It was March and cold for sure. The next morning the cranes would be at the clear ditch at dawn. I had learned about them from the new pediatrician. He’s a good doctor, and single, but I still miss old Dr. Bass. When Ben was a baby I called him to ask how many diapers I should wash at a time. One, he told me.
None of the kids had wanted to go. I dressed, shivering. Built a piñon fire, poured coffee into a thermos. Fixed batter for pancakes, fed the dogs and cats and Rosie the goat. Did we have a horse then? If so, I forgot to feed him. Jesse came up behind me in the dark, at the barbed wire by the frost-white road.
“I want to see the cranes.”
I gave him the flashlight, think I gave him the thermos too. He shined the light everywhere but the road and I kept bugging him about it. Come on. Cut it out.
“You can see. You’re walking along. You obviously know the road.”
True. The dizzy arcs of light swept into birds’ nests in pale winter cottonwoods, pumpkins in Gus’s field, prehistoric silhouettes of his Brahmin bulls. Their agate eyes opened to reflect a pinpoint of dazzle, closed again.
We crossed the log above the slow dark irrigation ditch, over to the clear ditch where we lay on our stomachs, silent as guerrillas. I know, I romanticize everything. It is true though that we lay there freezing for a long time in the fog. It was fog. Must have been mist from the ditch or maybe just the steam from our mouths.
After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue gray. They landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning.
As the cranes drank upstream the silver water beneath them was shot into dozens of thin streamers. Then very quickly the birds left, in whiteness, with the sound of shuffling cards.
We lay there, drinking coffee, until it was light and the crows came. Gawky raucous crows, defying the cranes’ grace. Their blackness zigzagged in the water, cottonwood branches bounced like trampolines. You could feel the sun.
It was light on the road back but he left the flashlight on. Turn it off, will you? He ignored me so I took it from him. We walked in his long strides in the tractor tracks.
“Fuck,” he said. “That was scary.”
“Really. As terrible as an army with banners. That’s from the Bible.”
“Oh yeah, teacher?” He already had an attitude, then.
Good and Bad
Nuns tried hard to teach me to be good. In high school it was Miss Dawson. Santiago College, 1952. Six of us in the school were going on to American colleges; we had to take American History and Civics from the new teacher, Ethel Dawson. She was the only American teacher, the others were Chilean or European.
We were all bad to her. I was the worst. If there was to be a test and none of us had studied I could distract her with questions about the Gadsden Purchase for the whole period, or get her started on segregation or American imperialism if we were really in trouble.
We mocked her, imitated her nasal Boston whine. She had a tall lift on one shoe because of polio, wore thick wire-rimmed glasses. Splayed gap teeth, a horrible voice. It seemed she deliberately made herself look worse by wearing mannish, mismatched colors, wrinkled, soup-spotted slacks, garish scarves on her badly-cut hair. She got very red-faced when she lectured and she smelled of sweat. It was not simply that she flaunted poverty… Madame Tournier wore the same shabby black skirt and blouse day after day, but the skirt was cut on the bias, the black blouse, green and frayed with age, was of fine silk. Style, cachet were all-important to us then.
She showed us movies and slides about the condition of the Chilean miners and dock workers, all of it the U.S.A.’s fault. The ambassador’s daughter was in the class, a few admirals’ daughters. My father was a mining engineer, worked with the CIA. I knew he truly believed Chile needed the United States. Miss Dawson thought that she was reaching impressionable young minds, whereas she was talking to spoiled American brats. Each one of us had a rich, handsome, powerful American daddy. Girls feel about their fathers at that age like they do about horses. It is a passion. She implied that they were villains.
Because I did most of the talking I was the one she zeroed in on, keeping me after class, and one day even walked with me in the rose garden, complaining about the elitism of the school. I lost patience with her.
“What are you doing here then? Why don’t you go teach the poor if you’re so worried about them? Why have anything to do with us snobs at all?”
She told me that this was where she was given work, because she taught American History. She didn’t speak Spanish yet, but all her spare time was spent working with the poor and volunteering in revolutionary groups. She said it wasn’t a waste of time working with us … if she could change the thinking of one mind it would be worthwhile.
“Perhaps you are that one mind,” she said. We sat on a stone bench. Recess was almost over. Scent of roses and the mildew of her sweater.
“Tell me, what do you do with your weekends?” she asked.
It wasn’t hard to sound utterly frivolous, but I exaggerated it anyway. Hairdresser, manicurist, dressmaker. Lunch at the Charles. Polo, rugby or cricket, thés dansants, dinners, parties until dawn. Mass at El Bosque at seven on Sunday morning, still wearing evening clothes. The country club then for breakfast, golf or swimming, or maybe the day in Algarrobo at the sea, skiing in winter. Movies of course, but mostly we danced all night.
“And this life is satisfying to you?” she asked.
“Yes. It is.”
“What if I asked you to give me your Saturdays, for one month, would you do it? See a part of Santiago that you don’t know.”
“Why do you want me?”
“Because, basically, I think you are a good person. I think you could learn from it.” She clasped both my hands. “Give it a try.”
Good person. But she had caught me earlier, with the word Revolutionary. I did want to meet revolutionaries, because they were bad.
Everyone seemed a lot more upset than necessary about my Saturdays with Miss Dawson, which then made me really want to do it. I told my mother I was going to help the poor. She was disgusted, afraid of disease, toilet seats. I even knew that the poor in Chile had no toilet seats. My friends were shocked that I was going with Miss Dawson at all. They said she was a loony, a fanatic, and a lesbian, was I crazy or what?
The first day I spent with her was ghastly, but I stuck with it out of bravado.
Every Saturday morning we went to the city dump, in a pickup truck filled with huge pots of food. Beans, porridge, biscuits, milk. We set up a big table in a field next to miles of shacks made from flattened tin cans. A bent water faucet about three blocks away served the entire shack community. There were open fires in front of the squalid lean-tos, burning scraps of wood, cardboard, shoes, to cook on.
At first the place seemed to be deserted, miles and miles of dunes. Dunes of stinking, smouldering garbage. After a while, through the dust and smoke, you could see that there were people all over the dunes. But they were the color of the dung, their rags just like the refuse they crawled in. No one stood up, they scurried on all fours like wet rats, tossing things into burlap bags that gave them humped animal backs, circling on, darting, meeting each other, touching noses, slithering away, disappearing like iguanas over the ridges of the dunes. But once the food was set up scores of women and children appeared, sooty and wet, smelling of decay and rotted food. They were glad for the breakfast, squatted, eating with bony elbows out like preying mantis on the garbage hills. After they had eaten, the children crowded around me; still crawling or sprawled in the dirt, they patted my shoes, ran their hands up and down my stockings.
“See, they like you,” Miss Dawson said. “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”
I