Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass Page A

off the hens. Possums and raccoons would gather here. These mapaches and tlacuaches would inhabit your patio. Wildcats from the mountains could be at home here. Thieves might come.”
    “There are no thieves,” said the Evertons.
    Then Fermin filled apertures in the adobe walls with thorny branches of mesquite trees. The North Americans had forbidden him to set traps for either skunks or possums or raccoons, since he had caught a scavenger dog in one and the animal’s howls of pain rent the night from one compass point to another.
    Luis the gardener, who could tell time within five minutes of the hour by looking at the sun, and Fermin the watchman, who associated many of life’s betrayals and rewards with the shifting course of the stars, had been friends since childhood. Luis, being five years younger, had no recollection of Colonel Torres. Instead, he remembered the disappearance of the original bandstand from the plaza of Ibarra.
    “The mayor of those days had the kiosco carefully dismantled, with all the pieces numbered, and personally sold the carved wood and wrought iron to the magistrate of the town of Tres Glorias,” said Luis. “That is how he became rich enough to pursue his career in politics. When I was a child, there were concerts in the plaza every January on the saint’s day of this town. All afternoon musicians in red coats played waltzes and polkas behind a grille of iron leaves and iron roses.”
    “Even without the colonial bandstand and without water to irrigate the trees, the plaza still has charm,” the Evertons insisted.
    “It has not,” said Luis.
    “Where is Tres Glorias?” Richard asked. “Perhaps we will drive over there to see the kiosco.”
    “Tres Glorias is in another state of Mexico,” said Luis, in a way that implied the other state was in another hemisphere. Plans for an excursion dwindled and died.
    Richard and Sara discovered that Luis was a widower of long standing and Fermin a lifelong bachelor.
    “Two lonely old men,” Sara said to Lourdes, the cook.
    “Luis is not lonely, señora,” Lourdes told her. “Though he and the potter are compadres, godfathers of the same child, Luis has been observed since last summer climbing through a window into the room where the potter’s wife sleeps.”
    “Where is the potter?” Sara asked.
    Lourdes continued to chop onions in the palm of her hand. “In the cantina,” she said, “and after that, asleep on the street haltway home.”
    Sara recalled returning to the house with Richard after a weekend away and coming upon a man’s body spread-eagled on the driveway. At first the two North Americans had failed to recognize the potter and thought that a victim of foul play had been abandoned within their walls.
    “You mean the potter is still alive?”
    “Yes,” said Lourdes, “but he is in poor health.”
    “Does he know that Luis is with his wife?”
    “The potter can no longer separate what he knows from what he dreams,” said Lourdes.
    Fermín, the watchman, spoke so often of his chest pains and stomachaches and the diminishing number of his days that the Evertons sent him to the doctor in the capital of the state. Fermín returned with a prescription.
    “So now you are taking this medicine?” Sara Everton said.
    “No, I cannot afford it.” Fermín shook his head and his wide-brimmed sombrero.
    “We will be happy to pay for it.”
    “No, señores, I cannot accept further gifts from you.”
    The Evertons had knowledge of others in the village who earned no more than Fermín and were raising five children, building a lean-to for their stove, and feeding a horse and an orphan lamb.
    “But since you have no family, are your expenses actually so great?” Richard asked.
    “Señor, it is true,” Fermin told him, “that I have never had to pay the cost of a wife.”
    A silence fell. The night was cold, and Fermin had wrapped himself to the eyes in two deep-fringed sarapes. Under the pervading light of the full moon,