“You soiled this day with your presence,” he said. “No one invited you. All you are is a poor memory of Manuel, and we don’t need his memory here anymore. You, your sister, and Manuel, you were all lost causes when I picked you out of that poor miner’s house. When I was young, when I crossed into the states, I got beaten, spit on, and ignored. They called my wife a ‘whore’ and ‘dirty.’ Why, John, why? Because we couldn’t speak English. Because we ate beans and tortillas and chilies. Because we were Mexican no matter if we built their railroads or cleaned their houses or dug their mines or fed their babies. We didn’t speak a da English. Spics. So, when I saw your little brother, I thought I could give him the life I have now without him having to go through what your grandmother and me went through. You and Maria and Manuel, you were just stowaways. So get out of here before I hit you even harder.”
I walked over to the holy water and cleaned the blood off my dress blues, moved slowly over to my grandfather, and swung a fast fist up and under his jaw, laying the old man out on the ground. My grandmother gasped. Paulo, like he had been born to do, fell into his new, older wife’s arms, and stayed there.
“That was for Maria,” I said. I turned toward Paulo. The pews, thick and shiny and mahogany, passed by me as I walked to my little brother. I pulled him away from his wife, threw my arms around him, and shook his hand. Then I gave Ida a small hug, turned and kissed my nephew on his forehead, patted my grandmother’s veil, and walked out of the church and into a bar.
THE MORNING I LEFT, I sat in a bar in Reno and drank until my train pulled into the station. I remember this much.
“I think you’ve had enough,” was not something bartenders said to you back then in Northern Nevada. They poured drinks and let you drink them as long as you had money, and if you wore the uniform, they didn’t turn you away. I drank and I drank.
“Let me see your ticket,” the bartender told me.
I slid my ticket across the bar to him. He placed his palm down on it and slid it toward his belly until he could easily wrap his thumb and index finger around it, turned it over, and scanned it.
“Okay, John, I’ll make sure you get on that train,” he said. Then he turned his back to me, scribbled on a piece of paper next to the cash register, swung back around, and refilled my whiskey and beer. “I’ll make sure you get there.”
I wanted to replay the sound of my fist hitting my grandfather’s face, and smile. I wanted to feel like a long-lost hero that had come back and avenged his brother. I wanted to feel it all again and raise my fist in the air in victory. Instead, all I saw was my grandmother’s face. Her tears. My little brother’s shock that splashed across his eyes. My sister-in-law’s disgust that I had ruined her wedding day. She had already lost my older bother to war, but she had found my little brother. It was their faces that I saw that day when I pulled the mug of beer off the edge of the bar and placed it on my lips. Their fear, sadness, and disgust, not my grandfather’s face at the end of my fist.
The bartender never said that I had had enough, and I never said it either.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Della
1942
IN DENVER, I BOARDED THE TRAIN, FOUND A NICE EMPTY CAR, and closed the doors and shades to the hallway, and looked at my reflection in the mirror and the train station behind it and thought to myself, “Della, you’re leaving. Yes, you’re leaving.” I smiled at my own smile in the reflection in the glass, hoped no one would enter, thinking the room full. This didn’t work. First, a large wealthy family that had spent their holiday skiing in Northern California tried to budge in but there weren’t enough seats for all of them, and I did not give them a welcoming expression, scowling at their youngest child who said, “I’ve never seen eyes like yours.”
The mother moved them out and the father cursed me with barely opened lips, “Half breed.” Hell, he was pretty observant, because he nailed it.
The train began to move, and a young man fell into my car, drunken. His body splayed across the seat on the opposite me, and he buried his face into the cushion, shielding me from taking a good look. He smelled of booze.
He could barely talk, and the seat cushion swallowed up his voice. He mumbled something about his little brother and his grandfather, but it didn’t make any sense. He was a drunken sailor who couldn’t lift his head up.
“My dad was a miner and my mother was a saint, until they died.”
He wasn’t making any damn sense, and to be honest, I wished he’d just shut his mouth and pass out. Drunks. I’d been around them before. At get-togethers. At parties. Just walking around town and running into them after school as they grasped at my skirt. I didn’t want to be around this one, so I got up quickly, grabbed my things, and tried to move out the door.
I did what any smart woman would do. I left the car and found another one, the one with the ski family. They had heard the noise and let me in. I sat on the floor of their cabin until we hit Kansas City and they took another train.
The boy’s snoring rambled through the train like a bear growling in the woods.
He really was a crazy asshole.
THE NEXT EVENING, I WENT to dinner in the dining car.
There he was. I could tell by the slick, oily black hair that fell across his arms. He sat there sheepishly with his forehead on the table and his arms wrapped around it like he was playing some sort of childhood who-done-it game; it reminded me of how my dad sat years earlier when he waited for my mother to cook steaks. The sailor wore a collared shirt, a brand-new one. I’d guessed he’d gotten his first paycheck from the military and spent some of his money on clothes. They all did, all the poor ones. He’d been crying, at least it looked like it, stains on his forearms. When he stood up from dinner, he accidentally dropped a photo that he had been looking at on the ground. I didn’t want to have anything to do with him, first the drunk and then the quiet and sad man who could barely eat. Neither of these sides of him were attractive, but he just stared at the photo for a moment like some kind of idioto who had lost control of his hands.
