Текст книги "Water from My Heart"

Автор книги: Charles Martin

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“With all deference to your father, a change in geography does not necessarily mean an improvement in circumstances. In my experience, problems have a tendency to follow you whether you’re in Boston, Miami, Bimini, or Nicaragua.”

She laid a towel across her lap, pulled a mango the size of a small football from her bag, and began peeling it, while the juice dripped off the knife and onto the towel. She offered me a slice, which I accepted. She then cut herself a slice and placed it in her mouth. She spoke with her mouth full. “In my experience, I usually run into some trouble when I let my experience dictate another’s.” She turned to me. “I don’t have the corner on the market, but I have known some pain in my life. And I see the same when I look in that kid’s eyes. His body will heal, but it’s his heart that’s in question.”

I smiled as she gave me another slice. I, too, spoke with my mouth full. “Did your father teach you all this?”

“Which part?” A sly smile. “The peeling part or the giving of unsolicited advice part?”

“The advice part.”

A single shake of her head as mango juice trailed from her lip to her chin. “Mom.”

“Smart woman.”

She pointed the knife at me. “She’d have liked you.”

“I highly doubt that.”

She laughed and stood. “So, it’s settled then?”

“I’m pretty sure you had it settled before we started talking, but just so I can feel like I had some say in this situation, I need to run it by Colin. I think he’ll agree—and I imagine you’ve already thought about that.”

“I have.”

“I know what I’d do if he were my son but he’s not, so in a very real sense, I’m stuck between Zaul on this end of the phone and Colin on the other.”

“If Colin is smart, he’ll see that you have more influence in Zaul’s life right now.”

“He’s pretty smart.”

“Evidently he’s pretty dumb if he’s the one that suckered you into the family business.”

“Well, yeah. There’s that.” I sat back, crossed my legs, and folded my hands over my knees. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Was it your mother who taught you this leading line of conversation, which not even the experts at Harvard ever mentioned to me?”

“You went to Harvard?”

“Graduated.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“So you’re smart?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘smart’ as much as ‘able to adapt.’”

“What’s your degree?”

“Finance. Followed by an MBA.”

Her jaw dropped. “You have that in your back pocket and you run drugs for a living?”

“Ran.”

“Whatever.”

“Yes.”

She considered this and then returned to my question. “You asked whether it was my mother or father.” She shook her head. “Neither one.”

“Who then?”

“Wasn’t a who. It was a what.”

“Well, what was the what?”

A hard-earned belly laugh. “Life. After we lost the plantation, I had control over very little, so I had to learn how to protect Isabella and myself and later Paulo when his wife died—the three of us. You learn by talking, asking questions. It doesn’t grant you control, but it does help eliminate and name the players who don’t have control over you from those that do.”

She walked toward the clinic and left me chewing on everything she said. I had two responses: First, I’d single-handedly created the circumstances that caused her to lose the plantation. As that realization settled in my gut, a pain rose beneath it unlike any I’d ever felt. Second, I liked watching her body language when she talked. There was a concert between what she said and how she said it. Maybe it was the way the Spanish language is spoken by those who are native to it, but it’s beautiful and mesmerizing. And, okay, maybe there was a third. Maybe I was self-aware enough to know that she was trying to convince me to do something I already wanted to do anyway.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The following morning, I helped Zaul out of the clinic, steadied him, and let him lean on me as we walked out into the sunlight. Paulo and Isabella sat in the front seat with the engine running. Incredulous, he stood staring at his dad’s truck. “How’d you—”

“Won it in a poker game.”

“You beat that guy?”

A shrug. “Don’t feel bad. He had a thing going with the dealer. You got worked by a couple of pros.”

