ABRAHAM’S AMERICA

AS HE’D LEFT HIS BROTHER SITTING IN THE DARK STOREROOM that morning, he’d shoved the one-hundred-dollar note deep into his pocket, taking care not to rip it. Had he made it back to the house that morning, he surely would have packed up his wife and his child (of course it was his child) and made for the bishop’s land. He would have pleaded with Bishop Lagrande to help them leave this town, and he was thinking of this when he rounded a corner and Cuca’s men blocked his path. He was thinking of this when, after they took him down by the dun-colored river, after they threw him to the ground and he swallowed dirt and sour blood, after one man kicked him three times in the gut, the other put a gun to his head. “Here,” Abraham said, digging out the bill that Meyer had thrown at his feet. “Take this. And…there’s more.”

The man with the gun laughed out loud. “We have waited for you. We did not throw your wife and child out into the street. Are you grateful?”

He nodded; he swallowed a small, sharp stone.

“Why not say it then?”

“I am grateful,” he said. He looked up the hill and could swear he saw Doña Cuca’s carriage with her damning silhouette inside. Beyond the carriage was the sky. He knew that in moments the sun would start beaming its brightest lights, and he would have no need to shield his face. He closed his bloodshot eyes, felt the cool metal gun like certainty itself, pushing gently into his skull. He pictured Eva and he pictured his child, who he only now realized was a little girl, a girl who looked strikingly like his mother who was thankfully no longer alive to receive this kind of news. “I am grateful.”