The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

  The Córdova sons and daughters had scattered, as the saying goes, to the four winds. Or actually, only to the three winds, eastward being anathema to the children of Milagro, whose Mississippi was the Midnight Mountains, that chain running north and south barely a mile or two from all their backyards.

  Nadia, a waitress most of her life, first in Doña Luz, then Chamisaville, wound up in the Capital City barrio, dying violently (and recently) at the age of sixty-one in a lover’s quarrel. Jorge emigrated to Australia where he tended sheep, same as at home. Pólito, who spent his life wandering around, getting married three or four times and taking care of sheep in Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, had died young of the flu. María Ana wanted to be a dancer, took the train to San Francisco, and after years of strenuous work, heartbreak, and small roles in the city ballet company, she hurt her back and wound up teaching in an Arthur Murray studio. Berta married an Anglo who raised lemons in California, and, curiously, they never had any children. Roberto, Billy, and Nazario became farm workers, mechanics, truck drivers, dishwashers, and short-order cooks in and around Los Angeles; they all raised large families, and although between them they’d had nine sons in Vietnam, only one of Billy’s kids, Rosario, had been killed. Gabriel, who miraculously metamorphosed into a run-of-the-mill featherweight boxer in the army, turned pro after his discharge, was known as the Milagro Mauler during his short and undistinguished prime, and died in a plane crash in Venezuela. Ricardo had stayed on as a rancher in Milagro, although he spent half his life in the lettuce, sugar beet, or potato fields of southern Colorado, or else with the big sheep outfits up in Wyoming and Montana. Two of his sons, Elisardo and Juan, had died in Vietnam; another boy was stationed in Germany. Sally married a plumber in Doña Luz and had eleven kids herself, one of whom became a successful pop singer in Mexico City, but never sent any money home, not even after the plumber died when a black widow bit him while he was creeping around somebody’s musty crawl space on a job. Patsy, the most beautiful and the sharpest in school, ran West to join a circus, became an Avon lady instead, and died with her husband and all their children except Peter (who was in a Japanese hospital at the time recovering from wounds received in Vietnam) in a head-on car crash in Petaluma. And little Cipriano, the baby of the family, born in 1925, who went farther than everyone else in his education, and, in fact, had just obtained a full scholarship to Harvard when he was drafted, was vivisected by a German machine gun during the first eighteen seconds of the Normandy D-day landings.

  All his life Amarante had lived in the shadow of his own death. When he was two days old he caught pneumonia, they gave him up for dead, somehow he recovered. During his childhood he was always sick, he couldn’t work like other boys his age. He had rheumatic fever, chicken pox, pneumonia three or four more times, started coughing blood when he was six, was anemic, drowsy all the time, constantly sniffling, weak and miserable, and—everybody thought—dying. At eight he had his tonsils out; at ten, his appendix burst. At twelve he was bitten by a rattlesnake, went into a coma, survived. Then a horse kicked him, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He contracted tuberculosis. He hacked and stumbled around, hollow-eyed, gaunt and sniffling, and folks crossed themselves, murmuring Hail Marys whenever he staggered into view. At twenty, when he was already an alcoholic, scarlet fever almost laid him in the grave; at twenty-three, malaria looked like it would do the job. Then came several years of amoebic dysentery. After that he was constipated for seventeen months. At thirty, a lung collapsed; at thirty-four, shortly after he became the first sheriff of Milagro, that old devil pneumonia returned for another whack at it, slowed his pulse to almost nothing, but like a classical and very pretty but fainthearted boxer, couldn’t deliver the knockout punch. During the old man’s forties a number of contending diseases dropped by Amarante’s body for a shot at the title. The clap came and went, had a return bout, was counted out. The measles appeared, as did the mumps, but they did not even last a full round. For old time’s sake pneumonia made a token appearance, beat its head against the brick wall that evidently lined Amarante’s lungs, then waved a white flag and retreated. Blood poisoning blew all his lymph nodes up to the size of golf balls, stuck around for a month, and lost the battle.