“That explains a lot.” He smiled, hobbled to the truck, and was gingerly climbing in when the sight of two flowing brown robes caught his eye. He stopped, backed out, and returned to the door of the cathedral, where two priests stood watching him with muted curiosity. Holding on to the doorframe with his left hand like a drunken sailor, he extended his right and said, “Muchas gracias.” Then he returned to the backseat, where Leena sat next to him and hung the IV bag—through which she was dripping antibiotics and pain medicine—on the clothes hook above the seat. Maybe it didn’t sink in how weak he was until he sat down, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. By then, he had broken out in a sweat and had to work to catch his breath. If I had visions of a speedy recovery, I was mistaken. Zaul had lost more blood than we previously thought, and this was going to take time. I sat up front, chewing on what I’d just seen. I’d never seen Zaul thank anyone for anything.

*  *  *

We returned to Valle Cruces and moved Zaul into the chicken coop, which under the haze of medication, he found humorous. He turned to me. “When I need you, do I just cluck?”

He slept through the afternoon while Paulo and I made several trips to the hardware store for lumber, tin roofing, a door, and a bed. By evening, we’d patched the roof of the coop, plugged holes in the rafters, hung a real door, set up a new bed for me, and purchased a second fan. Evening found Paulo, Paulina, Isabella, and me sitting in plastic chairs beneath the mango tree, quietly listening to the sound of Zaul sleeping.

In my life, I’d known times of rest. Of peace. Of quiet. But rarely had I known all three at the same time. Sitting beneath that tree, I felt maybe for the first time the three come together. And the only way I know to describe the sum of those three was “contentment.”

And while that described my life, I knew it would not describe Zaul’s if I attempted to take him home. Colin and I needed to talk and waiting wasn’t helping any. What I needed to say to him was in the end his call, but I needed to get it off my chest. I dialed, said “Billy,” hung up, and he dialed me back. I picked up.

Colin said, “How’s he doing?”

“Better.” He waited, knowing the tone in my voice meant I had more to say. I cleared my throat. “I know you want me to bring him home—to you and Marguerite and Maria—but I don’t think Zaul wants that. I can force him, and if you want, I’ll put him on that plane but he’ll just run. Yes, we found him, but we haven’t done anything to fix the hurt. This will continue. And then one day we just won’t find him.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying as much as I’m asking.”

“What are you asking?”

“I’m asking you to let me not put him on the plane. Let me nurse him back. Give me a few weeks. A month. Maybe two. I’m asking you to trust me with your son.”

I heard the quick inhale. The breath he caught before it escaped. The long pause. The shuffle. The sniffle. “You think he’ll stick around?”

“I don’t know. But my guess is that he’ll stick around here longer than he will anywhere close to home.”

As much as it hurt, he knew I was right. “Whatever you think best.”

“You want me to talk with Marguerite?”

“No. I’ll tell her.”

*  *  *

The following morning, I woke early. It was still dark. I checked my watch: 4:27 a.m. I rose, checked on Zaul, and then walked next door to where Paulo lay sleeping. I shook him gently. He woke and stared at me as I made signs mimicking a man digging. “Dig? We dig?”

He swung his feet over. “Sí. Sí. We dig. Dig deep.”

*  *  *

Paulo and I spent the morning at the well. Me on one end of the rope, he on the other. I surfaced for lunch and he and I ate a sandwich, and I played with the kids who had appeared to watch us dig. Then I descended again. When my arms were noodles, I pulled twice on the rope, and Paulo once again lifted me up as I scaled the inside of the well like Spider-Man.

This continued all week.

While Leena and Isabella cared for Zaul, Paulo and I dug. Standing at the bottom of a deep, deep hole in the earth, with thinning air and only the dim light of a headlamp, gave me a lot of time to think. Sometimes I thought about the rope—my sole tether to the surface world of light as I rummaged around below in a world of darkness. Several times, as I squatted in the hole or leaned against the side, waiting on Paulo to return the dirt bucket, I cut the headlamp and stood in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. But they never did. No matter how long I stood there, and no matter how many times I blinked or tried to adjust, my eyes never made sense of that black world until I turned that lamp back on or climbed up toward the pinhole of circular light above me. Until then I was just groping about in the dark. Credit the thin air, credit tired muscles, credit exhaustion, I stood down in that muddy hole amazed at the absolute absence of light. Call me simple, but it was tough to miss the lesson: If it’s dark and you want light, you either need a source outside yourself or you need to get to one—because nothing resident in me lit that hole. And as quiet as it was, I was not able to silence the voice that questioned when I was going to tell Leena about my role in Cinco Padres’ collapse. Every time I climbed down into that hole, that voice was waiting on me. The more I dug, the louder it got. And I had no answer for it.

