Hard Red Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

drop them off here.”
    â€œWhat are they doing?” It was shocking to Evie that children could lose their parents at all, although it seemed that orphans could only be little girls.
    â€œIt seems they’ve been instructed to pray the volcano away. Or maybe the army.”
    ~~~~~
    The band played for two and a half days without stopping, though the ash had finished by the next day. Father said that they brought in replacements so they could play in shifts. For two days, all through the day and night, Evie could hear those drums all the way up their mountain. She would find herself walking to the beat, chewing, breathing. Even Magellan the bird could not resist the beat. He ignored his food, his water, and any effort on Evie’s part to communicate, but he did acknowledge the drums. If Evie sat far enough away and pretended she wasn’t watching, he would turn his head almost perpendicular to his body and bob to the rhythm, as if it made perfect sense to him.
    She thought often of the orphan girls, too, lined up and praying for two days.
    Evie asked Father what all this could be. If it wasn’t the volcano, then what was it? He assured her that it was the volcano, that he had climbed the range and seen it himself. It looked like a big mouth smoking a cigar.
    â€œThen why does the paper say it isn’t the volcano?” Indeed, the paper had gone from not mentioning the volcano at all to explicitly denying the eruption.
    â€œA hundred years ago, Evie, there weren’t newspapers down here. A hundred years ago, no one would deny that volcano erupting. Not even the Spanish. But progress is a funny thing. Newspapers aren’t for news, Evie. They never were.”
    â€œWhat are they for, then?”
    â€œFor coloring,” he said, handing over the latest edition.
    And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” stopped. Evie was on the porch helping Ixna, when the beat that had been regulating their lives for the past two and a half days just stopped. Evie looked up at Ixna—who also looked up, cleared a stray hair from her face, and then went back to her sweeping.
    ~~~~~
    Father stood on the porch in a pose of determined, casual calm, a tense smile fixed on his face as he stared down at the newspaper Judas had brought from Xela. The sun was back, high and red. The days now were stuck in perpetual dawn with the ash lingering in the atmosphere.
    Mother, standing next to him, did not smile. Not even a little. Not even inher exasperated way. Evie saw a new expression on her face, one of despair. The band had worn her down over the past sixty hours. The assault by music, her beloved medium, had unhinged her. Criminals and thieves she could understand, but absurdity proved to be too much. After a particularly scary story from Ixna, Evie had asked Mother the scariest story she’d ever heard.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, she had replied.
    Father, on the other hand, remained calm. To him, Guatemalan politics were akin to natural disasters. No use getting upset, you merely endured and recovered. He’d been executing funny dance steps for two and a half days.
    They gave the paper to Evie to color in. She could not read the Spanish, but she knew what it said. They’d been talking about it in escalating whispers all morning, the sound of the drums replaced by their quarrel. On the front page, she began to fill in the picture of the President. She’d give him horns. Every time his picture appeared in the paper, which was quite often, Evie colored him a different way to make Father laugh.
    That day’s newspaper published two decrees from the President. One: that a volcano had indeed erupted in Mexico five days before. A strong wind had blown the ash into Guatemala and aid was being sent to the affected coffee plantations. This decree, printed in Spanish, English, and German, made everyone laugh—Father heartily, Mother nervously.