Papá shook his head, coming to stand between us and the back door. “I can’t let you do this.”
Mamá fastened the wide black buttons of her cloak, her fingers flying down the front of the dark material. “We have to.” She held a hairpin between her teeth and talked through it as she pulled her hair together. “I promised Flora we would take care of him. Please don’t get mad, Acevedo. We have to do this.”
“Mamá is right,” Tomás said. “We have to act now. Before dawn. By tomorrow there won’t be much of him left. Don’t worry, Papá. God will be with us.”
“This has nothing to do with God!” my father boomed. “Don’t bring Him into this. Not now, Tomás. It’s not fair.”
“Fair?” Tomás narrowed his eyes. “Whoever said any of this was fair? Is it fair that Munro has turned against you? Is it fair that yet another innocent boy is hanging in the brush, or that women and children are huddled together in makeshift huts, hungry, wounded, and scared, because the Rangers have taken to terrorizing them on a daily basis? No, Papá. None of this is fair. But it’s the right thing to do. The decent thing to do.”
Turning to my mother, Papá changed his tone of voice, speaking softly. “Jovita, por favor. Try to be reasonable. What you are doing, what you are asking me to consent to, is too dangerous. You heard what Munro said before he left. He’s going to have men watching over that body at every turn. Nothing would please him more than to capture La Estrella. Don’t you see? You are the grand prize. He’s laid out his trap, and you’re planning to walk right into it.”
“Munro doesn’t know anything,” Mamá said, tucking the hairpins deftly into the chongo she had pulled together, holding it in place on top of her head. “Not when it comes to La Estrella. He’s too busy trying to keep up appearances. His biggest concern, his only concern, is his reputation as the law of the land.”
“Exactly.” My father took my mother into his arms and spoke to her softly, face-to-face. “He doesn’t have to suspect anything to figure it out. He just has to catch you doing this to put two and two together. And what would be more reputable than becoming renowned for bringing down La Estrella? You’d be the biggest feather in his cap. Is that really what you want? You want to give him that much power?”
“Don’t treat me like I’m a child,” Mamá said, putting her hands on Papá’s chest and pushing him away. “Don’t you think I know that? But I’m not about to let fear stop me from doing what’s right for Flora and her family. I have two sons. I wouldn’t want them to be left out there to be mutilated by beasts. Why should Gerardo suffer that fate if we can do something about it?”
Papá released my mother as she struggled to get out of his embrace, glancing at me and Tomás. “They’re my sons too, you know. I wouldn’t . . . I could never let that happen.”
“Good,” my mother said. “I’m glad you understand. Just as I understand that you can’t take part in this. You’re needed here as much as I am needed out there. When all this started, when my own sister left and went back to live with my mother in Monterrey because she was scared of the Rangers, you said you understood. You promised you’d let me do whatever was necessary to help my people. You promised you’d never be part of the problem.”
“I’m not trying to be part of the problem, Jovita.” Papá spoke in a quiet but firm tone that said he wasn’t ready to acquiesce to my mother just yet. “What I don’t understand is why it has to be you who does this. Why can’t you let Carlos and his men go out and get Gerardo’s body? Isn’t that why they came to Las Moras, to make sure nothing happens to you?”
Mamá took my father’s hands and kissed them. “I know you love me, and you’re worried. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Carlos and his men are my decoys. While they’re keeping Munro’s men busy, Tomás and I will be getting the body. We’ll be in and out quickly. We’ve done it before. Many times. Trust me. We can do it again.”
“It’ll be all right, Papá,” I said, trying my best to sound confident. “I’ll be there to help them.”
My father let out a short, exasperated breath that made his nostrils flare out. He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something else. Then, as if he thought better of it, he put his arms around me and Tomás, kissed our temples, and said, “Take care of your mother. Take care of yourselves.”
Then he let us go and moved aside to let us through.
