Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Katherine looks at George.

He does not exist in her mind. He is real. Her marriage to him does not exist in her mind, but comes from real things. Has always come from real things. It is more than love, is it not? It is the sweet pattern of compromise. It is love and more than love. She has suspected this. Suspected it long before her illness ever distilled her.

And as she watched George then, the night she stood on the little veranda of their Mexican hotel, she had felt that the sky was too big to be true. Looking up, it was the widest expanse she had ever seen and still blazing, although the tyranny of the daytime sun had waned. Incidental clusters of cloud, bathed in a burning sunset orange, broke the foreverness of the sky and helped her feel less overwhelmed by it, gave her eyes something to latch onto. These clouds felt almost merciful to her. She had never seen anything like this before.

She stood on the wooden veranda, which faced onto a broad stone courtyard. Shadows fell from the yucca plants and the bougainvillea. Behind her, the town square, out of which a church spire stretched elegantly over the surrounding low buildings with their ugly loose-hinged shutters, was quiet. She could smell the resin from the wood beneath her bare feet. The wood was warm. The air was warm. And from off of her skin rose the faint, and not unpleasant odor of her perspiration.

She turned from the sky to look through the open door into the room beyond. She watched George. He was inside, sitting on the bed and fixing the strap of her sandal, which had snapped during their walk back to the hotel that evening. He was quietly and intently working with a needle and thread.

Beside the bed, its plain covers of limp cotton crumpled from their lovemaking, sat two sombreros, one on top of the other, on a squat cabinet. She and George had bought them when they had stopped to get their bus at the border town of Nogales. The markets there had been full of street sellers crouched on the ground, selling sweets and flowers, some offering little wooden images and idols of baked clay. Mangoes had spilled from plaited baskets. There had been papayas and bitter cucumbers, too. She and George had both felt the flush of inelegance when one street seller, a man with a deep-set jaw and coal black eyes, had reached out to take their camera and had gestured to them to pose for a photograph in their new hats. They had stood for what seemed like an achingly long time while the street seller pointed the camera this way and that, their arms slung around each other, motionless in their vulnerability, smiling into the sun, and had felt obliged to give him extra pesos.

The trip to Mexico would symbolize a new start for them, George had said. And after Katherine had finally agreed on a wedding date, he could think of nothing else. His plan was for them to travel by boat from Belfast to Liverpool and then take the transatlantic liner on to New York. Arriving in New York, they would board the Southern Pacific Railroad Golden State train to Phoenix, Arizona, stopping overnight in Kansas City. In Phoenix, he and Katherine would stay with Mildred, his mother’s sister, until he had secured a job and a small flat to rent. His job prospects at home with the Belfast City Council were modest, to say the least, and he felt fervently that America promised them a better life. Mildred had assured him in her letters that there were plenty of opportunities in the burgeoning electronic and clothing industries in Phoenix as long as he was prepared to accept any position to start with. She already had a list of employers for him to contact when he arrived. So George and Katherine’s wedding was also a wake. They said their good-byes to family, friends, and colleagues to begin their new life together, a strain of anxiety visible in both their faces, despite the obvious excitement of the day.

Their journey from Belfast to Phoenix would take them almost twelve days, and they had put aside enough money to then celebrate a week’s honeymoon together before George would begin looking for work. Being so close to the U.S. border, Mexico had seemed the obvious choice for a honeymoon. It had also seemed exotic to them, dangerous almost. Clearly the start of something new. But as they set off on their trip out of Phoenix, they suspected that their honeymoon had been ill planned. A little too much to take on in a week. They had already felt the journey across the country to Arizona very long and tiring, and then here they were almost immediately setting off again. They took a Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Nogales, which was comfortable enough. However, the bus journey onward from Nogales had been long and hot (the only “air conditioning” was the fleeting rasps of still-warm air sucked in occasionally through the open windows of the bus). The bus had rattled along the rough sandy roads through scrubland, infants sleeping on the floor, the driver chewing coca leaves in an attempt to keep himself awake, and it had taken almost six hours to reach their final destination, Alamos. It disheartened them to realize that after only three days in Alamos, they would make the return journey, stopping once again at Nogales to catch the Greyhound bus back to Phoenix.

Despite all that, the time spent together in the heat and the uncomfortable confinement of the bus had reduced them. It had disabled their quick judgments and their small talk and had induced a kind of sleepy acceptance of this harsh new world through which they moved together, watching the mountains push majestically toward them as they traveled south.

When they arrived at Alamos, they had walked from their cheap hotel through the town, crossing the almost colorless central arcaded plaza, catching glimpses, here and there through half-open doorways, of the small patios beyond filled with marguerites and with carnations of yellow and white. They had talked and walked holding hands. They had sat waiting patiently in the heat at an empty bar just off the central square, where, eventually, they were served seasoned pork sandwiches and refried beans, which they washed down with glasses of lime water.

Refreshed, somewhat, they had walked back through the town and across the Plaza de Armas, where they had found a small museum — they were not sure whether it was even open, it seemed so empty and quiet, but it was — which had retouched photographs of the town in its heyday. The photographs showed Alamos’s rise to substantial wealth in the seventeenth century, following the discovery there of some of the richest silver ore in Mexico, a stark contrast to the sleepy town they now saw around them. The mine workers stared out from the photographs with a fearsome intent, their large mustaches ringed in white dust. There was a little model of the mine itself and of the homestead of the Alamada family, who had governed the region after its independence. Someone had stuck a parakeet’s feather down into the chimney of the little house. A feathery plume of green-and-yellow smoke. Katherine slipped the feather out of the little chimney, thinking she might keep it as a memento.

“ My turn to put the fire out,” she had said to George, giggling a little, and then had blown her breath upwards, through her pursed mouth to cool her face.

There was little to do in the town. Within an hour and a half, they had walked from one side of it to the other and back again and had had their modest meal and their visit to the museum, but it was just this sense of idleness which, they were suspecting, was enriching them.

And the way in which George had held her hand that day as they’d walked through the square of the small Mexican town, is the way in which he holds it still, now, among the drip trolleys and the dying women in the hospital ward. He holds her hand now the same way in which he has always held it, with love.