I did as He said. At sixteen I married Pedrito González and we settled down for the rest of our lives. Or so it seemed for eighteen years.

My boy grew into a man, my girl long and slender like the blossoming mimosa at the end of the drive. Pedrito took on a certain gravity became an important man around here. And I, Patria Mercedes? Like every woman of her house, I disappeared into what I loved, coming up now and then for air. I mean, an overnight trip by myself to a girlfriend‘s, a special set to my hair, and maybe a yellow dress.

I had built my house on solid rock, all right.

Or I should say, Pedrito’s great-grandfather had built it over a hundred years back, and then each first son had lived in it and passed it on. But you have to understand, Patria Mercedes was in those timbers, in the nimble workings of the transoms, she was in those wide boards on the floor and in that creaky door opening on its old hinges.

Minerva lived in a little nothing house—or so Mate had described it to me—in that godforsaken town of Monte Cristi. It’s a wonder her babies didn’t both die of infections.

Mate and Leandro had already had two different addresses in a year of marriage. Renters, they called themselves, the city word for the squatters we pity here in the country.

Dede and Jaimito had lost everything so many times, it was hard to keep up with their frequent moves. Now they were in our old house in Ojo de Agua, and Mama had built her up-to-date cottage on the main road from Santiago, complete with aluminum jalousies and an indoor toilet she called “the sanitary.”

And me, Patria Mercedes, like I said, I had settled down for life in my rocksure house. And eighteen years passed by.

New Year’s Eve we gathered in Mamá’s new house in Conuco, the sisters and all the husbands, a first since Maria Teresa’s wedding a year ago this February. We stayed late, celebrating being together more than the new year, I think. There wasn’t much talk of politics so as not to worry Mamá. Also Jaimito had grown adamant—he didn’t want Dedé involved in whatever trouble Minerva and the others were cooking up.

Still, all of us were praying for a change this new year. Things had gotten so bad, even people like me who didn’t want anything to do with politics were thinking about it all the time. See, now I had my grown son to nail me to the hard facts. I assigned him to God’s care and asked San José and the Virgencita to mind him as well, but still I worried all the time.

It was after one in the morning when Pedrito and Noris and I started back to our house. Nelson had stayed at Mamá‘s, saying he was going to bring in the new year talking to his uncles. As we rode home, I saw the lamp at the window of the young widow’s house, and I knew he’d be bringing it in with more than talk. Rumor had it my “boy” was sowing wild oats along with his father’s cacao crop. I had asked Pedrito to talk to our son, but you know how the men are. He was proud of Nelson for proving himself a macho before he was even a grown man.

We hadn’t been asleep but a couple of hours when that bedroom was blazing with light. My first thought was of angels descending, their burning brands flashing, their fierce wings stirring up things. But as I came fully awake, I saw it was a car aiming its lights at our bedroom window. iAy, Dios mío! I shook Pedrito awake and flew out of that bed terrified that something had happened to my boy. I know what Pedrito says, that I’m overly protective. But ever since I lost my baby thirteen years ago, my deepest fear is that I will have to put another one in the ground. This time I don’t think I could go on.

It was Minerva and Manolo and Leandro and, yes, Nelson, all very drunk. They could hardly contain their excitement till they got inside. They had just tuned into Radio Rebelde to hear the New Year’s news, and they had been greeted by the triumphant announcement. Batista had fled! Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Ernesto they call Che had entered Havana and liberated the country. ¡Cuba libre! ¡Cuba libre!

Minerva started singing our anthem and the others joined in. I kept hushing them, and they finally sobered up when I reminded them we were not libre yet. The roosters were already crowing as they left to spread the news to all their friends in the area. Nelson wanted to go along, but I put my foot down. Next year when he was eighteen, he could stay out till the cacao needed picking. But this year—he was too dead tired to argue. I walked him to his room and, as if he were still a child, undressed him and tucked him in.

But Pedrito was still wanting to celebrate. And you know him, strong emotion takes him and he knows only one way to express it if I’m close by.

