The Yoke

2241

The yoke came down from the Quiroga barn on the second Friday of July, as it had every year for longer than anyone’s grandmother, and Elena Quiroga, who was twenty and carrying the front end of it for the first time because her father’s back had finally made good on thirty years of threats, discovered what every Quiroga discovered in their first year under the beam: that it was heavier than it looked, that it steered like a boat, and that every soul in Paihuano felt entitled to shout advice.

It was an ox yoke, a real one, black with age and wax, wide as a doorway. Nobody in the valley had yoked an ox to anything in two hundred years. It had a lamp bracket at each end, and on the night of the festival the lamps were lit and the yoke was hung on its chains from the plaza arch, and underneath it, in the course of a long evening, the whole of the valley danced, and a certain number of couples, at the hour when the band went slow, stood beneath the beam and were married.

The idea of it — Elena had this from her father, who had it from his — was as plain as everything else in Paihuano: up the winter sky, past the cordillera’s southern shoulder, stood the Yunta, the two oxen, the near one gold and the far one white, pulling their nothing across the dark forever; and one night a year the valley hung its own yoke under theirs, and lit its two lamps under their two, and matched them, beam for beam and pair for pair, so that anybody looking down would know the arrangement was mutual.

Elena spent the festival running: wax for the chains, oil for the lamps, her cousin lost, her cousin found, the band’s second guitarist drunk in the acequia. But she was under the arch at the slow hour, because the Quiroga who carried the yoke stood by the yoke, and the couples came through — six that year; it was an uneasy year, the feeds full of the blocs, and people marry in uneasy years — and among them a pair of Abarcas from up the hill, him solemn as a post, her laughing at him for it, the two of them stopping under the beam at the exact moment the lamps guttered and steadied, which the old women called lucky. Elena, twenty, her shoulder aching, watched the girl take the solemn boy by both hands under the two lamps and the two stars. This was the best thing her family did. You hung a wooden nothing under the sky once a year and it made people brave.

The lamps burned down. The yoke went back up the hill to the barn, heavier drunk than sober, and the stars over the packing-shed roof stayed, all of them, that year and for the six that remained before the word arrived.

2296

The committee met in the school hall in October because the mayor called it there, which told Berto Quiroga everything before a word was said: the school hall was where the valley was gathered when something was going to be done to it.

The near ox had been conceded that winter, days after the festival. Everyone knew; everyone had had months of the feeds; there was a number in a catalogue in Vicuña now where the second star had been, and up on the cemetery hill, on the Abarca stone, under his wife’s dates, old Abarca had had the date cut, which the valley had decided — nobody discussing it, everybody knowing it — was the most Paihuano thing any Paihuano man had ever done.

The mayor had slides. The mayor had, God preserve them all, a consultant. The proposal wore the word renewal the way a bill wears an envelope: the festival to be renamed — the Festival of Memory — with a dignified plaza ceremony, an interpretive pavilion, provision for visitor coaches, and (slide nine) a monument. The consultant said the valley’s story was, and Berto wrote the phrase on his order paper so as never to forget the enemy’s language, a heritage asset with strong seasonal potential.

Berto Quiroga was fifty-one, and had carried the front of the yoke for thirty years, and had a bad shoulder from it that he called his inheritance, and he waited until the slides were done and the hall was restless before he stood up. He was not a speaker. The Quirogas had never been speakers; they were carriers.

“The festival,” he said, “is called the Festival of the Yoke. The yoke is in my barn. It was in my father’s barn and his father’s, and it goes up the arch in July and it comes down after, and this year it will do the same, and the lamps will be lit the same.” He found he was turning his hat in his hands and made himself stop. “You want to build a monument, build a monument; stone doesn’t dance. You want a pavilion, God love you. But you won’t rename a thing that isn’t yours. The festival isn’t the stars’, either — I’ll say this once, because my father never had to: the festival was never for the stars. Stars don’t dance. It was for us, under them. And we are still under them — under where they were, which is the same place.” He sat down. Then he stood up again, because the last of it had arrived late: “And the couples still need somewhere to be brave. Slide that.”

