Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  It was Helen, of course. She walked to the very corner of the room and then sneezed quietly, as if she were trying to just cool the tips of her fingertips with a small breath, and then she came back, sat down by me, and smiled. She placed her hand on my knee and then squeezed it tight, her way of telling me that she was so excited to be there and that she was doing her best to tamp down her excitement in the presence of other people.

  “I went to the pharmacist to get something really strong for my cold, so I wouldn’t sneeze all over everybody. Nothing like a big snot bubble to ruin an important interview.” She giggled and held in a sneeze. “You see, that would have been huge if I didn’t take that syrup he gave me. I don’t know what it was, but it works, and I feel a little tipsy too. Don’t worry, not the kind of tipsy that makes we want to dance around in my underwear, but the kind of tipsy that makes me feel confident enough to punch some handsy asshole in the mouth, that kind of tipsy.”

  I laughed a bit. The other women frowned at us both. They can take their disapproving faces and shove them right up their asses, I thought to myself.

  “Della, did you know there are seventy-seven different patterns in these frames,” Helen pointed at the wooden frames on the wall. “What the hell are we here for?”

  Instead of answering Helen, I just shook my head, smiled, stood up, walked toward the paintings, shuffled back and forth in front of them and did my best to prove Helen wrong, but I couldn’t. Helen had nailed it. There were exactly seventy-seven patterns in the nine frames—made up of swoops and crosses and slants and circles, all forming very specific and artful wholes.

  “I have no idea what we are doing here. Or at least I have no idea what you are doing here. I’m here to pass a test.” I had to tease her a bit. She would have been disappointed if I didn’t.

  With a nod of her head and her lips tightened together, Helen grabbed my hand and led me to the window of the hotel and nodded for me to look down into the street at the back of the building, opposite where I came in from. She had not only been counting patterns. She had been scoping the whole damned place out.

  “What do you see?” Helen asked.

  It took no time at all for me to catch her drift. Every single car parked on the northern street that lined the hotel had military license plates on them, and every single one of them were from Washington, DC.

  I nodded at Helen.

  “I’m here to pass a test too, Della, and you and I are going to DC,” she said.

  A woman exited a conference room door behind us. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Her hands made fists as she walked out toward the front door. In her purse, a large manila envelope stuck out. She didn’t say one word to one woman before she left the hotel, making a b-line to the exit and not looking back.

  “Helen Brigance, please join us,” the Navy officer said.

  With my thumb still in Helen’s hand, I typed a message with it on Helen’s fingers: good luck.

  Helen returned the very quick message: thank you.

  This exchange took longer than the officer had expected, so he coughed loudly to interrupt our brief moment. Helen dropped my hand, the last bit of her code tapping on my palm and walked into the room, her fingers crossed behind her back.

  One hour later, she came out of the door. She too had a manila envelope in her hand. She too had eyes the size of quarter dollars. She too walked straight toward the door without saying a word to any other woman in the room, including me. But right as she made it to the exit, on her fingertips, with her thumb, and in Morse code, she signaled out, “Hell, yes.” No one else in the room saw the fingers, but Helen knew I would be watching, and I beamed for a moment before letting the sliver of self-doubt that I may not get the yellow envelope or that I may not get to join my friend in DC slide into my mind for a long, fearful second.

  They called the two other women into the room before they called my name. I sat there, more nervous than I had been before Helen went in.

  I’d always been competitive, intellectually, aiming to be the smartest. I cursed the walls of my high school when they gave my male classmate the valedictorian award instead of me because, as my favorite teacher put it, “The boy might be able to do something with it and Della would not.” The principal saddled me with the salutatorian award instead, patting me on the lower back so close to my ass that I almost told my father about it. I let it go because I had two little brothers that needed to go to school there, and my father’s anger would jeopardize their time under the principal’s thumb. Plus, no one ever said anything about that stuff back then, sure as hell not in rural Colorado where girls were being married off in wink-wink fashion in exchange for heads of cattle, like the tradition of dowries had never really “officially” gone away.

  Instead, when the principal announced the awards at graduation, I waved from the audience and didn’t get up to shake his hand. I couldn’t bear to touch his skin. I devoted the red painted nail of my middle finger to my principal when I raised it to Trinidad High School on my way out of town on the train after high school graduation. That was his special part of my “fuck off.”

  A short-haired woman went in and came out first. She did not have an envelope, but she followed the same protocol as if she had. She looked straight ahead. She did not smile. She remained silent. And she walked out the front door of the hotel.

  The second woman, the one with the long, long dress, was only in the room for five or six minutes. She exited and shook her head no. Instead of walking out the front door slowly, she galloped toward the exit as if someone had begun to chase her. No one did.

  “Della Chavez, please join us,” the officer said with his hand on the doorknob.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  John

  1943

  OUR FIRST PATROL.

