A Far Country Read Online Free PDF

all.’
    There were those, like the healer, for whom no barriers existed, for whom there were no limits of knowledge or suffering. ‘That isn’t you,’ said her mother. ‘In you, the walls are there, they are just thinner. My grandmother was like you. Even when she stopped seeing spirits, still her body wasn’t closed. She could read people. She knew cures and could calm children. Then, when the drought came, she began to see more clearly: she knew how to find water, and whether rain was coming. Some said she was lucky for it. But it wasn’t easy; she felt the sadness of others, too. She was like that her entire life.’
    She paused. ‘Except when my grandfather was sick: then she was blind. Everyone knew he was dying, but she didn’t believe it. With him, it was like her vision was blurred.’
    Later, she added, as if from nowhere, ‘Being blessed and lucky aren’t the same.’
    In Prince Leopold, they stopped at a little store that sold incense and icons. Rows of saint icons lined the shelves. Handwritten labels curled from the bottles. Isabel read them slowly. There was
Find Employment Soap, Soap Bring-Him-to-Me, Spell-Breaker Soap, I-Dominate-My-Woman Shampoo, Shampoo
Beauty, Shampoo Goodbye-Evil-Eye
. At home her mother washed her in a bitter solution that stung her eyes. They set a laminated card of Saint George on a shelf next to a rosary and a photo of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Tears in Blackwater.
    Isaias watched Isabel from a distance. ‘Why are you staring?’ she asked. ‘I’m not.’ ‘You are.’ ‘It’s like performing miracles,’ he said. ‘Like magic.’
    ‘Not magic at all,’ snapped her mother. ‘Just seeing.’
    He asked Isabel, ‘Does it scare you?’
    ‘No,’ she answered, not certain if this was true. She thought, Does it scare you to see farther, to hear better? ‘I’m not seeing anything that isn’t already there,’ she said.
    Her grandfather Boniface considered the diagnosis silently. They repeated the prayer for three Fridays.
    She didn’t see the little boy again. At night, her dreams were quiet dreams about her family and the white forest, dry and empty recapitulations of the day. She no longer heard snakes moving close to her on the trail. In the market, it was easier to pass the beggars without feeling their sadness. She could still calm children, but it took longer now. Somehow the old drought songs weren’t as lonely anymore, and she knew that if she tried, it would be harder to find Isaias in the cane.

T he burning season came.
    In the fields, the men set fire to the cane. The long blades flared, blue and yellow, the nestled leaves fanning like pages of a burning book until only the sweet core remained.
    At night, Isabel could hear the crackling of the fires. Sometimes she went to the edge of the road and watched the men herd the flames over the hills. At sunset, the smoke turned the horizon as red as a rooster’s crest. She joined the other children as they ran down the long road to the burns, where they felt their faces prickle in the heat and squinted at the silhouettes of the cutters moving gracefully against the fires.
    The harvest began as soon as the long, sharp leaves crumbled to cinders. The workers came home with their nostrils black, their eyelids dark with ash like kohl. Spiderweb tattoos laced the wounds on their hands and striped the chapped crevices of their lips.
    The days were long. She saw little of her brother. She waited for him to resume their walks in the final moments oflight. But each day he said he was too tired, and so she stopped asking. At night, his coughing kept her awake. She found black stains in the handkerchiefs she washed in the stream. In his absence, her world narrowed and quieted.
    When the season was over, the men collected their final wages from the foreman. The canteen ran a swift business. Some of her uncles visited a house in the city, and at home their wives cursed them. Once, her father went along, and in the