The vote was not close. The mayor got his monument eventually, and his carpark, down by the co-op where the coaches could turn, and the valley was on the whole glad of the carpark, because a carpark at least admits what it is.

The next July the yoke went up the arch as always, and the lamps were lit as always, and for the first time in the history of the Festival of the Yoke, the lamps hung under a piece of plain dark. Berto stood by the beam at the slow hour and watched four couples come through beneath it, brave as any year, and found the sight had not changed at all.

2341

The tourist was polite, which made it worse. He had come down from the observatory road with the genuine article in his voice, real interest, real courtesy, and he stood at the barn door on rig-day watching Luz Quiroga wax the chains and asked his terrible question with his whole friendly face:

“But what’s it for now? The pair’s been gone — what, fifty years? There’s nothing up there.”

Luz was thirty-eight, and had answers of several calibres for this, depending on the asker. Her grandfather Berto had died with the yoke’s wax under his nails at ninety; her mother had carried until her hip went; Luz had the beam now, and the bad shoulder coming along nicely on schedule. For coach parties she had a short answer with a smile on it. For the feeds, every few years, a middle one, wry, quotable, safe.

Luz looked at the tourist and decided, on the strength of the genuine article in his voice, to give him the long one. The long one was a job: she put the wax rag in his hand.

The tourist waxed chains all afternoon. He carried the tail of the yoke down the hill on the Friday — the tail, where you learn; the front steers, the tail obeys — and he stood at the arch through the whole long evening while the valley danced under two lamps and a dark quarter of sky, and at the slow hour he watched three couples and one silver-haired widow pause under the beam — the widow alone, a second marriage of some private kind, her hand flat on her own sternum — and when the lamps guttered and steadied, the old women called it lucky.

At the end, at two in the morning, helping Luz lift the beam onto the trestles, the tourist said: “It’s for this, isn’t it. You carry the thing. That’s the whole answer — somebody has to carry the thing.”

“Now your shoulder knows it,” Luz said, and gave him the wax rag to keep; and years on, when the coach parties asked her what the festival was for, she would sometimes catch herself starting the answer with there was a man from the observatory road who waxed the chains all one afternoon.

2402

The boy was six, and it was his first festival awake past the dancing, and he stood in the plaza at the cold end of the night with his hand in his father’s hand, looking up.

The sky over Paihuano was still, by the standards of that century, a good sky — the valley said so, the way it had always said so, and the observatory road still ran, and people still came. But it was a sky with the thin patches everyone the boy’s age took as given, the worn places, the quarters where the old maps showed a crowd and the eye found a scatter; and the reach past the cordillera’s southern shoulder, the reach the arch was aligned to, had been a long time empty. The yoke hung from its chains with its two lamps burning steady in the cold, and above it, low over the southern shoulder, beam-space where the Yunta had pulled, there was nothing at all — and the two lamps were, without question, without competition, the brightest things in that whole reach of the sky.

“Papa,” the boy said. “What’s a yoke for?”

Nilo Quiroga looked up at the black beam and the two flames, his shoulder aching in the good way, the inheritance, the Friday’s work still in it. Forty generations of oxen, none of which anyone had ever seen; two stars, which his great-great-grandmother had seen and he never would; a wooden nothing his family had hauled down a hill two hundred times and more so that people could be brave under it. The whole answer stood in him like the beam itself, too wide for the doorway of a six-year-old’s question.

“It’s for joining two things,” he said, “so they can pull together.”

The boy considered this with the seriousness of six.

“What two things?”

And Nilo Quiroga looked at the lamps burning under the empty quarter, at the last couples swaying in the cold, at the whole small lit valley holding its end up, and gave his son the answer his father had given him, at this hour, in this plaza:

“Everything else,” he said. “Come on. We carry it back up in the morning. You can take the tail.”