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 it 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.”