Under the Mango Tree
When I was eighteen years old, I drove a Guatemalan family from the parking lot of Immaculate Mary Catholic Church in Cornerstone, New Jersey, to a Benedictine monastery in New Hampshire, in a white van with brown paper taped to the inside of the windows. The trip took nine hours, including two bathroom stops. Luis, the father, rode in the passenger seat beside me. He wore jeans worn shiny at both knees, a blue-and-red plaid button-down shirt with white pearl buttons, and a white cowboy hat. His family rode in the back, sitting on a queen-sized mattress—Elena, his wife; Victoria, a girl about eight years old; Juan Carlos, a boy two years older; and Katarina, seventeen. Carlos was the only one who spoke English in whole sentences, but his vocabulary was mostly restricted to cars, food and Bruce Springsteen, who he called “The Bossman.” Luis could say “hello,” “please” and “thank you,” but mostly he sat still and quiet, his eyes cast out at the road ahead or sideways into the rearview mirror.
“No policia,” he said at one point, shaking his head. I couldn’t tell if he was making a statement of fact or warning me of his greatest fear.
In the church parking lot that morning before we set out, Father Willem spoke to me in a low, urgent voice, leaning forward so his head almost touched mine. I had never been this close to the man. He was mostly a figure I viewed from a distance, from a pew when he was seated in his presider’s chair with the plush red cushions on the altar or standing at the creaky overpolished wooden podium at the front of the church, where he delivered his finger-wagging but occasionally profound homilies.
“Drive the speed limit,” he said, pressing the van keys into my hand. “Stop once, at the Wallingford rest area in Connecticut. I marked it on the map.”
Father Willem handed me a road map.
“I got it,” I said.
“Call me from the rest stop, right before you get back on the road. There’s a pay phone around the back.”
“OK,” I said.
Father Willem was a tall man, lean and Irish, with broad shoulders, a reddish scowling face, and a thick tussle of graying black hair that was always leaning out too far to the front. He was not exactly kind, but he made up for this deficit of priestly compassion by cultivating an overly permissive demeanor, especially with children. Father Willem was like the uncle who never said ‘no.’ He would turn on the lights in the basketball court behind the rectory so me and my friends could shoot hoops at 11:30 p.m., long after the church property was officially closed. He would let me drive the parish golf cart whenever I asked him. He didn’t care if we hung out on the white-painted brick wall behind the church smoking cigarettes or drinking beer, as long as we were civilized about it. He would never join in—he wasn’t that kind of priest, the chummy kind who doesn’t have good boundaries—but he was always lurking nearby in his black cassock like a character in a Hawthorne novel.
Prior to Father Willem asking me to drive the family to New Hampshire, I had spoken only a few words to him in my entire life, which is why I was so shocked when he leaned his head out of the second-floor rectory window one Friday afternoon in early August of 1983 and called my name in a clear, confident voice. I was shooting baskets with Bean, one of the former youth group kids who still hung around the church grounds on weekends, even though he was headed to college like me at the end of the summer. Friday late afternoon was when the younger high school kids would gather for youth group. Bean and I would show up to help but also to talk to the sophomore and junior girls. The two adult youth group leaders, Cam and Jenny, were Bean’s uncle and aunt, and they had encouraged us to stay involved in the group after we graduated from high school that June, but already it felt like we had one foot out the door. We were both going to college out of state, and everyone knew what that meant.
“Jimmy,” Father Willem called out to me from the open window, “Can you come up to the front door? I’ll let you in. I’ve got something I want you to do.”
I tossed the ball to Bean, shrugged, and walked up to the front of the rectory and through the front door, which Father Willem held open for me. I grew up in a devoutly Catholic Italian American family, and this was the ’80s, before the big priest abuse scandals. We were taught to revere and obey priests, and when one of them asked you to do something, you jumped.
When the door closed behind me, we were standing in the narrow entryway of the rectory building.