I felt guilty as we left the house, knowing that we were leaving him there alone to worry about us. How many times has he had to do this? I wondered. Worried about Mamá? Stepped aside so that she might go out and “do the right thing”? How many times had he swallowed his pride and stayed behind to protect Las Moras because he couldn’t be in two places at once? The question remained in my head long into the journey as we traveled on horseback through the woods, avoiding the roads.
“Mamá,” I whispered as we squatted in the darkness, our horses tied behind a thick cluster of huisaches, listening for Carlos’s signal that we could rush in and take Gerardo’s body. “Has Papá ever come with you? Has he ever ventured out to help the rebels too?”
“No,” Mamá whispered. “Your father and I, we have different ways. He’s not as keen on the idea of fighting the law, not in subversive ways. But then again, he’s never had to. Your father’s a good man, Joaquín. He has integrity and a good heart, but rebellion and revolution are not in his blood.”
I could see what she meant. My mother was born in the United States, but her mother, Abuela Rosa, was born in Mexico. After my maternal grandfather, Aurelio, passed away, Abuela Rosa went back to Mexico to take care of her sister who had fallen ill. Abuela Rosa still lives in her family’s rancho in Monterrey. Papá’s family, on the other hand, has owned Las Moras since the times of the Spanish land grants. They are true tejanos, original settlers of Texas, and as such, they’ve always believed in cultivating friendships with local law enforcement and politicians. My father’s father, Abuelo Tomásito, who passed away when I was five, was even mayor of Monteseco for a while in the late 1880s.
I was about to ask Mamá if she could see anything, when we heard a group of horsemen rush toward us. Startled, I jerked and hit my head on a tree branch. Mamá put her hand on my head and pulled me in close, shushing me quietly. I clamped my hand over the knot forming on the top of my head. The horse hooves beat rhythmically against the earth as they galloped by.
I couldn’t make anything out from our dark hiding place, but the hooting and hollering told me it was Carlos and his men, riding past us like the devil himself was lashing after them. No sooner had they gone by than another group of men galloped by us. They weren’t as fast, and instead of rushing on to catch their prey, they slowed down a few yards away, lingering in the brush.
“Where did they go?” one of them asked.
“North, I think. Come on, we don’t want to lose them,” another answered. The Rangers were scouring the brush so close we could hear their horses’ heaving breaths in front of us. My heartbeat roared in my ears, and I had to remind myself to breathe.
“This way! Let’s go!” And with that, the horsemen rode off, intent on catching Carlos and his men. After they were gone, we stayed put for a while, listening for Pollo’s signal, which came within minutes, a low, owlish triple hoot that he repeated just like he’d shown me before we rode into the chaparral.
Mamá prodded me with her elbow. “It’s time.” Tomás and I rushed over to get our horses, then we all mounted and rode out.
It didn’t take long to locate Gerardo’s body. If the cries of scavenger birds flapping their wings in the dark had not done so, the sickly stench of death would have led us right to him. Mamá passed me a plaid handkerchief. I followed her lead and covered my nose and mouth with it.
“You sure that’s him?” I asked, when we rode up to the site.
“Yes,” Mamá said, dismounting before the corpse. I stood in front of Gerardo and touched the
tip of his worn-out boots.
“Help me lift him,” I said, grabbing his legs. Together, Tomás and I hefted Gerardo’s limp body while Mamá used a sharp pocketknife to cut the noose on his neck, releasing him.
“Hurry,” Mamá said. Tomás and I made short work of placing him across the saddle of the extra horse we’d brought along for this purpose. I helped Mamá tie him down, and then we rode off toward Calaveras, traipsing through the darkest, densest part of the brush. Staying off any roads would help us avoid any deputies or Rangers who might have given up on the chase and come back to check on the body. Before we left the site of Gerardo’s death, I had obscured our tracks with a branch so come daylight the Rangers couldn’t just track us after a few hours.
After traveling southeast for about half an hour, we broke through the thicket. Mamá stopped. We stood atop a cliff overlooking a small, darkened village in the woods, a tiny neighborhood made up of a cluster of jacalitos, rough-made huts that housed the poorest among us.
