Milagros   

by Thaisa Frank

 Thaisa Frank reads 

Milagros



in RealAudio format.
     

       Arthur came home from his bookstore at six o'clock, stood on the steps and whistled. The dark night. The porch. The familiar smells of home. Inside he could see Emily, Annie, Marc, Eduardo, all bent in unison over the table with the black cat Primus below them. Emily was spooning soup. Annie and Marc were looking. Eduardo was staring in the distance. This, he thought, is my home. This is what I have come to.

       He stood on the steps and whistled again.
       And then he was gone.

___

       Eduardo sits in the kitchen. He leafs through copies of the New York Times and People magazine which his stepmother reads somewhat guiltily. The small river has been dragged. The police have arrived and asked questions. The swollen body of his stepfather has been found. "It's very bloated, Ma'am," the police say. "You wouldn't even want to see his clothes." But Annie brought the clothes home in a bag, and set everything out to dry on the line as if Arthur was about to come back.
       "He whistled!" she kept saying to the policeman. "He whistled and I heard him. Just like he always does."
       His stepbrother and stepsister said that, too. "He whistled! He really whistled!" They said this like it would lead them back to Arthur's warm, living body. They said this like this was a clue. They'd been born in this house, knew Arthur since they had been babies. They had seen his head over their cribs. They had felt his arms around them when they cried. He had taught them how to play ball and read to them from the funny papers.

       Eduardo, however, could believe exactly what happened, although he didn't say so. In fact, he feigned surprise only because he knew people expected it. He could believe it because his mother had died and his grandmother had died and his uncle also had died and Eduardo knew death had a way of making itself known. Before the person departs the air opens around them and whenever one happens to look out a window with them the view is large. Eduardo's uncle Oliviero had killed himself rather than be taken by the police, and the day before, Eduardo could read the space around his uncle's body as though it were a map. Not everybody who looked could see what was on the map. But his grandmother could. "Look at uncle Olivero's back," she said. "But don't look too closely. You don't want to follow." Eduardo didn't. Death was everywhere.

       During those days in the sharp Maine summer, the air around Arthur was large, spacious. He also moved slowly, as though his body were inside glass. And his eyes looked straight ahead, stopping at a fixed point, as though there were nowhere beyond that point they needed to look.

       At night, Arthur sat in his study and drank strong cups of coffee. Eduardo knew he was fighting sleep because in sleep he would disappear. Once, Eduardo went downstairs to get a glass of Ovaltine, which he was allowed anytime because since coming from El Salvador he was always hungry. Arthur was sitting at the kitchen table drinking milk, surrounded in wild, friable air. Eduardo's grandmother had told him to look inside the air, as though he were parting curtains, so he could get a good last look at his uncle. He parted the air now, to look at Arthur and Arthur was very much himself, except he was one notch back from the world and waiting.

       "What are you doing?" he said to Eduardo.
       "Getting Ovaltine," said Eduardo.

Annie had wanted to adopt another child. To Eduardo's way of thinking, it meant that she wanted two of him. She wanted an Eduardo in the third grade and an Eduardo who was in kindergarten. She wanted an Eduardo who wore his own new clothes (she was careful not to use the other children's hand-me-downs) and a smaller Eduardo who wore the real Eduardo's hand-me-downs. Annie and Arthur had tense discussions about the second Eduardo, while he, the first one, crouched by the door. Sometimes their voices grew so loud, he wondered if Arthur were intending to leave and was tempted to ask. In fact, he did something close to that. He leaned toward Arthur and asked in Spanish. "Are you sorry that you got me?"

       "No," said Arthur, carefully. "I'm not sorry at all. How come?"
       "I just wondered." Eduardo drank his Ovaltine. Arthur drank his milk.
       Suddenly Arthur asked, "Do you believe in milagros?"
       "No," said Eduardo, even though he did.
       "I do," said Arthur. And then he took one out of his pocket--a bent right arm, the kind that people get when they hurt themselves on a construction site. "Here," he said.
       "There's nothing wrong with my arm."
       "No. Not literally. This is for strength. For muscle. For purpose."
       "I don't need that," Eduardo said, not wanting a gift from someone who was going to die.

       Later that night, Eduardo heard the discussion again.
       "I can't take in every kid who walks those railroad tracks," said Arthur in a low calm voice.
       "I'm not asking you to do that. You know I'm not."
       "I think you are," said Arthur. "Eduardo' a good kid, but you treat him like a cause. He's himself. Himself alone. "
       Eduardo did not listen the way he had listened back home where voices were threaded around him while he slept. These had been soft, laughing voices, talking of amulets, witches' markets, neighbors, and later, in lower voices, about the junta. Shhh! Eduardo is sleeping! the voices said. Here it was different. He had to shift, move, press his ears against the wall, the way his grandmother made him listen to crops grow.
       He shifted now and the floor creaked.
       "Eduardo is up," said Arthur. "That kid knows everything."
       "He has to," said Annie. "How do you think he walked those railroad tracks?" She said this loudly, throwing her voice in Eduardo's direction. She was trying to reassure him. Eduardo wanted to run out and tell her Arthur is thinking of dying.

