Martin A. Ramos

Though Samuel de la Hoz could not foretell when he would bite the dust, he had promised himself that death would not surprise him as he labored in the cane fields. It would not take him in the form of sunstroke as it had his compadre, the father of his godchild. Neither would he permit it to sneak up unannounced in the guise of a centipede sting turned septic; nor as the itching sickness (called pica-pica) fields hands such as he suffered from most.

How soon would death come? From where would it come, and when? Samuel often pondered these questions.

Just forty-eight years of age and he considered himself an old man, an old timer barely keeping ahead of death’s dispassionate snout. He looked old, tired and spent, his body decaying in vigor and fortitude.

Thirty-five years. Thirty-five mean, weighty years of toil in the fields of Caribbean cane had sapped the juice from his joints, scarring his body, parching his skin and curving his spirit in that inimitable way nature has of humbling a man, especially one who lives and works in the tropics.

  The Caribbean sun, looming like a jaundiced eye in a celestial frame. The sun and heat and humidity coupled with the mad inhuman toil of the field worker. Having reached manhood thin and rangy and no taller than a pole on a barbed wire fence, Samuel often blamed this predicament too on the sun.

Also this question, forever tugging at the coattails of his soul: “Why have I never gotten used to it: the sun’s rays striking like hammers upon my head?”

Even in those early years of his youth he had looked lanky, bony-faced and thinly muscled: strong but stringy. Was the sun at fault here as well? Not to mention (or forget) his ruddy complexion, the bronzed skin of a near-Indian. This too he owed, if not to his Taíno ancestors, then to an indiscriminate solar implacability. Again, to the sun.

Yet despite the unanswered questions and his human predica-ment, Samuel de la Hoz rarely halted his rhythm of work--the scythe-like slash and surge of the machete--to ponder the intricacies of his manhood, whether it be love, life or death.

Because he was a responsible man and a dedicated field hand, because he valued a good day’s labor no matter how menial the task, Samuel accepted his predicament. And he cut cane. He cut cane to feed both himself and his woman, his mujer, his eighteen-year-old bride.

Magdalena.

She was a light-skinned, raven-haired, almond-eyed sorceress he had envisioned one day and grew to idealize--like Don Quixote his Dulcinea--even before he had met her. When they finally did meet, one sunny afternoon in the marketplace in Mayagüez, it was love at first sight.

Though pleasing and unexpected, Samuel would have considered this predicament a young fool’s fancy had it not happened to him in middle age and in broad daylight. He was a widower and Magdalena the only single female in a family of eight, yet he courted her like the town Don Juan, with flair, taste and charm.

He had been smitten. What else could he do?

He gave her flowers and candy, escorted her to church on Sundays. Finally, he gave her an engagement ring. And they were wed.

Suerte.

He had been lucky to find and marry a woman young enough to

be his daughter. Or so folks said. In the hamlet of La Cuchilla the cane cutters--wily veterans as well as the young bucks--all envied his luck, even though they understood that his marriage to Magdalena Maristany had been but a fluke of fate, like finding a kernel of gold in a dying riverbed or water in an abandoned well.

Until luck, like a hurricane with its gale-force winds, turned against the lucky one.

The turn (and trouble) came one morning at the breakfast table. Then and there, Magdalena revealed something which a suspicious man would have seriously brought into question. Words, in fact, which would cause the blood in his veins to run as thick as cane syrup. And he hated sweets, even sugar in his coffee.

“I’m pregnant,” Magdalena revealed, as if confessing it.

Samuel almost didn’t hear. Sitting at the kitchen table, he barely stirred. He reacted to the news by dropping his freshly brewed cup of coffee on a china plate and rolling a cigarette between forefingers and thumbs. He sealed the cigarette and lit it. He smoked.

“Did you hear me, Samuel? I said I’m pregnant.”

“I heard you, woman.”

His tone sounded caustic, as potent and thick as the cigarette smoke escaping from the cavern of his mouth and flaring nostrils. The muscles of his jaws tightened, then relaxed. The furrows and creases on his face gave him character. He said, “Are you sure? I mean, really sure?”

She answered without looking at his face. “It’s been two months since my last flow. A sure sign.”

As he always did in the morning, Samuel watched his wife meditatively, like a parishioner at the altar. Her back to him, Magdalena stood barefoot in front of the kitchen sink in a simple homespun dress, hands soapy with dishwater. She looked vulnerable, petite and inviting. Her round shoulders and pear-shaped figure, her feet dainty with firm calves, her hair loose and lustrous: the qualities which had attracted her to him.

There was a glow in the room, not from Magdalena but coming from the open kitchen window in front of her.   

