She turned back from the step, and took Martín again by the hand. She pulled him out to the road and he came along grudgingly, dragging the stick behind him and raising a cloud of gray dust that wafted up and over their heads to the crest of the hill.

“Where are we going? Are you going to tell Doña Adela?”

“No.”

“Are we going to see Pá?”

“No, hijo, no.”

She strode quickly despite the steep incline, forcing him to skip and hop to keep up. He dropped the stick. Alba doubled back to retrieve it. She handed it back to Martín. “Tino, hold on to it. You’re going to need it.”

He held it out before him like a talisman now, as he trotted along, turning it end over end, wondering at its newfound importance. Alba slowed her pace about halfway up the hill, and stopped before a large rock that tilted up out of a hollow two paces off the side of the road. The hollow was thick with bushes, and a few yards further on was a gnarled old ceiba, half its branches blasted and bare. Alba turned and looked back down the hill. The house looked small and broken, like a discarded box of crackers. She then stood at full height and turned slowly on her heel, surveying the spread of the land. “De aqui no se ven las otras casas.” You can’t see the other houses from here.”

Martín gazed about, and felt a different air on his skin. It came up from the valley down the road, past the house, but it here it was cooler, and picked up the smell of the ocean. He found it just then, and pointed it out to his mother, a small blinking triangle of blue, in the space between two trees blustering in the wind to the left of the rock.

Alba walked a few yards further up the path and searched the underbrush, probing here and there with Martín’s stick. She returned to the tilted rock and gazed back down at the house. Martín watched her closely from his seat on a smaller rock right on the shoulder of the road. He had never seen her like this. For the first time he saw a little of Tito in her. A seeing and reading of things in the ground, in the air. The sense of something close to being said. Finally she stood over him and spoke in a low voice, a trembling hand to her cheek as she continued looking about.

“Tino, listen. People say that Indians lived here long ago, very long ago. Even before Mamá was born. Sometimes—once in a great while— you might see one. Viejeciiiito! Very very old. But usually, if you see one, es un muerto.”

Martín looked at her intently.

“I saw one. Early this morning, before you came back.”

He opened his eyes wide at this, and looked about.

“I saw him come up the road. He was not walking. He didn’t take any steps. He was floating! Floating this high above the ground. He came up the hill, slowly, slowly, without speaking, and stopped, right here.”

Alba embraced a column of air over the middle of the road.

“He turned around,” she said, pointing a trembling finger down toward the house, her eyes brimming, “and he looked right down at me, and he disappeared!”

Martín stood up now to a low crouch, and half-turned, scanning the woods with wide eyes. “Don’t worry, Tino. He’s not coming back. But I think he wanted to tell me something.” She pressed the stick back into his hand, and took him again by the arm. She climbed down with him into the hollow, down to the rock. She took his hand, the one holding the splintered old stick, and guided it, poking around the hidden bottom edges of the old rock, into the loose soil around it. He resisted a bit, moaning with fright.

“Go on, Tino. See how the ground is a little loose. It’s like sand! Dig. Dig here… and over here.”

He warmed a bit to the task as he sundered the defenses of an ant colony, and the little white eggs and worker ants came tumbling to the surface with each scrape of the stick. When these little worlds opened up to him, the larger world fell away, muertos and all. Alba whispered encouragement to him as he scraped and dug, as she peered at his handiwork.

“You see, when a muerto appears to you, he is taking pity on you. You don’t have to be afraid, because you know you have earned his favor.”

Martín exposed a series of smaller stones jammed under the big rock, and there seemed to be a cavity underneath them; the sandy soil began draining down through the gaps. He pried one stone loose and the big rock shifted forward with a scrape and a groan, threatening to topple over and bury his excavation.

“Ay, ay, Tino!” Alba exclaimed.

Four hands grasped the rock and pushed and hefted. The hollow sound of collapsing debris sent a chill up their spines. The rock seemed to cover a great hole in the earth.

“Don’t drop it, Má!” Martín clambered around to the other side of the rock and wrapped one arm around the pointed end of it, and pulled upward, while Alba pushed. Gradually the earth released its grip on the rock, as it tipped upwards with a gnashing of stones and a soft ripping sound. Its hoary belly thrust upwards and over with a great thump, in a shower of soil, tendrils and spasmodic centipedes. Martín tumbled backwards into the bushes and scrambled to his feet, letting out a yell at the sight of the great bugs and centipedes. He picked and swatted at them with his splintered stick until they scrambled out of sight.

Only then did he glance up again at Alba, who stood there looking down into the great mouth they’d opened in the earth, swaying slightly from side to side. A single curl escaped from under her bandana, the end of it stuck to the sweat on her broad brown forehead. A slight smile was on her lips, and her eyes shone. He leaned cautiously over the hole, half expecting to see a bleached skull and moldering warrior’s feathers.

Instead, he saw a smooth bowl of natural limestone bowl a foot across, which reflected the light of the lowering sun back into their faces. The bottom was a bed of powdery sand, littered with bits of black and gray gravel, dead insect fragments, and gold coins. Martín reached down and picked one out that was particular shiny. He wiped it off with the other hand, and traced the edge of a splayed bird with a shield on its breast with his finger.

“Damelos,”said Alba. Give them to me.

He collected up to about ten of them when she held out her hand. She dropped them into a pocket of her apron. Martín looked up at her from where he crouched at the edge of the pit. She lifted her broad brown face to the sun and squinted, her mouth thin and serious and a set line in her jaw. The mottled blue of her bandana blended with the rich blue of the sky. She turned her gaze to the crest of the hill as she idly jingled the coins in her apron.  

“Your father will be home soon.”

She looked into his eyes.

“Help me cover the hole again.”

Alba and Martín struggled to tip the great flat rock back into place. When they were done she scraped the loose soil back around the rock with the edge of her shoe. Martín hurled his stick into the distance. They clambered onto the road, and strolled back down the hill to their three-sided house.

“Doesn’t the money belong to the muerto?” asked Martín as they approached the house.

“I don’t know,” Alba replied, after a long moment. “But I think he was protecting it. An Indio doesn’t go to heaven until he knows he left his treasure in the hands of someone good and decent.”

She thought of how the apparition turned to face her. Like a door on oiled hinges. It reminded her of that day long ago, in her father’s house, when she chased a capricious summer wind as it twisted and turned through the rooms, banging doors shut with an invisible hand, one by one. At first she was giddy with the game, then the terror of it caught up with her, and she ran outside, thinking the rooms were overrun with spirits.

She stopped a few yards from the house and turned to Martín. She pressed a coin into the palm of his hand.

“Tino. Take this. It’s better than a yoyo, isn’t it?”

He nodded, bright-eyed and serious. Pocketing the coin he ran into the house and put it in a small tin he kept in his shoe. Alba stoked a fire in the stove and stepped back to the open end of the house to watch for her other boys and men on their return from the fields, from the roads.

“Tino.”

“Sí?”

Wobi-wobi, called the mockingbird.

“Don’t tell your father.”

                                                                     Fin