Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  Once past the gate, autumn had painted the campus trees with brushes of red and yellow and orange. The river of color above me lined a sidewalk, and the fallen leaves of the trees covered the path that led to the largest building I had ever seen in my life. I walked up its concrete stairs and stood beneath the towering wooden doors at its entrance, no one else in sight. I could hear geese cackling along the edge of a large pond in the distance. I felt completely alone, but, at the same time, I felt as if the campus had wrapped its arms around me and given me a hug, like I had been there before, somehow.

  AFTER BEING REGISTERED, TOURED, GREETED, and ushered, I was overwhelmed but happy when I stood in the doorway that opened up into my dorm room.

  “YOU WILL BE IN ABBEY Hall, Ms. Chavez,” Sister Mary May told me when I walked with her across campus. The nun’s long black and white skirt seemed to be starched so stiffly that it would take a tornado for it to shift at all. “This hall was built specifically for young women like you, those who come from places in the country, for instance, that are unique, to create a community where you all can thrive together.”

  I was many things—abrasive, ornery—but I was not dense. I knew exactly what Sister May meant. I was a poor half Hispanic and half Indian girl who grew up in a place in the country that every single girl at Mount Holyoke had never heard of in their lifetimes. Most girls, though they did come from small towns that were scattered across the eastern coast, had no clue what it meant to grow up in the high valleys of the Rocky Mountains, and that was okay with me. I didn’t mind at all. Damnit, I liked me. But damnit, don’t beat around the goddamned bush, sister.

  I didn’t mind being unique. I didn’t mind that no one knew where I came from. I didn’t mind that I was poor. And I didn’t mind that they put me in a dorm with other unique girls. The only thing that all this meant was that I got out of Trinidad, a city stuck in time, a town without my brother Ernie.

  ABBEY HALL WAS BUILT ONLY a year or so before I walked in. It felt new. It smelled new. The paint on the large round pipes that snaked their way over the bed in the corner of the room—that was bigger than my family room at home in Colorado—still had driblets of paint that had dried unevenly. I sat on the bed and drowned happily in the moment. I would not have a roommate, not my first year, so I knew I would have to find comfort and a lot of friendship within myself and within my books. I felt okay with this, ya know. I trusted me. I trusted me a lot.

  I lay there on the bed and thought about Ernie, how he too had left home just two years earlier. We didn’t have to wait long for him to come back.

  In my hands, I held books. Shakespeare. Biology. Latin. French. Geometry. I ran my fingers over their rough, used covers. My rough-skinned fingertips spelled out the subjects. And then, without a hint of feeling strange or awkward, I kissed those dammed books as if kissing a boy for the first time, soft and gentle and full of passion. I fell asleep with the books on my chest and didn’t wake up until the next morning when the church bells rang for morning Mass and echoed across the green grass of campus that held the leaves of fall in its hands.

  * * *

  AT MASS, I SAT IN the front row, clasped my hands in prayer, and asked the Lord to help make the two days before classes go faster, damnit. I couldn’t wait to learn. I couldn’t wait to raise my hand and share my thoughts about biology and Shakespeare and Latin.

  Mass was different there. Sure, it followed the same structure. It had all the same readings. We prayed to the same Catholic God, but it was so quiet. While we rarely went to Mass in Trinidad, when we did go, the community swarmed in with rumblings and gossip and the sounds of children playing and then being disciplined by their parents to behave. Children hung onto their mothers. Fathers, some drunk, genuflected and fell asleep in the pews, only to have the priest yell toward them to wake up during his homily.

  Me, personally, I liked the movement of it all. I liked the pattern of the Mass—the kneeling, standing, and sitting, choreographed with the readings and the songs—and I tried to count the seconds between when the priest would start a reading and when the first person would perform the sign of the cross and then when the crossing would end.

  The whole thing was in Latin then, but we Chavezes had an advantage. We spoke Spanish, first, so most of the words made sense to us. I can’t imagine what the English and German speakers did during Mass with their minds. They must have just thought they were along for the ride, hoping the priest had their best intentions in mind. He could have damned them all to hell on any given day, and they would have just nodded and raised their hands to God in appreciation. But us, nope, we would know if something like that happened.

  At Mass at Mount Holyoke, silence dominated the hall. Long moments passed between the priest’s words and our movements. It thrived on precision—all standing at the exact same time in some kind of crowd-like hypnotism. It was unnerving, to tell the truth.

  When Mass ended, I followed the map Sister Mary May gave me to the library. When I walked inside, I felt I had stumbled upon heaven. Heaven didn’t come to me in church. It came to me in the library where wooden arches stretched above me, and huge windows let in the dim light of the early fall morning where grey met the yellow and red and orange of the tree branches that waved outside the windows. And the books, all the books in the rich mahogany bookshelves, I could smell them. When no one was watching, I dipped my nose into an open book that I had torn from its shoulder-high shelf and pulled the aroma of knowledge into me before taking it and sitting under one of the arches that gave me both a view of the ornate library and the green campus that I would call home. Damn it all to hell. I was in my heaven. The library at Mount Holyoke could have been haunted, and I would have drunk beer with the ghosts.

