The Hacienda(47)

“What happened?” I asked Paloma as she led us to where Ana Luisa was. Where Ana Luisa’s body was.

“I woke up and she was gone,” Paloma said curtly. She walked a half step ahead of us, her dark shoes striking the earth with firm purpose, as if their beat were the only thing keeping the tears that hummed beneath the surface of her voice from welling up again. “She wasn’t ill, she hadn’t mentioned any pain . . . I think it was her heart.”

Andrés nodded, then set his mouth in a pained twist. Sympathy tugged at my heart. The blow to his head must have been even worse than I thought.

When we reached Ana Luisa’s house, a small crowd of people had gathered outside the door. They parted at the appearance of Paloma, followed by Padre Andrés and myself, whispering to one another as we stepped over the threshold into the darkness of the house.

Paloma took us directly to the sleeping quarters. It was similar to Andrés’s room: simply decorated, humbly furnished. But unlike his room, herbs covered the threshold, lined the walls. The air had the inevitable smell of stale copal, mixed with something foul.

Two beds were on either side of the room. One was empty, its sheets in disarray. The other was Ana Luisa’s, the floor surrounding it etched with imitation witch’s marks.

And there she was.

I stopped, barely a few steps past the doorway. My breath vanished from my throat.

I had not been fond of Ana Luisa, nor she of me. The figure of Juana stood between us, an impenetrable barrier that made us adversaries before we could even learn to know each other. I did not know if we would have ever moved past our differences.

That did not make the sight before me any less shocking.

In death, Ana Luisa’s face was fixed in an expression I had never seen her wear in life: her mouth dropped open into a surprised oh, her eyelids torn back so far by fear her pupils were naked and round and stark against the whites of her eyes. Her arm was outstretched, stiff.

Ana Luisa pointed to the wall by her daughter’s bed.

My stomach dropped.

Though I was beginning to feel my staring was disrespectful, I could not rip my gaze from her stiff, bloodless face.

Fear.

I knew that fear. I had felt it last night. I felt it every night inside the walls of San Isidro.

“I woke up and she was like this.” Paloma’s voice trembled barely above a whisper. “I can’t even close her eyes. I tried—” Her voice broke.

Andrés’s posture shifted. He put a hand on Paloma’s back; she immediately turned into his embrace and began to sob against his chest. He hushed her gently.

I was suddenly aware that I was intruding on a private family moment. Paloma deserved the same privacy I had needed when Papá was taken away, the privacy I was only able to get at night, sobbing into my sheets with Mamá stroking my back. I took a step away from them and turned to leave.

As I did, I glanced at the wall that Ana Luisa pointed at in her final moments. An unassuming stucco wall, so like the wall Andrés had been thrown against last night. White, rough, plain. My eyes dropped to the floor before it. There was a cross there, a simple wooden cross like the one that hung in Andrés’s room.

It was broken.

The center of the cross was cracked, its short arms almost fully detached. It looked as if someone had taken the heel of their shoe and smashed the center of the wood, not once but over and over again, grinding it into the floor.

A chill coated my palms, slick as oil.

Something had been here last night.

Something frightened Ana Luisa to death.

I shuddered and left the house, blinking as I adjusted to the painfully bright morning.

Other villagers had stepped away from the door, but still hovered, forming an arc around it. Next to José Mendoza, I recognized the woman from the baptism Andrés had performed a few days ago. She was crying. The child on her hip watched me solemnly.

What was I supposed to say? Ana Luisa had been their friend. Perhaps they had lived alongside one another for years. Perhaps they had known her longer than I had even been alive. Who was I to tell them to go away?

But part of me saw Paloma’s back shuddering with sobs and saw myself.

I cleared my throat. “I think Paloma requires privacy,” I said. Murmurs quieted as Andrés stepped out of the doorway behind me. He held up a hand to shade his eyes.

“Funeral Mass in an hour,” he said. “Burial after. I require volunteer gravediggers. May God bless you.”

Despite the grimness of this pronouncement, the tightness in my shoulders eased. I had the sensation that all of us around Ana Luisa’s door responded as one to the soft authority in his voice. Something in the air shifted; relaxed. I am here, his presence said. And if I am here, all will be well.

A few voices repeated the words back to him, and the people dispersed, retreating to their homes or moving to other parts of the hacienda to begin the day’s work.

Andrés let loose a long sigh.

“What on earth happened?”

“My aunt had a weak heart,” he said, keeping his voice low. Paloma’s sobs had waned but were still audible. “A number of people in my family do. It might have been natural, but . . .”

The terror on her face caused both of us to think otherwise.

“Did you see the cross?” I murmured.

Andrés nodded slowly, carefully, as if his head were made of blown glass and shaking it too hard would cause it to shatter. He had not lowered the hand that shaded his face.