overhear her.
“They are the quetzal’s eggs. Destroying the quetzal’s eggs is a great sin against Nature, and lying is a great sin against God. You must go into the forest with me and do your penance.”
When Mary Rutledge saw Martín leading Sarah toward the forest, she asked her husband what was going on; and George made the mistake of telling her what he’d overheard. Mary saw Sarah’s tear-stained face and horror-strickened eyes when she returned with Martín.
“You have no business punishing my child, Martín. It is no concern of yours, and you must not do it again.” Mary spoke calmly, rationally, without any expression of emotion in her voice or on her face, but Martín’s black eyes glittered like lightning reflected on obsidian. His jaw was clenched.
“You can send me away if you want to, Doña María, but as long as I have responsibility for your finca and your family and your forest and your daughter, I have to do what is right.”
“Now Martín, I did not mean to imply that you were wrong, but I think parents ought to be in charge of punishing a child. I am sure Sarah deserved to be reprimanded. Please just inform us when she needs to be corrected, and tell us what you propose.”
“She can tell you what I did. That is up to her, not up to me. Then if you want me to leave the finca, I will go; but I have to do what is right with the children in my forest, just as you must do what is right with them in your house and garden when they steal the fruit.”
Sarah told her mother that Don Martín had rubbed a bitter herb over her mouth to remind her how ugly lying was, and Mary laughed and said that she could remember how her grandmother from Virginia had washed her mouth out with homemade soap for lying. Several months later Sarah told her father what had really happened, how Don Martín had rubbed the ordure of wild birds over her lips.
Every Sunday morning the Rutledges traveled up toward Managua on the Pan American highway for the English-speaking Anglican service at the little stone church that Sarah’s great-grandfather and other British expatriates had built. St. Francis Church appeared like a chapel on a meadow in Kent with its narrow lancet windows that provided little ventilation in the stifling tropical heat. A new missionary priest had arrived from somewhere in the mid-West, and Sarah had overheard her father muttering to her mother. “I wonder if he’ll fit in or be as much a disaster as the last one,” (who had fled back to the United States in less than six months.)
“What’s his name, George?”
“Father Richard Sims, I believe. I should have driven out to welcome him this week I suppose, but . . .”
“We’ll just have to wait and see. Give him a chance. Maybe it will turn out better this time.”
Even though Father Sims was younger and taller than Sarah’s father, he was somewhat stooped and very thin so that he appeared to be shorter. He seemed distracted by the insects flying around the church. His eyes glanced back and forth from one of the lizards crawling up the wall to a moth flitting around the chancel. The small congregation of forty-odd people was almost equally divided between North American and British expatriates and English-speaking Nicaraguans of Caribbean ancestry from the East Coast of the country. When a dark costeño (resident of the East Coast of Nicaragua) stood up to read the Old Testament lesson, Sarah began giggling.
George smiled and glanced at Sarah whose tittering laughter was almost out of control, but her mother was not amused and had no sympathy for such misbehavior, especially in church.
“Stop that, Sarah, or I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life when we get home.”
Sarah bit her lip and pinched her thigh, but she couldn’t stop. “I can’t help it, Mother.”
“You must stop.” Mary gave Sarah a stare that could have frozen even the sweltering inside of St. Francis Church. The reader paused and looked at them and frowned—an unusual expression on his usually broad smiling face.
After the service Mary Rutledge was shaking Sarah by her shoulders and screaming at her in a whisper, as only her mother could do. “Making fun of people who are different from us is the worst thing a person can do. I will not have you looking down your nose and laughing at the Negroes.”
“I wasn’t doing that, Mother. I wasn’t making fun of him. I just got tickled at how he talked, and I couldn’t quit.”
During the coffee hour after the service on the brick patio beside the church Father Sims found Sarah standing by herself close to the wall in the shade. Only a few younger costeño children worshipped with their parents at St. Francis, and none of them was Sarah’s age.
“I find the British-Caribbean accents a little amusing, too, although quite charming. A reading from Isaiah . . . .” He poorly imitated the flat monotone and long “I” of the reader. “Do you know Taylor? He’s quite a nice chap.”
“Not really. The costeños usually hurry off before the coffee hour to catch their bus downtown. I guess they’re staying late today to welcome you.”
“Are there any activities for young people here at St. Francis? A youth group or Sunday School?”
“No. There aren’t any children except for me.”
“Well, we’ll have to remedy that. You stay there. I have something for you to take home.” Father Sims scurried with his cassock flapping against his legs across the parking lot toward the small vicarage where he lived. He brought out a hand of bananas to offer Sarah in order to placate her and perhaps bribe her to behave better in church. Perhaps he’d heard during his first week of cultural orientation that bananas didn’t grow well at higher elevations, and he had several heavily laden trees at the back of the vicarage garden.
“No thank you. I really don’t like bananas at all.”
As her mother approached them, Mary Rutledge overheard Sarah and shot her a withering look. In the parking lot, Mary read Sarah another diatribe. “You must always accept gifts graciously, Sarah. Refusing people’s gifts is almost like rejecting them personally. Just say, thank you, and smile and be pleasant and gracious. It’s almost as bad to spurn people’s freely offered, friendly gift as it is to make fun of them. I really don’t know what’s gotten into you today. I’ve tried to teach you to be polite and lady-like. Surely you understand that people’s feelings are the most important . . . .”
“That little priest will soon learn to take off his cassock before the coffee hour, or he’ll burn up.” Sarah knew that her father was attempting to change the subject and alter her mother’s focus.
“He’ll learn, George. It’s quite an adjustment for him, I’m sure.”
“We should invite him to Quinta Louisa for a meal, Mary. Maybe Beatriz and Armando could join us for a little dinner party.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, dear. I’m glad you’re going to give him a chance.”
Even though Armando and Beatriz Chulteco were Nicaraguans from old aristocratic families that belonged to the Conservative Party, they had both attended college in the United States; and most of their close friends were North American and British expatriates. Beatriz’s mother had been the closest friend of Sarah’s grandmother, and Armando’s grandfather had befriended Sarah’s great-grandfather when he’d first arrived from England. Mary Rutledge often referred to Beatriz as her closest Nicaraguan friend; and when she was being honest with herself, she admitted
