by Ruth Wariner
For some reason, the tortillería didn’t have a line that afternoon, so Mom had time to pick up a dozen during the few minutes it took Casas passengers to get on and off the bus. Steam rose from the paper as she doled out our one-tortilla allotments. I gobbled mine down as the bus inched away from the city center and back toward the highway. Then I fell into a deep sleep, not waking up until we began our steep descent into the valley of LeBaron. I was never able to sleep through the stomach-dropping sensation of that part of the trip.
I yawned, sat up, and stared out at a slate sky. The clouds looked as if they’d all been made from a single piece of cotton that had been stretched by the wind until holes appeared. To my right, over Luke’s sleeping head, LeBaron spread out for a mile on the west side of the highway. During the spring and hot summer months, the colony looked like a quilt stitched out of large patches of dark green, yellow, and orange fabric. But now, in the winter, the patches were nothing but different shades of brown.
As we descended farther, prickly barbed-wire fences that separated farms and neighbors came into focus—the quilt’s silver and brown-threaded seams. I lifted myself up by the arms of my seat and looked over at Matt, who was rubbing his eyes. Outside the window behind him, adobe houses with flat, tar roofs nestled against rocky, golden-yellow hillsides—homes of the local Mexicans we often hired as farm and ranch hands.
Then, as we rounded a corner, the L came into view. High above LeBaron’s humblest homes, on the tallest of the hillsides along the east side of the highway, jagged rocks and round stones had been assembled to create a giant letter L. Painted white, it was always visible, but never more so than at dusk, when it seemed to glow. Mom always told me that my father himself had painted the rocks of the L.
The road began to flatten out just as we reached the colony. LeBaron was too small to have its own bus station, so residents disembarked at a stop on the highway. As soon as my feet touched the gravel, the cold stung my face like a slap. By this point, the gloomy sky had given way to a starry night. Rainfall from earlier in the day made the air smell like moist dirt. A stiff breeze hit the back of my neck. I shivered as the driver opened the undercarriage door and we gathered our things. Matt threw the bag of gifts over his shoulder like a young Santa Claus.
The bus pulled away and left behind nothing but darkness. The taillights became dots, the motor’s hum faded in the distance, and suddenly all I could hear was the trickling of water through the irrigation ditches that ran the length of the colony. The rows of tall willow trees lining the ditches swayed in the breeze. The town was so quiet I could hear myself breathe.
Mom looked up and down the highway, and I watched her expression melt from expectation to disappointment to weariness to acceptance. Lane obviously wasn’t coming. “He probably didn’t get my messages,” she mumbled with a sigh. “It’s no big deal. We can walk home.”
She balanced Aaron on her hip, threw her purse strap over her shoulder, bent over to pick up the suitcase, grabbed Audrey’s hand, and prepared herself for the mile-long walk home. The rest of us followed silently, watching and listening as Mom took a wide step over the highway shoulder and onto the dirt road, the gravel crunching beneath her footsteps, the sound of home.
As we walked past the adobe homes that led to the farm, I envied the bright and buttery glow emanating from the few that were wired for electricity. Interspersed among those warm, well-lit homes were houses where the light flickered and ghostly shadows bounced against every wall. These were the homes with kerosene lamps, homes like ours.
But ours wouldn’t even have flickering lights at the moment. It would be utterly dark, distinguishable only by Mom’s broken-down van parked outside.
Alejandra’s house was on the other side of the property, farther from town than our own. As we walked that night, I could see through the bare peach trees and across the alfalfa fields the faint light from my stepsisters’ bedroom widow. I was always curious about my stepsisters’ lives, but that night their kerosene lantern was too dim to reveal much.
We reached the long gravel driveway leading to our house. I could hear the water flowing through the irrigation ditch, the small house standing cold and dark on the other side. The windows were so black they gave me a feeling of emptiness. I dreaded going inside.
