The mountains were blazing under a high sun when the first tremor passed through the cornfield. It rolled lightly over the low hill flanking the cemetery and rippled into the village of Sombra de Dios. It shook dust from the walls and roofs and rattled crockery and tins. All singing, all laughter, all gossip ceased. The animals fell silent in their pens. The only sound was of Paco Cantu’s one-eyed white dog, whining and turning in tight circles in the middle of the muddy street. Women at their cookpots took quick account of their children. Girls at the creekbank made swift signs of the cross and hastily gathered their wash.
In the cornfield the men stood fast and tried to sense the earth’s intentions through the soles of their feet. Sombra de Dios was set on a narrow tableland in the western range of the Sierra Madre, a region of Mexico which often trembled as if in sudden fright. These shudders were usually brief and harmless, and the villagers had long ago learned to make jokes of them. “The mountain has been startled from its siesta,” they might say. Or, “The earth is once again shrugging at one of God’s great riddles.”
But sometimes a tremor was more than a minor interruption of the day’s work. Sometimes it was a warning of imminent worse, an advisement that, for reasons known only to God, the earth was in a black temper, in a mood to bring ruin.
For a long moment the men in the field waited to see if worse was coming. Then somebody uttered a loud derisive curse, and somebody else added to it. A pair of young machos expressing their fearlessness. Now others among them grinned and made dismissive gestures and made fun of each other for their frighted looks. They resumed their slow shuffle along the rows, plucking corn and dropping it into the long bags slung across their chests and dragging behind them.
And then again the stalks rustled queerly. Louder this time. And the ground again quivered under their feet.
Once more the men stopped working. Some slipped off their picking bags and began to ease slowly out of the field, casting anxious glances at the dark wall of the mountain barely fifty yards away.
“It is nothing, nothing!” Anastasio Domingo called out to them. He was a village elder and the foreman of this season’s harvest. “A little trembling. It will pass. Don’t be such hens and get back to work!”
Standing beside him, his eldest son Benito could feel the ground shivering softly against his soles. He was as eager as the others to abandon the field and put distance between himself and the looming mountain. But his place was at his father’s side.
Now a low growl sounded deep in the earth—and the rest of the men threw off their bags and hastened away.
“Father,” Benito said, shedding his own bag. But old Anastasio was not listening. He was glaring up at the mountain and muttering darkly.
Its growl deepening, the ground began to quaver. Then it suddenly jarred sharply and men cried out and fell. They scrabbled to their feet and ran. And Benito ran with them.
The ground buckled and men again fell—and again rose and kept running. The earth rumbled. The mountain shook against the sky. It began to shed black boulders. The huge stones bounded down the rockface and cut swaths through the cornstalks.
Benito fell twice before reaching the wide clearing encompassing the village cemetery. Here the villagers were coming together in a terrified herd. Here was the only spot a falling rock had never reached, the only expanse of ground a temblor had never cracked open.
Benito’s younger brother Lalo ran up to him, wide-eyed, yelling, “Father! Where’s father?”
They searched the crowd frantically, and then someone shouted, “There, Benito! Out there!”
Anastasio Domingo was still at the edge of the cornfield, all alone now between the mountain and the cemetery, bellowing curses at the sierra, shaking a bony fist. He tottered like a drunk on the undulant ground. A boulder the size of a sow shot past within feet of him.
“Fatherrrr!” Benito cried. He started for the field but Lalo grabbed his arm and held him back, yelling, “No, Benny!”
The ground at the base of the mountain wall ripped open with an explosive burst and a jagged gaping fissure lengthened swiftly and made directly for Anastasio. The old man tried to run but he still wore his picking bag and the load of corn weighed him down. The fissure rushed up behind him, the ground crackling as it parted, widening like monstrous jaws.
The ground opened under Anastasio and the villagers screamed.
The old man caught hold of the rim of the fissure and arrested his fall. For a moment he hung in the crevasse, only his head and arms visible as he clawed wildly at sand and stones in a desperate effort to pull himself out against the full weight of the picking bag hanging round his neck.