*  *  *

By Friday night, I climbed out having spent the better part of the week down in the earth. Paulo pointed me to the rope coiled neatly at his feet and kicked it with his toe. With a satisfied smile, he patted me on the shoulder. “Trescientos.”

I knew he was speaking of a measurement, but he said it so fast that I couldn’t make it out.

I shook my head. “No comprehende.”

He smiled and said, “Three hundred.”

I understood that. In the last week, I’d dug almost a hundred feet.

*  *  *

In the evenings, I took walks with Zaul. First, we just walked from the backyard to the front. Then a few houses down the street. Then around the block. The sight of two gringos in a village where few seldom ventured off the hard road was akin to the circus being in town, so we were often followed by an audience. One of the things that amazed me was how the kids gravitated to Zaul. They tried to hang on him like a jungle gym until Isabella shooed them off. If they had a ball, they kicked it to him. If they had a Popsicle, they offered him part. If they had a toy, they shared it. I’d never seen someone attract children with such a magnetic draw. One afternoon, I came back from digging, covered in mud, and when I walked out of the shower, Zaul was sitting on top of a five-gallon bucket with another upside down in front of him holding two homemade drumsticks. The kids around him were sitting on the ground, with sticks in their hands and buckets or bowls or anything that worked or sounded like a drum, and he was giving them drum lessons. I didn’t even know he played the drums. And as I stood there listening with Leena, I watched as a kid began to shed a dark blanket that he’d wrapped himself in a long time ago. The more he played that bucket like a drum, the more those kids smiled. And the more they smiled, the brighter Zaul became. With the kids joining in as a chorus, he busted loose. His arms waving, his hands spinning the sticks, his face smiling. We were watching a kid bloom. Walking in a circle around him and his class, I took a short twenty-second video on my phone, which I sent to Colin. Moments later, he responded with a single word: “Tears.”

I wrote him back. “Me, too.”

*  *  *

Sunday afternoon, I found Paulo shoving wood into an outdoor oven that rose up out of the ground behind the chicken coop. It looked like one of those large brick ovens that pizza places use to cook their pizzas at a thousand degrees. In a few moments, he stoked a raging fire, and after shoving in more hardwood, we stepped back as the heat grew intense. The oven had two large holes about the size of a window, which he covered with pieces of tin roofing just slightly larger in size. He left a small “intake” opening that fed the fire with air while the chimney poured white smoke. While he prepared the fire, Leena and Isabella, both wearing aprons, appeared with several bowls and trays and oil and smiles. Leena waved me closer. “Come on. You need to get your hands dirty.”

I washed my hands and stepped up to the table, where Leena tied an apron around my waist, which prompted a quick giggle out of Isabella. She looked up at me with a smile and one upturned shoulder. “I’m laughing with you. Not at you.”

Leena walked me through the process of making and then kneading dough. Making it was easy, kneading it broke me out in a sweat. Evidently, the kind of bread we were making cannot have any bubbles in the dough, so I had to roll it and beat it and slam it until the bubbles had been worked out. By then, my forearms were cramping.

Then we sliced the dough into small doughnut-sized pieces, which we then flattened like tortillas and spread with a coarse, brownish-looking sugar; raw cinnamon chunks; and some sort of smelly, crumbling cheese, which curled my nose and convinced me I had no desire to taste it. Then we “folded” all of that inside the bread, leaving essentially a triangle pastry.