Samuel stood and his chair creaked. “Daybreak. It’s time to go, wife. Mist is starting to break up. I can see the lap of the mountains, the smokestacks of the mill, the fields of un-gathered cane. This early in the morning there’s something uncommon about the cane fields.”

“What?”

“The cane,” he said, as if peering right through her, “so yellow and ripe. The cane is always there, waiting. If I were a younger man, I would do anything except cut cane.”

She remained silent, not knowing what to say to him. Somewhere around the house a goat bleated, a cock crowd.

“The baby will be costly,” she finally said, wishing not to stray from their original conversation. “The first few months it will get sick a lot, from colds, infections. We will be hard put.”

“If God wills that it should be born, then it will be born.”

“You don’t sound very happy,” Magdalena said, her tone accusatory.

He puffed greedily on the cigarette, exhaled. “Why should I be? Just means another mouth to feed, less room for us in the house. Diapers to buy and wash. Extra milk to fetch. Dammit, woman.”  He paused, dark eyes cold, brooding. “Before she died my first wife, God rest her, bore me two sons. Both died in infancy from cholera. There’s too much gray on my head for me to want children—-and care for them.”

“You make having a baby sound as simple as brewing coffee. Magdalena brushed her hair back from her face. “And it isn’t.”

“It is for me,” he said. “I’m not a hard man. Just old and tired, set in my old and tired ways.”

“You’re not that old,” she said, chiding. “You’re saying it to spite me. I know it’s hard work raising a child. But promise me you’ll help me take care of this one. If it’s a boy, I’ll name him Samuel. And if a girl, I’ll name her after my mother, Victoria.”

He snorted and remained silent.

Staring at him with eyes the color of honey, their expression soft and vulnerable, Magdalena said, “Please, Samuel, I don’t want this baby to die. It will be such a beautiful baby.”

“Life isn’t always about what we want, or how we want it. If you don’t know that, one day you will.”

She stirred. The flat sobriety of his manner and no-nonsense response moved her to consider his words, which were realistic. And though she was no stranger to reality (they lived in hard times), what he finally said that morning puzzled her.

“Don’t eat too much salt, woman. And rest whenever you feel the need. Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

He looked at her with coal-colored eyes. She did not expect that he would kiss her that day, but he did, saying goodbye.

#

Like a man possessed, Samuel de la Hoz worked fitfully all morning. Brandishing a machete with a twenty-four-inch blade, swinging it wildly, he had injured himself twice: a superficial cut on his leg, and a deeper cut in his hand. This was unusual. Only a fool or a madman would labor in the fields this way, careless and distracted and unconcerned. Everyone knew (at least everyone who owned a machete and worked a ten-hour day) that a honed blade unwisely wielded could sever an arm or a leg, hampering a man’s productivity and maiming him for life.

Retirement for the cane cutters often arrived this way: unannounced, unasked for and unrewarded. In an oblong box. Hunger and death were constant bedfellows. Stay healthy and whole, the landowners said--or starve. Such was their credo.

From experience, Samuel knew this. He also knew that he had been foolhardy while working because a woman’s face occupied every dark crevice of his mind. Magdalena. And the unborn child she carried in her womb.

Is it my child?

Twenty odd years back he would not have been embarrassed to ask that question, nor would the question have need of asking. But circumstances (being what they were, life and death always looming so stark and indomitable) had given him reason to suspect Magdalena’s apparent fealty. Equally painful and disturbing, two months ago there occurred the incident. And this he couldn’t forget.

While enjoying a drink and a cigarette at the local cantina, Samuel overhead a gathering of cane cutters remark that the landowner’s son, while delirious with drink and acting crazy, boasted having made love to Samuel’s beautiful bride. Samuel charged at them like an enraged bull, calling them liars and story mongers. Undaunted, the men stuck to their tale, and insisted that the boy had uttered those words.

Wounded in his pride, Samuel confronted Rodrigo, a good-looking twenty-one-year-old dandy, vowing to cleave his young heart if the cane cutter’s story proved true. Rodrigo Fajardo, the landowner’s son, cried and lost composure as was his wont when accosted or cornered. He insisted upon his innocence, and told Samuel, tears flooding his eyes: “I would rather die, honored sir, than offend either you or your bride.”

For the time being Rodrigo’s disavowal placated the older man’s ire. No blood was spilled, not this time. Samuel warned the young man, however, to stay away from him and his wife. To Magdalena he said nothing, having decided to remain more vigilant of her and his house. Thus he relegated the incident

to the cobwebbed hole of memory, and it was forgotten.

Until this morning, when Magdalena told him she was pregnant.

