Caminos Read online

  The mention of Bernardo doused Mercedes’ bright mood. “Is he here, too?” she whispered, her eyes darting over the crowd along the far side of the churchyard where the boys had been playing. She hoped to catch a glimpse of her father, and she hoped not to at the same time.

  “Oh, he’s around somewhere,” José said. “Probably on his fifth bottle of cider by know. You know how he is.”

  She did not, actually. Not in the first person.

  “Hey, why don’t you come down to the stream with us,” José said, trying to lighten her mood again. “Munch thinks he’s found an old stone fortress in the woods, and we’re going to play Don Pelayo and the Moors.”

  “No,” the dejected Mercedes said. “If I go to the woods, I may ruin my new dress.”

  “Oh, come on,” José insisted. “Ramón just sent me this shirt from Havana, and I’ve already torn it!”

  The mention of one of the brothers she had never known—and one who sent gifts, but not to her—only made Mercedes feel worse. “Thanks, José, but I’d better go find Noelia. She’ll be cross if I miss the mass.”

  “Hey, José! Are you coming?” Munch shouted from the edge of the woods. “Or are you just going to stand there yakking with your orphan baby sister all day?”

  “Shut your mouth,” José yelled back.

  “Why don’t you come over here and shut it for me?” Munch taunted.

  José turned to Mercedes, who was stricken by the succinct verbalization of her familial circumstances. Her face was crinkling up to cry. José turned his burning eyes to Munch, who was laughing and stoking on the other boys. He looked back to his sister.

  “You pay that loudmouth no mind, Mercedes,” José said. He hugged her stiff, skinny body.

  She loved that he cared about her, but at that moment, José’s embrace did not make Mercedes feel any better. And his eruptions of anger, though never unleashed on her, always frightened Mercedes. The summer before, she had seen him beat a boy bloody over a practical joke he played on José.

  “Look at him now!” Munch laughed to the boys, shouting loudly enough for José to hear. “Maybe he should just go play with the girls.”

  “You’re going to pay!” José shouted back over his shoulder. To Mercedes he said, as calmly as possible: “Go on now and find Noelia and the kids, and have some fun at the fiesta. Mrs. Álvarez is selling her almond pastries, and I’m sure she’ll give you one if you ask.” The rich, almond paste pastries called carbayones were one of his sister’s favourites. “You know how much she liked mama,” he added.

  “Okay, José,” Mercedes mumbled, her eyes downcast. She was disappointed that her happy day had soured so quickly, and that her time with José was clipped short. “See you later.”

  “Yes, see you soon, little rabbit,” José said, giving her one last quick hug before sprinting across the pasture to pummel Munch, who had already taken flight into the trees.

  Mercedes climbed the hill to the chapel forecourt, which was enclosed by a semi-circular stone wall, and threaded through the worshippers chatting and lingering outside. She entered the chapel and sat on the top stone step, leaning back against the opened door. Mercedes again smoothed the pleats of her green skirt. She stared hard at the resplendent statue of the Virgin of Covadonga, the patron saint of Asturias, adorned in a red and white cloak and bejewelled crown. The painted wooden Madonna stood on a platform at the altar rail, its base wreathed in freshly-cut white and yellow flowers. Mercedes’ anguish eased. Sitting in a church and marveling at the saints always comforted her.

  The live Covadonga, Manolo and Noelia’s oldest daughter, came rushing in after a while and saw Mercedes sitting on the cool, grey slab of stone. “Mercedes!” she said sharply. “We’ve been looking all over for you. Mama is terrified we’d lost you!” Grabbing her firmly by the upper arm, Covadonga pulled Mercedes to her feet.

  “Ow!” Mercedes cried. “That hurts!”

  “Stop whining, you little brat,” Covadonga barked. “You come with me this instant, and stop making trouble!” Covadonga dragged her outside and up the hill toward the village.

  When Mercedes saw Mrs. Álvarez and her pastry stand, she tried to pull away from Covadonga. “I want to get a carbayon,” she squealed.

