Shame the Stars

by McCall,Guadalupe Garcia

  “Don’t move, mi amor,” he said. He put his arm around my mother and held her against his chest.

  At the sight of our mother, bleeding in my father’s arms, Tomás let out a scream that sounded more like a wounded beast than a human being. “No!”

  He turned to the deputy who had shot my mother and pulled the rifle out of his hands. Raising the lawman’s weapon over his right shoulder, he hit the deputy on the head with the butt of it. When the deputy fell to his knees, Munro and his men rushed in to arrest Tomás, pulling him aside and cuffing him.

  “Take him away,” Munro ordered, and a group of deputies walked off with my brother as I fought to keep myself from passing out from the fevered pain that blazoned across my torso and pierced through my left shoulder blade.

  “Joaquín! Joaquín! Are you all right?” Dulceña screamed.

  I wanted to reassure her, but my head was spinning. My eyes blurred and focused and blurred again.

  “Yes. I’m okay,” I said, fighting through the pain to sit up and take my mother’s hand in mine. She was pale and weak and her breathing was ragged. She was dying, but I didn’t want to accept it. I clung to the hope that she might pull through.

  “Jovita, please don’t leave me, mi amor,” my father begged, kissing my mother’s forehead. He buried his face in her neck, swallowing his sobs as he cried like a child.

  “Joaquín, listen to me, corazón.” Mamá squeezed my hand. “M’ijo, you have to help your father take care of our family. Please don’t let Munro punish Tomás and Dulceña for my part in the rebellion. They’re innocent. You know they’re innocent.”

  “Sí, Mamá, I promise,” I said, kissing her hand and feeling the tears that had welled in my eyes start to fall down my face.

  Like a vulture, Munro cast a long, dark shadow over my mother as he swooped down on us. “Is it true, then?” he asked her. “Are you La Estrella?”

  “Sí,” Mamá said, a small smile lifting the corners of her full lips as she glared at the Ranger. “Sí . . . I am La Estrella. . . . I’m the ghost you’ve been chasing. . . . Let my son and Dulceña go, Munro. They’re innocent.”

  Munro took his hat off and ran his hand across his forehead, back over his bald head. “So this is all your doing, then? ¿Es tu culpa?” he asked, shaking his head. “Tell me something, Jovita, was it worth it? Are you happy with the chaos you brought to your family?”

  “¡Hijo de Satanás!” Papá cried. “This is all your doing! Leave her alone. Can’t you see she’s dying? Get away from us, canalla!”

  “I regret nothing,” Mamá whispered. The shallowness of her breath as she spoke to the Ranger belied her defiance. “What I did . . . I did for my people . . . my love . . . my devotion . . . that’s something you can never take away from them.”

  As the last words left her mouth, Mamá closed her eyes and sighed peacefully. Her hand slackened inside my grip and I cried out to her, “Mamá! Mamá!”

  “Jovita! Talk to me, cariño,” my father begged, crying and shaking my mother lightly at first and then more forcefully. “Stay with me, mi amor! Stay with me!”

  Excerpt from Joaquín’s journal, Wednesday, September 8, 1915

  THIS WOMAN, MI MADRE

  Because this woman won’t be there

  to smuggle supplies to rebel troops,

  into darkness — tejanos will reach out,

  hands outstretched, fingers splayed out,

  groping, grappling empty weapons, empty shells.

  Because this woman won’t be there

  to deliver kerosene,

  into the darkness — rebels will stumble

  and fall, skin their knees, scrape their elbows,

  split their lips, and trudge along unaided.

  Because this woman was La Estrella,

  their Morning Star, their sky will be darker,

  denser, disillusioned, now that she is gone.

  Because this woman won’t be there

  to dispense food and medicine,

  into despair — mujeres tejanas will wander,

  creep through the chaparral, search in vain,

  and go back to their empty hearths

  to watch little ones unravel.

  Tiny hands outstretched,

  stomachs groaning, children will sleepwalk,

  stumble over to empty pots,

  peer into empty kettles, and cry.

