Broken Ground

by Karen Halvorsen Schreck

  But they don’t want the story to continue. They want to stay right there, between house and castle, between good and evil. “It is like Adam and Eve and the serpent,” says one of the older girls, Maria. She is all of eight, with two long black braids secured at her temples so that they hang like teardrops against her cheeks. She’s made it clear before that she knows her Bible well, and that she’s had some previous schooling. In Spanish, she quotes a verse from Genesis 3, then translates it into English: “ ‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food . . . she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.’ ”

  I swallow my surprise and tell Maria she’s right. “So interesting. This part of the story is a bit like Genesis,” I say.

  “Bad things happen to people who do bad things.” Maria nods, confirming her assertion, and her teardrop braids bobble.

  “That can be true,” I say.

  “Or when people go where they’re not supposed to go.” Maria gives her peers a knowing look. “That’s why we must never leave camp alone. Bad things happen all the time.”

  Again Gabriel shudders. “La bruja es como La Llorona.”

  “I know that song.” I sound like a child, piping up eagerly. But the other children keep their sober gazes on Maria and ignore me.

  “Sí,” she says. For now, she is the authority in the group. She says something in Spanish, then gives me a sober look. “The witch is like La Llorona and the officials who want to deport us.”

  This is not what I intended to happen when I chose to share this tale. I wanted to give the story to the children as a reward and, if possible, teach them a few things, simple things, classic things—about beginning and middle and end, plants and towers and adventurous escapes. I didn’t want the children to become frightened, which, from the looks on their faces, many of them are. They’re comparing government actions and authorities to evil spells and witches. What will they remember from this storytelling time, and what will they tell their parents? Will they have nightmares tonight because of me?

  “But you’ve done nothing wrong,” I say. “As Maria pointed out, the husband in the story got himself into this mess.”

  The children ignore me, understandably. If I were one of them, I’d ignore me, too.

  An older boy named José begins talking about his mother, who is pregnant. Unlike Silvia, she is still working in the fields. Today the two of them were miles away, picking beets. “She is still hungry, though we had some supper tonight. If I had stolen food, maybe she wouldn’t be,” José boldly says.

  “Ruth.”

  I turn to see Thomas standing some yards away. And then I see my students’ parents, waiting and watchful, nearby. Reluctantly, I stand and go to them.

  “You all right?” Thomas asks. “The rest of us finished some time ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I must have lost track of time.”

  “I can see why.” Thomas smiles. “Look at them. They’re chattering away. They’re interested. Not so shy of you anymore.”

  “You think so?”

  “Look!”

  He’s right; I can see their enthusiasm. A few children are brave enough to beckon to me; they want me to return so we can resume our discussion. We. Our. The children and me. Students and teacher, although I’m the one who is by far learning the most. Smiling, I return to where they sit. Three more children may speak, I say. Then we’ll go home to get some rest. We’ll resume the fairy tale tomorrow. We’ll see it through to its end—the official tale and their unofficial realities, two sides of one coin that add up to a living truth.

  FIFTEEN

  The next morning, I return to the river to do Silvia and Luis’s laundry as well as mine. The older women know me now, as do the little children, and they greet me, smiling and waving me over to stand with them, not at a cautious distance. Their welcome fills me with happiness—unfettered by any other emotion, uncompromised by memory or doubt. With gestures and a few words of English, the women include me in their work. They smile at my clumsy Spanish. The soaking and scrubbing, the drying—they show me how best to do it here. When my basket of laundry is empty, the clothes carefully draped over rocks and steaming in the midday sun, I am nearly as dry as when I arrived. This is thanks to their good direction, and they know it, nodding approvingly. But then the children grab my hands, tug me deeper into the river, and splash me with water. We’re playing as before, drenched as before. The women seem bemused by the sight.

  When the clothes are dry, I walk with the women and children back to Kirk Camp. It is midafternoon by the time I arrive at Luis and Silvia’s. Carrying the full basket in my heavy, sodden clothes has left me tired, and I nearly miss the slip of folded paper tacked on the door. Ruth is written on the outside. I open it to see a note from Thomas. The parents and other adults are asking if we’ll work with them, too. If you’re able, come an hour earlier tonight, and we’ll figure out what we can do.