Mom handed me Aaron, his wet diaper squishing against my waist. She and Matt pulled the gate open, and we all moved out of the way except Audrey, who just stood there bending her upper body forward and moaning with her fingers squeezed tightly together. On instinct, I moved some distance away, but when Mom walked back and patted Audrey softly on the back, the moaning stopped and Audrey stepped out of the way of the gate.
Mom was the first to jump over the ditch. She climbed onto a soggy dirt mound, lifted Aaron from my side, wrapped both her arms around him, and jumped. Aaron’s head bounced and his hood fell off when Mom’s feet landed safely on the other side. She wobbled a little but righted herself to avoid falling backward into the mud.
She looked back at us, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. “Let Audrey go,” Mom insisted. “Go ahead and jump, Sis,” Mom told my sister in the kind, patient voice she always used to address Audrey. Audrey hunched her head forward, straightened her rigid legs, leaped, and landed smack in the middle of the ditch. The cold water reached all the way up to her knees. She moaned as Mom helped her out of the muck. The rest of us were well practiced, so we safely cleared the ditch and made our way to the house.
The smell of wet alfalfa was strong as we walked around the Microbus and approached the black wooden side door that led into our kitchen. It didn’t have a real lock, just a long, bent nail that hooked over the inside doorknob. Still, it kept the door closed and could only be opened from the inside. Matt had to climb through the one unlocked window into the kids’ room at the back of the house. He yanked the window open, jumped inside, and soon we heard the nail twist away and the door opened.
We stepped into a dark, frigid kitchen, which reeked of mice droppings. Audrey’s teeth chattered as she rocked from left to right, and Aaron started to cry. Mom passed him to me while she went to retrieve the pair of kerosene lamps and matches she kept in her bedroom. She set one of them in the center of the kitchen table and lit it, the smells of sulfur and kerosene masking the mouse stench. The lamp’s flame brought light to the gas refrigerator and the stove, our white table and the four plastic chairs that surrounded it.
My stepfather seldom completed any of his projects. The inside of our house hadn’t even been finished before the outside began to crack and crumble. The house had been intended for Lane’s original second wife, who had taken their two children, left him, and moved to the States a few years before Mom married into the family and became Lane’s second second wife.
Even though it was just two days before Christmas, no decorations were in the kitchen or any other room. In better times we’d bought Christmas trees in El Paso and brought them down with us, but this year we had neither the money to buy one nor a working car to transport it.
I felt fresh mouse droppings squish under my feet as I followed Mom into the kids’ bedroom, where she set a lamp on the small, white dresser we all shared and pulled on it with all her might until the top drawer came open. She found a flannel nightgown and helped Audrey change into it before wrapping a white cotton diaper around her bottom, securing it with two pins, then covering it with a pair of clear-plastic underpants.
I opened my drawer, took out a red-and-black flannel nightgown, and shook off the mouse droppings. I shivered as I put it on over my head. Like the rest of the house, the kids’ bedroom was unfinished. The two outer adobe walls hadn’t been stuccoed inside or out, and small animals and insects lived in and crawled through the holes between the dirt bricks. That night, the chilly wind whistled through the cracks and made our clothes, which hung from a silver pipe attached to wires in the wooden ceiling, sway in the breeze. The wind hardened my skin with goose bumps and rattled my bones. I slipped cotton sock
s over my feet and ankles and put my jacket back on over my nightgown.
While Mom dressed Aaron for bed and nursed him to sleep, Matt brought a kerosene lamp back into the kitchen and sat it in the center of the oval table so we could all play a game of Go Fish. The lamp’s small flame created tall, bouncing shadows that played on the bare white walls, and I had to squint to see the numbers on my cards. A dark purple sky was visible through the uncovered, wooden-framed window above the table, and dim moonlight shone down on us.
Audrey shuffled the cards, of course, and stacked them into a perfect pile before dealing them to Matt, Luke, and me. For some reason, she never needed help with Go Fish. She knew all the rules, how to pair her mates, and never forgot who had the cards she needed. She also seemed calmer when we played card games, although her concentration would periodically waver. Sometimes I’d look up to find her staring straight ahead at nothing in particular, and Matt had to call her name or tap her shoulder to remind her it was her turn. He always had the most mates on the table by the end of the game; then he would often throw his head back and laugh fakely with one eye closed, acting superior as if to remind us that he was the smartest.