  Because this woman won’t be there

  to tend their wounds, into despair — they will fall

  to bed and dream feverish nightmares.

  Because this woman won’t be here

  to hold me tight, kiss my forehead,

  and whisper tenderly at my temple,

  “Eres mi alma — mi corazón,”

  my life will be darker, denser, disillusioned,

  now that she is gone.

  Because this woman was mi madre,

  the one who brought me to light,

  into darkness — into despair — I stumble and fall.

  Chapter 21

  Munro conducted his investigation in the presence of Gregorio Luna, a lawyer Papá and the Villas had hired jointly to defend everyone arrested the day of our wedding. Luna had made a name for himself as a great defense attorney in Brownsville. He knew what he was doing, so Caceres and Munro had no other choice than to let Dulceña and Conchita go free.

  Whereas the deputy who shot my mother was not being brought up on charges, my brother, Tomás, was being charged with attempted capital murder for beating him up. Despite Luna’s best efforts to have the charges dismissed, or at least reduced, Tomás was quickly indicted by Judge Thompson.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the lawyer told us, as I sat across from him and my father in our living room back at Las Moras. “I’ll get this all sorted out.”

  Luna tried interviewing members of the captain’s posse, but Munro told them they would hang for treason if they talked to him. He sat in on all interrogations and verbally intimidated Sheriff Caceres every time Caceres agreed with anything Luna said, reminding him that as an officer of the law it was his duty to remain neutral. He was not to side with defendants or their attorneys.

  I went with Dulceña’s parents to pick her up the morning she was released from jail. When she saw me, she put her arms around me, hugging me gently because Doc Hammonds had immobilized my arm with a sling after he’d pulled a bullet out of my shoulder.

  “I knew you’d come for me,” she whispered, kissing me softly.

  “Of course,” I whispered against her cheek. “I love you. You are my wife now. There was no way I wasn’t going to be here.”

  After releasing me, Dulceña threw herself upon her parents. “Thank you,” she said, her voice trembling as she hugged them. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden to you.”

  “You’re not a burden,” Doña Serafina said. “Never, ever, think that.”

  We returned to Las Moras together. Don Rodrigo drove us in his Ford so that we could all get there as fast and as safely as possible. Dulceña sat beside me in the backseat, completely exhausted. She leaned into me, weeping into my shirt as we headed home to my mother’s velorio.

  Doña Luz informed us that Conchita was set free a few hours after we left town. Her parents picked her up and took her straight home. According to Doña Luz, Conchita was keeping her distance from Mateo. He was staying in a boarding house, hoping to get a chance to see her, but like many people in Calaveras and Monteseco, Conchita blamed Mateo for my mother’s death. Doña Luz was sad, but also relieved that, soon after Conchita’s release, Mateo had decided to leave town to go live with Luz’s in-laws in Mexico.

  “We’ll be leaving too,” Carlos said when Doña Luz finished telling us all about Mateo’s departure. “After the funeral.”

  “Leaving?” I asked, looking up at my uncle. “Why?”<
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  “This isn’t over, Joaquín,” Carlos said. “La Estrella may be gone, but her mission must be kept alive. We have to go back to the brush; we have to keep fighting. It’s what she would want us to do.”

  Because Tomás was still in jail, we had to bring in a priest from Hidalgo County to give my mother last rites at Las Moras. We prayed for her throughout the night of her velorio as was customary, and then we buried her right beside my paternal grandparents in the family cemetery at Las Moras. Because my mother’s obituary was printed in several small papers in Hidalgo and Cameron Counties, a huge procession of people from all walks of life came to pay their respects. At the velorio, Mr. Simmons came up to talk to me. He’d heard from his friends in town that it was La Estrella who had sent men to stop rebels from blowing up his mill.

  “The people of Morado County owe your mother an enormous debt,” he said solemnly. “She saved more than our livelihoods. She saved our families from starvation and ruin. I’m just sorry I never got to thank her.”