We lined the trays with about forty triangles, and then Paulo, using a long stick, removed the glowing red pieces of tin roof and pushed all of the fire out the main window onto the ground, where he rolled buckets of water underneath it. Having cleared out the fireplace, he then used a broom of sorts to “brush” out all the ash. When finished, he was left with a clean oven where the inside was hovering around between eight hundred and a thousand degrees—which it would do for the next hour.

Leena handed the four trays to Paulo who—using a different stick—slid them into the fire much like a man cooking pizzas. He leaned the tin against the windows again, covering the holes, and then stood there, tapping his foot. After ninety seconds, he threw off the pieces of tin and, using the reverse end of his stick, hooked the corners of the trays, removing them from the heat, and Leena, donning hot pads, set them on the table to cool. When finished, Leena placed a napkin in her hand, set a browned, puffy tart in the middle, and handed it to me with a raised eyebrow. I viewed it with suspicion and sat hesitantly until the smell wafted up, convincing me to sink my teeth into it.

In the next ten minutes, I ate seven pieces. When I was finished, I sat back—my stomach taut like a melon—and marveled. “Best bread ever. Hands down.”

Leaning against the back of the house, soaring on a sugar high from which I was soon to descend like a rock, I was once again struck by the simplicity and matter-of-factness of life around here.

Leena chuckled at my heavy eyelids and motioned toward the hammock. “Best thing to do is sleep it off.”

I fell into the hammock and don’t remember closing my eyes. Three hours later, when I woke and forced my head up, one eye half open, Leena was sitting next to me in a plastic chair sewing a patch onto a piece of clothing. I pulled myself up, sat upright, then decided that was too much too fast, so I lay back down and hung one foot out of the hammock, dragging my toes on the ground. She pointed her needle at me, smiled, and squinted one eye. “Nicaragua looks good on you.”

*  *  *

The second week, Zaul felt strong enough to venture up the mountain where Leena held her medical clinic. Paulo held the rope, I held the dull remains of a shovel, and Isabella held everyone’s attention. In between naps in the back of his dad’s truck, Zaul assisted Leena, talked with Paulo, sent me funny notes attached to the bucket, and played his makeshift drum while Isabella danced with the other kids. Digging that hole was a constant process of moving in a tight circle while squatting and digging out the ground beneath my feet. It was maddening. My feet were constantly shuffling, never stood on anything even, and were always covered in dirt and mud. I seldom saw my toes. And to say my lower back ached would have been an understatement. The more I dug, the more I became convinced that this well had been plugged. Maybe intentionally. Based on the stories I’d heard about this well and the amount of water it used to put out, I kept thinking, if I could just break through the blockage, the spring would shoot up like a geyser and clear water would fill this nearly four-hundred-foot cylinder and carry me to the surface.

By Wednesday evening I was digging ankle-deep in mud and growing more and more convinced that I was standing on top of a water rocket that was poised to shoot me to the surface as soon as my shovel struck the trigger that held it cocked. I dug gently and moved slowly. As I was digging what I promised myself would be my last bucket of the day, my headlamp crossed my feet, and for one brief second I saw something shiny. When I poked around, I turned up nothing, and I’d grown so tired that I had not the patience to look. But as Paulo tightened the rope, pulling me earthward while I scaled the wall of the well, I knew that I’d seen something below my feet. My trouble was that while most would have been excited at finding something of possible value, I had a feeling that I didn’t want to find whatever it was, and I was secretly hopeful that it would either be nothing—a figment of a tired imagination—or it would disappear by tomorrow morning.

When I crawled out of my hole, I found Zaul dancing—​Isabella in one hand and Anna Julia in the other. Leena and an audience of forty or fifty people were clapping and singing a song whose words I’d not heard, but whose melody I’d known my entire life. Paulo lifted me out, dusted me off, and then pointed to the rope with a wide smile. Not much remained. We were close. I could barely lift my arms. He squeezed my biceps. Then squeezed it again. “You good dig. You good gringo.”

