Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [145]
She consulted her books and pamphlets, and following their recommendations, spent most of the day formulating ever stronger infusions and broths. Severo found her in the kitchen with Flora, Paula, and Conciencia on the eighth morning. A trestle table was laden with branches and leaves of herbs, twigs, and the desiccated peels of fruits and vegetables that they were tying into bundles. A cauldron bubbled on the fogón. Clear and greenish liquids cooled in several cans and bowls. The shack was stifling in the July heat. Ana wiped her forehead with her apron and followed Severo outside. He started toward the breadfruit tree, but she led him to the shade on the other side of the house.
“Nothing but bad news comes to me under that tree,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry that my news will be no better,” he said grimly.
She looked toward the barracks. Fela scooped water from the drum by the door and went inside with it.
“I’ve ordered that the dead be burned,” Severo said.
“But that’s a sin,” she gasped, because even though she was losing her faith, she still thought like a Catholic.
“José can’t make coffins fast enough.”
She was having a hard time maintaining her composure. “They’re dying faster than we can bury them.”
“Yes,” he said.
She covered her face with her hands; then, as if the gesture were too revealing of the horror she felt, she dropped them quickly and settled her shoulders. “Do what you must. Just do it far from here.”
He ordered that the pyre be started in the meadow farthest from the casona. Dense smoke swirled over the burning mound, dispersing the bittersweet tang of burning flesh. Every time Ana looked in that direction, she saw years’ worth of work dissolving into the clouds.
She was in her study early the ninth morning, preparing the pay packets for the jornaleros. Severo ran up the steps, tugging at the bandana that he wore over his face as protection against the pestilence and that made him look like a bandido.
“Three of the foremen ran off with their families,” he said.
“But who’s going to supervise—”
“Coto agreed to stay, at double salary, until I can find more men.”
“In just a few months we’ll have four hundred cuerdas to harvest.”
“I know, but our biggest concern now is to keep the healthy from running away.”
Failure had always been a possibility: poor harvests and financial exigencies, physical labor, the twins’ deaths, storms, a hurricane. Failure had always been a cloud on her horizon, but she’d found a way to meet those trials through hard work and, yes, calculated manipulations. Maybe it was exhaustion, but she couldn’t think her way out of this predicament.
“We’ll be ruined,” she said, as if her greatest fear had become real.
“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It had been years since she’d heard that hard, unemotional voice, that gathering of tenacious will fixed on a mission. He had confidence that she couldn’t match, that frightened her. As it did the afternoon he pledged to punish Inocente’s murderers, her scalp now tingled and she was glad that Severo Fuentes was on her side.
Neither Flora nor Conciencia was allowed to care for the sick, but the precaution didn’t spare the Mbuti, who woke up the tenth morning with stomach cramps and diarrhea.
“Agua, señora,” Flora pleaded when, alerted by Conciencia, Ana went down to their room to the cries, to the smell, and to Flora’s big eyes already dimming.
Severo ordered that she be exiled to the quarantine barracón.
“Not Flora. Conciencia and I can take care of her.”
“She can’t be saved, Ana. She’s dying.”
“Let me try.”
“I can make no exceptions.”
“I can’t let her die, Severo, not my Flora.”
Over the course of that day, Ana trickled her concoctions onto Flora’s parched lips, the bitter and the sour, but