It shot back and forth at first between Yucatan and Freehold, but the story was about the dwarf’s head and his mother. Dagger said over his shoulder, You know who it was the dwarf met, and Sherman said, Right, and Herma said, O wow, and I looked back to see her hand touch Sherman’s shoulder.
The Indians revered this dwarf, Dagger said, feared him — a fellow Indian but set apart, a legend in his own lifetime. His mother had been an old woman miserably childless who mourned for the kids she didn’t have as if they had lived and died. She had a dream, and it was of a deep well colored down as far as she could see with green and red and yellow shapes and the more she dreamt the more they became birds, then real birds, and she reached down the well mouth and found red eggs. A pair of green birds flew up out of the darkness and they took out her eyes and it didn’t hurt, for now she saw even better but something else. And in thanks for the red eggs and the new vision, she baked on her hand-packed earthen griddle some tortillitas and sailed them down into the well.
Well she woke from this dream and she took an egg and covered it with a yellow cloth and set it in a corner. She left it alone but always thought about it but told no one.
This is in Uxmal, said Dagger, and asked if we knew Yucatan, and Sherman said Right, and Dagger said it was strange on the map, Yucatan, like an underground water-cave you go way down to get to and pass under water then come upward, and come to think of it if you’ve come down from Laredo through Vera Cruz, Yucatan is like that.
Well one day the old woman got hungry looking at the blue sky at dawn and made some tortillitas, which are wheat cakes, and gobbled them up like a pregnant lady and when she went to the corner and lifted the yellow cloth, the egg had hatched and a criatura, a creature, had hatched and the old girl was happy and called the thing her son and took good care of it, fed it lots of fried beans and at the end of a year and a day, so this Mexican Indian dwarf told me, and he should know because he was it — walked and talked like a man, but it stopped growing.
Well the old woman was thrilled and she told him he would be chief man around there. One day she sent him to the house of the gobernador.
The boy under Elizabeth said abruptly as if he wanted to identify himself, Who built those ancient cities, I mean Uxmal, Copan?
Dagger said, It’s all connected, Egyptian pyramids and hieroglyphs, Hindu temples even carved out of the living rock — the point is there was communication.
Telepathy at most, I said.
From the orient, you mean, said Elizabeth to Dagger.
Both ways, said Dagger.
Rubbish, said Elizabeth.
I’m convinced of it, said Dagger. But the dwarf’s old lady now you see sent him to the gobernador and challenged him to a test of strength. The gobernador scoffed and told him to lift a one-hundred-pound stone, so the dwarf ran back home crying but his mother sent him back to the gobernador to say if the gobernador lifted it he would too, and that’s what happened. And they had other tests. Same thing — it was as if the dwarf tied into the gobernador’s power that had an inadequate purpose and used that power for his own ends.
Is he still alive? said Herma, and I looked around at her to check if she did have that lovely imagination in the cheekbone and mouth that my sister once had and I thought I’d heard this tale before in different form and I let Dagger get away with the power-direction idea he’d recruited from me to help his story.
The gobernador, anyway, got fed up and told the dwarf he must in one night build a house taller than any other there or he’d have the priests cut out his heart on top of one of their pyramids which were only fifty feet high. So the dwarf raced home crying and again his mother said to cool it.
Now according to him, he woke next morning and found himself in this high, high building which I myself have seen and if only I hadn’t dropped my Pentax in a swollen river back in the jungle, but what you remember is the best. So the gobernador wakes up and looks out thinking what a great day for a rite, and lo and behold here’s this high, high stone building with the dwarf leaning out of a top window enjoying the view of the village, and the gobernador’s wife looks over his shoulder and says what a white elephant that’s going to be — but the gobernador put on his hat and went out and collected two bundles of the hardest wood and went to the dwarf and proposed the ultimate test. He would beat the dwarf over the head with the wood and then when that was over, the dwarf would have his turn.
The hiker from St. Louis, Sherman, asked when we were getting there, and I said, So the dwarf ran home crying.
Right, said Dagger. Well the old lady put one of her special tasty tortillitas on the crown of his head, a thin buckwheat cake, and back he went and all the bigwigs gathered round.
Well, the gobernador stepped up and he put the wood to him, whaled away for as long as it took to bust the whole bundle, and he never raised even a pea on the dwarf’s head, much less an egg.
What next, for heaven sake! Well the gobernador naturally tried to get out of his deal but he couldn’t because he’d made it in front of his officers and the town fathers who were pretty interested by this time in what was going to happen.