Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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round ovals with dots that were obviously meant to be eye sockets with straight or curved lines for mouths. Some looked to them like they were “smiley faces.” To the right, at the edge of the cliff, stick figures and more faces on a huge rounded boulder, wedged into the mountainside, showed a commanding view of the sweep of the lake behind it with a small patch of thick trees before the shoreline began.
“How’d they get out there to do that?” Star marveled.
“Yeah, what’s it all mean?” wondered Basil. “Some of these look fake, like jokers imitated them, like that one with the ears and the big round circles for hair and the stick arms and hands, but I dunno.”
“Why are they just out here?” asked Star. “We haven’t seen anything like this in the mountains. How old are they? The people who put them up—what were they trying to say to the lake?”
“Or maybe to people coming in off the lake—maybe a warning,” wondered Basil, “but they look friendly enough.” He shook his head. “The government’s already got these here for free, so the lake is where we should be concentrating. That’s got acres and acres of shoreline—beachfront property! There’s got to be an angle here.”
Whatever the angle was, Star and Basil were getting less help than they expected from the innkeeper back in Descubierta. They kept plying him with questions about the lake: Did anybody own it? Did anybody use it? Who had the rights?
But he kept wanting to talk about the Taino Indians and the little faces and the fact that these simple carvings had been gracing this particular hillside for, maybe, a thousand years.
Finally, Basil broke in. “Look,” he said, in his best Spanish. “The Indians are great! The little faces are great! But the lake is great too! We,” he indicated Star and himself, “want to do something great with the lake.” Not much variety of expression, but he finally had the proprietor’s attention.
“You want to buy the lake?”
“Well not the whole thing,” explained Basil, “but, you know, some of the beach front—to help somebody set up something . . . like a hotel—wait,” he realized he was talking to an innkeeper with whom this idea might compete. “Not a hotel,” he corrected himself quickly. “Maybe a park.” “Theme park” was beyond him, so he added: “Water park.”
Señor Feliz became very serious and suddenly very quiet. He looked at both of them mournfully. “Oh, Señor, Señora,” he said, and all but patted their hands in a growing dismay. “You do not know the power of the lake or you would not be talking so. Before you make any plans or invest any money, you must go and see the lake for yourselves.”
“But we saw the lake,” countered Basil quickly, “from the stairway at the little faces.”
“No, no!” said the proprietor. “You saw the size, yes, but you did not see what the lake itself is doing. You must travel now to the south—around the other side of the lake. You must see for yourselves. Here is what you must do. Go now—it is still early—watch for the desvio.”
Both of them looked at him blankly. Star opened her little dictionary and asked him to spell it. He did. “It’s detour,” she said to Basil.
“Yes, daytuur,” tried Señor Feliz phonetically. “You watch for that and do not miss it. Take that road and you will come out by the great city of Jimani. After that you must go left down by El Limon. Do not miss either the daytuur or the later left turn. If you miss the left at Jimani and you work your way to Mal Paso, you will cross over into Haiti.”
Star shuddered. Being xenophobic, she and Basil could not think of Haiti as anything but a mass of spirit-possessed voodooists, thin, with crazed eyes, beating ceaselessly hypnotic rhythms designed to turn all strangers who haplessly stumbled across her borders into zombies. They had both seen far too many horror movies in their youth, and these had helped addle their brains into what they were today.
“I’ll write the directions down,” said Star nervously.
“Note them on the map,” suggested Basil.
The innkeeper produced a pen and made sweeping circles and arrows on the little partial page map in the light-fingered library book that belonged in Massachusetts.
“We won’t miss it,” said Basil.
“That’s because I’ll drive,” decided Star.
So, with two bottles of water, a couple of grape sodas, and the innkeeper’s best wishes, they headed out to discover the power of the waters of the lake. But, little could they know that the real discovery that might change their destiny, bring them fame at last, and even potentially provide a bit of fortune was just beyond the lake and waiting for them later that afternoon.
3
Home and safe in her apartment, Jo brewed herself a cup of tea—apple tea tonight, because she needed energy to deal with all the thoughts jostling each other for primacy in her mind. The big bruiser shouldering out everybody else, of course, was Finance, which is probably every minister’s mental bully: How am I going to afford everything I want to do for my people? “You can see clearly that you need more money!” it lectured her in its severe tone. “How do you expect to run a ministry on pennies?” As usual Jo had no answer. Her salary was a gracious, but simple, start-up grant from the church—read: Pastors Ron and Toni’s tithing off their own salaries because they saw the need and believed in Jo ever since she’d been the local Hispanic community organizer for Richfield, fresh out of Richfield State with a degree in social work and a lot of dreams. After several years, when the dreams of fixing everything had crashed into reality and she had come to realize that change was dependent as much on the internal as the external, she felt the weight of that divine call to help her people become something even more than simply middle class, and Ron and Toni had taken on a new role as mentors. They had been the ones to guide her to Boston’s Center of Urban Ministerial Education (known affectionately as CUME). It turned out to be a perfect fit and even gave her an internship at David B, funded, she suspected, again by themselves. They were a couple in their 60s and had swiftly become her role models of how to give yourself to ministry, but she still felt badly that she was drawing so much off their already modest, divided salary as a clergy couple. But she’d joined the great weekend migration of mainly Korean seminarians from Boston to scattered churches in New Jersey and, after three years, naturally segued into a part-time position as the new pastor of the fledgling Spanish congregation of David B. Jo had even attracted a few donors, like, of course, her dad, who also didn’t have much, and stepmom, and a steady anonymous donation she feared was coming from Lawrence Fennelman. That was troubling. . . .
But finance was not the only concern demanding her attention. Back in seminary, she had promised herself she was going to equip her congregants with ministry skills, in the same way she had tried to develop the job skills of the people she had served when she was a community organizer. She wanted to teach them to preach and to visit and to minister to people in the hospital. Those she attracted to her services, however, were mostly the same ones who had once depended on her as their advocate and they were mainly interested in learning English to get better jobs than factory work (at which fingers were severely at risk) and domestic dead ends (slaving for the rich folks in nearby towns). Jo was working on grants to fund the center and to buy computers with educational software—which was all doable—but grants took time away from ministry. It was the all too familiar terrain of her old job.
She frowned. The problem was clear: She was turning back into a community organizer without the office or the status or the inside pull. She was more of an outsider now—a sectarian minister, welcomed, of course, but no longer mainstreamed into the social work community. Plus, most of the Spanish community was Roman Catholic and attended Our Lady of the Angels, the big Roman Catholic Church on Center Street. To them, a woman pastor was incomprehensible, and even some of her little flock, she feared, thought of her more as a nun or as their former community organizer back to serve them with a collar now.
Jo put a cinnamon stick into her apple tea—she really needed a lift tonight. Sure, she thought,