Nicolás kept on walking, slender brown hands tucked into the straps of his backpack. When I ran out of breath, he said, “Wait and see.”

  Weeks later, the new statue of the Virgin Mary stood on top of a hill beside the village, shiny white and new-looking. A little rough, but I had to give the villagers credit — it was pretty good. Certainly easily recognizable as the Virgin Mary, head bowed and hands spread in the traditional gesture.

  The villagers gathered on the hillside below her. They vied to tell us how they had worked together to get what they needed to construct the statue. It was a celebration, and I felt out of step. The children were certainly happy along with the adults, but they were still thin and sick.

  When the story was told and the people settled down a little, Nicolás addressed them. “Now that the children have a statue of the Virgin Mary, what do they need next?”

  No need even to break into groups and discuss it: “Vegetables.”

  “What do you need to grow vegetables?”

  By the end of the meeting, the villagers had figured out where to get seeds and tools, and plans were underway to build terrace gardens up the hillside all around the Virgin Mary’s feet.

  “See?” Nicolás said on the trail home. “If I had said, ‘No, your children don’t need a statue of the Virgin Mary,’ that would have been the end of it. An outsider knows what they need more than they do. Instead, they proved to themselves what they can do together.”

  “But what does any of this have to do with literacy?”

  He stopped, brown eyes totally focused on me. Shivery feeling. Was that the first time I felt it? “Literacy — words — are the heart of empowerment. What you can name, you can act on.”

  “Okay, but how do you get from growing vegetables to reading and writing?”

  “At some point, they will need to read to keep going. Maybe when they need more information about soil, or the vegetables they want to grow, then they will want literacy classes. Then they will start to explore more of their world.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Legal Aid takes a break over Christmas, including Judith. We hang out at St. Marks and the library, Fresh Start in the evening. Bara talks me into going to the Christmas service, where Reverend Peter gives a pretty good sermon on the social status of carpenters in Jesus’s time, how it wasn’t the professional trade we think of. On the way out, he catches up to me. He likes “Who dies for our sins?” Would I consider preaching one Sunday in January?

  The prospect of me standing in the pulpit, along with Bara’s plans to return to school, prompts a trip to the clothing depot, but there are no pants big enough for me and nothing “cool” enough for her. She gathers up some of our social assistance money and drags me off to Sears. The Central American Solidarity Network has its office upstairs in this mall, but I usually scoot as quickly as I can from the doors to the elevator. It’s been years since I’ve actually gone shopping. Mostly, I hole up in the change room and Bara drops things over the top of the door. I hate it, but I survive and go home with a pair of navy wool slacks I actually like. Bara chooses two of the skinny, odd outfits women her age wear these days.

  On the first Monday after New Year’s, Bara dresses in her new clothes and goes to school. I feel at loose ends without her, but I have my own fish to fry, my court date coming up. Have I been a good enough girl? Will Santa give me freedom from probation?

  I show up at the Legal Aid reception desk to see if I can get an appointment with Judith. The woman gives me one, written on a little card, but says, “You should check the day before, in case she isn’t back.”

  “Isn’t back?”

  “She’s out sick. I’m sure it’s just a winter flu or something. She’ll be back for your court date.”

  ***

  John pulls out my file, scans the papers on top. “There was the incident at Magdalen House. Don’t get me wrong, m’dear, that was serious, but you’ve been doing much better at Fresh Start. Just a couple of nights when you didn’t turn up. What was that all about?”

  I hear Bara, that innocent voice to the worker at Fresh Start. “Sometimes my pills make me sleepy. I drifted off on a park bench.”

  “You could have frozen to death.”

  “Bara stayed with me, kept me warm, got me back to Fresh Start when she could wake me up.”

  “She did say she could keep you out of trouble. And the other night?”

  Now I have to fall back on “I don’t remember.”

  “I’d be happier if you had another visit with the psychiatrist. Shall I make an appointment?”

