Read Online Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass - Free Book Online Page B

taken the Wednesday train or the Friday train from Libertad to Obregón. But Thursday was market day in Obregón, when I could buy flannel, buttons, and yarn at less cost. Because I was sixteen and foolish, señora, I was not ready for the baby I had been carrying for almost seven months.”
    Trinidad sat with Sara Everton under the widening shade of an ash tree, on a pine bench that was as upright as a church pew. The two women faced a walled garden, where limp vines and seared lilies drooped in the heat of the April afternoon. The uncompromising sun still paralyzed the air and baked the earth, although its rays slanted almost horizontally from the west.
    Dust from the road had powdered Trinidad’s flat black slippers. She carried ten small eggs in a wire basket. When Sara asked the price, Trinidad said, “Whatever you wish to pay.”
    Sara Everton realized that the eggs were the product of hens who scratched a living from straw, weeds, and piles of trash, and paid slightly more than the amount asked for a dozen large ones in the city supermarket.
    From the bench the two women looked over the adobe wall, past the plowed field, the dry arroyo, and the village, with its three church towers and two domes, and across the broad empty plain to the mesas that closed the eastern horizon.
    Sara inquired about Trinidad’s children.
    “Señora, I have ten,” her guest told her. “Three dead and seven living.”
    Unlike almost everyone else in Ibarra, Trinidad had not been born in this town. Only a year ago, she had come here to live with her sister. The two widows raised chickens and embroidered coarse cotton tablecloths in cross-stitch designs of harsh colors: heliotrope, hot pink, and saffron yellow. Trinidad’s hair, which showed no gray and was still as thick as ever, was pulled straight back into a knot, her skin was smooth over high flat cheekbones, her unwavering glance was directed from eyes where wisdom had been acquired without loss of innocence.
    “Was the infant of whom you speak the first of your children?” Sara asked.
    “Yes, señora, the first of them all, and a son, and the only one among them who was to be granted a miracle.”
    A silence followed. The tree shadow edged out, like a pond spilling, over the parched soil.
    Then Trinidad said, “I think you know the state of Michoacan, where I was born and lived all my life, in the village of Libertad, until I came here, to these dry hills, to be with my sister.”
    At these words Sara Everton saw the state of Michoacán rise like a mirage from the clods of the field before her. As in the finale of a silent movie, when there appears behind the credits a vision of improbable rewards: a humble cottage almost buried in roses or a wire cage from whose open door two doves soar out of sight—like these illusory heavens, there now floated up before her the image of wet green meadows, red furrows of fertile earth, steep slopes of extinct volcanos serrated from crater to ground with ledges of ripening corn, low white houses almost crushed by their tile roofs. She heard the rush of water in ditches and canals and was not surprised when a lake materialized, drowning the famished plots of land, the baseball field, the cemetery and the naves of the churches. Within an hour there would be rain that would silver the surface of the lake as well as the leaves of the eight olive trees that lined the road.
    Sara cast off her trance. “Yes, I know Michoacán,” she said, and asked Trinidad what had happened to her firstborn.
    “The distance is so short, señora,” Trinidad said, “just fifty kilometers from Libertad to Obregón. Only one hour by the local train, and it stops often on the way. I traveled alone because my husband was to meet me at the end of the line, in the market town where he had gone the day before to sell a calf. In that short distance, in that single hour, it happened.”
    Trinidad sat very still, her hands folded in her lap. “I thought the train would