I could barely make out the grass huts, with their thatched roofs and stick walls and fences, in the darkness of the night, scattered down a crooked dirt road. We had arrived at Calaveras, the place where our displaced people went to live after they were run off their properties, where they disappeared to when they had nowhere else to go. Calaveras wasn’t necessarily the best place to live. The jacales were remnants of old Mexico, relics of a time and a place that no longer existed, much like the people who went to live there.
When we entered the village, Doña Flora, her two younger sons, and Gerardo’s girlfriend, Apolonia, were waiting for us at Doña Flora’s comadre Petra’s house. Apolonia cried out and began to sob, but a wail escaped Doña Flora’s lips when we brought down Gerardo’s body. Even more heartbreaking, when we laid him on the floor just inside Doña Petra’s kitchen, Doña Flora threw herself onto her son and wept, wheezy sobs that clawed their way out of her chest like wounded lechuzas.
Wanting to feel something — anything — besides the numbness that had taken over my heart, I pressed my fingertips into my dry eye sockets. But no tears came, no sobs racked my body, no emotion overcame me.
I was empty inside.
“There’s no shame in crying, Son,” Mamá whispered. Gerardo’s two younger brothers were crying even as they tried to console Doña Flora.
Tomás and Doña Petra had laid down an old weather-beaten tarp on the butcher table in the kitchen. I helped them pick up Gerardo’s body and place it gently over the tattered cloth. I bent my head as Tomás placed his hand on Gerardo’s forehead and administered last rites. When Tomás stepped away, Apolonia reached down and caressed Gerardo’s face. She pushed his hair off his forehead, placed it gently behind his ears, and then leaned down and kissed him before she left, crying softly into her cupped hand.
“You don’t have to stay for this,” Mamá said as Doña Petra put a pot of hot water on the table beside Gerardo’s body. The next step was to wash his body, to prepare it for burial. “You and Tomás can go stand outside and wait for us to finish. We won’t take long.”
“You should go home now, Doña Jovita.” Doña Flora caressed Gerardo’s face and then undid the buttons of his shirt with the gentleness and reverence only a grieving mother would have. “We’re just going to clean him up a bit before we bundle him up and take him home to Matamoros for the burial.”
“No,” Mamá said, a deep crease forming over her brows. “This will go quicker if I stay to help. I’ll feel better once he’s tucked away in the wagon and Pollo and Chavito are transporting him down to Mexico for you.”
I didn’t go outside. I stayed in and held the water bucket, watching Mamá and the other three women lovingly scrub down Gerardo’s body, limb to limb, and head to toe, until he was as clean as they could get him. Then Mamá concocted some sort of medicinal balm to mask the scent of death and keep the bugs away. Tomás and I stepped back and gave the women space to move around the table and rub Gerardo down with the thick balm before dressing him and wrapping him up in a clean sheet.
When the body was ready, Tomás went outside. He whistled, a long, extended sound that echoed in the darkness. Within minutes, Pollo and Chavito rolled up in a rickety old wagon that groaned as it stopped behind Doña Petra’s jacal. Tomás, Pollo, Chavito, and I moved Gerardo’s body quickly into the bed of the wagon. Then Pollo and Chavito took it down the dirt road, where Mamá said it would be covered over with sacks of old clothes and boxes of unwanted knickknacks, disguising it as the belongings of a father and son on their way back home to Mexico.
Doña Flora and her sons would wait until morning to get on another wagon and cross the border a few hours behind it. It was a well thought-out plan. One that, unfortunately, the people of Calaveras were used to orchestrating.
As soon as Gerardo’s body was gone, Mamá, Tomás, and I left Doña Petra’s shack and headed down the dirt road to another jacalito a few hundred yards away. A young boy was waiting for us on the porch, and he ran up and opened the stick gate for us. We walked up to the tiny hut and were welcomed by an elderly woman who took Tomás’s right hand and kissed it. Then she hugged Mamá and thanked us for coming.
Inside the woman’s home, the oil lamp sitting on the table in the small room offered little light, but my eyes were drawn to the bed where a young woman lay on her side with her back to us.
