Nicaraguan Gringa. John Keith

dictionary. “Sacrílego. What nonsense!” She spoke so loudly that she thought he could have heard her from the dining room, but he’d already returned to the garden.

      Julio and Guillermo were six and two years older than Sarah respectively, but she rarely saw Julio and hardly knew him. He didn’t work on the finca (farm) except during the coffee harvest when he helped to pick the beans. Guillermo often helped his father in the garden, but he was shy and rarely spoke and never played with Sarah. George Rutledge had arranged for the two older sons of Martín and Flora to attend a school in Managua after they graduated from the village school, and he paid for their tuition and school uniforms and books. Pablo was almost seven years younger than Sarah and often followed Martín around the garden. When Sarah turned twelve, she thought of Pablo as a baby always needing attention, even though he was really a little boy of six who came and went as he pleased.

      Avocados were George Rutledge’s favorite fruit, and it annoyed him that the trees at Quinta Louisa had done so poorly that only three or four pears a year were harvested from his garden. He told Martín they ought to be able to do something about it.

      “I am going to take care of the problem, Don Jorge. You will have plenty of avocados when the rainy season comes again.”

      “As if that ignorant peon has the competence and training of a horticulturalist and can improve the yield of temperamental fruit trees,” Sarah heard her father mutter as he entered the house.

      Several days later George saw Martín cutting a ring of bark around the trunk of the avocado tree. “What are you up to, my good man?”

      Martín uttered some long word that Sarah didn’t recognize. “What was that word you used?”

      (“Who else in Nicaragua has an Indian peasant working for him that spouts out ten syllable words like some Cambridge don . . . in Spanish, of course,” George had said as he related the story to his wife that evening.)

      George went into the study to look up the definition in the Spanish-English dictionary to be sure he understood it. Circumcidante (Circumcising).

      Sarah read the entry on the page where her father had left the dictionary open on his desk, but the words didn’t refer to fruit trees and confused Sarah and made her blush. “Circumcising: cutting circularly a portion of the skin around the male virile organ.”

      She heard the patio slam once again as her father went back to the garden.

      “Martín, tell me one more time what you are doing to that tree?

      “I am circumcising it, señor.”

      Martín was cutting a strip of bark around the trunk of the tree. “What are you doing that for?”

      (“It really did look like some primitive circumcision ritual,” George told his wife that evening.)

      “To change the sex. It is a male. That is why it will not bear any fruit. I am making it into a woman.”

      “My good man, circumcision is not the way we go about changing the gender of things.”

      “It is for avocado trees, señor.”

      George told Mary at dinner that the tree would be dead within the month but he might as well let Martín have his way. “You can’t tell these bull-headed campesinos (peasants) anything. They’ll just walk off and start sulking and do no work at all. You might as well let them have their way in little things and save your arguments for urgent matters. The tree is perfectly useless anyway if it bears less than a half-dozen pears every year.”

      To George’s surprise the avocado tree didn’t die. It produced more buds that season than it had borne in all the previous seasons added together, and there were even more pears the following season; but the next season after that, the year that Sarah turned thirteen, the tree put out almost no buds again.

      “Martín has some crank theory about virgins. Perfectly ridiculous. These fool peasants are obsessed with superstitions about virgins. I don’t believe a word of it. He told me an avocado tree won’t bear fruit if a virgin climbs on its limbs after she begins to menstruate.”

      “Father! Really!” Sarah got up and threw her napkin on the table without inserting it into its ring, as she’d been trained to do, and ran to her room and slammed the door.

      “You really shouldn’t talk so freely around Sarah now that she’s becoming a young woman, George. She’s easily embarrassed.” Mary’s eyes twinkled, and she wrinkled up her lips. “But you might pay more attention to Martín’s folk remedies. Remember how the tree began to bear fruit after it was circumcised a couple of years ago.”

      George forbade Sarah from ever climbing in the avocado tree again. He told her that she was too old for such behavior, just as he’d told her when she was ten that she was too old to ride on Don Martín’s back.

      The next season the trees produced even more fruit, and the next year they showed more buds than George had ever seen on a tree, with the promise of a prodigious 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!”

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