Also by Samantha Mabry
A Fierce and Subtle Poison
All the Wind
in the
World
SAMANTHA MABRY
ALGONQUIN 2017
For Kristen D. and her girls
“Won’t you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing.”
—Townes Van Zandt
CONTENTS
PART ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
PART TWO
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
PART THREE
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Algonquin
PART ONE
The Cousins
One
The goal is to get to the heart:
Slash off the spines.
Sever the bulb from the roots.
Move down the row.
There are other steps to the maguey harvest, but I’m responsible for only those three. There are men who drive the trucks, and there are kids who jump down from the beds of those trucks to load up the hearts, which, once shorn of their spines, are the color of milk and roughly the size and shape of medicine balls. The hearts are then taken to factories by train, where they’re roasted and mashed until they produce a heavy, smoky-sweet liquid. That liquid, when distilled, becomes pulque, mescal, or, if you are rich, tequila as clear as a tear.
It’s morning. I’m on my way to the fields when I hear a whistle from a passing train. The sound hits the mountains and hums a ragged tune across the plain. We tell time by whistles: 7:10 in the morning westbound, 9:22 in the morning eastbound, 2:20 in the afternoon westbound. We know it takes ten minutes at a steady run to the south-southeast to get to those tracks from camp. We’ve timed it.
The truck I’m riding in starts to slow and pulls alongside several others just like it, all crammed with workers. We clutch the long handles of our coas, hop down from the truck, and take our places in front of a row of spiky plants that seem to disappear in either direction into the orange-hued horizon.
A gust of wind comes through, carrying with it a strange smell: something like sulfur mixed with citrus fruit.
“I’m surprised how late you slept, Sarah.”
My heart lurches, then yanks itself back into place. James has snuck up behind me enough times in my life that he shouldn’t cause this kind of reaction, yet somehow he still does. I turn to see him standing no more than a foot away, his eyes glinting, much like the blade of his coa does in the desert sun. I can tell he’s worried about me, just on the edge of frustrated. When he gets this way—which is often enough—the brilliant, moss-green color of his eyes comes out.
“No, you’re not,” I reply.
“I thought maybe you wouldn’t make it out.”
“No.” I flash James a grin. “You didn’t.”
We’re surrounded by other jimadors, so we’re talking in code. I’d rather we not be talking at all. I’d rather it be like last night late, when it was just the two of us on the outskirts of camp, out in the scrub grass under the harvest moon, when the only sounds coming from James’ mouth were the syllables of my name broken by sighs.
“No,” James says. “I didn’t.” He glances at my blade.
As usual, I woke up late, and, as a result, am stuck with a dull tool.
“The sun’s not even all the way up, but it looks like you’ve already run out of luck for the day,” he says. “I’ll trade you if you want.”
“Please,” I scoff. “I could cut more maguey than you with a butter knife.”
James laughs, which is wonderful. He does this automatic thing where he lowers his head and covers his mouth with his hand, like he’s embarrassed. He is embarrassed. There’s a scar at the left edge of his upper lip, the result of a dog biting him when he was a kid, way before we met. Whenever he laughs or smiles wide, his lip tugs up a little bit, like it’s being sewn with a needle. It’s hardly anything, but to James it’s conspicuous.
Sometimes I think that there’s so much sameness in the desert. The bunkhouses are the same peanut-shell color as the dirt. The dirt is the same color as the mountains. Most days, the sky is striking in its clear blue, but there are few birds that fly through it, and the ones that do are black. Our long days are reiterations of the long days that came before. It’s tough to tell young from old or man from woman because the desert has a way of erasing the things that make us each unique. Flying grit scrapes away at our faces. The wind tries to knock us flat, and the sun tries to bleach us, dry us out, and turn us into dust.
All the wind and dirt; it doesn’t scrape away at James. It polishes him to a shine. He’s alive out here. He stands taller. His eyes shine brighter.
I lean forward, as if to dive into those eyes. He leans forward, pretending to examine the nicks on my coa blade.
We’ve done a version of this thousands of times: hovering whisper-close to each other. But each time the feeling is new and thrilling, like snatching something from a store shelf or trying to outrun the rain.
Another whistle blows—this one just near my right ear and most certainly not from a train—and James and I fly apart just as one of the foremen jerks his chestnut-brown mare to a stop alongside us.
“James Holt,” the foreman barks. “You think you and your cousin get paid to stand here and admire the weather?”
James snorts. “What’s biting you, Angus? New horse causing you trouble?”
It is a new horse, a sorrel I’ve never seen before. She’s twitchy, obviously uneasy. She tosses her head, her nostrils flaring as she sniffs the sulfur-tinted air. She shuffles forward, then back. Angus responds by gripping the reins and pulling hard. The horse squeals as the bit pulls against her gums.
“You’re too rough with her,” I say.