  Juntos, no separados. In the past, my circle of friends has rarely exceeded two. Charlie and Miss Berger in Alba. Charlie and Edna Faye in East Texas. Helen and, God help me, Tobias at Union University. Now my circle is expanding quickly. Silvia, Luis, Hector, the older women at the river, the younger children there, the children I teach and their parents. And Thomas. I feel wealthy in a way that I never have felt before.

  Inside the shack, I put away the clean laundry and make a late lunch of rice and beans for Silvia and me. Well, the beans are for me. She can’t stomach beans, nor should she, her book says, for the child to stay healthy in her womb. There’s one orange left in the bowl on the table, and I press her to eat it. She starts to peel it, but then she nearly drops it. She looks at me, her large, dark eyes fearful. “I don’t know myself,” she tells me. Her lack of strength, I think she means. I peel the orange and pass it to her segment by segment. Then I bring her the pan she uses to relieve herself, and when she’s finished, I wipe her dry.

  “Only a little while now,” I remind her.

  I stroke her hair, hum songs and nonsense tunes until she sleeps. Then, dropping down on my cot, I fall asleep, too. Luis is home for the evening when I wake. He readily agrees to prepare supper so I am able to leave early for the bonfire, my copy of Brothers Grimm tucked under my arm.

  While the children watch and play around us, Thomas and I work with the adults who’ve asked for help improving their English. We sit in two separate circles: I work with the women, Thomas, the men. There are ten adults in each circle. “How are you?” “What is your name?” “Where do you live?” “How may I help you?” We all take turns asking and answering these questions, working on not just the words and their sequence but their pronunciation. Sometimes the questions and answers spark surprising exchanges that end in laughter. In this way, the hour passes. As our time draws to a close, I hear Thomas asking the harder questions, so I feel liberated to ask them, too—the frightening questions, the questions that are frequently an attack, the questions that it is most important to answer correctly. “Are you a United States citizen?” Each woman in my group answers no. “Then where are your papers?” All but two of the women reveal work permits pinned inside the waistbands, pockets, and hems of their skirts. We practice new phrases now: “Here they are.” And “Please, look.” The two women without legal documents shrink into themselves, their gazes darting around the group, but meeting no one’s eyes. I don’t see you, you don’t see me. They seem to be playing this children’s game. Only they, like the rest of us, know it is no game. Their fear is palpable.

  In this way, the lesson ends. “It is very nice to meet you,” we say to one another. And then: “I hope to see you again soon.” I extend my hand to each woman, and after some hesitation, each one shakes it. The two women without documents try to slip away, but I catch up and cajole them until, flushed and unsettled, they say farewell to me. I long to tell them not to worry, that all will be well. But I can’t think of the words in Spanish, and I’m not sure of how truthful t
he words would be. I watch the two women hurry back toward camp and whatever awaits them there. I watch until they are lost in the shadows, and then I turn to the children, gathered together and waiting in the bonfire’s warm glow.

  Thomas is working on a science lesson with the older group; they are dissecting, naming, and drawing the parts of a plant. They’re working with flowers—the bright orange and yellow poppies that bloom wild all around us. His other students are divided into groups of two; they are, with varying degrees of attention and success, taking turns reciting important dates in history, related to the United States and Mexico: 1492, 1776, 1865, 1929 for the United States; 1521, 1810, 1848, 1910, 1923 for Mexico. (What these last dates signify, I don’t know yet, I realize to my shame.) And then for California, 1850, the year it became one of the states. “The thirty-first.” A serious young girl with long black curls falling over her shoulders says this to her partner. “Before that, this land belonged to Mexico.”

  I do a quick calculation. Only eighty-five years ago, I would have been the immigrant, the alien here, perhaps in need of my own set of legal documents in order to stay.

