2021 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing Second Runner-Up
For Now
by Cecilia Feilla
If “Children are a gift from the Lord,” as the billboard in town proclaimed, quoting Psalms to honor the children beginning their catechism, then Herminia had been passed over on giving day, forgotten by God, robbed, and nothing the priests said on Sunday, nothing the sad looks and silence her family doled out on holidays could coax the bitterness and pain from her heart. She attended church each week not to worship but to spite God, as witness to His miserliness toward her, and took umbrage at the greatest story ever told about a child born, betrayed, and mourned.
Herminia was an only child, a posthumous child, and grew up the darling of her father’s house. She inherited her mother’s precious things as her birthright—the silver hairbrush and mirror set (a wedding gift) and an opal pendant (her great grandmother’s) among her favorites—wholly unlike the childish things and ways of the other children. She played at adult life, preferring the company of her aunts and grandmothers to the local children. The women, like Herminia’s father, indulged these eccentricities of la pobrecita, even after her father married again and sired a pair of sturdy boys.
At seventeen, Herminia had been engaged to a wealthy boy from the town over. Their fathers did business together and the boy was said to have, like Herminia, a fine taste in things. Herminia had moved the wedding gifts and her belongings into the house they would share, a modest but tasteful residence at the border where the two towns met. But on the night of the bachelor party, after many toasts were drunk to the groom’s good fortune, the boy drove his father’s car into a caoba tree and died before making Herminia his bride. She returned the wedding gifts, moved her things back into her father’s home without ever having properly moved out, and wore the black of mourning for a year, though less as a widow for her fiancé than as the mother she did not become for her children unborn.
“La pobrecita,” the townfolk said, but in private they wondered if the haughty girl wasn’t cursed. First her mother, now her fiancé—who would have her now?
In the spring of her nineteenth year, Herminia’s niece and half-brother were preparing to receive first communion. It was a ritual the town looked forward to each spring, but this year it was overshadowed by another event: Lago Enriquillo started to rise. At first the lake only overflowed its banks a few feet, but when it stole an acre of land from Diego Ramon’s farm, the villagers took notice. Instead of farming, Diego Ramon now spent his days drinking and lamenting his ill fortune to whomever would listen. But in town people said it was payback for having used the lake as a personal dump. It was only natural, they tutted, that it eventually spit back up on him.
But then the water crept another few yards, covering the road and a third of the Corrado farm nearby. The island at the lake’s center, Isla Cabritas, had long been swallowed up by then. Like Herminia’s fiancé and dreams, it seemed to vanish overnight, displacing the flamingos that nested there onto the shore and into the town.
Scientists and officials soon arrived from the capital. They asked a lot of questions. They collected data, reviewed weather records for the past hundred years, and with blinking machines probed the depths of Lago Enriquillo. The data were abundant but yielded no explanation or solution, and the water continued to devour the land.
When the lake finally entered the front door of Diego Ramon’s house and filled the first floor with crayfish and carp, he was forced to take shelter in the Corrado’s barn. Two nights later, the water chased him out again. The Corrados saw what awaited them, bundled their belongings, gathered their animals, and left town. The neighbors came to say goodbye and, through mutterings about Noah and Job, they wondered to themselves if all of them would sooner or later be forced, like the lake’s namesake, the sixteenth-century Taíno rebel, to take refuge in the mountains to the North.
“Who will buy my house and my land now?” the elder Corrado lamented with a sob. “I’ve been robbed. But maybe the lake will recede and then we will return.” But all knew that the silt had already rendered the land infertile. His neighbors cried as much for their own robbed futures as for his.
The scientists were long gone by then. The government workers too had stopped coming with their blankets and bottled water, having abandoned efforts when no cause for the rising was found. It was not a crisis but a new reality, they said. For now, the residents would have to make do.
