Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  It was the smell that hit me first. My father’s leather shoes. The ones he only wore to church. My mother’s floral perfume. The scent she only wore to church too. I dug through their folded clothes and the blankets my mom had knitted. I didn’t know what I was searching for. But I dug through it all, my hands swimming through old socks and shirts that my father saved for planting the chiles, all of them stained with oil or dirt. The smells consumed me. My parents lived in those clothes, they sweated in them, and no matter how many times my mom scrubbed them and dragged them back and forth over her favorite washboard, she couldn’t wring out her sweet sweat and my father’s musky and rich odor mixed with the sand carried by the dry wind of the badlands of New Mexico.

  I fell into the clothes and cried. My body rolled back and forth, smacking the bottom shelf. I yelled out to the heavens, cursing God.

  And then I found what I had been looking for, or, more truly, it found me. From the top shelf of the closet, a photo drifted down through the air and landed on my chest. I watched it float down. As if it were being held by an angel and slowly pulled down through the air, it took a couple seconds to reach me.

  I held it in my hands. An old picture of my parents when they were young and without kids.

  My father had to have been about seventeen years old in the black and white photo. His skin was so dark that he nearly blended into the giant boulder that he leaned against. His hair, as thick as wool, climbed down his forehead, nearly touching his thick, black eyebrows. His pants, held against his body with a very thin belt, were hiked up about six inches above his very thick, hard waist. His young skin, so taught and smooth, only looked rough because he stood next to my mother. He leaned in to stare at her eyes. She looked away from him, a shy gaze into the mountains.

  Her light skin contrasted gravely against his like the two colors of a magpie clashing against each other on the belly of the earth. Her hair looked nearly blonde, and though I couldn’t see the color of her eyes, I imagined the grey and blue tint that circled in the white around them. Her dress fell around her. She had none of the weight she had gained from carrying and bearing four children, and her shy smile and open gaze transfixed me. For a moment, I didn’t think about her as my mother but more as just a young girl whose life would end a short fifteen years later.

  It was all there, of course. Their young, yet-to-be-tortured faces. Their shared love for each other. My dad’s eternal need to make my mother smile by whatever means possible, whispering something in her ear as she turned away from him to control her blushing. The truth that I wanted to see, that they were made for each other. It lived in black and white and the shades of gray that swam across the slick photo. And, of course, scattered across their faces were hints of my brothers and sister; Maria’s dark skin a copy of my father’s; Manuel and Paulo’s light skin that reflected the sun like my mother’s; and mine, of course, a shade or two lighter than my father’s and Maria’s and a shade or two darker than Manuel’s and Paulo’s. It was all there. The truth that they were perfect for each other.

  I found my father’s chile knife and shoved it in my pocket too.

  * * *

  I STUDIED THE PHOTO IN my grandfather’s car on the way out of Colorado. I ran my fingers across their faces even though I couldn’t see them in the dark night, the house of our childhood disappearing into the cold.

  Besides the rumbling of the thin tires over the dusty, rocky road that would lead us to the Highway that stretched across the country from Atlantic City to San Francisco, the quiet of the night put us to sleep in the back seat of my grandfather’s new car. Our bodies fell over onto each other. What would have started a war of pinching and hitting in our shared bed at home gave us comfort, like our shoulders and arms and legs and laps were the only part of home that we brought with us. My grandfather had sold the house and everything in it before he even came to see us.

  In the quiet night, my grandfather looked back on us through the rearview mirror, his white eyes reflecting back at us.

  “Where’s Maria,” he asked. “She back there? Because I can’t even see her. She’s so dammed dark like your father that she blends into the night. I can see the rest of you, John fades out a bit, but you two, Manuel or Paulo, I can see just fine.”

  Maria sat up, bleary.

  “I’m here, Señor,” she said. “I was sleeping.”

