Father and son took the opposite direction from the day before. The trails they’d known well had disappeared; they walked one behind the other up the mountain using broken branches as walking sticks. Sometimes they stopped to get their bearings, other times they stopped because they were dumbfounded by the devastation. Where once there had been a hill with groves of coffee trees or with dozens of straw bohíos, some with families they had known well, now there was just sunken earth.
Another day they were able to make it all the way to Raúl’s coffee farm. The hurricane had picked up the coffee trees and shaken them like maracas, scattering the still-green coffee berries all over the mountainside before tossing a few trees back down. Vicente snuck a look at his father, but he’d pulled his hat low on his face to protect it from the rain. Most of the shade trees had disappeared—the banana, the plantain, the guama, and the guava. The few that were left bowed their giant leaves in surrender.
They helped pull corpses out of the river. Each time they turned over a woman who could have been his mother or Inés, Vicente cried, his tears disguised by rain. Each time it wasn’t either of las damas, he felt ashamed of his relief.
On the tenth day of rain, they were able to reach Vicente’s farm. He told himself that whatever they found, he still had his health, his wife, his children, Gloria, and even his father. And perhaps he would find Raulito and las damas. People were what mattered. People. Not coffee. Not land.
All the trees had been carried off, and the ground was saturated with water. Vicente stood in the batey, his shoes sunk in the mud. He stared at the house that he had built and where he had lived with Valentina and their children. Where they had kept vigil through the night for their little girl, where Evita had lain in a tiny white coffin set on the fine table his father had built. A huge palm tree had fallen on the house; the hurricane had taken the roof. It was as if someone had punched him in the gut.
His father stood beside him; they didn’t speak.
The shed he had used to store coffee still stood. It seemed impossible that it had survived while the house had not. Perhaps the pig had survived. Inside, Vicente found a naked man on the ground.
“¡Raulito!” Vicente shook his shoulder.
Raulito sprang up and threw his arms around his brother.
“The hurricane took her,” Raulito mumbled into his brother’s shoulder.
“You’re coming with me.” Vicente patted his brother’s back.
“But your house—”
“To our father’s house.”
“He won’t want me.” Raulito tried to cover his nakedness with his hands.
Vicente took off his shirt and gave it to him.
“He’s here, don’t worry.” Vicente put his arm around his brother.
It had begun to rain again. They walked around the palm tree inside Vicente’s house. Raúl was looking at the broken pieces of the table he’d made for Valentina.
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell Valentina about the table just yet.”
“Papá, I found Raulito in the shed.”
“¿Raulito?” Raúl Vega turned around.
“Don Raúl.” Raulito didn’t raise his eyes from the floor.
Raúl Vega looked at his sons, one naked from the waist up, the other from the waist down. For once, he didn’t make a sarcastic comment.
“And Eusemia?” he said.
“Desapareció.” Raulito tried not to cry.
Raúl Vega nodded as if he had expected it.
Vicente found Raulito a pair of pants and a shirt; the clothes were wet, but then so were they. They carried what they could salvage and walked home in the rain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE PUEBLO ASKS FOR WORK AND BREAD
They were to learn that almost two thousand people had died in their district; that the hurricane had been named San Ciriaco because it had landed on the saint’s day; that every single bohío in Utuado’s countryside had vanished, the inhabitants presumed dead; that the rivers had swept up more than five hundred houses, with a hundred persons drowned in a single house, forty people in another; that the entire town had flooded, the current dragging twenty houses and their occupants down to the river; that the hurricane destroyed most of the houses, including the infirmary, the telegraph station, the Catholic church, the schools, and the cemetery; that almost the entire coffee crop and most of the food crops had vanished, even the tubers in the ground had been blown away. Later they would learn that in one town on the island, people saved themselves by passing from balcony to balcony and climbing into borrowed boats; they would learn of the deaths and devastation in other parts of Puerto Rico including the city of Ponce, where over five hundred people had drowned, most of them los pobres who lived in shanties; ships arriving in the port of Ponce reported dead bodies floating in the sea. The island-wide damages totaled over twenty million dollars. Three thousand three hundred and sixty-nine people dead, and thousands more homeless.
Utuado had sent a contingent to San Juan to meet with Governor Davis en La Fortaleza to plead for immediate help, informing him of the desperation of its citizens, of the many hundreds homeless and starving. General Davis pledged to provide money to construct a bridge at the entrance to Utuado after the rainy season ended, but unfortunately, Puerto Rico would have to wait for emergency funds until they figured out how to distribute them in an organized manner.
At the post office and the ayuntamiento, Vicente added Angelina and Inés and also Eusemia to the list of the missing. He reasoned that as long as they didn’t find his mother’s body, there was the possibility that she was still alive. One night he dreamt of his mother and Inés hand in hand at the edge of the raging river during the night of the hurricane. In his dream, he shouted at them to turn back, but they didn’t hear him.
More than half of the island’s food supply was destroyed. One-fourth of Puerto Rico’s population, half a million people, were destitute or homeless. The newspapers were filled with horror stories. Vicente read in El Pan del Pobre that a man had slumped over dead from hunger on Calle San Francisco, and that campesinos from the town of Morovis had taken to roasting cadillo seeds instead of coffee beans to make a breakfast of dandelion coffee. Armies of los hambrientos spent their days in aimless walks around the pueblos. Skeletons in tattered clothing slipped barefoot down country roads swollen with mud. Only up close was it possible to see that the walking bones had once been José Valderrama or Joaquín Sandoval Hernández or Cristina Mercado Ortiz or fulano Santiago or fulana Castillo or any of thousands of puertorriqueños. Rather than watch their children starve, people drowned themselves in the streams and rivers. Girls and women sold themselves for a piece of bread. More than once, Vicente came upon a man dangling from a tree branch.
When Vicente met other Puerto Ricans after the usual greeting of Buenas, how are you, and the answer, Luchando, at least I’m alive, the questions they asked each other were always the same: Why don’t the Americans help us? Why are so many American soldiers doing nothing but eating good food and sleeping in real beds? Why didn’t the American military feed the people—the thousands of starving men, women, and children?
They read the newspaper editorials that asked: Where was the help that the people of Puerto Rico had expected from the great Republic to the North, the country of Washington and Hamilton and Lincoln?