  “And what do you plan to pay for it with?” Covadonga asked. She tightened her grip on Mercedes’ arm. “Or did my mother give you some pesetas to go with that new dress?”

  “I won’t have to pay anything for it!” Mercedes yelled, thrashing around trying to free herself. “She was friends with my mama, and she’ll give me one.”

  “Oh, your mama! I’m sick and tired of hearing about your dead mama, and about poor, abandoned little Mercedes!”

  At that, her hatred of Covadonga leaping to a new level of intensity, Mercedes bit the girl hard on the wrist. Covadonga recoiled and turned her loose. “You little viper!” she shouted as Mercedes ran off down the hill.

  Mercedes tore across the pasture as quickly as she could run and disappeared into the woods, looking for her brother José.

  * * *

  In 1895, when he was fifteen years old, José boarded a ship in the Asturian port town of Gijón and followed his brothers to Cuba. Two years later he was dead, killed in a fight with three other Asturian migrants over a dispute about money. Though José had fled Bernardo, he could not so easily leave the rage behind. He went to his Caribbean grave with raw knuckles and a knife wound to his heart.

  Twelve-year-old Mercedes was living in Naveces, working as a house maiden for a different family. She wept for three days when word arrived that the only brother she’d known was gone.

  * * *

  West Virginia, USA

  July 1976

  Robert was terrified. As he lay flat in the center of his bed, he felt as if an icy electric current was racing through his eight-year-old body, down his back and legs, up his arms and through his shoulders, and back down again.

  Robert loved his new bedroom in the daytime. His parents let him choose the scarlet carpet and navy blue colour for the walls, as well as the ceiling light with its baseball globe and three miniature Louisville Slugger bats at the top. He liked the big window looking out at the woods near ground level, through which he could watch the birds flutter and squirrels scurry. He even liked the windowless storage room through the door on the wall opposite the window, into which he could retreat. He would close the door, and sit in the silence to read by the light of the single bulb mounted on the wall beneath the staircase.

  But at night, his bedroom became a chamber of imaginary horrors. He thought over and over of how easily someone could look in the window at him, or break in and carry him off into the dark woods. He worried that vampires lurked in the storage room and that some terrible creature skulked under the bed, waiting to grab him if a hand or foot broke the vertical plane of the sides of the mattress.

  Two nights before, he had braved the creature’s grasp as he leapt from the bed and went down the hall to tell his parents he was scared. His father had come back with him to the room and turned on the light, showing him that there was nothing under the bed or in the storage room and that the window was locked. Robert could not go back into their room again tonight. He felt they would be angry and disappointed, and he feared that worse than abduction or vampires.

  So there he lay: flat because he could not bear to turn his back either to the window on his left or the door to the storage room on his right, and in the center of the bed so the creature below could not reach up with its scaly, clawed hand and grab him. He tucked the blanket tightly up to his ears so the vampires could not get to his neck. Somehow, he managed to sleep.

  He woke to the scent of bacon frying and the sound of The Today Show on the television in the kitchen upstairs. The summer morning sunlight was greenish filtering through the trees out the window. He loved his room.

  “Hey, mammaw,” Robert said as he climbed onto the stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen.

  “Hey, Robby,” his
grandmother Virginia said, flipping the bacon sizzling in the pan. There had not been a case of trichinosis in West Virginia in decades, but she still fried all pork until it was the consistency of chalk. It was just as Virginia’s mother did on the farm before she died, when Virginia was Robert’s age. “I thought you were going to sleep all morning,” she said to her grandson. “You want some bacon and eggs?”

  “Yes, please,” Robert said enthusiastically, “with toast and jelly.” He watched the little television on the kitchen counter as his grandmother prepared his breakfast. His parents, Brenda and Tom, both worked full-time. Virginia had taken care of him every weekday since he was a baby. She had never learned to drive, so her husband Sam brought her to Tom and Brenda’s house in the mornings and collected her in the evenings after Brenda arrived home.

  In addition to caring for Robert, Virginia cleaned the house, did the laundry and ironing, and often started preparing the family’s dinner. During the school year, she also packed his lunchbox, but now it was summer break. Usually, they ate sandwiches together for lunch while watching the first of Virginia’s afternoon soap operas.