  Las Moras never felt as populated or as desolate as it did during the days leading up to my mother’s funeral. My father was inconsolable and stood by my mother’s coffin the whole time we prayed for her. Because he was emotionally distant and overwhelmed by his loss, it fell to me and Dulceña to see to the comfort of the people who came in and out of Las Moras for the funeral.

  Admittedly, Don Rodrigo and Doña Serafina carried a lot of the burden of providing for the people in attendance. They made sure tarps, tables, and chairs were brought in from town and set up at the gravesite to facilitate the service. With the help of my brother’s congregation, there was enough food to keep everyone well nourished during the long visitation. Because they were so helpful, even offering to stay and clean up after the funeral, I had newfound respect for my in-laws.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of all this,” I said as Don Rodrigo and Doña Serafina were leaving after the funeral. “I am sure my father is very grateful. I hope you understand he is not quite himself right now. He would be seeing you out personally if he weren’t so grief-stricken.”

  “Of course,” Doña Serafina said. “But please, you don’t have to apologize for anything. You are family now. We would be most honored if you looked upon us as parents.”

  The day after the funeral, I read all about the death of Jovita del Toro, otherwise known as La Estrella, in several newspapers. I couldn’t help but notice that the stories were written in both Spanish and English. Whatever else might have gone by the wayside, my mother’s death had created a shift in perspective. More and more newspapers written in English were willing to take a chance on covering her story.

  La Estrella was no longer a legend told for and by tejanos. The death of Jovita del Toro, an American woman of Mexican descent, killed by a deputy sheriff on American soil, outside a courthouse no less, drew a lot of attention in our area. Her face was plastered over every front page in our newspapers.

  For the first time since I was a small child, I started to have nightmares again. I woke up that second night after the funeral in a cold sweat, a silent sob strangling me, suffocating me, because I was drowning in sorrow. Because Dulceña was just as devastated by my mother’s death as I was, she was especially attentive to me. It grieved me to see her go to such trouble to comfort me. But no matter how much I tried not to be a burden to her, she was always ready to soothe me with one of her herbal teas.

  My father suffered too, more than the rest of us. Not long after the funeral, he took to sleepwalking. The first time, Dulceña woke me up in the middle of the night from a deep sleep to say that my father was walking around in the garden.

  “He went outside?” I asked, pulling a shirt on and pushing my feet into my boots before rushing out ahead of Dulceña. She followed me down the stairs and out the back door to the courtyard, where we found my father standing by the fountain, crying out loud with his eyes half-closed, like a wolf howling at the moonlight.

  “Papá,” I called out softly as I touched his shoulder. “Papá, what are you doing out here? Did you need something?”

  “Joaquín,” Papá whispered. Then he opened his eyes and stared at the fountain. I leaned in to get his attention, but I could tell by the way he looked right past me that he was still asleep. “Come weep with me; past hope, past cure, past help!”

  Dulceña came around the other side and wrapped her arm around my father’s elbow like she was about to go on a moonlit stroll with him. “Don Acevedo,” she whispered. “Let’s go inside. It’s too cold to walk barefoot out here.”

  “No,” my father said, pulling his arm away and lifting his face to the sky. “I can’t go inside. She’s not there. She’s here with the crickets and the chicharras. I heard her singing to them.”

  It took us a while, but with gentle coaxing and a lot of patience, we managed to get my father to come back into the house. Dulceña refused to come back to our bedroom. She took a chair from the sala and sat in the hallway downstairs, afraid he would get up and do it all over again.

  “God only knows what would have happened if I hadn’t heard him,” she said.

  I stayed up too, sitting across from her on the stairway. Doña Luz found us at dawn, curled up together, half-asleep on the three bottom steps. She chastised us for not waking her up to help keep watch over my father.

  “I could have put Sofia and Laura on a schedule,” she said. “A couple of hours between the three of us and you two wouldn’t have had to stay up all night.”

