When the Owl Cries

by Paul Alexander Bartlett

1

A tattered mass of yellow cloud hung over the great Mexican volcano. Above the broad lagoon, between the volcano and the hacienda house, a flock of herons flew lazily, carrying their white with consummate ease. Their wings took them in a low line above the water. The surface wore a yellowish cast—like weathered lichen, wrinkled along the shores. Some of this yellowish cast spattered the upper slopes of the 14,000-foot peak, where badly eroded lava sides creased to form a cone.

Raul Medina noticed the odd colors as he sat in his garden. He stared at herons and lagoon and volcano and frowned. He was dressed in a gray suit, a short, well built man with a scrubby head of brown hair and eyebrows like twisted cigarette tobacco, his eyes dark brown spoked with gray, his mouth thin but kindly, his face a little meaty for a man in his middle thirties who had lived an outdoor life. As he gazed toward the Colima volcano he rubbed his strong, fibrous hands together. His mind went back in time: he remembered that the curious lagoon and mountain colors had appeared when he was nineteen or twenty; in those days, the cone had blasted open and thrown flames and lava and doused the area with cinders and ashes and shaken down walls.

Raul's thoughts switched to everyday problems. Yesterday a milch cow had died, the poultry had gotten out of their pen, a mule had ripped a tendon on a stone fence, a cowboy lay seriously ill. Manuel Boaz, Raul's personal servant, had come to him after supper, as he sat on the veranda with others, and whispered that the night before an owl had hooted on the roof of the house.

"We haven't heard it for a long time, Don Raul. Someone will die. Your father has been getting worse ... perhaps his time has come. It's not a good sign."

Raul had laughed at him, and waved him away—watched his cigarette disappear in the dark.

The moon was rising above the lagoon; the last streaks in the sunset sky had gone; Raul got up and leaned on top the rough adobe wall surrounding his garden. The granular adobes, still warm after the long sunny day, felt good to his arms. It seemed to Raul that Lucienne von Humboldt was beside him, that they were looking at the moonlight. He felt her kiss on his cheek. They had loved each other a long time, maybe since childhood. It had been weeks since they had seen each other; he tried to plan their next meeting. Cool fingers touched his arm, and he glanced up to see his wife.

"What are you doing here?" Angelina asked, in her husky voice.

"Just watching the moon," he said, wishing she would remove her hand.

Standing beside him, she was just a bit shorter than he, willowy, almost frail. She had what Mexican aristocrats called a "French face," though she was as Mexican as Raul. Her features were tight-skinned features, molded and balanced. Her eyes were blue. She wore her black hair braided in an elaborate bun at the back of her head.

"Whenever you come out into the garden by yourself I know you're troubled. Why, you slipped away from supper before all of us finished. What's wrong?" She was obviously displeased.

"Look at that moon," he said, his mind still on Lucienne.

"A three-quarter moon," she said. "We've seen it before ... I like the way the light trails over the water."

"The lagoon was yellow, even after the sun had set. So was the cone," he said.

"I can tell by your voice that you're worried," she said.

"I suppose I am," he admitted, thinking of the hacienda.

"What is it, then?"

"The usual problems." Then he realized how much more weighed on him, and said, speaking tersely: "It's the way things are headed. Time is bursting around us. I feel things are going badly; it's the people, our hacienda people; I detect undercurrents; it's something hard to describe. Petaca means so much to me, the lagoon, the horses, cattle, the house ... I feel undermined." His words rushed out of him.

"Nothing is so wrong we can't remedy it," she said, annoyed.

"But that's not true, Angelina," he said, his voice cutting across hers. "Petaca can't go on as it has in the past. You must understand. It's more than a conflict with my father and his ideas." His tongue slowed down. "He lies in his room, arm and leg useless. He has always hated the peasants; they've never been his workers—only chattel. My idea of improving their lot is a joke to him. And now there's increasing disapproval at other haciendas; men are sick of the way they have been managed; they want to breathe ... it's freedom they're after."

"Don't be worried, Raul. Perhaps the craving for freedom is not so widespread as you think."

Raul sighed. Angelina never grasped hacienda problems; she cared little at heart about any serious matters. Something seemed to shut her off. She had never loved Petaca, never known what it was to feel the bite of wind, the power of seeds sprouting, the rasp of the mill wheel, or the breadth of sky.

