In Hell They Wear Necapals

In Guatemala I was accosted by many an evangelist waving pamphlets, many a prophet preaching precautions against the fires of hell.  On one winding road in the gathering gloom of a mountain storm I was nearly held by force by a preacher standing in the road with slicked back hair and a golden watch, telling me that the time was near and the path was straight but that the light had come into the world.  But though I was given many a glimpse of the lurid flames of the inferno, nothing put the fear of God in me like the time I wore a necapal.

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After my near miss in Rio Pajaritos, the weather cleared and the scent of pine wavered heavy in the hot air along with the sound of a thousand crickets shrilling their occult songs.  I hiked down and down and with every step I took the air became hotter and the land drier and the scream of the crickets louder.  I arrived at the outskirts of Sacapulus where a sweet green river rolls by parched banks and a family invited me to sit in the shade and drink water.

"Would you like to stay the night here?" they asked me.

"Well, I don't know... it might be better to keep going a bit.  I want to get to...."

Just then I caught a glimpse of three beautiful young women coming up the path from the river, in multicolored skirts and crisp white shirts with bundles balanced on their heads.  They swayed and undulated with grace as they balanced the loads they carried.  They passed on a different path and went into one of the rooms in the cluster of buildings belonging to the family that had given me water.

"Um, like I was saying... I'd love to stay here for a while.  I help out with whatever you guys need."

And so it was that I found myself walking the three miles up the path back toward Rio Pajaritos with Uncle Herman to carry fire wood down so that the women could cook.  We split wood (which I finally got the knack of.  Or maybe I just thought I was doing well because there was no 80 year old indigenous woman around to show me up).  It came time to carry down the wood, and Uncle Herman produced the necapals.

The Russian Gulag itself could not have produced a better instrument of torture.  The necapal consists of a thin strip of fiberglass that serves as a headband (yes, fiberglass, that same material that leaves thousands of inexctractable shards of glass in your skin when you handle it and is so nefarious that it doesn't return back to its natural state in millions of years.  Radioactive material decays hundreds of times faster than this hideous fabric).  This headband bears the full weight of the load. From both ends of the fiberglass strip extends a rope, not a nice slick silky cord, but a rope gnarled by weather and use and rough as burlap.  These ropes pass under the armpits, in the most tender spot for maximum abrasion, and wraps up and around the bundle of wood to tie it off.  Imagine yourself to be a giraffe with a car dangling from a cable tied around your head you get a sense for how this thing feels.

I had seen workers all over Guatemala with the necapal,  hauling 100 pound sacks of coffee, bundles of wood, great sacks of grain.  Even the school boys carry their books in a sack on their backs with a strap around their head.  Workers wearing necapals would often stop and chat with me in the road, sustaining the weight like it was a straw sombrero on their head, and then move on.

"If they can do it there is no reason I can't do the same," I thought, eying my pile, half the size of Uncle Herman's and ready to be tied off.  "I'll carry the same as you're carrying, Uncle Herman." I had visions of myself sauntering triumphantly into camp, bearing my load as if it were a bundle of feathers, while two of the young women wiped the light sweat off my brow and the other took the wood I had brought to make me a savory meal.

Uncle Herman look at at me skeptically and put a few more slivers of kindling on my pile.

Pain exploded across my neck as I hoisted up the load and the weight of the wood settled onto the necapal harness.  I took a wavering step and as I set my foot gently down the jarring in my neck felt like I had landed from ten feet up instead of ten inches.  Every fiber in my neck popped and twinged in pain as we set off down the trail.  After about five minutes I was doubled over, my nose bumping my knees, so that the weight of the wood would rest on my back rather than my neck.  We were about a twentieth of the way down.

Uncle Herman was strolling behind me whistling a mindless tune.  "Hey it's easier if you stand up straight," he offered by way of encouragement.

I straightened up and my neck snapped back as far as it would go so that I was gaping open-mouthed at the hot sun overhead, leaving my feet to blindly navigate the rocky path. I tried lifting the load with my hands to take the pressure off my neck but my arms quickly wore out.  My vision wavered as the hazy heat and veil of pain became one and the conviction engulfed me that in hell there are no torturing flames, there is no endless darkness, there are only necapals laden with thousands of pounds that can never be taken off.  I saw a vision of wretches bent double after centuries of wearing the necapal, croaking for water.  If there was only a one and a million chance that hell was like that I did not want to risk going there, and so I prepared myself to fall to my knees and confess my sins to Jesus. Oh Lord spare me thy wrath and the necapal!  But before I got the chance to kneel on my own accord I fell to my knees because I tripped over a rock.