  However, my father’s wanderings, his growing mental instability, was the least of our problems. We still had to worry about Tomás. While my father refused to eat, wandering off to my mother’s gravesite like a ghostly apparition, our lawyer worked diligently to obtain my brother’s release.

  Chapter 22

  I’m just worried about you, Joaquín,” Tomás told me when Señor Luna, the lawyer we’d hired, and I went to visit him in jail a few days after the funeral. “You’re looking a little worse for wear.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I just wish we could find a way of getting you out of this place.” I glanced over at Luna, but he was too busy reading through a stack of papers related to Tomás’s case to pay attention to our conversation.

  “Don’t lose faith, little brother,” Tomás said. “I haven’t. Everything will be all right.”

  “But how can you keep believing when your life is in jeopardy?” I asked, fighting the urge to scream at him. “I mean, doesn’t He care?”

  Tomás reached around my neck and pulled my head to his. He pressed our foreheads together and whispered, “I understand. These are difficult times. You were bound to question Him. But you’ll find answers in prayer. Even Jesus had to do that. He went to the Garden of Gethsemane, remember? Sometimes, a man needs to be alone with the Lord, to talk to Him, to be reminded of who’s really in charge.”

  “Amen,” Luna said, his face buried in the book in front of him.

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked Tomás, resentment crawling up inside of me, welling up in my eyes in the form of hot unshed tears. “Because I can honestly tell you I’m beginning to worry about His plans for us.”

  “I’d like to think there’s a purpose for everything,” Tomás concluded, and then he pulled at the back of my thick blond hair and kissed my forehead. “My purpose here will be revealed soon enough.”

  That was the last time I saw my brother before Munro and Judge Thompson held a private hearing and sentenced him to hang in one week’s time without even the benefit of a trial.

  “They can’t do that!” I cried, when Luna came by Las Moras to tell us of Tomás’s death sentence. “That has to be illegal! Isn’t it illegal?”

  “Yes,” Luna said. “It is. Unfortunately, it happens all too often, especially in small towns like this one. I’m sorry, Joaquín.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked, horrified at the
thought of giving up and letting my brother hang. “Isn’t there something you could do? Can’t we get Governor Ferguson involved? Do you know anyone in the capitol?”

  Dulceña, who had been standing behind me as I sat at the table with Luna, came around and sat down on the chair beside me. “What about a petition?” she asked.

  “That could take days to put together, and it probably wouldn’t help,” Luna said. “We don’t have time to waste. What we need here is immediate action. We need to call this to the attention of the world, not just the capitol. We need to do something drastic. Give me till tomorrow morning. I’ll think of something.”

  After Tomás was sentenced to hang, fear, dark and menac­ing, started seeping into my dreams. I couldn’t close my eyes without having nightmares. Sometimes I dreamed that Munro came after me, dragged me out of bed, and shot me in the forehead in front of Dulceña. Other times, I dreamed the Rangers ransacked my room before they burned me alive as I lay hogtied on my bed at Las Moras.

  My father was suffering too. He moved from innocent sleepwalking sessions straight into nightmares that grew more and more dangerous. He lost all sense of reality as he walked through the house, acting out his anxieties in delusional episodes.

  “Never leave a loaded weapon where your enemy can get to it,” a voice snarled in the darkness. The cold metal barrel of my own rifle was pressed savagely against my face as I lay trapped in my bed next to Dulceña. “Don’t worry, Son. I’m not mad at you. Just trying to teach you a lesson.”

  “Papá!” I hollered, relief rushing through every pore of my body. “You scared me. What are you doing in here? You should be sleeping.”

  “Sleeping?” Papá asked, pushing himself off me, leaving the rifle lying on my chest. “You don’t have time to be asleep when you’re under attack. You don’t have time to think either. You need to learn to react when you hear something, Joaquín. A sharp mind is your best weapon!”

  “Why are you doing this, Papá?” I asked, picking up the rifle and sitting up in bed. “Do you know how crazy this is?”