Somewhere in the garden a mockingbird burst into song, evoking its Toltec past. The outburst lasted half a minute and then the lowing of cattle followed and then silence settled over the place. Raul drew away from the wall and at Angelina's suggestion they walked together, following a path to the upper terrace. Leaves glistened in the moonlight. A frog chugged into the nearby swimming pool. The path led under a rose arbor, to a sandstone figure of Christ, a seventeenth century carving, carefully, deeply chiseled, suspended on a huge granite block twisted with stone leaves. The cross marked a curve in the path where ribs of light pushed at vine shadows, and sliced the upper part of the life-sized figure, making the calm face seem awake.

Angelina crossed herself before the statue.

As they walked, Raul noticed her profile, appreciating its perfection; for a moment, it was as if he were strolling with her years before, a few days after their wedding. She had worn another simple white dress then. Those June days had been free of emotional conflict, threat of trouble, and hatred of father for son. Or so it seemed now, looking back.

"It's nice that Caterina's feeling better," Angelina said.

"Yes, it is nice," Raul said, hoping their daughter would continue to improve.

"I still wonder what made her so ill in Guadalajara. I think I did the right thing to bring her here; goodness knows she wanted to come. It takes so much care to bring a child around," she said with peculiar warmth.

"It's a month till school starts; she'll be fine by then," Raul said.

"Of course she will," Angelina agreed. It seemed to her that without their two children she would have fled years before to any city, any place where there were people, theaters, entertainment. Here, at the hacienda, children were the best of life. She had wanted more, until Lucienne had changed her mind. She tried to shake Lucienne from her thoughts—the beautiful auburn hair and smiling face.

She felt the loneliness of this garden and its volcanic shadow. A gleam of the broad lagoon—moon whitened—chilled her. Guadalajara had companionship to offer, relatives, friends, lights in shop windows, lights in homes, pretty parks.

"Is Chico better?" she asked, righting for a better mood.

"Yes, his leg's better. He'll be all right."

Though Chico was his favorite horse, she said, in spite of herself: "I wish he had broken his leg."

He laughed, thinking of the fine palomino he had raised with such care.

"You'll have to try him someday," he said.

"Someday he'll throw you and cripple you. There never was a crazier three-year-old."

They strolled along the farthest side of the garden, under young jacaranda trees; the wind had shaken blossoms onto the path and some of them popped as they stepped on them, making a soft, damp sound. In the moonlight, the mauve flowers on the trees were white or gray or faintly blue.

The main façade of the hacienda showed here, the house almost centering a walled enclosure that had turrets at the four corners. Walls and house were of cut stone, stuccoed white. The house was a simple rectangle with six veranda arches on the ground floor and the same number on the upper floor. The chapel—with a blue and white zigzagged tiled dome—had been built into one side of the residence, and its short spire prodded the cool sky. Moonlight softened the block-like severity of the old building. A sweep of trees set off the place, and behind the trees, dusty gray, rose a mountain range, low and rounded. Columnar cypress plunged out of the main patio and looked about stiffly. There were twenty rooms and two patios in the hacienda, and the cypress were the stage props for the drama that had occurred there for almost three hundred years.

A breeze shook the trees and they bent and swayed about the house; panicles of fresh palm blossoms rustled. A chill nipped the walkers in the garden, as cool air swung down from the volcanic heights.

"It's getting chilly," Angelina said. "Let me go in and get my scarf."

"No. Let's go inside. How about a game of pool?" He questioned the wisdom of his own suggestion, wondering how this gesture could make up for his shortcomings. He cleared his throat, expecting a refusal.

"We haven't played for a long time. Let's. I'll get my scarf."

In the doorway of the poolroom, Raul lit his pipe while Angelina went for her scarf and Manuel Boaz brought lighted candles for their game. Manuel was a burly fellow—almost sixty, part Negro. He had been with the Medinas since childhood. His mother had died in a remote mountain hut on the hacienda. Some said she had been insane. Manuel had the speech of a southerner because a Oaxacan had raised him. He lit candles on wall brackets and leaned in the doorway as Raul and Angelina chalked their cues. Tall, almost gray-skinned, his Negroid face took on a mask of shadows and pale half-lights as he leaned against the doorframe. He wore the customary white of the hacienda peasant and was barefooted. Unlike the Indians, he had to shave, but he had neglected his beard for several days and its stubble crinkled in the light from the candles.

"Angelina—you shoot first."

Manuel stepped away. He knew his place.