  I spent the next two full days in the library. There were get-togethers and socials and all that silly shit that schools make you do when you first arrive, but I didn’t go. I could see girls playing icebreaker games on the lawn from my perch in the library, and holy hell, that was the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. I could see their giddy expressions as they tossed a ball to each other and said their names and where they were from and what they liked to do for fun.

  I would rather be stuck in the fields with an unruly steer, knowing that the big bastard wouldn’t move, than sit out there and tell other girls what I like to do for fun. In Trinidad, I worked, and I studied, and I read. If I did anything else for fun, I would not have been sitting in that library on that day in Massachusetts.

  At night, I moved through the entrance of Abbey Hall like I had done something wrong and didn’t want to get caught. I crept through the hallways and toward my dorm room and turned the key and cursed at the creak that echoed from the small turn of the knob needed to open the door.

  I shut the door behind me and breathed out. I knew that someday I would have to interact with other girls, but I was doing my best to hold that someday back. For the moment, I just wanted to be alone, to live in the world of academia like in my own bubble.

  “Who are you?” a girl said to me from beyond my door. “I know you’re in there. I hear you breathing. You haven’t joined us for all of the get-to-know-you charades. How did you get out of them? I want to get out of them. Holy God, they were the worst. One girl told us that for fun she likes to pretend she’s married, cook for her husband to be, and then imagine what chores he’d like her to do when she was done. No kidding, I’m not kidding.”

  This person who stood on the other side of the door understood me, so I opened it up. I had never been shy. That wasn’t why I avoided those activities. I had just always known how I wanted to spend my time and who I wanted to spend it with.

  I cracked the door just a bit and did not expect to see who I saw standing on the other side of it. A tall, auburn-haired, absolutely gorgeous young woman carried a book in one hand and held her other hand up to the door, scrunched in a fist, ready to knock again—persistently until I answered.

  I couldn’t believe the sight of her
. I know that men have always liked me—I’m not a dumb, falsely humble idiot who feigns modesty, dismissing every compliment thrown my way, but I also knew that this woman rose beyond men’s tastes, their personal “types.” She was prettier than all of that.

  “Do you think you can avoid people forever?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” I said. She was brash, strong, and full of confidence.

  “Listen, I live here, down the hall. I’m Helen, and I saw you sneak through the front hallways. So, I followed you to your room to see why you’re sneaking around so much. Everyone else is trying to fit in. The way some girls love to talk about themselves is enough to drive me crazy. They talk about their sweethearts, their moms, their dads, their place in The Hamptons. They talk about it all, as if someone gives a lily-white crap about any of it. So, how did you get out of all the icebreakers?”

  Helen stood so tall and talked so fast that I didn’t really know how the hell to answer her, but I knew I liked her immediately. I didn’t want friends. I didn’t really care if I made one friend in the years I would spend at Mount Holyoke. I wanted to get my rural, brown butt through college, absorb everything I could, and not waste a moment of any of it doing bullshit stuff.

  “I just didn’t go,” I said. “I just went to the library. That was it. No one came looking for me, so I just ignored all of the invitations and the announcements.”

  Helen fell back against the wall behind her in hallway, placed her hands on her hips, and yelled, literally yelled, as if the hallway were her own goddamned recording studio or echo chamber, “Fucking brilliant.”

  There, right then, I knew that this tall, beautiful woman would be my savior at Mount Holyoke. Her and that beautiful library. I had fallen in love with both of them.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Follow me, and this time you cannot just not show up because I will tie a rope around you and drag you with me. Any girl who would simply not show up to all the stuff that we are supposed to and treat it like she had just decided to not pee is coming with me. I don’t care about their boyfriends or The Hamptons or their stuck-up mothers. You don’t, and I don’t, and I think we can not care about all of that stuff together. What do you say?”

  “Della,” I said. “Della Chavez, from Trinidad, Colorado.”

  “Okay, Della, from Trinidad, Colorado, follow me,” she said.

  She didn’t ask where Trinidad was. She didn’t ask about my family. Holy hell, though I love my family dearly, I didn’t really want to talk about them, and she didn’t offer up anything about her family either when we went to her room, when she pulled out two bottles of vodka, when we crossed the quad, when we drank until we were full and drunk, and when we didn’t stop talking all night long.

  What did we talk about? Nothing and everything. We talked about life, about love, about all the big things that people talk about when the details fall away. We talked about what it meant to be me and what it meant to be her.

  I stood up, raised my glass to her, and clinked it against hers.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  John

  1941

  FOR THREE YEARS, I LIVED LIKE A GHOST IN THAT HOUSE. MARIA was gone, off to Elko, Nevada. Manuel was gone, off to war. Little Paulo was gone too, my grandpa sent him off to boarding school.

  I worked from early morning to early afternoon, feeding the horses and milking the cows and carrying slop to the pigs. The winters were the hardest. The snow fell heavy and the winds came off Lake Tahoe’s cold Pyramid lake, bone slicing and dry. After doing my work, I would hide in the barn. I had whittled down a stick to the size of a pencil, and in the open spaces between the animals, I would write letters to my mom and dad and Della in Spanish in the dirt, covering the whole barn with my words and then erasing it all with my feet when I finished and headed in for dinner, where I would sit quiet at one end of the table while grandfather talked and lectured about all the things I had done wrong. I missed the sound of my own voice. They did not.

