longer hours than he’d ever done before. He never sat with Sarah on the back patio after supper while Mary and Flora put away the food and tidied the kitchen as they’d often done in the past, as if his pain were greater than his wife’s and it was too much to inflict on Sarah.
Mary Rutledge died on a Wednesday afternoon while Sarah was at school, as if she’d planned the moment of her demise to spare Sarah the agony of her final hours. Sarah couldn’t remember who the people were from the hoards that came to Quinta Louisa and to the funeral at St. Francis Episcopal Church and couldn’t recall what they’d said to her. She did remember Doña Beatriz Chulteco and Carlos Vargas Allen’s mother because they didn’t try to talk to her and say things that would make her feel better. They hugged her in just the right way and released her at just the right time. Father Richard Sims was the only person she could remember talking to her. Even though she couldn’t recall his exact words, she remembered that he’d made her feel, if not better, at least somewhat less terrible. Later she felt comforted as she remembered his gawky appearance and jerky movements when he’d spoken to her.
It was late in the afternoon following the funeral when they lowered Mary Rutledge’s coffin into the hole at the top of the cliff. Martín had arranged for the grave to be dug, and he and some of the workers used ropes to let the coffin down slowly. Sarah thought how remarkably level they kept it with a rhythm that almost seemed like a stately dance. She could see far out across the mountains. The parrots chattered more noisily than usual. She watched a scarlet macaw fly into the trees at the edge of the forest. She wondered if she would ever see a quetzal. Then she thought that someday her father would be buried here beside her mother, and a long time from now she would also be lowered into the earth at the top of the cliff.
Along with the construction on the workers’ houses in the village George Rutledge had a small house built at the back of the garden, so that Martín and Flora would be closer in order to care for Sarah. Pablo lived with them. Guillermo visited several times a week. Julio now worked in Costa Rica and came to Nicaragua only every other month or so. Flora did everything physically for Sarah that her mother had done—preparing her food and fussing at her for not eating properly, arguing about what clothes she should wear to school, waking her up in the mornings and reminding her to go to bed at night, asking her if she’d finished her homework—but Sarah never felt that Flora was like a mother to her in even the slightest way. When Sarah saw Flora embracing Pablo and laughing and talking with him, she remembered what it had been like to have a mother, especially during the last months of Mary Rutledge’s life; and she felt a great weight of sadness enveloping her and had to walk into the forest so that the parrots and other birds would drown out the pulsing beats of her thoughts.
Father Richard Sims steadfastly pursued his plan for organizing a youth group. He had followed Beatriz Chulteco’s suggestion of meeting with the parents of teenagers at the American School in the afternoons after classes were dismissed. A few enthusiastic parents came the first week and fewer returned the second and third weeks, but by the fourth week they realized his intentions were serious, and they brought other parents. After two months of meeting with the teenagers and their parents Father Richard began a Sunday afternoon gathering at St. Francis Church. Only Sarah and a younger girl, not yet a teenager, and a much older boy came. By the second week only the two girls arrived, and by the third week only Sarah appeared. None of the costeño children who attended St. Francis Church for worship on Sunday mornings remained for the youth group, even though Father Richard offered to give them lunch. For a couple of weeks the next month Father Richard tried a weeknight gathering, but only Sarah came, and George told him that it would not be possible for him to drive Sarah regularly from the finca on a weeknight evening.
Then Father Richard gave up his dream of bringing the poorer Nicaraguan children together with expatriate teenagers and relinquished his illusion of having a gathering at St. Francis Church. He began meeting at the American School on Wednesday afternoons with whoever showed up. The half-dozen or so teenagers that came the first month—Sarah was the only consistent member—grew to a group of twelve or fifteen the second month and by the third month reached an average of twenty-five to thirty regular participants that met faithfully every week.
It was neither scintillating discussions nor exciting outings that attracted the students but rather Father Richard’s dogged consistency and dedication to the group, the same qualities that drew Sarah into regular conversations with him after her mother’s death. Unlike other people who gave pat answers and slick euphemisms and polite advice to Sarah, Father Richard’s embarrassed silences and incoherent mutterings and gawky movements seemed to break open Sarah’s own inchoate thoughts and stifled emotions.
Father Richard and Sarah usually met at the American School on Thursday afternoons after classes were dismissed. Sarah knew that the afternoon, like the youth group meeting on Wednesday, took her father away for a longer time from the finca and the construction of the new coffee-processing factory that would grind and package the coffee for export as well as wash and dry the beans like the old plant had done. She felt badly about asking him to stay late on two afternoons a week and for creating difficulty for him, but he never complained. When she mentioned her concern about imposing on his time, he told her that it was all right. “Your happiness and well-being are my major concerns, Susi. What’s the point of the rest of it if I don’t take care of you?”
At the school Father Richard always wore a clerical collar without a coat. Sarah once teased him and asked if he wore his collar to bed. Father Richard blushed deeply and raised his arms in his familiar scarecrow pose and smiled but didn’t reply.
“Do you, uh, think about your mother very often, Sarah?”
His patient silence drew her out, a silence without anxiety, without frustration. The question elicited a string of memories that Sarah related for almost half an hour. She stopped talking only because she was sobbing too greatly to form words.
On another day he asked, “Do you, uh . . . visit your mother’s grave very often, Sarah?”
Sarah began to talk again in an endless stream of words but not about her mother’s grave nor about her feelings related to her mother but rather about listening to the parrots and other birds that she saw in the forest on her way to the cliff and sometimes seeing the squirrel monkeys and iguanas in the trees and how Don Martín had promised her that one day she would encounter the quetzal that she’d never seen. She wondered why she found it easier to talk with Father Richard than with anyone else, even than with her father.
There were only five Episcopal teenagers in the youth group—Sarah and the son and daughter of a British consular officer, who attended only sporadically, and the younger girl and older boy who had come to the very first meeting. The other members of the youth group were the children of American Embassy personnel and children of American business representatives as well as an odd selection of children of evangelical missionaries and children whose parents were Nicaraguans married to foreigners, two Germans, and a few Nicaraguans from wealthy families who sought to emulate gringos. Most of them were Protestants with a few nominal Roman Catholics. The strict Roman Catholic families refused to allow their children to participate.
Sarah was attracted to the muscular German boy and the tall, blonde English boy and hoped that one of them would notice her. Although both of them were almost painfully polite to her, neither of them ever paid any real attention to her. She had no close girl friends. A Nicaraguan girl named Carmen made her laugh and was easy to chat with, but Carmen applied such heavy make-up and wore such tight dresses that Sarah alternately admired and feared her, simultaneously repulsed by her and envious of her. Sarah’s only real friend was Carlos Vargas, the boy who had escorted her to the dance at the end of the previous school year before her mother had died.
“If only he wasn’t so short,” she told herself. Carlos looked more like his Nicaraguan father than his North American mother. His dark face and arms glowed with luminous Indian gold just below the surface, but his shiny black hair,
