“That is not true. I talk about things I learned from Dr. Hodgson.”

“You tell me about medical things and how much you admired the doctor. You never talk about your life there. How you lived. I don’t even know exactly where you’re from.”

“I am from Chihuahua. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard the name. Is that a state?”

“Yes. It’s also a town. Chihuahua, the capital of Chihuahua. We have desert and forests, but I come from the mountains, the Sierra Madre. A small village outside the town of Cuauhtémoc.”

“Tell me about your life there. What it was like.”

Juanita hesitated, looking at her hands. “Are you sure you want to know these things? It is not a pretty story.”

“I want to know.”

She listened to the wind. It was blowing hard outside. She thought of the night they found Eli, the towering plumes of snow blowing in the wind. She would tell him the story.

“I was happy when I was a girl. My father, Alberto, was a tailor. I had two brothers, Cristiano and Hernando. They were almost men, working in the tailor shop with my father. He had a good business. It was small, but there was always work. There were rich men who would not allow anyone else to clothe them.

“Then Pancho Villa came to my village, with about five hundred of his men. It was 1916. I was fifteen years old. Villa had crossed the border and killed some Yankees in New Mexico, in a town called Columbus. Your General Pershing chased Villa into Mexico, but he could not catch him. Villa hid for a few days in our village. Pershing was looking for him, so was Venustiano Carranza. My mother made me hide in the cellar. She was afraid Villa’s men would take me and do terrible things. I lived for three days and three nights in the cellar with only a candle, listening to rats and cockroaches. Sometimes I would hear girls screaming. When Villa and his men left, they were a mile outside our village and someone started shooting. No one knows who fired the shots. Maybe it was the father of a girl who had been raped. One of the soldiers was killed and two others were wounded. Villa came back into the village and said that eight men would be hanged because one of his had been killed. They took the first men they found. My father’s shop was right there, in the square, so they grabbed my father and my brothers and beat them so badly that we could not tell my brothers apart. Then they were hanged with the others, from lampposts in the plaza. After Villa left, my mother and I had to cut them down so that we could bury them.