Tatarabuelo Nicolás hadn’t been much of a husband and even less of a parent due to his love of the bottle, but his death enshrined him in our family. Originally hired to cut cane, he was ordered to help in the Central’s boiler. Drinking cheap rum wasn’t much of a problem out in the fields. Inside, using a heavy pole to stir simmering cane juice while perched on a swaying catwalk, was a different story.
Minutes before the whistle sounded, he toppled over, head-first.
The Colossus ground to a halt for a week as they fished him out. The warm brown of his skin had been leached away, replaced by a ghastly white. Worse, as his family later found out, his corpse had been candied. Much to their horror, his funeral was interrupted when, like clouds darkening the sky, bees descended to swarm the casket.
The priest in attendance was said to have called upon the divine to smite them.
The last anyone saw of the priest were his black robes flapping in the distance as he attempted to fend off the swarm.
The rumors began immediately that Nicolás did not rest easy in his grave. His former co-workers talked in low whispers about a curse—at least whenever the boss had his back turned. It was the priest’s fault. He should’ve performed the mass correctly. That they hadn’t been at the funeral that day didn’t stop them from believing this, of course.
Months after the accident, workers tasked with stirring the same vats that had claimed his life said they felt Nicolás behind them. One or two workers swore his cold, sticky hands had tried to push them in as well.
Years later, one of our distant cousins who’d moved to Connecticut for work came back with a story about an old spook. When children spooned sugar into their tea, they’d chant ojos golositos three times over their cups. If they’d done it right, they saw a ghastly figure instead of their own reflections – someone who looked like a sugar cube left out in the sun.
When asked, the children admitted that ojos golositos wasn’t very scary. For one, he never did anything. He didn’t even make their tea taste weird or gross. It was sad. They felt sorry for him.
It was as if our great-great-great-great-grandfather’s ghost was pulled and pulled until, not content with haunting locally, he went global. Stretched as far as the sugar trade itself.
Until depreciation sets in, sugar stops making the Central money, and it’s abandoned. Now it’s a heap of bricks and a smokestack about to fall over, and among the ruins the diminished ghost of Nicolás, of ojos golositos, walks alone.