During the midday break, while Samuel ate a hearty meal of cooked rice, stewed beans, fried codfish, avocado and bread, this thought gained currency in his head:

Now I must confront her. My honor is at stake.

He decided to ask her tonight if she had slept with the boy. If she answered yes, Samuel would know that the child she carried was a bastard child. He would kill her and then Rodrigo. If they both denied this shameful act in his presence, however, and swore by the Virgin, convincing him of their innocence, Samuel would allow them to live and raise the child as his own.

He set himself firmly upon this road--even if it provoked a backlash of vengeance and blood spilling. He even vowed to see events through, no matter what the consequences or the cost. They--the men, the boy, the woman--had given him no other recourse. In La Cuchilla, shame was a burden he did not wish to carry. Not if he was an honorable man.

Though he may have looked like a dying old man, with gnarled limbs, arthritic pains and a crusty hide, Samuel’s neck and back had remained--like that of the fighting bull in the corrida--unbending and unbent. Even after almost two score years of working in the fields of dense cane. Even after having buried his first wife and infant sons.

Like most cane cutters, Samuel usually arrived home near dusk. But today he heeded an urge to stop by the cantina and have a cold beer and a cigarette. He bought a caneca to take home, a bottle of rum that fit like a wallet in his trousers’ back pocket. He wore a straw hat to shade his head from the sun, a plain cotton shirt and thick boots to protect against centipede stings and tarantula bites.

On the road home Samuel spotted a dead animal and drank a toast to it. By the time he could distinguish his house amidst foliage in the distance, he had offered many libations. To dying animals and living beasts of the earth and sky, to the unwinding day and purgatorial night. He felt dapper and high-spirited, having decided not to provoke his wife. Not tonight.

After all, was there really a problem?

He had been a firebrand when young, fathering two sons--twins. Then wasn’t it possible--even in the twilight of his life--for him to have sired a third? When much older than he, did not Abraham and Jacob each sire their favorite sons?

To have remained vital and potent even as death approached. Such a thought filled Samuel with immense pleasure. He smiled.

  Suddenly, climbing up the front steps of his house, he slipped and stumbled. The open door permitted him to peer inside. And what he saw caused his world to collapse like dislodged earth in a mudslide. Dusk and deep shadows had smeared the room with a sepia wash of nightmarish shades and somber colors. Enough gloom to make a man choke on his own vomit, or cause the saints to spill from their niches in heaven.

Samuel shuddered when he saw Magdalena and knew she must be dead.

Yes, dead, since her body lay on the wooden floor, prone and lifeless, judging by the rivulet of blood that extended from her torso and meandered all the way to the front porch. Flies hovered and buzzed, and a sulfurous smell of decay choked the air in the room. He saw that the bullet that pierced her heart and took her life had been fired point blank from a high-caliber pistol. So death--and he thanked God for this--struck swiftly.

Samuel discovered another cadaver there, to his left: Rodrigo, the dandy. Sitting with legs splayed and arms dangling, his back propped against the clapboard wall, the boy made a final, pathetic gesture: his head cocked like some discarded marionette. The inside of his head stood exposed, and bits of his own flesh and brain matter stuck clammily to his silk clothes. His raven hair, combed back and roguishly slick, hung

disorderly and was caked with splattered flesh and blood.

The murder weapon lay on the floor next to Rodrigo’s body. Samuel recognized it as a dueling pistol, one of two the boy’s father had purchased from a retired army officer’s widow who had little use, and less inclination, for owning such a firearm. Being the son of the hacendado, Rodrigo must have handled the weapon dozens of times. The boy was probably an expert shot. He understood about drinking and gambling, guns and their use.

Then why did not someone (his old man, maybe the parish priest) instruct him concerning the more mundane patterns of life, such as falling in and out of love?

Judging by this spectacle, Rodrigo Fajardo bit into something he could not spit once chewed. And then the burning question:

Why did they both have to die?

Samuel knew the answer almost immediately. Dammit, it was true. Magdalena had been pregnant with Rodrigo’s baby. How else could he explain what took place here and lay, literally, at his feet? They knew he would redress dishonor with bloodshed. They knew he would kill them both. So, like Romeo and Juliet--star-crossed lovers--they orchestrated the double suicide, which led them to this unnamable drama.

Weak-kneed and shaken, Samuel rearranged the incidents in a

multitude of ways in his mind. He cringed, believing that fate had dealt his life its definitive blow. Like a carnival ride in which the turning never ceases and the rider never gets off.

Magdalena, the pearl of his life, the love of his heart--corrupted. At that precise moment reality struck vindictive and cruel.