With Aaron now asleep in his crib, Mom made us quesadillas with the rest of the tortillas she’d bought in Casas Grandes and with her own white cheese made from the milk of our cows. The cheese was stringy and always melted perfectly; the grease oozed from between the tortillas onto our fingertips and mismatched plastic plates. As Luke chewed his food, he opened his mouth and grunted, a dinnertime habit. “Lukey, eat with your mouth closed,” Mom said for the thousandth time, but he never learned.
The night grew darker and colder. Given that, and how tiring the day had been, Mom decided that we should all go to bed. Audrey and I tramped back to our room, where I lay down next to her, still in my coat. My head was at her feet and my legs prickled with goose bumps as they slid across the cold plastic bedcover that protected the mattress from Audrey’s leaky diaper. I moved next to my sister for warmth.
The bed that Matt and Luke shared was opposite ours, up against the windowed outer wall, although Matt preferred to sleep on the green-and-white couch in the living room on nights when the wind howled through the walls of our bedroom. The wind didn’t blow through the living-room walls the way it did in our room. Matt took the lamp with him when he left, and for a time the three of us lay in pitch-black darkness. Soon, thanks to the heat from Audrey’s body, I stopped shivering and took my jacket off. I listened to the sounds my home made, of Aaron’s whimpering on the other side of the single plastered wall, of the whistling outer walls as the winter breeze blew through them. I held my pillow tightly, pulled the blankets over my head, and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
THE WALLS WERE whistling again when I woke up on Christmas Eve morning, my legs freezing and damp from Audrey’s leaking diaper. I had barely opened my eyes when I heard a bloodcurdling scream from the living room. Throwing off the blankets, I bolted over Audrey’s sleeping legs and ran in the direction of Matt’s voice, my feet almost burning from the cold of the cement floor.
My brother’s eyes were still shut and he was shaking his head from side to side. “There was a mouse on my head!” he screamed. “There was a mouse on my head and he was chewing on my hair!”
“Where is it?” I yelled as my eyes scanned the floor.
“It ran into the kitchen.”
Now Luke was up, and the three of us ran in that direction. Matt grabbed a broom and swept its handle wildly under the oven.
Luke’s face was panic-stricken as he begged Matt to stop. “Don’t hurt it!” he cried.
“What the heck are you guys doing out here?” Mom asked as she walked into the kitchen in her old, blue robe. “The baby’s still sleepin’. You’re gonna wake him up.”
“Mom, he was chewin’ on my hair!” Matt said.
“I heard. Quiet down. I’ll pick up some mousetraps when I go to the store later.” Mom took off her glasses, exposing swollen, tired eyes. “You and Luke—go bring in some wood and start the barrel heater.”
“I don’t want you to kill de mouse, Mommy,” Luke said meekly. He didn’t always pronounce every word correctly or speak in complete sentences. Mom was already out of earshot, silently padding to her room in search of our ragged, old cotton sheet with little yellow flowers. She attached it to the walls between the kitchen and the hallway so that the warmth from the barrel heater would concentrate in the living room and the kitchen.
The heater was a rusty, fifty-five-gallon petroleum barrel into which Lane had cut a circular hole so we could load it with wood. He’d also attached a makeshift door that half covered the hole and made several coin-size holes in the barrel so the fire could breathe. A silver metal tube rose from the top of it and up through a hole in the wooden ceiling, the hole being at least a quarter inch larger in diameter than the tube. As a result, we always kept a silver milking bucket next to the heater to catch rain when it fell into the house.
The ramshackle heater stood in the far corner of the living room to the left of an old upright piano that Lane had originally bought for the wife whose place Mom had taken. Even though it was out of tune and most of its glossy black finish had faded and flecked away long ago, I loved that piano and played it more than anyone else. My grandmother LeBaron, my dad’s mom, gave me piano lessons twice a week at her house, which was about a mile from our house.
