Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

face. Then, putting down the cloth, I head over to the stove and hunker beside my grandmother. For a moment we stare into the flames together, quietly.

“Once, there was a boy who was a miner,” I start, trying to mimic the rolling storyteller sound of Abuelita’s voice. “This boy’s mother had died a few years ago, and now there were only him and his father, and they lived in a little house. His father was no good at cooking and keeping the house up, so the boy figured out how to boil water and wash clothes and did his best to keep the place clean. Then one day, the boy and his father were packing to head off to work in the mine, and the boy realized that he didn’t have any bags to put their lunch in.”

Abuelita is looking at me now, I can see out of the corner of my eye, but I don’t turn, not yet.

“The boy was frantic. It was almost time to leave, and he had to pack his lunch and his father’s or they’d be late for work! He checked all around, but he couldn’t find any plastic bags. No jars with lids. No box or container of any kind. He thought about tossing the potatoes straight into the work sacks, but they were full of dirt and rock bits. That seemed like giving up, and this boy isn’t one who gives up easily. Then,” I say, and I turn to Abuelita, “he had an idea. The boy raced over to where he had hung the laundry to dry after washing it and pulled a pair of socks off the line. Then he stuffed three potatoes into each of the socks and put them in the two lunch packs.” I smile at her. “Imagine his father’s face when he opened his lunch sack in front of all of his friends at the midday break!”

Abuelita cackles, delighted.

I smile at her. “Victor did that today.”

She purses her lips for a moment more, but she can’t resist a good story.

“Did he really?” she finally says, standing to lift the pot of soup.

“Yup,” I say, reaching out to help her. “And when I teased him about it, he argued that the socks were clean! He didn’t see any problem with that at all.”

“Those Sánchez boys!” She laughs. “Too much creativity by half. You’d never know it now, but Victor’s father was exactly the same. Now, when he was a boy . . .” As Abuelita launches into a story of her own, I know that she’s taken the first step toward forgiving me.

Each holding a handle, we walk the pot inside and sit down to eat dinner as a family.

7

My days slip into a routine and February sneaks away like a thief. Every morning before dawn, I haul my aching body out of bed into the chilly air and pull on my filth-encrusted mining outfit. I barely remember what it feels like to be clean. Half asleep, I follow Papi on the long walk to the edge of El Rosario. I wait outside, staring into the jaws of the mine, until I get assigned to a crew. Then, work. Hand drilling. Blasting. Breaking rock. Hauling ore. Each task feels harder than the last. I spend my first six hours down in the belly of the Cerro Rico sweating in the hellish heat and straining every muscle I’ve never used past its endurance.

When we break for lunch, I sit off to the side with Victor, drinking in the only half hour of sunlight I’ll get to experience for the whole day and eating whatever Mami was able to spare from home. Work like a miner, eat like a miner, Mami jokes when I tell her not to give me too much. I worry that she and Abuelita are skipping meals to feed me more. But with the extra bolivianos I’m bringing home—the ones that Papi doesn’t get to first—we have been able to buy more food, so maybe it’s all okay.

After lunch, it’s back into the mine for another six hours. By this point the heat and my exhaustion have made me clumsy. I rarely have the energy to talk to anyone during the afternoon. By the end, I shuffle around mechanically, doing the best I can to complete the tasks set for me. These are my most dangerous hours, because my mind is muddy and my reflexes are slow. When the full carts whisk by me, I press myself into the wall and turn my face to the side, but don’t leap to safety. I don’t pay as much attention to my flame. Sometimes when they blast, I don’t even count to make sure all the charges detonate. These are the hours when the devil visits me. Working beyond the edge of exhaustion, I hear the echo of his laughter in the vibration of the pneumatic drills, and flickers of his eyes and teeth haunt the edges of my vision. I shake my head to clear it like a llama tries to clear its face of flies, but it never works. In those long hours, the devil tracks my every move.

At the end of a day of work I come aboveground with the feeling of someone who’s been buried alive clawing their way to the surface. It’s dark by then, and I stumble home with Papi down the narrow mountain path, praying that I won’t trip over the edge and die. When I get home, I strip off my stinking suit, mechanically eat whatever Abuelita has prepared, let Mami massage some of the aches from my shoulders, and fall into bed.

I fall asleep every night hungry for more food.

I wake every morning hungry for more sleep.

I get neither.

And still I get up, and do it again.

It’s now the second week of March and I’ve worked at El Rosario for just over a month when Papi decides