“Money isn’t life,” Doña Crescencia said, moving a pearl of wax from her friend’s knuckle.
Serafina glanced at her, remembering the tiny apartments, the feeling of desperation when Larry didn’t bring home money, when the only place for food was the corner store. “When you are up there, it is. Up there, it feels like the whole life.”
She went into the cane-walled cooking shelter outside, starting the fire under the clay comal, mixing the masa she had ground. The firelight was the only glow yet in the dark. Serafina didn’t need to see. She had done this since she was small; she had thought she would teach Elvia.
Her throat hot, as if an ember were lodged there, she kneaded the masa, waiting for the tears. For the first few years, she had wanted to die. Every morning, in the blackness before dawn, she had shaped tortillas, making sure the small maize-yellow suns appeared in her hands before light filtered through the cane-stalk walls, before any words or pictures drifted through her head. Sesame Street. Cap’n Crunch. Náā. Crickets running along the baseboards in Rio Seco. The old woman next door, her bony, pale hands reaching for the jars of pomegranate jelly.
Serafina nudged the suns, laid them gently on the comal. Her mother had stripped dry corn with her in the storeroom, saying, “A San Cristobal man will come back, and you will marry. You will have children here.”
Every year, families came from America for the fiesta, but not Rigoberto, not Rogelio Martinez nor his brothers. Every year, the pueblo was empty again except for the old, a few children, and a crazy-eyed girl whose mother ran the soft-drink concession.
Serafina would imagine Elvia’s small, dimpled fingers on the glass of the Nova. The fingers growing longer, thinner. Holding someone else’s hand. The nun. A policeman. A stranger. Growing in Elvia’s blood would be hate. She will hate me when I go back to find her.
She washed her face with water from the barrel. Pulling the silver barrettes from her apron pocket, she rubbed them over her lips. She felt the weight of the Nova’s lighter in her palm. All she had. What did Elvia have, by now? Had she taken anything from the car? Serafina looked at the adobe walls she had touched almost all her life. Had Elvia had a home? The only address Serafina could remember was Yukon Street. She couldn’t be there now. What if she wasn’t even in Rio Seco? She could be anywhere in California. Anywhere in America.
When I see her, I will tell her: “Don’t hate me. Your backbone lay along my breastbone every night, that close, while we slept. My arm was over your belly, to protect you. To keep you.”
She brought a cup of coffee for Doña Crescencia. “All those cities in California named for santos, full of people who never go to church,” the old woman said, sewing beside the coffin.
Serafina nodded, carrying the dishtowel-wrapped tortillas and dented thermos into the road. Doña Crescencia’s singing followed her on the path to the fields, her words like gauzy trails from a spider. Serafina breathed heavily, but she couldn’t see her own air in the cold because the dawn’s fog, the sierra’s own exhalation, shimmered like thousands of pearly beads.
She paused to look back at her uncle’s house, the tin roof disappearing in the fog, and suddenly she felt invisible, too, not watched by the saints of earth and sky, whom she might have ignored for too long. She squatted in the path, nearly panting with fear, holding the tortilla bundle like it was a baby. Her mother was gone. This was how she’d felt in the linen plant that first day, invisible in the steam, sure no one was watching over her.
She pressed the tortillas to her chest for warmth and walked again, up the steep path to the milpas, the corn fields of her uncle. His patch of green was high above, where the valley was very narrow and the flanks of the sierra nearly met. “Rigoberto and the others are collecting someone else’s dirt under their fingernails,” he always said. “In their mouths.”
But Rigoberto had always been angry at the soil while he pulled the plow himself on the steep slope where oxen couldn’t maneuver. After the rain stayed away for years, and then a flood washed the soil down around the scattered houses close to the river, he said to his uncle, “Your earth is almost gone.” Serafina looked at the palm-frond shelter where her uncle sat sharpening his knife, near the shrine honoring the season’s only cornstalk with three ears.