  The summers were much better. I finished all my work quickly and then headed to where Manuel and I used to grow our chiles. I tended to our plants every day, even if they didn’t need any tending to. I spoke to them like my father did. I ran my fingers along their purple and red and orange and green skins. I tilled the dirt with my fingers and dug thin irrigation ditches along the edges of their roots that would fill with the water from the Truckee River and gulp it down when the sun covered the sky in the Nevada desert.

  One summer in 1941, my fear came true in the form of a letter from the Navy, delivered to our home along the Truckee. Manuel’s boat had been sunk by the Japanese. My grandfather opened the letter, he handed it to me, and walked away. I read the words, and I let them sink in hard. They made their way through me like influenza attacking the body, slowly making my breath hot, my muscles weak, and my head fuzzy. I felt like a fever had taken me. My temples burned, and the back of my neck could have fried an egg. I was mad, madder than I’ve ever been. I wanted to kill the entire Japanese Navy, the entire damned country. I worried he would never come home, but I never believed it. Like the last blood-filled organ that my body relied on to live, the hope that Manuel would return safe, had been excised from my gut.

  On that hot summer day, I shed all but my underwear and walked across the flood plain and into the Truckee River. Next to my chile plants, white rapids rushed all summer long. I waded into them. The fast, hard water pushed stiff against my ankles and then my calves and then my knees and then my waist, doing its best to yank my legs down into the current, but I would not let it. I placed my feet down on the rocks, each step precise until I stood in the center of the river. It was something about the water. It felt violent there, just like the rain that came down hard the night my mom and dad died. I screamed “CALLATE” over and over again. Then I sat down in the water. It smacked me on the back of the neck and head until I lifted my waist up to its surface and floated with it, the anger in it disappearing and turning to soft hands that carried me a mile down to where the river slowed and swirled.

  I lay there, keeping my body afloat in the swirling waters of the Truckee, and looked up toward the sky. I dove down into the colder depths, ten or twelve feet down in the pool, and stayed there for as long as I could hold my breath. My father, if he were alive then, would have yelled at me to never swim in the weeds because they could have tangled me up, but he wasn’t alive, and Maria was married to a used-to-be priest and Manuel was dead in the Pacific Ocean, and Paulo was at school where my grandparents wouldn’t allow me to go. I didn’t really care if a weed were to wrap itself around my leg and tug me down.

  But then I thought of the chance to see Della again. If I could escape my grandfather’s home, I could see her again. I couldn’t go directly to her. He’d find me there. He’d wrestle me back. Somehow, even at nearly twenty years old, he’d win. But if I could get away, far away where he couldn’t wrestle me back, where he had no control of me, where someone else was in charge, I could escape.

  I always had that fear, the one he planted in me so early on. If I did anything wrong, he would find a way to hurt Paulo. The crazy part was that I knew my grandfather loved Paulo, but I also knew that my grandpa’s heart had a dark, black stain on it, and he would hurt the ones he loved to hurt the ones he didn’t. If they Army made me go, he couldn’t blame me, and Paulo too could escape soon enough, just a few years down the road.

  After swimming for more than an hour, I made my way onto the beach and walked the mile up toward the chile plants, only wearing my underwear. I lay down in the rows between the sprouting guajillos and let the sun dry every last inch of my skin. I knew what I had to do.

  I just had to survive another year.

  Chapter Thirty

  Della

  1942

  I LOVED SCHOOL SO MUCH. I LOVED CAMPUS AND THE BIRDS and biology and French and even calculus, which to me, was just another language like German or Latin or Dutch. Besides H
elen, I was a loner. I wouldn’t change those years or give up my time in the library for dances. I wouldn’t have given up those mornings of sunlight where I sat and read under the gaze of only glass and giant trees while other girls ran off to the city or to meet their boyfriends by the water.

  Helen would do everything on her own terms. She would go to the dance by herself even though she could have gotten a date just as easy as it was for her to breathe. Instead of dancing, she would sit in the corner with a flask and write down the tiniest details about dresses and coats and braids and nylons and fabric. She couldn’t stop herself. Details are what made the world, she would tell me over and over and over again. She never made a judgment about how other girls pulled themselves together for an evening; she only noted what the details were and how they made the whole. She would scribble down words like “pinched, risen, flattened, dull,” and “disheveled” or “classy” or “lovely.” Math, to Helen, came to her like the boys would come to her if she let them within in ten feet. She didn’t.

  And she let me do my own thing, like not going to dances or to ceremonies or to socials. She knew that me making it to Mass three times a week had been like throwing handcuffs across my wrists, plugging me into a socket, and then scolding me for moving.

  The summer came, and I dreaded it.

  If I stayed, I would have to find a place to live and work. I didn’t mind work at all. I’d grown up working, but the only options for me at the time lay in the service industry in Boston or Vermont. This meant I had to be around people all the time and on top of that, I had to pretend to be nice to them all damn day long.