I collapsed to rest and Uncle Herman, not the savviest salmon in the sea, finally realized I was struggling and offered to come back for my load.  But due to some streak of perversity in my nature (maybe something to do with me being a distance runner), I refused.  I was sweating copiously.  The ligaments in my knees were slackening and threatening to buckle sideways.  The burnt-grass wasteland began to spin around me and the river seemed so far away.  I was breathing in short gasps as I stumbled into camp and fell down into the dust.

There was a clamor in the compound as the kids ran to and fro.  They were getting ready to go down to the river for a swim!  Someone offered me a cool liquid and I revived enough to sit up straight. "Come on!'  they yelled to me. "We're going swimming!"

We went down the path and dove off a rock into the cool current.  I let my body relax as the water bore me slowly swirling down the stream and lapped at my dusty face and abraded sides.  The kids laughed and wriggled like fish in the water.  The three young women came down and waded in to their waists and waved like willow saplings.  The bottom was soft sand and the river sound soothing.

"Hey!  Time to get out!  They're releasing waste from the gravel pit!"

The current was suddenly brown and gritty and we all splashed up on shore, dried and dressed.  As we walked up to the house, Isabela, one of three young women told me her story.

"We just came here six months ago from the city.  Our mother was murdered, we don't know who did it but we think it might have been jealousy over her business.  The six of us were left alone... my two brothers, these two sisters, and the baby of the family, Silvia.  So we came where our mom's brother lives and are trying to make ends meet... my brother commutes to the city and works construction and we sell tamales."

I later found out that their father was alive and around but was a drunkard and wouldn't talk to them.  That night the six insisted on giving up one of their three beds and I slept soundly in their sheet metal shack with a sloping dirt floor, crawling with ants searching for crumbs.

The next day I found out most of the family was going back up the mountain to where we had cut wood.  "I will not wear a necapal, never again!"  I let them know.

"Don't worry.  We are just going to carry down a few sticks to fix the roof," Isabela told me.

And so we went up through the burnt grass wasteland again and into the pines where Uncle Herman was already at work lopping off branches for us.  As we sat and waited Isabel and I fell into a conversation about religion.  Isabel and her sisters belonged to the evangelical church in town and went every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.  She asked about me.

"Well I grew up in a Christian home but now I'm not so sure... what kind of God is supposedly loving and then there is hell and all kinds of pain... how does that work out?"

"You can't think of it that way.  God is good.  We owe him our existence."

"And what about people whose existence sucks?  I mean you've seen it.  I just think that it's messed up that God could actually do something about it and doesn't.  Better to not believe in that kind of cruelty."

"You can't speak of God that way.  If we obey him he will welcome us into heaven. "

The conversation was heating up and we weren't listening to each other any more so I went off to help Uncle Herman.  But I didn't get very far because I stepped into a hidden ditch and fell flat on my face.  Everyone laughed at me. "God is smiting me!" I yelled.  I found the "sticks" that Uncle Herman had cut for me and found them to actually be two small tree trunks.  As I hoisted them crosswise onto my shoulder the rope wounds in my side split open again and I was again doubled over under my burden.  I wobbled down the hill, my arms draped over the crosspiece and my shoulders already burning.  The logs pressed onto my neck and the pain of yesterday came flooding back.

About a mile down the hill I gave up carrying my tree and began hurling the logs, one by one, down the hill.  They would crash and thunk through the brush and come to a stop and then I would come up and either drag them a ways or hurl them again.  As I was lugging unsuccessfully on one of the logs to extract it from a bush, the sisters caught up to me.  They each had a log balanced on their heads, touching it occasionally with a staying hand.  They stepped gracefully around me, never missing a step, and continued on their way as I muttered and tugged on the log.

By the time I got back and rested night had come and the cactus stood out, spiny and succulent, against the fading western light.  The sisters came back from church, elusive shadows under the stars that sometimes streaked from their places and burned into ruin.  We all went into the shack and prepared to sleep.

We couldn't sleep because Uncle Herman, who'd decided to huff glue since it was Friday, kept banging in and out of the door and slurring indeciferable phrases.  We blockaded him out and went to sleep but in the middle of the night we were awoken by a sobbing outside the door, and a begging to be let in out of the cold and to be allowed to speak to the youngest, Silvia.  It was their drunken father.  The simpering went on and I could feel the shame of the daughters well up as deep as the source of the springs that feed the river.  The oldest got up and silently let him in and gave him a blanket.  He lay on the dirt floor and all around his dark shape red ants moved across the ground carrying their heavy loads.