Chapter 26

26

ON A MONDAY MORNING IN MID-OCTOBER, DO?A RUIZ SAT AT HER TABLE EATING A corn cake and drinking her cup of cold black tea. She had woken up that morning determined to get to the bottom of a mystery that had plagued her for weeks—the mystery of Francisco Aquino and his son.

Throughout Omar’s absence, Do?a Ruiz had kept count of each day that he had not come home. Periodically, she had gazed up at the heavens for a sign, but there had been no murky shadows, no black birds, no shattering flashes of lightning, nothing whatsoever to indicate that the boy was anything other than fine. Because Do?a Ruiz knew that anything was possible, it was possible of course that the signs could be wrong, but as they had never been wrong before, she chose to believe them. Eventually, she had told herself, Omar would return. She had not told Francisco of her belief the day he had come to her with all his worry and hot air in tow. She had not mentioned the signs in the sky, nor had she assured him his boy would be fine, but she had given Francisco advice meant to set him straight. Open not only your mouth but your eyes. What she had meant was that regardless of when Omar returned, Francisco needed to find his son, really find him. It was not a physical imperative but a spiritual one, as so many things are.

And then, one evening as Do?a Ruiz was tending to some peppers that she had growing in her yard, Omar did return. The heavens had predicted he would, but still she was so surprised that the only thing that kept her from thinking it was a ghost was the soft sound of his footsteps on the muddied dirt road. Ghosts, in her experience, did not make the sound of footsteps. She had glanced up, shocked and then enormously relieved at seeing him, and she had watched him trudge down the road in the same manner as always, though from the way his clothes hung, he appeared to have lost weight in the two weeks since she had last seen him.

The very next morning Do?a Ruiz had heard the squelch of those footsteps again, and she had peered out her window to see the boy walking in the opposite direction, toward the city again. The sequence repeated. He came home at night, he left in the morning, and all that was as it had been until yesterday, when Do?a Ruiz, lying in her hammock, had heard the footsteps again and had opened one eye to see Omar, dressed not in his work clothes but in his Sunday best, walking up the long dirt road. This was new. Francisco and Omar did not go to church—Do?a Ruiz knew that and held it against them—and not once in her life had she ever seen one of them walking up the road on a Sunday, dressed for the gods. Not once in her life had she ever seen one of them walking up the road toward the city on a Sunday at all. And yet it had happened. The boy had called out to greet her, and she had called back a blessing, and on he went. Mystified, Do?a Ruiz had thought about it all day, and by the time the boy had returned in the late afternoon, she was thinking about it still. She had half expected Francisco to approach her again, as he had the Sunday before, but though she had stayed outside all day long, enjoying the rare sunshine and the absence of rain, he had not, which was puzzling. What to make of it all? All the coming and going, and the fine starched clothes, and the fourteen-day absence, and now the Sunday sojourn? Something was amiss, and she wanted to know what it was.

So today after breakfast, Do?a Ruiz threw her shawl around her shoulders and put on her straw hat. For the first time in her existence, she walked all the way down the muddy road, along which the butterflies darted in the tall, tangled grass and the lemon trees grew in such abundance that they fragranced the air. She walked until she came to the spot where the road ended at the edge of the bay. It was raining again, but even in the rain, the view was dazzling. Past large boulders and blanket-sized patches of sand, the broad graceful ocean opened ever outward, dimpled by raindrops, kissed by the sky. The smell of the salt water and the rain and the mud and the lemon trees was a heady mixture. Do?a Ruiz paused for a moment to take it in. She took a deep breath, wondering why she had never come here before and grateful for the reminder that, truly, wonder was everywhere. There was more wonder in the world than any one person would ever know.

Do?a Ruiz then turned to her left to face the small thatched-roof house that Francisco had built. She straightened her wet shawl and strode up to the door.

No one answered when she knocked.

“Francisco Aquino,” she said. No one came.

But she had seen the boat tied up at the rocks. She knew he was home.

