You swallow and force the question out again.
“Where is he?”
The old woman finally sits across from you and places the ring on the table between your hands.
“Alive,” she says. “For now.”
Your mouth opens, but no sound comes.
She introduces herself as Aurelia. She says she has lived in the mountains so long the valley below forgot whether she was ever part of it. Some call her a healer. Some call her a witch when they need someone to fear. Once, long ago, men came to her cabin asking for poultices, births, prayers, or silence. Don Fausto’s father included. That last detail chills you more than the ring.
“Four months ago,” Aurelia says, “two men brought a body that wasn’t dead yet.”
Your skin goes cold.
She tells it plainly, and the horror becomes worse because she wastes no time making it dramatic. A mule cart arrived after midnight on the back trail behind the magueys. One of Don Fausto’s foremen and a younger ranch hand dumped a man at her door wrapped in a blood-stiff blanket. His skull was split at the temple. Three ribs broken. Right leg crushed below the knee. He wore Diego’s work shirt, but not his ring.
“They thought he’d be dead by dawn,” Aurelia says. “Wanted me to keep him quiet until then so they could say they tried.”
Your breath catches on the edge of your ribs.
“Why didn’t you send for me?”
“Because the foreman came back at sunrise with a shotgun and two warnings. First: if the man lived, he belonged to Don Fausto. Second: if I told the widow, I’d be the next body left in the ravine.”
Mateo, sitting on the floor with his tortilla forgotten in his hand, looks up at that word.
Body.
He knows enough already. Children of the poor always do. They learn early that adults speak softly when the truth is ugliest.
Aurelia continues.
She worked on Diego through the night anyway. Stopped the bleeding. Set what she could. Burned fever out of him with teas and cold cloths. For three days he hovered between life and death, delirious, calling your name, the children’s names, and once, over and over, saying, “I saw him, I saw him, I saw him.” On the fourth day he woke just long enough to beg one thing of her before passing out again.
“Don’t let Fausto know I remember.”
A tremor runs through you from throat to fingertips.
“Remember what?”
Aurelia looks toward the door as if mountains themselves might be listening.
“That the tractor didn’t go off the ridge by accident.”
For a second the world becomes narrower than the table between you.
You think of Don Fausto’s cold face when he brought the document. Of the speed with which the debt appeared. Of how no one let you see Diego’s body for long because, they said, the injuries were too terrible. Of how the priest avoided your eyes. Of how Don Fausto was already acting like the land under your house had shifted into his hands before the mourning food had gone cold.
You were not widowed.
You were managed.
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