He entered me, and it took some weeks before I realized. But I’d like to think, since my cycles stopped in January, that Raúl Ernesto began his long campaign into flesh the first day of this hopeful new year.

I went on like this another month, and I missed again.

“Pedrito,” I said, “I’m pregnant, I’m sure of it.”

“How can that be, Mami?” He teased. “We’re ready for our grandchildren.” He indicated our grown son and daughter, playing dominoes, listening in on our secrets.

Noris leapt out of her chair. “Ay, Mami, is it true, really?” Fourteen going on fifteen, she had finally outgrown her dolls and was two, three, who knows, ten years away from her own babies. (The way young women wait these days, look at Minerva!) But Noris was like me, she wanted to give herself to things, and at her tender age, she could only imagine giving herself to children.

“Why don’t you have one of your own?” Nelson teased, poking his sister where she’d already told him a thousand times it hurt to be poked. “Maybe Marcelino wants to be a daddy?”

“Stop that!” Noris whined.

“Stop that,” Nelson mimicked her. Sometimes, I wondered how my son could be with a woman and then come home and nag his sister so miserably.

Pedrito scowled. “That Marcelino gets near you and he won’t know what hit him.”

“Help me think of a name,” I suggested, using the baby to distract them from a silly argument.

I looked down at my belly as if Our Lord might write out the name on my cotton housedress. And suddenly it was as if His tongue spoke in my mouth. On my own, I would never have thought of naming my son after revolutionaries. “Ernesto,” I said, “I’m going to name him Raúl Emesto.”

“Ernesto?” Noris said, making a face.

But Nelson’s face lit up in a way that made me nervous. “We’ll call him Che for short.”

“Che!” Noris said, holding her nose. “What kind of a name is that?”

I had tried to shelter him, Lord knows. To no avail. He was always tagging along behind his Tío Manolo and his new Tio Leandro, men of the world who had gone to the university and who impressed him more than his country father. Any chance he got, he was off to the capital “to see Tía Mate and the baby Jacqueline,” or to Monte Cristi “to visit Tia Minerva and Minou and the new baby Manolito.” Yes, a whole new crop of Mirabals was coming up. That was another possible explanation for my pregnancy—suggestion. After all, whenever we were together for a while under the same roof, our cycles became as synchronized as our watches.

I knew my boy. He wanted to be a man outside the bedroom where he had already proven himself. That widow woman could have started a school in there, the way I understood it. But I didn’t resent her, no. She delivered my son gently into manhood from his boyhood, something a mother cannot possibly do. , And so I thought of a way for Nelson to be in the capital, under supervision so he wouldn’t be running wild with women or his rebel uncles. I talked to Padre de Jesus López, our new priest, who promised to talk to Padre Fabré about letting Nelson enroll in Santo Tomás de Aquino in the capital. It was a seminary, but there was no obligation to the priesthood.

At first Nelson didn’t want to go to a school of pre-priest sissies. But a couple of weeks before the start of classes during the heavy plantings in the yucca field, he had a change of heart. Better to abstain from the gardens of delectable delights than to be stuck planting them, dawn to dusk.

Besides, his weekends would be his own to spend at his aunt Maria Teresa and his uncle Leandro’s house.

Besides, some of those pre-priests were no sissies at all. They talked about pudenda and. cunnilingus as if they were speaking of the body and blood of Christ. How do I know? Nelson came home once and asked me what the words meant, assuming they were liturgical. Young people don’t bother with their Latin these days.

Next step was to convince his father, and that was the hardest of all. Pedrito didn’t see why we should be spending money sending Nelson to a boarding school in the capital. “His best school is right here beside me learning about his patrimonio.”

I didn’t have the heart to suggest that our son might not want to be a farmer like his father. Recently, Nelson had begun talking to me about going to the university. “It’s just for a year, Papi,” I pleaded. “It’ll be a good finish to his education.”

“Besides,” I added, “right now, the seminary is the best place for him.” It was true. Johnny Abbes and his SIM were dragging young men off the streets, and farms, and from offices, like Herod the boy babies in all of Judea. The church, refusing as it did to get involved in temporal matters, remained the only sanctuary.