“Francisco! This is Do?a Ruiz,” she called through the door. There was only the sound of the birds and the rain.

She pushed the door and felt it give. She nudged it wider. When she peeked through the opening, she saw Francisco sitting on a chair across the room, his eyes closed, his head bowed, his hands in his lap.

“Francisco,” she hissed.

When he did not move, she had the thought that he might be asleep. But as Do?a Ruiz stepped into the house and started to walk toward him, he opened his eyes and said, “What do you want?”

Do?a Ruiz gasped and then dropped her shoulders and said, “Why are you sitting there like that?”

“Why are you here?”

“Why didn’t you answer when I knocked on the door?”

“Why were you knocking on my door?”

“Why didn’t you answer when I called your name?”

“Why were you calling my name?”

Do?a Ruiz sighed. “One of us has to answer the other’s questions and not just keep asking more.”

Francisco shrugged. He still had his head bowed. The room was dim, and the air within it was suffused with unmistakable sorrow. Do?a Ruiz sniffed. It was an old, stale sorrow, one that had lingered for a very long time. Is this how they lived? Do?a Ruiz thought to herself. Suffocated by sorrow?

“What is wrong with you?” Do?a Ruiz asked.

Sitting in the chair, Francisco stared at his hands. They were weathered and wrinkled from a lifetime of work out on the ocean, coarsened by nets, calloused by paddles, dried by the salt air. That morning, he had gotten up like always to fish. He had dressed and walked down to the water and untied the boat and rowed out with his net. It was more force of habit than anything else. But as soon as he had rowed out far enough and was sitting in solitude on the water, he had been overcome by an uneasy feeling. It was the culmination of an unease that had started almost immediately after Omar had returned home from his mysterious fourteen-day disappearance and that had been steadily growing ever since. Francisco had lived with the feeling for a week, but that morning as he had bobbed atop the waves, it was more powerful than ever. It turned his stomach and muddled his mind to the point that he could not even concentrate on the job at hand. He had tied the fishing net with such an imprecise knot that it came undone, slipped off the side of the boat, and sank down like a spiderweb melting into the sea. Without thinking, Francisco had leaned out to grab for the sinking net, and before he knew it, he had fallen in, too. He was so stunned that he sank like a rock until he remembered to swim. When he surfaced at last, the net was gone and the boat was several feet away. He swam toward it, pulling his arms through the water as his chest tightened. When he got to the boat, he heaved himself up and slumped to the floor. He was gasping for air, blinking with water still in his eyes. He spit a few times and blew his nose on his sleeve. It had been a long time since he had been in the water. He used to dive in of his own volition, looking for her, but eventually, as the scent of violets had diminished, he had settled for merely peering over the side of the boat each day instead. Falling in that day sent his heart rac ing. He was old, so much older now than he used to be. Time had passed. It was passing still. Yes, he was old, and now he was also scared. He was not in the mood for fishing that day. Francisco blew his nose one more time, and then, uncharacteristically, he had cut short his workday before catching even a single fish and rowed back to the shore.

Now, staring at his old, battered hands, Francisco wanted to cry. What had he done? How had it all come to this? That night when Omar had come home, Francisco had walked through the front door, and at the first sight of his son he had been overwhelmed by the most intense gratitude and relief and happiness and awe, a riot of emotion the scale of which Francisco had not experienced for a very long time. And yet the riot, as explosive as it was, was something that Francisco kept inside. Somehow, despite everything, he carried on in the same manner that he had for the nearly six months previous and did not utter a word. He should have done it right away, at the very moment he saw Omar sitting at the table. Omar, who had been wearing only his underclothes, had looked up at him, and the two of them had locked eyes. Right then, Francisco should have opened his mouth and let escape even one syllable of what was thrumming inside him. There had been a brief opportunity, an opening, and he should have taken advantage of it, he knew, but he had faltered and every second that elapsed thereafter had compacted his failure until after a minute, the whole thing was hardened again. Some irrevocable threshold had been crossed. A minute into their strained reunion, Francisco and Omar were back in the same place they had been—saying nothing at all.

