Paulo held Isabella, who clutched his neck, while Zaul and I stood helpless. After a moment, Leena fell on me and soaked my shoulder, clutching me. I wrapped my arms around her and offered what I could but I fear I was little consolation. The wound was deep and my friendship only reached so far. The wounds of the mudslide, the loss of so many friends and family, the loss of her parents, the loss of the plantation, the loss of her husband—all of it landed in her hand when I set that stone in it. She was inconsolable. When she collapsed, I caught her. We slid together down onto the ground and leaned against the well. Mango tree above us. Her parents entombed below us. Surrounded by a quiet and rapidly growing community, Leena cried.
After a few minutes, she stood and was stepping into my harness, speaking incoherently and instructing Paulo to lower her into the hole when I touched her hand. “Leena.” No response. “Leena.” Still nothing. “Paulina.”
She turned to look at me. I said, “Please let me do that.”
She shook her head. “No, my father—”
“Leena, if he’s down there with your mother, you should be here to receive them. Not us.”
That stopped her and she knew I was right.
I buckled in and descended. Once at the bottom, I tried not to disturb the manner in which the bones lay. Gently I picked my way around. Trying to delicately pry them loose. I knew I’d found her father when I uncovered a wedding ring. I looked at that ring and remembered the one and only time I’d ever seen Leena’s father.
When Marshall had first sent me to make the offer to the Cinco Padres what seemed a lifetime ago, I took the offer to the attorney who was acting as our middleman, and I remember sitting at a café across the street, hiding behind my Costa Del Mars, wanting to see the owner’s reaction. I watched him walk into the office, and then about three minutes later, he walked out. He walked down the steps wearing a frayed straw hat, a farmer’s tan, and the weight of the world on his shoulders. I remember thinking how strong his hands appeared and how his broad shoulders were no stranger to hard work. How the crow’s-feet beneath his temples made it appear as though his eyes were smiling. I remember him walking down those steps, and despite the look of pain on his face, he stopped to talk to an older woman. He took off his hat and smiled and bowed slightly. After that it was a man of about the same age. Then an older couple. By the time he’d reached the sidewalk, he’d stopped to talk with seven different sets of people. Everyone wanted to say hello. Shake his hand. I remember thinking that despite worn boots, a tattered, dirty shirt, and fraying jeans, he had more distinction than Marshall. Than any of us. He had not bought the honor bestowed on him by those he passed in the street. He’d earned it. I also remember one more thing that came to mind—I didn’t know him, never met him and never would, but one thing that afternoon on the street taught me…that man was beloved. The proof was in the faces of the people he met. He’d given them something, and each wanted a chance to thank him. As he walked away, I realized what it was. What he’d given them. It was something neither Marshall nor I could ever offer. Something we didn’t know the first thing about.
He’d given them hope. In comparison to that coffee farmer, we were subsistence farmers and he the billionaire.
I sat here in the mud, tears rolling down my cheeks, remembering that time in my life when I’d worked for a man who pretended to be great, who thought his money made him significant, yet walking across the street in front of me had been a man whose boots Marshall wasn’t qualified to polish. Marshall didn’t hold a candle to Alejandro Santiago Martinez. The reaction of those he met spoke volumes about his greatness. I stared down in the mud, wishing I’d stood, taken off my hat, and shaken his hand.
Marshall had never had that effect on me. Ever.
At the bottom of that hole, tethered to the world via a wet, muddy rope, I took off my headlamp, cleared my throat, and spoke to those bones. “I want to tell you both, and you especially, sir, that while I had nothing to do with this mud, I had a lot to do with what happened after this. Your family has suffered a lot, and it’s safe to say that I’m the cause of that. If I were you, I’d be real mad at me. I’m sorry for what we did. For what I did. For not being a better man.” I paused, not knowing what to say next. “You’d be real proud of Leena. She’s…well, she doesn’t know any of this about me and I’ve been living most my whole life with half-truths and no truths, and every time I’m around her I want to be around her a lot more but there are a few things she doesn’t know about me—namely that I did all this.” I glanced at myself, at the mud covering every inch of me. “I’ve been like this my whole life.” I shook my head. “I want you to know that I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and”—I glanced up toward the pinhole of light some three hundred–plus feet above me—“will cause.”
