Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Later some men brought Ernesto home, on an improvised stretcher, through the rain. Teresa by now was totally numb, although she still wept, and wept; numbly she washed off the blood and changed the muddy clothes of Ernesto; she put on the clean white shirt and light pants that she had prepared for market day, in Ixtapanejo. And the next day the same men came with a coffin, into which they lifted Ernesto. They carried him in the coffin to the church, with Teresa and Felipe and the little girls all following behind, in rusty black clothes that the women of the plantation had found for them.

Throughout the next days, weeks, months, Teresa was like a person who is automatically propelled into motion; she performed all her duties; habits of industry pushed her through the hours, but within herself she felt a vast black emptiness. Grief, and fear.

Felipe, although he was so young, and still not very tall, was allowed to do the work that his father had done, and for almost the same pay; on the day after Ernesto’s funeral one of the overseers had come around to tell them that. And so now every night Felipe came home as pale and exhausted as his father had been, and he spoke as little as Ernesto had, although his eyes said a great deal. What she saw in Felipe’s eyes was terrifying to Teresa.

One night he came home shouting, in a terrible rage that frightened his little sisters. “That man, he dared to speak to me! All these months he has avoided my sight, as he should, and then today he comes over and speaks; he asks if the work is too hard for me. Too hard! I should have spat at him. Oh, why did I not?”

It was of course Señor Krupp of whom he spoke, his father’s murderer, who had dared to address Felipe.

In a pacifying voice Teresa said, “Our cousin Aurelia was here for a visit today, and she always asks, don’t we want to come and work for her? You could be in the restaurant, and perhaps I could get some work in the large hotel.”

“You would like to be a maid, and all of us sleep on the floor of the restaurant, like Aurelia and her family?”

What he said was true: Aurelia and Francisco and their children did sleep on the floor of their restaurant, a small space already crowded with tables and chairs; and in truth Teresa had not much wanted to be a maid in the big hotel for tourists, mostly foreigners, or rich Mexicans from Mexico City.

“It is necessary that I stay here,” said Felipe.

On some market days, just as she used to with Ernesto, Teresa, still in black, would go off to the market at Ixtapanejo, with Felipe and her daughters, the five of them packed into the back of a neighbor’s truck, or sometimes, much more slowly, in the potter’s cart, along with the plates and jugs. Arrived in town, they would wander through all the booths of the market, almost never buying anything, and then, a small procession, they would cross the town, with its new bricked-in streets, its stores full of ridiculous hats and bright bathing costumes, cameras and all manner of sweet-smelling oils for the tourists’ skin. They would walk across to the beach, past the large white city hall, with the small jail in back, and they would stand at the edge of the water, near the men who were busy repairing nets. There they could observe the arrivals and departures of the fishing boats, and sometimes out in the harbor there would be an enormous white ship, from which North Americans, in smaller boats, would cross the harbor water and arrive at the dock, in their light bright clothes, to walk about in the town and to buy an incredible number of things, huge baskets and satchels of objects, all in an hour or so.

On some afternoons Teresa and her children would then walk all around the sandy cove, the harbor of Ixtapanejo, climbing over the large rocks where seabirds perched and flapped away at their approach, all the way to where the grand hotels were situated, up a hill and back from the beach. There the tourists spread themselves out on towels, almost naked in the sun, or else they sat in large chairs, beneath small thatched shelters, drinking beer or another thing which was sucked through straws from a coconut shell. At the bottom of the small steps that led up to Aurelia’s restaurant Teresa would stop, and she would send one of the girls up to seek out Aurelia. After a few minutes, there Aurelia would be, laughing and wiping her hands on her apron, offering them something, anything to eat or drink. Which they never accepted, but soon went on their way, back to the main road that led out to the miles and miles of coconut palms, with their high dry rattling fronds: the plantations, Señor Krupp’s plantations.

Because in many ways she found him increasingly disturbing, with his silences and angry eyes, Teresa paid less and less attention to her son. She was able to be with her daughters, to take care of them and even to enjoy them, hardly thinking at all. Whenever she did think, in a serious way, the pain and emptiness that had followed Ernesto’s death would return and almost overwhelm her, like an enormous and darkly threatening storm cloud. And Felipe seemed to personify her fears, to remind her of everything of which she did not wish to think. Once she even caught herself thinking that without Felipe she would be just another young widow, with three young daughters, herself almost a girl among girls again. But Felipe was nearly a man, the son of a murdered father, and she was twice the age of her son.

Once, on a Sunday afternoon, when there was no work being done on the plantation, their day of rest, Teresa heard a series of explosions, loud and irregular, like the sound of war scenes in a motion picture. She asked Felipe, and he said yes, there were guns. But she was not to worry; a couple of the other boys had .38s, that was all. No, he did not know where they got them. They took turns practicing, using coconuts thrown up into the air for targets. Teresa started to say that he should not, guns were dangerous, but then she sighed and said nothing. She saw no way to try to direct the life of Felipe.

Felipe shot and killed Señor Krupp, Carlos Krupp, on a rainy night in November, almost exactly a year after the killing of his father, Ernesto.

Teresa heard the shots, muffled but resounding through the rain, and she thought it strange, shooting at coconuts on such a night, in the greenish darkness, in the rain. Somehow, sinkingly, she knew that they were not shooting at such targets, and when, a few minutes later, Felipe ran in through the door, blood flowing from a wound in one leg, she knew what must have happened before he spoke.

His face shining and fierce and pure white, he said, “I have killed him. Finally there has been justice. I do not care what happens, after this.”

As she had washed off Ernesto’s blood, Teresa now bathed Felipe’s leg. She felt that in some way Felipe too was now dead; certainly he had passed into a new and unreachable place, he was lost to her. He was no more a child, nor a young boy. He was a man who had killed, who had murdered the murderer of his father.

Soon after that, an hour or so, when Felipe’s leg had barely stopped bleeding, two policemen came to take him away. They were men whom Teresa had known from her village; they spoke gruffly but with an apology in their manner. “You know, Teresa, that we must do this. The boy has shot Señor Krupp; the man is dead, and people saw him do it. We must take him to the jail, in Ixtapanejo.”

That was the beginning of a terrible time in Teresa’s life, perhaps the worst. She had seen the white exterior of the jail at Ixtapanejo, but she had no idea how it was inside, nor what was done to people there. A few times, boys from her village were arrested for drunkenness, on market days, and they spent some time, a weekend, in that jail. Teresa remembered a black look of fear in their eyes when they spoke of it, although of course they swaggered and pretended that it was nothing. But Felipe had shot and killed a man: would they keep him in jail forever? Would they hang or shoot him? Or would anyone, possibly, understand that it was the murderer of his father whom he had killed—an evil man—and understand that he was very young? She knew the answers to none of these questions; they raged back and forth in her mind, like waves in a storm, and she could think of nothing else.