Samuel realized then how much the love of Magdalena meant to him, how empty and pointless his widower’s life hand been, and how desperate and hopeless his widower’s journey would result from here on out. He found no pleasure in a void, only a waterless expanse dotted with sorrow and regret. A desert provided no place in which he could settle his feet, where seeds could take root, sprout and grow.

Once again life and living had become meaningless for him. He thought: Love is like the cane after the harvest. Once you cut all the stalks, only the stumps remain.

Charred stalks, crisp ashes, bleeding stumps of cane.

These images consumed him, blinded him, filled his heart with regret until Samuel understood what he must do.

He carried Magdalena’s cadaver to the bedroom and placed it with care upon their bed. She wore the dress he had bought for her in Mayagüez, of hand-embroidered silk with chiffon sleeves: the most elegant party dress anyone had ever seen in La Cuchilla. He folded her arms so that her open cold hands crossed her breasts. He studied her face, the portrait it made. Her features revealed serenity and grace: proud forehead, prominent cheeks, small lips, noble chin. A striking, natural beauty not even the patina of death could efface.

Soon he abandoned the room and tumbled into the kitchen. He reheated this morning’s coffee, gulped it scalding hot. He wanted to scream, lash out, to bash his brains-—to throw, rip and rend things. But only a madman, a coward or a fool would lose cordura and courage when confronted with death, and its handmaiden: spilt blood.

Samuel bit his lower lip until it bled, refusing to cry, to buckle under the strain.

He searched in the kitchen. He found what he was looking for below the sink in a gallon container. He took the container and soaked every room in the house with kerosene.

Then like a drunkard he tumbled outside, to smoke, to breathe. Even in the tropics the evening air had a chill to it, like splashing ice water on a sunburned face.

He flicked the lighted cigarette on the wet floor of the house and stepped back. He heard a lion’s roar: wood bursting into flames. As if in protest, the old boards crackled, blistered and hissed. He smelled wood resin, pungent and penetrating. Such fine lumber would produce a lasting flame, a holocaust to be observed and commented upon by everyone for miles. A bonfire of love, a pyre of despair: the old house, a feast for the furnace.

And the cadavers inside, an offering to the god or goddess of reckless love.

Samuel never thought to look back and behold his home, now consumed by flames, a place where he had known felicity in old age. Machete in hand, he scurried in the direction of the fields, the cane.

The trail he took led from the perimeter of the plantation--limitless flatland pregnant with cane--to a road-like clearing deep along the way. Everywhere he looked, Samuel saw the lush, proud bounty of the earth: loud ochers and ruddy browns and pastel yellowish greens. He walked like a blind man, aware of yet unresponsive to nature--her sights, smells, sounds and textures.

He spotted the tree to which he trekked. Looming gray and imposing, it was a solitary giant with scabrous armor, gnarled

limbs and crooked hands.

He shivered. The sight of the old mango tree made him suddenly weary and cold. The air felt moist and cool in his nostrils. And everything there was to see bespoke of the harvest: the singed soil, the dry, wind-swept December leaves, the charred and piled stalks of Caribbean cane.

Overhead, like flaming galleons, were scattered bands of orange-tinged clouds. Fruits bats darted and pivoted. And below, on earth—-what? Death? Destruction?

He shook again. And it was the raw fiber of the man that spurred him to consummate this act without further resistance or regret.

He would do it this way. He felt for a hole termites had dug in the base of the mango’s wide trunk. From the hole he removed loose leaves, accumulated dirt and rotted debris. He then placed the machete edge up in the crevice, anchoring the hilt of the blade with large stones. He inspected his handiwork and made sure that the blade of the knife stuck out at a precise angle and would not collapse under his weight.

He was ready.

As was his custom during and impending trial or tribulation, even as he had seen Magdalena often do in church, Samuel made the sign of the cross. He breathed . . . and swayed. Felt the ground surge underneath his feet. Sensed his world rocking with thunder, as if consumed in a vortex. Imagined the vault of heaven uncoupling itself, as when rain clouds disperse after a storm. Then suddenly he toppled, and it was like an aging bull being ceremoniously pierced by the toreador’s shining blade.

Moans, groans, fevered emotions. For a moment no other sounds echoed in the air, mocking the stillness. Pain, followed by shock, overwhelmed the dying man’s senses. The machete had traversed his torso in a delicate clean arch, sending blood spurting. Rich and scarlet, the blood from Samuel’s mortal wound drenched the proud earth and soon disappeared beneath it.

The stalks of cane were not mute witnesses. Erect like golden sentinels, they shook and swayed with the gusty breeze. Perhaps the cane--after giving so much of itself for so long, no longer sweet--had conspired and willed this, an unexpected harvest.