“I do.” Amanda smiled with her, without pain. The wind carried the sound of bells from the temple tower in Sanpedro town.
“The evening bells; José should be coming home…now.” Teresa reached for her crutch, pushed herself up from the chair. Amanda rose, pulling up her veil as she heard a commotion in the courtyard, shrill delighted voices and a barking dog. José came in through the hall, dark and smiling, a child trailing on each arm. Amanda dropped her eyes, as Teresa did, peeked upward to see José gently raise his wife’s chin with a fingertip. Longing pierced her; she pressed her own rough hands against the lavender weave of her shapeless dress.
“My husband ...”
“My wife. And Amanda: it’s good to see you, wife’s sister.”
She raised her eyes, looked down again, made awkward as she always was by the warm concern in his eyes. “José. Thank you.”
Two more figures entered, crowding the small room. Amanda’s breath caught on anger as she recognized her other sister, Estella, with her husband Houardo.
“José, why didn’t you tell me we’re having more guests!” Teresa pulled at her veil, flustered.
“I thought since Amanda would be here, Wife, there’d be plenty to eat for two more.” José beamed at his unsubtle inspiration.
“Yes, there will be, José,” Amanda said, meeting his gaze directly, made reckless by resentment. “I can’t stay. I have too much…work ... to do.” She glanced away, at Estella. She could only see the eyes, scornful, beautiful and coal-black, above the fine cloth of Estella’s veil. Memory filled in the face, pale, moonlike, flawless; the body, soft, sensually cushioned, with none of the sharp, bony angles of her own. Estella was two years older, but looked two years younger now. Houardo’s hand was on Estella’s shoulder, possessively, as always, a touch that stirred no longing in her. Teresa had said that Houardo beat his wife, without cause, in fits of jealousy.
But if there was no longing, there was also no sympathy in her now, as she endured their stares. Estella had loved not well, but wisely, marrying the son of the town’s wealthiest merchant; a thing which she never let her disinherited sister forget. Amanda noticed that the rich cloth of Estella’s dress was the muddy rose color of imitation, not the pure, fragile lavender-blue that only her own dye could produce. She smiled, safe behind her veil. “I have to finish a piece of cloth, if I’m to get it to market.”
“Amanda ...” Teresa started forward, leaning on José’s shoulder.
“Good-bye, Alicia, Manolito ...” She slipped out through the hallway, into the fading heat of the desert afternoon. Dog joined her as she left the shaded courtyard, licked at her hands and her bare, dusty feet. She stroked his bony back. Dog would not share a room with Houardo.
Amanda followed the palm-lined road that led to her father’s fields, her toes bunching in the warm dirt; trying to outdistance her own futile resentment. She slowed at last, breathing hard, a cramp burning her side from the long rise of the road. She looked back over the bay, saw ships, like toys, moving under the wind. And they go away, forever…“He will come back!”
Dog barked, his tail waving.
She looked down, her shoulders drooped as she reached to pat his head. “And what would he find, if he did…?” Her calloused hands knotted, loosened. They go away forever. But the futility, the bitterness, the sorrow and the dreams never left her, never gave her rest. Still looking down, she saw a wrinkled, thumb-sized lump in the dirt; she crouched to pick it up, seeing more scattered across the road in the reaching shadows. Dates hung in bulging clusters below the green frond-crests, in the trees above her head. The crop was turning, the earliest to ripen were already falling along the road. She picked them from the dirt eagerly, filling the pockets she had sewn into the seams of her dress.
As the track wound through the last of the fields before the pasture, she saw her father standing in the road. She stopped; he was not alone, but with three other men. Other merchants, she supposed, come to dicker about the shipment of his grain…She saw that one wore the inlaid ornamental chain of the mayor: he had come to designate the tribute to be sent to the fortress in the hills of Palos Verdes. Her heart lurched; the men of the mayor sometimes took women, as well, for tribute. But they had seen her; she could not turn back now. She moved toward them again, walking on hot coals.
The agent of the mayor turned back to the fields, disinterested, as she drew closer. She felt the other men’s eyes on her, vaguely curious, and on her father’s broad, unyielding back. He had not looked at her; would not look at her, or speak, ever again. She kept her eyes carefully downcast, seeing only the edge of his long vest, the rich earth-red of his longer robe beneath it, his sandaled feet. I have only two daughters, he had said. She did not exist, he would not speak to her, and so she could never speak to him again. Her feet made no sound in the road; the men began to talk of wheat as she passed them.
Suddenly they fell silent again. Amanda raised her head, looking out across the fields toward the river. A high, throbbing sound in the air; she frowned, searched her memory, but no recognition came. One of the men muttered something. She saw him point, saw a dark spot on the sky, a bird’s form, growing larger and larger, until it was no longer a bird form or the form of anything she knew. The noise grew with it, until she imagined that the air itself broke against her eardrums like the sea. She covered them with her hands, frozen inside her terror, as the monster swept over the green leaf-wall of the olive orchards. The workers in the field began to break and run, their shining scythes falling in the wheat, their shouts lost in monstrous thunder…that ceased, abruptly, leaving a shattered silence.
The monster plummeted toward the half-mown wheat, keening a death song. At the last moment a tearing cough came from it, it jerked upward, its wings a blur . . . and smashed down again into the field, with the grinding crunch of a ship gutted on the rocks. Fingers of sudden flame probed the crumpled corpse, pale smoke spiraled. In the eternity of a heartbeat, she realized that the broken thing was not alive, that it was a ship that flew, like the balloon-ships in the south. And then she saw a new movement, saw the flames give birth to a human form. The man fell, fire eating his arm, crawled, ran desperately. Behind him the flames spread over the ship, the stink of burning reached her, and a cracking noise. The machine exploded, split by God’s lightning, impaling on her eyes the image of the running man struck down by a mighty, formless hand. Blinded and deafened, she toppled in the road, while the sky rained blazing debris. “Mercy…have mercy on us, sweet Angel…!” Dog began to howl.
One of the merchants came to take her arms, helped her to her feet. She blinked at his stunned face, lost to her behind splotches of dark brilliance as he let her go.
“Are—are you all right, maid?”
She could barely hear him. She nodded, hearing other voices fogged by her deafness.
“Angel, Son of God—” Her father turned away as she looked toward him. “Did you ... it, Julio? An accursed thing…down by God in my own field! My wheat field; why did this—miracle happen in my field?” He shook his head, to clear his eyes, or his regret. The others shook their heads with him, murmuring things she couldn’t hear. The mayor’s man stood at the edge of the irrigation ditch, his face gray with shock.
Amanda looked out across the field again at the smoking ruins of the machine spread over the flattened wheat. There were no field-workers at all that she could see now, only the sprawled form of the man struck down by God. Her hands wadded the cloth at her stomach as a sound pierced the fog of her ears, and the man in the field lifted his head. She saw only redness—her blindness, or blood.