Oh, but what agony it had been, not to talk to each other after that! Not talking before, when all Francisco felt was his own stubborn, righteous anger, had been easier. Every time Francisco had seen Omar come home in his work clothes, every time Francisco had seen the boots the boy had purchased, boots that by their very presence seemed to rebuke Francisco’s entire way of life, his life as a fisherman in which one would never, ever need boots—every time Francisco saw those things, his anger was renewed. But now that Omar had returned, something had shifted. The anger had weakened, and crowding around it were all of the other emotions that Francisco had felt upon seeing Omar again—the gratitude, the relief, the happiness, the awe. Even with time, those feelings had not disappeared. They had stayed locked inside him, so that now when Francisco looked at Omar, he saw not only the work clothes and the boots but also his son , whom he missed.

The day that Omar had returned, Francisco had gotten up in the middle of the night and walked to the boy’s room just to see him again. To assure himself that yes—Omar really was here. In the dark, Francisco had stood barefoot in the doorway and peered into the room. He could hear Omar breathing, a miraculous sound. Francisco pictured his son—his long nose and dark eyes, the half-moon shape of his ears. He resembled his mother. As Francisco stood there, all the feelings from earlier swirled up through his chest. And there was something else. Love. He felt such love for the boy. He always felt it, though he never knew how to express it. It was a love encased in pain—he could not look at Omar without thinking of Esme—but it was love nonetheless, and it existed for the very same reason: because Omar reminded Francisco of Esme. Something surged in his throat. Francisco parted his lips and pushed his tongue against the back of his teeth. He wanted to say something, even there in the dark, even though Omar would not hear him if he did. He stood with his mouth open until his lips turned dry. Then he swallowed the lump in his throat and walked back to his room.

Between that moment and this morning when he had fallen off the boat, guilt and regret had also crowded in alongside every other emotion Francisco felt. And such a mass of emotions had led to a sense of crushing unease. It was too much to handle. Something, Francisco had been thinking as he sat in the chair, had to change. That morning on the boat had reminded him of what he, more than anyone, should have known: One never knew how much time one had left with the people one loved. Yes, something had to change soon. He had to find a way to talk to his son.

Do?a Ruiz, who had come to the house to get to the bottom of things, realized as she looked at Francisco slumped in the chair that she knew the answer to her own question. She knew what was wrong. And she knew there was only one way to make it right.

“Go,” she said.

Francisco did not budge.

“Did you hear what I said? I said go.”

He scoffed. “Did the stars tell you that?”

“No, they did not.”

“Some other black magic?”

“Not everything is magic! This is simple, you ass. You need to go.”

“Go where?”

In Do?a Ruiz’s experience, there were only so many times a person could be told. People, especially the hardheaded variety like Francisco Aquino, sometimes needed a shove.

Do?a Ruiz pulled Francisco up by the arm and turned him to face the open door. She gave him a push from behind.

“Go to your son,” she said.

***

FOR THE FIRST time in his life, Francisco boarded the train. The railroad that spanned Panamá had been built, from what Francisco understood, because the United States needed a way to transport its mail from the east coast of that massive country to the newly conquered west. At least, that is how it began. The rest—how suddenly Panamá was overrun with people looking for a shortcut to gold, how the railroad company scrambled to finish the track so that they could profit from whisking foreigners through—was known by everyone who lived here.

In the city, Francisco had seen the locomotives, of course, those hulking steel snakes with their cyclops eyes, rudely bellowing smoke. They looked like monsters to him. Monsters that belonged to the Yankees, no less. And now, incredibly, he had stepped inside the belly of one.

