crop of pears until Pablo’s outrageous behavior ruined them. From the time that he was still in diapers there had never has been a child at Quinta Louisa who could make mischief like Pablo.
Pablo’s troublemaking was partly Mary’s fault. She hadn’t objected to having Julio and Guillermo in the house before Sarah was born or even to having them play with Sarah as older boys when she was little, but she’d refused to have another baby under foot when Pablo was a toddler. He’d seemed always to be at the patio door or yelling in the garden, and Flora would have to run out to care for him.
Pablo was eight years old when Mary saw him high in the avocado tree, breaking off pears and tossing them to the ground. She rushed into the garden. “You get down from there right now and stop picking the avocados.” For a moment he looked at her, and then he began pulling off all the pears with frenzied flings, even the green ones and those hardly out of the bud. “Stop it! You hear me, stop it right now, you wretched boy!” Mary ran under the tree and began shaking the trunk, although she herself was shaking more violently than the tree, while Pablo was scurrying around above her, pelting her with green avocados, giggling and bouncing them off her head and shoulders like some evil monkey. She screamed until everyone appeared in the garden—Sarah, Flora, Guillermo, and various other workers. Finally George heard her yelling hysterically even from where he was drying coffee beans in the sorting shed. (Martín was in Costa Rica taking the training course to run the new coffee-processing factory that George Rutledge planned to build.) One of the workers helped George get the rebellious little imp down out of the tree.
“Why did you do such an awful thing to my avocados, you horrible, wicked boy?” Mary’s voice was raspy after her screaming and from her lingering anger.
The plump, brown little brat put his hands on his hips and looked Mary straight in the eye. “My Papá planted the tree, and my Papá waters the tree, and my Papá gathers the fruit, so why do you call them your avocados?”
George emitted one of his single puff-pops of laughter in spite of himself at the boy’s audacious courage and spirit. No one else would dare talk to his wife like that.
“What are you laughing at, George Rutledge? You’re the one who’s crazy about avocados. I’m just trying to protect them for you, since you think they’re the most delicious food that ever was.”
Flora assured Mary that she would buy avocados for them at the market and replace every piece of fruit that Pablo had destroyed.
Mary was still trembling and breathless, near hysteria. She turned red-faced and bent over in an inelegant squat that must have been inherited from some long-dead North Carolina mountain ancestor. “I do not want avocados from the market. These were mine, and they belong to no one else, and that wretched boy destroyed them, and I do not want him ever in my sight again.”
“Mary, Mary, now let’s keep things in perspective.”
“Get that child out of my garden, and do not ever allow him to come inside the garden wall again unless you stay with him. Not ever!”
The following day Sarah saw her father sitting on the bench in the middle of the garden after he’d gathered the limes that the family used to marinate meat and flavor their drinks. She slipped out of the house without her mother seeing her leave.
“Daddy, why was Mother so mean to Pablo yesterday? We can always buy avocados at the market, and Doña Flora offered to replace them.”
As her father rubbed his chin Sarah recognized the gesture that often accompanied his reluctance to respond to her questions. “Well, Susi, you have to understand something about your mother. She is the most generous person in the world to those who are less fortunate. For too generous for her own good sometimes, I fear. But when someone takes something away from her that she thinks they have no right to, something that belongs to her and is important to her . . . well, you saw how she acted yesterday.”
“But why is Mother like that? She doesn’t act that way all the time.”
“Most assuredly not. She’s usually the most kind and generous . . .” George Rutledge rubbed his chin again. “I don’t know. Perhaps it goes back to her early life on the farm in North Carolina. After the tenants all left for better jobs, and the Lloyds had to give up growing row crops and convert to timber and cattle; and people started taking advantage of them, encroaching on their land and filching things . . . I don’t know. It may go back to some of that.”
“It’s too bad. Pablo’s not really so awful, not for a little boy his age.”
“I know. And your mother does a great deal to help Don Martín and Doña Flora and their sons. I think it would be best not to mention any of our conversation to your mother. Don’t you agree?”
“I understand, Daddy, and I promise never to climb in the avocado tree again either. I wouldn’t want Mother to yell at me the way she screamed at Pablo.”
“That would never happen, Susi. Not ever. But let’s keep this as a secret just between the two of us.”
George Rutledge took pride in telling whoever would listen to him that his tree bore more avocados than any others in the region after Martín circumcised it. Following her father’s strict orders Sarah never climbed the avocado tree again, and except for the season when she entered her teens and a year later when Pablo broke off the buds of fruit, Quinta Louisa never lacked for avocados. George could never determine which had caused the larger dearth of fruit, Sarah’s climbing on the limbs as a teenager or Pablo’s vandalism. As a rational man he wondered if Pablo hadn’t surreptitiously destroyed the buds on the tree the same year that Sarah had climbed it as a menstruating virgin.
About a week after Pablo’s escapade in the avocado tree Martín came home from Costa Rica for a visit and told George that he wanted to quit the apprenticeship for running the coffee-processing factory.
“Now look here. You must not let that business between Doña Mary and Pablo bother you. You know how riled up she gets over little things from time to time. It will all blow over and be forgotten in another week or so.”
“I miss my family, Don Jorge. I do not like living in the city.”
“It’s only for a few months. You’re much too intelligent to spend the rest of your days as a servant or a common laborer picking coffee. I want to give you a better chance in life. You deserve it. Besides, a smart fellow like you can be extremely helpful to us in running the factory, if I decide to build it.”
“I just want to come back to the campo (countryside) and live in the mountains where I know the trees and the flowers. Please don’t send me away again. Let me stay here with my wife and children in the village. I’ll die in the city. I’ll grieve myself to death. I belong here.”
George had been unable to persuade Martín to return to Costa Rica, and he never left the campo again for more than a couple of days at a time.
When Pablo was sick the month after he’d been banned from the garden, Flora had to care for him; and Martín spent several days doing Flora’s cleaning chores inside the Rutledges’ house, where he found the broken shells from wild birds’ eggs in Sarah’s room.
“Did you take eggs from the nests of the birds in the forest?”
“No, Don Martín. I just found the broken shells on the ground. They must have fallen out of the nest.”
Don Martín swiped his index finger inside the shell and held the sticky albumen