The townsfolk, however, had no shortage of theories to explain the sudden waking and hunger of the lake. There was Diego Ramon’s dumping. There was the suspicion that the scientists and officials themselves were to blame—that whatever they were fabricating in their labs and factories in the city had caused an imbalance with la naturaleza that the countryside was now forced to pay. Others believed it was speculators conspiring to run the folk off their land and then snatch it up for cheap once the very last one of them was gone. Those with a more spiritual bent prophesized that the rising was a sign of more plagues to come, God’s wrath at their sins. Still others chose not to think too hard about it, consoling themselves with an extra thimbleful of rum before bed.
Only Herminia knew for certain what lay at the root of Lago Enriquillo’s rising. The truth had come to her the day of the first communions. The dwindled town and displaced flamingos gathered at church to celebrate the joining of the children into the holy community. Parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles watched as the little ones drank their first wine and ate their first wafers, taking pictures and remembering their own first sacraments in the same place years before. All except Herminia. While the others checked their phones or admired the details of the stained glass, she listened attentively to Father Domingo’s reading aloud from the Bible. Something about the way he elongated the “s”’s so that they spilled over their bounds through the reading of John caught her attention. “And the Lord said: ‘I will not leave you as orphansss; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not sssee me anymore, but you will sssee me. I am the vine; you are the branchesss. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing—a branch that is thrown away and withersss; such branchesss are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my wordsss remain in you, assssk whatever you wish, and it will be done.’”
The reading ended there. Father Domingo closed the book. The parishioners waited expectantly for the silence to end, but Father Domingo did not rush. He glanced at his flock, at the eleven children in pristine white squirming on the hard benches, at the flamingo pulling at the altar drape, at Herminia. The words had touched her, made her feel suddenly that her mother, who reputedly lisped her s’s, was there with her. Though unseen, she had not left her daughter an orphan, she was the vine and Herminia the branches.
When Father Domingo spoke again it was almost in a whisper, as if a private conversation between himself and God, as if all that mattered was that the words were uttered. Some might think it was lack of enthusiasm that made him dispense his homily so softly that day. But Herminia, straining to hear each word, like seeds falling to fertile ground, felt they were spoken for her, felt their truth as one feels rather than understands beauty. Father Domingo spoke of the Last Supper and the first Eucharist. Of Judas’s betrayal. He spoke of human frailty and God’s sorrow. “For their sake He would sssuffer the worst fate a parent knows. Having a mortal ssson, born of flesh to this earth only to be betrayed by the one he loved most, in order to sssave all those to come, meant He would know the worst pain of humankind. And He sssorrowed for their frailty, and for his only child who, like them, would sssuffer death.”
Father Domingo stopped abruptly. The altar boys took it as their cue to begin the rituals they had practiced all week. Everyone else shifted in the hard pews. Except Herminia, who remained transfixed in her seat. God had spared her. God had spared her the tears as He had spared her the joy. He had spared her the suffering as He had spared her the laughter. She looked at the children, at the slickly combed hair of the boys, the sequins and lace sewn lovingly to the girls’ bodices, the red prayer books in their tiny white-gloved hands, and something rose in her. Not the lofty flight of wings, or voices raised in hymn, but the rising of dark waters mysteriously from within. Her eyes filled with tears.
She saw now that it was tears glutting Lake Enriquillo. Tears that made the water brackish and wrecking. Not just hers or her family’s or fiancé’s family’s for their dead, but Diego Ramon’s and the neighbors’ and all their compatriots’ and, before them, their ancestors’ who died giving birth to the nation so that they and their motherland could be free. So many tears, God’s eternal tears, spilling over and filling their homes and land, their stores and schools and churches, their tombs.
Like water breaking from a womb before birth, she let the tears fall, smiling as they cooled then burned her cheeks with salt, for now she understood. Children are a gift from the Lord, she thought, and she began to laugh, and laughed in a way that made the children turn to look and sent a flamingo high-stepping out the door.
Herminia dried her eyes and joined the others in communion and song.
When the lake began to recede as suddenly as it had started rising, the town rejoiced. Some recalled Herminia’s laugh that day and said it had turned the tide. Others said they saw her arms stretched high as she exited the church, like two caoba branches unfurling after a summer rain, and that’s why the very next day, for now, Lago Enriquillo was satisfied.