Crossroads

Dear God, she prayed, if this is the final test, I accept the test. If my time has come, I’ll die rejoicing in you. But please let it be your will that I live. If it’s your will that I live, I promise I will always serve you. If it’s your will that I be pregnant, I promise I will never harm my baby. I will love her and cherish her and teach her to love you, I promise, I promise, I promise, if you would only let me live. Please, God. Let me live.

Clem met Felipe Cuéllar at a construction site where the work consisted of shoveling sand, under a sand-colored Lima sky, and pushing it up narrow planks in a wheelbarrow. For a month, they shared a corrugated metal lean-to near the water treatment plant, shared food and beer, awakened to the smell of each other’s farts. Like other young men from the highlands, Felipe had come to the city in the winter to earn some cash. When it was time for him to go home, in November, Clem offered to join him and work for his family in exchange for food and shelter. The nonweather of Lima, the identically beige-skied days, was oppressing him, and throughout his months in Peru he’d seen the Andes in the east, the sun reflected on their heights, without getting any closer. He knew so little of farming, it didn’t occur to him that planting season coincided with the arrival of the rains.

He’d thought he knew what labor was. He’d carried tons of tar paper up six flights of stairs, a hundred-pound roll at a time, at a building site in Guayaquil, he’d stood in raw sewage outside Chiclayo and shoveled for ten hours, he’d raked hot asphalt under midday sun, but not until he was slipping and crawling in the mud of the Andes, in freezing fog and pelting hail, pulling out stones with cracked and swollen fingers, hacking at the earth with a dull-bladed implement, the altitude sharp-bladed in his brain, the blood from broken capillaries in his throat, did he put to rest the question of his strength.

When he’d left New Orleans, a year and a half earlier, his only plan had been to have no plan. With a few hundred dollars and the Spanish he’d taught himself while waiting for a passport, he’d crossed the Mexican border at Matamoros and headed farther south, intending to be gone for two years, the same term he would have served in the army. When he’d exhausted his money, on a boat passage to Guayaquil, he’d become an itinerant day laborer, motiveless in every respect except the need to work. If he saw a bus packed with other workers, he squeezed onto it without caring where it was going, not because he wished to understand the underprivileged but simply because, if he didn’t work, he didn’t eat.

Neither having nor seeking a larger motive, he’d been surprised to find one in the highlands. The fundamental equation of human existence—soil + water + plants + labor = food—was the most applied of sciences, nothing philosophical about it, but the Andean farmers’ way with their seedlings and their tubers, their wresting of sustenance from the harshest margins of arability, was a fulfillment of the plant physiology and genetics, the physical and atmospheric chemistry, the nitrogen cycles, the molecular jujitsu of chlorophyll, that he’d studied in school without appreciating their existential crux; and it had given him a plan. He would stay on through the potato harvest, complete his two-year term, and return to Illinois to study the impure science of agronomy.

The Cuéllars lived in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the town of Tres Fuentes. Once a week, after the crops had been planted, Clem descended on a boggy track through the puna, past pockets of hardwood forest whose recession upslope made the gathering of firewood arduous, to a post office conceivably colonial in age. Unlike the Cuéllars, whose first language was Quechua, the postal clerk spoke perfect Spanish. He was Clem’s sole connection to the world beyond the highlands, his fútbol-themed calendar the only marker of that world’s chronology. Every week, Clem returned to find another line of days x-ed out.

One afternoon, when x’s had consumed half of February, the clerk had a small package for him. He took it outside and sat down on the rim of a dry, ruined fountain. The air was scented with the smoke of kitchen fires, the sun hidden by a ceiling of pale cloud through which he could feel its warmth. In the package were three pairs of wool socks and a letter from his mother.