"I was staying here in case Valencia's labor pains began," Papi said.

"Now that the babies are here-"

"I will be walking your way again," he said.

Juana rushed out from the pantry to meet Beatriz.

"How kind of you to visit us so early, Senorita Beatriz," Juana said as a greeting.

"Thank you," answered Beatriz, looking annoyed that Juana had disturbed her conversation with Papi.

"The senora did not have a restful night, with both the children waking at different hours," Juana announced. "It seems they already have dissimilar temperaments, those children."

"Do you have my tea?" Papi coughed as though he were drowning.

"The tea is boiling," Juana said. "It must stew; you need it for that cough." Juana turned back to Beatriz. "Would you like a taste of my good strong coffee, Senorita Beatriz, some that my sisters sent for me from my birthplace only yesterday?"

"Whatever pleases you, Juana," Beatriz said.

"Come, Amabelle." Juana grabbed my hand and dragged me back to the pantry where she busied herself making everyone's morning meal. Luis stood in a corner eating quickly before starting his day's work.

"Take this." Juana handed me two boiled yuccas in a large bowl. "Build up your strength. This day will be full of comings and goings for us."

I ate while she lined up the cups and saucers on a tray for Papi and Beatriz.

"Take your time with your food, Amabelle," she commanded.

Luis wiped his hands on his pants when he was done eating. He squeezed Juana's behind as he headed out.

"Don't forget the goat meat you must take as a gift to Dona Eva from Senor Pico," Juana reminded him.

When I came back into the parlor, Beatriz was bending over the radio with Papi as he turned the large dials to get a sound. The radio remained voiceless. He conceded defeat and turned it off.

"What are you writing there?" Beatriz asked, peeking into Papi's notebook.

"I'm trying to write what I recall of my life," Papi said, closing the notebook. He cleared a space for me to put the tray in front of him, tore a piece from the bread on my tray, and crammed it into his mouth.

"Papi, can I see what you have written?" Beatriz asked.

"I'm writing only for my grandchildren," Papi replied. "I feel like a bird who's flown over two mountains without looking at the valley in the center. I don't know what I will or won't retain in a few more years. Even now there are many things that took place yesterday I don't remember."

"Your grandchildren were born yesterday. I know you have not forgotten this, have you?" Beatriz teased, sliding her cup and saucer off the tray. The smell of Juana's coffee scented the entire parlor, like smoke from a green-wood fire.

I put the tray down on a side table near the radio and started walking back to the pantry.

"Stay, Amabelle," Papi said. "I may need you to warm my tea again."

"You've had a colorful life," Beatriz said to Papi.

"What do you know of my life?" Papi sipped his tea as he waited for her reply.

"I know what Valencia has told me," she said.

"Valencia knows only what I tell her, and for an adoring child a foothill can seem like a mountain if her father's painting the picture."

"So you didn't like being an officer in the Spanish army, is that so?" Beatriz asked.

"This was almost forty years ago," Papi said. "Spain was at war then too, a splendid little war, fighting for colonies with Los Estados Unidos. I fled from bloody battles to come here, the great battles of El Caney and San Juan Hill. But even if things were peaceful, I still would have left my country."

"Do you like it here?" Beatriz asked.

"I married here. I've raised my daughter here and now my grandchildren-"

"But does it please you, honestly?"

"Why do you ask so many questions?"

"I read in La Nacion La Nacion that there are women fighting in the International Brigade in Spain," Beatriz said, twisting her long caramel-colored braid. that there are women fighting in the International Brigade in Spain," Beatriz said, twisting her long caramel-colored braid.

"Is that what you see in your dreams at night, visions of the International Brigade?" Papi puckered his lips and moved his head from side to side in apparent disapproval.

"Do you enjoy it here?' Beatriz asked like a paid inquisitor.

"Should I tell you the truth?" he asked.

"Certainly, the truth," replied Beatriz "Do I like the way things are conducted here now, everything run by military men? Do I like the worship of uniforms, the medals like stars on people's chests? Do I like this?" He looked up at Senora Valencia's spectacularly large portrait of the Generalissimo.

"Do you like it?" Beatriz persisted.

"No," Papi said. "I don't like any part of it."

"When you were in the army, did you kill anyone?" Beatriz asked.

"This is between me and my conscience," he said.

"You did, then?"

"What good can it do you to know what evil things I have or have not been part of?"

Beatriz threw back her long braid, almost hitting Papi's face with it. Papi was seized by another fit of coughing. Beatriz hurried to pat his back.

"You want to know what I'm writing to my grandchildren," Papi said after catching his breath. "I've begun with my birth in the seaport of Valencia. My father was a baker there. There are times when he gave bread to everyone in our quarter for nothing. I was his only son but he would never let me eat until everyone else had eaten. He lived to be ninety years old only to be killed in this evil war."

Like me, Papi had been displaced from his native land; he felt himself the orphaned child of a now orphaned people. Perhaps this was why he often seemed more kindly disposed to the strangers for whom this side of the island had not always been home.

Senora Valencia was nursing her son when I took her morning meal to her. Her husband motioned for me to enter as soon as he saw me in the doorway.

"Senorita Beatnz is here for a visit," I told him as I put the tray down.

I took the children's dirty linen from a corner and carried it down to the basin of rainwater that Juana kept out in the yard for the wash.

From the hill I could see some of the cane workers heading towards the fields. Kongo was at the head of the group, with Sebastien close behind. Mimi and Felice were walking with them on their way to buy provisions in the marketplace. I waved to them, but it was Doctor Javier who waved back instead as he climbed up the hill. He walked over to the washbasin before going inside the house.

