Hard Red Spring Read Online Free PDF

get caught in Ixna’s eyelashes. She didn’t even blink.
    Mother, still holding Evie’s hand in her sweaty fist, tightened her grip. “If it’s not the volcano, then what the hell is it?”
    Rocks fell on the town and littered the street. They burned through the thatched rooftops of Indian shacks and shattered the windows and roof tiles of the government offices and the fancy whitewashed houses. Mother looked around in amazement.
    â€œEurope’s all played out, Evie. Aren’t you glad we could come to a place with so much promise as this?” She laughed, wiping her eyes clear of something.
    A flaming rock the size of a man’s fist hit the side of the police station behind them, leaving a hole in the stucco. Ixna turned away. Mother’s mood turned sharply at this close call. She reopened her parasol, pulled Evie under its protection, and walked toward the safety of the church.
    â€œNow do you see?” she yelled over a sudden shout of trumpets. “Now do you see our predicament, trying to conduct reasonable and civilized business in a place like this?”
    Two young Indian women, Ixna’s age, walked past with very large babies, their heads covered in black sacks. Almost all the Indian babies in town had their heads stuffed in black sacks, always, to protect them from evil spirits. A fact that made the image of her own sister arriving in a sack one day very plausible to Evie. Mother eyed these young mothers as if they had walked across on cue to make her point.
    The band had come all the way from Guatemala City. They played “TheBattle Hymn of the Republic” over and over, with no flourish or variation. But with all music, there are rests. Not even the Guatemalan Army could deny that. Even as they denied the ash that rained down, clogging their instruments and forcing some to shake their horns clear, even as one of the trumpeters was knocked in the head with a flying rock and fell down and did not move, they could not deny those beats of silence at the end of each verse. And so everyone stood waiting for it. The director tried to hurry through those rests, waving his arms frantically, as if he himself summoned the rumblings in the distance that seemed, along with Mother, to get angrier with each verse.
    A crowd had congregated near the church to watch the performance. The huge limestone cathedral sheltered them from the occasional flying, flaming rocks and blocked much of the ash. Mother pulled Evie up the main steps—past the poor Indians sitting at the bottom, then Ladinos, then the rich Spanish-speaking Guatemalans above them. At the top sat the foreigners, like them, the Germans and French, a few Americans. Mother walked past everyone and into the high, hollow church, where the band’s song was transformed into ominous echoes.
    Evie had never been inside the cathedral and was disturbed by its decadence. Muddy paintings framed in bright gold, the pictures so muddled and dark that it was not until they got close that Evie could see the scenes: men hanging from trees, a man holding his own severed head.
    They sat down to wait and rest in safety. Who knew where Ixna had gone? Indians came and went, lighting candles. Up front, Jesus on his cross looked like the saddest man on earth, with his open eyes rolled up to the sky and his ribs showing. Below him, a line of little girls in sack dresses prayed on their knees. At least thirty girls, all dark, black-haired. A nun paced nearby, watching. Evie had never seen so many little girls in Xela, so many so close to her age.
    â€œMother.” She tugged at her sleeve. “Who are they?”
    â€œOrphans.”
    â€œWhat are orphans? Can I play with them?”
    â€œOrphans are children without parents, Evie. You can’t play with them.”
    â€œHow did they lose their parents? Do parents die?”
    â€œOf course not, Evie. Sometimes they just can’t afford to keep their children, so they