That night as we sat quietly beneath the mango tree, Leena asked me, “You okay? You seem…distant.”

“Sorry. Just tired.”

She smirked. “You’re lying to me.”

I nodded. “Well, I’m also tired.”

She let it go, but she was right. Something was bugging me, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. Like it or not, I’d find out in a few hours. To be certain, I replaced the batteries in my headlamp and stuck a small penlight in my pocket.

*  *  *

The next morning, as Paulo checked the rope and then steadied himself against the side of the well, I turned to Leena. “You be around?”

She looked at me strangely and sort of shook her head. “Need to go check on some kids up in the barns. Might need to treat them for parasites.”

“You mind hanging around till I’ve been down there a few minutes?”

Her complexion changed from hope to concern. She placed the back of her hand gently on my cheek. “You okay?”

“Yeah, no, I’m good.” I waved her off. “I’ll come up for lunch. Forget it.”

I dropped into the hole, but the look on her face and the one raised eyebrow told me I’d not convinced her. Which was good.

When I got to the bottom, it didn’t take long. It was right where I’d left it and it was exactly what I thought. A polished stone wrapped in a gold fitting connected to a gold chain—the match to the one Leena wore. I held the stone in my hand, digging gently to loosen the chain when my shovel hit something hard beneath the surface of the water. Digging with my fingers, I lifted the obstruction and held it before my eyes. It was a bone. Shining the light below me, I realized I was standing in bones.

I held the chain in my hand, making sure it matched Leena’s. It did. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but I had a feeling that I’d just found Leena’s mom, and if I dug around enough, I’d probably find her dad, too. I squatted in the hole, leaned against the wall, and considered what to do. It wasn’t like I could just mix everything in the bucket and send it to the top without her knowing. I had to climb up and tell her. I had to climb up and give her the stone.

I tugged on the rope and Paulo immediately began lifting me to the surface. Something was stuck in my throat and it would not budge. The closer it got, the more it threatened to cut off my air supply. I exited the hole and Leena was there waiting. The crowd hushed because this was unusual. Previously, I’d come out only at lunch and at evening, but this morning, I’d been down there only a few minutes. Everyone knew this meant something. They didn’t know what it meant but they knew it was significant. They inched closer, prompting Paulo to spread his arms and force them back.

I motioned Paulo and Leena a few feet away. I tried to speak, but what could I say? What words could I offer that would not hurt her? Not knowing what else to do, I gently placed the stone in Leena’s hand. At first, she just stared at it, not making sense of it. Then, when the image in her hand matched the memory in her mind, her mouth opened and she sucked in an uncontrolled breath. She touched the stone with her fingertips as the tears rolled down her cheeks.

Soon she was shaking uncontrollably and sobbing. The crowd around us, normally joyous at our presence and the possibility that the well might one day produce water, fell to silence. No one spoke. No one moved. No one made a sound. Everyone just watched Leena cry. And after almost a minute of no breath being inhaled or exhaled, the cry and wail that she’d stuffed and held for a decade exited her body and echoed down and across the mountain. And when it did, old and young alike began to cry as well—a testimony to how they carried her and wanted so badly to share in, even carry, her pain.

Leena, the necklace woven through her fingers and the polished stone dangling beneath her hand, pressed it to her lips and kissed it, then clutched it to her chest. Finally, head bowed, she lifted it before the crowd. An offering that needed no explanation, and when she did, the older women untied the scarves from around their necks and began to cover their heads.

Paulo held Isabella, who clutched his neck, while Zaul and I stood helpless. After a moment, Leena fell on me and soaked my shoulder, clutching me. I wrapped my arms around her and offered what I could but I fear I was little consolation. The wound was deep and my friendship only reached so far. The wounds of the mudslide, the loss of so many friends and family, the loss of her parents, the loss of the plantation, the loss of her husband—all of it landed in her hand when I set that stone in it. She was inconsolable. When she collapsed, I caught her. We slid together down onto the ground and leaned against the well. Mango tree above us. Her parents entombed below us. Surrounded by a quiet and rapidly growing community, Leena cried.

