Melinda Selmys
Originally published in Issue XVII of Vulgata, October 2007.
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Pedro's
Treasure
Melinda Selmys Originally published in Issue XVII of Vulgata, October 2007.
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At first they did not know what it was. He had not been at the mines, and no one could say then, or later, where he had been instead, except that he came in at dinner time, and his face was shining with sweat and oil, and he was in a state of great agitation. His old grandfather had just been folding his hands to say prayers over the evening meal when the boy stumbled in through the door of corrugated plastic and seized his sister by the shoulders and cried, in a tone of mystic exultation. “There's nothing there! I've seen it. I've seen it with my own eyes. I looked into the gold mine, and I could see that there was nothing. No gold! All this time, Theresa, all this time, and there has never been any gold!”
His mother took him to bed and felt his head for fever, and his grandmother made a potion that smelled of dead cats and camphor oil and made him drink it, and all the time he continued to say that there was no gold.
When his father came home, with dust under his fingernails, he felt Pedro's head as well, and since there was no fever, he beat the boy soundly on the ear and said, “What is this, then?” and pulled out the money that they had paid him for his work that day. “What is this? You think they pay me for bringing them nothing? For dust? Our village has had gold out of the mine for a hundred years, and it is still not mined out. What sort of stupidity are you spouting?”
“Forgery,” the boy gasped. “All a forgery...robbery...lies...” but he said it in a far-away voice, as though he had just seen Christ turn wine to water, and thought it as great a marvel as water into wine.
The best doctors were called in – or at least the best doctors that could be afforded – and a call was put out for a priest to come from a neighboring village, since there wasn't one in that part of the mountains at that time. It was said that there was a 'specialist' that he could be taken to in the city, but Pedro's grandfather knew better than to trust his grandson to a Yankee witch-doctor full of spells and hypnotism and pills that changed men's minds. When the priest arrived, he said there didn't seem to be a case for exorcism, but he said prayers of deliverance and prescribed a novena to Our Lady of Guadeloupe, and another to St. Dymphna, the patron of nervous disorders.
His mother wept day and night for her son, and his father brought home a nugget of gold as proof, smuggled out of the mine – though he had never stolen in his life and scrupulously returned it the next day. Pedro's sister dragged him into town and showed him the image of the Madonna with the golden crown, and asked how it had been afforded if there was nothing in the mine. To everything he said, “Dross,” or “Forgeries,” and he laughed to himself in the night, a strange, low laugh that, even though it was very quiet, prevented everyone in the house from sleeping.
After that, his father tried to force him to go back to work so that he would see it was real gold they were mining, and his mother knelt beside him and begged and pleaded and shook his shoulders and made great puddles on the edges of his shirt. But nothing was of any use. Beatings he took with the air of a martyr, and to tears he replied with a dreamy, red-eyed look.
It was in the fifth day of his illness that he started bringing home the insects. Not live insects. Dead insect husks, some with icons of devilish saints painted on their exoskeletons, others reddish-brown with long crooked limbs, and others flat and unburnished and black as coal. Peridot, he would call them, or opals, or in the case of some specimens that were not special to any other eyes, rubies. He ranked them according to their preciousness, and the next morning he collected together scraps of old tin and made a shrine where they could be displayed. In the mornings he would go out and stand on the dusty old mule-path where all of the people were shuffling along towards the mines, and he would prophecy against the deceptions that were being worked by the mine owners. He cried that they had bewitched everyone in the village to see gold in tunnels of worthless dirt, and said they were paid with ordinary stones that their eyes perceived as coin. In the afternoons, he went mining in the jungles for his jewels, and came home with a little pouch full of skeletal beetles to arrange on top of his tin-can. These he guarded jealously, and with such ferocity that when the baby came and tried to crush them in his little fists, Pedro didn't have to swat him or scream at him. He just looked at him with his wide, reddened eyes, and the baby sat down and started wailing until mama came and took him away.
