The Boiling Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

ability, but here his authority seemed greatly diminished, owing more than anything else to his rumpled brown suit, vastly inferior in quality to the red jacket with the Erdrich crest that he wore at work.
    We passed through the capital and south along the coast. Out here in the countryside it was a different world. The farther we drove, the more it felt as if we were going back in time. Soon oxcarts outnumbered cars. I was surprised by how little green there was to see. Along the dusty, disintegrating road, almost entirely free of landmarks, women and children bore their burdens however they could, the lucky ones leading donkeys loaded with heavy packs. There was nothing but brown, parched earth as far as I could see.
    Beyond the bay there was more for living things to cling to in the soil, and the view improved slightly. Small plots dominated the landscape, daggered crowns of sisal and rows of corn and millet interspersed with tufts of vetiver. And then came the great swamps of rice, worked by peasants in wide palm hats, who looked up as we drove by, as if obliged to keep a tally. Yet despite the crops and laborers, this too was an oddly barren landscape. The fields, so lush in their confines, looked as if they had been artificially grafted onto the terrain. In stark contrast, the land left uncultivated seemed unable to support anything more than low, desolate shrubs and rust-colored grasses. There was scarcely a single tree anywhere in sight.
    I had never been so far from the city, and yet there was something familiar about the surroundings. Perhaps I was remembering my father’s stories of his youth, one of six children of poor farmers like these. But they could have been anyone’s stories. The city was full of people who had fled the depleted countryside in hope of finding better lives and had simply found themselves wasting away somewhere else instead.
    I was relieved when, after half an hour, we left the coast on a course due east into the mountains. The road here was rough, and we frequently had to slow so M. Guinee could ease the car over rocks and around holes sluiced out by recent heavy rains.
    â€œI’m taking you to see a house,” M. Guinee finally volunteered.
    â€œA house?” I repeated, and I waited for him to smile, to say he was only kidding. Surely he would not have brought me all this way for a house. Every home we had passed so far appeared to have been lashed together from roadside detritus.
    By this time we were halfway to the mountain village of Saint-Gabriel, and suddenly M. Guinee pulled over. I thought at first that something had happened to the car. On roads such as these, axles snapped as easily as bones.
    â€œImpressive, isn’t it?” M. Guinee said. He was looking past me out the passenger side window, and I turned in that direction. Only then did I notice the immense stone wall running parallel to the road, largely obscured by underbrush. We were parked on a pebbly shoulder that I now realized was the start of a private drive. Just a few meters away I saw a tall wrought-iron gate camouflaged beneath a tangle of weeds and liana.
    The wall was perhaps two and a half meters tall. The sun, just barely filtering through the trees, reflected off dirty shards of glass cemented to the top. As I looked down the road behind us, I realized we had been following the wall for perhaps as long as a kilometer.
    At the time, the area was largely uninhabited, but for a few rustic farms. The sugar plantations that centuries ago had claimed swaths of land all across the island had not extended into these inhospitable hills. And neither had the mango groves nor the bean fields nor the coffee plantations, which survived—however meagerly—at higher altitudes. The land, however, was anything but unspoiled. The only things growing here were things for which no one had any use. Furniture makers in the capital had long ago harvested all the hardwood they could find. Desperate