Pedrito folded his arms and walked off into his cacao fields. I could see him pacing among the trees. That’s where he always went to think, the way I have to get down on my knees to know my own mind. He came back, put his big hands on either side of the door frame his great-grandfather had built over a hundred years ago, and he nodded. “He can go.” And then with a gesture indicating the green fields over his shoulders that his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father had farmed before him, he added, “If the land can’t keep him, I can’t make him stay.”

So with the help of good Padre de Jesus, Nelson entered Santo Tomás de Aquino last September. Out of harm’s way, I thought.

And for a while, you might have said that he was as I was—safe in God’s love.

I sat him down and reminded him what the church fathers were teaching us. God in his wisdom would take care of things. “Promise me you’ll stay out of trouble!” I was on my knees before him. I could not bear the thought of losing my son. “Por Dios,” I pleaded.

“Ay, Mamá, don’t worry!” he said, looking down at me, embarrassed. But he gave me a lukewarm promise he’d stay out of trouble.

I did worry all the time. I went to Padre de Jesús for advice. He was straight out of seminary and brimming with new ideas. He would have a young way of explaining things I could bring home to my son.

“Padre,” I said, kissing the crucifix he offered me, “I feel lost. I don’t know what the Lord requires of us in these hard times.” I dared not get too critical. We all knew there were priests around who would report you to the SIM if you spoke against the regime.

Still, I hadn’t given up on the church as Minerva and Maria Teresa had. Ever since I’d had my vision of the Virgencita, I knew spirit was imminent, and that the churches were just glass houses, or way stations on our road through this rocky life. But His house was a mansion as big as the sky, and all you had to do was pelt His window with a pebble-cry, Open up! Help me, God! and He would let you inside.

Padre de Jesus did not intone vague pronouncements and send me home with a pat on the head. Not at all. He stood and I could see the travail of his spirit in how he took off his glasses and kept polishing them as if they’d never come clean. “Patria, my child,” he said, which made me smile for he couldn’t have been but five, six years older than my Nelson. “We must wait. We must pray.” He faced me. “I, too, am lost so that I can’t show you the way.”

I was shaking like when a breeze blows through the sacristy and the votive candles flicker. This priest’s frankness had touched me more than a decree. We knelt there in that hot little rectory, and we prayed to the Virgencita. She had clung to Jesus until He told her straight out, Mamá, I have to be about My Father’s business. And she had to let him go, but it broke her heart because, though He was God, He was still her boy.

I knew they were up to something big, Minerva and Manolo and Leandro. I wasn’t sure about Maria Teresa, caught up as she was with her new baby Jacqueline. But those others, I could feel it in the tension and silence that would come over them when I walked in on one of their conversations. I didn’t ask questions. I suppose I was afraid of what I would find out.

But then Minerva came to me with her six-month-old Manolito and asked me to keep him. “Keep him?” I, who treasured my children more than my own life, couldn’t believe my sister would leave her son for anything. “Where are you going?” I asked, alarmed.

That tense silence came upon her, and then haltingly, as if wanting to be sure with each step that she was not saying more than she had to, she said, “I’m going to be on the road a lot. And I’ll be coming down here for some meetings every week.”

“But Minerva, your own child—” I began and then I saw it did hurt her to make this sacrifice she was convinced she needed to make. So I added, “I’d love to take care of my little godson here!” Manolito smiled and came readily to my arms. How delicious to hold him like my own baby five months ahead of time. That’s when I told Minerva I was pregnant with a boy.

She was so glad for me. So glad! Then she got curious. “Since when are you a fortune teller to know it’s a son?”

I shrugged. But I gave her the best reason I could. “I’ve got a name all picked out for a boy.”

“What are you going to name him?”

I knew then I had brought it up as a way of letting her know I was with her—if only in spirit. “Raúl Emesto,” I said, watching her face.

She looked at me a long moment, and very simply, she said, “I know you want to stay out of trouble, and I respect that.”