"Have you given thought to what I asked?" He spoke Kreyol like a Haitian, with only a slight Dominican cadence. "Soon, I'll be going back to the clinic for two days," he said. "If you want, you can come with me and some others. There'll be many children with us, perhaps ten orphans. The clinic itself is nothing more than a small house. At night some of the workers sleep there. You'll live there in the beginning. You'll be paid a wage, though not a big one. The mothers pay with food. Some make you the godparent. I'm godfather to twenty-six children."

With Joel's death, I hadn't given myself much time to think about this, to consider returning to a place I had not seen since I was a child. The cane workers had all turned at the bend in the road. Sebastien would soon be in the fields for the first day of what he hoped would be his last harvest. He was going to work hard, too hard, to save a few pesos, hoping to change his life. Maybe I too had been waiting for an escape, looking out of the corner of my eyes for a sign telling me it was time to go on to another life, a life that would fully be mine. Maybe I had been hoping for a voice to call to me from across the river, someone to arrive saying, "I have come for you to bring you back." Maybe this was that voice, that someone disguised as the doctor. Perhaps I should seize this chance. But not unless Sebastien was prepared to leave also.

"Javier, is this you I hear?" Senor Pico called to Doctor Javier from the parlor.

"It's me," Doctor Javier replied.

"Come, then."

"Amabelle, I need you," Juana signaled from the pantry doorway. I scrubbed my hands in fresh water and rushed to her.

"I must go and buy some things for the midday meal," she said. "Senor Pico wants rum and cigars brought to him in the parlor. I already have them prepared."

Senor Pico and Doctor Javier were sitting out on the lower verandah overlooking Papi's vast orchid garden when I brought them the rum and cigars. The garden had always been a great source of pride for Papi, who had forty-eight different species of orchids growing there, including a special hybrid with wide feathery petals that glowed like Christmas lanterns, the kind Senora Valencia had been plucking for the vase at her bedside the day she and the senor, as it was often repeated, had their hearts joined together.

"You have had your first night as a father," Doctor Javier said to Senor Pico. "I see you survived."

"No one slept." Senor Pico laughed as he drew on a long cigar. He handed another one, unlit, to the doctor. "Is that how it will always be, no one sleeping?"

"They grow and become calmer," the doctor said, biting off the end of his cigar.

15.

My mother's cooking takes all day. She goes to the stream to wash our clothes and visits with our neighbors while the pot lies on the rocks, the contents bubbling up as if to make the pot talk.

I am always curious as to what is boiling inside and whether it is yet mashed into something thick and edible. Dry red beans take the longest, but I like to see them each float up to the surface and shed their skin to the water's heat.

It takes me half a morning to make my way to the boiling pot. I start at the kowosol tree across the yard and slowly progress towards the fire. I stop on the way to jump rope, to smash marbles against each other, to watch some of the vendor women mutter to themselves as they pee under their long skirts, standing up in the middle of the road, when they think no one is looking.

Finally I am at the pot. The steam is rising, the lid clanking against the water's force. I reach over and raise the lid from the side and immediately my forearm is scalding and I am blinded by the fog of red kidney beans.

I feel a hand descend on my burning forearm and I release the pot lid in the dust.

It is my father and he is laughing.

"Soon you will have to be near a pot every day," he says, turning my face to show me that I am blind only when I am looking straight into the steaming pot. "For now you don't have to be and you should not be."

16.

Sometime after Joel's death and Kongo's disappearance with the body, I walked into the orchid garden that on his very first day in the Dominican Republic Papi had bought, along with the house, with a gentleman's handshake from Don Francisco, Dona Eva's husband, and Doctor Javier and Beatriz' father, may he in eternal peace rest. Papi was tending to the orchids in this same garden, stroking petals and yanking weeds and rocks from the earth beneath them. He was wearing his well-worn, mud-stained shirt and gardening pants, the pockets bulging with seeds. Juana had given me a large cup of water to bring to him.

"I brought you some water," I said, "so that you'll suffer less with this heat."

"How kind you are," he said, removing the old straw hat from his head and fanning his face with it. He took the water and drank.

"I have finally heard of a man dying," he said, when he was done with the water. "Don Carlos himself told me that one of his men died some days ago. But there are so many who work for Don Carlos, he did not know the name of the man who died."

"I have given four planks of your wood to a cane cutter who wanted to make a coffin," I said.

He put the water cup down on a piece of open ground. Staring ahead, he moved his lips in a hurried conversation with himself.

"Even though we did not go down into the ravine," he said, "we left the automobile and looked for his body along the incline. There were two other men with him who ran, so when we didn't see the one we hit, we thought-I hoped-that he'd run, too." He pressed a closed fist down on his hat, now on the ground. "The wood you took, who was it for?"

"It was for a man who was struck by Senor Pico's automobile," I said.

"Do you know this man's family?"

"He had only his father."

"No brothers or sisters?"

"Only the father and a woman who had promised herself to him."

"And is the father here?"

"He works in Don Carlos' fields."

Papi sank heavily onto the dirt and pushed his face down between his knees.

"You are aware, Amabelle, that I have no son," he said, without raising his head. "I would like you to bring me to visit the dead man's father. Will you take me?"

"To be prudent, I should ask first to see if he would like to receive you."

"I would like to speak with him."

"I should first request his permission to bring you there."

"It was a frightful accident," he said. "Please don't tell Valencia, she need not concern herself with such things now, at her time of greatest risk."

"I will tell Kongo you want to visit him," I said.

"Is this the father's name? Kongo?"