The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

Perhaps the problem, he thought, was that a person needed faith to be able to see things that did not exist, to imagine a world not yet made. In addition to so many other things, Francisco had lost his faith a long time

Everything in the Canal Zone—the commissaries, the train cars, the dining halls, the housing, the hospitals, the post offices, and the pay—was divided on the basis of silver and gold. Gold meant the Americans, and silver meant them.

John, she knew, had watched from the sidelines with envy these last few years as other men had brought yellow fever under control in Panama. And he was right—she was familiar with the studies and the reports.

Marian worked as a stenographer at the lumber company for three years, drafting bills of lading and purchase orders, before she caught a glimpse of John Oswald, who was the youngest of the three Oswald boys as well as the outcast, the only one of them rumored to have the ambition to make his own way.

John, whose career aspirations lay beyond the lumber company, wanted distance from his family and their influence.

Many afternoons, she read outside in the sun. Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology, Principles of Scientific Botany by Schleiden, Mendel’s Experiments on Plant Hybridization.

John had begun work at a small laboratory, researching the theory that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading disease. It was a discovery that had been made seventeen years earlier by a Cuban doctor named Carlos Juan Finlay and then put to the test by an American doctor named Walter Reed.

How could this frail little insect, no heavier than a cobweb, propagate diseases that could take down men? The skepticism only made John persevere. “It is indisputable fact,” he told her once.

John often worked into the night, and Marian’s evenings were as solitary as her days. She had entered marriage with few expectations. She had been grateful, mostly, that anyone had wanted to marry her at all. But she had grown up an only child, without many friends, and she’d hoped that marriage, at the very least, would be an end to loneliness. It was not. Even when John was home, his mind was still on his work. He was perpetually distracted, lost in thought, physically present sitti...

John had turned and looked at her with such gratitude that for an instant she mistook it for love.

The town of Empire was at the highest point of the canal route, roughly midway between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. It was perched on a ledge that overlooked the immense Culebra Cut, the nine-mile-long segment of the canal impeded by the mountains, which had to be dug through.

Three million years earlier, Marian had read, underwater volcanoes had erupted and sent great reservoirs of sediment up through the surface, connecting two continents and forming the bridge of land upon which they all stood. Now, evidently, the task was to divide it again, to open the land from sea to sea. What nature had accomplished, men wanted to undo.

By morning, the bleeding was done. The baby was gone. It was all different after that. They could try again, John said, but Marian said no, and she did not unbutton her dressing gown again, not for that reason or any other. Their nearest intimacy after that would be lying side by side in bed, and neither of them would reach for the other—never again. John did his work, and they were cordial with each other, and Marian looked at him sometimes and felt an exquisite pain. She wanted to love him, and she wanted so badly for him to love her, but neither of them, it seemed, could understand how.

After school, he kept fighting in the streets. He was foam-mouthed angry, and for the longest, stupidest time he didn’t know why. Perfectly obvious, of course. The absence of his father was a force, a ripping gale of wind that nearly tore him in two.

“Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”

Beyond schooling, just like her mother before her, Lucille aimed to teach Millicent and Ada certain practical things: how to sew a hem or mend a tear, how to cook barley in the pot, how to hammer a nail and file a board, how to reckon money, how to chop wood. At home, Lucille put the girls to work in the small garden she had planted out back, teaching them how to harvest cassava, pumpkin, arrowroot, eddo, and yam. She taught them about herbs and plants, what they could do with things like milkweed and pigeon pea and crab’s-eye vine. And all the while she sewed clothes that earned them enough to get by.

Lucille walked closer and read. I am going to Panama to earn money for us. I will send word when I arrive.

The heat in Panama, it seemed to Ada, was equal to the heat in Barbados, but the air was more humid, so thick that if she had reached out and closed her hand, she would not have been at all surprised to be able to grab ahold of it like a clump of mud. But even in the sluggish air, the street was bustling just the same as in Bridgetown. Carriages led by horses clapped down the road, and carts led by mules in turn led by men rattled and clanked. Women walked about carrying baskets on their backs or their heads or in the crooks of their arms. Well-attired people stood on street corners and talked. Every building looked clean and brand new.

She disliked doing the wash, but she would not be choosy, she told herself. If work as a washerwoman was the only work she could get, she would take it.