  INITIALLY, WHILE JUST GETTING OUR feet wet, we moved through the easy stuff to cook, the stuff we could just kick out in masses—beans, mashed potatoes, bacon, eggs. All of that good, comfort food that filled up bellies. But at the end of our shift, right when two other cooks took over, Noakes and I got to cook for ourselves, so we rummaged through the boxes in the kitchen and then the boxes in the showers and then boxes on the bunks and found a few golden items, those, I’m guessing, reserved for the captain’s cook, the sailor who ran the show. There was nothing we did on that ship without asking him first. And everything was inventoried, so as soon we found a few spices and peppers and onions, and even thick bones covered in turkey meat, we asked if we could use them for our dinner after our second shift that ended just about supper time on the second day as we pushed out into the Pacific Ocean.

  “As long as you cook for me and don’t waste anything. I’m on shift, and I’ll need some food,” he told us. “The pantry and proteins are yours, boys.”

  “You cook something you like, and I’ll cook something I like, and we’ll share, sound good?” I asked Noakes.

  “You’re gonna love this,” Noakes said. “See you back here in a bit.”

  Two other cooks stammered around the kitchen. They had never really cooked before, and cooking for the masses really confused them. In front of them on the counter, they had opened the large and barely together cooking handbook and procedures the Navy had given us right before getting on the submarine in Connecticut. Noakes and I had run our fingers through it and talked strategy, knowing that we would be cooking in a miniature kitchen with two of us in tight, tight quarters. The handbook that we shared had handwritten notes all through the margins. We had crossed out procedures we knew that were excess, and we added our ingredients to recipes. We knew what would work and what wouldn’t. Noakes grew up cooking for his younger brothers and sisters, and I grew up cooking with my whole family and Della and her family until I lost my parents and had to move away from Trinidad and the Chavezes, so we both had a learned feel for the kitchen. The two new sailors who ran around the kitchen, pissing off the head cook by getting in his way while he prepped food for the Captain and lead crew, were such a mes
s that the head cook had to line them up three times and yell at them to “pull their square heads straight out of their round assholes.”

  Noakes and I stepped around each other, weaving and ducking like boxers in a stainless-steel covered ring, while we prepped and cooked food. There was a reason we scored the highest marks in our boot class. We were good.

  “You’ll like this too, if I can find the right stuff,” I told him. We both went off in search of ingredients for our second supper on board the submarine.

  I knew they were there. Somewhere. I saw them on the list. We’d spent a large part of our first days on the boat taking stock of all the available food items. Breads. Beans. Corn. Salt. Pepper. Potatoes. But we didn’t come across the special ingredient items that I saw on the inventory list. The head cook said we could use anything we wanted, and I wasn’t going to start cooking until I found them. I looked in the boxes in the shitter, praying they weren’t in there. I looked in the showers that had been stuffed with tiny boxes. Three days into our mission, and no one had showered, so the boxes remained stacked under the sprayer.

  And then I found them, hidden in a corner next to the captain’s quarters. Ten or eleven little boxes all wrapped in cellophane.

  “Thank you, Jesus,” I said out loud. “Thank you, Jesus.” I did the sign of the cross.

  I worried that when the head cook said that we could use anything that he didn’t mean we could use what was in those boxes. At that point, however, I had already pulled my pocketknife from my pocket and slid it along the top surface of cellophane and opened it up.

  They weren’t anything special, nothing my dad would have prayed about in his sweat-covered shirt in the middle of the Colorado plains, but they were something. Something that would add just enough kick to make the hunt worthwhile.

  Dehydrated chile peppers. The box held only about five bags of dehydrated green and red chiles. From the look of them, they were just mild Anaheim peppers and pimientos, but I was so happy to see them that I said the prayer my dad used to say to the Lady of Guadalupe.

  Bendícenos Señor, bendice estos alimentos que por tu bondad vamos a recibir, bendice las manos que los prepararon dale pan al que tiene hambre y hambre de ti al que tiene pan. Amén.

  I don’t believe too much in hoodoo voodoo stuff, but I felt my father with me then. I think he led me to those peppers. I felt his hand on my shoulders and his breath on my hair. I was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles and a decade away from my father’s chile garden on the plains, but I felt my old man out there at sea with me. The dry air of the desert was replaced by the humid, thick air of the hull of a submarine, but I felt like I had gone home with those peppers in my hands.

  I dug my knife into another box and pulled out a brick of chocolate.

  “Bendice me, la Señora de Guadalupe,” I said.

  Then, as if my father had become a real man, I heard a voice above me.

  “Stand up,” the captain said.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Della

  1943

  I SAT IN FRONT OF FIVE NAVY OFFICERS AND ONE ARMY OFFICER. The Army officer looked out of place, his green uniform clashing with the beautiful Navy blue. They all placed their hands on the table in front of them as if it were a collected effort to hold it down. I crossed my legs. I sat up straight. I had planned to spend my evening watching the ships roll in and out of the harbor and drinking cheap vodka in even cheaper soda. If I would have known about the opportunity to sit in the lobby of a hotel with my legs crossed and my back straight before being displayed in front of five military officers without a table of my own to protect me, I would have pulled my long black hair up and worn a pant suit.