“If there should come a time—” I said.

“There will,” she said.

Every time they came, Leandro drove up from the capital, and this curly-headed man Nino and his pretty wife Dulce came over from San Francisco. They met up with Cuca and Fafa and one named Marien—though sometimes they called each other different, make-believe names.

They needed a place to meet, and so I offered them our land. There was a clearing between the cacao and the plátano groves. Pedrito had put some cane chairs and hammocks under a thatched roof, a place for workers to rest or take a siesta during the hot part of the day. Minerva and her group would sit out there for hours, talking. Once or twice when it was raining, I’d invite them to come into the house, but they’d refuse, knowing it was just politeness on my part. And I was thankful to them for sparing me. If the SIM came, Pedrito and I could always swear we knew nothing about these meetings.

It was a problem when Nelson was home from school. He’d go out there, eager to take part in whatever his uncles were plotting. In deference to me, I’m sure, they kept him at a distance. Not in any way that could hurt his young man’s pride, but in a comradely way. They’d send him for some more ice or cigarrillos or please Nelson, hombre, couldn’t he take the car down to Jimmy’s and see what was up with that radiator since they had to make it back to the capital this very night. Once, they sent the poor boy all the way to Santiago to pick up batteries for the short wave.

When he came back from delivering them, I asked him, “What’s going on out there, Nelson?” I knew, but I wanted to hear what he knew.

“Nothing, Mamá,” he said.

Then the secret he was keeping became more than he could contain. When it was almost June, he finally confided in me. “They’re expecting it this coming month,” he whispered. “The invasion, yes!” he added when he saw the excited look on my face.

But you know why that look was there? I’ll tell you. My Nelson would be in school in the capital until the very end of June, out of harm’s way. He had to study hard if he expected to graduate in time to attend the university in the fall. We had our own little plot cooked up to present to his father—the day before university classes started.

I explained that I’d be traveling with Padre de Jesús and the Salcedo group, and this retreat was important for renewing my faith. We were going up to Constanza. That mountain air would be good for my baby. And I’d heard the road was fairly good. I didn’t add from whom (Minerva) or why. Troops were patrolling up and down the cordillera just in case any would-be guerrillas inspired by the Cubans were thinking of hiding there.

“Ay, Virgencita, you know what you do with my girls,” was all Mama said. She had become resigned to her daughters’ odd and willful ways. And yes, she would keep Manolito. Noris, too.

I had wanted my girl to go along on the retreat, but it was no use. Marcelino’s sister had invited Noris to her quinceañera party and there was too much to do between now and then.

“But it’s two weeks away, mi amor.” I didn’t add that we had already designed and cut her dress, bought her little satin pumps, and tried out how she would wear her hair.

“¡Ay, Mami!” she wailed. “Por favor.” Why couldn’t I understand that getting ready for them was what made parties fun?

How different she was from me at that age! For one thing, Mamá raised us the old-fashioned way where we couldn’t go to dances until after our quinceañeras. But I was raising my girl modem where she wasn’t kept cooped up, learning blind obedience. Still, I wished she’d use her wings to soar up closer to the divine hem of our Blessed Virgin instead of to flutter towards things not worthy of her attention.

I kept praying for her, but it was like Pedrito having to let go of his son. If the Virgencita didn’t think it was time for my girl to magnify the Lord, I certainly couldn’t talk her into a retreat with “old ladies” and a bunch of bad-breath priests. (Lord forgive her!)

We were a group of about thirty “mature” women—that’s how Padre de Jesus described us, bless his heart. We had started meeting a few months back to discuss issues that came up in the gospel and to do Christ’s work in the bohios and barrios. Now we even had a name, Christian Cultural Group, and we had spread all over the Cibao area. Four priests provided spiritual guidance, Padre de ]esús among them. This retreat was our first, and Brother Daniel had managed to get the Maryknolls to let us use their motherhouse up in the mountains. The theme was the exploration of the meaning of Mary in our lives. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe Padre de Jesús or Brother Daniel or one of the others would have an answer for me now about what was required during these troubled times.

