Free In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Álvarez Page A

hoped that this consolation prize would settle Minerva happily in Ojo de Agua. But every day she was on the road, to Santiago, to San Francisco, to Moca—on store business, she said. Dedé, left alone to mind the store, complained there were more deliveries than sales being made.
    Maria Teresa was home from school for the long holiday weekend in honor of El Jefe’s birthday, so she came along. We joked about all the commemorative marches and boring speeches we had been spared by leaving this particular weekend. We could talk freely in the car, since there was no one to overhear us.
    “Poor Papá,” María Teresa said. “He’ll have to go all by himself.” “Papá will take very good care of himself, I’m sure, ” Mama said in a sharp voice. We all looked at her surprised. I began to wonder why Mama had suggested this pilgrimage. Mama, who hated even day trips. Something big was troubling her enough to stir her far from home.
    It took us a while to get to Higüey, since first we hit traffic going to the capital for the festivities, and then we had to head east on poor roads crossing a dry flat plain. I couldn’t remember sitting for five hours straight in years. But the time flew by. We sang, told stories, reminisced about this or that.
    At one point, Minerva suggested we just take off into the mountains like the gavilleros had done. We had heard the stories of the bands of campesinos who took to the hills to fight the Yanqui invaders. Mamá had been a young woman, eighteen, when the Yanquis came.
    “Did you sympathize with the gavilleros, Mamá?” Minerva wanted to know, looking in the rearview mirror and narrowly missing a man in an ox cart going too slow. We all cried out. “He was at least a kilometer away,” Minerva defended herself.
    “Since when is ten feet a kilometer!” Dedé snapped. She had a knack for numbers, that one, even in an emergency.
    Mamá intervened before those two could get into one of their fights. “Of course, I sympathized with our patriots. But what could we do against the Yanquis? They killed anyone who stood in their way. They burned our house down and called it a mistake. They weren’t in their own country so they didn’t have to answer to anyone.”
    “The way we Dominicans do, eh?” Minerva said with sarcasm in her voice.
    Mama was silent a moment, but we could all sense she had more to say. At last, she added, “You’re right, they’re all scoundrels—Dominicans, Yanquis, every last man.”
    “Not every one,” I said. After all, I had to defend my husband.
    María Teresa agreed, “Not Papá.”
    Mama looked out the window a moment, her face struggling with some emotion. Then, she said quietly, “Yes, your father, too.”
    We protested, but Mamá would not budge—either in taking back or going further with what she had said.
    Now I knew why she had come on her pilgrimage.

    The town was jammed with eager pilgrims, and though we tried at all the decent boarding houses, we could not find a single room. Finally we called on some distant relations, who scolded us profusely for not having come to them in the first place. By then, it was dark, but from their windows as we ate the late supper they fixed us, we could see the lights of the chapel where pilgrims were keeping their vigil. I felt a tremor of excitement, as if I were about to meet an estranged friend with whom I longed to be reconciled.
    Later, lying in the bed we were sharing, I joined Mamá in her goodnight rosary to the Virgencita. Her voice in the dark was full of need. At the first Sorrowful Mystery, she said Papá’s full name, as if she were calling him to account, not praying for him.
    “What’s wrong, Mamá?” I whispered to her when we were finished.
    She would not tell me, but when I guessed, “Another woman?” she sighed, and then said, “Ay, Virgencita, why have you forsaken me?”
    I closed my eyes and felt her question join mine. Yes, why? I thought. Out loud, I said, “I’m here,