Back when she was eleven, carrying lunches in a basket on her back, her father had promised her to Rogelio Martinez, who was fourteen, and accepted the promise of Rogelio’s sister for his oldest son, Luis. During their three years of school, they all played together, until the boys began to accompany their fathers to the milpas and the girls began to grind corn in the yard and wash clothes at the river. She remembered seeing Rogelio and his father plowing or resting under their own shelter, opposite theirs. She glanced at her uncle now, his thin puckered mouth chewing, his eyes far away on the hills. “Ñū’ún saví,” he used to say to Rigoberto when they argued. “We are people of the rain clouds.”
“Ñū’ún tu cuiti,” Rigoberto used to mutter, so only Serafina would hear. He didn’t want to be disrespectful. “People of nothing.”
When Rogelio and his father left with a truckload of men, her father reaffirmed their promise. “Three years, four,” the men said. “When we get the money to come back and build a house.”
But a year later, after another dry season with no rain and ears of corn the size of thumbs, Serafina’s father took them north to Culiacan, in Sinaloa state, to harvest tomatoes. They slept in a box of tin, in a row of twenty, where the sun was molten all day and the brown water came from one pipe. Her mother’s belly was big again. One day in the field they tied tomato plants to metal stakes, their hands stinging-slick with green paste, and a plane flew low overhead. A burning mist dropped onto their hair, flew past their lips, and seeped into their chests.
A week later, Serafina’s mother moaned in the tin corner, two other women blocking her from Serafina. In the night, men gathered down the line of doorways, kicking a soccer ball, but her father and brothers sat frozen on a truck bed. In the morning, two cloth-wrapped bundles lay tiny as loaves, faceless, covered blind.
“Sēhe síhí,” her mother cried, and Serafina ran to her call. Daughter. But her mother saw nothing, murmuring, “Sēhe síhí, sēhe síhí.” and Serafina understood then. Two girls. Daughters.
They were buried in a row of graves near the edge of a tomato field, under a series of long stones chipped by a man from Puebla. A long row of gray doorways to the sky.
Rigoberto turned his book to the graves and trudged toward the field, where a crew boss screamed. “He doesn’t care,” Rigoberto said. “More from Oaxaca come every week. More ants. Ants carry so much. They’re so strong. And then you step on them.”
Their father only stared at him. Their mother didn’t eat, didn’t speak. Her black hair grew silver at the part between her braids, a stripe of emptiness, of hunger. The tomatoes were hot in Serafina’s fingers, stacked in the crates. When the field was trampled and bare, her father took them north again, to Tijuana. Her mother rode silent in the bus, eyes blank until they reached a plywood shack painted yellow near the dump, where her mother’s comadre Alba, long gone from San Cristobal, stared into her face. Alba’s lips nearly touched her friend’s, and then her mother’s eyes shifted, glistened, and she began to sob into Alba’s aproned chest.
Serafina knew then that only a woman who’d lost a child could receive those tears. She was not old enough yet to cry like that. Now, folding the dishcloth, she knew she was.
Her uncle finally said, “Nicuvui nuhundeyteta.”
The deceased become the earth. Serafina whispered, “Ñú ūu cuhu,” to herself. My two sisters. Her uncle had never seen them, had never left this plot of his earth.
“When are you leaving?” he said.
She looked at the green fields, bending with beaded mist. Her uncle had his corn and the liquor he distilled from the sugar cane he grew in the far corner. Ndixi kept him
warm all winter, dissolved more and more of his words every year until now he spoke only of ritual. “Soil is the flesh,” he used to tell her and her brothers. “Rocks are the bones, rivers are the veins, and water is the blood. If the santos are not satisfied, we will starve.”
“You’re worried about who will feed you,” Serafina said finally, and he glared at her, hearing the bitterness in her voice. She had never spoken to him with heat and disrespect.
“Is that what you think?”
“Someone else will do that. Doña Crescencia will make your tortillas and wash your clothes.”
He frowned. “What is it that you miss so much? The money?”
Serafina looked at the sun turning the mist gold. “Tonight we bury her, and I will cook for the raising of the cross in nine days. Then I will leave, whether Rigoberto comes back or not.”
“Because you’re young, you think you know everything.”
