Jennifer Clement - Prayers for the Stolen

My mother’s hands were lying across her stomach. As I approached I could see she was holding something shiny gripped between her fingers.

The next morning my mother seemed upset. She would not even look at me.

So when did José Rosa leave? I didn’t notice when he left, she said.

You just passed out, Mother. What were you thinking? He’s my teacher!

My mother paced and pulled at her bleached blond hair. I didn’t know if she was angry or sad.

Finally she said, I was just turning inside out, turning inside out so that my bones were on the outside and my heart was hanging here in the middle of my chest like a medallion. It was just too much and so I had to lie down. Ladydi, I knew that man could see my liver and my spleen. He could’ve just leaned over and plucked my eye off of my face like a grape.

What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

My mother sat and was quiet for a moment.

What gun?

What are you doing with a gun, Mama?

Some men need killing, my mother answered.

I sat down beside her and began to rub her back gently.

I have to go to school now, Mama, or I’m going to be late, I said.

Why the hell can’t this place have a bar full of men so that you can get drunk and get yourself kissed?

I’m going to school by myself. I have to go, Mama.

I left her there on the floor and walked out of the house.

As I moved down the hill an army of ants was marching in several lines down the mountain toward the highway. Lizards were moving in the same direction, moving very quickly. The birds above me were also disturbed and flying away.

That morning everything on the mountain seemed to be pushing down toward the black asphalt river.

And then I knew why.

Way off, far off, I heard a helicopter.

I ran toward the school as fast as I could.

At the schoolroom everyone was already inside and the small door was closed.

Let me in, I cried.

José Rosa opened the door. I pushed past him and ran over to Maria and Estefani who stood at the window looking up.

Where’s Paula? I asked.

My friends shook their heads.

José Rosa was confused and bewildered. Maria explained that the helicopter meant the army was coming to dump Paraquat on the poppy fields.

Everyone is running for cover, she explained. You never know where the herbicide might be sprayed.

We could hear the helicopter getting closer until it finally passed over our little one-room school and moved away.

Do you smell anything? Estefani asked.

I don’t, Maria said. No.

José Rosa sat down and took out a small box of white chalk from his leather briefcase and walked toward the blackboard. He wrote out four columns with the subject headings History, Geography, Mathematics, and Spanish Language.

We took out our copybooks and pencils from our school satchels and began to copy down what José Rosa had written.

As I wrote the word History I could smell it. By the time I’d written the words Spanish Language there was no doubt in my mind that I was smelling Paraquat.

The three of us knew it. José Rosa did not.

We also felt the absence of Paula.

As the scent grew stronger we could sense the poison creep in under the schoolroom door.

At the moment when Maria squirmed and was about to stand and insist that we had to get out of that room, Paula pushed open the door and entered panting and crying.

She was drenched in the poison.

Paula was crying with her eyes closed and her lips pressed firmly together.

We all knew that if you got any Paraquat in your mouth you could die.

In her race to outrun the helicopter she’d lost her flip-flops and her satchel. Her dress was drenched and her hair dripped with the stinging liquid. Paula kept her eyes firmly shut. The herbicide can blind you too. It burns everything.

Maria was the first to jump up out of her chair.

In order not to touch her, Maria guided her by pushing Paula with her notebook into the small bathroom built at the back.

Estefani and I followed them. In the bathroom Paula tore off her dress. We tried to clean her off with tap water, but it came out much too slowly, so we also scooped water out from the toilet bowl. We washed her eyes and mouth over and over again.

I could taste the poison. Where some had rubbed onto my skin, I could feel the burning, which could turn a radiant poppy into a piece of tar the size of a raisin.

José Rosa watched in silence. He peered into the room from outside, and covered his mouth and nose with his arm, holding the white cotton shirtsleeve against his face.

We washed off the poison, but we knew much of it was inside her already. Paula did not speak or cry, as she stood naked and trembling in the small bathroom.

It was Estefani who had the idea of wrapping her up in the frayed cloth curtain that hung in the schoolroom.

We walked her through the jungle, down to the highway, and back up to her house. Even though we offered her our own plastic flip-flops, Paula said no and limped on her bare feet. She was afraid there might be Paraquat in the grass along the path to her house and we would be burned by it.

We handed Paula over to her mother who could only say, It was only a matter of time.

We knew she would not be able to reach a sponge into Paula’s body, as if she were a bottle, and wash the poison out.

At home my mother was sitting on the ground at the back of the house overlooking the beer cemetery. Her hair stood up in the air like a yellow halo. The brown-glass bottles and silver cans gleamed and shone under the late-morning sun.

I sat down beside her.

She turned and looked at me and then looked up at the sun and said, What are you doing here so early, huh?

I was still shivering.

Oh my, Ladydi, she said. What happened?

She leaned toward me and placed her arm around me. I told her the whole story.

Daughter, my child, this is, of course, an omen. We have been distinguished. The worm will turn, she said.

She was right. Later, when Paula was stolen, I knew this day had been an omen. She was the first to be chosen.

That night Estefani, Maria, Paula, and I menstruated for the first time. My mother said it was because of the full moon. Estefani’s mother said it was because of the poison triggering something bad inside of us.

But we knew what had really happened.

José Rosa had seen Paula naked. He saw her dark skin and her breasts with their large, brown areolae and soft, black-red nipples and the black hair between her legs. He saw her young, teenage beauty. At that moment, we became one woman and it was as if he’d seen us all.

I promised my mother that I would never tell Maria that she was my half-sister.

I don’t want to shake the leaves out of the trees, my mother said.

I won’t tell her.

As Maria grew and the scar from her harelip faded, she looked exactly like my father. If he’d seen her, he would have thought he was looking in a mirror.

My mother noticed it too. She would stare at Maria in a quiet way, studying her face. She was struggling between wanting to take Maria into her arms and kiss her and wanting to slap her hard across the face.

I loved Maria. Out of everyone in that godforsaken-godforgotten-hottest-hell-on-earth place, as my mother liked to call our mountain, she was the kindest person of all. She would walk around a big red fire ant before she’d step on one.

The year that José Rosa was our teacher I remember as a series of events.

The first event was the day of his arrival, combined with the visit at my house when I showed him our beer cemetery. The second event that stands out is the day that Paula was rained on with herbicide.