Within minutes, my brothers had come back inside with chopped wood in their arms. Matt filled the barrel and wiped his dirty hands on his faded jeans. Then he stepped back as Mom poured kerosene over the wood, struck a match, and threw it into the barrel. Flames burst out of the hole before she closed the round door, and Mom reminded us for the umpteenth time to watch Aaron so he wouldn’t burn himself on the heater.
The smell of burning wood filled the living room. The entire family was up now, sitting on the couch or the living-room rug, all of us snuggled under blankets. Knowing we were still chilly, Mom lit the oven and left its door open while she made breakfast. She filled a pan half-full of wheat berries that she kept stored in a gunnysack, then covered the berries with water and boiled them until they were soft and round. We ate the chewy, hot cereal out of plastic bowls at the kitchen table with milk, cinnamon, vanilla, and sugar.
After breakfast, once everyone was dressed and ready for the day, Mom placed Aaron into his round, hard-plastic walker in the living room as far as possible from the heater. While he rolled around on the rug, she put on her heavy wool coat and told Matt and me to watch the baby and Audrey while she walked to the Conasupo. The Conasupo, about a mile and a half away, was another convenience store run out of someone’s house and sold staple food items and toiletries.
The hinges on the kitchen door creaked as Mom left. I was practicing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano, my rough, tuneless playing accompanied by the rhythmic squeaking sound Audrey made as she rocked on the couch. She picked at the bottom edge of her pink cotton turtleneck, pulling little pieces of thread from the material with her fingertips. A bit more of the pasty-white skin of her skinny belly peeked out with each thread that fell to the floor.
I played the song over and over, faster each time, as Aaron made his baby sounds. Matt and Luke played checkers on the rug, and Matt laughed teasingly at every wrong move our brother made. Suddenly, the bouncing springs on the couch went quiet. On instinct, I stopped playing. I turned to find Audrey on her feet, squeezing her hands together just as she had the night before, although now her lips were spread wide, exposing clenched teeth. Her upper body began to jerk from left to right. We all just watched for a second, not sure what to do. Even the baby looked at her, wide-eyed, his mouth open, drool falling onto his chin.
Audrey was older, bigger, and stronger than the rest of us, so Matt stood up from the rug slowly and positioned himself in front of her, an arm’s distance away. “Audrey,” he said calmly, staring at her with kind but fearful eyes. “Settle down, okay, Audrey? Sit ba
ck down on the couch and settle down. Mom will be back in a few minutes.”
Audrey threw herself back down so hard the whole couch shook. Matt returned to the rug but kept one eye on Audrey. She stared straight ahead, gazing blankly at something that only she could see. She cocked her head forward, clenched her teeth, and started to moan loudly from deep inside her throat. In an instant, she shot to her feet again, still staring at something. Matt and Luke scooted away and scrambled to the other side of the living room.
Her moaning grew louder as Audrey began rocking forward and backward, her pale lips spread apart like a wild animal’s. She then bent forward all the way to the ground without bending her knees. She grabbed the checkerboard with both hands, lifted it up, and slammed it back down with a crash. Red and black disks flew in every direction.
“Audrey, settle down, ’kay?!” Matt was pleading now. “Sit back down. Okay, Audrey?”
No response. She just continued to moan and stare. Matt inched closer, trying to grasp her forearm to lead her back to the couch the way Mom would have done. But the second his hand touched her, her head jerked forward and the moaning grew louder.
Matt looked panicked. He turned back to Audrey, and then, as commandingly as he could, told our sister to settle down and sit back on the couch. His voice startled her—her head spun around in his direction.
“Settle down. ’Kay, Audrey? It’s okay. Mom’s coming back in a few minutes.”
Audrey blinked and turned her head abruptly away. Then, in one violent motion, she jerked her arm away from Matt’s grip and attacked him, grabbing fistfuls of his hair in her hands. She jerked his head sideways from left to right, making him lose his balance and fall to one knee. Then, with almost superhuman force, she threw him onto the floor. He landed with a thud, flat over a sea of checkers.