“Too rough?” Angus yanks again. The horse squeals, then stills long enough for the foreman to lean down and level his eyes with mine. “You haven’t seen how rough I can get with the girls who piss me off.” He grins, revealing a jagged row of gray teeth. “Now get moving.”
I END UP working alongside a wisp of a man who showed up at camp a couple of days ago with a little kid who coughs a lot and is probably consumptive. The boy may be his son, but I doubt it. The kid has his arm in a splint made of burlap and wood. Because of that, he can’t cut crops or work mess, so he sits on the ground between the rows of maguey attempting to make small houses out of the discarded spines, which is nearly impossible because the wind that’s come in strong over the course of the morning keeps knocking them down. He reminds me of my sister, Lane. This is exactly something she would have done at that age: create castles out of trash and never get discouraged when something comes around and knocks them down. There was no such thing as a lost cause to that girl.
For the last hour, the man has been carrying on a mostly one-sided conversation with me through the dusty red bandanna that covers his nose and mouth. His voice is muffled, but I’ve gathered that he’s from California, where there are still grapes.
“Have you ever eaten a grape?” he asks.
The man goes on to tell me that he wants to
leave the maguey fields and go out East and into some other line of work. He says he’s pretty good with numbers and could be a bookkeeper. He tells me he’s got a bad leg, points to a visibly swollen knee, and says he won’t be able to continue to do physical labor for much longer.
“Where were you before here?” I ask. “Ojai?”
The man shakes his head. “The Real Marvelous. It’s a ranch in Texas, just outside Valentine.”
“I hate to tell you this, but if you’re trying to go east you’re headed the wrong way. This is New Mexico.”
The man stops cutting, takes a dirty piece of cloth out of his back pocket, and wipes his brow. A sudden, sharp gust of wind knocks into him, and he’s forced to check his balance. He winces, clutching his knee. “You’re trying to be cute,” he growls, “so obviously you know nothing about that place.”
I shrug. “I know a little—from the people who’ve passed through. It’s big, bigger than here. The pay isn’t all that great, but at least there’s always work there.”
“There’s always work there because no one wants to work there.” The man leans in and lowers his voice. I can smell the sharp tang of his breath. “Those fields are cursed. The owner puts hexes on the workers and . . . stuff in the food to control us. This knee.” He gestures to his leg. “This is not a normal injury. It’s punishment. I got together with some of the other jimadors and asked for better pay. Not much more, just a few measly cents. I don’t remember hurting my leg at all, but then, one morning I wake up . . .” The man trails off, hitching his eyebrow and assuming I can fill in the rest.
My gaze catches on the bundle of sticks and dried herbs that hangs around his neck as a common, crude protection against harm. A superstitious jimador like him would wear it under his shirt at all times, nestled against his breastbone, right in front of his heart.
Some people out here believe in all kinds of shit: cursed fields, gray-skinned demons that rise from the cracks of the earth, jackals that come out during full moons and walk around on just their hind legs, or a jumble of sticks and twine that somehow magically keeps bad things at bay.
“Interesting,” I mutter.
The man shoves his cloth back into his pocket and starts cutting again. “What about you and your cousin? Is this the only ranch you’ve worked on?”
“It’s the third,” I reply.
“Where else?”
“The first was outside Tulsa. Then one a ways north of here, near Picuris.”
“Neither of you have parents?”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” The man sighs and glances over at his boy. “Where are you two headed next? Surely you don’t want to go on cutting maguey forever.”
I look down the row at James. Even with the hard gusts of wind and dust blowing in his face, he’s working at twice my speed. He’s strong. His muscles have memorized this work. Mine have, too, but James is different. He has this focus. He cuts the plants like they’re his enemy, but he’s calm about it. He never stops working to wipe the sweat and dirt from his eyes. He says he doesn’t really think about the sun or discomfort when he’s cutting. He thinks about other things.
When I ask James what “other things” he thinks about he just smiles that ragged, brilliant smile of his.
James and I could work in these fields, doing the same thing every day, for the rest of our lives. More than half the continent is desert now, from the Mississippi River to the Pacific. Much of the South has started to dry up, too, or so I’ve heard. Maguey grows quickly in the dry climate, and water is scarce and not to be trusted. Much of what’s left is salty, unfiltered, and full of the dust-remains of dead fish and birds. Alcohol, like mescal or pulque, on the other hand, is clean and safe; it burns away impurities.
Ranches like this one, just outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, are the new lifeblood of the country. Here there are hundreds of hectares of fields reaching past the train tracks and toward the mountains. These fields provide the raw material that will lead to millions of gallons of alcohol. James and I could hop trains, moving from ranch to ranch, following the harvest, always smelling like dried sweat and feeling sticky from maguey sap, for years, decades even, until our bodies give out. We’ve seen it happen: older men or women, their muscles cramped into angles, their skin baked to their bones, stop cutting and just . . . sit. No amount of shouting from the foremen or pleading from the other jimadors will make them move. Eventually, they’re hauled up by their armpits and tossed in the back of a truck with the maguey hearts. We don’t see them again. The foremen tell us they are taken, along with the milk-white hearts that have piled up like severed heads, to the factories, and that they work there, in relative comfort, indoors and out of the sun. I don’t know if this is true. There’s no telling where those people go. The desert is a big place.
