Free The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass Page A

he'd regarded Celestino--or so he'd said--like another child.
    Soon after fleeing to New York, Celestino had telephoned his family. His father had refused to speak with him until he came home to account for his rash behavior. He let a month go by before phoning again. His father held firm. And so it remained, each time he called. Then, just one year after Dr. Lartigue's death, his mother told him that the dig had shut down--almost without warning. For one season, other men had carried on Dr. Lartigue's work, a younger professor in charge. But the following year, as Celestino's father and his crew had prepared for the start of the season, only a few archaeologists came. They had come to close the dig and take their stored belongings away. Their grant had ended, and without Dr. Lartigue's leadership, it would be hard to renew. They assured Raul that another group of archaeologists, from a museum in Antigua, would soon take over the project. There were no grand speeches to the villagers this time.
    Six months later, Celestino got a short letter from one of his sisters. They were moving. A band of thugs had come to the village; there was a panic, fear that the raids had started again, even with the new government in power. People fled, or they hid. It turned out the thugs were looters looking to scavenge the site. Loyal to the end, Raul and two other men tried to defend the locked storeroom. They were beaten. The thieves were angry that the shed contained nothing but tools, books, and papers. They claimed they would return to find out where the valuable things were hidden.
    Raul told his wife and daughters that what he had to do was go directly to Antigua and find the museum, tell the archaeologists there about the looters, demand to know when they would come to continue the work of Dr. Lartigue. When the women had not heard from Raul for four months, they decided to travel to the city and find him.
    Of course, they never found him. They found a museum that displayed relics like the ones Dr. Lartigue had been digging up near the village, but no one at the museum had heard of Raul--or of plans to continue the dig. The women were lucky to find jobs at a tourist hotel. What was the point of traveling back to their village? The trip they'd taken to reach the city had been risky enough.
    That day in Cambridge, as Celestino walked along Brattle Street, past the regal many-windowed houses of the richest, most successful people, with no idea where he was headed or what he intended to do, he noticed two separate groups of Latino men working on the lawns. He listened to them speaking with one another. They were Mexicans, Indians from a region just a few hours from where he'd grown up. He knew their way of speaking from back in New York.
    This, he thought, I can do: work on the gardens of the rich and make them grow. I will not have to keep a baseball bat on the floor beside my feet. I will not have to scrub inside the rims of toilets. Dirt, digging in the ground, he did not mind. He knew dirt well. So, it occurred to him, had his father when he had labored for those university men and believed the work would last forever, even change the fortunes of his children. Like father, like son: dreamers in the dirt.
    This was how, last spring, he had found his way to Loud, joining a group of men who waited on a city corner every day to be picked up and taken out to the country for work.
    He knew that the gardening would end with the first snow--he'd been through two years of this work in the city, under less successful men--and he had to wonder if winter would, once again, throw him back with all the others, sent out to shovel and blow away the snow. A season of misery. But Celestino, who had seen his first gray hair that morning in the small mirror over his sink, was determined that by the time the last leaves fell, things would be very different. He wasn't sure how, not yet, but they would be. They simply had to be.

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    From: Trudy Barnes,