Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr

Author:Harriet Doerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1985-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

10

THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH

Believing as they did in a relentless providence, the people of Ibarra, daily and without surprise, met their individual dooms. They accepted as inevitable the hail on the ripe corn, the vultures at the heart of the starved cow, the stillborn child. But when they heard that Basilio García had killed his brother, Domingo, everyone in the village said, “It is a lie.”

At this time the brothers lived with their mother in a house that was dissolving with the rain and scattering with the wind. Domingo was ten years younger than Basilio and still had his first teeth when his brother began to bring home money that he earned. Their mother, Concha, surrendering each slack day to the next, sat on her doorstep and allowed the hens and chickens, and even the goats, to enter the house. Rice soups and sorrow had made her so fat the mattress of her bed sagged like a hammock. She still mourned her husband who, three months before Domingo was born, went to the city to find work, encountered love instead, and died of a disease.

• • •

On a gusty March afternoon when Basilio was twelve, he walked behind the hill of San Juan through whirlwinds of topsoil to the Paradiso mine, which had not operated since the Revolution. Here he climbed down the shaft on the loose rungs of old ladders to the first level and filled a sack with rocks that were lying near the opening. The next day he took a candle and a bigger sack. At the end of a week he showed his pile of rocks to don Emilio, who bought ore.

Don Emilio looked at them and said, “Choose the best and put them in one sack,” and when this was done, he said, “The Paradiso is mined out above and flooded below. If you want to recover some high-grade ore, go to the Socorro dump. I will buy anything this good or better.” And he tapped his foot against the selected rocks. He lifted the sack into his truck and paid Basilio five pesos. “From now on, it must be weighed,” said don Emilio.

When Basilio was fourteen, don Emilio gave him a pick and a helmet with a lantern. Basilio stood with a dozen men in the shadow of the hoist tower, where fraying cables clung to a rusty drum, and climbed after them down forty meters of ladders to the second level. When he had broken off as many rocks as he could carry, he attached his sack to a head strap and climbed back up the ladders.

At the end of the day, Basilio and the others—who were all grown men, fathers and grandfathers—watched don Emilio weigh the ore each one had brought to the surface.

“You ask why I cannot pay more,” said don Emilio. “Remember that the owner of this mine receives a percentage. Remember the cost of transportation to the smelter. And if you follow the metal prices, you will see how they swing, up one month and down the next.

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