I knew that Father Willem was tall, but standing this close to him in such a small space, I could feel his gangly enormity towering over me. He must have been six four, a whole head taller than me, and dressed as he was in his black cassock, he filled the hallway like a strange apparition. He smelled faintly of sweat and Old Spice.
He spoke immediately.
“Your family drove up to Wheaton Monastery last summer, right?”
“Yes,” I replied. The summer before, my family had traveled in a caravan with four other families from the church to a campsite in central New Hampshire to attend an outdoor mass for the feast of St. Benedict at Wheaton Priory, which was a sort of hermitage for men and women living under the order St. Benedict. My father joked that they were hippies for Jesus. My mother was enamored with them.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Father Willem led me through the foyer, across the living room and down a hallway to a closed door. He stopped at the door and turned to me.
“I am trusting you, OK?”
“OK,” I said. By now, my heart was pounding. What in God’s name did this man have hidden behind that door, I wondered?
He opened the door, and I could immediately see down a beige-carpeted stairway into a well-lit basement room. Though I had been in the rectory kitchen and dining room a handful of times, I had never seen this part of the building. From my vantage, I could see a blue suede couch and a coffee table and two plush chairs. I could also see part of a kitchenette—a countertop and the edge of a refrigerator. The Morales family were all there, sitting on the couch and chairs or standing in the kitchenette. They had heard the door open and were now all staring up at us. I nodded hello, and then Father Willem swung the door shut as quickly as he had opened it.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They are a family from Guatemala.”
“OK.” What else could I say? As far as I knew, Father William lived in that rectory building by himself. No one had ever seen this basement apartment, or the Central American family who apparently also lived there.
“Are they living with you?” I asked.
“For a few more days, and then they’re moving on.” He paused. “That’s what I need you for.”
“For what?”
“Do you know how to drive a van?”
“I can drive a pickup truck.”
“That’s close enough.”
“You want me to pick up something in the church van?”
“No, I want you to drive this family up to Wheaton,” he said. “To the priory.”
I was too stunned to speak.
“I wouldn’t ask,” Father Willem said haltingly, “But I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday and there might be tests afterwards. I can’t do it myself, but it needs to be done quickly.”
I knew very little of priests back then. To me, they were these odd, inexplicable men who didn’t quite fit into our suburban world. They were conspicuously bizarre in public. They didn’t care about money. They drove cars they didn’t actually own. They weren’t interested in sex, at least not officially. You only really understood what priests were about if you came from a Catholic family with roots in the old world—Italy, Ireland, Poland, etc. The priest was like a shaman in those cultures. They lived in their own stratosphere, and people did favors for them, offering up their vacation homes or season tickets to sporting events. No one said it, but we all regarded these favors as a kind of payment for their sacrifice, compensation for a life of celibacy and material self-denial. It wasn’t about corruption. We weren’t playing at some cosmic quid pro quo. The favors and gifts brought them down to our level.
I say all this because I want you to understand why I said “yes” immediately to this man, without hesitation, even though the task he had assigned to me was sketchy and very likely illegal. He asked, and I said yes because I was raised to regard him with respect. It was one of those decisions that came effortlessly. Only now, decades later, am I aware of the audacity of his request.
It’s also fair to say that I sensed the adventure in it. The summer was coming to a close—two more weeks until college classes began. I had spent June and July installing satellite antennas for a small mom-and-pop company and drinking beers after work with my buddies from high school down at the reservoir. We would sit in lawn chairs at the water’s edge with our fishing poles in hand, our lines cast out twenty or thirty feet with a piece of hotdog jabbed onto a hook, catfish bait. Someone would bring a spackle bucket full of ice and Coors beer. Someone else would bring a boombox. For the guys who were going to college—me and Bean and Petey—this was the slice of home and normality we were all clinging to, knowing that our bond of friendship was dissolving with each passing day. For Stone and Volvo, the guys who were staying behind, these outings at the reservoir would become the bond that held them together.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Father Willem said. “Not Bean, not even your parents.”