Francisco, who was wearing his fishing clothes and sandals and hat, all of which were damp, stood in the aisle of the train car and looked around with great suspicion at the open windows and the wooden seats and the people sitting in them. None of the people in this car were white, but many of them were speaking English, it seemed, and he wondered if they in turn were looking at him, if he appeared as out of place to them as he felt. His palms started to sweat. Why had he listened to Do?a Ruiz anyway? What did she know? Barging in and pushing him out the front door of his very own house—what kind of behavior was that? And why was he so spineless that he had not fought back? Instead, he had walked all the way to the train station in the city as if under a spell. At the ticket window Francisco had slid a coin across the counter and said to the man behind the counter, “Emperador.” It was the only thing Francisco knew with any specificity about where Omar worked. The employee at the ticket window was an American man who had looked at Francisco, confused. “Emperador,” Francisco repeated. The man wrinkled his forehead, and said, “Empire?” It did sound similar, but Francisco was not at all certain they were referring to the same place. The stop that he needed was called Emperador, and he said it a third time. The man at the window responded a second time: “Empire?” Francisco, at a loss, had stood there not knowing what more he could say, and finally the man shrugged, took the coin, and handed Francisco a ticket.

Francisco wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and returned to the thought that this was all Do?a Ruiz’s fault. She and her dark arts had led him astray. Standing in the center aisle of the train car, Francisco crossed his arms over his chest, secure in the certitude of his blame. Around him, more passengers climbed aboard and sat down on the hard wooden seats. He would not sit, he decided, as a matter of pride. But a minute later when the locomotive lurched away from the station, Francisco stumbled and nearly fell onto his rear end. A man reading a newspaper looked up sympathetically and scooted in toward the window, motioning to Francisco that he was welcome to sit. But with the same furious pride that had prevented him from sitting down at the start, Francisco merely held the seatback to steady himself and stood in the aisle for the rest of the ride.

***

WHEN THE TRAIN pulled into the station at Emperador, Francisco was so happy to get off that he almost forgot where he was arriving. The other passengers streamed away in every direction, and from the platform, Francisco watched them until he was the only one left. The rain that had fallen all morning long had stopped.

Several of the passengers walked across the train tracks toward the open end of a broad, paved street. From where he stood, if he craned his neck, Francisco could see that the street was the start of a town that was much bigger than he had expected. Emperador, he knew, had long been a railroad town, but what he saw now was more like a carnival. People were everywhere, all sorts of people in all different shapes and sizes and colors and clothes, in addition to carriages and mules and many tall wooden poles with thick, black wires draped in between. The buildings, on streets that seemed to stretch on forever, were two and three stories high with balconies and awnings and U.S. flags. ?Dios! When had they built all of this? And where was Emperador? Surely this was not it. He could not imagine the old town had looked like this. But where had it gone? Had the United States really swallowed it whole?

A newfound dismay filled Francisco as he stepped down off the train platform into the mud. Even from here, he could hear the horrific noises from La Boca, which told him it was not far away. His palms started sweating again as he walked.

Had he turned right and crossed the railroad tracks, Francisco would have seen that, in fact, the original town of Emperador remained. Every new building and residence that the Americans had built was on the opposite side of the tracks in a space they had claimed as their own. But Francisco turned left, and with each step he took beneath the midday sun, he wondered if he should not turn around. He told himself that if he turned around now and got back on the train, no one would even know he had come. He could just talk to Omar tonight. As Francisco considered that scenario, however—Omar arriving home and immediately going around back to strip off his work clothes, Omar walking with soft footsteps through the house, coming into the kitchen for something to eat, the two of them making room for the other to pass, Omar taking his food back to his room and Francisco watching him go—he knew it would not work. He no longer believed in such things, but lately he had found himself wondering whether Do?a Ruiz had put some implacable curse upon the house that would not allow him to speak. Why she would do such a thing was unfathomable. And after this morning, it seemed improbable as well. But the fact remained: He could not speak in the house. His only hope then was to try in some other place. Unfortunately, this was the only place Francisco knew Omar could be.