___

       "Arthur always whistled," Annie is saying for god knows how many times. "He whistled every night he came home. That's why we suspect foul play. He worked so hard. He had such a good business. Everyone in town trusted him. Everyone went to the bookstore." She was talking to a neighbor and Eduardo was listening. This neighbor was a woman from the east, a psychologist named Claire.
       "Arthur was unhappy," said Claire with authority.
       "How do you know?" Annie pressed her hands on the table.
       "I just know."
       "Were you two having an affair, then?" After Arthur died, Annie was given to sudden outbursts.
       "No," said Claire calmly. "Arthur and I weren't lovers. I didn't even know him well. It's just when I came into the store one day, he recommended some books about suicide. It was clear he'd been reading them." Claire looked triumphant. "Didn't you know?"
       "What were the books?" Annie was trembling.
       "They were"—Claire closed her eyes—"they were When Life is Not Enough, The Ethics of Leaving Others Behind, Six Questions to Ask When You are Contemplating Death and Meditations on a Funeral. There were also several biographies of St. John of the Cross. Or San Juan de la Cruz, as he really should be called. And except for When Life is Not Enough none of them were self-help books. They were books that Arthur had ordered for himself, because there was only one in stock. He had read them and wanted to get rid of them. He gave them to me. Do you want them back?"
       "No."
       Claire was not an unattractive woman, yet had the marks of a spinster: Sensible clothes. Pulled-back hair. There was a bite to the word gave. Annie flinched and reconsidered. "Were any passages underlined?"
       "That happens to be why I came. Except for that first book, which was crap, the others are good and I've ordered them. But I thought you should have these." She pulled them out of her briefcase and set them on the table.
       "Did you read the books?" Annie asked.
       "Of course. That's why I ordered them. Nothing was underlined, by they way—there weren't any notes. But it's clear he read them. You can tell when a book has been read." She didn't say how and Eduardo stayed still, the way he was supposed to. He spoke more English than people knew, which meant they acted as if he weren't there.
       "There was one other thing, too," said Claire. "Arthur was collecting milagros."
       "Milagros?" said Annie. "You must be kidding. He hated that kind of thing."
       "Maybe. He was a very rational man. Even so, he was collecting them. I saw them in the back of the store. Haven't you been there since....?"
       "Of course I've been." The night Arthur drowned, Annie had put up a notice that the store would be closed. She hadn't stayed long, of course. On the other hand, she hadn't run. She'd stood in the darkness, waiting, she hoped, for Arthur's murderer. She didn't care if he came out right now and killed her. At least she'd know.
       "You should go back," Claire said. "Look in Arthur's office. That's where he kept the milagros. If they're gone, maybe it was foul play. Maybe even the books were a cover-up. I don't think so."
       She stood up and looked at Eduardo. "You've seen a lot of death," she said. It was a statement, not a sentiment.

       Later that day, Annie tapped Eduardo on the shoulder. He was looking out the window, at the vista that had been large the week before Arthur died. It was now an ordinary landscape, consisting of a flat green pasture, circled by hills. The week before, it had been enormous, suggesting fields beyond fields, hills that went to the sky. He'd only seen this when he and Arthur were looking together, the way, when people are dying, they look at something for the last time.
       "Let's go to the store," Annie said in Spanish. "I want to see the milagros. Do you mind?"
       "No," said Eduardo. He was used to the haunts of the dead. On the Day of the Dead they had picnics by his grandfather's grave near his mother's favorite park, where his uncle used to played bocce. It was the living who were ghosts, prying human secrets.
       "You don't mind, do you?" said Annie said in Spanish. Like Claire's pronouncement about death, it was just a statement.

       The bookstore hadn't been opened since Annie put up the sign and they tripped over a pile of envelopes under the drop-in mail slot. Some of them were condolence letters, and there were also business letters and catalogues from publishers. Annie stepped over them as though they were snow, leaves — or some inconvenience of the weather. Eduardo put them on a shelf. He felt this mail belonged to Arthur, who hadn't been dead for very long. They walked to Arthur's office in the back of the store which had couch, a desk, and Japanese puppets. There was a round box on the desk with an open lid. It was full of milagros.