Mrs. Wimple had shaken her head and said that Ada’s mother was not “saltwater true,” a charge Ada had often heard levied against her mother, who did not always behave or dress or live in the way other people expected her to. It was a charge that boiled down to one thing, Ada thought, and it was her favorite thing about her mother: She was independent of mind.

“You need a doctor just now.” And Ada had watched her mother nod once, as though Mrs. Callender had simply said out loud something she already knew. It was not until a week later that a doctor finally arrived at the house. He was a white doctor from town who charged 10 shillings for an in-house examination in addition to the cost for mileage to get there. He was smartly dressed in a suit and necktie, and he strode into the bedroom with an air of authority and briskly did his exam.

Ada heard a strange, muffled sound. Her mother had not come back inside after seeing the doctor out to his carriage, and now, Ada realized, standing in the garden behind the house where she thought no one could hear her, her mother was crying. In all Ada’s sixteen years, she had never heard her mother cry, but she was sure, as she knelt there, that that was what the sound was. It was the very next day that Ada packed her things and boarded the ship.

For as long as people had inhabited this land, they had fished from its waters, its rivers and seas. The very name Panamá meant “abundance of fish.”

But it was not courage, he knew. Something else drew him to her, like a wave to the shore. It was, he had started to believe, akin to divine fate. He almost laughed at himself for thinking it. Divinity! Fate! Ideas he would have scoffed at in the past. But Esme had changed something elemental in him. Because of her, he believed in things that he had not believed in before.

As a physician, Pierre sincerely hoped it could be done. What he had seen up close of malaria was truly appalling. Fever and chills so violent that at times the legs of patients’ beds vibrated audibly against the hospital floor. The only known remedy for malaria was quinine, a liquid so bitter that the nurses mixed it with whiskey to mask the taste, but the cover of alcohol made it only slightly more palatable.

Death came for them in the end. It was part of the profession, of course, to be acquainted with death and disease, but before coming to Panama, Pierre had never seen quite so much. Men crushed by rocks; men maimed by the swinging arms of steam shovels; men whose legs had been severed from their torsos by barreling trains; men burned by a live wire; men who had fallen off cliffs; men who had fallen off bridges; men who had fallen off cranes.

Sixty years earlier, Pierre knew, when the Americans built a railroad across Panama, there were so many deaths among the laborers—men from China and the Indies—that the railroad company, without space to bury them all, pickled the bodies and shipped the cadavers to medical schools to use for research. These days, however, the bodies were placed in plain pine coffins and loaded on trains. If the bodies inside the coffins were white, the trains took them to the grassy cemetery at Ancón. If they were colored, they were taken instead to a place called Monkey Hill.

For twenty years she had given Horacio everything—and now what? He had gone off and married. He did not need her anymore. Which was the point of parenthood, Valentina told herself. To raise children who were capable of going off on their own. Although it was a perverse point, as she saw it, since raising children to go off on their own meant that the children inevitably . . . went off on their own.

Anyway, Howard with his dotish lisp was hardly worth thinking about. He was a shiver in the wind. If anything, he reminded Millicent what her mother had told Ada and her a dozen times or more: A woman should have no need for a man. Millicent could sit by the sea and hold her own hand, she supposed. It was why she had two.

Others, like Edward Wainwright, were showy, pompasetting about, coming to church in a new three-piece suit and pulling a shiny gold pocket watch out of his vest pocket every few minutes so everyone could see just how gold and shiny it was. He was always flipping the timepiece open, making sure it caught the light of the sun, and announcing the time even though no one had asked. “I see it quarter past nine!” “It now upright six!” A few kind people would sometimes respond, “That it is, Mr. Wainwright,” or, “We thank you for the report,” while others, like her mother, just rolled their eyes. The pocket watch was accompanied by a new collection of hats, one for every Sunday of the month, each with a feather that annoyed her mother so much that she called him Edward Peacock when he could not hear.

“What sort of job you think she got?” Millicent asked. “Knowing your sister, could be anything.”

“Do you think he misses us?” “Who?” The ache in Millicent’s chest was so deep at that moment that she could not tell whether it was from the illness or something else. She was, these days, always short of breath, but she took the deepest inhalation she could and said, “Our father.”