  I nod, and he makes a quick call. Second little card I’ve collected today.

  He takes another page out of my file. “Now here’s a police report I kept. Older woman, dressed like a street person, gets up on a box in a downtown store and starts yelling at people. Politics sound suspiciously like yours.”

  I look as innocent as I can.

  “Apparently, she got away.”

  I’m fascinated with the grooves his chair has been digging into the linoleum. There is a rustle as he picks up the page. I look, expecting to see him slide it back into the file, but his hand has moved to the edge of the desk. The paper floats downward into the trash can. I look up. He’s smiling.

  “So, m’dear. Looks like a better report for the judge than last time. We’ll see what he says.”

  “And if I get off probation, you’ll write a letter to Project Witness?”

  “We’ll see.”

  ***

  Damn. He softened me up, then “We’ll see.” My plan was to go to the library and read, but now I feel the need to walk, sore old knees complaining but pushed ahead by anger. This is dangerous. I don’t want to do something stupid so close to my court date. I force myself to slow down, walk normally, breathe.

  I still end up north of Needham Hill, small houses in narrow residential streets. I am just about to turn around when I see an old blue Morris Minor like Judith’s. Not a common car. It is going slowly and, approaching an empty parking space, pulls over. A slight figure steps out, shiny ponytail swinging with the motion.

  I step between two parked cars and crouch. My vision distorted by several rear windows and windshields, I watch her walk around to the trunk and open it. She looks both ways up and down the street, also takes a careful look at the houses nearby. She lifts out a large, blue recycling bag, sets it down on the curb beside one that was already there. I glance along the street. Every house has at least one. I duck because Judith looks around again before getting back into the car and driving off. I straighten, feeling slightly dizzy, and walk over to look, although I’ve already guessed. Bottles.

  ***

  I see Doctor “Tell-me-all-about-it,” who is surprisingly uninterested in hearing all about it this time. Maybe he’s given up on me. Congratulates me on doing better with my meds, writes another prescription.

  ***

  It’s hard to work with Judith when she returns to Legal Aid, feeling the weight of my secret and hers, but it’s she who seems distracted. She fiddles with her elegant fountain pen as she goes over John’s report, briefs me on what she plans to say. Her main concern, too, is Sister Marie.

  That, as it turns out, is the judge’s concern too. It looks too much like what I did to Dell. He congratulates me on doing better and gives me another six months’ probation. That evening, at a table in the sitting room at Fresh Start, I sit beside Bara as she does her math homework. Those rows of figures down the page I hated when I was in school. Beside her notebook is the calendar she uses to keep track of assignments. I flip the pages, counting weeks. July.

  ***

  I set up a meeting with Carmela, coordinator of Project Witness, and ride the bus out to the Sears mall. She pulls my application out of the file. No, no letters yet, I tell her, explain about getting six more months of probation. “Lo siento, Lucia. I’m so sorry,” and her round brown face tells me that she is. “The first group has been chosen, anyway. They are preparing to depart. But there will be more.”

  “Does anyone need practice speaking Spanish? I could help.”

  “Everyone in this first group is fluent. But maybe some of the people who have applied for future groups …” She looks thoughtful. “Say, Lucia, would you consider helping us with something else that requires fluent Spanish?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know about the children? The ones that were taken …”

  “And sold. I know.”

  “Their parents, the ones that are still alive, will always grieve for them, but it might help them to heal if they know where their children are. The children too, many would like to know where they came from. As part of the Commission for Historical Clarification, the Guatemalan government has agreed to open their adoption records. We have a package of papers for children who came to Nova Scotia, and there will be more as the process continues.

  “By coincidence, Nova Scotia started an adoption registry this spring, where children who were adopted and parents who gave children up can fill out a form and the government will try to match them up. It’s an opportunity to maybe find some of the Guatemalan children, put them back in touch at least with their country, if not their parents. They are, in a way, exiles too.”

  “And you need someone to translate the Guatemalan documents?”

