When the Owl Cries

by Paul Alexander Bartlett

6

The burial was to take place before sunset.

During the afternoon, the chapel bell had tolled intermittently and alarmed pigeons had flown about. Even the livestock had become restless. Small boys, Caterina's friends, had yanked the bell rope, their ragged shirts and trousers flapping dismally.

Manuel and Salvador carried the casket out of the chapel, following a path through the grove. The flowers on the box caught at branches and twigs, falling, littering the route. Bougainvillaea, cup-of-gold, roses, lilies, jacaranda blossoms that had survived the wind, rain and hail. As the men put the casket down by the grave, a hummingbird dived and clicked at the flowers; the men stared sadly; the ebony rapier poked; the red-green-blue feathers throbbed; then a second and third hummingbird whisked the blossoms.

At the morning chapel service, the ceremony had been touching because Vicente had raced from the room, sobbing. Gabriel had not said the right words: his mind had turned back to Italy and his reminiscences of the death of a childhood friend had indicated more than he had intended of the transience of life, the beauty of childhood. Peasants had crowded the chapel: men in white, women with blue rebozos over pink and white blouses and skirts, half clad children.

Someone had heaped bougainvillaea over the altar and on top the mango-shaped glass dome that protected the jeweled virgin of Petaca. A wreath of pink and white carnations had leaned against the casket. Candles had burned on the altar and at the ends of the coffin. The virgin's jewels, her rubies and emeralds, gleamed.

Lucienne von Humboldt had come first. From her hacienda, Palma Sola, by the ocean, she had driven to Petaca in her blue and yellow victoria, scarred and bitten by sea air. The black she wore made her seem older than twenty-six, and accentuated her auburn hair and the Germanic character of her face. Her hazel eyes, glossy thick hair, and rose-colored skin impressed everyone.

Baroness Radziwill and her big family had arrived next, a wreath of evergreen on the carriage top. She had placed a gold plated candleholder for Caterina and lit it herself. A beautiful woman in her sixties, with gray hair and black eyes, she had a motherly manner with everybody.

Count de Selva had come with his fat wife and three sons. As workers gathered in the forecourt, afoot and horseback, the Count had remained in his carriage. His servant had cleaned off the mud-spattered coat of arms on the doors and had polished the blue running boards and fenders. An obese, asthmatic man, de Selva preferred to wait until the chapel ceremony began before showing himself; he had come only out of respect for the Medina family, scarcely remembering Caterina.

Lucienne removed a ring from her handbag and buried it among the flowers on top of the casket, Manuel and Salvador waiting in the shade of a palm tree. She nodded to them and said:

"I put it in there. She wanted to ... I had promised it to her." She did not care whether they understood her.

She wondered if anyone realized the courage it had taken to come here. Was Angelina defiant? Was she terribly bitter? Her face, so forlorn, had filled her with compassion. She should never have come to Petaca ... her city friends meant so much to her.

Neither man spoke; it was not for them to comment. Manuel admired Lucienne for her love of Raul and her affection for Caterina, and he appreciated the hundreds of kindnesses she had shown him through the years. They had been friends since her girlhood. Her beauty filled him with pleasure. Noticing her black dress, he recalled her recent return from Europe, the hatboxes, suitcases full of gowns and high-heeled shoes ... things she had forgotten for her garden. Anyone who appreciated plants and flowers as much as she appreciated them had a place in his heart.

Raul found Lucienne by Caterina's grave, and her black clothes startled him. They shook hands, their eyes lowered; he could not bring himself to look at her; he had merely glimpsed her at the chapel service.

"I'm sorry you lost her, Raul," she said.

"A lovely girl," he said, as if he had memorized the words.

"Such a dear child. I loved her."

"She wants you to have Mona," he said.

"Mona, her little dog?" she asked, hoping that a few words, any words, might lessen his strain. Such a sad, dark face.

Palm fronds laddered the space behind her.

"You taught her to collect plants and butterflies."

"Did I?"

"Now God has taken her...."

"I wish I thought so, Raul."

"Don't say that," he objected.

