Abuelo wore a suit and tie to work in the garden, a suit that my aunt remembers smelling of loam and plant resins. While he was clipping and trimming, he scrutinized every branch and leaf with a chemist’s deliberation. My father said Abuelo usually stayed extremely quiet and concentrated while he moved from plant to plant, looking for the smallest blemish, gathering clumps of cuttings and petals in a bag hanging from one arm as he went along. As he watched his father from behind a large potted cactus, the sound of Abuelo’s steady breathing, of his boots rasping and echoing against the moist soil on the paving stones, was calming. Playing throughout the greenhouse with my uncle Raul and aunt Connie, it smelled of mint, camphor, lavender, and eucalyptus, unless they ventured too close to the acrid ammonia cloud that hung over the compost box. In the middle of a game of hide-and-go-seek or tag, they were always dazzled anew whenever the pipes that ran along the high vaulted ceiling would begin first to rattle, then hiss, and then the entire greenhouse would rumble and fill up with fog so thick that my father could hold his hand in front of his face and not see it.
Everything that surrounded them—palms, lilies, ferns—was gradually shrouded in an opal-colored neon haze, and they wondered to each other if this was what heaven looked like all the time.
Good wood is like a jewel, Tío Abrán, my great-grandfather Jacobo’s twin brother, used to say. Huisache burns fast, in twisting yellow flames, engulfing the log in a cocoon of fire. It burns brightly, so it is sought after for Easter bonfires. But it does not burn hot, so it’s poor wood for home fires. On a cold morning in the sierra, you can burn a whole tree by noon. Mesquite, and even better, cedar—these are noble, hard woods. They burn hot and long. Their smoke is fragrant. And if you know how to do it, they make exquisite charcoal.
“La leña buena es como una joya”
Good wood is like a jewel. And old Tío Abrán knew wood the way a jeweler knows stones, and in northern Coahuila, from Múzquiz to Rosita, his charcoal was highly regarded for its sweet, long-burning fire.
Abrán was one of the last of the Garcias to come north. Somewhere around 1920, he finally had to come across the border with his family. He was weary of the treacheries along the roads, from robbery to rape, that had become a part of life in the sierra towns since the beginning of the revolution ten years earlier. Most of the land near town had been deforested and the only wood he could find around Palaú was huisache. To find any of the few pastures left with arbors of mesquite trees, he had to take the unpaved mountain road west from Múzquiz, along a route where many of the militantes had their camps. Out by the old Villa las Rusias, in a valley far off the road, there were mesquite trees in every direction as far as you could see. He made an arrangement with the owner of the villa to give him a cut from the sale of charcoal he made from the mesquite. But many times, the revolucionarios confiscated his day’s load of wood, leaving him to return home, humiliated, with an empty wagon.
Aside from Tía Pepa and Tío Anacleto, who had returned to Mexico by then, he had been the last of the Garcias left in Mexico, and he had left reluctantly. On the day he arrived in San Antonio with his family, he had told his brother Abuelo Jacobo, “If there was still any mesquite that was easy to get to, we would’ve stayed.”
He said he had come in search of the legendary Texas cedar stands. And he found them sixty miles north of San Antonio. Here was a broad swath of hill country that had been rocky grassland until the middle of the nineteenth century. That was when the charcoal industry based in Austin had planted miles of cedar, from Kerrville to Buda, to support the growing demand for fuel, as more and more settlers arrived from the north. Eventually, that part of Texas became a cedar forest, a forest which is still growing, pushing farther south past Austin and closer to San Antonio. Jacobo and his family went there despite the sentido among some family members that this was “Gringo” country, where Mexicans were not welcome.
And perhaps they knew this to be true, for it had been in cedar country, growing pecans and corn and raising goats, that the very first Garcias to come out of Mexico had first settled. Abuelo Juan José’s brother Uvaldino Santos had settled north of Austin, in Elgin, a town that sat at the edge of the forested hill country, looking north onto the vast Texas flatlands that ran all the way to the Red River.