***

THE EDGE OF Emperador backed up to the edge of a cliff, which is where, before long, Francisco found himself. Without even looking down, from the smoke and the noise, he knew he had come to the worksite, and when he finally gathered the nerve to lower his gaze, what he saw made him gasp. The Mouth yawned. Down its sides, the earth had been stripped and carved bare. There were layers of dirt and clay and rock in shades of every color, it seemed: black, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, and red. They flamed in the sun like a vast open wound, one that was not meant to heal. But even more bewildering than what had been done to the land—what had been done to his country—was how many hundreds of men were participating in it. It might have been thousands from what Francisco could see. All down the sides of the mountains, upon plateau after plateau of dirt, there were men and machines, machines and men, moving as though they were one and the same, shoveling and digging and lifting and doing who knows what. And unlike the passenger train he had just ridden upon, down in the valley Francisco saw work trains, endless tangles of black locomotives towing long caravans of open-topped boxlike containers filled with nothing but dirt. On multiple railroad tracks the trains wove in and out and around and back again in a loop that seemed to have no beginning and no discernible end. And amazingly, alongside them were still more men, gangs of them lined up and shoveling, all while the train whistles blew and rocks crashed down and thick, black odorous smoke billowed up. He tried to take everything in. What he saw as he stared across that vast chasm was not simply a canal, but a great divide that would sever Panamá in two. All at once every emotion that Francisco had felt for the past four years, since the time of La Separación, came swirling together into one great knot, and what the knot amounted to was not anger, as he would have expected, but sorrow. Seeing his country like this was one more extraordinary sorrow on top of all the rest.

Francisco started to cry.

It was the first time he had cried since the disappearance of Esme, and the sensation of tears on his face was unfamiliar. He reached up and quickly wiped them away. The thought of someone seeing him here had been bad enough, but the thought of someone seeing him here crying was worse. The tears, though, had a mind of their own, and they kept falling for several minutes during which Francisco wiped them again and again until the palms of both of his hands were wet. But when he looked at his hands, those old, battered hands, he remembered why he was here. Omar. And at the thought of his son, Francisco became resolute. He threw back his shoulders and straightened his spine. He wiped his hands on his pants. He had come this far. He imagined himself descending into the Mouth not as a traitor or a martyr or a sacrificial lamb but as a father whose love was infinitely greater than his sorrow or fear. He would find Omar and say something to him. Never mind that he did not know what that would be; the point was that it would be something, yes? Yes. He could do that.

Not far to his right was a long staircase set into the mountainside. Francisco walked over to it and, with as much courage as he could muster, started down one step at a time. His legs shook due both to age and to nerves, but miraculously, step after step, he did not fall. And when he finally reached the bottom and looked up, he was once again taken aback. He, Francisco Aquino, was in the Mouth now.

He took another deep breath and turned left for no reason at all. There was so much noise echoing between the walls of the mountains that it was hard to think straight. Clattering and rumbling and crashing and clanking. Relentless vibration rattled the air. Were they digging it out or merely shaking the earth till the whole thing came undone? Tentatively, Francisco started walking through what seemed certain hell.

Francisco was wearing a pair of leather sandals that crossed in an X over his feet—sandals that he had cut and hammered himself, the only shoes that he owned—but as he stepped over the rocks, those sandals, which seemed perfectly natural everywhere else, looked ridiculous here. Suddenly he understood why Omar had purchased boots shortly after taking this job. Francisco had scoffed at the time, but he could not deny what an improvement boots would have been in conditions such as these.

