But Benjamin did not think about this as he offered comfort to the crying child. He was not thinking about the child’s miracle at all, really, as he had only intended to help the German. And for him, like for most, there was not much that the head had to do with hearing a crying child and moving toward it; that was all in the heart.
It took no time for the Soria darkness to manifest in Benjamin. Soria darkness, as said before, is faster and more terrible than the usual pilgrim’s darkness. Benjamin had barely spoken to the child when he let out a gasp. His legs had gone sprawled and odd, a foal’s legs scrabbling for footing in the snow. He could not see it, but his legs were beginning to turn to wood. Loyola, unknowing, asked him what was wrong. She tugged up his snow-crusted pants leg to reveal gray, spindly wood, dry logs like you would find left in the sand.
“Oh, Benjamin, I will love you anyway!” she told him, and even this phrase, this small comfort, counted against her, and now the darkness began to fall upon her, too. She became wood from the top down, the opposite from Benjamin, and as Benjamin’s chest and arms became wood, her head and neck and shoulders became wood.
“?El ni?o!” José cried. He did not mean the dragon-scaled child, but rather the infant that the now-wooden Loyola had been carrying. As Antonia began to scream Loyola’s name, the sound swirling away in the powder, José seized a shovel and leaped forward to chop Daniel’s small body out of the now-wooden Loyola before he was sealed in forever. Even as José hacked at Loyola’s lifeless form, his own legs became wood from this interference. He shouted for his brothers to leave him.
Francisco and Michael and Rosa dragged Antonia into the house and slammed the door.
The fox ran away, and so did the dragon-scaled boy.
It was only after the sounds of destruction had died away that Antonia, Francisco, Michael, and Rosa reemerged. José’s sacrifice had worked: The baby Daniel had been hewn from his wooden mother and now sobbed in the dust beside his wooden father and wooden uncle. He was fully flesh and blood, and untouched by the darkness. As a helpless newborn, he had no way to accidentally interfere with his parents’ or uncle’s miracle, and moreover, as an innocent infant, he had no darkness inside him yet to be provoked by such a disaster.
Rosa lifted Daniel from the wooden remains of his family. Antonia touched the place where Loyola’s wooden frame had been cleaved to remove him. Francisco took the shovel from where it had fallen beside José and leaned it back up against the house. He did not say anything.
This was when Antonia became angry, and she had never become unangry since. This was also when Francisco began to use fewer and fewer words each year. Michael stopped cutting his hair. Rosa remained Rosa.
Antonia finished telling this story as she led the cousins toward a small shed by the chickens. The door was barred and never opened, but she opened it now. The light sprawled over the dust inside.
She threw her hand outward to demonstrate the contents of the shed. She said, “And there they still are today!”
“That just looks like wood,” Joaquin said.
“Exactly,” replied Antonia.
“But Loyola was not a Soria,” Beatriz pointed out. “Why wasn’t she allowed to help Benjamin?”
“If you love a Soria, their darkness is yours, too,” Antonia said.
“Hm,” said Beatriz.
They all peered at the pile of gray wood inside the shed for several long minutes. Beatriz was thinking it was fortunate that she had never opened the door before, as she would have thoughtlessly burned her relatives as firewood. Antonia was thinking that she was even angrier now than she was the day she lost her best friend. Joaquin was thinking that Daniel was only alive because of José’s quick and selfless bravery … and now Daniel had been felled by the precise same thing that had claimed his parents. Judith was thinking about how she had never even considered that Eduardo was just as endangered now by the Soria taboo, by virtue of his love for her. Francisco was thinking about how long it had taken them to decide on a name for his dead sister’s baby once they had removed him from the scene of the tale.
They were all thinking about what Daniel’s darkness might look like.
“If only we could train your dogs to take food to him,” Beatriz said.
“Without killing him directly afterward,” Joaquin murmured.
Antonia snarled.
“In any case, that settles the issue of the birthday party for now,” Francisco said finally. “I won’t celebrate until Daniel returns to us.”
Pete worked.
He began to work as soon as he tossed his bags into the room he was to share with Padre Jiminez, and he worked without pause all day long. He worked for six hours straight, pausing only to suddenly divert his path when he caught sight of Beatriz Soria, waiting until the coast was clear and his heart was safe before he began work again.
“New boy!” called Robbie, one of the twins, who could not remember his name. “Come talk to us.”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
“Pete?” Marisita called as he walked through Bicho Raro, his arms full of boxes. “Will you be stopping for almuerzo?”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
“You’re making me tired to look at you,” said mossy Theldon from his seat on the porch. “Take a load off.”
Pete said, “I can’t. I’m working.”
Antonia had set Pete on tasks that required little skill but much sweat. Pete found himself digging out collapsed irrigation ditches and picking individual nails out of the driveway, sweeping unoccupied (and sometimes occupied) wasp nests out of eaves, and plucking malevolently red Colorado potato beetle larvae off the tomato and potato crops.
The last of these tasks nearly broke him. As relentless as Pete was, the Colorado potato beetle was more so. As fast as he could destroy them, they made more of themselves. He did not know that the Colorado potato beetle, also known as the ten-lined potato beetle, was also currently persecuting the East Germans. Plagues of potato beetles were blamed upon American planes. Communist propaganda shouted that the Sechsbeiniger Botschafter del Wall Street (six-legged ambassadors of Wall Street) would eat them out of house and home and right into capitalism. East German schoolchildren were sent into the fields to pluck larvae, just as Pete was doing, and they, too, learned to hate the small, fleshy, scarlet creatures.