Like these early settlers, I have always been drawn to the ridges and canyons of the Texas hill country and its infinite cedars. The silence of the cedars seemed familiar to me. Along the road from Sister-dale to Grapevine, a two-lane, farm-to-market highway that runs like an artery through the middle of the hill country, I have heard the wind slowly wrapping itself around the draping flat branches of the cedars. Even the birds seem to fall quiet there. Uncle Gilbert remembers how he walked with his father and his uncle through hills full of cedar on the land Abrán had found to make his charcoal in Spring Branch, Texas, northwest of San Antonio, “It always seemed chilly up there, like you were up in sierra country,” he says now.
On one of those days, the whole tribe made the journey from Burr Road, and Juan José, Abuelo Jacobo, and his sons all helped Tío Abrán on his first large order of charcoal for a buyer in Austin. A pit the size of a small house had already been dug when they arrived. Abrán had meticulously lined it with chalk and lime, and then everyone helped stack the cedar in precise rows, alternating directions, until the pit was nearly full. Making charcoal involves an alchemy of dirt, wood, fire, patience, and prayer. If all of these are not in impeccable balance, the final result is a pile of ash.
As the wood was being stacked, Tío Abrán moved around the pit in slow circles, sprinkling droplets of kerosene from a paint can onto the cedar with his fingers. After the wood was anointed, Abrán, already in his early sixties, stepped gingerly across the latticed cedar trunks, dusting them with handfuls of what he called his polvo mágico, or magic powder, a combination of sulfur, coke, and other secret ingredients. The pit was lit with long branches, flaming at their ends, which were pushed down as far as they could to the bottom of the pile. When the smoke began to be visible at every corner, but before flames engulfed the wood, the whole pit had to be covered with a large mound of soil, shoveled quickly from every side.
Then, Tío Abrán would forget about it and walk away, saying it was bad luck to watch too closely. For days, the mound smoldered and shifted as the earth around it grew warmer with each hour. Uncle Gilbert sat near the mound while my grandfather cleared the area of twigs and dry brush, as if he feared the pit might explode and rain fire on all the surrounding terrain. After all, there was an enormous ball of fire consuming everything just beneath their feet, sucking in air through the dirt.
Maybe the fire they had started would never be put out.
“That was the first time I saw him nervous, afraid of something, preocupado,” Uncle Gilbert recalls today. “We couldn’t convince him it was all under control.”
Two days later, the air took on a subtle scent of embers and Tío Abrán announced the partially collapsed mound was ready to be uncovered. As my great-uncles helped him shovel the dirt off from the top of the pit, just beneath the surface they saw the glistening ebony chunks of fresh charcoal, smelling sweet of cedar and crackling like black ice beneath their feet. Juan José stood off from the pit, furtively looking on from beneath a lone oak tree. There was no explosion and the invisible fire had subsided. But he had already told Uela he was ready to return to San Antonio.
And he didn’t want to take any of Tío Abrán’s new charcoal back to town.
On the morning after Madrina arrived in San Antonio to stay, she went out for a walk on Burr Road after breakfast. It was astounding to her how little dust there was. So much of her life in Mexico had been lived in a world of swirls and eddies of infinite dust. In the mornings, you could wet down the ground around the house with water drops from a full bucket, but within an hour, the scirocco haze of dust would return. In San Antonio, the streets were paved and the ground alongside the road was planted with grass that held the dust down.
Inside the cage, a lone wolf, crazed and panting, circled the small space so quickly that, at first, he looked like a smudged, bluish blur.
When he stopped for a moment, Madrina saw where he had nervously bitten the fur off his hind parts until the wounds were raw and red. Elsewhere along his long, emaciated body, the hair was falling off in patches. His gray eyes had the piercing look of a mute scream, and the cage smelled of old food, feces, drool, and spoiled blood. In Palaú, the whole family used to pause on the nights when they heard the packs of wolves howling from the sierra. Madrina says it was less like singing and more like talking, like a conversation in an old language of the mountains everyone but the wolves had forgotten to speak. She knew the ranchers and goat farmers battled with them as their greatest nemeses. But the wolves were a part of God’s wild creation that always seemed beyond human control.