“Ha! Your church will keep mum till kingdom come,” Minerva was always challenging me. Religion was now my belonging she didn’t want any part of. “Not a peep to help the downtrodden.”

What could I say when I, too, was intent on keeping my own flesh safe. I’d written a letter to Padre Fabré down at Santo Tomás.

But Nelson found out about the letter from his little blabbermouth aunt in the capital. It was unfair, I wasn’t letting him become a man. But I stood firm. I’d rather have him stay alive, a boy forever, than be a man dead in the ground.

Maria Teresa was also hurt. One Saturday morning, she had come to take Nelson out for the weekend, and the director hadn’t allowed her. “Don’t you trust me?” she confronted me. Now I had two angry souls to appease with half-truths.

“It isn’t you, Mate,” I began. I didn’t add that I knew from Nelson’s remarks that Leandro and Manolo and Minerva were involved in a serious plot.

“Don’t worry, I can take care of your baby. I’ve got lots of experience now” Mate was holding pretty Jacqueline, nuzzling her baby’s head with little kisses. “Besides, there’s nothing happening in the capital Nelson could get into, believe me. The Jaragua’s empty. The Olympia has been showing the same movie for a month. No one goes out anymore.” And then I heard her say it: “Nothing to celebrate yet.” I looked her in the eye and said, “You too, Mate?”

She hugged her baby girl close and looked so brave. I could hardly believe this was our tenderhearted little Mate whom Noris resembled so much. “Yes, I’m with them.” But then, the hard look faded and she was my baby sister again, afraid of el cuco and noodles in her soup. “If anything should happen, promise me you’ll take care of Jacqueline.”

It seemed I was going to raise all my sisters’ babies! “You know I would. She’s one of mine, aren’t you, amorcito?” I took that baby in my arms and hugged her close. Jacqueline looked at me with that wonder the little ones have who still think of the world as a big, safe playroom inside their mother’s womb.

By mid-June, things had quieted down. It looked as if the invasion was not going to come after all. The state of emergency was called off, and so we went ahead with plans for our retreat.

When we got to Constanza, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had grown up in the greenest, most beautiful valley on the island. But you get used to close-by beauty, and Constanza was different, like the picture of a faraway place on a puzzle you hurry to put together. I kept trying to fit it inside me and I couldn’t. Purple mountains reaching towards angelfeather clouds; a falcon soaring in a calm blue sky; God combing His sunshine fingers through green pastures straight out of the Psalms.

The retreat house was a little ways out of the village down a path through flower-dotted hillsides. Campesinos came out of their huts to watch us pass. A pretty people, golden-skinned, light-eyed, they seemed wary, as if somebody not so kind had come down the road ahead of us. We greeted them and Padre de Jesus explained that we were on a retreat, so if they had any special requests they wanted us to remember in our prayers, please let us know. They stared at us silently and shook their heads, no.

We were each assigned a narrow cell with a cot, a crucifix on the wall, and a fount of holy water at the door. It could have been a palace, I rejoiced so in it all. Our meetings and meals were held in a big airy room with a large picture window. I sat with my back to the dazzling view so as not to be distracted from His Word by His Creation. Dawn and dusk, noon and night we gathered in the chapel and said a rosary along with the little nuns.

My old yearning to be in the religious life stirred. I felt myself rising, light-headed with transcendence, an overflowing fountain. Thank the Lord I had that child in my womb to remind me of the life I had already chosen.

The fourteenth of June: how can I ever forget that day!

We were all in that big room having our midafternoon cursillo. Brother Daniel was talking of the last moment we knew of in Mary’s human life, her Assumption. Our Blessed Mother had been taken up into heaven, body and soul. What did we think of that? We went around the room, everyone declaring it was an honor for a mere mortal. When it came my turn, I said it was only fair. If our souls could go to eternal glory, our hardworking motherbodies surely deserved more. I patted my belly and thought of the little ghost of a being folded in the soft tissues of my womb. My son, my Raulito. I ached for him even more without Manolito in my arms to stanch the yearning.

