Tree Girl by Ben Mikaelsen Read Free Book Online

the cantón filed past Mamí, placing flowers and beads and other items of remembrance on her thin chest. And then we burned Mamí’s body high above the ground. I helped to gather her ashes and carry them in a vase to a space outside our home. I also helped to dig her grave. The place we buried her ashes already held the afterbirth of each of our family members as well as the ashes of our grandparents. This sacred land held the fluids of life as well as the ashes of death.
    “I’ll teach your students for you,” Manuel told me before he left that day. “Your family needs you now.”
    I stayed with my family as Manuel recommended, and after three days, we visited Mamí’s grave with flowers and candles to help send her spirit on to the next world. Papí gathered all of us that third night and said, “Don’t go outside. The spirits are out tonight.”
    We huddled together around the fire all evening, Alicia and Lidia under my arms, all of us peering intothe fire. “Let’s tell stories of Mamí,” I said. “Not sad ones, but happy and funny ones. Mamí would want that.”
    It was Julia who found strength to giggle first. “Mamí hated mice,” she said. “Once Lidia and I found a nest of dead baby mice and put them in a bowl of hot water. At mealtime I told Mamí we had made her some special soup. We covered her eyes, and when we let her see the baby mouse soup, she pretended to be grateful and took out extra spoons. She said, ‘I must share something so delicious with you.’”
    “What did you do?” Antonio asked.
    “We ran screaming from the table.”
    Lester laughed so hard that spit came from his nose, and then the rest of us laughed even harder.
    Before the night ended, each of us had told stories of Mamí, laying her to rest in our minds as carefully as we had buried her ashes, sharing memories of happiness and not of grief. This was something Mamí had done with our family when her mother had died.
    Halfway through that long evening, Papí went outsideby himself. When I heard a strange noise, I peeked outside. Papí was tying a neighbor’s donkey behind our home to make noises so he could tell Lidia and Alicia that they were hearing spirits.
    When Alicia heard the donkey move outside, she whispered in my ear, “Mamí, do you hear the spirits outside?”
    When Alicia called me Mamí, great watery tears blurred my eyes. I cuddled her closer and said, “Yes, Alicia dear, I hear the spirits.” I was so proud of our family that night. Jorge was gone, and now so was Mamí, but still our family sat around the fire, unbroken.
    After everyone had gone to their sleeping mats that night, Papí came to me. “Gabriela,” he said. “With Jorge and your Mamí gone, you are now the oldest. I will need your help more at home, but I want you to still go to school.”
    I nodded.
    Papí continued. “Promise me one thing. If anything ever happens to me, you must protect your younger brothers and sisters as if they were your ownchildren. Will you promise me this?”
    Promises borrow from the future, but of course, I said, “Yes,” never realizing how soon I would need to honor my promise.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he first rumors of war had come to our cantón less than one year before Mamí’s death. And from the beginning, I had assumed it was not our war. Why would we have enemies? We were only
campesinos
, country people, and we didn’t care about politics or power. We cared only about our families and raising food for our survival.
    For this reason I didn’t understand why the soldiers kept coming to our cantón. “The guerrillas are communists,” they shouted. “If you help the guerrillas, then you, too, are communists.”
    In school, Manuel had explained communism tome, but most in our cantón had never heard of the words
communism, democracy, socialism
, and
capitalism.
We wished only to live our lives and to work the same land that our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had farmed. Mamí and Papí