carpet of it. To keep it trimmed and weedless and green would take constant effort in this jungle climate.

  A labor of love.

  The realization shook her. She touched a bouquet of flowers at the base of the stone. They were fresh—orchids and jasmine tied together with vines of deep purple bougainvillea. The baker’s wife picked up the bouquet and pressed it into her hands. “We thought you would wish to have them tonight.”

  Julie had not cried when the news had reached her of her parents’ illness and death. There had been too much stony unbelief for that. She hadn’t allowed herself to shed tears in front of the tough old man who had become her guardian, nor later at that New England boarding school in the room she had shared with three other giggling, careless teenagers. Indeed, she had prided herself on having quickly and sensibly set aside her grief.

  But now, as she lifted her eyes from that simply tied bundle of flowers to the anxious faces that were all that remained of the lively congregation that once had filled this church property, something gave way inside her, rising hot and scalding into her throat, and for all her efforts, she felt the tears spilling down over her cheeks and onto the flowers in her hands.

  Above her, the women murmured softly, making clucking noises of sympathy, but with the innate dignity of the campesino, they did not intrude on her grief.

  “Mommy! Daddy!” The silent cry was wrenched out of her in the childish names Julie had never had the chance to grow out of.

  “Julie?”

  The startled rustle of the women warned Julie only an instant before a familiar American drawl shattered the silence. Julie sprang to her feet, furious at the adrenaline jolt his voice had given her. If one more person sneaked up on her—!

  Snatching up the Coleman lamp, she raised it high as Tim McAdams stepped into its circle of light. The soft gleam of the lantern caught his eyebrows arched high in astonishment as he glanced around at the women who were with her, then at the grave at her feet. Then his face smoothed into gentle concern. “Julie, what are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” Julie hissed, angrily mopping at her damp cheeks with the bouquet in her hand. “How did you get here, anyway?”

  “I followed you. I saw you leave. Not that I was spying on you, believe me. But—well, I know you said you wanted to be alone, but I couldn’t let you, seeing you were kind of upset. So I hung around, hoping I might be able to be of some assistance. When you did that Houdini act with the truck—well, I just did the same when the next one came through.”

  Julie should have been grateful, but she felt only irritation. He was speaking in English much too loud for the quiet night. “Shh! You want to bring in the whole town? Are you crazy? Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be wandering around in guerrilla territory?”

  “That didn’t seem to stop you!” He stepped farther into the circle of light. The soft gleam of the lantern’s flame shone golden from the tall crown of his hair and gleamed from his teeth. “I figured if you thought it was safe to come here, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “You figured.” Julie struggled to keep her own voice down. Unfortunately, this was definitely in part her fault! If she’d dreamed someone was watching …

  “There is a problem!” she said severely. “I know this area. And I don’t stand out like a sore thumb—or some glow-in-the-dark torch! I can’t imagine how many people must have seen you come in here.”

  She sighed. “Come on! We’d better get you back before we’re both in trouble.”

  But Tim made no move to go. “So—what are you doing here, Julie? What do you mean, you know the area? And who are these women—your contacts? You might want to reassure them that I don’t bite!”

  Julie caught his quick glance around the silent circle of women, then saw for herself the frozen fear on their faces.

 
“It’s okay,” she reassured them. “He’s only one of the reporters from the airport. But I must return with him immediately before we bring trouble to you.”

  The news didn’t change their frightened expressions, and Julie felt their tension in her own stomach. She handed the lantern back to the baker’s wife, wishing she could remember the woman’s name, then hugged each of the women in turn. “Thank you! Thank you so much! What you have done—I don’t have words to tell you what it has meant to me.”

  Spinning around on her heel, she pushed ahead of the missionary journalist. “Come on! I want to get out of here before we bring anymore trouble to these people.”

  This time Tim followed her rapid strides. “What did you mean back there?” he reiterated. “You said you knew the area. Well, that’s obvious, but how? And whose grave was that?”

  “My parents,” Julie said shortly. Stooping under a low-lying lemon branch, she saw the dark mouth of the sanctuary door across the courtyard and hurried toward it. Tim McAdams caught up to her just as she stepped inside.

  “Your parents!” he demanded. “Then … you lived here? You were serious about … those people? They really weren’t your contacts?”

  “My contacts?” Julie answered blankly.

  “For your research. I assumed you were out here in search of a story.”

  Julie stopped dead in her tracks. “Look!” she said fiercely. “Not all of us will do anything for a piece. You think I’d jeopardize these people just for some added column space? They’re simply villagers who knew me as a child.”

  “But—” Tim stopped as well, his large frame only a wavering shadow in the unlit sanctuary. “What in heaven’s name were you doing here as a child? I thought you were an American.”

  “My parents were missionaries.” Julie started off again down the dark aisle, her feet tracing the path by memory. “Like you.”