  Amarante limped, coughed, wheezed; his chest ached; he spat both blood and gruesome blue-black lungers, drank until his asshole hurt, his flat feet wailed; arthritis took sledgehammers to his knees; his stomach felt like it was bleeding; and all but three of his teeth turned brown and toppled out of his mouth like acorns. In Milagro, waiting for Amarante Córdova to drop dead became like waiting for one of those huge sneezes that just refuses to come. And there was a stretch during Amarante’s sixties when people kept running away from him, cutting conversations short and like that, because everybody knew he was going to keel over in the very next ten seconds, and nobody likes to be present when somebody drops dead.

  In his seventies Amarante’s operations began. First they removed a lung. By that time the citizens of Milagro had gotten into the irate, sarcastic, and not a little awed frame of mind which had them saying: “Shit, even if they took out that old bastard’s other lung he’d keep on breathing.”

  A lump in his neck shaped like a miniature cow was removed. After that a piece of his small intestine had to go. There followed, of course, the usual gallbladder, spleen, and kidney operations. People in Milagro chuckled “Here comes the human zipper,” whenever Amarante turned a corner into sight. His friends regarded him with a measure of respect and hatred, beseeching him to put in a good word for them with the Angel of Death, or whoever it was with whom he held counsel, even as they capsized over backward into the adobe and caliche darkness of their own graves.

  But finally, at seventy-six, there loomed on Amarante’s horizon a Waterloo. Doc Gómez in the clinic at Doña Luz sent him to a doctor at the Chamisaville Holy Cross Hospital who did a physical, took X rays, shook his head, and sent the old man to St. Claire’s in the capital where a stomach specialist, after doing a number of tests and barium X rays and so forth, came to the conclusion that just about everything below Amarante’s neck had to go, and the various family members were notified.

  The family had kept in touch in spite of being scattered to the three winds, and those that were still living, including Jorge from Australia, returned to Milagro for a war council, and for a vote on whether or not they could muster the money to go ahead with their father’s expensive operation. “If he doesn’t have this operation,” the Capital City doctor told them, “your father will be dead before six months are out.”

  Now the various members of the family had heard that tune before, but all the same they took a vote: Nadia, María Ana, Berta, Sally, and Billy voted for the operation; Jorge, Roberto, Nazario, and Ricardo voted against it. And so by a 5–4 margin Amarante went under the knife and had most of his innards removed. He recuperated for several weeks, and then, under Sally’s and Ricardo’s and Betita’s care, went home to Milagro.

  But it looked as if this time was really it. Slow to get back on his feet, Amarante had jaundice and looked ghastly. He complained he couldn’t see anymore, and they discovered he had cataracts in both eyes, so Ricardo and Sally and Betita took him back to St. Claire’s and had those removed. Thereafter, he had to wear thick-lensed glasses which made him look more like a poisoned corpse than ever before. His slow, creeping way of progressing forward made snails look like Olympic sprinters. The people of Milagro held their collective breath; and if they had been a different citizenry with a different culture from a different part of the country, they probably would have begun to make book on which day it would happen. In fact, the word had spread, so that down in Chamisaville at the Ortega Funeral Home, which handled most of the death from Arroyo Verde to the Colorado border, it became common for Bunny Ortega, Bruce Maés, and Bernardo Medina to wonder, sort of off the cuff during their coffee breaks, when Amarante’s body would be coming in. And eventually, although she did not go so far as to have Joe Mondragón or one
of the other enterprising kids like him dig a grave out in the camposanto, Sally did drop by Ortega’s in order to price coffins and alert the personnel as to what they might expect when the time came.

  One gorgeous autumn day when all the mountain aspens looked like a picture postcard from heaven, Amarante had a conversation with Sally. “I guess this old temple of the soul has had it,” he began with his usual sly grin. “I think you better write everybody a letter and tell them to come home for Christmas. I want to have all my children gathered around me at Christmastime so I can say good-bye. There won’t be no more Navidades for me.”