Next thing I knew, His Kingdom was coming down upon the very roof of that retreat house. Explosion after explosion ripped the air. The house shook to its very foundation. Windows shattered, smoke poured in with a horrible smell. Brother Daniel was shouting, “Fall to the ground, ladies, cover your heads with your folding chairs!” Of course, all I was thinking of was protecting my unborn child. I scrambled to a little niche where a statue of the Virgencita was standing, and begging her pardon, I knocked her and her pedestal over. The crash was drowned out by the thunderous blast outside. Then I crawled in and held my folding chair in front of me, closing the opening, and praying all the while that the Lord not test me with the loss of my child.

The shelling happened in a flash, but it seemed the chaos went on for hours. I heard moans, but when I lowered my chair, I could make out nothing in the smoke-filled room. My eyes stung, and I realized that in my fear I had wet my pants. Lord, I prayed, Lord God, let this cup pass. When the air finally cleared, I saw a mess of glass and rubble on the floor, bodies huddled everywhere. A wall had tumbled down and the tile floor was all torn up. Beyond, through the jagged hole where the window had been, the closest mountainside was a raging inferno.

Finally, there was an eerie silence, interrupted only by the sound of far-off gunfire and the nearby trickle of plaster from the ceiling. Padre de Jesus gathered us in the most sheltered comer, where we assessed our damages. The injuries turned out to look worse than they were, just minor cuts from flying glass, thank the Lord. We ripped up our slips and bandaged the worst. Then for spiritual comfort, Brother Daniel led us through a rosary. When we heard gunfire coming close again, we kept right on praying.

There were shouts, and four, then five, men in camouflage were running across the grounds towards us. Behind them, the same campesinos we’d seen on our walk and a dozen or more guardias were advancing, armed with machetes and machine guns. The hunted men crouched and careened this way and that as they headed towards the cover of the motherhouse.

They made it to the outdoor deck. I could see them clearly, their faces bloodied and frantic. One of them was badly wounded and hobbling, another had a kerchief tied around his forehead. A third was shouting to two others to stay down, and one of them obeyed and threw himself on the deck.

But the other must not have heard him for he kept on running towards us. I looked in his face. He was a boy no older than Noris. Maybe that’s why I cried out, “Get down, son! Get down!” His eyes found mine just as the shot hit him square in the back. I saw the wonder on his young face as the life drained out of him, and I thought, Oh my God, he’s one of mine!

My stillborn of thirteen years ago. My murdered son of a few hours ago.

I cried all the way down that mountain. I looked out the spider-webbed window of that bullet-riddled car at brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, one and all, my human family. Then I tried looking up at our Father, but I couldn’t see His Face for the dark smoke hiding the tops of those mountains.

I made myself pray so I wouldn’t cry. But my prayers sounded more like I was trying to pick a fight.

No, Patria Mercedes had come back to tell them all, tell them all.

But I couldn’t speak. I was in shock, you could say, I was mourning that dead boy.

It was all over the papers the next day. Forty-nine men and boys martyred in those mountains. We had seen the only four saved, and for what? Tortures I don’t want to think of.

Six days later, we knew when the second wave of the invasion force hit on the beaches north of here. We saw the planes flying low, looking like hornets. And afterwards we read in the papers how one boat with ninety-three on board had been bombed before it could land; the other with sixty-seven landed, but the army with the help of local campesinos hunted those poor martyrs down.

I didn’t keep count how many had died. I kept my hand on my stomach, concentrating on what was alive.

They picked right, all right. I was ready, big as I looked, heavy as I was.

The minute I walked into that room, I knew something had changed in the way the Lord Jesus would be among us. No longer was there the liturgical chatter of how San Zenón had made the day sunny for a granddaughter’s wedding or how Santa Lucia had cured the cow’s pinkeye. That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

The priests had decided they could not wait forever for the pope and the archbishop to come around. The time was now, for the Lord had said, I come with the sword as well as the plow to set at liberty them that are bruised.