Raul grinned as Angelina's cue spun balls wickedly across the felt. She had a knack for pool. She and Caterina and Vincente played frequently. If he let himself be absent-minded, she would beat him. The game went pleasantly enough. Manuel brought copitas of brandy and set bottle and tray on the low armoire. Raul used his cue as a staff while Angelina played the nine.

This was his favorite room and its familiarity relaxed him. He took in the thick, unpainted ceiling beams, the carved cedar armoire (stained and discolored), the huge roll-top desk with a deer head and a tiger skin above it. The skin was nailed to the wall with silver horseshoe nails. Between the grilled windows of the opposite side of the room, windows that led to the garden, hung a painting of their horse, El Pobre. Who had named the horse—his father, in some fit of anger? El Pobre had been anything but poor. He had outrun and outjumped all hacienda rivals. And when old and spoiled, Uncle Roberto had given him a set of horseshoes with silver nails—a gift typical of Roberto's city humor. French prints, some fencing swords, a piece of Sèvres ware, a gold crucifix, a rack of guns and cues—for Raul it was a perfect room.

He wished Lucienne had such a room at her hacienda. Palma Sola had a plainness about it, except for Lucienne's plants and flowers and the nearness of the sea.

"You're not thinking of what you're doing," Angelina said, pushing back her hair. "You shouldn't have missed that shot."

"I guess I wasn't thinking," Raul said.

c"You'll get beaten," she said.

"You just watch this play," he said, and sent a ball into a pocket with skilled English.

"That was luck, just luck," she said, and her glance took him in nervously. She was a little afraid of him at times. She felt inferior, disliked, shunned. His mind could spread itself over so much. His feeling for life made her hands turn cold. She could not follow his plans. His idea of taking over Petaca—that was idiotic. Better the old ways. What could one man do with seventeen hundred people? What if they were underfed, sick, poor! They had always been that way. He couldn't get anywhere with new-fangled ideas. Those arguments between Raul and his father were pointless. Let the old man have his say ... lying there, in his room, he was still hacendado with whip and gun, unafraid to take and destroy.

Outside, in the garden, a man began to sing: Delgado, the gardener. His watering can clinked on the edge of the stone-walled pool. He was singing a Coliman song, pitched rather high; Delgado was seventy and his old throat added a special tremolo to every word. A bird took up his song. "Ave María, ave María, mi corazón es tuya ... ave María." The song floated around a corner of the house, as Delgado walked away.

Raul won the game, and they sat down by the armoire. Her pale blue scarf loose over her arm, Angelina poured them another brandy and handed him his with an absent smile. She was thinking now of their children, of the fun they had had today, at the mill.

"Salud," she said, raising her glass.

He raised his glass, but glanced away.

"I'm taking grain to the huts at Sector 15," he said. "Father has cut off the corn supply from that sector."

"It must have been necessary to punish someone," she said. There was a pause. He did not bother to correct her assumption. "Do you think we can drive to Colima this week? I'd love to buy some things—it would be nice to go to town; we haven't been to town together for several weeks."

"I'll try," he said. "I think we can go."

A bat skittered close to the ceiling and then flew round and round the room, keeping near the walls. They watched it silently. It seemed such a small brown spot, in such haste, dipping between the candles on the armoire.

"What an ugly thing!" Angelina said.

"Manuel," Raul called.

When Manuel appeared, Raul pointed to the bat and said, "Drive it out."

Manuel brought his wide-brimmed hat, waved it, and chased the bat outdoors. He said nothing, but the way he moved expressed acceptance and pleasure. He had the grace of an old cat.

After Manuel went out, Raul said: "I've been thinking about Manuel, how he and I used to fly kites. He would take the kite on top of the house, where the roof's flat. We'd let out balls of string. He must have been thirty years old then. I remember his face—so full of smiles. He was patient with me. He knew the things a boy wanted to do. Horses. Hunting." His voice trailed off. He lit his pipe.

"He'd do anything for you," Angelina said, and rose abruptly. "Let's blow out the candles. You and Manuel have been true to each other. That's a fine thing." Then in a high voice, she added: "A fine thing."

He tried to disregard the inference. He puffed out a candle and watched her bend over another atop the armoire. The ivory light flared across her polished features. Sadness stabbed him: their marriage should have worked. Who had made the first mistake? Gradually, like a candlelit picture, Lucienne's face appeared, hazel eyes serious.