  “I still can’t see you, you little darky,” he said. “I’m guessing all those little black boys whose fathers worked with your father in the mines really like you, don’t they?” He laughed as if he had just made a joke. We were used to laughter in our house, but this laughter sounded different, filled with meanness instead of the happiness we got when my dad chased us around the house and tickled us until our stomachs hurt.

  “Well, maybe we can scrub some of that skin off you. You could just be dirty,” he said.

  My sister Maria was the cleanest person I knew, and when I looked at her, I saw my father. I wanted to grab my grandfather’s eyes, dig my fingers into his sockets, and tug. I wanted to feel his blood on my fingers and hear him yell in pain.

  Manuel shook next to me. He too felt that rage. But Maria quelled it.

  “How long until we get home?” she asked.

  My grandfather’s eyes darted forward toward the long-outstretched road. Then his eyes shot back at us again.

  “Ten hours,” he said. “Now, go back to sleep. From now on, you are no longer Mexican or Indian. You are proud Cordovas from Spain. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” we all mumbled.

  Under the man’s breath, carried in the warm air of the heater that sat on his shoulders first and then drifted back toward us, he whispered, “The dirty brown one will spoil it all.”

  We fell back into each other and sleep came again. Together in silence, with each other, we knew that we may never have that piece of home again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Della

  1933

  I DID CRY.

  When I saw John leave with that asshole of a man, I did cry. I wanted to chase after that stupid kid who could have kissed me ten times if he wasn’t so damned shy and dumb.

  Like looking through a telescope and seeing the blurry blinks of night come into focus to form patterns across the black sky of Western Colorado, I saw John’s life so clearly. His grandfather was a mean bastard, the likes I had rarely seen outside of the racist KKK in my life. He was cold. Cold men were sometimes crueler than hateful men. Hateful men have passions. Their passions can be turned to caring if you get into their heart, but cold men are just cold. They are cut off from the world. They have walls. There is always a sliver into the heart of hateful man. Cold men seal everything up with walls of ice.

  John left with a cold hateful man, and I wanted to chase after him, but my mom held me against her.

  “How can we just let them leave with that man?” I screamed into the crook between her chest and arm. “How can we be so weak? We’re Chavezes!”

  I tried to pull away from her and yell into her face, but her sinewed arms held me close. She whispered over my cries.

  “Family is family, Della. We have no right to keep them here. If we tried to fight them, we would lose. We would lose them eventually. Family is family, mija,” she said.

  The little boys had woken up and wandered into the kitchen with their eyes covered in sleep. Ernie fell to the ground and leaned against the wall. He dropped his head into his hands. He too had lost a close friend. He too had lost a Garcia.

  “Let’s all get to bed,” my father said. “Let’s all sleep and we can talk more in the morning.”

  He made the rounds, gathering the boys and me in his arms and pulling us through the house toward our room. Like he did when we were little, he tucked us all in together beneath the sheets, kissed each of our heads—even Ernie’s—he said goodnight, and he closed the door behind him, the light disappearing with him.

  “I could have shot that son of a bitch,” I heard my mother sa
y.

  “I know, Benita, I know. Me too,” my father said. “But you are right. Family is family. Blood is blood. And we couldn’t afford to raise eight children, not today, not this year. The dust has come. The land has dried.”

  I did cry.

  Chapter Eighteen

  John

  1934

  COMING FROM OUR HOME AT THE EDGE OF THE DESERT AND entering theirs felt like moving from the warmth of the edge of fire to the dry, cold surface of the ice that covered Lake Tahoe. The land felt barren. We had just moved from where the land had died because of the dust, but I remembered the green and fertile fields from before the earth had died around us. Where my grandpa took us, however, had not died in the dust but seemed to live until we hit the edges of the Truckee River whose waters sprouted greens more green than I had ever seen, and the water itself flowed so wide and strong that all I wanted to do was jump into it and float away home to Colorado.