Digging out that man and his wife broke something loose in me. I loaded them through tears in ragged, bony chunks into the five-gallon bucket. I cannot tell you why, but as I did, I remembered something that happened to me as a kid. I was five. Maybe six. Coming off the beach. Surfboard tucked under my arm. The taste of salt on my lips. Sun-bleached hair draped across my face. I walked up through the dunes and began walking across the grass toward our house. My first three steps onto the grass were uneventful. My fourth stopped me and sent a bloodcurdling scream out of my mouth that brought my mom running out the front door. Sandspurs are a small weed that grow among the blades of grass, and they’re tough to pick out if you’re not looking. They produce small balls with fifteen or twenty spikes per ball. They can pierce hardened leather and stepping on them is like sliding across shards and splinters of glass. They are also known to grow quickly and without warning. I’d walked across that grass a thousand times and never stepped foot on a sandspur, but for some reason on that day, they’d sprouted and I stepped into the center of them. I knew when my foot touched down that I had just driven about five hundred little spikes into the sole of my foot, and what’s worse, I couldn’t move. I had to stand there and take this until someone with shoes walked across the land mine and lifted me out of that patch of grass. Mom ran across the street, lifted me, and carried me inside, where she spent the next two hours plucking them out of the base of my foot with a pair of tweezers. She pulled out several hundred. With each one, she’d pluck it and then hold it to the light, making sure she got the whole thing.
Loading that man and his wife into that bucket and then tugging on the rope and watching it rise to the surface was a lot like that experience with my mom. It plucked the shards of glass from my heart, and as it lifted toward the light above me, I got to stand there and wonder if I’d gotten all of it or if a portion remained.
* * *
I filled and sent up five buckets with large pieces of volcanic mud turned rock, which held the skeletal remains of Leena’s parents like ancient fossils telling a story of tenderness, of a final hug that had been a decade or better in the making, of love lived out. Once I was certain I’d unearthed them, I surfaced and found Leena staring at a piece of rock, which she’d just rinsed in a bucket of water. Protruding from the edges of the porous stone were the bones of a hand. As she picked away at it, chunks of mud fell off, revealing two intertwined hands. The larger holding the smaller. And on the larger, Leena found her father’s wedding band.
The effect of that on Leena was more than any of us could hold. Some turned away. Others covered their mouths. I knelt next to her not knowing what to offer. Finally, she turned to me, holding the hands in both of hers. She didn’t need to speak. Through painful tears, she cracked a broken smile. The image was clear—they had died together. The crowd around us formed a firemen’s line from the creek sending bucket after bucket of water, allowing us to rinse the piles of rocks and bones clumped together. As we rinsed and then pieced together the rocks much as they had been in the hole, we were able to make sense of her parents’ last moments. Or moment. Somehow, with the wall of mud approaching, they’d climbed into the well thinking it would provide protection. And i
t had until a wave of mud thirty feet high swallowed the hole, pressing them down. Leena’s dad was only able to hold them so long. Judging from the protective halo of white bone encircling the smaller frail bones of her mother, he had cradled her mom as the caustic mud filled around them and then carried them to the bottom, where their last minute together had been forever entombed. I never knew them, so I cannot comment on how they lived, but I can comment on how they died. Her mom’s head was resting on her father’s shoulder. It was an undeniable picture. Their fingers were intertwined. Locked within each other’s. When those around us saw it, they gasped and shook their heads. Old women cried. Young girls covered their mouths. Old men took off their hats and crossed themselves. My uneducated guess was that they’d died near the top, engulfed in a wall and pool of mud. Then, in the following moments, when the mud cooled and dried and hardened into rock, it pulled away from the sides of the well and shot toward the center of the earth. Given its weight, it descended the shaft of the well like a giant cylindrical bullet, lubricated by the water. The column of rock fell nearly four hundred feet, then it slammed into the cap rock of the spring below, stopping up the well like a stone cork, cutting off the water supply and burying her parents.
