Free Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass

leave late, as usual, so I almost missed it. I had to run the last hundred meters, with the conductor waving from the step and the heads in the open windows leaning out to watch me, to see if the conductor would wait or not. I managed to pull myself up into the vestibule just as the train started to move. You know these trains, señora, only two second-class cars, one freight car, and the engine. I looked in both cars, and the wooden seats, each one intended for three people, seemed to be taken, and many of them by more than three passengers. So I was prepared to stand, no harm done, I thought, being young and strong, when the conductor showed me to the one place that was left, a seat on the aisle.”
    Now Trinidad went on without pausing. “Across from me was a family of seven, all eating tacos from the mother’s string bag, except the baby, who was at her breast. In front of me near the window was an old man who fell asleep, and beside him an old woman who became ill from the motion and continuously coughed into her rebozo. Directly in front of me was a woman with a boy of three, who stood looking at me over the back of the seat. The woman bought him an orange crush and then another to keep him happy. When he started to whimper she spanked him, and the two orange crushes that had gone in and through him by then burst out below and ran in little streams onto my shoes from the seat where he stood.
    “Next to me was a very quiet, very ugly girl. She had pale eyes with no lashes, and a long face. Perhaps she was quiet because she was ugly. She was with a man who sat next to the window. His mouth was twisted by a scar that slanted from his cheekbone to his chin. He was drunk and angry. I think he was trying to make the girl say yes, to admit something, but she only shook her head without speaking. Once he shook her shoulder hard enough to make her teeth rattle, and once he slapped her cheek so hard she cried. Twice the conductor came to warn this man, saying that he would put him off at the next stop if the disturbance continued. Then the man would look out the open window with his lips moving, one hand clenched to his knee and the other in his pocket, and we would have a moment’s peace.
    “But he always returned to the argument, angrier than before, until at last, when there were only ten minutes of the trip left, the girl spoke, still not looking at him. ‘Then kill me,’ she said. And when he heard these words, out of his pocket came his hand, holding a knife that looked as if it lived there. He switched it open and stabbed her in the chest, in the neck, in whatever part of her he encountered, while she struggled and screamed, until the conductor came running and, with the help of three young men who were passengers, disarmed this man and took him away, his arms bound to his sides with rope.”
    Now Trinidad looked at Sara. “And the plain girl, with her pale eyes wide open and blood pouring from her mouth like coffee from the pot, lay dead with her head on my shoulder and her blood running down to my knees, soaking through my shawl and my apron and my dress and my garments beneath. Soaking through my skin until it reached my unborn child and he swam in her blood.
    “So great was my fright, señora, that I could not utter a word and no tears came. Two men carried off the girl, and when we arrived in Obregón a few minutes later, there stood my husband, fixed to the platform, thinking that the people from the train who helped me walk to him were bringing him an expiring wife.
    “And so it was that my first son, Florencio, whom we call Lencho, was born five weeks before full term, and we feared he might bear some mark of the shock he and I had suffered. But, señora, he was a perfect baby, unmarked, unscarred. Only later we began to notice that when I dropped the cover of a pan, Lencho did not start and when I called to him by name he did not turn. So after a few months we realized that Lencho was deaf and a little