Everywhere Francisco looked as he walked, there was something to see. Slabs of broken black rock. Piles of crushed, powdered stone. Machines as enormous as trees. Locomotive wheels nearly as tall as his house. Processions of men carrying crates atop their heads. Men leaning out of signal towers, yelling to more men below. Almost all of them dressed in the same blue shirts and khaki trousers that he was used to seeing Omar wear. And the odor! Good God, the pungent odor of smoke was atrocious! Was this really where Omar came every day? Francisco found it hard to believe. Omar, after all, was the boy who used to spend his days catching butterflies, a fact that Francisco knew only because once, when Omar had held a butterfly for too long and it had died in his hands, he had been so distraught that he had sat with it enclosed in his hands all day long, waiting for his father to return home and asking tremulously what they should do. Francisco would have chuckled had Omar not appeared so distressed, and in the end they had buried the butterfly in the backyard next to a banana tree. Omar was the boy who lined up seashells on the sand, the arrangements of which Francisco saw when he pulled the boat back up to the shore at the end of the day. He was the boy whom Francisco could hear sometimes whispering to himself in the dark at night, even though Francisco did not know what he said. He thought perhaps Omar was praying, and he did not have the heart to tell his son what he had come to believe after Esme died, which was that clearly there was no God worth praying to. No one was listening to them. No God would have let his mother leave like she had. When she had disappeared, everything that Francisco believed about God, mystery, and faith had disappeared, too. For him those things had ceased to exist. They all died with her. But Francisco had never said any of that, because Omar was also the boy who was too sensitive to hear the truth—that his mother had taken her own life. Instead, Francisco had said simply that she had died. From illness, he said when Omar had asked how, and that was, after all, a certain form of the truth. But was the boy Francisco remembered really the same boy who worked down here in this loud, smoke-ridden, perilous place? It occurred to Francisco just then that perhaps he did not know his son, that the Omar he still thought of as a boy had somehow, without Francisco even realizing it, turned into a man. Then, colliding with that first thought, he swiftly felt the force of another: Perhaps he had never known his son. He knew things about him, yes, but what did he know about what Omar truly thought, what he held in his heart, how he saw the world? They had never had conversations like that. Even before the months of silence between them, how often had Francisco ever really spoken to him? As he walked through the mud and the noise and the stench, Francisco finally understood. If there was indeed a curse on the house, he had put it there himself.

Francisco felt sweat collect under the collar of his shirt. He watched machines whose necks jutted out at an angle dip down to gobble up the piles of broken rock that waited below. Once the rock was in its grasp, the neck reared back up, and the entire body of the beast turned. Then the neck opened its jaws and the rock crashed down onto the bed of a train car that had only three sides. This happened again and again. “Look out!” people called, and Francisco quickly learned to hurry off to the side, to leave room for a passing train or an explosion of rock. He wove around piles of spoil and ducked under swinging machines, looking every direction at once, for there was so much activity and noise and commotion that he had to be vigilant, to watch where he was going and what was coming for him from all sides. He looked up once to make sure that the mountains had not closed in around him and that he could still see the sky, but looking up only made him feel even more overwhelmed. It was an experience similar to how he felt out on the ocean sometimes, but the feeling on the ocean was a kind of surrender to the grandeur of the world. Here it was different. Here, he kept thinking, instead of surrendering to nature, they were foolishly attempting to make nature surrender to them. Francisco was still looking up, about to walk on, when, amid the acrid odor of smoke, he smelled violets. He froze. It made absolutely no sense. There were no flowers down here. Of course there were not. But the smell, a delicate, powdery smell just like he remembered, was unmistakable. Francisco closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ?Dios! he thought. And for the second time that day, for the second time that very hour, he cried.

For so long Francisco had thought that when he had lost Esme, he had also lost his faith—his faith in mysterious, magical, unexplainable things. Such things had not even seemed possible to him anymore, as though in the wake of her death, Francisco’s imagination itself had withered and, devoid of imagination, his entire world had shrunk to the point that he could not see beyond what was right in front of his face. He was aware, having experienced it before, that there was another dimension to life, but, frustrated that he could no longer access it, he had eschewed it altogether, rejected its powers, and derided it in order to make himself feel that he had lost nothing at all. He had convinced himself that it was enough to live in the rational world, which is what most people did. There was nothing wrong with that. Yes, it might have been smaller and less wondrous, but what did he need with wonder? He had had something wonderful once and it had only broken his heart.

