P R O L O G U E
“Look at that cloud,” Kate said. “And the moon looks just like a commun-ion host, doesn’t it?”
Father Bosque had his rifle with him, as he always did on our trips into the bush. I felt uneasy around it, afraid it would go off accidentally. Now, on a whim, I asked if he’d let me fire it. It was the same gun he had used to kill the tiger.
He knew I’d never used a firearm before. “You’re in a strange mood,” he said as he showed me how to hold it.
“Where should I aim?”
“Anywhere but at us.”
Holding the butt against my right shoulder, as he instructed me, I took aim at the cloud dove.
“Not the dove,” Molly cried out in mock horror.
Deliberately, slowly I squeezed the trigger. The violent kick of the rifle knocked me backward. Father Bosque caught hold of me and kept me from falling. I staggered upright with a giddy feeling of release – and relief.
Unimpeded, the moon continued its serene rise and the grey dove continued to brood, undisturbed.
Just before midnight, Father Bosque chanted compline, the last office of the day. By then, we had named the mountain “Kamagacha”, combining parts of our names. With our hands piled on top of each other’s, we swore someday to return together to this place we shared as home.
C h a p t e r 1
Crossing Borders
M Y F I R S T I M P R E S S I O N O F British Honduras (“BH” as I soon learned to call it) was of walking under water. The atmosphere, dense, tropical, pressed against me as I moved. Everything slowed down. I took a deep breath and felt as if I were drinking the air. I began to like the feeling. In my memory, St Louis humidity, my native environment, seemed claustrophobic compared with this. There, nothing moved.
Leaving the airport lobby, cooled by open windows and overhead fans, I realized the difference. A current of air flowed around me, lifting my skirt and tangling my hair. Here, there was a constant breeze. And on it, I smelled the sea.
A warped poster near the door greeted arriving passengers: “Welcome to Belize City!” It pictured a blue canal bordered by white colonial mansions whose balconies overflowed with flowers.
“Yes, there are some canals in Belize City, as you’ll see,” Father Weaver said as he drove three of his new teachers – Peg, Sue Ella and me – along the potholed road from the airport into town. “Once, all this area was mangrove swamp. Long before white people arrived, the Maya built the canals to drain the swamp.”
Father Weaver was the forty-something Jesuit with large, watery green eyes who’d recruited us to teach in a country none of us knew existed before we met him. On our left, briefly, lay the hazy sea, and on our right, the dark waters of the Belize River. My imagination generated images of a tropical paradise. Scenes from the movie version of South Pacific merged with memories of Xochimilco, where not two days earlier, during a layover in Mexico 3
City, Peg, Sue Ella and I had drifted on limpid water through sun and shadow, the scent of gardenias in the air.
“Why are so many of the buildings on stilts?” I asked, noticing that almost all the houses we passed sat at least ten feet off the ground on wooden or con-crete posts.
“To catch the sea breeze. And in case of floods.”
They reminded me of cottages along the Meramec River, just south of St Louis, where I’d spent occasional summer weekends as a child. Looking more closely, I saw that more than a few of these cottages looked unsteady on their perches, sagging and tilting at odd angles. The most dilapidated had been abandoned. All that remained of some was rubble among the pilings.
Not only on the outskirts but also approaching the centre of the town, I saw one vacant lot after another. On them, squatters had constructed shanties out of whatever came to hand: mismatched lengths of wood, salvaged pieces of rusty tin and cardboard packing crates. Brown-skinned children crouched on the shady side of shacks, out of the blistering sun. A few waved as we drove by in our Land Rover. Their greeting felt like a welcome, and I stuck my hand out the window to wave back.
As we crossed one small bridge after another, I saw for myself that a net-work of canals did indeed criss-cross the city. Their water was neither clear nor blue. Flowers did not festoon their banks. Instead, shops and tenements backed on what were in reality wide and dirty ditches. As we passed over one of them, I watched in disbelief as a woman tossed a bucketful of garbage out her window into the murky water. We’d gone by before I could be sure that what I’d seen scrabbling along the slimy bank were rats.
In the back of my mind, I heard my grandmother’s sensible voice: “What have you got yourself into this time, Abigail Porter?” She often accused me of leaping before I looked, a reputation I’d established at age eight by running away from home and trekking nine miles over busy city streets to her house.
What my grandmother didn’t know was that I hadn’t leaped at all that first time. I’d spent months memorizing the route every time we drove it, plan-ning my escape from unpredictable parents and too many squalling babies.
This time, though, I feared she might be right. Accustomed as I was to the modern conveniences of the United States and fresh from the ancient beauties of Mexico, the city I came to that June afternoon in 1962 looked impoverished and insubstantial, improvised and temporary. It was hard to tell whether the city was coming into being or going out of existence. Even the nicer neigh-
bourhoods looked besieged, with palm trees snapped off and hibiscus bushes ragged and misshapen, like beggars clinging to life.
“What happened here?” Peg asked. A native St Louisan like me, Peg was a large blonde with a decisive manner who’d quickly assumed leadership of our band of three as we explored Mexico City. Hers were the guidebooks, the sense of direction, the Spanish phrase book, and the handbag bulging with Bayer Aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, Band-Aids and Coppertone.
Father Weaver replied that Hattie had happened.
“Hattie? Whoever is Hattie?” asked Sue Ella. She was born and spent her childhood in Arkansas. Her twang perfectly complemented her auburn hair and narrow eyes, an earthier green than Father Weaver’s. In Mexico City, men had turned on the street to watch her go by.