I couldn’t believe this was the same Padre de Jesus talking who several months back hadn’t known his faith from his fear! But then again, here in that little room was the same Patria Mercedes, who wouldn’t have hurt a butterfly, shouting, “Amen to the revolution.”

And so we were born in the spirit of the vengeful Lord, no longer His lambs. Our new name was Acción Clero-Cultural. Please note, action as the first word! And what was our mission in ACC?

Only to organize a powerful national underground.

We would spread the word of God among our brainwashed campesinos who had hunted down their own liberators. After all, Fidel would never have won over in Cuba if the campesinos there hadn’t fed him, hidden him, lied for him, joined him.

The word was, we were all brothers and sisters in Christ. You could not chase after a boy with your machete and enter the kingdom of heaven. You could not pull that trigger and think there was even a needle hole for you to pass through into eternity.

I could go on.

Padre de Jesus walked me out when the meeting was over. He looked a little apologetic when he glanced at my belly, but he went on and asked me. Did I know of any one who would like to join our organization ? No doubt he had heard about the meetings Manolo and Minerva were conducting on our property.

I nodded. I knew of at least six, I said, counting Pedrito and Nelson among my two sisters and their husbands. And in a month’s time, seven. Yes, once my son was born, I’d be out there recruiting every campesino in Ojo de Agua, Conuco, Salcedo to the army of Our Lord.

“Patria Mercedes, how you’ve changed!”

I shook my head back at him, and I didn’t have to say it. He was laughing, putting on his glasses after wiping them on his cassock, his vision—like mine—clean at last.

“Hola, Patria,” the men called. “That’s quite a macho you got there!” When they picked him out of my arms to look him over, my boy howled. He was a crier from the start, that one. “What you call that bawling little he-man?”

“Raúl Emesto,” Minerva said meaningfully, bragging on her nephew.

I nodded and smiled at their compliments. Nelson looked away when I looked at him. He was probably thinking I had come out there to get him. “Come on inside now,” I said. “I have something to talk to you about.”

He thought I meant him, but I was looking around at the whole group. “Come on.”

Minerva waved away my invitation. “Don’t you worry about us.”

I said, “Come on in, now. I mean it this time.”

They looked from one to the other, and something in my voice let them know I was with them. They picked up their drinks, and I could have been leading the children out of bondage, the way they all followed me obediently into my house.

The same month we met in Padre de Jesús’ rectory, a new law was passed. If you were caught harboring any enemies of the regime even if you yourself were not involved in their schemes, you would be jailed, and everything you owned would become the property of the government.

His land! Worked by his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. His house like an ark with beams where he could see his great-grandfather’s mark.

We had not fought like this in our eighteen years of marriage. In that bedroom at night, that man, who had never raised his voice to me, unleashed the fury of three ancestors at me. “You crazy, mujer, to invite them into the house! You want your sons to lose their patrimony, is that what you want?”

As if he were answering his father, Raúl Ernesto began to cry. I gave him the breast and long after he was done, I cradled him there to help coax out the tenderness in his father. To remind him there was some for him as well.

But he didn’t want me. It was the first time Pedrito González had turned me away. That hurt deep in the heart’s tender parts. I was going through that empty period after the baby is born when you ache to take it back into yourself. And the only solace then is the father coming back in, making himself at home.

“If you had seen what I saw on that mountain,” I pleaded with him, weeping all over again for that dead boy. “Ay, Pedrito, how can we be true Christians and turn our back on our brothers and sisters—”

“Your first responsibility is to your children, your husband, and your home!” His face was so clouded with anger, I couldn’t see the man I loved. “I’ve already let them use this place for months. Let them meet over on your own Mirabal farm from now on!”

It’s true, our family farm would have been a logical alternative, but Dedé and Jaimito were living on it now. I had already approached Dedé, and she had come back without Jaimito’s permission.