* * *
Word spread quickly. The gringo at the end of the rope had found the bodies of Alejandro Santiago Martinez and his wife. Soon the road up was cluttered with people coming from all over the mountain to pay their respects. Throughout the night, more and more people appeared on foot, in horse-drawn carts, and then by the busloads. Near midnight, we stared down the mountain and could see a stream of people walking up like ants. Leena gazed down on a sight that had never been seen in her lifetime, locked her arm in mine, and passed from sadness and heartache to smiles and deep, deep joy. To hugs offered and received. For hours, she stood at the top of the mountain thanking those who’d climbed up to pay their final respects.
When daylight came and she asked me to drive her up the mountain in Colin’s truck, and she saw how many people still remembered her mother and father, how many people had camped along the road, how many were streaming in, something broke loose in Leena and her mourning turned to dancing. Finally, she asked me to let Paulo drive, and the two of us walked the last three miles up the mountain where more than five thousand people had gathered.
Seeing the mass, the horde of people, I turned to Paulo and handed him every penny I carried. Several thousand dollars cash. Offering it all to him. He smiled, patted me on the shoulder, and shook his head. “No need.” He waved his hand across the sea of faces. “Nicaragua pay for this.” And he was right. Campfires filled the early morning light, as did the smell of cooking tortillas, rice, and beans. Pigs were led up the mountain on leashes and then slaughtered by the dozens, and once butchered, sweaty men turned them slowly over white embers that they continued to feed and stoke throughout the day. In a nearby barn, several old women sat for hours grinding coffee beans to make enough of Alejandro’s coffee for everyone to sip and remember. Groups of ladies, wearing aprons and scarves in their hair, cleaned and cut vegetables; others made loaf after loaf of bread, piling it high in huge baskets. Leena took me by the arm, and we walked through tents and hammocks and cook fires and checked on the preparations. She thanked hundreds of people who knew her father or her mother or had been impacted by his life. By their lives. Leena never tired. It was a solemn day, reverent sadness that would birth vibrant joy. Countless children, nursing mothers, and old men approached Leena and offered a hand or a hug. The honor bestowed on her was unlike any I’d ever witnessed.
Because of the number of people, and those rumored to be coming from well past Managua—eight hours by bus—the funeral was postponed until the following day. The problem, and it was a big one, was water. Somehow they had prepared food and somehow they had enough latrines, but clean water on the mountain was nonexistent. Leena came to me at noon, sweat mixed with concern. “How much water do you think your truck could carry?”
“Several hundred gallons. Why? What’s up?”
“That wouldn’t last the afternoon and probably wouldn’t get to a quarter of these people.” She shook her head, took off her scarf, and wiped down her neck and face. Defeat was setting in. “These people climbed up here and used most of their water to do that. It’s hot and they’ll be dehydrated by tomorrow and then they’ve got to get home. In their thirst, they’ll start drinking from the stream that runs out of the pasture higher up, and many of these people will go home sick and in worse shape than when they came.”
I turned to Paulo, who was equally concerned. Zaul was standing next to him. “How strong are you two feeling?”
Paulo shrugged. “Hermano?”
Zaul shook his head. “Still pretty weak but I’ll do whatever you need.”
I began walking to the well. “I’ve got an idea. It’s a bit of a long shot, but it might work.” I turned to Paulo. “I need a piece of steel, couple of feet long, that I can use to drive with. Like a wedge if you were splitting wood. A root ax. A spear. Something long and sharp and strong.”
He held up a finger and disappeared toward the tractor barn while I climbed into the harness. Leena’s face did not exhibit faith in me. Paulo returned with a steel pry bar, five feet long, worn sharp on one end and mushroomed at the other from people hitting it with a sledgehammer. My problem was that I also needed a hammer, but it couldn’t be very long ’cause I’d never be able to swing it. Paulo then handed me a sledgehammer about a foot long. Just enough room on the handle for my hand and then the twenty-pound steel head.
