Fresh Dirt From The Grave

First published by Charco Press 2023

Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh

EH10 4BF

Copyright © Giovanna Rivero, 2020

First published in Spanish as Tierra fresca de su tumba (La Paz: El Cuervo)

English translation copyright © Isabel Adey, 2023

The rights of Giovanna Rivero to be identified as the author of this work and of Isabel Adey to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781913867515

e-book: 9781913867522

www.charcopress.com

Edited by Fionn Petch

Cover designed by Pablo Font

Typeset by Laura Jones

Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh

Giovanna Rivero

FRESH DIRT FROM THE GRAVE

Translated by

Isabel Adey

For Pablo, my younger brother,

who consumed his own shadow.

Contents

FRESH DIRT FROM THE GRAVE

BLESSED ARE THE MEEK

FISH, TURTLE, VULTURE

IT LOOKS HUMAN WHEN IT RAINS

SOCORRO

DONKEY SKIN

KINDRED DEER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TRANSLATOR’S REFERENCES

BLESSED ARE THE MEEK

I

‘Was it warm, this sticky liquid you found down there?’

‘Warm?’

‘Yes, warm. Sticky. Was it like an egg white? The white of an egg, Elise, when you’ve just cracked the shell…’

‘I think so, yes. I don’t know. I thought it was monthly blood.’

‘And yet it wasn’t. It was the seed of a man.’

‘Yes, Pastor Jacob. I’m telling the truth.’

‘The truth is always greater than the Lord’s servants. Especially if the servant has been led astray, if she has failed to take the care He demands. We are going to ascertain the truth. In the first testimony we recorded, you said you were in a strange stupor, as though you had surrendered your will to the Devil.’

‘I would never surrender my will to the Devil, Pastor Jacob.’

‘Don’t say never, Elise. We are weak. You are very weak, it seems.’

‘I was asleep, Pastor Jacob.’

‘We are taking that into consideration.’

‘…Will my father be attending the meeting of the ministers?’

‘No. Brother Walter Lowen cannot participate in the meeting. The ordeal and the disgrace are keeping him very busy as it is. Go now, Elise, tell your mother to bring the sheets from that night, we need to inspect them. Don’t let anyone touch them. Everything is impure now, do you understand?’

‘Yes, Brother Jacob.’

II

Her father watches her for a few seconds and then glances away, ashamed, Elise thinks, or angry. Or both. He promptly returns to the business that brought them here, to this small town on the fringes of life. This cluster of houses in no way resembles the colony. They are just scattered constructions stubbornly trying to claim a patch of that dirty sky, empty of birds. Two or three ugly red-brick buildings with pokey windows dominate this expanse of mud. Elise looks at her shoes and thinks she should probably take them off, be more careful with them in case her feet keep growing. She’s fifteen, true, but she’s heard that her grandmother’s feet didn’t stop growing until she had her first son at age eighteen. Elise has a lot in common with Grandma Anna: those almost transparent eyes and that rounded forehead, as though thinking up solutions or words of praise. When Elise sings, too, the veins at her temples flow blue like subterranean streams. That’s singing with love, her father says. Or at least he used to say. Until the last storm, when the world came crashing down on her.

Elise understands smatterings of the Spanish her father uses for his dealings with the Indian. Tractor, luna and five hundred pesos are the words Elise recognises. Although she isn’t so sure about that last one. It could also be five hundred quesos. Last year when the June storm burst the riverbanks, flooded the irrigation channels and mercilessly swamped the soya plantations, her father Walter Lowen pulled through by scaling up his dairy business. Graciously she pleaded with him to take her along to the market in Santa Cruz to help sell the cheeses. Over five hundred perfectly set rectangles, made with the best milk, brushed by the scant rays of sunlight that filtered through the high windows in the dairy, where the women were tasked with turning out the cheeses from the moulds. That day she’d understood very little, almost nothing, of her father’s conversations with the customers. Some of them stared at her brazenly, perhaps trying to come up with some absurd genetic explanation for those unsettling albino eyes, then whispered to each other or smiled right at her. Was she a beautiful girl, Elise? Not exactly, but she could thank the Lord for her defined facial structure, the way her chin nestled up to her bottom lip, slightly fuller than the top – a trait that meant she’d have to be more unassuming, protect herself better, Grandma Anna herself once said.

Protect herself. From the storm that clawed its way through the colony, destroying everything in its wake by sheer force of water and electricity. Protect herself, indeed, from the ways of the Lord! But may Walter Lowen never hear her blaspheme like that.

Truth be told, though, her father probably used the Lord’s name in vain too. Elise had walked in on him crying furious tears in the storehouses as he set fire to the blood-stained sheets, which had finally been returned after days of deliberations in the meetings of the elders and ministers. And crying when, in the middle of the night, like lamp thieves stealing the light from other homes, they loaded their most prized possessions onto the buggy: the rusty casket with their savings; the bundles of clothes; the quilt with intricate, satin-stitched tulips so plump they asked to be touched again and again; the albums and cassettes containing the images and voices of their dead. It shouldn’t have been her family who had to leave. But they were the ones who left. ‘Don’t look back,’ Walter Lowen told them, and then she rested her head, covered with a simple scarf, on her mother’s soft shoulder and focused on the clattering of the buggy’s metal wheels as they registered every pothole, every single hollow hacked into the roads by the storm. Her head against her mother’s chest scented with whey, onion and vanilla, the desire stronger than her young spirit to leave everything behind and not look back, just as Walter Lowen demanded, repeating the same refrain, ‘Don’t look back,’ over and over, until his words ceased to make sense because another town with its modern temptations had started to loom on what could only be the horizon.