With all the bad luck that could come my way, when he dropped the photo, I had already begun to walk back to my cabin and couldn’t just let it lie there, so I reached down, picked it up, and placed it on the table. I did my best to not make eye contact with him.
Men are dumb, and many of them would take direct eye contact as a sign of flirtation. I placed the photo gently on the table in front of him. His awkward grasp toward it landed his hand on mine. I pulled my hand slowly away to not be too rude, and still did not make eye contact, lowering my hat down over my eyes and tilting my chin down toward the floor. I walked away, hoping that he didn’t recognize me from the night before. I hoped I’d never have to deal with that young man again.
Later in my cabin, however, the photo came to mind, the one he had dropped on the floor. A family standing beside a new car with looming clouds behind it. A photo of a woman who must have been his mom, a poor beautiful woman with light skin and dark hair. And, somewhere inside me, a lightbulb went off and my heart broke for him—the little boy from Trinidad—the one that left for Nevada, the one I missed—John.
I stood up. I walked toward the door. I even opened it to go find him. I loved him. I missed him. He was there on the train with me. I stepped into the hallway to go save him. I understood why he cried. I understood why he felt such deep pain. I could make him smile. I could love him and give him love.
But then my life came back to me. I was on a train to go to school. I was on a train to get the hell away from Las Animas County. The boy who sat broken and hungover in the dining cart was everything I was leaving, even if I loved him. Hell, I loved my parents, but I left them to find whatever I needed to find out there, and they weren’t some borracho who crashed into my cabin the night before and smelled like the underside of a big, pink pig on the ranch.
I closed the door. I sat down on my seat. And I decided to leave him be. I had to. For me.
Chapter Thirty-Five
John
1942
THE NEXT THING I KNEW, I WOKE ALONE, SMELLING OF BEER and sweat in my dress blues, in a train car somewhere in Wyoming. Like someone had slammed a mallet down hard on my forehead, everything hurt. My lips cracked, and my mouth clambered for water like the desert mountains where I was born. With each shift of my body, something else hurt. With each turn of my head, my brain slammed against my skull. I think I had drunk the liquid straight out of my brain, nothing left to capture the movement of soft tissue against hard bone. Everything hurt.
The light from the high-west morning screamed through the window shades.
I stood up, disgusted at everything in the world. I thought for the first time in my life that jumping from the train might be the best solution to everything, hurling my body onto the tracks, aiming my head toward the slick metal tied together by wooden ties and iron spikes. But I couldn’t.
Noakes waited for me. My submarine waited for me. I believed I had earned my spot on the top of the ship to shoot down the motherfuckers that killed my older brother. I had to stay alive for that, but, to be honest, that was the only very thin thing that kept me from either leaping off the train or jumping off at the next town and drinking and going AWOL.
Somehow, I had carried my body to the dining hall. No one looked at me. I kept my head down, not knowing who I had run into the night before when I boarded the train, not knowing who saw me so drunk in my dress blues and thought, “What a disgrace to the uniform.” I kept my head down, reached into my pocket to pull out the photos of my family the day the storm struck them down, and I stared at them, trying to do my best to bring some light into my life. And then I dropped them on the floor.
My body hurt so bad and my brain moved so slowly that it took me a minute to even realize what I had done, but someone else did. A kind woman bent down and picked them up. I didn’t look up at her, shame still full in my belly. She smelled like lavender and vanilla. She placed them on the table gently, with all the kindness that I thought had dried up in the world.
I reached for the photos and accidentally placed my hand on hers. For a split second, a rush of warmth replaced all the pain in my head. She let me hold her hand for a second longer than I ever deserved, and then she walked away.
Somehow, that one kind gesture and that one gentle touch changed it all. Life was worth it. Kindness existed. My boat awaited.
I spent the next two days sober and thinking about Della. Something had brought her fully to me. It wasn’t just the same fuzzy memories that I pleaded with my mind to resurrect. It wasn’t just the daydreams of finding her after the war and praying that she hadn’t met someone else and forgotten about me. Something fresher had taken me. Something more real had swept me up in my fantasies, like she was with me there on the train.
The smell of lavender caught me every once in a while, and the natural scent of it made me dizzy. There were a couple times that I thought about going to the dining cart for a drink, but to be honest, I felt so much shame for getting on the train so borracho that I ordered my meals in my cabin and watched the world go by through my window, thinking of Della.
The train slowed in Hartford, Connecticut. I had to get off and catch a train to New London. It seemed like the whole train emptied out too. I dragged my bag into the station and waited for my next train. The board flashed destination after destination: New London, Connecticut. New York, New York. Boston, Massachusetts. Springfield, Massachusetts.
I watched people from all over the country walk from platform to platform. They weaved around each other, oblivious to anyone else, and headed straight toward their gates. Trains pulled in and pulled out. And then the train that carried me there moved away from its platform. One last passenger walked out from the platform from where it departed.