       "My God," said Annie. "We used to use that for pot." She turned the box upside-down and they all fell out. There were more arms, legs, eyes and several books. Eduardo was sorry that Arthur hadn't offered him a book. He took one of the milagros that was shaped like one.
       "Put it back for now," said Annie. "We'll get to the bottom of this." She spoke briskly, as though something would lead to the unspeakable. And then she sat on the couch and cried. "What was he doing with the milagros?" she asked, no longer acting as though Eduardo didn't understand English. "What in the world was he doing with them?"
       Eduardo didn't answer even though he thought he knew. He thought he knew because he saw a metal child among them, and this was a signal that Arthur was having trouble making himself strong against Annie's will about having another child. His grandmother had told him that. Milagros come to people whether they want them or not.
       "What are you thinking?" Annie said.
       "I wasn't thinking anything."

       There was a book on Arthur's desk. El Secreto de los Milagros.
       "Can you read this?" Annie asked.
       "I don't know."

       "Well try. Read it to me here." The book was about eighty pages.
       "Can't we take it home?"
       "No. I don't want the other kids to see it."
       "Okay," said Eduardo. He started to read.

       The book took them four days to read because Eduardo read slowly, and Annie always went back at six to feed the kids. Every day they locked up the shop and left everything just as they'd found it. And in the afternoons when they came back, Annie walked across the mail and Eduardo put it on a shelf. Eduardo read carefully, omitting certain passages. He didn't want to stumble on anything that referred to fate. It was his grandmother's theory: She believed that if certain things were read, they would happen, and he cared about Annie. Fortunately, the book was so scholarly there was almost nothing he had to leave out. "The totemic nature of Spanish Catholicism," Eduardo translated, "is often linked to Indian worship." "My God," Annie said, "how could he read all this?"
       Eduardo wanted to say that maybe he hadn't. Maybe he'd just gotten the book. But he didn't because he knew--just as Claire knew--that every page had been read. He could tell by the way they were worn, the way some were bent back. He could also feel Arthur's eyes, a concentration that belied a kind of tired excitement. Eventually he came to the part he didn't want to read: "Some people believe that when a milagro comes their way it isn't an accident. The witches of La Paz think that if you don't want another child, but get a cow or a ram or a goat or anything else that symbolizes fertility, you are out of luck. Husbands of women in La Paz destroy milagros of babies in the corn fields. Especially when they already have sons and are very poor."

       When he came to this passage he stopped and read right on. There was a sense of a beat skipped, a page being turned.
       Annie grabbed his wrist. "You've forgotten something."
       "No," said Eduardo, "I haven't." This was the truth. He'd been scrupulous about the omission. But Annie made him read the passage anyway. When he was through, she was quiet.
       "Is there a milagro like that in there?" she asked.
       "No," said Eduardo.
       "Yes," said Annie. "There is."
       She walked to the box and her hands went right for the child.
       "This is it." she said. "Isn't it?"
       "My family didn't believe in crap like that," said Eduardo. "We weren't peasants who couldn't wipe our asses. We went to the university. We knew a thing or two."
       Annie slapped him.
       "A good family, really?" she said. "Then why were you hungry all the time when you got here? Why do have Ovaltine whenever you want it?"
       "Because there wasn't any food there. You know that." He stuck out his tongue at Annie, and she slapped him again. "I'm not reading any more of that book," he said. "I'm not being your little Spanish translator." He grabbed the book he really wanted--the milagro—and left the store.

       When he got home, all the kids were gathered around the table. It was seven o'clock. Annie had forgotten dinner.
       "Listen, I'll make tortillas, okay?" It was what Eduardo had done when his mother had died, his uncle had died, and when his grandmother who told him about death had died.
       Emily and Marc thought tortillas were a cool idea. They could say that, even though their father had killed himself.
       "A cool idea," Marc repeated before running to the corner store for a tin of refried beans.
       "A cool idea," said Emily, taking tortillas from the freezer, and thawing them by holding them lightly over the gas flame, the way Eduardo showed her. They were delighted when they found sour cream and tomatoes, scallions and avocado in the vegetable bin. Eduardo made rice. He showed Emily and Marc how to make canned refried beans taste fresh by adding lemon. And all the while he cooked he thought of how he would cross the border and walk the railroad tracks back to El Salvador. He also thought he would stop by the river to see if he could get a glimpse of Arthur. Mourn. Drown. Home. He chanted the words that had brought him there.
       When Annie came back and saw Eduardo making tortillas, she had no idea that later, much later, he would put on old clothes, and leave one more empty space around the kitchen table. She was only thinking of the metal child, and a piece of paper she'd found in the book Eduardo was reading. It was yellow paper, probably used as a bookmark, and had something scribbled in Arthur's writing: All good things will come to you.

Able Muse

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