Chapter 2 of 13
This is where the love story begins, and it begins on a holy afternoon when two young men had run out of anything they were allowed to do. What John found that evening, on a road between two farms, would shape the whole rest of his life — though neither of them could have known it at the time.
Read it for the small hinges that turn out to carry everything: a question asked at a gate, a handful of laboured letters written with a Bible open for the spelling, and then a silence that was not what it seemed. The chapter ends in that silence, and in a young man’s decision that the whole thing was finished. He was wrong about that. But he would not find out for a long time, and neither will you — not yet.
Down in the colony we kept our holidays the old way, and the big ones came in threes. Three days of Christmas, three days of Easter, three days of Pentecost. These were religious days. It’s not in the Bible anywhere, but that was how we kept them. The first day a man might see to a thing or two, but the second and the third were holy. And the rule on it was plain. If anybody worked on the second or the third day, that person would go to hell. That was the long and short of it. You kept your hands still those days, and that was all there was to it.
Which is how two young men came to have a whole holy afternoon on their hands and nothing they were permitted to do with it. By the third day of that Christmas, my friend Cornie and I had run clean out of places to go. So we did the thing we always did. We traveled together looking for girls. That evening I thought of one farm we had never tried — Rosenthal, where the Dueck family lived. I knew her brother Jake well, and he had been after me about it for the longest time: “Why don’t you come out to Rosenthal, to our place, and visit?” So that is where we pointed our bicycles.
I had seen the girl before, mind you. She was a nanny for a wealthy family in Lumar Plata, the same town where I worked, and I would see her walk to the store. I knew her face, and I knew whose girl she was, but that was the whole of it. I had never stood close enough to say a word to her. Back then she was just a girl on a street to me, somebody else’s daughter walking to the store, and I was nobody to her at all. But I watched for her. I will admit that much.
She came off a farm out at Rosenthal, where her family, the Duecks, made their living the way nearly everybody made it down there, out of the ground and off the animals. They were milking a bunch of cows. They had peanuts in, and cotton, and corn. A farm girl from a farm family, no different from a hundred other girls in the colony. Except I had got it into my head to watch for her on that street. And a man does not do that over nothing.
We came in just before dark. There was a crowd of young people in the yard — Nettie, her sister, another girl from a farm down the road — and they were on the point of walking another kilometer or so to her uncle’s place. It was now or it was never, the way these things are when you are nineteen and your heart is going, so I asked her, “May I walk with you?”
She let me. We left the bicycles where they stood and walked out with the rest of them into the evening, and somewhere on that road between the one farm and the other it happened to me. I walked with her, and I fell in love with her right away, and she fell in love with me. I cannot tell you what it was. It was not anything you could have written down. It was just that by the time we reached her uncle’s gate I was a different man than the one who had ridden in, and I knew it.
When the evening was over and I was getting ready to head home, she said the thing I had been hoping to hear without quite knowing I was hoping for it. She said, “Are you coming back on the weekend?” That was the word I wanted.
So I came back, and the next weekend, and the one after. And it was not all smooth, either — I will not pretend it was, because that would not be honest, and there is no sense telling a thing if you are going to tidy it up. There was a stretch in there where she nearly called the whole thing off. “You almost dumped me,” I have told her since, and it is the truth. But then she thought better of it. She came back, and apologized, and begged me again to come. And that was the end of the wobble. I really loved her, you know? And I guess she loved me, too. On about the third weekend, when I was leaving, we put it into words, the way you have to eventually.
“Do you mean it?” she said.
“Yes, I do,” I told her.
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes, I do.”
And that was that. We were courting.
We carried on like that — weekend after weekend out to Rosenthal — and then the tickets came for Canada, and I fought them. I battled and battled with it. My mother and father wanted the whole family up there, and the plain truth of it was they needed what I could earn; a young man’s wage was part of the reckoning, and they were counting on mine. But I had found the girl by then, and I was not going to be pried off from her for any ticket. I told Nettie flat out, “No, I am not going.” I said it and I meant it. But the pressure came down on me and it kept coming, my mom and dad wanting me to come, and finally it got too big for me and I gave in. And here is the shame of it — I did not tell her until it was almost on top of us. About a week before I flew, that is finally when I told Nettie I was moving to Canada.
So my family made the move up to Canada. And that was a thing I would not wish on anybody. To find the one girl in the whole colony and then to be loaded onto a plane and carried five thousand miles off from her — I do not have the words for it even now, except the ones I have always used. That was a killer. Leaving her standing there in Paraguay while I went north, it felt like I broke her into bits and pieces. And my own heart, it was in bits and pieces too. That is as near as I can put it. You carry a thing like that onto an airplane and there is nowhere to set it down.
They were awful times, those first ones up north. I have cried many times over it, I do not mind telling you. You come to a foreign country where you do not know a soul, and the best part of your life at that moment is back in Paraguay, and there is no way to reach it. You could not so much as hear her voice. There was no such thing as picking up a phone in those days, not to a place like that. All you could do was carry it.
After that all we had was the mail, and the writing was the hard part. I had had almost no schooling, so a letter to her was real work. The way a day in the field is work. I would sit down at night with the Bible open beside me and hunt through it page by page for the words I needed, spelling them out the way they were spelled there. So the letters I wrote, they were holy. They came out reading half like Scripture, I suppose, and I did not care, and neither did she. I could work all day and never tire, and a single page of writing could undo me. But I would not have given it up for anything. It was the only road left between her and me. I wrote her about six of them, maybe, one after another, and she wrote me back just the same, and for a while there was that thread between us across all that distance, thin as it was.
And then the letters stopped.
I did not think much of it at first. The mail was the mail, and South America was a long way off, and things went astray. What I did not know, and would not find out for a long time, was that my own parents had set themselves against the match. It was my mother who did the deed. A couple of Nettie’s letters came, and she went to the mailbox and took them off before they ever reached my hand. She took care of them. That is why I did not get any more letters. So I stopped hearing from her, and after a while I did what a young man does. I figured that was the end of it, and I let it be the end of it.
I was in Canada two years and two months, and once the letters quit we did not hear from each other for a long time. A young man in a new country has his hands full just keeping his feet under him. The work, the language he can barely speak, the money that has to be earned before it can be spent. A silence like that, you let it close over a thing, and after a while you stop reaching down into it. We had both given it up. I had taken up with a girlfriend here in the meantime, and she had a boyfriend down there. That is just the plain fact of it. If you had asked me in those two years, I would have told you the Paraguay chapter of my life was finished and folded shut.
I was wrong about that. But it would take a morning I did not see coming, and fifteen hundred dollars I did not have, before I found out how wrong. For now there was only the silence, and a man in Canada who had made up his mind that the girl on that road at Rosenthal belonged to a country he was never going back to.