egg

He came up the road into the village at noon with the heat standing off the stones and there was a line of people along the wall of a house at the top of it. They were sitting in what shade the wall threw. A woman with a child on her hip and two men with their hats in their hands and an old man asleep sitting up.

He asked the last of them what the line was for and the man looked at him and said, La señora.

Doctor.

No, the man said. La señora.

He got in the line because there was shade in it.

The house had a door of planks and no window and the woman came out of it from time to time and looked down the line and went back in. She was small and thick through the shoulders and she wore an apron over a black dress and there was a shine of old burn on the inside of her left forearm from the wrist to the elbow where she had rested it on a comal maybe fifty years ago and never once since.

When it was the woman with the child she went in and West could hear them talking through the planks. It went on a long time. There was a silence and then the child began to cry and then it stopped crying.

When they came out the mother was holding a raw egg in a twist of cloth like something she had been given to carry a long way.

The next was the two men. They had a third man with them out under a mesquite on a door they had carried him on and they went and got him and brought him up and she came out to look at him there in the road rather than have him brought inside. She got down on her knees in the dust beside him. She put her hand under his shirt and left it there a while and asked him three questions in a voice too low to hear and he answered two of them. Then she stood up and wiped her hand on the apron.

Llévenlo a Tepehuanes, she said.

They looked at each other.

He cant ride, the older one said.

Then carry him. It is two days.

We come here for you.

I know it.

They started in on her. They said what they had heard about her and what she had done for the Ibarras and how far they had come and one of them said a thing about her mother. She stood there and let it run out of them. When they were done she reached into the apron and took out the money they had put in her hand at the start of it and she held it out and they wouldnt take it so she bent down and put it under the man’s hand on the door where he could feel it.

For the trip, she said. Go now. Go in the night when it is cool.

They took him up and went down the road and one of them was crying and the other was not. She watched them out of sight around the church and then she turned and saw West still standing there.

You, she said. You are not sick.

No.

Then you can carry water.

He carried water. There was a spring below the village and he made four trips with two cans on a yoke while she worked, and in the evening she gave him beans and a tortilla and a place in the shed and when he offered her a coin for it she took the coin and put it in the apron and did not give him any change and did not look at him while she did it.

Everybody pays, she said. What is free is worth what it costs.

They sat outside in the dark. There was a goat somewhere in the village complaining and then not.

That man, West said.

He has something in the belly. A knife works on that. My hands dont.

How do you know it.

She thought about it. She was not being careful. She was looking for it.

I dont know it, she said. I knew it was not mine.

She said that when she was young she would have taken those men’s money and put a poultice on him and prayed over him and he would have died anyway and they would have gone home saying she had done everything. She said she had done exactly that four times that she could count and she said the four names out loud into the dark, an old man and two women and a boy of nine, the way a person says names they have said many times before and will go on saying.

Somebody could write it down, West said. What you know.

Write down what.

The way you knew.

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. She said that when her aunt took her she carried water for two years before she was let to touch a plant, and that she had hated her for it, and that she had been wrong to hate her, and that she had a granddaughter now, fourteen, who had been carrying water since she was twelve and hated her the same way.

Two years of water, West said.

The plants dont need the water, she said. She looked at him. There is no line to write. There is only the standing there while the thing happens in front of you, four hundred times, until you have seen the one that is different.

And if she quits.

Then it stops with me, the old woman said, and she said it the way you would say that it would probably rain in June, and she got up and went in and shut the plank door.

He lay in the shed. Toward morning he heard her go past with a lamp and somebody else’s voice going with her, and a door somewhere, and after that nothing.

He was gone before it was light. Down at the bottom of the village the road forked and he took the north one and behind him the church bell rang the once for the hour and did not ring again.