“How is she, Doña Sarita?” Tomás asked. Mamá walked across the room and sat on a rickety chair by the bedside.
Tomás and the old woman hovered over Mamá. “She’s not eating,” Doña Sarita said. “And she won’t stop saying she wants to die. I don’t know what to do, Padrecito. She’s my only granddaughter. I don’t want to lose her.”
“Adelita,” Mamá said, putting her hand on the girl’s hand to get her attention. “Are you awake, m’ija?”
Adelita turned over and sat up, slowly. Her long, loose hair was covering most of her face as she shook her head and whispered, “Sí.”
“How do you feel?” my mother asked, and Adelita shrugged. “The fever’s gone. Your hands feel warm, but not hot like before. How’s your head? Does it still hurt?”
When Adelita shook her head slightly, Mamá tried to gingerly push her hair aside. That’s when I understood what she was talking about. The left side of Adelita’s face was battered to the point of disfigurement. Mamá turned around to give me a murderous glance, because without even intending to, I had let out a small sound that showed my horror.
“What happened?” I stepped closer to the bed to hand my mother her medicine bag. Mamá had no medical training, but she had learned to stitch cuts and cleanse wounds well enough, out of necessity. The nearest physician, Doc Hammonds, lived too far away to travel all the way to Las Moras every time someone had an accident. Mamá tended to the people that worked and lived at Las Moras. She knew how to care for anything from insect bites to dysentery.
“Rinches,” a voice rasped. Behind me, an old man sat on a cot on the other side of the room. “They had their way with her, just like they did with the Robles girl last week.”
Doña Sarita sat down on a chair on the other side of the bed and took her granddaughter’s hand. “It’s not enough that they hang our young men,” she said. “Now they’re coming after our girls too.”
“Rangers did this?” I asked Tomás. “Did they report it?”
“You know better than that.” My mother opened her medicine bag and took out gauze and a small bottle of red iodine to clean the wound. “There is no trust, no faith, no honesty in men, especially not when they join the Rangers.”
As my mother tended to the poor girl’s swollen face, a new wave of anger for Dulceña, at what had nearly happened to her, arose in me. How could any man do this to a girl? I couldn’t reconcile it. “I don’t understand why they come after our women,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. “Isn’t it enough that they take our fathers, our brothers, our friends
, and hang them in the brush?”
“They know our men are our strength,” Doña Sarita said. “But women — well, women are our corazón. They go after our girls to tear us apart, to keep our hearts from growing strong.”
The old man at the table cleared his throat. “At least they didn’t kill her like they did that Gonzales girl last month.”
“Killed!” The declaration should not have shocked me, given recent events. Yet it did. “How many girls have been attacked?”
“Five,” Doña Sarita said. “Two of them are missing, but they were good girls and too young to run off with some boy. We all know the Rinches killed them. There’s no way of finding out where they dumped their bodies, though. They could be anywhere out there in the monte. God rest their souls wherever they may be.”
“Amen,” Tomás said, crossing himself.
“Amen,” Mamá and Doña Sarita whispered, but I couldn’t join them in their faithful show of respect. My heart was too angry. When I thought about what could have happened to Dulceña, how much worse the attack on her could’ve been, my heart thundered and my stomach twisted itself into knots. If they had raped her — killed her — dumped her body, well, I wouldn’t be alive. I’d be dead too, but I would’ve taken some Rangers with me. I’d be hanging from a tree for sure.
As we rode back home that night, my heart seethed with rage as I thought about Slater and Davis and what they were doing to the people of Calaveras. I couldn’t even be grateful that Dulceña had escaped the worst of the same fate. All I could think about was how much I wanted to get back at Munro and his posse.
— from Joaquín, Saturday, August 28, 1915
D —
Eres mi alma — mi corazón!
Thoughts of you swirl in my mind every time I close my eyes. There is so much I wish I could share with you — so much I cannot divulge in these dark times! A lot has changed since we last saw each other. The world has flipped on its axis, and I find myself turned upside down on my ideals, my values, my personal beliefs.
Shame the Stars Page 11