The wind carried the smell of lavender. I took a long look at the woman. There was something eerily familiar about her. Her black hair down over her shoulders. The edge of her dress swung around her calves, and then she sprinted passed me.
“Della?” I yelled out.
I didn’t even know where the yell came from. I hadn’t fully realized that it was her when I said her name. Something from deep down yelled it out like I had no control of my own voice.
The woman slowed, she turned around. “Hi, John.”
I stood up.
I didn’t know what to do. It had been six years since I saw her through the window of the schoolhouse and more than eight years since we stood in the corn rows and nearly kissed. We were children. Now, as a man, I felt like that small child who ran with her to her apple tree and sat beneath it Sunday after Sunday and who looked at her in awe while she told me about science and agriculture.
“Shit, John,” she said. “Well, shit.” Della planted her fists into her waist just like her mother used to do when she got mad at us when we were children. She scowled at me like I had stolen her ticket from the train or taken her last bit of food after a long day of work. Her lips, however, gave her away. I wouldn’t say they smiled. I would say that they moved around on her face like she didn’t know if she should smile. Passengers rushed around her, but I felt like it was just us standing there in the train station.
“I miss you, and I think I love you,” that’s all I could say. I wasn’t really quoting her letter to me as much as using her words from her letter to express my feelings. I didn’t have words of my own.
“Goddamnit all to hell, John,” she said.
Like she had been defeated, she dropped her fists from her waist, her shoulders dropping too, and put her head in her hands.
“I know you were on the train from Denver. I knew the whole time,” she said.
“You picked up my photo, didn’t you?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“Why didn’t you—” I asked. Heartbreak began to settle in, began to sink inside of me.
“Because I couldn’t. You came into my cabin drunk the night before. I can’t clean you up. I don’t know if you need saving, but I can’t save you.”
“Manuel is dead,” I said. “Paulo married his wife. Maria left with a priest.”
None of this was a real response to what she had said.
“I came to Trinidad when you were still in school a year after I left. I saw you through the window, and my grandfather found me and took me back to Reno,” I said. “I went back after boot camp and saw Paulo marry Manuel’s wife and hit my grandfather in face and it felt so good. Then I got drunk.”
She stared at me. These were the only words I had, so I just stared back. My hands gripped each other at my waist, and I could smell her perfume, like vanilla. She was a woman, and she was Della, and she was right there in front of me.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Della
1942
“I HAVE TO GO, JOHN,” I SAID. “I’M TRULY SORRY. I HAVE TO GO to school.”
His face dropped in front of me. The sadness that covered it resembled that of the boy who lost his mother and father, not the borracho from the train. It was the John I had always known. First, the quiet and happy boy who walked me home and then the weakened boy who looked lost when his mother and father died. The boy who almost smiled when I leaned in to kiss him before he left, and the frightened boy who looked back for us to help him when his grandfather pulled him from our home.
When I saw the borracho on the train, my decision to avoid him was easy. For the rest of the trip, I snuck between the dining cart and my cabin. I hid my face in a veil when I went to the bathroom. I even figured out where he slept just so I knew which routes he might take to get places on the train, and I avoided them like a spy moving through an enemy’s castle.
That was easy. He was a broken boraccho who smelled like he’d just come out of a goddamned whorehouse.
That day on the platform though, it got hard to dismiss him. Real hard.
“I miss you, and I think I love you,” he said. This hit me with some kind of damned emotion, but I couldn’t say
what it was, honestly, half anger and half love. “I came to Trinidad. I saw you in the window. I hit my grandfather in face and it felt so good. Then I got drunk.”
I don’t remember if I even responded to him during all of this. I was numb and angry that my old world had come into my new world, even if it came in the form of a boy I loved.
“Manuel is dead,” he said. “Paulo married his wife. Maria left with a priest.”
And my heart sunk. I imagined Manuel leaving John. Maria leaving John. Paulo deserting him. It made me want to wrap my arms around him and squeeze so hard that he would crumble into me.
“Ernie is dead too,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t have opened up at all. I should have said, “I’m sorry,” and walked away, but the goddamned words just fell out of my goddamned mouth. “Goddamnit, Della,” I said out loud.
His face, again, changed. No longer did his eyes drift towards the ones he had lost. Instead, they focused on me. They stared so directly at me that it gave me a chill. He had lost his own sadness and fallen into mine.
“No,” he said. “How is your mother?”
“She’s a liar,” I said. “She says she’s okay, but she hasn’t been the goddamned same since she found out. I think she’ll get better, but right now I think she wishes the KKK would come back just so she could shoot somebody. The gun on her hip is always loaded. She’s pissed off, John, really pissed off.”
“How’s your father?” he asked with that damn quiet sincerity that had always caught me off guard. Like we hadn’t been apart for the last eight years, my shoulders fell from their defensive lift, and I answered.
“He’s sad, but I was always my dad’s favorite, so, you know, he’s really happy that I’m heading to college to ‘do something so special in this world,’ like he always says. I give him hope, ya know?”
Let the Wild Grasses Grow Page 17