This is what I learned in Mexico.

A Mayan woman gives birth kneeling. She holds on to a post. Like this. Her husband is right there kneeling behind her. Her husband holds her. Her mother tends the fire and waits. She wears her traje, her traditional clothes. She won’t undress, no matter what. Her clothes are taboo for forty days after the birth and there’s a washerwoman whose job it is to wash the clothes of the mother and the baby. No one else is allowed to touch those clothes. When her time comes she digs a pit in the dirt beside the post and she lines the pit with plastic or nylon and she kneels there. A young one might cry out but an older one might not. She’ll just wait. She’ll just surrender. Though some would say that crying out is part of the surrender. The husband might give her black pepper to make the baby come. They wait for the placenta before they cut the cord and if the placenta is slow to come, her mother tickles the back of her throat with her long black hair and that will make her gag and the gagging stresses the abdominal muscles and that pushes out the placenta. If the placenta is slow to come, the mother ties a corncob to her daughter’s end of the cord to keep the placenta from pulling back up into the womb, you never want that, the cervix closing up too soon. They use corn for that, they believe they’re made from corn, that God breathed life into corn to make men and women. I have heard of them cutting the cord with a machete but I always use a sterile razor blade. If possible, a man builds his woman a special bed and she stays in bed for thirty days after the birth. The babies’ toes and ears were always soft and brown and their hair was either fine or coarse but always the blackest black and they were often perfect babies. When the father would say, un milagro, I would agree, un milagro, yes indeed. Imagine the woman walking all that way through the jungle and running from the soldiers and eating only wild greens and with her tongue feeling a tooth rotting away and knowing the baby grew bones with the calcium from that tooth. Imagine the bad water they drank, when they had water. A miracle. Un milagro. And there was a baby born every week or so in Casa Buena, the refugee camp near the border where I learned these things.

Amazing how life keeps pressing itself upon us. I have heard that in Rwanda doctors went on a rampage through a hospital, stabbing—slaughtering—women in labor, women of an enemy tribe. Doctors did this. We have come that far, we kill the goddess, source of life. We’re not astonished either way, now, are we? Astonished at the mystery, astonished at the killing.

Sometimes the babies had problems I’d never encountered before. I could feel a hard time like that coming on, I could feel it in my own body, my jaw would clench up, I would prepare myself for the worst. Though there is no way to prepare yourself for that. A baby might be bleeding from his anus or a baby might have feces in his mouth and nose or he might be jaundiced or she might be blue, milky blue, grave blue, or she might not be able to suck.

And there was a baby very sick or dying every week or so. They died from infections or measles or dehydration from diarrhea. The diarrhea might be caused by not eating right or the flu or food poisoning or allergies or worms. Roundworms can enter the bloodstream and the intestines. If the child has a fever the roundworms might crawl out through his nose or mouth. Whipworms can make the rectum prolapse and hookworms can reach the lungs through the blood. And diarrhea from all of this can cause extreme dehydration. We tried to catch the dehydration in time. Whenever I went to San Cristóbal for a couple of days, I would leave two gallons of rehydration drink. I’d mix the drink of boiled water and sugar and salt and soda and I would give the instructions to a curandera. I would go to town to see Deaver and that was my reward for all I had been doing. Deaver was my reward. I would walk around his bedroom naked and feel his eyes on me. His eyes could make me want him then. This was another life, a period of accruing regrets. From June until December 1982, I left the refugee camp ten times and went to town for my reward. And only one baby died of dehydration while I was away with Deaver. Only one. Deaver never wanted to hear about the babies.

Fourteen years ago. Now Paul Byrne has come a long way to my highland kitchen, where sunlight falls across the table, across the maps he brought from the States. The door is open to the mountains. Los flores del muerto grow in a golden curve beside the barn. A neighbor woman sits back on her heels in dirt, a wooden shuttle zinging through the warp on her backstrap loom. The caramel-colored goat named Wabash lays her chin upon our porch to see what she can see. Hummingbirds weave intricate nests of meadowsweet and insect silk, bits of bark and lichen, minute twigs and fibers of hemp stolen from a hammock.

Kate, come home with me, he says.

So that’s why you came, I tell him. I can’t keep the lilt from my voice. Flirtation. A bad habit I thought I’d left behind. I rest my hips against the kitchen counter.

It’d be good for Marta too.

He’s the same, the same. Blond hair glinting in the morning light. A patch of sunburn where his collar is open. Strong arms. A pale yellow golfing shirt. Once I borrowed such a shirt for sleep or sex.

He says, I remember everything. About you. He turns me around to face the window, hugs me from behind. His arms across my collarbones. Lips at my ear. In the distance near the whitewashed clinica, a man unloads green pineapples from a lorry.

Paul’s maps depict land claims and new world exploration, colonial administrative organization, and what little remains of once exuberant tropical forests. The maps do not tell you that the forests of Belize and Honduras were cut down to rebuild London after the Great Fires of 1666. They do not show you the scars of Nicaraguan children who lost their arms and legs when their school bus struck a Contra mine buried in the road. Nor do the maps delineate the precise number of Mayan cornfields soaked in gasoline and set afire by Guatemalan government soldiers. And they cannot tell you the exact words of the sermon given by Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, before his murder at his own altar.

You don’t know me now, I say. In a voice as kind as I can muster.