Mary Rutledge was not moved. “Don’t be absurd, George. A chicken is nothing compared to a beautiful purebred collie. Besides, if those campesinos think so much of their chickens, they should keep them penned up.”
“I’m sorry, my dear. I shall have to see that Laddie’s taken away. I’m especially sorry for Guillermo’s sake.”
Sarah was sad about Laddie, but she never asked her father what he’d done when he took the dog away. She felt even worse for Guillermo than she did about Laddie. She and Guillermo never spoke about what happened to Laddie or even mentioned him to each other again, but they continued to talk together often in the garden and on the back patio.
“Mother, I think Guillermo has become one of my best friends.”
“I do wish you’d try to make more friends at school, Sarah. We are very fond of Martín’s family, but they are different from people like us. Of course, Guillermo’s my favorite of Martín and Flora’s children, but you belong to two different worlds.”
Sarah’s mother continued to treat Guillermo with a mixture of affectionate admiration and condescension, not altogether differently from how she had treated the purebred collie, Laddie. When Sarah told her father how her mother had talked about Guillermo, he said that his wife acted toward people in Nicaragua as she’d been taught to behave in North Carolina and that Sarah should understand that her mother might never really understand the way people related to each other in Central America.
Ever since the Rutledges had visited Barrio Arbolito searching for the mother of the little boy that had been shot, Mary Rutledge had been campaigning to provide better housing for the coffee workers that lived in the village and especially better quarters for the temporary seasonal workers that came from other regions of the country to gather the coffee beans during the harvest. Last season many of them had fallen ill with flu-like symptoms.
Mary had stayed at the harvesters’ camp from dawn until dusk for days that stretched into weeks, and George believed that she had become overly involved and obsessed with their problems. After the epidemic had long since passed, she continued to nag him about erecting what he considered to be elaborate houses to shelter the pickers at harvest time.
“They’re little better than chicken coops, George. We’ve got to provide something more adequate.”
“My dear Mary, they’re only needed for a few weeks every year, and the combination of weather and illness last year happens only once a century or so. I know they’re cramped and uncomfortable, but they do all right for the few weeks of harvest time under ordinary circumstances.”
“I think they’re sorely lacking in the minimal standards of basic hygiene and sanitation.”
Sarah was always concerned when her parents argued, as if it threatened the security of her world, although their voices were usually quiet and calm with her father’s British reserve and her mother’s Southern gentility.
“I think you’re more concerned about appearances than you are with the basic standard of life for poor Nicaraguans. You’ve been in a tizzy ever since your sister-in-law came down here and began ranting about having never seen such dreadful poverty as there is on our finca. I know the shelters for the harvesters don’t look very attractive, but I’ve told you a thousand times that my resources are limited and the resources of this country are limited, and we have to take care of critical health problems and year-round living conditions first. We can’t be distracted by appearances.”
“I’m not talking about appearances, George Rutledge. I’m talking about contaminated water and a lack of available necessities that very nearly brought on a plague at our finca last year.”
“Haven’t I done more to alleviate poor people’s problems than any coffee planter in Nicaragua?” He sniffed, as he often did when he felt he was being unfairly criticized. “This is not our country, Mary. We do what we can to help our own, our workers in the village; but we can’t change this country.”
“Your family has been here for three generations. Sarah is a fourth generation Nicaraguan, George.”
“She’s not a Nicaraguan. She’s an American of British ancestry. You’re being more sentimental than practical. What do you know about contaminated water and conditions that cause a plague? What do you even know about how poor Nicaraguans really live? You’ve always had everything you needed and most of what you wanted in life.”
“I’m a woman, and I have the feelings of a woman, and I see the poor women of this country spending half their lives carrying wood and water. I see them on the road, barefooted and ragged, with a stack of wood on their heads or a pot of filthy water on top of a rolled-up rag to balance it and protect their skulls. You’re not a woman. You wouldn’t understand what it means to gather wood and carry water ten hours a day, day in and day out.”
George left the room and made no reply to his wife, but that very afternoon he sat down at his desk and began to work out the plan that would bring potable water to the village and extend the pipes to the harvesters’ camp, where he decided to erect new, larger shelters. The new shelters would be simple and rude, certainly not what his wife had envisioned; but they would be safer and drier during storms than the old ones and larger and more adequate for the families that stayed there for the harvest.
Sarah didn’t usually notice how her parents looked or felt; but after her mother returned from North Carolina, Sarah couldn’t avoid seeing her mother’s pallor and loss of weight when her clothes seemed to droop from her shoulders as if they were hanging from wires in the closet.
“Mother, are you all right? Are you feeling bad?”
“I’m fine, dear. I’m just a little run-down. They gave me some tonic to build me up.”
Soon Sarah’s concerns about her mother were displaced by anxiety about her own situation. At fourteen her focus was most often on her social standing in her peer group, and her preoccupation was not alleviated by her mother’s concern. Even when Mary Rutledge didn’t pepper Sarah with seemingly benign questions about with whom she ate lunch, what the girls in her class were talking about, whether any boys had spoken to her, Sarah was aware of her mother’s unspoken fretting. Sarah was at least half a head taller than the boys in her class and a full head taller than most of the girls. Both mother and daughter chased each other in circles of unspoken worry as the date for the end of the school year dance approached.
Finally, Mary broke the silence. “Are you going to the school dance, Sarah?”
“No one has asked me.”
“Surely there’s a boy from your set who would escort you as a friend. You don’t have to be sweethearts.”
“Carlos Vargas is my only friend.”
“He’s a lovely boy. I play bridge with his mother at the Gran Hotel every Wednesday. Nancy is rather shy and doesn’t talk much, but she’s very nice.”
“They say his father is a revolutionary, a member of the FSLN.” (Frente Sandinista Liberación National)
“Oh, I hardly think so, dear. If that were true, he surely wouldn’t be married to an American. I could whisper a word in her ear.”
“Mother! Don’t you dare!”
“I’ll be discreet. Carlos would never even know I’ve spoken to her.”
“I don’t want to go to the dance with him. I want to go with a boy like me, an American or English boy. Isn’t that what you said you wanted me to do, mother, make friends with people like us?”
“He’s half American, dear; and he goes to your school and even attends the church youth group sometimes, doesn’t he?”
“What’s this all about?” George Rutledge came through the patio door from the garden mopping his brow.
“Mother’s trying to fix me up with a Nicaraguan boy for the school dance, but it’s crazy. I want to go with