Tree Girl by Ben Mikaelsen Chapter 6

1. Highlight 5 vocabulary words that you do not know and write the definition in the margin.  Label each with a (V).

2.  Ask 5 questions in the margins.  Label each with a (?)


3.  React to 5 events in the text.  Label each reaction with a (*).


4.  Make 5 connections to the text, text-to-self · text-to-text · text-to-world.  Label each with a ©

Manuel had often asked his students what thoughts we had when we looked up at the sky.

Always since that day beside the river, I have thought only of Manuel when I look up. I see his face in the clouds and I feel his gentleness in the breeze. I feel him dancing in my arms. Whenever raindrops fall, they come as tears from a better place.

After the deaths of Manuel and the schoolchildren, word of the massacre spread like wind through the cantons, fields, and countryside. Men from each canton were sent to return the bodies for burial.

Of curse, the Army denied the killing and blamed (83) everything on the guerrillas. They asked to talk to the student who would accuse them of such barbaric things. But we weren't that stupid. Whenever the soldiers came to our canton, Papi sent me to the forest to hide in the trees.

No longer able to attend school, and with Mami and Jorge gone, my younger brothers and sisters became my full-time responsibility. Because Alicia was the youngest and the most helpless, I let her sleep with me. I hugged and comforted her whenever thunder rumbled across the sky. She kept calling me Mami, and I didn't correct her. All children need a mother.

Papi spent his days in the fields harvesting the corn and coffee; he had no time to leave the canton to go to the pueblo for market. So although I was only fifteen, it also became my job to go to market each week. The only market for selling our coffee was ten kilometers away, so each weekend during harvest, I arose two hours before sunrise and walked for three hours to market. Always I kept to the mountain paths, avoiding the military patrols on the roads.

When I arrived at market, I spread the coffee onto (84) an old blanket on the ground and used a tin can for measuring. I didn't have a weight scale like some vendors. This made it easier for the Latinos to accuse me of shorting them. When the coffee sold, I bought chili powder, soap, or spices to take back to the canton. Sometimes enough change remained for me to buy hair ties for Julia, Lidia, and Alicia, and a piece of candy for Lester and Antonio.

But sometimes the coffee didn't sell and I had to carry it back to our canton along with a much heavier burden, the news for Papi that we couldn't even buy salt until the following week when I would travel to market again.

In the market, the Indios whispered to each other in hushed tones. Some believed the guerrillas were trying to help the Indios, and they spoke of young men from different cantons enlisting to join the fight. The military, unable to enlist many Indios, kept coming to the cantons and taking away men and older boys at gunpoint to fight for them. Still, nobody from our canton had joined the guerrillas.

By July, horrible stories were whispered in the (85) marketplace of whole cantons being burned and everybody killed. Rumors spread that hundreds of people were dying. Thousands of Indios were fleeing north into Mexico, the closest place for them to try and escape the madness.

Still the soldiers blamed the guerrillas, and the guerrillas blamed the soldiers. I wasn't sure what to think. I heard of guerrillas who killed military men, but I also heard of guerrillas who spied for the military. Still, I believed that only the soldiers were hateful enough to massacre whole cantons. I had seen their thirst for blood with my own eyes.

By August most cantons had posted lookouts to give themselves enough warning to run when the soldiers approached. Angered when they discovered a canton empty, the soldiers burned down homes.

With each passing day, the war changed around us. As the soldiers earned a reputation for being cold-blooded killers, many Indios openly sided with the guerrillas.

Each week at market, I heard more and more stories of soldiers killing the Indios and the campesinos (86) with no pretense. One week the old man selling fruit next to me in the market leaned over and whispered to me, "They're sending out death squads now to kill us because we're Indios. They want all of us dead."

Manuel had told me of genocide in history, but I never dreamed that such a thing would come to Guatemala, and that we, the Maya, would be its victims. But the brutality I'd seen convinced me that the old man was right.

Returning from market/ one evening, I forced myself to walk along the river where the soldiers had massacred Manuel and the children. Standing there with the water flowing gently at my feet, I heard new sounds, the drumbeat of helicopters on patrol and, the sounds of machine guns spitting death. These were new tools to be used against the Indios. As I stood there, a helicopter flew low downriver, forcing me to run and hide beneath some trees.

More than ever, I worried about leaving my family to go to market, but if I did not go we would not eat. Starvation would kill us as surely as any soldier's bullet. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the Saturday (87) afternoon when I returned home late and saw fires burning ahead of me in our canton. A rotten scorched smell filled the air.