“Why not?”
“This family…” He paused and stared down the dark hallway. “This family is not supposed to be here.”
“In the church?” I asked.
“No, in the country.”
“So, they’re illegals.”
“They’re refugees,” he said. “And that is a distinction that matters.”
I did not ask any more questions about their status. The conversation turned quickly to details: Where and when I would pick them up. How much money he would give me for food and gas. How I should drive the speed limit and stop once for lunch and bathroom breaks. “Don’t let them go in a big group to the bathrooms,” he warned. “They’ll have food with them, so they should eat lunch in the van.”
I knew their names because Father Willem had given me a cheat sheet when I arrived to pick up the van keys in the rectory at sunup the next morning. The family was already in the parking lot with their suitcases and backpacks. They did not look like refugees.
I glanced down at the cheat sheet as they filed into the van. Only the boy, Juan Carlos, looked back at me. He winked and gave me a thumbs up.
I should have asked more questions. I should have been more curious or more frightened or something, but I wanted to know what would happen next to the family hiding out in the rectory basement.
*
For the first hour, no one spoke. Luis stared out the window, his wide brown eyes soaking in every detail. I had the feeling that even in the most comfortable surroundings, this man did not speak much. Elena, his wife, sat with her back against the steel van wall, sewing what looked like a blue work shirt that her husband might wear. I adjusted the rearview mirror with my right hand so I could peer into the back. I could make out Elena’s small fingers tugging and pulling and stabbing at the shirt collar with a surgeon's precision. Victoria lay on the mattress with her head in her mother’s lap, her black hair fanned out around her peaceful oval face. Juan Carlos sat cross-legged on the mattress reading an X-Men comic, a wiry, energetic kid with a thistle of black hair stacked on his always bobbing head. Katarina sat with her knees pulled up to her chin, her eyes drifted off to some other universe altogether.
At some point, the silence became unbearable for me.
“Hey, Juan Carlos,” I called back to him. The boy startled and immediately crawled across the mattress towards the front of the van, poking his face between the seats. “What's your favorite Bruce Springsteen song?”
The boy, beaming with pride, answered immediately:
“Mi favorito… my favorite is ‘Glory Days.’” And then he was singing the chorus.
Glory days, they pass you by
Glory days, in the twink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
I removed my hands from the wheel for a few seconds to applaud.
“Awesome!”
I adjusted the mirror again to peer at Elena, who was still sewing but smiling now and nodding her head, obviously proud of her precocious son. Katarina had not moved from her balled-up squat in the far corner of the van.
I tried to keep the conversation going with Juan Carlos. I asked him to name his favorite X-Man. I was surprised by his answer.
“Why Magneto?” I asked.
Juan Carlos rapped the side of his head.
“I like his helmet,” he said.
It went on like this for some time, me asking questions and Juan Carlos answering, sometimes acting out words that he didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce with hilarious flourish. His father sat beside me listening and nodding. I detected the upturning of a repressed smile.
I tried a few times to speak to Luis, deploying whatever mangled present-tense grammar I could remember from my badly taught two years of high school Spanish. He shook his head and said no entiendo without a hint of frustration at my failed efforts. Unlike his son, he was not seeking a connection with me. But underneath his calm facade, I could tell that the man was nervous. At some point, he walked to the back of the van and lay on his back on the mattress, tipping his white hat down over his eyes. Juan Carlos practically leaped into the passenger seat to take his place.
“I can drive,” he insisted.
“No, you can’t,” I said with a laugh.
“Mama,” he called back to his mother. “Dile a el hombre que sé conducir un camión.”
“Si, si,” his mother called up from the back.
“She says, ‘yes, he knows how to drive a truck.’”