After a few minutes, she stood and was stepping into my harness, speaking incoherently and instructing Paulo to lower her into the hole when I touched her hand. “Leena.” No response. “Leena.” Still nothing. “Paulina.”

She turned to look at me. I said, “Please let me do that.”

She shook her head. “No, my father—”

“Leena, if he’s down there with your mother, you should be here to receive them. Not us.”

That stopped her and she knew I was right.

I buckled in and descended. Once at the bottom, I tried not to disturb the manner in which the bones lay. Gently I picked my way around. Trying to delicately pry them loose. I knew I’d found her father when I uncovered a wedding ring. I looked at that ring and remembered the one and only time I’d ever seen Leena’s father.

When Marshall had first sent me to make the offer to the Cinco Padres what seemed a lifetime ago, I took the offer to the attorney who was acting as our middleman, and I remember sitting at a café across the street, hiding behind my Costa Del Mars, wanting to see the owner’s reaction. I watched him walk into the office, and then about three minutes later, he walked out. He walked down the steps wearing a frayed straw hat, a farmer’s tan, and the weight of the world on his shoulders. I remember thinking how strong his hands appeared and how his broad shoulders were no stranger to hard work. How the crow’s-feet beneath his temples made it appear as though his eyes were smiling. I remember him walking down those steps, and despite the look of pain on his face, he stopped to talk to an older woman. He took off his hat and smiled and bowed slightly. After that it was a man of about the same age. Then an older couple. By the time he’d reached the sidewalk, he’d stopped to talk with seven different sets of people. Everyone wanted to say hello. Shake his hand. I remember thinking that despite worn boots, a tattered, dirty shirt, and fraying jeans, he had more distinction than Marshall. Than any of us. He had not bought the honor bestowed on him by those he passed in the street. He’d earned it. I also remember one more thing that came to mind—I didn’t know him, never met him and never would, but one thing that afternoon on the street taught me…that man was beloved. The proof was in the faces of the people he met. He’d given them something, and each wanted a chance to thank him. As he walked away, I realized what it was. What he’d given them. It was something neither Marshall nor I could ever offer. Something we didn’t know the first thing about.

He’d given them hope. In comparison to that coffee farmer, we were subsistence farmers and he the billionaire.

I sat here in the mud, tears rolling down my cheeks, remembering that time in my life when I’d worked for a man who pretended to be great, who thought his money made him significant, yet walking across the street in front of me had been a man whose boots Marshall wasn’t qualified to polish. Marshall didn’t hold a candle to Alejandro Santiago Martinez. The reaction of those he met spoke volumes about his greatness. I stared down in the mud, wishing I’d stood, taken off my hat, and shaken his hand.

Marshall had never had that effect on me. Ever.

At the bottom of that hole, tethered to the world via a wet, muddy rope, I took off my headlamp, cleared my throat, and spoke to those bones. “I want to tell you both, and you especially, sir, that while I had nothing to do with this mud, I had a lot to do with what happened after this. Your family has suffered a lot, and it’s safe to say that I’m the cause of that. If I were you, I’d be real mad at me. I’m sorry for what we did. For what I did. For not being a better man.” I paused, not knowing what to say next. “You’d be real proud of Leena. She’s…well, she doesn’t know any of this about me and I’ve been living most my whole life with half-truths and no truths, and every time I’m around her I want to be around her a lot more but there are a few things she doesn’t know about me—namely that I did all this.” I glanced at myself, at the mud covering every inch of me. “I’ve been like this my whole life.” I shook my head. “I want you to know that I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and”—I glanced up toward the pinhole of light some three hundred–plus feet above me—“will cause.”