  I smiled a courteous smile, one that barely moved my lips upward. I’d grown up around men much more intimidating than the ones who sat at the table in front of me, ranching men who, though very polite, were rough around the edges and full of machismo. These men didn’t scare me.

  Major Welker, the man in the center of the table who wore his name on a badge on his chest like all the other men, stood up and placed his hands on the table in front of him, a power stance meant to show he was in charge, not just of the committee but also in charge of me and my belonging in the room.

  “Ms. Chavez, you’re American Indian, correct?”

  “Yes, I am. I am half American Indian,” I said.

  “How do you feel about manifest destiny?” he asked.

  His fingers splayed out on the table, the tips of them starting to turn pink and white.

  “I think the slaughter of innocent people, of innocent children especially, because of the color of their skin or the land that they own or the god or gods that they pray to should never happen. And if it happens, the best people should stop it, even it means they have to travel across oceans to do so,” I said. Instead of remaining seated like they expected me to, I stood up and walked toward the table and stopped one foot in front of it.

  “Don’t you?” I asked Major Welker.

  Major Welker shook his head one time—very, very slightly. It could have even been seen as a twitch, but I knew it wasn’t. He was shaking away his surprise at my answer and my approach before he answered.

  “Please sit down, Ms. Chavez,” he asked politely.

  So I did.

  “I agree with you, Ms. Chavez, and this is why we are at war, well, one of the reasons,” he said.

  I had flipped the script on him.

  “You are asking if I hold animosity against the people who slaughtered my mother’s people and put them in reservations,” I said. A statement. Not a question.

  The Army officer at the end of the table coughed uncomfortably and said, “Yes, that is what we are asking.”

  I held my breath in and met each of their eyes. This made them shift in their seats a bit.

  “I believe in our place in this war,” I said.

  “But that doesn’t answer the question,” another officer said.

  “I believe that is the real question, isn’t it? We forget the question of my mother and her tribe, if we skip the questions about my loyalty to this country, and if we ask the real question, do I believe in our place in this war and do I support our country, the answer is a resounding, yes,” I said.

  I placed my hand on my lap and did my best to shut the hell up.

  * * *

  ONE NAVY OFFICER HAD REMAINED quiet throughout the discussion. When he finally spoke, his voice was strong but not loud, gruff but not harsh, quiet but not a whisper.

  “Della, beyond the loyalty question, can you remain quiet? Can you lie to your family? It seems that you don’t hold true animosity against the government for what our ancestors believed to be manifest destiny. Hitler believes he should rid the world of the Jews, which we are over there to fight against, but can you lie to your father, to your mother, to your brothers for your country? Can you tell them that you are moving to Washington, DC, to solely work as a typist or a secretary after you left Colorado to become something more than the wife of a rancher or a miner? Can you swallow that?”

  “My brother Ernie already died in this war. There is no secret I could tell that would bring him back. So, yes, I can lie.”

  The officer flipped through a manila folder that sat in front of him. He pulled out a stapled packet and thumbed through it until his eyes fell on what he wanted. He folded the previous pages back underneath that page and began to read, “A woman should not fall victim to the practices of tradition if those practices only create the perfection of stagnancy of cultural and feminist growth in society.”

  He looked up at me, “Do you believe this to be true?”

  “Yes,” I said. I straightened my back in the chair.

  The third officer, the one that had snatched me from my tranquil afternoon, stood and asked with kindness, “We are here to give you a chance to break boundaries, to break tradition, to break the codes of our enemies and to save our men at sea from surprise attacks. To find enemy ships. To d
ecipher the enemy’s ciphers. You would be a very important link in our intelligence chain that will help us win this war. Is this what you would call breaking tradition and cultural and feminist growth, Della?”

  I thought about it all. The idea of millions of puzzles, the image of breaking codes, the concept of reading other languages, translating them, and on top of that, working to open up the hidden meanings of codes within them. I felt happy.

  “Yes,” I said. My words came out, mirroring his tone, humble but also confident. The defensiveness that the other officer’s question had built had been broken down by this officer’s words and demeanor.

  “Here’s the hardest question of all for you, Della,” he said. “When the war is over, will you be able to walk away and never utter the words cipher or analytics or speak of what you did there ever again? Can you stifle your desire to prove to the world that you broke from the tradition of just being a secretary or a runner or someone who just typed during the war?”

  I sat quiet for a moment to think. All the other officers sat quietly too. This was a real question, one that had been laid out well, so the long silence, this time, felt appropriate, necessary. I wanted so badly to travel to DC to help break down the most important puzzles of my lifetime, but I understood exactly what the question was, and I understood why it had been asked. This would all be top secret, and the military was not joking about keeping it quiet. Then it came to me, the old concept about love that I had read in one hundred different forms in one hundred different stanzas from one hundred different poets from many, many different time periods. “It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved.” Shakespeare shared this. The Greeks shared this. Neruda shared this. Petrarch shared this. All the poets believed it to be true.