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

Mami is moving through the predawn murk, putting on her best clothes.

Steadying my breathing, I get up and join her.

True to his word, Don Marcelino shows up at our house a little after dawn. With his help, we lift the cold, stiff thing that used to be my father and load it into the truck bed. Mami, Abuelita, and I pile into the heated cab, to start the slow drive down the mountain. Mami gets in first, angling her knees to make room for the gearshift. Abuelita wedges in next to her. With nowhere else to go, I climb onto Mami’s lap. I’m far too tall for this to really work and I have to bend my neck at an angle, but it’s the only way all four of us will fit in the cab. Don Marcelino gets in on the driver’s side but says nothing. Perched awkwardly, I brace myself against the dashboard for the long, bumpy drive to the coffin shop. But surprisingly, Don Marcelino turns.

“I hope you don’t mind, Doña,” he says gently, “but another one of my students lost a father. I said I would help him as well.”

“Of course,” Mami says.

We pass the school on our left and curve up the road toward El Rosario. I can feel Mami tense beneath me when she sees where we are.

At the edge of the entry lot, Don Marcelino hauls on the wheel, taking the truck up a steep slope to get to the ridge above the mine. Once there, he slowly rolls past a stretch where half a dozen one-room houses have been built against the cliffside out of mud bricks until he gets to a few solitary shacks off on their own, like ours. Don Marcelino stops the truck in front of the third one and gets out. Mami, Abuelita, and I wait in the cab. I realize I can see down into the entry lot of El Rosario. I know who we must be picking up.

A few minutes later, Don Marcelino backs out of the house, again supporting the head and shoulders of a corpse. The body comes out, horizontal, and then, carrying the feet, is Victor. His face is scrubbed and his hair is gelled aggressively into place. His dress clothes are clean, if a little too small. Though he’s pale, his hands don’t shake as he wedges what’s left of his father into the truck bed beside what’s left of mine.

I think about how awful it has been to have Papi’s corpse in the house, even with Mami and Abuelita there with me. I can only imagine how Victor has managed these past two nights alone. Victor comes around and opens the passenger door, only then noticing us.

“I . . . I’ll sit in the back,” he says.

I imagine us, snug in the cab, while Victor sits alone with the corpses and can’t bear the thought.

“No!” I say, before I even really think it through. “We can all fit . . .”

I trail off because it’s obvious we all can’t.

“It’s okay,” Victor says, and turns away from the door.

“Wait!” I scoot over Mami and Abuelita’s laps and slide to the ground. “I’ll sit with you.”

The last thing I want to do is sit in the wind-whipped truck bed with our dead fathers, but I can’t leave Victor to face that alone.

“Okay,” he says, and we climb in together.

We crowd up near the cab to be able to hold on to the edge of the window. It also mostly blocks the dust kicked up by the tires. The rattling and cold make it so that we don’t say anything. The corpses jostle with every bump. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

A warm hand grips my fingers. I look over. Victor won’t meet my eyes, but he gives my fingers a small squeeze. Together, we stare at our joined fingers all the way down the mountain.

Only an hour later—a third of the time it would have taken us to walk to the city from El Rosario—we arrive at the coffin shop. I hop out of the truck bed, grateful the trip is over.

There are four plain pine boxes on the sidewalk in front of the shop. Victor and Don Marcelino put the contents of our truck into two of them and the coffin man comes out and nails them shut, then helps lift one of them into the truck.

“I’ll drop the Águilars at the church,” Don Marcelino says to Victor before he gets back in, “then I’ll come back for you and your father.”

Victor nods, his face very stiff.

I climb onto Mami’s lap and we drive away.

Even on a normal Sunday, I have trouble finding God in this echoing stone space. Today, a Wednesday and my father’s funeral, I find it even harder. My eyes keep wandering around the church, checking the faces again and again. Pretty much everybody I know has made it to the shared service. There are some people from the city, like Don Marcelino, but mostly it’s mining families. My gaze roves over them. There are the families missing a mother: Susana, with her papi and her little brother; César, stiff and uncomfortable in a suit, his little daughter Belén beside him in crooked braids and a too-small dark dress. Then there are the families missing a father: mine now among them. When I see the families that still have both parents, I think: Which will they lose first? Because, even though the miners call it the Mountain That Eats Men, it doesn’t just eat the men. It eats their wives with grief; it eats their children with poverty. I look at Victor, standing alone, his spine rigid. And as soon as the men die, the mountain starts chewing on their sons.

Mami pokes me gently in the side, and I face the front again and mumble along with the responses.

After Mass, I stand outside the church with Mami as