"You know how I feel, you know what I believe. I can't lie, even at this time." The gentleness of her speech took away its offense. "I wish I could believe in immortality. It would be my comfort too, you know. I need that comfort."

Raul fingered his pipe in his pocket. It was not often he resented Lucienne's Teutonic independence, her foreignness, her atheism. Glancing beyond her, he felt the sorrow of his friend Manuel, expressed in his face, stooped shoulders, and bowed head. He looked at the raw burial place, the palms with their tattered greens and browns, fronds over the headstones and markers in this family plot. A mound of vines hid his grandfather's stone, and the same vines in exuberance scrambled toward the newly upturned earth that would cover Caterina. Raul determined to have the cemetery cleaned and properly tended: by the end of the week the graves should be cleared and reornamented with shells.

Men were approaching, carrying Don Fernando, who had refused to attend chapel service but who had demanded to be brought to the grave. The men stumbled over roots; Fernando cried out; lizards fled under vines; birds soared away.

The Radziwills and de Selvas walked together and Father Gabriel and Angelina followed; then the peasants, like white ants, sifted through the grove. Vicente, ashamed of himself, had hidden in the stable.

They were a courageous-looking lot. The sunburned hacendados had the bodies of people who live outdoors, for even the asthmatic Count had been a stockman. The powdered women stood out among the peasants who needed only a feather or two to put them back a thousand years. Fine faces, buck faces, pretty girls, hags with tortilla cheeks, all gazed with sympathy at the grave of the child.

A bright cloud hung over the group, its shadow twisting toward the slope of the volcano. Shadows flecked the grove, the bent heads, the casket and its wilting flowers; other shadows fled across fields where oxen grazed. Gabriel said a few words and prayed and Angelina wept, clinging to Raul's arm, hating his black, hating Lucienne. She longed to return to her room and hide her grief, to be away from Lucienne's auburn hair, her placid face. Had she never known tragedy? Why had she come? Not out of respect! No, no ... to see Raul, to bribe him away, to laugh at her sorrow ... let me go, Raul. I'll go back alone!

Slowly, everyone began to leave the grove.

Raul thought himself the only one left, and then he saw his father in his chair among the trees. A great iguana peered at him from a palm immediately behind: its iridescent greenish head and dark eyes faced the ground, the tongue licked out. Click, click, ssh, ssh, said the blackbirds.

"Shall I call the men to carry you?" asked Raul.

"No," growled Fernando. "I told them to leave me here."

A flock of parrots fanned through the wood, loros, with red on their shoulders, yellow daubs on their beaks.

"My wife's gravestone is the parrots' roosting place," said Fernando. "She gave up her fight too soon. They'll not dump their excrement on my grave any sooner than I can help it."

Raul kicked at a scrap of palm and admired his courage.

"Death is for fools," the old man spluttered.

"Then we're all due to be fools," Raul said.

"Light a cigarette for me."

Raul's wax taper flared and dropped among the fronds and and grass.

"Caterina was no fool," Fernando retracted. "But you shouldn't have buried her in her scarlet dress."

"What would you have liked?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Your men have come to carry you."

"Let them wait. I came to sit and think. I'm old enough to sit and think. Over there is Pepe. He called himself 'The Tiger.' Under that crooked palm is Mama; I was glad to see her go because she never had a well day. There's Papa—the man I murdered. He'll be glad to see me go." The old man's voice was blown by the wind. "I counted them one day last year ... quite a lot of them buried there. The jungle has us under its vines and lianas and rot...."

"I'll have this place cleaned next week."

Fernando guffawed.

"You'll have it cleaned. What for? Can you keep back the jungle? Are you thinking of Caterina? The jungle has her already. This palmera stretches all the way to the Pacific. You can't stop it, boy.... Neither can you change the hacienda."

"I can try."

"I'll stop you whenever I can. I've decided to have a special chair constructed. In my chair I can look after the hacienda."

"No, Father. Your day is past. It's my job!"

Fernando spat. "You and your radical ways. God, you can't run this place!"

"Why not?"

"Everyone will laugh at you."

In the tree behind Fernando, the iguana decided to climb higher, its head waggling, tongue forking.

"That's the least of my worries. I'm thinking about the people and their chance to live as men ought to live."