  I sit down with the youngest children, who are, with great care, passing around the book of fairy tales, poring over the illustrations. “Por favor?” one boy says, holding the book out to me. “Please,” a girl adds for good measure. “What? No math?” I exclaim in mock horror, and to a child, the group exchanges worried glances: That’s exactly what they mean. “No math,” I agree with a sigh, though of course I want to return to the fairy tale as well. “But tomorrow night,” I add for good measure. “Math.”

  And so we finish the story of Rapunzel, and gradually reach the happily-ever-after end. But the children aren’t really interested in that; they seem suspicious of it or disregard it altogether. They want to talk about the beginning again—the hunger and need and what it can drive the most moral of human beings to do. The danger and repercussions of getting caught.

  “Should we make up our own fairy tales and illustrate them?” I ask.

  Some of the children gasp with delight, others clap or jump up excitedly; a few others are quiet, their expressions doubtful. “No hay papel, no hay lapices,” a boy flatly states. Even the giddiest children, and those most proficient in English, don’t bother to translate as this irrefutable fact sinks in.

  “Don’t worry.” For once I can say this with utter conviction. Other than for necessities like food, there’s never been a better reason to spend my money. “I’ll get the paper and the pencils. There will be plenty for everyone.”

  Tonight, parents seem to whisk their children home more quickly than usual, and I suddenly find myself alone with Thomas. We have avoided this moment until now. But here we are by the lowering fire. His thick hair has grown longer and wilder since my arrival: a lion’s mane to match his eyes.

  “You can go back.” His voice is quiet. “I’ll stay with the fire until it goes out.”

  In spite of myself, my vows and reservations, I go to stand beside him. “I’ll stay, too.”

  We sit together on the ground and talk about the children—the ones who show particular promise and confidence, the ones who show less promise because of a lack of confidence.

  “There’s a fine line between helping them learn how to survive in the United States and encouraging them to forget Mexico,” Thomas says.

  It takes me a moment to put into words one of the many things that’s been troubling me in the past days. I take a deep breath. “I’m afraid they’ll be caught between here and there, unable to call either home. Many of the children are already acting as translators for the parents, you know.”

  Thomas shrugs. “The children are the best chance the parents have to stay here. They’re the reason the parents are here to begin with. And many of them are U.S. citizens after all.”

  A lock of my hair has slipped from the pins I use to keep it out of my eyes. Thomas reaches out and tucks it behind my ear, then quickly draws his hand away. But still I feel the pressure of his touch where his fingers grazed my ear.

  A hard, loud clatter makes us both jump, and then sparks rain down close at hand. Something went in the bonfire, and went in hard. An ember has snagged on Thomas’s shirtsleeve; he swiftly brushes it off. The smell of singed cloth—my throat clots with that smell. For a moment I am back in East Texas, and there is a blowout. I jump up and turn toward the fire. A patch of flame has leaped over the stones set in a ring to contain the blaze; the flames lick at the grass, spread. In an instant, those few inches of flame have turned into several feet. Thomas runs to try and stamp it out as a lithe figure darts from the other side of the bonfire—a slip of a boy, trying to run away.

  “Stop!” I lunge after the child, seize his arm, drag him back into the light. Daniel, eyes wild behind his broken spectacles, hair wild about his head. He struggles against my grasp, shoves at me, knocks the wind out of me, nearly pushes me down. So I do the same to him, only my weight and force overpower him and we fall on the ground. I leverage myself up and pin down his arms. Behind me, Thomas shouts for help. The flames are leggy, moving ever more speedily through the tall, dry grass and weeds, heading toward the line of trees that borders the field, and toward Kirk Camp. Beyond, all around, stretch farms. What will happen to us if the camp burns down? What will happen to us if the fields catch fire and the crop is ruined? I try not to imagine. I try to keep hold of the boy who is twisting, spitting, and clawing now—a wildcat of a boy. A hot wind gusts, invigorating the flames. From the corner of my eye, I see Thomas rip off his shirt. He uses it to beat down the flames. But it won’t take long, it’s clear, before the fire will be more than any person, any group of people, can handle.

