A Far Country by Daniel Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

fountain. The schoolhouse, where sometimes he went to read the few books, was empty. At last she found him, alone on a trail above town. His eyes were red and his lips trembled when he tried to speak. Finally, he said, ‘Don’t cry. There is enough crying already.’
    She went back down the hill to her house and curled into the cool cup of her hammock. Twice she heard her uncle speak to her, and she whispered him away. She squeezed her fists, pinched her eyes tight and felt the fabric beneath her face grow wet and warm.
    They completed a novena of mourning.
    When the nine days were over, she began to hear different words in Saint Michael. They no longer spoke of the droughts, but of false papers and boxes of crickets. I will be run off my land by cricket piss, they said, and no one laughed. Their conversations dried, as tinder dries and becomes ready to burn.
    She was awakened by her parents’ arguing. ‘What do you want me to do?’ her father said again and again. ‘I have nochoice—they have taken away my choices.’ At the weekly market in Prince Leopold, she joined the crowd around the canteen television. Images played of massive settlements made of black plastic tents, clashes between landless men and the police. One day, a young mother stared from the screen with such defiance that Isabel turned to look behind her in the square.
    The days passed, but the henchmen didn’t return. Slowly the men put their guns away. Someone said there were bigger fights over better land elsewhere. ‘I never thought I would thank God for worthless land,’ said her father, smiling for the first time in months. That summer the men still found work in the cane fields. When the foreman offered them the same pay as the year before, one of her cousins shouted, ‘But prices have doubled!’ ‘I think there are many men who would be happy for your job if you don’t want to work,’ said the foreman.
    In November, a family who lived near the highway locked the door to their house and boarded a parrot perch to the south, and two weeks later another followed. The older people cursed them as cowards. They asked, ‘Who will do the work if all the children have gone away?’
    In December, on Saint Lucy’s Day, they set out six chips of salt at night. In the morning, four had dissolved: it would rain by February.
    Now when her family gathered, they spoke only of the city in the south, as if the calm had cut a path for the rumors to pour in. Everyone had a story. In Isabel’s mind it ceased to be a place; it was the static in the background of the radio programs, the flickering on the television screen, a press of crowds, a screech of tires, a chorus of hawkers’ shouts. On thenews, a reporter stood before a bus station, where families dragged bags over concrete floors. He spoke of numbers, first tens and then hundreds of thousands, numbers she didn’t understand. In her imagination, the television’s forest of great glittering towers shattered and fell about the city. In their shadow grew a tangle of planked slums and brick escarpments, a city of cement and broken cement. It was a heaven and a terrible place, an emptiness, a tomb, a place to beg alms, a whorehouse, a street child’s playground, a floodland, a stink. Shimmering at the end of the great descent of her imagination.
    One night Isaias shook her awake. ‘Come,’ he whispered, and she swiveled her legs from the hammock and followed him.
    Outside, the square was empty and blue. He said, ‘Isa, I’m going. There’s a perch leaving for the city early tomorrow from Prince Leopold. If I leave now I can catch it.’
    Sleep still clung to her. She stared at him mutely. ‘I am going to go mad here, Isa. I am going to die if I stay.’
    She was quiet. He said, ‘Isa, you understand. I can’t take it.’
    ‘Those men aren’t coming back. Things will be better—’ she said, but he shook his head. ‘That’s not it. If I thought they were coming back I’d stay. But I’ll