Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

It didn’t matter. He had never seen the woman — not even once.

He had only heard her cries.

And then, suddenly, he could not hear her at all.

The music of the flies was much too loud.

They came, fat and black, squeezing through chinks in the window, buzzing around the bloody fruitskull, ignoring the other skulls that had been picked clean during the previous season.

A stray fly danced over Raphael’s bloodstained fingers. He listened to its music and did not move. The fly was hungry, and he would not disturb it. He would not raise his hand against even the most disgusting of God’s creatures.

He stared at the dirty window and imagined the woman out there, somewhere, weeping for an audience of ghosts.

The afternoon waned. The flies had gone, their bellies full. Raphael left the shanty. He checked the mailbox at the end of the road, hoping for a reply from the government, but there was nothing waiting for him. There hadn’t been any mail in more than a year. He started along the border of the grove, avoiding the bruja’s domain.

Not far from the mailboxes, a car was parked on the shoulder of the dirt road. Dead trees blanketed it with feeble fingers of shade, printing strange cracks on the white hood and hardtop. Raphael looked inside. He saw keys hanging from the ignition and a wallet tucked haphazardly beneath the front seat. He glanced into the grove but saw no one there.

He hurried away. The wind was rising, and he could almost hear the evil woman weeping again.

This was not the first abandoned car that Raphael had discovered. He imagined the bruja falling upon the driver, an innocent who took a wrong turn off the highway. An innocent who had no protection. These days, people didn’t believe in creatures like the one that haunted C-Town. They had no faith to protect them.

Raphael wished that he could do something to protect the people who came here, but he could do nothing. Gripping his machete, he walked to the west side of the grove, almost to the highway. The sunlight was still strong there. He skirted the dead trees and was happy at their nakedness, pleased by the spindly shadows that were much too feeble to frighten him.

He sat down and thought about the bewitched fruit. The bruja’s bugs had killed the trees when the farmers stopped spraying. Raphael imagined that the insects made her witchcraft possible, even though the trees were long dead. He wished he could find a spray that would kill the cursed bugs, and he decided that tonight he would write another letter to the government and ask if they knew of such a spray.

The sun drifted slowly from the sky. Raphael’s shadow stretched before him, as long and gray as a rich man’s gravestone.

None of Raphael’s children had gravestones. Not Ramona, not Alicia, not Pablo or Paulo. Before his wife left him, Raphael had promised her that he would buy stones as soon as he had enough money to fix the old car. They had to do that first, he said, because they needed the car to visit the cemetery. It was too far away, otherwise.

But it never worked out. His wife left him, and he never had any money. He didn’t have the car anymore, either, and the only time he visited the camposanto was when nobody came for the cars that he found near the grove.

When that happened, he would drive to the camposanto and park nearby. Then he would visit his children. He always found their graves, even though they had no headstones.

Except when the long shadows fell.

And when the shadows turned to darkness and the gravestones disappeared, he walked back to C-Town.

Alone. Crying

Shadows fell across the grove, thickening, stretching toward him. Raphael moved on and found a rabbit trapped in one of his snares. He took it back to the shanty, where he built a fire beneath a dead oak tree.

Sometimes he worried about eating the rabbits. If the lawyers were right, the animals could be sick with the same disease that killed the children.

The idea frightened him. He looked at the rabbit, suddenly afraid of it. But he was hungry, and he knew that the lawyers were wrong. He had eaten many rabbits in the last two years, and he was not sick.

Still, he was afraid, because he knew that C-Town was bewitched. He hung the rabbit and skinned it, his hands unsteady, his face dripping sweat. And then he laughed and laughed, because it was only a dead rabbit, after all, and there was only good meat in the places where he had imagined that he might find sticky fruit.

That night Raphael lay still and listened to the bruja’s weeping.

He had heard of her as a boy in Mexico. The story had come from the lips of his grandmother. “You must be a very good little nino, Raphael,” she had said. “If you are not, La Llorona will come for you.”

“Who is she, Grandma?”

“She is a very bad bruja. Long ago, someone stole her babies. Now she steals children who are bad, because she knows that their parents will not miss them.”

Raphael wasn’t the only one who knew the story. As the children of C-Town fell ill and the doctors failed to help them, more and more people remembered the tale. Raphael’s neighbors had not spoken La Llorona’s name in years, except in jest. But death made things different, especially the deaths of so many. The priest at the little chapel near the highway tried to stop the talk. He said that it was all superstitious nonsense. But the priest only came to the chapel once a week, and soon it seemed that the stories were more than just rumors.

Epifanio Garcia said that he saw La Llorona in the grove one evening, spying on his shanty. Epifanio and his wife had two babies, and he was determined to protect them. He chased La Llorona through the grove, but he could not catch her. He said that every tree which the bruja touched was instantly blighted, its fruit suddenly heavy with huge black bugs.

Rosita Valdez said that she was walking to Mass when she came upon La Llorona drinking from an irrigation ditch. Rosita was so frightened by the evil one’s muddy leer that she ran home without stopping, and that was something, because Rosita was barely five feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred pounds.

Epifanio’s babies fell ill and died. Rosita’s daughter died, too.

Not everyone who lost children saw the weeping woman. Raphael never saw her. But everyone heard her, even over the children’s cries. Each night her wails haunted the camp, sawing through the dead trees along with the summer wind. The poor little ones feared La Llorona so much that they could not sleep at night for the terror of her. They shivered and wept and begged for God’s mercy. But God did not help them. He did not heal the sickness that stole their appetites but somehow left them as fat and bloated and bald as giant babies. And He did nothing to stop La Llorona.

The lawyers said that the sickness came from the water, but Raphael did not believe them. He knew that La Llorona was making the children sick so that they could not escape when she came for them.

She came for Raphael’s children over the space of a month. Poor little Paulo was the last to go. His final days were spent in agony. He cried and cried, promising his father that he was a good little boy and that La Llorona would not take him. Raphael wiped his son’s tears and said that he would stay with Paulo always.

Paulo was the youngest. Raphael sent him to school whenever the family was going to be at one colonias for a long time. When Paulo fell ill, Raphael brought him books to read, and Paulo taught his father how to read them, too. They slept together, holding each other close in the tiny bed.