I broke into a run. At first I spotted only a single body lying in front of a burning home, but then I saw another and another. Scattered everywhere among the ashes of our canton were corpses. Many who hadn't been killed by soldiers in the canton lay dead in the open fields, killed by rifles or maybe by machine guns aimed from the helicopters. In the late-afternoon light, the fallen bodies looked like scattered branches from a tree. But they weren't branches. They were people I knew aunts, uncles, grandparents, and neighbors.

I stared in shock, convulsing as tears burned my cheeks like hot water. Again and again I swallowed at the bitter taste building in my throat, trying to make me throw up. This was my worst nightmare.

I ran frantically from one fallen body to the next, searching for my family. I found Papi first. Crumpled in the grass, his body looked frail and weak. Not ten yards away lay my little sister, Lidia, facedown as if asleep. Two red stains on her huipil showed where she had (88) been shot. I ran to Papi and then to Lidia, and fell beside their bodies, hugging them and sobbing. ·"No! No! No!" I cried.

Closer to our burned homes, I found Julia lying among several other children, faceup, a stick still in her hand as if she'd been trying to protect those around her in the only way she knew. I pulled a shawl from one of the dead bodies and laid it over Julia's innocent face. I walked now as if in a stupor, my mind drunk from shock. I wandered out away from our burned homes, searching. Not until I reached the trees did I find the next body. Lester lay dead behind two shrubs, as if he'd been trying to hide. I kept searching, but Antonio and Alicia were nowhere in sight.

As 1stumbled around in horror, my eyes burned from smoke and tears. I had betrayed my promise to Papi that I would care for my brothers and sisters if he died. I hadn't even been there for him.

Numbed by shame and despair; I dragged the cold bodies of those I loved back to what remained of our home. I would bury Papi, Lester, Lidia, and Julia in the same sacred place. I had buried Mami's ashes. As I dug (89) shallow graves with a stick and bleeding hands, terrible thoughts haunted me. I imagined the children's terror in their last desperate moments before death, everybody screaming and running, the soldiers shouting, and the guns echoing like thunder.

l couldn't stop weeping and hiccupping with grief. Even as I dug the simple graves, I looked up and saw two more bodies of neighbors I'd known. All the bodies in the canton needed to be buried, but I was only one person, and even as I piled rocks on top of the four graves, I knew that by morning the rats, the armadillos and the foxes would dig up all that I had buried. Even now, buzzards circled overhead and landed to pick at the bodies. I shouted at them but could do nothing more. I had no shovel to bury anyone decently.

As I looked around me I noticed a hairbrush in the ashes and picked it up. This was Mami's brush. Many times she had used it to brush my hair. Now it was the only physical object I had left from my family. I slipped it inside my huipil.

I feared that if I did no stay for three days to take flowers and candles to my family's grave their spirits (90) would not rise to the next world from where they lay buried.

If friends and family didn't carry their deceased to the hills to be burned high above the ground, if spirits were pot sent properly to the next world, what became of them? The question cut away at my heart and soul. I felt I was betraying my family, my ancestors, and the ancients. Still, I knew that I could not remain in the canton for fear of the soldiers returning. I had to move on.

Not finding Antonio and Alicia also hurt me deeply. My little sister had placed all of her trust in me when she called me "Mami." I imagined her screaming "Mami! Mami! Mami!" as the soldiers fired around her. Had she mistaken the sounds of gunfire for thunder?

I wept more tears, knowing I must leave with all of my questions unanswered. Other military foot patrols would pass soon, so I walked for the last time away from the place where I had been born and raised. I walked straight into the forest and headed north toward the border of Mexico, the direction I had been told that many Indios fled to escape from Guatemala.

I took only memories with me, but they weighed (91) heavier on my heart than any burden I'd ever carried to market. Behind me lay ashes of death, ahead lay clouds of uncertainty. I was a young girl alone in a dangerous country, with no home and no future.

I had walked only a few hundred meters into the forest when a whimpering sound like that of a hurt animal caught my attention. It came from beneath a dump of bushes just ahead of me. Fearing a trap set by the soldiers, I quietly lowered myself to my stomach to peek beneath the bush.

Deep under the branches, a small girl cowered on the ground, naked, hugging her knees. Beside her crouched a young boy. They both turned to stare at me. My heart exploded with happiness. "Alicia and Antonio!" I gasped. (92)