“Surely I mentioned Hattie when I interviewed you. She was our Halloween surprise last October – a Category 5 hurricane. The worst there is.”
He told us Hattie’s eye had passed directly over Belize City. The combined winds and floods had killed hundreds of people (“God rest their souls; we’ll never know the exact number,” he said) and left more than three-quarters of the population of British Honduras homeless. The cayes – islands just offshore
– and all the towns and villages along the coast had been ravaged.
So nature itself was responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Those dark-skinned people among the ruins, throwing garbage from windows – not their fault.
As we drove into the city centre, Father Weaver pointed out a few new buildings that had gone up since Hattie, their tin roofs and fresh white paint glinting in the sun. Scaffolds encased many buildings, including one he iden-tified as Holy Redeemer, the Catholic cathedral. The image of the massive cathedral in Mexico City – we’d visited it only two days before – flashed into my mind. It, too, had been encased in scaffolding – sinking under its weight, we were told, falling back into the ruins of the Aztec temple the conquistadors had demolished to build it.
Hattie had blown out all the stained glass windows in the church, Father Weaver explained, and the steeple was damaged too. But, he added, “We’re still able to offer Mass there, thank God.” Most of the shops along the main streets had reopened within a few months of the hurricane, he said, but rebuilding and repair were slow because, as he put it, “We have the time but not the money.”
Our vehicle was one of only a few on the road, but we moved slowly through the narrow city streets, thronged at midday with pedestrians and bicyclists. We passed dozens of tiny, stall-like shops that displayed an assort-ment of goods, from straw hats and baskets to plastic sandals and buckets.
“What in the world are those birds?” Peg asked. She was in the front seat, leaning forward and looking up.
Sticking my head out the open back window, I saw dozens of prehistoric-looking birds circling overhead. He said they were frigatebirds, a type of marine bird. The wharf was close by, he added, but warehouses hid any clear view of the waterfront. The closer we came to it, the less we saw of the sea’s mercurial expanse.
Father Weaver told us that cargo ships from all over the world docked offshore. Almost everything except citrus, mahogany, bananas and sugar cane had to be imported, making the cost of living in the city very high. He said that in the villages, people grew food and caught fish. They had most of what they needed just outside their doors. Life in the city was harder, especially for the poor. “And that means almost everybody.”
Before we reached the harbour, where a branch of the Belize River emp-tied into the sea, Father Weaver turned to the left. This was the Fort George District, he told us, the nicest part of the city before the hurricane.
He soon stopped in front of a smaller version of the white mansion pictured on the airport poster. This was PAVLA House, where we’d be staying until we received our assignments. It was in the process of being repainted, and dark green shutters leaned against the railings of the upper balconies, waiting to be reattached. It was once the Dutch Embassy, he said, and pointed out the US Embassy, located down the street within a large, gated compound.
Papal Volunteers to Latin America – PAVLA for short – was the Catholic equivalent of the Peace Corps. Both were in their second year of existence, the Peace Corps founded by newly elected President Kennedy as a goodwill initiative and PAVLA by Pope John XXIII in response to the needs of the church in Latin America. That was almost all I knew about the organization I’d committed a year of my life to, but I knew a lot about the Society of Jesus
– the Jesuits – an order of Catholic priests as notorious for subtle casuistry as they were respected for their top-notch educational institutions and world-wide missionary efforts. Many of my friends had attended St Louis U., one of their universities, and Jesuit scholars had often lectured at my college.
All along the winding street, surely one of the most impressive in Belize City before Hattie, we saw signs of construction, even though no workers were anywhere in sight. Several large houses were boarded up, with “Keep Out” signs posted on the doors. Father Weaver said that it takes a long time to come back from a hurricane like Hattie.
Sue Ella, Peg and I helped the priest unload our suitcases from the back of the Land Rover. As we stood on the pavement, our matching sets of luggage piled around us – mine was three-piece white Tourister, a graduation present
– Father Weaver shook his head. “You girls could start a department store with all that stuff!”
I was taken aback. Except for a box of books and another of winter clothes stored in my mother’s basement, everything I had in the world fit into those two suitcases, one smaller than the other, and a tiny overnight case. I’d just been thinking how little I had to get me through an entire year. Half the clothes I’d brought needed laundering after only three days in Mexico City.
It was Peg’s idea to stop over in Mexico City on our way to British Honduras.
Peg and Sue Ella, who’d been classmates at Fontbonne College, already knew each other, though not well. I’d gone to Maryville, another Catholic women’s college in St Louis. We had met only once before we left for British Honduras, at Father Weaver’s suggestion, to make travel plans. The plane ticket, paid for by our local bishop, wouldn’t cost any more with a layover, Peg assured us, and Luisa, a college friend of hers from Mexico City, had offered to show us around. With an exchange rate of twelve pesos to the US dollar, she thought we could get by on less than ten dollars a day. After all, she pointed out, people went to Europe on five dollars a day.
I’d never been out of the continental United States and didn’t need much persuading. Sue Ella hesitated – she was on a tight budget, she said. So was I, but if I was careful, I was sure what was left of my graduation money would cover the cost of a shared hotel room and food.
In fact, it wouldn’t have if Peg’s friend Luisa and her cousin Ramón, who met us at the airport, hadn’t insisted on paying for almost everything. “But you are our guests,” one or the other of them would say when we tried to pay our share of entrance fees or the cost of meals. I’d never before experi-enced such generosity outside of family.
Both of them and most of their friends had studied for a year or more in the States and could speak excellent English. They were in love with America