I tied both to my harness and lowered them into the hole so that they hung below me as I descended. Before I touched off and began my descent, I spoke to Paulo and Zaul. Leena listened intently. “I need you two to do me a favor. When I pull hard, I need you to pull me up as fast as you’ve ever pulled anyone.”
Paulo took off his shirt, spit on his hands, and ran the rope through the pulley wheel at the top, and then wrapped the rope twice around the tree and braced it against his hip.
After checking my headlamp, I kicked off the sides, hung briefly, and then let Paulo lower me into the hole on what I hoped was my last trip. As the light above me grew smaller and the darkness wrapped around me like a blanket, I thought about the incongruity of my life. So little made sense.
The rope above me was piano-wire taut. How precarious life was down here for me as I hung by a few fibers. If the rope broke, I might climb out, but if I were to slip, it’d be the last time I ever slipped.
Finally, the rod and hammer clanked rock below me and my feet touched down. I stood, ankle-deep in water, and began trying to make sense of my world. It was tough to tell whether the water in which I now stood had seeped down or leaked up. The area around me was wider—whereas the well shaft was maybe three to four feet in diameter, here it was wider than my outstretched fingertips. The walls were worn smooth where the pressure of the water through the years had hollowed out a cavity.
The water was cold, which was a change from the water I’d been standing in since I’d started digging. Previously, the water and mud were a slimy, warm mush, but this was different. This was like a mountain stream. It was cold, and when I cupped it in my hands, clear. I knelt and ran my fingertips along the rock beneath the surface of the water trying to sense any flow of water. Any place at all where I could feel a trickle. While I didn’t sense water flow, it did get colder. There was a definite place below my feet where the rock and water were the coldest.
The steel pole and hammer were concerns. If I struck water and had to get out of here fast, I didn’t want to leave them in the bottom of this well to forever fill it with rust and poison those above, so I made sure the tethers to each were tied. I didn’t know what would happen when I broke through the rock, but I had a feeling it would not be gentle.
I steadied my footing and placed the point of the steel pole in the center. Getting a good grip on the hammer, I practiced raising it above my head and bringing it down ont
o the pole, making sure I had enough headroom to swing and then asking myself where the hammer would end up if I missed—which was both possible and likely.
I’d hesitated long enough. People were thirsty. I held the steel pole against the solid ground with my left hand and raised the hammer with my right. I’m not sure if it was my crouched position or what, but the reflection of the rock at eye level caught my eye. A smooth piece of rock had been carved and there were words in it. I couldn’t make them out because they were packed with mud, but after a few minutes of tracing the letters and prying out the lines of rock, I smiled at that old man. He was obviously shorter than me, and while he hadn’t signed his name, his signature was clear. I rinsed the wall several times. It read: “AGUA DE MI CORAZÓN.”
I thought about trying to cut out that rock and give it to Leena, but it was part of the whole and Michelangelo himself couldn’t have cut that piece out of the shaft. It was staying. If I’d had my phone I could have taken a picture, but cold, wet, damp holes in the ground are no place for electronics so I’d left it in the truck up top. This note would have to be between me and the old man.
I’d wasted enough time. I raised the hammer, steadied the pole, and slammed the head of the hammer as hard as I could down against the pole, driving it into the rock below my feet.
Nothing.
I waited, thinking whatever was about to happen might take a second.
Still nothing.
I hit it again. No response. Again. I was met by silence and no water. I struck it six or eight times. Then twenty more. But nothing changed down in that hole. Over the next hour, I chipped and bored and banged my way into that rock, making very little progress. My right arm had become a noodle, and my left hand and forearm were bruised and tender where the hammer had hit the pole and then slid or slipped off. I was growing increasingly frustrated because, standing in “new” water, I thought for sure I was close. Exhausted and not wanting to surface, I sat, soaking my hands in the water that had crept over my ankles and contacted my shins. I knew the water had not been that deep when I got down there. Water had to be coming from somewhere because there was more of it, but it was certainly not coming up. I’d have better success against the Rock of Gibraltar. I leaned back, staring up at the pinhole of light above me. Only then did I feel the drip.