Hard Red Spring Read Online Free Page B

began reading the Fasbinders’ guest list from the paper, names easy to pronounce because they were American. Father held his head in his hands, hopeless, like these influential guests were being introduced and promptly led away from him, one by one.
    â€œMaybe that was what we’ve been hearing, you think, Robert? We should file a noise complaint. That party has been shaking our whole mountain!”
    Father grinned, spreading his fingers to look at Mother.
    â€œAnd the ash from their cigarettes!” she added with a whoop. “Blowing over here, making a mess!”
    It became a happy breakfast, with Mother and Father teasing one another, joking about the newspaper, which failed to make any mention of the volcano.
    â€œHere, Evie, you can color the front page of this one. That’s all it’s good for.”
    So there was no news on the lava. In town, there had just been talk of the ash. Judas said so much of it piled on Xela’s rooftops that several had cracked under the weight. With that news, Father climbed up onto the church roof to sweep it clear. “I can see the party from here!” Father called down, hanging his arms over the big cross. “I can see the President with his big cigar! They’re all eating bananas, over there! Dancing girls, naked dancing girls, eating bananas!”
    â€œRobert!”
    There was no more discussion of the delayed harvest, of the ash, which fell more heavily, Evie noticed, by the hour.
    â€”
    The band began playing that afternoon—the drums so loud that they could be heard all the way up at the farm. At first Evie thought that it was the volcano. But this noise felt different. It did not shake the ground. It thumped in Evie’s chest like another heart. Mother, standing on the porch, sweeping yet another layer of ash off into the yard, paused, cocked an ear in the direction of the city.
    â€œIt’s music,” she said to no one in particular, although Evie was the onlyone around. Father had left with Judas, gone to climb the ridge again, hoping for a better view. Ixna worked in the kitchen, whitening their good shoes with the useless newspaper.
    Evie held her breath and listened, finding the regularity of the beat.
    â€œIt’s ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” Mother said, with a peculiar smile on her face. She set the broom against the house and told Evie to run and get her parasol. They were going into town.
    They took Ixna with them because they needed a translator. In preparation for the move to Guatemala, Mother had taken six months’ instruction in Spanish, only to find that it was useless in most everyday interactions outside the capital. Out here, where the Indians lived, people spoke Ixil, or Quiché, or Mam, or any one of a dozen Indian languages. The only people who spoke Spanish in Xela were the wealthy Guatemalans they did not associate with, the government officials, who preferred to speak English anyway, and other foreigners (mostly German coffee planters), who’d made the same mistake Mother had. Their Spanish, Mother declared, was unintelligible.
    Mother held her black mourning parasol like a shield as she walked through the gray flurries of ash. In her other hand, a lantern swayed, revealing frightening glimpses of smoked-out jungle. Today, Evie did not fear the volcano as much as she feared walking to town without Father or Judas. Every foreigner in Guatemala had been warned (by government officials, by the newspaper, by each other) of the dangers awaiting lone white female travelers in the highlands: a familiar refrain from Mother’s weekly teas with Mrs. Fasbinder. Men were killed, but the horrors awaiting women were much more unimaginable to Evie, because she had no idea what the words meant.
Taken, molested, disgraced.
All Evie understood was that there were worse things awaiting women on the road than merely being killed.
    â€œThey throw girls in the volcano, you