"They're not men," said Fernando, coughing over his cigarette.

"They've been called animals, many things. I think they're men."

"You'll ruin Petaca ... I could summon a lawyer and preserve my control. I suppose you could declare me physically or mentally incompetent. It would be touch and go, maybe one bribe against another. I'm not that kind of fool. We'd lose Petaca. I'm not that far gone."

"The courts are no place for us," said Raul, knowing how easy it would be to expose the Medina crime; he began to walk away, thinking of Caterina, disliking the conversation, the grizzled face of his father.

"I hadn't finished speaking," said Fernando.

"I don't want to listen."

"I've talked to Pedro."

"I told him he had to go."

"He'll stay," the old man croaked.

"Let's keep sane," said Raul, curbing his emotions, shutting down on his voice. "You must accept my way; hostility will finish Petaca. We have to settle things between us. It's time I had the administration. You've had your day. There never has been any mutual planning, so now I have to work out the problems alone."

"I tell you, you'll ruin Petaca!" Fernando exclaimed; his cigarette had died out, but he still held the stub between his fingers.

Parrots jabbered and a few of them roosted in the iguana tree.

"Get me out of here, before the parrots use me for a headstone!"

"I wish we could work together."

"That's sentiment—not sense. I've never wanted to work with you or anyone. In Europe, you picked up ideas. Hell, I know what men are. I know what life is!" He shouted for the men who had been lugging him; his voice broke and became that of an old woman. "Get me out of here," he quavered.

Raul followed a palmera path that wandered toward the ocean. He thought: I won't forget that place with the old man's talk squirming among the graves. Tomorrow I'll go back and see whether her grave has been taken care of ... maybe I'd better go back later tonight....

From a hill, the hacienda resembled a small fort, disguised among garden and trees. The volcano blocked the horizon, dragging an ugly purple scar above the green valley and dark green lagoon. Where banana trees fanned into a screen, Raul sat down, overcome with grief. The banana leaves, shaking in the wind, chopped his thoughts to fragments: he saw the open grave, Caterina in her red dress, the chapel, and Vicente running away, Angelina crying: it would have been better to have put Caterina in a buggy and taken her to Colima, as sick as she was. How stupid to have become dependent on Velasco and Hernández.

What is wrong with people? he thought. He felt more and more confused. The shaking leaves irritated him; he felt shut in, dominated by the grove. Shortly, he rose and walked through the palmera, to find the spade sticking where the workmen had left it. It was dusk now and fireflies blinked yellow and green. One of the bugs flickered about him, as he began to shovel the dirt onto her coffin. Stars were brilliant ... fronds motionless now. The spade rasped. The box sounded hollow. Raul brushed away sweat. The smell of the fresh earth choked him and he leaned on the handle, remembering that she had dashed after fireflies, shouting, bottling them, sharing them with Vicente.

Salvador found Raul leaning on the spade and, without a word, took it and went on filling the grave.

"Let me have a cigarette paper, Don Raul," he said, as Raul started off.

"Of course," said Raul, and gave him paper and tobacco.

As Raul passed the corral, Chico neighed. Head over brick wall, he called and Raul thought of a night ride and then dismissed the idea. While he stroked the horse's head, Manuel joined him and they lit cigarettes: as the match flared, they studied one another, read one another's minds, a communication without words.

Raul inhaled deeply, and said:

"I know a sculptor in Guadalajara and I'll have him make a bronze figure for Caterina's grave. The next time I go to Guadalajara, I'll visit his studio. I want the figure of a young girl carrying flowers. Our family burial plot is as cheap and ugly as the fields. It doesn't have to be."

"Caterina deserves something good," Manuel said.

Raul patted Chico's nose and distended lip, and the horse bobbed his head, snuffling.

"I must go and be with Angelina now," Raul said. "I don't know where she is: is she in her room?"

"Father Gabriel's with her. In the living room."

"I'm glad of that. I'll join them."

He felt tempted to mention the owl's cry in the night: no, that would be unwise: peering at the sky, he imagined broad, dark wings headed for the lagoon: the bird would glide low, searching for a frog in the sedges, a snake, a toad ... a child.