*
The first bathroom stop at the Wallingford Rest Area in Connecticut was uneventful. I parked the van so the side door would open facing an area with two empty picnic tables; I did not want anyone looking inside the van when I opened the door. I instructed Juan Carlos to tell his mother to take Victoria and Katarina first to the bathroom.
“They shouldn’t talk to anyone,” I said. Juan Carlos gave me a quizzical look, and then I realized how stupid I sounded. They would certainly not talk to anyone. “They should be careful,” I said.
The women returned after about ten minutes. Then I nodded to Luis, and he moved to exit the van on the passenger side. With my right hand, I made a motion to his white cowboy hat. Luis removed it and placed it carefully at the center of the passenger seat, awaiting his return. We understood each other.
When he and Juan Carlos returned from the men’s room, I turned to face the group.
“Do you want food from the vending machine?” I said too loudly. “¿Tu quieres comida en la machina?”
Luis shook his head firmly, answering for the entire family. Father Willem had provided them with a large brown shopping bag with sandwiches, fruit and bags of snack food.
I exited the van and walked to the phone booth just outside the bathroom area. Two quarters and I dialed the rectory number.
“How’s it going?” Father Willem asked.
“Perfect,” I said.
“You’re halfway there,” he said.
*
I gassed up at the next exit and returned to the highway. The two younger kids were asleep on the mattress by then. Elena had finished her sewing and was rubbing Katarina’s back. My hand was still on the rearview mirror when I saw Katarina give me an accusatory look from the back of the van, as if to say don’t you dare look at me.
In the silence of that hour after the bathroom break, the presence of Katarina had begun to grow in my mind. When I was that age, I was awkwardly aware of the outsized magnetism of young women, how their near proximity could derail any thought or intention. I would not call it attraction in her case because I can’t say I was attracted to her; this was more like a current tugging at my mind, a sense of obligation to do something, say something. Katarina Morales’ inexplicable hostility towards me hung in the air like an unmet challenge.
When we reached the Charleton service area on Route 90 in Massachusetts, we repeated our bathroom ritual, but this time I exited the vehicle first and walked around to the side door, pulling it open from the outside. I think I did this because of Katarina, because I wanted to make a gentlemanly gesture that she would acknowledge. I reached up my hand to help Elena step down to the asphalt, then Victoria, who gave me a shy smile. My hand went up again for Katarina, but she recoiled at the sight of it. Without looking at me, she jumped down and ran alone towards the bathrooms on her own.
Luis saw this, and his eyes dropped. Was it sadness or anger or something else? I could not tell.
There could be no explanations from any of them for Katarina’s behavior, no assurances that everything was all right. In that moment, the language gap had become a chasm between us.
The final leg of the trip was quiet. No one spoke, not even Juan Carlos, who was rereading his comic again, wide-eyed and fully absorbed. Once, I adjusted the mirror to scan the back of the van and caught Katarina staring at me again. Her eyes had hardened into polished chunks of obsidian.
*
When I arrived at the monastery, a man and woman walked out of the large stone abbey building to greet us. The side door was open now, and the Morales family was stepping out into the afternoon sunlight, stretching and yawning. The woman, who introduced herself to me as an oblate, spoke Spanish and greeted the family warmly, hugging each of them, except for Luis who extended his hand to her for a stiff handshake.
I stood off to the side, not knowing what to say or do. I saw Luis staring at me, and he walked over, extending his hand.
“Gracias por todos,” he said, firmly gripping my hand in his. Then he turned and walked back to his family.
I watched the Morales family walk to the end of the driveway in a single file and then begin the climb up the long stone staircase to the abbey. Luis led his family to the first step and then stepped to the side to allow Elena to ascend before him, then Victoria, then Katarina. I noticed the gentle way he touched his wife’s back as if to guide her way, then lightly brush the elbows of his two daughters to reassure them. Finally, it was Juan Carlos’ turn. He put his right foot on the first step, and then turned quickly to wave to me. I waved back. Luis watched his boy run up the first few steps to catch up with his sisters. When they were all on their way, Luis turned to me and nodded. And then they were all gone, up through the stairs and disappearing through the open double doors.