  Beyond moving from the low desert to the high desert among the mountains, we’d come from a place where hugs and kisses were shared between our parents and given out to us like children tossing candy from a float in a parade. We landed in a home where physical affection seemed to be banned—somewhere in the house a book of old rules lay, I imagined, and the first rule was to keep all forms of outward affection to thyself. This gospel was so foreign to us that we got in trouble for hugging, told by our grandfather that that kind of stuff was not for us and that we should keep our damned hands to ourselves because this wasn’t kissy Mexico.

  My grandma had a niceness to her that my grandfather did not, but she held it very close to her—except with baby Paulo. We, as my grandfather liked to rant, were given to him so that Christ could test him. He believed his grandchildren had been dropped in his home to be the burden that Jesus spoke about in the Bible, something we all had to carry, a testament of faith, to get past Peter’s Golden Gates. And he wanted his new burden, his four freeloaders, to keep the house as clean and as quiet as it had been before we got there.

  We were to be seen very little and not heard at all.

  We did what our grandfather told us to do, but all for different reasons. We stopped speaking Spanish, first off. It wasn’t spoken in the home, and if we got caught speaking it, Grandpa would whip us with his belt. I remember his eyes the most. If you could capture steel and rust and round them out, shining them up to make a glossy glow on a little ball, and put them into my grandfather’s deep eye sockets, you could see what I saw. They seemed so confident behind the belt, so full of the outright righteousness that came with every slap of leather across our bare skin. He believed what he was doing was right, and you can’t fight with or change a man like that. We learned quickly to do everything he said to avoid the beatings.

  Once, one day at dinner during those first few months, Manuel asked if he could have some more bread without it being offered. My grandpa backhanded him so hard that one of Manuel’s teeth cracked. Instead of saying anything about the tooth, Manuel swallowed it, not willing to give my grandpa the satisfaction of breaking part of him. Manuel was quiet and stubborn and tough, just like our parents, and I loved him for it. Maria and I never said a word at the table after that, and I know Manuel was glad it all happened that way so that we could avoid making the same mistake. He was always such a damned martyr.

  They only allowed Paulo to go to school. And my grandmother brought Paulo into her arms like he was her own. He alone escaped all the whippings and lashings and the silvery and rusty glare of my grandfather.

  The boy slept with my grandma in her bed for the first year after we were thrown in their home, the other three of us huddling together in a twin bed in the cold corner of the ranch house. For us—Manuel, Maria, and me—seeing Paolo, our littlest, avoid the belt and the beatings and the shovel and spend his days wrapped in my grandmother’s love or in the wooden seat of the local school, made our work worth it. We loved him, and we knew that we couldn’t bear it if he had to live the life we lived, so we didn’t say a word about it, fearful that my grandfather would turn on our young brother out of spite, to punish us for our words. We hugged him and played with him when we could, comforted in the fact that his smile was real.

  When we went out in public, before any of us could leave the house, my grandfather made sure that we all looked as European as possible. He went to extremes to kill the Mexican parts of us. For Manuel and me who looked somewhat Mestizo, he dressed us in slacks and collared shirts, slicked back our hair, and made us wear hats, tapping our cheeks and saying, “That stuff sure works. You’re getting back to your real color every day.” He was talking about the stuff he made in his basement to cover our skin. He rubbed it over our skin and smeared it across our arms. He was pretty proud of his concoction, though I don’t know what he put in it. It smelled like rubber.

  The darkness of my father’s skin began to fade in us, to shed like the skin of a snake, and, looking in the mirror after a full winter and a summer of having had our skin covered in slime, we looked lighter, very close to my grandmother and grandfather’s shade, more olive than brown, and this corresponded with less whipping.

