Read Online Island of Divine Music by John Addiego - Free Book Online

Tacho, as he put it to Maria in his street Spanish, that she would prefer digging in shit like a pig to a life of luxury in the city with a rich man like Paolo who loved her. She stood with dried mud dusting her bare feet and legs, her hands scratched by thistles and leaves and callused by work, and described the punishment that God had in store for them. This made both men laugh. By now José and three other men had gathered in the dusky light near Maria and her child. Paolo shrugged and pulled a stiletto from his pocket. Tacho produced a length of chain.
    Former zoot-suiters who’d cut their teeth breaking thumbs for the mob, Paolo and Tacho were accustomed to frightening the poor country Mexicans in the barrio with a gesture or a threat. While Paolo brandished his knife Tacho explained how much he and the mafioso next to him enjoyed breaking bones and performing various acts of castration and vivisection on little
indios
such as them. Although Paolo didn’t understand all of the monologue, he got the gist of the Spanish insults and chuckled. What neither he nor Tacho knew was that every campesino, from age five onward, wielded amachete with breathtaking authority. Country folk like Maria used the tool from childhood in order to chop firewood, harvest crops, slaughter livestock, and separate the heads of vipers from the rest of their bodies.
    Paolo grabbed Maria’s elbow, and José shoved him, as much to save face in front of his
compañeros
as to defend the woman. The bill collector’s stiletto sliced José’s throat, and the powerful little man stood holding the gash while blood squirted between his fingers. He stared at Maria before his legs buckled. Then Maria swung the machete from beneath her poncho and buried it in her former lover’s leg. A storm of blades and screams followed.
    The little drunk
patron
saw the carnage, vomited, and called the rancher. It made sense to both him and his boss to let an entire migrant community take to their heels before calling the authorities. In fact, with payroll a couple of days off, the crisis became an opportunity in disguise from the rancher’s perspective. Scare the hell out of them, he suggested.
    José died in the arms of his
compañeros
and was left in a trough between two endless rows of beets. The two thugs were so horribly slaughtered that a photo of their dismembered corpses found its way into a
National Enquirer
issue some weeks later, under the caption Crazed Farmworkers Attack Threshing Machine! In the photograph Paolo’s eyes seemed to be regarding each other from two separate faces across the mangled expanse of his torso. Parts of Tacho Valdez lay in the dust as if awaiting assembly. A leg punctuated by a laced oxford lay across the big man’s neck.
    When the
patron
told the workers that an army of immigrationand police was on its way, the campesinos scattered All but Maria, who held her child in one hand and the bloody machete in the other, unable to move. The camp grew quiet, the land dark, while she stood holding her child and the blade, waiting for God to complete His celestial thought. God seemed in the middle of an idea of how the woman should kill herself and her child, but He wasn’t clear about the details. Should she slit her wrists first? How would He have her end the innocent one’s life with the least pain? Should they leap into the river? The Snake curved in the distance, a dull shard of black glass near a warehouse, a dark shape slithering between the fields.
    When the sirens sounded Jesús urged his mother to move. Here was where their thoughts diverged, as if a fork in the road of God’s mind appeared and the child would always take a different road from his mother’s. It even seemed possible, as Maria would see it later, that Jesús was able to convince God to change His mind. Lights bumped along the dirt road near the fenced housing enclosure, swept through the field and smeared across the distant river. Jesús tugged on his mother’s