“Bring your identity card. We have a list.”
The sergeant herded the family outside. Neighbors from all over the village began walking together down the gulley toward the plaza, their movements stiff and deliberate. Their bare feet scuffed the still-damp dirt. Dawn broke with a pink sky. Squawking chickens, bleating sheep, and bellowing cows added to the cacophony of howling dogs. The sergeant pushed the wife and her children toward the church’s side door and continued with the farmer to the plaza where the men were being gathered.
The commander stood on the church steps with his feet splayed. Mirrored sunglasses shielded his eyes. He lifted a megaphone. “Hear this, you communist sons of whores. Traitors to Guatemala. We have a plan to help you remember the location of the stolen rifles. First, you dig a ditch. Then you will fill it.”
Soldiers who spoke the local language, Ixil, translated the commander’s words for any who didn’t understand. Soldiers were of the villages, too. A boy might be on a bus to town to sell his family’s corn, get stopped at a checkpoint, and find himself enlisted. But once they wore the uniform, the maroon beret, these boys forgot their dark skin, their straight hair, their village roots.
The sergeant shoved the farmer Juan Jorge toward a line of a dozen men tied together by a rope looped around their necks and fastened him to the end of the line. Without a word, the men crammed their shovels into the packed dirt and turned over soil. A large mound grew behind them as sweat glistened on their faces.
Inside the church, the women and children huddled in the wooden pews, holding hands and praying. A soldier fingered a silver candlestick from the altar and slipped it into a sack. Two other soldiers picked up the carved santos of San José and the town’s patron, San Rolando, and punted them like soccer balls. A third man stood at the altar smoking a cigarette, and, when ashes fell onto the sacred white cloth, brushed off the small sparks with his pinkie.
Babies first, that was the order. Two soldiers patrolled through the aisles. The wife of Juan Jorge pushed her baby deeper into the sling. A soldier pointed straight at her. The boy and the girl grabbed her arms. “Mamá,” they whimpered.
“Shut up!” the soldier commanded. He aimed his rifle at the girl’s face and jerked his head toward a corner where the young girls and teenagers were corralled. Next, he swung his weapon at the boy and gestured toward a circle of boys in another corner. The separation process continued until the pews were emptied. A soldier led Juan Jorge’s wife and her baby out the church’s side door.
The wife squinted against the morning sun, eyes straining past the soldiers and trucks toward the pine trees. Two dozen men now stood roped together next to their shovels, faces and clothing flecked with dirt. The ditch they dug was finished: fifteen feet long, four feet wide, and eight deep.
The rest of the mothers with babies filed out of the church behind the wife, and one, whose infant had been baptized on Sunday, lifted her blouse to let him nurse.
The commander strode down the church steps, fingers flicking over a pistol holstered on his right hip. A young boy in uniform carried the megaphone. The commander waited while the soldiers gathered the mothers with babies into a group. The newly baptized infant sucked on his mother’s breast.
“Now you will see the fate of people who betray our great country,” the commander said. “We kill their seed.”
He nodded at a soldier who then reached over to the nursing infant and pulled him from his mother’s breast. A strangled gasp rose from the throats of the captive parents. The soldier carried the infant to a pine tree, and with one swift motion, swung him against the rough trunk. The infant’s soft skull cracked open, seeping a mass of clear fluid. The soldier tossed the body into the trench.
The infant’s father surged forward, dragging the other men to the ground. With one shot, the commander dispatched the infant’s father. The wailing mothers torqued their bodies toward the gunshot. The soldier loosened the noose around the dead man’s neck and kicked the corpse until it also fell into the ditch.
The infant’s mother collapsed to her knees, weeping. The commander walked in a circle around her. “You smell too bad for me to take you,” the commander said. “I’ll wait for your daughter to be brought from the church. Fresh and sweet.” As the infant’s mother lifted her hands to cover her ears, the commander aimed his pistol at her sternum and pulled the trigger.
Juan Jorge’s wife’s legs felt weak. Her baby would be murdered and she would die, too. She closed her eyes and murmured the words of the Ave Maria, asking the Blessed Mother to spare her boy and her girl. She begged the Virgin, “Let my children live.” She clutched more tightly to her baby in the sling.
The commander holstered his pistol and adjusted his sunglasses. Licking his bottom lip, he said, “You traitors killed twenty-one of my boys. I want to see you suffer.”
He gave a signal and the sergeant who had taken Juan Jorge’s machete walked in front of the line of mothers and their babies, brandishing the knife. The mothers stared at the ground. The sergeant with the machete stopped in front of the wife.
“Give me the baby,” he said. Tears ran down the wife’s face as she fumbled to untie the knot at her neck that secured the sling. The sergeant waited. One second, two seconds. He wrenched the full sling off her body, throwing it onto the hard-packed dirt.
The farmer’s wife shrieked. In a second, the sergeant raised the machete shoulder-height and with one strike, sliced across her neck. Her body crumpled, twitching on top of sling and baby. The air filled with moans of the mothers, the babies, and the captive men. Using shovels, soldiers pushed the bodies into the ditch.
The commander lifted the megaphone to his mouth. “Any of you bastards remember where those rifles are now? Because it’s not over until you do.”
He lifted his free hand as though tipping a bottle. “We found their stash of guaro liquor. You soldiers got work to do first. Finish the women and let the Indios bury them. The men eliminate each other with machetes. You get to watch.”
Later, when night came, the soldiers set fire to the thatched roofs of the adobe houses. They burned the plots of corn and beans and torched the town hall.
They searched every hiding place in the village and found no stolen rifles.
Two days later, three brave men from the nearby hamlet of San Lorenzo Chal walked over local trails to investigate. In the trench by the church, they discovered a pile of the dead, and as they offered prayers, heard a faint cry. They burrowed through the pile, and at the bottom, found a bloodied sling with a baby wrapped inside, skin puckered from dehydration and left eye swollen and bruised.
But the baby was alive.
FIVE
SAN FRANCISCO AND GUATEMALA
NOVEMBER 2002—ONE MONTH BEFORE THE SHUTDOWN
Candidates for the Clay directorship marched through the gallery like a black-clad parade. Curators from Kansas City, Fort Wayne, and Houston; assistant directors from Portland, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Julie recognized some from profiles in ArtNews, Art Forum, and the New York Times, but others were unknown, untested associates on her level, yearning to cross the yawning professional divide from mid-management to stratosphere. As they filed in, she lurked behind a sculpture or installation to scope them out, creative types like her but from someplace else and therefore more desirable: one sporting green-tinged bangs, another exotic leather oxfords, a third an emaciated body—her self-deprivation an implied statement of purpose.
Never before had Julie allowed herself to dream so big, but once she’d opened her mind to the idea of yes, she was seized by desire. She reminded herself she was worthy, deserving, and more than competent. She wrote affirmations on sticky notes and stuck them beside her computer, repeating the phrases, absorbing them into her subconscious. Wonderful things unfold before me. Everything works out for my highest good. I am enough.
She hoped Talbot might drop a hint about her chances, but he didn’t offer a morsel. He seemed to be avoiding her and