  Sally burst into tears, she wasn’t quite sure whether of relief or of grief. And, patting her father on the back once she had loudly blown her nose, she said, “Alright, Papa. I know everybody who’s left will come.”

  And that was a Christmas to remember! The Celebration of 1956. Jorge came from Australia with his wife and their five children. Nadia journeyed up from the capital with her lover. María Ana took off from the Arthur Murray studios in San Francisco, flying in with her husband and four children. Berta and the lemon grower took a train from the San Jose Valley. Roberto, Billy, and Nazario, their wives and fourteen children and some grandchildren, drove in a caravan of disintegrating Oldsmobiles from L.A. And Sally and the remaining two of her brood still in the nest motored up every day from Doña Luz. People stayed at Ricardo’s house, at what was left of Amarante’s and Betita’s adobe, and some commuted from Sally’s in Doña Luz.

  They had turkeys and pumpkin pie, mince pie and sour cream pie; they had chili and posole, corn and sopaipillas and enchiladas and empanaditas, tequila and mescal, Hamms and Coors and Old Crow, and in the center of it all with the screaming hordes revolving happily about him, chest-deep in satin ribbons and rainbow-colored wrapping paper, so drunk that his lips were flapping like pajamas on a clothesline during the April windy season, sat the old patriarch himself, dying but not quite dead, and loving every minute of it. His children hugged him, whispered sweet nothings in his ear, and waited on his every whim and fancy. They pressed their heads tenderly against his bosom, muttering endearing and melodramatic lovey-doveys, even as they also anxiously listened to see if the old ticker really was on its last legs. They took him by the elbow and held him when he wished to walk somewhere, they gazed at him sorrowfully and shed tears of both joy and sadness, they squeezed his feeble hands and reminisced about the old days and about the ones who were dead, about what all the grandchildren were doing, and about who was pregnant and who had run away, who was making a lot of money and who was broke and a disgrace, who was stationed in Korea and who was stationed in Germany … and they joined hands, singing Christmas carols in Spanish, they played guitars and an accordion, they wept and cavorted joyously some more, and finally, tearfully, emotionally, tragically, they all kissed his shrunken cheeks and bid him a fond and loving adios, told their mama Betita to be strong, and scattered to the three winds.

  Three years later when Jorge in Australia received a letter from Sally in Doña Luz, he replied:

  What do you mean he wants us all to meet again for Christmas so he can say good-bye? What am I made out of, gold and silver? I said good-bye two winters ago, it cost me a fortune! I can’t come back right now!

  Nevertheless, when Sally a little hysterically wrote that this time was really it, he came, though minus the wife and kiddies. So also did all the other children come, a few minus some wives or husbands or children, too. At first the gaiety was a little strained, particularly when Nazario made a passing remark straight off the bat to Berta that he thought the old man looked a hell of a lot better than he had three years ago, and Berta and everyone else within hearing distance couldn’t argue with that. But then they realized they were all home again, and Milagro was white and very beautiful, its juniper and piñon branches laden with a fresh snowfall, and the smell of piñon smoke on the air was almost like a drug making them high. The men rolled up their sleeves and passed around the ax, splitting wood, until Nazario sank the ax into his foot, whereupon they all drove laughing and drinking beer down to the Chamisaville Holy Cross Hospital where the doctor on call proclaimed the shoe a total loss, but only had to take two stitches between Nazario’s toes. Later that same afternoon there was a piñata for the few little kids—some grandchildren, a pocketful of great-grandchildren—who had come, and, blindfolded, they pranced in circles swinging a wooden bat until the papier-mâché donkey burst, and everyone cheered and clapped as the youngsters trampled each other scrambling for the glittering goodies. Then the kids stepped up one after another to give Grandpa sticky candy kisses, and he embraced them all with tears in his eyes. Later the adults kissed Grandpa, giving him gentle abrazos so as not to cave in his eggshell chest. “God bless you,” they whispered, and Amarante grinned, flashing his three teeth in woozy good-byes. “This was in place of coming to the funeral,” he rasped to them in a quavering voice. “Nobody has to come to the funeral.” Betita started to cry.

