Nicaraguan Gringa. John Keith

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 close to her nose. His eyes squinted, and Sarah was terrified.

      “I am sorry.” She wept and tried to swallow her sobs so that her parents wouldn’t 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