Shannon Costello

Bracing herself securely, she helped him shuffle his weary way to the chair that was always left in the warm, sunny spot just outside the front door. He wasn’t so tall anymore, not so tall as when they had first married, nearly fifty years before. Age, exhaustion, and illness had worn him down, slowly twisting his firm stride into this tentative straggling step.

Doña Elena could readily remember a time when she had leaned on him for strength. It was strange to have their roles alter this way. It was strange to care for her husband in ways she might have once cared for their son when he was ill, long ago, before he grew up and went away.

They had reached the chair. He positioned himself in front of it, carefully sliding backwards until he felt the seat of the chair touch his legs. Then he stooped down slowly, slowly, until gravity mastered and he landed somewhat heavily in the chair. “Tea?” She asked, and he nodded, looking off through the open gate and down the dusty dirt road that passed within a few feet of their front door.

The cement-plastered one-room building that was the church, whenever a pastor could spare time to come out and hold a service, was just across the road. The area vegetation was too dense and the land too flat to allow glimpses of the other scattered dwellings nearby, or of the river, a scant half-mile away. They dwelt in an impossibly rural area amongst impossibly impoverished people. The house - their house - had been built with his two hands, back when she had been the weaker partner and he had directed her work - steadying the frame, retrieving nails, checking along the river several miles nearer the highway to see what scraps of wood might be found.

Their house was pieced together of boards and sticks. Some boards had once been machine-cut, while the sticks were simply taken directly from the trees that crowded the land. When they went inside and closed the door (there were no windows), daylight glimmered through the many chinks and cracks between the pieces of wood, dimly illuminating the hard-packed dirt floor, which was partially concealed by a large bed and pieces of rude furniture. The place gave the sense of being rather crowded, perhaps due to its small size. There was a cooking stove, woefully insufficient as a source of heat, in the end that served for a kitchen, the end nearest the door.

It was almost unbearably warm in the summer, but the winters were apt to be too cool. One year she could even recall a light snowfall. How excited their son Tomás had been to see snow!

Trees, vines, and other green plants closely surrounded three sides of the house and crowded the quiet road. Everywhere one looked there was thick, heavy green. The trees were mostly low and thin with heavily gnarled branches densely packed with small leaves that twinkled in the sunlight. Some plants had curtains of bright pink flowers. More plants covered the tiny, fenced in front yard, which ran the length of the house and ended at the edge of the road. Plants were crammed in every available container, nearly covering this small area where no grass grew. The open gate alone allowed Don Pedro to see down the road. Even in his younger days the wooden palings of the fence, fastened close together like the walls of his house, were higher than his head.

From her place at the stove Doña Elena heard voices outside, and she listened carefully until she determined who their guests were. The pastor and his wife were come to visit. Maybe they planned on a service tonight. She found two more cups. It took two trips to carry the mugs of tea outside. Her husband was smiling, the smile creasing his face into a myriad of thick wrinkles.

Their guests were cheerful, friendly, saying nothing about how Don Pedro was only sitting now where he had been working only months before. Perhaps they would point it out to each other on the way home - Don Pedro, sinking fast, and Doña Elena hiding her concern under a steady flow of talk. They discussed this even as Doña Elena commented to Don Pedro that the pastor and his wife looked tired, that it was hard to be the only pastor in a wide-spread impossibly poor rural area with impossibly tiny churches located miles apart. He did not respond, but he listened. It had always been that way with them. She was the talker and he the listener, even when they were young and passionately in love, with all the storms and difficulties of eking out an existence for themselves and their child before them. They had done it, though. There was the house and the child. And they had each other still. She did not think beyond this. The future stretched out as it always did, but there was an emptiness in it that did not exist back when they were building the house, or when Tomás was young.

They did not see the pastor and his wife again that summer, or all through what passed for autumn in those parts. The days grew colder, and Don Pedro ceased to shuffle to his chair outside the front door in the sunny spot where he could see down the road.

She could not keep out the cold, just as she could not keep back death. She knew this, though she did not say this to Pedro. It might not have mattered. She talked still, but she felt that he no longer listened. He had caught a cold; at least, she said it was only a cold, and that he would recover soon. He stayed in the bed now. A single light bulb burned overhead, hanging down from the ceiling on a long cord, unrelieved by any sort of shade. Electricity had come long after the house, but it had come. But heat would never come. One would not install heating in such a house in such a climate, even if one could afford it.

He grew worse. She piled every blanket and coat, indeed nearly every article of clothing she could find in an effort to keep him warm.

One day, while he was sleeping, the pastor and his wife came. Doña Elena offered them tea in the kitchen of the house, talking quietly all the while, and then they went together to the bedside to see Don Pedro. Underneath a multi-colored heap of blankets and clothing he was cold and still as death.

Much later, as the pastor and his wife traveled home, they would be glad they had stopped to talk to Doña Elena on that night. And the pastor’s wife would never mind hereafter when she visited Doña Elena in her remote little house with the daylight shining through the cracks in the walls, and Doña Elena never ceased talking, not even when she had closed the gate after her departing guest. She smiled understandingly when others complained of Doña Elena’s constant chatter, but her heart was with the elderly, lonely little woman whose husband had lain cold and still even under every sliver of warmth and comfort his wife could scrape together for him.