  When the language had been eradicated like a swarming bug and our skin had become closer to my grandfather’s hue—when he looked across the table at us two boys and saw younger versions of himself—the man stopped hitting us as much. But only us.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Della

  1934

  I’D BEGUN TO LIVE IN THE TRINIDAD LIBRARY. IT WAS BIG, AND I could disappear in it. I’d find myself lost in the stacks, and, yes, damnit, I used to smell the must of the books and lick my fingers when I got paper cuts from the magazines so that I didn’t have to get up to go to the bathroom to wash the blood off. And my curiosity, though I tried to read fiction or poetry, always pulled me toward science. Once I had devoured all the old science in the old books, I went straight for the periodicals section to see what was new.

  “POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY translates the wonders of science into terms that apply personally to the average man… THE average man’s biggest task is to rule himself before he can learn to control the elements…THE average man has an average body. It may be likened to an automobile engine that must see him to the end of his journey. But any engine, to operate successfully, must have a car…MOST men today have automobiles, or hope to have them. With car ownership come problems…THE average man has a home and family, or expects to have them. He wants to know how to make new and useful things at home. He wants to know how to lighten the daily labor in his household.

  “IN SCIENCE there is imagination. And for the average man, the curious man, the imaginative man, POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY is like a magic carpet. Hundreds of articles and pictures in each issue can transport him to places where men are doing new and amazing things and thinking significant thoughts.”

  I put down the library’s copy of Popular Science Monthly.

  The average man? What about me? I thought to myself. That was bullshit. I scanned the pages of the magazine looking for a mention of a woman scientist or a woman professor or a woman scholar. I stopped briefly and read the article “Checking Up on Einstein’s Theories,” which was good because it looked at Einstein’s theory that time and light bend in space and said that a new telescope, taking a look at the sun, proved that to be true, but, hell, I’d already taken Einstein’s word for it. I’d read the theory in The Scientific Journal when I was around eleven years old, and it made a whole lot of sense to me. It almost pissed me off to so see that some jackass thought that he needed to check up on Einstein.

  I scanned and scanned and then I found a picture of a woman with the abbreviation “Dr.” before her name, and I almost tore that goddamned page out of the magazine when I saw her in a hat with flowers on top of it, her thick, round, and sagging face beneath. She looked smart. Dr. Katherine B. Davis. She was the only woman mentioned in the magazine, so instead of reading the brief caption below her photo, I read the captions of Dr. C.W. Kanolt an
d Dr. O.E. Hovey whose photos shared the page with hers. She had landed on a page of men who had achieved scientific breakthroughs.

  Dr. Kanolt worked with liquid and solid nitrogen and had led the way in element transformation—I liked that, taking one thing and stabilizing it as another. Dr. Kanolt, in his picture, stared at a giant tube with nitrogen frozen in it, his thick goatee hanging down in unison with the tube. Dr. Hovey held a tiny microscope up to his eye and looked a small example of a petrified thunderbolt. It was black and white and small, so I couldn’t get a good look at it, but I imagined how beautiful the glass would look up close.

  After reading about their achievements, I scanned over Dr. Davis’ photo, excited for the grand finale, excited to see what the one woman in the magazine had accomplished.

  “Dr. Katherine B. Davis, Director the New York Bureau of Hygiene. Discussing answers to questionnaires recently sent to 1,000 married women, most of them college graduates, she says: ‘We are certain that in the future scientists will place at the disposal of humanity something that will help solve the serious problems of sex relationships.’”

  What? Sex relationships?

  “One of the most hopeful bits of evidence about American social life is that 872 of 1000 women answered, without qualification, ‘Yes’ as to the happiness of their married life.”

  “This is bullshit,” I said out loud.

  The librarian, a woman who had come to know my outbursts, whispered loudly, “Della, shhh.” Then she smiled at me.

  Women are happy in their married life? That’s the whole goddamned study? That’s not science. That’s feeding manure to the cow, telling men who read Popular Science that all is good in the world, and a woman doctor is here to prove it. These women must not live on los ranchos or with husbands who come home from the mine. They must not live with men who get drunk and beat them. They must not have to haul shit out of a barn or take care of their kids alone when something happens in the bottom of a mine and their husbands never come home.