  After Robert finished his breakfast, he changed from his pyjamas and bounded outside. At the bottom of the big, sloping back yard stood a soaring, old, oak tree. Its thick roots spread out from the base of its fat trunk along the ground. The tree was one of his favourite places. Even the hottest August day seemed to be cool under its thick canopy.

  Robert unpacked his Matchbox cars from their vinyl valise and went to the woods to collect as much moss as he could carry. Then he went back for twigs. He spent the morning digging tunnels under the tree’s roots and constructing a town from the twigs and moss. He drove the cars along the roads he had built and imagined all manner of activities in the settlement. Robert did not want to come inside when Virginia called him to lunch, so she brought his sandwich and cherry Kool-Aid to him.

  At four o’clock, she came back down from the house. “Look! Look, mammaw!” Robert shouted when she was halfway across the yard. “Look at my town!” He pushed around some of the cars for her, demonstrating every tunnel and bridge and explaining the functions of all the stick-and-moss buildings.

  “That’s very nice, Robby. You’ve built some place there,” Virginia said. She adored the boy and loved the summers when he was around every day. “But it’s time to come in and get cleaned up. Your mommy’ll be home soon. You can play down here again tomorrow.”

  Robert packed up his cars and followed Virginia up the hill to the house. He rarely complained or disobeyed his parents. “You are such a good boy, I love you very much,” they had told him frequently all his life. They did not intentionally link the two—being good and being loved—but that was the message which Robert unconsciously internalized.

  After his bath, Robert lay on his belly on the family room floor and watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island and The Munsters as he waited for Brenda and Tom to return from work and for Sam to come for Virginia.

  Chapter 4

  Hundreds of thousands of Asturians sailed to the Americas during the nineteenth century, looking for work and dreaming of wealth. They could find neither at home. Most of the Indianos, as they were called in the north of Spain, went to Cuba. Some ventured to countries throughout Latin America. Thousands of Indianos realized their ambitions and returned to Asturias with cash enough for them and their extended families to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

  The stereotypical Indiano came back and built the biggest, most elaborately-decorated house he could afford. The preferred location was atop a hill overlooking the ancestral village, but one of the new Indiano neighborhoods on the edges of the principality’s primary cities of Oviedo, Gijón and Avilés also sufficed.

  Antonio González Conde went to Cuba, by himself, when he was fourteen years old. Mercedes’ oldest brother was industrious and hard working, but his conservatism and good nature mostly sabotaged his aspiration to wealth. A staunch Spanish nationalist, Antonio volunteered for the colonial army when the Cubans began their armed struggle for independence. The required purchase of his own weapon and uniform were only the first economic costs of his patriotism. His dry-goods shop suffered during his absences campaigning with the army against the revolutionaries. Then his trusted partner swindled him out of what was left of the business while Antonio was being held a prisoner of war by the U.S. Army in 1898.

  Along with other captured colonial troops, the U.S. repatriated Antonio after Spain’s defeat. He went home empty handed, the bitterness of his country’s loss multiplied by his failed dreams and so many years of toil wasted. He tired quickly of Bernardo’s ridicule and tyrannical reign back on the farm in Asturias. In the spring of 1900, Antonio took a job as a deckhand on a cargo steamer in exchange for passage to Cuba. He started anew, just as he had when he was fourteen, hauling for hire anything that would fit in his burro-drawn wagon.

  Antonio arrived this second time in a Havana to which he took an immediate dislike. The Cubans overflowed with triumphal nationalism, and he deeply resented the implication that 400 years of Spanish rule had been some sort of imprisonment. Thus, he was not too troubled to leave—though his quest for an Indiano fortune again remained unfulfilled—after a little over a year. One morning, a telegram came to the boarding house where Antonio was living. It announced that he was the new patriarch of the family and the farm across the Atlantic. Bernardo was dead.