It was more upsetting to think that her father was so near and yet never came round than to think that he was absent altogether. And what sank Millicent’s heart even deeper was that he had cast them out. That is what she believed: Their father did not want them, so he had told them to leave.

With pride, her mother recounted how she and a few other people had built the house here, how they had worked all night till it was done. The point of the story, as Millicent understood, was to show Millicent and Ada how capable their mother was, to impart the lesson that a determined woman could do such things, build a house from the ground up, and in so doing build her own life.

as a general rule neither of them talked to the other more than was necessary, a habit that had been their practice for the last few years. Theirs was a contractual marriage, arranged by two sets of parents who believed, incorrectly it turned out, that they were suitable for each other. They had not had children together and had little to bind them beyond documents.

The consequences of collapse were felt all over the island. It was near impossible to find work. Every day one saw pitiable beggars in the streets. It was no wonder, given the circumstances, that everyone was leaving for Panama.

Henry lay with the babe against his bare chest. He had had a good life, he always thought, filled with the richest, most wonderful things, but those nights in that small two-room house brought him more happiness than anything that had come before or anything that would come after.

Around eleven o’clock, Henry climbed out of bed. Gertrude pretended to stir. She moaned and rolled over. The effect was as she intended. Henry, startled, got back into bed. She had stopped him from leaving. It was as simple as that. She had done it not out of love, per se—Gertrude had never loved Henry, she knew—but out of possessiveness. He was hers. Before God, that was what they had once declared.

It was not until several weeks later when Gertrude heard that one of their tenants, a Negro woman who had birthed two girls on their property, was moving off the estate grounds, and furthermore that Henry himself had permitted her to take her house with her when she went, that her husband effectively told Gertrude everything she needed to know.

It was easier, Francisco had learned, to live in a world of delusion, which was after all not so different from hope, than to stand face-to-face with the truth.

AFTER ESME HAD disappeared, Francisco had stopped fishing for a few years. He had no choice. He could not take a baby out on the boat all day long, nor could he leave a baby at home. Instead Francisco bought a knock-kneed goat and milked it and poured the milk into a cheesecloth that had been filled with rice and let Omar suck the milk out.

Why, since the time of Christopher Columbus people had wanted to create a canal across the isthmus, and no one yet had gotten it done. What made the North Americans think they could do it now? Audacity, Joaquín told them, and Francisco knew his friend well enough to know that he meant it as praise.

To be independent and to be sovereign were two different things. Panamá, detaching itself from Colombia, had merely done an about-face and attached itself to the United States instead.

Many days, Francisco woke up in the morning with every intention of saying something to his son. Sometimes he thought he might say, “I am sorry. Let us stop this,” and they could move on.

From experience she had learned that when a man is stupefied with joy as Francisco was in those days, there are only two possible outcomes—marriage or heartbreak. As it happened, Francisco would get both.

Doña Ruiz watched the baby grow into a boy and then into a young man. He had a very different temperament from his father. He was shy and quiet but open to things, pliable, flexible, eager to learn.

Francisco understood what it meant—the canal would be completed, they would find a way through—but more than being frightened, Francisco was awed to find that his imagination had returned.

Not for the first time, Ada thought how much she enjoyed talking to him. At home, she relied so much on the company of her mother and sister, the three of them wound together in their own cocoon, that she never quite made space for anyone else. Omar had shown her how nice it could be, talking and laughing with someone new. He came across as mild most of the time, but there was a rumbling beneath the surface that she recognized.

She stopped and stared. What a wonderful house it seemed to her now, with its slatted shutters and porch. But it was more than that. Ada had always believed that her mother, in rebuilding the house only three miles from where it had once been, had kept her world piteously small, but maybe what mattered, Ada thought as she gazed at it now, was not how big or how small her mother’s world was, but that her mother had managed to keep it at all. It must have been no trifling thing to carve out a space of her own, to protect it and hold within it the people she loved.

At the sound of the creaking door, she saw both her mother and Millicent look up. They were sitting together at the hearth, sewing. Millicent jumped to her feet first and ran to hug Ada tight, holding her for so long that Ada thought Millicent might never let go. From over Millicent’s shoulder, Ada saw her mother stand up as she blinked back tears. She said, “Thank the Lord you come back.” She walked closer and circled her arms around them both, and as the three of them stood in the light of the house, it was exactly where Ada wanted to be.