Katherine Anne Porter Read Free

home that night, but went away to war and María Rosa went with him. Juan had a rifle at his shoulder and two pistols at his belt. María Rosa wore a rifle also, slung on her back along with the blankets and the cooking pots. They joined the nearest detachment of troops in the field, and María Rosa marched ahead with the battalion of experienced women of war, which went over the crops like locusts, gathering provisions for the army. She cooked with them, and ate with them what was left after the men had eaten. After battles she went out on the field with the others to salvage clothing and ammunition and guns from the slain before they should begin to swell in the heat. Sometimes they would encounter the women from the other army, and a second battle as grim as the first would take place.
    There was no particular scandal in the village. People shrugged, grinned. It was far better that they were gone. The neighbors went around saying that María Rosa was safer in the army than she would be in the same village with María Concepción.
    María Concepción did not weep when Juan left her; and when the baby was born, and died within four days, she did not weep. “She is mere stone,” said old Lupe, who went over and offered charms to preserve the baby.
    “May you rot in hell with your charms,” said María Con-cepción.
    If she had not gone so regularly to church, lighting candles before the saints, kneeling with her arms spread in the form ofa cross for hours at a time, and receiving holy communion every month, there might have been talk of her being devil-possessed, her face was so changed and blind-looking. But this was impossible when, after all, she had been married by the priest. It must be, they reasoned, that she was being punished for her pride. They decided that this was the true cause for everything: she was altogether too proud. So they pitied her.
    During the year that Juan and María Rosa were gone María Concepción sold her fowls and looked after her garden and her sack of hard coins grew. Lupe had no talent for bees, and the hives did not prosper. She began to blame María Rosa for running away, and to praise María Concepción for her behavior. She used to see María Concepción at the market or at church, and she always said that no one could tell by looking at her now that she was a woman who had such a heavy grief.
    “I pray God everything goes well with María Concepción from this out,” she would say, “for she has had her share of trouble.”
    When some idle person repeated this to the deserted woman, she went down to Lupe’s house and stood within the clearing and called to the medicine woman, who sat in her doorway stirring a mess of her infallible cure for sores: “Keep your prayers to yourself, Lupe, or offer them for others who need them. I will ask God for what I want in this world.”
    “And will you get it, you think, María Concepción?” asked Lupe, tittering cruelly and smelling the wooden mixing spoon. “Did you pray for what you have now?”
    Afterward everyone noticed that María Concepción went oftener to church, and even seldomer to the village to talk with the other women as they sat along the curb, nursing their babies and eating fruit, at the end of the market-day.
    “She is wrong to take us for enemies,” said old Soledad, who was a thinker and a peace-maker. “All women have these troubles. Well, we should suffer together.”
    But María Concepción lived alone. She was gaunt, as if something were gnawing her away inside, her eyes were sunken, and she would not speak a word if she could help it. She worked harder than ever, and her butchering knife was scarcely ever out of her hand.
    *
    Juan and María Rosa, disgusted with military life, came home one day without asking permission of anyone. The field of war had unrolled itself, a long scroll of vexations, until the end had frayed out within twenty miles of Juan’s village. So he and María Rosa, now lean as a wolf,