“I’m old. I’m thirty-one.”
“When people leave, they only go somewhere else and die. Your brother sends money but he doesn’t come home. Mixtecos must die on their own land, or their souls wander forever.” She turned for the path. “Don’t forget the santos, even if you can’t see them where you are going.”
She bent over the metate in the yard, grinding five huge leaves of yerba santa into a bright green paste. Then she laid cilantro leaves under her stone mano, moving back and forth. To send her mother on her journey to the other world, she would make her favorite. The green mole sauce with pork. In the stone molcajete where her mother had guided her fingers so long ago, she ground cumin and green tomatillos, garlic, and several jalapeños, mixing in the yerba santa.
A new straw hat, like the ones men bought for the fiesta, floated up the path. She recognized the slumped shoulders and stubbled jaw. “Florencio,” she said.
The lines around his mouth were deeper than when she had seen him last, three years ago at the fiesta, when he told her he worked with Rigoberto. He was her brother’s closest friend. He turned to look at the cooking pot, and in the firelight she saw only the sides of his neck and his hard cheekbones. He looked so hungry.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. “I heard now, walking through town. We have only one letter from you. We’ve been moving from place to place for months. A bad, rainy season.”
Serafina let out her breath. “So Rigoberto isn’t coming.”
Florencio shook his head. The marks around his mouth were curved, as though someone had cut him with a machete, and three grooves reached from each corner of his eyes. “There were floods all spring in Pajaro and Salinas. The lettuce and the strawberries. No work for weeks; no place to sleep but a barn. No money. Now the oranges are ready.” Florencio paused. “I told Rigoberto I was coming back to see my cousin.”
Serafina nodded. Florencio’s young cousin had lived in Tijuana for a few years, but she had come home alone to have a baby. She stayed in a room at the small store, taking care of the empty soda bottles.
“She is the only family left,” he said. Serafina knew his parents had died in a car accident years ago, with Gabriel, Alba’s son. The one who had found her in the arroyo. Bandits had chased Gabriel’s truck in Sinaloa, causing a crash, then robbed the bodies.
“Rigoberto stayed in the oranges because he borrowed money from the boss. For you.” Florencio took out a roll of dollars wrapped tight as a cigarette. “Now he can’t leave.”
Serafina couldn’t breathe. “He knew?”
Florencio shrugged. “He said your letter sounded like you would come soon. It’s much harder to cross now, and coyotes charge more.”
Serafina shivered, hearing a string of firecrackers from town. Her hands shook when she ladled a dish of mole verde and put it near him. He dipped the tortillas and ate slowly. His face was grave now. “He said you want to go back there. To where you were.”
“Rio Seco,” Serafina whispered. “I do.”
“What happened to you?” he whispered, looking down at the ground.
She went to the adobe storeroom to hide her face. Stripping dried corn kernels into a bowl, she saw herself small, heard her mother telling her not to waste any part, not the husk or even a few kernels, or the ñū’ún would look from the sky, see them lying on the ground, and assume her family had too much corn and didn’t need such a large harvest next season.
She tried to remember what she’d been teaching Elvia. A. Apple. B. Balloon. C. Cat. She had chanted the letters to herself for years. But someone would have taught Elvia everything else. Another woman had taught her to tie her shoes, to button shirts, to comb her own hair.
Or Larry had combed her hair. He hated braids. Maybe he cut them off. “She ain’t Mexican,” he used to say. “Ellie ain’t Mexican.” He would have told Elvia a thousand times that her mother was someone to forget.
She was fifteen last week. Ocho Agosto. She will never recognize me. Serafina bit her lips until they stung. Then she slid sticks across the hearthstones to feed the cooking fire, careful to brush off splinters and dirt from the blackened rocks that held up the iron ring.
The ñū’ún yuu nu’un—the santo of the hearthstone—was the fiercest of them all. Rocks are bones, her mother said, and the rocks burned daily in the hearth suffer the most pain. They are truly dead. Never step over them or place things on them, or you will become very ill. Serafina crossed herself, missing her mother’s whisper across the steam.
