Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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“Well, that’s not true!” snapped Ben, affronted. “I was working all night.”
“At what? You sound like a night watchman!”
“I was working on my system.”
“Your system? What—in Atlantic City?”
“Of course, at several casinos. I was tabulating the numbers and working on averages.”
“Ben, that’s not a job—that’s a waste of your life.”
“Hey, you sound like Dad now. When I hit the big score, everyone will be sorry they doubted me. But, any rate, Jo, Danny’s right. You’ve got the touch! Whatever you decide will be fine with me too. I’m used to being up at all hours—and I can sleep on the plane. Just give me some lead time, okay? Love ya—bye.”
Jo sat staring at the phone. She was alone with her thoughts. And they weren’t charitable. It reminded her of their childhood. All her siblings had been so excited when their aunt suggested they adopt an orphan apiece—it had lasted about a week with Ben and Daniela. Ruby had persisted for several months, but when her orphan stopped writing, she stopped too. Only Jo had gone doggedly on year in and year out until recently when Jean-Jacques, her orphan and now her pen pal too, reached age eighteen and went on his own. He’d sent her a nice farewell and thank-you letter. She shook her head, but she was beyond being disappointed. She knew her siblings.
Her day lined up in front of her. Best thing to do first was to shower and get dressed, then have breakfast. Next, she had to call Pastors Ron and Toni and let them know about her emergency. Nilka could actually teach her and her Dad’s classes together, with a little guidance, and both Toni and Ron would be there to help her out. They could also handle the high school equivalency part and, as always, make sure the rooms were open and the volunteers all had someone to work with. But helping out with the Sunday services was another story. Not only did they have their own hands full on Sunday, but neither of them had enough Spanish to do a last-minute sermon or a comprehensible job on the rest of the parts. The two other Latino pastors in presbytery were overwhelmed, so no help there for Sunday morning. She could ask Mercedes Del Rio, who ran the Spanish mission in town.
Mercedes was just over on Second Street. Jo had worked with her establishing the very same English as a Second Language classes she was now herself teaching when Jo was still Richfield’s Hispanic community organizer. In fact, she and Mercedes had been overlapping classmates in seminary. Mercedes was younger than she was, but actually had gone to seminary before she did and had been in her final year during Jo’s first year at the school, so they knew each other from both contexts. Jo admired Mercedes’s effectiveness with her people and her example had been one of the reasons Jo herself followed the call to minister when it became undeniably clear that God was calling her. But Mercedes had so much going on herself it was hard to imagine she could cover for Jo as well, and, Jo was well aware, having attended one Sunday herself at the mission, Mercedes’s own Sunday services were probably still being held at the same time. In fact, being Pentecostal, for Mercedes and her people, church was pretty much an all-day affair. So, the best bet was to call CUME up in Boston and see if the school could send her one of its Spanish seminarians who did not have a regular commitment—that would work. Next, of course, was get on the net and see if she could locate flights for four now. Dad hadn’t said anything about that, but how could he object? Uncle Sol loved them all—and they loved him, each in her or his own way. Grief evokes different coping responses in different people. She had read about that in her pastoral counseling texts, but she had also seen it so often when she was a social worker. Her sisters and brother might be focusing in on the inheritance issue because the pain of the loss was too hard to deal with so soon. She was sure that was it.
But, before she tackled any of these tasks, Jo realized, she needed to pray—to throw herself on the mercy of God. She needed the everlasting arms of comfort, because she was in deep pain herself. She needed God’s clarity to help her make the right decisions for what was best for the people whose spiritual growth she was nurturing, and she needed to submit her plans to God so that they would come to fruition, as she had recently read again in Proverbs. And, finally, she dreaded all the delay, expense, and red tape it took to arrange four last minute flights to a surprisingly popular destination. She needed God’s help to get them all on a nonstop flight.
God’s grace, as always, was with her. Two days later they were winging their way between Newark Liberty Airport and JFK International, scattered all over the plane, perhaps, but everyone accounted for, and then off to the Dominican Republic.
The flight, though nonstop, was four and a half hours. Jo had seen the movie and so gave that a miss. Instead, she worked her way forward from her last row seat across from the bathrooms to see how they were each getting on, only to discover all three of her siblings were fast asleep in their different rows. It was a lot like when they were kids, she thought. Jo, as the oldest, and still the most responsible, ended up as their little auxiliary mother, interpreter, and advocate. Maybe, she reflected, that’s why she ended up a social worker. Ben, she figured, probably had the biggest sleep debt of all, no doubt followed by Danny, who was a party girl. Ruby, the athlete, kept early hours, but assistant coaching had a lot of physical demands and though Ruby, as all of them, was still in her twenties—Jo, of course, being about to exit—they all had a good reason to settle in on this red-eye flight. Jo, as mother hen, seeing all her chicks asleep, went back to her own seat and nestled in. All four of them had middle seats and, since most of the rest of the passengers were sacked out as well, it was a peaceful flight.
Thus it was a rested Archer family that woke up when the passengers applauded as the plane taxied down the runway at the international airport of Santo Domingo.
Over the years, Jo had seen a number of changes at this airport. As a very young child, she remembered it mainly as a large empty room where they would wait what seemed to her to be endlessly for their suitcases—not all of which would arrive—even though their little planeload would be the only one going through customs. Everything would be searched and her parents were asked many questions. Those days were long gone. Now the airport was shiny and new. A long corridor filled with wall-sized posters of beautiful palm- and water-filled promises of fun in the sun greeted them. The line for a tourist card for their stepmother, who was Puerto Rican, and now for Ruby, Danny, and Ben, who had all been born in Richfield, had grown longer and longer. Only Jo was Dominican-born and, therefore, holding dual citizenship, since her birth mother was Puerto Rican. Jo alone did not need to buy a tourist card. In addition, several carousels now handled the baggage and one had only to check which of these had theirs. The baggage of two planes each was now doubling up on the carousels, and porters came up and politely asked if their help was needed, having mainly ceased simply grabbing one’s suitcases right out of one’s hands, tossing them on a cart, and peremptorily hauling them off to customs. Aduana, as customs was called, had also been streamlined, and, although baggage claim checks were these days being carefully noted, most North American flight passengers were now waved automatically through.
So, pushing their carts with one suitcase each of no more than fifty pounds (a cruel hardship for Daniela) and two carry-ons, they exited the inner sanctum of passport control and walked the gauntlet of friends and relatives gathered on either side of a long exit ramp—their faces being eagerly searched by hopeful welcomers and then dismissed. Jo and her family made it to the door, but no one stepped up to them and said anything like, “Baiguanex has sent me for you.”
“What now?” asked Ben.
“Now, I guess, we rent a car,” decided Jo, though hesitating as she carefully surveyed the throng of mainly taxi drivers offering to take them anywhere they wanted to go. Neither her father nor her mother and certainly not an emissary had come for them. Jo was disturbed. Her father normally did what he said he would.
“I’ll drive,” said Ruby definitively.
In Puerto Rico, the land of their mother’s and stepmother’s births, a traffic jam is called el tapón, the bottleneck. The idea is that all the content of a big bottle is attempting to squeeze out a tiny opening all at once. That is a perfect description of what was happening when, with Ruby at the wheel, they raced from