As she looked into the eyes of the animal, it felt as if the wolf was looking back at her, like it knew her, she said later. In the quiet morning air, the animal’s panting was the loudest noise until she heard her own heart beating, accelerating like a hummingbird’s. And then the world went black.
When Uela saw Madrina from the porch, she was still quivering stiffly in the midst of her seizure in the middle of the road, while the wolf looked on from inside its cage. As the seizure gradually began to subside, there was a small lace ribbon of spittle falling to one side of Madrina’s mouth. Her head cleared and she opened her eyes to see her father, sister, and brother-in-law gathered around her. They seemed to be floating in a silky, coffee-colored light.
The morning air was clear and there was a faint scent of newly cut grass. She could hear the paws of the wolf scratching against the iron floor of the cage, but she did not want to look at him. It did not seem like Texas or Mexico anymore. It was as if all of that had been left behind. She felt she had been transported even farther north, to where the sky looks silvery and the sun seems farther away than she had ever imagined possible. She felt lighter, as if she had been returned to the body of a child. The three stood over her, wordless, waiting for Madrina to make her own way out of the fit.
A strange thought came to her in that moment. Time seemed to be moving more slowly, and her body was covered in a cold dew.
We have been taken to Purgatory, she told herself. And soon the chastisements would begin.
Peregrinaje
7
Zona de Niebla
Fog Zone
Uncle Sid had been living on Black Cows—frothy highballs of root beer and vanilla ice cream—for three weeks already. Dressed in cream-colored pajamas and a paisley silk gown, he had stayed in bed since his doctor had told him the liver cancer afflicting him was inoperable. I had just flown into San Antonio, heading for Mexico again, so I gathered three aunts and my mother in her vintage Cadillac to drive to Austin for a visit with my uncle, the eldest son of my grandfather’s brother Uvaldino.
For generations among the Santos, there had been an undeniable dichotomy within the clan. There were those among us whose destiny it was to carry what seemed an indelible sadness not of their own making, while there were others who carried a reservoir of ceaseless laughter. As a kind of filial Yin and Yang, it was as if we had been guaranteed that consolation would be always close by for the confounded.
Along with Uncle Raul, Isidro, or Sid, was one of the family’s unwavering emissaries of laughter. His laugh quaked the whole girth of his body, rolling out like a rapidly gamboling Pavarotti tremolo, hitting all the high notes, gathering all of his face up around the bushy Santos eyebrows that would shake in tempo with his guffaws. He laughed with a rhythmic, breathy lisp that gave his booming belly chuckles a cartoon glow.
When he had been well, he told his stories like a jeweler etching on a stone, careful to set up his lightning bolt punch lines. He said he had been trained by the best. Growing up, he had spent a lot of time in Nueva Rosita with Abuelo Juan José’s sister, la Tía Chita, who was famous for her ability to tell jokes for hours; whether in the afternoon while she was making hundreds of tortillas for a quinceañera fiesta, or late at night, sitting in the cool courtyard of her house with a circle of comadres during a lunar eclipse.
Uncle Sid’s bedroom was full of his lavish multi-tiered bowling trophies, won over the last fifty years, shining now in the last of the afternoon sunlight. When he saw me standing in the doorway, he gestured weakly for me to come sit on the side of his bed. I held his hand and watched his eyes glisten through milky tears. “I remembered something Daddy said about where they all came from,” he said. His face was full of a wistful tranquilidad, a softening fatigue that seemed overpoweringly sweet and contented. His skin was smooth and pearl-colored, as he lay on his side, his head cradled on a bended arm. He took a long weary breath and fixed his gaze on me to convey the knowledge passed down from his father, Uvaldino.