Then the ground broke under his grasp and he vanished into the abyss.
This time the village was almost undamaged. Much clayware had been shattered and a few pens had come apart and the animals had scattered and would have to be rounded up. But no walls had collapsed and no roofs had fallen. The creek had not drained to thick mud, not this time.
Singly and in small groups the villagers approached the edge of the crevasse where Anastasio Domingo had dropped out of sight. They peered into the black void, blessed themselves hastily and hurried away with faces tightly fearful.
The day after the temblor, Father Enrique arrived in the early evening from the neighboring pueblo of Tres Cruces and said a mass for Anastasio’s soul. But there was no funeral because there was no corpse to bury. The old priest spoke of God’s mysterious ways and of the great need for faith during our brief tenure in this vale of tears called Life. But his words did little to comfort the village men, and after he departed they gathered in the village cantina to drink with urgency and speak forlornly of the riddles of life and death.
The room was draped in shadows and pungent with the sooty smoke of kerosene lamps. The men drank and gestured and shook their heads. It had been such a meager little earthquake, they told each other. All of them had seen at least a half-dozen temblors worse than this one, quakes that left the village in piles of broken adobe and littered with tiles and thatch, that buried entire cornfields under mountain rocks, that ripped open the ground in a dozen places—and yet had killed no one. Then along comes a dwarf of an earthquake like this one, a weak sister of an earthquake that drops only a few big rocks in the field and opens only one big crack in the ground—and yet, just like that, it takes a man off the face of the earth. How, they asked, was a man to make sense of such a thing?
For a time they drank in morose silence. And then Marchado Ruiz spoke up in a loud slurred voice. He said he only hoped they had not held the mass for Anastasio’s soul too soon.
Heads turned his way. Marchado Ruiz was a fool and everyone knew it, but even from him such a remark could not be easily ignored. Eyes narrowed at him in question. Lips drew tight in anticipation of stupidity.
“What I mean,” Marchado said, waving his cup for emphasis and spilling pulque on the men sitting beside him at the long table, “is that maybe Anastasio was not yet dead.”
Now everyone in the room was staring hard at Marchado Ruiz. Faces clenched in anger and men muttered darkly. What was this fool saying to insult the dead?
“I mean,” Marchado said in the rising whine of one desperate to make himself understood, “that hole looks pretty damn deep, doesn’t it? I dropped a rock into it and never heard it hit the bottom. That’s deep, no? So, what I mean is, what if it’s so deep that Anastasio was still falling when the mass for his soul was said?”
The room fell silent as a tomb.
“The mass was supposed to be for a dead man, but if he was alive and still falling, the mass was too soon to do him any good, no? Now, maybe he died of fright as he fell, but I don’t think so, not a brave man like old Anastasio. Hey, for all we know, he’s still falling. It’s possible, no?” He looked around at his gaping audience. “I mean, that hole looks pretty damn deep to me.”
Marchado Ruiz had never been able to tell a joke properly in his life. The only laughter he ever inspired was derisive and directed at his foolishness. But now somebody burst out laughing—truly laughing—and in a moment was joined by somebody else.
And then suddenly everyone in the room was laughing—laughing hard, laughing with their teeth and eyes and belly, laughing with all their heart, roaring with laughter. They pounded the bar and tabletops with their fists and slapped each other on the back and howled with laughter. They bought drink upon drink for Marchado Ruiz and they put their fists to their faces and wept with laughter.
All of them—even Benito and Lalo, who could not help themselves and would later pray for their father’s forgiveness—laughed and laughed until their bellies were in agony from laughing, until their fists were raw and sore and their jaws ached and their eyes were burning dryly, drained of all tears.
And then every one of them got happily drunk—and later, singing loudly in the moonlight, they went staggering home to their women and their beds. And in the morning, as the sun once more ascended over the mountain peaks, they were back at their work in the sierra’s long shadow.