  “It won’t be easy. They will be sad, the stories.”

  “I know, but yes, I would like to do it.”

  Carmela finds a zippered portfolio to protect the documents. On the way home on the bus, I rest my hand on its anonymous plastic side and, for the first time in a very long time, think of my Guatemalan baby. I wonder what would have become of her.

  ***

  Everything in Judith’s basement is just as we left it before Christmas, the lamp sitting on the small table beside the reading chair. I have brought the Guatemalan adoption files with me, along with my half-used lined pad. I balance the pad on the arm of the chair, lay my pen on its clean, white surface, open the zipper, then pause, feeling the grief, the tragedies, the loss inside, Mía, Adela … perhaps I said yes too quickly.

  I reach inside. My fingers close around the first few sheets of paper, stapled together in one corner, and touch a small square, thicker than the rest, shiny on one side. Oh dear, there are photos. I pull the report partway out into the dim light. I can see most of the top page. It won’t take long to translate, a small scattering of words. Quick peek at the photo, scrawny, sickly little body, wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. I push it back out of sight, my vision blurring. I did say yes too quickly.

  I get to my feet, pace the trail from the chair to the door and back. Bending over the box on the floor, “Creamed Corn,” I open the flaps, lay my hand on the spine of Nicolás’s Bible, but it just brings more tears. Before Christmas, Bara had pulled out my copy of This Place, left it sitting on top of the boxes. Reading about women in prison won’t be any less emotional, but at least it’s closer to the present. At least it’s anger.

  I take the book to the chair, open it and stare at the first page, but the words just swim around, refusing to sit still long enough to be read. And now I become aware that I need a bathroom. Beyond what the drain behind the furnace can handle. Well, I made it up to the bathroom under the stairs before and apparently left no trace. Nothing she noticed.

  ***

  I check the small bathroom in the front hall very carefully before I leave. I can’t see any trace of my little invasion. As I begin my retreat to the basement, my stomach grumbles. Is it really that late? There will be a sandwich in my coat pocket, put there by Bara as she does each day when she makes her own lunch. My hand is on the knob of the door back to the basement when I remember. Bara didn’t have time this morning. She apologized, suggested I pick something up at St. Marks before coming here. Damn.

  In Judith’s refrigerator, I find a row of small yoghurts, perfectly straight, of course, three quarters of a President’s Choice frozen lasagna, tired bag of salad greens. Enough yoghurts that, if I spread them out a bit, surely there’s no way she’ll notice one missing.

  I borrow a spoon from her drawer, take a few stale crackers from a box in the cupboard, and eat the yoghurt. I wash the spoon, put it away. The empty yoghurt container, even the foil lid, go into in my pocket. All I leave in the kitchen is a wet spot on the tea towel, but that’ll be gone by the time Judith gets home.

  Just before I disappear back into the basement, on an impulse, I check the cupboards under the sink. Sure enough. Bottles. Not just wine, but Scotch too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Tomorrow Christ is coming, as yesterday he came.

  A child is born this moment, we do not know his name.

  The world is full of darkness, again there is no room …”

  The organ booms into the gothic beams of the sanctuary roof. A scattering of people stand in the front pews, mostly my friends — Cindy, Patty, Bara, Robin. Judith’s neat dress suit stands out, but not her hat, which is small and plain compared with most of the others in the congregation. Althea’s wearing a great, flowered creation with a brim that hides her face when she looks down at the hymnal. A few of the homeless guys from the drop-in are here, sporting clouds of greasy hair, tied in ponytails or flying about. Everyone is holding a hymnal and singing, but I can’t hear them. None of them knows this hymn. That was one of Reverend Call-me-Peter’s objections to it. I insisted.

  “There will be no tomorrows, for many a baby born;

  Good Friday falls on Christmas …”

  Dressed in my new navy slacks and a robin’s-egg-blue blouse Bara located in one of my boxes, washed and pressed, I stand beside Reverend Peter behind the pulpit, in front of the empty choir stalls. Despite his resistance, he booms out the notes beside me. He must have learned it between Wednesday and today.

