Francisco was grateful for the brave front she put up, because it gave him the strength to also put on a mask each morning, to say goodbye with a smile, and to leave her in charge of whatever happened on La Florida while he went about his various tasks in the surrounding area and farther afield in Tamaulipas. Much like his mother-in-law stirring her cajeta, he had his ranches and plantations to exhaust his body but give respite to his mind.
Beatriz had nothing to bring her comfort. She kept busy all day but without anything really bringing her peace. She knew that her workers also missed their homes, which were simple but their own. They all had a roof over their heads at La Florida, but little privacy. Just one family of servants normally lived on the hacienda there, in an old building of twelve large, independent rooms—originally built to house more campesinos than had inhabited it in recent years. With the sudden invasion, it had been filled, a family in each room.
While they slogged away or followed a yoke of oxen during the day, on La Florida or on La Amistad, the men told themselves everything was back to normal. Lost in hard work, they forgot that their families were living in exile as far away as possible from the town. Then, when they returned before nightfall, they were surprised by their wives’ ill humor and did not understand it.
It was the wives that felt the real pressure, for they had no privacy or time away from one another through the day. They had to share a kitchen and washhouse. They had to live with the mayhem of so many children together in one place with nothing to do. They had to take turns cooking for everyone, cutting back on the provisions not grown on their land and, thus, hard to replenish, such as salt, pepper, white flour, rice, beans, and potatoes, all things they had bought from the Chang brothers before the ban.
Francisco had seen to it that they procured everything in large quantities, but since nobody knew how long their exile would last, they had to be sparing. He was not worried they would go hungry. On his ranches they had plenty of meat and milk from the cattle and goats. All trade had ceased since the onset of the epidemic, so the idea of slaughtering however many animals were needed to feed his people did not trouble him. The plantations meant they had homemade brown sugar, and there would be no shortage of onions, squash, and carrots grown on their vegetable plots. If needed, he would also buy food from his campesinos. They had plenty of their own maize and lime to make cornmeal in the mill, where they also ground the sugarcane.
Beatriz had recently brought it to his attention that the workers were holding back some of the sugarcane extract in order to ferment it and make aguardiente in a still they’d rigged up from some old copper pans.
“The women are complaining, Francisco. Especially about the unmarried men who have no family responsibilities. They keep everybody awake, they say, particularly Trinidad, who’s a heavy drinker, but not a good one.”
Worse, they could not go to the bathroom in the middle of the night for fear of unwanted advances from some drunken seducer, single or married.
Francisco was not a teetotaler: he enjoyed a beer once in a while. Carta Blanca from the Monterrey Brewery was his favorite, and ever since the ice factory had been set up in Linares, he had liked it ice cold. He also enjoyed his daily glass of the whiskey that he brought back from his trips to Texas. But the alcohol content in the aguardiente that his workers distilled scorched the throat and made the stomach burn. With a few swigs of this liquid, any man would lose his good sense, so combining the potent liquor with the close quarters in which they lived was an invitation to disaster.
Therefore, he confiscated the ingenious distilling contraption, though he knew it would affect his men’s morale. Believing that the remedy for any demoralization was work, he kept them busy with tasks on the haciendas. It was what they were accustomed to, part of their daily life. The hours they spent tending to the plantations, with no help from their wives, wore them out. They would return to La Florida with no desire to do anything except eat and go to bed early, without making trouble, aware that more work awaited them the next day.
The only one that dispensed with his routine duties was Anselmo Espiricueta. Francisco allowed him to stay at home because, a week after the caravan’s departure, his wife had fallen ill and died the same day, and it had not stopped there: four of his children were now dead or dying. Only the father, the eldest son, and the youngest daughter remained in good health.
Francisco did not know how one disease could attack some and have mercy on others, but he did know that this particular tragedy could have been avoided.
The fact that the woman fell sick a week after the warning he had given his worker told him that Espiricueta had ignored him and sent his pregnant wife into town again—for more tobacco, no doubt.
Francisco Morales had never been one of those people who go through life saying, See, I told you so. In fact, he hated comments like that—what did they achieve? They were just wasted words, when there was no longer any way to repair the damage. However, he had never been so tempted to grab somebody by the shoulders and yell, I told you not to go to town, I told you your smoking would kill them! Somehow, he found the strength to keep his mouth shut, for Francisco could not imagine the anguish and the magnitude of the grief that such a loss could cause in any man, not least one whose responsibility for his family’s infection must be weighing heavily on his conscience.
All Francisco could do for them in the circumstances was to leave packages of ready-made food near their house. The first time, he also left Bayer aspirins, but the next day he found them moist on the ground, wasted. He was sad to see something so precious and so expensive squandered. He did not offer them again: he could not afford to leave his own family without medicine, in case they needed it.
Beatriz was the one who had the idea to send the family food when they heard of the woman’s illness. She also suggested they summon the doctor, but Espiricueta categorically refused to receive him. And now he was paying the price for his decisions.
What began as an act of kindness on Francisco’s part to help a man, to help a desperate family, eventually became a nuisance. Perhaps it was Espiricueta’s lack of commitment to his work, his lack of effort, or simply the weight of his expression, which held something his employer could not decipher. That look in his eyes, a look that all the good treatment—a home, food, schooling, good company—had not lightened. It might have been that Francisco suspected Espiricueta beat his wife, that he had noticed the usually friendly Simonopio avoided him, or that Beatriz found the man repulsive.
Now, with the family decimated, Francisco struggled to admit even to himself that he had been mulling the idea of getting rid of Anselmo Espiricueta for some time. Each time he had considered it, sympathy had gotten the better of his determination. If he had dismissed the father, the wife and children would have been left homeless, without work or earnings. Hopeless, again. He also knew that, if he fired Espiricueta, nobody else in the region would give him work.
And with good reason.
He could not let him go. Much less now. He did not believe in kicking people when they were down, and it was not possible to fall lower than Espiricueta. Francisco could not turn back the clock or return his wife or children to him. All he could give him was continued employment and, with it, some peace.
He felt a presence beside him.
“Simonopio, what’re you doing here?”
That day, Francisco had left La Florida with no company other than his campesinos, whom he transported in the pickup truck. There was much to do every day. The social life of Linares might have halted, but the land stopped for neither death nor mourning. Each day the cows and goats waited for someone to milk them and the plantations had to be irrigated or harvested.