Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [22]
I raise a puzzled eyebrow.
“Think about it,” she says. She sets the rest of her sandwich down and reaches for the wineglass, which she drains with the same consideration someone in my part of the world might give a glass of ice tea. “He’s got this thing going back twenty-five hundred years. But from what I can see, he only tracks the bones back to the thirteenth century—the Chevrier family, or paternal designation. Question is, how did he get from the cemetery to there? He has to have something he hasn’t shown you yet.”
I shrug. I’d wondered the same thing but hadn’t considered it a deal breaker. If I can prove that his findings from the thirteenth century on are accurate, then I can feel good about pursuing the matter. What I need Esperanza for is to confirm the last portion of the record, the place where Elisha’s bones seem to have dropped off the face of the earth: Fraternidad de la Tierra. The Brotherhood of Dirt.
She can read my mind.
“Fraternidad de la Tierra existed.”
“Existed. As in, they no longer exist?”
“Definitely past tense. It was an organization that was active in the region during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Mostly merchants, a few political aspirants.”
“So they weren’t associated with a single family?”
“They were a guild. In the truest sense of the word. Membership crossed national and economic lines.”
I take another bite of my steak. It’s excellent. I’ve never had a bad meal here.
I’m more than excited. The way Espy is describing this group means they are one of those fringe peoples unknown to all but the most serious academics. The fact that they’re integral to Gordon’s research, and that she has verified their existence, means a great deal.
“When did they disappear?” I ask.
The last of the tuna salad sandwich disappears. “Not sure. From what I can remember, they were a nonentity before Bolivar came along.”
“Why’s that?”
It’s her turn to shrug. “All pseudo-guilds dissolve over time. All it takes is for one branch to splinter because they think they’re on the bad end of a business deal, or that some organization-wide decree doesn’t favor them. Sometimes it’s even because of political altruism.” She raises her wineglass to one of the waiters lining the near wall. “All I know is that, by the start of this century, they were gone.”
“Sounds like that bothers you.”
“In a way, I guess it does.” When I raise an eyebrow, she says, “I know I’m running the risk of oversimplifying here, but how many of the problems South America’s experienced over the centuries are a direct result of the same sort of tribalism that kept Europe from unifying for so long? Something like a stronger version of this guild might have had some stabilizing influence.”
“You’ve got the Catholic Church,” I say, only half kidding.
“Funny.”
Like me, Esperanza had a religious upbringing. But Latin American Catholicism is an entirely different animal from the staid Protestantism I know and love like a weird cousin at a family reunion. I think one would have to live among the Amish back in the States to understand how religion can so permeate a people group. I think what hides under the surface of both approaches, though, is fear. Fear of God. Fear of there being no God; fear of there being a God who is in a perpetual state of irritation; fear of discovering that your religion got it horribly wrong; fear of being afraid because that is assuredly a sin. The people here wrap themselves in what they fear most, like hunters who would dress themselves in the animal skins of fierce predators, while we pay distant homage to that same horrific thing from behind the three-inch safety glass of pious ceremony.
Esperanza stopped going to church when she went to Cambridge, and her mother didn’t talk to her for two years. To hear Espy tell it, her mother attended Mass daily and lit candles for her daughter’s soul. When I first met Marie Theresa, I was sure she blamed me for her daughter’s