The man in the black cassock introduced himself as the abbot. He put his hand firmly on my shoulder.
“That was a long ride, I’m sure,” he said. “You should stay the night with us before you go back.”
“I’m OK,” I said. “Father Willem gave me some money to stay in a hotel.”
“Are you sure?” the abbot said.
I was sure.
I don’t remember the details of how I returned home. I stayed in a Howard Johnson’s hotel, I remember that, but the rest is a black hole in my mind.
When I reached Cornerstone the following afternoon, I drove the van to its parking spot behind the rectory. It was Sunday afternoon, and the parking lot was empty. I walked around to the front of the building and knocked on the door. I waited for about a minute, but no one answered. I opened the mailbox beside the door and dropped the keys in the box. Then I climbed into my car and drove back to my parents’ house.
*
I was not especially curious at that age. Experiences rolled off me with little reflection on my part. I plowed through life. I lived deep inside my feelings and desires. Decades passed, but eventually, reflection was forced upon me. My mother’s death from breast cancer when I was 27. The car accident that nearly killed me when I was 33, laying me up in the hospital with two broken legs and a broken jaw and too much time to think. Then my first marriage to Ella and the big crash-and-burn separation and divorce three years later that left me bitter and bereft. Laid off three times. Once evicted from an apartment. And then my marriage to Esme, the great stabilizing force in my life, who is still my wife after two decades, and our two children, Millicent and Davy, one in college now and the other about to graduate from high school.
Thanks to the internet, I now know more details about the Morales family. They had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally about six months before I met them, and once in the U.S., they were under the protection of the Sanctuary Movement, a network of more than 100 churches and synagogues that offered sanctuary to Central American political refugees. Luis fled because he was being hunted by the Guatemalan army. His crime: he had created a pirate radio station that catered to the Mayan population. The Wheaton monastery, invoking the medieval law of sanctuary, extended protection to Luis and his family. They lived in a cottage on the monastery grounds for almost ten years, and in 1994, the year of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they returned to Guatemala.
Before his family left the U.S., Luis was interviewed by a daily newspaper in Montpelier, Vermont, and he told the harrowing story of why he and his family fled his country: The Guatemalan army came to their village one afternoon, landing in a nearby field in three big American-made helicopters. Luis ordered his family to flee up a mountain trail to a mango tree that overlooked the valley. They were supposed to wait for him there, which they did; he arrived at the mango tree a few minutes after them. Elena brought Victoria and Juan Carlos further up the trail, but Katarina stayed behind with Luis to wait for her aunt and cousin Lucinda. From this vantage point, in the shade of the mango tree, they watched the soldiers round up twenty people, including their friends and Katarina’s aunt and cousin, and then gun them down in the plaza.
The moral imagination is timeless. I heard this from the professor in my introduction to philosophy class when I was a freshman in college. I think he meant it in the sense of philosophers like Socrates being able to speak to us across centuries, the universality of moral teaching—something like that—but it landed differently with me. I couldn’t help thinking about that family in the van, how they were now encapsulated in my mind forever, speaking to me in the big silences that stretched out between our feeble attempts to communicate with one another that day in the van. How they were terrorized by one state and treated like criminals by another. How they had endured.
I recently found Katarina on Facebook. I recognized her immediately from her profile picture, the long face and the sad, quarrelsome eyes, but in the photo, she was smiling and looking directly at the camera, and I felt a lightness in my soul, as if I could detect a long redemptive arc in her life—a woman who had found her way back to happiness. But how would I know this? I considered reaching out to her, but what would I say to her? I am the awkward kid who drove you in a van to New Hampshire forty years ago, all grown up now. Remember me?
Or maybe I would say, ‘I understand now.’
But how could I?
~