“But you believe in what they’re doing, Pedrito,” I reminded him. And then I don’t know what got into me. I wanted to hurt the man in front of me. I wanted to break this smaller version of who he was and release the big-hearted man I’d married. And so I told him. His first born did not want this patrimony. Nelson had already put in his application for the university in the fall. And what was more, I knew for a fact he was already in the underground along with his uncles. “It’s him you’ll be throwing to the SIM!”

Pedrito wiped his face with his big hands and bowed his head, resigned. “God help him, God help him,” he kept mumbling till my heart felt wrong hurting him as I’d done.

But later in the dark, he sought me out with his old hunger. He didn’t have to say it, that he was with us now. 1 knew it in the reckless way he took me with him down into the place where his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had met their women before him.

It was here with the doors locked and the front windows shuttered that the ACC merged with the group Manolo and Minerva had started over a year ago. There were about forty of us. A central committee was elected. At first, they tried to enlist Minerva, but she deferred to Manolo, who became our president.

It was in this very parlor where Noris had begun receiving callers that the group gave themselves a name. How they fought over that one like schoolgirls arguing over who will hold whose hand! Some wanted a fancy name that would touch all the high spots, Revolutionary Party of Dominican Integrity. Then Minerva moved swiftly through the clutter to the heart of the matter. She suggested we name ourselves after the men who had died in the mountains.

For the second time in her quiet life, Patria Mercedes (alias Mariposa #3) shouted out, “Amen to the revolution!”

So it was between these walls hung with portraits, including El Jefe‘s, that the Fourteenth of June Movement was founded. Our mission was to effect an internal revolution rather than wait for an outside rescue.

It was on this very Formica table where you could still see the egg stains from my family’s breakfast that the bombs were made. Nipples, they were called. It was the shock of my life to see Maria Teresa, so handy with her needlepoint, using tweezers and little scissors to twist the fine wires together.

It was on this very bamboo couch where my Nelson had, as a tiny boy, played with the wooden gun his grandfather had made him that he sat now with Padre de Jesús, counting the ammunition for the .32 automatics we would receive in a few weeks at a prearranged spot. The one named Ilander we called Eagle had arranged the air drop with the exiles.

It was on that very rocker where I had nursed every one of my babies that I saw my sister Minerva looking through the viewfinder of an M-1 carbine—a month ago I would not have known it from a shotgun. When I followed her aim out the window, I cried out, startling her, “No, no, not the mimosa!”

I had sent Noris away to her grandmother’s in Conuco. I told her we were making repairs to her room. And in a way, we were, for it was in her bedroom that we assembled the boxes. It was among her crocheted pink poodles and little perfume bottles and snapshots of her quinceañera party that we stashed our arsenal of assorted pistols and revolvers, three .38 caliber Smith and Wesson pistols, six .30 caliber M-1 carbines, four M-3 machine guns, and a .45 Thompson stolen from a guardia. I know, Mate and I drew up the list ourselves in the pretty script we’d been taught by the nuns for writing out Bible passages.

It was in those old and bountiful fields that Pedrito and his son and a few of the other men buried the boxes once we got them loaded and sealed. In among the cacao roots Pedrito lowered the terrible cargo. But he seemed at peace now with the risks he was taking. This was a kind of farming, too, he told me later, one that he could share with his Nelson. From those seeds of destruction, we would soon—very soon—harvest our freedom.

It was on that very coffee table on which Noris had once knocked a tooth out tussling with her brother that the plans for the attack were drawn. On January 21st, the day of the Virgin of Highest Grace, the different groups would gather here to arm themselves and receive their last-minute instructions.

It was down this very hall and in and out of my children’s bedrooms and past the parlor and through the back galería to the yard that I walked those last days of 1959, worrying if I had done the right thing exposing my family to the SIM. I kept seeing that motherhouse up in the mountains, its roof caving in, its walls crumbling like a foolish house built on sand. I could, by a trick of terror, turn that vision into my own house tumbling down.

As I walked, I built it back up with prayer, hung the door on its creaky hinges, nailed the floorboards down, fitted the transoms. “God help us,” I kept saying. “God help us.” Raulito was almost always in my arms, crying something terrible, as I paced, trying to settle him, and myself, down.