The Farming of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

her own house and you in your room.”
    “One of us must stay with you, even if Señor Pico returns.”
    I left the señora to the care of one of her husband’s girl cousins, who had come from the village with more old hen soup, eggs, nutmeg, money, and dog’s teeth for the babies’ protection, and went down to the pantry to find Juana.
    Juana was sitting at the table, stirring a wooden spoon around the plate of stew in front of her. Her eyes were red from all the crying she had done. She got up and ladled out a bowl of stew from the pot for me.
    “I think a tear or two might have fallen in the stew while you were cooking,” I said as I sat at the table next to her.
    I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I saw the chunks of cabbage, yucca and manioc floating in my bowl.
    “There are no tears in your bowl,” Juana said. “I was careful. Nothing but what is meant to be there ever enters my stew.”
    “I was not serious,” I said, patting the cushion of flesh on her back.
    “Don’t tease. What if the señora heard you?”
    “Why are you crying so, Juana? I don’t believe they’re all for joy, your tears.”
    “It’s a grand day in this house,” she said, “a day that comes to remind me how quickly time passes by. A woman like me grows old while more and more children arrive m this world.”
    “Are you jealous, Juana? Do you want your own babies?”
    “Jealous? Santa Ana, the Holy Mother who gives life, what if she heard you?” She rapped her knuckles on the four corners of the table, as though to test the strength of the wood, and then picked up a rag and wiped the already clean table legs.
    “If she has ears, then Santa Ana, she’s already heard everything I said.”
    “The sin’s on your head, then,” she said. “But you’re not a believer.”
    “How do you know I’m not a believer?”
    “Do you believe in anything?”
    Juana rubbed her closed hands together as though washing in the stream. After years of working as a housemaid, it was hard for her to remain still.
    “I remember when Señora Valencia’s mother became pregnant with her,” she said. “One day, she had no menstrual rags for me to wash. I said to her, ‘Señora Rosalinda, could you be with child?’ She said to me, ‘Juana, I dare not even dream it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘It would be too miraculous.’ She was with child indeed, and during the first and second months her body became so uneasy. She grew larger and larger until she was too wide for most passageways in this house. If anyone looked like they were going to have twin babies, it was Señora Rosalinda.”
    Juana stood up and poured another bowl of stew for herself. She’d had an enormous appetite over these past few months and had grown even broader, especially around her face.
    “Now Señora Valencia has children of her own.” She pondered the event out loud. “Look how quick the time has passed. It’s not the time itself, but what it does to us.”
    “You’re far from old,” I said. She was at least fifty, twice my and Señora Valencia’s age, but her body looked hardy and capable, like it could still bear many children.
    “You don’t know how long I prayed for a child myself,” she said.
    “I have no child, but even I know you must do more than pray.”
    “Sinner!” She laughed and playfully slapped the back of my hand.
    “So you’ve wanted babies?” I asked.
    “Babies always lead us to talk of more babies. Don’t you want to have your own?”
    I shook my head no. Perhaps because my parents both had died young, I never imagined myself getting older than I was, much less living long enough to bear my own children. Before Sebastien, all my dreams had been of the past: of the old country, of places and people I might never see again.
    “I was close to becoming a mother once,” Juana said. “My stomach grew for three months and nine days, then all at once it was gone. ¡Adiós bebé! This child was never born. It never had a sex.