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Chapter Thirty-Seven
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Amos was weak and slightly emaciated, but hardly ever had the friends seen so beautiful a sight as he -- Désirée had never been so happy. They gathered around him, and laid hands in prayer; healing flowed through Ellamae's fingers, and Amos stood up, strengthened.
"Por favor, dinez con nosotros," the peasant said.
It was a simple meal; the friends were each given a few corn tortillas.
"This isn't much food," Sarah said. "How much do they have?"
"Eat it," Jaben said. "This is more than they can spare. The family will go hungry tonight."
"I know!" Sarah said. "We could give them some of our MREs."
"No," Jaben said. "I'd be happy to give them, but to a great many Mexicans, corn is food and food is corn. Our own ancestors had difficulty finding food in a New England whose waters were teeming with lobster. Each culture has its own baggage, and these simple folk are giving us the only food they know. A gift of MREs would not do them much good."
Sarah wasn't the only one to wipe a tear from her eyes.
The meal was mostly quiet; Amos explained how he had been abducted, beaten, and left for dead in a field, and how the peasants had taken him in and slowly nursed to health. "Will this make it hard for you not to hate white people?" Jaben asked.
"Very hard," Amos said. "But you're worth it."
The peasant family consisted of a grandmother, a mother, a father, a teenaged son, a preteen daughter, two little boys, and a baby girl. They were all thin, and lines of suffering were etched on all but the youngest of faces, but at the same time there was a real joy, a glow, about them. "I would like to go to mass with them, if they go to mass, but we should really be going back," Jaben thought. "I need to get back to work." Still, he did not wish in the least to haste this moment.
After the meal, they said goodbye, gave abrazos, and then Jaben reached into the sheath on his left hip and pulled out a thick Swisschamp Swiss Army Knife, showed them every one of its twenty-seven features (the children liked the magnifying glass), and then ceremoniously handed it to the father. The man's eyes lit up.
Sarah stared at Jaben; she knew what that knife meant to him, where he had taken it. Then she ran to the van, and ran back, and threw her red bouncy ball to the children, gave them each a kiss, and departed.
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Chapter Thirty-Seven
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