She bent near her mother’s small, dark face on the pale pillow. She had carefully braided the long gray hair, the woven tail wispy as a moth’s antenna. She could see the small indentation left by her thumb, at the corner of the mouth, where she had held her mother’s dry lips closed as gently as she could, until the body’s stiffness settled in to keep them together.
Her mother carried with her the things she needed for her journey to the other world. A soft white cotton bag that Serafina had filled with chocolate and sugar and a tiny wooden molinillo to beat the foam. Two tortillas. Five pesos. A small bar of soap, a small bottle of water.
Her mother’s papery, corn-husk voice would be gone when they closed the box. Her soft brown neck, where Serafina had cried so many times, her mother’s collarbone wet when she finally let go. Doña Crescencia said, “You will keep your mother’s rosary? It is yours now.”
The rosary twined in her fingers. “No,” Serafina said. “It was her mother’s. It is still hers.”
Last week, when her mother was fading, Serafina had thought she would call out the names of her husband and sons. Claudio. Luis. Rigoberto. But her mother spoke to her own mother. “Náā,” she said. When her mother called out the word again and again, “Náā, náā,” Serafina lay on the dirt floor near the cookstove and screamed into her rebozo so no one would hear. Her daughter would have called for her over and over, screamed at the car window.
When the husk slipped easily from a rubbed kernel, Serafina washed the corn until the thin skins rose into tiny drifting pockets on the water’s surface. Nuñi saha. She remembered the Cap’n Crunch, the sweet corn dust on Elvia’s fingers.
Nine days later, Serafina made mole coloradito, the red sauce, for the raising of the cross. While people sprinkled holy water on the flower-laden cross at the family altar, Doña Crescencia begged Serafina not to leave. “They hate Mixtecos there—remember the Cortez brothers?”
The four Cortez brothers had left for the border last year. The coyote who drove them in a crowded pickup through back roads didn’t stop for la migra’s sirens and crashed the truck in a ravine. The bodies were sent back to San Cristobal naked, bruised, and bloody, in cardboard boxes. When the lids were removed, the entire pueblo screamed at the disrespect for the dead.
Serafina shook her head. “Everyone else is already gone.” August was harvest time, and Serafina imagined the people at the border like swarms of birds, all trying to get through a hole in the straw roof at onc
e, circling and circling while some slipped inside at each pass.
Her uncle lay in his bed; days after he had carried the coffin, his back still ached. Serafina mixed cloves and turpentine in the molcajete, smeared the paste on a cloth, and lay it on his lower back. Before her uncle could speak, she hurried outside.
The church smelled as it always did, of roses and wax and sweet smoke. She would never be home again, in this familiar light, with the tilted faces of santos she had known all her life. “You are everywhere,” she whispered to la Virgen de Guadalupe. Serafina kissed the metal lighter from the Nova, the shiny black knob, the circle that had glowed red. She placed it near the candles and flowers and photos. “If you let me get to Tijuana, I will give something else for the rest of the journey. When I lost my daughter, I was only looking for you.”
The white-petaled flowers on the cross were wilted by all the touching. Serafina wondered if her mother’s bag of possessions had comforted her. In her own cloth bag, she had Rigoberto’s money. A few clothes. Her rosary. And at the last minute she had washed the gray stone molcajete, the round bowl with tiny legs her mother had used every day until she gave it to Serafina. She had put the smooth pestle inside and wrapped the bundle with a shirt.
Outside, she touched the stone sink, still wet from her washing dishes, and the comal, still warm from her cooking. Where she was going, nothing was permanent, carved of stone.
She walked down to the main road to Manuel Jimenez’s truck. He drove people from Oaxaca to Tijuana now. The men waited, their cigarettes glowing inside the windshield and floating in the truck bed. When her shoulder was pressed to the window and the truck was moving, she kept her eyes closed, not wanting to see what was sliding past the glass, away from her. She could feel Florencio’s elbow. She held the barrettes, not needing to see the rubbed shine, the silver bars she had mouthed and touched until they were fragile stripes of light in her palm.
Highwire Moon Page 7