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

dress up, a bowler hat on her head. Today is one of those days. Brown bowler firmly in place, hands knotted in the shawl around her shoulders, she gives me a once-over. I glance at my long-sleeve T-shirt and dirty pink leggings, my too-small sneakers. “Go wash your face,” Mami says firmly, “and change into some clean clothes. Nice ones.” She turns to Abuelita. “Will you come, Elvira?”

Abuelita puts her hand on top of Papi’s.

“No, I’ll stay here with my son.”

Mami nods, and I hustle off to get dressed.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re on our way down the mountain. I didn’t know how nice Mami expected me to dress, so I rounded up. I’m wearing clean black leggings, a sweater that I know Mami likes, and my church shoes, even though they’re not the best suited for the two hours of walking we’ve got ahead of us. I even combed and rebraided my hair. I’m not giving Mami one more thing to worry about.

When we get to the church in Potosí, we join the other mining families there. I see Victor, his eyes red-rimmed, talking quietly to Padre Julio. I realize his father must have died yesterday too. With his mother dead, there’s no one to do this but him. I catch his eye and give him a weak smile of what I hope is encouragement, but he looks away from me.

Does he blame me for this too? My stomach twists painfully at the thought and I don’t go over and talk to him. I don’t want to know if my best friend hates me.

My eyes hunt through the rest of the families there, bunching them into groups, doing a roll call of the dead by association. Pedro Sánchez Céspedes, Victor’s papi. Ernesto Jimenez Almedo. Luís Molina Vargas. My father. At least four dead, then, from yesterday. My heart is a cramp inside my rib cage, but my eyes stay dry.

When it’s our turn to talk to Padre Julio, I let Mami take the lead, standing beside her quietly like an obedient daughter should. Padre Julio tells her he’s planning a joint funeral Mass for the fallen miners. To lend the families the strength of their community in their time of sorrow, he says. But I know that the real reason is that Padre Julio knows how poor our four families are. This way we can pool our donations for the Mass. Padre Julio is a good man.

When the arrangements are made, we walk to the coffin maker. It is a tiny, clean shop that smells of lumber and varnish, but the air in the room is filled with death anyway. When Mami pulls the roll of bills out of her skirt pocket, she ends up giving most of them to the coffin man. After all, we live on a barren rock far above the tree line. Even the cheapest, plainest box is not cheap when you have to get your trees from far away.

Our last stop is the miners’ graveyard, at the foot of the Mountain That Eats Men. I’ve heard that, down in the valleys, they bury people underground. But up here, the ground is solid rock, so the dead are stacked in concrete sepulchers, one on top of the other. They stretch to the sky with each new disaster, bureau after bureau, where each drawer holds a corpse. If you come to visit your dead, kids with ladders will climb up and polish the plaques for a coin. While Mami negotiates rates with the graveyard man, I think how ironic it is that on this cursed mountain it’s only when the men are alive that we bury them underground. They have to die to be allowed to lie down and stare at the sky.

It’s dusk by the time Mami and I, finally finished, start the long trek up the mountain. Tomorrow will be another terrible day.

Wearily, I put one foot in front of the other and follow my mother’s bent figure up the rocky road.

I should have worn my sneakers.

That night, I dream. It starts as it did before: with me standing barefoot outside El Rosario, the arched entrance to the mine looming dark in front of me. Beneath my feet, the mountain moves and a wave of air exhales out of the mouth of the mine and over me.

Rock dust on my face.

I lift a hand to wipe it off.

Sticky.

When I pull my hand away, I’m no longer alone. The watery light outlines a body at my feet. My breath hitches. Reaching down, I grab the material of his mining suit and turn him over. A stranger stares up at me sightlessly. I gasp in relief and straighten.

But instead of an empty entryway, the open space before the mine is now lined with the dead: tens of them, packed shoulder to shoulder. I step over the man at my feet and turn one after another, not even remembering who I’m searching for, or why, but gripped nonetheless with the certainty that I must look at each of them.

I turn body after body: some young, some old. Some paler than me, some darker than me, some who are eerily familiar. But none of them are who I seek, and I sob, wondering when I will be done. And I see body after body after body rolling out of the mine entrance, not tens now but hundreds, thousands, all slipping in the cold silt mud, piling in front of the mouth like heaps of mining slag. The mountain vomits them at me, one after another after another. Eight million of them. It is a never-ending cascade of death.

The bodies roll off each other and bump against me. I have to move quickly to avoid being buried by them.

“Your fault,” the dead whisper in eight million shadowy voices. “You should have known better. This is your fault.”

“Stop!” I shout, swimming against the torrent, trying to save myself. “Stop! No more!”

I wake up, a scream