  Out of the old man’s earshot and eyesight his sons and daughters embraced each other, crossed themselves, crossed their fingers, and, casting their eyes toward heaven in supplication, murmured, not in a mean or nasty way, but with gentleness and much love for their father:

  “Here’s hoping…”

  When, five years later, Jorge received the next letter from Sally, he wrote back furiously:

  NO! I just came for Mama’s funeral!

  On perfumed pink Safeway stationery she pleaded with him to reconsider, she begged him to come. For them all she outlined their father’s pathetic condition. He’d had a heart attack after Betita’s death. He had high blood pressure. His veins were clotted with cholesterol. His kidneys were hardly functioning. He had fallen and broken his hip. A tumor the size of an avocado had been removed from beside his other lung, and it was such a rare tumor they didn’t know if it was malignant or benign. They thought, also, that he had diabetes. Then, most recently, a mild attack of pneumonia had laid him out for a couple of weeks. As an afterthought she mentioned that some lymph nodes had been cut from his neck for biopsies because they thought he had leukemia, but it turned out he’d had an infection behind his ears where the stems of his glasses were rubbing too hard.

  Jorge wrote back:

  What is Papa trying to do to us all? I’m no spring chicken, Sally. I got a heart condition. I’m blind in one eye. I got bursitis so bad in one shoulder I can’t lift my hand above my waist. And I’ve got diabetes!

  He returned, though. He loved his father, he loved Milagro. Since the last time, Nadia had also died. The other surviving children came, but none of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren showed up. Times were a little tough, money hard to come by. And although maybe the old man was dying, he looked better than ever, better even than some of them. His cheeks seemed to have fleshed out a little, they were even a tiny bit rosy. Could it be their imagination, or was he walking less stooped over now? And his mind seemed sharper than before. When Jorge drove up the God damn old man was outside chopping wood!

  They shared a quiet, subdued celebration. Most of them had arrived late and would leave early. And after they had all kissed their father good-bye again, and perhaps squeezed him a little harder than usual in their abrazos (hoping, maybe, to dislodge irrevocably something vital inside his body), the sons and daughters went for a walk on the mesa.

  “I thought he said he was dying,” Jorge complained, leaning heavily on a cane, popping glycerin tablets from time to time.

  “I wrote you all what has happened,” Sally sighed. “I told you what Papa said.”

  “How old is he now?” asked Berta.

  “He was born in 1880, qué no?” Ricardo said.

  “That makes him eighty-four,” Billy said glumly. “And already I’m fifty.”

  “He’s going to die,” Sally said sadly. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  And those that didn’t look at her with a mixture of hysteria and disgust solemnly crossed themselves.…


  For the Christmas of 1970 only Jorge came. He bitched, ranted, and raved at Sally in a number of three-, four-, and five-page letters, intimating in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t care less if his father had lost all the toes on one foot plus something related to his bladder, he wasn’t flying across any more oceans for any more Christmases to say good-bye to the immortal son of a bitch.

  But he came.

  The airplane set down in the capital; he took the Trailways bus up. Ricardo, who was recovering from stomach surgery but slowly dying of bone cancer anyway, met him at Rael’s store. Sally came up later. Jorge had one blind askew eye and poor vision in the other, he was bald, limping noticeably, haggard and frail and crotchety. He felt that for sure this trip was going to kill him, and did not understand why he kept making it against his will.

  Then, when Jorge saw Amarante, his suspicions were confirmed. His father wasn’t growing old: he had reached some kind of nadir ten or twelve years ago and now he was growing backward, aiming toward middle age, maybe youth. To be sure, when Amarante lifted his shirt to display the scars he looked like a banana that had been hacked at by a rampaging machete-wielding maniac, but the light in his twinkling old eyes, magnified by those glasses, seemed like something stolen from the younger generation.

  The next day, Christmas Day, in the middle of Christmas dinner, Jorge suffered a heart attack, flipped over in his chair, his mouth full of candied sweet potato, and died.