On the ninth day, a man came from the company that owned the mine. He was not the man who usually came – an affable, middle aged man from the city who was too soft around the waist and pinched the young girl's cheeks and gave candy to the babies. The usual man was ill with some sort of city fever, and the man who had come instead was brown and tough as a nut, and he wore a white suit that was stained with dust. Pedro followed the villagers all the way to work that day, preaching against the mine, and when he saw that a man had come from the company, he broke out into such a stream of vituperations that everyone looked at their feet and shuffled into the mouth of the mine and hid there where they could see what would happen.
The man from the company ignored Pedro. He could see that the boy was causing a scandal, so he called for the foreman, and the foreman coaxed the prying eyes away from the edge of the mine shaft, and got everyone to go back to work. Seeing this, Pedro became so enraged that he began to shout threats and to cast around for a weapon. The man from the company ignored him and went over to the shade underneath a palm tree that hadn't been trimmed of its dead branches, and that looked like a wild old man with an unkempt beard. He sat down in its shade, and lit a cigar, and started breathing long lines of tobacco-scented incense into the hot air. Pedro picked up a rock, the sharpest that he could find, and he ran at the man sitting under the palm tree, and beat it as hard as he could into his head.
The man was tough, as I've said, and his skull didn't crack open all in one go. Pedro had to hit him quite a lot of times – no one counted how many, and there was no-one around who could do a proper autopsy. But it was a lot, and everybody knew that. They pulled him away before the man had finished dying, and the foreman and some of the men from the mine threw Pedro down in the dust and began to beat him. They might have beaten him to death, except that his grandfather and his father were there, and everyone respected them enough that they didn't have to beg to be able to take the boy back home.
He was very sick then, and one of his eyes was swollen shut, and he couldn't walk properly. Someone said that the company would be sending out the police, and the foreman warned Pedro's family that they had better not let the boy get out of their sight. His sister, Theresa, was put in charge of him. She watched him, and tried to make him eat black-bean soup and to drink the concoctions that grandmother had prescribed for him. When he was not groaning or refusing medicine, Pedro sat and counted his dried up bugs. He counted them and counted them, and sorted them one way, and then another, and nothing Theresa did or said could convince him to stop to sleep or eat.
It was on the last night, before they knew that the police were coming to get him, that Theresa came back from fetching water and found him crouching in the corner and stuffing something into his mouth. She hung the lantern up on the wall and tried to see what he was doing. He turned his back towards her, and she had a lot of trouble getting him pulled around. He opened his mouth to scream and her, and she could see the broken beetle-legs and crushed carapaces sticking out between his teeth. With his fists, he beat her back, but she managed to grab the tin-shrine, and to pour the bugs out all over the floor. She began to stomp on them, one after another, their carapaces cracking and breaking under her sandals. He reached out to try to protect them, but she stamped on his fingers so that he wouldn't be able to stuff any more into his mouth. He screamed and berated her, and told her that he had to hide them in his stomach, because evil men were coming to steal them from him. Since she didn't listen, finally he fell into a kind of torpor, staring off out the door into the darkness. She finished smashing his treasures to dust, then went to fetch a broom.
While she was gone, he sat there looking down at the thin, broken up legs, and the shattered husks, and the little fragments of dried-up jelly that had once been the living inside of the bug. Then he began to cry. He collapsed forward onto the dirt floor, with his fingers digging holes in the woven blanket, and he cried and he cried. At first he cried because he had lost all of his riches, and then he cried for the killing that he had done, and then, last of all, he cried for the tears that his mother had spilled on his shirt. He cried until at last he began to weep golden tears. Then he laid down his head in a puddle of gold. A sour pain was filling his stomach, and it seemed to him as though the walls of the little clap-board house were twinkling with hidden nuggets. Theresa had just come in with a broom and a pan. “Wake me up early,” he said quietly. “I have to go to work in the morning.” Then he closed his eyes. He was dead before the police ever arrived.