Who Carries the Pastor's Wife?

The mist sits in the pine trees until almost ten. Roosters call from every yard. The road into the village is dirt and switchbacks, and when it rains the bus does not come. In the house beside the little chapel, Rosa is already on her third pot of café de olla, cinnamon and piloncillo, because somebody is always arriving.

This morning it is Doña Carmen, whose son has not called from Los Angeles in a month. Before her it was a young mother whose baby has a cough. Yesterday it was the men arguing over a boundary between two cornfields, who wanted the pastor and settled for his wife and her coffee.

Rosa listens to all of them. She prays with them at the kitchen table. She brings tamales to the sick and walks the children to the clinic in the next town when their mothers cannot go. Her husband, Mateo, preaches on Sundays and works the family's milpa during the week. The village loves them both.

But no one asks Rosa how she is. And Rosa does not tell them. She has not told anyone that her own mother, in the city, is ill and asking for her. That she lies awake. That some mornings she sits on the edge of the bed and does not want to open the door.

She has always thought of Galatians 6:2 as her verse. “Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” She has preached it to herself a hundred times as she climbed a muddy path with a pot of soup. Carry the others. That is the job.

It was Doña Carmen, of all people, who noticed. On her third visit that week, she stopped in the middle of talking about her son and looked at Rosa properly. “Hija,” she said, “you look tired. Not tired in the body. Tired in here.” She touched her own chest.

Rosa started to say she was fine. Then, to her own surprise, she began to cry. Everything came out. Her mother. The sleeplessness. The feeling of being needed by everyone and known by no one.

Doña Carmen did not try to fix it. She asked Rosa for her Bible, found the page slowly, and read the verse back to her, running her finger under the words. “Bear ye one another's burdens.” Then she closed the book. “One another,” she said. “That means you too. You are not only the one who carries.”

That week the village did something small. Doña Carmen told the women's group, with Rosa's permission. A cousin in Oaxaca city offered a bed. A neighbour with a truck drove Rosa down the mountain on Thursday. The women took turns making the coffee in the pastor's kitchen while she was gone, and the men fixed the leaking roof, which nobody had asked them to do.

Her mother is still unwell. Rosa still goes down the mountain every two weeks, and it is still hard. But now when she comes back, there is usually someone in her kitchen waiting to ask how she is. She has learned to answer honestly. Carrying, it turns out, works better when everyone is allowed to be carried.