  And then the last note flies away into the rafters. There is a brief shuffle of people sitting down, expectant faces turned up to me, smiling encouragement. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this. I wonder if anyone can hear me over my pounding heart. I take a huge breath. “That cross behind me, what’s missing? The torture victim. The Catholics kept him, but we Protestants like our crosses bare. Still, the central image of our faith is an instrument of torture.

  “Think it happened once, do you? Not surprising, that’s what we’re taught. He died for our sins. Once. But that’s not true. Every day he is tortured for our sins. In a concrete cell, in a clearing in the jungle, with a rubber rod, with electrodes and a car battery, because he stood up to those who would take his land to grow our coffee, our bananas …

  “Our sin. Our greed. Our ignorance. Our desire not to know.”

  ***

  Reverend Peter shakes my hand and then claps me on the back so hard it nearly knocks the wind out of me. “Well done, Lucy. Now I think you should write one about capitalism as the Beast in Revelation.”

  My eyes jump up to his face.

  “You said that once. Remember?”

  I said that? Out loud? To Reverend Call-me-Peter?

  “Consider it,” he says, as he moves on to greet someone else.

  I get warm thanks for my words from everyone, a hug from Althea, Judith’s hand laid briefly on my arm, a hug and some tears from Cindy. Robin tries for a hug, but I sidestep.

  And later, I can’t help myself. My mind starts to turn it over. Capitalism as the Beast of Revelation.

  ***

  Judith’s basement is darker now. The snow is piled against the grubby windows like a cutaway geology model, alternating layers of packed snow, ice and black city grit. It makes my reading chair feel even safer, the circle of light cast by the stained-glass lampshade cozier. I hold Nicolás’s Bible once again, run my thumb over the edges of the pages, moving toward the back of the book.

  Revelation. Nicolás once called it the Bible’s horror movie. The margins are full of his spidery notes, different ink at different times, but very few in John’s psychedelic vision of the end. Halfway through: “Un exceso de guerra, venganza.” I agree, too much war and vengeance. Next to the Whore of Babylon on her seven hills: “Roma” and “Porque mujer prostituta?” Why indeed?

  As the Whore of Babylon falls, Nicolás underlined a series of passages: “the Kings of the Earth … wallowed in her luxury … the sea captains and voyagers cried out, ‘Alas for the great city, where all who had ships on the sea grew rich on her wealth’ … the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn for her, because no one any longer buys their cargoes of gold and silver, jewels and pearls, cloths of purple and scarlet, silks and fine linens … scented woods and ivory … slaves and the lives of men.” “The lives of men” is underlined twice.

  So what happens to the Beast in the end? I’ve forgotten. I turn pages. There: “Taken prisoner and thrown into the lake of fire with its sulphurous flames … .Chained up for a thousand years.”

  ***

  After supper, Bara and I sit at opposite ends of the table in the sitting room at Fresh Start. She is working in pencil, more lines of numbers, every now and then sighing and rubbing something out. I hold a pencil too, given to me by the woman at the front desk when I couldn’t find my pen. I consider the clean top page of a new lined pad Bara lent me.

  Beast of Revelation. Capitalism. Too “normal” to see. “Can a fish see water”? Until someone challenges him. Rises up, roaring.

  I grind to a halt, losing my thread. “Can I borrow your eraser?”

  Bara slides it across the table without looking up, that small frown between her brows.

  I erase, start again.

  The Beast of Revelation. What is he? Violence. War. “We” win or “they” win. It doesn’t matter. The Beast wins. That’s the whole point of non-violent action. We withdraw our participation in the Beast, deny him life, because he has none without us. He responds with violence, of course, showing himself for what he is, a killer of innocents. This calls up all that is decent in those who look on, forces them to choose.