“Before Coahuila?” I asked. Sid knew I had been making journeys back to Mexico, piecing together what I could of the family’s lost history in Mexico.
“Hell. They were in Coahuila forever.”
“Was it Palaú?”
“Uh-uhn. It was San Felipe. Las Minas de San Felipe. Near Sabinas. That’s where Pop said they were all born.”
Uncle Sid said he wanted me to have a videotape, and he sent Aunt Mary off to find it. A surprise, he said, that he had lost, and then found. While Mother went off with Aunt Mary, to give her the cheese wheel she had bought at a Czech deli in San Antonio, Aunt Connie, Aunt Bea, and Aunt Margie gathered around Sid’s bed and laughed with their cousin about the practical jokes that were his métier as a kid. Like tying Aunt Margie’s baby carriage to a goat, or wearing a cape and a flour tortilla mask with the eyes poked out, like the costume of a Spanish count.
His laugh was quieter now, slowed down to a gurgling whir. And then, when he grew silent, we all stared at one another, and we suddenly knew that this would be the last time we would see Isidro alive.
By the time we left, the road between Austin and San Antonio was lit in crisp tungsten blue, and the cruise control carried us all home in a floating reverie. On the highway back to San Antonio, with the earth moving through vast space, I knew we had always left our ancestors’ spirits behind, scattered in the planet’s wake, through other parts of the galaxy, other parts of the universe. Just as we would now leave Sid’s laugh behind, in a December sky that had been lit up by an unexpected comet, recently discovered in Japan.
After we returned home, I looked at the videotape Uncle Sid had given to me that afternoon. It was footage of a family reunion during his father, Uvaldino’s, eighty-fifth birthday party in Elgin, Texas. Uvaldino, dressed handsomely in a dark suit and vest, looks much smaller than I remembered him, his thick hair completely white, the dark skin of his face growing ashen—and he is wearing a golden cardboard crown. The party room, festooned with streamers and confetti, is crowded with all of the relatives from San Antonio and Austin who had traveled to celebrate Tío Uvaldino’s long life in Mexico and Texas.
From off-camera at one point, someone asks him to name all of his brothers and sisters. At first, he seems confused and disoriented, still slow to speak from his head injury of years ago. But before the question can be asked again, he straightens himself in his chair, takes a sip of his margarita, then, looking straight into the camera, recites,
“Mariano. Francisco. Manuela. Andrea. Jesusa. And . . . Juan José.”
I stopped the tape at “Juan José,” at the very moment when Uvaldino’s gaze fell to the right as if in an instant of forgotten reckoning. At the time, only Uvaldino was still alive. He had already been
gone for more than a decade, when I saw the tape.
All of the Santos are dying, I thought.
San Antonio de Bejar wears its glistening halo of creeks, streams, and rivulets like an ageless crown, as if this place at the edge of the arid country west and south has been vouchsafed by time, receiving a long span of years with the grace of a thousand springs and endlessly flowing water. Maybe it is an accidental oasis. To the north of the city, there is a wide swath of impermeable igneous rock, jagged ridges of red Texas granite from Grapevine to Llano. To the west, there is desert, to the east are wetlands, bayous and swamps.
San Antonio lies over an enormous limestone aquifer, a vast earthen filter made from the dense sediment of accumulated eons of fossil remains. Over millennia, the husks and membranes of millions of dead organisms were pressed into rock that was porous enough to let the rain wash through, ever more cleansed as it went. And the earth became hollowed out like a honeycomb. As a result, a half mile beneath the ground, there are rushing crystalline rivers and a seemingly infinite reservoir of sweet water.
Agua dulce. That’s what the old Mexicans called fresh water. Sweet for drinking, like a néctar de mango in the withering hot Mexican summers. Sweet for the crops, for the furry okra vines, the blood-red stalks of sorghum, all the bristling cotton and bright yellow chayote squash.
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation Page 12