Digging out that man and his wife broke something loose in me. I loaded them through tears in ragged, bony chunks into the five-gallon bucket. I cannot tell you why, but as I did, I remembered something that happened to me as a kid. I was five. Maybe six. Coming off the beach. Surfboard tucked under my arm. The taste of salt on my lips. Sun-bleached hair draped across my face. I walked up through the dunes and began walking across the grass toward our house. My first three steps onto the grass were uneventful. My fourth stopped me and sent a bloodcurdling scream out of my mouth that brought my mom running out the front door. Sandspurs are a small weed that grow among the blades of grass, and they’re tough to pick out if you’re not looking. They produce small balls with fifteen or twenty spikes per ball. They can pierce hardened leather and stepping on them is like sliding across shards and splinters of glass. They are also known to grow quickly and without warning. I’d walked across that grass a thousand times and never stepped foot on a sandspur, but for some reason on that day, they’d sprouted and I stepped into the center of them. I knew when my foot touched down that I had just driven about five hundred little spikes into the sole of my foot, and what’s worse, I couldn’t move. I had to stand there and take this until someone with shoes walked across the land mine and lifted me out of that patch of grass. Mom ran across the street, lifted me, and carried me inside, where she spent the next two hours plucking them out of the base of my foot with a pair of tweezers. She pulled out several hundred. With each one, she’d pluck it and then hold it to the light, making sure she got the whole thing.

Loading that man and his wife into that bucket and then tugging on the rope and watching it rise to the surface was a lot like that experience with my mom. It plucked the shards of glass from my heart, and as it lifted toward the light above me, I got to stand there and wonder if I’d gotten all of it or if a portion remained.

*  *  *

I filled and sent up five buckets with large pieces of volcanic mud turned rock, which held the skeletal remains of Leena’s parents like ancient fossils telling a story of tenderness, of a final hug that had been a decade or better in the making, of love lived out. Once I was certain I’d unearthed them, I surfaced and found Leena staring at a piece of rock, which she’d just rinsed in a bucket of water. Protruding from the edges of the porous stone were the bones of a hand. As she picked away at it, chunks of mud fell off, revealing two intertwined hands. The larger holding the smaller. And on the larger, Leena found her father’s wedding band.

The effect of that on Leena was more than any of us could hold. Some turned away. Others covered their mouths. I knelt next to her not knowing what to offer. Finally, she turned to me, holding the hands in both of hers. She didn’t need to speak. Through painful tears, she cracked a broken smile. The image was clear—they had died together. The crowd around us formed a firemen’s line from the creek sending bucket after bucket of water, allowing us to rinse the piles of rocks and bones clumped together. As we rinsed and then pieced together the rocks much as they had been in the hole, we were able to make sense of her parents’ last moments. Or moment. Somehow, with the wall of mud approaching, they’d climbed into the well thinking it would provide protection. And it had until a wave of mud thirty feet high swallowed the hole, pressing them down. Leena’s dad was only able to hold them so long. Judging from the protective halo of white bone encircling the smaller frail bones of her mother, he had cradled her mom as the caustic mud filled around them and then carried them to the bottom, where their last minute together had been forever entombed. I never knew them, so I cannot comment on how they lived, but I can comment on how they died. Her mom’s head was resting on her father’s shoulder. It was an undeniable picture. Their fingers were intertwined. Locked within each other’s. When those around us saw it, they gasped and shook their heads. Old women cried. Young girls covered their mouths. Old men took off their hats and crossed themselves. My uneducated guess was that they’d died near the top, engulfed in a wall and pool of mud. Then, in the following moments, when the mud cooled and dried and hardened into rock, it pulled away from the sides of the well and shot toward the center of the earth. Given its weight, it descended the shaft of the well like a giant cylindrical bullet, lubricated by the water. The column of rock fell nearly four hundred feet, then it slammed into the cap rock of the spring below, stopping up the well like a stone cork, cutting off the water supply and burying her parents.