wanted to say something more to him, but she didn’t know what to say. She looked over at him and smiled; but he glanced away out the side window of the car turning away from her, as if he were afraid of her seeing something in him that he’d divined from the fire of Cerro Negro.
Sarah continued her private conversations with Father Richard Sims almost every week and continued participating every week in the youth group that he led, but it didn’t seem the same after Carlos Vargas left. She’d hoped to see Carlos during his school’s summer vacation and at Christmas, but his family had almost always visited his mother’s family in Florida for Christmas, and they continued to do so after Carlos was in the military school. His mother spent more and more time in the United States, especially during his summer vacation, as if she were trying to keep him away from Nicaragua. Some of Sarah’s Nicaraguan classmates whispered that Carlos’s father was more and more involved with the Sandinistas. Perhaps Carlos’s mother wanted to shield him from danger or from humiliation if his father was imprisoned by Tachito or suffered an even worse fate. As Sarah advanced through her final years of high school she thought of Carlos, like her mother, as someone cherished in memory and affection that she would never see again.
One evening near the end of her senior year Sarah and George Rutledge were sitting side by side on the back patio as they usually did after supper, looking at the garden beneath the blazing stars after the moon had set. Sarah had been accepted at Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina, where her mother had gone to school and close to some members of her mother’s family. She wasn’t sure whether her anxiety was induced more by her fear of living in what was to her a foreign land or her concern about leaving her father alone here in Nicaragua.
“Do you think I’ll like it up there, Daddy? Do you think I’ll fit in?”
“Of course you will. Your mother reveled in her college years at Elon. That’s where we met, you know.” Sarah knew very well. She’d heard the story recounted many times, but she didn’t speak because she knew her father wanted to tell her again; and even if she had objected, he would have gone on narrating his memories.
“I was asked to speak at a forum about Central America at Elon. I’d just graduated from Duke, and Mary was a senior. From the first time I saw her, I knew she was the woman I wanted to marry.
Then George Rutledge continued with a long monologue about things Sarah had never heard before, perhaps things her father had never said aloud before. “I was so worried about how Mary would fit in down here, like you’re worrying about fitting in up there in North Carolina, I suppose. But she was at home from the moment she got here. Not that she ever went native. Mary was always a North Carolina belle, as Beatriz Chulteco so often reminds us, to the day she . . . left us. She always saw people down here as a reflection of North Carolina castes and classes, blacks and whites, cotton mill workers and old Southern families. But still, she was different from my mother and my grandmother. Mother never really left North Carolina. She was sort of a perpetual visitor in Nicaragua, and my grandmother . . . well, Louisa was a whole other story. She tried to make everything she touched in Nicaragua British, from the furniture to the servants to the coffee finca workers, even to the garden. You’ve heard how she tried to plant an English rose garden.”
“I’ve heard Don Martín laugh about it.” Sarah chuckled at the story, especially the way Martín told it.
“Yes, just ask Martín about la Dueña Louisa. He was just a little boy, but he never forgot . . . Mary was different. Mary felt a kinship with this country, with the people, with the finca, with the birds, damn it all, even with the volcanoes. That’s why she wanted to be buried here, I suppose. She belonged . . .” George’s voice broke, and he sobbed.
“Daddy, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, of course. You know, of all the things I’ve done in my life, what I’m most proud of is what we did in the village for the workers . . . the potable water, the electricity, the renovation of their houses, even moving Blanca’s family here. That was all Mary. That was her idea. Her passion. I only wish she could have lived to see it completed.”
“I’m very proud of both of you. You know that.”
“I know, Susi. I’ll miss you very much, but I want you to have a wonderful time in college, as I did, as your mother did.”
“I will, Daddy; and I’ll miss you very much, too. You know that.”
“I hope you’ll come back someday . . . to live; but if you find your place in North Carolina or somewhere else in the States or somewhere else entirely, that’s all right. You have to find your place where life takes you.”
“Of course I’m coming back to Nicaragua. This is my home. This is where I belong.”
Flora died in the middle of the night from a fever, perhaps typhoid, and Martín came to the front door of Quinta Louisa tapping softly and then speaking apologetically for waking them so late at night to tell them that his wife had passed away and asking helplessly like a little boy what he should do. Martín had always known what to do and told them what must be done at such times and so George Rutledge was flummoxed at first by his queries. George and Sarah had both noticed at odd moments over the past several days that Flora didn’t seem to be feeling well, but they were so preoccupied with their own concerns that they were distracted from inquiring seriously about her health; and Martín and Flora had not wanted to burden the father and daughter for whom they worked with their problems and pain.
The next day Martín had asked George Rutledge if he could bury his wife atop the cliff beyond the forest close to Mary Rutledge’s grave, rather than in the village cemetery beside the little church.
“Of course. Of course you can, my good man. Where we will all be together someday.” It was one of the few times that Sarah had seen her father weep openly in Don Martín’s presence, and she wished that he would reach out and embrace Don Martín, but they never touched, not even their hands.
On the third day they buried Flora at the top of the cliff. The workers from the finca carried her casket though the forest, just as they had carried Mary Rutledge’s casket; and all the people from the village followed them. Father Richard Sims helped them with the service at the grave. They couldn’t find a Roman Catholic priest who was willing to come up from Managua for a campsina’s funeral. George said the Catholic priests couldn’t be blamed; it was estimated that there was only one Roman Catholic priest for every ten thousand of the faithful in Nicaragua. The people from the village and Martín and Guillermo and Julio and his wife and children seemed touched and grateful for Father Richard’s words and prayers in broken Spanish; but Pablo ran screaming back through the forest before the service was finished.
“Mamí! Mamí! Do not let that foreign devil priest take you away!”
For the first time in her life Sarah felt a loving tenderness for Pablo and wanted to take him in her arms and comfort him like a little brother, but she remained standing beside the grave as if some force beyond her control anchored her there while the women from the village chased after Pablo through the forest.
Earthquake and Revolution:
1972–1979
Where Do You Belong?
International flights from the United States arrived in Managua in the morning and returned in the afternoon so that anyone traveling beyond New Orleans or Miami would usually schedule a connection to arrive at a final destination late at night or else stay in one or the other port city overnight. Not only would George Rutledge need to schedule a domestic flight for Sarah