III

‘While the Devil was in you, Elise, did he say anything? Did he whisper things in your ear? The Devil whispers. His voice mustn’t have sounded very commanding, I suppose? The Devil seduces, you see.’

‘The Devil seduced me, Pastor Jacob? I thought it was Brother Joshua Klassen. I’m pretty sure those were his eyes and that was his birthmark by his mouth, like a grain of rice… I thought…’

‘So many details, Elise! I notice you say you’re pretty sure. But the Devil plays these tricks in the imagination when the imagination rebels, and it also makes us submit to observance, to the fear of God. Your parents, Elise, what were they doing? We’ve heard that Brother Walter Lowen was trying to sign some contracts with a supermarket over in Santa Cruz. If he had shared those tasks out among the community, he would have been able to fulfil all his duties. His hunger for possessions has corroded his self-control. Your parents have neglected your upbringing, Elise. They’ve failed to maintain order under their own roof; they, too, are responsible for this episode of evil. You are a victim of the world’s temptations, and that is why the ministers and I have pleaded with the Lord for mercy. Mercy for you, young Elise, and mercy for your parents and siblings, who are so very ashamed.’

‘What will happen to us, Pastor Jacob?’

‘This situation calls for much withdrawal, Elise. It is important to look inwards, to matters of the home. For a while you will not work on the farm or in your father’s dairy. You can spend your time perfecting other virtues instead. The council is going to do some business with the people of Urubichá. They weave colourful hammocks, but they have no talent for flowers or depictions of nature, which always make the best decorations. You can weave or embroider pieces like those, Elise, humble and harmonious patterns that will please the Lord. All from the comfort of the cabin. You’re going to have to look after that fruit you’re carrying now, aren’t you?’

‘This… fruit?’

‘It’s yours, Elise. If the Lord has allowed its heart to beat in your young womb, you must give thanks. It is the fruit of your body.’

‘But… Isn’t it the fruit of the Devil, Pastor Jacob? Isn’t it the fruit of that seduction, like you say?’

IV

The plot of land they moved to is on the edge of that small town. They didn’t have to build cabins on arrival, because the Welkel clan had deserted before them and gave them shelter while they built their own homes. The right hand helping the left. No one has forbidden them to say, ‘We’ve deserted’; there is no need to lie. Elise still misses the brilliant light of Manitoba, but the glare of this astonished sun won’t let them hide a single secret either. This isn’t just another exodus, it’s an escape. They’re starting a new story. One day they’ll say: Mateo Welkel assisted Walter Lowen with the process of securing credit and purchasing a tractor. That was the genesis of it all. Before the storm, after the storm. And then the tractor.

Three months ago, the families set up a joint venture, hiring out machinery and their own labour for the construction works cropping up around the area. It’s amazing how that tractor with its fantastic rubber tyres can lift such vast amounts of material. There’s something affecting about the insistent force of the tractor dragging the debris back and forth, like an animal. It’s a real Goliath! When the contracts are concluded and the animal is sleeping it off, the fifteen Welkel children, excluding Leah, rush up onto that high throne of commands and levers. Leah watches them from the ground and bids her brothers farewell, waving wildly and giving them infinite blessings, as if at any moment the tractor might take flight to some part of the universe where only men go.

‘Over here, Leah,’ Elise calls out to her.

Elise decides to let Leah weave her auburn hair into a pretty tangle of braids.

‘Where did you get this hair, Elise?’ Leah asks again and again, as if Elise hadn’t already told her countless times that she’s a modern-day mirror image of Grandma Anna, and that women in the Canadian clan are born with locks of hair so red it’s almost purple. But patience is required with Leah Welkel, because she’s always had problems keeping track of all the things that can happen in a day. She’s just one of those people, like the eldest and seventh-born of the Welkel brood, who are also incapable of amassing reality in their heads. God intended them poor and small in every way. That was the price you paid for staying in the same colony for so long, generation after generation. Eventually you marry your cousin, accept that part of your harvest will be spoiled, give up on perfection.

Leah has been possessed in her sleep too, and she’s told Elise that the same thing also happened to two of her brothers. Their father ordered them not to talk about it, to cleanse the wound with silence.

‘But I don’t know how to do as I’m told,’ Leah said to Elise, her watery sky-blue eyes full of guilt.

Elise feels no more pity for Leah’s innocent stupidity than she does for herself. Self-pity is one of the ways that pride, the greatest of all sins, slips through the cracks in the soul, Pastor Jacob said in one of his sermons, but Elise just can’t help it. There must be compassion for her somewhere. Pastor Jacob hasn’t been possessed in his sleep. Pastor Jacob isn’t going to be alone for the rest of his life, this long life, because his wife left him with a long line of descendants. Elise, on the other hand, will have to look after her parents until the end, especially since the Lord has reaped the crop of her mother’s belly and she, Elise, is the last Lowen from the Manitoba colony.

‘You won’t have a husband, that is true,’ Pastor Jacob told her during her first testimony, squeezing her shoulders, ‘but you will have a child, a fruit of your own.’

Poor Elise felt her little nipples twitch when Pastor Jacob sentenced her to that punishment. She watched the birds, saw only pride and beauty in their soaring flight. She looked at the cows, their lazy, merciful eyes, and she felt better. If it weren’t a sin, if everything weren’t a sin, she would have sat down to moo right there in the middle of the farm. Yes, because although she did not know it right then, of all the creatures, it was the cows Elise was