  * * *

  Naveces, Asturias

  June 1901

  Antonio knocked at the door of the tidy little house which sat high on the hill above San Román Church. When it opened, he said to the middle-aged woman who stood wiping her hands on her apron: “Good morning. I have come to take my sister home.”

  A bit flustered by his unannounced visit and his pronouncement, Anna Carbajal stammered after a moment: “Mr. González … hello … good morning … welcome. I wasn’t … we weren’t expecting you. I wasn’t aware you’d even returned home from Cuba.”

  Antonio stuck a hand into the jacket pocket of the new hopsack suit he’d had made in Havana for his return. “I sailed into Gijón yesterday and arrived in Avilés only late this morning. And my first order of business is to see that my sister spends not one more night in the servitude to which my father sentenced her sixteen years ago.”

  “Well, Mr. González,” Anna said, pushing her shoulders and elbows back and standing a little taller, “I don’t believe it’s fair to call it servitude. We and the other families took Mercedes in for all these years, at our own expense. I’d expect a little gratitude from you.”

  Antonio nodded and smiled, replying quickly: “I apologize, Mrs. Carbajal, for any offense. I did not intend any criticism of you or our kindhearted neighbors and relations,” although he did. Mercedes had written him often in Cuba in recent years. She lamented her semi-servant status in most of the families with whom she’d lived after Manolo and Noelia urgently summoned Juan and Father Agustín on the day of the San Adriano festival ten years before and insisted that they had done more than their fair share. “Any negative emotion I feel is directed squarely at my late father,” Antonio added.

  “Of course, of course, Mr. González,” Anna said, relaxing her stance again. “It’s been a heavy cross for her to bear, what your father did.” She turned back into the house and shouted: “Mercedes! Come!”

  For God’s sake, Antonio thought, she’s not a dog.

  Mercedes appeared in the entranceway behind Anna. She was lean and muscular from much scrubbing of floors and pots and hoisting of Naveces babies and toddlers since she was scarcely more than a child herself. Mercedes burst into tears at the sight of Antonio and pushed past Anna to embrace her brother, kissing him once on each cheek. “You’ve come! Oh, you’ve come, Antonio, just as you promised!”

  Before he departed for Cuba that second time the year before, Antonio had visited Mercedes at the Carbajal house and assured her that when Bernardo died—“the old goat can’t live forever,” he tol
d his sister—he would return and liberate her from exile.

  Mercedes’ nickname had also stuck with Antonio. “Yes, rabbit. I’ve come to take you home to Las Cepas.”

  “Oh, Antonio, you have no idea how I’ve longed for this day!” Mercedes said, her arms still around his neck. She had wanted to believe her brother, both about Bernardo’s mortality and Antonio’s good intentions, but she had experienced so much disappointment in her life. Until that moment, when Antonio appeared, she did not feel that she could trust much of anything.

  “I know, Mercedes,” Antonio said. He pried her arms from around him. “Go, now, and collect your things.”

  She ran back into the house and placed her meagre belongings into a burlap sack. Antonio had politely demurred when Anna Carbajal invited him inside. He waited for his sister outside in the sun, smoking one of his Cuban cigars and gazing out at the cerulean sea, a froth of white curling along where the distant crag met the water.

  Antonio had missed this vista, and his homeland, every day during those nineteen years in Cuba. As a boy, he often wandered up this hill after Sunday mass and sat looking at the sea. Sometimes the surf slid in gently, like today. Sometimes it pounded in, leaping high and white as it raked the bluffs. Always, he found its endless churning landward and its flat expanse to the horizon reassuring. It had been there for millennia and would be there for millennia to come. Whatever troubles or joys he experienced were momentary and insignificant compared to this physical manifestation of geologic and universal time.

  * * *

  A month later, Antonio, Mercedes and their Uncle Anselmo walked the two miles to the Castrillón municipal hall in Piedras Blancas to appear before the chief councillor of the district. Mercedes was still a minor, and with Bernardo dead, the law required two men be named her guardians. They would have to concur on any legal question concerning her, such as marriage or the percentage of the farm she inherited, until she reached the majority age of eighteen.