  A man cries out—not Thomas.

  I see them then, running toward us from the camp, men, women, and children. They carry blankets, and the slower ones, far behind and emerging from the darkness, lug buckets. The fire is so close to Daniel and me now that Thomas has dropped his shirt; he’s pulling me, pulling Daniel, up and away. My exposed skin feels tight and swollen, blistered hot. The thought of Charlie flashes through my mind—what he might have suffered in his last moments—and sets me retching. I stumble over my feet, over Daniel’s legs, and wheel away from the fire, sucking in smoky breaths that burn my lungs. Charlie—my grip loosens on Daniel, and he wrenches himself away with such force that now he entirely slips my hold. Like a wraith, he is lost in the smoke, lost as Charlie was. But there is Luis. And there is Thomas, the fire dancing too close to his bare chest as he wields a blanket, beating at the flames, trying to snuff them out. And there are two elderly women struggling to carry a bucket of water. I recognize them from the river and try to help.

  IT TAKES NEARLY two hours, but finally, the blaze is out. People exchange words of exhausted relief; those who’ve suffered injuries return to camp to tend to them. Soon most everyone begins to drift in that direction, and once again, it’s Thomas and me, only this time we’re standing by the wet, smoking remains of the fire.

  “Daniel’s gone,” I say.

  Thomas, still bare-chested, looks up at me. His skin is soot-stained, his eyes bloodshot. A purpling burn slashes the back of his hand. “Did you see where he went?”

  I shake my head. I am drenched in sweat, my hair plastered to my forehead and neck. “We could try to find his aunt and uncle again.”

  “You really think they exist?” Thomas rakes his fingers through his hair, then lets out a sharp yelp and gazes, stunned, at the ugly burn on his hand. It’s oozing now.

  “Silvia should take a look at that.”

  “Is she strong enough?”

  “She can look. Then she can tell me what to do.”

  Thomas shakes his head. “But Daniel—he’s somewhere, yes? Something’s wrong with that boy. I don’t want him doing worse harm to himself or anyone else.”

  “Silvia first. Then Daniel.”

  “Daniel first. Then Silvia.”

  Thomas starts walking, and I fall in beside him.
I glance down. “You’re limping, too. Don’t be foolish, Thomas. She needs to tend to your leg as well. Otherwise you won’t be looking for anyone or going anywhere at all.”

  With each step, Thomas’s pace increasingly falters. At the edge of camp, he stops walking altogether. He turns to me, his eyes suddenly wide and frantic with pain. “Ruth?” he says, but he’s unable to finish the question. He sways, and I manage to catch hold of him, wrapping my arms around his waist. His body is less lean than Charlie’s, less lithe and long. His body is denser, more compact, like mine. I am able to support him, bear up under his weight.

  Our arms around each other, we move through the camp. The place seems strangely quiet after the chaos. The others must be getting cleaned up, recuperating from the fire inside the privacy of their cabins; tomorrow morning comes earlier than early for them, after all. And so Thomas and I lean in to each other, so close that we move almost as one. But we are not in love. We are not. We are simply trying to keep each other upright and alive. We are simply trying to find the way home.

  At last we reach Silvia and Luis’s. I can’t let go of Thomas to open the door, so I give it a sharp kick. The rope handle jiggles, and there is Luis, peering out at us, his face, like Thomas’s—like mine, too, I suppose—blackened with soot. He takes one look at Thomas and opens the door wide. He opens his arms, too. I release Thomas. He falls into Luis’s arms. Luis maneuvers him inside and lays him down on the dirt floor. I follow.

  “My book—get it,” Silvia says from her bed. I go to where she likes the book kept—a high shelf on the wall farthest from the stove, where grease and smoke are least likely to penetrate its pages, and thieves (though I’ve never heard of thieving at Kirk Camp) are least likely to locate it. I take the book to Silvia. She is sitting up in bed, her hair loose and long, shielding her face as she sets the book on the mattress—her belly is far too big for her to open the book on her lap—and begins to turn the pages.