His name was Tomas, but in the village everyone called him "the old man," because he was seven years old and had hands like a man who had worked a lifetime. His mother died when he was four, and from then on his grandmother Rosa, with worn-out knees and a tired heart, became his only refuge. She raised him on bone soup and hard bread, with songs that forgot sorrows and with the certainty that, as long as they were together, nothing could break them.
But illness arrived without warning. First the cough, then the fatigue, then the bed she no longer left. Rosa needed medicines that cost more than air, and Tomas understood, with the brutal clarity of children who grow up too soon, that no one would come to save them. So he did the only thing he knew how to do: work.
Every dawn, when the sun still didn't dare show itself, Tomas slung a sack over his shoulder and walked three kilometers to Mr. Andres's farm. There he carried baskets of cassava, cleaned pens, picked coffee until his fingers bled. They paid him a few coins that barely covered bread and pills. Sometimes, when hunger pressed, he kept a fallen fruit and hid it under his shirt to share with his grandmother.
He returned at noon, sweaty and with blistered feet, and the first thing he did was prepare food. He fed Rosa mouthful by mouthful while she stroked his hair and said in a thread of a voice: "Forgive me, my child..." Tomas smiled, even though something broke inside him, and answered: "Don't say that, Grandma. You are my home."
Neighbors murmured that he was too small to carry so much weight. Some gave him a coin, others looked at him with pity. Tomas hated pity. He didn't beg, he worked. He wanted his grandmother to live, to heal, to sing again. But illness doesn't understand effort. One night, Rosa called him with a weak gesture and said: "Promise me you won't stop being good, even when I'm gone." Tomas didn't understand then. Or maybe he did, and that's why he clung to her hand until sleep overcame him.
Next morning, Rosa didn't wake up. Tomas found her cold, with a peace she had never had in life. He didn't cry in that moment. He left the house, walked to the farm, carried the sack as every day, and only when the sun fell behind the mountains did he sit on the ground and let the weeping break his chest.
Now, when someone asks him why he works so hard, he doesn't talk about his grandmother. He just looks at his calloused hands, the ones that learned to carry the world too soon, and says: "It's what she taught me." Because there are children who grow up all at once, and there are loves that are shown by carrying baskets of cassava until your fingers bleed.