This is not our plan—to be old bones in the desert. Our plan involves saving up enough money so that we can catch a train that takes us far away from these fields, all the way to the East Coast, where James and I can open our own ranch, not for cutting maguey but for breaking horses. We’ll go and dip our feet into cold ocean water whenever we want. We’re young; we still have time. We work smart. We work fast.
I hear the man beside me grunt, so I turn to face him. He’s stopped cutting again and now has his foot braced against the side of a maguey plant. His coa blade is stuck in the heart, and he’s attempting to dislodge it by wiggling the handle side to side as if trying to free a loose tooth. A combination of the wind and shifting his weight to his bad leg causes him to fall to the earth and let out a muffled curse.
I set down my tool and go over to grip his. With a cut this deep, the plant is ruined, so I work to save the tool. The wood starts to strain as I push on the handle, and I think for a moment it’ll snap. I throw all my weight into it anyway, and the blade pops free, accompanied by a sucking sound. A fist-sized hunk of the maguey heart soars through the air in a short arc and lands at my feet.
I help the man to stand and hand him back his coa.
“If you cut too deep like that,” I say, “you’ll destroy the heart. You want to use your blade like it’s a paring knife, and you’re trying to slice the orange part off an orange. No more.”
“I know how to cut maguey,” he mutters.
I don’t get the chance to reply because some jimadors farther down the row have started shouting.
“Down!” I hear them cry out. “Get down!”
I turn slowly, my stomach dropping, and see the storm: a hazy, rust-colored curtain extending from the ground to the sky. Its roar is a dull moan now, but it’s building fast. Within seconds, it’ll crash down on all of us.
One after another, the jimadors drop to their knees, bracing their coas against their bodies and the ground because a loose coa in a dust storm is a bad thing. My own tool—the one that I’d dropped in order to help the man with his stuck blade—starts to skitter across the dirt. I lunge forward and barely get my fingers around the handle before it spins away. Then I press my lips together and angle my face away just as I’m pummeled by a hard mass of grit and wind.
This is protocol: make your body small. Cover your nose and mouth. Don’t lose your blade. Wait.
I fold forward and into myself, pressing my forehead to my knees. I start to hum a song, an old one my grandmother used to sing to me and Lane at bedtime when we were little and there were lightning storms. Sometimes, if I’m able to create a vibration in my head, I can drown out the wind and distract myself from the fact that I can’t breathe.
Here’s another thing some of the jimadors believe: a dust storm is made up of the scattered, unsettled fragments of the past that insist on never being forgotten, like some hateful phantom. When they finally arrive, those fragments plow into you, burrow into the folds of your clothing, and stick in the spaces between your teeth. They want to be a part of you. They won’t let you go.
Other people claim the opposite, that because a dust stor
m pops up so quickly and seemingly out of nowhere, it serves as a reminder of the unpredictability of the future. It represents uncertainty, total chaos, or, worst of all, futility.
I don’t believe any of this, but I’m still terrified. My humming isn’t working, but I keep it up anyway. I can hear the man next to me calling out to his boy, telling him not to panic. The boy is crying. I hear him say he can’t breathe just before the hiss of wind heightens into a terrible, all-encompassing roar.
Seconds pass, maybe a minute. Then, over the wind and the hum in my head, I hear a horse. Its hooves are hammering against the ground. It’s snorting and screaming.
The rider has no control. He’s shrieking his commands. I lift my head a fraction and see that it’s Angus. His sorrel is snapping her teeth and spitting, and even through the dust I can see the whites of her panicked eyes. She’s near—maybe just thirty yards away and closing fast—and if she doesn’t stop or change course, she’ll plow straight into the man from the Real Marvelous and his boy, who both have their heads down and are huddled against each other.
I push myself to standing. The wind immediately catches my coa and knocks me off balance. I’m pretty sure I can hear James calling out to me from several yards away, but I ignore him. I know my way around a horse, and I don’t need his help with this.
I lurch forward and wave the blunt end of my tool in the direction of the horse’s flaring nostrils. My intention is to get her to circle around, run back the other way, but instead she comes to a halt, screeches, and then rises up on her hind legs. Her front hooves thrash at the air. A good rider will know what to do in a situation like this, but Angus has never been a good rider. I slam the blade of my coa deep into the ground and lunge for the horse’s reins.
“Get back!” Angus yells.
I ignore him. If I can just grab hold of the reins, I can get the horse to turn.
“Get back, you stupid bitch!”
All the Wind in the World Page 1