When Francisco opened his eyes and looked down the length of the valley in which he stood, the wide rocky chasm between the peaks of the mountains, he saw what he had not seen before, what he had not even been able to imagine before: an ocean filling the space where he stood. Now when he looked up, he saw not the sky, but the underside of a massive ship, its brown wooden hull perfectly visible to him in every detail. In one way it was frightening to see it, for Francisco understood what it meant—the canal would be completed, they would find a way through—but more than being frightened, Francisco was awed to find that his imagination had returned. He was almost afraid to move lest his resurrected imagination be tied somehow to this exact spot. But when someone yelled and all the men nearby went scrambling away, he ran away, too, as a small blast ignited and scattered pebbles and smoke through the air. Nervously, Francisco gazed up again. He saw, high over his head, the hull of a different ship, long and lean and gray, floating on the surface of water that did not yet exist. He did not like the canal. He had never liked it, and for as long as he lived, he told himself, he would not change his opinion about that. But the sight of that ship in that moment brought him tremendous relief.

With new vigor, Francisco walked on.

“Omar!” he called out. It was the first time in six months he had said his son’s name. “Omar!” he kept calling, thrilled by the sound of it, but if anyone heard him, no one looked up.

Eventually, he found himself walking between a railroad track and a line of men. The men were swinging pickaxes at the mountain face before them, and Francisco peered at each one, looking for Omar’s slender frame and his straw hat banded with rope. He watched the men chip off flakes of the mountain again and again, a process almost as effective, Francisco thought, as using a toothpick to carve out a tree.

“Omar!” Francisco yelled.

A voice yelled back. “You! You there! Who are you?”

The words were foreign, spoken in a language Francisco did not understand, but he understood that the man was speaking to him. He was a robust white man, wearing overalls and tall rubber boots, and from up on a rocky ledge he was pointing at Francisco, jabbing his finger in the air. A few men within earshot stopped digging and turned to look at Francisco. Francisco shouted, “Omar?” The men, all of them young and dark-skinned and speckled with mud, stared at him blankly. “Omar Aquino? él es mi hijo,” Francisco tried again. It was a doomed interaction from the start. The men who had turned shrugged their shoulders or else shook their heads. One of the men, a man with sideburns that stretched all the way down to his jaw, looked at Francisco for longer than the rest, but when the white man in overalls started shouting again, all of the men on the line turned back to their work. Francisco sensed the futility, but he tried one last time. “Omar Aquino? Estoy buscando a mi hijo.”

None of the men on the line understood what Francisco had said. They heard “Omar,” but none of them knew Omar’s name. If Clement or Prince or Joseph had not followed Omar’s lead and climbed up out of the Cut earlier after seeing what Miller had done, they would have known. Before the end of that day, each of them would find work doing other things on the line. Clement would secure a job as a brakeman making 16￠ an hour instead of just 10￠. Joseph would work for a few weeks building a bridge before he would leave to go home. And Prince would whistle as he unpacked dynamite in Bas Obispo, which he would do for a year until a premature explosion killed him and twenty-five other men, and he would whistle no more. If Berisford had been there, he, too, would have known, but Berisford was dead. The men had buried him earlier that day. And when the white man started stomping down from the rise, waving his arms wildly through the air, Francisco hurried away.

Francisco wandered through the Mouth, walking up and down the line, past men pulling up railroad ties, past men mounted on top of drills like giant grasshoppers, past control towers and dirt cars, over railroad track and rocks, until he had seen everyone he thought he could see, sometimes seeing the same man more than once. He called Omar’s name, but no one who answered was of any help. His son was nowhere to be found. Francisco did not know what to do. He had come all this way. His head pounded from the noise; his eyes watered from the smoke. He was tired and muddy and sopping with sweat. When the work whistle blew at the end of the day, a swarm of men, none of whom it seemed were his son, dropped their tools and clambered out of the Cut. Bedraggled and defeated, Francisco climbed out, too.